Basic Steps To A Personal Brand

So you agree that building your personal brand around your career is a good idea? Now you have the obvious question: What should I do first?

You’ve come to the right place. This post will outline a simple strategy to get you started.

There are more advanced techniques that we will discuss in a future posts, but like most things the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of the benefits of building your personal brand will come from 20% of the activities you can perform. These items represent the best ‘bang for your buck’, the low hanging fruit, and that’s always where you should start.

Here’s the general outline

1. Create your digital assets (website and blog, social media profiles, etc)
2. Determine where your peers and/or target audience hangs out online
3. Determine what the most requested, relevant, hot or trending topics in your industry are (if you don’t already know)
4. Write 20 headlines around trending topics you can (and want to) write about
5. Create a publishing calendar (aka content calendar) for publishing your articles
6. Consistently write articles for your blog post according to your content calendar
7. Go to your social media accounts and promote the material you have written

Sounds like alot? It’s really not that bad. The work is in setting up a website, your professional social media profiles, etc. Once that’s done, you will get into a routine and habit of writing regularly (once a week, or ??), posting that information on your blog, then promoting it via your social media accounts.

You are writing about topics you already know, so that’s not hard. But don’t misunderstand … the writing is the key. Building your personal brand, particularly related to your career, requires that you become a publisher of information you know and are willing to share with others. That act of freely sharing your knowledge and expertise is how you will establish yourself as an authority, an expert in your field, and start to spread your name throughout your industry.

Getting your information, with your name attached to it, spread across the web is critical. And the most important thing, which we will explain later, is getting that information indexed by Google and the other search engines so when someone Google’s your name OR goes looking for information in your industry or niche … voile’. There you are.

The brand that you’ve worked hard to develop, with your article of blog post on the topic/information you know best, is on display in the search engine results page. This lets people see what you know, they learn that this is your field of expertise, and they quickly come to recognize you as an authority in your field.

Is this all there is to it? Of course not. There are plenty of advanced techniques which really begin to separate you from any other personal brand builders in your field. But remember I described this as the 80/20 rule? That remains true. This is where you should focus your efforts for at least 90 days. Once you’ve got a good base of content on the web and a well established presence as a publisher, you can move on to the more advances techniques I’ll write about in future posts. But for now, you’ve got your work cut out for you.