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It’s important to build a personal brand for your blog and business. You want your blog to be memorable and create an impact on people’s lives. That’s what a personal brand can do for you!

We’re going to go over the 4 important things you need to consider when creating a personal brand for your blog. We’ll cover what a brand is, help you figure out your target audience, and go over the super important building blocks that will help you create a strong personal brand online and offline!

-WHAT IS A BRAND?

The first thing to cover is what is brand? Your brand is more than just colors, you should be living and breathing your personal brand because it consists of you.

Your values, who you are, and what you believe in. You may have heard this before- your vibe attracts your tribe. Which means who you are will attract your audience to you. People who align with you and your personal brand will stick around.

To get started with building your personal brand you want to think about what you want people to feel when they interact with what you post online, whether it be your blog posts or social media posts. And that starts with your target audience.

1. WHO IS YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE?

Many bloggers who start out think that they have to try and reach everybody. When you ask them “who is your target audience?” They’ll either don’t know or they say “everybody”.

Why wouldn’t you want everybody to like your blog?

The problem is, you don’t want to try and reach everybody with your brand or blog. It’s actually okay to push away people who don’t fit your vibe.

Not everyone is going to resonate with you and your message, so you want to attract the people who are most like you to stick around and be so “you” that you push away people that are going to mess with your vibe and personal brand.

Getting clear on who you’d like to reach will help you figure out what you want to get out of your brand. For example, if you’re trying to reach men over 40 who want to get in shape, creating a blog and a vibe of pinks and purples probably isn’t the way to go. And vice versa.

Once you’ve done that, ask yourself this question.

-WHAT WORDS OR FEELINGS DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO GET FROM YOUR PERSONAL BRAND?

You want to leave people with some sort of feeling when they walk away from an interaction of your personal brand. What do you want those feeling to be?

My words are inviting, light and airy, and powerful

Inviting- I want people to feel invited into my space. I want them to feel welcome whether that be on my blog, on social media, or on YouTube.

Powerful- My mission is to inspire women to live a life they love. And If you’re willing to step out of the 9-5 life and stand up and say, I want to run a business. I want to go on a different path than the rest of the world. I want to be an entrepreneur- that is powerful. And I want my brand to reflect the powerful women I want to inspire.

Light/airy- Generally, I’d say pick 3 words to describe your brand, but I think light and airy go hand in hand with each other. There are the words I have picked to describe the colors I want to use for my brand. I want to use light colors, pinks, whites, light golds- things like that.

-PICK 3-4 WORDS TO DESCRIBE YOUR BRAND

So, go out and pick 3-4 words that you want people to feel when they walk away from online interaction with you!

And try not to pick something totally different from your own personality, if you’re more of a laid-back, reserved, quiet person, maybe the word “bubbly” isn’t for you. Maybe you’d want to portray a more “moody” vibe and pick darker colors for your brand.

Or, if you are outgoing maybe “bubbly” is for you and you can pick vibrant colors for your brand! Remember- this is a personal brand for your blog which means it about you!

2. WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO BUILD YOUR BRAND?

So once you have the words to describe your brand, and you know your target audience, you want to think about the platforms you’re going to be online.

When first starting out, you don’t want to be everywhere- Facebook, Instagram, YouTube ect.. It will get too overwhelming and you won’t really be able to fully focus on growing one platform at a time.

I recommend one platform where you will be producing long-form content, such and a Blog or Youtube. And 1-2 platforms as “support” where you will be promoting your long-form content- such as social media.

Chances are, if you’re watching this you may already have a blog, which is good!

-START WITH A BLOG

This first platform is one that you’re going to be providing a ton of value on. This will be the core of your business.

I recommend starting with a blog or website over YouTube because if you go self-hosted (which you should!) you own your blog. No one can take that away from you.

Whereas, with YouTube, it is a great place to create content but- you don’t own the platform. Your subject to algorithm changes, platform, or policy changes that you don’t like, your videos can be taken down or demonized- or worse. YouTube could just simply shut down, and all of your work would be taken away with it!

On your blog, you are in control of everything!

-PICK 1-2 SOCIAL MEDIA SITES TO BE ON

These are going to be your supporting platforms. Where you interact with your audience, make connections and how you bring traffic to your site. My two favorites are Twitter and Pinterest.

Pinterest brings me pretty much all of my traffic and Twitter is where I make affiliate sales and connect with other bloggers and writers. It’s also a great place to get sponsored posts as well if that the type of income you’re looking for.

Instagram is another great place to get sponsorships, And facebook is good for connections if you own a Facebook group.

So pick 1 to 2 platforms and work with those. You can create accounts on all platforms to begin building up a following and to save your username from being taken for later. But, you don’t have to focus on every platform at once!

3. CREATE A CONSISTENT BRANDING

Now that you have the words to describe your brand, and you know what platforms that you’re going to be one- it’s time to create that consistent brand.

Now what does that mean? It means two things.

-BE CONSISTENT IN POSTING

You want to be showing up consistently on your brand platforms. The easiest way to do this is by creating a schedule.

The schedule can mostly be for you, just to help you stay consistent but if you tell your audience you schedule they’ll know when to look for your content.

For example, I post every Thursday on my YouTube. And I announce that in my YouTube banner so that everyone who subscribes can know when to come back for another video.

I post every Monday on my blog, and I post about it right after on my Twitter to let people know a new blog has gone up.

You can also have a consistent social media schedule. This will help you keep your accounts active and help you grow in followers consistently.

The easiest way to keep track is by using a content calendar. I have a content calendar for my social media and for my blog, I recently did YouTube videos on both of those that you can check out and I am selling both calendars in my Etsy shop if you want to pick one up for yourself.

-USE CONSISTENT FORMAT AND COLORS

Now we can finally get into the color choices! But even still, it’s more than that.

You want to start with a consistent format that will be easy for your audience to recognize and follow along with. For example, all of my blog posts are written in a similar format in terms of headings, spacing, and where my photos are laid out

My YouTube videos are also recorded and laid out the same way in every video.

You also want to choose consistent colors, and use consistent graphics in your social media like on Pinterest, and everyone’s favorite- Instagram themes too!

RECOMMENDED: How to Better Format your Blog Posts- 6 Tips

4. MAKE SURE YOUR BRAND IS AUTHENTIC

This is huge! You want to make sure your personal brand is authentically you! There is such a thing as “fake it til you make it” but that does not apply to personal branding!

One way or another your true self will make an appearance eventually. How many people have you seen on TV and they seem to be the nicest people, but you hear from people who have met them in real life that they are actually super mean?

The, in my opinion, is personal branding gone wrong. If you get big enough online, and you see some fans in real life and you’ve portrayed online that you are this bubbly, happy, pink-loving person online, and fans meet you and you’re the total opposite… they’re gonna be a little shocked.

Of course. That’s extreme. But you get my point! That’s also not to say a moody aesthetic is not the way to go, if that’s you- go for it! But if not, stick to what matches you most.

Always be yourself online!

It will get exhausting if you are putting up the facade that you are someone you are not. The easiest thing to change is the colors and the logos and things like that, but what shouldn’t change is who you are as a person, your core values, and what message you want to send to the world.

This doesn’t mean that you can never change those things! As you grow as a person your values may change, you may redefine what you want from your business but I think really you won’t “change” them exactly, it’s more of a redefine and honing in on the core values that you hold as a person to really make your brand stand out online.

There are going to be people who are in the same niche as you, write on the same topics, target generally the same people. There is most definitely someone in the world using the same theme as you! So what you need to make sure the personal brand for your blog stands out online is who you are and the values you hold!

There are honestly so many more tips that I can give you about building a personal brand for your blog. Because, here’s the thing. Building a personal brand does not happen overnight. Your brand will evolve and change as you figure out what you want from your online business.

The main thing is to consider what you want your brand to be now, get those core values down, and worry about the rest later. Post that blog post or record that video. Get started! And the rest will fall into place later!