The Personal Branding Strategy to Help You Get Ahead
For freelancers and entrepreneurs, building a personal brand has never been more important than it is today.
Anyone with access to the internet and social media can build an audience, position themselves as an expert, and start attracting clients for their business. And that’s exactly what a lot of people are doing.
While it’s great to see that so many people are embracing their entrepreneurial spirit, this also means that every self-employed freelancer, independent contractor, and entrepreneur will soon face more competition than they already do.
The key to differentiating yourself from your competition is building a personal brand.
What Is Personal Branding?
Just like corporate branding, personal branding is a representation of you on an individual level. For some people, personal branding is synonymous to social media influencer, but that doesn’t have to be the case for everyone.
The presentation of personal branding online involves creating a voice, personality, logo, biography and even the topics you want to be known for.
What you don’t want to end up with is a boring and robotic account. Perhaps even worse, a mismatch between your online persona and your real life persona.
Why Is Personal Branding Important?
For the average person online, you may think that personal branding is completely unnecessary to your life. This may be true.
However, if you use Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other online service that requires some of your private information, your persona is already being documented somewhere.
Taking control of how you present yourself is the best way to tackle what comes up when someone Googles your name.
In truth, you already have a personal brand. It’s based on aggregated data of your purchasing habits, browsing history and all of your social media posts. It’s established with or without your control. But is it what you want it to be?
Why every entrepreneur should build a personal brand?
When you’re building a business around your niche (as an author, speaker, coach, consultant, freelancer, etc.), the concept of building a personal branding probably comes naturally to you.
When you’re the face of your business, building your personal brand makes perfect sense.
Your brand is what distinguishes you from your competitors, helping to form a lasting impression in the mind of your audience and customers.
Without a compelling personal brand that attracts your target audience, you may find yourself struggling to build a profitable and sustainable brand.
While it’s great to see that so many people are embracing their entrepreneurial spirit, this also means that every self-employed freelancer, independent contractor, and entrepreneur will soon face more competition than they already do.
The key to differentiating yourself from your competition is building a personal brand.
Steps to Personal Branding Success
Establishing a personal brand that you’re proud of is an ongoing project. It takes time to create a vision of what you want, and to then execute that vision.
Neil Patel did not establish their brand overnight and neither will you.
1. Set Personal Branding Goals
What do you want to be known for? This isn’t the existential version of the question.
Much like how companies set social media goals, you want to set your own personal branding goals.
Examples of some goals include; become an expert in your niche, get paid to speak at industry conventions.
When you’re establishing your goals, take a look at other people you admire and how they present themselves online.
These include known thought leaders in your community as well as industry experts. How do they post and what do you like about them?
What you want to be known for usually doesn’t match up with what you’re currently known for and that’s OK.
Growth is important in every part of your life and that’s why the next step is key in personal branding.
2. Establish a Personal Branding Strategy
Your personal branding strategy should read like a company’s branding guide. From the previous steps, you should already know your goals and where you’re at for reaching them.
For example, if you want to be known as a social media expert in the food and drink industry, search for common phrases and see what comes up.
If your name isn’t on there or if you aren’t as high as you’d like to be in the search results, write down a plan to create relevant posts.
A big mistake that new people make to personal branding is thinking that they need to promote themselves all the time.
Much like you don’t want to hear a company’s sales pitch over and over again, you also don’t want to talk about yourself all the time.
Take some time to find relevant articles and engage with the community that’s already established around your desired field. If you want to be known as someone who is on top of Instagram news, start sharing new features and your opinions on them.
The more consistently you share about this topic, the more people will start to associate you with that topic.
3. Audit Your Personal Brand
The easiest way to audit yourself is to search online for your name. Make sure your internet browser’s cache is cleared or that you’ve opened the search in a private browsing window.
This way you can make sure you’re receiving the same results as anyone else would be when searching for your name. When searching for yourself, take note of who else pops up if you have a common name.
How can you make yourself stand apart from everyone else? Don’t just stop at your name either. Search for combinations of your name with keywords from your goals.
Now it’s time to take a look at your social media profiles and website. Approach this audit like you would for a brand.
Take a look at key points, such as:
Profile consistency: Profile photo, bio, cover photos and website links are all similar.
Overall look: Colors, fonts and style are all similar.
Website: Whether it’s through an about.me page or your own site, you have all of your social media profiles linked in one place somewhere.
Social media handles: If possible, make sure all of your social media handles are the same. If your name is too common, either find a new username or create separate public profiles that can be distinguished from your private ones.
In the end, establishing and keeping track of your personal brand is an important part of your general life.
So much of our lives are already online and everyone from employers to potential dates run searches on your name.
Why not make sure that you’re broadcasting what you want to the world?
Here are some additional tips on how to get your personal brand off to a good start:
Ask your friends and industry colleagues what five words they associate with you.
Don’t be afraid to let your personality show through. Make your profile photo and your posts authentically you.
Lift other voices up in your posts. Your personal brand is based on an innumerable amount of interactions that you have with multiple people. Share their work in your feed as a way to engage and thank them.
Conclusion
Consider hiring a personal branding expert. Sometimes a third party is what you need to tell you what’s missing. If your work heavily relies on your personal brand, hire a coach to advise you on how to better present yourself.
At the future of work program, you will be taught what is needed to build your brand and get ahead in today’s digital world.
We have free training available to unemployed and underemployed youths below 35 from families in the B40 income tier. With our program, you'll gain the skills you need to kickstart your freelancing and full-time career and succeed, all online.
Apply for Free Training today, and get started on your exciting new career!
