Building a personal brand is the most underrated way to open doors and create your own luck. Yet, few people prioritize their personal brands. I was one of those people until I created my website. If you’re on the fence about developing a personal brand, I’m here to convince you otherwise.

What is a Personal Brand?

Our personal brand is everything we put out for everyone else to see. It includes our social media presence, personal website, and any public internet activity. It is an online representation of our reputation. And it is what appears when we Google ourselves, including mistakes and insights.

Why Build a Personal Brand?

A personal brand is important for many reasons. 

• One, it markets our skills. What we put out is a signal to employers. If done correctly, our brand will showcase our aptitudes.
• Two, it builds an audience. Having a following is a competitive advantage for an entrepreneur. We already have people invested in our success, and will likely be our first customers.
• Three, we’ll always have a personal brand. Everything we share influences how others perceive us. Instead of this happening by itself, why not cultivate a personal brand that places us in the best light?
• Finally, we’ll attract like-minded people and grow our network.

Myths Around the Personal Brand

Here are common myths about creating a personal brand.

I Have Nothing Interesting to Share

This is flat-out false. We are all unique, with different perspectives. Our brains run everything through a filter, so everyone’s perception of experiences differs.

How do we know what we share isn’t interesting? It might not be interesting to us, but it could be interesting to someone else.

I’m Not an Expert

The point of sharing is to help others. Just because we’re not an expert doesn’t mean we can’t add value. If we’re a few steps ahead of someone, we have knowledge to impart to them, making their journey a little easier.

We also don’t fall prey to the expert paradox, giving us a reason to teach as we learn.

Someone Will Steal My Ideas

It’s always possible for someone to steal our ideas when sharing online. However, this does not outweigh the benefits of building a personal brand. The network, audience, and reputation are more valuable than losing an idea.

Ideas are not a limited resource. As we get into the habit of content creation and idea consumption, new ideas emerge more readily.

As Austin Kleon once said, “Some people say ‘oh you must have so much to say because you write every day.’ I’m like, ‘actually it’s the opposite. I have more to say because I sit down and write every day and I figure out what I’m thinking.’”

So, if someone takes our idea, we’ll have others to fall back on.

How to Start a Personal Brand

Emphasize Your Website

Our personal website should be the primary hub of our brand, as we have more control over it than social media. We can get banned on social media. Or, an update to the algorithm could reduce our viewership. A website avoids these issues.

My first step in creating my personal brand was starting my website in May 2021. I wanted a place where I could document what I was learning. A place where I could look back when I was older and reminisce.

Create Great Content

With building a brand, content is king. Content attracts the right people, engages leads, and turns them into promoters. It’s free marketing. Without great content, there is no reason for people to read our work versus someone else’s.

I wanted my audience to be young, self-motivated people at the beginning of their careers. So, I created blog posts about starting a career. I have articles about work-life balance, living without regrets, and the price of success.

We should prioritize evergreen content, as it’s longer-lasting.

For example, a post on how to save money is evergreen. If the information is valuable, people will click on that post for as long as it’s up. However, a post around the 2020 election loses most of its relevance as time progresses. It’s not evergreen.

Create a Consumption and Creation System

It’s important to have a system for creating and consuming content. The more ideas we learn, the more we can write. And the more we write, the more ideas we have. The two are mutually reinforcing.

I have a basic schedule where I write for at least 5 minutes and read for 30 minutes every day. I will ramp up this process as this routine becomes a habit. My goal is to reach an hour and a half of writing every day. 

My writing goal will look different from yours. Find your ideal level of content production and create routines to support it.

Write Consistently

Initially, the best way to improve the quality of our content is to create consistently. This will help build our following and ensure we’re putting in our reps.

Write About What You’re Learning

Writing is a laborious process. But writing about our interests and what we’re learning reduces this process’s friction.

This will develop connections with like-minded people and solidify our knowledge. When we explain something, we must clarify and concretize our knowledge. This improves our understanding.

Create content for yourself first.

Be Interesting

How do we stand out? Be interesting! By being interesting, we’re able to better hold people’s attention

The formula for interestingness is uniqueness * accomplishment * expression. So, all we must do is express our uniqueness and accomplishment in our writing.

To find your uniqueness, ask yourself what combination of life experiences differentiates you?

My unique angle is dropping out of college during a pandemic + my knowledge from everything I’ve consumed + living with entrepreneurial parents.

Another tip is to be transparent. Tell people what you’re doing. If you’ve made a mistake, own it. This deepens our audience’s connection and trust with us.

Clarity Above All

When building your brand, write clearly. Attention spans are decreasing, so the fewer words, the better.

Attention is a valuable currency. To get it, we must provide value in as fast a manner as possible. Try cutting at least 30% of a post in the next draft. Leave only what’s essential.

Optimize for different social media algorithms

Social media is great for driving traffic to our website. To do this, we want to create a posting schedule. For instance,

• Share original things you’ve created 1-2 times a week.
• Share an interesting quote, idea, or observation 2-3 times a week.
• Share daily recaps of what you’re consuming.

I’ve done the latter route by posting goal updates on Twitter.

Go on forums like Reddit or Quora and answer questions about your content. If you write about productivity, go on productivity forums and answer questions. You can add links to relevant articles on your website in your answers.

Finally, follow experts on your social media platforms to learn new trends.

General Tips

A few other ways to build our personal brand include:

• Making videos
• Writing reviews
• Creating tutorials and guides
• Hosting a podcast
• Sharing tech tools and techniques
• Taking part in online communities
• Presenting at meetups and webinars

Understand the Numbers

Once we’ve built a following, we’ll have to analyze and break down the relevant data. By doing so, we can orient our content towards what most interests our audience.

Learning Google Analytics is great for developing these abilities. I took Google Analytics for Beginners to deepen my understanding of metrics.

Skills For Developing a Personal Brand

Copywriting

Copywriting is writing that attempts to drive leads into sales through a call-to-action. It requires clear writing, understanding our audience, and general knowledge of psychology. And, it makes our writing more engaging and exciting, attracting and keeping users.

There are a few steps to get better at copywriting.

• One, move to an environment that provides realistic and rapid feedback. The only way to get better at copywriting is to edit, and edit, and edit some more.
• Two, write more than you need. You can always cut on later drafts, but we must make sure the content is there.
• Three, read your copy out loud. Good writing sounds like talking. Reading our writing out loud catches awkward sentences and grammatical errors.

For learning copywriting fast, find real projects to work on, learn from the top copywriters, and share your work.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is business storytelling to help our audience make a well-informed decision. We answer their questions and solve their problems. And we create a relationship with our audience.

Humans are narrative creatives. We love stories, and emotions are often more convincing than logic. So, it’s important to become an excellent storyteller to captivate our audience.

I’m improving my content marketing by taking the Content Marketing course from HubSpot.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is how marketers rank their websites higher in search engine results. It involves researching keywords and using those keywords in high-quality articles. These keywords are often questions, which our article answers. When people search those questions, our article is likely to rank higher and get more clicks. 

SEO is important, as only 8-29% of people go past the first page in Google. If our content isn’t ranking, we’re not getting clicks. And if we want to build an audience for our personal brand, we need clicks.

The best way I’ve found to get better at SEO is to use it on my website. I bought the SEO tool Ahrefs and learned how to build a keyword list. I also took SEO for Solopreneurs by Nat Eliason.

When approaching SEO, we must look long-term. If our website is new, it will have low domain authority. Domain authority is how trustworthy Google thinks our website is. To develop it, create great content and get backlinks from more established websites.

This is a long process, and it can take months to years before reaching serious authority. Until then, we won’t see many results. We must push through this point and delay gratification.

If we want to write about a certain topic, we can research our competitors. Search the question your article is answering, and click on the first few results. See how they write and ask yourself, can I write a more comprehensive and clear article? You’ll rank higher than them if you can.

Summary

Building a personal brand is important, as it creates a spring of serendipity. The first step is always the hardest, so go out and create your website! Tweet me your website @JacksonUpmann.