How to be a Superstar with Personal Branding

It doesnt matter who you are. You can be a CEO, a manager or an executive.

With a great personal branding strategy, anyone can build their own brand and become a superstar.

If you are a business owner, it puts a face to your business and is a great way to communicate with your customers, business associates and investors on a personal level.

If you are employed, it helps you to develop an online reputation that helps you to expand your career opportunities online.

How to Create Your Personal Brand

1. Protecting Your Identity
2. Build Your Brand with Your Domain
3. Delivering Value Through Content Marketing

Step 1: Protecting Your Identity

Before you build your brand, you have to first protect it.

It doesn’t matter if you are employed, self-employed or retired.

Buying yourname.com is crucial. You definitely want to protect your name from unsavory competitors or perhaps even an ex with a vengeance.

Anyone can buy your name and turn it into a slanderous website.

And imagine the first thing you search your name online is that particular slanderous website. That is going to destroy any form of professional reputation you may have.

Moreover, if you are the face of a reputable corporation, hackers could potentially create customised domain emails with your domain such as hr@yourname.com and mass email to the unknowing public.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. ~ Warren Buffett

A great example would be Tim Cook, one of the most celebrated CEOs in the world who interestingly did not purchase his domain name. In the end, someone else has bought timcook.com and would probably extort him for an astronomical of money in time to come.

This problem could be avoided at the first place especially when most domains can be acquired for only $10 per year from Namecheap.

If you are running your own business, we highly recommend you acquire your domain name.

Once it has been purchased by others, you will never get it back (or if you are willing to spend a bomb to buy it back).

Step 2: Build Your Brand with Your Domain

For a start, we need to start thinking ourselves as a brand and how we can market ourselves as a brand.

The pandemic has forced thousands of businesses to fold and we are facing increasing global competition as we speak.

That said, we need to distinctively differentiate from others, aside from just managing a Linkedin profile.

Having a great website design creates a professional portfolio with visual branding, strengthening your position within your industry.

From there on, you can tell your story, showcase your uniqueness and display what you do best.

In short, you are selling yourself what makes you different that stand out from the crowd.

You may also add your website link to your business cards, emails and even Linkedin so it acts as a landing page for your visitors to have branded, precise understanding of who you are.

A great example would be Simon Sinek, a well known motivation speaker.

You might have seen his online videos through Youtube and Facebook.

His personal website acts as a landing page that further augments his personal branding.

Through specially curated brand messages with colors, fonts and images, he creates an unique, customised visual representation that tells the world who he is and why his followers should care.

Step 3: Delivering Value Through Content Marketing

Your experiences and skillsets determine who you are within your industry.

You can be a engineer, a lawyer or a consultant. It doesnt matter what type of industry you are in.

By sharing your knowledge and expertise in the form of articles on your website, you are displaying your competence to your consumers, business associates or investors.

A brand that displays expertise inspires confidence.

Through content marketing, you are expanding your influence to professionals in your industry. This positions you as an expert in your field and boost your professional reputation.

If you have already started…

If you have already been building your brand on Linkedin, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

All you need to do is to publish all your content on your website and share them on multiple platforms. This is known as off page SEO which will in turn generate organic traffic on the search engine for your website.

What do you think? Have we missed out anything? Share with us your personal branding tips below.