What Building A Personal Brand Really Means

6 min readMay 3, 2016

Today has been an interesting day.

It started with me waking up at my Girlfriends house in Bondi Junction, Sydney, Australia.

We had just arrived back only last night from my grandparents farm about 7 hours north-west of Sydney.

I woke up with a sense of “ I need to go home”.

With-out having breakfast I left Felicity’s house, and made my way to the train station, about to embark on my 3 hour trip back home to Bowral, in the Southern Highlands.

As I sat down, I had a strong thought come into mind. It was to listen to Gary Vaynerchuk’s first business book — Crush It.

I found this thought interesting, as I had already listened to the audio book once before, and was only 2 hours from finishing his most recent one — #AskGaryVee.

Without complaint or question I followed the direction of my internal voice, and proceeded to listen the audio.

I spent the entire trip listening, pausing, and taking notes in Evernote, when I needed to.

The book is all about creating your personal brand, and cashing in on your passion. In particularly, Gary suggests using social media platforms (as you all know) to build your personal brand, and grow your personal brand equity.

He goes on to suggest that in this day and age it is imperative to build a personal brand so that you can ensure that you are being presented in the most authentic and positive way possible online.

It wasn’t the books content that was revolutionary to me today though, but rather, what it got me thinking about.

It made me question whether I had been building my personal brand the most effective way possible?

Was I utilising the current social media platforms to the best of my ability to spread my message of self-awareness and conscious entrepreneurship?

“I had to answer, no”

So whilst listening to Gary’s book on the train, I decided that I needed to purchase a hard copy. I wanted to dowse over particular chapters, and then write notes on the ones that I needed to. This is a technique that I use when studying any non-fiction book. I would then ask myself specific questions surrounding the particular topic being examined.

I find this practice incredibly useful for truly understanding concepts. It gets you to apply the knowledge presented to yourself, within your own context, which greatly helps in the assimilation of the content. After all, understanding is the application of knowledge.

So when I got home, later this afternoon, I went to the book shop, only to be disappointed to not see Gary’s book there. I felt like I still needed it, so upon returning home, I purchased the e-book.

I started reading the e-book, dowsing the chapter headings figuring our which parts I needed to read. I spent the next 3 hours or so going through the text, writing notes on particular parts that resonated with me, and asking myself questions along the way. To me this is what self-awareness is anyway.

I came to the section in the book about choosing your platform to build your personal brand. Now remember this book was written in 2009 (I think), so some of the platform specific advice is slightly out of date.

Gary suggests, building a blog to house the content that you produce. This can be in the form of an audio, written, or video blog. He also suggests have a home base, so to speak, using a platform such as Wordpress.com to be the central location for your content.

I decided to investigate whether there were better platforms to blog on now that it’s 2016.

I came across an article by Gary Vaynerchuk, (no surprise there), suggesting that in 2016 you don’t need a separate blog, such as Wordpress.com, because the;

social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, Medium, Anchor, etc, are the blogging platforms.

Having now being on Anchor.fm for a month and a half, with incredible results, I can certainly understand why Gary would now be saying such a thing.

However, I wasn’t convinced.

I needed to dig deeper, which led me to a Forbes article, written by Quora on the same topic —

Oh wait… the Quora article was actually written by Gary Vaynerchuk as well.

Yet I noticed something different in the article. It was similar content to the one that I had just read from Gary’s blog, but not exactly the same. The Quora article was also only written the other day (mid april), whilst the one appearing on his blog was written 10 months ago…

But that’s not the point of the story. I just found it interesting.

What struck me though was the consistent reference to platforms such as snapchat, medium, and twitter. No word of @Anchor just yet. That will come though.

I decided to follow my gut, and go and check out Medium in more depth.

I began scrolling through some of the most recent articles and came across one in particular which struck accord with me.

It was about a guy named Jonas Eliasson — entitled “How one year of daily blogging changed my life”

In this post, Jonas tells his blogging once a day story.

It truly inspired me. It’s the reason why I’m writing this post write now.

When reading it, everything just seemed so simple. All this in depth research into creating the best personal brand possible, meant that I had forgotten the true key —

“Consistent authentic self — expression”

I had forgotten that I can write very easily and that content comes to mind without too much thought. I forgot that one of my greatest strengths is in telling stories, like I have done right now. This blog post hasn’t taken me more than 30 minutes to write. I had also forgotten that the purpose of a personal brand is really to develop self-awareness, and you can only develop self-awareness by practicing your craft.

Writing is my craft (@medium)and so to is asking and answering questions (@anchor)

So I wanted to write this blog post in all honesty not for you, the one reading this, but for myself. To illustrate to myself what the purpose of a personal brand really is.

It’s about communicating the authentic you to the world.

It’s about getting out of your head, and sharing your thoughts, ideas, and opinions with others. It’s about engaging others into what it is that you do, and you can only do that by actually expressing it.

It is no good for my personal brand to have these thoughts and words in my head. It is no good not sharing them with anyone. They need to be out there. For the world to read and to hear.

So I want to close this piece of writing with a commitment to myself and a commitment to you.

“I will write a post here on Medium every day for the next 10 days.”

It is an experiment and one that I will need to be kept accountable for.

I will use this 10 days to share with you my thoughts and experiences as they occur throughout my journey as I have done previously.

My content will be original, raw, and authentic.

There will be spelling and grammatical mistakes. Some posts will be interesting, some will be insightful, some may just plainly suck. But it’s something that I have to do.

What Building A Personal Brand Really Means

“I had to answer, no”

“Consistent authentic self — expression”

“I will write a post here on Medium every day for the next 10 days.”

Thanks for reading everyone!

Written by John Hungerford