Maybe you’ve heard that it’s important to have a personal brand.
That it can help you in your career and also businesses you’re associated with.
You probably know some of the more extroverted business personalities with strong personal brand recognition.
You see their videos. You see their businesses seemingly doing well. You wonder if maybe you should try building awareness for yourself for the benefit of you and your business.
You can certainly jump right in and start experimenting. But there is a question to ask first that may help to make things a little easier…
What’s The Goal Of A Personal Brand?
We’ve kind of gotten into this already.
For many, the goal of building a personal brand or really building awareness for yourself is to increase business sales. In that case you’re the owner or manager or marketer for a company and the goal is to gain attention for yourself and also for your business so that sales increase.
Pretty straightforward and a good goal.
But there are other goals for building a personal brand.
You may want to build a high profile so that no matter where you work you always have an audience that may be interested in whatever you’re selling.
Speaking at conferences and at corporate events is another reason to raise awareness for your personal brand. You can make money by speaking on topics where others see you as an expert.
Consulting could be the goal. Instead of speaking in a conference setting you’re hired to come in and help a company with something they believe you’re an expert in.
I think it’s important to start out with a goal in mind. Certainly other good things may come from building attention for yourself, but when you have a goal in mind you can track the progress. You can see if sales are increasing for your company. You can see if you’re getting more and better speaking opportunities.
Start with the goal in mind as you ease or jump into the personal brand building experiment.
Who Are You?
Another important aspect of personal brand building is that you need to understand yourself. It can seem like you need to be extroverted and good on camera to be able to successfully build a successful personal brand.
But those are usually just the perceptions. You can build more attention for yourself in a variety of ways. You don’t have to be a certain way to reach people in today’s world.
I do think, however, that you need to know yourself. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses.
You can certainly push yourself to grow comfortable on camera, but if it’s not a strength now the odds of it becoming a strength in the future are slim. There usually needs to be some competence, willingness and passion in order to do something consistently for a long time.
If you’re not comfortable on camera you can still try out video blogging. See how it goes. See if you begin to enjoy it. But maybe you know that you’re better with audio or with text. If you know this then dive fully into one or both of those areas. You can build a personal brand with a blog or with a book or with a podcast.
Knowing yourself helps to set expectations. A key here is that you can’t expect to have a huge profile if your personality only allows you to post one blog post a month or guest on a podcast once a year.
Can You Commit Long-Term?
This is a big one that many people don’t even consider.
Look at the successful personal brands out there. The odds are nearly 100% that they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing for years. They’ve been creating videos for a decade. They’ve been writing blog posts for just as long.
Are you willing to commit to that type of timeline?
One of the big blunders with personal branding is thinking that you’ll get incredible response within the first year. You won’t and if you expect to you’ll be let down and then you’ll quit.
Final Thought: You Already Have A Personal Brand
The reality is that you already have a personal brand. It’s just about whether or not you’re going to share it with the world. In order to share it you need to know yourself. You need to know what you’re an expert on. From there, you can start by answering questions your target audience is asking. You can do that with text, audio or video. You can create your own content or you can guest on other people’s content platforms.
Go through the steps above and you’ll be better positioned to have success building a personal brand.