Recent years have proven that branding is no longer confined to the world of business, but rather to celebrities, political parties, and just about everything else. So what does personal branding mean? And why is it important? How do you build your personal brand from scratch?

What is a personal brand?

Personal branding is about finding what differentiates you, building a reputation for you based on the attributes you want to be known for, and then promoting that reputation to monetize it. In a simple definition, a brand is that unique combination of your name, data, ideas, experiences, and skills.

And it is this very combination that sets you apart from everyone else. So you should use it to serve others and to enhance your reputation. The personal brand should not be limited to expressing yourself at the current stage but extends to include who you want to be in the future as well. The personal brand is built through tools such as websites, social and professional accounts, blogs, and personal cards.

Why should you care about building a personal brand?

The adage “famous is better than riches” eloquently expresses the importance of a personal brand or “name”. Its impact spans many areas, helping you to:

  • Develop your career

According to CareerBuilder, more than half of recruiters reject applicants who do not have an online presence. As the most important self-marketing method that makes you more popular and grows your network, a personal brand provides you with opportunities for professional advancement that may not come to you in any other way, and the greater your desire to succeed, the more important it becomes to you.

  • Build trust and bonds with others

Building trust results from the content you share about yourself with others, which creates an interaction between you and them from one direction. This interaction allows them to feel that they know you well, enhances their confidence in you, and encourages them to interact with you in a corresponding direction.

  • Take control of your data

The easiest way for people to get to know you is to search for you on Google. If you do not take the initiative to control the information available about you on the Internet, you are missing an important opportunity to create a positive and strong presence for you on the Internet, leaving the opportunity for search algorithms to display random information about you, or to share information with others who are similar to you by name.

  • A window for thought leadership

Influencing people's thinking is one of the most important qualities of a leader. And if you are a company manager or team leader aspiring to become a thought leader in your field, with the use of “media” tools for personal branding, such as articles and podcasts, you will be able to spread your ideas, beliefs, culture, and values ​​to the masses.

How do you build a personal brand from scratch?

Let's look at the personal brand as a long path of steps, with each step you put a brick in the building, and with each new brick the building becomes stronger and more durable and the personal brand flourishes with it. In the following stages, we will discuss in detail the steps of building a personal brand from the beginning and before it to professionalism, taking into account that the goals and details differ from one person to another.

1. Arranging ideas and developing a “vision” for the brand

As with companies, a people brand is based on taking advantage of the uniqueness of its owner's personality and the originality and distinction of what it offers. Therefore, it is important to understand well the aspects of your personality today and to know who you want to be in the future, many people stand and are confused about finding the correct answers about themselves.

a. Define your values, passions, and most important attributes

  • Value

The best decisions you make in life are usually consistent with your values. For example, your most important values ​​might be family, friends, social relationships, or perhaps ambition, intelligence, or volunteer work. For example, when making the decision to get a new job, you will review your value system, and ask yourself what is the best decision in terms of family, ambition, and other values ​​that you have?

When you're defining your values, it's important to think about the people and feelings that make you happiest. You'll likely find your values ​​there. Arrange your values ​​according to their priority to make the right decision when you find yourself facing a difficult choice, such as choosing between family and ambition, as your personal brand and the future you draw for yourself relate to your happiness in life before it relates to developing your career.

  • passion

The second thing you need to know is your passion, which sparks your interest and motivates you to work. For example, your passion may be in travel, technology, or in sports. Passion combined with values ​​will provide a clearer vision of where you want to be in the future. For example, driven by a passion for travel and the value of spending time with family, a person would be happy in a job that requires travel but should leave enough space for them to spend time with family.

  • Personal traits

Identifying traits helps you know which traits need to change so you can take this into account as you build your personal brand. For example, if you are closed off and aspire to a future career in another culture or country, you need to start trying new things to change this trait.

B. Answer the question Where do you want to be?

Discuss your previous findings with those around you, including family and friends, to ensure that they are not biased and to reveal any blind spots. Ask them about their perceptions of your passions, personality traits, and values, as they may differ from, or fit into, what you've come up with, and then state what your ultimate goal is.

Your ambition may be to become a customer service executive in a telecommunications company, but you will not reach your ambition overnight. So, you need to take a step back to decide what are your next steps? Before you are a customer service executive, you will be responsible for the customer service team, and before that, you may be a customer service manager in a branch and a customer service representative.

More than one path may lead to your ultimate goal, so you can draw more than one path and prioritize them to determine which one is most attractive to you and is likely to lead to your ultimate ambition.

c. Get inspired by other people's experiences

You don't have to reinvent the wheel, watch, learn, and emulate what others are doing so you don't have to start from scratch. Make a list of the leaders in your field that you admire, and take a deeper look into their lives to get a comprehensive picture of the positives, failures, and problems facing them. For example, you may discover that someone is very successful in their professional life but has problems in their personal life.

Choose the characters who are most similar to you and have the same vision of life as you. Then learn about the path they took to get to where they are now. This will give you an insight into how they were able to reach their goals so that you can compare it with the path you set for yourself in the previous steps.

2. Determine the target audience

Define your target audience from your personal brand

One of the biggest mistakes budding personal brands make is trying to get everyone's attention. It doesn't make sense to please everyone. In this case, it is best to invest time and effort in attracting the target audience to your brand.

Think of it like a dart game, every time you hit the board you score some points, but if you hit the target accurately you get the most of them. Basically, there are three audience segments into which your target audience is divided:

a. customer (the person who will pay you)

The customer could be your current or next boss, it could be the target customer for your current or next business, it could also be an investor or a bank. And since you've identified your career path that will lead to your ultimate goal, it's easier to identify the people who will make the decision to move you from one step to the next along the path.

In our previous example of your aspiration to become a Customer Service Executive, the person who decides how far you can go will be your boss. For example, when you start a customer service representative, your target audience will be your direct boss or customer service department manager.

It is important when identifying your clients that you think about their practical and personal goals to anticipate the opportunities that you can seize to help them achieve those goals, and in return, you get what enhances your personal brand.

If you provide a product or service to companies, the main goal of your customer will be the growth of his profits, and if you can help him achieve this goal through an educational post - as we will see about profit growth - he will be more willing to buy your product or service, and thus you will move further in the path of your ultimate ambition.

B. The person who influences the client

The indirect way to reach your customer is through the people who influence him, for example, the personalities and pages he follows on Facebook and Twitter, magazines, and specialized websites that he subscribes to. It is easy to select a list of these influencers and then try to gain their trust and thus influence your customer.

Make your way to communicate with the influencer, by interacting with posts and commenting on posts to be visible to him, help him increase his customers and page views, to create an opportunity for mutual benefit between you and him, and motivate him to promote you in return to your customer.

c. Supporters

Supporters form the support network needed to support and advise you when needed. Supporters may include family, friends, co-workers, a mentor, and anyone who believes in the value of your work and promotes you for free. Supporters with advice will help you to do better and will positively encourage you to keep striving in times of frustration. Introduce them to your goals and ask them to offer their honest views on your steps towards achieving them.

Another class of supporters is your community of followers. Feeling that someone is up to date with what you are up to helps keep you moving forward. Return the favor by offering them the help they may need in achieving their goals. Create a group or community for beginners in your field to offer advice, criticism, and real-world support that will keep you motivated as you build your personal brand.

3. Use personal brand-building tools

Brand-building tools are the assets you have to communicate your brand messages to your audience. These tools may be virtual assets such as a website and blog, or real assets such as a business card, and they may also be means of communication such as social accounts and a newsletter.

a. social accounts

  • Use a single name: Choose a single username for all of your social accounts. If your name is common and shared by others, choose a unique name and keep it as short as possible to make it easier to remember and write.
  • Get a professional photo: A photo taken with a professional eye will be a necessary investment for you in building your personal brand. So add a professional photo to your social accounts and dress appropriately. It is better to seek the help of a professional photographer who knows very well how to adjust the lighting and add professional touches to the image that your mobile phone camera will not provide you with.
  • Choose the most popular networks: Start with the most popular and professional social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. And focus your efforts on the communication channels that are most important to you, although this does not prevent you from creating an account on most platforms, to secure an account in your name before others with the same name acquire it.

B. website

A website acts like the trunk of your personal brand tree, as it is the most powerful component of its strategy and a wholly owned tool when compared to social accounts. For example, You will notice that changing the appearance policies on Facebook may significantly affect the degree of visibility of posts. Following these tips may help you when building your website.

  • Choose a domain name that matches your name
  • Build your site on an easy-to-use platform such as WordPress, and if you need technical assistance in creating the site, use the services of WordPress developers on Fiverr to build a professional site.
  • When organizing your site, think about the things your visitor will want to know about you in a second or two. Write your name and current job at the front of the homepage, for example, Khaled Adam | Sales Consultant, Ph.D. Student, Certified Trainer.
  • Post a friendly, professional photo with a sincere smile.
  • Tell your story briefly and in chronological order in the Who I am section. Don't dwell on the past. Focus on talking about your current work and what you aspire to achieve in the coming years, avoid exaggeration and ambiguity, and use a simple descriptive style instead of fillers.
  • Include testimonials from your clients or case studies of projects you worked on previously, to make the site attractive in the eyes of your target customers, so that the case study includes a description of the project, implementation challenges, and the work you have done.
  • Create a contact form on the Contact Me page or add your email address. For a professional email address, use your first name and website domain name.

c. blog

The blog contributes to highlighting your personality and sharing your experiences with others and enables you to attract your target audience through renewed posts with appropriate content, expand your reach, develop the audience's interest in you, encourage them to participate, and attract them to the website.

  • If you use the WordPress platform to build your site, you can easily add a blog to the site, or you can create a blog directly using free blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress.
  • Based on the needs of your target audience that you have previously identified, provide solutions to their problems and answer the questions that concern them.
  • Offer your opinion on events that occur in your field of specialization and present your point of view on new ones.
  • Conduct interviews with important people and influencers in the field and present them in the blog.
  • Add high-quality images to articles and blog posts.
  • Encourage your readers to sign up for your newsletter to start building your email list. Then keep sending out new blog posts to your subscribers using the automation provided by email tools like MailChimp.
  • Ask your readers to tell you about one of the challenges they face in their work and respond to each one. This is a clever recipe for creating a real bond with your subscribers and talking to them in person.
  • Diversify blog content between articles, videos, and podcasts.
  • Write persuasively as if you are in conversation with the reader.

Dr. Personal card

A personal card or business card is an important personal branding tool when you meet people in real life. So it is important to keep it with you at all times so that you are ready when the opportunity arises for a meeting. The personal card must include your name, a brief description of your business and website, and your work email, and phone number.

4. Create a strong network and promote your personal brand

Extending a wide network of relationships with others

After you've established your personal brand assets and built the different places your audience can use to get information about you, you shouldn't be satisfied with this stage. You have to keep working towards going to your audience and getting their attention.

In the stage of promoting your brand, you will need to extend relationships with personalities who have a powerful influence on your customers, and the basis for extending the relationship is to provide them with value so that in return they allow you to market yourself to their audience. We will summarize the discussion below on the most important methods of promoting your personal brand:

a. Participate in events

Follow events related to your field of work that are located in your geographical area, and be sure to participate in them. Such as conferences, seminars, and lectures, to get to know business owners, entrepreneurs, and customers and expand your network of business relationships.

b. Write on sites owned by others

Create a list of websites that accept guest posts, including pages titled “Write with us” or “Post with us.” If this option is absent on one of the sites, browse the list of writers, as its great diversity often indicates that the site accepts the participation of external writers with experience in their field of specialization. Then contact the site on the Contact Us page, to make sure that the contribution is available. In this case, do the following:

  • Review the site's top articles to see the elements of their combined success and write an article of equal or better quality.
  • Follow the site's editing rules, if any, and if you submit an article and it is not accepted, ask about the reason for rejection, then improve your article or write a new article so that all reasons for rejection are remedied.
  • Be sure to address the topic of the article comprehensively, in-depth, and cover all its angles, and provide actionable advice to readers.

c. Do an interview with a blogger

Find well-known bloggers and websites who post interviews on their sites, and contact them via email. In your message, explain the benefits that will accrue to them from conducting the interview, such as: sharing it with your followers, and when preparing for the interview, think about how to present your story and share your experiences in an attractive way to the audience.

d. Create a paid ad

Personal brand advertising is relatively inexpensive unless associated with a popular keyword with a high CPC. Create an ad on the Google search engine, and link it to your personal website. Write an appropriate ad copy that includes your name, phone number, and a short description that grabs attention.

And if your budget isn't that big, target a specific audience with a low-cost Facebook ad. Use your professional image in the ad and include marketing text focused on the benefit to the reader and a call-to-action (CTA).

Conclusion

In this guide, we have tried to cover as many aspects as possible of building a personal brand. Treat the information contained therein as your reference, and in light of the different circumstances and goals of each of us, use all or some of them in your own way to chart your steps toward success.