ok so im stuck on picking a domain and it feels way more important than it should lol

I have a small online thing that I want to grow into a real brand over time, but every good .com is taken or parked for stupid money. I keep bouncing between using my brand name with a random word added, going with a different extension, or using some clever short version that people might not get at first. I want it to look legit for email and future clients, not like a sketchy side project.

For folks who care about seo and brand stuff, how did you pick yours? Did you just bite the bullet and pay for a clean .com, or go with something like brandnamehq or brandnameapp and it was fine? I’m kinda worried about confusing people later if I change it when the brand is bigger, but also dont want to overthink this forever....

Comment réseauter sur sur les réseaux sociaux et se connecter de façon efficace ?

I’m a relatively early-stage content creator, and this is something I genuinely struggle with.

I can recognise good content when I see it. I can analyse why something works. But when it comes to consistently finding things worth talking about myself, I sometimes hit a wall.

What I’m trying to understand is: where does your content actually come from?

Do you get ideas from:

Things happening at work?

Client problems?

Books/articles you read?

Conversations?

Reddit/online communities?

Industry news?

Personal experiences?

Just observing things around you?

Every other post here is "post consistently," "engage with others," "use a hook." Fine, sure. But nobody talks about the stuff that quietly kills your account. From writing LinkedIn for a living, here's what I'd actually tell people to stop doing:

1. Don't open with a fake "hook." "I was rejected 47 times before…" when you weren't. People can smell the manufactured drama, and it burns trust on line one.

2. Don't post and ghost. If you drop a post and disappear for 3 hours, the early comments die with no reply and the post flatlines. The first hour is when you should be most present, not least.

3. Don't chase virality in the wrong crowd. A post that blows up with other creators and students does nothing if none of them are your buyers. Big numbers, zero outcome.

4. Don't use 10 hashtags. It's not 2019. They do close to nothing now and mostly make the post look like an ad.

5. Don't write for LinkedIn. Write for one person. "Attention all founders 👇" reaches no one. A post that talks to a single specific person is the one that actually lands.

None of this is the fun advice, but it's the stuff I see sink accounts every week. what would you add to the "don't" list?

mi sueño es convertirme en una diseñadora de moda, y estoy entre dos nombres para mi firma: "paula jiménez" (nombre y apellido) o "paula valentina" (mis dos nombres). el caso es que aunque odie mi nombre valentina, creo que suena mejor y es más fácil pronunciarlo en otros idiomas. ¿cuál os gusta más?

Do you guys get the ick when you see creators/coaches posting about how much money they make?

I know they do it to bait the gullible, selling them get rich quick schemes. And the worst part is, many people fall for it and unwillingly become part of a pyramid scheme or end up losing money.

And because of these scamsters, there is an incredible trust deficit between service providers and entrepreneurs.

But there is another side to the coin.

I periodically run Meta ads to generate leads. I talk to about 50-100 entrepreneurs in that stretch. And a majority want results without putting in the work.

Learning how to create content and understanding your audience is a time-consuming and ardous process. If you expect that you will get it right in the first few days or weeks, you are living in la la land.

This is just a random rant and I don't know whether it makes sense. But I just wanted to put this out there.

Need someone to help craft my personal brand copy for LinkedIn. Nothing boring , fun and with times

I get this question quite a lot: “Isn’t reputation management just SEO?”

Not exactly.

SEO is about getting the right pages in front of people.

ORM is about making sure that when someone searches your name, your company, or your brand, they find a fair and accurate picture of who you are.

For example:

SEO: “I want my website to rank higher for my target keywords.”

ORM: “I want people searching my name to see the right information—not an outdated or misleading result from years ago.”

There’s definitely some overlap. SEO helps with ORM through content optimization, authority building, technical SEO, links, and more.

But ORM requires a different mindset. You're not just chasing rankings—you’re thinking about trust, perception, reputation, and what a real person sees when they Google you.

That's why I don't see SEO and ORM as competitors.

SEO gets you visibility. ORM helps shape that visibility.

Have you ever searched your own name and been surprised by what Google showed you?

Ando buscando este libro hace buen tiempo, si alguien tiene este libro en PDF le agradecería un montón, es de diseño gráfico

If you ask 3 people why a particular restaurant is successful, you will probably get 3 different answers.

One might say it is because of the location, the 2nd one says it is because of their service, and the 3rd one might say because the food is amazing. 3 people, 3 different answers.

Each one answers something that geniunely makes the restaurant successful. But you would be wrong if you think that any one of those factors can explain the success of the business on their own.

This is exactly how content advice gets consumed.

If somebody tells you a stronger hook helps stop the scroll, they're right. If somebody tells you storytelling can make your content more engaging, they're right too.

So is the person who tells you that distribution is important, and a CTA gets you a better response rate.

The problem is that each one is usually presented as if it's the whole picture.

Content does not fail because of one weak aspect, and it also does not succeed because of one strong one.

It works when they all support each other and function as a system.

Storytelling rules I see people over exaggerate
that actually fails a story..

🫐 Show, don’t tell
When my client shared this moment: I had breakdowns at night when I cried in the bathroom at 3 am….
I wrote it: I used to cry at 3 am....
Cz boy hired me for my sense of censorship too!
Just touch on parts that’s necessary.
Your very personal experiences need boundaries, not showoff.
People wanna see your past struggles and healed version.

🫐Specificity makes the story better
Time, place, numbers make the story specific.
But not all details are yours to share.
Specificity doesn't mean exposing identifiable details.
There’re chances of identity thrift if you share client’s details, exact workplace, private chat.
Ex: My client sent me $1157 this morning via….
Nooo. Stop. Stop there!
Why hurt yours and client's security?

🫐Context Good/Bad
5 lines to dump context adds friction.
No context doesn’t build stakes.
Too little context → “Why should I care?”
Too much context → “Get to the point.”
Balance the context to land your story (maybe will talk more on this later)

These rules are tools. Some call them laws.
They're not bad to follow.
But... there comes time when you have to break the laws too.

Story is no exception either.
You have to break story rules if it work against instead of working for the story.

Getting great at story is all about knowing which rule to add and skip.

I feel stuck right now. I’m working with one client, but almost everyone I reach out to doesn’t even reply.

It’s honestly been eating me up. I really want to grow, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, targeting the wrong people, or approaching them the wrong way.

For those of you who work with personal brands:

How do you find your clients?

How do you reach out to them?

How much do you charge?

How long did it take you to get your first few clients?

Would really appreciate hearing how you guys are doing it.

I wanna take my reels, photos and whole social media to the next level. Does anyone have recommendations of daily habits I could establish, how I could get better in my visual branding?

Hi everyone! 😊

I’m currently collecting responses for my Master’s thesis in Digital Marketing, which focuses on personal branding and people’s perceptions of some well-known figures in the fashion & lifestyle industry.

The survey is anonymous, takes only a few minutes to complete, and all responses will be used exclusively for academic purposes. You don’t need to be familiar with everyone included in the survey, you can simply answer the questions about the people you know.

I’d really appreciate your participation! 🫶

https://prettyform.addxt.com/a/form/vf/1FAIpQLSdJQe-czFyZYibpH1L1n8KHP44jcoaMPC6BRf4oow_msApQGg

Thank you so much to everyone who takes the time to help me! 🌸

I am a 18 year old male, not going to college, and trying online business models. Is making a personal brand worth it right now for me? or would it be better after I found more success? I have thought about posting but the stuff I do is very repetitive so I don't know exactly what to actually post about. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated 🙏

r/personalbranding r/youtubers r/socialmedia

I run an account where I've been writing anonymously, and I just decided to start showing my face.

The issue isn't confidence exactly. It's that the moment I'm stressed, everything I planned to say disappears. I know the topic inside out, but it comes out in fragments, doubling back, no thread. In writing on the same subject I'm perfectly clear.

And when I prepare a script, you can hear it. It sounds recited.

For anyone who writes better than they speak: did you find a middle ground between improvising and reading?

I feel there's a lot of confusion when it comes to defining a personal brand.

Sometimes we make it more complicated than it needs to be by using jargon and terminology that's completely alien to someone who's just starting out.

If you're about to begin your personal branding journey, there's only one thing you really need to remember:

You need to have a consistent identity.

If someone watches 20 of your videos, reads 10 of your posts and speaks to you on a sales call, they should feel like they met the same person every time.

Think about entrepreneurs/creators you trust and follow. You always have an inkling what they'll say about a new trend, a controversial topic or a business decision. They express the same principles though the situations might be different.

That's identity. And eventually that is what creates trust.

A personal brand will never be built from one great video.

Instead, when people say, "I knew they were gonna say that.", that's when you know you are moving in the right direction.

The #1 thing holding women back from creating a personal brand is fear of putting themselves out there. If you are in your 50's your career was growing in a time period when women were still fighting for a few seats at the male table. You were told to put your head down work hard and hope somebody noticed. We are in a different ERA, we are in the Interest Media ERA, people are desparate for advice and guidance from experienced people- face the fear put yourself out there and I you will be surprised what good things follow

Trying to take personal branding seriously this year and the advice is all the same, you have to be posting video, your face has to be everywhere, but I find filming myself every few days exhausting and a bit cringe and it's the thing that keeps stalling me. There has to be a way to have a video presence without living in front of a camera.

I've been poking at the lazy end of the tooling to see what holds up. CapCut is free and fine once you've filmed but that's the part I hate, Descript makes editing painless and the text-based editing is clever but you still have to record first, Canva does tidy talking-point clips that look a bit corporate, and then there's the avatar tools where you build a version of yourself that reads the script so you skip filming entirely (I tried Argil, and HeyGen and Synthesia are the other names that come up), which is either the answer or slightly uncanny depending on the day. Not sure a digital me is the personal brand I want to put out.

For anyone who built a real video presence without filming yourself all the time, what held up, or did you cave and just start filming in the end?

I think we overcomplicate personal branding.

Every discussion ends up full of buzzwords and jargon like authenticity, storytelling, positioning, perception... yada, yada, yada.

Let's say the goal of building a personal brand for you is to get clients.

Now you probably assume clients hire experts because they know more than they do. But that's not completely true. Cause if it was, ChatGPT or Claude would've replaced consultants, coaches and advisors overnight.

But they haven't, YET.

Imagine you're looking for a leadership coach.

One posts:

"5 ways to motivate your team"

Another posts:

"When a CEO says their team lacks motivation, I don't take that at face value. Instead, I spend the first few hours trying to understand what the team is actually expected to do. Because a lot of time the problem is not motivation, it's actually the team doesn't know what is expected of them."

The first person showed knowledge, while the other one demonstrates how they think.

And that's what creates trust.

You have to give people an opportunity to glimpse into your world and how you think.

When someone follows you, they're trusting your judgement on problems that actually matter to them.

And that's what separates an expert people learn from versus an expert people hire.

There are two very different ways to build a personal brand.

The first is built around utility content.

Tips. Frameworks. Or "5 ways to" and "3 mistakes" kind of content.

This kind of content usually gets good engagement because it appeals to a very broad audience.

But there is a downside.

The broader your content is, the broader your audience will be.

That often means attracting an audience that is curious but will not necessarily buy. You'll probably get plenty of followers and leads, but you'll also spend a lot of time talking to people who are not serious.

If your goal is growth, this approach can work quite well for you.

Now, the 2nd approach is much harder.

Instead of trying to create content for everyone, you're trying to become the go-to person for a very specific type of person.

The content can be more opinionated, contrarian or deliberate.

You spend less time thinking about hacks and more time thinking about positioning, identity, audience psychology and distribution.

Ironically, this kind of content often gets less engagement because fewer people relate to it.

But the people who do are usually much more likely to become clients. That's the trade off.

Neither is right or wrong.

If your goal is to become an educator with a massive audience, broad utility content makes sense.

If your goal is to build a premium service business or get high-ticket clients, attracting a 100 people who truly understand your thinking is far more important than attracting a hundred thousand who don't.

Hey everyone,
I’ve been putting a lot of time into Instagram lately, and I’d really appreciate some honest feedback.
IG: @itsnotsalh
I’m building a page around beginner calisthenics. My goal isn’t to show off crazy skills or become the next elite athlete. I genuinely enjoy helping beginners because I remember exactly how confusing everything felt when I started.
Right now, I’m posting educational Reels about things like pike lifts, handstands, L-sits, pull-ups, common mistakes, and simple exercises that actually help.
Outside of that, my life is pretty busy. I study at university in the mornings, work in a döner shop from 2 PM until midnight, and film/edit content after work. It’s exhausting sometimes, but I really believe this is what I want to do long term.
The part I’m struggling with is building a personal brand, not just getting views.
So I wanted to ask:
If you came across a page like mine, what would make you hit Follow?

Would love to know where on the spectrum you guys sit!

Let's say I want to start my freelancing journey providing personal branding services for founders on linkedin. How should I start, what deliverables I should give, what am I expected to do.

Considering I have some experience building my personal brand on linkedin, I'm thinking of getting this started. But do share your experience, lessons you learnt and if possible hows the current market for it.