PERSONAL BRANDING: WHAT MAKES YOU TO BE YOU
The simple definition of personal branding is establishing and promoting what you stand for. Your personal brand is the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you you. Effective personal branding will differentiate you and makes you outstanding from other professionals in your field. People are used to thinking about brands in relation to companies and products such as KFC and Apple. But, nowadays anything can be a brand. Even as an individual, you have a personal brand.
So what is your personal brand? What makes you unique from the rest of your coalligues or family members? Whether you are known as an Information Technology guru or you are still using a type writer, you have a brand that exists both online and offline. Fortunately there are a lot of great tools and resources out there to help you with the personal branding process. Make use of them to leave the right impression on people who look you up online (on the internet).
The idea of personal branding scare a lot of people. They think they have to be extraordinary or popular to be outstanding which is not the case. Personal Branding simply means upgrading yourself in a way that makes you usefully unique from other people. If you don't take control of your personal brand, then you're missing out on opportunities and letting others control you.
Why did l mention the word online? Nowadays people are connecting with each other via social media on platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more apps. These platforms are now used as a worldwide marketing tools for most companies and individual entrepreneurs. Some of the questions that you need to ask yourself are: Who am l? What makes me different from other people? What are my future personal goals? What am l known for? By being able to answer these questions, congratulations! you are a brand.
By branding yourself l believe that personal branding should be accessible to everyone. That is why l have decided to create this article which is a guide to help you through the process of building your personal brand. The specific circumstances and goals vary from individual to individual but, the overall concepts and process are still relevant to everyone. When it comes to building a personal brand, other people dismiss the process as being too time consuming or not necessarily that important. That is true, you will need to devote time and energy into self branding properly. The idea that building a personal brand is not important is just a myth and here is why:
•People Are Googling You At Every Stage Of Your Career
Regardless of your age or professional stage, someone out there is screening you online. What they find can have major implications for your professional and personal well-being. More than half of employers won't just hire potential candidates without sort of online research about those particular candidates.
Nowadays the internet is just like an x-ray. The moment you type a certain individual's name, everything the internet knows about that person immediately pops out. The internet is a record keeper if you didn't know. What you posted 2 years ago is still in possession with the Internet. So be very careful about what you post on the internet, it may haunt you like a ghost in the future.
You can also take advantage of the internet by building your personal brand and advertise it there. Therefore, don't lose out on an interview over something you can control like your personal brand. If you aren't properly managing your online reputation, then you are actively losing out on business and other meaningful connections and relationships.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic that affected the whole world, a lot of people lost their jobs and some of them opted and are opting for freelancing. This means that a strong personal brand is more important than ever before. In fact, the more successful you want to be, the more important personal branding becomes.
The most important reason to focus on personal branding is to help yourself. Think of this as building an additional channel for growing your own successes being it your career, business or social reputation. Personal Branding is a painless step in working towards your goals. View it as a work out just like how you go to the gym. The process is painful in the beginning but, as time goes on, it becomes painless and normal because of persistence and consistency.
Regardless of your industry or professional status, your personal brand has the power to make or break all kinds of opportunities for advancement. When building your brand starts to feel like a job, remember that it is an essential part of the greatest investment of resources, time and effort will likely come upfront.
The process of building and optimizing new profiles, generating content about yourself and your work, identifying your goals and building your brand strategy can feel overwhelming but, once you have established a strong foundation, you will have a road-map to follow which makes the whole process manageable. It is high time to distinguish yourself from your competitors and take control of your personal brand with the following approach:
Effective Process For Building A Personal Brand
Now that we know that personal branding is the process of presenting yourself as a marketable brand, as you start to go through the stages of creating a personal brand, it is easy to get overwhelmed. But, before you throw your laptop or phone on the ground, take a deep breath and relax.
Think of building your brand and personal branding as an ongoing process that can be broken into digestible phases. You don't have to go from an inactive Twitter user to a top influence on Instagram. This is not an overnight process and the objectives and specifics look different for everyone. Below l have gathered the most important tips on how to build a personal brand with long-term success in mind. This entire personal branding process can be broken into 3 phases:
Phase 1: Building a basic brand
Phase 2: Building credibility and an effective audience
Phase 3: Targeting Opportunities.
NB: l'm going to incorporate the last two phases in phase 1; building a basic brand.
Building A Basic Brand
On this phase here, you simply build an online presence that reinforces your qualifications. Make sure that when someone looks you up, they need to see a strong presence with latest and fresh content on your expertise. In order to do so, you will need to:
•Audit your search results and clean up any content that doesn't fit your desired image.
•Define yourself and personal brand.
•Build an online presence that reflects your brand and area of expertise.
•Follow a personal branding strategy and stick to timelines.
Auditing Your Search Results And Cleaning Up Any Content That Doesn't Fit Your Desired Image
Before you begin to build a personal brand, you first need to know where you stand in search results. It is very crucial to Google yourself so you know what others see when they look you up. Is an article from a high school year end arts festival you were in 10 years ago your first result followed by your mum's travel blog from 2008? While these are not terrible results, they're not relevant and could be disadvantaging you.
Don't worry about what you find. While some results may cause "what the hack?" kind of reaction, keep looking. You have to be aware of everything that you are dealing with before you can come up with an effective personal branding strategy. Identify what search results or online content attached to you can damage your reputation.
Once you know what kind of search results are closely attached to your name, you can take steps to remove them. Start with the easy ones such as posts, images, videos, comments etc that you can simply unpublish or delete. Take your time browsing through your social media profiles and websites. Get rid of anything that doesn't fit with your vision for your personal brand.
Clean up can at times be tough and boring, even if you are not particularly active on social media. That is because there is always a chance that a post, comment or picture from years ago could come back and sabotage your personal branding strategy (even if you aren't the one who wrote or post it). Below are examples of posts/ pictures/comments that can be most damaging to your personal branding:
•Unprofessional Communication Style e.g vulgar language.
•Drinking or drug abuse.
•Criminal behavior.
•Sexual explicit content.
•Violence or bullying.
Define Yourself And Your Personal Brand
After the process of cleaning up existing web properties, you can really start to think about the personal brand that you are trying to build. Create your own personal brand online by identifying the unique elements that make you you. What is your personal brand? What do you want to achieve by putting effort into how you look online? When figuring out how to start your own brand online, ask yourself questions like:
•Who are you?
•What makes you unique?
•What is your goal with personal branding?
•What are your professional goals?
•Who is your audience?
•Who can you help?
•How can you help them?
•What makes you different from others?
•What makes you reliable and trustworthy?
In addition to these kinds of questions, start thinking about your accomplishments and gather any supporting materials that can reinforce them. What are your short term and long-term goals for your personal branding strategy? Before you start building your personal brand, think about (and find examples of) the information that you will want to share about your own successes.
Showcase Your Abilities And Accomplishments
Now that you finished brainstorming about your goals and what differentiate you from others, it is high time to hone in on showcasing what you are made of (your assets). You can do this by:
•Writing out the accomplishments that make you proud.
•Listing moments when others recognized you and your work publicly.
•Reflecting on the times other people acknowledged your work privately.
It is very crucial to think holistically about what you are projecting and the impression that you want to leave with anyone who searches for you online. Now you can come up with succinct description of your personal brand and biography as well as longer versions . You will use these variations of your biography and personal brand statement for your social media profiles. This is how to make your own brand cohesive but, still have unique content available on different platforms. This is appealing to users and search engines alike.
You want people to find results that are positive and relevant to you when they search your name online. Spend time reflecting on who you are and what you want to highlight through your personal brand.
Building An Online Presence That Reflects You And Your Expertise
Just to recap, you should have the following written out somewhere:
•A clear outline of your personal brand.
•Short and long-term personal brand goals.
•Your unique qualities, talents and area of expertise.
•Your accomplishments.
Once you feel confident in that, it is high time to start building an online presence that people find easily and leaves a great impression. This involves following a 3 step process of building a strong foundation of sites and profiles, optimizing them for search engines and then maintaining content over time.
•Step 1: Build
•Step 2: Optimize
•Step 3: Monitor
Strong Foundation Of Sites And Profiles
For you to have a strong online presence, you need to build the sites and profiles that you want people to find. This involves having a strong combination of personal websites and professional profiles. What does a strong foundation looks like?
•1 Personal website
•8-10 Professional profiles
You need to build these because each page of search results typically shows at least ten results. By taking control of at least 8-10 properties, you give yourself the chance to curate those key search results on the first page of Google. And what is a personal brand without visibility?When choosing which profiles to build out of your personal branding foundation, l suggest that you select at least 8-10 from the list below:
•Personal Website
•Youtube
•Quora
•Instagram (not strong for Google search but excellent networking tool and a place to showcase your personality)
•Medium
•SlideShare
Optimizing Your Online Presence For Search Engines
Optimize the existing sites and social media profiles that you control for search engines and for people looking you up online. To optimize these properties for search engines:
•Use your full name on all profiles and domains (be consistent with the name you go by)
•Write in the third person when you can
•Fully fill out all profiles
•Include your location when possible
•Include relevant keywords in meta data.
To conclude this article, after you have created and optimized a strong foundation of profiles and websites, you still have to keep them fresh by updating them with new content to keep your personal branding campaign heading in the right direction. That is it on personal branding. My final question to you is what makes you YOU?
*****The End*****
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