Personal Branding is a process in which individuals and their career or expertise is packaged as brands. It is different from the personal management techniques which focus on self- improvement. Personal branding is more about self-packaging, and managing one’s own positioning amongst followers and peers. The term personal branding was coined in 1971 in an article by management guru Tom Peters.

Just like any physical brand, focus in positioning is the key in personal branding too. If you want to get yourself branded, you should stand for one thing, one distinct quality.

The process of personal branding involves 3 stages:

• Analyze – Involves analysis of your brand, how you are perceived by others and how you want to be perceived to achieve your career and personal goals.
• Create – This was the most difficult part in an earlier, non-digital era. But because of the internet revolution and more recently, social networking revolution, creating your brand and thus a set of followers has become easy. Your own website/blog, social networking profiles, communities you are part of online and offline, all contribute towards creating the brand you.
• Manage – Creating the brand is not enough. It has to be managed and nurtured to grow. Again you can use your original content, your updates on social networks, your interaction in your community to manage your brand and analyze your performance using various feedbacks (online and offline) and online measurement tools.

Given below is an interesting infographic on personal branding by Sestyle.

And here is another infographic by Guy Kawasaki, the author of the bestselling book Enchantment on how individuals can make themselves enchanting to others.

[Feature Image Credit: Vectorstock]