With Personal Branding, There is NO Bare Minimum - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

With Personal Branding, There is NO Bare Minimum - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career A question I occasionally hear from people who are just getting started with personal branding is, what is the bare minimum I should do online? As my friend Doug Karr says, thats like being given the keys to a high-performance race car and asking whats the slowest you can drive. The better question to ask is what is the fastest I can go?' Bottom line When it comes to personal branding, there is no bare minimum. Youre trying to grow your personal brand, to become famous or at least a recognized expert. Why would you want to throttle your efforts by thinking in terms of a bare minimum. Several years ago, motivational speaker Zig Ziglar would often speak of foundational performance. That was the starting point for the bare minimum thinkers, not the end. For example, if you had to make a bare minimum of 12 phone calls a day for your job, the bare minimum thinkers would do 12 a day and call it quits. But for foundational performance thinkers, 12 was just your starting point, 15 was better, and 20 was awesome. Think performance We need to think of our personal branding efforts in the same way. Dont assign a bare minimum value to what youre doing, whether its the number of tweets you can send, the number of blog posts you should write, or the minimum number of LinkedIn connections you can make. After all, this is your career, your business, and your personal reputation youre talking about. Youre not willing to work for a bare minimum salary, live in bare minimum housing, or eat bare minimum food. And if you are currently doing that, youre not willing to stay at that point in your life, are you? Instead, look at where you want to be, determine the steps and length of time you need to take to get there, and then work to achieve that. Set realistic goals, and then see where you can exceed those goals. If you know you need to grow your Twitter network to 3,000 followers but you capped at 1,000 because that was all you could handle, then grow it and figure out how to handle all of those new followers. If youve only been tweeting five times a day because someone said that was enough, increase it to 10. If youre blogging once a week, challenge yourself and do it every day for a month. Goals and vision Your goals are important and ones you need to meet. If youre hitting the target every time you aim, youre too close to the target and your goals are too low. If youre hitting your personal branding goals, then youre not setting challenging goals, and youre focusing on bare minimum thinking. Remember, youre competing with everyone else who is trying to build their personal brand too. Theyre going for the same job you are, competing for the same clients you are, and fighting to win that top-of-mind spot you are. Someone is going to win it, and I can guarantee it will not be the person who does the bare minimum. If it is, its not something that was worth having to begin with. Author: Erik Deckers is the co-owner and VP of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service in Indianapolis. He has been blogging since 1997, has been a published writer for more than 24 years, and a newspaper humor columnist for 17 years. Erik co-authored Branding Yourself: Using Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (Pearson, 2010) and also helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies.