Personal branding is the application of brand management principles to the marketing of yourself and your career. This is an ongoing process that leverages social media, blogging, email marketing, and other channels to create and maintain a positive perception of your unique skills and achievements in your field. In the same way that a well-managed corporate brand helps a business attract and retain customers, a carefully-cultivated personal brand is important for helping your work find the right audience as well as creating new career opportunities.

Developing a strong personal brand starts with answering a key question: what do you want to be known for? Answering this question isn’t always easy, as it requires a candid skills assessment to identify your most impactful talents and experiences. Then, as with a business brand, you need to conduct a competitive analysis to better understand how to differentiate your brand from others with a similar background in your industry. Once you have a sense of what your unique value and niche should be, you can begin to develop a strategy to build a memorable brand that enhances your reputation and advances your career.

A strong personal brand can benefit almost any career path, as it helps to differentiate you from others in your industry and increase your competitiveness when pursuing jobs and other opportunities. In fact, the ongoing development of a successful personal brand has itself become a viable career path, as influencer marketing techniques seek well-known individuals with a following on social media to endorse their products. Personal branding is also particularly important if you’re a freelancer in fields such as consulting, photography, writing, or any other line of work where you’re always looking for new clients.

Maintaining a strong personal brand has become a major concern for writers in particular, as journalists, fiction writers, and even academic researchers find it increasingly necessary to maintain an active presence on Twitter or email newsletters on services such as Substack to showcase their expertise and personality even when they are between assignments. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, writers and authors made a median annual salary of $63,200 in 2019, and a projected decline in the number of these jobs available over the next decade will make personal branding even more important to achieve success.

Yes! Coursera is a great place to learn about digital marketing as well as career development, including courses on personal branding specifically. You can learn remotely from top-ranked schools like University of Virginia and The State University of New York, all while paying significantly lower tuition than on-campus students taking the same courses. And, because you’ll receive the same course materials and credits as on-campus students, learning on Coursera lets you add significant credibility to your resume and your own personal brand.