Your Personal Branding Cheat Sheet

If you aim to reach out to your customers on a personal level, personal branding is your gateway to success. It doesn’t have to be rocket science, but you can go through the various channels to implement the principles of personal branding. Use this cheat sheet to ace personal branding either for you or your company.

Build a Good Image

Personal branding allows individuals and entrepreneurs to differentiate themselves and stand out from a crowd by identifying their unique value, what you can offer that makes you valuable, and articulating it through different platforms. This effort calls on you to drive a consistent message and image to achieve a certain goal.

To build a good image, you need to set your goals and objective, present your best self, and market your skills and personality. Your goals and objectives define your brand and it will help you map out a course of action from which all your efforts will branch out. Presenting your best self means highlighting your strengths and improving your weaker points. Marketing your skills and personality is to create an impressive portfolio that will detail your abilities, education, and professional experiences.

Understand Human Nature

To be effective in how you want others to perceive you, you need to know that emotion is a major driving force that will help you arrive at a decision. So, if you want to be in control of the people’s impression of you, don’t leave your reputation to chance, when you can be your own PR guru. An emotional appeal will be your biggest tool to help you connect with others better.

To determine this, you need to look at it from a wider perspective and see how your personality affects the experience someone will have with you. Do people love working with you because you are fun to be with? Or are you unreliable with tasks?

To make this process easier, make a list of words that best describe the different aspects of your personality. These descriptions are called emotional modifiers and it is similar to a long-lasting deodorant that can make a customer feel fresh and confident even hours after you’ve applied it. It’s that one word that describes and experience. It could be FUN, CONFIDENT, or TRUSTWORTHY. This process should bring you to decide on a brand mantra or the articulation of the “heart and soul” of your brand.

For instance, you might want to leave the impression that you are empathetic, efficient, or dynamic. Aligning yourself towards positive descriptions allows you to invest your efforts in that direction.

To determine these descriptions, here are questions to consider:

• What are the words other people use to describe me?
• How do I make people feel?
• How do people benefit by working with me?

Develop Good Communication Skills

The art of expressing yourself is an important aspect of personal branding. You need to understand that aside from what you say verbally, non-verbal cues are just as loud. In fact, the effectiveness of communication depends largely on body language, so you need to use it to your advantage.

Unless you have the gift of the gab, honing your verbal skills can be quite a challenge. Communicating, whether on a public platform or on a personal level, will be effective if it is clear and direct to the point. Going straight to the point will prevent your listeners from getting lost in translation. If you also want to leave a positive impression, your words should be empowering, comforting, or uplifting.

Most of the time, what you don’t say speaks the loudest, so you must be mindful of the nonverbal cues you are showing. Good nonverbal communication can be expressed in a firm handshake. It’s in the way you hold eye contact to show sincerity or assertiveness, the manner in which you move your arms and hands to prove a point in your speech, or the way you position your body to show someone that you are interested in what they have to say. All these can amplify what you are saying and leave a lasting impression.

Establishing the right mix in your communication efforts will ensure that your message reaches your target audience effectively. At this point you should establish your personal brand statement, and communicate, or expound, on that. Experts would advise that creating and implementing a brand communication plan will significantly increase your opportunity to stand out.

Create Your Network

To be able to leave a good impression, you need to work on yourself too. This is a continuous process which involves surrounding yourself with influencers and immersing in communities.

Choose social influencers that you think can help you in your career or personal life. Learn from them and even create relationships. Their valuable insights and example can help you improve yourself as you make your own mark.

You can also actively participate in groups and forums related to your field. Learning from like-minded people also allows you to widen your perspective. Furthermore, visiting networking events related to your field can also help you connect with personalities that you can also learn from. Widen your reach when it comes to grabbing information, sharing your own, or in socializing because, in order to grow your brand, you need to grow yourself.

Use the Right Places to Tell Your Story

People, especially employers, use the internet to know more about you. It would be smart for you to have them find something smart, well-crafted, and professional, instead of drunk photos and other brow-raising posts. Leave a digital trail in a variety of places over time and refine your profile. Aggregate your work and ideas. The different platforms which also serve as your ecosystem where you can tell your own story include:

Linkedin.com Clippings.com Pinterest.com Muckrack.com Tumblr.com Scoop.it.com YouTube.com Pressfolios.com Contently.com Naymz.com

Outside of the digital world, you may also take every chance to impress your personal brand on others. Be it in the form of a speaking engagement, some words of encouraging to a friend, or pretty much how you command your daily conversations with those around you. All these are perfect opportunities to display how you want them to perceive you. Again, this is not a shallow endeavor because this also requires you to improve yourself so that all that the transformation which started on the inside will eventually reflect outwards – in your words and actions.

Monitor Your Brand

If you want to know how your personal brand is perceived by others, monitoring will keep you up to speed. This means listening to their feedback and learning from it – be it bad or good.

Twitter, RSS, or Google Alert are very helpful resources for this purpose. Using the right tools, like analytics, can also be a more concrete way of showing your audience’s response. Adding to this, you must learn to listen and deal with criticism in a professional manner.

Coaching

Personal branding involves shifting mindsets, improving communication skills, and overcoming limiting beliefs and behaviors. As you plan on a strong personal brand, it helps that you enlist the help of a coach. Doing so can help you streamline efforts and put better focus in what is required to achieve your goals.

A coach can propose a custom-made intervention so that efforts are driven at achieving personal goals. Many have embraced this process as they realized that this can help them tap potential while tackling personal issues and challenges.

Jacky Lim is a certified and reputable NLP coach in Singapore and he can run a gap analysis for a customized approach in helping you in your personal branding efforts. If you want to stand out from the rest, you must also be mindful that competition is stiff, so you should get all the help you need to stay ahead.

Take these reminders as you improve your brand, and book an appointment with Jacky today. Discover your breakthrough and witness your growth become evident in your life, relationships, and career.