How to build your personal brand, even without TikTok.
A good friend called me this week to tell me he had started a new business. Because his new entrepreneurial adventure would require him to sell himself to others, he asked me for my best advice on how to build a personal brand. I’m not sure if he asked me because I have spent my entire career building brands, because he admired my personal brand, or because he wanted to understand where I went wrong. I was afraid to ask. After a moment of reflection, I shared my best advice on building a personal brand. And here it is for you.
Influencers know something that other people don’t:
It is not about who you know. It really is about who knows you.
The more people who know about you, what you know, and what you are doing, the better. The Kardashians have built an empire on this simple principle. And the fact that so many people can actually spell Kardashian is proof that it works.
The first thing you should consider when building your personal brand is to start a blog, vlog, podcast, newsletter, social media feed, or other regularly published knowledge. (Which would include having your own TV show like the Kardashians.)
When I first started The Weaponry, I also started The Adam Albrecht Blog. It has been an amazing vehicle to share my thoughts, ideas, successes, and learnings with the world. Literally. My blog has been read in over 150 countries. Who knew there were over 150 countries? (Geographers and cartographers knew. There are actually 195 countries.)
A regular commitment to sharing your knowledge and experience through blogging helps build your personal brand and reputation. For the past 9 years, I have shared my thoughts, experiences and perspectives two to three times per week. This creates a steady stream of value-adding content that I can then share on various other channels, including LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Medium, Reddit, Instagram and Threads. However, as of this morning, we Americans can no longer share our expertise or best dance moves and lip-syncing skillz on TikTok. Because apparently national security is more important.
As of this publishing, I have written and published 1,045 blog posts that I can share across my social media ecosystem. As a result, my business and I are both top of mind when people have relevant opportunities. I regularly hear from people that I haven’t seen in a long time who tell me that they think of me often. This is what sharing your content does for you. This makes it great for building your brand but terrible if you are in the witness protection program.
Podcasts, newsletters, vlogs, columns, and social media channels all work too. The key is to share information and value with the world broadly so that more people than you could reach through individual messages know about you, your skills, experience, philosophies, and your business offering.
While you may create your platform to help support your business, you never know where your platform may lead. My blog readers encouraged me to write a book. Which sounded crazy-hard, until 2020, when I suddenly had plenty of time on my over-sanitized hands to do crazy-hard things. I published my first book in 2021, building on the content I had first created for my blog.
My first book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say?, created amazing new opportunities for me as a paid speaker, and as a guest on TV shows and podcasts. Those opportunities helped raise my profile, and enabled me to share more about my business and my personal perspective on a wide range of topics.
In 2024 I also started publishing Adam’s Good Newsletter. The reach of the newsletter now exceeds the reach of my blog. And the newsletter is a great vehicle to share good news and information about all of my activities, interests and offerings.
Having your own newsletter also means that you own a media channel. While Facebook, LinkedIn and X continue to modify their algorithm to their own advantage, making it harder and harder for you to share your message without paying for exposure, like at those clubs, you control everything about the way your message is shared in a newsletter. And the audience you develop for your newsletter becomes one of your greatest assets.
What’s more, a newsletter created through a newsletter service provider like Mailchimp (which I use), Substack or others, enables you to see when readers have opened your newsletter, and which links interested them enough to click on them. This feedback enables you to create an even more valuable offering, both for your readers and for yourself and your business.
Key Takeaway
Always remember, it’s not about who you know. It’s who knows you. Develop a platform to share what you know and what you are experiencing with others. This not only creates value for your audience, it raises your profile. It means that people will think of you more often, even when you are not thinking of them. As a result, you won’t just seek out your own new opportunities, the dynamic flips, and both people and opportunities find their way to you. Which changes everything. Kinda like a TikTok ban.
*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.
+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.
Originally published at http://adamalbrecht.blog on January 19, 2025.