What makes a personal brand – and how to leverage it through LinkedIn

When I look back on my career in business and now as an entrepreneur, I see that in every interaction I ever had with clients and partners, I was subconsciously building my personal brand - before the phrase even became fashionable.

To me, building your brand involves defining two key things: your values and your purpose.

Your values are the things you stand for, your principles, the things you want to be known for, the things you’d never compromise. Your purpose is why you're doing what you're doing. My purpose, for example, as the Founder of Matchboard, is to help people in business save valuable time and money in finding their perfect match suppliers.

Another example of “purpose” is Anita Roddick, Founder of the Body Shop, who passionately believed that animal testing of cosmetic products is wrong, and her purpose was to bring women cosmetics which do not rely on animal testing. She was in fact a pioneer of ethical consumerism. Values + purpose together make for a powerful brand.

When I started Matchboard, I had no investors, and a small marketing budget. I thought long and hard about how I was going to get clients to try my revolutionary new matching platform. After all, finding customers is the biggest challenge of any startup. Then it dawned on me, that I could get some early success just by leveraging the personal brand I’d built up the previous 20 years - and leverage that I did.

Big companies have a charter of company values, but few employees know them, let alone live or breathe them. Often they’re just corny acronyms that pop up in employee inductions then are promptly forgotten. But startups, solo traders and small businesses have a huge advantage – their size enables them to have an authentic brand that the business and its people truly lives and truly believes in. So I set up a page on Matchboard's website called Guiding Principles, and I put it all out there. I distilled my values, my approach to business into 4 elements: integrity, passion, simplicity and knowledge. Everything I do every day aligns with these values.

And I have not hesitated to reject potential clients whose own brands don’t align with mine, no matter how large the deal. As Jesse J famously sings, it’s not about the money, money, money. It’s about the brand, brand, brand!

Let me expand on one of the values defining my brand - integrity. Matchboard's whole business model is built on trust, and what I mean by that is this: our free platform connects users with suppliers who are a perfect match for a specific business need. The way we monetise this is we take a success fee from the supplier who wins business from our referral. We trust our suppliers to report their revenues honestly to us. The suppliers, for their part, trust us to keep all their information housed in our platform secure and confidential, and they trust us to fairly allocate leads. And why do they trust us? Because in every way we behave and communicate, it's with transparency, with honesty, with integrity.

My personal track record of integrity has given many clients the confidence to try our service. And it gave many suppliers the confidence to join our ecosystem, even before we’d launched.

So, how can you convey your values and purpose, to the wider world, and how you can translate them into tangible business opportunity? Let’s talk about LinkedIn.

I can say hand on heart, I wouldn’t be where I am today without LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the ultimate personal branding platform, and most of the value you can derive from it is free.

Let’s face it, you can publish articles which define who you are and get this message out to a massive audience. I published an article on why I want my kids to be entrepreneurs, which garnered hundreds of likes, comments and new followers, as well as exposure to 7500 readers. All for free, all weaving in my values and my purpose. Anyone can do this, and if your writing skills are not your strong point, that’s no excuse. You can invest a tiny amount in having your writing polished or your ideas wordsmithed by a professional. And Matchboard can recommend some great digital content writers!

In addition to publishing articles, use LinkedIn to regularly post updates and comment on other people’s updates. If the only way to get yourself into the rhythm of doing this at first is to set yourself a calendar reminder, then do it! It’s worth it, at least once a week.

A personal brand is nothing unless it’s audible and visible.

Tip number 2. Engage first, sell second. You want your brand to be associated with offering and adding value, not second-rate sales tactics such as selling to someone in the first breath before you’ve even interacted with them.

Thirdly, identify groups where people go to find thought leadership in your target market. Expose people to your brand in these forums. Focus on quality rather than quantity of contributions, and it won’t take long for other group members to see the value and credibility you bring.

Next one. This is really obvious but I rarely see it happen – don’t be shy about asking your network for an occasional favour. If your personal brand is strong, they’ll be happy to support you. For example, when I launched Matchboard, I asked my network to share the Matchboard website with their networks, and Day 1, I got three clients. For a marketing cost of zero!

Protect the integrity of your brand by not blindly accepting LinkedIn invitations. I often reject invitations to connect. Fake profiles are not rare. Tell-tale signs are no endorsements, few connections, and beyond attractive photos. You may also get invited by dubious characters. For example, I was invited by a CEO I read about in the news who is being sued for data theft. Obviously I didn’t connect. People make judgements about the people you surround yourself with, so connect with caution.

I add around 100 new connections on LinkedIn each month – half are people who invite me, the other half are people I reach out to. Since I’ve been on the platform 13 years, I’m now sitting on more than 9000 connections. I once did a hard business calculation to test out: is the time I spend on LinkedIn each day (around half an hour) really worth it?

The result of my analysis was that almost $90,000 in business came through my LinkedIn connections last year. Divide $90,000 by 182 hours a year on LinkedIn, and that equates to earning $500 an hour.

This calculation is of course not entirely accurate because some LinkedIn connections may have become my clients even without LinkedIn, but it’s certainly enough of an indicator to me that using LinkedIn has a quantifiable ROI if you are in business development or running a business.

The bigger your network grows, the easier it becomes to get noticed and grow even more. It’s like a Domino effect. An easy way to grow your network quickly is to import all your contacts into LinkedIn. Then you can just select which ones to invite, and in all of 60 seconds, you may have reconnected with dozens of ex-colleagues and other friendlies.

When you invite someone who’s not an existing contact, be sure to personalise the invitation to connect. This will increase the likelihood of your invitation being accepted, and warm up the contact for your first interaction. Include things that will immediately establish rapport, such as common connections, groups, universities, interests or causes.

If you can genuinely rate someone for a particular skill, endorse them for that skill on LinkedIn. They will then be reminded to endorse you for skills they know you’re great at too. One of my proudest moments from a personal brand perspective was when I attended a business lunch with the Managing Director of LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Australia who were speaking on a panel. The MD of LinkedIn announced he’d done an analysis of the 500 executives in the room, and the person with the most endorsements on LinkedIn was… me. I never ask people to endorse me, but I get a lot of endorsements which I believe is due to the strength of my personal brand.

Finally, show, don’t just tell. Display your brand visually on LinkedIn. Get yourself a professional photo. And not only a photo, why not also a video. Engagement with videos is often higher than with static text, but to please everyone, the ideal is to have it all.

You can always check in to see what impact you’re making on LinkedIn by pinging your SSI. It’s your social selling index and a score out of 100. Anyone can get it for free!

To sum up, I’d strongly recommend to anyone looking to build their personal brand to first be crystal clear about the values and purpose which define your brand. Then set about conveying this to the world, through a strong consistent message, whether on LinkedIn, or whatever marketing you have in your mix.

[Excerpt from speech delivered on Mar.16, 2017 to the women’s business networking group, WWGI.]