I’ve given this topic a lot of thought in the past two years. It is challenging to walk the line between privacy and visibility for personal branding purposes. I recently signed up to receive Google Alerts on my name. This way I can easily monitor if anything new involving my name comes up on the Internet.
I was pleased with the results that came up when I Googled my name. Most of the results on the first page refer to me and the ones that do are positive. The first result, of course, is Facebook. I have tweaked my privacy settings to show only my (tasteful) profile picture, my name, and my website address. The second result is my LinkedIn profile. Later results refer to my website.
I am currently working on a logo to represent my personal brand. This logo will go on my business cards and website. I like the idea of having a consistent image on all of my professional materials. Last night I bit the bullet and purchased a domain name for myself. As of today, http://bethanygrabow.com is mine and goes to my website.
Any suggestions on ways to improve my personal brand would be greatly appreciated.
Bethany Grabow- Enthusiastic Librarian 
One suggestion for getting your brand out there is to interact with folks who are already known in the field. There are lots of librarians who have national name recognition (with other librarians, anyway 😉 ). Comment on their blog posts; you’ll find others who read the comments will click through to your site. On your blog, reflect on what you’ve read on some of these well-known blogs; your site will show up for them in their own alerts and they might read your stuff and send it out to others. Retweeting blog posts you like is another good way to get influential folks in the field to become aware of you. Lastly, go to conferences and meet these people. They’re all very friendly and they didn’t become well-known for nothing: there smart and interesting so you can learn a lot while having a good time!
Bethany – you really got this figured out. Not struggling like me. Way to go! Your webpage is very professional, nice job. The comments from Civillibrarian are great advice.
Bethany
Congratulations on your website! I especially enjoyed your book lists and wiki. I’m a Nancy Drew generation reader so I plan to take a closer look at The Agency.
Okay Bethany, you’ve inspired me to be better at personal branding. Nice website, domain name, etc!