Building your personal branding – how is it important?
As an aspiring entrepreneur, have you ever thought of staying ahead of the rat race amongst all the other entrepreneurs?
Entrepreneurship today is no longer about promoting your business branding; you have to build your personal brand and put yourself out there before you could start promoting your business.
Illustrating this in the context of consumer goods, consumers are more willing to purchase products from brands that are well-known. Consumer trust is built up from the brand image and reputation. Back to the topic, this applies to all individuals as well.
The main gist of this is – a well-established personal brand will put you in a better position in the network of start-ups – allowing you to gain greater opportunities to promote your business in various market segments.
Here’s a summary of how you can start building your personal branding and become a successful entrepreneur:
Establish rapport and trust
Make yourself present online. People will most likely check out your profile before deciding if they want to meet and speak to you. You could create a LinkedIn profile or have your own personal website/blog, basically you want people to easily find you online. Of course, you would need to create a positive image through strategic content curation. Good content includes writing articles based on your own opinions, whilst maintaining objectiveness. This will help to establish trust from your readers, and you might even be seen as an inspiring leader/entrepreneur.
Building authority
Join online interest groups that relevant to your field of business. Keep track of relevant posts and leverage on these platforms to share your area of expertise and knowledge with the members of the group. These people might be your prospective clients and partners – hence do not attempt to ‘over-market’ yourself or your business – you might be scaring them off instead. Create backlinks to your profile or your business website, so that they could contact you and discuss further on opportunities.
‘Search and test’
You’ve set up your website, built your personal profile, curated attractive content, etc.
You’re all set to go, except you should do a check on how you will appear on search engines. It is essential to see what is shown in search engines when your name is being searched. To do this, all you must do is to go on private browsing and search for your name with and without inverted commas. Voila! If you aren’t satisfied with the search results, continue working on building your profile either through stronger visible content or greater network.
Similar to business brand marketing, it takes time to build on your personal online reputation. Do not rush into it. Once your reputation is built, continue to work on it as this will help to score greater and stronger relationships with your network circle. Ultimately, all these people in your network will soon get to know more about your business; and that is where to real marketing comes into place.
