How to Build A Personal Brand Fast
In this post, we are going to talk solely about building a personal brand quickly.
Building a personal brand, and making money with a personal brand, are two separate topics. There are dozens of personal brands in the world who have big followings don’t make as much money as you would think. That being said, it’s much easier to make money after you’ve built a following and created some momentum with your personal brand.
Before we get started, it’s important to note:
In order to build a personal brand quickly, it requires that you have a solid foundation set.
It’s virtually impossible to build a successful personal brand quickly if you don’t have true expertise or substance to build your brand upon.
Think of it like building a house.
Yes, you can just start nailing two-by-fours together, but if there isn’t a solid foundation, the first gust of wind is going to blow your house down.
Building a sustainable, durable personal brand is something that takes time, hard work, and patience.
That being said, there are a 5 areas where you can condense time to accelerate your personal brand.
Here’s some tips on how you can build a personal brand quickly.
The key here is to accelerate the development and creation of these 5 things: Credibility, Content, Community, Confidence and Continuity.
5 Personal Brand Accelerators:
- Accelerate Credibility and Influence.
- Accelerate Confidence in your products and services.
- Accelerate Community creation and your reach.
- Accelerate Content production to show domain expertise.
- Accelerate Continuity in your online presence
Accelerate Credibility and Influence to Build Your Personal Brand Fast
People want to follow and learn from people who are credible, influential, and trustworthy. The fastest way to build authority in your industry, is to use borrowed or assumed credibility, influence, and trust.
If you haven’t heard the terms “borrowed credibility” or “assumed credibility” it’s probably something that you see more often than you think. Have you ever been to a personal brand website, or even a corporate website, and they have the logos of the big media outlets they’ve appeared on, or big fortune 500 clients that they have? That is borrowed credibility.
When people see that IBM is one of their clients, or that they have been featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine, they hope that builds credibility, influence, and trust with their prospects and customers.
You’ll see on some speaker’s websites that they spoke at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or some other prestigious University. That claim alone, elevates and differentiates that speaker from most other speakers.
People automatically assume that they were hired to come in and speak at a graduation ceremony or some big university event, when in reality, that speaker could have spoke for free to a campus club or a single class. There are even events where the speakers actually pay money in order to get on stage at these prestigious schools – which could make the claim a bit inauthentic.
Ultimately, find creative and authentic ways that you can leverage the authority of other people in your industry and use borrowed credibility to accelerate your personal brand.
Accelerate Confidence in Your Products or Services to Build Your Personal Brand Fast
One of the fastest ways to create confidence in your products and services is to tastefully showcase above-average results that you frequently get your customers and clients. If you aren’t getting your customers/clients above-average results on a consistent basis, then you should start with improving your product or service.
If you don’t yet have testimonials and case studies to pull from, and you don’t yet have raving fans that you can reach out to right away, the best way to get those quickly is to sell a discounted “beta version” of your product or service to someone in your target market. If you can make sales of your product or service at full price easily, you may not need to discount, but it does help create a sense of reciprocity with your customer to where they will be more willing to provide a testimonial for you. The end goal is simply to generate revenue quickly, while also extracting a great case study and testimonial for your product.
If you’re just getting started with your products and services, one of the best ways to do this is to sell a discounted webinar series, where you personally walk people through your content, course, or process in a small group, while also having a 1-on-1 touchpoint with each person.
At the beginning, you’ll want to actually do things that don’t scale because that’s a big differentiator that you can use to your advantage.
There’s no way people like Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss are able to have a low-to-mid priced product ($197-$1,997) with high-touch. Use that to your advantage when you get started, spend time with people, learn as much as you can about your target market, and focus on scale and automation down the road.
Accelerate Community to Build Your Personal Brand Fast
This is what most people think of when building their personal brand, getting their name and message out to more people. When in actuality that’s only half of the equation. The true goal is to get your name and message out to more people AND attract them to follow you and join your community. There are many ways to accelerate your community, and they essentially all boil down to the concept of leveraging existing communities and communication channels.
At first, it’s much more effective to be a guest on other people’s podcasts than start your own.
At first, it’s much better to speak on someone else’s stage, than try to put on your own event.
At first, it’s much better to be interviewed by an established “YouTuber” than start posting your own YouTube videos.
YES, you will absolutely want to do all of the above, but, if you’re looking to accelerate your personal brand, look for strategic and aligned communities that already exist that you can tap into, and make sure you clearly communicate how and where people can learn more about you, and learn more from you.
Even to this day, whenever Gary Vaynerchuk or Tony Robbins is promoting a new book, they do countless interviews with other people because they know that’s the fastest way to reach more people, and most-likely, people they wouldn’t otherwise reach.
All that said, It’s important to have a business model in place, and a strategy around building your community, before you spend a lot of time, energy, and money, blasting yourself out into the world. Make sure that you have a way to monetize any interest you stir up from your reach-generating activities.
Accelerate Content Production to Build Your Personal Brand Fast
Before we dive into this topic, we need to make one thing clear. NEVER sacrifice quality for quantity.
Ok, now that we’re on the same page, one of the most essential components of building a personal brand is sharing your knowledge or perspective through content, either written, audio or visual means of communication.
Common advice from “marketing guru’s” is to post on Facebook 3-4 times per day, Twitter 7-10 times per day, and post at least two high-quality blog posts every week.
The average person building their personal brand doesn’t have a content, or social media person, let alone a team to help execute this plan, so it can become quite a time-consuming, and overwhelming effort to try to meet this demand.
The key here is to accelerate your content production by creating a content creation system.
We go over this system in detail in our Content Marketing GPS course, but the essence of it is to create a process of recycling your content across multiple platforms.
The best place to spend time and effort building skill is around video content, because you can multiply video content into audio, written, and social posts
Video > Audio > Blog > Social
From one video:
- You can have it transcribed into a blog post
- You can strip out the audio for a podcast or audio version of your blog post
- You can extract “Tweetables” or quotes from the post to make 5-10 social media posts
The key here is to create a small team of contracted freelancers to do most of this work without your direct involvement. You shoot the video, and pass it through your established system to have that content multiplied for you.
People who listen to podcasts, probably aren’t going to visit your blog. And, people who enjoy reading your content, probably won’t sit through a YouTube video.
Accelerate Continuity in Your Online Presence to Build Your Personal Brand Fast
Make sure that you have a quality and consistent online presence across 2-3 of the major social media platforms, and your website.
Do NOT try to manage 5+ different social media profiles. Identify the top 2 or 3 platforms where you can reach your target customers and focus your energy on building your brand there.
A high-quality website that gives potential prospects and followers a credible, and professional first impression is essential.
Your website doesn’t need to be crazy, but it should be more than just an online brochure.
Make sure people can join your community, or subscribe for your updates at the very least.
Continuity across your online presence is critical. Are your social profiles and your website consistently branded? One of the most critical components to creating a great online presence is to have really awesome, professional pictures taken.
If you haven’t had a professional photoshoot in a while, lets start there.
It’s also very important that your online presence is updated with fresh content on a regular basis. Create a cadence and stick to it. If you can only publish one new blog post per week, that’s fine. Have that be your cadence and do not waiver from that commitment, no matter what.
Once you have your website and social profiles setup, and you’re consistently creating content, one of the fastest ways to accelerate your online presence is to leverage Facebook ads for content amplification. That’s just a fancy word for paying to get your best content in front of your target market.
You can spend as little as $2 per day on Facebook ads to get your content in front of your ideal prospects. This is a great way to get traffic to your website, and build your social following.
All that said, remember…
Create substance around your brand.
Pull the levers around these 5 personal brand accelerators.
And create a game plan that is sustainable.
Although there are things that you can do to accelerate your results. Building a highly-successful personal brand takes time, and consistency.
If you’d like to stay up-to-date on the latest tools, strategies, and best practices for building your personal brand, be sure to join our private, Personal Brand Builders Community. It’s free… and awesome!
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