Introduction to Personal Branding
In this overcrowded, oversaturated, fast-paced world, how do we stand out from the competition? Two words; Personal branding.
Your personal brand can make or shape the reputation you have with your friend’s colleagues and potential employers. But what is personal branding, how do we use it, what things do we have to consider when creating a personal brand, and how does it all come together? In this lesson, we will cover the basics of personal branding so you can stand out from the crowd. Let’s get started.
What is personal branding?
Personal branding is the way that we present ourselves to the world. It’s essentially a promise of consistency. When you create a personal brand, you’re telling the world that this is who you are and what they can expect from you.
“A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.”
—Personalbrand.com
Here’s a quote from author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss.
“Personal branding is about managing your name—even if you don’t own a business—in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records. Going on a date? The chances are that your ‘blind’ date has Googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.”
—Tim Ferriss
I think this quote sums up the importance of having a personal brand perfectly.
Why might you want to create a personal brand?
Here are a few reasons why you should consider developing a personal brand.
- Defines you
- It gives you a competitive edge
- It gives you control in how others view you—Perception is key!
- Improves visibility
- Has the biggest impact
- Shows dedication
- Builds valuable relationships
Defines you
Creating a personal brand is great for self-identity. It can help shape who you are and Define even to yourself what you stand for, what your values are, what you want to do in the future, and who you want to become.
It gives you a competitive edge
As already mentioned, the world is filled with qualified, talented professionals. How will you stand out? Developing a personal brand helps me stand out from the crowd because most people will not have the technical know-how to create a personal brand in the first place. Not to mention you will be seen as a true professional, especially if you create a website and social media accounts for your personal brand.
You can influence how others view you
People make snap judgments all the time. Developing a personal brand can help pivot the conversation towards the positive aspects of you, your life, and your work.
Improves visibility
You will be found much easier by recruiters and head-hunters when you have a website and social media accounts.
Shows dedication
As mentioned, most people won’t take the time out to create a brand identity about a skill or passion that can speak volumes. It shows your dedication to your craft,
Builds valuable relationships
The high-profile individuals in your industry likely have personal brands. So if you create one, it allows you to be seen on the same plane. And can facilitate establishing a relationship when networking.
Now that we understand the importance of a personal brand, how do we create a personal brand in the first place0?
Discovering your brand’s voice
Creating a personal brand all starts with answering a few basic questions, including:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Why are you doing it?
- Where are you doing it?
- Who are you trying to serve?
Who are you?
What do you stand for? What’s your present. How do you define yourself? Answering these questions will give you a better idea of how you should position your brand.
What do you do?
You should also consider what you currently do and what you want to do in the future. Do you help people make more money? Do you help people feel better about themselves? If you don’t, maybe that’s what you ultimately want to be doing?
Why are you doing it?
What is the purpose of your brand? Consider who you want to help and why you want to help them. That should help answer this question.
Where are you doing it?
It’s possible that your audience is in a particular geographical location. If so, make that a part of your brand and pitch.
Who are you trying to serve?
Are you serving people with disposable income? Stay-at-home parents? Perhaps you’re trying to serve an underrepresented group? Identifying who you’re trying to serve will help you identify how your brand should look and feel. This includes the tone of voice used in your marketing material etc.
Technical Considerations.
By now, you should have a better understanding of what your brand should represent. Now it’s time to talk about how you develop and implement the brand.
Create a website
Every good strong brand has a website. Yours should be no different. You should never rely on social media platforms to be your only means of communicating to your audience. This is because:
- You don’t own the platform
- You can’t add or take away any features that you don’t want or need
- You can’t emphasize the point that you might want to make
- You might be limited in character count or file size
- It’s more difficult to monetize a social media account as opposed to something on your own website
- And ultimately, the platform has the right to do anything they want with your profile.
So we understand that we need to create a website. But before we do that, we need a domain name. Here’s a couple of pointers to keep in mind when choosing a domain name.
Note: Since this is just a basic lesson, we won’t be going into how you actually purchase the domain name or how you implement the website. We just want you to know the very Basics at this point. Check out our web design module for more information on how to create a website.
Choosing a domain name
Choose a domain name that is professional, clean, and represents you, or what you want to do. A great way to do this is just to use your actual name. This way, the content on the page will be strongly associated with you.
Stay away from old School AOL AIM messenger Style domain names like Demon Slayer 64 dot-com or something like that.
Social media profiles
Along with choosing a good domain name, you also need to consider your social media profiles. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all use something called handles to identify users. Your handle is essentially your username.
It’s best practice to choose a brand identity name that is available on all major social media platforms. So, for example, if my name was Dwight Schrute. I’d want to ensure that dwightschrute.com is available, along with facebook.com/dwightschrute instagram.com/dwightschrute and twitter.com/dwightschrute.
Don’t neglect alternative social media platforms. Just because many people use Instagram, Facebook and Twitter does not mean that other platforms are dead. In fact, you should be eager to secure your brand name on all platforms, just in case they have a sudden increase in users.
Use Namechekr.com to quickly find out the availability of a username on all of the major social media platforms.
Note: Reddit seems to always give me some kind of ever. I don’t know why this is. It always says that the name is unavailable, even if it is available. If you’re having this issue, just search the username on Reddit to see if it’s available or not.
Color
Color is a strong branding tool. Color theory is used by corporations, goods, colleges, sports teams, and organizations to strengthen their brand qualities and generate constant recognition and memorability among their stakeholders.
Color theory is the set of principles and criteria that designers employ to engage with people via color. To choose the ideal color for their brands, designers utilize a color wheel and resort to significant accumulated information about human optical ability, psychology, culture, and more. Color is important because color generates emotion.
To pick the color for your brand, first, you need to grasp your real personal brand features. After all, the first step in personal branding is discovering and defining your brand. Once you are clear about those traits, you need to understand the brand personality of various colors so you can choose the one that best portrays that personality. Different colors emanate different features. Therefore you need to choose a color that highlights your most engaging personality characteristics.
Use the image below as a guide.
Typography
Typography design is the skill of organizing a message in a legible and aesthetically beautiful arrangement. Choosing the right font, point size, kerning, and line spacing are all part of this process, and the designer must make all of these selections in order to come up with a style that fits the tone of the brand.
The image below shows a bad font choice for what the brand is trying to represent.
When selecting your brand’s fonts, keep these key points in mind:
- Use at most two fonts
- Don’t use decorative fonts for paragraphs
- Pay attention to color contrast
- Pay attention to font size
Conclusion
That wraps up this very basic lesson on personal branding. We periodically have virtual events, which include a live presentation and demonstration of how to create a personal brand. Be sure to check our home page for the latest events information.