A Step-by-Step Plan for Rocking Your Personal Brand
If you’re utilizing an online presence to build your business, you are building a personal brand. Personal branding plays an important role in business growth, whether you are a freelancer or working for another company.
Building upon a brand is critical for establishing yourself as an authority and increasing the size of your business through new expertise.
Not sure where to start? Let’s take a look at how to strengthen your personal brand and delve into detail on how it can help you over time.
Determine Your Goals
What is it you desire from building a personal brand? Do you want to leave your corporate job? Do you want to expand your credibility to shift away from what you do in your business and move into a different role, such as a public speaker or consultant? Perhaps you simply want to increase your client base and make more money? Or, do you just want to build a more passive income?
Whatever your goals may be, you can’t effectively take action to build your personal brand in a way that allows you to achieve them if you don’t know what they are. Take time to do some soul-searching.
Write down your goals. Keep them in a place where you can see them often, so they don’t get lost when your head is in the nitty-gritty.
Don’t Build a Business on Rented Land
It’s important to have a social media following. However, you don’t want to rely solely on social media platforms to build your empire. You don’t own your social media information. You don’t own your followers.
You could spend years building up a Facebook fan page with 50,000 followers only to have it shut down with no explanation and no recourse.
Focus on building your social media following, but also make sure to connect with those people in other ways, such creating an email list.
Build an Editorial Calendar
Building your personal brand means creating content and promoting it across social media. Based on the goals in the first step, build an editorial calendar. Your editorial calendar should include a list of topics you want to discuss, and make a list of platforms where you’ll be active so you can cover all of your content distribution needs.
Create your calendar on a spreadsheet, on a wall calendar, or with a plug-in on your WordPress website. However you choose to do it, create a workflow that’s your style. Include as much or as little information as you see fit. Things to consider include date, topic, platform, details, and desired outcome.
Your editorial calendar will enable you to create a consistent and low maintenance publishing schedule. This way, you don’t have to take the time to write and publish a new blog post every day. You can, instead, set aside a larger block of time once a week to crank out all of the content you need for that week or month.
Make it Work For You
Simply having a large online following won’t necessarily yield much authority or revenue. If that was the case, all of us would be millionaires. How do you take those 50,000 Facebook followers and start the flow of income? Get them off of Facebook and over to your email list. Then, give them something to buy. Use an online platform to sell online courses and other knowledgeable products, promoting the products with Facebook Live broadcasts and free webinars.
If you’d rather start small, selling things like eBooks and cheat sheets can work as well.
Regardless of which path you take, create something cheap for people who don’t have a large budget, and then create a more expensive alternative for your more loyal followers who have money burning holes in their pockets. As your following and traffic continue to grow, survey them to make sure you are continually developing products that serve them and make their lives better. And track your social media metrics to see what types of content are resonating best with your followers.
Give, Share, and Teach
The best way to elevate your personal brand is to elevate everyone around you. Teach everything you know – even your secrets. Create content that will walk people step-by-step through everything you do and how you do it.
When you fail, make that as public as you do when you succeed. Vulnerability makes you seem genuine and relatable. And your audience will appreciate being taken along for your journey, learning from your mistakes as you do.
If you are a silent expert, no one will listen to you.
Doors Start to Open More Easily
As your personal brand grows and you make it easier for people to find you, you’ll spend less time doing outreach, sending proposals and applying for gigs. Clients will find and approach you, simply because they are interested in who you are and what you have to offer.
You’ll start to see an increase in connections on social media platforms. People who find your content will want to keep up with what you’re producing. You may find several people follow you on Twitter and send you a LinkedIn request every day.
The enhanced online networking also makes it easier for you to find, attend and present at offline networking events, whether they are large-scale conferences or small-scale, local coffee meet-ups.
Improved Confidence, Growth and Success
As you continue to put yourself out there and observe successful customers and colleagues in your industry paying attention to your work, you will have better confidence in your skills and your ability to connect.
That means you may approach prospective clients that you would have never even thought to in the earlier days of your business. It means you may send quotes for projects at what you’re really worth, instead of what you think will get you the job.
It’s that improved confidence, increase in connections, and the clear vision of what you want for your brand to that allows you to start compounding your growth and success.
Start at the Beginning
It’s often a fear that we’re not good enough at what we do or the imposter syndrome, that stops us from going all in on a personal brand that showcases our true expertise. This is where you have to remember that everyone learned what they know from someone who knew it before them. Everyone has a unique journey that brings them to where they are. Everyone has a story to share.
Don’t let the imposter syndrome stop you from creating your personal brand. The sooner you start, the sooner you will reap the benefits.
