Why one might need a personal brand
Who would Mickey Mouse be without a personal brand? It would be an ordinary mouse. In life, everything works exactly the same way. The lifestyle era in blogging is over. You need to find your expertise, reveal your personality, and build your personal brand and blog on this.
Before, everyone wanted to spy through a keyhole for someone else’s personal life. Now the goal of every blogger is to influence and guide the audience. Due to the oversaturation of content, it is hard to distinguish yourself as a person and gain the audience’s interest. Therefore, a personal brand is crucial in the modern world: in the transition from a lifestyle blogger to an influencer — a person who guides their audience and whom one wants to follow.
You have to find correct positioning — if your peers try to fake your positioning, they will fail. You must be different from your competitors in your niche.
Stages of creating a personal brand
- Understand why you need a personal brand. A personal brand is like a second job. It is not a hobby. It is vital to define clear goals, KPIs, why you need it as an individual, and why your brand and company need it. There is a common misconception: the business owners think it is enough to hire a content manager, SMM manager, PR specialist, marketer, even the whole team that would work on a personal brand, but it does not work this way. You are a brand. Your values, energy, and expertise play a sufficient role.
- Define the target audience. It is crucial to understand what kind of audience you are dealing with in business, in your life, with whom you communicate, and how this audience perceives you. Audit your existing audience. Ask your friends what they think of you, what emotions and associations do they have with you. You can write down your thoughts on how you assess yourself, what you have heard, and what people are saying about you.
- Run a SWOT analysis. These are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Analyze your expertise: is it something new, or is this niche full of experts, and how relevant it is now. Use Google Alerts — you will receive all mentions about you in Google and on the media in your Gmail box.
- Develop a strategy. A personal brand cannot be detached from your real life. You must know who you want to be in five years, who you want to be in ten years, and what you want other people to say about you. It is crucial to know exactly where you want to go.
- Plan your content. In this part, you define what you say: when you say it, where, to whom, through which communication channels. Personal and professional roles need to be combined. Use different communication channels as well, and each channel has its role.
Onlypult posts to all social media platforms, collects analytics data, allows creating micro landing pages and multiple links, and helps monitor what people say about your company.
A personal brand provides a path to the essential basic resource of the future — social capital. And social capital is directly connected with financial capital — everything that touches a person’s hand with a strong brand, rockets up. You have an army of fans and ambassadors who are ready to follow you, and with the help of a personal brand, all possible horizons, opportunities, and prospects open up.
Mistakes in building a personal brand
- Building a personal brand without a goal. The personal brand, as such, is a trend right now, and since everybody does it, you need to follow the trend.
- Delegating. If someone else does all the work for you, your personal brand will not work. Taking responsibility is crucial: you are in charge of what you do.
- Perfectionism. Perfectionism is a progress killer. On the contrary, you should show your transformation, your history, and your struggle. Show that you also overcome difficulties, that you are also a living person, that you do not know something and are cannot do something. Don’t be afraid to show your failures.
- Lack of professional and social positions. It is vital to keep tracking top news in your main domain. You need to have your point of view, and expressing it is very important.
- Fear of calling yourself an expert. Even if you do not feel very self-confident yet, you already know 20% or 30% more information than everyone else — in their eyes, you are an expert.
