Build Your Personal Brand

Creating a personal brand is one of the best things you can do for your career.

Welcome!

Hi this is John with this week’s Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

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Tip of The Week: Level Up Your Career By Building a Personal Brand

Creating a personal brand is one of the best things you can do for your career.

It will help you get a promotion, find new roles, new opportunities, launch a business or side hustle (if that’s your thing) and meet, learn from and collaborate with some amazing people.

It’s something everyone can do, but not everyone knows how.

So here’s the simple 6 step plan to create a personal brand:

1. Determine your goal - why do you want to improve your personal brand?

2. Identify the relevant audience - who is the audience that you need to build your brand with to reach your goal? It might be as small as your team or as big as your industry or niche.

3. Make yourself interesting to the audience - build your credibility with them.

4. Identify people you want in your network - who can help you reach more of your audience.

5. Reach out to people and build relationships - be interested in people and provide them with value.

6. Keep in touch.

All those steps are the same for in-person and online networking. Five of the additional things you can do to grow your personal brand through social media are:

1. Share original content that resonates with your audience.

2. Engage with your audience.

3. Comment on other people’s content.

4. Build a content pipeline.

5. Level up your copywriting game.

These can be applied to LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Instagram and other social media. I’ve personally focused on LinkedIn over the last twelve months and it’s created amazing opportunities for me: new roles, a new business and the chance to learn from and collaborate with some amazing people.

If you’re interested in building a personal brand on LinkedIn, I’m thinking of creating a course teaching you how I:

✅ Grew my LinkedIn following from 3,000 to 130,000+ in just 12 months.

✅ Became the No. 1 ranked ‘IT & Tech’ influencer on LinkedIn in the UK and 34th worldwide.

✅ Generated 40 Million post impressions on LinkedIn.

✅ Grew my newsletter to over 95,000 subscribers on LinkedIn and over 50,000 on Substack.

If you would be interested in learning more I have a course that teaches you what I did to build my personal brand on LinkedIn.

Many thanks, John

Two Ways I Can Help You Level Up As A Software Engineer:

1. I write another newsletter, Coding Challenges that helps you become a better software engineer through coding challenges that build real applications.

2. I have some courses available:

   1. Become a Better Software Developer by Building Your Own Redis Server (Python Edition) which guides you through solving the Redis Coding Challenge in Python.

   2. Build Your Own Shell (Go Edition) which guides you through solving the Shell Coding Challenge in Go.