Paid Advertising For Your Personal Brand Using Google, Facebook and Blogs

I’ve been seeing a lot of personal branding creativity out there lately. People have started to experiment with using Google AdWords and Facebook Social Ads, as a way of advertising their personal brand. I think it’s not only creative, but since most people have never thought of using these strategies, they stand out BIG TIME. Yet again, this proves that we must act like our own company’s, which sometimes means we have to pay the price.

The good news is that advertising on Google and Facebook is quite cheap and you have complete control how much you spend per day, week and month. Today, I want to go over how to effectively use Google and Facebook to advertise your brand (not by building a profile or ranking high in natural search) and then pitch you a way to advertise on blogs! You become a passive candidate when using all 3 mediums.

Remember that this is a two-way street, meaning that employers and applicants can use both strategies to their own advantage.

1) Google AdWords

Google AdWords is Google’s advertising platform, which offers CPC (cost-per-click) and CPI (cost-per-impression) pricing for advertisements on Google and partner sites. Some of their partner sites are newspapers, radio and TV now.

Before running your advertisement, you need a landing page. If you have a website or blog, then use the resume page within it to display through advertising. This works beautifully because recruiters can see that single resume page and notice all the other pages/options on your website, to getting a better sense of your brand.

Creating your ad

• 1) Title. When you create your ad, label yourself as a specialist, expert or guru on the title tag. You might want to state the fact that it’s your resume first.
• 2) Description. In the next two description tags, pull out your biggest achievements in 6 words or less and list your personal brand statement or a few descriptors.
• 3) URL. For your URL, don’t use the URL for your resume page.  Instead use yourname.com for personal branding purposes. Although in the example above (picture), I use www.yourname.com, I think you should drop the “www.” completely because people get the point.

It’s keyword selection time. My friend Jim Stroud, the HR Evolution Columnist for Personal Branding Magazine, says to use Overture to find popular keywords. You should be very specific with your keywords, such that you narrow the focus on the type of job you want to be recruited for, rather than a general position. Think of an industry or an open position you might have seen recently and build it around that.

If you’re a recruiter, then please see Jim Stroud’s blog post on how to use Google AdWords to source candidates.

Read More…