As an entrepreneur, you ARE your company in many ways—and certainly your own best advocate.
And yet, many of us were raised to feel uncomfortable “tooting our own horn.”
Business advisors and marketers who preach that the only path to success is the road that worked for them only make matters worse if their style isn’t true to our own personality.
The truth is, there is only one path to success: yours.
When it comes to developing your personal branding and achieving career success, you are your own secret weapon.
Any entrepreneur—whether an artist or an accountant—needs to develop, expand, and celebrate their brand and business according to their own unique values and individual strengths.
Why?
Because we’ve seen time and time again that if it’s not authentic, it’s not effective.
Any entrepreneur—whether an artist or an accountant—needs to develop, expand, and celebrate their brand and business according to their own unique values and individual strengths. Find out how: Share on XWhat is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is a process of designing and expanding the ways others perceive you.
In my post on personal branding versus personal promotion, I break down this process into three distinct phases of personal brand building:
- Unearthing your personal brand: Digging deep into what makes you, “you”—your strengths, your goals, and your personality.
- Understanding your personal brand: Discovering how other people perceive these strengths and leaning into the positive, unique traits that encompass who you are.
- Utilizing your personal brand: The act of living and giving yourself permission to live and work from a place that is authentic, satisfying, and sets you apart.
Authenticity in personal branding
At brandiD, our motto is: Be yourself, and be unstoppable!
If a hard sell isn’t your style, build an online identity that captures your own charisma—and showcase it in your blog, Facebook page, or LinkedIn profile. Or, if you’re the most self-confident entrepreneur on the planet, shout your strengths from the rooftops with an online platform that has all the bells and whistles.
What you should avoid at all costs is following rules that worked for some other person, building some other business.
As a serial entrepreneur and a mother of two daughters, I know that the only way to build a successful brand isn’t to join the old boys’ club but to play by your own rules.
But that can be hard to do if you’ve never focused on it before.
3 steps to better personal branding for entrepreneurs
To really make an impact with your own personal branding, follow my three most important steps, honed from years of experience working one-on-one with clients as well as learning from personal and business branding gurus William Arruda and Jonathan Fields.
Step 1: Understand Your Personal Brand
Even if you’re running a wildly successful business, you may want to take it in a new direction, unveil a new offering, reach more clients, or make your work still more satisfying.
To gain a deeper understanding of your personal brand, it’s important to:
- Develop a deep understanding of where your brand is and where you’d like it to go.
- Think about your mission, your vision, your core values, and the brand attributes you’d like your brand to embody.
- Step back and look at your business and your role in it.
I’ve seen first-hand that the process of exploring your personal brand and how it impacts your business brand is provocative, profound, and a catalyst for powerful change. Clients always tell me how surprised they are by how much impact the results have. It’s a real game-changer as far as how they see their businesses—and themselves.
Step 2: Create a Personalized Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve articulated the qualities that make your brand one-of-a-kind, and the new levels of success you’d like it to reach, the next step is developing an online marketing strategy—including email and social media marketing—to let the rest of the world in on how amazing your business is.
Identify the best methods and tools to connect with—and influence—your target audience, and create systems by which you can measure your success.
Step 3: Communicate Your Online Identity
In person, you can charm, impress, and influence people. Personal branding is a methodology of packaging all that in a way that works for you online, via your website, social media presence and / or blogging.
Develop an authentic online presence for your brand, one that is true to who you are. Doing so can be as specific as creating a logo or tagline, or as complex as building a multifaceted website, complete with a video bio to greet clients and blogging capabilities to continue your conversation with them.
Finally, make sure your brand has a strong social media presence on the platforms that work for you, whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and/or LinkedIn, or other media.
Entrepreneurs: Keep Your Personal Branding Authentic
As an entrepreneur, getting clear about who you are and why you do what you do is the first step towards a whole new outlook on entrepreneurship, personal branding, and growth.
By being authentic and promoting your business in ways you’re comfortable with, you can create greater success than ever before.
You don’t have time to mess around. Start succeeding on your own terms.
Need help defining your personal brand? You’ll find all you need to dive deep into the fundamentals of your own personal brand in our FREE Build Your Brand Workbook. Download it today, and enjoy!
Interested in learning how our proven branding framework can work for you and your business?
Contact us today. We can’t wait to help!
About The Author
Rachel Gogos is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for people, the web, and creating strong personal brands. She started her career at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where she helped create the look and feel for the organization’s first website. Today, in her current role running brandiD, Rachel channels over 15 years of marketing and communications experience into each and every website for brandiD’s clients. Find out more!
