How Personal Branding Can Help You Grow Your Business in 2019

What do the likes of Tony Robbins, Arianna Huffington, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Grant Cardone have in common? If you’ve heard of any of these four business owners, you’ll know that they focus on their personal branding.

Personal branding means using your reputation to attract more customers. It means forgoing the sale for now and focusing on leveraging aspects of your personality to build proper, lasting relationships.

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The good news is that it doesn’t matter if you lack the natural charisma, swag or charm of a Gary Vaynerchuk. When it comes to personal branding, everything can be taught, learned and implemented.

In this article, we take a look at how to create the kind of personal branding that makes people feel SO good about you that your business grows and grows.

Have the Right Intentions

If you go into this with all the wrong intentions, you will ultimately lose.

In 2019 and beyond, more and more of your customers are looking for honesty and transparency from you. In fact, it’s something they’ve now come to expect. And now that social media is dominating our lives, anything you say on there will either be a blessing or a curse.

If your intentions are all wrong, social will be a curse.

Having good intentions means going into this with the right values. These right values should include goodwill, generosity, honesty, transparency, and a genuine desire to help people. As long as you keep these values in mind at all times, your message will resonate with the right people, and your relationships will flourish.

If, on the other hand, your intentions are bad and all you care about is your next sale, you will soon be exposed.

Provide As Much Value As Possible

As well as having values, you need to provide value to your community.

The likes of Grant Cardone are pumping out an insane amount of daily content. A quick cursory check of his YouTube profile shows us that he’s uploaded a ton of content in the last few days alone.

Source: YouTube

And it’s all free.

Notice also that a lot of the content isn’t directly related to what he’s selling. Instead, he’s producing content that’s designed to educate and inform people, and foster strong relationships with his audience.

In essence, Grant Cardone is treating his personal branding as a media company. As well as YouTube, he’s also producing a pile of content for his Facebook page and his website. He’s providing value to his community, and in exchange he’s winning fans and making people feel good about him.

They feel so good about him that many of his more devoted fans lovingly refer to him as ‘Uncle G.’ That’s the kind of personal branding that works.

Be Unique

One of the biggest challenges of personal branding is standing out from the crowd. Gary Vaynerchuk isn’t the only entrepreneur who owns a media company and who tries to motivate and inspire others. But he stands out because his voice, message and branding is as unique as his angle.

It’s important that you find a way of distinguishing yourself from the crowd, otherwise you won’t have a personal brand. What is YOUR core message and theme? What aspect of your personality makes you different to anyone else?

Remember, there will always be people who try to copy you, but no one can be you. Leverage what makes you unique — it could be your wicked sense of humour, your style of writing engaging copy etc — and run with it.

Another way to help you stand out from the crowd is to show different sides of your personality. If you’re a fitness guru who focuses 100% on one aspect of your personality, you will be just like all the other fitness gurus out there.

Engage with People on Social Media

You’ll be amazed at what taking the time to respond to comments on social media can do to your profile. Your fans love the thought that you’ve taken the time out of your day to engage with them. It shows them that you care and appreciate them. It also shows that you’re listening and will help to refine your reputation.

It doesn't take long. Just put some time aside each week to respond to comments across your social media platforms, make sure to provide value feedback, by making your social media interactions useful.

Look for Guest Blogging Opportunities

Guest blogging can be a great way to raise awareness of your personal brand in 2019. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s when you pitch an article idea to a high domain, authoritative blog in your niche. Upon acceptance, you write your article, before it’s published to the website.

The rewards can be huge. By publishing content to high-traffic websites in your niche, you’re positioning yourself as the expert. You’re putting your brand in front of new faces and building your brand.

Naturally, guest blogging takes a lot of time and effort.

You’ll need to use an SEO tool to find relevant blogs in your niche, and you’ll need to put together a small team that includes someone to pitch article ideas and someone to write them. You can also delegate the process to the companies providing content writing services. Meanwhile, you can use tools like BuzzSumo or implement social listening techniques to generate content ideas.

Recommended: 4 Ways to Find Best Sites for Guest Blogging

Double Down on Email Marketing

The thing with personal branding is that you need to have a dominant mindset. You need to be everywhere — and this includes inboxes.

Email marketing will continue to be a powerful weapon for brands in 2019. Use it to stay in touch with your subscribers, and send out regular emails. Mix up your content — hit people with educational, informative and entertaining content, as well as your sales emails.

Remember, everyone has an email address. If you can bring all your customers together in one place, you can then work on using your personal brand to build your business with personalised content that hits the spot. To this end, segment your list so that you target specific audience segments with the right content.

Recommended: 7 Email Marketing Trends to Start Implementing Right Now

Conclusion

Personal branding can be the difference between a prospect remaining a prospect or turning into a loyal, long-term fan of yours. Use the tips in this article to boost your reputation and bring as much value and entertainment as possible to keep your customers happy in 2019.