Written By – Jaya Pathak
Personal branding is not just for business leaders, influencers and celebrities. It is essential for everyone who wants to stand out in the industry. If you want to differentiate yourself, build authority and create opportunities which aligns with your passion and goal, then building a personal brand from scratch is a powerful way to do so. But the question here arises how will you build a personal brand from scratch?
In this blog, we will explore the step-by-step ladder of building a personal brand.
What do you mean by personal branding?
Personal branding is the way you present yourself to the entire globe. It includes your reputation, values and your voice. It reflects your personality, experience, passion and purpose. Establishing a strong personal brand will help you to enhance job opportunities, authority and building valuable connections.
A strong personal brand lives within you. The purpose of building a strong personal brand is to connect with others so that you will be able to resonate with your target audience. Your personal brand is about the way you are presenting yourself publicly – offline and online.
What should your personal brand reflect?
Every individual is unique. In the very similar manner, the success of personal brand depends upon its authenticity. It cannot be possible that what is working for any brand will definitely work for you. Therefore, there are certain characteristics which your personal brand must contain and reflect:
- Personality: Your personall brand must reflect your personality. Your personality must resonate with your thinking and the way of your communication.
- Passion: Personal branding should be a reflection of your passion. What are the things which is exciting you? Are you really enjoying this journey? Passion is the foundation stone of a successful human being. You must focus on your passion if you want to build a strong foundation for your personal branding.
- Experience: With a strong determinism, you must add on your experience whatever you are encountering in your journey. Things which you are seeing and challenges which you are overcoming every day are playing crucial role in developing the skill over the period of time.
- Purpose: Your personal branding must reflect what do you want to derive in any field in which you are entering. It must be able to define the impact which you want to make in the society or in the entire globe. Your brand must align perfectly with your vision.
How to build your personal brand?
- Self reflection: If you want to build your brand identity then it is quite crucial to think about yourself. Ask yourself about you and capture your hobbies and feel of your interest. You have to understand your defining characteristics and for that purpose you can ask your friends or family members. While doing self reflection, it is also important to know your values. What are the social issues which are important to you and how this issue can align with your personal branding.
You have to know and understand your unique features which can help you to determine your own value. Strength and weakness is quite crucial to understand. Additionally, you also have to decide what impact do you want to make through personal branding in the society and the world. - Identifying your target audience: After defining yourself, you have to answer yourself that why do you want to build a personal brand? It will help you to know whether you want to build a business or you want to break into creator economy. When you will answer every why’s, then you will be able to define your target audience. It could be customers, investors, employers or some other group. It will also help you to know your value proposition and help you to create a unique value for your target audience.
- Brand messaging: It plays a pivotal role in building a personal brand. Brand messaging is the mirror of the way you are presenting yourself in front of the audience. Your brand messaging must align with the core values. It should be specific, clear, consistent as well as authentic. It should clearly reflect your personality and it should be consistent throughout your website and social media platform.
- Storytelling: Telling a story of your brand applies to personal branding also. You can choose visual or auditory method. You can choose the format which is suitable to the platform you want to focus on. You may create a podcast, videos, tweets and many more. You just have to keep in your mind that the tone of your story is reflecting your personality.
- Differentiating personal and professional brand: There might be certain section of your personal life you wish to keep private and distinct from your public personal branding. But you should always keep in centre your customers and their experiences in your business brand storytelling.
- Professional network: Find those people who are sharing your interest and value. Engage with your target audience and include their stories as well as a part of your content. You can ask for feedback and participate in discussions. Audience want authenticity and meaningful connection. You must choose a right platform for yourself so that later on you will be able to expand your reach to grow your audience.
- Online presence: It is not just enough to be on a social media platform if you want to build a strong personal identity. You have to be consistent. You have to build a strong online presence and hence modify your content style and follow trends to be relevant.
- Creation of content strategy: If your content will be deeply rooted in the core value, then it can help you to grow and drive traffic to your website. It can even encourage you by consistently providing value for your community.
- Monitoring and adaptation: Personal branding is about monitoring when things are evolving. You have to pay attention to every single detail and adapt in a way that it still feels like you. Above all, you have to fuel personal branding with the touch of authenticity. If any platform, style or trending topic is not aligning with the values of your brand then you should restrain yourself from aligning to those things.
- Monetize your personal brand: If you are thinking to build your personal brand into a business then you must monetize it. It is possible on platforms through ads, brand partnerships, tips, shootouts, sponsorship and ad revenue.
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