Personal Brand Strategy – 5 Steps to Develop Your Personal Brand

How to brand yourself

Before we can figure out how to brand yourself, let’s first establish what personal branding is.

We use this definition:

“The process of uncovering and marketing your core competencies to meet an audience’s needs, resulting in your financial freedom and fulfillment.”

Understanding how to brand yourself in order to work a job you love involves these vital steps:

• Uncover/Develop your personal brand
• Establish credibility
• Establish niche involvement
• Establish visibility
• Create your career toolkit

Uncover and develop your personal brand

Uncovering your personal brand is your first step. Your brand is how people think and feel about you. Uncovering your brand through self-discovery and soul-searching must happen before anything else. Only after “discovery” does developing a personal brand make sense.

Developing your personal brand does not mean that you are creating some fictitious image. Actually, it is the opposite. It means figuring out who you really are, where you want to go, and how you can help others.

Ask yourself:

• How do people describe you?
• How do you describe yourself?
• What makes you different from your peers?

To determine how to brand yourself, you need to identify:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What do you do better than everyone else?
3. Why do you do what you do? What provides the motivation?
4. How do you stand out from your peers?

Develop your personal branding statement

One of the best ways to determine your personal brand is to craft a personal branding statement. The personal branding statement enables you to draw out your personal brand on paper. You will be left with a concise way of articulating your unique value proposition to others in one or two sentences. This personal branding statement will come in handy when you are assembling your career tool kit. To get down and dirty in discover the foundation of your personal brand, check out our popular post: Everything you need to start building your personal brand right now.

How you answered the questions above determines how you should approach making your personal brand by being more credible, visible and involved.

Establishing Your Brand: Get Visible, Credible and Involved

Visibility, Credibility and Niche Involvement are vital when you’re ready to market your developed personal brand. Without any one of these, your brand will not be as strong.

Establish credibility

Now that you have gone through the initial process of developing your personal brand we can tackle the question “how to brand yourself.” Moving forward we will first focus on making sure that your brand is credible. We put this as the step first because we feel that without a credible brand that everyone will believe, it is not important how visible or involved you are.

So, how do you go about becoming more credible? There are three things you can do online to make yourself more credible and to help brand yourself.

• Publish Articles
  • Publishing articles builds your credibility by spotlighting you as a reliable individual in your area of expertise.
• Maintain a Blog
  • Starting your own blog demonstrates your willingness to contribute back to your niche with your own expertise. Most importantly it shows that you care about a certain topic and are willing to spend time writing about it.
• Contribute to other blogs
  • Many bloggers out there are regularly looking for guest blog posts. Start to know who operates in the blogosphere related to your expertise and reach out to these bloggers.

Establish niche involvement

Being involved in your niche is the next step in figuring out how to brand yourself. After you have proven that you are credible you need to get more involved. You will probably be surprised at how large your niche is and you will soon realize who the major players are.

There are three key things you can do to get involved:

1. Comment on Blogs. Start off by commenting on other blogs out there. It is not useful to post simple comments such as “That was a great post.” Instead, spend a few minutes and put down a useful response that shows your brand in a positive light as well as potentially starting a conversation between yourself and the blogger. Provide insight or an interesting and related fact.
2. Comment on Forums. There are thousands of forums on the web, many relate to your area of expertise. Start by reading forums and contributing feedback to threads. This shows that you are willing to participate in conversations and that you are able to help other people with their questions.  Demonstrate that you are involved and intelligent enough to participate in current dialogs, as well as answer people’s questions.
3. Answer questions on LinkedIn and other Q&A communities. Reach out to others in your niche by tapping into your own experience and expertise and responding to questions in places like LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo! Answers.

Establish visibility

This is one of the more fun stages in your search to answering the question “How to brand yourself?” In the age of the web, a strong brand means little  if nobody can find you. This step in your search to develop your personal brand is where you display for the rest of the world who you are, what you’ve done, and where you exist online.

• Create a profile on social networks such as LinkedIn,  Facebook and Twitter.
• Create a profile on directories such as Naymz, Plaxo and ZoomInfo.
• Vote for your site in social bookmarks to improve your position in Google results.

A common pitfall that we see all the time is when someone rushes into a social network and friends everyone they can find, even people they don’t know. Then they never log in again. This is not a good practice. We suggest that you start slowly and carefully. Pick one top-tier place at a time, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Establish your presence there before bringing another one on board. Just creating a presence is not enough. You have to go through the process of filling in your entire profile – including your bio and a professional headshot. There is nothing worse than coming to someone’s profile that is not cohesively put together or completed.

It is also important that your brand is consistent meaning that you use a common headshot through all networks, and your brand on each of these systems conveys a similar message. It is also important that you can be easily found online..

Create your career toolkit

A career toolkit is a vital step to develop your personal brand. Before you apply for a job, you need to make sure that you have the following items are cohesively put together. I am not going in depth here, but I’ve provided a link to some of our other posts related to each item in your career toolkit:

• Your resume
  • A brief overview of the 5 types of Resumes
  • The key components of a resume
• Your cover letter
  • Writing the perfect cover letter
• Your web presence
  • Tips to Clean Your Social Networking Profiles and Impress Employers
  • Tips to Rank Highly on Google and Increase Your Visibility Online
• Your references
  • Top 5 Articles About Getting Stellar References for Your Job Search
• Your interview skills/preparedness
  • Interviews 101
  • How to Ace Any Type of Interview

If you are not familiar with all aspects of the hiring process you should probably spend a few minutes going over our outline of the job hiring process.

How to Brand Yourself: It’s A Continual Cycle

The above steps will greatly help you figure out how to brand yourself. You will find that as you work to develop your personal brand the process never ends.

You cannot just “create” a personal brand overnight. It is important that you first uncover it, articulate it, and then strengthen it by spending time on each step.

Developing your personal brand means laying the groundwork today for a happier and more successful life later. You have to be genuine to figure out what you want to do, whom you are doing it for, and then market your core competencies in a way that moves others.

Next: Everything You Need to Start Building Your Personal Brand Right Now >