How To Create A Personal Brand As An Entrepreneur

As an entrepreneur, you need all the help you can get to get your name out there and build a strong reputation online. Nowadays, building a personal brand is almost a must for entrepreneurs and business owners. In this blog post, I’m going to share my top tips for how you too can create a personal brand as an entrepreneur.

Why create a personal brand?

Whatever your line of work is and what stage your business is in, personal branding can help you get ahead and improve your results.

Just like regular branding, personal branding is all about building a recognizable voice and identity. It will help you build up your authority and influence, and as a business owner or entrepreneur, it will ultimately help you grow your business. People generally prefer dealing with other people, rather than businesses, so having a recognizable name can help you make more sales, get more clients, find more investors for your business and generally grow your business much faster.

Here are some of the things that you can do in order to start building your own personal brand:

1. Establish your brand

The first step towards building a brand is to establish who you are, what makes you unique and how you want to brand yourself.

This is very similar to any other brand – before you can start growing it, you need to establish exactly what it is.

Think of what you want people to see you as: do you want to be known as an expert in your niche? Or maybe you want to be the fun, chatty type? Consistency is very important to building a brand, so by establishing the direction of your brand, you will be able to be consistent in the type of content you post, the updates you make on social media and the persona you’re projecting online.

This doesn’t mean you should create a fake persona for your personal brand. On the contrary, stick to your own personality, and your own passions and interests.

2. Be active online and off

In order to start building a personal brand, you need to be seen, as often as possible and by as many people as possible. And this means that you need to be very active, both online and offline. Join various social networks (as many as you have the time to deal with properly), join groups, related forums and engage with other people in your line of business.

Where possible, go to networking events, industry conferences and any other events in your niche.

The more you engage with others, the more you will be able to build your personal brand.

3. Social media: the perfect platform for building a personal brand

Social media is an amazing tool for building a personal brand online. It allows you to connect with people on a more personal level, it provides with a huge platform to promote yourself and to grow your social influence.

Ideally, you should try to create profiles on multiple social networks, so as to increase your visibility. That said, you shouldn’t take on more than you can chew – if you don’t have the time to properly manage a social profile, in the end it will do more damage than good. Get a social media dashboard like Agorapulse or Hootsuite (or others here) to help you manage all of your profiles and to save time.

As I mentioned earlier, you need to be very active on social media and engage as much as possible with other people.

Search for conversations through monitoring, use trending topics, join groups and communities and ask and answer questions – all of this will help you boost your engagement and grow your social media presence more quickly and efficiently.

4. Blogging: establish your expertise

Having a blog can be one of the most useful tools in your arsenal towards building a personal brand. It allows you to establish your expertise and thought leadership in your niche and it provides you with a platform where you can express yourself and your thoughts.

Once you create a blog, it’s very important to be consistent. Come up with a clear plan before hand and stick to it, as you will need to post new content regularly in order to stay relevant. 

5. Connect with social influencers

Social influencers have the power to give credibility to your brand, boost your authority and increase your reach.

First, start by identifying relevant social influencers from your industry. Some, you might already know just by spending time on social media, but in order to find more, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo.

As you find influencers, start interacting with them as much as possible, by leaving comments on their blog posts, engaging on social media, participating in the same online (and offline events) and so on.

Making these connections can help you build credibility just by associating yourself with them, plus they can also help you generate more traffic by sharing your content or linking to it, as well as help you reach a bigger, targeted audience – their audience.

Conclusion

Building a personal brand can help take you to the next step in your career faster and with much less effort. Are you thinking of building your own personal brand?