What's up brand builders! Stephen Houraghan here of BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this
video you're gonna learn the number one personal branding mistake that you need
to avoid so you can go out and carve your own path build your own brand and
more importantly build a reputation that will make other people want to do
business with you.
now if you're new to the channel and you want actionable
brand strategy tips and techniques to grow your business well then hit that
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when I first started to build my own personal brand I was absolutely terrible
as most people are when they started I was terrible at writing articles I was
terrible at social media post sand I was absolutely terrible at video
now it was terrible as I was at all of these
things that was a really really important time for me and anybody
getting into a personal branding for the first time when you're putting out
post for the first time that period is a really really important time for you too
because it's the time that you make mistakes but you need to be persistent
and stick with it that's what I've done and over time I learned to gain a bit
more confidence about what I was doing I gained more conviction and over time I
found my own unique voice now over the years I've built some really good
relationships with other branding influencers in the space and recently a
couple of them reached out to me to tell me that they've noticed somebody else
within the space using my unique voice and my unique content now I'm not
talking here about inspiration I take inspiration from people that I look up
to so Al Ries Jack Trout Marty Neumeier Chris Do Seth Godin Gary Vaynerchuk I
take inspiration from all of these people and I reference these people
often within my content I'm not talking about inspiration here I'm talking about
word-for-word copying so I'm talking articles directly from my blog premium
content and frameworks email drip sequences email
for email word-for-word a more recently YouTube videos and even though I've paid
an external company to get him to take three articles that were word-for-word
my premium content down off his website it still hasn't deterred him and he's
still doing it and more people are starting to notice this now and sending me
through content when it comes out when they see my emails and they can hear my
voice or they see videos and they can hear my sentences they're sending me
this content and I have to say when you hear somebody speaking around words
words that you have sat down and taken the time to write out it's a weird
feeling and in the beginning I was pretty pissed off about it but I'm not
the only one that he's doing this to and now he has built a personal brand and a
reputation within the space of somebody that people don't want to work with now
of course any brand or any personal brand share the same topics on the same
keywords with their competitors but the same topics and the same keywords don't
mean the same content and the same sentences so let me give you an example
here within the branding space on YouTube you've got many different
channels you've got The Futur with Chris Do he's his own unique voice he has
his own perspective his own philosophies and his own way of delivering content
you have Phillip VanDusen he's a personal brand he has his own
experiences as well his own ideas again his own philosophies and his own unique
content and his own unique voice and then Kaye Putnam them the same thing
we're all sharing the same space we all talk about the same thing we all talk
about the same content the same topics and the same keywords but we don't share
the same unique voice we don't say the same things we don't say the same
sentences you're not gonna hear Kaye's or Phillip's or Chris Do's content coming
from me and you're not gonna hear my content coming from them because we each
focus on ourselves we focus on building our own brands our own personal brands
our own philosophies ideas and way of communicating the information and what
we certainly don't do is we don't look at our competitors write down what
they're saying and then say the same thing now someone with a creative
background I can tell you I've gone to many places for inspiration whether it's
content creation or brand identity design but
what I've never ever done is I've never taken somebody else's content or taken
somebody else's brand identity design and tried to pass it off as my own
because even if I got comments to say my content was great or I had a client
telling me my brand identity was awesome inside I would feel like a fake and a
fraud and I have a consciousness that would gnaw on me and say hey what are
you doing why don't you just create your own now I speak mostly about business
branding but everything in business branding translates into personal
branding because it's all one and the same you're building your brand you're
building your reputation so having a purpose that you believe in having
values that you hold yourself accountable to having a unique
personality that people can gravitate towards and having authenticity and just
generally being honest all of this translates into personal branding and
Jeff Bezos once said that your brand is what people say about you when you're
not in the room so essentially your brand is your reputation and if you're
building your brand off of content that's not yours off of a voice that's
not yours off of email drip sequences that aren't yours then eventually people
aren't going to notice they're gonna realize that look this person is just
taking other people's content so the biggest mistake that you could ever make
within personal branding is copying other people and not taking the time to
find your own unique voice now as I said when I started out I was absolutely crap
and I remember I used to I used to send my outtakes to my whatsapp family group
and my sisters will be dying with laughter at how bad I really was but I
stuck with it and it would have been a lot easier for me to go out and try and
copy what other people were doing but I didn't do that I focused on myself I
focused on my own voice and my own ideas and philosophies and I worked on
learning how to communicate those ideas and philosophies in my own unique way
and even today this is all still a work in progress the me that you see on
camera today it's not the 100% me because I still have some insecurities
but the more videos I do the more confidence and conviction I
have the more of me I put out there and you know my followers are now starting
to see a side of me and a personality to me that you know previously has been
reserved for my friends and family and that's all due to the fact that I am
finding my own unique voice I'm getting more confidence and conviction and I'm
starting to believe more in what I'm doing because I'm connecting with people
and I'm building a personal brand and people are reaching out to me to tell me
that they feel now that they know me through the development of my own unique
voice and through working on myself now this unique voice that I have to be
honest it's nothing special but it's mine I've taken the time to develop it and
I've learned how to communicate my ideas and my philosophies and it's all
starting to come back to me now I have followers telling me that they've been
binging on my content and they feel that they know who I am because I'm giving as
much of myself as I possibly can and it's not just coming back to me through
the likes and the follows and the comments it's coming back to me through
personal one-on-one emails I had a student a couple of weeks ago telling me
that she tripled her income I had another student just the other day
telling me he just nailed a $40,000 brand strategy contract and just going
back a few weeks ago he never would have thought that would have been possible
and this is all coming back to me and it's all really feeding into my belief
in what I'm doing as I said and that is really fulfilling to me and it
really makes me feel that I'm on the right path to you know building
something that I can be proud of building something that's truly unique
and truly my own now this video is not to tell you don't steal I'm gonna assume
that you're not gonna steal this video is to encourage you to go out and
create your own path now it's not easy and as the old adage goes if it was easy
everybody would do it it's not easy it's difficult and there will be times where
you sit down and you create a piece of content whether it's an article or a
carousel post or a video and you might spend five hours creating that piece of
content and you send it out into the world and you might get a couple of
likes and it might feel like all of that time was for nothing and you know you
invested all of time and that's where most people give
up but that time is only wasted when you give up if you don't if you persist if
you keep going well then that time that you put in will become experience that
experience will lead into confidence in what you're doing and conviction that
will lead into your own unique voice developing and then you giving that to
the world and at the end of the day when it comes to your personal brand your own
unique voice is your differentiation strategy so take the time to work on
carving out your own path working on your own unique voice and that's when
other people will gravitate towards who you are and what you have to offer and
when you do find that unique voice and other people decide that they want to
copy you well then take it for exactly what it is which is a big fat thank you
thank you for being so unique and putting out great and unique content I
really do admire what you do but I would genuinely love to hear from you have you
had this experience before where somebody else has taken your content or
are you trying to find your own unique voice at the moment and are you
struggling do you have any challenges or any questions or any unique experiences
that you'd like to share in the comments below let me know I'll do my best to
answer all of those feel free to reach out to me directly as well
stephen@brandmasteracademy.com if you email me I'll email you directly back so please
feel free to reach out by email or in the comments below if you like this
video please give it a thumbs up hit that subscribe button and the
notification bell as well it'll let you know when we've got new content coming
out if you want actionable brand strategy tips and techniques jump on
over to BrandMasterAcademy.com and there are plenty of resources on there
if you want to learn how to build brands from scratch how to build brand
strategies from scratch there are plenty of resources on there as well but as I
said please let me know in the comments below any experiences any challenges
I'll do my best to answer all of those until next time brand like the unique
master that you are and I'll see you in the next video!