How many personal brands can you name without thinking? Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Harry Vaynerchuk, but who else? These people are too famous and unique to repeat their success, and what’s more, it doesn’t make sense to follow the path that someone has already paved. Instead, let’s grow your personal brand by thinking from an entrepreneur’s perspective, not a fame seeker. In this article, we will share effective practices for achieving this goal.

Join a Trendy Niche

If you think like an entrepreneur, then the financial success from the development of your personal brand is not more important than your values, mission, and the opportunity that you give to other people or businesses. Therefore, it is important to join a trending niche, a niche where money and public attention are concentrated.

But even this is not as easy a task as it seems. To make money on a personal brand in a trending niche, you still need to find a certain gap. The next tip is just about that.

Study Competitors

Let’s think of your personal brand as a business. To be successful, you need to research the market, user sentiments, evaluate demand, and, most importantly, study your competitors. It is important to understand what approaches they use to stay competitive. How do they position themselves in the market? What specific audience are they targeting their value proposition to? Only a complete understanding of the market you are about to enter will give you answers to these questions.

Therefore, your next step is qualitative research of the market environment, and after this stage, you can logically move on to the next.

Develop Your Unique Value Proposition

With a complete picture of the market in mind, you will be able to develop your value proposition in more detail and make it as competitive as possible. Keep thinking like an entrepreneur – what can you give to your target audience and how can your personal brand help you do that?

Your value proposition should be as clear as possible and focused on the target audience’s needs within the trending niche you have chosen. Being guided by it, you can develop a more effective personal brand that will allow you to meet the needs of your audience and build a long-term connection with them.

Deliver a Lot of Valuables for Free

Personal brand development means building personal connections with your target audience. To start this process, you will first need to give away some value for free—for example, your knowledge and expert advice.

For a new brand, sharing expertise for free and proving your expertise is almost the only way to build a reputation and let your audience know more about you and what you can do for their business.

Therefore, you need a thoughtful content strategy for your blog and social networks, free webinars, marathons, and contests – in other words, anything that grabs the audience’s attention and convinces them that you can give them value. Only after you convince them of this will you be able to monetize your brand.

Have a Strong Social Media Presence

Having a strong social presence is critical to developing a personal brand. After all, what makes your brand truly personal? That’s right, and this is your personality. This is how you speak and what you say, what values ​​you stand for, what you teach your target audience, and what is your ultimate mission.

To date, social media are the best platforms for showcasing your personality. How to do it? That’s right. The only way is to create valuable and useful content with an entrepreneurial mindset. That is, each piece of your content should, firstly, help the user get closer to solving his problem, and secondly, bring them closer to conversion. Analyzing your audience and competitors’ practices will help you find the right strategy. And don’t forget the most important thing – be yourself in every social media post.

And here’s another very effective approach. Tell stories. It can be stories about you, about your clients, about the difficulties and ways of solving the problem, about what has affected you personally and transformed your thinking, something on the verge of personal and professional. Keep the balance.

Make Yourself Recognizable

In addition to making your brand personal, you also need to make it recognizable. Therefore, create a simple but memorable name or an alias. Develop your brand style guide that defines your logo design, colour palette, other branding elements, tone of voice, and follow it. Follow it on your website and social media. Being consistent and recognizable is essential to brand differentiation, and a personal brand is no exception.

Launch Strong Self-Marketing Campaigns

No brand can exist without marketing, and a personal brand is no exception. Therefore, think about how to market and advertise yourself. Most experts use a very simple and effective strategy.

They use social media to pinpoint target audiences, highlight users who are looking for opportunities to solve their specific problem and address that problem through paid advertising. Of course, your advertising message should motivate your audience to go to your profile and start exploring your social media content.

This is the effort that we have already made in one of the previous stages, and now the content you have already created will work to develop your brand without your participation.

Next, you encourage new users to subscribe to your profile and your email newsletter and continue to give them the value they are looking for. Once you have established a relationship of trust, you can start selling your services.

Conclusion

Developing a personal brand takes time and effort. What’s more, it is also your personal responsibility for your reputation so you have to be consistent,  honest, and sincere. These seemingly outdated values in the modern world will never lose their relevance but will always help you promote your personal brand.

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