30 Costly Personal Branding Errors To Avoid

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

In 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?

• Are You Making These 5 Personal Branding Mistakes?
• 4 Biggest Personal Branding Mistakes People Make
• 5 Personal Branding Mistakes That Could Ruin Your Brand

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.