What’s Your Personal Brand- How to Market Yourself

There’s little or no time to prepare for your career between college and work. Now is the time to work on your market strategy for yourself so you can get the job you want.

One of the things that college doesn’t often teach is how to best position yourself for your future career. Taking a few minutes a week now, before you launch into your college career, can go a long way to making yourself look like a rock star with knowledge and connections in your industry. Today getting a job is about so much more than a resume. It’s about how well you’re able to communicate your personal brand online and in person.

Here are some simple steps to help you jump-start the process of marketing yourself

First, you are probably already building your brand but didn’t even know it. Next, you need to make an effort to focus on your future. If you are already on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, then you are building an image on those sights.

Maintain a clean reputation

Make sure that you maintain your reputation as clean and upstanding as possible. You never know who sees your friend’s social feeds, and for that matter, there is no guarantee that social channels will always keep their same privacy settings that are in place now. So the rule of thumb is that throughout your time in college, do not post anything across your social media profiles that you would not want your potential boss to see.

Start a blog

Another great way to start building your professional brand is to launch a blog. It can be a personal blog and you can use it to journal your college experiences, but just like your social channels, keep it clean and professional. In addition to information about you, it’s a good idea to include interesting facts or ideas from your classes, talk about your favorite topics in school, and highlight articles from the industry you want to work in. Highlighting an article can be as simple as linking to it, quoting one or two sentences from it, and saying a few things about what it means to you or what you think about the content. Establishing a blog presence may seem like a big-time commitment, but if you target to create one or two each month, then you are on your way.

Tap the power of LinkedIn

In addition to setting up your social networks and blogging, you can begin making professional connections in your chosen field, with peers and professionals as well as with recruiters and business leaders. LinkedIn is the best platform for this; it’s your professional social network. On LinkedIn, you set up your profile like your resume. Start building on this early so that when you graduate, you’ll already have a professional profile online with lists of your extracurricular activities, charity events, community service, internships, and recommendations from associates, fellow classmates, professors and education professionals.