Building your personal brand online

building your personal brand online

Your personal brand content plan can include all sorts of fun things like live videos, Instagram stories and podcasts… But before you run off and go mad with all the shiny things, you want to make sure that you have the foundations in place for building your personal brand online.

That sounds simple enough, but it can be overwhelming to know where to start – whether you’re just beginning to create your online presence, as a new business owner or freelancer, or you’ve been active online for some time but you’re wanting to shift direction. To help you out, this week I’m also sharing the opportunity to get my hands-on support in helping you execute your branding plan online. Make sure you check out these resources if that sounds like something you would appreciate – whether it’s that you don’t have time to spend on reviewing and optimising your online presence, or you’d just prefer that an expert does it for you.

Where to start

Your website about page

A well-written about page can help you share your story, establish your authority, and attract your ideal clients. It will bring to life your unique personality and style while increasing your value perception among your target market, weaving in your background, skills and strengths, and communicating how you can help your audience.

In fact, your “about me” page is not really about you after all, but about your prospective client. Yes, you want to be establishing yourself as the credible expert who can solve their urgent problem, but this needs to be framed in the context of that client and their wants, needs and desires. It’s not meant to be a self-indulgent treatise on how great you are, a promotional piece that’s all about “me” and “I”. Getting the balance right to attract and convert clients effectively can be tricky.

Your website services page

Having a strong “work with me” page will help you communicate what you do and attract more of your ideal clients, clearly demonstrating the value you can bring and converting your website visitors effectively into clients. You want to have a coherent page that builds your credibility with distinctive services that speak to specific customers and pain points and get people taking action to work with you.

This is not a list of every possible thing you can do with or for your client, nor should it be a long essay on your life philosophy. Assume that your visitor has no idea what you do and start high-level; speak in everyday language, not the jargon of your profession; and include a call to action for what you want them to do next, if they’re interested in working with you.

Your social media profiles

As much as building your brand is all about the content you create and share every day, every week, your basic presence across key social channels is critical to bringing to life your brand as you want it to be portrayed. Whether you’re looking to establish your authority in a new field, attract more of your ideal clients, or simply share your personal story with the world, you want your social media profiles to be working hard to help you do just that.

This means telling a coherent story using both imagery and copy that is consistent across your different profiles, with professional profile pictures and cover images, complete information in all the sections of each platform, and clear next steps to help your prospective client get in touch with you to find out more.

Moving forward

Spending some quality time on reviewing your website, specifically your “about” and “work with me” pages as well as your main social media profiles, will give you a strong basic presence and will ensure that you’re showing up online as you’d like to appear to your audience. However, this is only the first step, as if you leave it there you won’t have a lot of people who actually see the wonderful work you’ve done on your website and profiles!

Next week, we’ll be moving on from these basic elements to look at building on those foundations with the content that you’re creating every day, every week.

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Google

We use Google Analytics to track and optimise performance on this site as well as embedding video content from YouTube, and this means that your web browser automatically sends certain information to Google. This includes the URL of the page that you’re visiting and your IP address. Google may also set cookies on your browser or read cookies that are already there. Apps that use Google advertising services also share information with Google, such as the name of the app and a unique identifier for advertising.

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Facebook

We use the conversion tracking and custom audiences via the Facebook pixel on our website. This allows user behaviour to be tracked after they have been redirected to our website by clicking on a Facebook ad and enables us to measure the effectiveness of our Facebook ads. The data collected in this way is anonymous to us, i.e. we do not see the personal data of individual users. However, this data is stored and processed by Facebook, who may link this information to your Facebook account and also use it for its own promotional purposes, in accordance with Facebook’s Data Usage Policy https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/.

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How long we maintain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

The main reason for collecting this information is to be able to send you resources, updates and, sometimes, information and products and services, as well as for internal record keeping.

The rights you have over your data

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How we protect your data

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Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password that lets you access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential and we ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

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Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. Initially created on 18th November 2016, it was last updated on 23rd May 2018 to be compliant with GDPR.

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