You Followed the Personal Branding Advice. So Why Isn’t It Working?

Because it was generic.

Choose a niche, know your audience, pick your platforms, post consistently. Tell your story, build trust. And so you did.

After weeks or months of work, very little happened.

Now you’re looking at everything you’ve built and wondering if you should scrap it and start over.

Again.

Personal branding gets presented as a series of simple steps. The problem is that almost every step contains another set of decisions nobody explains, and gives little to no insight as to HOW.

The Advice Sounds Simple

Know your audience: OK, who are they and where do you find them?

Your audience wants what you have, clearly, but how do you find them? Aren’t they supposed to just find you?

Choose a platform: OK, which one?

The platform where you like spending time, or the one where your particular kind of content has the best chance of working? And how do you know which platform is the best platform for what you have to offer?

Be consistent: You can consistently post the wrong content to the wrong people on the wrong platform. Consistency alone won’t fix that.

The Lack of Results Starts to Feel Personal

When you’ve put hours into researching, posting, engaging, testing, comparing, and trying to do everything the experts said to do, a lack of results starts to feel personal. You wonder what you missed. You wonder what everyone else knows that you don’t.

Eventually it starts to feel like proof that you’re just bad at this. That social media just isn’t for you. That clearly there’s something you don’t understand, or that people don’t like what you have to offer.

Before You Start Over

This is usually the point where people start over. But before you do that, look at what you already have.

Look at your analytics. Look at which content gets attention and which doesn’t, and know that content without a lot of views doesn’t equal the wrong content. Content with tons of views doesn’t equal success either.

It doesn’t mean the right audience was reached. It doesn’t mean the algorithm understands who you’re trying to get your message to.

Look at whether people can understand what you offer. Look at the platform you’re choosing. Check your links. Check the path from seeing your content to actually buying something. Make sure all of them work.

There are a lot of places for the process to break.

A True Game Changer for Me

If you want to have your brain tickled when it comes to analytics, you are welcome in advance.

When I was in that beginning stage, I looked at analytics like most people. HOW MANY VIEWS!? How many likes? The more I had, the better I thought I was doing. I was getting somewhere! And I would have been, if that’s what I was after.

So I started looking at the numbers very differently, and still, it was just not enough information for me to know how to alter my strategy.

Until I happened upon a podcast called The Anatomy of a Dream, with guest Grace Andrews. Grace helped grow The Diary of a CEO from about 8,000 YouTube subscribers into an audience of millions, and that conversation completely rewired how I think about analytics and what actually counts as a successful post.

It’s one of the few conversations about social media growth I’ve heard that made me look at the numbers differently instead of just giving me another list of things to do. I am forever grateful.

The Villain Here Is Oversimplified Advice

It’s the universal, generic advice that ARE the basic steps. But those basic steps, that generic advice, does not answer everything, and it does not help you to answer everything you need to successfully build a personal brand.

It gives you the headline and leaves out the decisions underneath.

Those missing decisions can make capable people feel like failures.

So before you throw everything away, find out what actually needs fixing.

If you can’t name the problem, how are you supposed to search for the answer?

You may be much closer than you think.

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