A strong online personal brand can bring a lot of opportunities your way.
However, it can be hard to stand out amongst all of the other people trying to develop their personal brand.
Thankfully, there are some things you can do to make it easier to define and promote a personal brand, that will stand out online.
In fact, if you keep reading, you’ll learn exactly what you can do to create an online personal brand that will resonate with people and open doors.
Let’s begin!
What Does Your Brand Represent?
The first thing you need to do is get clear about what you want your brand to stand for. This can be a hard thing to do, but here are some questions that can help make the task easier –
- What do you want people to think about when the brand is mentioned in a conversation?
- What are the goals of the brand?
- What industry will the brand operate within?
- What does the brand dislike?
- How do you want the brand to affect the world?
Push yourself as much as possible when answering these questions. Do not allow yourself to produce vague answers. If you can be specific, it will be easier to communicate the ideals of the brand to other people. This will, therefore, make it easier to get other people invested in the brand and what it stands for.
If you need some help with these questions, think about some of the brands that you personally like to be associated with. How would you answer the questions mentioned above, for the brands you like? If you’re still stuck – do a quick search for sites dedicated to branding, that will let you learn more about existing brands.
Start Spreading the Message
Once you have some context on what the brand represents, think about how you’re going to communicate the brand with the rest of the world.
The best way to do this is by creating content that exemplifies the traits of the brand. There are many platforms you can use to create content and the platform you select will depend on which one is best suited to you.
Some people find that they are very good at writing. Such people will, therefore, be suited to writing content on a blog. However, others might feel as though they’re better in front of a camera, and so will decide to create a YouTube channel. Others might feel as though their best medium is ‘spoken word’ and they’ll create a Podcast.
Ideally, you want to make it so that the brand can be found on as many platforms as possible. This will help make it easier for you to spread your message to as many people as possible.
One strategy you can use to help you do that is ‘repurposing’ your content. This is where you turn one form of content, into several other forms. For example, you turn a video into a blog post and a Podcast. This is the most efficient way to get the brand in front of a lot of people.
It is important that you focus on quality when creating your content. Of course, creating high-quality content can be a lot of hard work. If you are a busy person you should hire a professional to help you out. This will help you maintain a consistent content schedule, whilst maintaining high-quality.
Create a Community
Over time, your brand will naturally cultivate a community. Like minded people will resonate with your message and vision for the future. However, there are some things you can do to speed up the process.
One step you can take is to host live events. These live events will give people the chance to interact with you personally. This can help bolster the brand because people will appreciate the fact that you’ve taken the time to communicate with them. It will also give you the chance to clarify some of the messaging for the brand.
Nowadays, you do not need to host live events in person. You can just host a live stream on YouTube or use Facebook Live. This approach can be a great way to interact with a lot of people at the same time. If you are going to host a live event, make sure you give people a lot of notice. This will help improve the turnout.
You can also create a Facebook Group to help you develop a community around your brand. If you are going to create a Facebook Group, make sure you have someone who is there to moderate it. A moderator will help maintain civility in your group. They will also be able to let you know if there are any questions that need answering.
Learn How to Magnify Your Branding
If you want the brand to grow as quickly as possible, you need to think about how you can magnify your branding efforts.
One way you can do this is by running ads designed to ‘amplify’ existing pieces of content. If you want to increase your chances of success, run ads for content that has already done well organically.
Such content has already proved itself and is more likely to produce an ROI when you put ad money behind it. You can use Facebook or YouTube Advertising to help promote the brand and existing content.
You can also speed things up by partnering with people who share an audience similar to yours. There are people out there who have already spent a lot of time building an audience. If you can provide value to their audience, you will be able to expose the brand to a lot of people that will be interested in your brand.
If you are thinking about using this strategy, make sure you do everything you can to bring a lot of value to the other person’s audience.
Perfect Personal Branding?
Developing a personal brand is one of the best things you can do if you want to create new opportunities for yourself. However, it’s not easy to create a personal brand that will stand out.
In this post, we’ve taken a look at some of the things you can do to define a strong personal brand. To begin with, you need to think about defining what your brand actually represents. You also need to put some thought into how you’re going to expose people to the brand.
While this can all seem like a lot of work, if you stick with it, the payoff associated with building your personal brand will be worth it.
Want to learn more about how you can market your brand online? Check out this section to see how you can use AdWords to help spread your message!