What the h*** is a personal brand?
Hi everyone! Welcome to my very first blog, where we will travel through the difficult, but rewarding journey (or at least this was my experience haha) of creating a personal brand.
Let’s get started, shall we?
Discovering MY Personal Brand
While I was studying for my bachelor’s degree in English, I began to see a personal brand as the message you want someone to know about who you are and what your work looks like as an individual creator. My Portfolio professor couldn’t have made this point any clearer: “When it comes to building a personal brand,” he said, “you choose what resonates with you, whether it's your niche, colors, or fonts, and you stick to them.”
So, of course, when it came time to sit down and actually figure out what MY personal brand was four years later, after graduating college and stepping into my career, my issue wasn’t knowing what a personal brand is; my real issue was figuring out how to define the rest of it.
As someone who prides herself on being a Swiss army knife, aka a writer who is also a marketer and maybe a little bit of a project manager, video editor, and so much more, I still had so many questions about what my brand could be, including:
What do you do when you want your personal brand to be a lot of things?
Do you embrace it?
Do you limit it to a certain niche?
Can your personal brand evolve as you evolve?
Is it inevitable to evolve since you’re creating a PERSONAL brand?
Figuring out my personal brand and answering these philosophical questions this process seemed to bring up quite literally felt like mapping out my entire life. As I struggled to commit to a niche, I looked online for a world of opinions from other creatives who might have experienced the same thing.
Anna Mack captured the issue many experience while trying to figure out what they should share. And in her article, she uncovered a truth for me, despite knowing what I wanted to do, I remained silent for a long time, allowing myself to come up with excuse after excuse as to why I didn’t want to write and why I couldn’t share my work with the world.
For me, my “personal brand” in college differs greatly from my personal brand today. I am definitely more focused at 25. I know more about who I am than ever before. But, at the same time, I will always hold 22-year-old Nicole within me, and that's why my brand’s true niche has never changed: writing.
And of course over the years, I’ve added new skills to my repertoire like editing, but what I have learned is that more than ever, I'm a writer, with marketing experience, and I’m a good one at that.
I can rise to the occasion and write copy for any brand if I truly wanted to. And because of this, my personal brand doesn’t need to display everything I am. It needs to display what I can do best, while I try to get my foot in the door using the interpersonal skills I accumulated while becoming a good writer.
Discovering my brand didn’t start until I began to follow where I felt my heart belonged, and that wasn’t until last year.
For context, I drafted this blog idea in the fall of 2025, a couple of months after I had my website created. It was a time when I knew that I needed to come up with content and a plan for my personal brand, so I didn’t waste $1,000 on a website.
But the truth was, as much as I thought creating a website would push me to start, it took a lot more than a pretty URL to motivate myself.
Getting Over the Mental Hump
Navigating what you want for your personal brand is challenging. It makes you sit with yourself at times and ask, why am I even doing this? But your love for whatever you’re doing overpowers the annoying self-doubt, and you keep thinking about the type of content you could be making.
The type of art you should be sharing and creating.
And sure, I’ve had times within the last year where I actually hated trying to be creative. Creating a personal brand, for me, has partially been a mental battle between I love what I do, but I hate trying to do something for myself and feeling like I'm not doing enough.
I reminded myself plenty of times that two things can be true at once: I can love my career, the people I work with, and the stability, but I can also hate that it takes up so much of my time. On top of all of that, I still had no idea what to create for myself.
I mean, I had ideas, but I had no idea how to execute them. And then other things in life would plop down like the cherry on top, forcing me to avoid the task at all costs.
Until writing about not knowing what the h*** my personal brand was became my strategy and getting over the mental hump to actually make myself want to create took a lot of time, effort, and courage.
Once I was able to put my own anxieties to the side, I stopped blocking myself from free thinking, and boy was the outcome beautiful.
Sure it was a pain in the a**, but I came out on the other end with a better understanding of what I want to create and how I want to create it.
Finding My Voice
Pinning down my voice was another difficult part of creating my personal brand.
When I started thinking about my brand, I didn’t know what I wanted to share of myself, or how I wanted to say it. I did know that I wanted to write things that would relate to others. I wanted my work to transcend the individual and become part of their story, even when I’m not speaking directly about what they’ve been through.
In a way, I’m still not sure if the voice I have now will be the same voice I’ll have forever. I assume I’ll grow and change. Hopefully, I’ll curse less, too. But for now, this is the most authentic way for me to share my feelings through writing. Using my actual tone.
Below are some tips I’ve found to be true while trying to find my voice for my personal brand:
Yap It All Out - Embrace your natural yearning to yap. It will sound like a personal journal entry at first, but with some good editing, your voice will really shine through your work (writing for me).
Utilize Your Interests - Talk about topics you are ACTUALLY interested in. Sure, you can relate these topics back to relevant ideas, but always stay true to what you want to put out for your brand.
Believing is Achieving - Believe in yourself. Your art can change. All you have to do is put it out there, hope it sticks, and create the next thing.
Punch Through Public Perception - How people perceive you does not matter. Your desire to create should drown out the noise anyway.
Let me know what you think of these bullets in the comments below. Now, let’s get into the hard part: putting your ideas for your personal brand into action.
All About The Looks
Figuring out the way your personal brand is going to look was so hard for absolutely no f****** reason. And then having to be your own graphic designer and social media manager on top of that was even harder. AND THEN HAVING THE MOTIVATION TO BE ALL OF THOSE THINGS FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL BRAND TURNS OUT TO ACTUALLY BE THE HARDEST THING EVER TO EXIST IN THIS WORLD.
To be completely honest, I really struggled at first, especially with figuring out how to create aesthetically pleasing content that I’m proud of. I’m a social media manager, but I am definitely no graphic designer, so creating consistent, nice graphics for my social media channels (Instagram and LinkedIn) felt hard.
And it’s not like I haven’t tried to create on Canva before. It was just that my confidence in my mediocre graphic design abilities was limited. At least that’s what I initially thought.
TikTok convinced me that I could at least try to do more. While doom scrolling, I started to come across Canva tips and tricks videos where people would show how easy it was to make Canva designs look like they were created by an expert in software like Adobe Illustrator or Figma.
I thought since I used the app before and made decent designs, if I followed these videos, there’s a way that maybe—just maybe—I could design something I thought was good.
So I grabbed my handy-dandy Apple Pencil and went to work in Canva and Procreate, designing and drawing until I found a style of content I genuinely loved and wanted to share.
Designing for my brand slowly became easier as I decided what I wanted it to look like. And along the way, I learned so much about myself. With the help of the small team I hired to make my website, we narrowed down my color scheme, fonts, and overall aesthetic.
Eventually, this personal project of mine finally started to come to fruition and felt fulfilling rather than a hard task I only talked about doing.
So, my advice: once you get to the point where you figure out how you want your brand to look, experiment with colors, try that font, and figure out what you want your aesthetic to be! It will change along the way, but so will everything else. You’ve gotten this far. Embrace what you want now and worry about changing it later. You’re getting closer to the finish line!
And, it’s true, the hardest part is keeping up the momentum after sharing that first agency graphic.
It might be exhausting trying to figure out what’s next, but it’s also so much fun to let yourself explore your ideas. And to push yourself to make those ideas come to life.
All you really need is a plan. Even if you want your content to come off as organic, it’s important to be consistent. Having a plan helps with that. And when it comes to my personal brand, I know now that all I need to do is try and hope that it sticks, and if it doesn’t, try again.
Once I started trying, and giving myself the confidence to be creative and the leniency to get messy, I slowly discovered the answer to my question: what the h*** is my personal brand?
Final Thoughts
Thank you so much for reading!
I figured, instead of saying the same exact thing over again to summarize my thoughts, I could end this blog with some book recommendations. I may not have cited these texts directly, but each of them has impacted the creation of my personal brand.
I hope one of these books resonates with you, or at least teaches you something. Each book is different, but equally important, whether you’re a writer, designer, social media manager, marketer, etc. Let me know if you pick one of these up in the comments below!
See you next month, where we will be covering this magical thing called a woman’s intuition. Until next time!
XOXO
