Personal Branding: What is it and Strategies for 2022

Well! Today you will see a lot of individuals using new personal branding tools like Social Media to craft personal brands that attract thousands of people to their websites and social accounts.

Moreover, you can see this y just doing a quick Google search and see the results.

Thus, you can say that personal branding is about taking responsibility for how you are going to present yourself.

In order to strive to position yourself as an expert or an influencer within your niche, you can increase your reputation as a leader.

Let’s learn more about it in detail.

Understanding Personal Branding

Personal branding is a technique through which you can create a brand around a person rather than a business entity.

Moreover, it can help by positioning yourself as an expert in the industry.

By developing a personal brand, you can grow your social following to secure a better job, sell more products, and increase better opportunities.

This process is not something that happens overnight.

It takes a lot of planning and months of hard work to start seeing the results.

In some cases, you need to improve your personal brand after receiving feedback.

This type of branding is also called Self-Branding.

In order to grow your personal brand, you can write a personal brand statement.

This statement sets out who your audience will be, the value to intend to give your audience, and why people should follow your, your USP.

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Importance of Personal Branding

Personal branding is important as it helps you to give more credibility.

Every day, more people are building personal brands, and you can also put yourself out there to get noticed.

With the help of this, companies can find experts in the specific niche with ease, especially, if you are a blogging brand yourself.

Moreover, if you are trying to land a higher position, you can showcase key data.

This includes the followers you have, traffic your website is getting, or other important metrics which can give your a competitive advantage over others.

You can think of it as your online portfolio.

Branding yourself allows more people to get to know you and how you can bring value.

Furthermore, it can also help you to land new opportunities like business deals or marketing partnerships that you would not have otherwise.

With the help of self-branding, you can instill trust and credibility, so companies know that partnering with you will improve their brand awareness.

Thus, branding yourself in a perfect way by showing your personality is a great way of differentiating yourself from others in the same field.

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Let’s discuss the types of Personal Brand as follows:

Types of Personal Brands

According to an article from New York Times, there are 6 main types of personal brands.

Altruists
These are the individuals that are recognized for helping others and dedicating their time to charity.

People like Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie, etc. fall into this category.

Careerists
These are the brands that put achievement before all ease.

This brand is known for sharing information and being thought leaders in their industries.

People like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Simin Sinek fall into this category.

Hipsters
Hipsters are brands that combine altruists and careerism, however, focus more on sharing info than taking action.

Look for brands for things that are new and trendy.

Boomerang
Boomerang brands share content to create controversy.

They might not agree with the content they are sharing, however, they like to be provocative.

This often includes your favorite meme accounts or news reporters.

Connectors

These are the individuals that love bringing people together and pride themselves on building communities.

They are very much creative and enjoy validation from others. Moreover, this category includes your favorite influencers or Instagram stars.

Selectives
These brands share content with specific audiences.

Moreover, they are resourceful and spend time curating information for their viewers.

Understanding what your personal brand is and how it acts is the first step to improving it.

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Successful Personal Branding Examples

While you might just be starting with Personal Branding, there are thousands of examples of successful branding.

You can look at these professionals for inspiration and directions.

Moreover, once you know who you want to be, ranging comes naturally.

Elon Musk
The name Elon Musk is also most well-known as Coca-cola.

Even if you have no interest in technology, it is hard to avoid the brand Tesla.

Though he is a public figure, his face is often absent from Tesla.
Instead, shiny products and clear copies of fascinating gadgets make his brand unmistakable.

Gary Vaynerchuk
No! He does not perform miracles, but he did turn his family’s liquor business into an e-commerce empire.

If you are looking for inspirational stories, then his story gives hope.

He became an influencer through social media, with his hard work and dedication, he created a successful brand.

Charlie Marie
Charlie Marie was a student of design when she started a Tumblr dedicated to pop-punk band Fall Out Boy.

The purpose of this brand was to connect with other like-minded fans and for the love of the brand.

Today, Charlie works remotely for Converkit, hots a successful YouTube channel, and has made a life full of travel and fun.

Alice Thorpe
She describes herself on the YouTube Channel as a “freelancer graphic designer stumbling through life one pixel at a time”.

Moreover, she produces a lot of content for designers on YouTube and on her own website.

Nesha Woolery
She greets her audience with “Hey designer lady!”, thus speaking directly to her audience.

With skills in project management and organization, she offers online courses, videos, and articles targeting female designers.

XO Pixel
XO Pixel creates content about design, code, and tech.

Moreover, their design features splashes of different colors with an imaginative approach that shows off their creativity.

Bill Nye
You may know him for his bowties and science-dad-jokes, however, he is popular who values increasing awareness and appreciation of science.

While his site promotes books and online stores, most of the content is science-related and accessible.

Brain Dean
Brain Dean is an internet blogger and when it comes to Google SOE, he is the real deal.

With well-thought content and testimonials, his website positions him as a credible expert.

Tony Robbins
It is often hard to find anyone unfamiliar with Tony Robbins and his brand of financial self-help.

This all is because of his books, seminars, and other content.

Furthermore, his site showcases a personal brand that is contemporary and relevant, giving a flash of the past.

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Improving your Personal Brand

After you start to work on your personal branding, factors like feedback and branding statements will help to improve your progress.

For a lot of people, it has been successful, however, without a personal branding statement, it can be hard to know what you have achieved.

Thus, it is essential to know what progress is like to improve your personal branding.

You can follow the steps below to improve your personal brand:

1. Research and create your Personal Branding Statement: Define your audience at this stage and audit the competitors that may exist for you.
2. Build a Strategy: Plan on how you will engage with your target audience and define what success looks like in 2 months, 9 months, and 2 years.
3. Monitor the Engagement: Promote positive participation and have a plan for negative comments as well.
4. Develop your Personal Brand: Make sure to share your personal brand through social media, networking, outreach, and speaking opportunities: You can consider blogging, Vblogging, podcasts, etc. to promote your personal brand.
5. Communication Plan: Controlling your presence in the digital world can be time-consuming, so this plan will help you to control negative backlash. Moreover, it will also help to provide information to partners that you will work with.
6. Measure your Success: Set some KPIs for the success of your personal branding. It will help you to to know whether you are heading in the right direction or not. Consider celebrating even small wins to remain motivated to achieve more.

After taking the above steps, how will you determine if you are going to be successful or not?

Therefore, we have gathered some valuable KPIs that include:

• When a sale converts through a blog
• when you will be asked to speak at an event or on a podcast
• someone refers to you as a potential client
• a publication reaches out to you to invite you as a guest blog
• your target audience starts monitoring you online, on social media, on blogs, and on other important media.

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1# Start by Finding your Niche

There is a popular saying about SEO traffic that highlights something that most individuals miss.

You cannot create search demand. YOu can only harvest it

This means that you cannot force people to search for a specific keyword.

They will either already do it or they will be searching for something else.

If you consider the agency Markfiniti, you will learn that our job in SEO is to recognize the amount of traffic to your website.

Moreover, we will be working on getting as much traffic from the words that are already popular on their own.

Personal branding is just like that.

For instance, being the best digital marketing agency in Dubai is worthless if there isn’t already a market or niche for that.

The niche selection process is crucial.

You do not want to spend all your time and energy linking your brand to a niche that is not growing.

Then where exactly should you start from?

Pick something that you can do better than 90% of the world.

This is important because you can probably do a lot of things well, however, that does not mean you are an expert in every single field.

The only way to create a personal brand is by becoming the go-to recognized authority on a specific topic or niche.

There is another important thing for a successful personal brand.

One that deals with your own style and point of view on a certain topic.

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2# Injecting Personality into your Personal Brand

The first step includes your own skills and potential market value for a particular niche.

The second step is about what you, i.e. your personality will bring to the table.

It includes your point of view or tone that will help differentiate you from your competitors who are talking about the same topic as you are.

For instance, you would want to be seen as someone down-to-earth.

You can see how Ramit Sethi is when he talks about I Will Teach you to be Rich.

This guy works in the personal finance space and is full of questionable individuals that give suspicious recommendations.

However, Ramit takes the opposite approach, using casual language, inside jokes, etc. to show you that he is honest and holding nothing back.

Thus, being polarizing like Ramit may turn some people away, however, it can also create raving fans who might like you.

Now compare him with someone else, who talks on the same topic, but in a completely different style and tone.

Thus, what you are saying is important.

But how you are saying it can be equally important, thus, make sure to choose a tone that is authentic to you.

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3# Creating Brand Identity

If you notice certain aspects about different personal branding websites, then you will learn that they have customer sites, beautiful photography, and even their logos are identifiable.

Why is it healful?

Because according to one academic study, 94% of the time someone’s impression is based on the design, and it only takes 50 milliseconds to make that decision.

Therefore, a huge part of creating a personal brand is looking at that part. Moreover, there is a secondary benefit to it as well.

Consistent design helps to become more recognizable no matter where you decide to post or interact online.

The first step is to create your logo or mark. You can use software, and one of them is 99designs.

On the other hand, you can make use of the expert team at our office Markfiniti.

Thus, professional design is what is going to separate you from everyone else.

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4# Create and Redesign your own Personal Site

While reading this heading you might come to a reading that says that there are 5 million blogs posts published every day.

This means that you not only need to make your content great but also need to publish frequently.

Continuously putting good stuff under your name will start to create a connection between you and the target topic you are aiming at.

Consider the following example.

When you type in “Markfinit” on Google you will see our content showing up.

So imagine you work hard to become an expert on the topic, however, people will then Google you, and then end up going to a different website instead of yours.

This is why having your own site and then working hard to raise its profile can be an invaluable part of reinforcing your personal brand.

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5# Make a Content and Social Strategy

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing.

Moreover, it generates about 3 times as many leads, according to a study.

Look back at the last example. The reason why many websites rank higher is because of the quality content published over many years.

There is no secret, it’s just consistent hard work.

Therefore, your content strategy should also extend to your social media channels.

However, keep in mind that you should not be on every single social platform.

Spreading yourself almost too thin is almost worse than not being on any social platform at all.

Learn more about Brand Awareness here.

6# Guest Blog to Promote your Brand

While you start, nobody is going to know who you are.

However, that is entirely Ok.

It is important that you realize it at the very beginning before it is too late.

If you spend all of your investment initially putting out good content on your own, you will be wasting your time.

Instead, spend more trying to get on the sites first.

Focus on sites that already have massive traffics and audience numbers you are targeting.

Moreover, these sites will also allow you o add your own bio and title.

Therefore, instead of using your generic name, you can use that valuable real estate to start planting the seed for your brand.

Incorporate your niche and bring in elements of your personality.

Learn more about Guest Blogging here.

7# Seek out Mentors

Everyone has help from someone, somewhere at some point in their life.

In the same way, becoming a recognizable expert in a field can be challenging at first.

However, you will eventually need other players in the industry to recognize you as an expert, which will boost your brand to help you reach the top of your niche.

According to a survey, about 80% of the CEOs had a mentor to help them early in their careers.

Almost all successful entrepreneurs have had a mentor to help them become the recognized expert they are today.

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Final Thoughts

Becoming an expert in your niche is not going to make you recognizable overnight. It is going to take a lot of hard work and effort to reach the top, however, it is also one of the highest ROI activities you can pursue.

You will have to invest time, money, and slowly break through your niche or industry. Ultimately, becoming a recognized authority in your niche is doable as long as you put in hard work.
Let us know in the comment section right below what you think about this blog post!