When it comes to marketing and growing your author brand, there’s something really, really important that you need to keep in mind. It’s something that I think a lot of writers and authors forget. And that is…
An author brand is a personal brand.
Your author brand is not like having a name brand that represents a group or a company of people. Your author brand is YOU.
Which is why if you want to grow your following and actually have a readership and sell more books, you need to do you. You have to do things your way. You have to say what you really think. You have to be who you really are. You have to document your life for your audience.
And screw the “rules” or what anyone else thinks.
The whole point of a personal brand is for you to be yourself and grow your audience and following by letting people into your world.
That’s all I do, every single day. I just show up as me and write from my heart whatever comes out.
No, my blog posts don’t always follow the “rules” of blog posts, like having subtitles to break up the text. I know the rules and principles of blogging because I spent years of my life studying them and following them.
But now I do things my way. Because at the end of the day, I don’t want to follow a formula. I don’t want to do things how everyone else is doing them. And I believe that I don’t have to.
I believe that I can do things my way and just be me and the right people will find me and resonate with me and want to be part of my community and work with me.
Now this was a belief I had to create, obviously. As the belief I used to have was that I had to follow a formula or the “rules” of online marketing and if I didn’t do that I couldn’t be successful. But it’s actually been the opposite.
When I started to show up fully as myself and do me and unleash the from-the-heart messages I deliver on a daily basis to my community, that’s when things started to take off for me. That’s when I started making more book sales and more money. That’s when my business became consistent.
And not a minute before.
Why?
Because before I started doing that, I was playing by the rules and trying to do things using a formula and planning stuff out to the most minute detail instead of just operating from intuition and flow.
Don’t get me wrong–the formulas work and the principles and rules work. But that doesn’t mean you have to follow them (except in the case of storytelling principles; those you do have to follow).
Yes, it might take a little longer for you to get where you want to go, but you’ll eventually get there knowing that you were 100 percent yourself and didn’t compromise or sell your soul in the name of other people’s opinions about what you should be doing.
These are just the things I believe about creating success on your terms. And my ideal readers are people who agree and have these same beliefs (or want to have them).
That’s why an author brand is a personal brand–because the reader wants to get to know the author and decide if they like them as a person or not before they’ll trust them enough to buy anything from them. The Know-Like-Trust factor is the foundation of successful online marketing.
And you build that Know-Like-Trust factor by showing up every single day, being who you are and unleashing the ideas, stories and messages that you feel inside you.
So don’t be afraid to say what you think and do what works best for you. Don’t be afraid to throw the rules out the window (again–except in the case of storytelling principles!!) and live on your terms, doing things how you want to do them.
When you show up as you and unleash what’s inside, the right people will always find you. Like moths to the light. You call them in when you allow yourself to shine bright as exactly who you are.
Dream life or bust,
#DreamLifeOrBust #DailyThinkDifferent
P.S. If you’re a blogger who is ready to create your first eBook, you’re gonna love my workshop that’s happening this Saturday, April 29 at Noon EDT. It’s called Blog to Book and it’s a 2-hour virtual workshop where I’ll be walking you step-by-step through the process I use to turn the content on my blog into eBooks that I sell on Amazon.
And you won’t just be sitting there listening to me talk about how to do it. You’ll actually start putting together your book right during the live workshop!
I know this is short notice… I meant to tell you about this workshop last week but with traveling and all it totally slipped my mind. So if you can’t make it live, don’t worry! Sign up anyhow and you’ll get the recording immediately after the live workshop is finished so you can put your book together in your own time.
