Landing a dream job and excelling in a career isn’t only about resumes, cover letters, and a track record of strong performance. It’s also about who you know — and who knows you. Your reputation precedes you. That saying is true in any setting and essential in a professional environment. You want to not only be great at what you’re doing. You want to be known for it. Having a solid personal brand can do wonders for your career.
What Is a Personal Brand?
Your personal brand is an image you project personally and professionally, based on your experiences, beliefs and credentials.
Milan Singh, a California-based entrepreneur, investor, and finance content creator, defines a personal brand as “your reputation and how you present yourself to the world.” Singh has built a powerful personal brand online and currently has 3 million followers across his social platforms.
“It’s who you are, what you do, and how people perceive that,” he says. “You can think of it as a billboard for your online presence: it’s out there for everyone to see, and it’s meant to represent your character in some way.”
Why Is a Personal Brand Important?
A personal brand is not only crucial for influencers, entrepreneurs and CEOs, and other professionals in leadership positions. It can make a difference in most types of careers.
“A strong personal brand can help you attract better opportunities,” Catherine Castro, senior HR and recruitment manager at a virtual assistant services company 20four7VA, says. “If employers or other professionals know who you are and what you’re all about, they’re more likely to seek you out for projects or positions that fit your strengths.”
Castro adds that having a personal brand can give you an edge. Between the Great Resignation, mass layoffs, and hiring freezes, job seekers need every advantage they can gain. A well-defined personal brand can help you set yourself apart from the competition and make a positive impression on employers.
As your brand grows, it can also benefit your networking efforts. When other professionals learn about you and your work, they may want to reach out to you. This visibility can lead to more referrals and connections, further strengthening your professional network.
Finally, having a positive personal brand can help you build trust and credibility. If you establish yourself as an expert or thought leader, you’ll gain recognition in your industry. When that happens, you may find that employers and clients begin to seek you out instead of the other way around.
How to Build a Personal Brand
Creating a personal brand can take time as you grow your expertise and utilize tools to showcase it. Here’s what the process looks like:
1. Finding Your Niche
When you’re developing a personal brand, you are the product. A product needs a niche market. Think about what you’ll offer, who you’ll help, and what your passions are. This exercise will help you identify your niche.
Say you want to establish yourself as a marketing expert, which is a broad term. Try to narrow it down. For example, you aspire to work in direct-to-consumer marketing rather than business-to-business. You want to focus on fashion brands and advocate for diversity, making fashion more accessible and inclusive. And just like that, you’ve found your specific niche.
2. Developing Expertise
Once you’ve identified what you’d like to be known for, you want to ensure you’re good at it. If you’re new to an industry, make a point to build your knowledge and skills, seeking out training, learning from established experts, and attending industry conferences. (Forage offers free virtual work programs to help you build new skills and get hands-on experience with the day-to-day duties of various career paths.)
Remember that building expertise is a career-long process. Naturally, the longer you work in your industry, the more knowledge you gain, but you also should stay aware of new trends and developments to be a true expert.
3. Creating an Online Presence
Now you need space to showcase your expertise and let the power of word-of-mouth do its magic. Since that power currently inhabits the Internet, your online presence will be critical to your personal branding.
Creating a website or portfolio with information about you and highlights of your work may be a good idea. And, of course, social media can be instrumental to your success if used right.
According to Castro, social media offers an excellent platform for sharing content, connecting with others, and growing your audience.
“One of the best ways to build a personal brand is by creating content that educates, entertains, or both,” she says. “If you can provide valuable information or insights that help your audience solve a problem or improve their lives, they’ll be more likely to remember you and seek you out in the future.”
You also want your online persona to be authentic and match your own. This authenticity allows you to share expertise, advocate for things you’re passionate about, and create a unique brand. After all, no one is you but you.
4. Building a Community
This step is where personal branding connects with networking. You can start building a community by growing your online presence, offering value, and interacting with your audience and other professionals.
A community is a space where people can interact with you and each other, sharing experiences and providing support. At this point, your name is out there, which can be invaluable for further advancing your brand and career.
The Bottom Line
Building a personal brand can give you competitive edge in a hot job market and help you become a sought-after professional in your industry.
However, remember, creating a positive personal brand won’t happen overnight. It requires consistent work providing value to your community and showcasing your achievements.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a successful personal brand,” Castro says. “Be patient, stay focused on your goals, and keep putting in the work, and you’ll eventually see results.”
Are you looking for other ways to get an edge in the current job market? Then, check out these 14 hiring manager secrets for job seekers.
This article originally appeared on TheForage.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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These 20th-century skills are almost obsolete
Our Gen Z kids and grandkids are digital natives. They can convey nuance in their text messages, effortlessly navigate wherever they want to go, and get a pizza delivered anywhere, anytime. But they’ve never learned some of the old-school, analog skills most of us were taught as we grew up. Does it matter?
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Does it matter? TIME Magazine says yes, claiming that cursive writing is harder to forge, activates different parts of the brain, and allows people to read historical documents in their original form. Other than signing your name, I’m not convinced. The only time my kids need to read cursive is when they get cards from their grandparents, and those can be “translated” easily.
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Does it matter? Probably not. When was the last time you needed to use a rotary phone? In any case, it’s something kids could learn in about a minute. Watching teens try to make a call with a rotary phone is entertaining, though. (For more phone-related fun, check out this 1954 Bell System video tutorial on how to switch from operator-assisted calls to dial calls.)
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Does it matter? According to Martha Stewart, yes, for practical and educational reasons. Sewing allows you to design, create, and mend clothing, and it can help build planning and math skills and hand-eye coordination. I still put my rudimentary sewing skills to use when I need to sew on a button or repair a small tear, but I leave the more complex projects to the experts.
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Does it matter? Maybe. PBS Kids says reading maps helps build spatial reasoning skills, and certainly understanding compass directions and the concept of the magnetic North Pole should be part of everyone’s education. It’s tough to compete with the technology behind Waze and Google Maps, though. A map or compass might come in handy when that technology isn’t available, as long as you can manage to find a map or compass.
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Does it matter? Most of the time, probably not. Sorry, stick-shift aficionados (and I count myself among them). Edmunds reports that only 1.2% of new cars sold in 2019 had manual transmissions, as of October. As much as some of us may love them, it looks like shifting for ourselves is on its way out.
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Does it matter? It depends. Family Handyman says you can change your own oil in about 20 minutes and save some money. I’m sure this project would take me a lot longer than 20 minutes, and I’m not convinced on the cost savings. You need to buy oil and a filter, own or borrow the right tools, and have access to a garage or driveway where you can work. You also need to take your used oil someplace to recycle it. It’s nice to know how to change your own oil, and rewarding to do things yourself, but for most of us, the time vs. money trade-off probably isn’t worth it.
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Does it matter? Yes, but being able to use this skill in real life is questionable. AAA reported in 2017 that 28% of new cars didn’t come with spare tires. About 14% of new cars come with run-flat tires; for the rest, manufacturers have often eliminated spares to improve fuel efficiency. If you don’t have a spare, you can’t change a tire. And even when you do have a spare, lug nuts are often so tight that many of us can’t loosen them to remove the flat tire.
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Does it matter? Nostalgic as we may be, it’s hard to make an argument for this one. The Smithsonian reported on the death of the card catalog in 2015.
RIP, Dewey Decimal.
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Does it matter? The skill matters; the system, not so much. To be sure, monitoring your accounts for accuracy and keeping your expenses below your income are cornerstones of personal finance. Logging in online to check your finances regularly works better than a paper-and-pencil system for just about all of us.
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Does it matter? The Weekmakes an argument for print dictionaries over their online counterparts and points to the serendipity factor — while looking up one word you’ll likely come across other words that are interesting.
It’s tougher to make that argument for a thesaurus, where you’re likely looking for an alternative to a word you already know.
And your options for analog encyclopedias are limited. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s 2010 version was its last in print, and the World Book is the only general encyclopedia still being printed today.
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Does it matter? Yes. It’s a good idea for all of us to memorize, or at least have analog access to, an emergency contact number at minimum. But with 10-digit phone numbers, multiple area code overlays, and phones serving individuals, not families, it’s not feasible for most of us to commit a lot of numbers to memory.
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Do you know where it goes? Does it matter? Um, yes. Everyone should know how to do this.
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Featured Image Credit: Michael Krinke.
