It’s time for all of the cobbler’s children to have shoes. If you’re reading this, you are likely to be a marketer or a small business. You’re apt to be busy, with little time to think about your personal brand.
We often focus on an urgent project and forget the most important part of the marketing plan: ourselves. So your career or business is the cobbler and your personal brand the cobbler’s children…who need their own shoes.
Let’s get the brand of you shared in a simple and sophisticated way, so that you can move forward with a digital footprint, err, shoes.
Before we get to the strategy, you are probably asking “why is a personal brand important for me in the first place?”
Quite simply, if you own a business, your personal brand story humanizes your business. Your human experience, your personal brand story, is what can attract new prospects, partnerships and other promotional opportunities.
How could a powerful personal brand story help you relate to prospects and open opportunities for the future? As you continue to ponder that, let’s take some forward action towards that future. Yes?
4 Personal Brand Tools
Here are four ways that the most tech-savvy, or not-so-technologically-savvy people, can create a strong personal brand foundation in an hour or two:
- Grab your preferred account name across all of your desired digital platforms with Know’em.
Man! Before I found this website, I would have to go to each social media platform one-by-one to create an account. And, there were times where I would get to the third or fourth account only to find out my preferred account name wasn’t available!
This free tool allows you to search the name you want and see if it’s available in one conveniently smooth swoop.
The example below shows my account handle and its availability across various platforms. This saves lots of time and frustration and also helps establish your brand’s consistency right off the bat!
There are options to check across social platforms in categories such as entertainment, blogging, microblogging, business, news, health, information, music, news, photo, tech, travel and video. You can even check domain availability right on Knowem too.
- Create a personal brand center with a one-page website about yourself with About.Me.
There are a lot of one-page website tools out, however most of them have not been active on their social media for over a year and when researched only showed un-answered support issues. So I bypassed most of them and stick to About.Me.
My recommendations are like my gift-giving philosophy: I only buy (or recommend) what I myself have used or would like to have.
About.Me has been around for a few years and is a simple and effective way to promote yourself online with sleek design and one focused call-to-action. The menu features allow you to edit with ease.
You can also check out my podcast episode all about About.Me benefits and download my *freebie* on my top tips for maximizing the platform for your personal brand on I am SelfCrafted episode 16.
Another site that can be compared to About.Me, however with some distinguishing features, is Branded.me. You can create more than just a one-page account like you could with About.me. If you have a LinkedIn account, it will even pre-populate your profile details from what you’ve already entered in to your LinkedIn profile.
The biggest difference between Branded.me and other personal branding platforms, is that Branded.me allows you to blog directly from its platform.
- Use Behance to enhance your projects and portfolio.
Behance (part of the Adobe family) is an online platform to display your personal and work team creative portfolio. It’s very simple to plug in projects and work experience, and you can also link it into your About.me profile.
It’s a networking tool too, where you can follow other creatives. Think of it like how Pinterest displays pins we may be interested in, but they are people and their projects.
Behance is also is a place to post or apply for creative jobs.
- Find or get found on a whole pro-level on LinkedIn.
As of this year, LinkedIn -yet again- continues to go mo’ pro. It recently launched Profinder, a tool to find local freelancers for your project needs. Or, for some of us, a tool to get connected to those looking for our pro-awesome skill sets.
So there you have it. Four ways to establish or up-level your personal brand. Whether you’re a marketer, freelancer or business owner it’s imperative to always make a good first-impression. Your reputation is everything, so let’s put your best digital footprint forward.
Have you tried to craft your personal brand strategy? Any tips to share on what did or didn’t work?
