How to Build a Personal Brand That Benefits Your Entrepreneurial Pursuits
As a business owner, you spend a lot of time thinking about branding and how people view your company. But when was the last time you spent any energy focusing on your own personal brand? It matters more than you’ll ever know, so it’s time to take control.
5 Tips for Building a Strong Personal Brand
Personal branding is arguably more challenging than any other type of brand building. There’s always a bit of friction between who an individual is in their own life and who they want to be seen as in their professional pursuits. The goal is to reduce this friction and make things as consistent as possible.
Here are a few other tips for building a strong personal brand:
Make Time for Personal Brand Building
The first key is to actually make time for personal branding. This isn’t something you can fake. If you don’t give it the time and attention it deserves, you won’t stand a chance of being successful in this area.
Just like you would when building a company’s brand from scratch, you have to set aside time to invest in personal brand building. This dedicated time will serve you well.
Attach Your Name to Content
In today’s business world, branding is all about content ownership. The more content you have, the more opportunities you have to get your brand out there.
As you’re well aware, content comes in many different shapes and sizes. The key is to find content formats that resonate with your audience. This may look like maintaining a blog, developing immersive infographics, or even launching a YouTube channel and publishing regular updates on your progress in a certain area.
Build a Strong and Powerful Social Media Presence
How’s your social media presence? This is one of the more critical areas of personal brand building in today’s world. If someone runs across some of your content online and wants to know more about you, the first thing they’re going to do is search for you on popular social networking sites. What they find will determine how they feel about you.
From a personal branding perspective, LinkedIn is one of the best networks. Spend some time tweaking your profile so that it properly reflects who you are and what you do. Twitter is another big platform, especially if you thrive off personal interaction.
Be Consistent in Everything You Do
Consistency is the name of the game. Your personal brand has to remain the same from platform to platform, content to content, and day to day. Little variances may seem innocent enough, but they water down your image and ruin all of the progress and hard work you’ve invested. Before doing anything, filter it through your brand’s core values and determine whether or not it makes sense.
Create a Community
“Remember, networking isn’t about selling; in fact it’s not about talking. Networking is about listening,” entrepreneur Catriona Pollard says. “The best networkers are the ones who are able to build relationships and invest time finding out about others.”
One good strategy is to build a community around your personal brand. A healthy community will give you an army of people who are intimate with your brand and will vouch for it in the marketplace.
Remember: People Are Always Watching
You might think that you’re just going through the motions and doing your own thing, but any time you put yourself out there, people are watching. Your personal brand will, to a large degree, define your entrepreneurial success down the road.
Remain cognizant of the image you’re portraying and how it reflects on your personal brand.
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