If you want to achieve freedom by building a successful personal brand through blogging, then there are three key principles you must follow.
By the way, these also apply if you are a vlogger, an Instagram star or a podcaster—or a combination of all of them.
1. Be Consistent
Whatever you do, and whatever your niche and preferred medium, you absolutely have to be consistent. That means getting up every day, and, over coffee, planning out and creating content.
There are no days off in this game.
You have to be ‘on it’ every single day—at least for as long as it takes you to reach critical mass and build an audience that is capable of sustaining whatever income you desire.
Consistency is the first principle of the list simply because it’s so damned important. You are building trust with your audience, and a Pavlovian response in them.
For example, I send out my daily email to subscribers every day at 11pm GMT. I Tweet every hour. And I publish on my blog every day too. That builds up a habit in my audience to check to see my content each day.
2. Give Away An Insane Amount Of High Quality Content
At the same time you’re being consistent, you also need to give away a huge amount of high-quality content.
There really is no way around this one: you have to be prepared to be supremely generous with your words and ideas.
This is the whole basis of content marketing.
At first, people are shocked—‘What! Give away my work for free? I want to make money.’
Well, yes, you will—but not before you build an audience you can sell to. And the only way you do that is to foster trust in them. And you do that by giving them your work for free.
it is only after you’ve done that consistently for a period of time that you can start to sell to them.
For example, I started writing dating articles many years ago. But it was only in 2014 that I published my first book. By then I’d built up enough of an audience that people trusted me and were keen to buy.
3. Help Your Audience
This is absolutely key: you have to help your audience in some way.
Now, what ‘help’ means is somewhat broad. You may be helping them by entertaining them. Or you may be helping by giving them personal finance tips. Or a bit of both.
But you have to help in some way.
People go to the internet, and to individuals with brands online, for help. This is precisely why ‘how to’ content is so popular. People want answers—or at least to be taken out of themselves for a period of time.
If you want your personal brand to be successful, you need to provide value by helping people.
There’s more, of course . . . and I’ll be going into further principles in future articles.
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