Personal branding can be super difficult. However, in today’s world, it’s a skill you need to have if you expect your business to succeed and turn over a profit. Your brand makes or breaks your business. Below are the 10 personal branding mistakes that you will want to avoid in 2021
1. Not asking the uncomfortable questions first.
If you want to build a personal brand right, then you need to sit with yourself and ask the difficult questions. Too many people skip this process. If you don’t take the time to figure out what makes you a “you” then chances are your audience won’t know either and your personal branding will come off as unrelatable and fake.
2. Thinking you don’t need a personal brand
The cold, hard truth is that you are brand. If I or anyone else asks someone to give me their opinion on you, what those people honestly think and say about you is your personal brand. By utilising it and taking control of it online, you control the narrative about yourself and your business.
3. Forgetting your story
People love stories. They want to know yours. They want to know why you made your business, about all of your struggles and triumphs. Your story makes you unique and relatable and those are invaluable for building your building your personal brand. If you forget your story, your audience will lose interest and eventually they will forget about you and your business.
4. Lack of a consistent message
Your brand needs to stand out from the crowd, because there are many businesses doing the same thing as you. You need to cut through all that excess noise and be heard. This gets a lot harder when what you are saying is unclear and unfocused. The key is all about maintaining a consistent brand message. You don’t need to be heard by everyone, just the ones that care about what your message is so focus on your audience and remaining consistent.
5. Ignoring influencers
You created some great content and posted it. If you are expecting people to find and come to you, you might be waiting a very long time, maybe even forever. You need to actively promote your content and a great way to do this is by collaborating with an influencer. Influencers have a large audience, and if their audience has a crossover with yours then you can piggyback off their success and create some success of your own.
6. Not planning your personal brand
You can’t just wing it when it come to creating your personal brand. You must sit down and develop a plan to promote yourself and your business, including your personal brand message and the quality content you want and need to produce.
7. Posting but not engaging with your target audience
Creating your personal brand is all about establishing an ongoing relationship with them. Just posting content is not how you build engagement with your audience. Reply to comments, share your opinions, agree or disagree on what is being said. The more you engage the more you will build a good rapport with your target audience.
8. Worrying about the opinions of others
Your brand is about you. You are marketing yourself to a specific group of people that are hopefully, if you have understood the needs of your audience correctly, primed to hear and receive your message positively. So, worrying over what other people will ‘think’ is unnecessary. You are creating your online family and they will have your back.
9. Not having a personal website
If you do not have a personal website, then you need to make one. People need to be able to find you and research what you do and just having an email address is not going to cut it. This applies to people who are working for someone else, as opposed to self-employed. You can use website builders like WordPress or Weebly to help.
10. Spreading yourself too thin across too many different platforms
Your target audience does not need to be everyone on every social media platform. That is too much content posting to be creating and managing. You will drive yourself insane. Instead, figure out which platform or platforms your target audience ingests your content and focus only on creating content for those specific platforms.
These are the ten biggest personal branding mistakes to avoid making.
About contributor Emily Henry
Emily Henry is a writer at Dissertation Services and Academized. Emily writes on many subjects, including personal branding. She also tutors at Masters writing service.
