Building a personal brand is one of many milestones in a public entrepreneur’s journey. It’s more than merely an elevator pitch, a social media profile bio, or a résumé. It’s about taking responsibility for who you are, what you stand for, the values you embrace, and how you express them as you build a trusting foundation of influence with a target audience.
Like a company’s branding helps communicate its values to its target audience, personal branding helps communicate a unique identity to potential employers or clients. By showcasing their unique character traits and an active online presence, entrepreneurs can build a personal brand that resonates with people worldwide. Consequently, this will help target new potential business opportunities and improve brand recognition among the target audience.
We understand that building a personal brand can be challenging. This article reveals 5 personal branding tips that’ll help entrepreneurs build a brand to elevate their business.
Tips to Build a Powerful Personal Brand
1. Design a Narrative
It’s essential to share your story and the values you’ve developed through your experiences. An entrepreneur’s career transition and growth are of particular interest to your audience as they explain the reasoning behind pursuing entrepreneurship. Don’t underestimate people’s intelligence. They’ll eventually figure out if you’re faking it. So, it’s important to be confident and authentic so that you’re genuinely involved in the process of building a relationship with them.
2. Be Consistent
As multiple companies work hard to garner attention, the market is very competitive. Building a community doesn’t happen overnight, which is why it’s so important to stay consistent, authentic, and persistent with your engagements and posts.
3. Engage With Your Audience
Once you’ve learned the type of content that resonates with your audience, the next step would be to create a “values”-driven social media presence. Share with them content that will enhance their lives and encourage them to have a conversation with you. Some ideas include incentivizing them with rewards and visibility, enabling them to share their opinion, and asking for feedback. Asking for input and feedback, in particular, brings in a sense of importance.
4. Treat Your Followers Like Family
Having a relationship of trust with your followers is key to longevity. The more your followers trust you, the more likely they are to become your lifelong buyers. It’s also likely that they’ll share their excitement with their own networks as brand evangelists. Let them get to know you. Don’t hesitate to share some details of your personal life, what you’re working on, and address any concerns they may have.
5. Don’t Be Afraid To Be Disliked
Your personal brand is more than just an online persona. A large part of it depends on how people around you perceive you. Real leadership comes from how you act, behave and interact with people around you. If you’re genuine about your values, not everyone is going to connect with those values. Some may even be repelled by them. But as that happens, know that you’re simultaneously gaining respect from the people who align with them.
The story you share online combined with those daily interactions, ultimately defines your personal brand.
Learn From How Mike Norton Is Building His Personal Brand
Mike Norton is one of the most inspiring entrepreneurs in modern day. He is the CEO of a defense technology engineering firm called Wolven Industries.
Mike had countless dreams of futuristic designs from a very young age. However, before transforming his vision into reality, Mike’s personal transformation was required. He had to overcome a series of painful and personal struggles, including homelessness, physical abuse, undetected tumors in his skull, and hospitalization for malnourishment. His trials led him to go on a psychological war with himself.
Though Mike is an introvert, he is known to stream-of-consciousness write on his social media pages. He writes self-reflecting posts in narrative formats that are genuine streams-of-consciousness semi-rants. Readers follow a continuing true story as he accomplishes life goals and what he learns throughout the entire journey to benefit those around him. His content focuses on family, business, politics, philosophy, and topics related to self-actualization. His posts are natural and published as they come to mind.
As a result of many years of journaling, Mike’s followers have witnessed impressive personal and professional growth from learning by his example, and look forward to reading about his current and future ventures. The connection that Mike has made with his audience has won him more than 35,000 followers, 50 early adopters and 4 potential investors even before the release of his first product, and the numbers are only going up.
Mike’s story and personal brand has truly propelled his business. In fact, Wolven Industries’ mission is inspired by Mike’s past:
‘We exist to develop technology that helps to protect, repair, and prepare our civilization from modern threats both large and small.’
Wolven Industries: A Dream Come True
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Mike saw the global problem as a golden opportunity to turn his dream into reality by developing products to help people prevent infection.
Mike decided to launch his first venture in the form of a UV-C cleanser that’s up to 30x more potent than his competitors’ products. The team is developing a handheld, battery-powered, LED-based UV-C disinfecting device, called the uRay, that’s designed and built for both advanced efficacy, safety, and intuitive ease of use. And unlike the ones in the market, uRay uses the right wavelength to kill up to 99.99% of pathogens within seconds.
With the opportunity came funding and distance obstacles. However, Mike reacted in an antifragile way to overcome them successfully. He built a remote team using communication and task management tools, and worked as a marketing strategist remotely to generate initial funding of $200,000. With the help of his mentors, tutors, and a Fusion 360 subscription, Mike taught himself both mechanical and electrical engineering. All of this he has shared openly on his social media channels.
Due to Mike’s pure dedication, hard work, and passion, his dream is now slowly turning into reality. Wolven Industries is at the final product development and testing stages and ready to take pre-orders soon!
Mike is a living example of how to turn a bad situation into a successful one. The psychology of self-mastery and the way in which he inspires people around him is something for everyone to learn from.
You can follow Mike on Facebook, and you can learn more about the uRay here.
