Avoid This Common Pitfall While Marketing Your Personal Brand

For many, the terms “personal brand” and “small business” are one and the same. Once you declare yourself and subsequently, your skills and more, a brand or entity, a lot of the advice typically offered to traditional business owners can be used to your advantage. To that same point, personal brands aren’t exactly rare- the influencer space is saturated. Yes, there’s only one you, but it wouldn’t hurt to utilize some easy expert advice for standing out, even when it feels as though you’re making zero progress. That being said, commit former BlogHer speaker, global marketing expert and Forbes writer Christine Michel Carter’s tips to memory.

Audience > Competition

Challenge the status quo, and market yourself based on the emotions and insights of your target audience, not how your peers and competitors are currently marketing themselves. Don’t be afraid to pay attention to marketing outside of your industry and refine it for your audience.

Remember Your Worth, No Matter Your Follower Count

Leverage relationships you may have with bigger brands and look for ways to cross-promote or co-brand. Don’t worry about being the junior person in the relationship; even the bigger brand has something they need to leverage from you. It’s your job to figure out what that is.

Fail Your Best

If at first you don’t succeed, fail again. Then fail again. Don’t be afraid to take risks when marketing yourself as a brand. Personal brands have a unique advantage in that failure, change and growth are appreciated. Who wants to engage with a perfect person after all?

Be Specific

The most common pitfall I see made when building a personal brand is a lack of strategy, a clear definition of where the woman wants her personal brand to be in 1, 5, or even 10 years. All too often women get stuck in the general statement, “I want to build my brand,” and allow themselves to get consumed by the variety of tactics they can execute to actually do so.

Record Your Wins (and Losses)

METRICS. DATA. INSIGHTS! Content creators should be tracking their analytics regularly. There are so many cloud-based tools and resources available now for the everyday person to become their own data analyst, there’s no excuse not to know the when, where, who, and what about your audience.  Regularly tracking this helps you refine content, notice patterns, get inside the mind of your audience, and thus… develop insights. Insights are your audience’s why, and when brands tap into the why… they always stand out and break through the clutter.

Get more game-changing advice at BlogHer Biz, a monthlong series of virtual (and free!) workshops that will prepare you for the big leagues, whether you’re a newbie small business owner, a blogger hoping to get more website traffic, or an influencer who wants to master their elevator pitch. In other words, we’re celebrating National Women’s Small Business Month all month long. Learn more here.