Author: Suzan Bond / Source: Fast Company Whether you work for yourself full-time or have a side hustle, having a personal brand is unavoi
Whether you work for yourself full-time or have a side hustle, having a personal brand is unavoidable. But while there are more self-promotion tools than ever, actually gaining an audience can still be pretty hard. Everyone has a brand message they’re trying to get across.
Feeling lost in a sea of advertisements can drive you to use personal branding tactics that backfire, turning off prospects before you even speak with them–without even realizing it. These are four common personal branding mistakes that lots of people unknowingly fall into, and what to do instead.
You know it’s important to build relationships rather than to just collect “likes” and followers. When you need to bring in new business to pay your rent, you amp up your self-promotion efforts. Feeling overwhelmed, you inadvertently shift your social media streams to “write only”–sharing only your own work rather than others’.
Under pressure, you don’t realize that your personality-based brand looks more self-centered than enticing. Ironically, your efforts to boost your branding have the opposite effect, turning off fans who might become customers.
What to do instead. Being less ego-driven and more impact-driven will make you more likely to meet those revenue goals in times of feast and famine alike. Focus on engagement instead of simple, more overt measurements like your follower count. Make your self-promotion efforts about your audience’s dreams, goals, and ambitions, Show that you understand the obstacles standing in their way. When people achieve their goals with your help, they’ll tell their colleagues and friends to hire you, too–leading to a steady business pipeline.
You already know that having a large following can back up your credibility as an expert, and you’re open to any savvy shortcuts to building your reputation faster, which is fine. But while you avoid obvious no-nos like buying followers from a shady site, it’s sometimes easy to forget that any quid pro quo tactic is likely to backfire. That includes striking follow-for-follow agreements, for instance.
Artificial boosters like these leave you with a large but unengaged audience, so chances are you’ll still fall short of your goals that way. Plus, people start to catch on pretty quickly when you haven’t built your following organically, which undercuts any credibility you might’ve hoped to build.
What to do instead. Sometimes you do need hacks to cut through the noise, but these aren’t the…
COMMENTS