9 Ways To Fake Authenticity For Your Personal Brand
Friends, here’s a little secret: The best way to grow your brand as an influencer is not a huge marketing budget, a fancy TED talk, or even an Instagram full of remarkably beautiful dogs.
The best personal branding strategy is this: always be 100% authentic. That’s why I’m going to give you the EXACT steps you need to convincingly fake it.
1. Invent an origin story
Your fans need to know about your humble roots and all the possibly-not-entirely-true struggles you’ve overcome. Example story:
My father was a lumberjack in Montana. We were so poor, we had less than nothing. We lived in a hole in the ground, slept on leaves, and owed a lot of money to an evil Canadian lumber baron. I used to go out into the forest with my father and watch him chop the trees. One day, a tree fell on him and killed him. With his dying breath, he said, “Son… honor me… and be successful in monetized podcasting.”
2. Start a company that rejects money in favor of love
Your company can be anything. Maybe you sell fair-trade matcha. Maybe you have an app that shrieks every 10 minutes to remind people to be more mindful of all nearby trees. Or maybe your “company” is just a single webpage that says, “I create creativity for creators who create love.”
The important thing is that you craft a mission statement where you pretend you don’t care about money because, in fact, your company is actually an e-commerce version of a human rights organization.
3. Take your selfie in front of a bunch of books you haven’t read
Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson: What do these geniuses have in common? They’re all book lovers who never stop talking about how much they read. Make sure your bookshelf selfie clearly shows Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, The 48 Laws of Power, and at least 70 business books with the word “Lean” in the title, e.g. The Lean Startup, The Lean Entrepreneur, The Lean Canadian Lumber-Baron, etc.
