Personal Branding is the method of marketing people and their businesses as brands. It’s when individuals wish to present themselves in a certain way and hold an online identity.
Personal Brand and business?
Having a personal brand, as an entrepreneur, has major positive effects on the growth of your business. The greatest of these is the ability to easily market your own business- your own brand. Through personal branding, you also attract an audience who doesn’t know your business yet.
Building up a personal brand is just like building up a company brand. And just like developing your business plan where you define the niche, main message, logo, and image, you must do the same with your personal brand. It takes time and effort to build a brand. You need determination and focus to deliver quality-filled content to the targeted audience in your niche. Eventually, through your organized approach and originality, you can effectively be the sole brand ambassador for your Personal Brand!
How do I start my Personal Brand?
To have a successful personal brand, you need to start on the digital platform. An online presence is a must in today’s digital age. For instance, when someone searches your name on the internet, they should be able to find you and your business. I recommend starting to think about a website for yourself. You can create a website on WordPress or Squarespace, and this should be your principal means of putting yourself out there. Make sure to include a bio about yourself so people understand more about you, and what you stand for, through your business.
What about Social Media?
Social Media is the best place to model yourself- whether through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube. One of the key activities that will gain you a large community of supporters is ‘posting’. You need to post very often! And by this, I mean that you should post daily appealing content. Instagram is my go-to platform for building a personal brand. Being my absolute favorite, it is where I built my brand and my social media marketing agency. You need to engage your audience, communicate with people and reply to DMs, ask questions or have polls on your stories, let people share their opinions with you, and host people within your niche (e.g.: Instagram Live). The whole point of this is to create a bond with your followers that shows your enthusiasm, and one that can develop into trust and a good reputation for yourself.
Your genuineness is what will make your brand even more personal and different from the other brands in your field. There’s no better way to share your experiences than to tell your stories honestly. People love hearing stories, and the best way to communicate with the public is through videos. If you happen to not be a camera person, you can always include your personal blog on your website. Be one with the community and get involved! The goal is to get people to know you and like you so that they trust you at the end of the day.
Can I make money from my Personal Brand?
Of course. The purpose of having a personal brand is to be able to monetize it. No one wants to put in all this work and not getting anything in return. To be able to monetize your brand, you need to have a community of people who trust you. Let me break it down for you. Imagine you have 1000 followers on Instagram who know you, 100 out of those 1000 followers like you and 10 people out of those 100 trust you. If you’re selling a product for $10, you are guaranteed to gain $100 from those 10 people.
Now apply this to 1 million followers, with 10% of them who like you. That’s 100,000 people, and of those people, another 10% who trust your choices and everything you say! If you’re selling a product for $10, that’s $100,000 right there. These 10,000 followers are the people who will buy anything you sell- whether it’s a product or a service- solely based on their trust in the brand that you’ve built for yourself. If you’re thinking about starting your personal brand, start taking action now.
Find your own niche, get inspired by your competitors, and start producing free advertised content to build your recognition.
By, Sarah Refai, Personal Brand Strategist, Founder of Coconut-Media and Instagram Academy
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