Building a successful personal brand is not difficult. After all, it is a way to connect with the world and leave a mark on it, but you have to follow some basic steps, and one of them is to create a web page that will be the center of operations where communication, dissemination, and management of products and services converge.
A writer should not be a professional isolated from the world. And although his work is not subject to a contract or schedule imposed from the outside, there must be discipline and interaction with his readers.
Having a website will allow you to make yourself known as a writer, increase your visibility, and even gain professional prestige to become a literary reference.
Personal branding is different from business branding, and it refers to what makes you stand out from other authors and what you express in each action and public communication. Keep reading to delve into this concept and how to build and enhance it.
What is the personal brand of a writer?
A personal brand is what you transmit to the world in each communicative action, what your readers perceive of you. In the case of the writer’s personal brand, it corresponds to the impact or marks you leave on the literary universe, that differential value for the rest of the authors of your identity and that of your books.
It is important to note that, although there is an aspect of perception or interpretation on the part of the readers that we cannot control, it is possible to build our personal brand based on the information that we transmit to the public and how we do it.
The balance between the reader’s expectations and the information you provide will make the difference so that he finally chooses to read you.
The personal brand is built day by day, showing what you like to do, as well as what defines you and differentiates you in the professional field.
Building and enhancing your personal brand as a writer will allow you to achieve your professional goals and new opportunities. Keep reading about how to create it step by step, tips, and other interesting tips.
How can a web page help the writer’s brand?
A lot of ink has been spilled since writers had a patron to dedicate their lives to their true passion: writing. Today, with the rapid deployment of technology, it is not enough to be good at what you do: neither knowledge, talent, nor experience is everything.
Then, you will wonder why having one or several social networks is not enough. These are limited platforms, both in the amount of content you can store and in the sense of fan preferences between one digital community or another. In addition, one day, this platform may come to an end without your decision since you are only a user, not an owner.
On the contrary, with a website, you will have the domain with the name of your personal brand, control of the content, and its management. Whether to find a job or to dedicate yourself to know as a writer, you will have to work on your personal brand.
As we defined before, the personal brand is what differentiates you. In other words, you need to specialize, define yourself and show the added value of your service or, in this case, your work in order to stand out in the sea of digital information.
Steps to build your personal brand as a writer
Although the personal brand is based on your identity and that of your books, you must work on it to define and enhance it. So you require a specific strategy to set the objectives and the process to achieve them according to your needs.
1. Get to know yourself better
Your personal brand should reflect your skills and added value, differentiating you from the rest. There will be many writers on the web, and know what quality makes you stand out from the rest.
The brand proposal must reflect your personality, virtues, and tastes. Show yourself in a different way than what will really be noticed. Be authentic and highlight your strengths.
How do you do this if you don’t know who you are, what you like, your weaknesses, and your strengths? That’s why discover your passion, your mission, and that when you do it, time flies, what you would do, even if you weren’t paid to do it.
2. Define and prioritize your goals
Would you go on a sea voyage without a compass, GPS, radio, maps, or knowledge of the constellations? I mean, would you drift? Sure not! It would be a suicide mission in which you would navigate aimlessly, spending fuel, energy and hydration, and food resources, whose goal would surely be death. At least that’s what the odds say.
It’s the same with any project. Without a clear map of the way forward with steps or sub-goals, destiny is that it will be extinguished without achieving success.
To build a successful personal brand, the same thing happens. This is the main objective, and to achieve it, you must draw others that will allow you to reach the goal. Obstacles or win-win situations may arise that cause you to modify your goals as you move forward and progress, but mapping out from the beginning will keep you moving forward and away from stagnation.
Take note of some generating questions to define objectives:
- Where do I want to go with my personal brand as a writer?
- What is the function of my brand?
- What is the future vision based on my brand?
- What genre would you like to specialize in?
- What career goals do I want?
- Am I ambitious to sell more through my personal brand?
- Do I want to generate new opportunities?
- Do I seek recognition and prestige?
- Do I want to connect with my readers?
Finally, make sure your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and temporary). You will be able to quantify from this wood in time, and they will not remain in unrealizable dreams.
3. Define your target audience
This step goes hand in hand with point two (define objectives) since you must know who you are targeting to succeed in your strategy. That way, you do not waste time and money.
Imagine that you make excellent content, but it is not focused on your target audience: the result will undoubtedly be not monetizing, not increasing traffic, or the number of potential customers.
In the case of a writer, their target audience or buyer person is readers, editors, other writers, editors, content creators, philologists, philosophers, scholars, and lovers of the specific genre that the author writes.
At this point, not only profession is taken into account, but gender, age, and socioeconomic level. For example, it is not a cliché that the largest number of readers of romance novels are women or that fiction and adventure stories can find a niche in adolescents.
4. Communicate effectively
Adapt the language to your target audience, and use terms appropriate to the genre and level of knowledge. But always maintain direct, concrete, and precise communication.
Once you have defined your target audience, you will know if the communication tone will be: formal, emotional, informative, close, or scientific, among others.
Convey confidence with your messages and always use calls to action to indicate what you expect from your audience, for example: that they discover your new novel, that they buy it, that they read your new blog, that they subscribe to your blog, that they participate in a contest or to be followed on your social networks.
5. Design a corporate image
Each company or person that has projected its image publicly has a corporate brand manual, even if it is a writer’s personal brand. This guide usually defines many aspects, such as the brand’s color, logo, typography, slogan, and other elements that add to your identity.
Each of these elements must reflect the brand’s characteristics and be supported by its media and communication platforms. For example, the corporate brand color must be present in social networks, blogs, websites, and print advertising.
In this way, a coherent identity is maintained that will allow the target and the general public to associate the brand with its color, logo, and even with a type of content and information.
It is true that when we talk about personal branding, beyond making an impressive logo, what most connects is the person’s presence. Their face is their best sign of identity. However, when it grows and increases in followers, having these elements defined from the beginning will greatly facilitate the work.
6. Execute an action plan
Once you have the objectives, it is essential to draw up a plan with a series of actions to achieve them. In this way, your personal brand will grow.
To achieve this, you can generate a calendar with defined dates and actions, facilitating the moments of analysis of the results obtained.
Some actions you can take are: create a personal blog and open accounts on social networks where you can share valuable content for your target audience, collaborate with other fellow writers, publish an e-book, and participate in book fairs and exhibitions, among others.
7. Analyze your results
The actions you carry out – following your objectives and within the framework of your action plan – must be quantified. This way, actions that do not generate impact can be corrected, and the strategy reconsidered.
The quantification of the results is called metrics, and it is essential to record them, analyze them and adapt the content and communication based on them.
Some quantifiable indicators of the impact of the actions you carry out are:
- The number of subscribers to blogs or social networks: this data will provide an idea of the reach or follow-up of the target audience.
- Blog comments or mentions: this is an indicator of “engagement,” that is, of the loyalty of your audience. There is nothing more powerful -neither repost nor like- than feedback or interaction.
- Web traffic: the number of visits is one of the metrics that allow us to evaluate the impact of the personal brand. It encompasses the following aspects: the number of visitors, how much time users spend on each page, and which pages people visit.
Properly tracking metrics is a powerful tool for evaluating whether your messages are appropriate for your target audience.
