What is Personal Brand?

A personal brand is the professional reputation that precedes you: what people expect you are good at, and why, before you have said a word in the room. Online it gets built from surfaces, your headline, about section, featured work, and the things you publish and comment on, all pointing at the same recognizable territory. The term attracts justified eye-rolling when it means logos, catchphrases, and manufactured vulnerability, so anchor on the working definition instead: a brand is repeated evidence of the same strengths, made visible where your market already looks. In practice that means choosing a positioning narrow enough to be remembered, stating it plainly in your profile, and then letting consistent output prove it over months rather than announcing it once. The test is whether a stranger, after sixty seconds on your profile, can say what you do and for whom without guessing. Run the profile checker to see whether your surfaces currently tell one story or five different ones.