How To Build Your Personal Brand As A Developer
Building your personal brand as a developer is one of the hardest yet most rewarding things to do. Let’s look at how you can do that.
What Is A Personal Brand?
A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions, and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.
As you know, as a developer, you may have a high paying job, but if you want to take it a step further, and get independent, or influence people, personal branding is the go-to choice for you.
Before moving forward, there is a really important question that you need to ask yourself, and that is “Why do you want to do this?”
If your answer is just money, it might not be the best idea for you to continue. Yes, money is important, but in the short term, you will be putting out a lot of work and not getting much money in return. It is just part of the process. You can either embrace it or fall in a pit. It wouldn’t be wise to quit your job just because personal branding appears to be a more profitable career.
If your answer is to help and influence more people, and if you understand that the money may or may not come later, then trust me, this is going to be an epic journey for you.
Let us now look at how to actually build a personal brand and make a difference in people’s lives.
1. Social Media
Even though some people use it as a mode of entertainment, social media is a way for you to expand your reach and influence a ton of people.
Let us look at some of the platforms you can use for influencing other developers:
Now, let us look at how you can do that.
- Creating posts that catch the eye: Think about what makes you like a post. It is quite possible that what makes you like the post also makes other people like the post. You can take inspiration from other content creators like Rafeh Qazi. Making creative and fun to look at posts gives a huge boost to your page’s overall look and feel. Investing time in content creation is crucial.
- Create content that makes the user want more: Ask yourself, if you were to come back to an Instagram page, what would have been the first question you would ask yourself? For me, and for many others, it was “Is this page providing enough value to me that I would come back?” If the answer is yes, then, of course, I would come back to your page, again and again, seeking more content. If the answer is no, then I probably would not have come back to your page. If you can deliver such content to the user that he/she can actually learn something new from it, there is nothing that stops you from making a good relationship with them. Not only have you influenced several people, but also, you have gained their trust. This will have massive returns for you in the long run. It is not about the number of posts you make, it is about the quality of those posts.
- Be attentive: Watch trends. If you see that one platform is getting more traction than the others, focus more of your efforts there. You need to follow your viewer’s attention so that you can keep up with them
- Remember to stay up to date with technology: You already know for a fact that technology grows and evolves really fast. JavaScript doesn't need to continue to dominate web development. If you are not up to date with your tech stack, then how do you expect your viewers to enjoy your content? Of course, there are gonna be those people who instantaneously learn every new technology that comes, but most people are not like that, and you want to provide content that can help them be up to date with technology, just as you are.
Social media is a 3 step process game.
- Outreaching
- Establishing Trust and creating a community
- Selling the product
Let us discuss these in detail.
Outreaching
Outreaching is when you create content on Instagram or any other social media platform so that it reaches out to many people. This step requires you to create absolutely amazing content and attractive posts so that people start to follow you. You want to reach as many people as you can in this step, so it would not be a bad idea to run advertisements on these platforms if that helps. In my opinion, you should prioritize SEO marketing, as it is organic and will help you a lot in the future. Your outreach is going to be done through free content, and you will not make any money from this, but the main idea is that you want to surround the user with your free content so that once you start to put out paid content, they cannot wait for it.
Establishing trust and creating a community
Once the user starts to like your content, you want them to have an ample amount of trust in you. This can be done by making a newsletter and asking your viewers to subscribe to that. Reading newsletters is a thing, and you can have a catchy name for it, say something like “Monday Motivation”. Newsletters are quite powerful, and what happens with them is that the user continuously sees your content. This way, at the back of their mind, they see that you are quite a knowledgeable person and trust does form up.
This step is not just limited to newsletters. You can create a telegram group, make a YouTube channel, put up Q/As, and a lot more. The main idea is to impact the user in such a manner that they cannot ignore you, and they will start to trust you. Just keep in mind that the content in these newsletters and YouTube videos need to be something that your target audience would enjoy.
Selling The Product
The above two steps take up a lot of time, but if you do them correctly- selling a product will not be tough. This product is going to be your revenue generator, and all your hard work is going to pay off here. Although, this needs to be done very carefully.
You can sell quite a few products. It could be an e-book, a software, a course, anything. If you have influenced people on all social media platforms, then you have the ability to market your product on all of them too. This is why the first 2 steps are crucial. Once the users trust you, and you start to tell them about your product, you will see that a ton of people may support you. The power of personal branding is here.
There is another thing that you can do, and that is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing basically means that you include links to certain products in your blogs or you talk about them, and if the user buys the product from the link you provide, you get a commission on the product. Keep in mind that this only works if you have a really big reach. If only 20 people view your content, then those links won’t be enough effective. There is a really good chance that none of them will buy the product. On the other hand, if there are 2,000 viewing your blogs or content, then there is a pretty good chance that you will make several sales. A really important thing to keep in mind when it comes to affiliate marketing is that you want to have links to products you have tried out yourself, and only if the product is good, should you go for getting an affiliate link for it. If the product that you affiliate with is not good, then maybe users will buy it, but that is the point where the trust you built will go down the drain.
The last, yet most important thing to maintain is trust.
Trust
Trust cannot be built in a day, but it can be destroyed by just a single viral Instagram post. You never want your viewers to feel that what you provide is not valuable, or worse, a bad product. Personal branding is a game of trust. Establish and maintain that trust among your users, and you will see succeed.
That is going to be it for this blog. I hope you found a lot of value. Make sure to drop your suggestions for more blogs in the comment section.
Thank you!
Priyanshu Saraf.
