What are the basic components of a successful personal brand?
To help you create a successful personal brand, we asked online personalities and business leaders this question for their best insights. From building credibility to telling your story, there are several basic components to include when building a successful personal brand.
Here are 11 basic components successful personal brand:
- Build Credibility
- Understand Your USP
- Hone In on an Audience
- Stick to Core Values
- Share Knowledge
- Utilize Linkedin
- Be Flexible
- Practice True Authenticity
- Select Fonts Deliberately
- Reconsider Old Beliefs
- Tell Your Story
Build Credibility
It’s important to remember that a good personal brand should be consistent across all platforms, so that consumers know who they are dealing with when they interact with you. This means creating high-quality content on all of your channels regularly, in order to keep them informed about what’s happening with your company and why it matters to them.
Additionally, use customer testimonials—particularly positive ones—prominently on affected pages, so that potential customers are reassured about the quality of what they’re purchasing or hiring. Building a strong personal brand can take time, but it is worth it if you want people to associate you with confidence and trust.
Paw Vej, Financer.com Ltd
Understand Your USP
Before you can start marketing, you need to determine your unique selling proposition (USP). A USP makes your brand unique. People will buy from you if you offer something other brands don’t have. If you don’t know what makes your brand unique, no one else will know either. They will buy from more well-known companies. Consumers give their money to brands they trust. They will trust brands they’ve heard of. How can you compete with the more established brands? Simple—be different. Offer something they don’t have. This is your USP.
Janice Wald, Mostly Blogging
Hone In on an Audience
When creating content to bolster your personal brand, you should be aware of what kind of audience you intend to reach. Once you figure this out, you can start creating content that attracts your audience, all of it with the use of an AI software like Copymatic. If you are looking to make connections with your peers, your voice and content style should be tailored that way, as opposed to if you were writing to leadership. This can also help you figure out which platforms you should focus your effort on. By choosing early, you can start to find your voice as a personal brand and make the kinds of connections you are setting out to create.
Brandon Brown, GRIN
Stick to Core Values
A major defining factor of your personal brand is your core values and everything you stand for. These values shape the way you communicate, what you’re passionate about and even the value that you bring to your customers and audience. It’s important to establish and amplify your core values from the get-go so that you don’t leave your audience guessing—they’ll instantly be able to identify your brand as one that’s authentic, honest and consistent.
Harry Morton, Lower Street
Share Knowledge
A personal brand speaks equally about one’s personality traits as it does about professional prowess, so it is essential to build one that is likable. And everyone likes people who share the knowledge they have and are eager to give away lessons, even when they have nothing to gain. The immediate advantage is that this approach helps in building a personal brand that speaks of the generosity of character. The long-term one is that it creates an image that reflects foresight, where a person is able to think of the collective good of the community and helps everyone move forward together.
Riley Beam, Douglas R. Beam, P.A.
Utilize Linkedin
Linkedin is such an underrated opportunity for personal brand building. I have been on the site for six months, and have posted around 3–4 times a week over that time. I’ve been able to build a following of nearly 10,000 highly engaged followers in my niche of entrepreneurship. Engagement is far better than any other social media platform. A typical post for me will get around 20,000 views and 150+ comments.
It also translates into real money. Whenever I talk about my SEO agency in a post, I get DMs and prospect booking calls. It is my number one source of new leads.
Sam Browne, HARO SEO
Be Flexible
Flexibility is a basic but vital component of a successful personal brand. A personal brand is supposed to reflect the person, however, sometimes people get too caught up with consistency and lose their authenticity. What I mean by this is brands should grow with the person, and with growth comes change. The flexibility to evolve a personal brand while staying authentic is what leads to success. That flexibility shows the brand is capable of adapting to the ever-changing world and embracing new things, all while remaining true to itself.
Erin Sullivan, University of Advancing Technology
Practice True Authenticity
While everyone talks about authenticity, very few people actually practice it. The core of a truly successful personal brand is being the real you 100% of the time. Too many personal brands are built around curated authenticity, which ultimately means the person behind the brand has to put on a mask—or multiple masks—when they show up publicly. That is exhausting and you’ll ultimately slip up. Rather than trying to curate something other than the real you, just show up as yourself. That way, you don’t have to remember who you’re supposed to be. Just be you!
Bobby Klinck, BobbyKlinck.com
Select Fonts Deliberately
Personal branding is important for businesses and professionals in any industry. Business owners can use their personal brand to market themselves and define who they are both professionally and personally. But personal branding is more than just a website, a font choice or a catchy slogan. A business owner’s personal brand is their silent ambassador—it can speak volumes about their work, business and personality.
One important component of a great personal brand is font selection. Your brand fonts should be carefully considered, and business owners should pay close attention to their fonts to ensure that their brand connects with their audience. The font a business owner chooses tells their customers a story about their professional career and business.
Every font tells a different story, and the font you use should never be left up to chance.
Nicholas Robb, Design Hero
Reconsider Old Beliefs
It has always been important that we change our thoughts and beliefs in tandem with the changing times. After all, learning the new and unlearning the old is one of the most vital characteristics of success. This approach is even more crucial when building a personal brand. By going public with all that we know, everything we share is open to scrutiny. It is therefore really crucial that as soon as we witness changes, we quickly pick up on the new and give up on the old and outdated, and make the move in a timely and convincing manner too.
Kris Harris, Nootka Saunas
Tell a Story
Everybody loves a good story, so tell the story of how your personal brand came to be. Were you trying to solve a problem? Fill a need? What is your brand’s mission? What makes it unique, and how does it stand out from its competitors?
If you can engage your customers with why you launched your brand in the first place, you can connect with them on a more emotional level. Tell them the journey of bringing your brand to life and where you see it heading in the future. This could spark them to become more loyal customers, and that is good for business.
Jason McNary, Brandon Blackwood
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