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Whether you’re on the job market or not, everyone needs to view themselves as a brand and start thinking about how they represent it.

If you are selling a product or service with a lot of competitors, it’s your personal brand that distinguishes you and makes the biggest impact on your target audience.

It doesn’t matter if you think Facebook and Twitter are for kids, social media and Google are where people turn when they want to get to know the “real you.”

You want to be in control of the conversation that is being had about you there -- and if there isn’t a conversation happening, you need to get one started.

Personal brands should be important to everyone. Personal brands are not only for the entrepreneur that owns their own business. It is the secret sauce that can make you stand out of a stack of resumes.

If you don’t develop your own personal brand others will do it for you. Developing your personal brand is the proactive way of controlling your career development and how you are perceived in the marketplace.

A strong personal brand will impact your ability to get the right jobs, promotions, and increase your ability to attract talent and capital.

starters, don’t make the mistake of thinking your personal brand is all about you. It’s not. Your personal brand is not about your work experience or your personal accomplishments. Your personal brand should be about other people, specifically what you can do for other people.

Start by asking yourself a few questions: What needs can you address? What are the areas where you can offer the most value? What makes you different from the rest?

When people say, "I want to build a personal brand," the first thing they think about is numbers.

Number of Twitter followers. Number of Facebook Likes. Number of blog subscribers.

Those are very poor metrics for building a meaningful personal brand.

Building a personal brand means providing so much value in one (or multiple) niche(s) that people begin to associate your name with the idea of what it means to be successful in that industry.

The need for a personal brand will continue to increase. It’s the one thing that no one can take away from you, and it can follow you throughout your career. It’s a leadership requirement that lets people know who you are and what you stand for.

Those who are willing to look (and there are too many marketers who are not) are witnessing the humanization of business; it will have one of the greatest impacts on commerce we’ve ever seen.

a checklist of all the steps you want to take as you build your personal brand:

1. Make a list of your interests and passions

2. See which of your interests sells well online

3. Name your personal brand. You don’t have to refer to it anywhere in your content, but you should have a clear idea of what it is.

4. Choose your medium: video, audio, written word.

5. Include a Facebook Connect link, Call-to-Action buttons, Share Functions, and a button that invites people to do business with you in a prominent place on your site.

6. Start creating your content now!

7. Do it again.

8. And again.

9. Enjoy the ride.