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The friendly and helpful interaction with people can really go a long way in developing your personal brand online and offline. When you start a one on one dialogue with someone new or old you have the chance to directly interact and impact their lives. In the process this can benefit you in more ways than you may have initially thought.

1. More traffic

The time you spend to develop a relationship with someone new pays off in dividends, especially when you help them. Lets say for instance you helped one person through a coding issue. This new person you personally interacted with is likely to come back and see what you are doing on your website more often than the normal user. They are also more likely to recommend you/your website to a friend. Of course everything here hinges on you accomplishing the task they want to get done.

2. Meet new people

You are building a relationship. This new person now has talked to you on a personal level and knows you more than the average user. Meeting new people can lead to many things down the road, but the sheer greatness of meeting them is enough to keep you helping and being friendly for a long time.

3. Build up a reputation

Even if you did not figure out the solution to the persons problem, you are still more likely to have a good reputation with them. When most people get a one on one interaction with a friendly and genuinely helpful person they feel taken care of. This feeling is not one you get everyday. The reputation you develop can solidfy your position in your niche very quickly as THE person everyone needs to meet and interact with.

4. Lead to better opportunities/partnerships

You never know who exactly you are helping or who they may know. These random interactions with your users can lead to greater opportunities on future projects or possibly partnerships. Although the later is something you earn and generally is not given. Some other opportunities can be the users writing about your blog and helpfulness, allowing you to do a guest post, linking to your website and the list goes on.

5. Feel better about yourself

Last and certainly the greatest reason of all.  At the end of everything you feel good because you just got the chance to positively impact someone else’s life. You can have the worst day ever and in the end when you look back and you helped someone else achieve a positive result, you just had the best day ever.

Try this out and help one person a week with whatever you can. Be it through forums, comments on a blog or just through email. You will end everyday feeling good about the results you are achieving. It will show through almost everything you do.

Social networks

Building up a brand on social networks is the first thing everyone thinks about when they get started online these days and for good reason. Social networks bring us together directly with the people in our niche. There is no better way to feel out your marketplace, than to talk directly to someone in it. Which social networks do you use? All of them. If you haven’t done so already, register your business/your name with every social network out there. Its free and only takes a few minutes. This will save you heartache later when someone else is squatting on your name.

Video

Video became an invaluable branding tool when YouTube was created. Video used to be costly to implement and most people couldn’t watch your movies without having to find some obscure codec. Now there are countless video networks. Webcams are built into most laptops and it costs maybe $30 to go out and grab one at the store. Which means anyone can start building their brand through videos. When I talk about building your brand, I do not mean go and try to make some fancy commercial, I mean turn on the webcam and virtually interact with your audience. It means giving them something of value or teaching them a new technique/method for the niche. Video also means they can see your facial expressions and understand your words on a whole new level.

Personal Blog

Like the one you’re visiting right now! Now building your own personal brand through a blog has been made the easiest thing to do. You can start through any of the hosted blogging solutions like wordpress, blogger or tumblr. You don’t even need a hosting account anymore. I do suggest if you have the money to spend, to at least buy your own domain name and use it to direct to your hosted blog.

Blogging on other sites

Contribute articles and blog posts to other sites inside AND outside of your niche. This is a great way to expand your brand and notariety. Users will start to recognize your name in places you hadnt expected before.

Forums

Contribute your knowledge to forums and usergroups. This also can apply to IRC, if you’re brave enough. Forums are a much more longer term way to establish your brand online, but if you choose the right forums to contribute to, it can really pay off.

To Round it Out

The idea overall for building a brand online is to stay involved and interactive with yours/your businesses user base. This ties in with all your market efforts directly. It is vital you spend almost more time building your brand and presence online than you do building up your product or whatever it is you are trying to sell.