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Published:
July 14, 2014

Personal Branding For Dummies

Overview

The simple guide to managing your personal brand, a vital element of success in the professional world

Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition, is your guide to creating and maintaining a personal trademark by equating self-impression with other people's perceptions. This updated edition includes new information on expanding your brand through social media, online job boards, and communities, using the tried and true methods that are the foundation of personal branding. Marketing your skills and personality, and showing the rest of the world who you are, gives you a competitive edge. Whether you're looking for your first job, considering changing careers, or just want to be more viable and successful in your current career, this guide provides the step-by-step information you need to develop your personal brand.

Distinguishing yourself from the competition is important in any facet of business, and the rise of personal branding has evolved specifically to help candidates stand out from the global talent pool. Establishing a professional

presence with a clear and concise image, reputation, and status is a must, whether you're a new grad or an accomplished executive. Personal marketing has never been more important, and your personal brand should communicate the best you have to offer. Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition, leads you step by step through the self-branding process.

  • Includes information on how to know the "real" you
  • Explains how to develop a target market positioning statement
  • Helps you make plans for your personal brand communications
  • Instructs you with ways to make your mark on your brand environment

The book also discusses continued brand building, demonstrating your brand, and the 10 things that can sink your brand. A personal brand is more than just a business card and a resume. It should be exquisitely crafted to capture exactly the image you wish to project. Personal Branding For Dummies, 2nd Edition provides the information, tips, tricks, and techniques you need to do it right.

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About The Author

Susan Chritton is a Master Personal Brand Strategist, Executive Career Coach, and Master Career Counselor. She guides professionals looking to engage their authentic self in the world through personal branding. Visit her website at www.susanchritton.com.

Sample Chapters

personal branding for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

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).

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Articles from
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Applying personal branding in the workplace is not a trend; it's a survival strategy. Personal branding experts agree that it's important to stand out: You need to be visible so that people know you have something unique to offer on the job. The personal branding mind-set is about standing out from the crowd and more closely resembles how an entrepreneur looks at her work.
The executive population was the first to embrace personal branding. During the formative years of personal branding, forward-thinking executives knew that in order to differentiate themselves, they needed to work on their public image and guide that image instead of being wholly associated with the companies they worked for.
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?
The first step in the personal branding process is to spend time figuring out who you really are and what you want from your life. Often, this self-analysis is the hardest part. Here are the building blocks of your brand that you need to identify: Needs: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a helpful tool that shows layers of needs from the most basic (physiological needs, such as food) all the way up to self-actualization — becoming everything that you are capable of becoming.
Completing a personal brand profile can give you a clear sense of who you are and what makes you tick. Your characteristics are like pieces of a quilt. Each is important, but it's only a part of a greater whole that becomes your personal brand. It isn't until after you assemble the larger product that its true beauty is revealed.
Personal branding is about making connections, and the logo you choose should connect with your audience. A logo creates awareness. It can be a symbol, text, a graphic, or a combination of these things. (Keep in mind that people recognize images more often than they remember text.)It symbolizes your brand and provides an image that gives you a memorable identity.
Why not infuse your portfolio with your personal brand? A portfolio is a collection of documents that validate your accomplishments and professional achievements when you go on a job interview (or when you meet with a new client).This tool helps you remember all that you have done in your past to build your personal brand.
Your personal brand isn’t universal. That’s because your target market is part of the equation in determining your personal brand. When you work globally, your target market changes. You need to take the concepts of personal branding and overlay them with the cultural nuances of each country, taking into consideration the specifics of each target market.
Your freak factor is a quality that you’ve probably worked hard in your life to hide and avoid integrating into your personal brand in hopes that no one will find out about it. It’s a unique quality that makes you different and unusual, at least to the people you knew early in your life. This unusual characteristic feels so individual to you that it may have actually been a source of pain when you were growing up.
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 you plan to extend your personal branding to an online environment, consider all the people you can reach with social media sites. Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging web service that allows its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as tweets. Twitter is the great equalizer in that you can become a content expert without years of schooling and a prestigious job title.
Here are some tips on how to introduce yourself effectively and communicate your personal brand in that introduction. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to sound professional, unique, and personable. Luckily, there are some tips in a book called Be Sharp (BookSurge Publishing) by Paula Asinof and Mina Brown that brilliantly laid out a personal commercial in three key steps: Make your first impression.
Megan Fitzgerald, expat career and personal branding coach at Career By Choice, has great tips for how to “internationalize” your professional bio. Megan has lived and worked in more than 40 countries and helps expatriates build personal brands to support their careers and success abroad. An internationalized bio is a powerful tool that will help you build a personal brand to support you in realizing your goal of living and working overseas.
When you create a branded resume, you use your personal brand to infuse your resume with your unique qualities. The primary function of any resume is to create a picture of how you want to be seen now and in the future. The result is a job search tool you’re proud of that highlights your brand promise. In other words, you want your branded resume to illuminate who you are and what you stand for.
William Arruda, founder of Reach Personal Branding, launched his own personal branding video resource at PersonalBranding.TV. Arruda says video is the new frontier in personal branding; video may be the most powerful tool you can use to build an emotional connection with the people you connect with virtually. Video allows you to deliver a complete communication — something that is often missing in a world where most communication is electronic.
Your unique promise of value and your personal brand statement are closely linked; the statement is an expression of the promise. Both of them focus on what your target audience expects from you; they create an expectation of what you can deliver. These pieces of your personal brand profile are probably the most important (no pressure!
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.
TV is the ultimate branding experience where all the components of your personal brand blend together in a three-dimensional expression of who you are. From your first contact with the producer or media representative, to the final handshake as you leave the studio after taping, each and every interface provides an opportunity to express your very best.
Articles express your expertise and help develop your presence and personal brand as a thought leader in a particular area. Writing articles is much easier than writing a book and can expose you to a large number of people in your target market. If you write with frequency, you can become known as an expert in a relatively short period of time.
In countless surveys, people rank public speaking as one of the scariest things in the world. What better way to set yourself apart and brand yourself? People are afraid of not knowing what to say, forgetting their words, looking dumb, or being rejected. One of the quickest ways to ruin a speech or presentation is to deliver a message that feels false.
Building a strong network often leads to referrals, which are by far the best way to grow your business, extent your personal brand, and shape your reputation. Personal referrals come from providing great service and being someone people can count on. Build your brand ambassadors Brand ambassadors are your fans — the people willing to spread the word about your personal character and/or your business.
Any time you seriously want to do some personal branding work, you need to know the opinions of others. Most people would prefer not to know what others really think about them, but in order to build a real brand, you need to collect data from a broader base than just your own personal opinion about yourself. After all, sometimes others perceive you differently than you perceive yourself.
Having a vision for your personal brand means imagining your ideal version of how you’ll use your mission. It’s an external process and describes what you see as possible in the world. A successful vision contains several elements: It’s written down and is in the present tense as if you’ve already accomplished it.
Certified Personal Brand Strategist and Career Coach Randi Bussin outlines a goal-setting strategy and how you can best use it in developing your personal brand. Following are Randi’s own words to describe this process: In Randi’s opinion, goal setting is a crucial exercise for career reinvention, job search, and personal branding coaching for the following reasons: Goal setting helps you get clear on what you want.
A tagline or slogan is a phrase that follows your personal brand name and sums up your unique promise of value. A tagline is shorter and catchier than your personal brand statement, but it serves a similar purpose: It distinguishes you in the minds of your target market, expresses your personality, and/or gives a sense of what you do.
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.
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.
A branded biography is a narrative of your personal brand story. It tells the story of your unique promise value to your target audience. Your bio needs to emotionally connect with your readers and be written in a way that engages them. It positions you for how you want to be known going forward while giving relevant confirmation of your experience and qualifications.
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.
You need to measure your online reputation to get a clear picture of what your online presence says about you and your personal brand. According to William Arruda, author of Career Distinction (Wiley), there are five measures of online reputation: volume, relevaZnce, purity, diversity, and validation. Check out each measure and how it impacts your online reputation: Volume speaks to how much content is on the web about you.
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).
Women want to be given the same opportunities to succeed as men, but often they want to succeed in a different way. The generalization goes that women (more than men) tend to embrace the desire to want to live more authentically, and that translates into being more of who they are in the workplace. Be your authentic self Personal branding is about living your authentic self and building on natural talents and strengths.
On the Internet, your reputation often precedes you. There are many positive attributes of the Internet to use in building your personal brand, but what happens when something dreadful is written about you? The scary thing about the Internet is that it’s very difficult to get rid of something after it’s been posted.
To reach the right target market, you need to identify who its members are. Visualize yourself working with your ideal client, company, service, or scenario. For example, here are possible characteristics of an ideal client: Appreciates the work that I do Pays me well and pays in advance Loves the service that I provide Trusts my expertise and lets me serve him or her using my best judgment Refers other dream clients to me Promotes my work to everyone he or she talks to Dreaming about the perfect situation gets you thinking about who would actually be the right target audience for you to put your time, energy, and effort into pursuing.
People are inundated with electronic information. Communicating your personal brand is important, but you don’t want to be pushy. Be honest: How many e-mails do you get a day that you don’t have time to read? What makes you actually click a content link? In other words, what makes something worth reading? Before creating a newsletter for yourself and your business, you need to determine whether doing so truly has value for your target audience.
You don't just communicate your personal brand in person; you should communicate your brand online as well. A profile hub can serve as a central point for all your online activity (your blog or website, Twitter account, photo gallery, and so on). Content for your profile may include A brief bio about who you are Links to your social media sites (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and business fan pages) The name, products, and/or services of your business If appropriate, your key clients Your education Special features that enhance your personal brand, such as a favorite quote or testimonial Videos highlighting who you are and what you do Your photo Links to — or PDF versions of — articles you've written, slides, or other visuals you've produced Popular profile hubs include: LinkedIn: This site helps you build effective business relationships based on nurturing the "know, like, and trust" factor.
If you have little experience with branding yourself online, LinkedIn is a great place to start. LinkedIn is the world’s largest online professional network and is growing daily. The people you’re trying to reach — those you know and those you don’t — are very likely on LinkedIn. Links: Using custom anchor text LinkedIn allows you to add up to three website links (not counting Twitter) in the contact area of your profile.
There are a few fast rules when developing your personal commercial. A number of terms can describe your professional introduction to another person — for example, the elevator pitch, the 30-second commercial, or the personal commercial. Regardless of what you call this introduction, you need to be able to describe (quickly!
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