If you're looking to define your own personal brand, you should, first of all, consider the exact impression that you want to build and the market you wish to target. Where do they meet? What do they like and want? What problems do they have? If you can meet them where they're at, you can build a solid personal reputation as someone who cares and who truly wants the best for his or her client. remember that personal branding is not about selling. It's about making yourself available to others, both clients and peers.

Make sure you have active accounts on like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Keep a balance between business-related updates and personal updates, so that others will see you as being both professional and personable. No one needs to know what you ate for breakfast, but a picture of your cat posing next to a promotional poster will probably get some buzz. Branding has reached a new level of imperative because of the rise of the Internet. The growth of the virtual world created the necessity of managing online identities. Despite being expressly virtual, social media and online identity has the ability to affect the real world. Because Individuals want to portray themselves a certain way to their social circle, they may work to maintain a certain image on their social media sites. As a result, social media enables the creation of an online identity that may not be completely true to the real self. WHY SHOULD YOU BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND? Building a recognizable personal brand opens professional opportunities. Creating a vision for your future and implementing that vision can lead to: A better job Better contacts and clients for your company (Industry recognition) It’s something of a no-brainer, but there is a clear correlation between success and branding.

Creating a strong brand establishes yourself as a natural leader, making people look up to you as a firm thought leader. The boost in image and direction opens doors and creates unique opportunities that would otherwise remain in the dark. Similarly, finding success throughout your career naturally pushes yourself to take a stronger stance on how you handle yourself and others. Leadership qualities naturally evolve as success and branding interact with one another, which can launch a career into exciting new directions. Building a strong and profitable personal brand is not a sprint and something you do over night … it’s something that takes time, hard work, dedication, patience and of course a lot of passion for what you do and want to be considered an ‘expert’ in. It’s an evolving process you have to go through and it never really ends.

The reason why personal branding has come to the forefront of society and business is the impact Web 2.0, or more generally social media has had on the world. Before Web 2.0, as opposed to today, your opportunities to get the word out about your business was limited. In fact, apart from word-of-mouth campaigns, you were reliant on the media to help you get your message out. Your ability to get your business message into the media, i.e. in front of your target audience, was typically limited to the size of your advertising and PR budget. As a consequence, it was the individuals with influence and budget who controlled, i.e. the marketing and external communications department, largely, the company brand, and how it was perceived by the outside world. Now, a company’s brand has always been the sum total of the employee’s personal brand. Because social media has truly given each individual a voice into the world, your employees personal brand and how they use it, has risen in prominence to companies. Whether you like it or not, all of your employees are constantly communicating to a global audience via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, blogging etc.  How you communicate externally to the outside world via social media can have massive consequences on both your employees’ future career prospects but also the reputation of your company.

As a language student  i observed that personal branding is the pratice of people making themselves and there careers as brands. while self-help management techiques were about self-improvement,the personal branding concept suggest instead that success comes from self-packaging. 
1 build your platform 
2 indentify your uniqueness and your strengths 
3 own your space 
4 be yourself 

Building a personal brand takes time and effort, but it’s worth it.

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