A key to growing your personal brand online is having a good picture ready to use for your social networking profiles. Here are a few tips to help:

1. Intentional Picture. If you have a digital camera and a friend then all you’re lacking is taking the time and effort to get a few good shots of just you. They don’t have to be stuffy or have a pretty curtain background, just good shots that have a look that fits you.

2. Upper Body. In general, crop the picture if needed in order for your upper body (mainly shoulders & up) to be the focus.

3. Keep Handy. Keep the picture(s) handy in a folder on your computer so you can easily access them when creating new profiles.

4. Standard. In general, use the same picture or two for most of your profiles. This also helps you define a general look that defines your brand.

5. Genuine. Make sure the picture actually looks like you. When you meet someone online, they should be able to recognize you in person.

6. Just Do It. Don’t wait for a perfect picture. The important thing is to get a picture out there that follows the tips above and represents brand you.

Have any tips of your own? Help us out and comment below.

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In today’s online communication, the “cool” thing is to be negative. If you do a search on Twitter for the popular #fail tag, you’ll see countless statements observing the failures of organizations and products.

Pointing out the bad is always easy (and many times valuable). The question, though, is if you want your personal brand to be What’s Wrong in the World.

My observation is that being a critique may earn you points on the coolness scale, but often doesn’t give you points on the Know, Like, Trust scale.

Not to say you shouldn’t point out what’s not working (and even twitter about it), just be mindful of the overall brand you’re putting out there.

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Way too much money.
Not enough real business sense.

Big surprise.

The problem, however, wasn’t in the technologies employed or the markets targeted. The problem was in the fact that just about every e-business start-up seemed to expect that a mature industry would develop the moment their product launch press release crossed the “wire.”

The reality is that virtually every successful large enterprise in every significant industry, ranging from automobiles to aircraft and from banking to baseball, all started as small businesses. If we take the time to study what went wrong with so many e-businesses – both B2C and B2B – last year’s big e-business fiascos just may pave the way for small e-business opportunities this year like never before.

I predict that 2001 will become the year of true small e-business legitimacy. My forecast is based on the confluence of four fundamental Internet tenets:

1. Throw a long shadow – Forget the concept of Davids and Goliaths. On the Internet there are no big guys and no little guys. The key to small e-business success is in appearing to be on the same footing, with the same e-business capabilities, as anyone else out there. Around the world, ISPs focusing on small business customers are offering the tools today for a small business to set-up e-commerce storefronts for less than the cost of a Razor scooter. This includes access to must-have e-commerce applications such as instant on-line store-creation, secure transaction processing, inventory and supply management, and on-line sales lead tracking.

2. Run From Mass Mediocrity – A handful of large e-players can (maybe) make money by distributing books, dog food or consumer electronics. Trust me, you’re not one of them. The success of new e-businesses will come only from identifying a niche that you can serve better than the average aggregator whose only benefit is to deliver the lowest possible price. I am a huge believer that e-commerce offers significant business opportunities in almost every segment of our economy. E-business history, short though it may be, has proven that most enterprises attempting to corner a commodity market will fail.

3. Stay Lean and Mean – Do not spend large amounts of money on e-business systems, software or services. If you’re a small e-business that’s bought into the “I’ve got to spend a million to make a million” concept you’re already doomed. The big-ticket, IT-lineaged companies like Oracle, IBM, and SAP, and even some of the newer, well-regarded e-commerce infrastructure players like iPlanet and BroadVision, may be the right choice for Bank of America or General Electric, that doesn’t make them right for you. My advice is that every small business entrepreneur should think of these solutions like die-hard Superbowl fans think of the halftime show – avoid it. If we learned anything last year it’s that, eventually, every business has to make a profit.

4. Customer is King – If you’re a small business looking to become a real e-business player then you’ve probably already taken care of the items that you think are most critical to your success: identifying your Web host and designing your Web site. Truth is, if you haven’t thought about customer service, then don’t expect to be in business for very long. Nowhere is customer service more important than on the Web. In fact, on the Web there’s even more opportunity to screw up. Ignore your customer and you’re left wondering why the saying “If you build it, they will come,” didn’t apply to you. If you’re going to build it, then build it right, with customer-centric features like 1:1 marketing, customer recognition, order tracking, and returns.

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There is nothing like a good argument to get people going. How do you leverage the power of emotion as a blogger?

Chances are that you are passionate about something, otherwise you wouldn’t bother with blogging – after all, it can be hazardous to your health. What is it in your niche that you absolutely love? Alternately, can you reframe that as something that you can really get emotional about?

I mentioned edgecraft in my Blogger’s Block article. Edgecraft is radical reframing – looking at one facet of your niche, then going to the far edge of what is doable and reasonable along that facet.

For XFBML blog, it is easy – I have an Information Architecture and Usability categories that is my way of giving myself permission to speak out about poor user experience and other things that really get up my nose.

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I would add the following:

• Keep your ideas journal close to hand: I use a mobile phone as both ebook reader and ideas log. It is fairly complicated – when I think of something, I email it to my gmail account, using a keyword in the title that gmail recognises as a tag so I can retrieve it later.
• Cultivate some blogging friends, either online or off, and discuss ideas with them – get them talking about what they’re into at the moment, regardless of whether it is a movie they saw yesterday or the problems they’re having at work – any interaction might help you generate ideas.
• Read Seth Godin’s book Free Prize Inside and learn about egdecraft. Edgecraft is not just flipping an idea on its head, but going right out the far side of reason and normality in the pursuit of the concept – how far can you get from the way that you would normally think without actually crossing the line into impropriety?
• In any sort of free-association/brainstorming/mindmapping around concept generation, leave no stone unturned – don’t just embrace Chaos, have a deep and meaningful relationship with her
• Walk into a bookstore and just browse for half an hour – even those parts that you would not normally go near – and select books at random and read the cover notes.
• Write a list of every hobby and passion that you have ever had onto sticky notes and randomly place them together. What is the intersection of cake decoration and organic farming? How does breeding goldfish relate to whale-watching?

If you can think of anything that I’ve missed, and it isn’t in this list (or even if it is! You might have a new take on it or a specific technique to make it work), please leave me a comment.Similar Posts:

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“Good enough” is how most of us get through our day. If we didn’t try, we wouldn’t sleep at night. We go to our beds knowing that we did our best, and that our best was, well, good enough.

Seth Godin has challenged us to think beyond good enough.

Good enough is beyond reproach. It’s safe at the same time it represents quality. Good enough demonstrates effort and insight and ability. People rarely get fired for good enough, which is a shame.

He gives us an alternative:

If you redefined the objective to be, “makes some people uncomfortable, changes the entire competitive landscape and is truly remarkable in that many of the key people we reach feel compelled to talk about it,” what would happen?

What does this mean for bloggers?

Most of us won’t get fired for blogging ‘good enough’. Most of us are just not employed to blog. But if we want to differentiate ourselves, and become truly remarkable (and thence be remarked upon), what do we do? Is challenging the accepted wisdom enough? Any fool can disagree with the accepted wisdom (and in the blogosphere, many do).

What might work is this: challenge the accepted wisdom well. Don’t just disagree, but disagree so spectacularly and magnificently that it takes your breath away. Good enough will get you read but it won’t get you to the Technorati Top 100.

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• Carpal tunnel syndrome
• Relationship issues
• Sedentary occupation issues
• Mental health issues

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Wikipedia tells us that:

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is idiopathic median neuropathy at the carpal tunnel. The pathophysiology is not completely understood but can be considered compression of the median nerve traveling through the carpal tunnel.^[1]

There are a lot of stories about bloggers with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome – a favourite of mine is Light at the End of the Carpal Tunnel. For what it’s worth as a non-sufferer, my advice is to get help if you experience any of the following symptoms:

Patients with CTS experience numbness, tingling, or burning sensations in the thumb and fingers, particularly the index, middle fingers, and radial half of the ring fingers which are innervated by the median nerve. Less specific symptoms may include pain in the hands or wrists and loss grip strength^[15] (both of which are more characteristic of painful conditions such as arthritis). Patients may also report pain in the arm and shoulder.^[16]

Relationship issues
I mentioned this before in Married to the Blog – a heavy blogging commitment can get in the way of a relationship, especially when the other partner doesn’t understand what you are trying to do. Maybe the relationship is a little rocky anyway, and blogging has brought up old stuff – or maybe there are some relationship issues brought on by this new interest. It could be a mixture of both – my only advice would be to talk openly and honestly with your partner about how you both feel.

Sedentary occupation issues
Let’s face it – as a hobby and as a profession, blogging itself does not encourage exercise. Like all keyboard-based work, blogging can take time away from exercise – especially if you are a part-time blogger, full-time office worker or student (and who would like to guess how many bloggers this covers?).

My advice would be to ensure that you get enough exercise (and I’ll leave it up to you, your doctor, your personal trainer and common sense to dictate how much exercise is enough).

Mental health issues
New Scientist argues that keeping a diary may lead to mental health issues – it seems that some people are capable of talking themselves into illness rather than using the diary as a way of assimilating past trauma. The same could be said of blogging – I think that the jury is still out on this, but it is interesting to note that the pop-psychology dictum “express yourself in writing – it’s good for you” may not always hold water.

There is a danger of social isolation through hours spent alone blogging. It needs to be said that physical social isolation does not necessarily equal total social isolation – I’m guessing that most bloggers interact socially online with other bloggers in one way or another (that said, I don’t have any references on this, and would be grateful for clarification).

There are some other issues that can affect mental health, such as loss of employment, social censure and imprisonment etc.

And as to advice? If in doubt, talk to a trained professional.

Conclusion
While there are some scary things in the above, I can’t see that any of them are deal-breakers – that is, there is nothing there that makes me personally want to stop blogging. But there are some important things to keep in mind that relate to your physical, mental and emotional health.

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Without going into specifics, or naming names, it is fair to say that intense blogging puts a strain on any relationship.  Between afterwork and blogging I get no small amount of grief from my partner, and I know that others get the same reaction. It is hard to avoid thinking about this sort of thing – is the discord a symptom of deeper problems or is blogging the root cause?

What does it mean, to be married to your blog?  Is it possible to have a meaningful long-term relationship AND a successful blog? Is discord over time spend blogging the symptom or the condition?

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They blog for pleasure now – when they have something specific to say, or when the muse takes them, and this is OK.  They don’t watch their Technorati rank, or check their numbers of RSS readers. They don’t run advertising on their blogs, and probably don’t need the money that this would bring in.

In other words, they don’t really need to blog any more.

So what happens next? If you are blogging to show your expertise within a profession (as opposed to directly deriving income from the blog), and you’ve got that reputation now, what do you do? I suppose that it comes down to motivation – if you were only ever blogging for one purpose, and that purpose is fulfilled, then there is no need to continue. The fact that my friends continue to blog means that they really are doing it for pleasure – and to maintain a connection to friendships already forged.

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