Personal Portfolio: Importance of self branding for developers

What is personal branding? 🦸‍♀️

"Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career"

Which means.....

You should be showcasing your skill and achievements.

You should be projecting yourself as a person who is knowledgeable in a set of skills to the public eye. This is essential when you're job hunting or trying to get a freelance gig. Your portfolio is direct reflection of your personality and your skills.

A person going through your website should get a clear cut idea about what you're good at. If you're a self taught developer and wants to make a name for yourself quickly and get noticed then this would be a great step in the right direction.

Personal brand statement ✨

Your personal brand statement has to be strong, descriptive, short, and catchy all at the same time.

Some examples include:

"I'm a UI/UX enthusiast who likes to create beautiful user interfaces"

“I help individuals reassess their life choices to discover their true paths to success.”

“I develop sustainable business models and marketing strategies to fuel small business growth.”

This is important since the user won't be reading everything on your website. Short statements like these would catch the eye.

This would be better in the landing page itself as it creates a good understanding of what to expect as the user spends more time on your website.

Write blogs 📝

Write blogs on the issues or bugs that you came across in your development phase. This is helpful because not only it gives a good impression to the recruiters but it would help someone else who might encounter this problem in the future.

Showcase your projects 🚀

Just adding project names and description wont help.
Provide links to your projects and source files which is hosted in GitHub, by doing this it helps the user to understand what kind of problem you solved using this application.

To get started here are few free places to host your site.

• Vercel
• Netlify
• Github Pages

Networking is key 🌐

Interact with your connections on LinkedIn or other social media's were developers engage more often that not.

This helps to leave a good impression and might help you get referrals from the connections you acquire from these platforms.

Notable ones I can think of to get started:

• Linkedin
• Hashnode
• Dev.to (duh 😅)

Don't know how to start? Need ideas? 🤔

Its okay if you are blanked out. We all been there.

If you are looking for inspiration go to dribble.
Its a great website showcasing designs from talented designers. Try to incorporate some of the design elements from it.

Here is is my personal portfolio website

This follows most of the stuff I have discussed above. You can refer the following for more inspiration.

Website : https://adarshajit.me/

Here is the source code for the same. Star this repository if you found it helpful. ⭐

Source Code : https://github.com/adarshajit/Portfolio-web-app

I Created this website using React JS ⚛️ and Styled Components 💅 for styling and React Reveal npm package for animations.

Last but not the least. Thanks for reading and getting this far in this post. I hope you learnt something new.

Thanks ❤