People with strong personal brands earn bigger bucks, get more opportunities and really enjoy life.

What are you waiting for?
We are all brands. An image, a mental mark planted in the minds of our markets. You can leave your personal brand up to others to create, or you can take charge and consciously take actions so your brand works to achieve your goals.

If you polled your peers, your clients, employers or prospects and asked them what they thought of when they heard your name, What would they say? Is there a pattern of perception about who you are? What you stand for? If not, it’s time to give your personal brand a jumpstart.

Here are 4 FREE (and 1 low cost) personal branding tools to fast track your success.

1) FREE Online Reputation Management and Business Promotion for Professionals
Lookuppage.com
LookupPage is a free online service that provides personal visibility, online reputation management and business promotion for professionals. It is focussed on enhancing presence across all leading search engines using SEO and PPC. LookupPage enables you to manage yourself online, be visible when looking for a job, as well as promote your business and generate valuable new leads. Users benefit from an individual domain around their name (www.yourname.com), sophisticated visitor tracking tools and inclusion in the LookupPage index.

According to studies carried out by Execunet, 83% of candidates are researched online by recruiters and employers with the aim of finding out more about the person’s professional or personal background. Being visible on the web is now more important than ever for anyone who is looking for new opportunities and needs to be visible to potential employers or business partners.

How It Works
Create your personal LookupPage (standard page is FREE)
Your LookupPage gets you prominent positioning on all leading search engines including Google, Yahoo, Live, etc. when people search for your name. (Prominent position is guaranteed for users who upgrade to one of the following packages)

Pro: $15.95 for the first month and $7.95 thereafter or $88 per annum
Basic: $3.99 per month

By upgrading your account you have access to LookupPage analytics dashboard, where you can gain valuable insight by monitoring who is visiting your LookupPage. Learn where your visitors come from (i.e. where they search for you – Google etc), what search term they used to find you and more.

Cost: standard package is FREE.

Oddpodz review:
We all know visibility; especially concerning your online footprint is a key piece in any new business development program. This tool not only helps on search results tied to your name, it’s got some very cool tracking features to see who and where your viewers are coming from. The company is based in England, so their reach is international. I started with the 100% FREE level and it’s definitely got value. Then I upgraded to the Pro level, it’s around $8 bucks a month. I find the added levels of monitoring well worth the investment.

LookUpPage is giving members of the Oddpodz community a 15% discount when they upgrade to the annual pro package. Have a look here www.karen-post.com – I have my own unique named-domain, full of information about me and my business, a sponsored listing in Google, my logo and links with detailed information about my business and partners, my contact details, a daily, weekly or monthly statistical report telling me who has visited my page, and additional search engine optimization to ensure maximum effect for marketing on the internet.

If you want what I have, i.e., the LookupPage Pro, click here and register your details, then log in and go to My Account to upgrade to the Pro package, but don’t forget: you need to enter this promotional code on that page: HXuUek to get your 15% discount.

2) Dan Schawbel does an excellent job at summing up brand monitoring tools and his Personal Branding blog is worth visiting.
Dan is a personal branding expert for Gen-Y and author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success” (Kaplan, April 2009). Fast Company calls Dan a “personal branding force of nature” and BusinessWeek considers Dan to be “a leading voice in the area of personal branding.” Two resources I’d recommend: his blog and a recent post he did on Mashable.com that covers brand monitoring tools.

Cost: FREE

Oddpodz review:
Dan Schawbel is new to my radar screen and glad I found him. His insight is fresh and direct. Besides his expertise, he has a team of diverse marketing/communications pros who contribute to his content. He also has a quarterly magazine about personal branding and you can sign up for one FREE issue.

3) FREE downloadable e-book on personal branding
www.chrisbrogan.com/free-ebook-on-personal-branding/

Chris Brogan President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency is a ten-year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. His free ebook on personal branding called Personal Branding for the Business Professional runs just about 15 pages and contains everything from strategy advice to some considerations to over 100 tactics and ideas on what to do next.

Cost: FREE

Oddpodz review:
Chris’s new media expertise is all over this book. Which unless you work from a cave, every professional needs to step up their new media brand footprint. This ebook will help you do that. It’s written in a non-techy, well-organized style. So don’t worry about feeling like a new media moron. If you want to learn about online tools and really take advantage of this exploding new media space, read this book. It’s very good.

4) One final resource, that’s almost FREE, it’s a buck for a 30-day trial.
Branded email signature

Letterclick
If you’ve every received an email from me as the Branding Diva®, you’ve seen this cool tool. It’s a service that sends emails with your personal graphic mark/or photo, the date, your actual signature and optional messaging and links. Basically, it looks like a professionally printed letterhead, signed by you. For $1, you can try it for a 30-day test drive.

Cost: $1.00

Oddpodz review:
I’ve been using this product for at least 6 years. I always get positive comments from people who receive it and it includes your contact info, so when someone wants to call you, it’s easy and not a chore. You can also be subscribed and send non branded email, if it’s not appropriate, just type in “NO BRAND” in the subject and the servers send your mail with no branding info.