Personal branding is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, and with good reason. Your personal branding matters more than ever when it comes to your online presence. If you Google yourself, what do you see? What social media profiles pop up? Do you want people to see what you’ve been up to online? Or even worse – do you not have an online presence at all? Building your online branding is important, as it can help you online and offline. If you don’t have a personal brand, now is the time to start it. What can you do? Let’s get started.

First – What Is A Personal Brand?

Personal branding is what introduces you to the world. Think about “influencers” on Instagram – they have certain looks that they always use, specific colors, and phrases that they use that viewers can come to expect. It is a perfect combination of a curated personality, showing off skills, and adding in personal experiences to make you unique and well rounded. Your personal brand matters. Executives have found that how they interact with other people online and the reputations that they have online helps to sell their products. This is because they have used social media and other online platforms to tell their stories. Let’s focus on how to build your own brand.

Determine What Makes You Unique

The first thing you need to think about is what makes you unique – this is your value statement. What makes you better than or different from your competition? If you can’t answer that question, you need to do some self reflection. This could be the tone that you speak or write in, something your services do, or where your product excels. Choose 2-3 reasons why you are valuable, and build content around that. When you post something, ask how it bolsters your value and highlights your abilities.

Craft Your Statement

What do people see when they look at your social media? They don’t always see your posts, but they do see your bio. To help bolster your personal branding, you want to have a 1-2 sentence bio that expresses who you are, what you do, and why you should be trusted. Keep it authentic, professional, and on brand.

Think Broader Than Social Media

When we talk about branding, we all think about social media because it is such a great tool. You should also think about what happens off social media. Build a website, get a blog, and build SEO authority for your personal branding. Of course, you should also be on all of the relevant social media websites, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, SnapChat, YouTube, and anything else that may emerge. You can leverage those accounts to build up your personal branding and add to your website – it doesn’t always need to be a lot of work.

Stay Focused On Your Personal Brand

Now that you know what makes you unique and how you can express that, you need to focus on creating content. Narrow down your audience and niche to create different forms of content that could work for you. This could be blog posts, photographs, short form videos, long videos, animations, lists, live stories, or anything else. You may need to do some trial and error to break down not only what works well with your audience, but to determine what feels the best to you. Remember that consistency is the key and you aren’t going to start with hundreds of thousands of eyes on you – but you may get there.

Stay Authentic

Your authenticity matters, especially on social media and your personal website. You want to remain consistent in the way you express yourself. This doesn’t mean that you cannot grow – but you should be transparent about that growth. If you know your target audience connects to emotional vulnerability, you may not want to shut off from them. If they are used to you communicating in a certain way with a level of professionalism, don’t go off on a profanity filled rant. Once again, change isn’t bad – but don’t change too much too fast that you turn off some of your audience.

Personal branding is an investment in who you are and who you want to be. Take the time to develop your personal brand and then stay consistent. While it may take some time, you will see the benefits. Think long term, do a lot of good ground work, and don’t lose faith. Every step you take pushes you further than where you’ve been before now.