“If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.”-- Zig Zagler.
Why Personal Branding?
Your company’s brand is one of the most important for its eventual success. It’s the combination of your company’s image and identity packaged and presented in a way that’s pleasing, familiar and attractive to your customers and clients.
However, companies aren’t the only ones in the hunt for solid branding. Personal branding, the art of building a unique brand around yourself, is just as important.
Whether you use your personal brand to consult, freelance, or drive more traffic and trust to your company, it's vitally important to establish one to stay competitive. Personal branding is to showcase your expertise. We have many experts in just about each and every field. Steps in Personal Branding: So if you want to be effective in your Personal Branding, it isn’t enough to choose a general field like "marketing" or "human resources." Instead, it's best to focus and develop yourself in a very specific niche. But before, choose a niche determine your area of expertise, show your pedigree, your specialized skills, like an evangelist or a thought leader in areas say, Innovation, motivation, or leadership etc and strive towards excelling it. And your audience might want to get more focused insights and help, rather expecting generic content from you. Be more Authoritative If content is king, context is god.
Eventually after choosing your niche topic, work towards building your personal brand. There are various ways of doing it. And the best way to do is to start writing, start commenting, showcase your expertise through articles, invest your time in writing, invest in a proper content management system, be more resourceful and helpful to your audience, don’t be overtly promotional. Make sure your effort to help your audience is genuine. If it’s an act, people will notice it, and the credibility factor goes down. Share your views via interviews, try writing in industry trade journals, contribute to blogs, and register in websites related to your trade and commerce or any monitoring, authoritative, governing body websites. Make friends and network with your peers in your/related areas, by doing so, a mutual respect and support might strike up and there’s a definitive chance for a better promotion for your personal brand from the other end.
Google yourself, and if you don’t see your details in Google search results it’s time to do some, SEO, make your content viral in social networks and some promotion. And now that you’ve build your personal brand and the best way to promote (make it more Google-able) is mostly by going social. If your content is helpful and insights are resourceful, social media is such a platform that it provides an immediate audience without even asking for it. When writing articles, makes sure they are search engine friendly, meaning, first do a little bit of research as to what topics are being most searched for by the audience, thereby start writing content surrounding the issues and concerns that your potential audience has. Ensure your content headline, body copy is properly optimized, a lot of writers, especially from traditional journalistic background tend to ignore this fact. Perform a smart link building activity, ask for referrals, you can review other websites too and inturn they’ll review yours. Make friends with press. Participate in trade events and seminars, show your pedigree, and provide yourself as an expert. On the contrary, it works best when you show your human side of your personality like, working with charity, and fight for a genuine social cause, people will notice that too.
Social platforms: Although there are lots of social media platforms that can give you much needed traction in Google pages. We’ll take a look at some of the prominent ones wherein you can do your personal branding to the best. Twitter: Best for effective short business communication. Twitter is a great place showcasing your talent. YouTube: Try making some simple videos, it doesn’t have to be expensive. Keep your audience in mind, showcase your expertise, you can provide insights on topics ranging from basic, intermediate to advance depending on your audience’s knowledge level.
LinkedIn: If your audience is more into B2B, then this is the place. LinkedIn audience by and large is much matured, so keep in mind, and develop content considering your audience. Show your resolve, post articles and join groups and discuss in forms, contribute and help to the group’s objective.
Slideshare: Though it’s a LinkedIn’s product, Slideshare has its own unique voice. Just bundle up useful and some nice content and present it as a pdf, word, or ppt in Slideshare. Flickr: This is the only photo site that gets traction in SEO. Profiles include all the basic information, such as a profile picture, location, bio and link.
Storify: If you’re a writer, this is a great tool. It lets you do that story telling effectively. Just go to Storify, search for your choice of topic that you’re planning to write, it’ll throw away all related info in the form of video, image and content and all you have to do is just drag and drop apart the ones you need, of course apart from adding your own content and build up a nice story for your audience.
Facebook: Facebook ranks high. Although your Facebook profile may not be relevant to your job, make your primary profile picture is professional. Depending on your privacy settings, a lot of people may see it. Also, claim your vanity URL. Overall, personal branding requires an expert to be more resourceful in his niche, and making his presence felt, and being more vibrant in social networks, related trade forums and blogs and ultimately if you’re authoritative in your subject, share your content via social platforms automatically you’ll reach your audience better and they inturn talk about you, and it all spirals up to your personal brand topping the Google search results.
Whether you use your personal brand to consult, freelance, or drive more traffic and trust to your company, it's vitally important to establish one to stay competitive. Personal branding is to showcase your expertise. We have many experts in just about each and every field. Steps in Personal Branding: So if you want to be effective in your Personal Branding, it isn’t enough to choose a general field like "marketing" or "human resources." Instead, it's best to focus and develop yourself in a very specific niche. But before, choose a niche determine your area of expertise, show your pedigree, your specialized skills, like an evangelist or a thought leader in areas say, Innovation, motivation, or leadership etc and strive towards excelling it. And your audience might want to get more focused insights and help, rather expecting generic content from you. Be more Authoritative If content is king, context is god.
Eventually after choosing your niche topic, work towards building your personal brand. There are various ways of doing it. And the best way to do is to start writing, start commenting, showcase your expertise through articles, invest your time in writing, invest in a proper content management system, be more resourceful and helpful to your audience, don’t be overtly promotional. Make sure your effort to help your audience is genuine. If it’s an act, people will notice it, and the credibility factor goes down. Share your views via interviews, try writing in industry trade journals, contribute to blogs, and register in websites related to your trade and commerce or any monitoring, authoritative, governing body websites. Make friends and network with your peers in your/related areas, by doing so, a mutual respect and support might strike up and there’s a definitive chance for a better promotion for your personal brand from the other end.
Google yourself, and if you don’t see your details in Google search results it’s time to do some, SEO, make your content viral in social networks and some promotion. And now that you’ve build your personal brand and the best way to promote (make it more Google-able) is mostly by going social. If your content is helpful and insights are resourceful, social media is such a platform that it provides an immediate audience without even asking for it. When writing articles, makes sure they are search engine friendly, meaning, first do a little bit of research as to what topics are being most searched for by the audience, thereby start writing content surrounding the issues and concerns that your potential audience has. Ensure your content headline, body copy is properly optimized, a lot of writers, especially from traditional journalistic background tend to ignore this fact. Perform a smart link building activity, ask for referrals, you can review other websites too and inturn they’ll review yours. Make friends with press. Participate in trade events and seminars, show your pedigree, and provide yourself as an expert. On the contrary, it works best when you show your human side of your personality like, working with charity, and fight for a genuine social cause, people will notice that too.
Social platforms: Although there are lots of social media platforms that can give you much needed traction in Google pages. We’ll take a look at some of the prominent ones wherein you can do your personal branding to the best. Twitter: Best for effective short business communication. Twitter is a great place showcasing your talent. YouTube: Try making some simple videos, it doesn’t have to be expensive. Keep your audience in mind, showcase your expertise, you can provide insights on topics ranging from basic, intermediate to advance depending on your audience’s knowledge level.
LinkedIn: If your audience is more into B2B, then this is the place. LinkedIn audience by and large is much matured, so keep in mind, and develop content considering your audience. Show your resolve, post articles and join groups and discuss in forms, contribute and help to the group’s objective.
Slideshare: Though it’s a LinkedIn’s product, Slideshare has its own unique voice. Just bundle up useful and some nice content and present it as a pdf, word, or ppt in Slideshare. Flickr: This is the only photo site that gets traction in SEO. Profiles include all the basic information, such as a profile picture, location, bio and link.
Storify: If you’re a writer, this is a great tool. It lets you do that story telling effectively. Just go to Storify, search for your choice of topic that you’re planning to write, it’ll throw away all related info in the form of video, image and content and all you have to do is just drag and drop apart the ones you need, of course apart from adding your own content and build up a nice story for your audience.
Facebook: Facebook ranks high. Although your Facebook profile may not be relevant to your job, make your primary profile picture is professional. Depending on your privacy settings, a lot of people may see it. Also, claim your vanity URL. Overall, personal branding requires an expert to be more resourceful in his niche, and making his presence felt, and being more vibrant in social networks, related trade forums and blogs and ultimately if you’re authoritative in your subject, share your content via social platforms automatically you’ll reach your audience better and they inturn talk about you, and it all spirals up to your personal brand topping the Google search results.
