Personal Image Is Not A Personal Brand

A Personal Image is Not an Online Personal Brand

Everyone has a personal image. It’s the collection of qualities people identify with you: your sense of humor, your clothing, your favorite food, your physical characteristics, and so on. Together, these qualities help people form a mental picture of you.

An Online Personal Brand is different because it’s how other people perceive you. On the outside, former President Bill Clinton looks like a noble, attractive and credible statesman. But because of his past actions, many people perceive Clinton very differently—as a morally bankrupt womanizer.

Never confuse the two. A great personal image doesn’t presuppose a powerful Personal Brand.

To Online Brand, Take Active Steps

Your Personal Brand exerts influence in your professional world…and may not always be the kind of influence you’re seeking. You’ve been creating your Online Personal Brand passively, without any awareness of the process or the consequences. It’s time to change that.

Transforming a personal image into an Online Personal Brand that creates opportunity means taking active control of the process-defining how prospective customers, colleagues and members of the media perceive you. It means cutting and polishing your brand so everyone who comes into contact with it hears the same words in their mind when they hear your name. It’s packaging the things that make you great at what you do, and sending that message out into the world.

Imagine being able to shape the opinions of decision-makers in your profession or CEOs of top corporations. Imagine being regarded as a uniquely gifted expert offering obvious value. Imagine being able to double your fees because demand is so high. Those are the things your Online Personal Branding can do.

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Mark Montoya has been working in personal branding for more than a decade for hundreds of online and offline companies, small businesses and individual service professionals. His focus has been toward improving the way jobseekers find employment on the Internet. He has synthesized his expertise by helping job seekers obtain their ideal choice of employment over the Internet on his sites MyOnlineCareerSpace.com and MyOnlineCareerCoach.com, and through his books 101 Tips Every Job Seeker Should Know and The Ultimate Online Job Search eBook. Learn more at MarkMontoya.com, on Twitter, Digg, or StumbleUpon.