Ep. 327 Effective Personal Branding for Independent Experts

In this week’s episode, Anna explores the challenges of creating a personal brand without falling into the trap of content overwhelm and creator burnout. If you’re struggling with the never-ending cycle of content creation or hesitant to start building your personal brand, this episode offers actionable insights to help you navigate these obstacles with ease. Tune in to redefine success and learn how to authentically build a personal brand that resonates with your audience.

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction to episode.

[01:42] Importance of personal branding for business growth.

[02:46] Details about the free three-part workshop series.

[03:41] Common misconceptions about personal branding.

[06:36] Anna’s personal experience with evolving her brand and business.

[07:49] Importance of knowing your personal and business reasons for building a personal brand.

[09:50] Differences between promoting a product and yourself.

[11:42] Practical tips for building a personal brand both online and offline.

[13:32] Call to join the Business Accelerator for personalised support and accountability.

Resources mentioned:

• Building a Business that Works Workshop Series: Watch on demand
• Personal Branding Workshop Series Registration: Sign up here

The Business Accelerator: Join the waiting list

Personal branding for experts

Reimagining Success Episode 327 and this episode is for you if you’re feeling caught in the content hamster wheel of creating content for every single platform all the time and you feel like you’re just chasing your tail in terms of everything you’re recording and posting and not really getting anywhere, or perhaps you don’t know what’s working. And it’s also for you if you just feel a bit reluctant to get started with the whole personal brand content creation thing for your business. So we’re talking about how to build a personal brand without getting that content overwhelmed. The creator burnout. I hope you find this episode valuable. And there’s also news about the next three part webinar series, so listen out for that one. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert. One that works for you and your lifestyle.

I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for, ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started. Personal branding is a pretty contentious topic. It can feel quite uncomfortable to put yourself out there. It can create all sorts of overwhelm with having to be on all the platforms all the time we’re selling ourselves. It’s the kind of thing that influencers do, do I really need to do it? And so on. And look, I come from a marketing background and I’ve still struggled with this over the years.

Having said that, an article I wrote on personal branding 10/plus years ago still brings me consistent clients and I know it’s a topic that is really important when we’re building a business, people buy from people. So being an anonymous entity hiding behind being a company without that personal touch is going to do you a disservice. And it’s not about selling yourself and bigging yourself up. It’s really about spreading an important message, demonstrating your credibility and getting in front of people who can buy from you. So that’s the topic over the next few weeks. And before I go any further, in fact, I want to talk to you about the next three part workshop series that I’ll be running. So this is a free series earlier or rather late last year, 2024. I need to get used to saying this and I ran a workshop called Building a business that works where we looked at having an intentional business model, authentic marketing and sales and simple strategies and that is still available to watch on demand.

So if you did miss that, you can go to one step outside.com a business that works to watch that. But now I’m running another live series and this about personal branding and specifically how to build your personal brand again in an authentic natural way. And above all without that content overwhelm, without creator burnout. So if you want to join me live for that, let me just cheque the dates that is running on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 10th, 11th, 12th of February, 12pm UK time. Of course if you can’t watch live, do still sign up because you’ll get the recordings and again you can watch it on demand. So onestepoutside.com your personal brand. Onestepoutside.comyour personal brand. And that will again be three 30 minute sessions, Super Bite sized sessions, very interactive.

If you join live, there’ll be a workbook and hopefully a really powerful session for you. And this is powerful whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been at this for a long time. Because the challenge that I hear again and again and even talking to really experienced entrepreneurs and founders now, recently, now at the beginning of the year, everyone is saying, oh, I need to refine my message. I’m looking at my strategy, how could I simplify my content strategy is the message landing and so on. So the bad news is that this is not going to be a one and done kind of thing, right? It’s something to be revisited again and again. My overall overarching message of reimagining success, I’m pleased to say, has lived on for over a decade now. But there have been many iterations and versions that seem sit underneath that. And it’s always about playing around with words and thinking about the channels and so on.

To address a few myths, I suppose, first about building a personal brand. You don’t have to be everywhere all the time to be clear. It certainly doesn’t mean sharing every detail of your life. You don’t need to be, thank goodness, sharing pictures of your food and children and whatever that you don’t want to share about. But at the same time it is not only for influencers or big name entrepreneurs like the Steven Bartlett and Daniel Priestley’s and so on. The big example I always heard and I guess used to use was Richard Branson. You know, yes, we know all the different Virgin businesses, but he was able to establish one of the perhaps first or at least most well known personal brands that sat above that. His fun, charismatic personality lived on long beyond and will continue to live on beyond those individual businesses.

My own personal experience has been that I started my working for for myself experience doing digital marketing consulting and that’s still very relevant to the work I do today and that still helps to build credibility. I am talking about AI now, talking about digital content strategy, social media and so on. But the company name that I happen to have, sadly is no more. So Crocus Communications was the name of that consultancy. A friend, Serena and I built the work. Sorry, Wolf Leaders Academy, can’t remember the name. We published a book together which you can still get, which is how to succeed in your first job. And Wolf Leaders Academy Sniff is no more.

But again, those themes are still part of what I do. So in a way I’m taking the pressure off here for you. You don’t have to have it figured out from day one. It can and will definitely evolve, but at the same time starting to get that clarity and the kind of narrowing down where you want to focus is really, really powerful. And again, this personal brand idea is essential for anyone who’s looking to grow their business. Whatever strategies you’re following, and this is always what I’m trying to do, make this relevant for all of us. Whether you know you’re doing cold lead generation on email or you’re speaking to get work, or you’re doing lots of social media or ads or whatever, your personal brand sits above that. It doesn’t matter if TikTok X etc.

Come and go. Building a personal brand is still going to be the right thing to do. Why? Well, it unlocks so many opportunities, right? It can build your credibility when someone looks you up and simply sees who you are and your online footprint. It can attract clients, both corporate and consumers. It can help you sell higher ticket services as they’re called. You know, if, if you really have a professional looking credible brand, if you’ve published a book or more books, you’ve got podcasts and all sorts of things that really establishes you as someone who is credible, experienced and not just, you know, a chance is like, yeah, yeah, sure, I can help you with this. It’s really something that’s well established. You can secure speaking engagements, land book deals, sell your books, etc, etc, right? So I hope that gives you an idea of the power of building a personal brand.

Now important, of course, is to work out what your personal and business reasons are for building a brand. And we will be doing that in the workshop. So again, a reminder, if you go to one step outside.com your personal brand, one step outside.com your personal Brand, be running a live workshop series, day one will be thinking really about why you want to build a personal brand because I even had this realisation recently in talking to someone that, you know, certain measures of success and certain strategies are more appropriate if you want to sell a course at a low price to lots of people compared to if you want to just. And I put quotation marks that you can’t see just. And build credibility for when you’re interacting with a corporate client or if you simply want to reach more people within a particular niche, that’s different to wanting or needing, needing to reach thousands of thousands of people. Right. So sometimes we chase those metrics, the followers and so on. And I have been guilty of this myself and without really having a reason why we need that.

So we’ll dig into that in the workshop. But really that. That’s what I wanted to say today in terms of why this is so important. And have a think why don’t you, about how you feel about personal branding. I think a lot of us, especially if you’ve been in the space for a while, will understand from an academic perspective that we need to do this, but it can still take time to come to terms with it. As I said at the beginning, you know, I worked in marketing, but it’s very different to sell yourself versus selling a product or hiding behind a business brand and that’s something to sort of use, I suppose have that little hack of thinking, okay, and how can I promote, in my case, the business accelerator and the results and benefits you get from that, rather than saying, hey, come and work with me and. But if you are an individual who doesn’t have any products yet, as such, you are a coach, let’s say. How do you do it? Well, it’s still about building your credibility as an individual and.

But again you will be focusing on the results and sharing testimonials and case studies and so on. If you are trying to be a thought leader, I don’t know why I keep putting on American accent. So sorry for any offence caused. If you want to be a thought leader, then thinking about what ideas you want to promote is really powerful rather than again, promoting yourself. I’ve talked many times before and it sounds a bit cheesy, but talking about serving versus versus selling. If I don’t sell, let’s put it this way, that means I won’t make any money. I’m going to say, or very little. So I can’t continue with this business.

It’ll just be a hobby or charity and I’ll need to look for a job. It means I won’t get to the people who need my help. So I’m doing them a disservice too. And so nobody wins, right? It’s just, it’s maybe counterintuitive, but just to think about, hang on a second, you know, why am I preventing my message and support from getting to the people who need it? Simply because I can’t get over myself, I can’t turn that camera on, write the post, whatever, and it’s never going to be perfect. And the good news is now, of course, that, you know, digital, you can very easily delete stuff if you’re not happy with it, but I wouldn’t recommend that. It shouldn’t be necessary. You can, of course, use tools and technology. A little bit of AI to support you isn’t going to hurt at all.

And you know, we just have so many opportunities now. And it’s not just online as well. I suppose that’s something to say. It’s not just having to be on Instagram and tick tock and LinkedIn and so on. You might not even want to do that as an ongoing strategy at all. You could be speaking and doing, you know, free workshops and talks in certain groups and associations. It could be networking in person. Your personal brand, by the way, is also built from interactions, right? Every interaction, whether it’s online or in person, is building up into that picture of what people think of you.

So that’s something to think about. But that’s laying the foundation again for the upcoming workshop, for the subsequent podcast episodes that’ll be more around how to craft your message. Think about what do you want to be known for next week, and then how to build that brand without burning out. And I do want to say as well that I am opening the doors to the accelerator. I should say I’m going to say next month, but it’s later this month. So do get in touch if you’ve been thinking about that and want to join us because we won’t open again until the summer, I believe. So looking forward to speaking to you about that. You can reach me on my usual social channels, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever we’re connected, or you can email@podcastnestepoutside.com but that’s what we’re looking at, looking at, building a personal brand.

Have a think about why you want to or don’t want to build a personal brand, what opportunities you would like it to open up and then we’ll dig into how you can craft your message and define really what you’re going to stand for and then develop that into content pillars and create systems and so as you can batch, you can repurpose and all that jazz to reach lots of people and build your brand without overwhelm, without burnout. Okay, so don’t forget to sign up to the workshop again. One step outside.com your personal brand. And I look forward to seeing you there or in the coming weeks as we talk about building your personal brand. Have a great week. See you next week. All right, so if any of this resonates and you’re ready to build a business that truly works for you without the overwhelm, without the hustle, all that constant second guessing, then I’d love for you to join us in the business accelerator. Bringing together a small group of like minded experts, coaches, consultants, solopreneurs who want that personalised support, clear action steps and above all, real accountability.

If you want to get in early, then head on over to onestepoutside.com/accelerate to register your interest or join the waiting list. Let’s create the business and the life that you have always wanted. Can’t wait to see you inside.

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