Beyond Personal Branding: A Balanced Approach to Growing Your Solo Business

Are you limiting your potential by focusing solely on personal branding to drive new business?

If you're scrolling through LinkedIn, you might think that's all you need.

After all, there's a common refrain among influencers: "Boost your personal brand, and business will follow."

This mantra has been sold successfully to countless aspiring solopreneurs, leading many to believe that consistent viral content is the golden ticket to success.

But is this narrow focus actually holding you back?

The Reality Check: Limitations of Personal Branding

Let's look at some hard truths. Take Neil Patel's experience: In his agency's first year, his personal brand drove an impressive $5M in revenue.

However, by year three, when they reached $30M+, his personal brand contributed less than 1% of their revenue. This isn't an isolated case.

Personal branding on LinkedIn faces several key challenges:

• Limited reach within your total addressable market
• Scalability issues as your business grows
• Time-intensive requirements for content creation and engagement

The Inbound Marketing Conundrum

While inbound marketing through LinkedIn can be effective, it comes with its own set of limitations:

The Numbers Don't Lie

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, in collaboration with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, conducted a study that popularised the “95:5 rule” in B2B marketing.

In that research, they found that only about 5% of businesses are in the market for most goods and services at any given time.

If you're solely relying on LinkedIn reach, getting in front of ready buyers is about as likely as winning the lottery.

The Time Investment

Many influential LinkedIn personalities admit to spending hours just on commenting.

As we say in National Service speak, "where got time?"

My own "overnight success" took more than 10 years of content marketing.

Starting from zero today?

You might see similar results around 2035.

A Better Way: The Balanced Approach

Here's where it gets interesting. Josh Turner, a LinkedIn marketing expert, reveals that in his company:

• 42.9% of appointments come from inbound marketing
• 57.1% come from outbound efforts

And crucially, that 42.9% isn't just personal branding—it includes SEO, SEM, ebooks, infographics, and more.

Practical Steps for Solopreneurs

1. Start Prospecting

Modern-day prospecting goes beyond cold calling. Here's what worked for me:

• Used Hunter.io to find email addresses (Lusha is also a good option)
• Leveraged Reply.io for automated sales outreach
• Utilised LeadConnect (then migrated to Expandi.io) for automated LinkedIn invites/outreach (Syndie is a much cheaper option although I haven’t tried them)
• Built nearly 30,000 connections before LinkedIn Creator became a feature

2. Perfect Your Pitch

My game-changing realisation?

Stop selling and start seeking advice.

Instead of "Can I show you a demo?" try "I'm new to this industry—given your experience, could I get your advice?"

If that might not work for you, you can draw reference from the variety of templates on AutoKlose Free Email Template Library.

3. Create Valuable Lead Magnets

With tools like ChatGPT, creating templates, checklists, or tearsheets is easier than ever. I've seen this work consistently since 2017:

• Create valuable, downloadable content
• Promote it via LinkedIn message and ask for email addresses to send it over
• Share magnet via email and follow up with mailing list invitations or consultations

Creating lead magnets work wonders on inbound too.

You probably seen many “Comment X, Get Y” kind of LinkedIn post with high virality.

That was what I did in 2017 when I created the first Singapore HR Tech Market Map.

The Proof is in the Pudding

Even marketing powerhouse HubSpot maintains multiple sales roles, including BDRs, SDRs, and Account Executives.

Let alone you, my fellow solopreneur.

The Bottom Line

While personal branding on LinkedIn is valuable, it shouldn't be your only strategy. Success comes from a balanced approach:

• Combine inbound and outbound marketing
• Create valuable lead magnets
• Perfect your outreach strategy
• Focus on building genuine connections

Your turn: What's stopping you from business development? Are you ready to move beyond just personal branding?

Whenever you’re ready, here are 4 ways I can help you:

1. No More Bosses - My book on the journey to sustainable self-employment
2. LinkedIn Growth Strategies - Discover how I grew my LinkedIn to 30K followers and the benefits it brings.
3. Fractional CMO Services for HR Vendors - Looking to scale? Leverage my expertise in driving marketing strategies and business growth.
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