A personal brand is more than a résumé, an elevator pitch, or a social media bio. It is a cultivated, formalized expression of your outward professional self. It’s a code you live by when engaging with the world.
A strong personal brand lives within you, but its purpose is to connect you with others—and particularly to resonate with your target audience. Learn how to tell your story with a personal branding strategy you can apply to your website, content marketing efforts, and beyond.
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What is a personal brand?
Your personal brand is your story. It reflects your character, values, strengths, and relationship with your community. Your brand extends to how you present yourself publicly and online, including the colors on your website, your podcast’s intro music, and your LinkedIn bio’s tone.
As ethical marketing pioneer Seth Godin writes, “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.”
Godin’s definition applies whether you’re building a brand for business or yourself. How the brand is perceived affects how potential partners, clients, employees, and employers relate to you—and whether they engage with your social accounts, buy your products, or hire your services. Developing a solid personal brand early will help you meet goals, whether it’s connecting the right people to your cause or landing the perfect job. It also creates a template for easy scaling across platforms and projects.
Why is effective personal branding important?
You need authenticity and storytelling to create a compelling personal brand that resonates with your audience.
People with strong personal brands present a unique perspective, clear core values, and a consistent brand voice. They’re usually skilled at forging personal connections with prospective clients and social media followers, nurturing credibility and trust.
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How to build your personal brand in 9 steps
- Self reflect
- Identify your target audience and focus
- Perfect your brand messaging
- Tell a story
- Differentiate your personal and professional brands
- Build your professional network
- Develop a consistent online presence
- Create a content strategy rooted in value
- Monitor and adapt—authentically
You already have a personal brand, the sum of your online interactions and how others perceive them. But, developing a personal branding strategy means being intentional and projecting yourself as you wish to be perceived. If you are a job seeker, an entrepreneur raising capital, an emerging creator, or really anyone conducting life and business online, a thoughtful approach can open opportunities.
1. Self reflect
Summarizing who you are is critical in building your brand identity statement and telling your story.
Interview yourself, or have a friend do it. Ask:
- What are you about? Capture your hobbies and interests, your desired industry or career. What excites you?
- What are you not about? What adjectives absolutely do not describe you? What don’t you want people thinking about you?
- What are your defining characteristics? Ask friends and family to describe you and compare their answers with your own.
- What are your values? What causes or social issues are important to you? Are any of these central to your personal brand or goals?
- What’s unique about you? This will help you determine your value proposition.
- What are your goals, short term and long term?
- What are your strengths? Is there one thing you do exceptionally well?
- What impact do you want to make—on your audience, business, and the world?
- Do your personal and business brands overlap?
2. Identify your target audience and focus
After defining yourself, answer your “why.” Why are you building a personal brand? Do you want to break into the creator economy? Are you building a business or product? Are you creating a professional public image to help you secure funding or other business partnerships?
Answering your why will help you define your audience. Is it customers? Investors? Employers? Some other group? What does that group need? What’s your value proposition? Essentially, how will you create unique value for your target audience?
3. Perfect your brand messaging
Your brand messaging is how you present yourself—your tone of voice, the words you use to describe yourself and your offerings, and the specific ways you serve your audience. Successful brand messaging is:
- Specific: When someone lands on your website or social profile, they should immediately understand what you do and why it’s relevant to them.
- Clear: Clarity beats cleverness. Avoid jargon, buzzwords, or vague statements like “I help businesses grow.” Instead, say exactly what you do: “I help freelance designers find high-paying clients without relying on job boards.”
- Consistent: Your messaging should be the same across your website, social media platforms, and any content you create. If your LinkedIn bio says one thing, but your website says another, people will get confused (and confused people don’t buy).
- Authentic: Your brand messaging should reflect your personality, not a corporate template. If you’re casual and friendly, let that come through. If you’re no-nonsense and to the point, own that.
4. Tell a story
The principles of brand storytelling apply to personal branding, too.
Start with a written draft in your voice first before working with a writer or editor to help you polish it. Stock your toolkit with short and longer versions of your story for various purposes, such as social bios, press kits, your personal website, or investor pitches. Then, choose the formats best suited to the platform or platforms you intend to focus on. You may need to create short- or long-form videos, a podcast, a pinned tweet thread, or all of the above.
Remember that the tone of your story should reflect your personality; revisit the getting to know yourself exercise as a reminder.
Personal story example
Creator and designer Alice Thorpe bio tells audiences what to expect from her on-camera personality.
Thorpe’s decision to use words like “creative,” “crafty,” “DIY,” and “passion” in her bio reflects the personality she presents on her YouTube channel.
Visual storytelling for personal brands
A picture is worth a thousand words. The visuals you use to represent your brand are as important as the words.
What colors or mood represent your personality? What tone should your headshot have: Casual? Fun? Professional? Artistic? Will you use photography or illustration? Are your videos raw and handheld or polished and produced?
If you’re not a designer or developer by trade, there are many free and inexpensive tools to help you DIY your branding design and website. The Shopify Themes Store has options for aligning your site’s aesthetic with your personal brand and style.
Or, work with photographers and designers whose portfolios align with your aesthetic to develop your website, logo, and other assets.
5. Differentiate your personal and professional brands
The “real” you, your public personal brand, and your company or corporate brand intertwine, but there will likely be distinctions. There may be aspects of your personal life you wish to keep private and separate from your public personal brand.
And you may wish to obscure certain details to avoid trolls, doxxing, and harassment. Decide how much of yourself you’re willing to give away.
If you have spun a business out of your personal brand, tying your story to it will help you sell to an audience that’s already bought into you as a person. However, you should center your customers, their experiences, and their pain points in your business’s brand storytelling. Tell your story, then reflect theirs back to them.
Patricia Bright is a serial entrepreneur with influence across a number of niches, including finance and beauty. While her personal brand is consistent across multiple platforms, she understands how to highlight (or downplay) different elements for each audience.
Her personal brand shines on Instagram, where she shares casual travel, family, and fashion moments. Notice how her voice and tone in her Instagram captions is upbeat, cheeky, and powerful. Meanwhile, on her YouTube channel, The Break, she speaks to an audience looking for advice on money and business while still being true to her personal brand.
6. Build your professional network
Find like-minded people who share your core values and interests, and remember that building a community is a two-way street. Engage with your audience by including their stories in your content, asking for feedback, and participating in discussions in threads and comments.
We are beyond the years of quick tricks and hacks for social growth, as audiences are hungry for authenticity and meaningful connections online.
There’s no bigger indicator of this than the success of TikTok during the pandemic, when personal and unpolished content brought audiences closer to authentic versions of the creators they love. TikTok made it possible for anyone with a phone and an internet connection to create content and join in a shared experience—a need to connect in a time of isolation. As a result, online personas came closer to resembling the people behind them.
Choose the right channels
Home base for your brand will depend on a number of factors:
- What medium is most comfortable for you? Short-form written? Livestreaming video? Short pre-recorded videos?
- Where do you already excel? On which platform have you already established a small following?
- Where is your desired audience hanging out? Research your demographic to understand the channels they use most.
Focus your efforts on the most natural platform, understanding that you’ll likely have to expand to others to grow your audience.
7. Develop a consistent online presence
It’s not enough to copy and paste from one platform to another. Understand the nuances in language and format and tailor your content accordingly, while still staying true to your tone and values.
Across platforms, Katie Sturino’s personal brand shines through: authentic, unapologetic, empowered.
Tip: Start on platforms that prioritize short-form content you can create with low investment (TikTok, X, Instagram). Test what resonates; as you grow and polish your content style, you can urge your audience toward long-form content by starting a blog, online course, or YouTube channel.
8. Create a content strategy rooted in value
A solid content marketing strategy can help you grow your personal brand and drive traffic to your website; in the long term, your strategy should include retention and loyalty, which you encourage by consistently providing value for your community.
Soko GLAM founder Charlotte Cho built her personal brand before launching her Korean skin care brand. During that time, her content brought readers along on her skin care journey, while helping them discover products.
By the time she launched Soko Glam, Cho had established herself as a knowledgeable source for skin care content.
9. Monitor and adapt—authentically
Your personal brand isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing. It evolves as you grow, as your audience shifts, and as the industry changes. What worked six months ago might not work today, and that’s OK—you might just need a brand refresh. What matters is paying attention and adapting in a way that still feels like you.
Evaluate what’s resonating with your audience. Which posts get the most engagement? What kind of feedback do you receive? Are people reaching out with opportunities you actually want? Low engagement or engagement from outside your target audience are signs that your messaging, positioning, or content needs tweaking.
But don’t chase industry trends just for the sake of it.
Authenticity fuels personal brands; if a new platform, style, or topic doesn’t align with your personality and values, it’s not worth forcing.
Instead, find ways to evolve that still feel natural. Maybe that means shifting your content slightly to reflect new skills you’ve developed, adjusting your messaging to attract higher-paying clients, or leaning more into the topics that get people talking.
It’s also OK to pivot if your interests or goals change. Many of the strongest personal brands started in one space and evolved into another. What matters is that they brought their audience along for the ride. If you’re making a shift, explain why. Share the story behind it. People will respect the transparency, and it helps them stay invested in you, not just what you offer.
Qualities of a strong personal brand
To build a strong personal brand that speaks to your audience, make your message consistent. Ensure your brand voice and aesthetic are seamless across your content marketing efforts on multiple platforms.
An effective personal branding strategy achieves the following:
- It builds credibility and trust. These are key factors in building relationships with your audience and landing business opportunities.
- It surfaces you as an expert or personality. A successful personal brand establishes you as a person of interest and importance in your niche or community.
- It reflects an authentic and sustainable version of you. Unless you perform as a character in your work, your personal brand should be a version of you that you can pull off consistently. This may differ slightly from your true private self, but it should still be you.
- It delivers a relatable personal story. Being relatable to your audience means understanding who they are and which aspects of your story will resonate with them.
- It’s portable and seamless across multiple platforms and press coverage. A personal branding strategy that includes brand guidelines, brand name, keywords, and visual assets can help you maintain consistency.
- It has a clear goal. Goals can include increasing your clients, driving awareness for your own company, or promoting yourself for public speaking engagements.
Personal branding examples
In the novel and film Big Fish, dying protagonist Edward Bloom tells his life story to his adult son. That son, who perceives the story as a tall tale, tries to know his “real” father before it’s too late. What he discovers is that the stories weren’t so much lies but real details colored in to fill gaps in memory. But the story also reflected the self that Edward wanted his son to see—and the world to remember him by.
The character used storytelling to create a persona that was larger than life but still rooted in truth. In some ways, this is the definition of personal branding: combining authentic and curated elements of your story, personality, and values to put your best self forward and meet personal and professional goals.
Performative celebrities like Sia, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Elton John showcase the power of personal branding. Their personas are larger-than-life versions of themselves.
Social media influencers are also experts in personal branding. Creators-turned-entrepreneurs like Ryan Trahan, Wil Yeung, and Chrissy Teigen are excellent examples of effective personal branding.
Monetizing your personal brand
The creator economy was built on personal brands. As the lines between creator and company blur, these entrepreneurs are finding ways to build independence by monetizing audiences on their own terms.
If you aim to build your personal brand into a business, there are several ways to monetize it, even while your influence and audience are still growing.
Monetizing your personal brand is possible on-platform through ads, brand partnerships, tips, shoutouts, and, eventually, ad share revenue and sponsorships. However, moving your audiences off social to owned channels is more sustainable.
Here are some business ideas to help you do that:
- Launch a website and collect emails: Building an email list helps you own your audience and bring them with you across platforms. Incentivize sign-ups by offering free access to exclusive content.
- Introduce a subscription model: Sell subscriptions or fan club access to give subscribed users access to extra content. Many apps, like Patreon, can help you do this, or you can set up user accounts on your owned website.
- Sell merch through an online store: Starting a store on a platform like Shopify extends your brand into physical goods. A print-on-demand app that plugs into your store can help you easily translate branded designs into saleable goods without requiring you to buy or manage inventory.
- Sell content like tutorials or courses: Creator duo Colin and Samir have established themselves as online video content experts. After building trust with their audience, they launched a course teaching YouTube storytelling.
Personal branding your way to success
Now that you have the tools to bring your personal brand to life online, it’s time to ship it! Remember, as you grow and learn from your audience and experiences, your personal brand may evolve. What’s important is that it resonates with your audience and remains focused on your goals, even if those things change.
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How to build a personal brand FAQ
How do you maintain your personal brand?
Consistency and authenticity are key. Keep showing up with the same messaging, values, and tone across platforms. Regularly engage with your audience, share valuable insights, and adapt your approach based on what resonates, all while staying true to yourself.
What makes a strong personal brand?
A good personal brand has a clear purpose and value proposition, and a defined audience. It is also a sustainable and authentic representation of you, even if it’s a refined one. An effective personal brand is consistent across social media platforms.
What is a personal brand statement?
A personal brand statement is the starting point for your brand story. It is usually one to three sentences that capture defining details about you, your goals, your audience, and what value you bring to them.
How long does it take to build a personal brand?
A strong personal brand isn’t built overnight—expect months or even years of effort. The more intentional you are about your messaging and visibility, the faster you’ll see traction.
How do I measure the success of my personal brand?
Look at the impact, not just the numbers. Are you attracting the right clients or opportunities? Do people recognize and trust your expertise? Engagement, inbound leads, and people quoting or sharing your work are all strong indicators that your brand is resonating.
