Create your personal brand: 7 tips

Wouldn’t it be nice if all you had to do to create your unique personal brand was to follow a check list? While it is helpful to have a checklist, the power of creating your brand comes from really thinking about what you do and what makes you unique. Self-knowledge is key for this. You also need to think of yourself as a product and think like a marketing person. Yes, even you engineers out there need to think marketing.

Here are some helpful tips to get you started creating your personal brand.

1. Go somewhere where you won’t have any distractions or interruptions.

Sit and think! Or just start writing. However you get your creative juices flowing. My best ideas come to me when I’m outdoors in nature.

2. Write down your skills.

Ask your friends and colleagues to help if you get stuck. Don’t stop and think about each skill, just do a brain dump of them.

3. Identify those skills you like and those which you want to use in your next job.

You may have skills that you’re good at, but you don’t like. For me, it’s analysis. I’m good with numbers, but don’t like working a lot with them; I much prefer to work with people.

4. Pick one or two of these skills.

I love figuring out how to make things work more efficiently. I also love working with clients to deliver better products and services.

5. Think about what makes YOU unique.

For me, it’s my diverse background in operations and in marketing. I understand how things work, I can communicate effectively to customers and I can bridge the gap between marketing and operations.

6. Describe what you do in one or two sentences.

Here’s my latest brand description.

I help companies interact better with their customers.

I do this by:
*content marketing
*using social media
*streamlining processes.

7. Make it so simple that even your Mom can understand it.

You want to be able to talk about what you do do anyone, not just colleagues in your industry. You just never know where that next job lead will come from! I’ve had leads from sources like my personal trainer and my dentist.

A suggested template  to use:

I am _____________________________.
I do this by _______________________.

I am looking for ____________________.

8. Practice , practice, practice!

Start out easy, try it out on your friends. I am eternally grateful to my friends for telling me, “Nancy, I know you’re smart and well-qualified, but I still can’t figure out what you do.” I can’t tell you how many times I went back to the drawing board to change the description of my personal brand. It is an eternal work in process.

So what is your personal brand?

Photo is courtesy of Stefano Principato’s Flickr Photostream, under Creative Commons Licensing.