Tips on Creating and Growing Your Personal Brand Why Everyone Should Cultivate Their Personal Brand

Why Everyone Should Cultivate Their Personal Brand

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 have the ability to 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:

1. Build Your Platform

If you are going to have a personal brand you will need a website in order 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.

2. Identify Your Uniqueness and Your Strengths

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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. When I think of this tip I’m always reminded of Gary Vaynerchuk and how he built his brand by doing videos sharing 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.

6. 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.

7. Craft Your Personal Brand Persona

This 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. 

By Laura Lake

 

How to Keep Motivated As an Entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, you are solely responsible for goal setting and holding yourself accountable. There is nobody in a higher position that’s responsible for your progress, goal setting and performance. It’s all on you.

Many entrepreneurs, news ones especially, have a difficult time with this. If you are not disciplined and motivated, failure is imminent. If you find yourself lacking focus, it’s time to leverage self-motivation to help you achieve your entrepreneurial goal. Use these eight ways to remain motivated while striving toward your personal and business goals.

1. Get adequate rest every night.

A lot of entrepreneurs like to brag about the fact that they work 18-hour days and don’t sleep. Not fully resting will eventually lead to fatigue and burn-out. What good are 18-hour days in the office if you are tired the majority of them? It’s anti-productive. You would be much better off getting a solid six to eight hours of sleep every night. When you start each day fully recharged and rested you will be more productive.

2. Absorb powerful motivational quotes.

Some of the most popular Instagram accounts are ones that share motivational quotes on a regular basis. Sometimes simply reading motivational quotes can help give you the little boost needed to push through a difficult task or situation. You can follow motivational social media accounts or even receive daily inspirational quotes in your inbox. If you are ever feeling overwhelmed, turn to these resources. You can even consider printing them out and filling your office walls with them. Many etch companies decorate their interior walls with motivational messages.

3. Write down your plan and goals.

Every entrepreneur should have a personal plan written out, in detail, that highlights each goal and a plan to achieve each goal. Using as much detail as possible will help you stay on track, and setting several micro-goals will give you the satisfaction of reaching goals along the way. This can contribute considerably when it comes to self-motivation. Small little tastes of victory can help power you through the difficult times, greatly increasing the odds of you knocking out your larger goals.

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4. Surround yourself with like-minded entrepreneurs.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone, and there will be a lot of friends and family that don’t understand what you are doing, as well as those that will try to discourage you. Pay no attention to them. Instead, make sure to surround yourself with like-minded entrepreneurs that share the same desire to succeed that you do. Consider joining local entrepreneur-themed meetups and mastermind groups. You become who you surround yourself with, so select wisely.

5. Set personal rewards.

It’s human nature to react well to incentives, so leverage this to your advantage. Something as simple as treating yourself to a nice dinner or attending a sporting event if you hit a specific goal can do wonders for your motivation. You can’t expect to work yourself to the bone non-stop until the end. You have to set performance-based rewards, and collect on them when you do complete a milestone. Use whiteboards or other visual ways to track your progress to each reward. Seeing them will instill additional motivation.

6. Have a daily morning routine.

Every person will have a different start-of-the-day routine that will effectively help them begin their work with a high-level of energy and enthusiasm that will carry them throughout the day. For some people, it’s dedicating 30 minutes in the morning to reading with no distractions. Some entrepreneurs work out in the morning, as they find an hour of physical exercise first thing when they wake up is what they need to push through each day without a decrease in energy level.

7. Schedule personal time for yourself weekly.

Being an entrepreneur can completely consume you, causing one to focus 100 percent of his or her energy on the business. It’s not healthy to be completely caught up in your business, so make sure you set aside some time each week to do something completely unrelated to your business. Some suggestions include meditation, hiking, golfing, traveling or any other hobby or activity that allows you to disconnect from your business for a few hours every week. This keeps you fresh and full of motivation.

8. Remain positive.

Entrepreneurs are all programmed differently. What works to motivate one, might not essentially work for another. Regardless of what motivates you, it’s important that you remain positive along the way, no matter what obstacles are thrown in front of you. Not everyone gets to do what they love for a career, but if you play your cards right, you have the chance to live the entrepreneurial dream. There will be days you want to quit and situations that seem impossible to navigate around, but by remaining positive you will be able to channel your inner strength needed to reach the finish line.

By:

Nicolas Cole, Contributor

Writer & Entrepreneur.

Ways To Reignite Your Passion For Success

No matter what or who you’re involved in, it’s tough to keep the fires of passion burning. Why do you think one out of every two marriages ends in divorce?

This certainly holds true for a business plan or product launch.

It’s easy to get pumped up and passionate about a product you KNOW will be the next great million-dollar idea. There’s no problem burning the midnight oil while you perfect your pitch, tinker with a prototype or map out your future success.

But what happens as days or weeks turn into months or years – and that sought-after success remains elusive? It’s not easy to stay fired up – not when you’ve been burning the candle from both ends for so long.

But you can’t give up now. Not when you’ve lived and breathed your idea for as long as you can remember.

So how do you retain the passion – or reignite it when you’re tired, frustrated and maybe even broke?

This may not help, but you need to remind yourself that we all get discouraged at some point. It still happens to me from time to time – and I’ve successfully launched more than 500 products.

For someone who is pushing for their first launch, it’s only natural to hit a few bumps along the way.

Donna Every, founder of Arise Consulting, says, "Remember your first love. Your passion or first love is the fuel that will keep your entrepreneurial fire burning. If you lose sight of your passion, the reason you’re doing this in the first place (whatever ‘this’ is for you), your entrepreneurial spirit will begin to die.”

If you are feeling like your pilot light is out, don’t let your dreams go down in flames. Here are a few ways to spark your excitement and stay the course.

Take a break! This may sound counter intuitive, but it really can do you and your passion a world of good to step away from your product or business plan for a few weeks – or maybe even a month. Your mind works in mysterious ways. It sometimes works better when you aren’t consciously trying to break through a plateau or obstacle.

Hit the books! These days it may be better to hit the Internet – and do some research into how others have succeeded after encountering similar frustrations. Watch a few videos of others who’ve enjoyed tremendous entrepreneurial success. Their excitement and joy is a great motivator! You’ll want to dive right back into your work.

Find a mentor! It’s great having someone to turn to when things get rough. Especially when that someone is a person who was once where you are now. Someone who learned the secret to success – and is willing to share it with you! Don’t know where to turn? Try findamentor.org. It’s a free website with a database of mentors and apprentices.

Lower the bar! If your idea of business success is launching a new product in six months and making your first million in three years, step back and adjust your numbers. Maybe it will take you a year to get that product off the ground. And maybe you won’t see a million dollars revenue for six years. Giving yourself more time to get it right weakens your self-imposed myth that you are a failure at business.

Learn to delegate! It’s your dream and your team. But that doesn’t mean you have to carry the ball on every play. Divvy up the duties among the members of your team. They’ll feel empowered and more important – and you’ll be able to focus on big-picture matters rather than the daily grind.

Become more unsocial! Put down your smart phone. Step away from your tablet. You’ll feel less stressed and more focused if you don’t try to answer all your emails or respond to all your texts immediately. Staying focused is really a key when you are trying to launch a product or fine-tune a business plan. Constant starts and stops are stressful and can leave you feeling unfulfilled after a long day’s work.

Befriend encouragers! A super way to keep your entrepreneurial passion alive is to hang out with optimistic and encouraging individuals. Jettison the naysayers and cozy up to the “you can do it” crowd. Negative people are like energy vampires that can suck the life – and passion – out of you.

The bottom line: do whatever you can to keep your passion or get it back. Work without passion is… well, it’s work! The great thinkers and doers of the world have been fueled by their passion.

As the oft-quoted Terri Guillemets once said, “Follow your passion, and success will follow you.” By Kevin Harringnton