Growing Your Brand isn’t Always Easy. Here are the Best Things I’ve Learned so far.

Y’all, we reached 100 email subscribers this month. I am so excited about it and figured, what better way to celebrate than share what I’ve learned with those who are also trying to grow a brand?

Growth Strategies for Your Brand

SEO Matters

First things first, every online entrepreneur you will meet will stress this over and over again. SEO MATTERS and I skipped it for soooo long. I figured it was a fancy coding thing and I would do fine without it. Wrong.

If you’re working on growing your brand and haven’t learned about SEO, read this post for more information. I’ll go over the basics, but there’s much more to it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And it is exactly that! When you search for something on Google, it gives you articles that fit your search best. How does it do this? It’s able to do this because Google has gone through every article searching for keywords, alt texts, meta descriptions, backlinks, etc. All the information you see when you read the article and more information you can’t see is processed to give you the best results.

This works for Google, Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest, and basically any online platform you might try to grow on. SEO is the foundation of all of it. So, when trying to grow your brand, you want to build visibility, right? You want to be on the first few pages of Google, the explore page of Instagram or the top result of Pinterest. To do this, you need SEO.

So, don’t be like me, please! Don’t skip over SEO!

Email List

Another one that’s important and I skipped- grow your email list. You may not have much use for it now, but you will in the future if you plan to continue growing the brand. Your email list is a way to directly communicate with people who want to hear from you. Posting updates on Instagram, the blog, Tiktok, etc. is great but only a small fraction of your audience actually sees your posts.

In fact, if you want to stay connected you can join my email list! I send out monthly updates with member tips, the newest posts, and an advice column. These emails only come out once a month (I’m with you- I hate getting spam emails), don’t miss them!

Shift Your Mindset

You Come First

Part of trying to grow your brand means hearing hundreds of others tell you the ‘right’ way to do it. There always seems to be a new ‘secret’ that only the people succeeding know. The truth? Thats BS.

You don’t need to stay consistent. You don’t need to post 3 times a day. You don’t need to make everything aesthetically pleasing. I’ve seen so many people grow with strategies that seem to contradict each other. One strategy may have worked well for one person and could do absolutely nothing for the next.

There is no one way to grow a brand. It should be unique to your community and unique to YOU.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

I’ve tried making just about every single type of content (except maybe a podcast which I have been wanting to start for a while hahah). When I started this brand, I had NO idea what I was doing. And let me let you in on a secret, I still don’t. At first, I wanted everything to be perfect. I spent hours every day stressing myself out over it.

Eventually, I realized I was hurting myself so I took a break. Today, I take it step by step and try to enjoy the process instead of stressing about it. My reason for growing this brand was to inspire women to take care of themselves and follow their dreams. How can I share that message if I wasn’t doing that myself?

My point here? Don’t be afraid to change things around. You don’t need to have everything perfect, you just need to start. I’ve messed up so many times and I expect to do so many more times. I could sink into the embarrassment or I could keep moving forward. Which one will you do?

Build the Personal Brand

Now I saved the most important part (in my opinion) for last. You guys, personal branding is where it’s at. I mean it.

If there is one prediction I have for the future of online marketing it is this- as a whole, humanity is burnt out. We want to connect back to our roots again. We want to feel community, authenticity, and a sense of belonging. We want to see personality.

I want you to think of social media from a consumer point of view for a moment. When you’re scrolling through Instagram, do you engage with the perfectly planned photos or the posts that are genuine? You probably answered genuine. In fact, you might get annoyed with seeing the perfect photos over and over again. When online branding was beginning to grow, it was new and exciting and people wanted to see the beautiful moments. Now we’re realizing that all of it is fake. Social media is only a fraction of someone’s reality and it can get really annoying. In fact, this is one of the reasons Tiktok has grown so fast; we want connection. We’re tired of posts with no emotion.

Now switch it around. Think from the brand’s point of view. The lies that people post on social media about being perfect and not making mistakes? That’s a load of crap and people are done with it. If a brand is smart, they’ll catch on to this quickly. It’s time to build a connection. A business is no longer about selling, it’s about connecting. So how exactly do you do this?

Quality Over Quantity

People no longer want to see 3 posts per day. There was a time when the best way to grow on social media was to post like crazy. People kept consuming. Now, the market is huge. Posting every day just gets annoying. This is a topic that I could explain but I feel that others do it better. My friend JeeIn Youn is a consultant in Chicago who build a 20K following on Instagram and 80K on Tiktok in only a matter of months. Her strategy? Focusing on quality over quantity. Here’s a podcast episode she recorded explaining her method. Listen to the episode for more on this!

And Finally, Be Yourself

Algorithms are constantly changing. Even the style of a brand changes. What doesn’t change? The authenticity behind the brand. BE YOURSELF. It won’t bring your overnight results, but it will bring you a community that sticks even when the algorithm changes for the 82736226283 times.

Final Thoughts

I often felt like I was doing something wrong in trying to grow my brand. I read article after article with the perfect tips and couldn’t ever figure it out. Then I realized- a brand is not one-size-fits-all. A brand is unique and the process of getting a hang of it takes time. I’m still learning. I will be for a while and that’s okay!

As you’re growing your brand or just following along don’t forget that you come first. Take care of yourself and the rest will eventually follow. Sending hugs to each and every one of you!

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