30 Costly Personal Branding Errors To Avoid

  • 1 min read

See “intellectual dishonesty” if you think this list isn’t for you.

We’re all somewhere on this list.

And that’s not a bad thing; it means there’s still room to grow.

30 personal branding no-no’s

photoIn no specific order:

  1. Lack of a chosen, designed branding plan to follow, including online and offline strategies
  2. Not measuring your branding activities, i.e. never knowing how well you’re following that plan
  3. Intellectual dishonesty such as misreporting numbers to make it appear as if your plan is on track
  4. Dishonesty in general; perhaps in making promises you can’t keep
  5. Too self-serving; it’s always about you and your projects
  6. Appearing too self-serving, which is just as bad
  7. Feeling entitled to success and acting like it
  8. Impatience with branding tactics before they can succeed
  9. Over-reliance on past achievements
  10. Overly slow execution towards new achievements
  11. Waiting too long to brand yourself as a mentor or expert
  12. Not practicing what you preach
  13. Not even being able to demonstrate what you preach, i.e. building an unauthentic brand
  14. Choosing the wrong niche to brand yourself in
  15. Taking too long to realize you’re in the wrong niche
  16. Branding yourself in unrelated niches
  17. Branding yourself with your job title
  18. Adopting a copycat or generic brand
  19. Lacking personality possibly due to fear of exposure or vulnerability
  20. Caught publicly doing something inappropriate, especially if you have role model status or aspire to
  21. Having an unfocused, seemingly random web presence
  22. Failing to check the quality of your content
  23. Not owning your personal domain name
  24. Asking too much of your contact network
  25. Not giving enough back to your contact network
  26. Not having profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and any other social websites critical to your niche
  27. Poor social media management, such as having too many social profiles to manage or not keeping those profiles updated
  28. Poor personal management, resulting in e.g. being late
  29. Poor network management, such as spending too much time with people who only take and not enough time with people who can give
  30. Poor brand management, such as not recognizing any of the other errors in this list and then taking corrective action

Want some more?

If you have any other suggestions for this list, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Or, share a story about how you recognized an error and fixed it.

Author:

Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.

Picture of Jacob Share

Jacob Share

Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.

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