Your personal brand is attracting the wrong people

There is a version of personal branding online right now that gives the entire game a bad name.

Founders posting revenue screenshots every other day like it's a personality trait. Guys renting Lamborghinis for photoshoots to sell "motivation." Accounts that only post hot takes designed to piss people off.

Endless platitudes.

None of it works.

Not for the reason most people assume which is that the content is cringe.

Cringe alone would be survivable. It doesn't work because the audience it attracts is not the audience that hires you, buys from you, or funds you.

It attracts people who like the theater of the account but would never spend a dollar with the person running it.

Good personal brands look completely different.

Good personal brands lead with a story.

Buyers don't know who you are, what you believe or whether they would want to work with you.

A story gives them all three..

Good personal brands share meaningful wins and strategic losses.

Sophisticated buyers build credibility by talking about wins openly and being willing to talk about losses even more openly. The founder who tells you what went wrong on a launch and what they learned from it is a founder you believe when they tell you what went right.

Good personal brands post the boring, niche-specific content their ICP needs.

A post that gets 200 saves because it solved a specific problem for a decision-maker feeds your calendar. The founders winning right now post the exact content their buyers need, in the exact language those buyers use and let the internet's engagement circus happen without them.

Good personal brands take positions backed by experience.

Founders who grow take positions that could only come from someone who has done the work.

Positions with specific dollar figures, specific mistakes, specific counterarguments to the mainstream position in their industry.

Good personal brands create content for 1,000 decision-makers.

This is the shift almost nobody makes explicit but everything else flows from. If you write for strangers, you optimize for reach, virality, and volume. If you write for 1,000 specific decision-makers in your industry then you optimize for something else entirely.

Here's what you should do this week:

- Pull up your last 20 posts.

- For each one, ask a single question: was this written for strangers or was this written for the 1,000 people who could change my business?

If the answer for most of them is "strangers," you're on the bad personal brand path. You may be gaining followers but you won’t gain pipeline.

Good personal brands look boring from the outside. From the inside, they are printing money.

– Wiz

P.S. Wanted to share this before I sign off, FTS just dropped Omnisend’s (proud partner) 4-layer cheat sheet for turning email into a predictable revenue engine. If you run an ecom brand or send email at all, it's worth 2 minutes. Read the full breakdown here.