By Aaron Agius
For internet marketers, personal branding is usually pretty low on the list of priorities for daily work.
There are always Facebook ads to run, products to launch, and landing pages to optimize. Who has the time for personal branding?
It’s unsurprising that short-term revenue-generating activities take precedent for most marketers, but if you’re in this for the long haul, personal branding is a must.
Your personal brand communicates your identity to the world. While technological advancements have allowed us to conduct business with minimal human contact, it’s important to remember that people still want to buy from people—not faceless corporations.
Entrepreneur Chris Ducker advocates a P2P (people-to-people) approach to business, and this is infinitely easier if you have a clearly defined, highly visible personal brand. Without a personal brand, it’s harder to establish trust, and everyone knows that trust is essential for sales.
This is especially important on the internet, because 65% of web users view online search as the most trustworthy source of information about people and companies.
If you’re in the spotlight and people are talking about you anyway, it’s crucial to give your side of the story. This can be achieved with a designated personal branding site, social media, and content marketing.
For some inspiration, learn how these three marketing superstars are leveraging personal branding to achieve great business results:
Alex Becker
Tech entrepreneur, author, and internet marketing expert Alex Becker is committed to personal branding.
Using a combination of PPC ads, email marketing, and content marketing, he has grown his software companies Source Wave and Market Hero to millions of dollars in annual revenue. Even if people had never heard of him, he’d still be financially secure.
However, Alex clearly understands the long game of entrepreneurship. With his best-selling book, The 10 Pillars of Wealth, he delivers brutally unapologetic insights into what leads to real wealth and prosperity in life (hint: it’s not what is taught in schools).
In his YouTube channel, his unpretentiousness is on display in full color.
With a sardonic sense of humor and plenty of vulgarities (which is fine, given that his core audience is younger aged males who want to escape the rat race and make money online), his videos cover a range of topics about entrepreneurship—from highly technical videos about how to set up a Shopify store and run ads to more reflective pieces about the dangers of listening to family advice.
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Ultimately, Alex knows that his viewers watch his channel for personal gain rather than out of interest for him. For this reason, he focuses on imparting actionable advice and wisdom in every video as a means to deliver value.
Because he only gives advice and never sells to his YouTube viewers, people inherently trust him.
However, he does run paid ads to his (already warm) YouTube subscribers in order to get them onto his mailing list, and presumably these ads are very profitable.
Timothy Marc
Business coaching is a notoriously oversaturated niche where it’s difficult to stand out. Timothy Marc, founder of acclaimed entrepreneur training course, Secret Society Mastermind (SSM), uses his personal branding site to convey that he’s not like the rest.