One of the biggest mistakes new business owners make is putting all their attention into building their business brand at the expense of their personal brand. Many of them don’t even realize they even have a personal brand to work with. If they do realize they have a personal brand, they treat it as secondary to other branding concerns.
What they do not realize is that a business can bounce back from bad business branding but it can’t bounce back as easily if something critical happens to your personal brand. That is just one reason that the personal brand is more important than the business brand.
There are many ways to build your personal brand. One of those ways is to provide useful content online that enhances your branding. If you are a plumber, don’t just post a webpage with your list of services and contact information. That is not particularly compelling. Besides, the only way people will find you is if they are looking for you, specifically.
A provider of SEO content writing services can help you create relevant content for which people are actually searching. That may include home repair and home improvement how-tos, the best tools for beginners, and guides on when a job is too big for a DIY project. There are many articles that tell you how you can do it, but few that tell you why.
Here are a few more reasons why your personal brand is so important.
Your Personal Brand Stays with You
Businesses come and go, even successful businesses can be sold, or change hands by other means. Sometimes, the only asset remaining with a struggling business is the brand. Just look at Blackberry and Nokia. Products sold under those brand have little to do with the founders who made them household brands.
However, there are also examples like Elon Musk. His investors are not so much investing in electric cars. They are investing in Elon Musk, himself. They believe in him. That means if something happens to the Tesla company, his personal brand will survive, and enable him to do other things. The value is not in Tesla. It is in Musk.
Your Personal Brand Allows You to Expand
Even if you are reasonably successful with your first business, you still have to start from scratch in convincing people to invest in your second business. If all your branding capital is tied up in the business, investors will not know who you are, or why they should trust you.
Once success means that you are just a person who had one good idea. If you only brand your business, you will have to sell every new business idea. If you brand yourself, that will carry over to your other business ventures. Make sure people are investing in you, not just your latest idea.
Your Business Cannot Survive the Failure of Your Personal Brand
Your personal brand can survive a catastrophic failure of your business. Your business cannot survive the catastrophic failure of your brand. Just ask Roseanne Barr. After making a career comeback, she managed to get her show canceled with racist tweets. She has also canceled any hope of a future comeback.
She is not alone. Hollywood is littered with the recent spate of crashed careers due to revelations of sexual harassment and misconduct. Every one of the actors in question has survived bad shows, movies, and other failed projects. That’s just business. But it will be almost impossible for them to come back from personal brand implosion.
That is why it is not only imperative that you build your personal brand but protect it as well. If you hit rock bottom but still have the integrity of your personal brand, you still have capital that can finance your next comeback. You have to protect it from slander, libel, and other forms of attack. Brand consultants can help with that.
The recent failure of the Essential smartphone is a cautionary tale. Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, could not put a successful Android phone on the market, in part, due to the tarnishing of his personal brand.
So never forget that your personal brand stays with you even when your business doesn’t. Your personal brand is the key to your next success. And neither your current nor your future business can survive the implosion of your personal brand.
What do you do to build and maintain your personal brand? What has worked well?
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