It seems like everyone is having trouble finding jobs after graduating from college. Many of my friends are currently working at jobs such as waiting, bartending, or construction jobs when they went to school for 4 years and have a degree. It seems like there just aren’t any jobs available!
I call that a crock of bull.
The problem here is that they haven’t done anything to differentiate themselves from others and to build their brand. My personal brand is WhosChrisHughes, which you can tell by my domain name: http://WhosChrisHughes.com , my Twitter handle @WhosChrisHughes , my facebook account http://facebook.com/WhosChrisHughes and many other social networking user names.
Why did I do this you may ask?
It’s simple really. Businesses are looking for people who are going to be beneficial to their business, someone who’s going to come in and make a difference. They are looking for people who are willing to go beyond the normal and learn outside of the classroom and turn themselves into a brand. They want people who are working so hard to improve themselves that it really becomes a problem if the business can’t hire this person.
I was lucky enough to have realized this fairly early on, although it wasn’t until my Junior year of college that I truly started to understand the benefit of personal branding and how it would change my future for the better.
I’m not here to rub it in your face or act like I’m better than you, but to give you a step-by-step plan so that you can do the same. I’m also going to show you a few other young people like myself who have done an excellent job of branding themselves as well. This way you will have a few examples so that you can see how it has worked for others.
The first step is to identify your brand.
This is pretty simple. It’s typically FirstName LastName. Ta-da! You’re now branding yourself. The steps you’ll need to take now are to go to GoDaddy.com and buy your name as a domain. The next step is to get a blog set up and you can do that with the training here.
Your brand should be your first and last name, in my case I was not able to get ChrisHughes.com because there are thousands of Chris Hughes’ in the world and someone has already taken that domain. Curse you Okaloosa Tax man!
If you can’t get your exact name, add a “-” in there so its “First-Last.com” or something along those lines, you can even use “FirstMiddleLast.com”
The next step is to get this username on the different social networks.
The top few social networks you need to get these usernames on is:
- YouTube
Identify your perfect job.
What is it that you are going to school for or want to be when you grow up?
This will be the main focus of your blog and all of your networking. You don’t want to hate what you are doing because if you do, life will flat out suck and you won’t be happy. The purpose of life is to be happy, so enjoy what you’re doing. You will be writing articles and creating videos about this type of job and learning about this stuff and sharing what you’ve learned on your blog.
What are your current specialties? These can be ideas for your first blog posts and are a way for potential employers to learn about you.
Networking and Sharing Content
This is where you should be spending some of your free time. I know that drinking and partying is a ton of fun and know it’s part of college, but remember to plan for your future as well. I had an awesome time in college but certain weekends I would stay in and do actual work, writing blogs, making videos, writing articles, doing backlinking campaigns etc etc.
Spend some time on Meetup.com and start going to these meetups. You’ll meet a ton of great people in the area who may know of someone who has a job available that isn’t posted. If you can develop relationships with these people, they’ll be more likely to want to refer you to their friends. This works great for getting clients or getting jobs and is worth doing. Spend some time on forums dealing with the job you want, help answer any questions you can and ask questions. Being active let’s people know you are interested and could potentially be an awesome asset to their company.
Comment on other peoples blogs and interact with people in your field. You never know when a blogger may be connected to a major corporation that happens to be looking for someone like you!
Start doing this TODAY, don’t put it off.