If you are interested in creating and developing your personal brand, then you’re in the right place.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at a few ways in which you can enhance your personal brand vision in order to do the following:

• Position yourself as an authority in your niche
• Land better clients and be able to charge more for your products and services
• Grow your network to open up more opportunities for business growth
• Build an online community to further increase your opportunities
• Lay the foundation for explosive growth in the future

If you’re an online marketer, there are already countless other people who are doing the same thing you’re doing within your niche.

Your personal brand is the main thing that separates you from everyone else in the industry.

When building your personal brand, the first thing you need to do is to get your thoughts organized and come up with a personal brand vision.

Your vision is simply the way you want people to perceive you, as well as how you would like to live your life (both professionally and personally).

This is a chance for you to inject some personality to ensure that you don’t become just another bland addition to the online scene. The foundation of great personal branding lies in authenticity.

You need to be able to tap into that genuine, humble, unique human quality from which your personality, character, and identity stem.

Follow the steps below to create a successful personal brand:

Step 1: Set Your Values

Values are what drives your life. They are at your very core and you refer to them constantly when making decisions.

Well, you might not always refer to them – everyone makes bad decisions at times. But, when you consider all the great decisions that you make in your life, it’s usually where you considered your values.

For instance, you might have the following set of values:

• Health and well-being
• Family
• Friends
• Wealth
• Ambition
• Intelligence
• Community

Such values define what’s most important to a person. For instance, say a person who holds these values is faced with a decision to take a new job in a different city.

This person might consult their personal values and ask themselves if that’s the best choice when considering their family and friends, as well as other values on their list.

There’s no limit to the number of values you can have on your list.

The values are yours and you can have as few or as many as you want. To find your values, all you need to do is consider the places, people, situations, and feelings that make you happiest in your life.

Step 2: Prioritize Your Values

Values aren’t just important for individuals, they’re also vital for businesses. If you have to hire anyone, it’s always wise to find people who share similar values to those of your company.

Those people with similar values are more likely to meet your business’s needs. Also, they tend to adapt to new roles a lot faster than ones who don’t share the same values.

As you’re going through the list of things that you value in your life, you will realize that not all values are created equal. It’s possible to prioritize the items on your list from the previous step. For most people, the list usually starts with family, then health, wealth, and so on.

You may come across situations in your personal life or your business when you’re faced with decisions where your values are at odds.

For instance, you may be considering doing something that fits in with the ambition value but it may require you to spend a lot of time away from family and friends.

Or, you may be faced with a new job that doesn’t have similar community values to the ones you hold.

Your goal of building a personal brand isn’t simply to help you grow your business or get better customers, but it’s also about helping you find happiness in your professional and personal life.

That way, the decisions that you make are more likely to result in happiness and truly align with your values.

Why is this important?

I’m pretty sure you know some people in your life who have found spectacular success in their professions, but happiness seems to elude them because they realized too late how highly they actually value family life.

This works the other way as well, and you may find people who have wonderful families, but they feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled because of the lack of professional challenges.

That’s why it’s vital that you take the time to prioritize your values so you know the best way to approach your vision of your personal brand.

Step 3: What Are Your Passions?

What is it that you love to do with your time?

Generally, your passions are different from your values, but it’s possible to have some that overlap. You need to think about all your values and passions (particularly the ones that intersect) and determine which activities give you the biggest rewards in your life.

One of the main keys to developing a successful personal brand has to do with identifying your passions and then making it your goal to have those experiences within your professional life.

Passions can be personal and professional, and in order to craft a successful personal brand, it’s a good idea to include both so that you have a pretty good idea of what drives your professional life as well as the things you love doing when you are not working.

Your passions should be those things that interest you, intrigue you, and drive you to investigate.

This should be something that you would love to do even if you were not being paid, and it can even be something that you yourself would pay to do.

Here’s a list of some examples of professional passions:

• Technology
• Smartphones
• Graphic design
• Digital Marketing

Examples of personal passions might include:

• Travel
• Family
• Outdoors
• And so on…

Once you have your passions, along with the list of values, you will have a much clearer vision for who you want to be in a year or two, or five or 20! After identifying your passions, the path that will bring you the most happiness in your life then becomes very clear.

For instance, using the examples above, a person with those values and passions would probably be happiest in a profession that includes designing websites for the travel industry or the outdoor industry, but their work would have to leave enough time to spend with their family and maybe even to take family vacations.

Step 4: What Are You Ideal Traits?

Now it’s time to identify what your traits are. Your traits are the unique personality aspects that shape you as a being.

They are those characteristics that give others insight into the workings of your brain.

Although there are a lot of different theories when it comes to the subject of personality traits, experts have identified five major ones that are listed below:

• Being open to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Agreeableness
• Extroversion
• Neuroticism

These are called the Big Five, and each of them is assessed or measured on a scale. Every individual on earth falls somewhere within the different scales, and that’s what makes up all the different personalities.

Keep in mind that whoever you are now, and whatever personality traits you possess at this moment, it’s possible to make a change even from the traits that you’ve held your whole life.

You can decide who you want to be and identify the ideal personality traits to help you create a successful personal brand.

For instance, if you have been closed off to exciting new experiences until now, it might benefit you to open yourself up to that possibility – if that is the kind of person you want to become as you create your brand.

When it comes to your traits, there isn’t a right or wrong answer.

All you’re simply doing is identifying where you currently stand and how you intend to build your personal brand. Change is always possible, but it’s a good idea to know exactly where you are right now to help you make plans for change, if necessary.

The bottom line is if you follow these steps you will be laying a foundation that will ensure that you not only successfully build and grow your business, but that you’re also able to live a happier life that is a lot more fulfilling.

Important Note:

Since you’re building a personal brand which has a lot to do with the way other people view you and the things you stand for, it might be a good idea to discuss your list of values and passions with your close family, friends, or peers so that you can get valuable feedback that will help you better understand the person you are right now.

At this point, you now have a firm understanding of exactly who you are.

It’s time to move into the next stage and figure out where you’d like to be in both your personal and professional life.

Listed below are the series of steps that you can take to help you lay out the path you need to take to get to where you want to be.

By the end of this section, you’ll have a clear understanding of the work and life that will offer you the most satisfaction and enjoyment in your professional and personal life.

Step 5: What Aspect of Your Life so Far Has Been Rewarding?

The first thing to do is to identify what you found rewarding in your life up to now. You’ve already taken the steps to determine the things that give you passion and make you happy in your life.

Simply use those memories to help you find such aspects of your life that have been very rewarding.

Make a list of all those points and make sure you include aspects from both your personal and professional life. Once you know what has been rewarding so far, you have a better chance of clearly defining the type of life you want in the future.

Step 6: Narrow Those Aspects Down

What you want at this point is one potential vision, so it’s time to narrow down all the aspects on your list from the first step.

Put all the positive aspects into categories.

Narrow each of the categories one at a time until you’re left with just a few. At this point, you start to see a clear path that is most likely to leave you satisfied in your professional and personal life.

Step 7: What’s Your Ideal Career Ending?

At this point, it will be very clear to you which path will make you the happiest.

Instead of a vague idea, you now have something very specific to focus on. For instance, using the examples above, a person with those values and passions might have started off thinking that they wanted to be a ‘marketing executive’.

But now, with the added understanding of themselves, they might have a clearer understanding of who they want to become: a marketing executive for a tech firm that builds mobile technology (or something like that).

Their vision will be a lot clearer.

Step 8: Work Back to the Present from the Carrier Ending

Think about where you want to end up personally and professionally, and then work your way backward.

You’ll likely find that there are many steps you need to take on your path to get to where you want to be. You obviously know that you won’t get there tomorrow, but you can start now to take positive steps toward your goals.

Jot down the end date, and then write down the step that comes right before it.

There may be multiple paths that you can take to that eventual ending. List all the different paths, but when you’re done, prioritize and rank them according to which one has the most appeal to you since you will be spending a lot of your life in those situations.

Step 9: Compare Your Vision against Your List of Values

If you find that the steps you’ve laid out for your work and life clash with your values, then you may have to reassess the path you chose.

For instance, if the path you’ve chosen to your goals requires you to be away from your family a lot of the time, or if it takes you away from your involvement in the community (or anything else that is important to you), then you may have to go back to the drawing board.

Keep doing this until you find a balance in your work and personal life that offers success and satisfaction and is aligned to your aspirations and values.

At the end of this exercise, you will have developed the perfect personal brand that will be your platform for future success in all areas of your life.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published May 25th 2019