A Six-Step Guide To Help You Build Your Personal Brand
It’s worth it
Personal branding is becoming quite a popular term in entrepreneurial and self-development circles. And that’s probably a good thing for personal branding coaches like myself.
There are in fact so many benefits to personal branding whether you’re an entrepreneur, an activist or an employed professional.
But, you probably don’t need me to get too much into the benefits of a personal brand since there are already so many great articles about it like this one and even this one.
So instead, I want to share with your my six-step process to create an impactful and meaningful personal brand based on mastery.
Step1: Acknowledge and embrace your fears
Fear is the number one thing that keeps most of us back from starting the process of deliberate personal branding.
From the time we become adults, fear becomes our lifelong companion. For many, it sits beside them in the passenger seat of their life and for most, fear is actually doing the driving.
You create all sorts of objections to why you shouldn’t start your personal branding journey now. But they are all fear-based. The most popular are these:
- You’re afraid that you will fail
- You’re afraid of what your friends and family will think
- You’re afraid that you’re not enough of an expert
- You're afraid that you aren’t interesting enough
As far as I’m concerned, these and any others all roll up into your fear of what your friends, family and even strangers might think about the things you have to do in order to become a powerful personal brand.
You’re afraid that you might fail — because then your family and friends might laugh at you or look at you in disgust and banish you from the safety and comfort of their tribe.
You’re afraid that you’re not enough of an expert — because if you aren’t then you might fail and then your family and friends might laugh at you or look at you in disgust and banish you from the safety and comfort of their tribe.
You’re afraid that you aren’t interesting enough — because if you aren’t then you might fail and then your family and friends might laugh at you or look at you in disgust and banish you from the safety and comfort of their tribe.
See the pattern?
The truth is the only thing you need to be afraid of is regret. When we get to the twilights of our life, that fear that we let drive for so long mysteriously melts away and becomes regret.
In the end, we never regret the things we did, we always regret not doing things that we had the opportunity to do.
Step 1 requires us to acknowledge all the manifestations of our fears, but then not try to get rid of them. I’m not sure if that’s even possible. All we need to do is get fear out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger seat.
We need to act in spite of our fears.
The more we do, the less power the fear has. The fear will still be there, just not in control. Eventually, it will move from the passenger seat to the back seat, then from the back seat to the trunk. You’ll make space for more important things.
Step 2: Get clarity on the things that hold meaning for you
Meaning is the key to fulfillment.
What’s the point of building a personal brand around something that you don’t even care about?
I have written before here about how futile the pursuit of happiness is so I’ll jump straight to the point. The reason why doing meaningful things and being fulfilled is so important is because becoming a successful personal brand requires authenticity.
And if you don’t care that much about what you’re doing. It’s going to be hard to fake it. Audiences can tell these days.
You might be asking “ What if I’m already doing something? Do I just drop it and start over with something that has more meaning?”
Well, I’m glad you asked!
Yes, starting over is an option. It might seem like a major move. Lots of fears start popping up. But remember regret.
Every time we give in to fear, we sew a seed of regret that we will be forced to reap at the harvest of tomorrow.
But, also no. You don’t always have to start over. Often times you can simply infuse the thing that has meaning into what you’re already doing.
You’re an entertainment lawyer, but you recently discovered that protecting the environment is important to you. You can become an environmental lawyer, or maybe even support environmental groups part-time.
You’re a fitness coach helping aspiring models get into shape and you recently discovered that you really care about teenagers living their best lives, you can run a fitness camp for teens on the weekend.
Step 3: Choose your focus/niche
One of the founding principles of my approach to personal branding is clarity and clarity comes from focus.
Getting this kind of clarity is a lot easier if you’re just starting out. You’ve acknowledged your fears and are ready to move forward despite them, you know what has meaning and are ready to build a business around it, now it’s time for the difficult question:
Who do we serve?
In fact, the difficult question is actually four questions. These are the four questions I have my clients answer. Now keep in mind, you need to answer these with no more than 3 words.
- Who do you serve? (specifically)
- What problem do you solve? (specifically)
- How do you solve it? (specifically)
- What makes you different? (duh, specifically)
Too often we decide not to decide. We want to leave all possibilities open to us. We want to continue to be all things to all people. In case one of them doesn’t work out, right?
This too is a product of our life companion fear.
Answering these questions brings a ton of clarity to our brand and comes in handy for the next step.
Step 4: Express your focus through consistent content that highlights our expertise and that delivers value and impact to our audience
I really have to find a shorter way to say that.
The point is, now that you have faced your fears and are ready to move forward despite them, you know what has meaning and are ready to build a business around it and you know exactly who you will be serving and what problem you’ll be helping to solve, the mission now is to create content.
What do we create? This question is big, but at this point, it should also be easy. Because we have clarity. We know who our audience is, we know what problem we’re solving and we know how we solve it. We even know how we’re different.
It’s time to express our focus, expertise, and difference consistently through content.
Determining exactly what and how to create, what platforms to use and how often to post is outside the scope of this article, but just keep in mind, when you get to this point, you have to create a shit-ton of content.
Most of it is not going to be great. But you have to start somewhere. The good news is the more you do it, the better you get and the more impact you will start to make.
When you start making an impact, people will start spending money with you.
Step 5: Work to continually add the missing skills, capabilities, and processes necessary to support our goal and claim of mastery.
Did I not mention that we aim to be masters?
We do. How else are we going to maximize the value and impact we can deliver to our audience?
We have to care so much about our work and our audience that we want to get better every day.
A lot of people don’t take this step. They get to step four and stop. But the world doesn’t stop evolving, therefore we too need to evolve.
Our audience’s needs will change. Their challenges will change. Even if they don’t, unless we can say we are the true masters of our niche, our work will never be done.
Step 6: Build a community out of our audience.
We have an audience. That’s great. They spend money on us. Even better. But if we truly care about helping our audiences transform, we need to create a community.
We need to connect with them on a deeper level and allow them to connect with each other as well.
Community building is hard. But a great way to start is to make sure you are part of any existing community.
Get to know your audience. Get to know other professionals in your space. Like really know them, not just their names and whether they bought one of your courses or journals on Amazon.
In Conclusion
There are so many different approaches to creating a personal brand. This is just mine. Whatever road you take, start the journey.
If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
