So you’ve decided that personal branding is the way to go.

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If the plethora of tools and technologies confuse you, worry not. We have a list just for you!

It can seem like a daunting task for newbies to figure out how to get started, but the choice of your weapons will be crucial to your success. Just like big brands, it is important to know how to leverage these tools as part of your overall social strategy as these tools can enable you to amplify and scale rather quickly.

There is no one-size-fits-all secret tool combination for personal branding success and considering social tools are changing rapidly, it’s best to get the basics right from day one. Below, we’ve listed various tools that we believe can help you get underway by helping you to curate, listen, or execute with ease and impact.

Google Alerts₁
A must-have for everyone trying to either create a personal brand or managing an existing one. In this day and age, you cannot afford to miss out on conversations about your brand.

It’s nice to know when you get a shout out, and proactive monitoring could mean the difference between landing the next big deal – or losing it.

Craft a Google alert to stay on top of your mentions or those of your competition. Decide how often you want to receive the updates and stay alert!

Twitter Analytics₂
With over 320 million users on its platform, Twitter has become one of the most sought-after social mediums to get your voice heard. Twitter analytics helps to make sense of all the commotion that may happen around your profile.

It automatically generates a monthly recap for you with the number of your tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, and new followers. Not only that, you can see more detail about how your tweets performed and the demographic makeup of your followers.

Buzzsumo₃
If staying on top of the game is what you want, Buzzsumo is a great digital monitoring platform for you to find what content is popular and who the influencers are within your niche.

Buzzsumo excludes social media posts and solely shows content from websites. With a free account, you will be able to see the top 10 most shared content (articles, videos, interviews, infographics, etc.) based on the keyword terms you enter.

Canva₄
Social media is extremely visual in nature. It is very important that your content stands out with good visuals that catch the eye.

If it’s hard to find a satisfying picture for your post, Canva can help. You can simply create an image that perfectly matches what you are trying to say. And since it’s already pre-fed with the right dimensions for a Facebook post, Facebook cover photo, Twitter post, Instagram photo, etc., it helps ensure your image is presented in the right way on different social platforms.

Medium / LinkedIn Publishing₅
If you want to take a bold step forward in building your personal brand – sooner or later you will need to create long-form content, or blog posts and articles. WordPress is the platform of choice for many professionals, but it may daunting for a newcomer to manage it by themselves. Medium or Linkedin Pulse might be useful for you to get started. Medium is a free blogging community that allows for you to create custom content easily including embedding videos and social links and inline comments.

Together, these tools can help you lay a solid foundation towards building your personal brand from scratch. Not only are they easy to use, they cover the entire ecosystem from listening to curating and finally, publishing.

(Editor’s note: You can also join Connected Women₆ and we can help you publish your content!)