Five Steps To Brand Yourself In 2020 Personal branding helps you build authenticity, trust, credibility, and connections.

If you're wondering why branding yourself is important, well, for starters, you need to be aware of the fact that everyone has a personal brand. Personal branding has a key role to play in the development of your career. For increasing the chance of advancing in career, you should know how to properly brand yourself. This ensures you are in the right spot to excel in career, and reach where you wish to be.

In simple words, personal branding is the process of creating a public identity for the target audience. It includes conveying your beliefs, purpose, values, and goals. For those who don't know, personal branding is similar to business branding. The difference is that you will be marketing yourself.

In my 14+ years of professional experience, I have gained a wide range of experience by jumping between different positions. I have worked at various posts in sales, tech support, digital marketing, coaching, training, e-commerce, and many more. There was only one thing in common across these jobs: I didn't apply for any of them! Wondering how did I get these jobs? It was because of my connections; they recommended me based on my experience and skills This, in a nutshell, explains why personal branding is crucial.

Whether you create it or not, personal branding exists. Just take a moment, and search yourself on Google. The results that are displayed are the first impression people have of you. Now, the information people come across is dependent on what you share across all social media sites. With the increase in the use of social media, it is imperative for everyone to improve personal branding.

Through personal branding, you can create connections with people from different industries. When it comes to the limit of personal branding, there is no restriction. By building your reputation, you will get more exposure. For instance, you will get the opportunity of speaking at an event; this will help you collect business cards, and build meaningful connections will all sorts of people.

Personal branding is also a great way to inform people what type of person you are. It is something that will motivate you to be successful. When you build a personal brand, you will feel comfortable during work. In addition, it will help in clarifying that your intentions are genuine and clear. People are comfortable around people they know. Since they will know about your energy source, they will let you be in charge of their needs- and, well, everyone knows trust is crucial for success.

Passion, values, goals, and skills are some of the key aspects of personal branding. It is important for people to grow and advance in a career. Personal branding will help in having authenticity. This is because a fake personality cannot be created. For achieving your goals, you have to be authentic. When you are authentic, you can minimize your weaknesses.

Related: Your Business Brand Is An Extension Of Your Personal Brand

Personal branding is thus important for anyone who wants to advance in their career, as it helps you build authenticity, trust, credibility, and connections. I assume by now that you are finally convinced that personal branding is the way to go in order to put your name out there and beat your competition no matter which field you are in. But the question now becomes: how does one do it properly? I've used the techniques outlined below, and with them having worked wonders for me, I'd suggest you give these tactics a try today if you want to give your career a boost:

1. Upgrade your mindset The first and most important step is to completely switch the way you think, especially when it comes to social media. Social media is no longer about posting photos of delicious food and fancy vacations; it has a deeper objective to show off your true skills across multiple platforms that are consumed on daily basis by many audiences worldwide.

2. Define your expertise Do this by simply outlining your experience on a piece of paper, and use it as a roadmap to reflect it in the digital world! This step will let you find out exactly what your core abilities are, and how you can steer them in your favor to expose yourself to the world. Even if you have zero experience, you can start by knowing exactly what you want to do, and then immediately start educating yourself utilizing thousands of available learning sources we have now. Remember to share with the world your progress; you will be amazed how many people are going to be interested in what you share.

3. Be everywhere Yes, everywhere! Even the platforms that you hate or don't know how to use, you have to be on them, and learn how to use them! This is how I gained over 20,000 followers on my Instagram where I share business tips in Arabic in a very unique way. I also use YouTube to share in depth Arabic videos about e-commerce, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship.

4. Share knowledge What you need to do across your different online channels is to share knowledge as much as you can, and help everyone to benefit from your unique experience. Make sure the content you share will become important to the people who will start to follow you and keep track of what you post.

5. Engage with others Don't build a one-way channel that broadcasts information only, create an engaging community around you, where you'd reach out to others in your field, and engage with their content in a meaningful way. You can do this through simple steps like, liking their post (if you really do), and leaving a comment that not only attracts more eyeballs, but also get recognized as an active person who provides value.

Related: The How-To: A Guide To Creating Your Personal Brand