A personal brand is not about having a great website or having a flashy logo. It is also not about having a office or having attractive business card.
Personal brand is about who you are and what you do which contains your journey. It is about how you represent yourself online or offline to your audience.
Your personal brand is all about you. What you do and what can your provide in value. How you will be going to solve problems of your audience. What makes you unique. Audience want to know everything about your brand which leads to personal branding.
Your personal brand is not only about your website it about everything you do from social media presence to live events to blogs your write to sending emails to your audience to video you produce to podcast you record, they all are part of your personal brand.
Everything you put out leads to shape your personal brand. So, it adds one step into your brand and leads to building your brand.
So, the question is why everyone should have personal brand.
Why Everyone Should have Personal Brand?
Now, personal brand is not only for big brands and big companies.
Everyone can create their own personal brand. If you know about GaryVee, Grant Cardon, etc. They all build their own brand over internet and getting huge audience.
I am also trying to build my personal brand over instagram( @therahul_gupta ) and also via writing blogs.
Benefits Of Building Personal Brand
- Allows You To Stand Out From The Competition
Your values, expertise, and stories makes you unique which enables you to stand out of competition.
You know what you can bring on the table which your competitors cannot. You know what you can offer which your competitors cannot.
Building personal brand is about showing your uniqueness.
All depends on the perspective, experiences, skills, strengths, believes and results that set you apart from everyone else. This allows you to capitalize your strength.
This creates a difference between you and your competitors.
Like, Apple is very much different than Xiaomi. They both make mobile phones but Apple creates difference with luxury and premium quality. They have created their brand and presented in secure and luxury mobile phones. Xiaomi is for everyone brand they presented themselves as cheapest mobile phone in the world.
Your values are defines your branding. Apple alone have huge competition with other mobile phone companies.
More you work on building personal brand, more value you will create to stand out from competition.
- Allows You To Charge A Premium Price
Personal Branding is showing how unique you are and what value you offer. Because of this offer and value you can charge premium price for your products and services.
When you create personal brand with strong audience then you can charge high because your brand gives you power to become exclusive for services and product you serve. These products and services are only available to you not from another person.
This is why brands like Apple, Nike, Rolex prices are higher because they have created strong personal brand. People want them for luxury symbols in their collection.
You can also create personal brand by working hard and showing how much value you can bring to the table, you can too charge premium prices.
- Highlight Your Expertise
Personal Branding requires great and valuable content you share with people in the form of Quotes, Blogs, E-Books, etc.
More valuable content you share, more people will trust you as expert.
With every piece of content you share, you establish yourself as a valuable person for someone who really need this kind of content which helps them.
For them you are the valuable person who can solve their problems.
The more you demonstrate your expertise, the more your audience will trust you and come to you to solve their problems.
- Allows You To Attract Your Ideal Audience
When you're known as expert in your industry:
- It Attracts your ideal audience, who need your help the most.
- You get more referrals from others in your industry and related industries.
- You can charge premium price, that only expert can charge.
Garry V, Grant Cardon, Tonny Robbins are the examples. They created huge audience by sharing values on different platforms.
They have established themselves as experts in their fields. They share same message in every video, every event and every book they publish.
You can also develop powerful individual personal brand.
It is great that you have to build personal brand as soon as possible.
- Puts You In Charge Of The Narrative
Personal branding evolves around you and your content. If you use social media, have email list, writing blogs, speak to groups, recording audio and sharing video, you already building personal brand.
Everything you put out in the world is part of personal brand.
Now, you need to know that the content you are putting out is just random content or for shaping your brand.
You want to make it shaping it as a brand or you are just taking it as ad hoc manner.
If you want to build a brand it should evolve around some story which is related to shaping your brand.
Like i am sharing content related to Digital Marketing now it can be anything related to SEO, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video Marketing, etc. These all topics are related to each other and follow same pattern.
This helps me to create my personal brands narrative of who i am.
- Increases Your Visibility
More content you put out, more it will be visible to audience:
You will attract more fans on social media.
Those fans will share your content with their community.
The more your content gets shared, the more fan's you'll get.
And Repeat.
Its cyclic process. You just need to create great content which have value.
As your fanbase grows you will get featured with big brands and media house. They represent you as expert and you become more authentic and audience who doesn't trust you start trusting you.
Everything you need to do is producing great content for personal brand.
- Shapes What Content You Share
You should follow the rules while building your brand. You should only share content which is related you not the content which looks fancy to you.
Like sometimes we start sharing memes and other stuff which is not part of our brand.
Like I share only digital, quotes, business and entrepreneurial content, and sometime my pictures on my instagram, linkedin, facebook, etc.
This type of content shape my personal brand and i try to focus on this only not on other stuff which i like.
Other stuff doesn't add to my personal branding content.
And you should also do the same, if your content is funny then you should share memes but if not then don't.
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Connects You More With Individuals
People trust more on people than brands and companies. That's why Elon Musk have more followers on twitter than the company he have founded.
The more you invest in building your personal brand, more people want to connect with you online and they also want to meet you face to face.
The more you connect with people, more business opportunity you will get.
Building personal brand connects you with potential clients and customers, which helps in building your business.
- Allows You To Become An Influence
Personal branding will create huge audience when you reach certain point then you will be known as influencer. Influencers have great impact on audience. People follow influencers opinion and behavior and what they buy.
Influencers have benefits, big brands want to work with influencers and they receive free products and tours from brands in return of advertisements.
If you want to get at this point the start working on building personal brand.
How To Build Personal Brand ?
There are steps to build personal brand:
1. Determine who you really are
This is very important step to build powerful personal brand is to determine who you are. You need to understand yourself where you can put your most of the efforts while building personal brand.
Personal branding is about sharing your authentic self with the world.
Your personal brand is built upon your values, skills, passion and beliefs.
Ask yourself this:
- What are my values?
- What unique skill do i have?
- What am I most passionate about?
- How i am going to serve my audience?
- What I can offer regularly?
You need to find answers of theses and that will shape your personal brand. This will give power to your understanding of your personal brand.
2. Determine what you want to accomplish
After understanding what to you want to do, now its time to understand what you want to accomplish with your personal brand.
Ask Yourself this:
- What you will be known for?
- What you will achieve personally and professionally?
- How you will communicate with your audience?
- What type of expert you want to be known for?
Answer to these questions will define in your mind how your brand will look like.
3. Identify your target audience
You cannot serve to everyone and also everyone is not your audience. There are certain people who feel interested in you and your content.
That audience which is similar to your content understanding is your target audience.
Your target audience depends on the content you serve and that content should be understandable by the audience and based on topics which is related to your personal brand.
You need to determine your audience based on persona and that persona should include.
Demographics : Demographics is about Age, Gender, Relationship Status, Education level, Career, Money they make, etc.
Hopes and Dreams : What they want their future look like? What are their goals?
Challenges : What obstacles they face? Why haven't they be able to reach their goals?
4. Determine your uniqueness
Your content, value or messages you deliver should be unique. Like what you can provide and in what way you provide is unique.
What your audience will get from you should not be able to get from others that is your quality maybe that will be your style, communication understanding, solving problem strategy.
Your uniqueness should be understandable, memorable and describes what you do.
They can come to you again to get same feel and emotion from you. Creating uniqueness is the art which defines your brand.
Take time to understand your uniqueness.
5. Start treating yourself as a brand
Once you have identified your target audience and uniqueness in your brand, now it's time to treat yourself as a brand.
What this means exactly?
In everything you do like blog post, email marketing, social media post or podcast, you stay true to your brand message.
You constantly speak about the problems you solve, if you were their what you will do, constantly encourage your audience and include your brands message in it to make it looks like what you will do and solve that.
Your goal is to portray yourself as a strong, compelling brand not just ordinary person. You have to treat yourself as a powerful brand with powerful message.
6. Optimize your website
Branding should include your website too if you want to look authentic. You should also have website because that is your first impression to look real. Your website is the place where people will know more about you and what you want to do.
Your website is the primary way where your visitors will turn into paying clients and it need to be
good.
What you need to include in your website?
- Have Professional Logo: Professional logo shows you are serious about your personal brand.
- Use Professional Photograph : Have a profession high quality photographs. Low quality photographs will ultimately reflect poorly on your brand.
- Use Testimonials: Testimonials are proof that you really solve people's problems. If you've been featured on any media or blog show off in your testimonials.
- Call-To-Action : Purpose of website is people should join your email list, join your webinars and consultations. Give them a clear call-to-action.
- Create About Page : Create a great about page where you should your story and why you are giving so much value?
- Create Service Page : If you want your clients to hire you then you should create service page.
- Create Free Give Away Page: This is great way to attract more people to your website and getting email from your audience.
- Create Contact Page : You want your audience to be in touch with you. This should be included in your website.
7. Develop your content strategy:
Building a content strategy is simply depends on content you produce. Content can be anything your blogs, videos, podcasts, social media post, emails, etc.
Every piece of content you share with your audience should build your brand.
I have written blogs for content strategies, you can check them for detailed understanding:
Storytelling : The Content Marketing Strategy
Content Distribution : The Ultimate Guide
8. Constantly add value to your audience:
When it comes to building your brand, you should have to provide constant value to your audience without asking anything in return. You can sometime ask your audience to visit your website or buy this but don't do it consistently because it will look like spam.
You can ask sometime sometime for promotion but that is not your main stream, your main stream of brand is value.
The main way to provide value is through content strategy.
If you are not putting new content, you're not giving value.
9. Build a Community:
One of the best way to build your brand is to build a community where you and the members can all help each other. Reason of building community around your brand is it gets other involved in to promote your brand.
You create a tribe of people who care about same thing you do.
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