What Is Personal Branding? 5 Tips to Build Yours

Alejandro I. Sanoja shares his top tips on how to understand what is personal branding and how to leverage it.

Are you an entrepreneur or business owner? Want to stand out from the crowd to grow your business? Award-winning Personal Branding Consultant Alejandro I. Sanoja shared the tips you need to know to understand what personal branding is and how to leverage it to grow your business. 

Alejandro I. Sanoja is the founder of Latinpresarios, a leading personal branding agency. He has been named 1 of the 6 Personal Branding Experts to Follow in by the American Reporter, he’s an award-winning MBA, and rumor has it he once had to cross the US-Mexico border on foot at midnight so he definitely understands the level of challenges entrepreneurs and business owners face.

With a fully remote team around the world, Latinpresarios helps entrepreneurs and business owners to stop worrying about where their next client is going to come from. They position their clients as thought leaders to attract leads and opportunities instead of having to chase these. 

Alejandro has 5 tips for entrepreneurs and business owners:

Knowing how to build a personal brand has become one of the most valuable skills in the world we are living in. 

It is an asset that can allow you to achieve professional freedom and help get your career to the next level.

A personal brand is, in essence, your professional reputation. It is the combination of thoughts and feelings that others have about you.

When approached with the right mindset and strategy, a personal brand can help position you as the go-to thought leader in your niche and industry. 

This will make people find you and go to you when they have a problem you can help them solve. 

Here are 5 tips on how you can start building your personal brand.

1. Pick a Niche

Riches are in the niches is a phrase that you’ve likely heard several times. 

If you don’t pick a niche you are missing out on the opportunity to stand out a grow faster. If you stay a generalist in your industry you will be “another one”. 

Picking a niche is difficult because it feels that doing so will mean missing out on opportunities. Yet, it will likely help you attract more clients. 

A generalized message will not create strong emotion and won’t lead people to action. A message that feels personalized to your ideal client will help create a connection and build trust. 

You can niche down on different variables. It can be a particular type of client, an industry vertical, a particular service, or even a particular outcome. 

I always use the example of a personal trainer. If you say you help people be healthy, that’s too general. Focus on something in particular. Do you help people lose weight? Build muscle? Increase athletic performance? Be an active dad?

As you can see, there are many ways in which you can identify and pick a niche. 

2. Professionalize Your Digital Presence

There’s nothing worse than getting people interested in learning more about you and your services and losing them after they visit your website or social media profiles. 

You don’t need to spend all your money on branding and digital assets. But make sure that you at least have a professional digital presence. 

Most of the biggest mistakes people make are:

1. Unprofessional profile photos
2. No profile banners
3. Unclear message
4. Low to no activity in the past months

Again, you don’t need to spend $10,000 on a photoshoot for professional headshots. But make sure that you at least use your phone in “portrait mode” and take a foto with a professional background. 

Also, make sure to use the same photo on all your profiles.

Same with the profile banner. That’s prime digital real estate. Make sure to use it to stand out and capture attention. 

Ideally, the banner and your profile should have some version of your personal branding statement. 

And at least share something once a week. So that your profile doesn’t feel abandoned. We’ll go over how to simplify this in the next point. 

3. Create a Content Pillar

Having a content pillar is a hack. It will allow you to minimize the time your spend on creating content. 

This could be as simple as having a podcast or a blog on a particular topic in your niche. This will allow you to focus and not have to think much about “what to talk about”. 

You pick a topic and then cover all the potential questions an ideal client might have about it. Anything you typically talk about in discovery meetings, while servicing clients, or on client support calls, all of these topics should be covered within your content pillar. 

These are all topics you are knowledgeable about. You don’t need to think much about what to say. You could even record some of those meetings, transcribe them, and use that as baseline content for your blog. 

And the same goes for podcast interviews. If you sit down for a 30-min interview, you will be able to create video, audio, and text content. 

4. Repurpose and Distribute

Most people don’t maximize their content because they only share it once. 

Let’s say you record that 30-min podcast interview. What most people do is share it and call it a day. 

The right way to do it is to cut that 30-min video into several 3-5 minute segments with the most interesting portions of the podcast. Then you can share those and link to the full conversation. 

You can also transcribe the interview and turn it into a blog. Then, you can share quotes or short insights via text-only posts on social media. You can also create carousel posts. 

With one 30-min video podcast interview, you could create content for a whole month. The key is to make sure you are repurposing and distributing the content in different ways. 

5. Build Your Digital Sales Machine

Nowadays, you can rely on your personal brand as the asset that propels your revenue growth. 

Your content will be out there so that your ideal clients can get to know you, like you, and trust you. 

By following the steps we’ve shared here consistently, you will be able to position yourself as the go-to thought leader in your niche. When people are facing a problem you can help them solve, you will be top of mind and they will come to you. 

To fully leverage the power of your personal brand, you should have content on your website that helps people move through the buying process without human interaction. 

No matter how complicated your services might be, you can still leverage pricing pages and services pages to help people inform themselves before they schedule a call or meeting with you. 

Questions like typical deliverables, timelines, results, potential ROI, and many others that are usually answered in a qualifying call can be answered through your content. This is a trend that you need to ride. 

In the past, people would average about 5 visits to a car dealership when they wanted to buy a car. That number is now 1.5 visits. Even for high-ticket products and services, people want to do the research on their own. Without the bias of a sales person. 

The more unbiased your content is, and the more geared towards answering the typical questions a prospective customer can have, the more you’ll be able to leverage your digital assets and turn them into your digital sales machine. 

The only action you’ll need to take is to have calls with qualified prospects so that you can both determine if it’s a good fit. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can position yourself as the go-to thought leader in your niche visit our website or contact Alejandro I. Sanoja on LinkedIn.