Published: Dec 25, 2018 Tags: career Category: Management

To be a great technical expert, you do not only do exceptional technical work, and also exceptional job to let people see your skills.

Build your personal brand

Your personal brand is how others perceive you. It means you can ask others, capture their language, use their language in your branding.

First, let's write down what is your personal brand is.

Then, you can do the followings:

• Do these things
• Answer questions
• Document your learning
• Share your failures
• Build something new
• Talk about your development process
• Justify your technical decisions
• Share updates on what you're building

The channels you can utilize are, blog, conferences, usergroup, stackoverflow, github, hacker news, Reddit programming, etc.

Methods

There are various methods to build personal branches, some of them are easy while the others are hard.

The personal brand needs to be built step by step.

• Define brand boundaries
• Tagline
• 30 Second Pitch
• Business Cards
• About.me
• LinkedIn Profile (Summary, etc.)
• On-brand picture/avatar
• Testimonials: Find influencial people and say something about you or recommond you
• Blog
• Ebook, Pluralsight course
• Toast master

Regarding to business card, there are creative examples in the following link:

https://mashable.com/2013/05/16/crazy-business-cards

The business card can also be interactive:

http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/

Push it further

• Start acting like a thought leader. Fake it before you make it.
• Pay for your own travel to speak across the country
• Post consistently to your blog as though readers already exist
• Write a book - even if you have no publisher
• Act like you're rich
• Pay others to free up your time
• Start working only part-time so you have more time to learn
• Speak in public
• Startup weekend/code for charity
• Connect people: create a meetup/user group/mastermind
• Do open source project
• Be social: never eat alone
• Help your evangelists

Measure your brand

You shall measure the brand to see where you are.

• Google Alerts/Talkwalker/Social Mention
• TweetBeep
• Online ID Calculator
• Bit.ly for shared links

CEO of Me, Inc

It will be interesting to treat yourself as a comapay: Me, Inc. And you are also the CEO.

Key questions you need to address:

• How do people perceive me?
• How do people find you?
• You have a market team (you): who do I market to?
• If you want to market to the whole world, then the effort will be huge, how can I achieve that?

Think differently

People with less programming/technical skills but much better communications skills will often be more successful than you.

Stop, think, speak!

Search for Scale:

• L1: Work: fix bugs, bill by the hour, do as you're told
• L2: Lead (Talk about work): Select architectures & technologies, mentor, hire & lead teams, define project scope & process
• L3: Own: Product: SAAS, PAAS, framework, author

Luck Surface Area

Your Luck Surface Area is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.

by Jason Roberts (see details from Bit.ly/1heY4uo)

Networking & Communication

You network and relationship means your brand, employability, revenue stream.

The best networkers are listeners rather than talkers, have a clear agenda, and are not shy about asking for feedback and guidance.

Remember that networking is more about giving than it is about talking.

• Martin Buckland

Give more than take, but ready to receive

Power Connector

Should you be a Power Connector?

• You provide value to your contacts
• You strengthen your relationship with others
• Your brand solidifies and includes: 'seems to know everyone!'
• You focus more on giving

Quality of communication

For communication: Quality is over Quantity

• Impact of words - 7%
• Impact of voice - 38%
• Impact of body language - 58%

Be careful of the inconsistent message.

Listen with all your senses. The truth about multitasking - just a fantasy!

Written by Binwei@Singapore