9 Steps To Build Your Personal Brand

Earning income via social media has transformed thousands, if not, millions of lives - and there's still time to capitalize on the trend. Here's nine ways to help build your personal brand.

1. Fix Your Social Media
2. Update current accounts or delete out of date ones. This means removing any and all content that you don't want associated with your personal brand.
3. Claim Your Niche
4. Finding one is hard. Who are you and what do you want to speak about? More importantly, why should your audience listen? A niche should be an area where you believe you can offer high-level and in-depth expertise.
5. Find Your Audience
6. This is where you need to study the niche you're entering and figure out which platform appeals to both the creators and audiences in your space.For example, graphic designers prefer Instagram over Twitter because the platform promotes photo/video versus a platform like Twitter. Graphic designers can also use Instagram to showcase work and tag companies like Adobe, Avid, Final Cut, Blender, etc. to show how they use the product.
7. Create Content For The First 100 Days
8. The biggest issue that content creators/influencers run into with social media is consistency. You have to consistently create content and post in a timely fashion. It's impossible to be a content creation machine, but give yourself a realistic goal of creating content for 30,60,90 or even 100 days straight. This will help you find your positioning with your audience and whether or not you're creating the right content.
9. Create Engaging Content
10. The content you create has to be meaningful and purposeful. It has to reach your audience beyond the initial post and prompt them to commit to an action (like, share, retweet, repost)
11. Keep It Positive, But Honest
12. It can be hard to insert emotion into a topic of conversation but the strongest influencer also allow for a level of transparency to "humanize" their efforts. In some cases, this could be behind-the-scenes of making a post, a personal battle, an accomplishment, as long as it relates to your chosen niche and aligns with your brand.Ex: Talk about the times you didn't make the team, lost the big game, lessons learned in your field, etc.
13. Collaborate
14. The fastest way to jump from 1,000 to 3,000 to 10,000 followers is to collaborate with other creators/influencers in your space.
15. (Brand) Consistency Is Key
16. Once you establish your personal brand, you have to remain consistent with the core beliefs and values you've selected. If you decide to deviate in any manner, it should be carefully planned.
17. Study The Competition
18. Every major creator/influencer has started where you are. Study them. Learn how they navigate the niche, how they interact with their audience. If you have 1,000 followers and want to jump to 10,000, study the creators/influencers with 5,000 followers. Take what they're doing, rework it, and do it better (within the boundaries of your own brand and content creation methods).

“We all have personal brands and most of us have already left a digital footprint, whether we like it or not. Proper social media use highlights your strengths that may not shine through in an interview or application and gives the world a broader view of who you are. Use it wisely.”

My name is Taylor Durham and I’m the Director of Marketing at Venture Lab, the University of Pennsylvania’s entrepreneurship hub for student venture development and the co-founder and chief creative officer at HoneyBlossom, a digital marketing company that works with small business owners to provide comprehensive creative and marketing services. In writing this series of articles, I’m hoping for one particular reason - to provide a set of accessible information on branding, digital marketing, and creative design. In this series, you’ll find various articles that provide tips, tricks, and best practices that any startup can apply with little to no cost.