What is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is the practice of creating a brand around a person rather than a business entity. Personal branding is used to help further people’s careers by positioning them as an expert within an industry. By developing a personal brand, a person can grow their social following to help them secure a better job, sell more products in their business, and increase better opportunities in their career. Building a personal brand is not something that happens overnight, it can take lots of planning and months of hard work to start seeing the results; sometimes you need to improve your personal brand after receiving feedback. This type of branding can also be called self-branding, and these will be used interchangeably in this article to mean the same thing.
To grow your own personal brand, you can write a personal brand statement. A personal brand statement sets out who your audience will be, the value you want to give to your audience, and why people should follow you (your USP). While building your personal brand, you should pull from this 1-2 sentence statement to ensure that you are remaining true to it.
Why is Personal Branding Important
Personal branding is important because it helps give a person more credibility. It’s never been more competitive to land a new job or earn a paycheque. With more people building personal brands, you need to put yourself out there to get noticed. Personal branding can let recruiters find experts like you with ease, especially if you’ve been blogging brand yourself. If you’re trying to land a higher position at a new company, you can showcase key data such as the number of followers you have, how much traffic your website gets or other vital metrics which can give you a competitive advantage over other candidates. Think of it almost like an online portfolio about yourself. Branding yourself allows more people to get to know who you are and how you bring value.
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