Golden Rules for Personal Branding
It is the conscious and intentional effort to create a perception about an individual as a leader in the industry to make the individual stand out in the industry crowd by elevating their credibility and differentiating them from competition. The ultimate aim is to generate more leads by using the brand, increase their influence and end up monetising the brand.
The process of personal branding involves finding your uniqueness or the niche even the micro-niche, working and building a reputation around the things you want to be known for and ultimately the goal is to create something that signifies your expertise and convey a message to your audience about your expertise which ultimately leads to monetize it.
What can be chosen for Personal Branding?
It may be the original name or a pen name (pseudo name) or the name of an organization which represents the person need to be branded. For professionals like Doctors, Lawyers, Chartered Accountants, Company Secretaries, Architects, Coaches, Consultants, Trainers and the Celebrities, their names may be chosen for branding where for partnership farms, privately held companies and even individual farms, the name of the organisation may be choosen for branding.
Beyond that, individuals searching for job can also brand themselves to be hired with a descent package.
Why most of the people fail to build their personal brand?
The commonest answer to this question is- not having the knowledge where to start and how to start. Generally people lost in the crowd competition by trying their hand in all the methods simultaneously.
Here you can find 10 precious rules of Personal Branding.
1. Have a Clear Niche: Too many people are not focused when it comes to what they are showing the people around them in social media, personal blog and press media. Decode what your key message is and stick to it when you address the people. Keeping your message focused to your target audience will make it easier to create contents around your brand and have others to define you clearly.
Your niche should be very specific that it is easier for the community to remember you. Keep your messages and contents to one niche to become memorable within a targeted community. The narrower and more specific your niche, the easier for people to remember your brand.
2. Be Genuine: The easier way to build a personal brand is to be genuine. Never project yourself with a false identity to grab the followers.
For example: Many people project their social profiles as celebrities and upload some photos of celebrities to attract more followers and try to pitch their products and services later and they hope to close with a good number of sell. But what happen in such cases? They usually end up with a dead social media channel and the biggest loss is the time they have invested creating and growing the channel with the false identity.
Another benefit of being genuine is, it will be easier for you to create contents around your brand in daily basis which will ultimately help to grow organically. Be a master of the skillset or industry in which you want to build your personal brand and that will help you creating contents continuously around your brand.
3. Tell a Story: If you are failing to tell a story about your niche, then you have lost half of the branding game. The most effective personal branding strategy now a days is to build a true narrative. If you are shouting out in social media about your brand continuously, it may be a boring chapter for your potential audience. The best way to create new stories is to be in touch with your audience and solve their problems by adding value with your niche. The magic will happen when they will start shouting around your personal brand.
One of the best method of telling a story is by written content and video. Videos are the easiest method to create a social content and simultaneously video is the most consumable content now a days.
4. Be Consistent: Consistency is very similar to having a narrow focus or the micro niche. It is much easier for get recognised to a single topic when you post contents in a consistent basis. Be sure that your “Brand promise” should be consistent, both offline and online. Don’t underestimate even the tiny inconsistencies which can derail your personal brand effectiveness.
5. Learn Accepting the Failure: Failure is tough and as a human, all of us want to avoid it. But however to have a personal brand, everyone need to face the failure. Failure may be painful, but literally “F-A-I-L” means “First Attempt In Learning”. Each time you fail, definitely you will learn something, but it is important whether you are learning out of your failure and correcting your failure in next attempt or not. It is better to have a hard failure when you are young. You will have more time to correct your errors. But for this early failure, you need to start early and to start early, you have to leave your dependency on your parents. Keep in your mind that there are no substitutes of taking action.
6. Create a Positive Impact: After you have created a personal brand successfully, the next step is to build a community around your brand and add value to their expectations. When you start helping others, they will reciprocate it by telling positive stories for your brand. It will help maintaining your personal brand among the community and will be in auto pilot mode in expanding the brand reach.
7. Follow a Successful Example: If you are interested in personal branding, you should project yourself as a celebrity or an influencer.
What does it mean literally?
If you want to position yourself like a celebrity, you have to study the trends and popular individuals on different social media platforms and implement them in building your own brand in spite of a popular brand you have.
For example, if you want to build a popular channel and engagement in YouTube, you have to follow the trend in your niche and study the new happenings in and around your area of your niche.
8. Live Your Brand: Often it is difficult to build a brand apart from your personal life as it seems like an artificial job. If you are building and living your personal brand around your personal lifestyle, it will be easier to maintain the brand which looks more authentic. Your personal brand should follow you everywhere you go.
9. Let other People Tell Your Story: The best promo is by word of mouth. As I told before, when you help people solving their problems and add value to their lives, they start promoting you around their circle by telling your stories. These are worth more than a paid promotion, no matter how much you are investing for the paid promotion.
10. Leave a Legacy: Building a Personal Brand is much bigger than Building a Business. When you build your personal brand and a community around your brand successfully, the next step is to build a legacy. What are the key words you are known about?
A brand is for lifetime that constantly evolves. There are no fixed rule-sets to build a personal brand. But these general guidelines help building the brand if you are starting a new brand or rebranding your existing one. Building a personal brand not only help you be known in your field, but it could be ended with generating leads and sells.
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