When I was first figuring out how to manage my personal brand, I started looking for other people who were good at it. One person that kept coming up for me was Dan Schawbel: http://danschawbel.com/. Shortly after we launched Nombray, he found me on Facebook and offered to chat.
Dan bills himself as the "Personal Branding Gen-Y Expert", and he's not fooling around; his book “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success" will come out April next year. He does public speaking, produces a magazine, and holds down a full-time job doing public relations for EMC. It's always refreshing to talk to a marketing person who lives the strategy they espouse, and Dan really puts himself out there.
We talked for a while about the challenge of writing a book, and writing in general. I find it hard to maintain a blog because I'm not a natural writer, and the concept of writing a book sounds excruciating to me. One thing that really helps Dan is that he's internalized the things that he's writing about. "Write what you know." In general, if you're building your personal brand, you're much more likely to succeed if your brand is built around things that make you happy. Maybe there's money to be made by creating a blog about Alternative Minimum Tax accounting, but if it's hard to spend the time writing about it, you're unlikely to stick with it long enough to enjoy the financial reward.
There's a lot of great content in his blog: http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/. If you're interested in tactics that you can use in developing the depth and reach of your web presence, I encourage you to take a look.
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