All-Things-Business

How To Start Your Personal Brand

January 22, 2022

Business Strategist Shungunna shares how to start your personal brand with proven strategies from previous experience.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business owner looking to scale your personal brand, reference the bottom of this page for higher level resources. The information shared in this blog post is specific to the basic 101 foundation of starting your personal brand. With that said, it’s practical to review the basics.

This post is all about how to start your personal brand – a simple 7 stage guide for entrepreneurs and business owners.

What you will learn:

Starting your personal brand
Making money from your personal brand
Scaling your personal brand
Picking a social media channel to build your personal brand on
Delivering your product to your customers
Fulfilling your service to your customers
How to improve your business
How to create content
And more…

What is a personal brand?

A personal brand is a representation of who you are and what you stand for.

I believe everyone has something they can represent so everyone can potentially establish a strong personal brand, if they choose to.

If you decide to take the path of building a personal brand, you most likely have a strong message you want to share with the world.

You have a vision others can embrace.

You are a leader who has decided to take the road less traveled.

If this sounds like you, I applaud you for this decision.

Who is a personal brand for?

As mentioned above, everyone has something they can represent so pursuing the path of building a personal brand is for anyone willing to take on the challenge.

From my experience, building a personal brand appeals mainly to entrepreneurs and business owners.

But I have seen all sorts of backgrounds utilize a personal brand to get their message out to the world.

If you’re selling a product or service, have a business you’re actively growing or just simply want to have some fun (because why not), then creating a personal brand is for you.

Why start a personal brand?

Have you asked yourself that question?

“Should I start a personal brand?”

For me, I had the opportunity to learn from a multi-millionaire who built one of the top personality brands in the business world (to this day).

Working with him gave me the experience to start my own personal brand because I had the chance to see how everything started and scaled.

Before that experience, what inspired me to begin this path has always been the desire to have complete freedom and control of my life.

Working a full-time job I’m not passionate about just doesn’t motivate or inspire me at all. When entrepreneurship and business came into my life, it was an opportunity to have a second chance at living life on my own terms.

The best part about this lifestyle is it’s open to anyone who really wants to make it happen!

The 7 Stages of Starting Your Personal Brand

To keep this as simple as possible, here’s a broken down fast-start guide to start your personal brand in just 7 stages. The goal of these 7 stages is to help you start your personal brand today and make it profitable fast.

Note*

This is specifically written for entrepreneurs and business owners who want to start and scale their personal brand.

Stage 1

Choosing your niche.

Because you most likely have a product or service that you offer, you might already have your niche decided based on what you offer to the market.

For example…

If you’re a real estate expert, your offer might be catered specifically for new real estate agents who need advice.

Dentist? Your offer might be catered for targeting new patients.

If you’re accomplished at something, your offer might be catered for people who want to accomplish similar results.

Your niche just depends on the value you have to offer to the market.

Use this simple framework to help you decide what your niche is:

I’m a (insert expertise), I offer (insert product/service) to (ideal customer).

I’m a business strategist, I offer proven strategies to entrepreneurs and business owners who want to start and scale their personal brand.

It’s really that simple.

Stage 2

Creating your content to marketing your business and brand.

How can you let potential customers know you exist?

By creating content that packages what you offer to the market.

Content comes in many forms and it’s ENDLESS.

The only limit is the limits you give yourself.

Content comes in two main forms: Audio or Visual.

Audio – Think audiobooks, podcasts and word of mouth.

Visual – Think pictures, videos and anything you can see with your eyes.

When I say the only limit is the limits you give yourself, I mean it.

What content ideas can you come up with for both audio and visual marketing pieces?

Stage 3

Picking your platform to get noticed.

What social media channel should you build on?

This question is answered with another question.

“What’s your return on investment?

Investment meaning time, energy and resources (money).

Regardless of your choice, there will be opportunity cost so I recommend picking the social media channel(s) that have the most attention + noise at this time.

I operate mostly in long-term thinking so to take it a step further, what’s an evergreen channel that rewards you long-term for your efforts?

Your choice will depend on what you’re willing to do and the strategies you’re willing to run.

Stage 4

Imagine your efforts start getting attention.

You’ve attracted a following of potential customers.

How do you collect payments in return for your product or service?

This is where an online payment processor comes into play.

I personally use a company called Stripe.

There are many companies online so just do a quick google search and you’ll find one.

Once you pick a company to handle your online payments, the next step I recommend is to streamline how you collect payments.

There’s a short-term solution to get set up today and there’s a long-term solution that I personally recommend.

I did the short-term path for 2 years and it worked very well for me. I was able to leave my 9-5 job and never looked back since.

In hindsight, setting up the long-term path would have been much more sustainable and scalable compared to the short-term solution but there’s a learning curve attached.

Short-term path:

Set up an invoice link on your social media channel.
Drive traffic to your offer.
Collect payment via your invoice link.
Deliver or fulfill your offer.

Long-term path:

Set up a sales funnel.
Connect your payment processor to streamline collecting payments.
Add your sales funnel link to your social media channel.
Drive traffic to your offer.
Your sales funnel will sell for you and collect payment on auto-pilot.
Deliver or fulfill your offer.

Regardless of the path you take, you will need to go through a learning curve.

It’s tough to show you the two paths here so, I can show you more of what I’m talking about in the official Personal Branding Program.

Definition: What is a Sales Funnel?

Stage 5

After you get your first sale online, you need to hold up your end of the bargain.

How do you deliver or fulfill what your customer purchased?

This process will depend on what you just sold.

If you’re selling a coaching call, maybe you host a Zoom session.

What about a physical product? You’d pick a proven method to ship the product to your customer.

If you’re offering a digital product, you’d choose the best way to deliver the product to your customer.

This is where seeking expert advise or executing trial and error comes in because this process just depends on what you’re offering to the market.

Stage 6

Now that you’ve successfully made a sale online, how do you scale your business?

There are many ways to scale your business.

Here, I’d like to introduce to you a long-term strategy that never ends (unless you exit).

It’s called feedback analysis.

Getting customer reviews and constantly innovating your offer.

If you do this repeatedly, you can eventually create flag-ship product.

An offer than has a competitive advantage in the market.

Who wouldn’t want that?

This is just one strategy of many that can help scale your business.

Stage 7

Achieve Mastery.

What I mean is rinse and repeat the 7 stages.

Repetition is the mother of all skill.

Because you’ve successfully made a sale online, why not double it?

You’ve done it once, now do it again.

Sooner than later with hard work and constant effort, your brand will dominate online and make an impact in the world.

Just don’t quit.

When should you start your personal brand?

There are two paths to take.

Now or never.

If you’re interested in creating a personal brand but haven’t started yet, why wait?

Now is the perfect time to start simply because of the regret minimization framework.

Besides, above you have a simple path to follow in just 7 stages.

Take a chance on your future self because you can do it.

Just reference back to this blog whenever you need help.

PS. Just keep in mind, this blog post shares the basic 101 foundation of building your personal brand. For higher level information, see the resources below.

Want specific help?

As a Business Strategist, my job and only goal is to help entrepreneurs and business owners get results.

After helping over 300 entrepreneurs get results, I’ve compiled what’s worked into specific digital resources for those who desire to grow their business successfully.

Here’s the list of digital resources for you: