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What is Personal Branding?
What is Personal Branding
People do business with people they like. It’s been that way for hundreds of years, there’s no reason to complicate it now.
The problem is, that everyone seems to forget that when talking about personal branding. Suddenly people turn into products and believe the same branding rules that apply to laundry detergent also apply to them, a living breathing human being.
That’s why this guide is different. It will cover the basics of personal branding while digging deeper into why it has a role in your own destiny. So, let’s start at the beginning.
What is a personal brand?
To answer this question, it’s easier to start with what a personal brand isn’t. It’s not a color scheme, a logo, a style of dress, or the way you talk. Sure, all of those things are important and help to make the overall brand, but at the end of the day, a personal brand is more like a reputation.
It’s how people feel about you that matters.
It’s personal. It involves who you are, your values, life philosophy, business, and more. It is the authentic image you present to the world and what makes you different. When done well a personal brand allows you to transcend existing markets and create new ones.
The benefits of personal branding
Truthfully, a personal brand is a form of power.
Throughout history, those who built their reputations and became known throughout the land were offered more opportunities for work, higher social status, luxuries, and even better relationships.
Today, the benefits of building a personal brand include everything from becoming an industry leader and aligning with the right clients, to book deals, franchising opportunities, and more.
The largest benefit, however, is the security of wielding your own destiny. You no longer have to rely on a boss, a single career, or a physical location. You can live anywhere and earn a living creating value for others.
Why is personal branding important?
In 1997, Tom Peters wrote an article titled The Brand Called You. In it, he said, “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
Having a personal brand is not just about all of the cool perks you get. In fact, it’s more about becoming an asset to everyone around you. Once you understand that personal branding is more about other people than it is about showing off how awesome you are, everything gets easier.
Personal branding helps the people who need your services find you. It helps your company by retaining talent. It helps your coworkers as you share your knowledge. It helps your friends, your neighbors, your community, and so on.
Think about it this way. If you were the best cardiologist in all of California, wouldn’t you want people to know who you are? Wouldn’t it be better for them if they did?
How to build a personal brand
(Personal branding expert Chris Do teaching personal brand creation)
Now we can get into the good stuff. How do you build a personal brand?
Let’s break it down into steps: story, values, gift, attention.
Step 1: Your life story
Take some time to explore the ups and downs, life lessons, and challenges that have made you who you are. It’s your job to find the pivotal moments and begin sharing them in an impactful way.
For example, Oprah Winfrey has one of the biggest personal brands in the world. She’s leveraged her name into a talk show, magazine, and television network. Her story follows the classic hero’s journey. Born into poverty, she followed her gift and began studying and learning about broadcast journalism. She was able to go from show host to owner and billions of dollars worth of business ventures.
Oprah’s story is truly rags to riches. It’s honest, inspiring, and gritty, and when people hear it they feel an instant connection to her.
During the discovery process, it’s important to look at:
- Your backstory (background/family history)
- Inciting incident (what made you take action?)
- Mentors you’ve had throughout your life
- Sidekicks and community (who’s been by your side?)
- Enemies/frenemies (who do you disagree with and why)
- Defining attributes (your catchphrases, colors, wardrobe, etc.)
Your story will be the building blocks of your brand. Just as Oprah is in the entertainment industry, you can operate within your own, using your life experiences to stand out from the rest.
(Steps to share your story to build your personal brand)
Step 2: Your values
Most of us have a set of core values that we live by. They may have been instilled in us by our parents or we may have come to them through trial and error.
Maybe you value honesty, respect, individualism, or liberty. Knowing and communicating your values through your words, actions, and content allow like-minded people to find you. Your values send a message.
As you take the time to think about your life story, your values will begin to jump out at you through the lessons you’ve learned and the certain way you handled situations.
Your values are a helpful part of coming up with your two-word brand. It’s a clear depiction of who you are and what you do. When choosing your words, make them unique to you. If they just describe a general field or could apply to anyone, that’s not a personal brand.
For example, Phyllis Strawder is a grandmother, a brand strategist, and a member of The Futur Pro Group. She combined the words ‘brand’ and ‘grandmother’ to create brandmother.
Start by coming up with a list of 50 words that could describe you. Then, start having some fun by mixing and matching them. By creating your own combination you’re positioning yourself as a leader, and leaders stand out.
Step 3: Your Gift
Steve Harvey once said, “Your gift is the thing you do best with the least amount of effort.” There may be things you enjoy doing but you aren’t great at. You could love basketball, watch game reruns, and buy the jersey, but you can also suck at basketball.
Your gift is a talent that comes naturally. You’ll still have to work to refine it, but it comes easier to you than anything else.
This gift, or purpose, is what you have to offer the world and it plays a significant role in your personal brand.
For example, David Ogilvy the famous ad-man, built his brand and reputation through his gift of words. He had worked other jobs such as being a chef and farmer, but it was because of copywriting that he broke through to the advertising world and created one of the most well-respected names in the industry.
Your gift could be sales, typography, storytelling, or design. Once established, your job is to share your gift with those who need it in a way that also feels fulfilling.
Take it this way, if Ozzy Osbourne used his gift of voice to answer phones instead of singing epic rock tunes, he wouldn’t be happy and millions would have missed out on great music. Your gift also corresponds to where you belong and where your brand can shine.
Step 4: Attention
In order to have a reputation aka personal brand, people need to know who you are.
This step is about getting out there and strutting your stuff. Today, attention is largely digital. Humans spend hours each day staring at their screens. The brands of the future use this to their advantage.
Social media is the easiest way to reach your target audience and build a reputation. Here are five tips to start your brand on social:
- Professional photo: Show people who you are and offer a presentable image.
- Optimize your tagline: Offer one or two sentences on who you are and what you do. Include your two-word brand.
- Choose your topics: Decide on three main topics that you’ll cover on your social profiles. For example, if you’re an accountant building a personal brand you might talk about personal finance, small business, and tax tips.
- Platform: Starting out you’ll want to pick one or two platforms that you can focus on. Don’t spread yourself thin in the beginning. If you like Instagram, stay there and grow your account. Communicate through audio, video, photo, or written word. Which are you best at? Double down and commit to sharing as much value as you can.
- Get creative: Growing your brand on social is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and doing something different. Study your industry and see how you can create content that matters in a unique way.
Personal branding essentials
By far, the biggest essential is consistency. This doesn’t mean you can’t talk about different topics or use a different color scheme. It means showing up and being your authentic self in a consistent manner.
Authenticity is key when it comes to a personal brand. If you try to be like everyone else, you’ll have nothing that differentiates you from the competition.
You’ll also need to think about the bigger picture. Who is your personal brand for beyond yourself? What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?
Personal branding done well (examples)
If you want to become a master of personal branding, you’ll need to study the masters. Here are three brands worth studying.
MrBeast
Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast started his brand on YouTube. As a young teen, he made videos in his bedroom and over the years transitioned into creating the best videos on the platform. His mission from the beginning was simply to create the best video possible.
Because of his unrelenting focus and the scale of his videos, with some of them costing over $2 million in production, he amassed a huge following of over 175 million subscribers.
He was able to leverage his brand to create MrBeast Burgers, a virtual delivery-only franchise that will be expanding to physical restaurants in the future.
Feastables is the candy and chocolate brand that leverages the MrBeast brand. It offers a variety of chocolate bars and gummies to physical stores like Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Lucky.
Altogether, his YouTube channels and business ventures have produced a net worth of over 110 million.
If you want to study how to build and leverage a brand, study the beast himself.
David Goggins
A retired Navy Seal and endurance athlete, David Goggins first began sharing his story on social media. From the age of nineteen until the age of twenty-two, he recalls gaining 125 pounds. After watching a documentary on the Navy Seals, he decided to join. In order to be recruited he would need to lose 106 pounds in six months.
Eventually, he quit his job spraying for cockroaches and became a Navy Seal. He then documented his journey of becoming an athlete, completing over 60 ultra marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, and once holding the Guinness World Record for 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours.
David is now a sought-after public speaker and author. His net worth is over $4 million, because he established and built his personal brand.
His advice for branding is, “You have to be unique in what you do and others will seek you out. You have to be uncommon.”
He also shares that if you want to be a teacher, you have to live the life you are teaching about. Again, your personal brand must be authentic if it is going to last.
Chris Do
Award-winning designer and founder of The Futur, Chris Do built his personal brand on social media. After several years of running his own design business, Blind, and teaching at ArtCentre College of Design he took his lessons to YouTube at the age of 42.
His personal brand was built with the mission to help creatives do what they love for a living. By sharing his years of expertise with students all over the world, his following now reaches over 3 million people across social channels.
True to his word, Chris helps individuals working as designers, copywriters, filmmakers, photographers, and others in the creative sector to turn their passion into a business. Countless lives have been changed by his work and detailed teachings.
He believes a personal brand isn’t built, it is uncovered. People already have their brand story, they just need to begin doing the work to uncover and present it to the world.
Personal branding at its core is service-based. If you can tap into that and shine the light on how you can be of service to others, you’ll do well. If you’ve enjoyed this deep dive and want to put these lessons to the test creating your own personal brand, consider joining Brand Lab. It’s a 6-month journey to develop a content strategy, build an online community, and grow your reach while sharing a message that is unique to you.
What is Personal Branding?
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What is Personal Branding
People do business with people they like. It’s been that way for hundreds of years, there’s no reason to complicate it now.
The problem is, that everyone seems to forget that when talking about personal branding. Suddenly people turn into products and believe the same branding rules that apply to laundry detergent also apply to them, a living breathing human being.
That’s why this guide is different. It will cover the basics of personal branding while digging deeper into why it has a role in your own destiny. So, let’s start at the beginning.
What is a personal brand?
To answer this question, it’s easier to start with what a personal brand isn’t. It’s not a color scheme, a logo, a style of dress, or the way you talk. Sure, all of those things are important and help to make the overall brand, but at the end of the day, a personal brand is more like a reputation.
It’s how people feel about you that matters.
It’s personal. It involves who you are, your values, life philosophy, business, and more. It is the authentic image you present to the world and what makes you different. When done well a personal brand allows you to transcend existing markets and create new ones.
The benefits of personal branding
Truthfully, a personal brand is a form of power.
Throughout history, those who built their reputations and became known throughout the land were offered more opportunities for work, higher social status, luxuries, and even better relationships.
Today, the benefits of building a personal brand include everything from becoming an industry leader and aligning with the right clients, to book deals, franchising opportunities, and more.
The largest benefit, however, is the security of wielding your own destiny. You no longer have to rely on a boss, a single career, or a physical location. You can live anywhere and earn a living creating value for others.
Why is personal branding important?
In 1997, Tom Peters wrote an article titled The Brand Called You. In it, he said, “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
Having a personal brand is not just about all of the cool perks you get. In fact, it’s more about becoming an asset to everyone around you. Once you understand that personal branding is more about other people than it is about showing off how awesome you are, everything gets easier.
Personal branding helps the people who need your services find you. It helps your company by retaining talent. It helps your coworkers as you share your knowledge. It helps your friends, your neighbors, your community, and so on.
Think about it this way. If you were the best cardiologist in all of California, wouldn’t you want people to know who you are? Wouldn’t it be better for them if they did?
How to build a personal brand
(Personal branding expert Chris Do teaching personal brand creation)
Now we can get into the good stuff. How do you build a personal brand?
Let’s break it down into steps: story, values, gift, attention.
Step 1: Your life story
Take some time to explore the ups and downs, life lessons, and challenges that have made you who you are. It’s your job to find the pivotal moments and begin sharing them in an impactful way.
For example, Oprah Winfrey has one of the biggest personal brands in the world. She’s leveraged her name into a talk show, magazine, and television network. Her story follows the classic hero’s journey. Born into poverty, she followed her gift and began studying and learning about broadcast journalism. She was able to go from show host to owner and billions of dollars worth of business ventures.
Oprah’s story is truly rags to riches. It’s honest, inspiring, and gritty, and when people hear it they feel an instant connection to her.
During the discovery process, it’s important to look at:
- Your backstory (background/family history)
- Inciting incident (what made you take action?)
- Mentors you’ve had throughout your life
- Sidekicks and community (who’s been by your side?)
- Enemies/frenemies (who do you disagree with and why)
- Defining attributes (your catchphrases, colors, wardrobe, etc.)
Your story will be the building blocks of your brand. Just as Oprah is in the entertainment industry, you can operate within your own, using your life experiences to stand out from the rest.
(Steps to share your story to build your personal brand)
Step 2: Your values
Most of us have a set of core values that we live by. They may have been instilled in us by our parents or we may have come to them through trial and error.
Maybe you value honesty, respect, individualism, or liberty. Knowing and communicating your values through your words, actions, and content allow like-minded people to find you. Your values send a message.
As you take the time to think about your life story, your values will begin to jump out at you through the lessons you’ve learned and the certain way you handled situations.
Your values are a helpful part of coming up with your two-word brand. It’s a clear depiction of who you are and what you do. When choosing your words, make them unique to you. If they just describe a general field or could apply to anyone, that’s not a personal brand.
For example, Phyllis Strawder is a grandmother, a brand strategist, and a member of The Futur Pro Group. She combined the words ‘brand’ and ‘grandmother’ to create brandmother.
Start by coming up with a list of 50 words that could describe you. Then, start having some fun by mixing and matching them. By creating your own combination you’re positioning yourself as a leader, and leaders stand out.
Step 3: Your Gift
Steve Harvey once said, “Your gift is the thing you do best with the least amount of effort.” There may be things you enjoy doing but you aren’t great at. You could love basketball, watch game reruns, and buy the jersey, but you can also suck at basketball.
Your gift is a talent that comes naturally. You’ll still have to work to refine it, but it comes easier to you than anything else.
This gift, or purpose, is what you have to offer the world and it plays a significant role in your personal brand.
For example, David Ogilvy the famous ad-man, built his brand and reputation through his gift of words. He had worked other jobs such as being a chef and farmer, but it was because of copywriting that he broke through to the advertising world and created one of the most well-respected names in the industry.
Your gift could be sales, typography, storytelling, or design. Once established, your job is to share your gift with those who need it in a way that also feels fulfilling.
Take it this way, if Ozzy Osbourne used his gift of voice to answer phones instead of singing epic rock tunes, he wouldn’t be happy and millions would have missed out on great music. Your gift also corresponds to where you belong and where your brand can shine.
Step 4: Attention
In order to have a reputation aka personal brand, people need to know who you are.
This step is about getting out there and strutting your stuff. Today, attention is largely digital. Humans spend hours each day staring at their screens. The brands of the future use this to their advantage.
Social media is the easiest way to reach your target audience and build a reputation. Here are five tips to start your brand on social:
- Professional photo: Show people who you are and offer a presentable image.
- Optimize your tagline: Offer one or two sentences on who you are and what you do. Include your two-word brand.
- Choose your topics: Decide on three main topics that you’ll cover on your social profiles. For example, if you’re an accountant building a personal brand you might talk about personal finance, small business, and tax tips.
- Platform: Starting out you’ll want to pick one or two platforms that you can focus on. Don’t spread yourself thin in the beginning. If you like Instagram, stay there and grow your account. Communicate through audio, video, photo, or written word. Which are you best at? Double down and commit to sharing as much value as you can.
- Get creative: Growing your brand on social is all about stepping out of your comfort zone and doing something different. Study your industry and see how you can create content that matters in a unique way.
Personal branding essentials
By far, the biggest essential is consistency. This doesn’t mean you can’t talk about different topics or use a different color scheme. It means showing up and being your authentic self in a consistent manner.
Authenticity is key when it comes to a personal brand. If you try to be like everyone else, you’ll have nothing that differentiates you from the competition.
You’ll also need to think about the bigger picture. Who is your personal brand for beyond yourself? What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?
Personal branding done well (examples)
If you want to become a master of personal branding, you’ll need to study the masters. Here are three brands worth studying.
MrBeast
Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast started his brand on YouTube. As a young teen, he made videos in his bedroom and over the years transitioned into creating the best videos on the platform. His mission from the beginning was simply to create the best video possible.
Because of his unrelenting focus and the scale of his videos, with some of them costing over $2 million in production, he amassed a huge following of over 175 million subscribers.
He was able to leverage his brand to create MrBeast Burgers, a virtual delivery-only franchise that will be expanding to physical restaurants in the future.
Feastables is the candy and chocolate brand that leverages the MrBeast brand. It offers a variety of chocolate bars and gummies to physical stores like Walmart, 7-Eleven, and Lucky.
Altogether, his YouTube channels and business ventures have produced a net worth of over 110 million.
If you want to study how to build and leverage a brand, study the beast himself.
David Goggins
A retired Navy Seal and endurance athlete, David Goggins first began sharing his story on social media. From the age of nineteen until the age of twenty-two, he recalls gaining 125 pounds. After watching a documentary on the Navy Seals, he decided to join. In order to be recruited he would need to lose 106 pounds in six months.
Eventually, he quit his job spraying for cockroaches and became a Navy Seal. He then documented his journey of becoming an athlete, completing over 60 ultra marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, and once holding the Guinness World Record for 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours.
David is now a sought-after public speaker and author. His net worth is over $4 million, because he established and built his personal brand.
His advice for branding is, “You have to be unique in what you do and others will seek you out. You have to be uncommon.”
He also shares that if you want to be a teacher, you have to live the life you are teaching about. Again, your personal brand must be authentic if it is going to last.
Chris Do
Award-winning designer and founder of The Futur, Chris Do built his personal brand on social media. After several years of running his own design business, Blind, and teaching at ArtCentre College of Design he took his lessons to YouTube at the age of 42.
His personal brand was built with the mission to help creatives do what they love for a living. By sharing his years of expertise with students all over the world, his following now reaches over 3 million people across social channels.
True to his word, Chris helps individuals working as designers, copywriters, filmmakers, photographers, and others in the creative sector to turn their passion into a business. Countless lives have been changed by his work and detailed teachings.
He believes a personal brand isn’t built, it is uncovered. People already have their brand story, they just need to begin doing the work to uncover and present it to the world.
Personal branding at its core is service-based. If you can tap into that and shine the light on how you can be of service to others, you’ll do well. If you’ve enjoyed this deep dive and want to put these lessons to the test creating your own personal brand, consider joining Brand Lab. It’s a 6-month journey to develop a content strategy, build an online community, and grow your reach while sharing a message that is unique to you.
