Amelia Sordell built an agency on the back of her own personal brand, and this book is her attempt at sharing how she did it, and has since done the same for her clients. I came away with a handful of golden nuggets and some frustration over how deep I had to dig for them.
Her honesty about her first stumbling steps helps. Sharing the transformation from zero to hero makes her prescription believable, and I’m convinced she is a great coach and mentor in person when it comes to personal branding.
The insight I loved most: you already have a personal brand, whether you like it or not. The only choice is whether you shape it intentionally or let others shape it for you. It reminded me of one of my favourite takeaways from The Slight Edge.
Her reframing of personal branding as one-on-one interactions at scale is useful too. Instead of a big grey mass of people, you’re building relationships with individuals. Lower stakes, clearer direction.
I also like how wide her definition goes: how you look, how you act, what you know, what you believe. Personal branding as a holistic concept resonates with me.
Now the frustration.
A large portion of the book reads like a biography of Amelia Sordell. Another large portion defines personal vision and mission without adding anything new. An editor should easily have cut a third of this book.
She backs her advice with numbers, which I appreciate. The numbers themselves, though: $1 million in revenue over three years with fifteen employees works out to $22k per person per year. I expected a lot more from a successful agency.
Then there’s the pseudoscience. She presents a “vibrational frequency” scale of emotions as “scientifically measured and proven”, then links to some woo-woo fluff website. Once an author does this, I start questioning her other claims too.
Like the claim that more authenticity automaticall equals more success. Consider the train enthusiast, fully authentic in his love of trains but with no marketable skills. He is arguably as authentic as Sordell; I doubt he sees comparable success.
Her recurring obsession with controlling how others perceive her grated on me as well. Years of studying and practicing Stoicism have taught me to concern myself only with what lies within my control, and others’ opinions do not qualify. She even contradicts herself later, urging you to disconnect your sense of value from other people’s validation. Her methods work fine without the neuroticism, but the theme runs through the whole book and I found it distracting.
So why am I still happy I read it? Because the book worked on me.
“10% content, 90% consistency” names exactly what I struggle with; once the novelty of a project wears off, I stop showing up. And her permission to repeat the same message over and over dissolved a blocker I’ve had for years. My engineering brain wants each thought documented once and then filed away. Personal branding doesn’t work like this.
One paragraph got me properly fired up: her dare, “statistically speaking, most of you will do jack all after reading this book.” Obvious, sure. But I’m three weeks into posting and engaging consistently, so the dare did its job.
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My highlights
I only started posting content online to prove my CEO wrong. But what happened next changed my life forever.
I started recording videos about topics that had already done well as written posts.
I’m not going to pretend this came naturally to me. I felt uncomfortable putting myself out there. I often felt incredibly insecure about what I was posting. In the early days I would spend hours perfecting a single post.
[C]onfidence comes from being OK with being told you’re wrong, not from always feeling like you’re right.
Ironically, despite proving to my old CEO that my approach worked, I also proved him right about his fear of other businesses poaching our talent… if only he’d listened to me about being a supportive employer.
[I]f you don’t want to drown, learn how to swim.
The reason I am telling you it is because your personal brand is built with every interaction you have. Every person you meet forms an opinion of you and your character. […] In reality, you do not build your personal brand, you take control of it.
I care deeply about how other people perceive my character and I think a lot about how I come across to everyone I meet. I want them to have a good experience – even if they hate every opinion I have.
One of the biggest mistakes many people make is hearing the word ‘brand’ and immediately thinking that their personal brand is something separate, and completely disassociated, from who they are.
[R]eframing personal branding as ‘one-on-one interactions, but at scale’, helps shift your mindset from ‘what if they don’t like me?’ to ‘I’ll be fine if they don’t’. And that is the basis of a strong personal brand – and of strong self-esteem.
[P]ersonal branding is not an ego-driven activity, it’s a strategic marketing imperative.
Research has found that the highest frequency emotion is authenticity, and not by a little, but by a lot: 400× more than love, actually.1
Authenticity is the only thing powerful enough to make our frequency double its wavelength. This is not some woo-woo fluff – it’s scientifically measured and proven.
There are four main components to your personal brand: How you look. How you act. What you know. What you believe.
Start with how you look, because that will be what people use to form their first impressions. What do you want people to think about you? Who do you want to be to them? Your outfit, hair, make-up (if you wear it), choices should reflect that.
A good first impression might open the door of opportunity, but if you lack integrity or substance – or, most importantly, authenticity – that door will get slammed right in your face.
No-one buys a drill because they want a drill; they buy a drill because they want a hole in a wall.
The question you need to ask yourself, then, is, do you want to be a Van Gogh or a Picasso? […] While there were many differences between the two, from the outside it appears that a major contributor to Picasso’s success is that he took control of his personal brand.
Self-promotion is not a dirty word. If you want to get ahead, you have to get comfortable with shouting about who you are, what you do and the talent you have.
When you are able to disconnect your sense of value from other people’s validation of you, whether that’s through likes on social media posts or comments on YouTube videos, you’ll be in a very powerful position. And that goes far deeper than just the content you post online.
I do not treat social media, or my personal brand, like a source of validation for my personality, but rather a distribution channel for it.
Stop letting fear dictate your actions and just f**king post it.
There is a real power to being disliked. If you aren’t willing to be hated by people you do not like, you cannot expect to be loved by those you do.
You’re the main character in your story, so stop giving screen time to shoddy support acts.
The reality is, the more you filter yourself, the more you water yourself down and therefore the less you stand out. That is the opposite of what you want to achieve. The whole point of any personal brand is to stand out.
[W]hen what you’re doing is in alignment with your ‘why’, it feels almost effortless. You won’t be worrying about your results because they’ll just happen. You won’t get writer’s block. You will attract the right people.
The greatest achievement I have had off the back of building my personal brand is my confidence. I have self-esteem by the truckload.
It’s very easy to make dating all about the other person, and to forget about yourself. Personal branding is very similar because you often make it all about whether other people like what you have to say and the reality is, it’s all about whether you like what you have to say.
My goal (mission) is to help 1 million people to build their personal brand. Another one of my goals is to be financially free; to be able to pick my kids up from school and not worry about work and to be able to travel the world with the people I love.
Building your personal brand is 10% content, 90% consistency in posting it.
[A] good brand strategy is comprised of four things: Goal. Audience. Content. Distribution and engagement.
One of the reasons I start with your goal when I’m helping build a personal branding strategy, is every tactic you need to deploy can be reverse-engineered from there.
It’s starting with your goal, working out who you need to attract, and then targeting your activities, content topics and distribution around those people so they come into your network and make achieving your goal possible.
One of the reasons I have managed to build a successful business selling personal branding services is not because I just talk about personal branding – which I do consistently – it’s because I talk about things that my ideal audience will relate to.
I call these ‘the ring of influence’. These are the people close to the executives and founders, like admin, assistants, marketing and sales teams. They’re not quite who we’re looking for, but they’re close enough to gain us access to our ideal customer.
Always remember, even in the business-to-business (B2B) space, it’s a human being who is making the buying decision. And human beings are often influenced by the people they trust most. Leverage that trust for a competitive advantage.
You can’t build a multi-billion dollar business on a children’s meal alone, but McDonald’s knows that if they influence the children, they influence the parents. (If a kid is screaming that it’s so unfair that all their friends get to go for Happy Meals on Fridays, even the most stern and nutritionally focused parents cave in!)
Make your content plan flexible enough that if huge news breaks, you’re not scrambling around to make space for a post reacting to it, but consistent enough that you always have something to say.
I repost, remix, reuse as much old content as humanly possible.
What you’re doing right now might not work in six months’ time. And that is why you’ve got to completely remove your ego from your personal brand. You have to be unemotional about testing and learning and adapting to new platforms, new algorithms and new styles of sharing your message.
If you’ve gained loads of followers quickly, it’s probably because your focus has been giving people a dopamine hit rather than building a relationship.
How many times have you been telling someone about a post you saw on TikTok or Instagram, but can’t remember who posted it? (Me, daily.) It’s because you have no connection with the creator of that content. The person behind that feed has only posted things to make you like their content, rather than posting things to make you like them.
Your content should give other people a window into who you are as a person, which means they get to know and like you, as well as liking your content. This creates a human connection. They feel like you’re their mate, not just an influencer!
Vanilla isn’t exciting. It’s not interesting and it’s certainly not giving the main character energy that mint choc chip gives. People don’t buy vanilla, and if they do, it’s because it’s an accompaniment to a fancy dessert. So unless you want to be a side dish in life, don’t be vanilla.
If you don’t highlight your personality through your content – which, scary as it sounds, might mean saying things that other people disagree with – then you are missing the point of personal branding.
A good way to avoid tasteless content is asking yourself ‘what’s the f**king point?’ every time you create a piece of content.
[B]efore you even start working on your personal brand, I’d grab a pad and pen – or the Notes app in your phone – and spend a few minutes making a list of areas you want to steer clear of. I call this a ‘no-fly’ list – and what goes on there will be different for everyone.
Fatal flaws. Definition: A flaw which causes an otherwise noble or exceptional character to bring about their own downfall and, often, their eventual death. OK, so maybe the death bit is a bit dramatic, but you get my drift.
- Det ar bokstavligen vad fatal betyder
Building a personal brand is a marathon, not a sprint, and not every run is going to be a personal best.
You have around three seconds to hook people in and around seven seconds total before they disengage on the micro-content platforms like TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
They look and sound smart, because they are. You copying their content makes you look dumb. Avoid this at all costs. I promise, it’s not going to help you – the person you’re copying will have completely different goals to you. Probably a different audience and, let’s be honest, you’re not the same person.
I’ve been able to create a very successful personal brand because I’m very clear about who I need to attract and therefore what I need to talk about – and the value I need to provide.
Get clear on your goals, work out who you need to attract to make those goals happen.
Let me just get one thing clear, there is no ‘best’ channel for building your personal brand. There is only the best channel to reach your intended audience.
If you try to post on too many, you’ll either get overwhelmed by the volume of content you need to create – and probably give up – or you’ll dilute your message so much that no one will give a monkey’s about what you have to say.
If you’re not actively engaging with other people’s content, and replying to comments and conversations on your own, you’re missing a huge piece of this personal branding puzzle.
Building a personal branding is 10% great content and 90% consistency in posting it.
One of the things I see people do is have an interesting topic they want to talk about – it’s bang on for their audience, but they give their audience no room to comment or engage because they’ve caveated and considered all perspectives, objections, challenges and opinions in their post. Don’t do that. You want to start a conversation, not have one with yourself.
When the only type of content you’re posting is hard sales stuff, it has the same ‘repelling’ effect. In fact, it doesn’t just stop people engaging with your content, it actually makes them run away from it – and your personal brand.
This might surprise you, but in the three and a half years I’ve been running Klowt, I’ve only asked people directly to buy what we’re selling in my content about THREE times – that’s out of hundreds and hundreds of posts.
Focus on how many relationships you can build with those people, rather than how many followers you have – aka, find friends, not followers. You need to build rapport – that comes from talking about multiple aspects of our lives, not just what you’re selling.
It’s only by knowing exactly who you sell to that you can work out what you need to talk about to get them interested in you.
Bonus tip to get even more insight from your ideal audience. Ask them who are the thought leaders they like – and on what platforms they follow them. This gives you a list of people who you can follow and engage with to attract more audience members, just like that potential customer, into your network.
There are different levels to personal branding. Level one is posting a piece of content online, level ten is getting paid to speak at an industry conference or event – level one hundred, you’re Beyoncé.
If you’re at level one, just getting content out there on the right social platform is enough. Set a key performance indicator (KPI) of how many times a week to post, and strive to hit it.
At level two, you want to start thinking about optimising that content, making sure it’s actually helping you achieve your goals. Like, what is performing well and what gets crickets? Do more of the former and less of the latter.
[B]y level six? You’ll be in a good cadence of posting, but people will start to get to know who you are and want to proactively mention your names in rooms you otherwise won’t have access to. This is the tipping point of when all the work you’ve been doing starts to pay dividends.
One of the most underrated ways to grow an audience is to engage in other people’s.
[T]he only thing you need to be able to build a solid foundation of a strong personal brand is clarity on what you want people to know you for. It really is that simple. And that is always why it is so hard.
No one is going to remember a mortgage broker that simply talks about mortgages. But they do remember a mortgage broker who talks about his journey getting into the industry after struggling to buy his first home with his pregnant wife. […] Your expertise is what people are buying, but your story is why they buy it from you.
If I told you to ‘talk about mortgages’, you’d fatigue out in five posts. If I told you to Google the top 50 most searched terms surrounding mortgages, and answer those in posts AND then Google ‘50 things that people care about’ and asked you to use those as inspiration for your own stories about your life and challenges, you’d have 100 days’ worth of content for multiple channels.
Make a list of the questions you get asked most often in what you do and answer them in your posts. This is one of the most powerful tools for positioning yourself as an authority in your space – and someone who is willing to give away their knowledge for free.
If your ideal audience can’t see the point in a piece of content straight away, then they’re not going to care about it. And you will have wasted your time.
Resonating with your audience isn’t only about talking about the right topics – it’s talking about the right topics in the right way.
Good content acknowledges dreams, provides painkillers, triggers nostalgia or sells a lifestyle to their ideal audience.
If you want to be known as the D2C guy, you can’t only talk about D2C once a month. You have to post about it every single day. And sometimes that means repeating yourself. A lot.
Repurpose, remix, reuse your content. If you posted something as a text post and it did well, post it as a video, or a graphic. Play around with how you presented it. Told a story? Try a one-liner and see if you get a similar response.
Repetition makes sure that your core message gets seen and heard by more people, and the need for repetition within content creation is a conversation I have constantly with clients. […] People forget, so we all need to keep sharing the same message until they remember. And then keep saying it until they know you for it.
[I]f you want to be known for your expertise in a particular area, it’s far more important to look at the views you get on your posts, and most importantly who is viewing it. If you are getting interactions and views from people you want to impress, then a comment from them in-person is more valuable than 200 likes on a post.
To me, creating content is the difference between being a consumer and being a creator. The difference between someone letting life happen to them, and someone making life happen for them. Read that sentence twice.
When you first start posting, it’s really easy to look at what everyone else is doing and think it’s a good idea to copy the viral formula they’ve discovered and apply it to your content. This is a huge mistake. There is a reason why it’s called personal branding, and not just branding, period.
[D]on’t lose sight of the bigger picture here, which is your personal brand is you and you are your personal brand. Creating something you’re genuinely excited about sharing makes other people excited too. And excitement = engagement.
No matter which channel you’re posting on, your message should stay the same. What does change, however, is the medium or context you deliver that message in.
Focus on sharing your knowledge for free to build credibility and trustworthiness. Both of those things will pay you 1000 × more in the future than what you’d get for charging for your knowledge now.
[E]ven if you give away everything someone needs to be able to do what you do for a living, for themselves (which I regularly do), 99% won’t take the action required. Instead, they will pay you to do it for them.
Look at Simon Sinek, Steven Bartlett, or Ryan Holiday – all of them state the obvious, but they do it in a way that everyone can understand and resonate with – a way that makes you go, ‘That’s me!’ They make complex, human experiences and ideas simple.
My advice is always to speak and write as though you are speaking or writing to a 12-year-old. […] Because it doesn’t matter how smart your audience is, people want the information they need or want delivered in a simple way.
The top-line goal you have for growing your personal brand might be to generate more leads, but the outcome for each piece of content should be to get people talking in the comments – that’s what’s going to drive more eyeballs to your content and that’s how you’ll generate more leads in the long term.
The more you analyse the posts that performed poorly as well as those that performed well, the more consistently good your content creation will become.
Don’t get hung up on what time of day you’re posting content on social media. If your message is strong enough, it will get picked up, regardless of whether it drops at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday or 9 p.m. on a Sunday.
[N]ot repurposing your content is like only wearing a great outfit once. Dumb and expensive.
Your personal brand isn’t just what you post online – it’s what you wear, how you act. It can be easy to forget that your personal brand isn’t just about your ideas and knowledge. Your personal brand is external too.
At the beginning of 2023, I completely rebranded myself aesthetically. I dyed my hair to the signature blonde I have now, I worked with a stylist to overhaul my wardrobe and find my ‘look’.
when you look like you’ve got your st together, people normally think you do. And people want to do business with people who have their st together.
Jobs always maintained he dressed like a Bond villain because he didn’t want to have to worry about what to wear every day, but I think it was much more strategic than that. The fact that we’re still talking about how he dressed now shows you how effective his visual brand was.
[T]he key is to talk about it from your personal experience. You can’t just share information and expect people to love you – if it was information people wanted, they could just go to Google. No, people want your information. They want to know why you have the knowledge, how you got that insight – your story.
Whether you’re paying for the right to be able to buy expensive cocktails or roll your eyes at the latest group chat rant for free, the entire point of the community is that people need to feel like it’s part of their identity. That they are proud to be a part of it.
You get to choose your hard.
Address people as ‘you’, identify as ‘I’ rather than saying ‘we’. Using active language allows people to feel like you’re addressing them directly, and therefore they will respond as such.
Statistically speaking, most of you will do jack all after reading this book. You’ll think, ‘Ah, that was interesting’ and then it will go and collect dust on your bookshelf until your partner nags you enough to take it, and the others you’ve done the same with, to the local charity shop.
[O]f the 100 people that read your content, only one will actually action it. The rest will either wish they had, or will find the budget to pay you to do it for them.
I spend about one to two hours per week on my personal brand,
I actually don’t think anything in life worth doing is worth doing without a system.
[B]uilding a strong personal branding is 10% content, 90% consistency and volume of posting it. Trust me when I say this is a numbers game.
One of the things I’ve been doing recently is content theming my months.
You have to consume content if you want to create it, which means instead of doom-scrolling cat pages on TikTok at 3 a.m. you need to get a bit more strategic in how you spend your time online.
Commenting on other people’s stuff is actually the easiest way to build a personal brand and expand your network with people who otherwise wouldn’t ever have come across you or your content.
My top tip is to not only share an opinion but to end your comment with a question.
Repurposing is, as the name suggests, taking a piece of content and turning it into another piece of content in a different format. Recycling is slightly different. This is when you post the same piece of content more than once.
Your version of monetisation might not actually be about making any money yet, but instead capitalising on your credibility and platform to get you into rooms you can’t currently get into.
[I]f you are positioning yourself as a thought leader, it’s important to think carefully about how you respond to requests for endorsements.
The more you give people, the more likely they are to give back. The formula that I think works is: give, give, give, give, give, give, give, then ask.
My advice, if you really want to accelerate the growth of your personal brand? Find a reason to go to in-person events or meet-ups where you can shake people’s hands and have face-to-face conversations.
The old adage of ‘It’s not what you know, but who you know’ isn’t true any more – it’s all about who knows you.