I began building my personal brand ten years ago. It was born from necessity and ambition. At the time, I was a Director of Sales and wanted to get a job as a Vice President of Sales.
I realized that the only people who knew how good I was at my job where my boss and my clients. Since those two groups of people had no vested interest in my getting a new job, I needed to find a better way. I felt like I was all alone in this process. But I took the first step and created a blog.
Since then I’ve encountered all sorts of tricks to build your personal brand. It will help more to list 5 stupid mistakes smart people make when building their personal brand.
1. They try to build a personal brand.
This one is tricky. We all want to put our best foot forward. To make a great first impression. I encourage you to forget about building a personal brand and lead with what you know. Start a blog and talk about your job. That’s it. Super simple.
What do you know, and what are your thoughts on what you know? If you take this first steps you’ll begin to find your rhythm, and you will define your own personal brand.
Look to others for motivation, for sure, but this is your personal brand.
2. They write the way they were taught to write in college.
I use Grammarly, and Hemingway App when generating any sort of written content. This is an important one. People can’t learn from you if they can’t understand you.
I thought I had to use big words for people to respect me. What I’ve realized is that people need to understand me to respect me.
Simple is hard. Keep it simple.
3. They don’t work on creating compelling headlines.
You can write the most compelling content in the world. It may change the way business happens in your industry. But nobody will read it if it doesn’t have a compelling headline.
Nobody.
So run on over to Co-Schedule and check out their free headline analyzer. It will help you become a headline writing master. It will help you to get people reading your content.
4. They publish their content in one place.
My publishing routine looks like this. I start on INC.com, I wait two weeks, change the title a bit, and then hit LinkedIn. I then publish to my personal blog. I leverage my email list to get traffic to these places.
Remember the acronym ABC? Always, be closing? You should ABP instead. Always be publishing. I recommend you reach out to larger publications in your ecosystem and ask if they need contributors.
You’ll have better success if you’ve been writing content for a bit. Make sure you can send over 5-10 compelling blog posts. They need to make sure you can generate some buzz around your content. It also helps if you have a decent following.
5. They don’t scale their efforts with a third party.
Co-Schedule is my secret weapon. I’m currently scheduling content to publish as you read this. To publish while I’m out of the office, sleeping, or working on new things is how I scale my brain.
I don’t care if you use Co-Schedule. But you should leverage some sort of publishing platform for social media content.