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).

Storytelling illustrates events through words, images, and sounds and can help you build your personal brand. A story has a basic structure: a beginning, middle, and end. The best stories pull you in from the beginning, keep your interest in the middle, and leave you with a satisfying ending, wanting for more.

LinkedIn is the most popular business social media site on the web, and you want to ensure that your LinkedIn presence represents you and the personal brand that you've developed in the most positive way. You make a first impression online in much the same way as you do in person. The ultimate goal is for your LinkedIn profile to provide answers about you and your personal brand that visitors typically look for when visiting any website: Who are you?

It’s hard to ignore Facebook’s power as a personal branding tool — and not just because Facebook is the largest of the popular social networking platforms. What’s more important is that Facebook is well designed to share the kinds of information — words, photos, videos, website links, and more — that help tell your story in ways that simultaneously inform and entertain.

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.

When you know your personal brand, you can figure out how to use it within the corporate culture where you work. It becomes an authentic exchange of assets. Developing a personal brand is more than insurance in a volatile workforce; it establishes a clarity of career goals that allows you to chart your career course by taking assignments to help you grow and develop.