How to Brand/ market Yourself

[Still Waters]

Marketing yourself  can be a daunting chore which you do for various good reasions, of which the most common ones probably are:  your are looking for a job, you are looking for business or you are looking for a business partner. You are applying for work, offering yourself, your work and your services. You hope to be hired as a valuable and unique professional.

Before rushing through the list of hottest tips of how to market yourself, you can save yourself a lot of effort and frustration if you take your time to think about who that that person is you want to present on the market. How to describe yourself?

What is your brand?
Many successful products and services are branded. Brand convey feelings, values, life style, quality and price. Of course you don’t want to be regarded or treated as a product or a brand. However, we do tend to categorize people just as we categorize products and brands. As such a brand as a useful metaphor which can help us put you in the right category and recognize what makes you unique. Show a brand which we like and which we can remember.
So, what does your brand look like? The answer is not so difficult if you follow the brand metaphor. A brand has purpose and stands for certain values.  What is your purpose? What are your values? What are you up to? Think about your attitude towards work, projects, people, co-workers, bosses, customers, clients. What are they to you? What can you give to them? What is the purpose of your actions, of your work, your business, your relationships? Do you have a life mission? What is important for you when doing a job? What do you want to achieve? Which achievements are the most valuable ones to you and why? How can you achieve them? Which assets (competencies, expertise, skills, talents, resources etc.) can help you? Take a piece of paper and write down answers to these questions as they come into your head. Yes, please do it, I am not offering you a free lunch, you do need to work for it.

If you are done, look at what you have written. If you became carried away and wrote too much, take a text marker and mark the essentials. If you could not come up with anything useful, try to think back into the past, imagine a time where you felt positive, successful, attractive. How would you have answered the questions above back then? Or, if the past does not work for you either, try the future: who would you like to be?

[trungvirgo]

Overall, the article is good, thanks for sharing with us.