The Single Most Important Lesson of Personal Branding

You may not realize it, but you have a personal brand.

Google your name. If you have a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page or a Twitter account, it will surely come up in the search results. Perhaps, you were mentioned on your company's website, or you have recently published a blog article. Ask people in your online and offline networks about the impression they have of you. All of this is part of the brand named YOU.

Your brand determines how your connections see you. It can encourage them to relate to you, reach out to you, work with you, learn from you. Or it can discourage them from doing any of those things. It is up to you to make sure you manage your brand to avoid the latter.

Personal branding is an art.

Even the most experienced marketers don't always know how to apply their extensive marketing knowledge to presenting themselves and their own stories, let alone the rest of us.

If you Google personal branding, you'll find tons of great tips on how to build your personal brand. Instead of outlining another list of X steps to eternal glory, let me tell you my story.

My biggest mistake in building my brand

When I first started building my brand, I was so concerned about doing it right that I'd spend hours trying to figure out the best way to write my bio, formulate my strengths and articulate my key message. They tell you "find your voice", and that's exactly what I thought I was trying to do for myself.

I would carefully polish up every idea and every sentence. I would make sure I was publishing the best version of whatever I could produce and be known for. As you can imagine, it would take me a lot of time and effort each time I wanted to write an article, share an update or create a marketing piece, which led to me doing it very irregularly.

What is worse, after all the time and effort I'd have invested, I would get very little results: insignificant traffic, very small audience, low engagement, and no leads or new interesting connections.

As I was starting to loose motivation, I knew I had to change my strategy.

Instead of investing hours at once to produce a flawless (at least in my perception) piece of content once in a blue moon, I would take a small imperfect step every other day. Edit one section of my LinkedIn profile, write down one short post, contact one new person, create one new element on my website. While doing so, I would care only about the routine process, and forget all about my end goal.

Turns out, small steps added up over time bring you much better results than one extremely well-thought-out, polished action taken only once in a long while.

So, what's the lesson here?

Consistency beats intensity.

You don't need to be a genius. You don't need to produce flawless content. You don't need to spend hours overthinking every word on your entire LinkedIn profile at once.

Similarly to how you can't get killer abs by doing only one intense workout per month, you can't build a brand, or a certain image, by working on your marketing inconsistently.

Take the first small step - any step.

All of a sudden, you are the person who takes action towards building your brand. Which makes you want to take the next small step, and then the next after that, and the next after that.

As Jeff Haden wrote in his book "The Motivation Myth" (which I highly recommend you to read),

The people who actually achieve their goals create routines. They consistently take the steps that, in time, will ensure they reach their ultimate goal.

He also wrote:

If you dedicate yourself to working your process, you will make progress. Success is inevitable.

If you want people to come to you for the work you do, start building your personal brand today. All you need is to take the first step.