Summary: A brand helps shape people's preferences and how they make choices. Building a personal brand can go a long way in enhancing your chances for success as an entrepreneur.

“A brand is a reason to choose.”

People buy products from the brands they trust and can relate to. So, with the changing arena of marketing and branding, personal branding is even more important if you want to get a better job or want to sell your services to people.

Personal branding is the process of developing a “mark” that is created around your name or your career. You use this “mark” to express and communicate your skills, personality and values. All of us want to make a mark and establish our personal brand to make ourselves stand out and be unique.

Here are the nine basic steps which will help you create your personal brand.

1. Who are you?

The first step in creating a personal brand is to define yourself in terms of your skills, abilities, education, professional experiences, what you are passionate about, and what is your USP (what is your specialisation).

The key to success is your specialisation, your niche, your personal competitive advantage. So, first self-analyse all your qualities, abilities, weaknesses, strengths, education and experiences to define yourself, think about what you can do the best and how you can help others with your specialised skill.

“Passion and personality are key to a strong brand.”

2. How are you perceived?

In personal brand building, it is of utmost importance to know how people perceive you or think about you. The best way is to get feedback from your immediate manager, peer, someone you don’t report to, someone more senior than you, your boss’s boss, from your key customers or others outside the organisation.

Knowing how others perceive you, plays a very important role in your own self development and your personal branding. Another very important aspect is your online profile. Do check on the web and see what people find about you when they search online about you. Create impressive social and business profiles of yours online where people can know more about you and your work and have perceived a brand image before they interact with you.

“You learn nothing from life, if you think you are right all the time.”

3. What do you want to achieve ?

First define what you want to achieve, whether it is services you are specialised in or is it your product you have built and want to sell. Then identify the right target audience for your products or services. Then plan your communication in a very clear and consistent manner, be it your social media posts, blog articles, newsletters, or anything for that matter. It should clearly communicate the value your customers would get when they are to engage with you for your offerings.

“When you turn your vision into reality, you build the future .”

4. Create your brand

Now comes the brand creation and the first thing you want to do, is choose a name and a slogan that will characterise you and is easy to remember. Make sure you check on google if the same is not being used by someone else. Then choose your brand’s colours and make a logo that represents you and the corporate identity for your brand. Write some content in a very engaging manner with your own story using your bio with which the users can connect and engage with.

“Good things happen when you believe in yourself.”

5. Create your ecosystem

The next step in your brand building is creating your ecosystem. An ecosystem is a community of channels functioning as a whole to build relationships with consumers. Is is also adding new channels where it makes sense to connect to new audiences. In the ecosystem, the role of the brand is to listen to the conversations happening around it, energise those conversations with interesting content and experiences. So, make your blog, the centre of your online communications. Use social networks as places to socialise, share and interact. Use social media to enjoy and share entertainment and content which users can engage with.

“Always do your best, no matter the size of the audience.”

6. Create your network

To build your brand, you need connections. So, the next step in the brand building, is creating your business network.

• Follow the experts in your field, learn from them and create relationships.

• Actively participate in groups and forums in your industry.

• Visit networking events related to your field and interact with members, introduce yourself and ask about them. Connect with them over social media and or through emails.

“If they can do it, you can do better.”

7. Create original content

The internet is inundated with lot of content already, so to position yourself as a valuable brand, you need to create original content, useful to your users and update the blog frequently so that people keep coming on your blog to read consume fresh content.

Create and share multimedia content (audio and video) that are likely to go viral. It will make your brand reach to a larger audience. Always keep in mind to change your tone of voice according to the social media platform you are using.

“When your why is big enough, you will find your how."

8. Get involved & share

Communication is the key to branding, so get into positive conversation, actively engage in other user’s conversations on social networks. Leave meaningful comments on blogs in your field which will help you generate backlinks to your blog, and generate more traffic.

Also, don’t forget to share valuable content and posts created by others, it makes people think that you are actively reading content in your field of specialisation and sharing valuable information with your users to keep them updated.

9. Listen & monitor

Listening and monitoring your audience, competition and influencers in your area of work is very important. Keep yourself updated on what is being talked about your brand and field on social media through Social Media Listening. Listen to and deal with criticism in a professional manner and act on it constructively. You can also use social media listening tools to monitor your brand and listen to your customers and prospects.

Remember, building your personal brand is a slow process, but starting it right will ensure that the journey is enjoyable and the end is wonderful.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, official policy or position of GlobalLinker.