It takes time to create a personal brand. You need to make people listen to you. You need to have achievements that they will acknowledge. You need to be able to arouse empathy, interest, and positive feelings in your customers and audience. A personal brand can make a huge difference to the health of any entrepreneurial venture. A brand is a great motivator for people to choose your business over your competitor’s.

Your personal brand attaches your name with any product or service that you endorse or put your money into. Implement the following ideas to create a personal brand, and you will find that brand building, although hard, is not impossible and can be fun.

1. Approach influencers

Influencers exist in every business. These are powerful thought leaders who have created a name for themselves by virtue of their achievements or ability to provide piercing insight that readers appreciate. If you can get such influencers to endorse you, then you will be giving your personal brand a big boost. When such influencers opine, people take their opinions seriously. Influencers have an online follower count that may run into millions. Your website, name, face, achievements reach these many readers if an influencer decides to promote you. Without an influencer, it would take you years to reach these many people…and all of them are people who count because they are in looking for services or products in the niche that you operate in.

Locating an influencer in your niche is not difficult. When you have zeroed in on one, you must have a plan to unobtrusively gain his or attention. Intelligent comments on posts and feedback on articles are great ways to initiate communication with influencers. Of course, you do not have to be obsequious in your feedback. Honest impressions that you have will gain you an influencer’s attention. Share the influencer's content. Invite the person to guest post on your website. Seek guidance. You have to nurture an influencer for a period.

Write a very useful post that addresses common pain points in your niche or discuss trends. Mention the influencer’s contribution. Market the article. Tag the influencer. If the article appeals to the influencer, he will share the link.

BuzzSumo and Traackr are useful online resources for looking up influencers in your line of work.

2. Become a guest blogger

Guest blogging remains a tried and tested method for raising awareness about yourself with an audience that matters. Just as solid one-way backlinks are never going to go out of fashion, similarly guest posting will always be a good way to take your personal brand to higher levels.

Guest blogging is a great way to widen your reader base. If you have insight and advice to share, then you can speak to a bigger audience by posting on a more popular blog. Approach the blog owner and discuss the topic that you propose to write on. Inform the blog owner on how the topic will appeal to the blog’s readers. Many blogs invite guest posters. Guest posts generate content. Posting on many good quality blogs will introduce people to your content, the work you do, and your personal brand will begin to grow.

3. Participate in speaking engagements

If you have the ability to address and audience and speak intelligently on subjects in your niche, then you simply must seek speaking engagements. Addressing an audience face-to-face can get you in the books of decision makers and people who matter. They can contribute to building your personal brand in the real and online world. Your speech can be transcribed into text and disseminated online on relevant forums and platforms, such as LinkedIn. Videos and photos serve as powerful engagers with an audience. Having many successful speaking engagements under your belt is a great way to enhance your personal brand. It is an opportunity to impress a live audience, answer questions, share experiences, and come up smelling roses from the experience. A speaking engagement can be a real brand booster. You can build an image as a humorous personality, a strong character, a problem solver, an approachable person, a go-getter…anything. These opportunities are not that forthcoming in an online scenario.

Seek such engagements. Offer to speak free. Build a portfolio and a brand. When that happens, you will be invited to such engagements and even be paid for your knowledge, wisdom, and efforts.

4. Live video is your friend

A live video is almost as good as a speaking engagement in getting the attention of an audience. Brand followers overwhelmingly prefer a live video over a blog by a brand. An audio-visual is that much more impactful. And videos get shared. This increases the reach of the content. Imagine, hosting a live video on Facebook and then watching the content getting shared on Facebook, Whatsapp, and other websites. Mobile users are active video watchers and net users. Nearly 100% of mobile owners watch videos. A live video places you in front of an audience without you even having to go to office. You can make a live video anytime you want to, and you can do so daily. If you have the content and the confidence to back your abilities then open up in front of an audience and watch your stock rise.

Invite questions and reactions from the audience. They type it, and you can answer the questions live. Solve problems, be of use, and people will come to know of you.

5. Use chatbots

As your personal brand begins to grow, so will your responsibilities in ensuring communication. Don’t let this slow you down or bore you. Use automation to carry out mundane communication tasks while you focus on intelligent networking and brand building. Use bots to craft automated messages that will show up on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and other platforms that you use to engage with your audience. Chatbots can be programmed to post a standard response or a message. Chatbots on your website will generate leads for you. With these autobots in place you can devote more time to crafting answers to questions, writing blog posts, networking in the real world, and gathering your thoughts together on what to do next.

Creating a strong brand is akin to climbing a mountain. You can climb this personal Mt. Everest of yours by systematically implementing the ideas discussed above.