How to grow a personal brand and generate income

In the digital world like now, personal branding is very necessary in the world of work. Personal branding doesn’t mean showing off your abilities, but more about how you ‘sell yourself’ or show someone your qualities so that you will be taken into account in the world of work. Building a personal brand requires a clear concept so that you can project yourself clearly in front of others.

Do you want to build a personal brand for yourself? Today anyone can search for you on the internet and learn anything about you through what they find in search results.

Personal branding in cyberspace helps you to gain credibility, new relationships, and even new opportunities

Personal Branding is a way to promote yourself and your achievements in your career and skills, including:

  • Job seekers who want to quickly get their dream job
  • Employees who want to be more successful in their career
  • Freelancers who want to get multiple projects
  • Entrepreneurs who want to build the best image according to the company they are building

Anyone needs personal branding, whether he is an entrepreneur, graphic designer, writer, painter, researcher, programmer, developer, or even a student.

Why should you pay attention to personal branding?

Increase Others’ Trust in You

Personal branding lets people know you better. As a result, other people’s trust in you will increase because you are no longer a stranger.

Strengthen Your Credibility

As mentioned above, personal branding allows other people to easily see your achievements. So that your credibility will be strengthened because it is already evident.

Build Confidence

If you can maximize personal branding, you can be more enthusiastic and maximal in doing things. Because you feel confident with the skills you have.

Expand Your Connection

In this digital era, personal branding can easily increase your exposure, you know. Especially if you are actively networking. As a result, your connection will be very wide. In fact, even beyond the field, you are in.

Show Yourself as You Are

It is almost impossible to fake personal branding. Why? Because personal branding is born from your passion and life values. As a result, people will believe that you are real and not made up.

Benefits of Personal Branding

In this digital era, personal branding is increasingly important. Because HR, clients, investors, or potential partners will type your name on Google and check whether or not your digital footprint matches what they need.

Strong personal branding on the internet will make it easier for you to be recognized, both personally and professionally. People can easily see your skills, work, and achievements online.

You have to be able to convince them that you are the best in your field. And a personal branding strategy can help you make that happen.

Building a Strong Personal Branding Strategy

Not only bringing in customers, but good branding will also be very effective in generating customers. Opportunities to make the business more professional are also raised with the personal brand development effort.

Maximizing Social Media and Website

The process of building personal branding is still long. However, don’t give up just yet. For this one point, it is quite familiar to you, namely social media. There are many social media that you can use for your personal branding strategy. From Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, to LinkedIn.

The Sport Social Survey in 2018 stated that as many as 90 percent of people use social media to gain experience as well as communicate.

Therefore, you can build personal branding as well as emphasize the positioning aspect by maximizing the role of social media optimally. In this digital era, building a personal brand can be done simultaneously offline and online.

You can use the web, blogs, or various popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to increase the value of your business. An optimal social media marketing process can improve branding while reaching thousands and even millions of consumers in several exposures.

In addition to providing a potential market, social media, blogs, and websites can also be a place to share information, promote quickly and accurately about product advantages, as well as build a personal brand.

An effective and efficient strategy in carrying out personal branding will generate trust from the market which will then be in line with significant business income. Moreover, the characteristic of interaction in cyberspace is that they are not face-to-face, so customers will really consider decisions based on the trust factor.

Before starting to build a personal brand on social media, the first thing that must be matured is the concept of the brand and product that will be developed.

Does everything have to be used for personal branding?

Maybe yes, maybe not. It depends on your needs, field of work, and target audience. You can use only one, two, or even all existing social media channels. The point is to research first. You can follow this social media maximization guide to help you determine which social media is right for you.
Create a Content Strategy

There are many portfolios, websites already exist, social media also exists, now is the time to create a content strategy. You can’t just sit back and wait for people to visit your portfolio website.

You need to invite potential clients to visit your profile both on social media and on the website. Well, to achieve this, a content strategy is needed. You can start from the blog.

On blogs, you can share insights, tips, or tutorials in the areas you are good at. For example, you are a graphic designer. You can make tips on starting a career as a graphic designer or design tutorials using certain tools.

By creating solutive and interesting content, you can attract many readers. Once you’ve gathered a large number of readers, you can start offering them the services or products you sell.

Build Networking

Networking is something that cannot be avoided in personal branding. Even if you are shy or don’t like meeting strangers, networking is a must.

Through networking, you can meet new friends, new work partners, better job opportunities, new clients, investors, or even new mentors. You can start building a network from the internet. Usually, each field of work usually has its own community on the internet. Whether it’s in a Facebook group or even having its own community website.

Collaborate

From the networking that has been built, you can meet people who have the same vision and mission as you. If you find the right person, you can invite them to collaborate with you.

Collaboration is one of the tips to build your personal brand. With collaboration, you can get new insights, new ideas, and even new work with your collaboration partners. The collaboration will require you to be able to continue to grow and not be stuck at the same level.

Personal branding will be more successful if you are able to find a character that makes you unique from other coworkers. For example, the character in terms of dressing, talking, walking, and how to interact with other people.

In building character, you must be able to be a creative person so that the character can grow quickly. It sounds a little difficult, but when you start, you will realize that nothing is difficult.

The point is whether you want to or not to cultivate character in yourself. If you want, then you will get used to the process.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you can start building your own personal brand.

Good personal branding is capital that can lead you to a brilliant career. There is one thing that should not be forgotten when building personal branding, which is to be yourself so that the results of personal branding are maximized.

Because whatever your job, personal branding is still important. That way, you can get projects outside of your full-time job or you can even become a full-time freelancer.