4 Ways to Take Control of Your Personal Brand Today

Developing a strong personal brand can seem overwhelming. As a busy professional, how are you supposed to find the time to blog every day, acquire a horde of Twitter TWTR -4.00% followers, develop a podcast series – and do your job?

The good news is, you don’t have to do everything – at least not at once. (And when you become famous enough, you can pick and choose your areas of focus. Marketing expert Seth Godin blogs every day, but doesn’t use Twitter except to link to his posts; businesspundit Guy Kawasaki has staff to help him keep up his feverish Twitter pace.) But where do you start? As I discuss in my bookReinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, here are four steps you can take today to enhance your personal brand.

1.    Take control of your domain. If you’re a consultant or an entrepreneur, you’ve probably already secured your domain name (for instance, people can reach me at dorieclark.com). But every executive should do it – this minute. (It’s quick and painless with services like GoDaddy or BlueHost). This is the first place people will go to find out about you, and even if you’re not ready to set up a blog or website, you want to make sure you’re prepared; much better for you to control it than some hacker. (Even though I’ve secured my name, I’ve still been approached by people hoping to sell me the rights to far-flung variations at hefty fees.)

2.    Take control of your connections. You probably have aLinkedIn LNKD -0.52% account. But have you taken the time to fill out your profile fully (to showcase the full complement of your skills and ensure past connections can find you)? And have you gone through your address book to connect with everyone relevant you know? If you ever have the misfortune to be laid off – and I speak from experience, as an early 2000s newspaper industry casualty – you’ll be lucky to have an hour to clean out your desk, and your company may not allow you to keep your address book. Having a robust LinkedIn account means the connections – and the contact information – are yours to keep, and you’ll always be able to reach out to the network you’ve cultivated.

3.    Determine what you’d like to be known for. Before you start broadcasting your personal brand to the world, you’ll want to identify what you’d like it to be. What are your goals over the next 3-5 years? Where do you excel now? (Click to tweet.) What kind of job would you like in the future? What skills will you deploy to get there? Find three adjectives or a phrase that sums it up – “the leader in X” or “the person you go to for Y.” This is the “personal brand statement” you’ll want to showcase every day with the content you create and the actions you take.

4.    Set up a Twitter account – and use it. Plenty of Twitter accounts get created and lay dormant. That’s not going to help you. Set a goal of tweeting at least once a day and make it happen – it only takes 10 seconds. It will force you to read more in your field (so you can retweet articles), get you familiar with the power players in your area (you’ll want to follow them), and help you hone pithy insights that you can later turn into blog posts, speeches, or other ways to spread your brand.

A domain name, a LinkedIn account and some Twitter followers won’t make you a superstar overnight. Developing a strong personal brand means living out your values (if you say you’re the expert in collaboration, you need to prove it) and developing a robust stream of content over time that highlights your expertise. But these are four steps you can take today to start moving in the right direction – because  in an increasingly insecure economy, your personal brand is the greatest insurance policy you can have. (Click to tweet.)

What ingredients do you think are essential to a powerful personal brand? How are you cultivating yours?

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.