Personal Branding with .ME at Blogalicious Conference
A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to take part in the Blogalicious conference – only the greatest multicultural blogging conference ever. We love Blogalicious because its goal is to grow a tight-knit community that celebrates diversity in the blogosphere and creates opportunities for their members. Their theme this year was #BeGreat – all a perfect fit for domain .ME because we’re all about community and being great with your URL!
Now in its 6th year, Blogalicious manages to gather some of the most influential, inspirational speakers, branding gurus, authors, social media experts and influencers. Looking at the line-up of attendees and speakers, we knew we had to head to San Antonio to get a taste of the Blogalicious greatness everyone raves about.
With the help from our friends from Everywhere Agency we organized a personal branding session and pop-up booth that allowed us to interact with the Blogalicious attendees and respond to their questions about building and managing one’s personal brand.
Our hour-long branding session was hosted by: branding guru, Shenee Howard of Hey Shenee!, international TV personality and Emmy Award nominee Jeannette Kaplun of Hispana Global and Danica Kombol, President of Everywhere Agency. They kicked off the session by telling the attendees that this hour was all about “ME time” and offered everyone the chance to bring their branding challenge to the experts. The session was wildly interactive, with members of the audience jumping at the chance to pose questions about rebranding their blog, try out their elevator speech or review marketing and positioning challenges.
We decided to share a piece of that amazing learning atmosphere here with you in the form of the most frequently asked questions and their responses:
1. I’m having troubling branding myself. I’m not sure my URL and the name of my brand accurately reflects what I do?
Choosing the right domain name can be quite difficult. While it is very important that your URL and brand name resonate with what you do, you have to remember that you are more than your brand name. Branding is storytelling and you’re telling and sharing your story with every interaction.
2. How do I expand beyond my existing site and URL? Right now I blog about parenting, but I want to branch out to beyond where I am now.
There is no reason to be limited by one website and one URL. Many bloggers have multiple sites and destinations for their diverse interests. What is important is to make it easy for people to find you and you can easily do that by housing them under one roof. You can create a domain .ME site where you link to a whole host of your digital destinations and take control of your online presence.
3. How important is it that all my social platforms align with my URL? Is it okay that my Twitter name is one thing and my site is another?
In an ideal world, we’d all have consistency in branding across platforms. Our Facebook page would have the exact same name as your site and your Twitter. That’s not always possible. The good news is we all have something nobody can take away from us – that’s our name, our personality and our presence in the world. So if we can’t get consistency with our digital destinations, we can keep consistency in who we are!
The questions and energy spilled outside the ballroom into our pop-up booth where Danica and Shenee held a “doctor is in” type afternoon, offering more branding advice to anyone who dropped by. (Jeannette had to fly home to Miami to exercise her brand-momness). Booth visitors were interested in brand building, tackling brand challenges and defining what they and their brand stand for. We talked a lot about the importance of having an elevator speech and defining what you do clearly and succinctly.
Of course, visitors also wanted to know about .ME – they were curious about the availability of .ME domain names, registration procedure and whether .ME domain had the same SEO benefits as .com. (It does!)
Our biggest takeaway is that influencers and bloggers, like the attendees at Blogalicious, are constantly growing and branching out. They may be retooling their blog or launching a new site. Having a domain .ME URL was such an attractive option that some visitors to our booth decided to grab a .ME inspired URL right on the spot!
We would like to invite you too to use the comments sections to pose any questions you may have about .ME domains. We are always in the mood to chat!
And let us say that this is not the end. We will continue working with influencers and specialists to educate the importance of personal branding as a way to achieve your personal and professional goals.
Follow us on our social media accounts and keep in touch!
