Susan Chritton

Personal branding is a marketing strategy focused on your most important product: you. Developing a personal brand requires figuring out who you really are (your skills, values, passions, and personality), who you want to serve (your target market or audience), and how you differ from the competition (your unique niche).

Color sends a powerful message and is key to representing your personal brand. Your brand color is the most important element of your visual brand identity. People remember color because it stirs up emotions. Therefore, you want to choose colors that best represent your personality and your brand. Color in the corporate world Corporate brands rely heavily on color.

If you’re just beginning to think about using online tools to showcase your personal brand on your business and social networks, begin with LinkedIn. While direct selling is frowned upon on LinkedIn, business conversations are not only accepted … they’re expected. These are the same conversations that allow LinkedIn to do what LinkedIn does best: help build effective business relationships based on nurturing the “know, like, and trust” factor.

Corporations must build and maintain their brand image to stay in business. Knowing these techniques gives you an advantage when building your personal brand. Brand equity is the value of a brand based on the quality of the product or service, its reputation, and customer loyalty toward that product or service.

Your cover letter or letter of introduction offers you the opportunity to connect with your reader in a more personal way using your personal brand than afforded in a resume. This letter differs from a branded bio because it’s more concise and formal, and it’s tailored to the specific work opportunity available.

If the list of people you know seems too sparse to support your personal branding goals, your next step is to consider how to meet more people. Simple, right? Well, for some people, it’s simple. For others, meeting new people may require a serious effort. Which category do you fall in? The following quiz, provided courtesy of William Arruda, founder of Reach Personal Branding, can help you figure out how skilled you are at going beyond your comfort zone in the effort to meet new people.

These days (unlike in the early 1980s and prior), personal branding means most people realize that they’ll have many jobs during their careers and must continually train to prepare for the changing workplace landscape. As a result, applying personal branding in the workplace is not a trend; it’s a survival strategy.

A personal brand helps you stand out in the workplace rather than simply fit in. Try to understand your brand likeability, and pay attention to your behavior on the job to make sure that you don’t tarnish your personal brand. Here are some common-sense ways to make sure that you shine when you stand out: Make yourself attractive.

Your personal brand is more fragile than you may imagine. You need to be vigilant in maintaining the standards that you’ve set for your brand. All it takes is one major mistake, especially one that you handle poorly, and all that you’ve built will vanish. Letting it go stale: Taking your brand for granted Your personal brand, no matter how well crafted it is, is never “done.