5 Personal Branding Hacks Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Creating a personal brand is like climbing Mount Everest. It takes dedication, commitment, and long-term work—so much work, in fact, that many people skip creating one altogether. Nonetheless, if you’re an entrepreneur, personal branding is too important to skip or get wrong.

Entrepreneurs face fierce competition in today’s business environment. This means you’ll need to give your clients a reason to not only choose your products but also to choose you. People want to do business with those they like and believe in, so your personal brand needs to be more likable than your competitor’s.

Want to gain better tools to climb your Mount Everest? If you know the right strategies, you can not only gain the right tools, you can even shrink the mountain. It will never be “easy.” (Nothing ever is!) But with the following five personal-branding hacks, you can increase your branding success exponentially.

For one of the most powerful hacks this year, leverage the reach of influencers. Why? Picture the advantages of having a leader in your industry share your content to a wide audience. An influencer with thousands (or even millions!) of followers could do in one day what would normally take you years to accomplish.

The first step is to locate a highly influential person in your industry. When you pinpoint someone, show interest in his or her content by sharing their posts, commenting on their content, and maybe posting positive reviews about their business. You could also email the influencer directly to compliment them on a recent video or post. Ask them questions or share some thoughts of your own.

If possible, try to feature an influencer in your content. You can talk about a business process they came up with or a solution to a common industry challenge, or even just quote them in a blog post. Then simply tag them and let them know you talked about them in your content.

If your content is useful and high-quality, there’s a good chance the influencer will share it with their audience. Over time, a synergistic relationship will form. Repeat this process with as many influencers as you can find.

Luckily, you don’t have to do this on your own. Traackr and BuzzSumo are two popular resources for identifying and engaging with influencers in your field.

You may have heard that guest blogging isn’t as important in 2017. But as Due founder John Rampton recently pointed out in a Forbes article , this isn’t the case at all! The reality is that guest blogging can launch your personal brand into whole new levels.

The goal is to provide interesting and helpful advice to a hungry reader base in your sector. What subject are you the most knowledgeable about? What is the niche that really ignites your passion and urgency? That’s the topic you’ll want to choose for your guest blogging endeavors. After a while, your brand will start taking flight in the all-important blogosphere.

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If you’ve never done any guest blogging before, the first step is to pitch successful bloggers in your industry. Look for bloggers with large readership—tens of thousands of readers, or even hundreds of thousands, preferably. Then email or tweet the blogger, and offer a few potential blog post titles you think their audience will love. If you can write a little synopsis, outline, or some bullet points of what the post will cover, all the better. Here’s some more guest blogging advice from John Rampton.

Can you speak confidently and knowledgeably about a subject in your field? If so, you have an advantage that many of your competitors don’t. Millionaire entrepreneur Sam Ovens offered the following advice in an Entrepreneur.com article :

Ovens is right to bring up speaking opportunities. Many new entrepreneurs find them to be highly effective for generating customers. Speaking allows you to meticulously form a brand image as if you were an artist, sculpting your brand out of clay. You can create an image that suits your desired style—whether casual, hip, or formal—and you can portray the energy level you’re after, your sense of humor and your unique, dynamic passion.

It’s best to avoid charging a fee for your first few speaking engagements. The goal, at first, should be to land some opportunities. After you’ve done enough speaking gigs to come across as an expert-level speaker, then you can think about charging. But for now, get known.

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Because public speaking is a very effective way to mold and shape your brand, be sure to capture all your engagements on video to share throughout your social media. As you’ll soon discover for yourself, the power of the podium is undeniable. There’s something about being in front of a captive audience that helps you exude authority and earn trust. As you accumulate speaking engagements, you’ll eventually be known as a trustworthy, sought-after leader.

There are many ways to land speaking opportunities, as this article proves. So get creative and make it happen!

In case you haven’t heard, live video is kind of a big deal. Take a look at the following stats from Livestream :

Live video on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube gets you in front of an audience without you having to leave your home or office. While a traditional public speaking event is always the best route for gaining authority, think for a moment of the personal branding benefits of live video.

First, unlike public speaking engagements, live video is something you can do every day if you have enough to talk about. All you need is an internet connection, a device, and something valuable to say. This is important because consistency is crucial in personal branding.

Also, because you can go live spontaneously, it’s very easy to do a video the moment an idea pops into your head. There’s no substitute for taking action the moment creativity strikes.

Should you do a live video every day? While there are no set rules for frequency, and it depends on what your audience wants. Remember: The more engagement you generate with your audience, the better.

And speaking of “engagement,” this just happens to be another advantage of live video. It makes question-and-answer engagement very easy. No one in your audience needs to talk. They can just text you their comments or questions, and you do the rest.

Set your sights on becoming an influencer. It’s more possible than many people realize, and it can happen faster than you might think! Massive brand growth certainly doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen in a few short years.

As your personal brand starts to become more well known, you’ll need to scale your brand. This means engaging with people, and engaging often.  Engagement includes contributing to other people’s content, responding to people’s comments about your content, providing tips, answering questions—and doing these things every day, on all platforms. Are you out of breath yet? You should be. It’s hard, time-consuming work!

That’s where chatbots come into play. Chatbots are programs that respond and interact with your audience so you don’t have to. A bot can’t r eplace your actual interactions with customers, of course. But they can do much of the legwork for you.

Facebook Messenger is a great place to start using chatbots. ( This article will help you get started.) You can create a bot and customize it to suit your preferences.

You can also create a chatbot to help you with your YouTube channel and help with your direct messages on Twitter, Skype, and many other platforms. Choose one platform, and start today! Starting with Facebook Messenger, however, might be best.

Hopefully, you’re more inspired than ever to sculpt an unstoppable, scalable brand for yourself. As you can see, there are many ways to make this possible. With some dedication and creativity, you can rise to the top while your less-diligent competitors remain unknown.

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