Is your online presence in order across your social media networks and memberships in various organizations? Is your image professional and are your photographs presentable to colleagues and clients?
The information now readily available requires you to manage your own reputation, both online and in real life. Whether you desire to become a virtualpreneur or stay within the confines of an organization, you now must get noticed. Building a personal brand both online and offline will help accomplish that goal.
Just like with an organization, building your personal brand starts with having a brand mantra – a quick and memorable statement about who you are and what you want to be known for. The next step is to live your personal brand to create consistency. This means being aware of maintaining your personal brand both in person as well as virtually. Just like with a company, people will remember you from their own experience.
The idea of building your personal brand is new to many, but has been used by authors and speakers for many years. Anyone who delivers services under his name has gone through the exercise of building a personal brand.
The development of a personal brand can be made easier by utilizing the following steps:
Think about your personality and build a list of descriptive words. Are you efficient and goal-oriented? A great communicator? Whatever the words are, write them down and do not filter your results. Elicit the help of those who know you well to provide additional words for the list.
Think of this like the target audience for an organization. The list can contain names of people you know, but also positions of people within organizations, associations, and types of companies interested as well.
What do you do, or what type of work are you wanting to do? Think about the services you have to offer, as well as what makes you stand out from the crowd.
Write a description while thinking about the information your Interested List would desire. This is meant to position you in a good light, not outline your resume or list previous jobs. Think about the brochures and information sheets organizations use and emulate that style. It’s about marketing you to the right people, not providing a list of previous employers. Make sure your differentiators, your function, and your assets are included.
The steps outlined above will help you start to build the foundational aspects of your personal brand. Just like building a company brand, there are a multitude of other steps required to be successful. Beginning with an understanding that you need a personal brand in order to compete is an important first step, particularly in light of the new world of work’s globalization of our market. Now more than ever understanding how to compete online for jobs is crucial to success. Building a personal brand is an important component to achieving that success.
Check out our upcoming book The New World of Work: From Cube to the Cloud. Find out why this is happening, what the new opportunities are, and what this whole shift means for you. Find out more about the book and get more information at www.newworldofwork.com.
With the soulfulness of Wayne Dyer and the entrepreneurial spirit of Richard Branson, Terri is a world-class business growth expert, social impact investor, and serial entrepreneur whose purpose is to inspire potential. With her own money, Terri built a portfolio of purposeful companies, Share On Purpose, Inc., and now invests in and creates mission-driven start-ups.
In a career that spans more than 25 years, Terri has launched, owned, sold, rebranded or turned around more than 40 companies. She is known for her game-changing business models and personal transformation frameworks.
Everything she built came directly from a wellspring of perseverance and soulful resiliency, which she openly shares through her first purposeful brand, Succeed On Purpose.
