Building Your Online Brand: Start with the Message

Over the next few weeks I'm writing about how you can build a strong online personal brand using some free tools that are readily available to anyone with Internet access. A few days ago I reviewed why it's important to have a strong online identity. In today's post, I'm going to talk about some of the elements of personal branding in preparation for later posts on using the tools.

What Is a "Personal Brand"?
In the world of organizations, a brand is the total perceived value of that organization, relative to competitors, as viewed by a particular audience. In other words, a brand is how people view an organization in comparison to other, similar organizations. Your personal brand, then,  is the perception that people have of you, as compared to other people in similar positions.  Obviously the goal of personal branding is to create a consistent, positive message about who you are and what you stand for that will make you stand out from the crowd.

The Elements of Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand is the sum total of information about you that people will use to form an impression of your value. Your appearance, your personal characteristics, your work experience and education, your strengths, your passions, your work values and your accomplishments are all factors in developing your brand. What makes your brand personal, though, is how you position these elements to show you as a unique individual. In other words, how do you use all of this information to convey to your audience what makes YOU special?

Some Resources for Developing Your Personal Brand
There are a lot of helpful online resources for developing your personal brand. You may want to start with this quiz, What's the Value of Your Personal Brand? It will give you a good idea of the steps you'll need to take in putting together your online identity. Then check out the slideshow I've embedded above and some of these other resources

• Personal Branding and Career Self-Marketing Tools
• Personal Branding Podcast
• Your Core and Functional Brands
• Excerpts from Be Your Own Brand

For those new to developing an online identity, it's important for you to start with some of these exercises to begin developing your personal brand before you dive into using tools.

If you've already been using some of the online branding tools I mentioned previously--blogging, Linked In, etc.--it's probably a good idea for you to go back to this initial stage of thinking through your personal brand and then looking at what  you have online to see how well it's communicating your brand.

Branding can be difficult, especially for women because it can feel like bragging. But in a world where our competition for a job isn't just down the street, it's across the country or on another continent, branding is really a critical tool to develop.