Personal branding is vital for professionals looking to showcase their skills online. It expands your network, raises your credibility, increases your perceived value, and helps you stand out from professionals offering similar services to you.
Again, branding yourself needs some special tricks. You’ll need to create a captivating brand story and publish it on the right channels. Furthermore, you will need to clean up inappropriate content online and post consistently to keep followers engaged.
If this is your first time branding, and you wish to get the process right, this post will walk you step by step. Follow along to get the secrets needed to set up a professional profile that cuts through the noise.
What is Personal Branding?
Branding involves creating an online profile to sell your skill. It showcases your experience, qualifications, strengths, accomplishments, interests, strengths, testimonials, and anything else that would make you stand out as an authority in your field.
Unlike CVs and resumes, in branding, you do not list your skills boringly. Instead, you use a captivating brand story to tell your unique personality, values, conduct, and attitude to the world. The story should stick in the minds of your target audience.
With strong branding, people will know, memorize, and trust you better than competitors with a weak brand. It will give you an edge against fellow professionals vying for the clients you are targeting.
5 Tips to Build Personal Branding that Stands Out
1. Know yourself
Branding yourself starts with intensive self-reflection and introspection. Know the goals you want to achieve and the audience you are targeting. Also, reflect on your unique values, personality, interests, strengths, and weaknesses.
This information will help you create a story that truly reflects what you are. With a thorough self-reflection, you will not underrate or overestimate yourself to potential employers, clients, or partners.
2. Create your brand story
A good personal brand story should have a couple of essential things. It should say who you are, what you do, and why you stand out. The story should communicate the image you want people to see you, alongside creating a genuine connection.
To create a great story, just maintain simplicity. Let it be a narration of the skills, experiences, struggles, secrets, and achievements that made you the expert you are. Do not let the personal brand story sound like a boring resume or CV.
3. Get professional photos
Your profile photo is the first thing clients, partners, investors, and other people will see whenever they search your name on various search engines. So, if you want to make an excellent first impression, make sure the photo is professional. It will act as a visual story.
You don’t have to engage a professional photographer for this task. Instead, use your phone as long as it captures good-quality photos. Make sure the background is neutral, the lighting is okay, and your facial expression is warm.
Do not post badly cropped pictures of an event you had attended. They could break the credibility created by your brand story.
4. Bring your brand story to life
With a good brand story and a professional photo, showcase yourself to the world. You would want to start with LinkedIn, a leading platform where professionals display their expertise to companies, investors, and partners.
Besides LinkedIn, you can publish your story on your website, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks. Make sure the story posted on different channels remains consistent.
In addition to the brand story, you will need to consistently publish useful content across the platforms. The content will help your profile rank higher in search engines, alongside keeping your audience engaged.
5. See what search engines display
Personal branding does not end when you create a beautiful brand story and publish it on digital platforms. But, you will want to check and see if search engines display you the way you want prospects to see you.
Head to Google, type your name in the search bar and see the results. If the search results show something you wouldn’t want to showcase, get rid of it. Clean up flirty selfies, photos of your drunken gang, and posts of your rants. We bet you would not want partners or clients to get a glimpse of such content.
Take Away
Branding yourself differentiates you from the competition, enhances your credibility, and expands your circle of influence is not rocket science. You need to furnish your social media and personal website with a captivating narration of your experience, values, skills, and accomplishments. Remember to get unprofessional photos and posts that would taint your image. Keep publishing new content to maintain an excellent online presence, alongside keeping your audience engaged.