The Web has made the "personal brand" more of an actual thing than ever before. These days, individuals can have their own websites, online portfolios, social media profiles and other online spaces where they can share their work, market themselves or connect with their audiences or customers.
Personal branding is a useful tool for freelancers and individuals who own their own businesses, but it also has numerous benefits and presents marketing opportunities for people who work for larger organizations, as it allows them to share company news and information (although you have to be careful to follow SEC guidelines), personally interact with their customers and generally humanize their organizations a bit.
Luckily, the Internet won't just leave you hanging. There are a number of useful tools available online that can help you simplify, automate and improve your personal branding efforts around the Web. Check out Website Magazine's big list of personal branding solutions below.
Profiles and Portfolios
Behance
Behance is a tool that allows users to make portfolios for their creative work to help them share their work and be discovered on the site. It also features close integration with LinkedIn, so users can add portfolios to their profiles on the social network.
enthuse.me
Promote yourself and your expertise with enthuse.me, which creates a one-page profile for its users that shows off what they're good at and why, thanks to hand-picked examples of the user's absolute best work.
about.me
Users can easily create their own personal profile pages that point visitors to their content around the Web, and also offers them analytics to see how many people are viewing their profile, where they come from and what they do while they're there.
Customer Relationship Management
Nimble
This small-scale CRM solution allows users to connect all of their contacts, calendars, communications and social conversations inside a single platform, and then listen to and engage any individual in order to attract and retain the "right" customers.
Insightly
Insightly is a Google Apps add-on that provides users with complete integration into the Google product line, which includes Docs, Contacts, Calendar and Gmail, making it a more-than-ideal CRM solution for anyone who runs their business with Google Apps.
Zoho CRM
Free for up to three users, Zoho CRM is great for helping small businesses manage customer support, opportunities, inventory, leads and marketing efforts; they can even launch email campaigns from within the platform. It also features word processing, database functions, collaboration and project management.
Mobile Apps
Skype
Networking is key to any good personal branding strategy, and sometimes you may need to have meetings on the go, so why not download the Skype app to consult or meet with people around the world, no matter where you are.
Resume App
With this application, users can quickly and easily update and send out different versions of their résumés. This is especially useful for those personal brand-minded freelancers that are always looking for new, challenging work.
WordPress
Many personal branders like to blog to share their stories, work and insights with their audiences or customers, and sometimes, when they're on-the-go, they'll find themselves with a great idea for a blog post, and no way to share it with the world. That's why you should download the WordPress app (or Tumblr or whatever blogging platform you use), which allows you to start a draft, publish a post, view or respond to comments and update pages on your blog.
GoDaddy Domain and Email Manager
Good domain names don't just fall out of the sky, but sometimes they do, and you don't want to be left hanging when that golden idea appears out of no where. Use this app to register the perfect personal domain name from anywhere.
Bump
Immediately exchange contact information with other iPhone users with Bump, an app that lets users literally bump their mobile devices together to share info. It's personal networking at its most technologically advanced.
Social Media
LinkedIn
If you're looking to brand yourself and your work, you have to have a presence on LinkedIn, the social network that lets users build and engage with their professional networks.
HootSuite
Manage all of your social media accounts (or most, at least) from within a single dashboard with HootSuite. This includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress and more. Users can schedule messages and posts, track mentions and engage their fans/followers.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another social media management and monitoring platform that comes with a user-friendly dashboard and handy "Messages" section that pulls all of a user's social media activity into a single stream. It also comes with keyword, hashtag and user monitoring across the Web.
Twitter
Probably the second most popular social network of ALL TIME, Twitter is a great way to share your content, market yourself and communicate with users in 140 characters or less. As far as personal branding tools go, Twitter may just be the best.
Mention
Mention is a social media monitoring tool that lets users set up alerts based on keywords. Then, content on social media sites that includes those keywords is displayed in the application or sent to the users email or social media account(s). This allows them to monitor and track keywords to find customers, build business relationships and even quickly respond to situations that could damage their brands.
Buffer
For personal branders that are already content with using different social networks individually and don't want a centralized management platform, they can turn to Buffer to schedule and share content across different networks. It can be used in a Web browser or on a mobile device and includes useful analytics.
