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How to Build a Personal Brand (Complete Guide to Personal Branding)
- Beginner
- Novembre 12, 2021
- Academy
- 14min
Why every entrepreneur should build a personal brand:
When you’re building a business around your niche (as an author, speaker, coach, consultant, freelancer, etc.), When you’re the face of your business, building your personal brand makes perfect sense. Your brand is what distinguishes you from your competitors, helping to form a lasting impression in the mind of your audience and customers. But even if you’re building a company that has its own brand (a software or physical product company, for example), building a personal brand still has its benefits. Elon Musk, for example, has more Twitter followers than 3 of his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity) combined. People connect with people.”– Kevin Stimpson
Benefits of building a personal brand:
7 Steps to Creating a Compelling & Profitable Personal Brand
After reaching out to dozens of entrepreneurs and branding experts, we’ve outlined 7 specific steps to help you build a compelling (and profitable!) personal brand that attracts your perfect clients. We also created a fillable Personal Branding Workbook, which you can use to help develop your personal brand strategy as you read through these steps.
1. Build your foundation
Take inventory of your existing brand assets:
To build a strong brand foundation, start by taking inventory of the branding assets that you already possess. The intersection of these assets is where you should build your personal brand. Your skills & credentials: What skills have you acquired throughout your life? What training, credentials, certifications, or awards have you received?Your passions & interests: What industries and topics are you most interested in? What are you passionate about?Core values & beliefs: What are some of your most important core values?
Key elements of your personal branding foundation:
Once you’ve identified your existing brand assets, the next step is to start piecing together the key elements of your personal brand. These will help guide your decisions as you build your personal brand:Your brand vision: What do you want to be known for? If you became known as the world’s go-to expert on XYZ topic, what would that be?Your brand mission: Why do you want to build a personal brand? What message do you want to consistently reinforce in your content and in your marketing? What is the perception that you need to create in order to appeal to the target audience that you’re trying to appeal to?”– Re Perez
2. Choose your target audience
3. Create an irresistible offer
How to create an offer your clients will love:
The first step to creating an irresistible offer is to position yourself as a specialist and not a generalist. A generic offer with a vague promise is definitely not irresistible. Then create an offer that sits at the intersection of these criteria. We call this the Irresistible Offer Formula. Irresistible Offer Formula:What you love to do + What you do best + What your audience wants most = Irresistible offerOnce you have an irresistible offer, you need to be able to articulate it clearly to your audience. To help him stand out from thousands of other Facebook Advertising experts that do the same thing, he developed a proprietary process and he gave it a unique name: “Contextual Congruence”.Here’s a screenshot from his website homepage, describing what he does in a way that differentiates him from his competitors:“People need to know who you are and what you do in the most simple way possible.
4. Optimize your personal website
Key elements of your website homepage:
A professional logo: get a designer to turn your name into a professional logo. Professional photography: get a photographer to take several photographs of you. Use these photographs throughout your website and also for your social media profiles. A clear call-to-action: give your website visitors a clear next step, whether it’s joining your email list, registering for a free webinar, or applying for a free consultation. One of the best examples of a personal brand website comes from our friend Jeanine Blackwell.
Other important pages for a personal brand website:
In addition to your homepage, here are the other important pages that your personal brand website should contain:About page: share your personal story. What experience and credential do you have? Why do you do what you do?To see an example of a well-written About Page, we recommend checking out Chris Ducker’s website here. Here is a screenshot of just one part of his About Page, where he shares his personal story:Products/services: make it easy for your website visitors to become clients/customers. Contact page: give your website visitors a specific way to contact you. Give them different methods for contacting you (email, social media, etc.)
5. Have a content strategy
Creating a content strategy for your personal brand:
To create a content strategy for your personal brand, start by creating a list of all of the potential topics that would be helpful for your target audience. Google’s Keyword Planner, BuzzSumo, and Answer The Public are all great tools for doing keyword research and discovering popular topics. Once you have a list of topics to create content on, the next step is to decide which type of content to create and where you will publish that content. Content marketing is a long-term play, but it pays incredible dividends when done correctly. Creating and promoting content is also more time consuming and expensive than most people realize. To learn more about how to high quality content, check out our complete guide to creating epic content your customers will love.“A strong personal brand is cohesive, clear, consistent and aims to serve a specific audience.
6. Have a visibility strategy
Publishing content on your own platforms is a great way to build your audience, but it also takes a lot of time. A faster way to build your audience is via exposure to other people’s audiences. Here are some common ways to increase your visibility:Interviews & PR: get interviewed as a guest expert on podcasts, virtual summits, as well as for traditional media including TV, radio, and print magazines. If you want to build authority and credibility in your niche, what better way to do that than getting one of the most prestigious brands to mention you? This gives you instant credibility.”– Ulyses Osuna
7. Build a community
Instead of trying to build a large and broad audience, shift your focus to becoming a leader of a community in a specific niche. Define your target audience, and build a community for them to interact with each other, share ideas, support each other, and reach out to you directly. Live Events: Host live events so your audience and/or clients can spend time with you in-person. Casual meetups, private dinners, workshops, retreats, and mastermind groups are all great ways to solidify long-term relationships with your audience. The key is to leverage social media and other social platforms and environments to create relevant and meaningful dialogues between you and the people you want to impact.”– Mark LackRelated:
Start building your personal brand
There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. As a personal brand, however, you don’t. Sure, there might be other people and companies selling similar products and services as you, but they are not you. This is why building a personal brand is so powerful. When you build a personal brand, you immediately differentiate yourself from your competitors because YOU are different than your competitors.“We all have a personal brand whether we think about it that way or not.
