11 Steps to Building a Strong Personal Brand

A strong personal brand can help you land your dream job, gives you real leverage when negotiating with clients if you’re a freelancer, and builds your reputation as an expert. Building one, though, is a process that needs solid foundations. Where do you start? Here are eleven steps to help you.

1. Who should hear about you?

Whether you’re a freelancer looking to win clients or you want to grow inside a larger organization, people need to hear about you.

• Prepare a list of five organizations where you’d like to put your talent and passion to work.
• Try to find out who (a person or a department) could be responsible for deciding to work with you or hire you.
• Start by… listening. Follow them on social channels (X, Facebook) — you might learn the exact details of problems your skills could solve.

2. What do you actually want?

“If something is for everyone, it’s for no one,” goes the old marketing truth. The worst kind of brand is exactly that — bland. For everyone and no one. Like a cover letter that says “I want to work at any company, in any position.”

• Think about a problem you want to eliminate from the world. Sounds heavy, I know, but you probably have one. That’s your vision. I, for one, don’t want to see bad, bland brands around me.
• Now think about how you can help solve that problem. Are you just starting out and can’t tackle it today? Fine — think about what you need to learn instead. That’s your goal. I learned marketing and brand-building, and now I help my clients tell better stories.

3. Let others tell you who you are.

If you’ve ever written a cover letter, you know the first thing that comes to mind is empty phrases. “Team player,” “goal-oriented,” blah blah blah. You know who has it easier? People who’ve already worked with you.

• Ask for honest feedback — start with family, then friends, and finally a few colleagues and coworkers.
• See which traits show up from a surface-level relationship with you (coworkers and distant acquaintances), and which only emerge once someone gets to know you better (family and friends).
• Looking at everything you’ve gathered, write a draft cover letter.

4. Do your own SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis sounds like a serious management tool, but it’s just as useful for building a personal brand. It’ll let you quickly craft a message that sets you apart. And if you already did exercise 3, this will be easy.

• What are you good at? Can you motivate people? Or are you detail-oriented? List everything that comes from within you and will help you carry out the vision from exercise 2.
• What are you weak at? I, for one, am hopeless with paperwork and details. Recognizing your weaknesses is the first step to protecting yourself against them.
• What opportunities do you see around you? Did you get into a good university? Is the job market short on people with a skill you happen to have?
• Is there anything that could change against you? Are you crashing at a friend’s place and could lose the roof over your head in this city at any moment? Or could your skills soon be replaced by an automated tool?

5. Do a competitive analysis

You know what you’re better at than others. Now ask yourself: how common are your skills? Where would you be easiest to replace, and what about you can’t be faked?

• How many people with similar skills could show up at a potential employer’s door and replace you right away? If you’re a developer, the market is fairly tight. But what if you teach English?
• Could your skills be replaced by other skills? Or by some automated tool? Say you’re great at building Facebook ad campaigns — when will Facebook’s own tools get simple enough that people stop needing you?

If you did this analysis honestly and it turns out that, for whatever reason, very few people could replace you… you’re in a strong negotiating position. Test these arguments on a friendly potential employer or client. They might come up with points you hadn’t thought of.

6. The elevator pitch and the high-concept pitch

A member of Congress, congratulating President Wilson on his habit of giving short speeches, once asked him how long it took him to prepare one. Wilson replied:

“That depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

• Take everything you want to say about your brand (including what you learned about yourself) and shape it into a tight, 3-minute speech. It should answer “how can you help” and “why you, specifically.” That’s your elevator pitch. And don’t kid yourself — polishing it takes at least a few days of work.
• “I make my living telling stories” is my high concept pitch — one sentence that hooks the person I’m talking to enough that they want to know more. Think about it: what would that sentence look like in your case?

7. Fill out your social profiles

A brand should be consistent. That means it should say the same thing at every touchpoint people have with it. For a personal brand, that means consistency across your social channels.

• Google your own name. What shows up on the first page? If it’s all links related to you, make sure each one carries your elevator pitch or high concept pitch.
• If searching your name on Google turns up things that have nothing to do with you, think about it: which keyword can you tie your brand to? In my case, that’s “Paul Skah Wrocław” or “Paul Skah storytelling.”

8. Start “social listening,” answer questions

When you walk into a party where you don’t know anyone, you don’t plant yourself in the middle of the room and shout about how great you are (I hope). A better strategy is to mingle, listen to what people are talking about, and join the conversation at the right moment. The same goes for your personal brand.

• Join topical groups on LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit — read the discussions, spot the influential people, and… speak up when you actually know the answer to a question.
• Start following (on X, Instagram, or LinkedIn) people who have something worth saying in the field you want to be known in. Sooner or later, you’ll get a chance to engage with them.
• Get familiar with “automated listening” tools like Google Alerts (free) or Brand24 (paid, better). Set up alerts for the keywords you care about.

9. Pick a fight. Start a discussion.

A strong personal brand belongs to someone with clear opinions on a given topic. The same goes for you. You already know what’s being debated in your industry. Now pick a side and… jump in with passion.

• Write an article, or a forum reply, taking a clear side in the dispute. Do your homework, gather the data, put in the work. Your piece will end up cited as a reference for “your” side of the argument.
• Debate people substantively and you’ll get noticed and respected.
• Keep doing this regularly, in different places, with different people.

10. Develop anecdotes and a “brand story”

An expert isn’t just someone who knows their corner of the market — they also know how to talk about it brilliantly.

• Collect interesting stories from your field. Write them down, then learn to tell them in an engaging way.
• Turn “how I ended up here” into a story too — people prefer experts who aren’t accidental, but were led here by a chain of events. Like the chef who says, “I loved cooking since I was little — I used to ‘cook’ earthworms in the sandbox and make my parents eat them with a smile.” Learn to tell that story.
• Check out this example (19 y/o Marketing Wizard is a genuinely great high-concept pitch in itself).

11. Tell your story

You can have a great story, but if no one hears it, it might as well not exist. So go out and tell it.

• Find local conferences and meetups in your industry. Volunteer to tell your story. Judge the results by how many people want to talk to you afterward, or want to work with you. That’s exactly how Michał Sadowski built Brand24 and his own personal brand — it also helped him find clients and advocates in the local market.
• Pay to put your story in front of the right people. If you have a particularly interesting article that important people in your industry should see, don’t hesitate to use paid promotion occasionally. WARNING: this should be a genuinely rare exception, not your standard playbook.
• Let others tell your story: show off your skills by helping someone. Look around at local schools and nonprofits — they’ll gladly make use of your skills. They can’t afford professional services, but they’ll happily talk about the good work you did.

Some of the things listed above you only need to do once — properly (emphasis on “properly”). Others need to become a repeatable process. But the results will show up faster than you expect. Good luck!

And if that’s not enough for you, Marek Jankowski put together a massive guide to building a personal brand. Check it out!