Building a personal brand means that we no longer live in a world where education level or previous work experience dominate your desirability in the workforce.
Instead, the focus is on what you do outside the office. Who you are as a person, what your daily impact on the world is and how you perceive the things around you are increasingly important.
Understandably, building a personal brand can be a daunting task. Even now, famous figures like Oprah and the Paul brothers had to go through several style changes before finding their voice and becoming some of the most influential personal brands in the world.
A personal brand is for everyone. In building it, you can differentiate yourself from the rest of the candidates in a job application. You can use it to build a huge social influence in the world.
Here are two golden rules to creating a personal brand that will help you stand out from the crowd.
1 – Find Your Direction
The problem that most people have when building their personal brand is that they focus on too many things at once. Trying to be everything to everyone does not work.
As much as you and I would like to have influence over an extremely diverse set of markets, that cannot happen without first having a focused group of people who follow you and live through your brand.
In specific, you need to be doing 2 things to have a focus.
- You need to understand what type of content you want to be putting out.
- You need to understand what type of people consume the content that you put out.
Your personal brand is, well, personal. With that being said, you need to make sure that your content is a reflection of who you are and what you’re passionate about.
The same goes for you in whichever niche you’re most interested in. Determine what exactly it is that you want to be focusing on, and then go out and find the people who consume that content. Do this by looking for other people posting similar content to you and “steal” their audience members.
2 – Be Genuine
There are a lot of people out there who create personal brands for the sole purpose of boosting their resumes.
Firstly, having a strong personal brand allows you to stand out from whatever crowd you want to associate yourself with. If you’re building the brand for the wrong reasons, however, then you may as well consider your plan a failure.
Ideally, you create your brand with the purpose of showcasing your special sauce.
You want to be teaching the world about your niche through your point of view. You want to be making peoples’ lives better on a daily basis, and you can’t do that unless you’re genuine in your marketing and content. In other words, reframing your mindset and attitude towards your brand’s mission can go a long way.
The Bottom Line
Building a personal brand is not an easy task, but the results that it will have on your career in the next 5-10 years will surprise you.
Above all, continue to be genuine and have a narrow focus. If you do, you will find tremendous amounts of success in all of your next ventures.
