by Leo Wiles
28 February 2014
If you don’t think you have a personal brand, well – you’ve got another thing coming.
Before you started emailing, tweeting or showing mum your first bylines, your personal brand was simply known as your reputation.
Post Google, enhancing your personal brand and letting potential employers and commissioning editors know who you are, what you do and how well you do it is more important than ever. So I have a question for you. How do others see you?
Are you an expert in a niche field such as finance or medical writing? Are you the go-to-person for technology articles? Perhaps you’re best known for your overflowing contacts book, or becoming a writer or radio star after appearing on a reality show.
Is this perception in-line with how you want others to see you? Is it misplaced? Do you need to shift the current perception? If you’re just starting out as a freelancer, are there more strategies you could employ to get noticed?
If you think it’s all too hard, just remember that creating a reputation is an invaluable investment and with the advent of the internet it may have a lifespan longer than yours.
So whatever your current career stage, here are my top tips for growing, nurturing and enhancing your personal brand.
1. Know yourself. Whatever the current industry perception may be of you, don’t ignore it, hide or pretend otherwise. Remember Kyle Sandilands embraced his detractors who called him arrogant and turned it into a hit segment called It’s All About Me.
2. Position yourself. Want to be seen as professional? Act accordingly online. Wear your 9-5 attire and an open smile in your profile picture and create a killer LinkedIn profile.
3. Create a shopfront. Run a blog or website that highlights your expertise in the field you want to be known in. If it’s lifestyle, fashion or marketing write about your passion and tweet, post to FB or instagram appropriately to create the impression that you know and love what you’re writing about.
4. Be fresh. Keep your knowledge up to date and follow the blogs and tweets of the influencers in your area. Don’t ape them – offer something fresh to the conversation when you comment and retweet so that others know what you stand for.
5. Network. Rachel wrote about the importance of this last week. And, even if people have a perception of you, it can be overturned by inviting them out for coffee or crossing the room at a launch and engaging with your potential client and letting them see for who you are – and not who they think you are. And then there’s the online space which is just as important as face to face networking, including our Rachel’s List Gold Community Facebook Group for members.
If you’d like to know more about branding or have another burning issue about freelancing, send us a question.
