Building a Personal Brand

Entering Adulthood

Since launching the consultancy and taking the blog a bit more seriously (as opposed to something I did to avoid going out on a Saturday night whilst binge watching Gossip Girl for the 4th time in my life), I decided to clean up my act a bit and take adulthood a bit seriously. Cashflow was going to be highly monitored since I’m a start-up and so was placing importance on issues like where I was going to invest my time and assets. I realized immediately that in this day in digital age, your personality is your brand and so it was time I cleaned that up a bit and bring out who I really was: independent, fearless and ambitious. Or so I would like to think I am. So here are a few tips I got from my mentor about revitalizing and building a personal brand.

Blueprint

The first piece of advice for building a personal brand is to map out what you want your personality to exude and your services to say about yourself and the company. The consultancy is some serious business, more analytical than strategic, so I want client to have confidence in me. Easy. I also want them to feel comfortable with me, so I show a bit of personality too. It’s how the design of the site came about.

Substance

On your social media to your emails and your texts, provide something intriguing and engaging to the recipient. One of the biggest problems with my LinkedIn account is that people are posting a lot of things that can be read easily on Twitter or it takes too long to read. I look for impactful articles on LinkedIn and love to share words of encouragement in personal e-mails. The meat of your published content will help with building a personal brand that is impactful.

Associations

This is easily the strongest point and the one that my mentor reiterates over and over again no matter where you are, who you are and what you’ve accomplished. Your connections are incredibly important: companies, colleges and colleagues. Strong connections will fortify your personal brand. Your circle and community of the people around you is the most obvious way to building a personal brand.

Narrative

It’s no secret that I have multiple passions from diplomacy, economics, fashion and entertaining, but that hasn’t stopped me. Try to find the silver lining among all those things. There’s a saying that it’s better to be great at one thing rather than mediocre at a few. My mentor told me to throw that out the window and look at how Martha Stewart revolutionized and invented the lifestyle brand. This is what gave birth to my consultancy!

Tell me what your thoughts and advice on building a personal brand!