I’ve always understood the idea behind the term “personal brand” and yet, a part of me has always been annoyed by it.
At its simplest, the idea is considering the public perception you generate. It’s difficult not to see how important that is - particularly in the age of social media.
Consider a job search - lets say you apply and you’re fairly far down the interviewing process. The odds are pretty good that an HR representative, a hiring manager, or anyone at your employer will likely glance through your public social content and use it to gleam a bit about who you are and the perception you portray online.
If what you wrote could be considered controversial and antithetical to the mission, values, or core of the business, they could choose to not hire you.
That means the social media brand of yourself could be detrimental. Of course, the inverse could be true also. Maybe your social content is considered a bonus and reflects positively upon you. Either way, or anywhere in between, if your content impacted a public perception, it’s your brand at work.
The natural extension of a personal band today is a website. Professionally, LinkedIn for millions of people is their career brand. And there are plenty of people out there who are leveraging LinkedIn’s features beyond a digital resume to great success.
And then, there are many people like me, who use a website for personal and professional extension. A place to share additional content, profile work, demonstrate expertise, and advance more information about themselves.
Reimagining How I Share My Work
During the past year, I’ve spent a lot more time dedicated to the creative itch that drives me. I’ve been writing about pop culture in a new brand called The Pop Culture Guide.
I’ve also been focusing on sustainability with Choosing Eco. I have put a lot of time into growing this publication, including creating a sub-newsletter dedicated to strictly sustainability within the Twin Cities.
Another recent focus includes more time with creative writing. I’ve been doing that on a new platform called Simily. It is far from a perfect platform, but it is an early stage startup and it’s very niche in terms of focusing on creating a home for original creative fiction version of Medium.
A big goal of mine personally has been to focus more on creative writing in general, which includes the passion projects. But I began to think about what the best way is to use my website.
My existing website was converted into my consulting business exclusively. There were years of old WordPress blogs that were transferred there and continued to generate traffic to my site, but its main purpose was a landing page for my business.
My personal brand got lost in the shuffle.
So I had an idea - what if a new website, on a new platform, with a new domain could do two jobs for me.
Enter The New Website
And that’s when MichaelRobert.work came into existence.
In its current iteration, it serves two purposes. My creative pursuits, as well as my consulting work.
It also served another purpose - it gave me a chance to try a new design platform, Wix. I’d heard about Wix over the past few years and didn’t have a project that warranted the time for it. Until now!
(I hope to review the Wix system in a future post, but I am a big fan.)
From a design perspective, I now am able to use one site to act as a gateway for two different intentions and purposes. It is my new and true hybrid portal for personal and professional goals.
Design Considerations
It was important for me to build new rather than retool and rebuild. If anyone has even managed a website rebuild or rebrand they know how daunting of a task it is.
For me, a big part of this was also getting away from WordPress. I found that I was spending a lot of time managing all the plugins, maintenance, and speed issues that took up a lot of time.
Additionally, I had built michaelrm.com using Divi and customized from there. One thing I didn’t realize was that Divi added shortcodes to all of my content and that when I went to try out new designs with alternative themes, my content was locked in from these shortcodes and design didn’t translate. (I later found a plugin to remove the shortcode.)
Speed was also a huge problem. Despite my best efforts, my site was bogged down and loaded - and continues to load - very slowly.
I’ve been using WordPress for website development and builds since 2010, but in the last year I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the necessity to rely upon so many plugins to make things function.
I used the opportunity to jump to a new platform and expand my website development tools and experience.
Wix allowed me to build my site quickly and with relative ease once I learned the process of the new interface.
The speed of my new site is lightyears ahead of what my old site was.
In addition to speed improvements, I also loved the build interface, the backend navigation, and was pleasantly surprised to be guided through accessibility checking and improvements.
Why Does Web Brand Matter?
You could make a very strong case that you don’t need a website if you’re an individual or consultant. You could leverage existing tools like LinkedIn, Git, Polywork, etc. where you can showcase your work on someone else’s platform.
But, it isn’t as easy to tie all these together or use a single one as your ultimate landing page to share content or your portfolio with.
If you’re a business, not having a website today can be a huge red flag. Maybe you’re small enough (like a carpenter, or other skilled trade) where you only need referral business to operate on. In those situations, you can get away with it if you keep an updated Google Business listing.
But everyone else? I’m struggling to think of one logical reason to not have a web brand and website.
Brand Audit
So what should you do? Run a brand audit.
Review your existing search profiles.
How do you show up in Google?
What images are out there?
How does your website look?
What content on your social profiles is publicly searchable? Could it be considered detrimental to your business pursuits? Does it help grow your brand?
Does your website reflect your business goals?
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. You are the only one that knows what your personal brand could be or what you want it to be. If you don’t want to consider it your brand, consider it your digital self. How do you want strangers to view you when they meet your digital self?
Take these things into consideration and you’ll be well on your way to envisioning your personal digital presence.
If you are interested in following my other work, please consider subscribing to Choosing Eco or The Pop Culture Guide using the boxes above.
Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments!