What’s more personal than your name? This is where your personal brand begins and you should own it. There are likely others with that name as well but you want to be known for the name, not the others. Owning and controlling your name is very important, although it is not the end of the world if you don’t, but it does provide a huge advantage.

Yes you’ve had that name your entire life but do you own it, as in the domain name?

Visit a site like NameCheap.Com and do a search to see if your name is available. Secure it if you can. If you can afford the cost, purchase all of the popular domain extensions like .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .me. Hell, buy them all if you can, this shuts out any other online use of your name as a domain.

If you own the domains, you own the name and have an advantage over all others, as you can now control the associated brand.

Why own the name, is it really that important?

It is that important and here are a few reasons why.

• If you don’t own the name you will have greater difficulty in controlling the brand and perceptions of that name.
• Many companies are now searching online for profiles of job applicants. You want to be in control of what they find.
• Whenever the name is searched using search engines like Google or Yahoo, you want your entry to be one of, if not THE top entry. This is what building a personal brand is all about.
• There may be others with the same name that you would prefer to have no affiliation with, control your portion of it’s usage.
• You can create your own personal or business site around that name.

Establish Your Web Presence

Ultimately you want to fully control your name and rank highly in the search engines with a very positive image. Building a website around your name is the best scenario as it provides that opportunity.

Using the popular .com extension, build a site using your name, making it the central hub from which you operate.

To gain control of the name add lots of compelling content so that you can rank highly in Google’s search results for that name or your targeted keywords. Continue to build valuable backlinks from authority sites. Join directories like DMOZ and insure that every profile or presence you have online links to one another, all leading back to your main hub.

Example: Link Twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn to Twitter.

Professional and Social Networks

In addition to your personal or business site, establish a presence on the popular business and social networking sites like Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, to name but a few. Linking these profiles to your main hub site expands your online presence and provides protection of your name from others who may open accounts or establish profiles with the same name.

Other profiles to consider:

• Google profile
• Posterous
• Flickr
• Friendfeed

Where Are You in Google’s Search?

Perform a Google Search on your name to get a sense of where you are in the listing. If you are like most people, there is work to do in order to rank higher, ultimately landing in one of the top spots.

This is also a good way to find out about others using the same name, some of which may have you raising your eyebrows and realizing that you must take action to build your own brand and avoid being associated with negativity.

On the other hand, it could be someone who has gained a level of fame, but in either case, you’ll want to build your own brand and let people know what that represents.

Conclusion

The important thing to take away from this post is that you really need to control your online presence as much as possible. It’s a form of reputation management that makes clear, who you are and what your brand represents.

The sooner you get started building and managing your brand, the better for you in the long run.

Keep Blogging!