Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

Typically I cannot allocate the time to post twice in a single day. I do commit to 5 posts a week; Monday through Friday. I even follow through when I’m on vacation, which certain people question. Anyways, today is the official 1 year anniversary for the Personal Branding Blog, which means it was this exact day on March 14th of 2007 that I discovered my own personal brand. My first blog post was entitled “Stairway to Heaven.” There were other posts before that period, but they were from my legacy blog called “Driven-to-Succeed.” Aside from this blog, I launched a magazine (3 issues), awards, a TV podcast series, countless articles, publicly spoke, got a book deal and drafted the entire thing, switched jobs at EMC to become the first social media specialist at the company, sat on the board of advisers for a startup company, became a columnist for JobWeb and TheLadders.com, constructed the first personal press release, created DanSchawbel.com to symbolize the future of recruitment, got a lot of press (including the timeless Fast Company article) and even more. If I’m missing something please remind me. I tend to name everything that is top-of-mind and/or significant.

I’ve noticed a few major points along my travel:

1) When you enter the internet world with no brand, you have to network with the right people to get started, including comments on blogs.

2) A blog is a source to filter out those who are attracted to your brand and repel those that aren’t. With the one’s that stay, they become sources for your possible business ventures.

3) Find ways of providing value first before asking for it. The magazine was perfect for this because I opened up new opportunities and it didn’t cost me anything.

To commemorate such an occasion, I designed a special logo:

After a years worth of work and dedication to personal branding, this blog and my other projects, I want to poll you to find out what you enjoyed this year. Based on what you suggest, I will provide more of that type of content. If you have any suggestions or comments you can always email me. Based on the Octopus Model of Relevancy, there are many different topics we can talk about on here and if you have anything worthy of consideration, please let me know.

Personal Branding Blog Survey

Ending the first year on a good note

Thanks to everyone who has supported me this year. It has truly been my pleasure to be a prime resource in the field of personal branding to all of you. Expect a lot more next year and in the future, as we evangelize personal branding and change lives. This is only the beginning and I’m dedicated for life to make personal branding the cornerstone of our education system. With the help of my fellow gen-y’ers, personal brand’ers and all of you, we can make the world a better place.