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Regardless of what your career path is, every single individual can benefit from personal branding. What exactly does this mean? Personal branding includes putting your best foot forward and controlling your own narrative online. Whether you’re a person who loves and utilizes many different platforms online, or if you’re the opposite and would rather be MIA, it’s important to take full control of your personal brand, since we never really know who’s looking. I’ve listed out the top 6 benefits of personal branding for your reputation to expand your thinking in this area.
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Why Is Personal Branding Important?
The importance of personal branding depends on how an individual values their online reputation. For many, it’s important to build out a personal brand because it’s how you’re presenting yourself to the world. Everyone’s preconceptions of someone else are because of their own experiences in life so it’s different for everyone. The main point here is that like a job interview, putting your best self forward may just result in new opportunities, friends, and other connections.
1. Securing your position online
The first two questions to ask yourself before securing your position are, who am I? And how do I poetry that? Let’s say you’re a lawyer who loves to do volunteer work for underprivileged communities. Knowing that this is the biggest part of your life, focus on building your profiles on platforms that are popular in this niche. This is how you can secure your position online, simply search terms that define you and the brand you’re trying to build upon and from here you will find new social media platforms, blogs, communities, etc. that you can join and get active on.
2. Expanding your reach
Expanding your reach is a huge benefit of personal branding. By creating new profiles, and updating old ones to meet with what you’re trying to portray in the present, you not only allow yourself to meet new people in different communities, but you’re also able to find new resources in those as well. Let’s say you’re a school teacher and you did research into the best online math gaming platform for your students. The results could include finding the best resources as well as a new private Facebook group filled with other information to use as a resource. You may also stumble upon a new social media platform just for teachers like BetterLesson, which will expand your great reputation in your niche.
3. Telling your story
The most exciting benefit of personal branding is to tell your story exactly how you want! You can do this by sharing photos on social media accounts or sharing your thoughts by creating a blog on a site like Medium. Regardless of where and how you want to share, other individuals will be able to engage with your thoughts and views. Depending on the niche that interests you, consider joining an online community that is interested in the same topics. This will help readers feel a sense of connection to you personally, which is great to expand your following. A professional who does a great job sharing her story is the CEO of a big swimwear brand, Devin Brugman. As you can see in her search results below, not only does she have her LinkedIn profile up to date so it ranks highly in her results, but she’s also worked with many news sites to expand her personal brand apart from her company as you can see from the Business Insider title.
4. Gaining new knowledge
Another great benefit of personal branding is gaining new knowledge along the way. You might find new areas of interest when you stumble upon a new blog or news site. Engaging with new content may give you ideas on where you want to build out your brand next. Gaining knowledge helps you to become a leader that others in your niche may turn to when they have questions about a certain topic. Let’s pretend you’re the owner of an automobile repair shop, doing research to find new forums about things specific to a problem you have will make you the thought leader surrounding it for any concerns in the space. This would be crucial to spreading your great reputation because new customers will now trust you even more.
5. Improved search results
Part of securing your position includes improving your search results. Perhaps your search results are already in a “good” place and have all positive sentiment, it’s a good opportunity to take advantage of this and build out random profiles about yourself to take up that real estate on your results page. On the other hand, if you know you have some unflattering content out there, it’s a good idea to expand your content before the negative sentiment becomes more of an issue for you. Consider submitting an interview to a site like Ideamensch, where you have full control of the narrative. Here’s another example of a CEO who took full advantage of building out their page search results with profiles and pages that are flattering to his own brand. We used the results from the CEO of Hello Fresh, Dominik Richter.
6. New engagements & opportunities
One of the best benefits of building out your brand is the new engagements and opportunities that present themselves because of the time you’ve put in. A great example could include the CEO of a fashion brand. The CEO wants to do something sustainable in fashion, by expanding their personal brand they can reach out genuinely to other sustainable fashion brands to do a collaboration for charity or something along those lines. Not only does this help with the cause that they care so much about, but it helps to build out their personal brand and reputation by showing the world what’s important to them personally. So many benefits could be built off of great action from a new opportunity like this, such as creating a new microsite, which again will secure your position and spread your brand awareness. Consider increasing your engagements on social media specifically LinkedIn to help build out these connections and opportunities.
Many wonderful benefits come with personal brand building, as you can see. Being creative and unique when it comes to taking actionable steps to do this is key. Even if you’d rather be in the background instead of in the spotlight, every individual should stand out from the rest in some way. By taking the time to really research what’s out there as far as new profiles, information, blogs, news sites, forums, and other platforms, you will be able to feel more confident about your personal brand online. When you build your confidence and knowledge, you will love the results that include, organization, thought leadership, and a great reputation!
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