Your Personal Brand is how you present yourself to the world. It tells your narrative and how it reflects your actions, thoughts, and attitudes, both expressed and unsaid. You want the world to recognise you as a one-of-a-kind blend of abilities, experience, and personality.

Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

Jeff Bezos

You utilise your personal branding to set yourself out from others. Your personal Brand is the impression that others have of you professionally. It might be a combination of how they see you in person, how the media depicts you, and the image they get based on online information about you.

You may either ignore your personal Brand and let it evolve spontaneously, potentially chaotically, outside your control, or you build it to portray you as the person you are. Before the internet, your personal Brand was essentially your business card. Few people would have heard of you unless you were well-known in the media or served prominently as the face of advertising. You are significantly less anonymous in today’s extremely public environment when social media scrutinises every tiny behaviour at length.

Why do you want a personal brand?

Your personal Brand might be pretty crucial to your professional success. It is how you portray yourself to current and prospective clientele. It lets you ensure that others view you the way you want them to, rather than in some random, perhaps harmful way.

Your Brand distinguishes you from the crowd. It provides you with the opportunity to emphasise your abilities and hobbies. It makes people believe they know you better and have far more trust in those they think they know, even if they have never met you. Your unique Brand differentiates you from hundreds of other people like you.

1. Define your ultimate goal

What do you want to achieve?- Identifying your ultimate objective is the first step in developing your personal branding action plan. Are you launching a new business and seeking new customers? Do you want to establish yourself as an authority in your subject so that you may become a well-known global speaker? Perhaps you’d like to leverage your Brand to raise awareness for a favourite non-profit or charity. Whatever the situation may be, identifying your goal is the first step.

One helpful tool can be to define your Personal Mission Statement.

2. Choose your area of expertise

When developing a personal brand, many people make the mistake of going too wide. Please don’t be everything to everyone. The more specific your knowledge, the sooner you’ll be able to establish a profitable brand. Why? It will make finding the people you’d like to contact easier. Not only that, but keeping your message concentrated will make developing content for your Brand a lot easier. The more specialised and limited your Brand, the easier for consumers to recall who you are.

3. Define your audience

Developing a brand is challenging when you don’t know who you’re attempting to target. So, first and foremost, consider who you want to serve. Consider the sort of customer you’d like to have or the type of workplace you’d like to visit daily if you’re searching for work. Who will be the most benefited by your message?

4. ​​Expand your online presence

Ensuring your online presence is attractive to hiring managers, coworkers, and others—even if you’re not looking for work—is one of the most crucial components of personal branding. Because there are so many various social media platforms accessible today, your online presence will most certainly seem different based on the channel you pick.

For instance, on video-based platforms like YouTube or Instagram, conveying your personal brand might not just rely on text and images. You might want to create engaging, professional videos that resonate with your audience. Note that adding subtitles to your videos can make them more accessible and searchable. You can easily do this with tools like VEED, which allows you to add subtitles to videos using SRT files, improving the overall quality of your presentations.

While your narrative should be consistent across all platforms, knowing where your target audience is most likely to turn allows you to redouble your efforts in conveying your best story.

5. Networking

As you develop your ideal personal Brand, you must network regularly (and successfully) to expand your professional circle. Attend formal and casual networking events to meet colleagues and industry thought leaders. The more connections you build and the value you give to your contacts, the more likely your Brand will be recognised. 

6. Be genuine and consistent.

Being authentic is critical when it comes to self-branding. 

Too many firms want their branding to portray some idealised, flawless vision of themselves. As a result, their brands lose texture, character, and public trust.

Richard Branson

Another essential aspect of self-branding is consistency. In the end, all followers desire is trust. Followers identify with distinct thinking structures and follow individuals who share their thoughts. If you modify these essential values, your followers will lose faith in your personal Brand.

7. Allow others to share your story

Personal branding is the tale others tell about you while you are absent. Word of mouth is the most effective kind of public relations. Developing a public personal brand is no exception to this norm.

8. Be prepared to fail

Failure is complex, and we all want to avoid it – it’s human nature. However, to establish a personal brand that stands out from the crowd, you must first fail. When Walt Disney reminisced about his failed initial attempts at developing an animation brand, he frequently mentioned this. “Having a good hard failure while you’re young is vital.” That experience taught me a lot. Because it makes you conscious of what may happen to you.” And the worst-case scenario is never as terrifying as not trying at all.

Conclusion

​​Personal branding is more crucial now than it has ever been. It can help you find work, attract customers, and even make you a valued employee. Leads created by workers through social media activities are seven times more likely to convert than leads generated by business social media operations. Personal branding is your unique selling point. Everyone has at least one. The question is whether yours is deliberate or not. David Gousset.

If you want to develop your management skills, read Extreme Ownership: 12 Leadership principles to learn from the Navy SEAL, The New One Minute Manager, and You Win in the Locker Room First.