How to Build a Compelling Personal Brand That Evolves With You

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 Are you ready to shake up your personal brand and turn your online presence into a profitable business?

Well, grab a drink notebook and a pen because you’re about to enter the world of social media monetization with me, your host, Attaliah Strubel.

So, whether you’re looking to up your social media game, refine your systems, optimize your website, or maybe you just need a little extra push to make your dreams a reality.

You’ve come to the right place. It’s time to join the ranks of the socially paid.

This has been a crazy journey in general with starting off as someone who thought they would be working with travel tourist boards and doing travel types of things. I wanted to not only talk about how you can discover your personal brand, but take you on a little bit of the journey that I went through.

We’re going to start from the beginning. So if you don’t know me already, I am Attaliah Strubel. I am a personal brand business coach and before 2020, I avoided Instagram like the plague. Crazy. I know. I actually only posted maybe four times a year. You can scroll back and go look and it was mainly because I wanted my life to be my life.

I didn’t want to post on Instagram because I saw being an “influencer”. Just sharing all of your stuff and nothing is really private. If you’re reading this, you can still have private things and share your life, or share your passions online and create a business from that.

My husband wanted to leave the US

Once my husband told me in 2019 that he no longer wanted to live in the U.S. What am I gonna do? And I was actually on Pinterest looking up Heidelberg, because that is where we live now, but that is where my husband grew up. So I looked it up. And I had actually found a blog post from Helene In Between, and she was talking about blogging and making money through blogging.

And so I was like, okay I mean, I used to be a good writer. I haven’t written in a while. At that time, I was working full-time as a nurse, so I had not written in some time, but I think I can do this. I started to build my website and in February 2020, I launched “A Tale About a Girl” with just a bio.

If you’re reading this and feel like you have to launch a website with 10 plus blog posts, or you have to have all these things…you don’t, sis! You can literally just launch what with what you have. I think I didn’t get my first blog post up till like a month later.

After that it was like, okay, now I’m gonna get into this. Then the pandemic hit and I thought, now what am I gonna do? I started to just share my story, share who I was, my journey, what I had been through. As I was sharing, I was also learning about social media. Instagram, hashtags, how to use it, what’s the best ways to use it, those types of things.

Social media became my passion

I became more passionate about the strategy behind Instagram, the strategy behind sales, the strategy behind marketing. As I was diving deeper, I really found out at that moment this is what I want to do. I actually had a friend where I ran her social media like, oh, you should do this with your social media.

There was like a month where I ran her social media for free and just kind of showed what it was that I could do. If you’re reading this and you think to yourself, oh no, I am only gonna get paid. You often have to show people what it is that you can do before you’re actually getting paid from something.

You can’t just show up one day and expect to be getting paid thousands of dollars for doing something without showing the proof. Once I did that, I was like, I like being able to test stuff. I was still posting on my own page. By the end of that year, that’s when Instagram Reels had come out. I was Miss Reel Strategy/Reels Queen and I was in there learning different ways to grow. I had grown my account that year by 670%, and that was solely through utilizing Instagram reels.

So, if you are someone that is on social media and you’re seeing new things come out, you want to hop on those new things. Learn them because the algorithms of all of the apps encourage you to try the new things, right? I mean, currently TikTok has like a beta creativity program that they’re doing, and I joined that and it’s like you have to create one minute videos kind of thing. We all know Instagram is, always coming out with something new!

I landed a mult-imillion dollar company as a client…

By the end of that year, I ended up applying for a multi-million dollar company, social media manager position, and I did that interview on a box in my empty living room cause I was moving to Germany.

I landed that position. It was a four figure position. I was working full-time by then, with my course on the side. With varied online presence, I gained high engagement by sharing my journey and building a strong personal brand.

Fast forward to now, I am in your ear on my podcast, and I am also a business coach. I’m coaching small businesses to grow their businesses, whether that be through social media, through email marketing. Letting them come to me for strategies that can help them grow and more market their business better.

Now that you know a little bit about my personal brand story, I wanted to get into the basics of personal branding. When you think about your personal brand, you are your brand. When we become so tied to a niche, you identify as only that. But remember, you’re multifaceted, right?

Basics of Personal Branding

There’s so many different parts of you! As a person, I want to know the different parts of you. I don’t want to be so consumed with only this one part of you. I’m not saying that if you’re someone doing makeup every day, that you have that on your page and then now you’re like doing some, I don’t know, random something, right?

I’m saying to put it together for you as a person, rather than it being just like, oh, that’s so-and-so, she does makeup, right. Instead it’s like, oh, that’s so-and-so. She does makeup. She’s married, she has this, and she has that. Remember, you can also keep your privacy. You don’t have to share every single piece, but still sharing different aspects of you.

I’ve noticed that helps when it comes to creating and increasing your sales or creating products and services, because then you have other avenues to spread that. When you’re creating a personal brand, you want to see what strengths and values that you bring.

Sit down and make a list of the things that you’re interested in and things that you’re really good at. The things that people are like, oh my God, you’re so good at this. I love telling you my problems. I always look for your advice when it comes to how I should decorate my home or your outfits or bomb.

Think about those kind of things. Those are all strengths, right? And the way that you differentiate yourself from other brands is having those many strengths. An example of that is, I am someone who talks mainly about business, but I also post affiliate links with my outfits because people do ask me, oh my gosh, where did you get that?!

So now I’m monetizing off of affiliate links I’m making about $50-$100 a month from that, and it’s just me sharing what it is that I wear. It makes me unique because there’s not many other business coaches out there that are sharing their attire.

Here are a couple of basics to personal branding...

1. Understand Your Strengths

You want to play on what your strengths are, but at the same time, you can learn new skills. For example, I spent an hour trying to figure out my mic only to figure out that on my computer, I didn’t have the right setting. But, I am learning this new skill of podcasting and it’s just like when I learned Canva when I first started working with Canva.

So, you’re allowed to learn new skills, but think about the strengths that you already have, the things that come innately to you. What things that are like, oh my gosh, this just comes to me. I don’t even have to think twice about it. I’m just doing it. Understand those types of strengths.

2. Identify Your Values

What do you value? How can you identify your core values when establishing your personal brand? How can you determine the factors that hold importance in your life, what serves as your motivation, and the principles you stand for when defining your personal brand? Who are you? When you know who you are, you’re not going to stray from that. I want you to write it down because as you’re creating content and as you’re doing different things, sometimes you kind of forget.

You have to have a check with yourself. Oh, I created this content and posted it. Is it me? Is that who I am? And showing that it’s okay to be different. It is okay to be different in the world of TikTok where everyone’s doing the same dance, like it’s fine not to dance. It is okay to just get on the camera and just talk.

It’s fine to be yourself and being yourself is what’s going to help elevate your personal brand.

3. Seek Feedback

Asking friends, as I said before, what kind of things do you come to me for? What kind of things do you see me as an expert in? Or what kind of things am I helpful towards?

4. Pursue Your Passions

How can you identify your interests, passions, and activities that bring you genuine joy and fulfillment, even without monetary compensation? And we want to remember that every single one of our passions or hobbies does not need to be monetized.

My friend had to remind me that I love to cook. My kitchen is just now completed after a renovation. And I was like, oh my gosh, now I can make this homepage and I can put cooking on there and then I can work with brands through that. And she was like, wait, Attaliah, you don’t have to monetize that hobby.

You enjoy doing it on its own, and when you put that pressure of monetization on things, sometimes those passions begin to become heavy, which then it becomes something that you kind of dread. So you want to think about that as you’re exploring and looking at the different passions that you have.

Think about what kind of things that you’ve done before that were accomplishments or successes or things that you were really great at, and kind of explore those kinds of things. As you’re going through this, you’re going be writing all of these down.

Try the following exercise to figure out your personal brand:

1. Write down short term and long term goals for your brand.
2. Think about what you want to achieve, not only personally, but professionally.
   • It can be simple things like, by this time next year I want to have a thousand followers. Thinking about what kind of things that you want to personally have for your brand.
3. Do a self-assessment for sections.
   • Section one – your passions.
   • Section two – your skills.
   • Section three – things that you enjoy/hobbies.
   • Section four – round those three things up and then put that as what your total brand is about.

As a reminder, your personal brand should be evolving.

You’re not going to stay the same. The story I told you before is that I evolved, right?

I went from travel and then I had a hiccup and I was like, okay, let me start to learn this new skill. In learning that new skill, I learned that I am actually really passionate about social media, even though I didn’t like it before.

And then from there, that is when I went into social media management and then went into business coaching. So, it is going to be something that is gonna be ongoing for you to learn and improve on yourself and kind of figure out what it is that you want to do.

I want to leave you with a couple of examples of different personal brands that are out there and big names and so that you can kind of see the connection of the things that we went over in the exercise today.

Personal Brand examples

Elon Musk: His personal brand is Innovative Disruption, pushing the boundaries. Of course he’s known for Tesla and he promotes sustainable energy and space and technological advancements. That’s what his personal brand is.

Oprah Winfrey: She has a personal brand around empowerment, empathy, and she is somebody that uplifts and inspires people through personal growth, and she discusses important social issues.

Gary V: he is everywhere on Instagram and TikTok. If you haven’t seen him already, he has like a no nonsense, hustle driven mentality where he’s like, you’re gonna work until you get what you want. He’s an expert in social media marketing and he has his personal brand to inspire and motivate you.

Brene Brown: an author and a speaker, with a personal brand that is rooted through vulnerability, courage, and authenticity. She is somebody that has done research on shame, vulnerability, and human connection. She uses that research to help people with their emotional wellbeing.

These are all like speaker type of people, but these are personal brands that you identify who they are and you understand what they are about from what they speak about and what they share on social media.

As you’re going through the above exercise, think about who you are and what you want to represent.

Remember, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing in the social media space, it can be applicable to everything.

I hope that this article gave you more insight on helping you discover your own personal brand, so you can continue your journey and join the ranks of the $ocially Paid.