Creating a Personal Brand: Making Amanda Listens
“Creating a Personal Brand,” swiggly line below. Under the line, “The Making of Amanda Listens” with Amanda Listens as the logo.
Representing a brand is nothing new to me. As I have been working in communications for non-profit organizations for over two years, being the steward of the brand is part of the job.
When I was graduating from university, representing myself proved to be a challenge as I did not have a solid communications plan and brand identity like organizations I worked for. While continuing to learn and improve my skills in content creation, I kept seeing “personal brand” popping up as a strategy, especially when developing a career.
Promoting myself always feels weird to me. It feels like I am coming across as self-centered, instead of showcasing what I can do and what I love to do. After much indecisiveness, I realized it was an opportunity to create a strong foundation of talking about myself while providing an avenue to create content that I love making.
In December of 2022, I made the decision to connect my urge to write blogs while also presenting myself as a brand. I started researching, brainstorming, and ideating how exactly I would want to approach this. Once January 2023 came along, I started to not let decision paralysis get to me and made decisions, leading to Amanda Listens!
How did I get to what you are seeing now? Well here are the steps I took to get to the launch of Amanda Listens.
The name “Amanda Listens”
The logo
The colours
The approach to the brand
Website
Content Creation
The Name
There was one thing I was decisive about, not having my full name as the domain. First, I did not like the idea of my first and last name as a domain. Second, unless you know the spelling of my last name, no one was ever going to find it because it kept being spelt wrong (a big no-no in domain name). So, that is why it is not called Amanda Hendrie (amandahendrie.ca). So what was I going to name it?
I was totally okay with my first name, it is a common name and the intention is for this to be a personal brand for myself while also creating content. So the challenge was to find a word that would flow with Amanda, still represent who I am, and what my personal mission is.
I listed my interests, passions, how I describe myself, how others describe me, things in my life, and so much more. I was on Thesaurus for quite a while finding words that I may have missed that could potentially work. The funniest part is that I did not find the word through searching, but in reflection of that process.
Listening has always been a word that comes up in my life. For me, it represents the deaf part of me that always has to listen because I could not hear. It represented the advocate in me that strives to pause and listen to understand different perspectives that I may not be aware of. It represented the communications side of me that listens to others for feedback or how well a piece of content resonated with people.
Thus, Amanda Listens became the name of my personal brand.
Logo
Once I had the name, inspiration for the logo struck! At first, I was thinking of logos just in general, what image would I like to be associated with my personal brand?
However, I also wanted it to be simple.
Since it is also a place to showcase my work, I knew a typeface that has more of a professionalism aspect to it would be important. However, I am also creative and do hand lettering in my free time. So a sprinkle of a hand lettering typeface was crucial for me. As I was playing around with different fonts, I found a logo and a submark.
I had the realization that the lowercase “a” and the uppercare “L” can look like an ear, perfect for representing the listens aspect of the brand. Since it was subtle, it was perfect for me to start out the brand.
Colours
The colours I was pretty flexible about. However, there were key aspects I wanted to consider.
I needed to consider the accessibility of the colour, enough contrast to be readable. This means I need a light colour and a dark colour
Since I care about accessibility and participation in my work, I wanted to include a blue colour to connect to the society’s perception of the meaning of blue and what blue emotes
Purple is a colour that represents me. I even have it as a fun hair colour for years so it makes sense to include it in the personal brand.
Lastly, I needed a couple of secondary colours to provide flexibility and variety for content creation and visuals
Therefore I chose
Squares of the colours
An off-white colour as the light colour (#E4E5F0)
A navy colour as the dark colour (#100D4F)
A light blue as requested (#7CA9D6)
Went with a darker purple for contrast (#6A68B8)
A light pink colour to complement and brighten up my visuals (#C1AEC0)
And, a burgundy colour for social media purposes as an additional secondary colour to play with as an accent (#520E38)
It connected with the dusk night sky I gravitate towards and my personal style (no kidding, only colours missing here from my wardrobe are grey, black, and army green).
My Intention for the Brand
During this process, I kept in mind my goals for the personal brand.
Creating content to work toward what I want to advocate for and my advocacy journey
Increasing my professional identity and showcasing my work
These were important to keep reminding myself so that I can actually launch this instead of daydreaming all that I could do. I needed the focus to actually follow through.
Content Creation
Choosing for Website
Choosing the domain host and website builder should have been easier for me but, me being indecisive, I wanted to explore all my options in case I was missing a “better” option. To be honest, I should have just taken what I learned from my communications roles and not gone down this rabbit hole.
While my research in blogging highlighted options such as Bluehost and WordPress as the standard, I had experience with different hosts and website builders. While they would have been the cheaper options, I choose comfort and familiarity.
I paid for a domain on Google Domains and built this website on SquareSpace and it was easier because I already knew how to navigate them. I can focus on the tasks that would require my effort, and rightfully so.
Building the Website
Going back to my intentions for the brand, there were a few pages I know I needed, Home is the landing page, Blog is my main form of content, and Resume for the professional and volunteer work.
Once I planned those out, the About Me, Journey, and Contact came after. They were additional pages that provided the full picture of the personal brand (and a way to contact). With copywriting, designing, and organization, I created this website! While it will always be a work in progress, hitting publish was a step that seemed big at the start.
Setting up for content creation
I need organization!! Managing different content requires many steps. It means that it is time to pull up Notion to help. I love developing systems to make my life easier. Since my goals, tasks, and evaluations are already on Notion, might as well add content creation for Amanda Listens.
It is not my first time creating databases for content creation so the process for me was quite simple, I already knew what I needed and my only gap was how to best fit it with my task database. Thanks to the relation function and rollup function, I created an integrated system in my Notion.
I made sure to include in my Notion contention creation database
A seamless process of the statuses from idea to publishing
Calendars for creating content and publishing content
Templates of what is needed for different types of content
And little guides to keep me on track such as branding guide
With a little work upfront, I can go through my content creation process based on my plan and strategies with room for creativity. This is crucial to ensure that I maintain my personal brand and blogs!
Where I am going with Amanda Listens
This is only the beginning. My first step is establishing myself and my personal brand. At the moment, it looks focused on my personal stories and experiences that could be useful for you to learn from. In the near future, I will be discussing topics that I advocate for and learn along the way while showcasing my creative works and content creation.
Amanda