CREATE YOUR PERSONAL (OR AUTEUR) BRAND ON THE INTERNET
If you’re a screenwriter, director, etc. you know how hard it is to get someone to notice your work. Even more so if you’re starting out and nobody knows you.
How can you make your work visible? How do you carve out a spot within the industry, so that people start to know you and the projects you’re working on?
All these questions have a simple answer: creating your personal brand. If you’ve ever heard this term before, you will know it is a concept used a lot in marketing. You’re probably thinking of stopping reading right now, because marketing isn’t really your thing, but wait, don’t give up just yet! We will show you how working on creating a personal brand brings its rewards in the long run. Also, you will see how it is very much related to your profession.
This is the first of a series of posts, which will try to guide you through the steps to build your personal brand. Let’s start from the beginning.
What does personal brand entitle?
The personal brand is a concept that has always been related to the working world, as a technique to seeking and finding jobs.
We could define it as the image people have of us on a professional level, through the management of our personal profile as if though it was a commercial brand, so as to improve on a working level.
This means that, as any brand, it has to have a certain set of values, objectives and a style. That is the first thing you need to define in order to build your own personal brand.
Why do you need a personal Brand?
Your personal brand will help you create and identity and, consequently, to show your work to more people, increasing your chances of landing a job. But if we still haven’t convinced you, here’s a list of advantages:
– It will allow you to differentiate yourself from the rest: your personal brand has to have a unique style, a tone with which you will feel identified and with which the rest will be able to easily associate you with.
– It gives you authority: it shows you know the sector you’re working in. This way, you will position yourself as an expert, which can give you prestige and recognition within your speciality. If you manage well your personal Brand, you can become an influential figure within your field.
– Generates trust amongst your followers and your sector of expertise: this will make it easier for your work to get to more people and build a community that trusts your work style. So, while you shop around your projects, petitions to work on other ones will arise.
– You win visibility: the creation of a personal brand will take you to your main objective: that more people read your work. It will create more interest around your work, which will open more doors for you in the long run.
– Grow your contact list: if your personal brand puts you in contact with more people, you will have more and more connections to people within the industry, they will count you in at more events, which will again, increase your chances of getting your work noticed etc.
– And the most important advantage of them all: live doing what you really love.
What do you need to create your personal Brand?
Reached this point, the next question is: where do we begin?
There are several things you need to understand clearly:
1. You are going to need time. A personal brand isn’t built overnight, it takes time and work, but we assure you that it is well worth it.
2. New technologies and digital communication channels will be your best allies. You will need a blog or website, and if you’re one of those people who believe social media doesn’t serve any purpose, it is because you haven’t yet discovered their great potential. You will need to create a profile in one of them and that will become your platform to the world.
In following posts we will go deep into each of these points so that, little by little, you will be able to put together your personal brand plan. But if you want to start straight away, we have an exercise proposition for you:
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, says the following:
“Your personal brand is what people say about you when you’re nota round.”
Think about it, what is you’d like people to say about you? What is the image you want to show to the world? Depending on your answer, you will build your personal brand in a way or another. Shall we start?
