LibGuides: Career Research: Developing a Personal Brand

What is a personal brand?

What does it mean to create a personal brand? Whether you are a new professional, job seeker, or scholar establishing yourself in a field, creating an online image is increasingly important for establishing yourself in a profession. Personal branding can be thought of as creating a unique and professional image of yourself so others will be able to find you and what you do on the internet. This page provides some resources on building an online image or individual brand.

Getting Found

Making sure that your websites/blogs/portfolios are found is part of creating a successful online image.

BrandYourself
BrandYourself gives you some extra ways to manage how your material is found online.
About.me
About.me allows you to create a personalized homepage linking to your other online involvement.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional networking service used by over 200 million people.

Scholars & Researchers

These resources offer some additional platforms for personal branding as an academic.

ORCID ID
Create a portfolio of your academic publications. The ORCID iD is a unique, persistent identifier free of charge to researchers and is internationally used.
Impactstory
open source website where the focus is to allow researchers to build an impact profile and record of their research.
SlideShare
SlideShare allows you to share presentation slides.
Academia.com
Academia.com webservice where you can create an account and share your research papers or titles.
ScholarWorks at CWU

Online Tools for Personal Branding

Blogs, Websites, & Portfolios

Wordpress
A free website creation platform through which you can create your own website or online portfolio.
Wix
Free website/portfolio service.
Tumblr
Tumblr lets you share "text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos" in a journal-like style.
Flickr
Allows you a lot of free image storage, as well as a way to organize and share your content.
DeviantART
DeviantART is mostly used by artists and useful for displaying images within an artist community.
Photo.net
In addition to free portfolio space, it provides an active photographer community.

Tracking Your Online Presence

Google Trends allows you to track most popular searches, currently or over time and can be useful in watching what types of blogs/websites are effective.

Google Alerts is a way of monitoring online activity associated with your brand and allows you to set keywords for Google to notify you when they get searched.