Creating And Growing Your Personal Brand

Posted by webigg on December 2nd, 2017

Why Personal Brands Are for Everyone

Personal brands should be important to everyone. Personal brands are not only for the entrepreneur that owns their own business. It is the secret sauce that can make you stand out of a stack of resumes.

If you don’t develop your own personal brand others will do it for you. Developing your personal brand is the proactive way of controlling your career development and how you are perceived in the marketplace.

A strong personal brand will impact your ability to get the right jobs, promotions, and increase your ability to attract talent and capital.  So, let’s look at these tips that can help you in creating your own personal brand:

1. Build Your Platform

If you are going to have a personal brand you will need a website in order to create your virtual platform.  Your website should be your name. You will also need social media accounts that represent your brand.

 You will use these platforms to share your voice.

2. Identify Your Uniqueness and Your Strengths

Think about the characteristics and strengths you’ve built in your career. If you are stuck thinking about that “one thing” that everyone says you rock at. If you're still stuck, ask others.

3. Own Your Space

Once you’ve identified your uniqueness and strengths, perfect them.

Learn all that you can and become the expert in that area. You can never stop learning. Read, absorb, and teach.

4. Share Your Knowledge

It’s not enough to learn it; you have to teach it and share your knowledge by helping others. Do this through videos, social media, and writing both online and offline. This is where you prove you know your stuff and gain exposure from doing so.

5. Be Yourself

Find your own style. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing and just follow the crowd. Use your style and uniqueness to attract the jobs and clientele that you desire. When I think of this tip I’m always reminded of Gary Vaynerchuk and how he built his brand by doing videos sharing wine reviews and tips. No one else was doing it and now look around hundreds of people are following in his footsteps. Find your own style and create a new set of footprints for others to follow in.

6. Identify Your Values and Set Your Priorities

It’s important to have a clear picture of your personal and professional goals, both short and long term. This will help you to not only identify the most important things to spend your time on but will also have something to align new projects with. Use your values and priorities as a compass that guides you both in action and your decision-making process.

This will ensure you stay on track.

7. Craft Your Personal Brand Persona

This will help in creating your brand. Your persona can be created by:

• Identifying your emotional appeal. What are your personality features? This can be as easy as saying you have a crazy sense of humor or that you are obsessively organized. Take a few moments, why do you think people are attracted to the brand of you?
• Describing yourself. When it comes to your brand who are you and why do people enjoy working with you?
• Identifying your specialty. What do you do and what do people want you to do for them?

Use these exercises to create a strong personal brand persona that you can always refer to when it comes to creating materials that support your brand.