Personal branding has become an extremely important factor with one’s professional success. Personal branding allows you to market yourself to potential employers, business partners and clients by highlighting your strengths while concealing your weaknesses. Similarly, a strong personal brand can have a huge impact on the opportunities one can get. Hence, it’s important that professionals know how to effectively build their own personal brands.
1. Determine exactly what type of brand you want to portray and stick with it
The first step when you’re establishing a solid personal brand is the determination of the type of brand or image you want to portray. Ask yourself some important questions like, how do you want to be seen by potential customers? Or what impression do you want to leave your customers?
2. Write an excellent, telling and descriptive resume – post it online
Writing an excellent resume and positing it online is a surefire way of establishing a solid personal brand. Excellent resumes are telling and descriptive – they highlight the applicant’s skills while at the same time concealing the applicant’s weaknesses.
3. Use real professional pictures as avatars whether it’s on Facebook or on online forums
Another way of building a solid personal brand is by injecting professionalism into your social accounts and online forums. Thus, the best way to inject professionalism is by using real professional pictures on your online accounts.
4. Use the power of social media; build your personal brand with Facebook and Twitter
Social media is the most powerful type of media these days – it beats mainstream television and radio by leaps and bounds. That is why it’s imperative that you utilize social media primarily the social networking site Facebook and the micro-blogging platform Twitter when building a strong personal brand.
5. LinkedIn – a great way to connect with professionals you’ve worked or partnered with
LinkedIn is one of the most popular professional networking sites of today. LinkedIn allows you to network with people within your niche – potential and past employers, investors and creditors among others.
6. Set up your own blog or website – don’t commit the mistake of blogging with free platforms
Setting up your own blog or website is another effective way of building a strong personal brand. Starting a blog or a website won’t cost that much (less than $100 a month). One thing that you should remember is to stay away from free blogging platforms. Free blogging platforms limit your creativity and bind you to play their own rules.
7. Network aggressively; make yourself as accessible as possible
Aggressive networking can also go a long way in helping you establish a solid personal brand. Make yourself as accessible as possible by promoting yourself not just in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn but also in social bookmarking sites, article directories and in video marketing platforms like YouTube.
8. Learn how to help others by providing things of value such as an eBook or a podcast
Helping others is the greatest way to build a solid personal brand – at least to the person you’ve helped. Always provide something of value such as an eBook or a podcast that can be downloaded from your blog or website. Your personal brand can serve as your ticket and gateway to success but that doesn’t mean that success is entirely dependent on the personal brand you’ve established. There are a lot of things that should also be considered such as the person’s knowledge and skills, the level hard work and patience a person exerts and the opportunities that come by.
This article is written by Kim Willis is a Brisbane SEO consultant and works with online businesses. If you wish to write for us, kindly check this.
Demonstrating credibility online through every channel you are in is very important in building a sound brand. Also, consistency in giving information is crucial.
Thanks for the wonderful comments guys. I hope this article helped.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing this wonderful article. It helped me gain a lot of info.
Nice points Kim! Replying to the readers comments on your article is also another important way to improve your personal branding. Being sensitive to audience comments is a crucial indicator of how reachable you are and how much you value your readers. 🙂
Forums and other communities is also a great way to effective for branding, and on top it would be much better if you would prefer to meet people in person rather than staring the desktop all day long. For a better impact meet people in person. 🙂
Interesting and very useful post, social media can help a lot in building a brand name and business.
I did add professional looking photos to all of my avatars. I will now look into some of you other points. Great ideas, thanks.
8 Ways To Effectively Build Your Personal Brand awesome post and really enjoyed the article.It's true that when you building personal brand reality is very important factor, real name and real profile by which you build faith in people and can achieve professional success. I also found that social media like Facebook and twitter is powerful tool build your personal brand.
Going aggressively in network growing really helps to increase one's branding. I have to concentrate on free give aways on my blog asap. Because these are the things which attract more users to build the network in any niche.
Thanks for sharing it 🙂
LinkedIn Is helps a lot to get a professional connection related to our niche.