We all know just how much businesses rely on their branding for success. Take a child past two burger restaurants and watch their reaction. Will they clamor for you to stop at Joe’s No-Name Burgers or McDonald’s? Of course, they will go for the brand they know – McDonald’s. Well, things are no different with people. Personal branding works in the same way. People take more interest in the names they recognize than the names of total strangers.
For some people, this does not matter. They happily get up, go to work in an anonymous business, and then head home every day. As long as their friends and family recognize them, they do not care. However, to many people, personal branding is vital. Moreover, this is no more so than when you run your own business, and you live or die by your personal attraction.
We have looked briefly at this inWhat is Personal Branding – an Influencer’s Guide. As we saw then your personal brand is the way you promote yourself. It is your unique combination of skills, experience, and personality, what you want the world to see. It is how you tell your story.
Your personal brand can be a combination of how people look at you in real life, how the media portrays you, and the impression that people glean from any references to you online.So how do create a personal brand that will get you noticed? Here are some of the steps you should work through to build a brand that could ultimately rival the masters of your niche.
Depending on your current stage in life, you might need to follow all of these steps. You might already have a solid vision and know your niche, for instance. However, it makes sense to review even the basics, if you want to take your brand to another level.
An In-Depth Look at Personal Branding:
Stage 1: Determine Your Personal Brand Vision
You may already know the direction that you want your life to take. Indeed, you may already be well seasoned and wanting merely to improve your existing personal brand. If that describes you, then feel free to jump to a later stage in this post. However, it will still be a worthwhile exercise to review your personal brand vision, to ensure that you are heading in the right direction for your success.
Before you get down to any actionable tasks toward improving your personal brand, you first need to decide what you want your personal brand to look like. What is your vision for it?
You will want to consider how you want people to look at you. What type of image do you wish to portray?
正如公司生产outlin视觉语句ing what they want to achieve, you should create a personal vision statement.
According toThe Highlands Company, “A clear personal vision is an integration of your abilities, interests, personality, values, goals, skills/experience, family of origin, and stage of adult development.” Now, that sounds enormous, but in reality, you can encapsulate all that is important about you in two or three paragraphs.
Of course, the focus here is really on yourbrand vision, so the primary emphasis is on how you want the outside world to see you.
Align Your Brand Vision with Your Core Values
You cannot build a successful personal brand if it does not align with their core values. You need to come across as being authentic and genuine to yourself.
You develop core values as you progress through life. They are deeply personal and are the heart of who you are. You may not consciously realize it, but your fundamental values influence most of your life decisions.
If you have not already discovered your core values, you should sit back and analyze yourself now. Scott Jeffrey provides seven steps you can go through todiscover your personal core values. As Scott says, “Values guide our behavior, providing us with a personal code of conduct.”
令人惊讶的是，大多数人不知道自己的核心价值观。他们在生活中混淆了自己，并没有真正理解他们做出的决定。如果您不了解自己，您如何期望别人了解您？
You should determine the five to ten values you consider most important. Remember, these will differ for all of us. While your friends and family will have influenced your values, your combination of values is personal to you.
Keep these at the forefront of your mind throughout this entire personal branding exercise. Everything you do needs to align with your core values.
还要记住为什么要创建个人品牌也很重要。这不仅是为了帮助您找到更好的工作或发展业务。您的个人品牌同样多于帮助您在职业生涯中找到幸福。如果您创建一个不是您的“假”品牌，那么您就不太可能感到满足。不要忽略您真正重视的事物 - 即使这意味着品牌中的“您”并不完美。
Work Out Your Passions, Traits, and Skills
The next things you have to determine to help you find your personal brand vision are your passions and traits.
Your passions are those things you like doing with your time. The more you love doing an activity, the greater a passion you have for it.
Of course, many of your passions will have little impact on your brand. Nevertheless, they may still have an indirect effect on it. If you are a proud parent, who loves spending time with your children, you could consider that a passion. It probably will not have too much of an impact on your professional life, though.
However, you are also likely to have professional passions – work-related activities that you particularly enjoy. If you do not currently have any, that suggests that you are probably in the wrong line of work. Britain’s’ The Telegraph suggests寻找生活中真正热情的八种方法.
You will probably find that your passion fits in nicely with the core values you previously determined. However, you cannot ignore your personality traits, either.
We are all born with an individualized combination of personality traits, positive, neutral, and negative. According toD.P. Farrington and D. Joliffe, “Personality traits are persisting underlying tendencies to behave in particular ways in particular situations.”
Our personality traits are innate. There are hundreds of possible traits we could possess. Here is a list of638 Primary Personality Traits.
如果您要建立一个引人注目的，真实的个人品牌愿景，它需要反映您的个性特征 - 也许专注于您的更积极的特征，同时谴责您必然的负面特征。
As we got through life, we获得了技能的组合. Some are basic and essential to a good life – our life skills. Others are more specific to a particular task, job, or industry. As you age, you build up a repertoire of employability, transferable, and specialist / job-related skills.
You are more likely to want to focus on your skill strength areas when you create your personal brand vision. Sure, you can acquire skills in new areas in the future, but you would not usually focus on these until you have learned them.
阶段2：决定您的利基市场和目标受众
You could look at all the factors you analyzed in Stage 1 – your passions, values, traits, and skills – as supply factors when you create your personal brand. Knowing these, you could probably design a brand that emphasizes everything good about you and your areas of strength. It would highlight everything that you have to offer people.
However, you are unlikely to want to highlight everything at which you are proficient. Indeed, many things in which you excel will be of little value to your personal brand. You might be an excellent knitter, but there is probably little demand for hand-knitted garments nowadays. You might have a vast collection of English comics, and can easily distinguish a Lion from a Tiger from a Beano - but you are unlikely to be able to make money from this knowledge.
The second area to consider is demand factors. For your personal band to succeed, you need to emphasize your ability to offer something about which people care. Your personal brand is irrelevant if nobody is interested in what you have to offer.
Just as a business needs to define its audience, so does a person creating a brand. You need to ask yourself, why you are doing this. Whom are you trying to impress? There is little point in trying to be generic and impressing everybody.
回到您的视野。如果您要达到自己的愿景，您需要设定什么目标？您需要遵循什么步骤才能实现自己的目标，以及您需要打动谁才能将这些目标转化为现实？
Ideally, you will want to focus on a niche where can demonstrate skill. However, for this to be of use, there has to be a clear target audience that cares about the subject. You want to become the go-to person in that niche – the person who people have faith to come to for advice.
Sometimes your niche may appear very general. While that will mean that there is a huge target audience, it will also suggest that you will have stiff competition. In that case, you could consider narrowing your focus, while still making sure that there is still a sizeable enough target audience to warrant your expertise.
For instance, you may have discovered that you have expertise as a novelist. Even in this internet-dominated age, many people still read books. However, there are also many novelists. Most top authors focus on one genre. Stephen King could probably write successful novels in a wide range of genres, but he found it easier to focus solely on establishing a reputation as a horror writer.
Stage 3: Determine Your Point of Difference
Once you have found your niche, you need to determine how you will come across as being different from everybody else fighting for top position in your area. Assuming that you are perfectly capable at what you do, and can provide genuine help to your target audience, what is your point of difference?
在某些方面,这回到这些特质examined earlier. What makes you distinctly you? There is little point in fighting against your own personality. It is far better to work with your traits.
For instance, two successful bloggers in the self-improvement niche are Michael Hyatt and Mark Manson. Both target people who are looking to find ways to improve their life directions, and possibly develop leadership skills.
Michael Hyatt是虔诚的克里斯蒂安纳（Christiana）和精神领袖。虽然他不强迫自己的宗教观点对追随者，但他也不回避他们。这意味着他的帖子倾向于强调道德选择并遵循基督教的精神。典型的迈克尔·凯悦（Michael Hyatt）书名是Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want.
Mark Manson also provides self-help and writes about how you can improve your life. He comes across a being much worldlier. He speaks plainly and is straight and to the point. To quote the home page ofhis website, “I write about big ideas and give life advice that doesn’t suck. Some people say I’m an idiot. Other people say I saved their life. Read and decide for yourself.” His bestselling title on Amazon isThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck– a book name that you could never imagine Michael Hyatt using.
The two men operate in a similar niche, but have followed their individual traits, and developed a clear point of difference.
Stage 4: Build Your Online Assets
One common feature of virtually everyone with a strong personal brand is that he or she has a definite, consistent online presence.
Look back at our article,12 people who have demonstrated expertise with their personal branding. You will notice that everybody profiled operates professional, well-designed websites. The websites all follow a clear color scheme and are pleasing to the eye.
Logo and Graphics
Each site has an eye-catching logo, which appears on every page, and this is often echoed in the site’s favicon. They all have decided on a clear set of fonts, and each follows a designer-picked color palette.
While some have chosen a simplistic, minimalist look, others have gone for a more luxurious, detailed look. Largely the appearance of each site reflects the tastes of the target audience who visit on a regular basis.
If you were to follow one of these people across the Net, you would notice that he or she has created a consistent look everywhere they have an online footprint. They have generally replicated their color scheme and fonts across their social pages. You will even notice that they typically use the same profile picture on each of their social sites, as well as their blog.
A huge part of building a personal brand is looking the part. Your websites and social sites are like your home. You are inviting your target audience in, and you want to look like you belong there.
You do not want to skimp on having a personalized logo. It does not have to be sophisticated, but it does have to represent you. You could find a designer to make one for you, possibly on a site likeFiverr. You could set up a project at a crowdsourcing site, like99designs.
Short-term you could produce a reasonable one yourself by using a template in an app likeCanva. However, you will eventually want a professionally designed one.
Website / Blog
You will want your own website. While social sites like a Facebook page have their place, ultimately they are not yours. Facebook only has to change their rules or close down, and your page is gone.
One of the secrets to a successful online brand is dominating Google. To do this, you need your own website, preferable named after yourself. You need to produce content regularly under your name to dominate Google.
但是，如果您要达到个人品牌目标，则需要确保您的网站具有吸引您的目标受众的主题。当然，一个个人博客，您可以在其中写下您今天所做的事情以及您吃的东西可能会在Google中获得吸引力，以搜索您的名字。但这不会感兴趣您所瞄准的人的类型。
例如,如果你的目标是成为一个费用rt on leadership, you need to ensure that your website provides valuable content about being a leader. The aforementioned Michael Hyatt has done this well. His site attracts people looking for advice and assistance on leadership. It helps connect the name, “Michael Hyatt” with the topic, “leadership.”
但是，最近对Google算法的更改确实意味着不再有可能使用自己的网站来主导主题搜索。Google更喜欢从特定的Web域中为每个搜索选择一个页面。因此，您将希望搜索引擎排名在您的个人博客/网页上与其他相关网页一起显示出最佳作品的混合。
Guest Blogging
Once you have built your own site and created quality content that is visible for anybody to see, you could then consider guest posting on other relevant blogs. If you are successful here, your guest blog posts will also appear in searches for your name – and hopefully also in searches for appropriate topic keyword terms. The idea behind guest blogging is that you “borrow” the audience of a popular blog in your niche.
Effectively, a blog that accepts your request for a guest post is saying to you, “if you can write a post my audience will love, I’ll let you put a small advertisement at the bottom of the post.” Your “ad” will actually be a link in your guest post author bio to a relevant page on your own website.
However, you do need to be strategic when hunting for guest blogging opportunities. There is little point writing for a blog that does not attract the same target audience as your own. You should only consider guest blogging on the right blog for your audience.
有三个主要要求，是一个很好的网站，用于访客博客：
- The site is popular and attracts a large enough audience to warrant your time. The easiest way to know this is by whether the posts on the site generally receive many comments and/or social media engagements.
- The blog accepts guest posts. There is little point pitching to a site that only uses a single writer or somebody on its staff
- The blog gives credit to its writers and allows a link in the author bio. You will gain nothing if nobody knows that you wrote the post.
社交媒体
The other component of dominating the search listings for your name is to operate social media accounts. It is more important that you do this well than it is to cover your bases everywhere. Therefore, take time to research your target audience. On which social media sites do they spend time?
It is crucial that you have a social media presence even if you intend to work with other influencers in your niche. Ultimately, you want people to see you as a go-to person in your niche, at which point you will become an influencer yourself.
Stage 5: Create Your Blog and Content Strategy
最简单的方法来构建一个积极的个人品牌involves a mixture of blogging regularly and keeping an active social media presence. It is easy to become discouraged in your early days of blogging when Google Analytics can make depressing reading. However, online success really comes down to two steps:
- Create high-quality content
- Promote your content as actively as possible
If you consistently repeat these two steps, you build up your online reputation, along with your personal brand.
The type of content will depend on your niche. We have found at the Influencer Marketing Hub that long-form content works best in our sector. Most of the people in our12 Incredible Personal Branding Examples articlereport the same. Oprah Winfrey is an exception, but that is probably because she made her name in an offline setting.
There is on other exception on this list, who made his name with short-form content. That is Seth Godin. He established himself as the简短博客文章的大师. Indeed, his target audience would be stunned if Seth was to write the 2000-word plus pieces, favored by the likes of Neil Patel or Jon Morrow. His readers would probably skim read such a post, rather than taking in any nuances.
Every audience is different, and it is essential that you try out various types of content to match your audience’s tastes. That includes non-written content, such as podcasts, videos, and slide share presentations.
Stage 6: Create Your Social Media Strategy
If you are going to produce a successful personal brand, you need to spread a consistent message across every social channel where your audience hangs out.
While each channel does have its own rules and practices, you will still want to keep your presence on each as similar as possible.
您的目标受众可能会发现每个社交帐户看起来都需要专业。当然，“专业”的定义确实取决于您的目标受众和您故意描绘的角色。正如您所期望的那样，马克·曼森（Mark Manson）的社交页面远没有迈克尔·凯悦（Michael Hyatt）的正式。但是，您需要确保您永远不会发布任何对目标受众不合适的东西。
Use that same professional profile photo on every social channel (and preferably on your website as well). If you really feel the need to have a Facebook or Instagram profile just for friends and family, set up one in a name that is different from the one you use in your public persona – and only accept friend requests from people you genuinely know in real life.
You will want to keep that consistency going, with the imagery you use on your social sites. Use the same color scheme on each of your social sites, along with the same types of images. You want to speak in the same “voice” on each of your social sites, using the same tone and forms of language.
Although each of your social sites should follow the same tone, that does not mean you should post identical content to each site. There are clear differences between each of the social networks, and you should focus on their strengths.
For instance, just because you have a limitation of 280 characters on Twitter, does not mean that you should restrict yourself to the same number of characters on your Facebook or LinkedIn posts.
As we saw inThe Ultimate Guide to Using Instagram Hashtags to grow your Followers, hashtags are vital for Instagram success. Indeed, you can use up to 30 hashtags there. But in reality, you should probably limit yourself to no more than nine.
If you were to try nine hashtags on other platforms, you would have problems, however. The ideal tweet includes one or two hashtags. It is debatable whether hashtags have any value on Facebook at all.
Therefore, you should customize your posts for each of your social accounts. Your posts should be similar – sharing the same type of content and using the same tone – but adapted to use the strengths of each network.
重要的是要记住，社交网络的用户希望您成为社交。您应该分享您和其他人的各种帖子。让您的个性有时会流过。无论您做什么，都不只是将您的帐户用于销售。那是社交网络上的死亡之吻。
CoSchedule has combined 14 studies to determine theoptimal sharing scheduleacross each of the leading social networks.
阶段7：宣传并使您的名字知道
Your website and blog should be the hub of your online presence. Your social media sites help build your name and can be excellent at directing traffic to your website. However, you will need to do more if you want to become a household name. You need to engage in outreach.
推广活动涉及为您的利基市场中的影响者提供价值 - 那些已经建立了您希望“借用”的观众的人。
You should consider outreaching both online and offline.
Do not forget the value of good old-fashioned networking. As well as your online assets like your website and social pages, you will still want to have a pile of business cards ready to share with relevant people you meet. These should follow the same branding as all of the rest of your assets. The colors, fonts, and imagery should be consistent with those you use online.
去当地的事件和与领导的人聊天your niche. Hand out your business cards to anybody who you think would make a valuable connection.
It is well worth perfecting an elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch should be a brief, persuasive speech you can make to people about what you do. It should be engaging and exciting. You do not want to bore people, so your elevator pitch should only take the time it takes to ride in an elevator – 20 to 30 seconds.
You can use your elevator pitch whenever you meet anybody new who you feel could widen the spread of your personal brand.
Consider becoming a member of your local Chamber of Commerce or equivalent. Attend their meetings and events and talk to relevant people. Keep your eye out for relevant conferences related to your niche. They provide an excellent opportunity to meet people and engage them in conversation.
We have already discussed the benefits of having a coordinated social media strategy. You can use social media for outreach, too. Both Facebook and LinkedIn provide niche-based groups that may be of interest to you. Indeed, if you are particularly confident you could start your own groups on either of these platforms.
Just remember, though, these groups are for the benefit of all members. People quickly grow sick of anyone who merely wants to sell his products or talk solely about himself. You have to provide value to the group’s members. If you do that often enough, nobody will begrudge you the occasional personal promotion.
Another way you can widen the reach of your name is to subscribe toHARO– Help a Reporter Out. Three times a day, HARO sends you requests by reporters for information or quotes relating to particular topics. Make an effort to reply to questions relating to your niche. You may well find that the reporter quotes you in his or her news article, maybe even linking to your blog.
传播您名字的另一种成功方法是搜索Quorafor questions connected to your subject area. If you feel you can help, write an informative article. It will need to be of a high standard and helpful, if you want people to take notice, so do not make it appear like advertising. You can link to your blog in your answer if you have a post that will be of interest to the person who asked the question on Quora.
阶段8：找到自己的导师
Remember that you do not have to go through this process alone. All successful people have had others help them. It is much easier to test your ideas on somebody else than it is to move ahead in a vacuum.
一个“个人品牌”可能暗示与您有关。否。要取得成功，您将需要获得任何帮助。
As you become better known, you will begin to gain access to successful players in your field. Many of these people will be happy to help and guide you.
Find mentors, to help you. Most successful people do. A mentor acts as a confidant who gives you direction and options. Of course, ultimately, you make your own choices. Your mentor is not here to tell you what to do. He or she is there to give you guidance as you make your decision, however.
Conclusion – Create Your Personal Brand
个人品牌可能需要大量的时间和精力。您将无法迅速做到这一点 - 您可能会花费大量时间成为利基市场中的“去”人。
But people do succeed in building a recognized personal brand. And the ROI on that investment can be incredibly high.
Ultimately, the secret is to be yourself. You can’t be anybody else, because they have already been taken.
This means that your personal brand needs to be very authentic and true to the real you. You cannot manufacture a persona and expect people to recognize you as the go-to person. If you try, it will not be long before people realize that you are as fictional as Harry Potter is, without his boyish charm or the ability to perform magic.
您可以从他人那里汲取灵感，掌握导师的想法，并注意追随者的问题。最终，您必须成为您。您必须拥抱自己的差异，并建立与您个性相匹配的个人品牌。
