Its Not About You - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Its Not About You - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career I hate to tell you this, I really do. The truth is that most people dont give a hoot about your personal brand. They dont care how great you are at what you do. They dont care that you are the perfect solution to their problem. They dont care about how many impressive clients youve had or what wildly successful projects youve led. And unless they went to the same college as you, they dont really care about that either. Obviously, this is a problem if youre trying to get your brand out there. Youre focused on telling the world about everything you can do and why youre the best person to do it. You want people to come by your website and spend time learning all about you. Shine the spotlight After all, personal branding is all about shining the spotlight on yourself, right? Sure. If you want people to avoid you. No one wants to hang-out with the braggart who is only interested in their own life! If you want your personal branding to actually be effective, it shouldnt be about you at all. Instead, your personal branding should be all about someone else. Yes, I actually wrote that. And Ill repeat it, just so you know its not a typo: When youre branding yourself, you need to stop writing about yourself and focus totally on your potential customer or employer. Why in the world do you want to do this? Isnt focusing on someone else the exact opposite of personal branding? Not at all. In fact, its the only way to get your brand heard. People are really busy right now. Theyre worrying about their own jobs and trying to get more done with less. Theyre buried in work and barely have time to focus on what they need to get done. Your potential employer or customer doesnt have time to listen to you babble on about yourself in hopes they might hear something useful. Instead, they want to know whats in this conversation for them. If you dont make that clear right away, theyll leave your website or tune out from your conversation. Theyre too busy to do anything else. So how do you know if youre focused on yourself or your target market? Take a look at your website and blog. Do you speak in the first person a lot? Does your website say I do this or Im great at that? Is it all an About page? Or do you talk about the issues and problems facing your potential customer/employer and focus on solutions? Are your examples all about the steps you took, or are they about the results that happened because of your work? What are they thinking about? When you come up with your personal branding strategy, are you asking yourself: What is my potential customer/employer thinking about? What is their day like? What issues are they facing? And the most important question of all: What can I do to make their life/work easier? If youre doing that already, youre on the right track. If youre not, you might be turning off the very people you want to reach. Once youve answered the questions above, you should focus your entire personal branding strategy around that final question. Everything you write should be focused on helping your potential customer/employer and showing them that you understand the problems they are facing and know how to solve them. Your goal should be to leverage your personal brand so that when someone from your target market visits your site, they think Wow, this person really understands me and can make my life easier. If you can do that, youve hooked them. Then, once theyre hooked, you can tell them all about you. But, in order to get their attention, it needs to be about them first. Thats why a successful personal brand is one thats all about someone else. Author: Katie Konrath writes about creativity, innovation and ideas so fresh they should be slapped! at www.getFreshMinds.com.