What if one day you woke up famous? What would you do and how you would use this status?
It’s an open secret that nowadays everyone can become a celebrity and start building a business using their own name and reputation.
And success doesn’t depend on your monthly income, country, job, gender, or age.
I am planning to write a number of articles with tips on personal branding in order to help you understand where to start and how to grow your business using your personality.
Being an influencer today is one of the MOST effective ways to bring any business to the next level.
Do not underestimate the role of personal branding in business development.
Such examples of personal brands as Neil Patel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, Richard Branson have an incredible impact on millions of people following them on social media and thus, contributing to their business growth.
So, why not use the opportunity of building your personal brand? Let’s analyze this topic in detail.
How to build your personal brand
What is personal branding?
According to Wikipedia, personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. In other words, you promote yourself as an expert, not your business or services.
An influencer is an expert in a particular niche who has an impact on people’s opinions and choices.
Read also: 11 creative ways to generate great business ideas
To become an opinion leader and have an influence on what decisions people make you should be an expert in a particular niche, share and promote your experience and knowledge.
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field” Niels Bohr
Today we have tons of information online related to any topic and it is hard to find really valuable advice there. Becoming an expert you help people to avoid mistakes and get expected results more quickly.
Following the steps below you can start building your personal brand and become an influencer in your niche:
1. Find your niche
Finding your niche is a MUST-do step that every would-be influencer should start with.
There are particular steps that will help you to identify your personal brand niche and won’t take too much time.
Select several niches you love
Write down at least 3 niches you have worked with before or you are interested in. It can be anything from cooking to investing. Your DEEP interest in these fields matters the most.
You should be passionate about it even you don’t have enough knowledge or experience.
Identify problems
Make a research for each of these fields. Visit niche websites and forums to learn what questions are most frequently asked there. It is even better to ask questions yourself in order to understand the target audience more deeply.
Communicate and get involved.
Analyze skills
After you realized the problems people have in the niche, write down the list of skills that you need to have if you want to help people with these problems.
Do not worry if you don’t have any of these skills.
Choose
Look at your list with niches, problems and skills required.
Which one is the most attractive to you?
What is the niche you are ready to devote your time to?
What is your passion?
You should have the desire to bring value to the niche by helping people to solve their problems.
Think about the variants you have and select 1 niche.
Follow the leaders
Now when you know what niche is the best fit for you, try to find at least 10 blogs related to it and follow them.
Consider not only blogs but social media influencers, YouTube vloggers, podcasts or anything else related to this niche.
Read also: Make Money on Instagram: The Most Powerful Secrets from Popular Bloggers
Learn what great leaders in your niche are writing about, which topics appeared to be more popular among the readers, read the comments and questions.
Learn the field.
Define your value proposition
The best business strategy ever is to bring value and solve problems. To understand your value proposition more deeply I would ask you to consider the following structure:
I help ________(here you write your target audience) TO________(here you write which problems you can help to solve and how
This is an example of how it may look in my case:
I help ambitious and self-motivated people to get financial freedom by starting and growing their own businesses.
And now it’s your turn, do it!
2. Identify your expert type and channel of communication
WOW! If you followed each step you already have your niche and unique value proposition. Congratulations!
Now you should identify the way you will communicate your expertise to your audience in accordance with your EXPERT TYPE.
Below is the list of key expert types and the channels of communication used to promote your personal brand. Please read it carefully and identify which one is a better fit for you:
SPEAKER
Channels of communication: conferences, seminars, public events, podcasts
AUTHOR
Channels of communication: books, magazines, blogs
INTERNET CELEBRITY
Channels of communication: social media – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
PROGRAM LEADER
Channels of communication: online/offline courses, business programs
COMMUNITY LEADER
Channels of communication: community websites / social media groups
Choose the type in accordance with the channel of communication you are going to use for promotion. When making your choice I would recommend considering the following factors:
- The interests of your target audience in accordance with your personal brand niche (where is the most part your clients
- Your skills – writing, speaking, organizational, leadership, photography, etc
NB! One very important thing here – you should select only one main channel of communication with your audience, but your personal brand can be presented in several channels.
Do not spend too much effort on each of the channels. Such a strategy is never effective.
Stay focused.
FINALLY
Building a personal brand needs time and hard work, but the results of your efforts can be amazing.
Follow personal branding tips carefully and be consistent.
In my next article, I am going to highlight the details on how to promote your personal brand. Stay in touch.
UPDATE: Read about how to promote your personal brand in the new post
Tetiana is a business coach and owner of IStartHub, a business media for ambitious female entrepreneurs and small business owners.