The main effort that entrepreneurs or professionals invest in their day to day marketing is aimed toward promoting their business or their special skills. You hear about the queen of this and the king of that or the guru of something else. It has become so common place that it’s working out and you need to have a way to stand out just to be noticed amongst the ten of thousands of other individuals and companies that promote the same services and skills that you are promoting.One way to stand out for sure is to demonstrate more care toward your customers, colleagues or employers so that they will endorse you and carry you forward with word of mouth. The second, even better way to stand out, is to brand yourself so that people will know what you can do as a person and when you will have to change business, profession or company you’ll be able to do it easily instead of starting all over every time.Somebody told me recently that the usual life cycle of a business or an employment is 5 years in the US, which means that every 5 years people need to build for themselves a whole new set of relationships, friends and supporters. They often also change neighborhood, city or state, not to mention changes that might have occurred in the family situation. It is quite tough and it becomes frantic when you sum it up to the level of change that this economy is demanding of each one of us already.I remember meeting a guy, about 8 months ago, we were both at a free course organized by Pinellas county for new entrepreneurs. He was planning to start a gym and he had just returned to Florida from another state where he had a driving license school for a couple of years. Just before that he had been a Realtor in Florida and before that he was a lifeguard. And I didn’t explore further. This gentleman was about 45 of age and he had changed completely job five times in about six years and each job had no relationship whatsoever with the previous one and he had been living in two different states plus he had been changing city a number of times.This is far from uncommon in the US: just today I was at my bank and I was told by friend of mien of a gentleman who had gone to Georgia for another job and had returned to Florida after one year just because he had been unable to sell his house in Florida and still had to make payments. These changes can be very heavy and can curtail the long term success of people unless they build some personal branding for themselves along the way so that they can capitalize on any job they have done while starting their new one.There is a specific approach that you can follow and a tool that is just right for the task: LinkedIn. I have mentioned it already in another article, but it is worth repeating: this is the main Web 2.0 platform for promoting yourself professionally, for building your personal brand and for keeping connections with all the people you have ever worked with or for. As of today LinkedIn has 50 million users world wide and it is steadily growing. It represents 150 different industries and, in September 2009, the company reported 9 million unique visitors in the US compared to 8.7 unique visitors in August. Worldwide, the platform grew from 18 million unique visitors in July to 20 million in August.In Europe alone there are 11 million members and India counts for 3 million. This the the platform you need to be in if you are serious about making yourself known to other businesses. It is unique because it allows passive job seeking: that is, once you have created and updated your profile once, then other people can come and look for you and offer you jobs or deals. You don’t have to keep posting information as you do on Facebook or other social platforms. You can also obtain formal recommendations that will help you build your personal credibility.Roberto Mazzoni