If you haven’t yet read my post here on what Personal Branding is, I would encourage you to check it out. Not only do I break down what Personal Branding actually is but I also talk about why every Entrepreneur pretty much needs one.
In this post, I’ll be talking about how to build your Personal Brand.
When a lot of people talk about building a Personal Brand, they mainly talk about building a community. And while I definitely believe that a solid Personal Brand is essential to having an active community, growing an audience and Personal branding are not the same thing.
Personal Branding is when an individual uses their personal values, lifestyle choices, personality and reputation to market their business.
To effectively be able to use your personal brand identity to market your business, you have to actually go through a process of self-discovery.
When I say this, many people wonder, what is this process like?
And well, I’m actually quite happy to be able to break this down for you into three simple steps.
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Step 1 – Find a profitable niche and getting total clarity around it.
First, I want to start this off by saying that any niche can be profitable. Seriously, there are over 7 billion people on this planet. You need less than .01% of the world to fall in love with you in order for you to have a successful business. There is seriously a customer for everybody.
Second, I want to break down what a niche actually is because a lot of people really get this wrong.
What is a niche?
Most people think that a niche is a set of topics that they’re restricted to talk about.
Yeah, nope.
A niche is your speciality. It’s the audience you specialize in speaking to and helping.
So for example, if you specialized in helping people launch online courses, beyond talking about the course launching process, you could also talk about..
- How to Build an Email List
- Money Mindset
- How to Hire and Manage A Team
- Sales / Launch Anxiety
- Your Launch Routine (Productivity / Daily Habits)
- Your Morning Routine (and how it helps you have a successful launch)
- Your Content Calendar
- How I Stay Healthy During Launch Season
Some of the topics I listed are obviously more about business while others lean more towards lifestyle. But if you’re into healthy eating and from time to time one to share with your audience about your healthy eating lifestyle, see how I was able to seamlessly figure out a way to include it in your content without compromising your brands core purpose: helping people lunch online courses?
Again, your niche is not about reducing yourself to one topic. It’s about having a specialty. And as long as you create content with the audience you specialize in, in mind, then you won’t ever have to worry about limiting yourself.
At least the way I teach my clients how to do it, they always tell me is super freeing.
What makes your niche profitable is your ability to communicate how your product or program can solve your customer’s greatest challenge.
The problem is, most people are marketing products or programs that solve a problem their audience isn’t really passionate about getting fixed.
Step 2 – Understanding the full value of what you offer
The next step is to get full clarity around the value of what you offer.
A lot of aspiring Entrepreneurs I meet sell services, but what they don’t do, is sell solutions.
Funny enough, many people know that they want to help someone, but they’re not sure at all really how what they do actually helps.
I remember when I first launched my business. I knew that I really wanted to help Entrepreneurs bring their brand and biz to YouTube.
So I created a ton of content around video marketing stats.
What I didn’t understand is that telling people that the folks on the internet spend 80% of their time browsing video content was great for educating cold traffic aka strangers that didn’t know that much about video marketing and YouTube.
But these stats were not helpful in terms of signing clients or closing sales.
If I wanted to close sales, I had to understand who would be ready to buy right now if I offered my services to them.
That meant I needed to shift away from speaking so much to the people that had no clue what video marketing or YouTube really was, and start speaking to the audience that had been on YouTube for a year or more, and were struggling really bad.
The people that needed me most.
I didn’t discover this instantly, btw. It was a few months of selling with no bites. I had to do the Personal Branding exercises that really allowed me to work backwards and find the answers.
Instead of thinking, what cool stat could I share with people that would make them want to launch their biz on YouTube, I had to start thinking, who needs the most help, who find this most valuable and where can I find them?
And like that, I transitioned from the segment of my target audience that wasn’t profitable and transitioned to a new niche that was: People that had already been on YouTube for at least one year.
Within a week of making this transition, I sold my first 4-figure coaching package.
So understanding the full value of what you offer is more so about discovering what segment of your audience finds your product or service most valuable.
Step 3 – Learn how to communicate your value through your brand and all of your content
The third step to mastering your Personal Brand is actually mastering your messaging.
For most people, this is normally the most exciting part.
Because your messaging shapes the kind of photoshoots you should be taking, the social media posts you should be posting, and the emails that you send out.
Once you’re clear on who you specialize in helping, and have full understanding of your value, it’s time to take your audience’s pain points and create amazing storytelling and content out of it.
Stories are what sell your products and help you build a community of raving fans.
Many people stray away from story, and resort to sharing overdone quotes, phrases and topics because they’re either afraid that:
- Their story isn’t worth sharing.
- They don’t know how to communicate their client’s story.
- They believe they’re a crappy storyteller.
My thoughts are that anyone can be a great storyteller.
Being a great storyteller is not the same thing as being a great writer. So even if you’re not amazing at writing, you can still tell a great story. You can also tell a story that sells.
Don’t believe me?
What about the last time you shared with a friend a story surrounding around a latest product you purchased and the friend was so blown away by your testimonial, that they went out to buy the product you recommended.
That, my friend, is sales.
That is what you need to do with your marketing.
The problem as business owners is that many times, we are so close to our products and programs we clam up and don’t really know how to tell the stories our clients and customers need to hear in order to make that purchase.
This doesn’t mean you should just give up story. This just means you should start learning how to strengthen your storytelling skills.
Storytelling is the pre-requisite to increasing your sales and your impact. It’s also apart of the Personal Branding process.
Want to build a Profitable Personal Brand? I’ve got a full guide that breaks down what the exact steps I did in my business to create a six-figure business.
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