This is the question which is probably asked by every person. A personal brand should be important to everyone. Personal brands are not only for the entrepreneur that owns their own business.
“Your personal brand is how you appear to the world. “ Once people know who you are and begin to identify you with a specific area of understanding or expertise, you’ll be well on your way to becoming the go-to person in your niche or industry.
Everything affects the Personal Brand, like How you speak, How you wear & How you compose an Email. The same applies online, too; A profile picture speaks much about a person & the posts on Social Media when it comes with your name.
When you want to start a new brand first, you should become a brand in the market people trust you, and it easy to introduce a new brand in the market.
If you’re curious about knowing more about starting an online business or building a brand on the internet, then you have to read this piece of content because it will guide you through the process of building a brand. In fact, not only will it tell you the basics of establishing a brand, but it will reveal some of the growth strategies as well.
Also Read: 8 Proven Ways to Dramatically Life Changing Decisions in 2021
- Be human.
- Tell the audience about your wins, setbacks, and end on a note of inspiration.
- Embrace being vulnerable.
- People only connect to tangible stories.
- Does the person feel like they’re there with you?
- Give your audience the opportunity to feel empathetic.
What is Personal Branding?
According to Amazon’s Jett Bezos
“Branding is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
A personal brand is pretty much what it sounds like: a branded individual instead of either a product (or product line) or a major corporation like Coca-Cola, Nike, or Disney. A brand is designed to set you or your company apart from competitors.
So a building a personal brand online is a thought or image of yourself in someones else mind along with your niche or specialisation.
3 Important Key for build a personal brand online
Before we go further into the topic, let’s take a look at the three key essentials of building a personal brand online:
Passion For Something
Anyone can’t come forward and start building a brand. It just never happens this way. You have to be passionate about your idea and the impact it would create in the future.
Strength as a base
To make it big, you have to have a certain skill set that helps you build a business you wanted to build. The strength is the area that you’re proud of and you feel comfortable in. It could be a specific sport, technology, or certain software coding. Upon using the strength, you can achieve something that others won’t achieve.
The Consistent Mindset
Being consistent does help entrepreneurs in establishing the business. Because it requires patience and calmness, if you don’t have patience, you might not be able to establish any business because you would try to skip past the hardship, and that won’t happen. To learn how to be consistent and patient along the way.
If You Build Your Personal Brand Online, Follow 3 essential steps
Get Out there and do something
By far the easiest thing to do! Find something that: makes a shit tonne of money, is really cool, you super niche, is an everyday job, is funny (Literally anything) and then write and document/ drop knowledge bombs on the subject. This will establish what is your “thing”.
Build a Facebook group
Facebook groups have better engagment than ‘pages’ and send notifications to members when there is a post. It also supports your brand as you will be encouraging other people to post content on the subject as well increasing engagement in your group.
Be everywhere
Quora, Medium, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram post your content everywhere. Obviously, this is time-consuming but doesn’t fret at the start about duplicating content that’s fine for the start.
So these were three key essentials for building a brand.
Step by Step Process of How to Build Your Personal Brand Online in 2021
Now we get into the step-by-step process of building a brand on the internet:
1 – Identify Your True Worth
People call it PASSION. Some of them say it SELF-REALISATION.
So begin with identifying yourself.
You must know:
- Who you are
- Do you have any purpose? Like what you want to do?
- Think about what are your likes and dislikes
- What you are good at
- Your strength
- Understanding What is your weakness.
It all comes down to the identification of your inner self.
Once you find out exactly who you are, you’re good to go with it.
It means you know exactly what you want to do in life.
When it comes to building a personal brand online, most people struggle with this kind of situation, and a small percentage of people start exactly what they should be doing. Many successful people reach the point where they identify your inner self and start doing that thing.
If you’re lucky enough, you’ll find it right away even without start building your brand on the internet.
- They were unsuccessful as hell.
- What kept them going?
- Probably, they were aware that it’s their strength.
- Then what happens at some point?
- ANGRY BIRD came out.
- And it changed everything for them.
So please find what you’re passionate about. Otherwise, you’ll quit someday and start helping someone else in achieving their passion.
2 – Polish Your Skill
Once you’ve identified your skills, the next up is polishing it to the point where it starts to attract people. It doesn’t mean you have to stop polishing it further. The grind remains on, but you get a little bit experienced, and you manage to keep the hustle of getting better going and still engage with the prospective clients. Very important for Building Yourself as a Personal Brand Online polish your skills.
At this step, we’re not entirely focusing on getting the early clients. Most of us often get early clients, or a lot of us don’t. It’s not about the early clients but rather how good you are at learning and evolving yourself.
If you’re a blogger, blog as much as you can. If you’re a marketer, market yourself consistently. You’re a public speaker; make videos if you don’t have speaking gigs at the moment. It is all about to keep doing it without caring about getting paid. Then what happens is that you polish your skills with time and bring out the better version of yourself.
Step one still counts in it. If you got that wrong and you’re building your brand on something you’re not passionate about, either you won’t be able to polish your skills, or you’ll get bored and walk away from that.
3 – Benefit The Community
One of the essentials in learning ‘How to Build a Personal Brand Online‘ is helping a certain group of people and lead them in a way that nobody has ever done. It could be either by solving their problems or providing them enough value so that they feel so much excited about your brand and fall in love with it.
You can see a lot of examples of community building. People use different platforms to build that. You can go for Triberr, Twitter list, or Facebook group for that.
People won’t notice you if you don’t do your stuff. Once you start doing the hustle, you manage to make a noise around. In the beginning, it won’t be much, but if you remain consistent and one-on-one sessions begin to work, you may start to develop a sense of belonging to the group of people. Once they start to consume your brand’s value, they’ll be more persistent in consuming that from you.
You must be 100% honest with the community. If the intention is selling to your community, you won’t succeed in that. Because people don’t want to buy from brands that want to SELL, and they don’t care about the customers.
You might come across many experts who manage their Facebook private groups for a community of their own where they engage people when they need to sell their new course, e-book, or something else.
The true essence isn’t based on selling but rather on harboring the community and nurturing people into the better version of themselves.
4 – Deliver Consistently
If you want to know how to build a personal brand online on the internet, then FIND out what value you deliver to the audience consistently.
People fail at this point and walk away. Because you don’t build a brand on selling your good stuff but rather on the value you provide to the audience that helps them.
Suppose you have successfully created a community and provided a lot of value over one month and on the first day of the second month. In that case, you show up with a paid product for them, a lot of them won’t respond, and many of them might not like it. You probably sell to a few of them, but that won’t be a great strategy to monetize your brand.
If you truly want to monetize your brand, then deliver value to the community for 5 months and then offer something that isn’t compulsory for them to buy but works like an addon. In that way, you won’t make people feel bad because they won’t be buying from you.
DON’T ever make the community ashamed because they’re not in the position to buy or haven’t decided to buy yet.
Neil Petal understands this idea. They publish many good and useful content on their official blog and help people through their blog. They have developed a stream of value for the audience, and a lot of their readers turn into their paying customers.
If the audience starts to understand your game, which is no matter what happens, you won’t stop delivering value to them; not only will they become your loyal fans, but a lot of them will also buy it from you.
- Just because you would have earned their trust, respect, and loyalty.
- This doesn’t happen in 8 months. It might take 2 years or 4 years to happen.
- But it will happen if you remain consistent in delivering the value.
5 – Sell What You’re Good At
You’ve built your brand on something you’re passionate about, and you’ve shown the audience that what your strength is. You should be doing along the way because you have to become an authority in your space rather than trying a lot of other things.
The idea of diversification into other things isn’t bad, but it doesn’t mean you start to put your energy into something you’re not passionate about.
For instance, if you’ve successfully built your brand as a ‘Facebook Marketing Consultant’ in 5 years and starting a merchandise store based on your brand, then that is okay, but if you suddenly go into a car rental business that you have no idea about, then that would be the worst decision ever.
If you’re wondering how to make money from your brand, whether it’s a service firm or a personal brand, it means you aren’t good enough to make money at this. So keep grinding it until you find the right idea to sell. It just pops out from nowhere, and you will have it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop looking for ideas. Keep grinding means keep on learning and honing on what you’re doing, and at some point, people would start to realize that you’re doing this thing better than everyone. And there, the game changes.
They don’t know that it’s your PASSION.
PASSION and BRAND BUILDING Go parallel along the way. The more you’re clear, the easier it becomes to build a brand.
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6 – Checklist Before You Start Your Personal Brand Online
I would like to mention a few things that I feel are necessary for an online presence as having your identification number by your state.
Have Your Own Domain
Get a domain for yourself, your name, or what you want people to call you with.
“Don’t use your website to tell people what YOU do, use it to tell people what you can do for them,”
Having a great website with the domain will also help you show your portfolio and win customers easily.
Social Media Presence
For a marketer, everything is an opportunity. Don’t miss one, be on all social media networks. Specially on
- Facebook with an optimised profile. +1 for your own personal page.
- Have Your own Twitter Page
- Have Your Own Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+ pages
Research where your clients are and just hit them by creating content over that social media network. Remember that from your Facebook status to WhatsApp status to what pictures you post on Instagram, everything counts. So you need to be more professional. It doesn’t mean that you may get boring, but you need to sound professional and interesting.
Understand Your Audience – not everyone is your customer.
Reaching out to Audience is one thing, but understanding your Audience is more important. But the first thing is that you may end up frustrated if you’re targeting the wrong Audience. Everything should fall into your target market circle, from creating content to idealizing the Audience, solving problems by sharing resources. Then your second aspect is to deliver them what they are looking for from you.
Share Yourself and Your knowledge
Remember, as mentioned above, it’s all about giving and take. If you don’t have the guts to share your knowledge, the chances are that you will have a hard time promoting yourself.
So what happens exactly when you share yourself and your knowledge with others? As a professional in your field, you will have more experience than others or those who have just started learning your niche as their skill. YOUR WORDS will matter to them, and that’s how you will start grabbing ATTENTION as a helper, guider, or Senior. This will also help you in making yourself an AUTHORITY in your niche.