Selling yourself means building the right strategy to gain the trust of others toward your professional abilities. It’s a genuine sales funnel designed to attract as many opportunities as possible and make yourself marketable.
In English, this concept is called Personal Branding, which is widely used in our language too because it has a more impactful connotation: branding yourself means making yourself unique and recognizable, like a brand.
The personnel selection processes have changed now, as well as the methods of applying for jobs. The time when you waited to be called after simply sending a resume is over.
Today, knowing how to sell yourself is essential and it involves reversing the dynamics: shifting from searching for a job to being discovered by the right job.
So, rather than wondering how to write an effective curriculum vitae, the goal to set is how to effectively sell yourself. Take a look at the Personal Branding course program: a training path that will help you put your strengths in black and white and teach you how to communicate them.
Keep reading, and you’ll discover interesting insights on how to structure the strategy to sell yourself, beginning with a fundamental premise: in the realm of work, those who can position themselves as the ideal candidate at the opportune moment pave their path.
In this article, I talked about:
- what to do to sell yourself online;
- what questions to ask yourself to really know your attitudes;
- how to identify the right market niche;
- how important a valid web marketing strategy is.
In Personal Branding, you are the product!
First and foremost, to successfully sell yourself, you have to be aware you are the product to promote. Before starting to market yourself, make sure you really know your attitudes and skills.
The former will help you focus your energy on the path that can bring you greater satisfaction, and the latter must be made clear to the job market to be credible and appealing to companies, whether you are seeking employment in a company or as a freelancer.
Doing personal branding in the digital age means being able to leverage the powerful tool of web marketing and reaching a much broader market than the local offline one.
However, be careful about how you decide to promote yourself, as, thanks to the greater resonance typical of the internet, what you do can come back to you like a boomerang. You have to set up a sales funnel that goes straight to the product: you!
Discover the secrets to sell yourself! Download the free mini-guide!
Selling yourself requires strategy, awareness, and determination. You must apply all the sales techniques just like any other product, but since we tend to have a subjective point of view about ourselves, doing personal marketing can be complicated without proper training or mindset.
Choose the shortest path to success! Enroll in the course and learn how to sell yourself!
Before discussing persuasive marketing and how to sell yourself, one thing that many tend to take for granted is concrete knowledge of oneself. Apart from skills, which are easy to identify, have you ever asked yourself about your inclinations?
Just to give some examples, which of these adjectives do you feel more aligned with?
- Creative or precise;
- Operational or managerial;
- Analytical or systematic;
- Reactive or proactive;
- Extroverted or introverted.
Try to answer honestly. Each of the characteristics mentioned above involves the ability to perform a job more or less effectively. For instance, as a freelancer, it’s crucial to adopt a proactive approach rather than a reactive one, regardless of your educational background and aspirations
The goal should be to have full control over your future career, providing the right direction and coordination to the activity, which, in any case, will have you at the center. Learn to sell your value and your distinctive characteristics!
In recent years, we have witnessed the phenomenon of burnout: many people have faced emotional exhaustion from being in the wrong profession. Many have chosen to change, reinvent themselves in the job market, propose themselves for new roles, or work independently.
Do you have the right mindset to work as a freelancer? Put yourself to the test with the quiz!
If, from the business perspective, this is a significant phenomenon today, in the coming years, we will witness an enrichment of skills: relocating in the job market, perhaps choosing different roles, will bring new synergies and contaminations. For the hybrid professional figures that are emerging, a simple curriculum will not be enough to sell themselves.
We are the sum of our work experiences, inclinations, and abilities. Unfortunately, especially in the digital age, we must be able to be found, present ourselves, and be chosen, all in a short time.
Americans use the term “elevator pitch,” imagining presenting a unique and functional idea and being able to sell it in 120 seconds, the duration of an elevator ride. Therefore, marketing oneself, without a solid strategy, can lead to wasting energy while thinking of bringing value to the new venture.
How to sell yourself in 5 steps
Why can’t I find a job? It’s a question that torments many people, and one of the reasons why, not knowing what to do after graduation, many young individuals tend to procrastinate facing the job market, enrolling in the most tempting courses offered to them.
Instead, I can tell you that those who don’t take risks will eventually work for those who have the courage to do so, so it’s worth not wasting time and learning to effectively sell oneself. Certainly, the era of indiscriminately sending resumes to companies and expecting something to happen is over.
For generations, millions of people have awaited astonishing results from this passive and overused action, which, in most cases, has flooded the mailboxes of companies and recruiters without giving candidates the opportunity to distinguish themselves and be noticed.
The heavy limitation of resumes is that they are mere self-referential descriptions, and as a result, job interviews become a verification of the truthfulness of the resume itself.
Today, there are platforms that are based on declaring one’s skills but already lean towards selling oneself, thanks to the relevance given to direct references. A LinkedIn resume, if directed toward companies, can be a starting point.
Focus on what you do well
Each of us is good at something. The problem is that few are truly able to identify their strengths.
What all these 5 steps have in common is the ability to optimize energies, an absolute must if you want to make a difference.
That’s why the first thing is to focus on your real aptitudes and skills and aim for sectors where you have an advantage.
All sales processes start with a deep knowledge of the product and the enhancement of its unique features, before identifying the target and the strategy for effective communication.
Selling oneself requires the same process.
Identify markets with growth prospects
Instead, choose unconventional paths and take risks, rather than turning to already saturated markets. Unfortunately, there are many professions that have become obsolete in the digital age.
If you have pursued a course of study that leads you to a market characterized by strong competition and few professional opportunities, conduct a thorough analysis of trends and also consider new prospects. Usually, following what the majority doesn’t yield much.
Compare skills and promising markets
Have you identified markets with greater potential that can guarantee important business prospects? Well, consider how your skills can be useful and in what form you can propose them. Employee or freelancer? Your attitudes will provide you with input regarding the professional positioning that will best enhance your value.
If, by matching skills and market, you find new sectors, it doesn’t mean they are obscure solutions: ask yourself at the very least how to create a need for the customer! There are many unexplored market niches, and this is the moment to try and learn how to present yourself.
To do personal marketing, you need to learn how to highlight your characteristics if you want to communicate them effectively. Remember, you’re not selling skills; you’re selling trust. Customers look for someone they can trust and who is competent, of course.
Look inside yourself to try and understand what makes you unique and special in the market. Among pull and push marketing strategies, there’s no doubt: you must attract to sell yourself effectively.
Gain work experiences that demonstrate your abilities
Once you’ve identified your target audience and the way to present yourself, start gaining experiences. Prefer those that align with your objectives, even if they don’t make you much money at the beginning – it doesn’t matter. You’re gaining experience and credibility.
Building a business takes time, one step at a time. The important thing is to move consistently towards your end goal, rather than dissipating energy in sporadic jobs, even if they pay better, but lead you away from your path.
In other words, build the product you’re selling: in personal branding, the product is you! If you discover that your skills remain largely theoretical in comparison to high-potential markets, consider enrolling in a hands-on learning program.
By the end of it, you’ll be able to demonstrate your capabilities through real experiences.
Cultivate your online presence
Web marketing can be a powerful tool in this new era, provided it follows a strategy coherent with the image you want to portray. You don’t need to be present on every social media platform, but rather, carefully manage your profile on the social media most used by your target audience or where your clients expect to find answers to their needs.
Otherwise, how can you sell yourself if you’re addressing an audience uninterested in what you have to offer?
Engaging in social selling on Facebook or Instagram entails distinct approaches, demanding customized content and tone of communication due to their distinct audience expectations and search intents. The trick is not to be found by everyone but to be appealing and authoritative within the specific industry you want to address.
Being capable of selling means deeply understanding your buyer persona’s behavior and applying targeted marketing strategies.
Create a website that aligns with your business plan and produce high-quality content that speaks to your customers, building trust before you start selling your services.
In the recent articles on your blog, readers should find interesting and unique topics, making you a reference in that market niche. Consider that selling yourself will happen only after several touchpoints that constitute the customer journey: meticulously design the approach path for your prospects. If you act consistently, you’ll build a successful value proposition.
So, in short, how to sell yourself effectively online?
- Consider your online presence as the best job placement agency you can have. You can open a webpage and write SEO-focused content to attract targeted organic traffic. Choose the social network that aligns best with your business, plan your posts, and optimize them for internal search engines.
- Plan the monitoring of results and anticipate trending topics in your industry.
- Try to obtain referrals and reviews from your social network: word-of-mouth is also the best advertising online.
Live Exercises: Learn to Sell Yourself
Selling yourself is a process that requires some starting time. You can shorten it significantly if you have the opportunity to practice with expert coaches in personal branding.
These are interactive live sessions, each lasting one hour, based on learning by doing, where you can learn how to use social tools or other web instruments that will add value to your business idea.
Conclusions and Free Coaching Session
So, doing personal branding and learning to sell yourself effectively requires a clear overview of the market and planning the steps you need to take in the short and medium term to achieve your goals.
Digital marketing offers endless possibilities; it’s up to you to choose the most suitable ones. Why not take advantage of the opportunity for free career coaching?
Want more information about training paths?
I direct Digital Coach®, the professional training school, leader in training all professionals who work in the Digital Marketing & Sales field.
As a trainer, I have trained over 35,000 business professionals from over 300 large multinational companies and over 5,000 Italian SMEs.
I devised the “Digital Strategy Framework®” method, thanks to which since 2014 I have been helping companies to define and improve over time a digital strategy that maximizes the generation of turnover and online sales.
