Why is Personal Branding important?
These days you can see many personal brands. More and more people are becoming brands. You can see a lot of influencers on Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat & Facebook. A lot of the people are becoming brands starting to work with influencers.
The question is how you, yourself become an influencer and leverage that brand at the end of the day. The chances are that you connect more with brands or corporates. For that personal branding is one of the strongest and most important things you could be spending your time, energy, and money on as a marketer.
If you think of people like Gary Vaynerchuk you see he is active on Snapchat, YouTube and he does podcasts daily. His brand is exploding. And if you go to Google Trends which is good at seeing how big these brands are. You can see how these brands are getting bigger and bigger. When you have a brand like that you can control what you wanna do with your audience. The toughest thing is building up the audience. It takes time to build that audience. A lot of people tell you that you should first build an audience before you start selling and that makes a lot of sense.
Where to start?
A simple tactic that helps you do this is to build up your social profile like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Like for example when you get a friend request on Facebook, even if you don’t know him, add him. Because when you share something like your personal photo or business-related or whatever it may be, people are seeing you. So leverage these popular social media sites to share your day, share what you’re doing to learn your business stuff or corporate stuff, whatever it may be, and grow from there.
Add all your friends you already know and cross-promote your social profile with each other. For example, tell your followers on Twitter to follow you on Facebook and tell your followers on Facebook to follow you on Twitter. Same way tell your Instagram followers to follow you on Snapchat and vice versa. So pair up Snapchat and Instagram because they have a similar type of audience. When you cross-promote you will get more and more fans.
There are tools on Twitter that follow people within your space and then if they don’t follow you back within a time period, it automatically unfollows them. And if they do follow, then well and good. Also, you must deliver something that is unique in its own way. If you just randomly post photos of food or “this is me partying”, it is not going to help. But there are people who can build the brand because they are posting something unique and since they are posting something unique, they are providing value to the audience.
Best way to build your brand
The number one thing to do to build a brand is to write a book. You can do blogging, you can do YouTube videos, you can be on TV but the number one thing that helps you build a personal brand is writing a book. The people who are the biggest brand are the ones that published books. You don’t have to publish a book, but doing so helps. You can also continuously blog and that will also help you build a brand. Not just on your website but you can blog on any entrepreneur forum, inc, etc.
How Neil became a superstar in blogging
One of the greatest tips is given by Neil Patel. He said that it is OK even if you are not very popular with blogging. When Neil hit up Forbes they didn’t know who he was even though he was there in the field for a long time. So what he did is he goes on Forbes and network with some ‘Guest Contributor’. So let’s say Jason is a guest contributor. So Neil sends him a mail saying “Hey Jason, big fan of yours. I read your articles on Forbes.
I noticed you wrote an article on SEO but you didn’t mention A, B, and C tactics, if you did it would really help your readers. Cheers,” Usually Jason is going to reply “Thank you for the feedback” This way Neil is building up a relation. After a few days, he mails Jason saying “Hey Jason, love your this post you wrote on blogging. I loved it so much that I shared it over my network. Neil” He will respond with “Thanks”. A week later Neil follows up with him again telling “Hey I love what you’re doing and I wanna follow in your footsteps.
One of my life goals is to write on sites like Forbes, inc. How do I get on to writing in Forbes? I also can write amazing content. I don’t know if it would be as good as yours. But I would like to give it a shot. Anyways you can introduce me to an editor there. Cheers Neil” And the key with the email is “Anyways you can introduce me to an editor there”. If you get introduced to an editor from a writer on a popular site, chances are that the editor is going to respond and will give you a shot at writing there. So that is how Neil got his 6 Million deal when someone saw his articles on multiple platforms like Inc & Forbes when he googled “content marketing”. So there are a lot of opportunities here.
It’s a long run
Once you start blogging, you’re not gonna get results soon. It’s a long-term process. It’s gonna build up over time. It will take around 12 to 18 months. You gotta start somewhere. So it’s OK even if you suck. You are going to get better at it. You are going to get more opportunities in the long run. And when you’re able to add value to people, they are going to come to reach out to you.
As long as you keep doing it better, as long as you don’t give up your brand is going to grow in the long term. Also, it is an association game. That means anyone around a famous personality is also going to be famous. So other people are really popular in your space and they say wonderful things about you. The chances are that you are also going to end up being very popular.
So it is a long-term, long haul, long play. You are not going to see brand new results in the first 6-10 months or over a year. It takes years to build a brand and it takes minutes to destroy it. So to sum up, be really careful with what you do, work at it consistently and this is all an association game- building up relationships at the same time.
