Whether for-profit or simply for personal fulfillment, individuals now have a lot of tools at their disposal to create a personal brand that engages their target audience and reaches their goals. Here are some tips and pointers for creating a successful personal platform.
Know your whys.
First, you need to know why you’re creating a personal brand or platform. At its core, having a platform is simply about sharing knowledge and information that you know. Much like writing a business plan, you need to be able to answer a few questions:
- Am I building a personal brand for profit or personal fulfillment? What are the goals and objectives of this endeavor?
- If I’m doing this simply for personal fulfillment, do I have something new to say? What can I offer to the world that other people haven’t yet? If what I’m offering is already being provided for by others in the digital sphere, can I do it better than them?
- Is this project something I can sustain even when it gets hard or when I don’t reach my goals?
Knowing the purpose of a project is crucial to its success. So it’s important to determine why you want to put yourself out there and do the proper market research and competitive analysis to see how you can set yourself apart from similar bloggers or personalities.
Develop a list of goals and objectives.
Developing a personal brand is not much different from creating a brand identity and marketing strategy for a business. List down a carefully-crafted list of goals that are S.M.A.R.T, which means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Having smart goals is important because they dictate your direction and purpose, they help you measure your progress, and they allow space for analysis and room for improvement. Here is a sample list of objectives that you can replicate:
- Increase social media engagement by X% every month for the first X months
- Gain X number of followers for the first X months
- Gain X number of views on the website for the first month
Your goals and objectives must come from a place of being realistic, lest you set goals that are too high, and you end up setting yourself up for failure.
Leverage your uniqueness and personality.
If you’ve done your competitive marketing analysis, then you more or less already have an idea about the personalities you will have to “compete” with, those with similar branding or objectives. Regardless of how many people you have a similar branding with, you still have a lot of characteristics that can set you apart from them. You can foster a connection with your audience by harnessing your unique personality; for example, if you’re extroverted and bubbly, you can harness this to engage your audience. Make a list of your positive and unique personality traits and think of ways to amplify them using your content. Then you can use these characteristics to develop a brand identity (your brand or website name, logo, colors, and other design elements).
Create a website.
One of the key elements of creating a successful personal brand is building a complete and well–designed website. It should be the one-stop-shop for your audience, which means it must have everything there is to know about you—what you and your brand are about, how they can reach you, your main content, all the links to your social media accounts, and others. If they know nothing about you, your website must be able to convey to them who you are and what you’re about with just a few clicks, which is shows just how paramount it is to have an excellent website that can give your target demographic a deep dive into who you are and what your business is about.
Curate your social media presence.
Your social presence is also a key ingredient to you the growth of your personal brand. Here are some tips for a well-curated online presence:
- Make content that has value. Make sure that everything you post has a purpose and is in line with your personal brand identity.
- Know your boundaries. Building a personal brand means you put yourself out there for people to either build you up or criticize you, and you can choose to keep your family off-limits by not posting about them.
- Choosing what to share doesn’t mean you’re inauthentic; it just means there are things you would rather keep private in your personal life.
Having a personal brand can lend credibility to your business and provide self-fulfillment and self-confidence as nothing can. So open yourself up to the opportunity and use the chance to do good for others.
Meta Title: How Can You Create a Successful Personal Platform?
Meta Description: To create a personal platform, take certain steps to reach your goals. Here’s how to create it that engages your target audience and hits your objectives.
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