What’s up fellow entrepreneurs and seekers of the six figure stream of income. (Sounds quite heroic) This website is a place for entrepreneurs and creators looking to build streams of income and establish a legacy through your brand your business and your impact.
This post is going to be a good one. We’re talking all about personal branding and how to create a strong personal brand. Now, these aren’t your average personal branding tips. I know everyone talks about meshing and finding your tribe, and picking colors and what colors evoke and taking great images and pictures and all that stuff; but even though that’s true, it’s very important in personal branding, but that’s not the only thing. Doing this made personal branding synonymous with what you put on social media about yourself, and it’s not just that.
The first thing I want to make note of is that whether or not you’re trying to have a personal brand, you have one. okay?
And all the personal brand is is what people perceive of you based on what they know about you. So your personal brand is not just social media; it’s how you interact with people in person, it’s how you do business, it is how all of that works together in one community and one kind of ecosystem that creates your overall personal brand.
So, yes! social media is an aspect of that, but it is not the end-all be-all and you can still create a strong personal brand without social media.
This post will focus on primarily some awesome tips to create and build a strong personal brand on and off social media so that you can have a brand that creates impact, or that builds your business, or that just achieves whatever goals you have for your personal brand.
Strategy #1
One of the best things that you can start doing immediately is writing down your core values, and these aren’t just things that you want people to receive from your content. These are not tangible things. These are feelings you want to evoke from your audience or potential audience through your brand. For example three words that I chose for my brand are legacy, quality and action.
From my days of teaching, I learned that one of the best things you can leave behind is a legacy that impacts people positively. I want people to feel like by reading my content, they are taking steps that will help them build their legacy. I want you to see this a source of inspiration; and through my journey, I’d like to show that it is possible for anyone to achieve great things.
The next thing I want to offer is quality, or you could translate that into value. A lot of times it’s hard to learn valuable information online because creators try to just churn as much content as possible. So far I’m trying to lean more towards what would provide the most value to you as a reader.
The last thing is building a brand that is about taking action. Most times we don’t achieve what we could, not because it’s a lofty goal but because we never took action. We dream of the life and the reward and our best future selves, but don’t take the actions today to build towards making that a reality. So I associate my brand with taking action, from the smallest to most impactful step.
So my three values are legacy, quality, and action. You can also start by picking three words that you want your audience to feel and you need to funnel every piece of content, every interaction, through those values. That needs to be a living breathing part of you, because your personal brand ultimately is about what is important to you and how that is important to your audience.
Strategy #2
The next thing that you should do in growing your personal brand is pick two social media platforms max to really put your energy into.
What you want to do, is you want to pick one platform that is more long-form so is long-form content where you can add value so that might be YouTube videos, that may be podcasting, that may be long-form Facebook videos, blog posts. Just pick one platform that adds high value, then you can pick a secondary platform that adds high engagement. This is where you engage heavily with your followers, and you begin building those relationships.
That is the perfect duo.
So this engagement platform might be Twitter; you may love to tweet; you might have a way with words, or be super witty and so twitter might for you.
After choosing, you kind of tag-team the two platforms and it becomes a really clean ecosystem; you’re not pushing people to Instagram, to Facebook and to YouTube, and to podcast. You give them two main places to live and to really build those communities. So I find that that’s a really great way to brand yourself personally. Do not try to focus on so many social media platforms, instead zero in on two platforms that are really going to help you build your audience.
Where one offers high value the other offers high engagement and strong relationship-building.
Strategy #3
The next thing is to be clear and to be consistent. Now, what I find a lot of entrepreneurs have an issue with, is being clear about what they do, the services they offer, who they’re offering those services to, and how they help that person. A lot of people don’t even know how to explain their business in a short and sweet way which is important. So the first thing is being clear on the purpose of your brand.
The second part of that is being consistent. Repetition is key.
Photo by Hasan Albari on Pexels.com
This is where those graphics and colors and those things can come into play where you’re constantly putting out content and it’s like a certain format, that is great branding. People can recognize you from those colors they know automatically that this is an “EarnYourSix” post because it contains XYZ, or they know what the thumbnails look like, or I know that this is the color scheme.
That is a great aspect of personal branding and you should be consistent in the way that you present yourself graphically, but also it’s important to be consistent.
The way that you present yourself personally should be congruent with the service you offer. I have dealt with businesses where their social media looks amazing; they make themselves out to be this flashy entrepreneur or hustler or something of the sort, and then I try to support and I order something. Then the customer service is terrible or I don’t get my order in X amount of time, or the personal brand doesn’t carry the same feel all the way through to the end of my transaction.
You always want to make sure that you are consistent with your brand, not just graphically and on social media and through your colors and your graphic branding, but also through your human interactions, and your customer service. It is very important that these core values don’t just live on social media, but they live in your day to day life.
Strategy #4
Now, let’s talk about quality over quantity.
It is far more important for you to have quality supporters than a lot of non-quality supporters. A lot of people get really caught up in vanity metrics: you want a certain amount of followers or a certain amount of subscribers. I know one of my goals for the end of the year is to get 1,000 subscribers but I understand that it is not just about the subscriber count that matters, it’s about having loyal supporters. There is a concept called the 1,000 true fans by Kevin Kelley and basically he breaks down how all you need to really make a living is 1,000 true fans. So if you are selling a product for example and it is $20/month, if there were 1,000 people signed up for it, that would represent $20,000 a month.
All you need is 1,000 loyal subscribers, those people who wait for your posts or are first to comment on your videos. Who are first to buy something from you. You don’t need to focus so much on having more people you just need to focus way more on having more quality people and building the followers that you have in to those people who want to be super loyal to you.
Strategy #5
The next tip in building your personal brand is not to just talk. Don’t just talk the talk but you need to walk the walk.
I think that this is probably the most challenging thing for people nowadays, because social media has given us a way to push out our personal brands even if it’s not something that we truly believe in or is authentically us; so there are a lot of people being impostors out there and putting up personal brands and trying to get the audience, their audiences, to perceive a certain thing about them that is not actually how they are.
Let me know if you have dealt with some of that before, because anyway if you cannot send a follow-up email, if you cannot have great customer service, if you cannot truly come through the way that you make yourself out to on social media then that is not your personal brand. And you can tarnish your brand and your reputation if you don’t follow through with the image that you are creating for yourself on social media.
Strategy #6
The next thing you need to do is know your audience. This is so important, because even though this is your personal brand and these are things that are valuable to you, you’re still trying to you know attract a certain type of person so you need to know what this type of person looks like. If you are into traveling and your brand is all about traveling to little known places, and you want to travel to places that nobody really goes to, your target audience is probably going to be some really avid travelers and so you want to make sure that the content that you’re putting out talks to them.
A big part of this is really knowing yourself before you pick an audience that you want to cater to because you want to know like, “Who am I?” and “what is it that I want the world to know?” before you start picking who you’re targeting; because you don’t want to lose yourself and your sense of authenticity by trying so hard to appeal to this specific demographic.
So a lot of it is gonna be those core values that set you apart from other people who are in that niche. So a big thing is knowing your audience, but also knowing yourself before you start trying to handpick the audience that you’re trying to attract.
Strategy #7
Last thing is to just be yourself. You’ve got to just be yourself and really not focus so much on all of the little things. In branding the little things are your logo, or your colors. All of those things are very important, but they’re not as important as your authenticity, your core values, the information that you’re giving to people, how you want people to feel, how you tell better stories and how you get your impact to more people.
The little things that you can change are your logo, your name, like those are things that you honestly can change and rebrand. But who you are and the message that you want to give to the world is not something that you can just constantly change. The only way that creating a personal brand is constantly going to be fun and enjoyable is if it truly depicts who you are. It can become very tiresome to create these videos and to post certain types of pictures on Instagram, putting on this facade online, when that’s not who you are in person; and honestly when people do meet you in person, it can be a huge letdown because they’re expecting you to be a certain way. Just make sure that everything is aligned and that who you are is at the forefront of what your brand is and how you shape your personal brand to be.
Yes, it can be one aspect of you. Maybe you love to travel, and you love to cook, and you love fashion; but you want your personal brand to focus more on traveling, because you want to come out with a travel bag someday or you want to curate trips for people, and you know that’s the thing that you need to focus on.
That’s totally fine, but make sure that that is genuine and that it is not something that’s forced.
So there we go; those are my personal branding tips. And if you want more tips on branding, building your business, and so on, you are welcome to subscribe to my blog and stay in touch to work on building our legacy for the future together.
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