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25 Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand

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I'm Jade Scarfone.
A digital strategist and transformation catalyst, merging a decade of corporate systems mastery with a profound journey of self-discovery. From navigating the high-stakes world of banking to making waves in high-ticket affiliate marketing, I'm now dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs through strategic digital innovations. 

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Many entrepreneurs know it’s important to build a personal brand, but they don’t necessarily know the best way to do it. So here’s a list of 25 essential tools for building a personal brand. The more of these you implement into your personal branding strategy, the stronger your personal brand will become.

A few days ago I covered the importance of building your personal brand and I recommend reading that first if you haven’t already. You can read the post here: Why Building Your Personal Brand is Important in Business

In that post I covered the 4 main categories for building your personal brand. These are personal, technical, design and strategy. And for some of these categories there are some essential tools for establishing a strong personal brand.

**This post may contain affiliate links. The services I share are the services I personally use and honestly recommend to anyone. No extra costs are incurred for you; the referral commission simply contributes to bringing you valuable content. 
Many entrepreneurs know it's important to build a personal brand, but they don't necessarily know the best way to do it. So here's a list of 25 essential tools for building a personal brand. The more of these you implement into your personal branding strategy, the stronger your personal brand will become.

To keep things simple and consistent I’m going to break these essential tools into each of the 4 categories I discussed in my previous post.

Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand – Personal

There’s not a lot of tools you need in this category as such, since it’s all pretty much about you.

Personal Branding Tool #1 – Brand Yourself

But one really great tool for ensuring you have a strong personal brand is BrandYourself. It’s a site that allows you to monitor your online presence. Which allows you to make sure your brand doesn’t get damaged. Not only can you manage your online presence, you can also track where your comments, articles, mentions etc. have appeared, and share them in your own feed, creating great interconnecting links.

Another important factor of the personal element of your personal brand is great imagery.

While I highly recommend using a lot of images of yourself and your own things. And I’ll cover the importance of hiring a personal brand photographer at a later date. I also understand it’s not always possible, or necessary, to have images of yourself.

That’s where stock imagery can come in quite useful. But you don’t want to just use any old stock imagery. You want to use images that still reflect who you are and represent your personality. Which is why I don’t recommend using free stock sites (Unsplash, Pixabay etc.) You’ll just end up using the same images that 1000’s of other people are using so there’s no real ‘personal’ aspect there.

So if you do need to use stock images a good choice is to join a couple of different stock image subscription sites that update their content regularly. With most of them, you get fresh stock images delivered to your inbox each month, it’s perfect, especially for girl bosses like us!

Here’s some of my top recommendations:

Personal Branding Tool #2 – She Social

I only discovered the She Social site a few months ago but I am OBSESSED. Courtney is a genius. She has created an awesome subscription site that includes beautiful girl boss images that are updated monthly. Here’s a snapshot of some of the latest images we’ve had access to.

25 Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand - #2 She Social

Personal Branding Tool #3 – Get Found Stock

Omg I looove Get Found Stock. It’s a girl boss stock photo heaven. The difference here is you can either sign up for their subscription or just buy one off photos when you need them. But one photo is $10 or their monthly subscription is $29 and you get to select 15 images per month plus get extra support and bonuses so it’s a no brainer really. They have a huge selection of images to choose from which are broken down into various categories making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for.

25 Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand - #3 Get Found Stock

Personal Branding Tool #4 – Ivory Mix

Ivory Mix is another great stock photos and design site. Kayla is awesome and provides so much great value including 500+ free images (in folders for each month), plus she has membership options where you can get even fresher, more detailed content sent to you each month.

 #4 Ivory Mix

Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand – Technical

When it comes to the technical side of building your personal brand you need to have your domain, website, and email address sorted. These are some of my essential tools for building a personal brand when it comes to the technical side of things.

Personal Branding Tool #5 – Bluehost

Once you’ve established your brand name is available the next thing to do is secure the domain. Personally I always recommend Bluehost. Why?

  • Well, it’s WordPress recommended
  • It’s large and widely used/known
  • Offers 24/7 helpful customer service
  • Affordable – you can get hosting + a free domain from as little as $3.95/month
  • Fast loading
  • Super easy to use

If you want more information on how to use Bluehost read my post on How to Start a Blog.

Personal Branding Tool #6 – Tonic Websites

Which brings me to my other recommended website option. If you’re like me and get frustrated with design. And you don’t want to waste time fiddling around trying to get your site to look like the beautiful WordPress templates. Or you don’t quite have the budget to pay a web designer to create a custom site for you. You could instead purchase a ready done for you site that can be installed in a few button clicks.

My favourite place for this is Tonic Websites (if you like the look and feel of my Aussie Adventuress site, you’ll totally love Tonic). And if you like cocktails you’ll love Tonic Websites even more. The only reason I didn’t use Tonic again was because I didn’t want my new site to look like my existing site. But, lesson learnt, when you find something you love, stick with it! You’ll probably see this site transitioned over to a Tonic site soon enough.

#8 Tonic Websites

Personal Branding Tool #7 – Wisestamp

Whilst I highly recommend creating an official email address linked to your domain. Which will be the main email you use for your marketing etc. I also understand it’s so much easier to link your domain email with your Gmail account and respond to enquiries from there. That’s what I tend to do.

But you still want to ensure it looks professional and on brand even if it’s coming from a Gmail account. If you have a personal email that you still use to communicate with businesses and potential clients, it’s a good idea to have a signature there. This way it stays aligned with your branded email address.

A great tool to create email signatures for Gmail and Outlook is Wisestamp.

Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand – Design

Once you’ve got the technical stuff out of the way, design is an element that is going to become part of your brand forever.

Personal Branding Tool #8 – Canva

Unless you’re a Photoshop enthusiast, Canva is the best tool going when it comes to design – and it’s totally free. Not only does it have heaps of resources to help you choose your fonts and brand colours, but once you’ve got the research out of the way it’s got all the tools you need to create beautiful graphics.

And you don’t need to have a creative bone in your body as they have templates for everything. Flyers, business cards, social media graphics, email headers – you name it, Canva does it!

And if you want to take it to the next level you can upgrade to Canva for Work. This allows you to save your brand colours, logo, and fonts for easy access every time you want to create a design. All my blog cover images, pins for Pinterest, graphics for Instagram etc. are made with Canva.

 #10 Canva

Personal Branding Tool #9 – Wordswag

This phone app is one of my favourite design tools. See all those fancy quote images all over social media? Chances are if they weren’t created in Canva, they were created in Wordswag.

This tool is great for when you’re on the go and still want to get a design out. You can store your logos, upload your own images, or choose from the many stock images already available. You can also add your own text, or choose from pre-populated quotes and inspirational phrases. And my favourite aspect, they have gold foil text. Fancy schmancy!

Personal Branding Tool #10 – Creative Market

This is probably one of my favourite places to shop online these days. I wouldn’t really class myself as the most creative person out there.

But thanks to Creative Market, I don’t have to be. It’s a marketplace where designers share their work for purchase. And you can purchase pretty much everything from graphics, to fonts, templates, themes photos and more. It’s literally heaven!

One of my favourite stores is Blog Pixie – she has so many beautiful and whimsical templates for lady boss bloggers.

Personal Branding Tool #11 – Adobe

If you are a little more creative then you can’t go wrong with the Adobe product suite. Personally I’m a bit scared of Photoshop but I have purchased templates that needed Photoshop before so having it came in handy.

And Premiere Pro is the best if you’re going to be creating lots of YouTube videos. But my favourite Adobe tool is Lightroom because I love taking photos. And this is an awesome tool that all the photographers use to edit their images as well so you can know you’re using the best when you use this.

Personal Branding Tool #12 – Smart Mockups

This is an awesome tool that allows you to take any basic graphic and turn it into a 3D image. I especially love using it to bring my ebooks to life. You simply create the cover in Canva, then save the image and upload it to Smartmockups and you can turn it into a 3D book cover. Or better yet you can have the book placed in various settings to look like it’s actually being used.

This is a great alternative if you don’t have a chance to get a branding shoot and want to feature your ebook in a setting that looks a bit more lively. Here’s some examples of mockups I’ve created.

 #13 Smart Mockups

Personal Branding Tool #13 – Remove BG

Have you ever had a really good photo taken and you just want to use it for other purposes like a FB ad graphic or YouTube banner but you can’t because you can’t get rid of the background?

Well thanks to RemoveBG that doesn’t have to be a problem anymore.

This tool is the BEST thing ever and it requires no techy skills at all. Designers will probably hate me for sharing this because it’s something people tend to go to them for. But honestly it’s such a time saver. You literally upload your photo and BAM background is gone. So cool!

Personal Branding Tool #14 – Font Bundles

One of the ways to set your brand apart is through colours and fonts. And a lot of times the basic Google fonts can be quite boring and everyone is using them. So how do you set yourself apart? By using different fonts. You can choose from a huge range of free fonts right here at Font Bundles.

Personal Branding Tool #15 – Fiverr

Sometimes there’s one off tasks you just don’t know how to do yourself. Whether it’s designing a logo, to burning text into a video, creating custom outro and intros for Youtube, copywriting, or any aspect that contributes to building your brand. Fiverr is your go to platform.

With hundreds of freelancers to choose from for any task you can think of. And all at very reasonable prices, and completed jobs usually returned in 24-28 hours. This platform is a lifesaver when it comes to deciding when to do things yourself or when to outsource to someone else.

Essential Tools for Building a Personal Brand – Strategy

Personal Branding Tool #16 – Clickfunnels

To build trust and credibility you need to be building your email list. To turn those leads into sales you need high converting sales funnels. And the best platform to do all these things is Clickfunnels.

Not only can you use all their ready made templates to create beautiful, branded sales pages and funnels. You can also host webinars, create membership sites and do so much more. Clickfunnels is one of the highly essential tools for establishing a strong personal brand.

Personal Branding Tool #17 – GetResponse

As you’re growing your email list you need a tool to enable you to efficiently and effectively communicate to your subscribers. This tool should allow you to set up automated emails and also have an inbuilt CRM system to allow you to effectively follow up and keep in contact with the right people.

My favourite tool for this is GetResponse – not only does it allow you to set up automated email systems, has a high functioning CRM tool, and allow you to create branded subscription forms to embed in your website. It also allows you to create branded templates so all your emails can look professional and on brand with consistent headers and signatures etc.

Personal Branding Tool #18 – Typeform

A great way to learn more information about your audience is through questionnaires and exercises. And Typeform is my go to platform for creating these. You can choose your own colours, add your own images and even your own videos. So it’s totally customisable to your brand.

Personal Branding Tool #19 – Interact

A great way to grow your email list is to provide fun and interesting ways to invite people to engage with you. And quizzes are a really great way to do this. Interact is my go to platform for creating these. You can make various different types of quizzes with all kinds of outcomes and they’re all totally customisable to your brand.

To learn more about this awesome tool read my Interact post here.

Personal Branding Tool #20 – Planoly

As mentioned in my previous post on How to Establish a Strong Brand on Social Media it’s important to keep your Instagram feed looking consistent and on brand. But this is hard to do if you’re just posting on a whim and without any strategy.

Enter Planoly – this has quickly become one of my favourite tools and is permanently open on my desktop (but it synchs to your phone as well). Basically it allows you to plan out and schedule your Instagram content. And it has simple drag and drop features so you can move your posts around to see how your feed will look before you post anything.

They’ve also recently released a sister app Stories Edit which has beautiful templates you can use to keep your IG stories on brand as well.

 #20 Planoly

Personal Branding Tool #21 – Tailwind

This is another favourite of mine and is also permanently open on my desktop. Basically Tailwind is a Pinterest scheduling tool and is the best tool to grow your views. I’ll go more into that on another post. It also has a phone app so you can schedule your pins on the go as well.

And they’ve recently started testing Instagram scheduling as well. I still prefer Planoly for Instagram because I like the layout and it helps me to plan my feed effectively. But one added bonus Tailwind has just introduced is being able to schedule your first comment for Instagram as well which is great for people who like putting their hashtags in their first comment.

Personal Branding Tool #22 – Hootsuite

This is another tool that allows you to schedule your social media content and is compatible with Facebook and Instagram.

Personally I no longer use Hootsuite because I switched to Planoly for Instagram and just use the scheduling capabilities within Facebook now so I don’t have a need for it anymore. But it is another great option if you wanted to have a few different scheduling tools to compare.

**The best thing about the last 3 tools I’ve mentioned is that each of them is an official partner of Facebook/Instagram meaning you won’t get in trouble for using them. Instagram has become much more vigilant in protecting its users so it’s important to only use apps that are approved by them to keep your account safe. Go here for a full list of their approved partners.

Personal Branding Tool #23 – Trello

This is the bees knees when it comes to planning out your strategy. I love to stay organised and on top of things and Trello has completely changed things for me.

You can put in tasks and reminders and lay it all out on a visual calendar so big projects are able to be planned out efficiently and effectively. And all the little day to day tasks don’t get forgotten about either.

Essential tools for establishing a stronger personal brand - Trello

Personal Branding Tool #24 – GroupFunnels

This is a really great tool if you’re running a Facebook group and you want to automate the process a bit. GroupFunnels allows you to connect your group with a spreadsheet that automatically collects all the answers people give to questions since Facebook doesn’t actually save these.

And it also allows you to automatically filter them onto your email list if you set one of your questions up to request this from them by offering some kind of freebie in exchange. It’s a huge time saver for people running large Facebook groups.

Personal Branding Tool #25 – TubeBuddy

As the name suggests TubeBuddy is a great tool for Youtubers. It’s a free browser extension that integrates directly with YouTube to help you manage your channel better.

And there you have it. 25 Essential tools for building a personal brand.

I’d love to know if you’ve used any of these tools, or if you have any other ones that you think I’ve missed.

Have fun going out and making your brand stronger than ever.

Jade xo

I hope you got lots of value out of this article. As usual, if you like what you’ve read feel free to like, comment, or share. Your time reading my posts is greatly appreciated. 
25 Essential Tools for Establishing a Strong Personal Brand

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  1. […] And there you have it, my guide on how to plan and schedule your content. For more of my favourite resources to help you build a powerful personal brand check out this post. […]

  2. […] Some of the low ticket affiliate offers I promote are products like membership sites, email marketing platforms, sales funnel platforms, stock photos etc. You would’ve seen me speak about these products in other blog posts. You can see an example of what I mean here: Tools for establishing a strong personal brand. […]

  3. Thankyou Jade for all the different ideas to brand and market . I like the site for using YouTube. I will probably use that. I like posting videos but I just need a plan to it now and direction to make it sucessful

    • jadescarfone says:

      Oh you’re so welcome, glad you found it useful. Yeah I must admit, YouTube has definitely not been my forte. I find it much easier to create IGTV content so I tend to do more videos there. But once you find what works for you as long as you get organised and stay consistent then it will definitely get much better traction. Excited to see how it all goes for you. 🙂