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Personal branding is one of the most important aspect of your online presence. Branding can have a positive or negative effect on your job offers, type of social media campaigns you can run, and many other situations in your life.
This blog post will detailed how to build your personal brand and how to protect it. Branding your online presence does not have to be hard, though it requires some work from you. Effective personal branding is not an overnight success.
The good news is, you will be able to see the results of your work and benefit from your personal branding.
What is personal branding?
Personal branding is the way you present yourself both on and offline.
Personal branding is a holistic process that is not limited to social media presence. While creating your own brand, you have to think about your logo, brand voice, and topics you want to cover.
While creating your personal brand, think what do you want to be known for. Do you want to focus on social media? Or are you more interested in becoming an expert in your field and publishing articles in professional magazines?
Before you start working on your personal brand, you have to know what your goal is. All your future activities will depend on the primary goal of your actions.
Why is personal branding important?
Personal branding is important to everyone these days. Your potential future employer, wife, husband, or business partner can look up information about you and decide on the nature of future relationship.
You have the power of information when it comes to personal branding. You can decide what is published about you, you can influence the tone of voice, and, thanks to the right to be forgotten, have some information removed from the web.
Even if you do not plan on building your personal brand, the information about you is already out there. If you have a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram profile, some private information will be available online.
Personal branding is all about writing the story about yourself. First, you need to establish how you want to be perceived and then writing the story yourself.
How to build a personal brand?
Building a personal brand is a lengthy process. Hopefully, with our personal branding guide, you will be able to create your personal brand that will help you achieve your goals.
The process of building a personal brand can be divided into three parts:
- Building your online presence
- Building trust and community around your personal brand
- Growing your brand by working with other people in your field.
First things first, let’s start with the basics of building your personal brand.
Determine what you want to be know for
Before you start creating profiles on social media, writing articles, and preparing dedicated content, you have to know why are you investing your time and other resources in personal branding.
That means you have to answer one simple question — what problems of your audience do you want to solve? After all, you are creating your personal brand because you want to interact with other people.
Think about the type of brand you want to be. Do you want to be considered a serious person within a serious industry, for example, law or business? Or can you slip in a joke from time to time?
The same rule applies to choosing the platforms you will employ for personal branding. You can use different tone on LinkedIn than on Instagram.
In other words, your personal branding strategy will determine your actions. That is why, before you start exploring your options, you need to know what you want to achieve.
While writing your strategy think about factors such as:
- your audience. Who do you want to reach?
- their problems. What problems do you want to solve?
- your value proposition. What differentiates you from other people in your field?
Your strategy is the document you need to proceed. Without your personal branding strategy, you will have harder time reaching your desired audience, protecting your brand during a crisis, or even staying on top of your content.
Audit existing content about you
Before you delve into preparing brand new content, take a look at what is already being said about you online.
I bet you will find some content you either forget about or were unaware of.
Some of the posts or photos might be harmless. But if you want to build a reputation of the leader in your industry, you not necessarily want to be mentioned in your aunts’ culinary blog from 2002.
You can ask the authors to remove some of the content you don’t like. If they say yes, that’s great.
But if they refuse to do so, it is not the end of the world. Once you are aware of any unfavourable content, you can prepare to respond to any questions about it, or even use it in your communication.
Design your personal brand
Now we can delve more into the nitty-gritty of building your personal brand.
Develop a distinctive design for your brand. That way, your followers will always know that they are in touch with the same person.
Think about:
- taking a professional-looking photo,
- choosing the colour scheme you are going to use across your online content
- designing a logo
- designing a web page or a blog
No matter where your target audience finds you, they will always know that they are engaging with the same person.
The same rule applies to choosing the channels you want to be present.
First, it is good to start with the channels where you know your audience is present. If you want to reach more professional audience, try establishing a robust presence on business channels, for example, Twitter or LinkedIn.
You should also take the advantage of positioning in Google and SEO.
Find the keywords people search for and try to rank high for them. This will help you get organic traffic to your brand.
