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"Personal Branding: A easy Step-by-Step Guide for starting your Online Presence"
Start your personal brand right now!
You need to be online for your personal brand as a professional and your business. In this article, we'll explore five essential tips for building a personal brand that will help you stand out and make a lasting impression.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.” - Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon
Step 1: Know Yourself
The first step to building a strong personal brand is knowing how your personality and knowledge will impact your content.
Tips to know yourself
Use personality tests like Myers-Briggs or Enneagram to gain a better understanding of yourself.
Keep a journal to reflect on your self-talk.
Make a test about the brand archetypes. I found four really useful options of test.
Step 2: Define Your basic content strategy
Once you have defined what you can talk about, you know better how to approach your tone of voice according to the archetypes that suit your brand. Now it's time to start posting content on social media platforms. Starting your content iteration process will help you to improve your skills and start to understand your workflow and your audience's needs.
Select some social media platforms and establish and optimize your profile.
Try to post content daily. This is important.
Do not miss TikTok's advantages for growth.
Check the analytics to understand your audience.
Step 3: Iteration and more strategy
At this stage, you are already getting used to writing and generating content daily. Iteration means to keep improving based on your evolution and your user's requirements. So we need to figure out what type of person that you are talking to with your content. To do that, I suggest you use two powerful tools called, buyer personas and empathy maps. Knowing this, you will be able to sharpen your content and customize your strategy.
To help you with that, I leave you some templates to make those easier. You will need a Canva Pro account to use the following templates.
Buyer persona: This is your ideal user/reader.
Empathy map: A way to connect and understand your user by adding psychographic characteristics to your buyer persona.
In addition to that, it is important to figure out your value proposition. How are you going to bring value to your community? Here are some free tools to organize that.
Step 4: Establish Your brand visual consistency.
Now it's time to design your basic brand identity. Yes, you read well, probably you will pay a designer to help you with this professionally. But you can start right now!
Use a branding guide template to create a consistent visual identity for your personal brand. And develop a mission statement.
Choose a color palette and two main typographies.
Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to ensure your objectives are realistic and achievable.
Step 5: Use statistics to monitor your brand and build a website.
Now, last but not least. You need to be professional. We talked about branding from the easiest perspective. This step is a little more technical, but you will find several tools online to learn and improve your skills. I want to give you some additional recommendations.
Use a website builder like Canva, Wix, or Squarespace to create a professional website.
Buy a domain.com on Namecheap: This will be key for your SEO optimization strategy. This will be a key point in your brand strategy.
To improve the workflow of your content creation process, you can use social media management tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts and manage multiple platforms at once. Utilize LinkedIn to connect with other professionals in your industry and join relevant groups to stay updated on industry news and trends.
In addition to that, you can use a content planning tool like Canva Pro (my favorite), Trello, Asana, or Notion to plan and organize your content calendar. Also, you can use a writing assistant like Grammarly to maintain a good writing style. For the graphic design part, you can use Canva.
Use Google Alerts to monitor mentions of your name or brand online.
Conduct regular audits of your website and social media profiles to keep everything improving and branded.
"Your personal brand is what makes you different from others. It's your unique value proposition that sets you apart from everyone else." - William Arruda, Personal Branding Pioneer
Mini case study on a successful personal brand:
One great example of a successful personal brand is Michelle Obama. She has crafted a powerful brand that is based on her intelligence, grace, and authenticity. She also wrote a bestselling memoir, "Becoming,". Her personal brand is mixed with her accomplishments, but also her personal style and giving value to people.
Building a personal brand takes time, effort, and dedication. Remember, building a personal brand is not just about your ego or self-promotion, it's about showing your talents, knowledge, experience, and personality. So, start building your personal brand today and share it well with the world. What are you waiting for?
Leave comments below your social media profiles or your blog, so I can read your content.
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Inline:
[1](https://www.citethisforme.com/topic-ideas/business-marketing/Personal%20branding-8471518) Labrecque, L., Markos, E. and Milne, G., 2011. Online Personal Branding: Processes, Challenges, and Implications. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 25 (1), pp.37-50.
[2](https://hbr.org/2022/02/whats-the-point-of-a-personal-brand) Llopis, G. Personal Branding Is A Leadership Requirement, Not a Self-Promotion Campaign 2015
[3](https://hbr.org/2022/09/how-to-build-your-personal-brand-at-work) Harvard Business Review, "What’s the Point of a Personal Brand?"
[4](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeseq/2022/08/17/building-your-personal-brand/) Harvard Business Review, "How to Build Your Personal Brand at Work"
[5](https://brandyourself.com/blog/how-tos/guide-to-personal-branding-top-7-must-read-personal-branding-books/) Forbes, "Building Your Personal Brand"
\[^6] BrandYourself, "Our Top 7 Best Personal Branding Books"
Footnote:
#### Sources:
1. <https://www.citethisforme.com/topic-ideas/business-marketing/Personal%20branding-8471518\>
2. <https://hbr.org/2022/02/whats-the-point-of-a-personal-brand\>
3. <https://hbr.org/2022/09/how-to-build-your-personal-brand-at-work\>
4. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeseq/2022/08/17/building-your-personal-brand/\>
6.<Bezos, J. (n.d.). Jeff Bezos quotes. BrainyQuote. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/jeff_bezos_416789/\>
- Arruda, W. (2017). Personal branding for dummies. John Wiley & Sons.
