Let’s talk about Personal Branding

Readers, don’t think this is a post related to marketing. This is highly related to you and you being a brand. Personal Branding is not the recent trend because this has been discussed already by Napoleon Hill in his book Think and Grow Rich by the year 1937. Personal brand talks about a person being popular. Brand in marketing talk about name, identity, logo, symbol, color, design or combination of these to create an identity for a product or a person. When the name get popularize and it becomes the talk of the town then you are called as ” Brand”. You are known to many people, same is the case of a product. When your brand power is leveraged to some person or a product then that is called “Branding”.

Example:-During your child hood, you might be recognized as Peter but you be recognized as Baker’s son is Peter. So Baker is a brand and giving the power of Baker name to you is Branding.

Enough of all those theoritical explaination. Let’s get into our topic “Personal Branding”. I am going to put down some points to elaborate on how to create Personal Brand.

Personal Branding

Specific skills:-

People in the world are not interested in you all the time, but there are occasions they remember you where you will be useful for them. So understand you need to have specific talents and skills so that people can remember you. If I say Roger Federer you will remember Tennis, Barack Obama – President, Balachandar – ??? (It’s my name but you don’t know about me right???) . This is how you are also there in this world. You need to have specific talents that can help people to remember about you.

Expose:-

This is most important point where you will have lot of sub headings. You will not be recognized until you expose your talent. You need to utilize the opportunity to expose your talents. So, how can we go about it?

This is an era of Internet, there are abundant social networking sites available for you to promote you.

• Youtube:- Start a channel in YouTube. Post videos of your’s and your interest. You are recognized not only by your name also by your face. You cannot just start a channel with you any passion, you need to upload videos in a regular interval. Note that the videos should be short, no one likes to see 2 hours or 3 hours video on YouTube.
• Facebook :- Thank Mark Zuckerberg for giving this wonderful site. This can be used for networking as well as for getting in touch with your friends. Update your status often, try to get more number to likes. You will get likes only when upload the right content suitable for your friends and audience.
• Twitter:-  With 140 words you can spread lot of information to the world. Twitter nowadays provides the topic which is trending according to the region. Use hash tag ( # ) to make your updates public.
• LinkedIn:-  LinkedIn was started especially for Professionals, so this is the right place for you. You can get in touch with people of your interest. There are many groups where you can interact with people having similar talents, here you will get updated about the new things that is emerging which will help you to make a plan.
• Blog:- Blog is the finest form to express your views. Twitter and Facebook is for shorter updates, but if you want to provide detailed information you need to use blogs. There are many website that is providing space for you to write. Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and so on. Create a beautiful attractive blog to attract people towards you. Keep your name as the domain name, you need identity!!!
• Website:-  All the time your blog cannot help you out, when you feel the blog is getting more traffic change that into a domain. Your name should be there while you create a website, Ex: http://www.peter.com. This is your identity, your name. Get the website update, so that your webpage will be ranked higher. Also when your name is entered in the search page, your webpage should get ranked No.1 that’s how you should maintain and manage it.

Socialize:- 

Here I am talking about Socializing with people directly not through websites. Follow these ways to get mingled with new faces.

• Conferences:- Attend conferences to interact with new set of people. This is the right opportunity to get in touch with many people at a time, but focus on key people who can help you out or where you can gain knowledge from them. While attending conferences do share you Email Id, Business card and Phone number ( if necessary).
• Guest Lecture:- If you are getting an opportunity to talk with people, please do accept it. Else you will be the one among the crowd. When you develop specific skills certainly someone will approach you to deliver a lecture on it.
• Organize:- Instead of attending conferences, you organize a conference with the help of your friends. This will help in getting touch with people personally. Where you are involved as the first person, not as a third person. There are conferences like TEDx, BIL, Toast Masters and Pecha Kucha where they provide you licensee to organize an event at your locality with a good brand name.
• Don’t stop here, after doing this you need to share your experience in your blog.

Consistency:-

It’s not that you did all these for a day and shut down the work very next day. You need to do it consistently to get recognized else you will lose market value.