An Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding for Beginners

This personal branding guide will help you to better understand personal branding. It will tell you about the different methods and useful platforms that you can use to create and develop your Personal Brand. It is about building a brand that will attract the audience to your business.

When we hear the word “Brand” the first thing that comes to our mind is large companies and famous products. However, today all the things could be a brand, even professionals.

Now you can ask why do professionals need to develop their personal brand on different digital platforms like social media. The answer is simple – the development of a professional and personal brand helps you to get more opportunities in your career and business.

If you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you need to attract your audience to your business. Personal Branding is the best way to attract your audience and to promote your business and skills.

The development of a professional brand or personal brand is very effective for professionals to promote their work and to get more opportunities in career and business. It is also very useful to engage your customers and audience on social media.

Personal Branding is a growing trend as a result of the increasing use of social media by professionals. Social Media platforms are the best place for personal branding because of the large reach and better engagement between audience and businesses.

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What is Personal Branding?

Personal Branding means the development of a personal brand of an individual for different purposes. It helps the professionals to promote their skills and abilities among their audience on multiple social sharing platforms.

It is a very useful concept for working professionals who have expert knowledge in a field. Personal Branding is about the development of relations and connections with your target audience, who might find your knowledge and content useful for themselves.

It gives an opportunity for professionals to utilize their expert knowledge to develop their personal brand and to attract potential customers to their business.

The development of your personal brand can be started with finding the unique abilities and expert knowledge that you have.

The expertise knowledge is about having a good understanding of any specific topic, like Social Media Marketing, SEO, or Content Marketing, while unique abilities are about the unique skills that you learn from your experience.

Answer these questions to start developing your Personal Brand:

• What are your unique abilities?
• What problem you will be solving?
• Who is your target audience?
• How will you help your target audience?
• What are the channels that you can use for personal branding?

The success of your Personal Brand depends upon the problem that you would be solving with your unique abilities and expertise knowledge.

The content you share became the most important part of this process because on digital platforms your audience will get your solution in the form of your content.

The quality of content is another make or break factor in the personal branding process. People like the good quality content and always come back to the platform and person who share the great content.

There are different types of content for different platforms like for images & short videos – Facebook & Instagram, for blogs – Twitter & LinkedIn, for slides & documents – Slideshare, and for videos – YouTube.

The effective way to develop and promote your personal brand is to find out your strengths in any specific area which you like and picking the right platform to connect with your target audience.

There are different platforms for different target audiences like for young audience Facebook & Instagram are the right places, while for the professional audience Twitter & LinkedIn are best.

Personal Branding & Business:

Personal Branding is very useful for the development and growth of new businesses and also for the existing business. The owner or the working professionals can utilize their expert knowledge to develop their personal brand and to engage the potential customers on social media.

Personal Branding helps businesses to get a wide reach to their audience and increase customer engagement on social media.

Customer engagement becomes more effective with personal branding because it is helpful in engaging with customers and followers. It also reduces the cost of marketing because of the organic marketing with the content.

The brand awareness is an ultimate benefit of personal branding. The marketing and promotion efforts of an organization are conducted with a simple objective. That is – more brand awareness, however, the cost of these methods are very high.

On the other hand, personal branding increases brand awareness in a creative way. It provides the solution to customers in the form of content and helps businesses to promote their business.

Content is the major part of personal branding because it shapes the whole promotion of the personal brand. Your content defines your brand on digital platforms like social media.

People like or dislike your brand on the basis of your content because it catches attention and attracts potential customers to your brand. It creates a connection and relation between the customers and brands.

Personal Branding develops the relationship between the customers and business by sharing useful information and solutions for their problems.

It allows businesses and professionals to connect with their target audience and share different types of content like entertaining, educational, or motivational.

Personal Branding & Thought Leadership:

Thought Leadership means the recognition of the expertise and specialist knowledge in a specific topic. Thought leadership helps the professionals to develop their followers’ base and to connect with them on social media.

The major platforms for thought leadership and personal branding are personal branding website and social media.

As we know content plays a major part in building a personal brand, it is important to understand how you can create and curate content for your personal brand. There is a term called User Generated Content (UGC).

UGC means collecting the content and information shared by your audience and add value in it to create new content. You can utilize it to get new content ideas that your audience finds useful.

Why content is essential for Personal Branding?

• Method of sharing information
• Engage your audience with you
• A creative way of marketing and promotion
• Multiple ways to share information – Images, Articles & Videos
• Helps your audience to solve their problem

It is important that you share useful and engaging content that is easy to understand and consume because people like and share the content that helps them to solve their problems.

You can share the content that solves the common problems related to your expertise knowledge like for Content Marketer – How to repurpose your content for new content ideas.

The method to share your knowledge with your audience is different on different digital platforms because of the users and content. You need to understand the different types of content like Infographics, Blogs, Articles, and Videos.

In the process of content development, you can use tools like Canva to create your visual content for all the digital platforms.

The content creation and sharing is the base of thought leadership and building a personal brand because of the quality of content that you share prove your understanding and expertise of the concepts and the topic.

The good quality of content is like a plus point for any professional. It attracts more followers and increases your engagement with the audience.

Why Personal Branding is Important for You:

The major benefit of Personal Branding is the more opportunities that it helps to get in career and business. It works effectively with digital platforms like personal branding websites, blogs, and social media because here you can develop and create your personal brand. There are many benefits of personal branding to professionals and business organizations:

Career growth and development: The development and growth in a career are very important for any professional. Personal Branding helps professionals to promote their work and expertise knowledge in front of other professionals and organizations.

There are many digital platforms like – LinkedIn, Twitter, and personal websites, where the professionals can develop their brand and increase their influence.

Jobs opportunities: Personal Branding helps professionals to get more work opportunities by promoting their skills and connecting with the other working professionals on various platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

It is much easier for professionals to connect with a large network of professionals and to share their work achievements on digital platforms. Thus right branding of the personal brand on digital platforms can help you to get more work and job opportunities.

Networking opportunities: Professional networking sites like LinkedIn facilitates professionals to connect with other professionals in the same industry and with common interests.

A large network on professional networks like LinkedIn and Twitter is a plus point for any working professional. It helps the professionals to promote their personal brand by sharing information in the form of content.

It is important to focus on the quality of the network because it will help you to get better results from your network and personal branding efforts.

Engagement with the audience: Developing and creating a personal brand identity is useful for the professionals and it is also beneficial for the organizations as well.

The personal brand of professionals working for an organization can help the organization to increase its engagement with the customers. The professionals can get better engagement with their personal branding on social media platforms.

Well-branded professionals can easily connect with customers to understand their needs & wants and provide solutions for their problems as an expert.

Attracting new customers: The small business and new entrepreneurs can easily attract potential customers to their brand and business with their personal brand.

The expertise knowledge of the entrepreneurs in their industry can help them to build their personal brand and to connect with their target audience.

They can share the information and content related to the daily problems and issues of their audience. It will help to increase engagement and to attract potential customers to their business.

Effective promotion: The marketing and promotion with the personal brand are more effective because the audience has faith and loyalty in the personal brand.

The reasons are simple – they have expert knowledge in the industry, helps in solving their problems, and share useful content. Personal Branding also increases the brand awareness of the organizations with the help of content.

The creation of useful and good quality content can easily increase traffic and engagement with customers.

How to Build & Develop Your Personal Brand

As we have understood – How personal branding is useful for professionals, entrepreneurs, and businesses. If you are a beginner you would like to know the process – How to start developing your personal brand.

There are many factors and points that you need to focus on, to start building your brand. If you have a clear roadmap at the start, it will become easier for you to build your brand.

Following are simple steps that can help you to build and grow your personal brand using any digital platform:

#1. Set simple & clear goals

It is important to set simple and clear goals before starting the process of building your personal brand. The goals should be simple to make it achievable and clear with deadlines – 6 months or a year – for effective results.

You can have different objectives for building your brand like – career & job opportunities or marketing of your business. The setting of goals will also motivate you to continuously work on building your personal brand.

#2. Find your expertise knowledge & strengths:

The expertise knowledge is the core of personal brand identity because it differentiates your brand from others.

It is important to find out your expertise and strengths in the domain and industry you are interested in. You can choose a specific topic to develop your grip and expertise on the topic.

For example in Digital Marketing, you have different choices like SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Blogging, or Affiliate Marketing.

#3. Understand your target audience

The right understanding of your audience is like a plus point for you because it helps you to focus on the people who might be interested in your brand and expertise knowledge.

You need to find the audience on the basis of your expert knowledge and try to help them in solving the common problems and issues in your industry. You can use social media and content for this.

#4. Develop your marketing & promotion plan

The development of a marketing and promotion plan is important because it will work like a guide for you in the whole process. It is also known as a Personal Branding strategy.

It includes the channel for marketing, types of content, and social sharing timeline. Personal Branding is all about marketing and promotion of your expert knowledge and strengths.

Thus, a marketing and promotion plan can make your personal brand a great success in a short period of time.

#5. Use a website or blogs

The digital platforms are an important part of personal branding because it provides you a platform to develop and grow your influence with the personal brand.

You can use your website or a blogging platform to share your expert knowledge with your audience.

The use of a website or personal branding blog is useful in case you want to share your content in the form of long articles to help your audience.

For example, writing how-to guides and Lifestyle or Health articles for your audience.

#6. Leverage the power of social media

Social Media platforms are the right place to promote your personal brand because of the benefits like a wide reach to the audience, engaging content, and a large user base.

Apart from this, social media platforms are very useful for personal branding because it is the best platform to connect with your audience. You can simply create your profile and start sharing your content with your audience to attract them to your website and business.

You can use different platforms for different types of the audience like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for personal branding on social media.

#7. Utilize your content

Content is the backbone of personal branding because it helps you to promote your products on different digital platforms and to connect with your audience.

Content Marketing as a part of personal branding can be divided into two parts content creation and content curation.

Content creation means create your own content from scratch while content curation means sharing the content created by others.

The sharing of content on digital platforms like social media ensures the promotion of your personal brand among your target audience. It helps you to build your personal brand and to develop your thought leadership.

#8. Engage with your audience

Social Media platforms are very useful to engage the audience with your brand and business. You can use your content to engage with your audience by sharing your thoughts about any topic.

Engagement is not just about your content. You can like and share the content of the people in your network to praise them when you find something useful. It will help your audience to develop better relations and loyalty with your brand.

#9. Analyze the final results

Analyzing the results of your effort is important to find out the final results and to match your results with your goals. You can use multiple tools to analyze your performance during a specific time period.

Some of the common tools to check your performance are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook Insights, and Twitter Analytics.

The analysis of your work will help you to understand your progress and the improvement areas. It will also make you ready to boost the growth of your personal brand.

The Right Platforms for Your Personal Branding:

The right platform for personal branding is very important because it helps you to connect with your audience and to grow your influence. There are many platforms available for personal branding, however, you just need to pick a few ones.

It will make your branding more effective. In the process of choosing the right platforms, you should plan your storyline – How are you going to present your brand story in front of your audience.

Blogs: Blogging is the right method of building a personal brand for professionals who are interested in writing their thought and share it with their audience.

There are people who like to read content to get the latest information about their industry and blogs to give this information. It gives the opportunity to the professionals to share their knowledge in the form of articles and blogs.

You can use a free blogging platform like Blogger to start your blog.

Personal Website: Personal website is more effective as compared to free blogs because here you can get many features that are not possible with free blogging platforms. WordPress is one of the best platforms to create your website.

You can use your personal website for different purposes like sharing information, writing articles, and customize your theme. It will help you to customize all the content on your website and to attract more traffic with SEO optimization.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, where you can connect with the people of the same industry in which you work.

Personal Branding on LinkedIn is useful to develop a good network of professional people and followers who might be interested in your content. You can share your content in different forms on LinkedIn like – Blogs, Images, and Videos.

Twitter: Twitter is a micro-blogging site to share your thoughts and content with a short message of 140 characters. It is a very effective platform to share your content especially your blogs and to publish the latest information about your industry.

You can develop your brand by sharing useful content for your audience that they find relevant for them.

Facebook: Facebook is the largest social media platform and very useful to share your content in the form of images and short videos. You can publish the latest information on Facebook about your blog and website.

The content that you can share to get higher engagement is Infographics. You can create Infographics for your audience that gives detailed information. The Facebook audience likes visual information more as compared to written content.

SlideShare: SlideShare is a visual sharing platform, where professionals can share their content – Slides, Documents, and Videos. You can share your slides with detailed information about any topic related to your industry.

It helps you to offer your expert knowledge to your audience and audience to get information that they are looking for.

Final Words:

Personal Branding is very useful for young professionals and small businesses because it provides many opportunities to grow and develop.

In the process of personal branding, you will learn the important lessons of business like marketing & promotion, networking, and customer engagement that will help you in your career and business.

The major part of Personal Branding is the content that you create, curate, and share with your audience.

It helps you to promote your brand by sharing information & content and help your audience to get solutions to their problems in the form of content. Thus, content is always an important part of Personal Branding.

It is important to understand that personal branding is also about experimentation. The number of experiments you do with your content will ultimately increase the chances of getting more success in developing your personal brand.