How to establish your personal brand without breaking the bank

Check out these marketing strategies

When your personal brand is established, it will pay dividends for decades. Whether you’re looking to get more clients, grow your followers, or get more leads, you can accomplish any of these relatively faster when you are viewed as an authority in your industry.

The best part is, solidifying your personal brand isn’t always as costly and as neck-breaking as others would have you think. With the right marketing strategies in place, you can build your own brand without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly, or burn the midnight candle every single day.

Allow me to share with you four high-impact marketing strategies that will help you build your personal brand, without you breaking the bank.

1. Create a personal blog

Influencers and industry leaders nowadays are expected to have a personal blog. After all, it’s pretty easy to create a new blog, and there is no excuse for anyone who is truly serious about becoming an influencer not to have their very own website. Think about blogs as your brick and mortar on the internet. In thhttp://neilpatel.com/the-step-by-step-guide-to-creating-a-money-making-blog-in-1-hour/e past, when the customers want to get some information about a certain brand, they go to the brand’s physical office.

Nowadays, when the customers want to learn more about a brand, they no longer go to the brand’s physical office. Instead, they go online to find the company’s brick and mortar on the internet — their website. Imagine this: What if you were the customer, and you spent half an hour trying to find the brand’s website, yet you still couldn’t find it?

You’d probably be frustrated, right?

Considering how we are all busy, we often do not have enough time to research a company’s website. If it’s taking too long to find someone’s website, we often decide to go to the competitor’s’ site. Of course, none of us want that to happen. It’s because of this that brands need to have a website. Without one, a brand can easily look second-rate or inferior to other brands. Without how cutthroat the competition is nowadays, you can’t afford to look weak in front of your audience. Having that kind of chink in your armor can lead to you losing boatloads of business.

2. Answer questions at Q&A sites

This strategy is pretty straightforward. You just have to go to Q&A sites like Quora.com then respond to questions that are highly relevant to your niche. The more questions you answer, the more of an expert you will look to the readers — assuming that you gave value-packed answers, of course. What most entrepreneurs and marketers love about this strategy is the fact that it isn’t that time consuming, and neither is it expensive.

I say this because, for those who are keen on using this strategy, they don’t spend hours upon hours answering questions. They just answer 2 to 3 questions daily (which usually takes about 10 – 15 minutes), then they’re pretty much good to go. It may not seem much at first glance, but if you do the math, you’ll realize that answering three questions per day translates to you having answered a whopping 1095 questions in a single year. When your brand name is seen on 1095 web pages that your audience would likely visit, it becomes almost impossible for them not to notice who you are.

Also, when you put into consideration the fact that your answers are packed with wisdom bombs, your readers are bound to see you as their go-to guy whenever they have questions or challenges that they need to address.

Important points to remember when using this strategy:

• As much as possible, keep your answers lengthy. However, you should never add words just for the sake of adding them. Add as much value as you can.
• Add your signature to your answers. Your signature should contain a link to your personal website.
• Whenever possible, link to one of your website’s articles as a reference.
• Don’t give everything away. Keep your readers hanging to some extent then tell them to go to your site to get the information that they need.
• Add a call-to-action at the end of your answers whenever possible. You can ask them to contact you if they need your services, etc.

3. Interview industry experts and feature them in your blog

By interviewing other industry experts, you are associating yourself with strong brands. That right there will work wonders for you. When your audience visits your blog and sees you together with the bigwigs in your industry, the chances are good that they’ll see you as one of the top guys as well. When that happens, your clout will skyrocket.

And so the question becomes: How will you get the experts to accept your interview? The answer is quite simple, really. You just need to ask. There’s nothing to it. While a good number of these experts will ignore or decline your offer, you’ll be amazed at how some of them will accept it. You just need to make sure that your outreach message is compelling enough.

Allow me to share with you five points that you need to consider before sending an outreach message:

• Be sure to highlight the benefits that they will enjoy should they decide to accept your interview request. Remember that they are asking the question, “What’s in it for me?” The sweeter your answer to this question is, the better.
• Make sure that you are contacting them using the right platform.
• Keep your message short and sweet. Avoid exceeding four paragraphs.
• Reach out to them at the right time. Sending your message during the day is often a good idea. Avoid reaching out to them when you know that they are on a trip or vacation.
• Personalize your message.
• Add a professional-looking signature on your message.

If you incorporate the points that I shared above when reaching out to the experts, the chances of them replying to you will drastically increase.

Bonus tip: Be sure to ask for referrals once you’re done interviewing the industry expert. That way, you won’t have a shortage of people to interview.