You’re A Professional. Develop a Brand for Yourself
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
It isn’t enough to decree that you are a professional. You have to act like a professional. Here, I speak about a few simple things you can do that will have you become seen as a professional by many more.
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I thought I would do a show today about building a brand because, I know for a lot of you professionally, you don’t think that’s of any value. You don’t understand the concept of branding for you. I’ll just say that you should think of it in terms of developing your reputation for your expertise. If you work on your reputation, if you develop relationships with people who know, like, trust and respect you, than, the result is going to wind up being opportunities are going to come to you more often.
So, I I am not going to tell you to go out on the Tedx stage or do a Ted Talk today, but I want to help you build up your repertoire so that you have choices and you can practice with a lower threshold of threats to your identity or fear for you so that you can see how these are building blocks in your development.
So, first, I would say, is, in building a brand (and this is a necessarily about changing jobs. It’s about practicing), so you develop a reputation for yourself. Think in terms of asking one question at every meeting that you attend. Just one question. It doesn’t have to be a big dramatic thing. It can be a clarifying question of some sort. It can be a recap question, such as, “let me make sure I understand this correctly . . .” Then you repeat what you understand the proposal is.
What that does is it affords you an opportunity to consolidate the thinking in the room about what’s being proposed. You can progress from that point to, shall we say, networking internally beyond your group, beyond your team, so, you get to know other people in your organization and, obviously, in doing so, you don’t want to be the complainer.
“Ugh! This guy I wok for!” Whatever it is you don’t want to be the complainer. You want to be the spokesperson for your ideas and develop a reputation in a relationship with other people.
The next thing I’d suggest you do is you write you write for a platform like LinkedIn and share it on medium.com, as well. Whatever ideas you have, start putting them out there and sharing them with your connections on LinkedIn and with the public, as well. So, that’s the third step.
The fourth one can be just very simply sharing it with influencers, sharing with other people. I mentioned sharing articles that you write on LinkedIn, but, as I’ve spoken about in other videos, there is a service call HARO, which stands for Help A Reporter Out. Reporters are great influencers. HARO is a site that allows them to reach out, based upon story ideas that they’re researching, for experts in a particular field.
Then, when they write an article, they will reference you in the article. It may just be a paragraph or a quote within that article. A lot of what HARO will put out is not related to you. However, when there is, it’s a great opportunity for you to respond quickly and get your message out and share it.
The last thing is to become speaker. Again, I’ve spoken about this idea before. Years ago, a friend of mine was working for a Bank, doing nicely. He was at an AVP level. We spoke about what he could do to promote himself more. I had suggested to him he start speaking at conferences and look for opportunities to be a more visible figure because, in that way, the search firms would start to know him and start reaching out to him.
He did that and the opportunities started to come to him. He was next hired at a senior level at another bank, went to one of the large consulting firms as the head of a function. He developed a big reputation from having become speaker and author or a co-author of a number of books. This was all because he invested his time in building his brand and building his reputation.
You progress. If you are just comfortable asking one question at a meeting, this is your starting point. Great! Do that for a few months. Then, progress to the next level where you or networking or speaking with people in other parts of the organization. Do stuff. It doesn’t have to be done all at once. All you have to do is try to improve yourself.
If you say, I’m not a good writer,” well, you can practice being a good writer. Share what you write with someone else for editing and let them critique it and make suggestions for you. Make sure you know someone who be willing to help you.
So, don’t think in terms of, “I can’t do this you.” Think in terms of how you can do this because the effort put in now is going to yield big results for years to come.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS job search coaching and career advice globally because he makes job search
and succeeding in your career easier.
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You will find great info and job search coaching to help with your job search at JobSearch.Community
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter
Schedule a discovery call to speak with me about one-on-one or group coaching during your job search at www.TheBigGameHunter.us.
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He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3000 episodes over 13+ years.
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