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How To Build Your Personal Brand

You might have heard people saying, I want to build my personal brand. So, what exactly is this thing? Personal branding is the practice of people broadcasting their careers as brands. It’s not so simple, it is an ongoing process of developing and maintaining a reputation and impression of an individual, group, company, brand, business, or even organization.

People first think of numbers when they start building up their brand. Numbers like the number of Twitter followers, Facebook page likes, blog subscribers, YouTube subscribers, and many more.

But those are a very poor metrics for building a meaningful personal brand. Building a personal brand means providing so much value in one niche (or even multiple) that people begin to associate your name with the idea of what it means to be successful in that very industry.

While building a personal brand takes a lot of work, but if you already made your mind to dive in, I’ve gathered some simple steps you should follow:

1.      Test Yourself, know your strengths.

I don’t know about you, in fact, no one knows you better than you know yourself. As far as me, I am really, really a horrible person. I’m really bad at convincing myself to do things I don’t want. That is the reason, I said I’m horrible.

Just get back, the very first step is acknowledging what you like doing most – because if you do what you don’t like, chances are you won’t take it very seriously, and if you aren’t willing to take it seriously and be good at it, then why are you doing this?

Once you know what you like doing, you need to make the commitment to be as great at that thing as you possibly can be. Just don’t play with yourself, be realistic. This has nothing to do with being competitive, sometimes you just need to focus on what you want. This is your life, and you only live once!

This all has to do with realizing that whatever you like doing, a million-other people like doing too – and they are all ready to take your position. You need to be committed to becoming a thought leader in the thing you love doing most.

2.     Find Your Social Platform.

One of the most common and biggest problems people make right out the gate, they rush into building a website themselves or start spending hours to come up with how they are going to brand themselves.

None of it matters, at least right now.

The thing which only matters is that you start owning your magic and providing value to people in a public domain. You have to be more focus instead of just running in the wall.

Find a social platform that suits your interest and start creating the best content you possibly can. By the way, who are you? Doctor? Make some videos regarding your area of practice. Upload it on Facebook. Are you a Fashion Designer? Upload the images of your latest designs on Instagram.

3.     Build Relationships.

Now, bring some kindness and simplicity in your behavior. Everything doesn’t deserve an aggressive response. It is time to build new relationships now, build as many as you can with other thought leaders within your own domain. This will open so many doors for you and it will help you to grow your social following.

Find other people who create the same great content and do a collaboration with them. If you are a traveler, just go for a trip together, make a video and upload it on YouTube.  Just bring it on, you have no excuse!

Create content together and trade audiences. Both of you will win and grow, and you’ll make some awesome connections and friends in the process. So, get going!

4.     Say Hello To An Online World.

Now it’s time to say hello to the online world. The best time to build a website is when you have significant amount of following on social media sites. Start with something simple, like Squarespace or Wix. No need to directly jump to a custom WordPress website unless that’s your forte.

Your website should have all the information they want. Consider that readers are wild hunters. They are only here to get the information you are offering. So, you should keep it nice and tight. If the user didn’t get the information he was looking for, sorry, you’re fired!

The big win, here is for you to offer specialized content in exchange for their email – a free download, a trial code to a program, etc. Something that will provide them value and give the ability to give them even more value over the long term.

5.     Now, Go For It.

Now, it is time to give it a go. The main purpose of building a Personal Brand is to avoid the route of being an affiliate to someone else. It’s kind of cool. But I have some other things in mind also.

The incentive for launching your own products, far more than monetarily, is the credibility it gives you. In this era business cards are books, courses, products that can be your ambassadors.

They are intended to open doors to other thought leaders in your industry, and tangential industries, so that you can continue building your social following, collaborating, and engaging with new influencers and their audiences.

 

 

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