How to Build Visibility for Your Personal Brand
One of the best ways to improve your career is with the development and ongoing support of a personal brand. But no matter how strong your personal brand, your knowledge, and your experiences are, they’re going to be limited by your visibility. Increasing your visibility means reaching more people, growing a bigger following, and eventually building a better network and reputation.
The question is, what are the best ways to build visibility for your personal brand?
Building the Foundation
It’s worth noting that all your personal branding efforts are going to be more powerful and more effective if you have a strong foundation at the center. In other words, you need a coherent vision and overall strategy for your personal brand before you start building visibility for it. That doesn’t mean you need to be a rock star in your industry, but it does mean you should have some idea of the persona you want to create and the audience you want to target. Without that, your visibility-building efforts run the risk of falling flat.
The Omnichannel Approach
For most people, the omnichannel approach is best. In other words, you want to use many different channels, platforms, and communication mediums together to maximize your reach across different demographics and sub-demographics. This is a way of capitalizing on the strengths of each platform, reaching more total people, and avoiding isolated pockets of online invisibility.
These are some of the best focal points for most personal brands:
· A website. Every personal brand should have a website at the center of it. This is where people will go to learn more about you, your work, your achievements, and your aspirations. Think of it as a combination resume, portfolio, and lead generation platform. Make it polished and connect it to every other channel you use.
· Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO, and by extension, link building, are some of the best strategies for boosting online visibility. Optimizing for specific target keywords and building up your authority increases your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). This should greatly increase organic traffic to your site and improve your name recognition simultaneously. The only real downside is that it takes some time to get started, especially if you don’t already have an SEO-optimized website.
· Guest posting. One of the most popular ways to build links is through guest posting on offsite publishers. Even if you’re not interested in SEO specifically, this is a valuable way to build name recognition for your personal brand. Focus on writing articles about your industry in publishers that are known in your discourse community.
· Social media marketing. Social media marketing is arguably the best-known strategy for supporting a personal brand because it’s highly accessible and practically free. Making occasional posts and interacting with your community in relevant groups can help you build a following in relatively little time.
· Email marketing. Email marketing is also incredibly inexpensive and easy to scale. Start publishing a newsletter with some of your latest thoughts and findings – and be sure to add value to subscribers so they aren’t motivated to leave.
· Paid advertising. For some professionals, paid advertising also makes sense. It’s an immediate and convenient way to put yourself in front of more people.
· Networking (in person and online). Of course, there is no real substitute for good old-fashioned networking. Network at both in-person events and on online channels to maximize your reach.
Scaling Up
Once you’ve put some or all of these visibility strategies into place, you can focus on scaling up. In other words, you can snowball your number of followers and prospects.
· Become a thought leader. Thought leadership is a bit of an overused term, but it’s important to demonstrate if you want people to value your personal brand. In other words, you need to make bold, impactful, thought-provoking statements that set you apart from other people in your industry.
· Concentrate on definitive achievements. Achieve goals, hit milestones, and accomplish things that are worth bragging about. The longer your list of awards and achievements is, the more eyeballs that will be on you as you develop your career.
· Keep engaging. Engagement is critical for maintaining your following. Keep getting involved in discussions, make your followers feel seen, and keep reaching out to new people.
· Connect with industry leaders. You can increase your own visibility by connecting with people who are more visible than you. This is the idea behind influencer marketing. Try connecting and collaborating with the biggest people you can find – as long as you do so respectfully and in a way that adds value.
· Increase your spending. Want to make an even bigger impact? Increase your spending. Depending on the strategies you use, that could mean increasing your ad spend, the time you spend, or both.
Building a personal brand isn’t easy. Making it visible in a competitive industry is even harder. But if you’re willing to put in the time and effort, it could be exactly what you need to make a bigger splash in your field.
