What is personal branding ? It is the process of promoting yourself, your skills and your careers as brands. It may be Donald Trump and the Trump Towersor Gandhi and non-violence or any blogger and his blog on the internet, all are just other names for personal brands.
Technically it was introduced first in 1937, in the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and has been a point of debates and conversations ever since. With the advent of the internet and social media, the concept of personal branding received the grand stage for its explosive performance and has been unstoppable ever since.
Today it is an essential part of everyone's repertoire as it projects a sense of high quality and expertise. Employers constantly look for candidates with effective personal brands through profile searches on leading websites like facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. Without us even realising, it has become an integral sphere of the entire individual productivity quotient and an essential skill to for effective career growth.
The point of question is how does one do effective personal branding?
Here is how you can create quality personal branding in 10 easy steps
Before you even think about launching a personal brand you should know what its constituents are. The basic parts are you and your skill. Therefore it is quintessential that you know your expertise in order to implement effective personal branding.
For instance, your skill may be blogging or content writing, accounting or management, marketing or finance, robotics or chemistry. You may also have a portfolio of skills too in which case you should be wise enough to choose the best ones which are those who help increase the effectiveness of your brand.
Your skills forms that part of the brand which will be promoted, projected and will be the USP. The clearer you are about what you can do the better.
No matter how good you are at what you do, unless you do not know how to market that, there is no point in that expertise. You may not even realise that you know basic marketing.
For instance, when you are in an interview, you're definitely trying to present yourself as the best candidate available which is a basic marketing strategy. Therefore for efficient personal branding, you need to know the basics of marketing.
Don't worry! It is not rocket science. You easily pick up and understand concepts from online resources like YouTube and Wikipedia.
This is important because once you know these technicalities you will get a better grip of what and how you need to do things like promotions and networking which form an integral part of personal branding. Therefore go ahead and do some academic research.
In the modern world, you cannot think about personal branding without the internet. Everything today is promoted online from your everyday dairy products to the heightened election campaigns. Internet and online media have become the pillars of marketing, branding, promotion and sales. Therefore in order to spike your growth you need to develop Personal Brand Assets which is an alternative to what I call online presence. Here are some key assets which you can create:
ATTENTION: How to Use Social Media & Actionable SEO Tips : Interview with Ann Smarty- Your Facebook Profile: Helps you get yourself out there on the biggest social media platform on the globe.
- Your Brand's Facebook Page: To implement your branding strategies
- Your Twitter Profile: For an effective outreach
- Your Brands Twitter Profile: For building an effective following
- Your LinkedIn Profile: Your professional portfolio showcased on the largest professional network on the globe
- Your personal website:To add a hint of uniqueness to your entire brand and project confidence
- Your Personal Blog: For your content to reach your audience
- Your YouTube Channel: For media-centric branding strategies
These personal brand assets help create a base over which the internet and its users can find you, judge you and know about you and your brand. As in finance, here to assets represent your holdings and the more top quality they are, the better effect they have on your personal branding.
After you have formed your personal assets the next step is to perfect them. This is very similar to when you buy a new house for yourself and your family. When you buy the house, you now own an asset. The next step is to perfect it by getting the right furniture, decorations and paint and doing everything so that the house looks and feels good to you and to everyone who visits it and see it.
The same goes for your Personal Brand assets. The qualities which they should radiate are:
One should make it a point that his personal brand assets are always in perfect shape and project all the level of awesomeness that he needs. Only then you can achieve profitable personal branding. Things which should be taken care of are:
- Profiles should be complete with 100% accuracy
- Information which you provide should be genuine
- Graphics should be aesthetically attractive and non-offensive
- Professional Profiles should have only professional touch while Social profiles should be able to connect on a personal level
- Content should be genuine, informative and engaging
- You must never promote your brand and yourself as separate entities
Keeping these checkpoints will help you create a powerful and effective set of personal brand assets which can be profitable for a very long term.
Once you are done with the above four steps, the next ones are fairly easy to implement and will not take up much of your time and energy if done effectively. The next process in personal branding is to promote yourself and what you do on your social channels and Personal brand assets in the form of posts with the intention of effective marketing behind them. Here, I should lay stress on the use of social media tools which will make your work efficient. Some of these must have tools are:
ATTENTION: How Best to Use Forums for SEO {Link Building}- Buffer: To help you in scheduling and analysing your posts across various channels at once
- Klout: To help in sharing and analyse online performance
- Google Analytics: To analyse post performance and engagement metrics
- Buzz Sumo: To keep track of similar content and other trending content and their performance
- Google AdSense: To utilize the revenue potential of your assets
There is another host of tools which you can use for effective promotions and networking of your brand which you will find and learn on this adventure. For now these tools should be enough.
Once you start implementing personal branding strategies, you will attract audience. It now becomes essential to analyse the traffic you get in the form of various metrics like:
- Sources of traffic
- Kind of audience
- Average time spent on your assets
- Engagement in the form of comments, likes, shares etc.
Keeping track of these will help you get a better idea of how your plans are working out and what more you need to do to promote your brand better.
Positive feedback is a pivotal point in order to generate effective and popular personal branding. It increases your rank among your competitors and helps you attain numerous indirect forms of advertising as the word of your brand reaches to a lot more interested people. What do I mean by positive feedback? It consists of the following:
- Increased comments, likes and shares on your posts
- Testimonials from friends, colleagues, clients etc.
- Endorsements from employers, clients etc.
- Feedback Comments from employers, clients etc.
- Increasing number of followers on facebook and twitter
- Growing and profitable network
Once you are successful in generating regular positive feedback, then sky is the limit for your personal branding as the process will soon become exponential with the implementation of the next step.
Check this amazing video on Personal Branding with Drake InternationalDigital Marketers are people who understand the technicalities of the internet which relate to personal branding like SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Content Strategy etc. in depth and are available for hire to assist with the same for your brand.
Once you start getting mentionable traction, it is profitable to hire professional digital marketing services and take your brand to the next level of popularity.
Oh! You are getting popular now. This does not mean that your work is over. Never forget that. Here are some activities you must do to keep your Personal Branding at steady and growing pace:
- Update your Personal Brand Assets at regular intervals
- Update out-dated content and information at regular intervals
- Be innovative to maintain the uniqueness and creativity of your brand
Regular maintenance of your assets is quite essential if you want your personal brand to keep up with the times.
Well, you have done almost everything to create a perfect personal branding campaign so the chances are big that you are a success by step 10. Cheers!
