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Monday, October 27, 2008

Personal Branding


If you are a CEO or an entrepreneur you are no doubt already familiar with the fact that personal branding is the new old-fashioned way to bring your business success. It’s printed everywhere! All you have to do is go out, promote your personal brand and watch your profit margins soar!

If only it were actually that easy.

The problem with personal branding is that while the technique is invariably successful, it doesn’t work very well if you aren’t familiar with the concept of personal branding and how it applies to business-both topics that articles on the subject tend to be suspiciously grey on! How a person can read a three page article on personal branding and still not have a clue what it is is a complete anomaly, but it happens. One can only assume that the people out there writing about personal branding don’t understand it any better than you do.

What is personal branding? Before you can begin to make any kind of marketing strategy work for you you have to understand its ins and outs, the way it works, how to make the most of it and what it has the potential to do for your life and your business.

You know that as a company and a business entity the most important thing you should be worrying about is your reputation. Your reputation is going to decide whether or not people come to you to meet their needs and, ultimately, whether your business will


succeed or fail. As the leader of the company, your reputation is tied up in your business. That means that while you’re in the hot spot you need to keep your reputation blemish free and do everything you can to cultivate your reputation as an expert in your field.

Welcome to personal branding.

Personal branding means marketing your image. When your image is strong enough, successful enough and popular enough, people will come to your company just to work with you. They trust your company because they know as an expert in your field you wouldn’t settle for any less than the best in your products and services.

Celebrities practice personal branding all the time. Why do you think the Olsen twins’ clothing line was so spectacularly popular when it first hit the market? Not because the clothes were remarkable (the designs didn’t really fit their niche until several years later) but because it was promoted by Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.

There isn’t a red blooded American that was alive during the eighties that doesn’t recognize those two names.

You want that to be you. You want people to flock to your company just because you’re there. You can actually use your own reputation to boost your company’s profit margin.

Personal branding is easy. All it requires is confidence in your skills and an understanding of how those skills relate to your chosen market. Now all you have to do is go out there and show the world what you're really made of.

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