Whether you realize it or not, your professional success depends on persuading others to recognize your value.
You can do this by building a strong professional brand (which I’ll refer to as a personal brand in this post).
Building a successful personal brand as an academic can help you to increase your visibility and reach, build relationships with other professionals, promote your work and expertise, and get noticed by potential employers and collaborators.
And, just so you know – academics have been building personal brands for decades! The only thing that has changed is that these days, you don’t need to published papers in high impact journals or be a well-known figure with a long history of conference and TV appearances to build a strong personal/professional brand.
In this week’s video (see below), I share a step-by-step process to build your personal brand online as an academic. I expand on the following tips for building a personal brand as an academic:
- Choose a platform. There are many different platforms that you can use to build your personal brand, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Choose a platform that you are comfortable with and start. I’m personally biased to LinkedIn enough that I created a course on it.
- Define your niche. What do you want people to know you for? What are your areas of expertise? Once you define this, you can start to create content and network with people who can help you meet your goals.
- Create and share content. This could include blog posts, articles, videos, or social media posts.
- Interact with other professionals on the platform you choose.
- Be yourself. People can spot a fake from a mile away. Be authentic and genuine in building your personal brand.
- Be consistent. While you don’t have to be sharing on platforms everyday, it should be regular enough to keep you top of mind.
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