As a working professional in the Digital Age, you are probably in the process of or starting to build your professional brand online. If so, excellent! There are quite a few benefits to having a personal brand: it makes you unique so that you stand out from the crowd, it increases the value of your business, and gives both your company and you as a person more credibility. It’s quite the process, so it’s best to get started early on.

There are many ways to begin this process. In their article on building a professional online brand, career acquisition experts LHH recommend that to raise your online profile you must update it constantly so it won’t go dark. As you spend more time on your online profile, you’ll see that more and more people will come, visit your profile, and get value from your content. Here’s how you can try doing this with WordPress.

Create your own website

The first and arguably most important step to building your personal brand is setting up your business’s website. WordPress makes this incredibly easy, and plenty of YouTube tutorials are available to help you. Once you have the basic site with the landing page and navigation, you can move on to the fun part: personalization! There are enough WordPress themes to keep you occupied for quite a while.

Many of them are free and you can use them to add a personal touch to your site. As you’re choosing what elements to add, remember to consider your potential customers and their navigation experience. You want it to be as smooth and easy to use as possible. This guide mentions some tips including keeping the navigation simple and staying consistent.

Add your personal details

Adding pages such as a “Contact Us” option and an About Page help instill a sense of trust in your customers. Another thing you can do here is add a portfolio page or link to repositories of work to showcase samples of your previous projects: this not only shows customers that you’re serious about your business, but that you’ve successfully done this before.

Additionally, studies show that maintaining a portfolio is “multi-platformed, connected, and temporally dynamic”, meaning that it’s a display of your consistency and creativity on a regular basis. Since this is your own work, this is also an excellent way to add an extra human touch to your website.

Build your blog

WordPress automatically gives you a blog option, and we recommend you take advantage of it. Blog articles and other content is what keep people coming back to your site – as long as you keep it updated and you consistently add more content.

This results in a better SEO ranking for your site, which means more visitors. In this write-up about the importance of blogging for marketing and branding, it is explained that blogging also increases your visitors’ trust and loyalty, which is especially important for visitor retention, and your brand.

Spread the word

Using social media is an excellent way to get your website and business out there. First, make social media accounts for your business, and link to them on your website (there are plenty of widgets for this).

Then, consistently create content for your social media platforms, and be sure to include your website there for visitors to see. As your network grows, your connections will visit your website and become more aware of your brand. Be sure to keep your content professional or otherwise linked to your website and the image that you would like your business to have.