Four Key Steps to Build Your Personal Brand – How to Build Your Personal Brand

Introduction to Branding

People buy from brands they know and trust. Especially when shopping online, we don’t like to buy from a faceless corporation. Personal connection is key when it comes to helping your potential customers make purchasing decisions.

Whatever you’re doing in business – whether it’s building a following, creating engagement with your content, or selling directly – you need a strong personal brand in order to do it. Your customers want to buy from a trusted friend and expert.

Your personal brand serves several important functions:

It tells people who you are and sets expectations. People can easily understand your core values and who you are through your brand.
It’s the face of your company or online presence. Branding gives you authenticity and shows that you’re legitimate.
It defines your reputation. As Jeff Bezos once put it, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
Your personal brand sets you apart from other businesses in your niche.

If you have any sort of online or public presence, it’s already setting these expectations and creating a reputation for you. As soon as you create a social media profile or publish a blog post, you’re already branding yourself unconsciously.

So, why not get ahead of it, get organized, and take charge of what aspects of your personality you show the world so you can best harness it and make it work for you? That’s what you’ll start doing as you work your way through this report, and it takes just a few simple steps.

Identify Who You Serve

In order to brand yourself successfully, you need to know who it is you serve. In other words, who is your audience?

People follow others online because they relate to them and their messaging resonates. Your audience needs to be able to feel connected to you. In order to make this important link, you need to know as much about your audience as possible.

It’s essential to know demographic information such as their age range, geographic location, and socioeconomics. But even more importantly, you need to know about their values and behaviors. If you understand your audience’s core values and tastes, you can better appeal to them to create a strong relationship.

Pay especially close attention to your audience’s needs, problems, and questions. Look for specific issues you can help them with. Try to find out what’s troubling them most so that you can offer solutions.

When identifying your audience, you should be as specific as possible. Even if your values and solutions appeal to a wide variety of people, you could run the risk of spreading yourself too thin.

On the other hand, if you can identify a very specific target audience, you can communicate directly with them. This will be the best use of your time and effort, rather than casting your net wide and appealing to those who only vaguely share your values.

You’ll need to create an authentic connection with your audience, so these should be “your people.”

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Define Your Brand Identity

Every brand has its own identity and language. In order for branding to work, it has to be consistent. Everywhere your audience sees you online, they should know it’s you and your content should give the same impression. If there’s a break in direction, this can cost you your audience’s trust.

You need to define these elements in order to ensure consistency wherever your audience encounters you.

Branding Statement and Tagline

You should craft a simple statement and tagline that defines your personal brand. You can use this tagline as a quick summary in your marketing.

The statement tells people in simple language what you do and why you do it. The tagline takes this statement and pares it down into a short sentence that people can see and, at a glance, immediately understand whether what you offer is for them or not.

It takes some time and consideration to craft a good statement and tagline. Here are some ideas to help you brainstorm:

What exactly do you do in the course of your work for your customers or audience?
Why do you do what you do?
How do you do what you do? Try to think about how your way is unique from others.
How do you routinely help people solve their problems?
If you haven’t gotten started yet, how do you think you could help people?

Summarize your statement in your tagline. It should be:

Unique
Bold and memorable
Authentic
So simple that a child could understand what it means

Design and Visual Identity

You should choose specific design features and visuals that will communicate your personal brand image to your audience. Elements of brand design include:

Color Palette. Choose a few colors that resonate with your audience and the image you’re going for. You can get ideas by looking at similar businesses in your niche. Certain industries tend to use certain color schemes.
Font. Pick a few fonts that you’ll use for headlines and text in your written materials. Make sure the fonts work well together and don’t clash.
Logo. Create a logo for your brand if you don’t already have one.
Headshot. Choose a good picture of you that you can use for your website, social media profiles, and other branded materials.

These design elements will immediately let your audience know it’s you when they encounter you anywhere, online or off.

Tone

Your written content should have a consistent tone and voice. Things to consider here include:

How formal or casual you’d like to be
Level of reading difficulty
Guidelines for slang usage
Words to use or not use
Type of humor

All of the above should match the tastes of your audience and be natural for you.

It’s a good idea to create a style guide that sets down guidelines for your tone and how you write. This helps you to clarify for yourself, but you can also use this guide if you outsource your content creation or other communication-related tasks.

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Create Content That Expresses Your Personal Brand

Content plays several important roles in your personal branding:

Build Trust. Consistent, helpful content builds a relationship with your audience where they trust you to help them.
Demonstrate Authority. The material you put online shows your authority in your niche. It gives you a chance to showcase your skills and expertise.
Gain Exposure. Your articles, videos, social media posts, and other work helps to bring new people into your sphere. People will find you when they’re looking for information.
Generate Leads. Content can be used as part of your marketing funnel to generate and qualify leads.

Create the kind of content that will attract the audience you identified earlier. Identify common problems you solve for your customers, and address these in your articles, blog posts, and videos. Give your audience what they’re searching for.

The content you create should be consistent with the tone and design elements you identified in the previous chapter.

Here are some ideas on the kind of content you can create:

Focus on times when you’ve gotten results for a customer or client. How did you do this? Write a blog post or article that addresses this problem and offers a solution you know works.
Create something that showcases a person you’ve helped. This could be a case study or testimonial. It offers help but also shows your expertise in action and includes a personal element.
Think of ways you can teach your audience things you know. Go beyond articles or videos and create webinars that address specific problems, or courses that teach how to do something step-by-step.
Tell your story. Create a piece that explains how you came to do what you do. A good story arc is to start with a problem you faced and explain how you solved this problem and learned how to help others.
Go for an emotional connection by making your content personal whenever possible. Be authentic and interact with your audience directly.
Post new content regularly. Your audience will come to expect a weekly blog post, a bi-weekly podcast, a daily Facebook post or email, etc. Consistency is important for branding, so be consistent with your publishing schedule.
Focus solely on offering value and helping people with your content without asking for anything in return. Don’t promote.

When planning and creating content, always keep in mind your personal branding goals and make sure the material you make helps you get to these goals.

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Communicate Your Message Where Your Audience Will Hear It

Where and how you publish your content should depend on two variables:

Your audience’s tastes
Your capacity to publish

Through getting to know your target market, you’ll discover what media they prefer and how often they’d like new content. You’ll also need to consider your capacity to publish. You don’t want to overextend your content creation abilities.

Personal Branding Through Your Blog

Whatever content strategy you decide upon, you need to at least have a blog. A blog allows you to publish regular articles for your audience. It gives them a place to engage with you through the comments section. One of the major benefits of blogging is that the fresh content helps to attract new people through search engines.

Spread the Word on Social Media

Social media is an essential tool for spreading your personal brand. Build an engaged audience on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and get to know your audience well. Interact with them on a personal basis and use the platform to let them know whenever you’ve published something new.

Don’t Forget Multimedia

Go beyond blog posts and articles, and consider publishing audio, video, and visual content. People love multimedia content and it attracts a wider audience who enjoys different types of content formats.

Expand Your Audience as a Guest

Appear in the content of other creators to expand your audience. Write guest posts and submit them to other sites. Get interviewed by other people with personal brands. This gives you a chance to share your expertise but also helps you to potentially reach a new audience.

Publish Books to Establish Your Expertise

A great way to establish your authority and become known for your expertise is to self-publish books in your niche. This not only gives you another avenue for publishing content, but also adds to your reputation because you’re a published author.

Summary

I’ve identified four key steps for building your brand in this report so you can increase your sales.

The best way to make your personal brand work for you is to approach it in a methodical way. Decide who you want to reach and what image you’d like to present, then create the content and post it where your audience will see it. Take my course for a detailed look at how to make your personal brand work for you.

A Special Invitation

Want to learn more about how you can create a personal brand that builds your reputation and your business? Head over here:

HowToBuildYourPersonalBrand.com