8 Strategies For Personal Branding In 2019

Your personal brand is your reputation. And your reputation in perpetuity is the foundation of your career.

A couple of months ago I came across a marketing myntra called “Personal Branding”. But let’s not get confused by the semantics. People don’t understand this. Playing the long game and building your reputation always plays out.

But the issue is, people see others getting ahead in the short term at the expense of their long term personal brand. And so, they get tricked. Instead of being patient, they go for quick sales. They keep trying to convert customers on the first interaction. They try to extract money, instead of creating an experience.

Brand is about how someone feels in the moment when they interact with you or your business.

You all have emotions you feel in reaction to names like “Coca-Cola” , “IBM” or “McDonald’s”. Whether good or bad, you have a reaction. When you hear someone’s name, you get a feeling too (which I hope is positive, can be negative at most of the times too).

For example, if you had to put into words — I hope you’d say “Anindya Chakrabarty, the guy who gave more than asked”, or something along those lines. I want you to think of me as someone who gave massive amounts of value.

The best companies in the world don’t sell. They brand. For example, Apple never tries to “convert” you into buying an iPhone. Instead, they paint a picture of the “iPhone experience”. They focus on branding.

I do the same.

Not saying you should never sell, but personal branding is a disproportionately valuable factor that most people just don’t focus on. In this article, I’ve put together a mashup of strategies, tips, and advice on building a personal brand I’ve learnt over a couple of months.

Hope you get a lot of value from it :)

1. GOOD INTENT WINS A TRANSPARENT WORLD

In a world with all these social networks, everything is transparent. Everything you do is captured — with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter etc. Every part of your movement is on record. Anything you do will be known.

You can’t have “multiple personalities” anymore for business, family, and everything else.

You are who you are now, in this world.

In an environment like this, people who have good intent are going to win. And people who come from a bad place are going to lose. The internet is going to expose all of us, so think long and hard about what your intentions are.

2. HAVE A MEDIA COMPANY MENTALITY

There is no reason to do anything other than act like a media company in today’s digital age.

People haven’t fully grasped the “attention shift” we’re living through.

Why ?

Over the past seven years, we’ve seen businesses “sell” to us constantly. There wasn’t much “free content”. And it makes sense. They just didn’t have the kind of opportunities we have. It was expensive to create a commercial. It was expensive to put up a billboard. It was expensive to run ads on radio. And it still is.

But now, you can produce as much content as you want across social platforms.

This has paved a new type of marketing. Instead of selling constantly like businesses used to, you can create helpful, educational, entertaining content and use it to get sales long term.

And amazing thing is, the content you create doesn’t have to be related to what you’re selling. For example, In this interview, Gary Vaynerchuk answered an audience member about how to create content for a legal business:

The answer he gave was a bit rogue.

He pitched her on starting a website about golf. Totally unrelated to legal services. But he knew it’d changed her business if, say, in every 7th post, she promoted her actual business while using golf as the “gateway drug” to attract an audience.

3. HACK CULTURE AND BUY ADS TO DISTRIBUTE CONTENT

When people ask me about mistakes and regrets, I struggle to come up with good answers. It’s not that I don’t make mistakes, I’m just incapable of remembering and dwelling on them.

But there’s one thing I regret:

Not spending money on Google AdWords.

Right now, Facebook and Instagram are underpriced platforms. And it’s amazing to me how many people aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity. Find a way to promote your content through ads. If you don’t have any money to invest, flip something on eBay, take that money and run ads with it.

The second way to get attention is hacking culture.

If you can understand what’s truly relevant culture, you can create unbelievable opportunity for yourself. Culture hacking deserves its own blog post, but the best advice I can give here is to take advantage of influencers.

Message anyone who’s got 500–1000+ followers. See how you can add value. Like if you’ve got a restaurant, you can offer them a personalized coupon for free food. If you’ve got plumbing service, give them free evaluation.

Message them, connect, add value, and in return, they might give someone awareness to your brand.

4. KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT

Being a personal brand for the sake of being a personal brand is usually the quickest way not to be a personal brand.

The first step to build a brand is to be self aware about what you have to add to the conversation. You have to understand what you do and the things you want to talk about.

In this post, I’ve talked a LOT about the past decade. But within a very narrow area. I haven’t talked about healthcare or geopolitical issues. I haven’t added my comments to every pop culture situation.

I talk about things I know — communication in a modern world.

If you’re not an expert yet, you can talk about your process of becoming an expert. Document the journey.

5. DOCUMENT OVER CREATE

If you want to be heard on social media, you have to put out a LOT of content.

You should be doing be a long form vlog or podcast atleast once a week. You should be posting on Instagram and Snapchat atleast 6–7 times a day.

Now, that sounds like a lot. And it is.

But here’s one piece of advice that’ll help: Document. Don’t create.

Think of it like Keeping up with the Kardashians vs Star Wars and Friends. One is more practical to create, while the other takes some creativity in coming up with the stories. The first is simple for most people (including myself). The second is harder.

You go through the process of fabricating your life on the internet to make yourself seem like an “expert”. Or you could just be yourself.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when their personal brand is trying to “oversell” themselves. They front. They try to act bigger than they actually are.

The reality is, it’s much more valuable to talk about the process than the advice you think you should be giving them.

Ultimately, the game is simple, readers. Know what you’re talking about, put out content around it and run ads.

Watch what happens to your personal brand/business.

6. SHOW DIFFERENT SIDES OF YOUR PERSONALITY

The reason so many influencers get commoditization is because they only show one side of their personality.

For example, if you’re an attractive fitness model on Instagram, brands that are looking to sponsor you will put you in the same “bucked” as all the other attractive fitness models on Instagram.

A lot of influencers are scared to post different sides of their personality because those posts won’t get as much engagement. If their followers are following them for one thing (i.e fitness), they won’t always like it when they post something like food, travel or business.

But it’s something that will change the course of your personal brand.

Even if you’re not an “influencer” looking to get brand sponsorship, showing different aspects of your personality will get people more invested in your journey. It shows your audience, who you are. Even if a number of people stop following you or stop engaging, 30% of your audience will start looking up to you in a different way.

That’s the key to positioning your brand in a way that separates you from everybody else in your space.

7. PRIORITIZE YOUR BRAND OVER SALES

As an entrepreneur, I’m in the prime of my career right now. I’m in my 20s. I am working hard to set a great foundation for myself. It takes an enormous amount of discipline for me to spend my late 20s and early 30s building a “framework” for rest of my life, especially since we’ve had a great economy for the last decade.

It would’ve been a “lot smarter” for me to monetize my information, sell courses, start a mastermind and be more aggressive with monetizing my audience.

But I know that prioritizing my brand over short term sales is something that will bring me more respect, admiration, and wealth in the long term.

It’s what I encourage all of you do. While you’re running Facebook ads to convert sales, you need to equally spend time on branding activities that bring you zero ROI in the short term — things like doing podcast interviews on other people’s shows, hosting events, and more.

8. BE YOUR 100% AUTHENTIC, TRUE SELF. DON’T “WATER IT DOWN” IN ANY SHAPE OR FORM.

The truth is the people who are “fake” will never last. It’s like hip hop artists who fizzle out having one or two big hits. It’s like entrepreneurs who call themselves CEOs and look the part but don’t actually know how to run a business.

The best strategy for building a personal brand is to be 100% “you”, without watering down your personality in any way.