Personal branding plays a crucial role in your success. Whether you’re aware of it or not, everyone has a personal brand or image that affects the way others see and think about you.

That’s why your personal brand and image are so important in determining if you’re successful in life.

What Is Personal Branding?

Let me start with the personal branding definition first — a brand is basically a promise. When you have a brand, it’s a promise that you make and are known for keeping to the person who you are asking or trying to influence.

Human beings decide emotionally and justify logically.

If you have a good personal brand, people are willing to pay you more for your product or service and argue less.

What Does It Mean When You Brand Yourself?

Branding yourself means developing your professional identity to align with your values. A personal brand statement always begins with your values. If you want to truly be a thought leader and an authority in your field you have to stand for something.

Quality? Excellence? Responsiveness? Teamwork? Innovation? Leadership?

Then you build a tremendous personal brand by starting with the principle of integrity.

There’s no better reputation you can have other than for people to say that when they do business with you, you always fulfill your promises.

The answer for success is to do what you’ve been hired to do and do it. Now, this expands into every area of your interactions with others.

Here’s the rule:

“Everything counts. Everything that you do either creates and builds your brand or weakens and destroys your brand.”

The “people buy from people” adage is so ubiquitous in business that we don’t even know who actually uttered these famous words.

So let’s put it down to Einstein, since the genius has so many other sayings attributed to him.

But the truth is that no matter who said them, these words hit on a fundamental truth.

And that’s why successful founders have personal brands