When you first start to build your personal brand, it can be overwhelming. There’s a lot of vague, and, honestly, flat-out bad information out there.
A simple Google search will reveal dozens of other blog posts that claim to offer insight into how to build a personal brand, but they end up just featuring some airy tips or concepts like, “find your why”, “build your social media following”, “be authentic”, etc., and never really lay out how to actually start building your personal brand.
This article is meant to help you take all of your ideas, and everything you’ve already researched, simplify it, and put you on a path that will help create a game plan for you to get started building your personal brand, fast. That being said, this blog post is by no means the silver-bullet, or a secret elixir. To put it bluntly, you will have to put in a lot of work to create your personal brand.
Creating a personal brand is tough, it’s really hard. Throughout the process of creating your own personal brand, there are many difficult decisions that need to be made and tough questions that need to be answered. The great news is that a personal brand is a living, breathing thing that can always be tweaked, adjusted, and can even evolve and morph into something entirely different down the road.
Yep, that’s right. You’re not locked-in to the brand you create now!
That’s one big obstacle that needs to be overcome when starting your personal brand.
Many people think that once they create their personal brand, they’ve planted their feet into wet concrete, and they’re about the be stuck there forever.
This mindset prevents countless people from ever starting to create their personal brand.
Before we get started, I want to note that a personal brand is not just creating a fancy website, a flashy business card, or turning your name into a creative logo. Don’t get me wrong, all those things are pieces of the bigger puzzle, but a successful personal brand must have more substance than just a clean-cut, trendy image and a fancy, foil-stamped business card.
Personal brands that lack substance, don’t gain traction, and don’t stick around for long.
So, that’s what we will be working on today.
We’ll get you moving in the right direction and help you start to extract and create the substance behind your personal brand.
Here’s a quick overview of what we will be covering:
- How do you generate substance behind your personal brand?
- How do you establishing a following?
- How do you make money as a personal brand?
So, if you’re ready to roll your sleeves up and get to work, let’s do this!
Extract and Create Substance.
Before you even think of creating your website, business card, or personal brand statement, you absolutely MUST identify a few key things. The very first thing that we need to figure out is where the best opportunity is for you to plant your flag. What do you do, and what industry are you going to serve, and what niche within that industry are you going to carve out and own?
- What do you do?
- Who do you serve?
- What are you the best at?
- What is your unique expertise?
- How are you different?
- What is your niche in the marketplace?
- How do you get results?
- What is your personal brand statement?
- What type of content are you going to produce to show your expertise? Blog, Vlog, Podcast, Books, etc?
- How frequently are you going to be producing content?
Once you identify some of those core elements, and establish the direction you are heading, you need to start to lay the foundation of your personal brand and build your platform.
Lay the Foundation & Build Your Platform.
Just like building a house, building your personal brand requires vision, a plan, and consistent execution over time.
Now that we’ve identified who we are serving, and how to build some substance behind
- What are your personal goals and ambitions?
- What needs to happen to achieve your goals?
- Who do you need to become in order to achieve your goals?
- What does your online presence look like, do you need a website?
- How is your personal brand presented visually?
- What tactics are you going to implement to start building your email list?
- Which social media platforms make the most sense to focus on? (1 or 2 to start!)
- What industry conferences, or local events can you land speaking gigs at?
- Does writing a book make sense to accelerate your credibility?
Once you identify what your platform will look like, and what types of content you will be creating, it will be much easier to execute and start to build your platform. This is where building a personal brand is like building a house. You create the blueprint for what you are building, and you get started by focusing on one aspect at a time. You don’t try to build the foundation, walls, and roof all in the same day.
The next step is to know how you are going to monetize your platform. How are you going to turn followers and subscribers into paying customers?
Revenue is essential to building a personal brand that lasts.
Monetize your Expertise.
There are two ways you can monetize your expertise. You can either package and sell your time through consulting, coaching, or done-for-you services, or, you can package your knowledge, strategies, and best practices into products that you can sell.
Most personal brands do both, the only way to scale a personal brand is to package your knowledge into products that you can sell to make money. One of the best places to start when creating a product, is creating an online course. Once you get all of your expertise, wisdom, and knowledge into a product that you can sell, you now can charge more for your personal time.
Courses aren’t the only way to package and monetize your expertise. Here are a few other ways:
- Webinar Series
- Membership site
- Audio training program
- Podcast
- Books, Audiobooks & eBooks
- Reports & White-papers
- Workshops & live events
- Group coaching program
- 1-on-1 Coaching/Consulting
- Paid Newsletter
- Mastermind
Once you create a product that is sellable, then you can focus on marketing and sales to get people in front of your product. At the same time, your online course allows you to charge more money for your personal time. If a potential client just wants information from you, they can get that in your course.
Your course is now a benchmark you can leverage to charge more money if a client wants your actual brain power, energy, and time behind their business. This is one of the big reasons why packaging your knowledge is one of the most critical pieces to building a personal brand.
As you can see, the road to building a successful personal brand takes a lot of time, thought, and hard-work.
It’s not something that happens over night, and it’s not something a single blog post can cover end-to-end, but we’ve got a TON of awesome content here on personalbrand.com to be a solid resource for you, showing you how and guiding you on the path to creating a successful personal brand.
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