Doing Personal Branding the Right Way
If you are reading this, you already have a Personal Brand.
Everything you do, say, post, comment or share, all the social profiles you use, every e-mail you send and everything that is available online about you has a role to play in your personal brand.
All of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called you. — Tom Peters
89% of people Google someone new they are about to meet and 25% have no positive content on the first page. These results clearly demonstrate that having a positive visible presence online is important. To increase your rankings and have more Positive content on the first page of Google, you need to spend some time building a brand for yourself.
Whether you are an entrepreneur, employer or an employee — the strength of your personal brand can be arrived at with the following two points:
1. How easy it is to find you (your searchability)
2. If found, how well you tell your story (the quality of content)
Simply put, personal brand management is all about controlling and managing what shows up when someone Googles you!
Let me walk you through some basic steps that you can take right away to determine the current strength of your personal brand:
1. Analyze your current brand: You can do this simply by Googling yourself (in incognito mode) and seeing how many of the first page results cater specifically to you. To make this practice easier and more efficient, use this tool which showcases your top 10 Google results without any browser preferences (directly fromGoogle). At the same time, it will allow you to select the ones that are yours and help you showcase your brand in a positive way, such as your LinkedIn profile, blogs or a personal website, while neutralizing the results which damage your brand, such as an embarrassing article or a story. It also helps you differentiate between results that are yours and those that seem yours, such as those pertaining to people with the same name.
2. The above step will give you a glimpse of how much more work is required to build a stellar personal brand. To increase your chances of being found easily you have to make yourself search engine friendly. One of the simplest hacks you can carry out right now is to customize the public URL of all your social networks profiles (those which allow you to) so that they contain your Full Name. Interestingly enough, most people overlook customizing their LinkedIn URL and carry on with a generic one that LinkedIn assigned. Visit your profile and ensure that you customize your URL.
Do you want someone to tell you what is missing and what needs to be done in your top social media profiles like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to make them more comprehensive and search engine friendly?
If Yes, login with LinkedIn here and add your Facebook and Twitter profiles to get customized steps that you can carry out on each profile to make them more relevant and search engine friendly.
All the steps mentioned on the Personal Branding do-it-yourself steps will improve your searchability on the first page of Google.
As most of the people start their search with your name + where you work or where you live in for example if you search for me by Pulkit Dubey HeadHonchos, it will definitely be easier to find me (if all my social profiles display that information).
However, to build a genuine personal brand for long term you need to answer these 2 questions for yourself:
1. What do you want to be known for?
2. What is your unique expertise?
Once you have answered that, make a clear goal in your mind. Start creating valuable content such blogs or vlogs catering especially to the answers of above questions on platforms such as quora, medium, youtube etc. This is the best way to improve your searchability for all the right reasons.
To create quality content on a regular basis is really difficult, but you already consume a lot of information about things you love. Therefore writing about it should be a natural extension of the same and will go a long way towards strengthening your online presence.
Start sharing relevant content on all your social media profiles to be known for what you love. You can use platforms like StumbleUpon, Product Hunt, Medium to stay updated on what’s happening in the world of your interests. This will also help you build a solid network, with people who are just as interested in the same topic(s).
While all the steps mentioned above will take you a long way in building your Personal Brand, sometimes you will need extra help. You can schedule your FREE consultation to get started here.
