Are You Branding Yourself?

creating your personal brand
Updated: Mar 29th, 2017

It seems like you can’t go anywhere these days without hearing the latest buzz words, “Personal Branding”

Seriously, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t mentioned in at least one – if not more – of the freelance writing newsletters you subscribe to.

In my email this week I learned that MediaBistro has an online course titled “Brand Yourself” coming up in May, although I haven’t taken the MediaBistro course, so I can’t really comment on it.

In fact, we’ve talked about it in the past here on TWE, and in our Forum as well. However, the concept isn’t unique to travel writers though – it’s everywhere.

If Andy Warhol were alive, I believe nowadays he’d simply say “In the future, everyone will be famous.”

Case in point: Last weekend I met up with a friend for lunch, and her just-turned-13 year old daughter joined us.

As her mom and I were chatting, this slightly-over-indulged techno-tween, who had been engrossed in her new iPad, suddenly interrupts declaring “Mom! Nobody has the website that is my name! Should we get it?

Since I know how sensitive 13-year old girls can be, I did my best to remain calmly neutral and let her mom handle it…..”What do you want that for?” mom asked…..daughter: “I don’t know – maybe someday I’ll be famous“…..mom: “what will you be famous for?“…..daughter: “I don’t know, maybe I’ll just be like Paris Hilton and be famous for nothing“……

I kid you not. It was hard not to laugh while her mom explained that, because she wasn’t born into a wealthy hotel-chain-owning family, it was unlikely that she’d ever get famous for just standing around posing for pictures or going to parties.

I guess 13 is not too young to start thinking about developing a personal brand, but the point of the story is, you really need to be known for something, if you want to be successful at branding yourself. Unless, of course, you were born into a wealthy hotel-chain-owning family.

So if you’ve been thinking this issue over lately, or even working on creating your own personal brand, here are some things to consider if you want to be sure you’re focused on the right things for optimal success:

First ask yourself these questions:

  • What do you want to be known for (or as)?
  • What are your goals? Really, all of your goals.
  • Do you care more about the byline or the paycheck?
  • Do you really want fame? For example, some people crave the spotlight, others shy away from it. You may not give a hoot if anyone ever recognizes you, as long as your site earns enough for you to live (and travel) on. Others don’t care if their site makes a dime or not, as long as they’re well-known and loved by all.

Some of the most successful, money-making geniuses on the internet you’ve likely never heard of – that’s because they sell a product, not themselves. It’s much easier to sell a product than it is to sell a person, until you’ve put in enough time and effort into it to become your own product.

So if your product is expertise at some subject, it’s easier to sell that expertise. Somewhere down the road, fame will follow by default, as your expertise becomes so well known that people associate your product (expertise) with you.

There’s more to consider

  • It’s very hard to become truly famous just for being you, unless you do something that is unique or just much better than anyone else does it.
  • Not everyone will click with your personality, even if they love your product.

What does that all mean?

Does that mean I’m saying don’t try to brand yourself? Absolutely not – there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be well-known, and for some folks it’s worked out really well – I’ll bet everyone reading this has heard of Rick Steves, Steenie Harvey, Arthur Frommer, and Christopher Elliott. And they accomplished what they did before the benefit of cable TV made household names of many others.

I just think you should really think about what you want to accomplish, and focus on accomplishing that by being consistent in every facet of your online presence about what you’re trying to brand.

Editor’s Note: Akila brings up a great point in her comment below, about the fear of brand dilution, and I felt it was was worth adding my thoughts in the body of the post so they won’t get overlooked:

“What can dilute a brand is an inconsistent identity when you’re promoting yourself – for example, let’s say a blogger has the (hypothetical) blog called “Travelingwithmydog.com”, tweets under the name “DogTravels”, has a Facebook page under his personal name John Doe, is on MySpace as John&Dog……well who could possibly connect all those and recognize a brand from it? So once one has settled on a brand, that should be consistently used whenever one wants to communicate or promote the brand.”

If Andy Warhol were alive, I believe he’d update his decades old but still applicable prophesy. I believe nowadays he’d simply say “In the future, everyone will be famous.

Hands down the best-known of the many quotations attributed to sixties Pop Artist Andy Warhol is this: “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”

~Trisha

Are you developing a personal brand? What steps are you taking?

About Trisha Miller 116 Articles
Trisha Miller Editor-in-Chief, TravelWritersExchange.com - Trisha joined the Travel Industry in 1996 with a background in telecommunications and helped to build (and later sell) one of the industry's top inbound call centers specializing in air travel. Her career in Travel Writing began with creating destination-specific content for a corporate travel intranet, and continued as she contributed content to a large number of travel-related companies that were establishing an online presence throughout the late '90's and early '00's. Currently she is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and a former Board Member of the International Food, Wine, and Travel Writers Association (2009-2015).  Still a frequent world traveler, and occasional guest-blogger on a number of other Travel Blogs, Trisha writes about travel and technology, sometimes both at the same time. You can follow Trisha on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/TravelWriting

7 Comments

  1. Great post Trisha. Branding is something we have been thinking about a lot because I think we have created a brand through our website and we worry about whether we will dilute or muddy that brand by adding advertisements — and what sorts of advertisements will be problematic. Right now, we carry more about the byline — that when people come to our site, we are producing rich, beautiful content rather than the paycheck.

    • Thanks Akila – glad you liked it!

      I don’t think advertising will dilute a brand, but I do recommend that you put thought into choosing advertisers that would be relevant to your readers.

      What can dilute a brand is an inconsistent identity when you’re promoting yourself – for example, let’s say a blogger has the (hypothetical) blog called “Travelingwithmydog.com”, tweets under the name “DogTravels”, has a Facebook page under his personal name John Doe, is on MySpace as John&Dog……well who could possibly connect all those and recognize a brand from it?

      So once one has settled on a brand, that should be consistently used whenever one wants to communicate or promote the brand.

  2. Excellent article. Branding is so important.
    It is interesting that you talk about diluting the brand. I had a facebook and youtube acount before our blog and we are having that same worry now. We have built up friends and followers on both facebook and youtube under different names and have not been sure on how to change the brand. On Youtube we have videos that have 30,000+ views, but they are under the name wegobyebye. On facebook we both have our personal accounts where we have connected with friends and those accounts actually generate quite a few views on our blog.
    We are trying to move people over to our facebook fanpage and group, but it hasn’t worked. Our personal account seems to be our biggest connection.
    Since we are ourselves on our blog, can we keep our personal facebook pages going as long as we keep it professional on the site? Just wondering.
    Thanks for giving me so much information to think about.
    .-= Dave and Deb´s last blog post: Wildlife of the World; A Photo Story =-.

    • Hi Deb & Dave – yep, that is a challenge, since you can’t just “change” your YouTube name….

      Ultimately it will be worth the time and effort to consolidate to a consistent identity – you just have to keep plugging away.

      For example, I didn’t know that you had a Facebook Fan Page – it might help if you regularly suggest it to your Friends – the ones who have already “Liked” it (what used to be called “become a Fan”) will be greyed out – those that aren’t you should select and they’ll get an invitation via email. I also send a message to everyone who sends me a Friend request asking that they also check out my Fan Page….

      Your YouTube strategy will be tougher, because even though you can upload all the same videos to a new account, your counter on views will start over. But you can modify the existing videos to point people to the new one, so that anyone who goes to the old account will be directed to your new one – something like “hey we’ve moved – come watch this and many more videos on our new YouTube account”.

      Good luck! And I’ll go Like your Fan Page now… :)

  3. Very interesting blog post, Trisha. I think I am lucky that I have just started blogging and have made sure that my blog name, facebook fan page, and twitter name are the same one. I also have a personal FB page, but I keep that one strickly for friends.
    What I need to do now is making sure that what my goal is, becomes more clear on my homepage.
    .-= Maria Staal´s last blog post: The Mysterious little Book I found at the Library =-.

  4. I wonder if that little girl ever did buy that domain name? I think branding yourself is important even if you just sell products. You can still sell products while branding yourself as an affiliate marketer (ie John Chow)
    .-= Danny´s last blog post: Indian Shores Vacation Rental 106 =-.

    • Hi Danny – thanks for stopping by! That’s a good question – my impression was that her mom was not going to do it, but I’ll be sure to follow up with to find out!

      I do agree that if you’re in business for yourself, whatever you do, you should be thinking about managing your brand all the time.
      .-= Trisha´s last blog post: The Write Time =-.

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