Have you ever missed a train by just a few minutes?
You run to the platform, but you see the doors closing… and there it goes. You missed it.
Opportunities can work in exactly the same way. A new client, a new job, a speaking invitation, a partnership. Sometimes the opportunity is there, but if people don’t know who you are, what you do or why they should choose you, it may simply pass you by.
Because it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if the right people don’t know it. That is where personal branding can help, making your knowledge, experience and expertise easier for other people to notice, understand and remember.
And before you start wondering: no, you don’t need to become an influencer, post every day or build an audience of thousands to strengthen your online presence.
What is a personal brand?
Your personal brand is much more than your LinkedIn profile, social media, website, logo or profile picture.
Jeff Bezos once said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
I will add that nowadays, your brand is also what Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other platforms say about you when you’re not there to explain, clarify or correct the story.
A strong personal brand helps people quickly understand who you are, what you know and why your expertise may be relevant to them.
Today, people can discover you in many different places: through search engines, LinkedIn, events, podcasts, articles, newsletters, YouTube, recommendations and increasingly AI platforms.
Your personal brand therefore exists whether you actively work on it or not.
The question is whether you are helping to shape it.
Why personal branding matters
In the AI era, your personal brand is one of your biggest assets.
Your digital presence is speaking for you, even when you are not in the room.
Building a strong online presence has become an important part of personal branding. Around 65% of professionals believe that the impression you make online is just as important as the one you make in person.
The question is: What is it saying? Are you intentionally building yours? If not why not?
I’ve been there too. For years, I didn’t think much about my personal brand.
When I switched careers into SEO in 2013, I attended conferences, learnt as much as I could, and worked hard to develop my expertise.
But I was mostly working behind the scenes.
That changed when I started working independently and created my digital marketing consultancy, Trebole, in 2020. Suddenly, visibility mattered in a completely different way.
Having experience was not enough. Potential clients, event organisers and other people in my industry also needed to know or heard about me.
So I started making my expertise more visible, and instead of only attending conferences, I started speaking at them. First speaking at small meetups then moving to bigger events.
I started sharing my knowledge, in articles, podcasts and I also started mentoring other professionals.
And eventually, in April 2026, I wrote and self-published my book, SEO for Branding, which explores how personal and business brands can strengthen their online visibility and authority.
None of those activities happened overnight, but they all had something important in common: They all created more evidence of what I knew and what I could offer.
That is one of the most useful ways to think about personal branding: it is not about creating a different version of yourself. It is about making the value that is already there easier to see.
The good news is that you do not need to make big changes all at once. You can start small and build from there. Let’s see below three simple steps to help you get started.
Step 1: Decide what you want to be known for
Before thinking about writing, pitching for podcasts, social platforms or content formats, start with clarity.
Ask yourself:
What do I want people to associate with my name?
You probably have many skills and interests. But if you try to communicate everything at the same time, it can become difficult for people to understand what you are really known for.
Start by identifying the intersection between four things:
- What you know well
- Who you want to help
- The problems you can solve
- The opportunities you would like to attract
And your core messaging certainly does not have to remain the same forever. Think of it as a direction rather than a permanent label.
As your career or interests develop, your personal brand can develop with you.
Once you know what you want to be known for, choose three to five topics that support that positioning. These topics create consistency.
Over time, repeated association of your name with particular subjects helps people understand where your expertise lies.
Step 2: Get clear about who you want to reach
You do not need everybody to know who you are; you just need the right people to know. That distinction is important.
There is a story I shared recently in one of my talks about Spanish speaker Víctor Küppers.
Before becoming a well-known speaker, he was working as a consultant. After an accident left him unable to work normally for several months, he used the time to organise years of reading and thinking around the subject of attitude into an article.
He published it in a specialised marketing magazine, and one of the readers happened to be the director of a group of car dealerships.
He contacted Víctor and invited him to speak at his company, and that opportunity helped open the door to a different direction in his career, and he started speaking
What I find interesting about the story is that the article did not need millions of views. It simply needed to reach one relevant person. That is a useful lesson for personal branding. Visibility is not just about audience size; it is about visibility with the right audience.
Your audience might include:
- Potential clients
- Business owners
- Marketing leaders
- Recruiters
- Founders
- Industry peers
- Journalists
- Event organisers
- Potential partners
Once you know who matters, learn what they care about.
What problems are they trying to solve?
What questions do they repeatedly ask?
What language do they use?
What information would genuinely help them?
This should influence both what you talk about and where you show up.
If your audience is mainly B2B decision-makers, LinkedIn might be a sensible place to focus. There are 1.3 billion Linkedin users and only around 1% post weekly. Most of the people are content consumers, not content creators.
I won’t start by creating a personal website, because not everyone needs one, although a website is an owned asset, not rented like social media or other platforms, and your insights and articles can provide longer-term discoverability through search. A lot of people nowadays start by being active in other platforms like Substack.
Speaking at panels, events or conferences or appearing on podcasts can expose your expertise to existing communities without requiring you to build the entire audience yourself.
You do not need to do all of them, select the one that resonates or start where your audience already spends time and where you can realistically show up consistently.
Step 3: Look at what people already find about you
Before creating new content, check what is already there. Search your own name on different platforms or search surfaces, using incognito mode.
Look at your LinkedIn profile or review your website, portfolio, and social profiles.
Then try to view them as someone discovering you for the first time. This is your starting point.
You might discover that you already have plenty of good material, but it is scattered across the internet. You may simply need to connect the dots.
Make your expertise easy to find
- Start with the basics. Update your LinkedIn headline and About section so they clearly communicate your expertise.
- Use similar descriptions across your profiles.
- Link your website, LinkedIn profile, articles, podcast appearances and other important profiles together where appropriate.
- And, most importantly, show evidence. Your personal brand becomes stronger when people can see proof of your expertise.
Posting content can make you visible, but proof makes you credible, and you need both.
Online Personal Branding Compounds
One of the biggest barriers to building a personal brand is the belief that it requires constant content creation. It doesn’t.
You could start with sharing one weekly or monthly useful post on the digital platform that you think is more important for you, or even pitching or saying yes to a podcast or speaking opportunity or contribution when relevant.
The exact frequency is less important than consistency, because personal branding compounds.
One post may not change anything, but every useful contribution leaves another piece of evidence explaining who you are, what you know and what you can offer. Over time, those signals accumulate. And that makes it easier for the right people to discover, understand and remember you.
Take action: Start small, but start
If you want to work on your digital personal brand, you don’t need a complicated strategy on day one.
Remember these three steps:
- Define what you want to be known for.
- Identify the people you want to be known by.
- Review what they currently find about you and improve it.
Then take one small action to improve your digital personal presence; it could be something like:
- Update your LinkedIn profile.
- Publish a useful, even if short, LinkedIn Post.
- Ask a client for a testimonial.
- Write the article you have been thinking about.
- Pitch yourself for a podcast, event or panel.
And remember, you don’t need thousands of followers and you don’t need to post every day or to reinvent yourself.
Personal branding is not about becoming someone else. It is about making the value that is already there more visible.
Somewhere, someone may eventually be looking for exactly the expertise you have. Most of the time, you simply need one right person to notice you at the right moment.
Your next train may already be approaching the platform. Make sure you are ready when it arrives.
