7 Ways To Grow Your Personal Brand in Less Than a Week

Promoting your name and company online is not easy. Some entrepreneurs have no idea where to start, but they key is begin by building your personal brand. You have to begin thinking of yourself and your name as a brand. If you start there, everything else will follow.

Check out Dhaval Patel’s advice from Entrepreneur Magazine below!

1. Do Your Research
Before you can build a positive personal profile online for yourself, you need to know what is already out there about you. Do you have some unsavory photos floating out there in the world wide web? One strategy is to set up Google alerts using your name. Try to clean up any negative press or posts (and always take a peak at your social media). You may even want to consider tweaking your name by using your middle initial or dropping your nickname to build your new profile. Get your name as clean and professional as possible before you begin building your brand online.

2. Get a Website
If you’re going to make a name for your brand online, you need a site where your audience can visit so they can learn more about you! One of the ways to do this is to get a personal website with an “About Me” page. There are lots of tools you can use and websites you can visit to help you build your own website.

If you want your website to be dynamic and professional-looking, make sure that you allot enough time, effort (and even money) into it. Use high-resolution photos of yourself and keep your narrative short and engaging.

3. Think About Your Audience.
This aspect of building your brand is perhaps the most important. Consider who are you trying to reach? This is called your target audience.

If Dhaval Patel has learned anything in his years of marketing, it’s that you need to define your audience early on. Are you trying to direct people to your personal website so they can learn something from you? What do you have to offer them?

By answering these questions, you’ll be able to get a better picture of your audience, and this will give you direction on how you communicate with them on your website and on social media.

4. Make Some Friends with Influential People Online.
Influencers are some of your best assets as you build your personal brand. Over the years, you’ll want to make friends with people online who have audiences in your industry. These days, its one of the best and most effective ways to network. By building these relationships, your influencers will be more willing to share or retweet social posts of yours to their audiences too.

If you get free exposure to an audience that you are already trying to target, it’s a win-win for both parties. Try out this technique to see if it works for you. If you have the right influencers in your circle, you’ll get more traffic to your website and more engagement in your social posts.

5. The More People You Meet, the Better.
When you are building a personal brand, the people you know can help promote you. With that said, keep in mind that you shouldn’t limit relationships to online. Reach out to some influencers online, and that is perfectly acceptable, but you’ll also need to do everything you can to meet influencers in other ways. Go to local events related to your industry. Network at happy hours!

Tell everyone what you do everywhere you go, from the waiter at your favorite restaurant to the people you sit beside at church. Expand your circles — and your personal brand – simply by being present with others.

6. Be you and only you.
When you are building a personal brand, you’ll want to put your best face forward. But you also don’t want to create an online presence that isn’t true to who you really are. Social users are savvy about honesty – and they can tell when marketers are not being vulnerable and genuine.

So make sure you are putting forth an honest profile of who you are. When you do this, you’ll effortlessly build trust!

7. Capture Information.
Once you have started building a relationship with your online audience, it will be time to collect some of their information. This will be useful in building an email list, for example, so you can communicate more directly with your target audience.

One way to do this, is once you have proven yourself as a trusted voice who offers valuable content, you can ask your audience to sign up for your monthly newsletter. Create videos to share your brand story. Offer a free giveaway or run a contest to generate excitement around free prizes. This makes it fun.

It can be a daunting task to try to get started on building your personal brand. Keep in mind though that these strategies can be implemented in less than a week. It won’t be long before you have a great target audience listening to you and looking to you for advice. That’s what a personal brand is all about!

Source:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296030 original article by Dhaval Patel