What is Personal Branding: 5 step student guide on how to start

In this day and age, you can not ignore effective personal branding. This is not only in the field of branding and marketing, but in business too.

We know what big brands are but when you think about personal brands, many people only think about big time influencers and never about themselves. So What is Personal Branding and how can you set it up to start making money.

Personal Branding Definition

Personal branding is the process or practice of marketing and representing individuals in their careers as brands. Just like branding for an organisation, is a process that involves developing and maintaining a reputation and impression to people they interact with, personal branding takes the same approach.

Personal branding views success as self packaging. This refers to the overall mental picture people create when they think of the individual.

A personal brand is all about your promotion. It consists of the collection of talents, personality and professional feel you want to be seen.

There are 4 parts to this.The kind of personal brand you create will heavily depend on this 4 factors.

• Talents
• Personality
• Professionalism
• Promotion.

Talents

Talents refer to the skills you have or what you can offer to people and solve their problems. When creating your brand, start by identifying a problem affecting a group of people, and a skill that you have that can solve it.

This group of people will be your Target group.

Professionalism and Personality

Personality refers to the image you want people to see when they see you or your brand. It refersto how you handle people and your business too.

Promotion

In the past, this was mostly presented on your business card only. It told who you are, what you do, and where to get you. The internet and Social media has totally revolutionized this but maintained bits of the original concept.

When you choose your target group and match up with your skills, you need to show them, who you are what you do and where you can be reached.

Example: When you google your name, of course you will get a lot of similar names but when you find yourself, is it what you want to see or does it require fine-tuning. Can you be reached easily?

If you search our name justcreativek, I would want you will be taken to searches where you can see our work and contact us so that you can pay us to do something for you.

personal branding examples for students

Why is Personal Branding Important to you?

A great personal Brand will attract new people and opportunities to you. However, few professionals understand what personal branding is and how it is important to them.

From our search in the example for justcreativek: I am happy with the search. The first search is our Fiverr profile where you can checkout some services we offer. Here you can easily look at previous jobs we have done, client reviews and even talk to us about anything.

The actions I take for you ( potential client) to find me, know what I am about, How I do what I do and represent myself is called branding.

Do not worry if you do not find yourself, this article will help with that too.

Before we even go to the other links, it already shows the 4 main things mentioned earlier.

1. Skills – What we know
2. Profession – What we can do
3. Personality – How we do what we do and interact

How do I start a Personal Brand?

After you have taken thorough research and know your skills, what you want to offer, you can now start the setting up of an identity for your brand.

If you are having a hard time researching this, I suggest you first read this A 7-Step Brand Development Strategy for Growth.

Step 1: Come up with a Brand name

Now first of all come up with a name for your brand based on what you want your brand to be about. You can use your name or a free brand name generator. This will help identify you.

Step 2: Create Platform accounts to communicate with your targets

Build your social media accounts and places you want to be posting your content. Use one name across all platforms you use.

1. Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn for content sharing.
2. Medium, Quora for answering questions and driving traffic
3. A website, Fiverr for where people will hire you from

The brand-name generator is good, but you can also hire a professional on Fiver, to search for name for you. Alternatively, you can use your real name.

Step 3: Create Brand collateral that identifies you

Get a logo design and a social media Branding Kit. You will use this across all the social media pages you have opened.

A logo will be the main representation of your brand and should be your mark of identity to your targets.

The freelancer you will choose should provide the logo plus brand colors that will represent you. A social media kit will also be necessary for your social media identity.

For a successful identity, I recommend this logo design service because you will get a logo design and social media kit and will not have to hire different people to design each of them.

This will help identify you and differentiate you from competitors.

What is in the social Media Kit?

1. YouTube – Profile Image and Cover Image
2. Twitter – Profile Image and Header
3. Pinterest Profile Image
4. Linked in – LinkedIn Cover Photo, Company Logo, and Background image
5. Instagram – Instagram Profile
6.Facebook – Profile Image and Cover Image
7. Etsy – Shop Icon, Banner, Profile cover

However, for this step you can also do it yourself check out How to make a Logo.

Step 4: Create a place where people can find you and order your services

Now you have your Brand look. It is time for the very important part. Create a place where people can find you and order your services. You can create a Website but I highly recommend Fiverr because it is free and you can offer many different types of services.

Step 5: Drive Traffic to your content and services

Create high quality and helpful content for your target audience and direct the traffic to your Fiverr gigs and social media.

Why you need a Personal Brand

A personal brand is a good way to demonstrate your skills and knowledge in a particular subject or field. When you present your skills and knowledge out there, your target group will follow. You will get a great resource of people you can work with and clients too.

Example
You might be far more knowledgeable than John Doe next to you, but if someone Googles your name and John Doe’s and John is the one with a private brand and professional online presence, he’s getting to look better than you and gets more opportunities.

Branding Opens more opportunities for you

Building a brand is your chance to point out your audience what you recognize and why you recognize it, and it’ll help set you aside from others who could be vying for an equivalent opportunities but who haven’t taken the time to create their personal brand

A great personal brand will bring many opportunities, including: More business, Job interviews, B2B engagements, Networking opportunities, Promotions, Partnerships and more

It can assist you reach any number of goals, both personal and professional, and it also can cause many opportunities for advancement in your career.

Branding forges trust from your audience

When someone introduces themselves nowadays, the first thing most people do is to look for them online. Either on Facebook, Instagram or any other online media. If they find you they gain more trust of course depending on how you have branded yourself.

There is a large push nowadays to “shop small”, and influencer advertising is so successful.

People are far more likely to shop from, and hear , someone who looks, talks, and acts like them as against big corporations.

So if you build your personal brand sort of a business, but still maintain a private front, you’re bound to inspire trust from your audience.

Personal branding tips 

Reach out and interact

Reaching out and interacting with your audience should be your goal if you would like to be more personal and close to your targets. 

Respond to your audience directly

When you directly interact you present your brand as respectful and shows the personal side of your brand.

Take advantage of visual content- images videos

Attractive images and videos act as windows and doors that attract an audience to your brand from afar. They then come in and see and hear what you have to say.

Be transparent and show it

Know what your brand represents and surround your communication and interact with this as your base. Do not be two faced. Be transparent.

Add a Blog

Another good way you’ll show a really personal side is to make a blog and link it to your network.

This will be a business-based blog, but the content thereon can affect a more personal side of your dealings, like expansions, news about employees, updates, and anything that provides people a peek through the curtain.

Participate in the Experience

Show willingness to join and network in platforms along your line of interest. Facebook & LinkedIn have different groups.

Join to permit the human element of your brand to come out. You do not need to be super active just show willingness to network and when people search for people in your field you will pop up as a related topic. This will make it easier for your relevant audience to find you.

Have a Solid personal brand Identity

Think about your business as an actual person speaking with one consistent voice. Make your branding consistent across platforms.