Crafting Your Personal Brand Story

Hi, it's Liz Lynch with Networking Excellence dot com and I'm here with my good friend Walter Akana, who is a personal branding strategist and Instagram Ninja. So I wanted to bring Walter in today because I talk a lot about how much easier networking is when people come to you. Standing out in the crowd and trying to raise your profile in your industry is something we all should be doing and building a strong personal brand is a big piece of that. So I wanted to ask you, Walter, what personal branding is? And specifically you're known for brand story. So can you tell us about that? Well, personal branding is really - it's something that a lot of people know about today and it's actually taken on a lot of momentum over the past several years. In fact, it's fair to say that personal branding has gone more mainstream and I think that's a good thing. There are some drawbacks to that, though. There are a lot of people out there giving advice on personal branding and one of the core pieces of advice is to create for yourself a personal brand statement. And generally speaking, people recommend that you put in maybe a job title, some core skills that you have, maybe if you have some personal attributes and to talk a little bit about the value you provide for clients. Well, that's fine as far as it goes, but I really think that people need to look at the rest of the story. And by that I mean brand story. So brand story specifically is - - it's the story of how it is that you got to be good at what you do. And it would include the ups and downs that you faced along the way to learning to do what you do. And the more those ups and downs are something that your clients can relate to the better because it gives them an opportunity to identify with you; it shows them that you've been down their road, you feel their pain, you get it! And when you can show them that, they are more likely to feel connected to you to, to feel that you're authentic, to like you, and this is really the best part of it - to want to work with you specifically as opposed to other people who do what you do. This is so powerful and I know that you have a process that you take your clients through. You work with clients all over the world. But if you're interested in building your own personal brand - and specifically your brand story - we actually did a full hour interview on this a couple of months ago on my Expert Interview Series and you can still get a copy of that interview by going to Smart Networking dot com forward slash Walter and you can listen to that interview absolutely free. So that's it for now. Thanks so much for watching. Signing off, this is Liz Lynch and Walter Akana and we'll see you guys later. Let's go to dinner!