Personal branding

You probably hear the word "branding" several times a day. It's become one of the most common subjects in entrepreneurship — and for good reason.

In the competitive work environment today where we seek to have impact, use our talents and support our life purpose, it’s a no brainer that personal branding is an important career development initiative. Yet many professionals feel they just don't have the time or energy to build their brand. There might be a number of questions that pop in your head regarding personal branding. Here is the biggest one, what are the real benefits of investing in building a strong brand?

But what is personal branding? And how can you make the most of it?

Personal branding refers to the process of establishing your public persona for your target audience. It involves carefully and accurately communicating your values, beliefs, goals, and purpose.

Think about some of the biggest brands' public images. Nike, for instance, has built a brand around celebrating athletes, creating high-performance products, and supporting consumers who want to live active lifestyles.

That's exactly the approach you need to take when working towards building your personal branding. You might not publish ads in magazines or create television commercials, but you have to think about how your personal branding is represented when you communicate with your audience online.

Why do you need personal branding?

A personal brand exists whether or not you create it for yourself. When you publish a blog post, for example, you reveal aspects of your personality to the people who read it.

Your personal brand develops around the content you post, from social and search advertising to blog posts and webinars.

Taking control of your personal brand, on the other hand, puts you in the driver's seat. You get to control the narrative and show your audience what you want them to see.

It's not about being fake. You're not creating a character for a movie. Instead, you are curating aspects of your own personality and presenting yourself in the best possible light to achieve your Knowledge Commerce business goals.

What are the best personal branding strategies?

Before you start growing your personal brand, you need to know the best practices so you don't run into common pitfalls. Remember that even a single misstep can set your personal brand image back and hurt your reputation.

Your personal brand revolves around your ability to educate people based on the knowledge that you have.

If people think that you don't have the ability to share your knowledge effectively, you won't have a business at all. That's why you need a carefully-crafted personal branding.

So what are the best practices for personal branding strategies? Let's dive into a few of the most important ones.

Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Every person on the planet has certain strengths and weaknesses. You have to embrace yours if you want your personal branding to come off as authentic.

In other words, you don't want to paint yourself as the person who has the answers to all the questions in the world. Instead, you have to make yourself as human as possible. The best way to do this is to know your weaknesses as well as your strengths.

Most high-profile personal brands have even made their narratives all about their weaknesses. Consider Heather Armstrong, more commonly known as dooce, who built a successful blog and business around her struggles with parenthood and mental illness.

This doesn't mean that you should follow in Armstrong's footsteps. You don't have to lay out every personal thing about yourself for the entire world to see.

However, building personal branding requires you to be honest about what you know and don't know.

Curate Your Online Presence

While authenticity is undeniably important for any personal brand, you also have to have boundaries. Before you begin to present your online persona to the world, decide what you will and will not share with your followers.

For many entrepreneurs, for example, family is off-limits. They don't want to subject their loved ones to online scrutiny.

Other entrepreneurs have no problem with posting, photographs, and other information about their families online. There's no wrong answer — you have to decide what is right for yourself.

You can also decide what you want to share with regard to your education, work history, personal struggles, and anything else about your personal life. Choosing not to share certain things doesn't make you any less authentic as long as you don't make up an opposite truth.

Build a Website for Your Brand

If you want to build a personal brand, you need a website. That's your own personal platform from which you can share your products, blog posts, webinars, social media and any other content you think would interest your audience.

Fortunately, With Connct business cards you can have all of that I one place. You can call it your website, your profile, anything that you want. You can fit all of your content here and just share with a tap. 

Now that you know that ‘What’ & ‘How’ of personal branding, Here are some of the most powerful results of uncovering and nurturing the brand called YOU:

Personal branding comes with many benefits. When you take control over the narrative that surrounds your online persona, you can make important decisions about what you share and how people see you.

Your personal brand is more about your personality, your hopes, your dreams, and your motivations.

You might have noticed that many major brands use celebrity spokespeople to help spread their brand’s message. You might not be a celebrity, but you are a unique human being who has interesting stories to share and powerful knowledge to pass on to others.

Don’t forget that.

With that said, let's look at some of the most important benefits of building your personal brand.

1. You’re More Visible Online

When you engage in personal branding, you automatically become more accessible and more visible to your online audience. People can find you with a simple Google search or interact with you on various marketing channels.

Becoming more visible can be scary for many entrepreneurs. They feel exposed and worry about making a mistake that could hurt their business’s reputation.

Just take it slow. Figure out what you want to share with your online audience and remember to respect your own boundaries as well as those of your loved ones.

2. Leverage Your Network

As you grow your online brand, you'll develop an ever-growing network of people in your industry, potential customers, and existing customers. This network can become a huge asset when it comes to growing your business.

You might have heard that "who you know" is important if you want to succeed in business. While this isn’t entirely true, having a network of people at your disposal can become extremely valuable when you want to launch a new product or take your business in a new direction.

Furthermore, the more people are aware of your personal brand as well as your business, the more visible you'll become in terms of your potential audience. People in your network will share your content with their own audiences, which means that you will reach people you couldn't have targeted otherwise.

3. You’ll Become More Identifiable in Person

Personal branding doesn't just have to help increase your visibility online. You'll also become more recognizable in person.

Many people still attend in-person events to promote their businesses and to secure new clients. If you think that you might want to do the same, making yourself more recognizable for personal branding can turn in-person events into excellent conversion machines.

You might attend local or regional trade shows, conferences, and conventions. Maybe you have written a book and you want to host a book signing.

Whatever the case, getting noticed in person can help you build your brand even further and make your business more profitable.

4. Your Online Relationships Will Flourish

It can be difficult to maintain online relationships with peers and customers, but when you have a strong personal brand, you can expect those people to continue to come back to your website and other marketing channels on a regular basis.

Since you are more approachable and visible online, it's easier to get in touch with you. You might not even have to reach out to other people to form partnerships, get new leads, and otherwise grow your business. Other people will come to you.

5. You’ll Build Confidence

Perhaps the biggest byproduct of building your personal brand is confidence. 

Personal branding can be scary, as we mentioned above. You might feel vulnerable when you put yourself out there online and make yourself more visible to your target audience.

It's a good form of anxiety, though. It means that you're trying something new and taking a risk.

The self-awareness you gain from going through the personal branding process translates into self-assuredness. And as your brand begins to pay dividends—opportunities, acknowledgement, —you become more and more comfortable in your own shoes. And that’s the best kind of wealth there is.

You probably know people in your organization who have strong brands, and you likely have witnessed them enjoying many of these benefits. It’s time to amp up your personal branding actions so you can experience these benefits while delivering exceptional value to your employer/audience.

6. You Control Your Brand Image

We've mentioned several times that control is essential when it comes to branding. If you don't take control over your personal brand and online footprints, people will form their own opinions and your brand will grow without your input.

Don't let that happen.

Instead, become purposeful about everything you share with your audience. Control the information that you release to the public so that you retain control over the narrative.

Even if you make a mistake, you're still in the driver's seat. You can figure out a way to navigate the future while still retaining control over your brand.

7. Your Credibility Will Grow

The more credibility you have, the more likely people will be to invest in your products.

How do you build credibility?

You share valuable, information-rich content with your audience. You use your personal branding to educate people who are interested in what you know and what you do.

It sounds easy, but it can get tough when you don't have a personal branding strategy. Once you know exactly what you want to share with your audience, you'll find it easier to connect with people and to share your knowledge with the rest of the world.

8. Your Goals Become More Achievable

It's true that building a personal brand takes a lot of work. However, the fruits of your labor can far outweigh the amount of time and energy you've spent on your personal branding.

When people know who you are and trust your judgement, your goals become far more achievable. You can sell more products, attract more visitors to your website, gain more participants in your webinars, and convince more people to join you.

Customer retention also becomes easier because you have a personal connection with your customers. Those people will continue to buy your products because they believe in what you stand for and trust that you will deliver consistently valuable content each time you release something new.