My post last Saturday, highlighted how I built my personal brand from scratch and the opportunities that followed. For today’s post, I want to focus on how you can get started building your personal brand so you can receive some awesome opportunities as well.
What’s required to begin building your personal brand?
First, let me start off by saying that building your personal brand will take time, dedication, persistence and passion. If you don’t truly care about building your personal brand, you will easily become distracted and lose the focus you need to succeed.
But, most importantly, don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you that you can’t build an incredibly powerful personal brand. They’re just plain wrong!
Now let’s hit it!
First steps to building your personal brand
Take what you’re passionate about and have the biggest brainstorm session of your life. Don’t hold any ideas back. Write everything down and let it flow. At this stage, your not aiming for perfection, you’re looking to get the big ideas down on paper so you can build on them and organize them later.
Brainstorming my personal brand, my blog, and how I would promote it took several sessions over the course of a month. Some days the ideas flowed better than others – stay with it, don’t feel like you need to rush or that you’re not making headway. The best ideas take time and constant improvement before they become truly great.
Make your brainstorm period electric
I love to read. I find it relaxing and I know I’m getting smarter at the same time. When I read, ideas pour into my head and I’m able to create original content of my own later. You should always be reading, but it’s especially important during your brainstorm period.
A great way to have information you’re interested in delivered to your e-mail or RSS reader is through Google Alerts.
By reading up on the subjects you’re interested in you will find that you become extremely knowledgeable and increasingly creative quite quickly. You will become more confident and likely to share your thoughts with the world, which in turn helps to create and reinforce your personal brand attributes.
After your brainstorm, organize your thoughts into a web
Making a web will help you get an idea of how you’re going to present your personal brand to the world – your blog, social networks, personal website, etc. It will help you create some structure to your thoughts and begin to give you some confidence that you truly do have something to present to the world. And, by the way, everyone has something to share with the world!
I remember when I was making my web and I looked down at my scrap piece of paper, and said to myself, “I’ve got something here. This is mine.” That was a damn good feeling and you will get there too. You just need to stay with it – persistence pays!
Let’s recap what we explored today to begin building your own personal brand
1.) Have the biggest brainstorm session of your life and let your brainstorm develop over time.
2.) Read all you can and use Google Alerts to help you find great info you can use to create some really cool ideas.
3.) After your brainstorm period, organize your brainstorm into a web to gain clarity and structure.
4.) Have fun!
With a little bit of time, dedication, persistence and passion you will be well on the way to creating a unique and powerful personal brand online.
Make sure to check back next Saturday for the next steps on how to create your personal brand online so you can reap the rewards.
