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In the network marketing, MLM, and direct sales industries, there is conflicting information on how to establish a personal brand in the industry.
Let’s see what a personal brand is. A personal brand is a way to attract business to you by promoting yourself in addition to or instead of your product. In these industries, people do business with people they like or feel they can relate to. They also do business with people who appear to have insider knowledge or leadership skills.
While I don’t recommend portraying yourself in false terms to establish a powerful brand, it’s a good idea to highlight your strengths. If you’re just starting out, your branding should be based on the strengths you bring to your new business, not the fact that you’re just starting out and haven’t made any money yet.
Presenting yourself as a strong leader doesn’t necessarily mean posing with a sports car or even dressing up for a photograph. It means telling a story that will invite people to engage with you and become curious about your business.
The fact is that there are hundreds of income opportunities on the Internet these days. They are mostly marketed in very similar and unoriginal ways. A very effective branding technique is to look at what other people are doing and do something very different.
In this particular industry, there are basically two general types of branding that I see a lot.
- The first is the “money and cars” type of branding that presents business success as a pleasurable experience and encourages site visitors to imagine having nice things and lots of money as part of the home business experience.
- The second is the “soft” mark. With this type of branding, which is often used with health and wellness MLM products, the financial rewards take a backseat to having a “feel good” product. While this type of branding is often instigated by MLM companies to build product loyalty, it often works to hide a weak compensation plan where few distributors make a lot of money.
Neither of these types of marks is particularly original. I would suggest that on the internet it is a good idea to build a brand that goes against these two types and establishes a more unique image for the dealer.
This is a creative process. The secret to building a loyal following and attracting customers is to build a deep brand on the internet. This type of brand cannot be bought, it must be earned.
How do you establish a deep brand on the Internet?
Through the written word. Distributors who want to promote themselves but aren’t willing to write web content on a regular basis will have a hard time building a brand. Blogs are perhaps the most familiar form of content distribution, but driving traffic to a blog requires an understanding of how information is actually distributed on the Internet, the kind of marketing knowledge that is never taught in most marketing courses provided by the companies.
In fact, some companies in the industry actively discourage or even prohibit discussion or content marketing on the Internet. My only advice is: avoid these companies like the plague.
Branding with content takes time and patience. Effective content distribution requires specialized knowledge of how the Internet actually works.
Who said building a brand is easy?
Building a brand doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does take time.
For this reason, brand building must come at the expense of other marketing activities. It is wrong for an independent distributor to spend money on branding activities only. Still, most promotional activity should be done with an eye toward increasing brand visibility.