Managing your personal brand is an important task in today’s society. By focusing on your personal brand and how you are portrayed in the public’s eye, you will be able to position yourself as an industry expert. Taking the proper precautions to ensure a positive personal brand can go a long way in ensuring you are viewed positively by the general public.

Think About your Message
Before you start building your personal brand in any way, you will want to carefully consider what your brand’s message will be. In order for you to effectively build a brand, you will need to decide what it is your brand will stand for. To make sure you are building your brand around a message you agree with, you will need to carefully think about what that message is before you start speaking or posting content online.

Register Accounts Using your Full Name
Owning as much online real estate as possible that has to deal with your name is an excellent way to start building your own personal brand. Registering your own domain name such as YourName.com and signing up for all of your social media accounts using your full name as your handle will make it easier for you to control what appears in the search results when someone searches for your name. A lot of the popular social media accounts will appear in the search engine rankings when searching for a specific person’s name which is why it is important for you to own as much of that online real estate as possible so you can control what is posted to those accounts.

Monitor Online Reputation
One of the best ways to build a personal brand is to monitor what is being said about you online. Regularly searching for posts or online conversations discussing your brand will allow you to jump into the conversation and either respond kindly to any positive mentions of your brand or address questions or concerns if someone is speaking negatively about your brand.

Reaching out to those who are discussing your brand is a great way to convey your brand’s message in a more meaningful way. Some people may think poorly of your brand simply because they do not know what you stand for. If they had a better idea of what your brand represented, you could convince them to change their way of thinking about your brand.

Use One Image
When creating social media accounts, websites or blogs, it is important to use the same image across all accounts. This will help people easily identify all of your content and associate it with your personal brand. Also, using the same color scheme across all of your accounts will help people reading your content associate everything they have read about your brand. Using the same color scheme will add a sense of symmetry across all of your online accounts.

Create Useful Content
Perhaps the most important thing you need to do when building your personal brand is to create high quality, useful content. When you are able to create high quality content, you will be viewed as a trusted source of information and an industry expert. Your readers will find your content interesting and engaging and will be more likely to share it with others, allowing you to increase the awareness of your brand.

Building a strong personal brand does not happen overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to build a well recognized personal brand. Carefully creating a message you would like to convey, using the same name across all of your social media accounts, and posting high quality content to those accounts are just some of the ways you can build your personal brand.

Ben Sawyer from Moldbusters, is a blogger and Internet Marketing Specialist. He is also a part time blogger and a tech-fan. Here, Ben gave a few tips to the readers about how to compete with big companies when it comes to SEO and organic results.