Measuring Your Personal Branding, Part 1: Introduction

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Personal branding has been a hot topic since the dawn of the digital age. In the last 13 years, it’s become one of the most searched topics by people:

However, one area of personal branding has remained elusive: measuring it effectively. Many personal branding guides, coaches, and textbooks advocate tracking little bits of data here and there, but we need a comprehensive, common-sense model for measuring our personal brand. In this series, we’ll build a model of measurement for a personal brand that anyone can use, constructed with free or very low-cost software.

What Is a Personal Brand?

Before we begin, let’s establish a baseline definition of what a personal brand is, via Wikipedia’s current definition:

Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.

Thus, we aim to measure ourselves using marketing metrics commonly used to measure a brand’s strength and effectiveness.

What Pre-Requisites Do We Need To Measure Personal Branding?

Before we begin the process of measurement, we need certain technological pre-requisites in place. To measure a personal brand effectively, we should have:

A unique website
A substantive call to action on our site, such as a contact form
A secondary call to action on our site, such as a download of some kind
A free Google Analytics account
- Ideally implemented with Google Tag Manager (free)
A free Google Search Console account
A free Bing Webmaster Tools account
One or more social media accounts
Access to spreadsheet software like MS Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets
A free Google Alerts account
A free Bit.ly account
A free Talkwalker Alerts account
An RSS reader like Feedly
A free Google Data Studio account

What We Won’t Cover

This series will cover the measurement of our personal branding efforts. We will not go over the process of building a personal brand. For that, I refer you to Mark W. Schaefer’s newest book, Known, which is an excellent guide for building a personal brand.

Next: Personal Branding Metrics Journey

In the next post in this series, we’ll tackle bringing some order to the myriad metrics of personal branding. Stay tuned!

Comments

One response to “Measuring Your Personal Branding, Part 1: Introduction”

Joan Michelson

April 17, 2017

Doesn’t measuring your personal brand depend upon your goals and industry? People can have a huge personal brand in a sector that does not use these social media measurements in their normal course of business.