Anyone who works for themselves, selling themselves, needs a personal branding plan to increase exposure. Students getting out into the workforce need to differentiate themselves from their peers by self marketing their abilities by using web promotion, brand development and old fashioned creativity.
Personal Branding to Get the Job
According to Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0, the secret to success in this world filled with social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is to create a personal brand that rises above other’s old fashioned techniques.
Creative ideas that he covers in the book are:
- How to create a personal press kit
- How to make sure a person’s brand is coming off positively
- How to differentiate a personal brand from everyone else’s
- How to make a personal brand development plan
“Not only do you have to aggressively promote yourself,” says Schawbel, “but you also have to protect your brand, by claiming your domain name and actively grooming our Google results.”
Web Promotion to Increase Exposure
As Schawbel believes, web promotion is one of the most important ways to both create and maintain an influential personal brand. Search engines pick up on keywords that can work negatively, by exposing past exploits, or highlighting achievements and successes. Let’s go for the latter.
The Internet is a mammoth beast and to underrate it’s power to affect personal branding is to throw away one of its most significant tools. Dan suggests the basics- building a simple, strong website, maintaining a blog and being active on social networking sites- but also gives tips on how to craft a resumé, cover letter and references list to produce a CD that can be used as a self marketing tool.
Self Promotion for Brand Development
The key to using brand development to further a career is made clear in Steven Van Yoder’s interesting book, Get Slightly Famous. His opinion is that by becoming a “celebrity” in a certain field, a person can use their own personality to increase exposure. This is especially true for folks in the entertainment industry, writers, public speakers and small businesses.
Steven suggests that by being the person everyone thinks of when they’re looking for (fill in the blank), success is born without as much effort as having to write lengthy sales pitches and letters. In particular, these things are important to “getting slightly famous”:
- Media: Get in front of the camera, on the radio, on the web or in print giving expert advice, helping people in a particular field or telling a story that resonates with the public
- Public Speaking: Become known as an expert and join panels, teleconferences and speak at conferences
- Create Products to Sell: By having info products, income can come in from multiple sources, making it a continuous stream of revenue.
As both Dan Schawbel and Steven Van Yoder can attest to (by their own successes), paying attention to personal branding and self marketing is becoming an important part of any career. Not only reserved for movie stars and public faces anymore, brand development might be the only way left to distinguish one aspiring career from another.
Lori Henry - A travel writer, Lori flits between exploring the world with incessant curiosity and huddling over her laptop writing.
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