What is your personal brand? Professionally your personal brand can be defined when you answer questions like:
What are your passions?
What do you do for a living?
What makes you different?
What are you best at?
What is your career path?
Your personal brand, in other words, is a signal to your managers, team and future employers what are you about. Your personal brand is shaped and strengthened by your career choices and your professional achievements. And in today’s world these choices and career can be successfully flaunted with your online presence. This could be your personal website, your portfolio, what you publish online and the voice that you use online.
After your resume and cover letter that introduces you to the potential employer, there are some other things you need to work on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Here is how you can go about creating a stronger brand for yourself:
Daily
Start with Engaging Online
It is a possibility that you are a part of the vast social media network that persists and you are engaged on it for some time during your day. So you definitely can take ten minutes out of the day to do some career boosting activities on social media.
Consistent activities on social media keeps your online presence fresh. This tells the potential employer visiting your profile that you are engaged. The more proactive you are online, the more connections you will grow and will be able to establish yourself in the field of your interest. Share an industry article, keeping connections live by little deeds like congratulating someone on a new job or promotion or a relevant tweet keep you at an edge in the race. Also use mobile applications of different social media platforms to keep engagement a lot easier and handy.
Stock Your Digital Real Estate
You do not have to be a blogger or a photographer to keep your page active. You can be a curator of your online space by selecting out good quality content that others are sharing. You can enhance it and add your own thoughts to it. Stock relevant articles, great videos, stunning images or anything that connects you to your industry.
Weekly
Pen down Something
Expressing your viewpoint and ideas on topics that are in news and relate to your industry helps you in supporting your personal brand. Whether it be writing about projects you are working on or in general, sharing your knowledge helps you establish your brand. Writing builds your status and displays your expertise in the industry.
If you think that writing is not for you, you can think of other ways that engages your network.
Monthly
Google Yourself
Yes! Admit it that you have googled a colleague before. Probably you have also gone and typed your name on the search bar. But this is one thing that you should not do this once when you have nothing to do. Make it a habit and google yourself at least once a month.
Why is this important? Because people will google you and you have to make sure you are giving the right impression.
A Tip: When you google yourself, log out of your browser or use incognito so that your search results do not get hampered by your search history. If you see anything that is disturbing to your professional image, take it down. If that is not a possibility, create some SEO friendly articles, blogs or comments and post them. Those negative search results will be pushed down over a time.
Do a Check Up on Your Personal Brand
Times change. People Change. Things change. Looking back at the times, you realize how you have changed over the years. You need to do a regular check up on your brand once a month to make sure that it accurately reflects what you are doing now and what do you want to do in the future. Keep tweaking your bio on your personal site, upload fresh images and keep updating your accounts by adding new links related to your work.
It might sound like a lot to do. But it will pay off in a number of forms. Widened professional network, increased number of offers and a respect among industry peers.
On the Concluding Note
The term branding has been associated with companies for years now, but today every person has a personal brand. It is important to remember that a strong personal brand should be universal and evolving.
Photo Courtesy of Stefano Principato at Flickr.com
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