The Core 4: A Framework for Building Your Personal Brand

If you're looking to build your personal brand this year, here are the four pillars I come back to again and again.

1. Turn your profile into a landing page, not a resume

Most people treat their LinkedIn profile as an extension of their resume, a static record of what they've done, where, and when. But your profile is capable of so much more.

A resume tells people what you've done. Your profile can tell people who you are, how you do what you do, and why it matters. That combination (your story plus your professional track record) is your personal brand. Your profile should be built to reflect that, not just archive it.

2. Curate your feed before you create content

The best way to grow a personal brand, especially early on, isn't to post constantly. It's to be genuinely active in the comments of people whose content resonates with you.

Here's why this matters more than people realize: LinkedIn has over a billion members, but only a fraction are active monthly, and a much smaller fraction create content regularly. That means most of the platform's real activity happens in comment sections, which makes them fertile ground for relationship-building, if you're paying attention to the right people.

Find the right accounts to follow, and you'll always have meaningful conversations to participate in, which builds visibility long before you're ready to post your own content regularly.

3. Build your content around three categories

Once your profile is solid and your feed is curated, the next question is: what do you actually post about? I recommend organizing content into three buckets:

Scope of genius: what you do, what you know, and the problems you solve (and for whom). This is the content that markets your expertise directly.

Fascination: things you're passionate about beyond your day job. Identify a few topics that genuinely excite you and share them often. People respond to passion, even (especially) when it's tangential to your "expertise."

Window into your world: the content that lets people actually get to know you. More emotionally honest, more relatable, occasionally vulnerable. This is what makes people want to reach out.

4. Operationalize it

Once your profile, your feed, and your content pillars are dialed in, the last step is turning all of it into a system, what I'd call a personal social-selling engine.

Because here's the reality: everyone is in sales and marketing now, whether their job title says so or not. Having a lightweight stack of tools and habits that make showing up consistently easier, not harder, is what separates people who do this for a few weeks from people who do it for years.

These four things (profile, feed, content, system) aren't sequential steps you do once. They're a loop. Get the foundation right, and the rest compounds.

Originally posted on LinkedIn, read it here

Hi5,

LD 🌶️