The Importance of Personal Branding: A Marketer's Guide

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is the practice of marketing people and their careers as brands. It is an ongoing process of developing and maintaining a reputation and impression of an individual, group, or organization.

In other words, personal branding means treating yourself as a brand — marketing and developing yourself. It encompasses everything from strengthening your skills to managing your reputation and impressions, broadly elevating your value and competitiveness through various methods.

It's a pretty intuitive concept, so you probably get it right away. But if it's still a little fuzzy, think about celebrities. They're the simplest example of personal branding I can think of.

Celebrities endlessly develop their acting skills, music, variety show charisma, and other talents while constantly managing their image and reputation. Every project they appear in becomes part of their portfolio — serving as a track record and proof that plays a crucial role in their future career. That's why they meticulously manage all these elements and steadily build their brand value. Watching them do this is essentially watching personal branding in action. (This is a simplified example for illustration purposes — let's set aside factors like agencies, connections, and other external circumstances.)

Why Should You Do Personal Branding?

In this day and age, I think everyone already knows that personal branding is important. But while many people have a vague sense of its importance, not everyone has deeply considered specifically why it's necessary. I was the same way — and in my case, it was traveling that changed my perspective.

In 2017, I went on my first backpacking trip. It was a long and meaningful 80-day journey through Southeast Asia, and the countless people I met along the way brought me that realization. Many of the travelers I encountered were deeply immersed in their own worlds, pouring themselves wholeheartedly into nurturing their craft.

One traveler documented every single day of their trip without fail. Another busked rain or shine, creating and uploading songs every day. Another steadily posted travel videos to their obscure YouTube channel that barely had any viewers. And yet another kept buying things they liked and listing them on eBay.

At the time, watching them, I simply thought, "It's nice to see people pursuing what they love with passion." Part of me also thought, "They're incredibly hardworking. Like lonely architects building towers even though nobody's watching." Honestly, I just saw all of it as things they did for personal satisfaction — nothing particularly meaningful.

But as time passed after the trip, I began witnessing something remarkable. I'm talking about the incredible updates I started seeing on social media. The traveler who kept writing even when nobody was reading had completed a book and become a travel author giving lectures. The musician friend had released an album and was traveling the world sharing their music. The one with the obscure YouTube channel had become a popular YouTuber. And the eBay enthusiast had become a business owner.

• The traveler who blogged every single day without fail -> Travel author
• The traveler who busked rain or shine and shared songs online -> Musician
• The traveler who posted videos to a YouTube channel nobody watched -> Popular YouTuber
• The traveler who discovered and sold interesting finds on eBay -> E-commerce entrepreneur

What led them to the positions they had always dreamed of? There are surely countless factors, but if you look carefully at the stories above, the answer lies in one thing: consistent documentation. Every day, they diligently posted their work where anyone could see it — on their blogs, YouTube channels, eBay shops, and other platforms. That very act became a major pillar of their personal branding, bringing them all kinds of opportunities.

So How Do You Actually Do Personal Branding?

As the examples above show, personal branding can be done in many ways. But in my personal opinion, the most important starting point — just like in those stories — is making the evidence you build up visible to everyone. That's exactly why leveraging platforms like blogs and the web is so important. Writing things down in a private notebook only you can see could be one form of personal branding, but we need to choose methods that allow for more active exposure. Our experiences and "evidence" become exponentially more powerful when they can influence and inspire others.

That's precisely why marketers now need their own well-organized, well-maintained web presence beyond the confines of their private notebooks. The web spaces we manage become solid proof, and that proof becomes the ultimate record of credibility that clearly declares to the world: "I did this. And I made this."

Start Now: Build Your Own Evidence Archive on the Web!

People want proof. Beyond job hunting and career changes, there are people in all sorts of fields watching us with countless possibilities and opportunities in mind — and they especially want to see evidence. Elon Musk of Tesla is famous for posting job listings on Twitter, and his postings typically go something like this:

Looking for core software engineers. No automotive experience required. Send us a link to your sample code or your work.

Now imagine that one day, a posting like this goes up at the company you've always dreamed of working at, or the company you've always wanted to collaborate with. How prepared are we, really?

If I had to distill this long post down to one takeaway, it would be this: "So let's start by building our own web presence. And let's consistently maintain it, nurture it, and stack up our evidence." Because this is the most important first step for us marketers who are just beginning our personal branding journey.