5 Tips To Build Your Personal Brand - The Legit Way.
I'm sure you've seen it all. The LinkedIn DM's promising you to double your revenue, pyramid schemes, cryptocurrency, and free but not free mentorships. The Instagram DM's selling you fake followers and likes, promising you the best engagement because your content is clearly amazing. Well, let's weed out the fluff and talk about 5 real ways you can build your personal brand.
Find your why, and what makes you, you
Often times we aren't really sure what we want to talk about or what fuels our flame. This is when asking questions to yourself most importantly, and trusted friends and peers would help. Identify what makes you happy, and does that happiness help other people when you talk about it. In other words, do you add value by doing it to yourself and other's lives?
For example, if you love to draw places that you travel to, your art can be used as visual aids with a story to talk about your experience there. Tips when going there, the good, the bad, what was the occasion you went for, what does your artwork of the place mean to you? Add value to what you are good at by thinking about what you would find most helpful out of it.
Decide the channels you will use
You know your why, now what? Figuring out how you place your why on different channels, and if those channels yield benefits are crucial. Often times people jump on a platform and post absolutely nothing and promote those channels for years. For example, my Twitter, it's dead.
Don't follow me on there. Let's create a persona: John. John LOVES to speak. And he's quite good at tackling difficult topics around climate issues. Where does he go? John can start a podcast and have audio discussions by himself and have guests as well. He can also record video on a phone camera and repurpose it as content on YouTube. He can create snippets of the video and share it on Instagram and LinkedIn. He can use Facebook to do live shows as well if he has the capacity. Is he on Medium? Is he tweeting? He could, but managing expectations is crucial to make sure you put the best content out there with higher frequency. As much as omnichannel marketing is important, don't start what you can't commit to.
Collaborate Consciously
Collaboration is absolutely crucial to building a personal brand. And it can be very easy to do so. After identifying what you will be providing through content and service offerings; aka your value proposition, identify whom you can collaborate with to further push your brand out there.
Let's take John, for example, every guest he brings into the podcast gets him a new potential follower and lead, plus John is exposed to the guest's audience and followers as well. Collaborative measures can always help you grow vertically in terms of growth and horizontally with more opportunities to grow your brand.
Consistency is Key
I know you probably have heard this one before but hard work is needed if you want to build your personal brand. That means going into the nitty-gritty to identify what works and what doesn't. In today's landscape, we aren't trying to be first, we are trying to stand out and be relevant. See, we are fighting for peoples attention, not to be first in the market.
Although being first helps, but people always notice you when you are consistently coming up with new and interesting content that grabs peoples attention. They choose to follow you, share your story, and support you because you are consistent with what you do and the message you put out there.
They fall in love with your why. And no one can take that away from you or them. That's more powerful than the number of followers someone has.
Take Breaks
Building your personal brand can be extremely taxing mentally. I myself have been off my Instagram for close to 4 months now because I didn't take breaks and identify how to best build my brand and advocate for mental health, whilst still taking care of mine. Being on top of things is important, but find ways to slot out time for yourself where you are not bothered about how many people watched your story, read your blog, or clicked the like button on your video. Take your time, work hard, have fun. You have one life to live, might as well live it happy.