Five tips to monetize your personal brand

- There are tremendous benefits to building your personal brand, whether you're a business owner or an employee. One great part is that you can actually monetize your personal brand if you master the art of packaging your expertise and building an online community. Believe me, I would know. After dedicating three years to building my personal brand starting back in 2008, in year four, I started monetizing my platform and channels, which has ultimately turned into a six-figure business. Here are five things you need to have on lock if you want to start making money from your personal brand. The first thing you need is to have an expertise and credibility to back it up. Becoming a true expert can take years or even decades. So if you try to claim yourself as an expert before you really are ready, it can seriously backfire on you. So be honest with yourself. Is the area of expertise you want to claim something that will take too long to establish true credibility in? Or, can you utilize your college education, your master's degree, or certifications to start backing up your authority as a thought leader? No matter how credible you are today, your mindset should be that of a student. Look to expand your skillset to further differentiate your personal brand from the competition. The second thing you need is a platform where you share value for free. I love this saying, "Marketing is not pushing people to buy things; "it's drawing them in to listen." In order to draw people in and gain their trust, you need free value driven content, like a blog or an ebook or white paper, or maybe even a webinar. And thanks to social media, you can easily share and promote your free content loaded with great insight to your audience to generate more brand awareness. And that leads us to our third thing you need to have. And that is an online community, a following, or what I like to call a brand tribe. In order to build a loyal brand tribe, you have to commit time to creating and publishing great content, and focus on engaging those with like-minded interests. Making the effort to build relationships online and to network with fellow thought leaders will only help to grow your influence. Think about it. Influencers are called influencers because what they have to say has a true impact on their followers decisions. As your social media following grows, as your blog traffic starts to increase, and as you start to generate engagement on your posts, the more likely you are to receive inquiries for sponsored content, brand partnerships, speaking engagements, and media mentions. Show me the money. And now to our fourth point. If you want your personal brand to turn into a profitable business, you'll want to create your signature offer, either a product or service to sell. So for example, if you're a financial expert who is passionate about helping startup entrepreneurs, consider creating an online course or a group workshop to teach people how to become their own CFO and financially prepare for a new business. This is where you need to do the research to discover the need in your industry that only you can fulfill. And lastly, leverage all of those happy client testimonials. Before most people make a purchase, they look for peer approval and read reviews to validate their decision. Leveraging testimonials on your website, your landing page, or social media channels can be a powerful way to strengthen your brand and help you convert more sales.