As a solopreneur, you don’t have access to a marketing team, so many generate demand through referrals and their network. Therefore, growing your network is the best strategy for growing your business and generating consistent demand.
This is where personal branding comes into play.
By growing your social media presence and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche, you’ll grow your network and build steady demand for your business.
This post provides a step-by-step guide to personal branding for solopreneurs, along with the tactical information you need to get started today.
What Is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is the process of establishing yourself as an expert on a specific topic and building a network within that niche.
As a solopreneur, having a personal brand will help you build reliable demand for your products or services. A personal brand can also open the door to other opportunities, like speaking at conferences and connecting with other interesting people.
Direct access to your audience also makes it easier for you to understand your audience on a deeper level, which will help you better tailor both your products and services and your content to future prospects.
Step 1: Define Your Offer And Your Target Audience
The topics you create content for depend on your offer and target audience, so defining both is the first step to personal branding for solopreneurs.
While you may think you already know what you offer and who you serve, many solopreneurs struggle to gain traction because they haven’t defined these two things with sufficient specificity .
For example, if you sell SEO services, it’s obvious that you should write about SEO tips.
Yet SEO is a fairly broad topic with many sub-topics.
If you publish tips on keyword research one week and link building the next week, you’re signaling to your audience that you’re a general SEO professional. While there’s nothing wrong with being a generalist, you won’t be able to charge a premium price for your services, and you won’t be the first person who comes to mind when a prospect is looking for a specific solution.
Therefore, clearly defining your offer is usually about labeling what you do not offer.
To clearly define what you want to be an expert in, list all the services you currently offer. Then, define which services you will not offer. Here’s an example:
Once you know what you offer, it’s also important to define who you serve. Ecommerce companies? SaaS companies? Agencies?
If half your content is designed for SaaS companies and half is designed for agencies, that means that half of your content is irrelevant to any follower.
As a result, you’ll find it difficult to build an engaged audience.
So make a list of all your customer segments and then choose just one to target.
After selecting one avatar to deliver one product or service, you’ll find it’s actually much easier to create content.
Now, you might object that most of the experts you follow on social media tend to discuss various topics and even serve various customers.
Eventually, you can branch out to discuss different topics and even share more about your personal interests. However, it’s much easier to gain traction if you establish yourself as an authority on a specific topic for a specific customer and then branch out.
Step 2: Select One Platform
You can leverage plenty of platforms to build an audience, from Twitter and LinkedIn to YouTube and TikTok.
However, you have limited time and resources. Rather than trying to post on mutliple platforms at once, concentrate all your effort and resources on building a single audience on a single platform.
Additionally, each platform has a slightly different algorithm and favors different types of content.
To determine the best platform for you, consider two questions:
- Which content format do you enjoy creating ? If you prefer writing, choose a platform designed for written content, like LinkedIn or Twitter. If you enjoy making videos, choose YouTube.
- Have you seen other people in your niche succeed on that platform ? It’s true that some platforms are better designed for specific niches over others. For example, there might be some people who win SEO customers through TikTok, though it’s much more likely that an SEO professional will win customers through LinkedIn or Twitter.
Once you select a platform, take time to learn the nuances of that platform and its algorithm.
Making simple adjustments, like finding the right hashtags to include, optimizing your hooks for that platform, and even discovering the best times of day to post can significantly improve your overall engagement.
Step 3: Develop Content Frameworks
Consistency is key to building an engaged audience, but most creators quit publishing content because it’s too hard to consistently generate new content ideas .
Content frameworks solve this problem by essentially giving you templates you can fill in rather than starting from scratch each time you sit down to write.
Here are some examples of content frameworks that you can use.
X Lessons From (Experience)
Start by thinking about something you’ve accomplished (that’s relevant to your target audience), and then write a list of lessons you learned accomplishing that task.
Here’s a great example from Jesse Pujji :
Failure Stories/Advice To Your Younger Self
Failure stories earn a lot of engagement because they make you more relatable. Make a list of failures you experienced before succeeding in your niche.
Here’s a great example of failure story examples from Moiz Ali :
Start by making a list of common problems that your audience faces and then create a list of stories where you encountered that same problem, struggled, and eventually overcame it. You can make the post itself either a story about how you overcame that obstacle or lessons you learned from it.
You can also talk about advice you wish you knew when you were younger.
Alex Hormozi frequently posts these “advice to my younger self” style of content:
The caveat to the “advice to my younger self” style of content is that this only works if you’ve already achieved some level of success.
If you’re just getting started, write about how you’re overcoming failures and what you’re learning along the way.
Case Studies
While failure stories often discuss the emotional aspect of overcoming a broader hurdle, case studies are excellent for discussing how to tactically solve very specific strategic challenges.
For example, if you’re building your brand as an email marketer, a common problem many people face is increasing open rates. Therefore, you could write a case study about how you increased the open rates.
Below is another excellent example of an SEO case study.
Contrarian Opinions
Another option is to take a contrarian opinion on a popular belief. For example, this YouTube strategist took a contrarian take on the common belief that “gear doesn’t matter as a YouTuber.”
To execute the contrarian opinion content format, think of best practice advice you’ve tried and why it didn’t work for you.
Then, write about why it didn’t work and a better solution.
Examples
Curated lists of examples are also excellent because people love to see how others have accomplished certain goals.
Here’s an excellent curated list of examples:
Here’s a video example of this same content format:
This content format is particularly useful if you’re just starting out and haven’t achieved any significant success, because the content is about other examples of others’ success and you therefore don’t need any credentials to deliver outstanding value.
What I Learned From (Person)
Many people post about their own success on social media, but you can also post about what you’ve learned from other influential people in your niche.
For example, if you’re in the YouTube niche, you could write about “10 lessons I’ve learned from Paddy Galloway.”
If the influencer is small enough, they might even reshare it.
Here’s an example of how one content creator curated a list of ten things he learned from Naval Ravikant:
An even better way to do this is to execute what you learned from each person and then share the results of using their advice.
You’ll notice that each of these frameworks relies on personal experience, so it’s important to not only post content but also test and continue to hone your skills at your craft. Anyone can build a personal brand, but it will become easier as you achieve more success and have more unique experiences to share.
Step 4: Publish Consistently
Publishing a high volume of quality content at scale is the secret to building a personal brand as a solopreneur, so if you’re serious about this, dedicate at least six hours per week to creating content. You’ll probably get faster as you become better at creating content, but figuring out your voice and style, as well as the nuances of publishing on each platform takes time.
If you chose a social media channel as your primary publishing platform, aim to post daily. If you chose YouTube, aim to post at least one video weekly.
If you’re struggling to post enough content consistently, create content in batches.
For example, schedule time at the beginning of the week to write all of your social media content at once.
You can then use a social media scheduling tool like Buffer to schedule your content in advance.
If you’re creating weekly long-form videos, consider batch-recording all four videos in one session at the beginning of the month.
Question: Should I just hire a personal branding agency to create content for me?
You can hire a personal branding agency/freelancer to create the content for you, but only hire out the content creation process if your hourly rate is higher than what you would pay that person to create and post the content for you. It’s also important to invest in a quality content creator if you choose to hire someone, as this person will essentially be posting your views in your voice.
Step 5: Build Genuine Industry Relationships (And Collaborate)
Your content probably won’t earn much engagement when you first start publishing.
Building genuine relationships with industry influencers is one of the best ways to expedite your growth, so here are a few ways you can do that online:
- Comment on their content : Engaging with people’s content is an excellent way to build relationships because your comment boosts the engagement of their content, thus adding value to that creator. Here’s a great example of a content creator who genuinely appreciates his followers’ engagement:
- Collaborate with them : You can collaborate with other creators by asking them for quotes or offering to share a case study.
- Share what you learned from them : You can encourage creators to share your content by discussing lessons you’ve learned from them.
However, the best way to create genuine relationships is by meeting people in real life.
Attending conferences and networking events is one way to accomplish this, or you can create your own meetup groups.
However, remember that you’ll receive more value from these events if you’re already doing the groundwork by continuously honing your craft and publishing quality content. These interactions won’t be as valuable if you don’t have any interesting experiences or ideas to share with the people you meet.
Step 6: Build An Email List
Social media, YouTube, and Google can help people discover your content, but it’s dangerous to rely on those platforms for access to your audience.
These platforms could ban your account altogether, though it’s more common that they simply won’t show your content to your audience.
For example, most social media platforms only show your content to a fraction of your followers and subscribers.
To solve this problem and ensure your audience always receives your content, funnel your audience into an email list.
You can do this by offering a lead magnet during your video.
For example, this video from a health coach on intuitive eating pitches a lead magnet, a five step process to achieve food freedom.
After users download the lead magnet, the health coach has their email and can send them more content.
Step 7: Scale Your Content
When you begin building your personal brand, it is important to select one platform and invest all of your resources into it to gain traction.
However, as you build your brand as a solopreneur and earn more revenue from your audience, you can hire other people to help scale your audience, ultimately driving more business.
The best way to scale your content is by repurposing your ideas across different platforms.
For example, if you’re currently writing LinkedIn posts, start recording video clips of yourself speaking the script of each one.
Then, you can send those video clips to an editor to post them on other social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. You can also hire someone to rewrite each one to optimize it for Twitter (X).
Sahil Bloom is an excellent example of a creator who has mastered content repurposing.
You’ll notice that he often records podcasts, and then his team repurposes those clips across social media platforms:
However, Sahil’s team doesn’t just cut clips from long form videos and repost them across different social media platforms.
Instead, they optimize each one for the nuances of each platform. For example, his shorts often feature b-roll from real footage of his personal life. These small optimizations make the videos perform significantly better than if he simply cut a clip from the video and then reposted it on TikTok or YouTube shorts with zero additional optimizations.
If you’re looking for someone to edit the video clips for you, you can hire an agency like Repurpose House , or there are plenty of freelancers on Upwork to repurpose video content for you:
You can also hire someone like this to rewrite the posts for you across different platforms and ensure they’re properly optimized for that specific audience:
Another option is to hire someone to create custom graphics as you scale your LinkedIn and Twitter (X) accounts. Sahil also uses custom graphics for his LinkedIn and Twitter posts.
Get More Help Building Your Personal Brand As A Solopreneur
Solopreneurship is challenging, and while this guide provides all the steps you need to get started, we recognize that you might still want some more help.
We created the Copyblogger Academy to solve this problem. It’s a community of entrepreneurs and solopreneurs building their brands on social media, and members can ask for feedback from the community as well as seven figure entrepreneurs (and Academy founders) Tim Stoddart and Charles Miller.
The Academy also offers nine courses on various marketing topics, including SEO, content marketing, email marketing, personal branding, and more.
You can try it out today risk-free , and we’ll give you a full refund if you aren’t 100% satisfied with your purchase.
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