Building Your Personal Brand
Here is the challenge with personal brands.
The challenge is noise.
There’s so much noise.
And I want to describe to you something that we call Sheahan’s Wall because I originally heard this concept from a guy named Peter Sheahan.
He talks about how there is this invisible wall. And on one side of any industry, some people are unknown. And then everyone’s trying to break through the invisible wall to become known.
What happens then, is you get all sorts of different advice about how you should have these different messages, right?
You should talk about whatever is the hot topic, or you should be in all these different mediums, right?
You should be on Instagram, Linked In, or have a membership site, offer video courses, or offer coaching or consulting services, and so on.
And we end up trying to do all these different things.
And what happens is that you have incredible brand dilution.
Personal Brand Tips
Here is a tip. The people who break through the invisible wall do one simple thing.
They focus all their energy, their resources, their efforts into becoming known for one thing first.
You become the expert on that one thing.
Then you break through the wall.
And once you’re on the other side of the wall, then you can expand and be known for lots of other things.
The best advice I ever heard on this topic was actually from a guy named Larry Winget.
And he said that the whole key to finding your purpose or to building a great brand is to find your uniqueness so that you can exploit it in the service of others.
Find your uniqueness so you can exploit it in the service of others.
This brings us to the question of how do you do that, right?
This is the number one secret of building a bestselling personal brand. I’m going to offer something that I think is so simple, but so overlooked.
The secret is to be able to answer one question and to be able to answer that question in one word.
The question is simply, “What problem do I solve?”
What problem do you solve?
See people buy solutions to problems.
It’s not that often that we just go buy luxury items.
Generally speaking, people buy solutions to problems.
And most of the people, when we first start working with brands, they can’t answer that question with one word.
What problem do I solve? They don’t know.
And here’s what we know for sure. If you aren’t clear on the problem you solve, there is no way your audience, your prospects, your customers will ever know either.
Personal Branding Examples
Let’s look at some real modern examples of some breakthrough personal brands.
Brené Brown spent two decades becoming the expert on shame. Just that one concept.
Dave Ramsey. He owns the word debt. That’s the only problem he talks about and solves.
Simon Sinek did this with purpose.
One of our clients, Lewis Howes- his entire personal brand is oriented around self-doubt and helping people overcome that even on a global scale.
Look at Mother Teresa- poverty.
Martin Luther King, Jr.- inequality.
What problem do you solve?
If you can answer that question, you can be a best-selling brand but until you get clarity on that question, you’re going to struggle because you must sell the problem as much as you sell the solution.
The problem that we at Brand Builders Group solve is obscurity. People who are untrusted, unknown, or unclear. That’s what we help people solve.
And we walk people through a simple process which we call the Brand DNA Helix.
It’s six basic questions. As you answer these six questions, you will find at the intersection, between who the world needs you to be and who you were designed to be.
At that intersection is where your uniqueness lives.
So, if that is something that you struggle with, I’d be happy to connect you with one of our personal brand strategists for a free personal brand strategy call.
Tell me in the comments below what you think is your uniqueness.
