Build a Personal Brand

What exactly is a personal brand?

It is a conscious and intentional effort to position yourself as an authority in your industry to ultimately leverage that knowledge and experience into opportunities with longlasting impact.

Why build a personal brand?

The way we share, network, and build an audience around the work we do today is in constant flux. The instantaneous culture and quick turnover rate of social media ensure that. But what if there was a way to ensure longevity? To build something whose rewards will not be reaped instantly in likes and comments but in the form of devoted subscribers in the years to come? That sounds like something worth investing in.

For most of us, the process of sharing with our audience usually involves curating and disseminating unique and shareable content across a variety of social media platforms. While a proven method, it’s evident that most of us have lost sight of the true purpose of social platforms: amplification (not of the singular work that is being shared at any given moment but of the ever-evolving material that is showcased on the hub that is our website or home-base). To serve as a reminder then, we’ve put together a few perks that come with building a personal brand.

Perk 1. Play The Long Game

If you want to be around and relevant decades from now, then your behavior today must reflect the vision you have for the future. If you’ve read this previous article, Map The Next Decade of Your Life, then you’re probably already aware of how setting big goals directly influences the small actions that you take to accomplish them.

I’ll break the fourth wall here to give a personal example of how my goals influenced the small actions I’m taking:

Long before I consciously realized it, I was passionate about mentoring and teaching. I spent 4 years in college mentoring middle- and high-school students, some years after that as a private tutor, and a few years after that creating workshops and curriculum for people with disabilities who were eager to learn. These were simply jobs I could afford to get at the time. But surely, there was a common thread that was hard to miss but I failed to acknowledge. With some time to reevaluate my interests, I discovered my daring vision to finally curate a digital learning experience for emerging creatives; it was clear that teaching would be integral to my work and I would have to fully embrace it. With this decision, I knew I would have to accelerate my education in a number of areas, connect and collaborate with leading creatives across a wide variety of fields, and build a digital platform that curates both free and cost-based learning opportunities. These were the beginnings of the small actions I would have to take to eventually accomplish the goal I’d set for myself. If I am going to be around and relevant decades from now, I knew I had to reevaluate how I was distributing my time, energy, and resources. Social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter help to garner short-span attention, but chances are: they are platforms that may very well have a short shelf life. This point has been reiterated by the likes of Eric Kim, Daniel Milnor, and other succesful entrepreneurs. Developing the first iteration of what I believe this learning platform could grow into was a first step in the direction toward a viable lifestyle.

Of course, this is not a total condemnation of the usage of social media. Instead, it is a reminder to have its usage serve a purpose that goes beyond the platforms. What is it helping you build? How is it ensuring that you still have a seat at the table years after the platforms are no longer relevant? Something to think about.

Perk 2. Own Your Own Platform

What happens when you incentivize the people who care about what you do to find your latest works and the content they find valuable on your own unique platform or website instead of third-party apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc.? What you get is a deeper connection and buy-in from your audience. These are people who have either randomly searched and discovered you for the type of content you are sharing or have specifically sought you out because they already know what to expect from you. To own your platform then is to build a treasure trove of relevant ideas, information, and an ongoing catalog that continues to foster meaningful interaction with visitors and provide loads of valuable material to inspire, entertain, and/or solve a problem that a specific group of people needs answers to. This “platform” is not necessarily limited to a website. It could very well be a platform that is most suitable for the type of art you are making (i.e. Youtube, if your niche is making video-based content). The idea here is that whatever platform you choose as the primary home-base for what you are creating, the goal should be to dominate and saturate that segment. This ensures that your success is dependent on your ability to produce high-quality content that is relevant and evergreen, not on algorithms or pay-to-play schemes. As fellow creator and filmmaker Matt D’Avella puts it, “Be so good that you don’t even have to think about algorithms.”

Perk 3. Become an Authority

When you own your own platform, it means you are dedicated to curating an ever-evolving catalog of relevant content and/or information. The more you create and curate, the more likely you are to become an authority in your niche. As a result, people gradually look to you first for new content and relevant information in your particular field. This makes you an authority, and with that comes enormous leverage.

Youtuber, photographer, and filmmaker Peter McKinnon became an “overnight” authority on Youtube for all things related to photography and filmmaking. Of course, that was the result of consistent work-ethic and building an enormous library of youtube videos that solved the problems of emerging photographers and filmmakers.

The same is true for international photographer Eric Kim, who has spent the past decade building a website filled with all of the resources any (street) photographer could ever need to become proficient. From thousands of blog posts and video content, on photography and philosophy to well-researched & curated PDF files and books, Kim has managed to create his own platform and become an authority on all things street photography. He was even ranked #1 in Google search rankings for street photography for a number of years.

Perk 4. Find and Lead Your Tribe

Lastly, one of the most important perks of building a personal brand is to find your tribe — the likeminded folks, the people who care the most about what you do and what you have to say. As it’s often said, “if you build it, they will come.” They are your tribe, and in that tribe is a sense of community and belonging.

People are always in search of leaders who have taken the initiative to create solutions to some of the biggest problems that they have. This creates a unique opportunity for you to fill in a gap that is missing and to come out on the other end as an authority, a leader worth following. I often say that people need people, and if you take the time to create a personal brand around the work you do, you might be the next person that people look to for direction.

Want to hear more about building a personal brand? Listen to our podcast episode with photographer and entrepreneur Eric Kim here.