Personal Branding 101, A How-To for Aspiring Entrepreneurs and Job Hunters in 3 Steps

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Previously in my life and career, posting content and ideas was considered cringe and phoney. I thought online interactions were nothing but posting exaggerated achievements and celebrating someone else's posts without even knowing them in person.

Therefore, writing online and building connections has always been a low priority for me. There are always more important things to do: university tasks that get me an extra mark, more questions to prepare for upcoming interviews, and technologies to learn to keep up with the ever-changing industry.

But I have neglected building my personal brand and its compounding benefits over the long run.

Firstly, it showcases your knowledge and worldview beyond a few lines and bullet points on your resume. By building a portfolio of writing and learning online, it shows the progression of your thinking over time, turning strangers into witnesses of your journey, which can build authentic connections without even meeting the person. This applies to job seeking, promotion, or simply finding a group of people who share your vision and interests, which will compound into a large network with unlimited opportunities.

Secondly, it forces you to think and learn. When you output content, you are testing whether you understand a piece of knowledge and distilling why such information is valuable for yourself and the audience. This is a valid way to leverage the power of Feynman's technique (learn by teaching). Additionally, it documents the journey for you to reflect upon and shift your direction as needed.

Therefore, here are the steps for starting a personal brand and learning in public.

Step 1: Find the Niche That You Are Truly Fascinated By or Have an Unfair Advantage In

When it comes to writing online, we often think it is exactly the same as writing journal entries: taking experiences from our daily lives and drawing actionable insights from them.

But there is a twist. The content you produce should be something that interests you so you will have the motivation to consistently create it. (This is a long-term game; most people fail by quitting too early.) Also, the content you produce should leverage an unfair advantage you have, which attracts followers with unique value and builds a moat to avoid competitors.

For instance, my passion is learning and applying new technologies and trends in the software industry. My advantage is that I am a software engineer with domain knowledge, able to build prototypes based on ideas.

If the previous two steps are executed successfully, you are on track to output valuable insights and secure connections with an audience who shares similar visions or interests.

However, your content should be consistent and align with the interests of your audience. If you start to post irrelevant information, it will negatively impact the audience's perception of your personal brand. (For instance, posting cooking recipes on a tech channel would be irrelevant.)

Step 2: Build a Sustainable Input, Organising, and Content Delivery System

One trick to building a personal brand is allocating time outside of our busy schedules to write and create content, especially during times when the results of your personal brand are not showing and writing becomes a chore.

But the solution to overcome this challenge is also straightforward: fine-tune and document your input.

So, what do I mean by fine-tuning and documenting input? Let me tell you a story first.

Richard Feynman had a really interesting idea: he always kept the 12 most important questions in his life in his mind. Whenever he encountered something interesting and insightful, he would match this newly acquired knowledge against these 12 topics to see which one it fit into. When he was not actively inputting and learning, his brain would still think about these questions subconsciously, generating sparks of great ideas.

I think creating content for your personal brand should follow this idea as well, where you keep the ideas you want to learn and write about in notes. Once you discover insights in your inputs, record them in the relevant section, along with your thoughts on the matter. Over time, pieces of insight will amalgamate into ideas within the topics. After that, creating content will come naturally since you have saved a lot of time in research and connecting the dots between different ideas. This is what I mean by documenting the input, where this bottom-up approach to creating content ideas becomes the source of your inspiration, streamlining the creation process.

On the other hand, fine-tuning your input is also important. I always believe in the notion of "Garbage in, garbage out." No matter how good you are at distilling insights from information and writing, worthless input will yield worthless content. Therefore, you should adjust your input sources to only contain the content you wish to learn about. The input channels can include, but are not limited to:

Step 3: Leverage Growth Tactics, Turn Output into Evergreen Content, and Let It Compound Over Time

The growth tactics I followed during the early stage are simple:

  1. Make your content engaging (not just valuable, but also engaging)
  2. Refactor and post multiple times on multiple platforms

For the first tactic, if your content is valuable but not engaging, readers and the audience will immediately lose interest in continuing to read. Firstly, the article should have a strong title and introduction as a hook, which relates to their experiences (identify the pain points of your audience) and informs them what value the content is going to deliver. Secondly, give emotional value by sharing your personal experiences or telling a story. Don't treat blog posts as academic papers; they should be relatable. Lastly, add a TL;DR at the end, which stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read." In the current age, where social media platforms are dominated by short-form content, you need to deliver your value as quickly as possible to capture attention.

For the second tactic, increasing the number of postings can significantly improve the exposure of your content. You can post your article in the form of blog posts, LinkedIn articles, X threads, etc. You can even post content beyond the final articles, which includes the initial input and reflections you gather from different sources, any insightful comments on your posts, etc. The key is to add a multiplication factor to the content you have poured significant energy and effort into.

Monetise Your Personal Brand

Once you have a personal brand and connections, there are countless ways you can leverage it, such as paid subscriptions/communities, paid consultation services, software products, etc. The upside to building a personal brand and documenting your journey is unlimited.

TL;DR

As I promised, a TL;DR section for the article:

Conclusion

The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago, the second best time is now.

Start to do the important things that always get neglected, it would compound over time, and turn into a unfair leverage in the future.