Ten Ways to Continue Building Your Personal Brand

Ten Ways to Continue Building Your Personal Brand

Building and maintaining your personal brand requires constant attention. You spend the most effort upfront in the branding process, but to have an effective brand, it needs to evolve along with you. These suggestions can help keep your brand moving forward:

1.?????Strategizing Personal Brand

Your personal brand strategy builds longevity into your brand. Setting a strategy means you’re committed to your personal brand for the long haul that accurately reflects who you are and what you can do. Setting the strategy means: You think about the big picture of what you hope to accomplish in communicating with your target audience.

Your big-picture vision helps you set an overall goal best accomplished by filling in your plan with implementation details – the steps that will carry you toward your goal.

2.????Staying Relevant

Doing the personal branding process once and never looking back to revaluate are big mistakes. Crafting your brand is not a one-time process. People with strong personal brands continue to evolve by incorporating their new knowledge, changing trends, or a change of target audience into their brand.

To keep your personal brand relevant and progressing, you need to set goals and constantly work toward accomplishing them. The world is moving too fast to hang your reputation on a singular effort. Strong brands are always improving and making sure that they’re significant to their moving target.

3.????Evaluating the Competition

Your competition isn’t always who you think it may be. Constantly look at who else is serving your target audience. Often, the greatest competition comes from the most unlikely sources, such as an online resource and not just other competitors in your town.

Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening around and know when you need to ramp up your visibility.

4.????Producing Genuine Value

You can’t maintain a strong reputation and therefore a strong brand unless you can deliver genuine value to the people you serve. You need to stay current in your area of expertise and continue to find ways to offer a great product or service to your target market.

Identify what you have to offer and the value that you bring and keep telling your story so that your target audience is reminded about who you are and what you can deliver.

5.????Working on High-Profile Projects

One of the best ways to get your personal brand noticed is to play a key role on a high-visibility project. Volunteer for the projects that are important to your target audience. Find extra projects that allow you to be seen by the people you’re trying to attract. Of course, you want to make sure that you do a stellar job and that the work you do enhances your brand and doesn’t detract from it.

6.????Setting New Goals

In a well-known Harvard Business School study, graduates of the MBA program were asked to set clear, written goals for their future and their plans for how to accomplish them. Turned out that only 3% of the graduates had written goals, 13% had goals that weren’t written down, and 84% had no specific goals at all. Ten years later, the same students were studied. Researcher found that the students with goals, especially written goals, had far out-earned the students with no specific goals.

People with strong brands are continually revaluating their goals and looking at what trends impact them. Set new goals regularly by reviewing smaller goals weekly and major goals at least once a year.

7.????Aligning Time with Your Brand

When you have a personal brand, you’re naturally more efficient. You know your purpose and are able to focus on the important on-brand activities. You have an easier time identifying an off-brand activity and eliminating the clutter that keeps you from being on brand.

By extension, a brand helps you plan your time because you can align your activities with your personal brand strategy and your communication plan. You learn to purge what no longer supports your unique promise of value. Aligning your time with your brand frees you from the things that you no longer want or need to do.

8.????Keeping Up with the Technology

This point is crucial: If you are computer illiterate, you have a very tough time building a brand online. You don’t need to be an expert or technical wizard to build and keep your brand, but you do need to know enough to hire the right people to help you communicate your brand online.

Learn basics of what you need to know to take and build your brand online. It can feel overwhelming if you haven’t ventured into this world before, but have no fear: many people make it their business to help you build your business online.

9.????Nurturing Your Network

You won’t keep your network for long if you ignore it or you do not honour your connections. Remember these tips to nurture your network:

·??????Ask how you can help or be of service to your network.

·??????Build your network by attending relevant social events.

·??????Connect your contacts and share connections with others.

·??????Invite people in your network to attend events with you.

·??????Let your network know about a valuable resource.

·??????Stay in touch by sending personal e-mails, phone, or meet.

·??????Send an online newsletter sharing your ideas across.

·??????Update your social media sites by staying current with posts.

10.??Being a Confidence Emitter

If your brand persona is of being a Confidence Emitter, you are self-assured. You exude confidence and gain the respect of those around you. You are happy with who you are and show a great deal of self-awareness. Ultimately, having a strong personal brand is hard unless you’re a Confidence Emitter. You need to be able to identify what’s working and what needs improvement.

You must also accept who you are. You, too, can be a Confidence Emitter and let the world know just how much you have to offer with your unique personal brand.