Digital You: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age

It’s your agent. Often delivering the first impression to a prospect, your LinkedIn profile is you when you aren’t there.

More than 100,000 articles are posted on LinkedIn each week, and 576,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day.

Personal branding is the habit of demonstrating and communicating your unique, valuable traits to communities where you can thrive.

Personal branding is not a onetime event. You change, the work landscape changes. Everything around you changes. Your brand must evolve to remain relevant.

Sweep it under the rug. This is what you do with content you can’t get removed. Because people spend most of their time evaluating you with the first page or two of your results, the goal is to get your name featured in lots of positive, current, high-ranking content to push the digital dirt down.

Visibility: It gives you the opportunity to be seen by others.

Enjoyment: You get satisfaction from doing it.

What makes you stand out? • What do people frequently compliment you on or praise you for? • What is it that your manager, colleagues, friends, and clients come to you for? • What adjectives do people consistently use to describe you—perhaps when they’re introducing you to others? • What makes the way you achieve results interesting or unique? • Wh

It’s a noisy world. To be heard in this world requires steadfast clarity and focus. You’ll get lost in the clamor if your message isn’t clear, consistent, and constant (the three Cs of strong brands, which we’ll talk about later in the book).