Are you trying to build a personal brand? In today’s age, anyone can look you up on the internet and learn more about you. WordPress can help you display the best information to help you build trust, following, and a great reputation online. In this article, we will show you how to build your personal brand using WordPress.
Why and Who Needs Personal Branding?
By definition, personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.
In our opinion, everyone needs to build personal brand. Whether you are an entrepreneur, small business owner, doctor, professor, real-estate broker, or a student.
In today’s information age, anyone can Google your name and learn a lot more about you than you can imagine. Building a personal brand allows you to market yourself on the internet.
Personal branding helps you not just earn trust, which in itself is invaluable. You can also build a following, become a thought leader, make friends, and find a lot of new opportunities.
Even if you don’t like the idea of marketing yourself as a product, you will still be judged by what you put online.
Let’s take a look how you can build an online brand for yourself that helps you succeed.
Build a Website
First thing you need to do is to build yourself a personal website.
While having social media profiles is great, social networks come on and go. You need a platform of your own where you can publish anything you want. A platform where you are the star.
Building a website with WordPress is extremely easy. You will need a WordPress hosting service and a domain name.
WordPress recommended hosting companies like Bluehost and Siteground are offering WPBeginner readers an exclusive 50% off discount and a free domain.
Most hosting service providers offer one click WordPress installs which allows you to be up and running with your own WordPress powered website in no time.
You can also take advantage of our free WordPress blog setup service.
Get a Personal Branding WordPress Theme
The way your website look is very important to make a good first impression.
WordPress comes with tons of free and premium themes.
For personal brand building, our favorite theme is GetNoticed by Michael Hyatt.
Our founder and CEO Syed Balkhi also uses the GetNoticed on his personal website.
You can also find some awesome WordPress themes at StudioPress and Themify.
Start Building an Email List
The most important thing you can do for the success of any website is build an email list.
Your personal website is no exception.
Before you do anything else, signup for an email service provider like MailChimp or AWeber.
MailChimp is the easiest to use, and they have a free version to start with.
We have a detailed guide on using MailChimp with WordPress, it will help you get started with in minutes.
Creating Content for Your Personal Website
Creating a website can be made easy with WordPress, but you will still need to add content.
Your content must be relevant to your industry, add value to your readers, and should help you showcase your skills.
About Page
You need to create an about page where users can learn more about you.
Many personal site owners use their about page as the front page of their website.
Use the about page to tell users who you are, what you do, awards you have won, and link to some samples of your work.
Let users know how they can get in touch with you through social media and by email. Take a look at our CEO, Syed Balkhi’s about page for inspiration.
You should also check out 6 Common About Page Mistakes That Are Killing Your Conversions
Contact Page
A lot of people don’t want to contact you through social media. This is why you will see contact pages on almost every website on the internet.
You need to add a contact page on your website with information about how users can send you a quick message.
WordPress does not come with a built in contact form. However, there are some excellent contact form plugins that you can install.
We recommend using Gravity Forms and use it on all of our websites.
Blog
By default WordPress comes with a blog on the front page. It is totally up to you whether you want to have a blog on your site or not. You can actually create a WordPress site with no blog and just a few pages.
However, adding a blog to your site has tremendous benefits. First of all, blogs are meant to be regularly updated, this means you can add fresh content to your site as often as you want.
Blog also provides your users a reason to visit your site again and again. With each visit, your personal brand will strengthen and become more recognizable to the users.
Blogs are casual, so you don’t need to spend too much time on writing lengthy essays. You can write short, useful, and insightful articles on a regular basis.
Each article brings users from search engines to your website. These users can then sign up for your email list, and you can reach them any time you want.
Add a Portfolio
Portfolios are not just for designers or photographers. No matter what industry you belong to, you can add your most successful projects to your portfolio.
This helps others quickly look at the things you have done, and it’s a great way to build trust.
Adding portfolio to your WordPress website is fairly easy. See our guide on how to add a portfolio to your WordPress site.
Adding Testimonials in WordPress
Testimonials help you show off what other are saying about you.
This kind of social proof helps you establish authority and develop trust.
Adding testimonials to your WordPress site is quite easy. First you need to install and activate the Testimonials Widget plugin.
It allows you to easily create and add testimonials using shortcode. Next, decide where you want to display testimonials. You can add them to your site’s sidebar, or you can create a dedicated page for testimonials.
Going Viral With Social
WordPress and social go hand in hand. There are countless WordPress plugins that allow you to add social buttons and sharing widgets to your site. However, many of them will slow down your website.
We recommend you to use Floating Social Bar, its the best social media plugin for WordPress. We use a slightly modified version of it on all our websites.
Floating Social Bar encourages users to share your content. It does not add links to your social media profile. You will have to use simple social icons plugin to add social media buttons to your sidebar.
You may also want to check out these 7 must have social media tools and plugins for bloggers that will help you use social media like pro.
Create Galleries and Slides
As humans, we love colors and visuals. Our brains are just wired that way.
You should use the power of visual imagery to build your personal brand. If you are a designer or photographer, then you probably already have stunningly beautiful content to display on your site.
WordPress comes with a basic gallery function, but it is not as pretty as we would like it to be.
If you regularly add image galleries to your WordPress site, then you will need Envira Gallery. It will help you easily add beautiful responsive image galleries in WordPress.
Sliders are highly engaging, this is why you see them on every other website on the internet. With WordPress, you can add sliders to your site without hiring a designer or developer.
There are so many slider plugins for WordPress, finding the right one can be tricky. This is why we compared them to find out the best WordPress slider plugin.
Add Appointments and Consultation
If you offer professional help and advice to users, then your WordPress site can be used to handle appointments. You can signup for a service like Clarity which allows users to book your time to get personal advice.
You can also use one these WordPress appointment and booking plugins for a more integrated experience. These plugins can display calendars, availability, and you can even accept payments right from your own site.
We hope this article helped you learn how to build your personal brand using WordPress. These WordPress tools will help you get started, but there is a lot more you can do with your site. Check out these 40 useful tools to manage and grow your WordPress site.
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