How to build a personal brand on YouTube

How to brand yourself on YouTube goes beyond the colors you place on your banner or even the font you choose to place on your Thumbnails. This is because YouTube is more than just slapping a logo onto all your videos and calling it a day. If you want to grow on YouTube, you will really need to dig deep and start defining your personal brand so you can stand out in a sea of other creators.

What is personal branding?

Personal branding is when an individual position themselves to have authority within a specific industry and exerts a perception or reputation about themselves.

Personal branding has grown more prevalent in the last decade as social media has become a part of our everyday lives. It is now more common to see someone turn their personal hobbies and interests into a personal brand and grow a community of like-minded supporters. Eventually, there will be opportunities to monetize their following through affiliate marketing or brand collaborations.

How do you establish your personal brand on YouTube?

Although YouTube is a search engine, many thousands of personal brands have been built channels to establish their audience and grow their Influencer business. But you cannot just hop on YouTube and expect to go viral overnight unless you have an established following elsewhere or know how to build a strong brand.

So, let’s dive into the three best ways to build your personal brand on YouTube.

Tell your story.

It doesn’t matter if you are on YouTube to create a sales funnel into your product and services, or if you are trying to establish yourself as the next big influencer celebrity, or even if you are a guy in South Dakota who installs fish aquariums for a living. Everyone has a story to share.

How to build a personal brand on YouTube

This story will help you find your niche, create relatability, and set you apart from other YouTubers your audience watches. See, YouTube is saturated, so having an aesthetically pleasing YouTube channel is not enough to establish authority and get people to subscribe to your channel.

Your story is the start of building your influence, establishing the value you provide to others, as well as creating trust with your audience. More than ever, people want to know the person behind the brand and the brand’s story so the viewer can determine relatability before following along.

Define your niche.

Wait, before you roll your eyes and click off the page because you are tired of hearing about a niche on YouTube, let me just explain the importance of finding your niche to establish your personal brand.

A niche is a targeting interest in the market that is established by a target audience. On YouTube, this can look like a channel about cooking or finance. Although these are great niches, they do not set the authority to promote a strong brand. If you take a more in-depth look, most YouTube channels have a micro-niche. Having a micro-niche allows the YouTuber to relate to their audience on a deeper level, which helps the YouTube algorithm suggest the creator’s videos and channel more.

So, what is a micro niche?

A micro-niche is a specialized area within a targeted niche. So the cooking channel we spoke of earlier may focus on Korean street food recipes. This extra bit of information helps them attract their target audience faster, which speeds up their channel growth.

Now, of course, establishing your niche and micro-niche all comes from your story. For example, write down anything that led you to create a YouTube channel in the first place. This includes personal life experiences, challenges you have overcome, or a personal journey you are currently on. Once you have this, take time to ponder your story and identify any keywords that pop out and how they can tie together, which will eventually create your niche.

Doing this exercise can help you understand that ONE thing you will be known for, which is the center of your personal brand and YouTube channel.

Build your content strategy.

At the end of the day, you cannot have a YouTube channel without a content strategy. Your content strategy will consist of videos specific to your niche that will help you create authority and influence built around that ONE thing you identified in your story.

One of the most important factors of personal branding on YouTube is to ensure your branding is consistent. Imagine if one day you are making videos on Korean street food and have established your brand there. After a few months, you decide to post a video on “how to go skydiving.” By doing this, you confuse your audience, along with the YouTube algorithm, and have lost trust and authority in your niche centered around your food expertise.

YouTube is no longer the go-to place to be a jack of all trades. You really need to niche down and be a master of ONE topic that others can relate to and that you can build your YouTube influencer business around.

Visual branding.

Now, of course, once you have established a more emotional connection that a personal brand brings, you definitely want to dig into the visuals. Adding consistent visual elements to your YouTube channel will help you solidify your authority and make it easier for your audience to identify your work, even if your name or face is not at the center of the design.

Think about Pepsi. Have you ever seen a blue metallic can and automatically thought of Pepsi, even if you did not see the logo? Did you think about the sound the can makes when opening it, the bubbles that tickle your nose, or the way the soda tastes? I’ll bet that you do all of that visualizing without ever seeing its logo or even taking a sip.

If you are a Pepsi fan, your answer is probably yes. That is because Pepsi has done a fantastic job of branding their product memorably and has seamlessly tied their visual branding to their personal branding. Hence, you think about how it feels when you drink a Pepsi just by seeing that specific blue color.

You must do the same thing when you are growing your YouTube channel and establishing your personal brand. Focus on the story, niche, and strategy, then seal it with your visual brand.

But now that you know how to establish your personal brand on YouTube, I’ve created a 14-day YouTube refresh plan to help you get all the technical elements of YouTube pointed in the right direction. This means, cleaning up your existing YouTube content, setting up your channel banner, channel icons, and ‘About me’ sections, showcasing your featured video, and even how to optimize for SEO and ranking in the Algorithm. Does this sound interesting?

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