Just as a quick reminder I wanted to say I bought my first domain name in 1999 and built my first website. By the end of 2003 I was making enough money online I quit my job as an advertising director and started working from home. After doing this for 20 years it seems like it almost started overnight but it didn’t.

It took three years of full time work to build what I had. Three years now doesn’t seem like much but if you’re just getting started please be patient! You will not be making a ton of money or have a huge audience in just a couple of months. You’ve got to stay consistent and add value to your audience.

I did not start working on my personal brand until 2019! I’m in the same boat as you all and I’m starting from scratch as far as my own brand. Part of this blog and podcast is to help build that personal brand. At this point it is not to sell a course, get you into a funnel or make you part of a mastermind. It’s just me helping you get to where you can have the freedom to work for yourself!

I knew the value of a personal brand in 2004 when I bought CurtisTucker.com. At that time the big personal brands online were Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman, John Chow, Shoemoney, Joel Comm and Heather B. Armstrong also known as Dooce.

I was using the branding of “That Sneaker Wearing Entrepreneurial Cartoonist Internet Guy”. My plan was to become a huge daddy blogger talking about parenting and living in the 70s. Unfortunately I was making great money with my cartooning and AdSense that I never devoted enough time to get it off the ground.

Today my personal brand includes being an entrepreneur, driving a Jeep, my love of the number 2, going on wild adventures, dressing casual, reminiscing about the 70s and having fun along the way. My skills include graphic design, cartooning, branding, web design, blogging, social media, podcasting, photography and speaking. I’m working towards adding pop artist and writer to my brand.

My personal brand name is now Shaggs, owner of Shaggy Duck Studio. I’ve developed my own personal cartoon logo based on my casual style and cartooning background. My casual style includes shorts and sneakers and my look entails wearing a backwards ball cap with black rimmed glasses.

The backwards ball cap has been a bone of contention at times but it’s part of my casual “look” and is included on my logo. A backwards ball cap fits my style which is shorts, t-shirts and sneakers. My Shaggy Duck clothing and lifestyle brand is all about being casual, spending time in the sun, outdoor life and fun. The ball cap fits the brand and stays on my head while driving my Jeep! A backwards ball cap is not the norm. Normal never stands out and normal will never rise above the crowd.

Examples of unique style becoming a brand include the wool cap worn by Michael Nesmith, the outrageous glasses of Elton John, the bucket hat on Gilligan, the huge cigar held by George Burns, collars worn by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the du-rag of Eminem and many others.

Having a known personal brand opens doors for opportunities like speaking engagements, interviews, book deals, media coverage, and more. An example is the fact that I was chosen to fly with the US Thunderbirds in Enid, Oklahoma because I had built a personal brand as the go-to guy for connecting to the Enid community.

Personal Brand vs. Reputation

Your personal brand is what you say about yourself, but your reputation is what others say about you. Your reputation is your integrity and values. Your personal brand is your interests, expertise and knowledge. Reputation can influence your brand.

When someone goes online to learn more about you they are going to find your name in different places. Your website is where they are going to learn about your personal brand. On review websites and forums is where they are going to learn about your reputation.

Reputation is something you earn while a personal brand is something you create. Your reputation can have a negative or positive effect on your brand.

You Probably Already Have A Personal Brand

Everyone has some type of personal brand whether they want one or not. A personal brand is basically what you are known for. People around you will form their own impression of what you’re known for but you can easily control that impression with just a little bit of effort.

There’s a guy in my hometown that has a personal brand even though he didn’t create it and may not even know he has it. His brand is that he is the go-to guy if you want to know about VW’s. He buys them, sells them and works on them. He’s also an artist that likes to draw so his brand is that he’s creative.

This guy also wears a hat everywhere he goes. Not ball caps but fedora and Indiana Jones style hats. So his wardrobe is part of his personal brand. His longer hair adds to his personal brand. You see, everyone in some way already has a personal brand whether they like it or not.

Not everyone needs or may want a promote their personal brand. Some people just want to be an employee or not connect with other people. But, if you are wanting to build up a following of people and market your information or products to them you really should build a reputable personal brand. You’ll need it to stand out when you start networking.

All that’s required to build a brand is to take what you know and share it with others, especially online. Inform, entertain or instruct consistently, and you’ll build your own personal brand in no time. It’s nothing more than marketing yourself rather than a business or product. In essence you are the product. It’s your skills, experience, and personality that will set you apart.

Make Yourself Unique

Personal branding is all about building a marketable image which you are able to mold. Your own brand is a combination of your skills, talents and personal life experiences that make you unique. What you stand for will differentiate you from others in your field.

A personal brand makes you unique in a professional field full of lookalikes. A well crafted brand can help you carve a niche in an industry and make you thought of as an industry expert.

The age of the Internet and social media has brought us a much more competitive market unlike ever before. And with that in mind, audiences are looking to form relationships with unique people they can connect with.

Your personal brand tells people what you’re known for and what you stand for. It’s ongoing and really never ends. You can pivot your personal brand so don’t feel like you have to stick with just one skill or interest forever.

Take your most personal characteristics and traits and weave into your brand. Do you want to be perceived as very polished and professional, or perhaps more quirky and adventurous? A personal brand allows you to decide!

Tools To Build A Personal Brand

To build a personal brand you must have a website! More often than not people will be introduced to you online before they ever meet you. Your well planned website can present your personal brand in the exact light you want them to see.

When building a personal brand, it is important that you also use all social media channels available and that you are consistent across every platform. Be visually appealing, and represents the type of influential person you want to be.

Make sure you can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and the latest hot platform. Keeping fresh content on all of those platforms is going to be work. But guess what? That’s now your job! If it didn’t take some pretty good effort everyone would be doing it.

The more personality you can add to your brand, the easier it will be to find your audience. Over time you will build a community of like-minded people value your skills, thoughts and will be willing to trade dollars for knowledge or information.

To build a personal brand more quickly you’ll need to use more visuals online. The best thing you can do is video and live streaming. When an audience sees you with many followers on the Internet or on TV it will make you a celebrity of sorts.

Once I started using Facebook live streaming my personal brand went through the roof. The fact that people began to recognize me around town upped my cred and I began to get more calls to speak and appear at events.

Having a memorable personal brand makes it virtually impossible for someone to compete against you. They can compete with you on services, price and knowledge but they can’t match your personality, quirks, perspective and personal style.

Create A Brand Message

Create a personal brand statement, which is 1-2 sentences explaining your values, who you serve, and your unique value proposition. When developing your personal brand statement, make it memorable, short and attention grabbing.

With a personal branding statement, you are the one controlling your real-life message and you can make it say anything that you’d like. Think of it as your slogan. I have not come up with my own personal brand statement but did create a descriptive motto.

If I did have a brand statement it might be something like this, “Twenty year entrepreneur with complete freedom motivating unhappy dreamers to escape their day jobs by investing time into an online side gig.”

I attended a Daymond John speech a while back and he recommended that people should brand themselves with just 2–5 words. Those words should shape who you are and your goals at that moment. At any time you can change your brand. I came up with a motto for me at the time and it is “Adventurous Entrepreneur Happily Journaling In Sneakers!”

Build An Audience

Building a personal brand will elevate you to influencer status and being an influencer builds trust and authority in your field. People like to follow interesting leaders that stand out, inspire and look at things in a unique way.

A personal brand will help you become the leader of an audience. That audience will become your followers and they will consume your content and products. Cater to them and try to niche down as much as possible. Don’t be afraid to be energetic and enthusiastic.

I believe you should give your audience a nickname. My followers are called ShaggHeads and BuzzHeads. Lady Gaga had Little Monsters, Barry Manilow has Fanilows, Jimmy Buffet has Parrotheads and there are many others. Having a common name helps build your community and makes people feel included.

Brand Name vs. Personal Name

Personal brand names can be your personal name or a made up name. I started out as Curtis Tucker but eventually drifted to That Buzz Guy and then changed to Shaggs. I like to be a bit more playful so I started using the name associated with my Shaggy Duck Studio and associated with the 70s. Shaggs fits just about everything I’m doing today.

Lady Gaga does great with a brand name while Taylor Swift does alright with her personal name. If you get huge one day your name could become a brand in itself like Walt Disney and McDonald’s.

It might be easier to sell a business with a made up name rather than a personal name but either will work. If you know you’ll never sell your company feel free to use your own name. If you’re building a business to sell try using a made up name.

Subscribe to That Buzz Guy podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel at YouTube.com/CurtisTuckerTV.

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Think of your website as your house, the place where you live online. Like a regular home you need an address to be found. Rather than assign a website along list of numbers you get to choose an easy to remember domain name. Your domain name is associated with a set of name servers that tell the Internet where your website is hosted. Name server addresses are entered at your domain name account registrar like Go Daddy or Network Solutions.

Think of a phone number like 1-800-843-2665. It would be easier to remember 1-800-THE-COOL. That’s exactly why we use domain names. There are many factors in deciding on the perfect domain name. Take a little time to research your choice but don’t let that stop you from getting started. Pick something and get going, you can always make changes later.

You can always change your name at a later date and even forward a new name to the old one. But! Don’t wait too long. If your business or side gig starts picking up steam you will need to make a decision quickly. The age of a domain name has been a ranking factor in Google before so the sooner you can get your name online the better.

I personally have owned over 100 domain names and still have a rather large collection. I have my own set of rules that will help guide you to a great domain name. There might be a reason for you to differ from my guidelines which is fine.

1. Purchase your name, business name, brand or keywords. This seems pretty obvious. I own CurtisTucker.com which is my name. I run EnidBuzz.com which is the name of my main gig. And I purchased EnidBusinesses.com which is a local business directory for Enid, Oklahoma. Most people will search for you by name so it would be advisable to buy your name if possible. Unfortunately your name may not be available. Someone may already be using it or a cyber squatter may have reserved it.

If you can’t get your exact domain name you can alter it slightly or choose a different name. At one time I wanted to buy CartoonLogos.com but it was not available so I purchased ECartoonLogos.com. If your name is gone try adding your middle initial or full middle name.

There might be circumstances where you want to buy your name or business name but would like to use something else as your domain name. Guess what? You can point more than one domain name to the same website! You cannot point a domain name to more than one website though. For example, I purchased CurtisTucker.com years ago but have since started branding myself as That Buzz Guy. So! I purchased ThatBuzzGuy.com and it forwards to CurtisTucker.com! Just like a phone number or email address.

Another example of when you might need two domain names is if one is very long or hard to remember. I purchased BottleCapsMercantile.com because we opened a brick and mortar store. That is the name of the store but is a bit much to type all of the time. So I also purchased BCMerc.com which forwards to BottleCapsMercantile.com. That way I can give people a much easier name to type in.

2. Purchase a .com. You can tell someone a million times that your website is WhiteHouse .gov and they’ll usually go straight to WhiteHouse.com. I always suggest getting a .com. Almost everyone has heard of famous DotComs whereas very few remember a famous .net, .edu, .org, etc. If you can’t get the .com go with a different name rather than going for a .net. Anything other than the .com will appear as not being the original or best web address. It’s like taking second place.

These days you can purchase a wide variety of descriptive extensions like .pizza, .photography, .buzz, .smile, .life, .lawyer, .me and many, many others. These are cute and can be fun to purchase but I would not use one of these as your main domain name. Like I said I own EnidBuzz.com but I also own Enid.Buzz. They both forward to the same website. I bought it just for fun and to make sure someone else didn’t come along and try to compete with me.

Some companies will purchase the .com, .net and .org to protect their brand. They don’t want anyone using their brand with a different extension. I’ll do a post on trademarking down the line.

3. Pick a name available on social media. Another factor for choosing a domain name might be the vanity usernames on social media. In an ideal world you would want to have your domain name as your username on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and other social media platforms. If your username is gone on most social media accounts you can pick a different domain name which helps with branding or you might just have to choose a variety of social media account names that don’t match. It’s not a huge deal but makes branding a little messy and less memorable.

4. The shorter the better. Try to get the shortest domain name possible. I purchased ShaggyDuck.com but my company name was Shaggy Duck Media & Design. Short domains are easier to remember, faster to type and actually worth more if you ever try to resell. Finding a four or five letter domain name is much like finding a nugget of gold. They are almost impossible to find unless they make no sense at all. I made up several six letter domains like Weetys.com. My shortest domain name is EHS81.com at five letters. It stands for Enid High School Class of 1981.

5. Choose a catchy name. There might be times when you are creating a fun online business and want something really catchy. Think of names like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Monster. My first domain name was Curtoons.com in 1999. It is a combination of my first name Curtis and the word cartoons. It was the perfect cartoon website name which I still own today. I also used to make up new words back in the day. I combined Zoinks and Jinkies from Scooby Doo and came up with Zoinkies.com.

6. Avoid hyphens and numbers. Although I just said I own EHS81.com I would not recommend using numbers unless it is specific to the name. Do not use a hyphen, nobody will remember it is in your name and they’ll never find you. The problem with numbers is that searches won’t know whether to use the number or spell out the word.

7. Don’t use a trademarked name. After the release of the Apple iPad I purchased iPadBum.com. I would blog about iPads, apps and accessories. It was a bad choice of names because I could never really promote it with merchandise and I could never trademark it myself because it was using the word iPad. If I had printed anything using the term and tried selling it, Apple would have shut me down really quickly. Make sure you have complete freedom to market your domain name without possibility of legal action.

8. Purchase an existing domain name. There might be a domain name that your really like or your actual brand name might be parked. In those cases you might want to purchase an existing domain name. Beware that you’ll pay way more than the actual $8-12 cost. Be sure and negotiate. One benefit will be that the domain name will have some age which could help in rankings. A negative might be that the domain was used for illegal purposes and or had been blocked in search rankings in the past. Be sure and do several searches online to see what info comes up. You can also visit the Way Back Machine to see what website had been connected with the domain.

Be sure and set your name to auto-renew! If you lose your name someone will snag it. They’ll hold it as long as they can and charge you big bucks to get it back. At one time I owned WebZot.com, a name I totally made up. I purchased the domain for about $10 from a registrar that I normally did not use. They did not have auto-renew on. The second the domain expired it was purchased by someone else. Over the years I’ve seen it used a few times but it is now parked and is for sale. Guess what the asking price is? $50,000! LOL!

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BIO:
Curtis Tucker is an entrepreneur, storyteller and content creator with one foot planted firmly in the 70s and the other racing into the future using the latest digital technologies. Known as the voice behind Enid Buzz, the founder of feel-good brands like Shaggy Duck and Zoinkies!, and the creator of The Banana Seat Squad, Curtis turns nostalgia into narrative and memories into magic. Whether he’s podcasting about pop culture, designing retro-inspired t-shirts, or speaking about being an entrepreneur, Curtis brings joy, curiosity, and authenticity to everything he touches. His mission? To encourage others to start businesses, spark adventure, spread smiles, and remind the world that life was (and still is) groovy.

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