If you aim to succeed by personal branding online, you must: get personal, optimize your contact channels, create an online-aware strategy and be consistent in all your platforms.
We are constantly posting about personal brand, which is the group of thoughts, adjectives and phrases that describe you, mainly when you aren’t present.
It’s what other people think about you and the image you show to the world.
When talking about personal branding online, we refer to the way you display yourself on the different platforms the Internet has to offer.
Most of the time, personal branding involves an online aspect and an offline one. In this article, we’re focusing on personal branding online, its main characteristics and some tips you should take into account if you want to have a stronger brand.
For example: one of the foundations to personal branding online is to have an active website in which you post constantly and show your story and services.
In a recent study, Hubspot found out that marketers that prioritize blogging on their online platforms are 13% more likely to have positive ROI (Return Of Investment).
Are you ready to take the necessary steps to become a thought leader in your niche, generate revenue and get your voice to be heard by the world?
Contents
The Foundations for Your Personal Branding Online
Depending on your goals, field and budget, doing personal branding online can get very elaborate.
An online marketing strategy for your personal brand could include everything between some social media posts and producing bootcamps, workshops, or even filming a whole documentary about you and your brand!
There are hardly any limits on how creative you may get when becoming the thought leader in your industry.
However, if you want to strengthen your personal branding online, there are two main elements you should make your priority.
They will be the main path you’ll “walk” on and the platforms you’ll be displaying your content in.
Website
A personal and professional website will be the perfect starting point for a potential client to really get to know you and your work.
This is where you introduce yourself, talk about your work experience, the services you provide, the events you get featured in, and much more.
This is also the place you want all your followers to end up at some point, because it’s the platform in which you’ll be able to transform them into customers.
In your website, you’ll offer direct contact with you (via email, a call, or something like that), and have all the elements you need to convince a loyal follower it’s time to turn into a client.
You should also be showing in here most of your expertise.
We recommend you do this by blogging! It’s a great way to exhibit your knowledge, give some free resources, but most importantly, make people trust you.
Check out some of the following examples:
- Marie Kondo: creator of the famous “Marie Kondo method” for organization.
- Tim Ferris: the author of “The 4-hour Workweek”.
- Amy Porterfield: a professional marketer.
- Nicolas Cole: co-founder of “Digital Press”.
Social Media
The other foundation you must have when building a personal branding online it’s your different social media platforms.
They will be the channel in which many people will get to know you, reach your website and potentially become customers or loyal followers.
Choosing the platforms you will be working in it’s no light decision!
There are lots of factors to consider. You can read more about how to select the right channels in this article of ours.
Each platform has its different characteristics, goals, content formats and target audiences that will tell you if they are the “right fit” or not when it comes to your personal branding online strategy.
#1: Get Personal
This might be one of the most repeated tips on our website, but it is because of its efficiency and relevance.
When it comes to personal branding online, getting your essence and communicating it will probably be more difficult than if you were only branding yourself “in real life”.
This is why it’s so important to be true to yourself during the whole process and make sure that, even though you’re branding your image, you’re still a human being.
Some recommendations we have to get personal with your personal branding online are:
Begin With Your Story
Storytelling is a magnificent tool to connect with other people and be open and genuine on the Internet or any other platform.
If you share parts of your life stories, your followers will learn about your growth and development, and understand with proof and examples that your achievements are a product of effort and years of work.
However, you are not just a professional that works X hours per week: you’re also an integral individual who has had many experiences through the years that have shaped you the way you are.
Read more about storytelling for your personal brand and the types of stories you can use right here!
Display Different Aspects of Your Personality
As we just mentioned in the previous section, you’re not only the serious professional who goes to meetings and makes important deals with clients.
You’re also a friend, a family member, maybe a significant other for someone or even a parent. This brings with it different personality traits that build your whole individuality.
Gary Vee, founder of VaynerMedia and VaynerX, influencer and four-times best-selling author according to the New York Times, explains in this article that when you show more sides of your personality, your audience becomes more invested in your journey.
It also helps to differentiate you from your competition and make you more attractive to potential followers or customers.
Nowadays, anyone with a laptop, a smartphone and Internet connection can access almost any kind of information you can think about.
Data is available to the public eye.
Even though there’s a whole world of information, when it comes to certain topics, we’ll eventually end up not finding anything that’s really “new”.
For example, if you search for news about a specific event in different online portals, at one point you will find the same information over and over.
The same will happen with most of the topics you think about.
One of the pillars of any online marketing strategy is to share valuable content for your audience.
A way of doing this is by providing insights instead of raw information.
When writing or posting about any topic, first ask yourself these questions:
- What are my opinions on this subject?
- Is this a sensitive topic? If it is, am I informed enough to talk about it?
- Which parts of my post will be new and valuable to my readers?
- Which parts of my post are raw data, and which are my insights about it?
These will give you a guide to build stronger and more rewarding content for your audiences.
#2 Optimize Your Contact Channels
When it comes to personal branding online, the two main contact channels are websites and social media, as we just explained before.
However, the Internet becomes more and more complex as days go by and there’s plenty of space to get creative when it comes to how people can get to know you better and get in contact with you.
Here are some specific tips about it:
Build Your Personal Brand Statement
In very little words, a personal brand statement is a phrase that summarizes what it is that you do and how you can help other people.
This will not only help your personal branding online communicate way better your purpose to your audience, but it will bring clarity to your own thoughts about your brand.
Check out our FREE guide on building a personal brand statement and start your journey!
Hire a Personal Brand Photographer
When optimizing your website and social media for personal branding online, photography becomes very important.
You should hire photography services in order to have plenty of images only you can use and that characterize your personal brand.
This will give your brand and different channels a more professional look, plus you won’t have to worry about copyright!
Create a Professional Email Address
Most B2B professionals already have an email account that’s serious enough, with their name and last name.
If you work at a medium or big company, you probably have a work email with the correspondent domain.
These two options are completely valid for your personal and professional everyday life, but if you’re considering personal branding online, you may want to get your own domain.
Getting your own domain it’s a way to generate trust in your audience and look way more professional than you would with a generic one (@gmail, @outlook, etc).
Read more about how to generate your own email domain right here.
Get a Vanity Phone Number
Getting a vanity phone number is also a way of stepping up your personal branding online.
Even though phone numbers don’t fall into the online category, they are a relevant contact channel that will probably be displayed somewhere in your website, social media profiles, contracts or even email signatures.
You don’t have to invest lots of money in order to set up one, and it would definitely be great to have a number like 555-YOUR-NAME.
It will not only be easier to remember, but it will also cause a great impression.
#3 Create an Online-Aware Strategy
We might sometimes think that a marketing strategy will follow the same ideas to matter the format of platform it takes place in.
Marketing any kind of brand has similar goals (positioning itself in the market, generating more sales, etc), but when we are talking about an online strategy, we must take into account many other aspects.
Keep reading to find out some of the main tips we have for you when creating a strategy for your personal branding online.
Evaluate The Online Presence You Already Have
Some people like spending their time on the Internet way more than others.
Some already have very complete LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram profiles, for example.
Being a B2B professional, there’s a chance you even have a website already!
Others haven’t paid much attention to their online presence because their career/job hasn’t made them.
No matter which group you fall into: there’s already something about you on the Internet and you should be aware of that.
By doing this, you will identify the areas/platforms that need more attention, if you have made something “in advance”, and which elements you could work with for your personal branding online.
Some tips we recommend you to do are:
- Google yourself: this way you’ll see if the information available about you depends on you or not
- Check out your social media profiles and compare them to your potential competition (or stakeholders): by doing this, you’ll identify the key points that should be changed in your profiles and get some inspiration
- Search for old accounts/profiles: sometimes we create accounts that we eventually stop using, but never close. For example, you might have an old Instagram, Twitter or Facebook account under your name and email that you don’t use anymore. If that’s the case, we recommend you to cancel them or at least make them 100% private. This will allow you to have a better control about the information about you that’s online.
SEO Optimization
“SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results.”
When personal branding online, it will be extremely important for you to optimize your website.
This way, it will increase your chances to appear on the first Google pages and attract more clicks and viewers to your content.
SEO optimization, writing and blogging for personal brands is a great way to increase your organic growth and get your brand out there and strengthen your online strategy.
Network Beyond Your Industry
As the famous entrepreneur Neil Patel says: “you never know what value someone might bring to your business in the future”.
This quote summarizes part of the importance networking has.
When building a personal brand, our instinct will be to establish meaningful connections with direct colleagues and within the same industry.
That’s a great place to start!
Nevertheless, it’s important you remain open to connect with professionals beyond the limits of your specific niche.
Strength comes in plurality, so it’s great to share spaces, conversations and ideas with people that don’t work in the same field and may have different perspectives around certain topics.
This will also make your networking way more natural and genuine, and that’s something that will show on the outside and that you will feel on the inside.
Some ways to make your network grow naturally are:
- Engage with certain profiles of your interest on social media
- Attend different kinds of event online and offline
- Volunteer in creating content for a non-profit
- Find interviews or features in podcasts, videos, posts and blogs
- Join social media groups
Buy ads
Some people may think that buying ads it’s a way of “cheating” through the growth of your brand.
And while most of the beauty of marketing comes from organic evolution, some help will always come in-handy!
Don’t think about ads as a “cheat-sheet”, but more as an impulse to easily access your target and introduce your content and ideas to them.
Even Gary Vee confesses to regret not investing in online ads sooner!
If you’re just starting with your personal branding online you might also think you’re way too early in your process to start investing money in ads, but we’re pleased to tell you that it’s not always as expensive as you may think.
You can always start little, and then incorporate more ads into your strategy over time.
#4 Be Consistent Across Your Platforms
The final tip we have for you today is to keep everything consistent.
This might sound easy, but sometimes it isn’t!
Being consistent across your platforms means having and following a posting schedule.
It means to be constantly creating valuable content for your brand and learning strategies in order to have a better management of your time, products and results.
Hiring a personal brand agency it’s a great way to simplify your work and make sure you will always be present and constant.
Nontheless, there are also plenty of ways of achieving great results on your own, like:
- Set up a realistic posting schedule that you’re confident you’ll be able to follow
- Use a posting schedule and calendar
- Come up with different types of posts with different effort requirements
- Get familiar with different social media tools
Benefits of a Strong Personal Branding Online
In summary, if you want to start personal branding online, you should make sure to be personal, optimize your contact channels, create an online strategy and post consistently.
If you implement these tips, along with a strong strategy, you will be able to have a much stronger personal brand, which will also allow you to:
- Be known inside and outside the Internet
- Gain confidence in yourself
- Learn new things about your own industry
- Grow your network
- Generate revenue
- And many other benefits!
If you like how this sounds and you would like to know more about personal brand, check out some of our other blogs about strategy.
We could also help you during this process! If you want to know more about our services and how we could assist you in becoming the thought leader in your niche, you can book a free call right here.
Are you ready to take the mask off and tell your story?
