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Game time: 20-60 minutes, depending on the depth of your answers.
Definition:
Personal Brand is your Online reputation.
It answers the question What are you known for.
On a human level, personal brand makes a lot of sense if you want to build a successful business for yourself. People trust people they know. If your face is familiar and friendly, clients pick you before any faceless competitor.
Designing a personal brand can be a fun game, where you get to play without limits. You get to pick whatever you want, and only after adjust the character to fit you more realistically.
For a primer, what characters and role models inspire you? They can be fictitious or real. What makes them so special? Think about that for second and let’s start playing.
There are 9 steps, covering different areas of building a brand and a business that you can claim for yourself. Think of it like claiming a gold mine, because your mental framing dictates how powerful your character will be.
Let’s take a first look on the list.
Take a blank paper or open your favorite notes app to jot down your ideas during the game.
Now, let’s open the 3 parts and start building your ideal personal brand.
What role do you enjoy playing?
On the top level, there are 3 categories you can choose from:
Are you a teacher, an entertainer or a motivational speaker?
Every personal brand is a mix of the three, but each have more weight on one role.
Choose one, and now you can imagine any type of role that fits you. Go wild and make it interesting. A boring personal brand gets you nowhere.
Take some Peter Pan spice to your imagination and forget critical thinking for a moment.
If you want to be a pirate, be a pirate. If you want to appeal to serious men with suits, wear serious suits and act accordingly.
Life is a theatre and everyone is playing role, whether they realize it or not. – Jay Abraham
– Visualize you character, the look, the style, the energy. Draw or write down what comes to mind.
This part is essential, and has to be based on your abilities. Everyone is uniquely talented, everyone has a set of skills, and everyone can improve their current abilities. If you study and practice, you can only become better.
Now, write down in your notes the things you like to do, and things you are good at.
Some people are socially gifted, others are technical and analytic, while others are artistic and spiritual. Some are explorers, builders or healers. Some are soldiers, magicians or philosophers.
There are literally thousands of skills and topics people are potentially interested in.
The best thing about this is that you get to do things you really like for a living. Not only, but hey, it beats the dreaded 9-5 cubicle doing something you dislike.
Once you have a handful of things on the paper, draw lines between things that belong to the same category, and name the categories. For example, if you like sketching, editing photos and drawing, they all go under the category ’Graphics’.
Find at least one main category that you really like to do, and write down at least 3 of your essential skills in that domain.
The best way to find your audience is to look behind you.
Who were you 2 or 5 years ago?
What kind of advice would have been very useful for you back then?
You don’t have to be a Picasso, Franklin or Curie to be useful for others. It’s enough that you are one or two steps ahead to teach and give value to others.
If you are an Apprentice, teach basics. If you are a Journeyman, teach Apprentices, and if you are a Master, teach Journeymen.
Go for your target audience, don’t try to impress sponsors or affiliates. When your audience gets big enough, the sponsors and affiliates will find you.
It’s not exclusive, and guess-work at best, but write down the age range, the gender, the location and main interests of your target audience to give you a idea who you are serving.
Now we have the first piece of the puzzle ready. Next we are going to outline the business-side of your brand.
In this part, write down some bullets how you want to interact with your clients or patrons, and what are the main tools to provide the value to your clients.
For example, if you are a dog trainer, you can communicate with your clients via email, and Facebook group and organize live workshops and events in Facebook. You can utilize Google Calendar and YouTube.
You can have training material online in written form, shared via Google docs or Dropbox. You can have a blog on your website. You can have templates, certificates and contracts collected into a single Google Drive folder.
If you are a software engineer or anything else, write down the tools and communication methods you use for your work with your clients.
Just having a familiar face is not enough to entice people to do business with you.
You also need to have a great deal, where the value exceeds the price.
Your social status gives you extra points to the value of your services and products. Personal Branding is boosting that social status.
New clients will not take a high risk, and you shouldn’t spend too much time doing something on a discount.
One idea to get new clients is to offer them something of value for a low price, that you have spent time on only once. For example, a video course for 5 dollars.
Then you can upsell more of your services and products once they become your clients.
This is mainly to tickle your mind into thinking about the options, and feel free to write down any ideas that comes to mind about your offer.
Anyone who works by themselves or with a small team know really well that there’s never enough time to do everything you want.
For that reason, what kind of an automation can you build to put clients on a conveyer belt and move through your factory to serve them without you personally holding their hand on every step?
For example, automation could be an automated email sequence when clients opt-in. Automation can also be a virtual assistant that sorts your email and takes your calls.
The best way to have clarity about your business, is to draw one graph that covers the whole system; call it a sales process, or a funnel, you need to create one. But not right now, this is just to give you an idea.
Now we have two pieces set in place. One to go. The last part is your social media strategy, so let’s jump right in.
Where do you want to show your face? Where does your audience spend time?
My favorite social medias are YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. For the moment, I barely use TikTok or LinkedIn. I don’t get on Twitter at all. For me, the most important platform is YouTube.
Do a similar recount, and choose your social medias which fit your avatar, your style and has the audience you want to find. For some that is TikTok, for others Twitch, and for a more professional approach, LinkedIn. Pick yours.
Pick your main social media platform and stick to it. Share your content on other platforms, but focus on one.
Now you know where you publish your content. But what content?
Going back to the main category of picking your 3 essential skills, synthesize that list to 3 main topics you want to talk about, and what people in your audience would find useful and interesting.
Focus on creating content around those 3 topics. When you run out of ideas, go back to them, and stick to them. They will be your base, your foundation and your strength. Choose them wisely.
Every success is a result of learned habits. Building a successful personal brand is not a one-shot trick.
It is repetition, reiteration and reliability. You need to show up regularly to earn trust.
Many fail because they disappear after a good start.
For you to succeed, dedicate one hour, two hours or whatever time you can spend every day to build your brand in a consistent, strategic manner, to reap the amazing benefits.
As the last step of picking your Winning Personal Brand, pick a slot of your daily timetable, and engrave Personal Branding to it.
You are responsible of your own success, so defend your time dedicated for your independence.
How to spend that time? First, I suggest finishing writing this list, and outlining your first steps in building your brand.
Then, you can start focusing on creating any type of content and publishing it, preferably every day. Be it written, audio, video, photos or drawings, get into the habit of publishing and putting yourself out there.
Critics are sitting on the bench, heroes are on the arena.
Every success is a result of learned habits. Building a successful personal brand is not a one-shot trick.
It is repetition, reiteration and reliability. You need to show up regularly to earn trust.
Many fail because they disappear after a good start.
For you to succeed, dedicate one hour, two hours or whatever time you can spend every day to build your brand in a consistent, strategic manner, to reap the amazing benefits.
As the last step of picking your Winning Personal Brand, pick a slot of your daily timetable, and engrave Personal Branding to it.
You are responsible of your own success, so defend your time dedicated for your independence.
How to spend that time? First, I suggest finishing writing this list, and outlining your first steps in building your brand.
Then, you can start focusing on creating any type of content and publishing it, preferably every day. Be it written, audio, video, photos or drawings, get into the habit of publishing and putting yourself out there.
Critics are sitting on the bench, heroes are on the arena.
Now you should have ideas about 9 things in your notes that give you an outline what your personal brand could look like.
If it is over the top, bring it down a notch, and if it falls flat, give it more freedom of expression. Your future self-image is your decision.
Every personal brand started from a simple idea, so yours is as valuable gem as any. Protect it, build it, and watch it grow.
Share this with anyone you think would benefit from this game. Thank you.
