Hello Fellow Codenewbies 👋,
I've heard the term "personal brand" before, but I didn't understand it.
What is a personal brand, and what are its benefits for developers?
Personal Brands
A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions, and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.
-- PersonalBrand.com
Building personal brands can help us get a job, speak gigs, or develop our network.
Our personal brand should say who we are and show our personality.
How to create personal brands?
🗝 Consistency
Consistency makes us stand out. And what kind of consistencies do we need to create our own personal brands?
Consistent image
People can recognize us without thinking twice if we have the same profile picture and cover image/banner on our online platforms.
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Consistent messaging
We can create consistent messaging to tell people what we do.
Take a look at what Swyx does.
He popularized and used #LearnInPublic because he helps developers learn in public.I don't have my own messaging yet. But I do have a consistent greeting in my articles; Hello Fellow Codenewbies 👋.
I see myself as a code newbie because I constantly learn new things every day. And one of the reasons I put my notes in public is to help fellow code newbies and my future self. Consistent voice
It's about how we bring our personality and our brand into work.
Maggie Appleton is known for her metaphors and analogies when she explains concepts in techs. We also know her for her idea of digital garden.
What are the impacts of personal brands on developers?
Building authority
Personal brands can help us to build authority.
We instantly associate her with Java when we hear the name Angie Jones. Angie is well known for her work with Java, and Oracle themselves named her Java Champion. People trust her and look up to her as an inspiration and a Java resource.Building community
With personal brands, we can build a community.
Take Scott Hanselman as an example. He's been creating content to lift people up for over two decades in communities. It now leads him to work full-time with the community at Microsoft.Building expertise
When we learn something, we want to make sure that we learn from someone who knows what they're talking about.
People know Josh W. Comeau as "King of Whimsy" for his ability to create magic in a browser, and he's good at explaining the concepts.
Personal brands can help us build our value, something that can make us unique and stand out.
Final Words
We need to have consistency to build our own personal brands to make us stand out and unique, to build our own value.
So what are your plans to build your personal brands?
Do drop your thoughts in the comment below 😀
Note:
This article is written based on Colby Fayock's talk, Stand out by building a personal brand.
Thank you for reading!
Last but not least, you can find me on Twitter. Let's connect! 😊
Top comments (16)
Some great points here Ayu 🙂 I'm currently trying to build my personal brand and keep it consistent across my posts on my personal website, DEV and Medium
Awesome, Kyle!
And you have such a nice website! 😄
Thank you, super appreciate the kind words! I've been building the website in my spare time to learn frontend development as I'd only ever worked on backend systems. I've tried to incorporate as many concepts as possible into it but I've always been conscious that the overall design could do with some work - given some extra time I'd look to overhaul the visual side of things 🙂
Really that you only work on the backend?
Your website is simple and on point and pretty!
With what did you build it?
Yeah, I'm usually backend with either Python or C# 🙂 It's built using React and Gatsby 🙂
Nice inspiration there! I‘m also working on my personal brand. What is your opinion on using the birth name vs. some acronym vs. something completely different?
Thank you for reading!
I think it really depends on your preference and how you want people to see you.
If you want to establish your online presence and get people to know you for who you are, use your birth name.
If you want to write a fiction book, for example, you can use either the birth name or some acronym.
But I personally don't recommend something that completely different. Except if you want to keep yourself very private
Alright thanks for the hints! I'm a bit struggling because I actually have two channels, one for Web Development and one for Music, and since I think it doesn't make too much sense to do both together, I'm not sure which to name after me :P. Maybe "[name]" for dev and "[name] Music" for music. Or "[name] Dev" for dev What do you think?
Do you want to go freelance with your web dev skills? If so, in my opinion, you can create a company name with "Dev" after your name if you would like.
As for music, I am sorry, I'm clueless 😅
But what I see, except you have a group, many singers use their own name.
Yeah I probably want to go freelance. I atm tend to use just my name for everything dev related and others, and an extra name with "Music" for the music thing, leaving me open what I'll be doing with my "default" channel. What do you think about this strategy of having a default channel with birth name + some others for specific topics? Seems to be the most flexible way of doing it. Thanks for your hints!
You're welcome, Sebastian! :)
Hope you can find out your way to build your personal brand :)
Great write up Ayu! I need to think of my consistent greeting! Got the avatar consistent though. I’ve heard a few folks now say, the guy with the DEV shirt. 😎
Woot! Hellow guy with the DEV shirt! 😎
Thank you, Nick! 😄
I still need to have consistent personal cover image/banner 😂
But my article's cover img start to have consistent template 😁
nope
Sounds like a good idea, thanks! I've never been very good at self-promotion, but this seems like a fairly easy step 😁
Thank you for reading!
I'm not good as well in self-promoting. I'm still learning 😄