How to create a personal brand in 2017

The secrets to personal branding success

Good branding can make or break your success: it stands for companies, and it stands for personal brands as well. Nowadays, personal branding is more important than ever, particularly if you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur, or if you work in a company. In this blog post, I want to show you the best way to start building up your personal brand in 2017.

Why personal branding?

Personal branding has become almost a necessity in recent years, especially for people in certain niches. The reason for that is other people that you come into contact with, particularly clients and employers will likely also check your online persona.

By building up your personal brand, you’ll be able to put your best foot forward online – which will also influence your success in the real world as well.

As an entrepreneur, there are even more benefits to creating a personal brand. People generally prefer the person behind the business to the actual business, as it’s something they can connect with. By building up your personal brand, you will be able to grow your business faster and find potential investors and clients more easily.

Now, let’s get into what you need to do in order to start your very own personal brand:

Be visible and be active

The first step towards building up your personal brand is that you need to be as visible as possible online:

• Create a blog or a website where people can learn more about you
• Join social profiles and be active
• Join online communities and social groups where you interact with others

You don’t necessarily need to be on every major social network and start a blog. Rather, keep to what you know realistically you have the time to manage properly and stick with it.

Since you will need to be very active in order to be successful, and engage as much as possible with other people, it’s better to not stretch yourself too thin.

That said, if you’re not seen by people, you won’t be able to truly brand yourself. Find the perfect balance for yourself, so as to make sure that you are visible, but not on so many platforms that you don’t have the time to manage any of them properly.

Grow your social influence

Social media offers even the most regular of people a chance at growing their influence online. And an improved influence, means a better, stronger personal brand.

In order to become an influencer, you will need to essentially become a thought leader in your niche, a person who others look up to for advice, tips or in other cases, for entertainment.

In order to grow your own social influence, you will need to be extra active online, and preferably, also have a blog which is updated regularly with new posts. Influencers can’t grow unless there is consistency.

As I mentioned earlier, as an influencer, you become a source of great information from whatever your niche is. This means that you need to share the top content, write insightful posts of your own, provide tips and advice to others and so on.

Another important factor is engagement: just like with personal branding, if you want to grow your influence, you will need to engage with other users as much as possible. Ask and answer questions, join groups and engage there regularly to get your name seen by others, network online and at events, take part in Twitter Chats and so on. The more you engage with others, the better for your influence, and for your personal brand.

Know who you are and what makes you unique

Just like with regular brands, a personal brand needs to have a clear direction.

In order to be able to build your brand, you need to know who you are: what makes you, you? What qualities make you unique? What makes you stand out? And how can you use these for your personal brand.

This is not a question of hiding things about yourself, or changing your personality to fit the idea of the perfect personal brand. Rather, it’s about using your best qualities and always bringing your best foot forward when you’re presenting yourself to others, online and offline.

Consistency is also very important to your success – just like with regular brands. Before you start building your brand, be clear on who you are and what image you want to portray to others, and then stick to it.

Branding: it’s in the little things

With branding, it’s sometimes the little things that can make the biggest difference to your success.

For example, you could consider creating a logo for yourself. This is especially useful if you have a website or a blog. A logo can help you look more professional, as well as make your brand stand out. You can use a tool like Tailor Brands to quickly create yourself a custom logo.

Another thing that can make a big difference is including a professional signature to all of your emails.

Most email providers will let you create a signature, or if you want a more professional-looking signature and one that includes links to your social profiles, you can use a tool like WiseStamp to create it.

Live streaming

Live streaming continues to be huge this year on social media. Use this popular (relatively) new medium to grow your personal brand and reach more people.

As Facebook is pushing this feature, it’s much more likely that a live stream will pop up in people’s news feeds, rather than a regular update. It’s unclear how long this will last – but while it still is, make sure to profit from the increased reach that live streaming gives you. And, now that Twitter has also included this feature, you have even more options for platforms.

There are lots of ways that you can use live streaming, for example to perform a product tutorial for a product that your audience would be interested in, to live stream from an event, or to take an interview of an interesting person that your audience would love to hear from.

Engage with social influencers

Another way of building up your profile online is to create connections with social influencers. As they start mentioning you or your work, it can really help you build your profile, not to mention, you will also be reaching their larger than average and very engaged audience.

Search for influencers in your niche and then simply start engaging to build these relationships. A platform like Clearvoice can help you map out and connect with influencers in many niches. Engage on their websites and blogs, as well as on social media and, where possible, take it to the offline as well: go to industry events, conferences and so on as this will not only help you meet influencers, but it will also improve your own visibility. The more people get to meet you, the better the chances of your personal brand growing and evolving.

Conclusion

A good personal brand can help you achieve more success in your career, or as an entrepreneur, it can help propel your business to success, much faster and easier. Are you thinking of building up your own personal brand? What are some of the best personal brands you’ve encountered online and why?

Thanks to Lilach Bullock for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach  has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street with her presence! Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers. Crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. A recipient of a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business. You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.