Personal branding is something very few people consider as an investment in their career. How do you get a more enjoyable or higher paying job? Education, portfolio, experience. Once you have enough of those, you can look for your ideal job, submit your resume, and stand a better chance than the rest at getting it.
Who benefits from a personal brand?
I commonly talk to people about the benefit of name recognition for entrepreneurs. If you start a business and thousands of people already know and trust you, your business will have an immediate kick-start customer base. In the web services industry, it is all about staying afloat until you hit critical mass and become profitable. The sooner you can do that, the better. With that in mind, the name recognition and established trust can have a significant impact on the likelihood of success of your business.
How does personal branding plug into the job-seeking paradigm?
While the entrepreneur discussion is very interesting to discuss, there is also great value in personal branding for working professionals.
I have learned this first hand while building a brand around my name during the last year. To help establish a reputation as a skilled developer, I worked on various weekend projects and released them to the public with my name attached. Some of the projects yielded tens of thousands of visitors while a couple even hit the 6 figure mark. Right now, it is remarkably difficult to find good or great Flash developers. Guess what happens when tens of thousands of people view a simple Flash tool you built. Some of them are likely to be business owners or managers that are in need of a Flash developer.
Obviously, the more you put your work and yourself out there, the more you will regarded as an expert on a topic. Also, the more your name is seen and discussed around the industry, the more job opportunities will come your way. From here, we can take a look at your situation from an economics perspective. If you are receiving job offers, especially in an industry that is lacking good workers, the supply and demand scale is tipped in your direction. The supply is you, which is constant, and the demand is the number of companies that want to hire you.
By establishing yourself in the industry and building your own personal brand, you put yourself in a position to choose from jobs that are seeking you rather than settling for which ever employer will accept your resume.
It’s less about deciding if you need one and more about focusing on improving it and communicating it to others.
Of course, Dan. Though, this article is about why — not if — people should be building a personal brand.
This is obviously not a question you would poise to your audience. Your readers are there because they already know that personal branding is important. On your blog, the discussion is and should be around answering the question “How?” Here, the question is “Why and how?”
I’ve been seeing this as a big up and coming “need” if you will for any business professional really, but especially for the freelancer types and entrepreneurs as well.
If I ever finish fidgeting with my blog build, I’ll be out doing the same thing you’re already talking about. Some of the social scene plays on that too with the amount of sites you can brand with your name as the custom url (think linkedin etc).
Good article – personal branding is becoming more important.
Becoming an Expert in your field requires a lot of good blogging to be recognized. well Done!