Maegan LujanIt’s not that often that you get the gift of time, but once a year in most U.S. states that’s exactly what happens thanks to Daylight Savings Time.
Rather than groan about the missed hour of sleep, use the psychological impact of extra daylight to inspire yourself to work a little longer each day to better your personal brand.
Here are five suggestions on how to use the extra minutes at the end of each day to make a big difference in your branding activities.
Audit Your Brand
There’s no better time to revisit—or create—your personal brand than when it’s time to spring forward. By looking at your brand, and how far it’s come in the past 365 days, you’re better able to strategically plan where you want to take your personal branding efforts.
This brand revisit can help you define your goals, differentiate yourself, stay consistent, remain authentic, and identify your strengths (and where there are opportunities for improvement).
If you need more help, I’ve created a free Personal Brand Audit Checklist to help guide you through the exercise.
Revisit Your Why
Whether or not you decide to audit your brand first, it’s important to take a step back now and again and revisit the why behind your brand. As in, why do you do what you do?
Ask yourself: Are your current branding efforts telling your message and your story the way you want it to be told? If they are, it’s time to ask yourself if your efforts are also attracting (and hitting the mark with) your ideal customer.
Be brutally honest here. Nothing can be more defeating than putting in effort only to have all your hard work promoting your expertise fall on deaf ears.
Update Your Bios
Things evolve over time. Including your bios.
Whether they’re meant to be personal or professional, there’s no better time than the present to make sure your bios—and how you’re describing yourself to others—is consistent across your digital footprint.
How else do you expect your target audience to be able to see if they’re a good fit for your product or service if they don’t know how to describe who you are?
Recapture Your Digital Footprint
It’s time to recapture your digital footprint. Like it or not, your online presence—from your website to what shows up when you Google yourself—is either working for your brand or against it.
That’s why it’s important to make time for social listening. Whether people are saying good or bad things about you and your brand, you need to know so you can respond. Be sure to search for keywords like your full name, business name, product names, and even your competitors’ names.
Some tools I recommend for you to use include Mention, Hootsuite, Google Alerts, and SocialOomph.
Repurpose Popular Content
Constantly creating new content can be time-consuming and inefficient. Instead, take an old blog post, email, or social media post, and repackage it into a new piece of content.
Here are some ideas:
- Combine several blog posts into an eBook
- Take an old newsletter and repurpose it into a blog post
- Grab a few quotes from a blog post and post them to social media
- Turn an old webinar into a lead magnet
The next time you find yourself time with more daylight to spare, pull up this post and choose a couple of items you can knock off the list. While some branding activities will take much longer than an hour, I hope the ideas above have shown you that there are many you can accomplish more quickly than you think!
Which activities from this list are you going to tackle today? Share them below!
