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!
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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.