Every day, most people, especially younger people, spend a significant amount of time on social media. Some of us use that to look at pictures of cute animals and sometimes even models. However, have you ever thought about what you put out there and post? A lot of the times when we post to Facebook, Instagram or whatever we are doing, we do not really think about it like we are building a personal brand, but this is essentially what we are doing.
Generally, people will post on the personal social media about their life and interests, not just their occupation. So really, you are building a personal brand whenever you post, you just might not be taking advantage of it like you could. In his book, How to Set-Up Your Personal Brand for Under $1,000, Dan Fleyshman explains how to do just that.
Your personal brand can be about whatever you want. Some charity you are passionate about, your business, a hobby of yours, literally anything. You don’t even need to be an expert, as Dan states “You don’t need to be an expert to start. But you do have to start to ever become an expert.”[1] However, you do need to be open-minded and have integrity to be successful with your personal brand. Also, it barely costs any money in modern day because to make the social media profiles and to create content is basically free.
Create your origin (story and profiles)
The Personal Brand Story
Your origin story is one of the most fundamental ingredients for your personal brand. This is where you really need to be honest. Do not just tell people about the wins. When you only post about the wins, people will not trust you as much as possible and they will not become a loyal follower of the brand. Also, when you are honest and post about the losses and sacrifices you had to make, as well as have them interact with the brand, they will trust you and this will create a kind of community associated with the brand. It is this deeper connection with your audience that you gain by being vulnerable about your failures that will create this sense of community and help develop your personal brand.
That being said, yes you obviously need to talk about previous sacrifices, but some of your passions. You are a person after all, and people want to follow and learn from people, not robots. Talk about some of the hobbies you have or things you are passionate about (this is where charities can come in as well). Do this even if your passions aren’t directly related to your niche or whatever your personal brand is about. You never know who could connect with one of your passions and attract someone to your brand. Remember to also post about current business ventures, but that should go without saying as that is one reason for the brand to begin with.
Be sure to be concise with your story. Every word matters because you will only have a person’s attention for less than 30 seconds, so you need to be as efficient in telling your origin story as possible.
Socials
Before you get too far with your personal brand, you are going to want to lock down the social media handles and domain names that you want. This can be just your name or some variation. For example, there are apparently quite a few people named James Forsythe, so I have to always put numbers or just use “always learning and improving” as the name.
Once you have the handles and website locked down, you need to be sure your story is the same across all platforms. You need to use it as a platform the way it was intended, but make sure the story itself is the same. If you seem to be different people on different platforms, people probably are not going to trust you. That being said, you need a website for your story and brand to call home. A one-page website where everything is in depth is where someone will go if they want to learn everything about your story and who you are. It’s like a resume that tells people why they should choose to work with you for whatever product or service you provide.
With all of these social media profiles and websites, you are going to need a Linktree. No, these are not just for your cousin’s Onlyfans account, you can put links to any of your social media pages, your blog, and definitely the one-page website. This way people can follow you on other platforms if they wish to do so.
Events to expand your Personal Brand
The Event
As you develop your personal brand, throwing events would be a very good idea to help it grow even more. By throwing an event, you gain recognition for the event within the industry and community while also creating a source for more content to post under your brand. Most importantly, you start and develop relationships with people within your industry that could open opportunities that you could never even think of down the road. Therefore, throwing events should be a major consideration for any personal brand.
Throwing events can be a huge ordeal, so it is best to throw yourself an underhanded pitch for your first one or two. You want to have the least amount of resistance as possible. That being said, it’s probably not the best idea to throw the event on a Saturday night, so pick a day that the attendees would be unlikely to be traveling or busy on, like a Tuesday evening or something in the middle of the week.
Also, you will want to pick a unique location in your area, a place where a photographer would love to go and take pictures or videos at your event. You don’t even have to sell tickets, honestly it would probably be best if you refrained from doing so the first few events. However, if you want to, you can make tickets and give them away for free. Price them at $50 or something and give them to the people you invite. This gives your event an implied value and the recipients of the tickets will think of it more of an obligation or a valuable event they need to attend, rather than some option they have and can just blow off.
Your Role for you personal brand
Remember, these are YOUR events. You are the host, and you are responsible for literally everything. This can be a lot of responsibility, but it will help people associate you as a figure within the industry or charity that the event is for. This helps grow your brand by giving you more exposure to important people in your industry as well as show people that you will be in the industry for a while and are serious.
A good idea is to keep the event to about 3 hours. Any shorter and people may not come because it would be difficult to fit enough quality activities in that time. Any longer and people may show up late or begin to lose interest near the end of the event. Also, the schedule must be very strict. Otherwise, people can run over when they are speaking, and this takes time away from other speakers and people in attendance. Since you hopefully have important industry-related people at your event, wasting their time is the last thing you want to do.
The major point of the event is to create a memorable impression of yourself on the people who attend. This makes it easier for them to remember you and your brand when they think of the event. One way to do this is to personally contact the people to invite them. It shows that you care about your event and think that it is important for them to speak or attend. Along with this, be extremely clear with them; you don’t want any confusion or obvious mistakes at the event. Setting a hard schedule down to the minute can help with this. Finally, make sure to under-promise but over-deliver. By doing more than you promised, the attendees will be surprised, and it will create a good impression with them as well as this will make you not feel disappointed or that the event was a dud.
Content creation for various platforms
As a brand owner, you need to create content. People have to hear and learn about you somehow. When people think of your industry or niche, you need to be at the forefront of their mind. The best way to do this is to serve them. Produce content for them that will improve their lives in some way. This is honestly one of my principal beliefs, your purpose is to serve others, and exactly how you do that is what you need to figure out (this is probably the biggest reason for this blog).
This means you need to pursue omnipresence. You have to be everywhere, all social media platforms, blogs, podcasts, newspapers, and any other form of media. By reaching the most amount of people as possible, you are able to serve the most amount of people as possible. Now, there are a lot of different platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, tiktok, snapchat, etc. So, repurpose content when you can. However, you still need to use each profile natively, people need to see that you are actually using the platform and not just as an advertising plug. Dan goes in depth about how to use each platform and the purpose for using each one in his book, so for more on this, you should read the book yourself as it definitely has some great insights.
Monetizing your Personal Brand
For all the work that you will be putting into your personal brand, it would definitely be nice to be compensated in some way. The good thing is, there are so many ways to monetize a personal brand. You can make any kind of physical product, make digital courses, sell memberships, or anything else. Due to the abstract nature of a brand, you can basically do whatever you want with it. Get creative, find your edge, and capitalize on it.
Omnipresence
The main reason for all the social media content isn’t advertising, it is to create an omnipresence for your brand. To do this, you must provide value. Produce consistent great content that will improve the lives of your audience in some way, and your brand will grow. Algorithms for social media platforms change rapidly, but people will gravitate towards value no matter what.
A great way to produce value is to collaborate with people within your industry or niche. Not only are you giving more perspectives on the same topic, but you are sharing your audience with them, and they are sharing their audience with you. To reach even more people, you can be interviewed for podcasts or various other forms of media. This shows that you are interesting or important enough in your industry to be interviewed and that people actually care about what you have to say.
Conclusions
In the modern day of social media, some people will believe in overnight success stories. It is true that sometimes someone makes one video, and it goes viral, but the odds of that happening to specifically you are almost zero. That means you should stick to the basic concept, create great content that provides value on a consistent basis, and you will succeed. In life, to be great, you need to be good for a very long time, and to be a legend you need to be great for an even longer amount of time. It can take years to succeed and start to gain traction, but it only takes one opportunity to completely change your life.
Some people refer to success as luck, as if success is just a function of chance. To some degree it is, but the more value you provide, the higher you change of being “lucky”.
To your wealth and future,
James Forsythe
For more personal finance and business
https://jamesdforsythe.com/category/personal-finances/
[1] How to Set-Up Your Personal Brand for Under $1,000, Dan Fleyshman, pg. 3
