3 Quick Tips For Creating A Personal Brand
by Aqueelah Emanuel
Branding isn’t just for businesses. You can build your own personal brand as well. Personal branding is a way to build a presence so that people see your skills and abilities. If you are looking to advance your career, personal branding is exactly what you need. Building your personal brand will help advance your career.
I’ve been in the technology industry for 10+ years with a major focus on software testing. It was only four years ago that I started blogging. Prior to that, my only writing experience was small stuff that I had written in elementary, high school and college. When I first started blogging my articles were about software development and testing. Eventually I branched out to articles with tips on career advice. A vast majority of my articles for both tech and business center around personal experiences. So, I created a space for myself where I became the subject matter expert.
Here are my top 3 tips for creating your personal brand:
Learn and Explore
You have a niche. It is something amazing if you may have not discovered it yet. If you are trying to advance yourself in your career, the best thing to do is find out what you are great at. It should also coincide with something you actually like about your career.
For example, if you are a front-end web developer, that means you are responsible for the layout and design of a website. You are probably familiar with CSS, JavaScript or HTML. You’re probably also familiar with liquid, fluid or responsive design. That’s great but you need to dig deeper and learn more about them.
Do research to learn more and be sure to think outside of your job description and your past experience. Practice anything new you’ve learned on your own so that it comes from “real world” experience.
Combine these new things you’ve learned with the things you already know and boom! Not only does this strategy help create better blog posts, but it helps you to advance your career.
It also makes for better conversations in meetings, simply because you’ve become the subject matter expert at the table!
You have a niche. It is something amazing if you may have not discovered it yet. If you are trying to advance yourself in your career, the best thing to do is find out what you are great at. It should also coincide with something you actually like about your career.
For example, if you are a front-end web developer, that means you are responsible for the layout and design of a website. You are probably familiar with CSS, JavaScript or HTML. You’re probably also familiar with liquid, fluid or responsive design. That’s great but you need to dig deeper and learn more about them.
Do research to learn more and be sure to think outside of your job description and your past experience. Practice anything new you’ve learned on your own so that it comes from “real world” experience.
Combine these new things you’ve learned with the things you already know and boom! Not only does this strategy help create better blog posts, but it helps you to advance your career.
It also makes for better conversations in meetings, simply because you’ve become the subject matter expert at the table!
Write and Educate
You have the ability to write. If you feel like you don’t, either research or take a class. If you feel like paying for writing classes, I’d recommend writing workshops. There’s some online and in-person classes. There’s also 1 on 1 classes.
You may have many first drafts when you start writing and that’s ok. You may go days where you are working on the same article and that is okay as well. If you are writing to educate others you need to do everything to ensure that your article is clear and concise.
You also need to ensure that it is filled with great examples and works cited where necessary. You should also decide who your audience is for your niche, beginners or advance? I personally like writing for both.
If I feel that an article should be more advanced, I’ll write a “part 2” as well. This works out great for three reasons: beginners can follow both articles and understand them both, advanced users can skip to the second article, and you’ll have another blog post under your belt. Obviously, you should make sure that the posts are linked to one another so that users can click back and forth when necessary.
Publish and Social Network It
You must believe in yourself! Everything starts with self belief. Imagine me virtually grabbing you and shaking you like the guy from the movie “Airplane,” when the woman started to panic. I’m basically telling you to get yourself together—you can do this!
If you would like to test the waters of self publishing your own articles, you can create a personal blog on sites such as, tumblr.com or wordpress.org and publish.
You can publish an article on LinkedIn to immediately reach followers within your industry to see what they may be interested in reading.
Creating your own personal blog gives you the ability to create sample articles to showcase. Once you’ve gotten comfortable, I suggest that you contact any publication that you read on a daily basis. Or google publications within your niche to see if they are accepting contributing writers. Read their guidelines on contributing and submit articles. After your articles are published make sure you “social network” the heck out of it. Post them on every platform that you are on. You should also ask the people you know to do the same.
Creating your own personal brand is not difficult. You’ve probably been doing it already simply by asking for LinkedIn recommendations.
It’s important to know that in order to stay relevant in your industry you must continuously be focused on doing everything to create and enhance your personal brand. I like to tell people, “don’t just be job smart, be career smart.” Make sure that you make a huge impact on your career so that you are valuable. You shouldn’t just be trying to secure yourself a job; you should be securing yourself a future.
Featured photo credit: Ed Gregory via stokpic.com
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