Make time for your personal brand

With busy lives and work and home pressures, it’s hard to find time to build and market your personal brand, but the benefits are well worth it for your career.

Finding time to brand and market one’s self when bombarded with many different priorities is a challenge. The endless emails and never-ending to-do list mean that personal branding and marketing can quickly slip to the bottom of your priorities pile. Here are some ways to ensure that doesn’t happen:

1) Set aside a daily or at least a weekly time in your diary to think about your personal brand. Identify one action that you can take in this time to build and market Brand YOU. Remember that great personal brands are built on incremental change. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz say, “Small incremental change is better than ambitious failure.”

2) Get creative. Keep a record of great quotes you have come across, or articles that have stood out. Perhaps something sparked your interest in a press release, radio or TV interview, an interaction on social media, a presentation, seminar or conference. Maybe you’ll be inspired by ideas from someone you have met or books you have read. Use these as triggers to think about your area of expertise and how you can create some new thinking.

3) Get help. It’s not always realistic to think you can do things on your own.
Just as companies enlist marketing resources to grow and develop their personal brands, you too need to enlist some help. Get a copywriter to help you with an article for a professional journal, or chat to a social media expert about how to grow your brand online. Maybe even enlist a buddy.

4) Get started. Write articles, blogs or social media posts. Maybe even try for a slot on a community radio station. Consider setting up small group discussions and finding other ways of adding value to your networking contacts and prospects.
It is all about learning to better communicate the value you deliver. Once you’ve started something and you’re excited about it and seeing the value in it, it’s much easier to continue to make time for it.

About Donna Rachelson
Rachelson is a branding and marketing specialist who uses her passion and 25 years of experience in strategy, marketing and change management to empower people and teams to achieve breakthrough results.

She is the founder of Branding & Marketing YOU. The company offers keynote presentations, workshops, strategic marketing consulting, coaching and support services. She is also author of the best-selling book Branding & Marketing YOU, the first South African based personal branding and marketing book.

For more information on Donna or Branding & Marketing YOU, visit www.brandingandmarketingyou.com.