Should You Build A Personal Brand?

The image above: Personal Branding – handwritten text in a notebook on a desk – 3d render illustration.

What Is A Personal Brand?

If you're like most people your mind immediately goes to a logo, maybe a catchphrase, but your personal brand is so much more than that.  Your brand is the way you promote yourself to others… it's what differentiates you from everyone else.  It's your chance to make an impactful first impression.

This isn't a new concept.  Personal branding, self-positioning, whatever name you choose to call it was first introduced in 1937 in the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and resurfaced later in the 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Simply put, it's the process of highlighting your uniqueness, building a reputation on the things you want to be known for…  the goal is to create something that conveys a message and that can be monetized

Defining Your Personal Brand

Your brand should reflect who you are and what you do.  You've heard it before… people will do business with people they know, like, and trust.  Branding allows individuals and organizations alike to get an authentic feel of who you are by focusing on your best qualities.  It can depict you as the person you want to be.

Who am I written on a whiteboard

So, how do you go about building a brand that defines who you are… you start by asking yourself a few simple questions.

• Who Am I?
• What Do I like?
• What Can I Offer
• How Can I Help Others with my skills and expertise?

Self-reflecting can go a long way in better understanding who you are and what you have to offer.  The idea is it can make you memorable, and the first person a prospect thinks of when they are in the market for your products or services.

How Do You Go About Building Your Brand?

Here are three ways to develop your personal brand as suggested by Gary Henderson”s post on Digital Marketing.org

1. Creat Content With A Purpose… Have a strategy as well as a budget to promote your content.  No fun working hard on an article or post that no one is going to see or engage with.
2. Be Consistent, Show Up and Deliver Value… When you're building a brand you want to be consistent and uniform across all platforms.  It should be visually appealing and should represent the type of influencer you want to be.
3. Pick your niche and stick with it.  Also, be consistent with the services or products you provide.
4. Find A Unique Selling Proposition… Figure out what is unique and special about your brand that sets you apart from your competition.

Conclusion

Remember, your personal brand is everything you do to represent yourself.  It can be the clothes you wear, the car you drive, or how you talk and act in business and social situations… it all contributes to who people think you are and how they will perceive your business.

There are a lot of moving parts involved in building a successful professional brand and then promoting it!  Some of which are:

• Brand Design
  

  Marketing concept torn newspaper headlines reading marketing, strategy, branding, advertising etc

• Marketing
• Web Design
• Brand Strategy
• Copywrite
• Online Solutions
• Audience Targeting

That's enough to make your head swim!  Who has the time or expertise to get that all done and if you don't have the ability, who wants to take the time to learn how?  Isn't your time better spent making sales?

What if there's a way to have this all done for you? 

Interested?  Click here to learn more.