Branding Yourself in Today’s Digital World

We all know to check our resume and cover letters for typos. But are you doing everything you can to brand yourself?

“Branding yourself really means presenting yourself and selling yourself,” said Gwen Larson, assistant director of marketing at Emporia State University in Kansas.

At the basic level, you want to ensure that your cover letter, resume, business cards and thank you stationery all have the same look. Larson also recommends including a cover sheet with your clips. If you are sending a CD, print a label.

In today’s world, though, that’s not enough. You need to think about your brand online. “You want to create a presence on social media,” she said.

If it’s appropriate to the work you do, you might build a website and/or launch a blog. You can hire someone to build your site or you can do it yourself through wordpress.com, wix.com or sites.google.com, Larson shared during the 2013 NFPW Conference in Salt Lake City. You also will want to purchase your domain name. You can do this through sites such as GoDaddy.com, domain.com or domainregistry.com.

“Be sure to buy all the variants of your name, too,” Larson said.

If you want help improving your ranking in Google searches, she recommends brandyourself.com, which allows you to “actively improving [your] own Google results without having to pay a company thousands of dollars to do it for [you],” according to the site.

And just as you ensure all of your written materials are consistent, you want to do the same on social media. Your LinkedIn photo, Twitter photo and website photo should be the same so that people become familiar with the brand of you. It goes without saying that you want professional photos. And nothing is worse than no photo on LinkedIn.