Your Profitable Personal Brand Blueprint: You Have A Business Plan; Now You Need A Personal Brand Plan For 2018!

Most businesses do not commence these days without a business plan. You've heard the old adage "if you don't plan, you plan to fail". Grant it, there may be some entrepreneurs who started their business without a formal plan.

However, if you study them carefully, you will find many of the strategic planning principles were in place or being practiced. Evidently, planning affords you the opportunity to set goals and practically work out those goals to achieve optimum results.

As a new year approaches, this may the opportune time to look at your personal brand as a professional or an entrepreneur and analyze whether you have added to your brand in the past year and how you can plan to project a compelling, relevant and authentic personal brand for 2018.

As a personal brand, planning the where, what, and how you want to get to the pinnacle of your career or achieving your strategic goals is paramount to your growth.

Just look at what can happen when you plan your Personal Brand:

*A Personal brand plan allows you to get strategic measurable results while you're in business or to grow and expand your career exponentially. The first step in planning for your brand is to look at what you've been doing - what's worked, what hasn't, reviewing client reactions, and looking at what could have gone better and what new ideas were sparked along the way.

Armed with that kind of knowledge, you can really dig into creating better results with each new step in growing and nurturing your brand.

*A personal brand plan creates more value for and from your brand. When you plan, you can make sure that you're using all of the existing elements of your brand to your best ability. For example, a plan affords you the opportunity of targeting a specific audience with a specific communication plan.

It also enables you to project your values, passions and your voice to different target audience earmarked for your planned communication. After all, it doesn't make strategic sense to invest in new areas when you may already have materials, presentations that you could tweak a bit for your new brand campaign or project - and that will increase your return on investment.

A Personal brand plan encourages consistency. Brand consistency creates momentum and forward motion in your brand. And it makes you look ultra-polished and put together because you now follow the laid down plan for your growth.

*Most importantly, planning matches the evolution of your Personal brand to your business plan and your marketing plan, (if you are an entrepreneur) to make sure that all of your plans are supporting each other.

That way, you're not scrambling with your communication and presentations but rather you coordinate the goals and dates you've set out in your business and marketing plans, enhancing cohesion and growth of all plans.

Strong personal brands don't just happen. They are usually the result of long-term strategy and carefully executed to guide how a person relates to its key stakeholders with their core requirements in mind.