Learning Personal Branding – LinkedIn Learning Course Review

Whether you’re involved in marketing, own a small business, or want to learn more about influencing, then personal branding is something you’re going to want to invest some time in learning.

As an entrepreneur or small business owner, you’re going to need to know how to market your business- yourself. After all, you know more about your business than anybody else. Spending some time on improving your personal brand can dramatically improve your marketing success – and improve your business, too.

If you want to learn more about how to craft your personal brand, you may want to take the Learning Personal Branding course by Chelsea Krost on LinkedIn Learning.

What is This Course All About?

In this class, you will not only learn more about how to create your personal brand foundation and how to create your personal brand content calendar. You will also grow your presence on social media and grow your personal website.

What is your personal brand, you might ask? According to Krost, it’s your most powerful and most unique asset. It’s also a valuable marketing tool. As the role of social media and other digital marketing strategies grow, consumers tend to desire a more personal connection with companies. They want a face behind their favorite brands!

This is why influencer marketing has become so popular. An influencer isn’t just anybody but is instead an entrepreneur with a strong following and a powerful personal brand.

Once you have your own personal brand, you can use it to build credibility, enhance your personal and professional networks, and grow your revenue. In short, personal brands are powerful, and you can combine your personal brand with your business brand for some seriously impactful results.

This course will teach you everything you need to know about why you should invest in personal branding as well as how you can create your brand and use it to create a strong marketing framework. You’ll gain access to a variety of techniques that will help you on a personal and professional level.

What Kinds of Content Does the Course Cover?

Personal Branding Basics

In the first section of the course, you’ll learn all the basics you need to understand about personal branding. As a newcomer to this topic, I found the section incredibly helpful. The instructor breaks down all the basics of why having a strong personal brand is important, as well as how you can intertwine your personal brand with your professional one.

She also breaks down how to create a foundation for a strong personal brand, with four core questions that you have to ask yourself:

● What am I passionate about?
● What am I good at?
● What gives me credibility?
● What are my personal brand goals?

Krost gives her students a number of clear-cut ways that you can use these questions to help build your personal brand. She uses solid examples – for example, when it comes to figuring out what gives you credibility, she gives examples such as awards, certifications, credentials, or training you might have that can help you depict yourself as an expert (and honestly).

In this section, you will also learn how to craft your personal brand story. After all, it’s more important that you tell a story than deliver data when you are trying to connect with an audience. She describes the key ingredients as they should relate to your personal brand – or, as she calls them, the three C’s (character, conflict, and conclusion).

The final section of this module is learning how to define your target audience. Krost again walks you through examples of a target audience as well as questions you can ask yourself to figure out who your target audience is. Then, she walks users through ways that you can package your expertise as a service or product that benefits that target audience.

Personal Brand Content Marketing

This next section of the course is a bit shorter breaking down how to build your personal branding content marketing framework. She goes into detail about how content marketing can help you create and distribute valuable content to both attract and retain your target audience – and drive profits.

According to Krost, there are five steps you should take when building your content marketing framework. You’ll Want to define your objective, consider your audience, craft your brand story, and develop a process to roll out your content strategy (perhaps the most complicated part, which she’ll walk you through). The final step in developing your personal brand content marketing is figuring out how you will measure your content performance.

Then, Krost will give you some information on how you can create a personal brand content calendar that will keep you organized. There are various types of content that are more beneficial than others, but being on a good schedule is the best thing you can do to make sure you are creating the right content and messaging for all consumers regardless of where they are at in their “consumer journey.”

Next, you’ll learn about how you can use social media to leverage your personal brand. Three or several social media services you can use to improve your branding, but each should be viewed as a separate way to advertise yourself. She gives students several things to consider as they look at their social media channels:

● How well does it align with your brand, business, and persona?
● Is your business name, signature hashtag, bio, website, and logo up to date and consistent across your channels?
● Are you reviewing your posted content regularly to make sure you’re posting on a consistent basis?
● Do you have a social media analytics tool?

Krost goes on in the next “mini-section” of this module to describe ways in which you can grow your personal brand with livestream, or live video, too.

Monetize Your Personal Brand

If you’re new to personal branding, this next module of the course might be the most interesting to you. Krost will give you information on how you can monetize your personal brand. There are five things you need to do – which she will break down in this section – in addition to building your personal brand website. She’ll also tell you ways in which you can leverage your signature traffic builder.

As someone without a lot of experience in personal branding, I found this section to be the most fascinating. Krost gives clear steps that you can take to help you earn an income but emphasizes the importance of following the other tips in the course to build your authority before trying to monetize your brand.

Press and Speaking Engagements

This next section of the course was one that I didn’t find to be quite as helpful as the others. Learning more about how to land and deliver press and speaking engagements is a niche that I don’t think all individuals taking this class would necessarily be interested in – not everybody wants to learn how to become a keynote speaker.

That said, if that’s a plan that you’ve laid out for yourself on your journey toward developing a stronger personal brand, you may want to spend some extra time on this module of the course. Krost gives clear details to help you look for, land, and deliver speaking gigs. She recommends simple, actionable steps you can take, such as preparing for outreach, creating a speaker’s bio, having a professional headshot taken, and tailoring your speaking topics to the event’s key themes.

Research here is key, and Krost will tell you some steps you can take when you’re looking for summits, expos, conventions, and events that align with your interests and expertise.

Interestingly, Krost also provides some tips for using LinkedIn to build your personal brand.

Conclusion/Next Steps

The last section of the course on personal branding is, of course, the shortest. Krost gives you some simple steps you can follow after taking the course. She recommends that students download the exercise files that are included with the course and that they check out her blog, Twitter page, and LInkedIn.

Krost also recommends that users tune in to her weekly Twitter chat and the book she helped to write, Mission Critical Messengers. These are some helpful resources you might want to maintain as you continue to build your personal brand.

Pricing Products Properly

This next section is one that will have most small business owners perking up their ears – at least, that’s what I found to be the case! Pricing is a challenge for most business owners, and ultimately, it requires a lot of research and considerations.

The instructors break down proper pricing in two settings – when you are pricing products and when you are pricing services. The methods given by the teachers are helpful in both settings.

The LinkedIn Course Platform

This course is one of several that I have taken on the LinkedIn course platform over the years. After merging with Lynda, another online course platform, in 2015, LinkedIn Learning has been able to provide a large selection of content to learners of all backgrounds. This platform is user-friendly and makes it possible for students to interact with others, learn with the instructor, and to stay engaged at all times.

I’ve taken classes on other course platforms, including Udemy, and LinkedIn Learning is one of my favorite options. There are so many courses for you to choose from as a student, and while you do have to pay for a membership, the endless amount of options means your membership is well worth the expense.

I’m not a huge fan of the fact that all of the courses don’t follow the same uniform template. Some of the courses lack features that others possess. Fortunately, the Learning Personal Branding course by Chelsea Krost has many of those features that I prefer to see, such as supplemental resources and chapter quizzes, so I don’t feel like I was slighted at all in this module.

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The Course & The Instructor

To date, more than 43,853 students have liked this course, and more than 264,760 people have taken it. The numbers don’t lie – this is a class that many students have found to be valuable and informative.

The class is taught by Chelsea Krost, a “leading millennial expert” and LinkedIn Learning Instructor. It is ranked as the twelfth most popular course of 2020.

Krost is an expert in her own right. She has been working to empower millennials since she was just sixteen years old, when she started a radio talk show called Teen Talk Live. Today, Krost is considered a leading influencer, millennial marketing, and brand strategist. She is a widely sought-after keynote speaker, media personality, and chat host.

She works both with individuals and small businesses as well as Fortune 500 corporations. Her programs include live coaching and DIY programs along with digital marketing strategies.
Chelsea Krost has spoken publicly all over the world, including in Africa and Malaysia. She also has a certification as a health coach.

Her accolades include honors as a Member of the Forbes Coaches Council, as one of the 10 Entrepreneurs to Follow in 2017, and as one of the Top 26 Millennial INfeluncers to Follow.

On LinkedIn, Krost has numerous skills and endorsements. She is endorsed in public relations, television, social media, and more. Her recommenders say things like, “Chelsea is not only talented at her hosting craft but also incredibly reliable and a joy to work with. It is such a pleasure in the high-stress live TV world to be able to completely trust that the talent is prepared and will deliver flawlessly with a smile on her face.”

Major Benefits of Taking This Course

Perfect Length

This course provides the perfect introduction to learning personal branding and content marketing. It is short but sweet, clocking in at just 48 minutes long. Krost does a nice job of delivering clear, succinct pieces of information without repeating herself or becoming redundant.

Solid Course Objectives

Chelsea Krost includes several clear objectives that you can view before you even start taking the course. If you’re trying to decide whether this class is a good fit for you, you’ll find that these objectives will help you narrow things down.

The objectives for this course are as follows:

● Determine the fundamentals of creating your own personal brand foundation.
● Recognize the essentials of making your personal branding marketing framework.
● Identify the steps in writing your personal brand content calendar.
● Examine the top LinkedIn tips for personal brand building.

Clear, Easy to Understand Instruction

I’ve taken several classes on LinkedIn Learning, but out of all of them, this one was one of my favorites. I hold this opinion or several reasons.

Not only is Krost a fluent, easy to understand speaker, but she is incredibly astute and confident as she moves through the instruction. She gives plenty of clear instruction that is easy to understand (in terms of the audio quality as well as the content). She has a powerful speaking voice that makes you want to pay attention. All of her information is backed by solid examples as well as clear, organized graphics.

The steps that Krost gives you toward developing your personal brand are detailed, clear, and actionable. I felt as though I could use these tips in my own business to help develop my brand and grow my audience.

Includes Opportunities for Continuing Education Credits

If you’re hoping to get something out of this course beyond just expanded knowledge, you’ll like this feature – it comes with the ability to earn continuing education units. There is one certification available with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy.

What does this mean? As long as you complete all videos and chapter quizzes and score a 70% or higher on the final exam, you can get 1.2 units of professional education credit. That’s helpful if you’re hoping to be able to add a defined, specific credential to your resume after taking the class!

Bonus Features Available

Take this class, and you’ll have access to several different bonus features at the end of the course. These include exercise files, certificates,s continuing education units (as mentioned above), and a final exam.

The exercise files are designed to help you practice the skills you learned in the course. There is also an exercise file that comes with a glossary of all of the terms that Krost goes over in the class.

Upon completing the course, you can get a LinkedIn Learning Certificate to show that you completed the class. You can also receive certification with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, as mentioned earlier.

Finally, the course includes a final exam. For many people, the exam might not seem like a bonus, but I appreciated it. It let me make sure I had covered everything the course wanted me to and that I was ready to set out and incorporate the tips that Krost includes in the class.

Chapter Quizzes

One of my favorite features of LinkedIn Learning is that it allows instructors to include chapter quizzes as part of their instructional packages. Not all instructors choose to include these, but I really appreciate those that do.

I find these sections incredibly valuable as I’m moving through a course. They provide me with a way to check in on myself and to make sure I’m achieving the course objectives as the instructor has listed them for the course. It’s a great way to stay accountable and to make sure I’m getting the most I can out of the class.

You don’t have to complete the chapter quizzes if you don’t want to – you can move forward in the class without having completed them. However, I recommend taking the time to give them a try. They’ll let you know if you understand the material and if you don’t, the course module will direct you back to the section of the course you need to visit to find the right answer.

Device Compatibility

I started out taking this course on my smartphone, via the LinkedIn Learning app. I liked taking the course in this way, because I could listen to the information while I was driving or getting other work done around the house. However, you can also take the class on your desktop computer.

Related Courses

Chelsea Krost unfortunately doesn’t teach any other classes on LinkedIn Learning. However, if you are interested in learning more about digital marketing and about personal branding, you might consider taking some of the following courses:

● Online Marketing Foundations
● Creating Your Personal Brand
● Writing to Be Heard on LinkedIn
● Charlene Li on Digital Leadership
● Ryan Holmes on Social Leadership

All of these courses include a similar structure and content as what is found in Chelsea Krost’s Learning Personal Branding course.

Complaints About the Course

It is not possible to view what people had to say about the course, but you can see by quickly visiting the course page on LinkedIn Learning that it has a very high reviewer rating – nearly five stars.

You can also access the question and answer section of the course to see what kinds of questions students are left asking once they’ve completed the modules. I like the question and answer section, as it gives me suggestions for continued learning and makes me feel as though I am interacting with members of the course and with the instructor.

Many people use this platform to sound off with their opinions on the course, too, so although there isn’t a dedicated section where you can view students’ reviews, you can find opinions and feedback here. This will help provide you with a good idea of what people liked and did not like.

There were few complaints to be seen here. Most had to do with the LinkedIn course platform rather than the course itself, with a few students frustrated about things like faulty certificates.

Who is the Learning Personal Branding Course on LinkedIn Learning Best For?

I found the Learning Personal Branding course to be incredibly helpful, both as an individual new to the topic as well as a small business owner. Although some of the steps detailed in the course were better for aspiring influencers, I still found many of the tips to be helpful from a generalized marketing perspective.

If you want to learn ways in which you can grow your business – particularly in the digital landscape but also offline – then this course is one of the best ones for you to consider. I would recommend it to anybody who wants to grow any kind of business in the 21st century. Your personal brand is key toward developing a strong, prominent, and marketable image for your business.