By Neil Patel

Do you remember when only celebrities and major companies had personal brands? Actors, musicians, Fortune 100 businesses, and athletes got all the attention and dominated the airwaves.

Now, nearly anyone willing to put in the time and effort can become a “thought leader” in a specific niche. It won’t happen overnight, of course.

You only need to do a quick Google search to see that ordinary people from all over the world are using new personal branding tools, particularly social media, to craft personal brands that attract countless people to their websites and social media accounts.

Personal branding is what separates you from the rest of the people trying to make it in your field. Building a personal brand allows you to become a standout figure that people know, like, and trust.

Follow these seven simple steps below to become the go-to expert in your space.

Step #1. Start By Finding Your Niche

There’s a saying about SEO traffic that highlights something most people miss.

You can’t create search demand. You can only harvest it.

That means you can’t force people to search for a specific keyword. They either already do or they’re searching for something else.

See How My Agency Can Drive Massive Amounts of Traffic to Your Website

Your job in SEO is to recognize that and work on getting as much traffic you can from words that are already popular on their own.

Personal branding is similar, believe it or not.

For example, being the best CrossFit pug breeder in the world is worthless if there isn’t already a market or niche for that. (Seriously, is there?!)

The niche selection process is really important! You don’t want to spend all your time and energy linking your brand to a niche that’s not growing.

Where should you start when picking a niche?

That’s a good question because there’s no right answer necessarily, but here’s where I think you should start.

Pick something specific that you can do better than 90% of the world.

Why is that so specific? Because you can probably do a lot of things well, but that doesn’t mean you’re an expert in every single one of them.

The only way to create a personal brand is by becoming the go-to, recognized authority on a specific topic.

If you’re not an expert on it, someone else will be. Don’t be afraid to go small or narrow to dominate a topic.

The “online marketing” space, for example, is massive, and it’s taken the better part of a decade for me to become a recognized authority.

Take someone like Brian Dean, who decided to go deep on a particular topic instead of biting off more than he could chew.

Notice how he perfectly positions his personal brand. It’s all about backlinks and rankings for SEO.

Then the site’s graphics, design, and testimonials all reinforce those points.

There’s another important ingredient for …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog

Author: Aaron