Blog

April 05, 2022

Building Strong personal brand for yourself is something more imperative than you may think. When you hear the word branding, you may think about it only in terms of a business and not as something you need personally. However, establishing a personal brand is very important and will help you advance down your career path.

“Your personal brand should follow you everywhere you go. It needs to be an authentic manifestation of who you are and amplify what you believe.” – NIRAALEE SHAH

What is a Personal Brand?

Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see you. It is the telling of your story, and how it reflects your conduct, behaviour, spoken and unspoken words, and attitudes.

You use your personal branding to differentiate yourself from other people. Done well, you can tie your personal branding in with your business in ways no corporate branding can possibly succeed.

Professionally, your personal brand is the image that people see of you. It can be a combination of how they look at you in real life, how the media portrays you, and the impression that people gain from the information about you available online.

Why Do You Really Need a Personal Brand?

• Employers Search Online to Investigate Their Candidates
• Take Charge of Your Message
• Develop a Clear Vision 
• Boost Your Expertise & Authority

Now that you know why a personal brand is important, here are some tips on how you can start developing it:

• Impact – Determine your unique value proposition

Spend some time thinking about what makes you different than your peers — your strengths, your passions, and your goals. If you left your job today, what would your company and colleagues miss? Know who you are, as well as who you are not.

The first step is to determine how you will brand yourself. How do you want your company to be thought of when you come to mind? Are you an expert in your field? Are you one of the best at what you do? Or is it more about the experience of working with you that should stand out? Define these aspects as clearly and concisely as you can and put them into words that anybody from your intended audience will understand.

Just like Starbucks knows that their target audience is coffee drinkers, you need to define to whom you want to send your message. This will not only help you hone your message, but it will also help you deliver it to the right places.

• Authenticity – Be Authentic

Your personal brand shouldn’t be a persona. It’s not an invention. It should be authentically you. Figure out what makes you different. Then learn to embrace that uniqueness and use it to get people to pay attention and seek out your content over everyone else’s. People want to interact with people, and that means being real. Determine what you want your brand personality to be.

Is it more casual or professional? Quirky or serious? The more authentic you make your personal brand, the more likely visitors to your site will resonate with your message. As Oscar Wilde once said, "Be yourself because everyone else is taken."

• Talent Stacking

Talent stacking is more about your range of skills than it is about your expertise in any one of them. What new skills can you learn? If you have absolutely no idea what to learn, some true-north skills that are great for stacking are:

Public speaking

Marketing

Coding (Because the world today is so digitized)

Social media marketing

Business management

Whatever you are passionate about

Again, you don’t need to be the best in every skill. Simply learning a new skill opens up so many options. For some, learning and combining different skills may be the answer to discovering your passion and talent — rather than something that you discover by sitting around and waiting for life to happen.

• Positioning

Unfortunately working hard or having great ideas is rarely enough these days. No matter what you do or what your goal is, the secret is to be in control of your P.I.E.: Performance, Image, and Exposure. All three pieces of your professional P.I.E. need to work in your favor if you want your personal brand to succeed.

Performance is fundamental, of course. You need to deliver quality results in your work. Image is about what other people think of you—it’s your personal brand! And the final piece, Exposure, is about making sure that people know who you are and what you stand for (I’ll show you how, below).

Try to figure out where you can improve: do you deliver top results, but your image isn’t great? Is your image fine, but you’re lacking exposure? You need to pay attention to all three for the best results.

• Emotional Intelligence

Having a high level of emotional intelligence allows you to empathize with others, communicate effectively, and be both self and socially aware. How we respond to ourselves and others impacts our home and work environments. Living in this world means interacting with many different types of people, as well as constant change and surprises. Being emotionally intelligent is key to how you respond to what life gives us. It’s also a key component of compassion and understanding the deeper reasons behind other people's actions.

EI is especially important when you are dealing with stressful situations like conflict, change, and obstacles. During these times, it's critical to remember to practice kindness, and being in touch with our emotions can help us do just that.

• Digital Presence – Develop a Strong, professional social media presence

You’ve sorted out all your social profiles so that they’re up to date and telling the right story. Awesome! But while it’s nice to have this basic online presence, if you stop there no one’s going to know that you exist. To make real connections you need to be actively engaging with real people.

Choose platforms that are appropriate to your line of business. LinkedIn and Twitter are the best ones to get started with, but having a Facebook business page and Instagram may also be important. Instagram is actually a great platform if your work can be represented in a visual way. Best of all, social media is free, until you get into paid advertising, but first things first that’s not necessary right away.

Remember YOUR NETWORK IS YOUR NET WORTH!

• Style - Appearance to Success

Your personal style is so important and it is a way to show the world and the people that you meet who you are and what you care about. This is something that we often forget about because we don’t really understand that the way we present ourselves to the people we meet is how they form opinions about us. Quite often the reason why we don’t like to think about it is that we like to run away from this. We run away from the fact that we have to make an effort and take pride in ourselves.

Now some people like to dress up really corporate and professional. You might wear a suit, slacks or tie. If you are a woman, you might also wear suit, nice dress or slacks. Guys I guess could wear a dress too, it really depends on who you are and your background. Some people dress very professionally while others dress more casually.

Dressing casually could mean wearing flip-flops on a stage or jeans, shorts, and a t-shirt. Really it depends on you and what you’re trying to portray. But know that how you dress and how you look portrays something about who you are, and it’s going to communicate something to different people.

• Networking – Become a Social Networker

Do you know who you are selling to? Do you know how old they are, what they do in their spare time, what they value most? Having a clearly defined audience ensures that your marketing efforts will be directed appropriately. It will hone your efforts and make them count, both from a time-spent standpoint and from a financial one.

Be sure to keep co-workers, colleagues, clients, and friends updated about what you are doing. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool, and what the people in your network say about you will ultimately have an effect on your brand.

Don’t forget good old networking. Throughout all of these processes, be sure to stay in touch with existing contacts, talk to strangers at conferences and other events and look for opportunities to speak and share your content. A lot of people find networking uncomfortable but it’s really just talking to people and you can definitely do that! Look for ways in which you can add value and help others and you’ll find that people will do the same for you.

• Feedback

Feedback promotes personal and professional growth.

Feedback is about listening actively, taking the time to analyse, and then thinking of the best possible solution to perform better. It provides positive criticism and allows to see what everyone can change to improve their focus and results.

• Ladder Up 

In building a personal brand, your goal is to stand out—but you can’t rise to the top without taking inventory of who’s already there.

A successful brand-building process outshines the competition and plays an important role to create your customer’s loyalty. You need to establish a strong connection with your customer in order to make your company successful. The branding process defines your company’s vision and position in the market.

A successful branding process increases your sales and advocates your product or service. From developing your Brand Guide to creating crucial brand elements such as a logo and slogan, the branding process represents your company’s true spirit.

A successful brand has to be consistent in communication and experience across

Environment

Print & packaging

Website & online advertising

Content marketing

Social media

Sales & customer service

YOU ARE YOUR BRAND SO PROTECT IT! LIVE IT!

Investing in the ULTIMATE PERSONAL BRANDING CONTENT COURSE shall help you in building blocks that will lead to success for your future. This course shall lead you to many opportunities for advancement in your personal growth and financial growth.

If you are interested pursuing THE ULTMATE PERSONAL BRANDING CONTENT COURSE, please definitely check via below link: https://www.niraaleeshah.com/courses/ultimate-personal-branding-content-course