Personal branding is the process of developing a "mark" that is created around your name or your career. You use this "mark" to express and communicate your skills, personality, and values.

We all can be a brand and cultivate our power to stand out and be unique. This uniqueness draws people to our product, our services, or even just our message. Your personal brand should be about who you are and what you have to offer.

Why Personal Brands Are for Everyone

Personal brands should be important to everyone. Personal brands are not only for the entrepreneur that owns their own business. It is the secret sauce that can make you stand out of a stack of resumes.

If you don’t develop your own personal brand, others will do it for you. Developing your personal brand is the proactive way of controlling your career development and how you are perceived in the marketplace. ​

A strong personal brand will impact your ability to get the right jobs, promotions, and increase your ability to attract talent and capital. So, let’s look at these tips that can help you in creating your own personal brand:

Build Your Platform

If you are going to have a personal brand, you will need a website to create your virtual platform. Your website should be your name. You will also need social media accounts that represent your brand. You will use these platforms to share your voice.

Identify Your Uniqueness and Your Strengths

Think about the characteristics and strengths you’ve built in your career. If you are stuck, think about that “one thing” that everyone says you rock at. If you're still stuck, ask others.

Own Your Space

Once you’ve identified your uniqueness and strengths, perfect them. Learn all that you can and become the expert in that area. You can never stop learning. Read, absorb, and teach.

Share Your Knowledge

It’s not enough to learn it; you have to teach it and share your knowledge by helping others. Do this through videos, social media, and writing both online and offline. This is where you prove you know your stuff and gain exposure from doing so.

Be Yourself

Find your own style. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing and just follow the crowd. Use your style and uniqueness to attract the jobs and clientele that you desire. Think of Gary Vaynerchuk and how he built his brand by making videos that share wine reviews and tips. No one else was doing it and now look ​around hundreds of people are following in his footsteps. Find your own style and create a new set of footprints for others to follow in.​

Identify Your Values and Set Your Priorities

It’s important to have a clear picture of your personal and professional goals, both short and long-term. This will help you to not only identify the most important things to spend your time on but will also have something to align new projects with. Use your values and priorities as a compass that guides you both in action and your decision-making process. This will ensure you stay on track.

Craft Your Personal Brand Persona

It will help in creating your brand. Your persona can be created by:

·         Identifying your emotional appeal. What are your personality features? This can be as easy as saying you have a crazy sense of humor or that you are obsessively organized. Take a few moments, why do you think people are attracted to the brand of you?

·         Describing yourself. When it comes to your brand who are you and why do people enjoy working with you?

·         Identifying your specialty. What do you do and what do people want you to do for them?

Use these exercises to create a strong personal brand persona that you can always refer to when it comes to creating materials that support your brand.

The Bottom Line

Building a personal brand takes time and effort, but it’s worth it. The need for a personal brand will continue to increase. It’s the one thing that no one can take away from you, and it can follow you throughout your career. It’s a leadership requirement that lets people know who you are and what you stand for.

Don’t understand what I’m trying to say well let’s word it a different way:

1. Know yourself and what you're good at.

Your personal brand reflect who you are, so you can't possibly brand yourself if you're clueless about yourself. This doesn't mean navel-gazing, but rather a realistic assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, what you love doing, and the skills that you've mastered or are working to master.

2. Create a memorable brand name.

If you've got a unique name, make that your brand name.  If not, create a brand name that's a hybrid of your name and your career direction. "You want people to find you, not somebody who's got the same name as you," explains Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.  Remember, though, if you put your direction in your brand name you're tied to that direction. (That's why Step 1 is so important.)

3. Capture your online turf.

Buy the domain name that corresponds to your brand name and secure the Facebook page, Twitter account, Google+ account as well. If you find that your brand name is already "owned" create a different brand name. With LinkedIn, you'll use your real name, so put your brand name prominently in your profile.

4. Build a website for your domain name.

This is easier than you think. There's no reason to struggle with a complicate website editor when you can create a perfectly usable site using a product like WordPress. (There are alternatives but WordPress is the de-facto standard.) You don't want a traditional website anyway, since they have an "institutional" feel about them anyway.

5. Set up automatic updating.

To reduce the busywork of all those different social media platforms, set up an application that allows you to simultaneous post to all of them. For that past few months I've been using the free version of Hootsuite.com, but there are many alternatives out there both free and fee.

6. Share useful content on a regular basis.

Don't try to be a full-time blogger. Instead share "helpful tips relating to the products [you] sell, relevant news, and personal updates that build emotional connection and convey positive character, such as a philanthropic interest," explains Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social, writing in the Harvard Business Review.

7. Get feedback from people you trust.

The advice and encouragement of others helps keep your "brand development" on target.  Philip Styrlund, CEO of The Summit Group, recommends setting up a "board of directors"--a few trusted colleagues who can assess your ongoing efforts and act as an informal sounding board.

8. Be authentic, even a bit risky.

As long as you don't come off like you're crazy or weird, a little opinion in your online presence is a good thing, according to Meg Guiseppi, author of the book 23 Ways You Sabotage Your Executive Job Search. "Don't assume that being authentic will turn people off," she explains. "Nobody is interested in working with a cookie cutter."

As you see I keep repeating myself but the proof is in the pudding. Know Thyself, Love Thyself, and Brand Thyself

Destini