Do you want to take your personal brand to the absolute next level? Well, in this post you'll discover 7 great ways to make your personal brand business shine like never before.
It doesn't matter when you're reading this post. It could be at the start of a brand new year, a new month, or at the start of a period where you're setting yourself and your business some new goals.
Whatever plan you have to make your business more successful and profitable now and beyond, I want you to remember one important thing before anything else.
We're both in the same boat together!
That's right. and so that means I'm here to help you, and if you can help me back in any way then great, I'd love to hear from you.
I'm being serious about that, I have a business I want to continue growing and be more successful with now, next year and beyond, and so do you, so let's help each other out OK?
Right, let's get to it.
So let me ask you a question.
How self-aware are you?
By this I mean to ask; Are you aware of what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are too?
Ask yourself, how do you think others see you in your business?
You're probably scratching your head right now thinking, "Well how is answering any of those questions going to help me rock my personal brand?"
Well, my friend, being self-aware is something very important for anyone serious about building a rock-solid personal brand business.
In fact, it is the first step of helping you to redefine your personal brand.
Way back in the summer of last year (2016), I made a list of all the things I thought I was really good at in my business and a list of all the things that I thought I sucked at.
For me, making a list like that was a critical step in helping me identify, what areas of myself and my business I needed to make improvements on.
A colleague and professional blog writer Adrienne Smith once wrote that - "We are and will always be a work in progress..."
I believe that to be very true, and if we stop working on ourselves, everything else around us will eventually feel the effect of this.
Your task
I want you to do something for yourself right now.
Go and grab a piece of paper or notepad, create three columns and in each column put in the following:
List as many things as you possibly can, and it doesn't just have to be related to your job or business either, it could very well be personal things.
Building a mental map of your strengths and weaknesses will help you to become more self-aware.
When you are more self-aware, you'll make better decisions about what areas of your personal development to invest in.
Investing in your personal development will most definitely help you build a more rock-solid personal brand.
One of the things many people do, especially bloggers, is at some stage in their journey, they forget about the things they truly stood for when they got started.
If you don't believe in yourself or what you stand for in your business always, how do you expect others to do the same let alone follow you?
Don't think you're alone with this because this was something I struggled with in the very beginning myself.
I believed that I had something unique and incredibly valuable to offer people in my business, but sometimes I would struggle in trying to convince people that I indeed stood strongly for what I actually believed in.
When someone asks you "why do you do what you do", you'd better be ready to answer that question with passion and conviction.
If you don't believe in yourself, your principles, your methods, your teachings, your beliefs, then don't expect others to do the same.
Lastly, and this one is very important. Don't let anyone dishearten you or cause you to doubt what you really believe in, in any way.
Continue to believe in what you stand fo in your personal brand and you'll rock!.
Here's what I stand for in my business:
As a passionate blogger and web designer, I stand for giving my website visitors and blog readers the best experience possible. By delivering value, resources and a great service so that they would want to do business with me.
If you stand for something similar in your business, in addition to believing in it yourself wholeheartedly, make sure other people know about it too.
If you have a great product people love, don't just make it better, make it the best in your industry!
If you're a blogger or solopreneur offerings online services, don't just improve on becoming better at what you do or how you offer it, become the best that you possibly can be in your field.
Become memorable. Become the ultimate "go-to" person in your niche or industry for whatever that "one thing" might be.
Here are four things you need to ask yourself to help you redefine your target audience right now.
Once you have some information about who your target audience is, and what they need help with, you can then begin to look at ways to help them overcome their specific problems and concerns, thus building a stronger community for your business or your blog.
Of course, redefining your target audience will certainly help you become a smarter problem solver in your niche or industry, right?
However, becoming a smarter problem solver doesn't mean just posting up a bunch of blog posts that aims to solve lots and lots of problems.
Or to answer lots of questions in one blast. becoming a smarter problem solver means stepping back and "solving one problem for one person at a time".
This is something my good friend Don Purdum over at Unveil The Web used to frequently talk about.
To be a smarter problem solver, you also need to make use of the tools available to you.
Your website or blog is just the start of it, there's a host of powerful content tools out there you can use to create smarter "problem-solving content", so make good use of mediums like videos, infographics, audio recordings and podcast shows, eBooks and white papers and so on.
So you've heard this saying I'm sure:
The more you talk about yourself and make it all about YOU and what you're doing and everything else in your business, the more you're going to make your personal brand stand out, right?
Well, you want to know what I think? That's a ludicrous belief.
If you're not providing anything of value, you're probably going to turn folks away more than anything else.
Hey, feel free to disagree with me OK? I want to hear from you, so leave me a comment below or email me.
So I'm not saying don't be true to yourself, or that it's bad to tell people what you're doing to grow and be successful in your business, but it's not always about you.
People come to your blog or website for help and answers to whatever problem they might be experiencing.
They want to know what YOU can give them, how YOU can make their life easier, so make it less about you and what you're doing, and more about them.
Because if anything, this will only help you to strengthen and solidify your personal brand now and beyond.
Another thing I see many solopreneurs and small business owners do is that they're NOT entirely consistent with their brand identity, especially online.
Consistency with your online brand identity is key for effective brand promotion, that's what I think.
So with that said, make your website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter profile, LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel all consistent with your brand design, logo, colors, USPs and so forth.
This type of consistency will only help you to strengthen your personal brand more, and you'll always be one step ahead of your competition.
So there you have it, 7 effective ways not only to rock your personal brand this year and beyond, but to help take your business to a whole new level, make it more successful and profitable in the years to come.
There are many more things you can do of course, but you should definitely start with the list above.
OK, so I've shared with you some of the things YOU can do to help your personal brand stand out. To finish off, I want to share with you a quick video: Vlog Episode #1 - 6 Awesome Productivity Tools I'll Be Making More Use Of In 2017.
You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here by the way.
