Everything I know about Personal Branding, for free.

This edition of the Sunday Scaries is sponsored by Pago Chairs. The chair brand I’ve been using happily for 5 years - see the range here

I’ve had a lot of people comment on and ask me about my personal brand, asking how I did it and saying how I’ve done a good job in developing mine. I assume the people who disagree with that just aren’t messaging me to tell me how they feel, so it’s only the positive side I hear from.

I have even been asked a few times to do talks on personal brand and I have declined because to be honest, I’m not sure if I think personal brand is a huge wankfest or a genuine and helpful thing that people should invest in.

Part of my scepticism on PB comes from what I see come out of Personal Branding experts and almost everyone of them says the same thing, to the point I can’t differentiate between them.

The personal branding experts own personal brands are so similar, that I couldn’t tell their personal brands apart from each other.

Maybe my biggest eye roll comes from the photoshoots. I can understand people want a range of images of themselves to use in promoting events and I guess in some content they post.

But do you really need 200 self portraits to go along with everything you post?

Maybe you do, but do they all have to be the same pose? You’re sitting on a chair that’s backwards.

You’re reading a book next to a window.

You’re smiling on a phone call.

You’re on a macbook at a cafe.

I don’t get it. I’ve never seen one of these pictures and thought “this is a person I want to do business with”. I also don’t think it’s someone I don’t want to do business with but I feel like people are doing this because they think they have to, or they’ve been told they have to.

When I started writing on LinkedIn, there was no goal to build a personal brand. I had never heard the term personal brand for the first few years of doing so.

But I did think there was an opportunity to use the platform to raise awareness of who I was, to help me do my job (get more clients, reach more candidates) and get jobs when I was looking.

So if you do think I’ve done a good job in building a personal brand or raising my profile I will say this, I’m pretty sure that in approx 7 years and 1000+ pieces of content, I have not posted a single selfie.

I did not have a set strategy on what I would say or who I would say it to. I have never had a goal on likes, comments, follows, connections.

My entire strategy which I will give you for free, is this:

• Be yourself, do it consistently and be patient at the start

That’s it, that my entire thought process and why I have been turning down requests to speak about personal brand.

But then I speak to people and start to think maybe I should be a personal brand coach as they often just need a little guidance on how to be themselves. How to boost their brand without it become a full-time job.

And most frequently and importantly, without hating themselves.

If I were to ever venture into the world of personal brand coaching, the course would be called something like “building a personal brand without hating yourself”.

So if it’s crossed your mind about building a personal brand - especially if you’re running your own business, you are a founder that wants to raise the profile of your company to increase reach for hiring good people or someone that wants to raise their profile for potential job opportunities in the future - but you’ve hesitated because what you see about personal brand makes you nauseous, do it and ignore all the advice you see out there.

Do what feels right to you (which could also be nothing), be consistent and be patient as it will take a while to pay off.

And if you’re a personal branding expert who sells the importance of photoshoots to your clients, I’m sorry for an offence I have caused. You might be right. It might work and I might just be a cranky old man about this. It’s just an opinion and not necessarily the right one.