Rockable Personal Branding

R A T S K C O R PERSONAL BRANDING by Skellie Rockablepress.com Envato.com © Rockable Press 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or redistributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publishers. Table of Contents Personal Branding: An Introduction 5 Positioning Yourself 7 Building your Reputation 11 Crafting your Elevator Pitch 13 Leveraging Blogging for Branding 15 Perfecting the Package 17 Review Points 21 About the Author 22 AN INTRODUCTION  Personal Branding: An Introduction Personal branding isn’t very different than product branding, except that the entity being branded is you. Just like Nike uses its brand to attach a certain personality and uniqueness to the shoes it sells, your personal brand is made up of the qualities and unique traits you relay about yourself. Your personal brand represents the way you want other people to think about you. Personal branding hinges on perception and the stories you tell about yourself: the things you emphasize and the things you don’t. Does personal branding involve lying? It shouldn’t. More than that, it shouldn’t have to. You don’t need to be a rockstar to build an extraordinary personal brand. Think of personal branding like an artist’s portrait of her or himself. Picasso, for example, created more than 10 self-portraits in his lifetime. Some are so stylized that he’s unrecognizable. Others emphasize his nose and de-emphasize his eyes; others make him look more handsome than he really was. They’re all different; all representations of the varying ways Picasso saw himself. Though all the images represent the same person, they encourage us to view the man through a different lens each time. Pablo Picasso Self-portrait with Cloak * 1901 Pablo Picasso Self-portrait * 1907 Pablo Picasso Self-portrait * 1972 Personal branding is kind of like creating a self-portrait and, in doing so, changing the way people think of you. The next question you probably have is: Why is this important? Why care about your personal brand? Freelancers? There are thousands of them. Bloggers? Even more. Entrepreneurs? Join the crowd. If you can’t get attention, you’re just another speck in the crowd. Part of the average and part of the many. None of us want that for our business. * © 2000 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  Introduction Your personal brand is the ladder you use to escape the average; the device you use to help potential clients, buyers or readers perceive you as the person they’ve been looking for. • A well-built personal brand will help you attract attention from the kind of people you want attention from. • It will make you worth talking about. • It will set you apart from competitors in you