I hate to tell you this, I really do. The truth is that most people don’t give a hoot about your personal brand. They don’t care how great you are at what you do. They don’t care that you are the perfect solution to their problem.
They don’t care about how many impressive clients you’ve had or what wildly successful projects you’ve led. And unless they went to the same college as you, they don’t really care about that either.
Obviously, this is a problem if you’re trying to get your brand out there. You’re focused on telling the world about everything you can do and why you’re the best person to do it. You want people to come by your website and spend time learning all about you.
Shine the spotlight
After all, personal branding is all about shining the spotlight on yourself, right?
Sure. If you want people to avoid you. No one wants to hang-out with the braggart who is only interested in their own life!
If you want your personal branding to actually be effective, it shouldn’t be about you at all.
Instead, your personal branding should be all about someone else. Yes, I actually wrote that. And I’ll repeat it, just so you know it’s not a typo:
When you’re branding yourself, you need to stop writing about yourself and focus totally on your potential customer or employer.
Why in the world do you want to do this? Isn’t focusing on someone else the exact opposite of personal branding?
Not at all. In fact, it’s the only way to get your brand heard. People are really busy right now. They’re worrying about their own jobs and trying to get more done with less. They’re buried in work and barely have time to focus on what they need to get done.
Your potential employer or customer doesn’t have time to listen to you babble on about yourself in hopes they might hear something useful. Instead, they want to know what’s in this conversation for them. If you don’t make that clear right away, they’ll leave your website or tune out from your conversation. They’re too busy to do anything else.
So how do you know if you’re focused on yourself or your target market? Take a look at your website and blog. Do you speak in the first person a lot? Does your website say “I do this…” or “I’m great at that…”? Is it all an About page?
Or do you talk about the issues and problems facing your potential customer/employer and focus on solutions? Are your examples all about the steps you took, or are they about the results that happened because of your work?
What are they thinking about?
When you come up with your personal branding strategy, are you asking yourself:
- What is my potential customer/employer thinking about?
- What is their day like?
- What issues are they facing?
And the most important question of all: What can I do to make their life/work easier?”
If you’re doing that already, you’re on the right track. If you’re not, you might be turning off the very people you want to reach.
Once you’ve answered the questions above, you should focus your entire personal branding strategy around that final question. Everything you write should be focused on helping your potential customer/employer and showing them that you understand the problems they are facing and know how to solve them.
Your goal should be to leverage your personal brand so that when someone from your target market visits your site, they think “Wow, this person really understands me and can make my life easier.”
If you can do that, you’ve hooked them. Then, once they’re hooked, you can tell them all about you.
But, in order to get their attention, it needs to be about them first. That’s why a successful personal brand is one that’s all about someone else.
Author:
Katie Konrath writes about creativity, innovation and “ideas so fresh… they should be slapped!” at www.getFreshMinds.com.
