11 Personal Branding Tips That Win Followers

There are three main reasons why personal branding efforts fail:

1. You never get started: You might not know how to get started, or if you do write content, you never actually post it, as you believe it isn’t good enough. 
2. You post content inconsistently: You go through phases where you occasionally post a lot of content and then stop for an extended period of time. 
3. Your content doesn’t earn engagement: You may be posting content consistently, but engagement is meager. 

The tips below address solutions for all three challenges and will help you consistently create content that delivers high engagement and allows you to build genuine relationships with people in your niche. 

1. Use Repeatable Frameworks

Using a repeatable framework makes it easier to create content because you’re essentially just answering questions rather than coming up with new content ideas from scratch. 

Additionally, if you select frameworks that worked in the past, your new posts are more likely to succeed as people clearly liked that content style.

To help you get started, here are some questions you can answer and corresponding examples that you can use as templates:

1. What’s a process you use to solve a common problem your audience faces?

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2. What are lessons you learned from a failure you experienced?  

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3. What are some lessons you’ve learned from a specific influencer?

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4. What are the top five, ten, or fifteen tips you’ve learned to achieve a goal your audience desires?

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5. For service providers – what’s the most common advice you give clients? 

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6. What tools do you use to achieve your audience’s goal? 

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7. What’s a contrarian belief you have regarding a subtopic of your niche?

Instead of trying to come up with clever content ideas, start with questions. It’s much easier to write an answer to a question than trying to come up with a catchy or clever quote.  

2. Hire A Ghostwriter

Hiring a ghostwriter is another option to help you start building a personal brand. Even if you only work with a ghostwriter for a few months, it can help you build momentum, and you can learn from them if you decide to create your own content. 

In fact, if you’re currently creating social media content and it isn’t performing as well as you’d like it to, consider hiring a ghostwriter to improve your content.

To hire a ghostwriter, reach out to some of the people with large social media followings and ask them for recommendations. Some of them may be using a ghostwriter you can hire, or they may be able to refer you to a competent ghostwriter.

If you’re considering a few different ghostwriter candidates to help you create personal branding content, here are some tips for hiring:

1. Look at their current clients – do they have a large and loyal following?
2. Ask them about their processes – do they interview you and use frameworks to craft the content for you? Systems and processes are an indicator of consistent results.

3. Leverage Storytelling 

How you package your content significantly impacts the engagement it drives.

For example, Jesse Pujji recently wrote a post about a hard lesson he learned from nearly losing his biggest client. 

The moral of the story was that it’s important to acknowledge the emotions of your team members. 

He could have written the post in a single sentence: “It’s important to acknowledge the emotions of your team members.” 

Yet that sentence isn’t nearly as engaging as the way he wrapped it into a story. 

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So how do you write a compelling story?

Here are a few critical elements for a compelling story:

1. Conflict: What’s the problem you were feeling during this moment?
2. Emotion: What are quotes (e.g., “how could you miss this?”) or actions (“I clenched my fists.”) that represent the intensity of your emotions?
3. Resolution: What was the moral or lesson learned from this story?

This story also gives you a deeper insight into Jesse as a person, which not only makes the content more engaging but also allows Jesse to build stronger connections and trust with his audience, which is valuable if you decide to sell a product or service. 

Not every post you write needs to be a story, but they should make up at least 20% to 30% of your social media posts.     

4. Invest More Time in Crafting Hooks 

Nobody will read your post, regardless of how helpful or well-written it is, if the hook doesn’t encourage them to pause and click to read more.

There isn’t a single formula for a great hook, but you can use frameworks for great hooks. 

To prevent you from staring at a blank page and trying to come up with a great hook from scratch, here are a few ideas to craft a great hook:

1. Advanced search on X/Twitter for the top-performing posts from your favorite creators.
2. Insert your post into ChatGPT and ask it to generate ten hook ideas.
3. Keep a swipe file of hook ideas that grab your attention.

Idea #1: Advanced X/Twitter Search 

Make a list of your ten favorite creators and then use X/Twitter’s advanced search feature to enter their handle into “From these accounts.”

Then, scroll down to “Engagement” and enter some minimums. 

Then, you can find a list of their top performing posts. Some of them might have hooks that you can turn into frameworks.

For example, the hooks below could easily be turned into hook frameworks.

“I think I’m allergic to X”

“I’m fascinated by X”

“The best X in recent memory”

Idea #2: Using ChatGPT 

Write out your social media post, plug it into ChatGPT, and ask it to generate ten different hook ideas.

Here’s an example:

Below are the ten different hooks it generated:

The suggestions aren’t always great, so you can always guide ChatGPT on how you want it to edit them: 

Idea #3: Keep a Swipe File

Whenever you stop to read a social media post, think about what grabbed your attention. Bookmark those posts, or even better, take a screenshot and save them in a Google doc. 

Then, you can refer back to it and use them as frameworks when you’re feeling stuck.  

Another great way to post more content with minimal effort is reposting the same social media post, but with different hooks. This allows you to A/B test hooks to see which resonates more with your audience while also posting more frequently. 

5. Create Content In Batches And Schedule It

Posting inconsistency is one of the most common reasons individuals fail to build a personal brand, and it’s usually because people may only have a burst of creativity or ideas once per week or month.

Instead of posting content as you think of it, schedule time once a week to create content in batches.

A challenge many people face when writing content in batches is that they aren’t creatively inspired and ultimately find themselves staring at a blank page.

To prevent this situation, use the repeatable frameworks from step one and start by simply answering those questions. 

After creating your content, use a social media scheduling tool, like Buffer or Hootsuite, and schedule it in advance so that you can effortlessly post consistently.  

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6. Incorporate Visual Content 

Images and videos take up more real estate in your social media feed, so using them is an easy way to capture attention.

A pro tip is to use consistent branding, as that will make your content more memorable. For example, Sahil Bloom has the same distinct branded images, and it makes it easy to recognize his content as you’re scrolling through your social media feed:

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You can also hire graphic designers to create the graphics for you. For example, Wisdom Made Easy is the graphic design specialist that creates Sahil’s graphics.

Short video clips (combined with a text post) are also excellent as they are more engaging and allow you to form a deeper connection with your audience.   

7. Collaborate With Others

Getting your social media posts in front of new people is one of the most challenging aspects of building a personal brand, as social media algorithms tend to give more organic reach to people who consistently earn high engagement (i.e., people who already have a lot of followers).

Collaborating is a cheat code to getting in front of your target audience faster, because you instantly receive access to someone else’s following. 

The challenge with collaborations is working out a deal where both parties benefit equally. For example, if someone else has 100,000 followers, whereas you only have 100 followers, it isn’t very beneficial for the established creator to do a collaboration.

However, there are ways you can provide an incentive for established people to follow you, even if you have zero followers. The most successful strategy is to find something they’re already paying others to do, and then do it for free. 

Here are a few options:

1. Offer to write a case study: If they sell a product or service, offer to write a case study on that product or service for them. This helps them because they probably already pay their marketing team to do this, so you’re saving them money by doing it for them. 

For example, if I wanted to collaborate with YouTuber Ali Abdaal, I’d ask his team if I could write a case study on one of their YouTube Academy students. Then, when the final case study is complete, it would be a no-brainer for Ali Abdaal to also share it, because it showcases the success of their product. 

2. Consolidate their thoughts and ideas: Scroll through all of someone’s content, and then organize it into a more cohesive manner. For example, Eric Jorgenson wrote a collection of Naval Ravikant’s ideas in what he eventually called the “Almanak of Naval Ravikant” and it captured the attention of Naval, who eventually collaborated on the project with him. 

8. Use an Accountability Group/App

If you’ve tried scheduling time to create content and still aren’t sticking to a schedule, consider hiring an accountability partner and have stakes to ensure you follow through on your promise. 

You can either hire an accountability coach or use an accountability app, set stakes, and have people check that you completed your tasks. 

For example, you can agree to pay $100 to a group you don’t agree with if you don’t post at least four times every week.

Another option is to create your own personal branding cohort and check in each week to encourage one another and ensure you’re on track. The benefit of a cohort is that you can also share feedback with one another and discuss challenges along the way. However, it’s also possible that other people will disengage, which can ultimately demotivate you as well.

So you may want to combine an accountability group cohort with an accountability app. 

While this tip might not seem significant, consistently posting content is the single most important aspect of building a personal brand, and relying solely on will power rarely works – even for the most disciplined entrepreneurs. 

9. Engage With Commenters

The value of your audience depends on not only the number of followers you have, but also the depth of trust with each follower. And, building real relationships online can lead to endless new opportunities, such as speaking engagements, collaborations, and business partnerships.

One easy way to engage with followers is responding to their comments.

If you’re worried you’ll get distracted scrolling through social media, you can use a social media management tool to respond to all of your comments across platforms in one place.

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Alternatively, many social media platforms allow business pages to respond to comments in the admin suite:

To maximize engagement, reply with not only an answer to that person’s question, but also ask them something in return.

Here’s an example of an excellent response:

Another clever way to engage with followers is to send them a direct message when they follow you. Ask them why they followed you and what they’re interested in learning.

There are plenty of tools, like Tweet Hunter, that allow you to send automated DMs to anyone who comments on your post, and it’s a great way to start a conversation and help you build a stronger bond with your audience.

This audience feedback is also helpful for coming up with new content ideas, and it can even shape how you build your products and services.

10. Recycle Content 

Unlike blog content, social media content is not evergreen, and you must continuously post content to stay relevant.

Reposting old content that performed well is an easy way to significantly increase your content volume with minimal additional effort. 

In fact, many prominent personalities on Twitter (X) simply reshare content they have already posted. 

For example, Justin Welsh posted this in April:

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He then reposted a very similar post in September with a few adjustments. Not only did the repost perform well, but it outperformed the old post, earning over 180 comments versus the original post, which earned 158.

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Look at your top performing content from a few months prior, and analyze how you can update and repost it. Social media algorithms often only show your content to a handful of people anyway, so it’s very likely that most of your followers never even saw your initial post. And, even if they did see that initial post, it’s unlikely they remembered it.

11. Focus On Building Your Business 

There are plenty of tactical tips to build a personal brand online, but the reality is that it’s much easier for someone with a successful business and large network of relationships to build a personal brand than a beginner with no connections or relationships. 

For example, Alex Hormozi built several multi-million dollar companies over several years, so it was much easier for him to build a personal brand in less time than someone with no experience.

That said, a beginner can still build a strong personal brand by sharing their journey as an entrepreneur as they achieve impressive results. In fact, it’s arguably more entertaining and engaging to watch someone achieve impressive feats in real time than listen to someone talk about their success retrospectively.

The key is to focus on building your business and build your personal brand by simply talking about your experiences. 

This will also make your content more authentic and resonate more with your audience. You’ll also find it easier to create content as you’ll be utilizing social media as intended – a platform to share your current life updates. 

By sharing your true life experiences and struggles, you’ll also likely find that people will be willing to reach out and help you.  

Also, not every post must be related to obtaining business success. Posting content about what you’re learning outside of business can help you build more genuine connections with your followers. Danny Miranda is a perfect example of a person who frequently posts about his personal life updates rather than focusing exclusively on business-related content. 

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Get Help Building Your Personal Brand

The most challenging aspect of building a personal brand is getting started. The second most challenging aspect is posting consistently. If you want accountability and guidance to help you stick to your personal branding goals, consider joining the Copyblogger Academy. This is a course and community for personal branding run by seven figure entrepreneurs, Tim Stoddart and Charles Miller. 

Charles alone has helped dozens of entrepreneurs build their personal brands on social media, and he has over 170,000 followers on X and over 120,000 followers on LinkedIn. 

Inside, you’ll have access to nine different courses on skills you need for personal branding, including copywriting, email marketing, content marketing, and more, as well as a detailed personal branding course.

You’ll also have access to a group of like minded individuals and accountability sessions to ensure you post consistently and get help when you need it.
Sign up for the Copyblogger Academy risk-free today to see if it’s a good fit for you.