Personal brands are extremely important, but many people tend to overlook them. They tend to forget all about themselves and focus on branding their business only. Don’t worry, I was the same way until I learned a valuable lesson.
After founding my first company, which was a multimedia agency, I focused solely on the marketing efforts of my business. After just over 2 years of running the company, I had to sell that business. After doing so, I was unknown in the world.
It was like I had just lost all my credit cards and ID cards before I got dropped off into a whole new world. It was at this time I realized that I had to build a personal brand. No matter what I did in my career, my personal brand would come with me.
In this article, I share my guide for building your own brand:
Find Your Unique Angle
To really have a personal brand that stands out and is as effective as it can be, you need to find what makes you unique. For me, I decided to go along with the angle of how I was a young entrepreneur trying to set the bar high.
That perspective really worked for me. Everything from my social media profiles to my presentations included my age and the fact that I was a ‘young entrepreneur’. It allowed me to quickly separate myself from the tons of other entrepreneurs.
Create A Personal Website
You are currently on my personal website. It simply has my first and last name while it features a variety of different pages. I chose to include a blog to share my thoughts, some pages that show the various services I offer and a couple of other pages that help you get to know me better.
Depending on what you aim to do with your personal brand, you can do any of those things or even do something completely different. However, if you have a website with your name locked in…..it establishes you as a presence on the web.
Find Ways To Create Value
Whether you’re branding a human being or a company, you always need to be giving some kind of intrinsic value to your audience. My personal brand’s value proposition is really the fact that I’ll share my experiences and lessons with you while trying to motivate you to do big things.
Everybody is really good at creating value in one way or another. You need to find a way to tie your strength to your personal brand. The more value you create, the better chance you have of converting individuals to loyal followers.
Be Socially Active
Social media is extremely important for any brand nowadays. Not only that, but it’s highly important that you connect with your audience through social media.
Social media is great because it’s an easy way to connect with a wide variety of audiences. You can share your thoughts, comments and opinions easily with a group of loyal followers. Create profiles on major social media profiles and convey your brand through these networks.
Network, Network, Network
Networking is extremely important. Many people go out and simply want to hand out a business card about their company while sharing all of the ways their business can help. However, I highly recommend against that.
When I went networking, I had a business card of just myself. It was a business card for my personal brand. Instead of trying to sell them on my businesses, I sold them on myself. I talked about who I was, what I did and they would pick and choose the things they wanted to know more about.
Conclusion
Building a personal brand can never be done overnight. It takes a lot of patience and persistence to build a solid personal brand that can make an impact.
photo credit: Philipp Lücke via photopin cc
