Spare a moment and search for yourself on the internet. Use Google or any notable search engines you like, browse social media networks and use any search fields you encounter. What do they have to say about you? Are you there? If yes, are you on the first page or the second or third?
You need to do some quick search about yourself once in a while, just to see what the internet knows you. Are the information good or are they bad? How do they reflect the current you? Is your name on the web the way you want it to be?
What you're seeking here is "personal branding", a practice in which you identify yourself as a brand to market yourself and your career.
People on the internet are there for a multitude of reasons: some people just want to be seen or exist while others want to be popular. Some want to sell something on the behalf of their name, and many others do what they like to do.
As someone that is on the web, whatever your reason might be, the information others have about you should be good.
If you're a notable figure, an actor, a famous singer, a journalist, a well-known entrepreneur, government official or even a common web users, you may have online footprints lurking somewhere to be seen. If there are any, some are good, and some can be bad. What you need to do is to take a closer look at each of them to see whether they affect your personal branding, or not.
Personal Branding As You On The Web
A brand is everything that goes with either a symbol, design, name, sound, reputation, emotion, employees, tone, and much more. A brand is what separates one thing from another, making them unique and distinguishable. Your name is unique, and it must represent something good if you want to brand yourself successfully.
Branding on a business-level is common. Most businesses have their own web presence and nothing is going to stop them from expanding. Because branding is becoming just as important on a personal level, your efforts to brand your business should go the same with your name branding. So if you want it big, you better make it big.
After all, you might work for a business that works with other businesses. But it's actually the people working with them that makes business relationships valuable.
Why should you build your personal brand?
Your business is where you sell something. Your name is what represents you inside that business; the person behind something that some people matters. Building a recognizable business brand is important, but so as building a personal brand in a way to open many more opportunities.
Several advantages of personal branding include: a better job, better contacts and clients for your company, industry recognition and many others.
Branding yourself can give a lot of potential in your professional and business life. If you want your name seen, you better make it seen.
Know, Show, Grow
To grow your online presence and influence, you need to first know yourself. Before going to write some articles about yourself or trying to deliver presentation or interview, or even trying to get influence on social media, you must first be clear about who you are and what sets you apart from others.
You need to know your strong points (and weak points) and understand the relevant and compelling elements in which you want to say out loud.
Strong personal brands know their vision, mission, values and passions. They have all documented their goals, and are fully aware of their powers as well as their signature strengths. Knowing yourself isn't all introspection, it's the phase to learn what others think about you.
Since your personal brand will be held in the hearts and minds of those who will know you, you must be aware of external perceptions when you're uncovering and defining yourself.
Once you've gained the clarity of knowing yourself, either by introspectively or from external feedback, you can then filter them out to learn your personal brand statement in order to describe your unique credibility and value.
By clearly defining and documenting your statement, you can then begin to get your messages out. Here you need some tools and some websites to aid you. They in turn will express the whole you to the world. For added benefits, you can define your personal brand by also using an identification system by including some elements such as: tag line, font, color, images and many others to help you in becoming unique. But they should all be "packaged" so they can be used constantly.
Effective personal branding, or any branding process for that matter, requires consistent repetition. In this step, you're integrating your brand into everything you do by building and executing your personal media plan to increase the effectiveness of your message. This in turn will increase your credibility in all your activities.
Personal branding requires commitment, attention, and constant intention. But this should not be as difficult as what most people think because above all, personal branding is all about being yourself, and that should be the easiest thing to do.
Maintaining and Concerving
Personal branding is often defined as your digital footprint. The more you (or the web) use your given name, the more your name is exposed, the more your digital footprints are available. Your digital footprints grow the more your name is used on the web, so always be aware that some first impressions won't be good.
To take control of your digital footprint isn't easy, but it is indeed doable. As your first step, you need to have access to all of your digital footprints that are either free or editable. One of the most prominent place for your digital footprint is social media networks. To name a few, Facebook, Twitter and others are the ones that have the most influence.
For you to take control of your online personal brand is to create accounts on those places and practically everywhere your name can be placed in a good way. To advantage your online personal brand, you need to "own" it before someone else does.
The next thing to do is to create a blog or website under your "brand name". You can use this to link all your social media account and your online activities that suit public consumption into one "formal" and "official" place. With this, you can also bundle it with an email address that is really you, and use it to highlighting the information you want the world to know.
The things you may want to control is the information the web has to give about you. From your real name, your email address, your home address, the city you live, your date-of-birth, to even your photos, videos and many other materials that can point to you.
Goodbye Past, Hello Future
You or your personal brand are surrounded by layers of publicly known information. This is known as your digital footprint.
Whether you're a financial planner or a blogger, a personal brand has come to seem like a professional requirement. It's becoming one of the keys to success and fulfillment in the current fast-paced world. Every person is a media company, anyone can have a platform now, whether you're unemployed or a CEO.
But the thing here is that people make mistakes. Don't be utterly sad if you made mistakes and then realize that the internet documented those things for you. Mistakes are the things that made you a human. So if you seen something about you that you don't like, you shouldn't be surprised, you need to take care of it.
To engage digitally, you must see not only what users are seeing but also the context in which they are doing it. The context here is made up of both your present state, your prior history and all this is contained in your digital life.
If you have forgotten about you past, the internet may not. If you see yourself as a different you from yesterday, the world is yet to acknowledge that. You may be a different person now but the public may see you differently.
Lets say that you searched for your name and found out something unrelated or not the representing the current you. While some information can be changed, some others can't. You may want to contact the website to see how the people behind it can help you. Another thing you can do is to submit a form to search engines, requesting them to demote the links you don't want to be shown on their SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
So if your digital footprints aren't the way you like them to be, it's necessary to change them, and the sooner the better. While this won't matter much now, it can pose a huge effect in the future.
Further reading: Humanize Your Brand to Build Trust