The ultimate goal of any successful personal brand exercise is to make you more discoverable, shareable and memorable, so discoverability is where we start.

Sometimes you only get one chance with people. If your brand doesn’t reflect authenticity, that’s bad. Not being discoverable is even worse.

Here are some ideas to help get your brand in order — so you’re more discoverable:

Use your real name

Someone, somewhere will be searching for you at some point in your career. It might be a recruiter or prospective employer, it might be a business contact you’re about to meet for the first time, or it might be an industry peer you’ve known for years that has a potential lead for you.

Overhaul all your profiles

LinkedIn, Twitter etc. all have profiles that are searchable either by Google or Bing or by the myriad of different social media tools marketers and PR people use to discover influencers and experts to engage with.

Crosslink your profiles

Links from websites are hugely important in ranking sites for relevant keyword searches across the search engines.

It’s important that you crosslink your social profiles so search engines can tell definitely that it’s your LinkedIn or Twitter profile that should show up top and not someone else with the same name. The more links you can get the more difficult it is to be pushed off that top spot.

Put yourself in discovery’s way

This is where you start thinking laterally about how you can be discovered as having something to say, even if people don’t know your name. Here’s a quick list:

• Intelligently and authentically commenting on blog posts or on Q&A sites, groups and forums like Quora or LinkedIn. Don’t make it look desperate. Just be cool and share your thoughts by engaging in an empathetic way.

• Start a blog and maybe use your name as the blog site address to rank well. Populate the blog with posts pertaining to your niche that people will find and associate you with that expertise. If you’re worried about the time-suck of writing blogs posts

• Speak at conference or seminars – we’re spoiled in the digital marketing industry as there are loads of conferences and meet-ups we can try and speak at, but whatever your industry, there will be opportunities for your to share your knowledge from a podium somewhere in the world. If you’re smart, you’ll optimize that speaking gig for maximum ROI by sharing your social channels and other digital properties at the start so people live-tweeting or writing about your session will link to you and share your wisdom beyond the people in the room.

These are just some ideas to help set you up on the road to your personal brand being more discoverable. Get in the groove of thinking like this and it will become second nature. If you’re serious about your career or business and you want to be known as someone to turn to for information or discourse, make yourself findable and available, only then can a real conversation begin!