How to Build a Personal Brand as a New Blogger

If you don’t build a personal brand as a new blogger, you might not succeed with your blogging efforts.

Growing a blog is much more than choosing a niche and posting content. You have to brand yourself as an expert to win quickly and avoid staying on the struggle bus for years and years to come.

When you grow your personal brand as a blogger, you quickly gain more readers, newsletter subscribers, and customers. Building your personal brand will unlock many benefits.

If you’re ready to unlock these amazing benefits, keep reading this guide, and I’ll show you exactly what you need to do to build a personal brand as a new blogger.

Why Build a Personal Brand as a New Blogger?

A personal brand can be defined as how you want the world to see you in reference to your experience, skills, and abilities within a specific niche or industry you are a part of.

I want my Hiking with Shawn personal brand to reflect the leading authority in promoting hiking, cycling, and outdoor recreation opportunities in the Shawnee National Forest and Southern Illinois State Parks. I want Shawn Gossman to be associated as a long-time blogger who shows new bloggers how to create and succeed with a blog.

But you can’t just create a blog, start posting, and expect everyone to fully understand who you are. You have to build a personal brand to make that possible. A lot of new bloggers fail at this, too.

There are many benefits in building your personal brand as a blogger, too.

For starters, a personal brand can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you seem the same as them, your content won’t be seen as unique, and you might not gain as many readers. You definitely want to be different from the rest of the competition.

When you build a personal brand, you open yourself up to starting your own business. Whether you continue to stay active on your blog or move on to something else, you can still leverage your personal brand as a business opportunity. Personal branding can pay off in the end, literally.

Building a personal brand as a blogger will assist you in increasing your reputation within your niche. The more people in your niche know about you, the more you can enhance your authority as an expert in your target market. Personal brand development will help you extend your reputation as an expert in your industry.

When you build a personal brand, you can use it to cross-promote your blog content and your personal brand activities, such as your business, products, and services.

A personal brand allows you to remain consistent across all platforms, including your blog, social media, and anywhere else on the Internet of Things.

Finally, building a personal brand is building trust within your target audience market. Trust is how you get loyal followers, how you gain organic ambassadors, and how you convert a blog reader into a subscriber or even into a paying customer. Trust is everything in such a competitive internet market.

As you can see, there are many benefits to having a personal brand, especially if you’re a blogger. Now, let’s move on to how you can get started today.

Build a Personal Brand with Social Media

Social media is one of the best methods of building a personal brand as a blogger.

You should evaluate what social media platforms your audience is using. Then, strategically choose the best platforms to meet your blogging efforts’ goals and objectives. Don’t overwhelm yourself by using every platform available. Use the ones that matter the most and will benefit your personal brand and blog.

Different social media platforms deliver different results.

X is great for sharing quick content, having live presentations, and sending direct messages to reach potential readers, subscribers, and customers.

LinkedIn is great for posting long-form content, networking with others in your niche, exploring the business side of your personal brand, and exploring blogging opportunities.

Facebook is great for building a community, creating a familiar local position in your region, creating events, and you can build a personal brand utilizing pages and social groups.

Instagram is ideal for sharing videos, stories, and photogenic posts with fans and followers of your niche and building your personal brand. It might be a great platform to make everything about you.

Threads is a new platform that is growing. It competes with X and might be worth treating like X to see if you can develop more reach.

YouTube is best for tapping into video, whether it’s long-form, short-form, or a combination of the two video formats. Video is a very popular form of building a personal brand these days.

Pinterest is a great resource for fan-focused niche bloggers to build a personal brand. Many food and travel bloggers have had great success using Pinterest.

When using social media platforms to build a personal brand as a blogger, there are some areas you want to attempt to focus on the most, including:

• Images—Make sure your profile photo and background (channel art, etc.) match your brand and theme across all platforms. Use eye-catching, high-quality visuals that explain your relationship to the niche.
• Headline—Optimize your headline (username, name, etc.) to reflect your name for personal branding but also reflect your industry. My Instagram, for example, is “Shawn Gossman—Shawnee National Forest,” which shows who I am and what topic I represent.
• Bio—Optimize your bio (about section, etc.) to build a personal brand on social media. Include your brand name, target keywords, and an eye-catching statement that explains exactly what you do. Keep your bio as short as possible.
• Theme—Try to stick to the same theme and colors on all social media accounts. If you can use the same colors as your blog, try to keep them the same or close. Keep the same statement language on all your bios, but you can mix it up with different words.
• Content—Try to keep the same flow of content for each social media platform, but the content format should match the best type for that platform. For example, video reels do better on Instagram, but long-form worded posts do better on LinkedIn.
• SEO and Readability—Use SEO practices to enhance your social media profile information on search engines. You should also ensure clear readability. Don’t use big words. Use shorter sentences and paragraphs. Make your content easy to read and understand immediately after reading.

Your goal with social media is to enable anyone who visits your pages on any platform to immediately recognize who you are. This can be accomplished when you build a personal brand as a blogger.

Be Consistent with Your Personal Brand

Consistency is extremely important when you build a personal brand as a blogger.

There are a few ways you can remain consistent with your brand. These methods are easy enough to form into a habit, too. Once you make your consistency habitual, it becomes a lot easier to build a personal brand as a blogger.

One way to stay consistent is to schedule ahead on anything you can schedule. Use the scheduling feature on WordPress to schedule blog posts to publish ahead of time while you’re writing more to add to the roster. Use something like Buffer to schedule social media content to keep everything active so you can focus on engagement. Scheduling is a remarkable tool for staying consistent with building your personal brand.

Use a content calendar for your blog and social media. A content calendar has multiple benefits. It allows you to stay ahead of content distribution so you don’t fall behind. It also helps prevent any sort of writer’s block that could prohibit your success. Building a personal brand requires consistently publishing content across your enterprise. A content calendar will help you accomplish that.

Make sure you prioritize engagement across your blog and social media. By scheduling content from your content calendar, you generate more time. You should devote this extra time to engaging with your audience. Reply to every blog comment and every comment on social media. Reply in a way that keeps the discussion going. Engage with other bloggers and social media pages related to your content. Engage on a daily basis for the best results.

Always use your same voice when you build a personal brand online. This also means you need to use your real voice. Don’t make a new voice for the internet. Be realistic and be you. If you’re caught using a voice that isn’t the real you, your entire reputation will be on the line. It could kill all efforts to form a personal brand. You should also be personal with your audience on your content and through engagement. Write and respond as if you’re talking to a person face-to-face. Being personal, using your voice, and being real with your audience will unlock many benefits.

As you can see, consistency definitely matters, whether it’s your content or your voice. It can make or even break your personal brand-building efforts.

Build a Personal Brand Strategy

If you want to build a personal brand, you need to develop a strategy for having a personal brand.

A strategy lets you define, plan, and measure anything you create one for. Strategies are why most businesses remain successful. They can also help you and your personal brand.

There are routine steps in strategizing for a personal brand.

Step 1 can be completed by identifying your goals. What do you want to get out of building a personal brand? Your goal or goals should be realistic. Don’t choose a goal that will take a miracle to complete. Be realistic and set smaller goals that lead to a much larger goal.

Step 2 is about identifying your USP. Your USP is your Unique Selling Point, which separates you from the competition. Whether you’re selling something or not, you need to be unique compared to other bloggers in your niche. My USP is that my content targets new bloggers. What’s your USP? Tell me in the comments below.

Step 3 centers around telling your relatable story. This means that your story for starting your blog should be the truth, but it should be said in a way that your audience can easily resonate with and identify with. Basically, your story should be their story. You can shape your story by listening to your audience and understanding their pain points and how they could be tied to your experience.

Step 4 is about being real and human. You need to create a human strategy. It needs to be ethical and moral in terms of what people in your community and audience mean to you and how you will benefit from their following you. When you build a personal brand, you need to be real about it and human.

This simple 4-step process will help you create an efficient strategy as you continue to build a personal brand as a blogger.

Build a Personal Brand Blogging Strategy

You also need to create a blog strategy as you build your personal brand.

Building a personal brand and building a blog are two different components. Sure, they’re being used to benefit one another. You’re combining both of these to make a more successful effort, but they’re still two different components. You have to plan for both in order for both of them to be successful.

Your blog strategy falls under the kind of content you create for your target audience. I say target because, by now, you need to know who your audience is. You can’t have a strategy without knowing who exactly your audience is. Once you know, you can begin to strategize on the kind of content you will provide to them that will benefit your effort to build a personal brand.

A good set of content strategies to consider include:

Create niche awareness content. This is content that you’re creating to target keywords and topics within your specific niche. For example, if you have a niche for traveling the world by bike, you might create an article focusing on “different kinds of bikes to use for different types of travel.” This article type would cover a topic and allow you to target a keyword associated with the niche.

Create expert advice content. This content would answer your audience’s needs and wants. When you answer that sort of question, you gain authority if the reader is satisfied with what you have to say about the topic. Answer the hardest questions and provide the easiest solutions, and you’ll do great in this area.

Create content that sells. Whether you plan to sell or not, you should create content aimed at selling something. It could be to sell an actual product or service. It could be to get a new email subscriber. It could be to join a community or take a course. In the end, the content is created to get a reader to act. You might even have to add a lead magnet, which is a highly valuable resource that you give away for free to encourage the reader to complete the action or purchase.

Create cornerstone content pages. These pages are either extensive ultimate guides or a directory of highly valuable internally linked content pages that are specific to the topics of your niche that you want to have the most authority in. These are the topics that you niche down to when choosing what to blog about. These pages should be the best pages on your blog. Many blogs mark these pages as “Start Here” or something like that just to give you an idea of what kind of content to include.

Be sure that when you create the content formats above, you also create them in your own voice, with a personal tone and strategy in mind. Every piece of content you create should have an end goal in mind. Everything should be associated with your strategies.

How to Grow Your Personal Brand

It’s not that difficult to build a personal brand, but it will take work. There are required steps that you must take when building your brand.

1. You should consistently write highly valuable, high-quality content that answers the needs and wants of your direct target market and audience.
2. You should gradually scale up your content. This means you should publish more blogs and social media content more often to get known quicker.
3. You should be active on Q&A websites like Quora, for example. This is an ideal way to answer questions that will build up your authority and reputation in your niche.
4. You should be active in your niche as an authority. This means you should post on discussion forums, be active in online communities, and even interview on podcasts.
5. You should create things that can go viral for your brand. You should start a newsletter. You should launch an online community. You should create a podcast.
6. You should be networking with other experts and creators within your niche. You should collaborate with these people and blogs and help each other out.
7. You should ask your audience to write reviews and testimonials for your content, share your content around, and create organic ambassadors for your brand.

By doing the steps above, you significantly grow your personal brand. You just have to consistently do them. It’s not and will never be a one-time deal. You have to be all in to make this work.

Personal Branding Mistakes to Avoid

There are things you should attempt to avoid when you build a personal brand. Not avoiding the things below can harm your brand or even stop you from building one.

• If you’re not willing to answer the same question more than once, no matter how annoying it may be, you’ll hinder your branding ability.
• If you can’t be nice and respectful to others, you won’t build a personal brand that others can feel comfortable to attach to.
• If you can’t be honest or as real as you are away from the internet, building a brand will be almost impossible.
• If you can’t give stuff away for free, how can anything trust your content or products that are not free? Be willing to give more than you sell.
• If you don’t fulfill the needs and wants of your target niche audience, you’ll never be seen as an authority or expert in your niche.
• If you don’t have a target audience or you don’t know who your audience is, you’ll never be able to build a personal brand because you have no direction.
• If you don’t invest yourself fully in building a brand with your blog, branding will be one of the hardest tasks you’ll ever attempt.
• If you don’t choose the right niche based on your passions, if there is a market for it, and if you can monetize it, building a brand will be impossible.
• If you can’t be active in your niche by engaging on a regular basis, it will almost be completely impossible to build a personal brand.
• If you can’t accept that failure is a wonderful opportunity to learn from your mistakes, building a personal brand will burn you out quickly.
• As a blogger who wishes to be seen as an expert, if you don’t try to develop a personal brand, to begin with, you’re going to miss out on many exceptional opportunities.

Avoid these mistakes as much as you can. However, if you make one, refer to the part where a mistake or failure is a learning opportunity because that’s what it can do for you.

Build a Personal Brand with Copyblogger

If you need more assistance to build a personal brand as a blogger, I have the perfect platform for you to get this assistance.

The Copyblogger Academy.

Join copywriting expert Tim Stoddart and personal branding expert Charles Miller in their personal branding workshops within the Academy. This program is so popular that it became really popular and active within a few days of launching.

You can also enjoy monthly accountability meetings hosted by your favorite blogging guru, me! I’m the Community Manager at the Copyblogger Academy, and I’d love to see you at our monthly Zoom meetings.

If you need more help building a personal brand, I highly recommend the Copyblogger Academy.

Final Thoughts About How to Build a Personal Brand

This concludes my guide on how to build a personal brand as a blogger. A personal brand will help you gain more readers, present yourself as an expert in your niche, and even make more money in the process. However, if you follow the advice above, you’ll have issues building your personal brand.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, please support me by sharing it with other bloggers you know. You can also make a one-time donation if you also want to support me that way.

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About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers that follow this blog. Shawn also offers a variety of services for extra help in the area of content creation, blogging, forums, and digital marketing. Learn more about Shawn Gossman by clicking here.