Creating a personal brand called you! 

Most important thing you can do. It isn't a color or a font. It's an attitude that tilts the playing field in your favor. Get that right and your other branding efforts will help. Without it no font is going to capture your share of the market! 

The Brand Called YOU

Your brand isn't about colors, fonts or style sheets. It's who you are. It's how your market perceives you. There's a place for the traditional branding conversation, but not here. If you have the perfect colors and your market sees you as a pain in the a$$. No color or font is going to fix that. 

In this course we focus on communicating you to your market. How they perceive you is the thing that matters. 

Your Personal Brand comes from two places: 

• Who are you as a person - This should be obvious. Usually it isn't. You may need some help identifying who you are. Don't make this complicated just ask the people who know you best. They can help you identify those things that make you uniquely you. Then think about the nature of things that people ask you about. This will tell you how others see you. 
• What you specialize in as a person - Building upon how others see, you're going to develop your area of speciality. This can be a combination of education, experience, and interests. Make a list of these as well as the way you like to interact with people. Form this you can formulate what you specialize in as a person. 

Building a personal brand is different from building a business brand. A business brand has to incorporate the culture and project that through everything. A personal brand is simply you being you. In this exercise you're going to identify and polish you! Then you're going to call that your brand. 

1. Stop hiding your identity in your company or product. The marketing department of that company/product you represent doesn't know you. Stop letting them speak for you. You're going to identify yourself by you and not what some cheesy marketing department has determined is important. 
2. Lose the company/product identity and replace it with you. Change your business name to your name. Your business name should be your name not some derivative of a company or product.  
3. Secure your name with a website and email. eric@ericsaid.com is more impactful for a personal brand than woodhippy@gmail.com. (Yes, I once had a business called Woodhippy). 

Finally, take the things you learned in the first exercise - who you are and your speciality and begin to blend them into the three steps above.