With the alarmingly fast rise of the internet and connectivity between people on Earth, it feels as though it’s become harder than ever to stand out from the crowd and truly make a name for yourself and get noticed. This is why it’s now incredibly important to create and cultivate your own personal brand that makes you stand apart from every Tom, Dick, and Harry. You should also realize that a personal brand is for anybody and not necessarily just large money-earning CEOs or social media influencers. A strong and effective personal brand will provide benefits such as finding jobs more easily, attracting more promotions, and improving your ability to collaborate. Creating a personal brand or mark is not an easy task and cultivating a successfully created brand is even harder. In our article today, we’re going to outline a few tips and tricks to properly creating and growing your personal brand.
Platform Building
If you’re going to build a personal brand, you need a place to display it. In particular, if you don’t have a website dedicated to you and your brand, you’re missing out. If people can’t view and experience your brand, then your brand’s utility falls to nil. Considering the extreme ease of difficulty in creating a website in today’s modern times, this step should truly be a no-brainer. Additionally, go out of your way to acquire all the related social media accounts that could tie into your brand. Even if they’re left inactive for now, securing them presently will help protect you from problems further down the road. Consider enlisting a branding advisor to help secure a truly unique brand.
Strengthen Your Strengths
A key element of your brand is highlighting the individual strengths that make you stand out. You should show off any strength you’ve built up over your career. An excellent way to find your strengths before building them up is to ask friends and co-workers. They should be able to outline where they feel you’re strongest at work. This is especially true of senior staff such as your direct manager that can help point out where you’re best. Once you’ve identified your strengths, you should begin to try and build them up. There is a wealth of resources available online to learn just about any skill, and just because you’re good at something now doesn’t mean you can’t be better. So get out there and get learning! It’s safe to assume that if you have any competition in your strength space, they will be doing all they can to become the strongest through training and learning.
Share Your Strength
An excellent way to establish yourself in any given strength is to begin to teach about that strength to others. This quickly establishes you as a leader in your field and someone to be respected. After all, a person that is so skilled in a given that they’re willing to share is clearly someone that is not concerned about being caught up by those below them. Create your own tutorials or online courses, whether video or written, and share them on social media. Not only will you appear stronger, but you may even garner a group of followers that can help spread the influence of your brand across the web.
Be Yourself
While it’s tempting to create a persona that you feel you should be living up towards, it’s far better to act natural and be yourself. Humans are typically very good at spotting deceit and lying to pass yourself off as better than you are will garner you no fans and fame for your brand. Get people to become attracted to you. Your personal brand is a reflection of yourself and if you can get people attracted to you, your brand will grow and be a boon in your life.
Ultimately, you should be aiming to show someone as quickly as possible why you’re worth investing time and energy in. Find your strengths, play to them, and be yourself. It’s these three simple rules that ultimately lead to the creation of a solid personal brand. Once you’ve established your brand, make sure to protect it by using any tools available to you. If you’ve created a logo, consider acquiring a trademark for it to prevent its fraudulent use and abuse.