How I'd Build a Personal Brand to Dominate 2026

How I'd Build a Personal Brand to Dominate 2026

Personal branding feels intimidating because people think it's for big personalities doing public speaking. That's wrong.

Personal branding is how people perceive you online. Whether you're looking for a job or building a company, you control the narrative people see about you.

I started as a commercial photographer and naturally moved into brand strategy. I spent years helping brands communicate visually across platforms, and I realized I was going deeper than photography. I was peeling back the layers companies build around their brands.

Here's what I learned about what works and what doesn't.

Position Yourself as an Expert Now

People need to start positioning themselves as experts in their field. You're probably already hired as an expert, but you don't show it online.

This shift is happening in the next two years. Anyone who gets ahead of it wins.

When I talk about being an expert online, I mean being open and transparent. Google, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram—all these platforms look for trust markers. They want to know you're low risk. That you know what you're talking about and you've been showing it for years.

Half of American professionals believe a strong personal brand matters more than a strong resume in 2025. That number jumps to 61% among business executives.

People buy from who they know, like, and trust. Personal branding bridges that gap.

Start With Your Core Messaging

Strategy comes first. Always.

If you want to be competitive in 2026, start by assessing your messaging. Distill it down to three core pillars. Every piece of content you create needs to touch at least one of those pillars.

For me, I focus on positive mindset, entrepreneurship, and creativity. I touch on these in pretty much everything I talk about. I can discuss other topics as long as I bring it back to that core messaging.

Core messaging helps people understand who you are and what you do. People like to put people in boxes. You're just helping them by positioning your box around you. When they talk about you, they can identify you with a few positive words.

Strong brands are built on multiple content pillars—themes that reflect your expertise, experiences, and values. By sticking to a few key pillars, you make it easy for audiences to associate you with a particular space.

Be Visible Everywhere

The easiest way to position yourself in tomorrow's market is to be present and visible.

Visibility is the name of the game in 2026.

You need to be a multi-platform disciplined content producer. That means creating content that gets repurposed to suit different platforms. Content on Instagram looks different than content on LinkedIn, which looks different than YouTube. Each platform requires different things.

You need the ability to take a singular piece of content—ideally long-form content—and repurpose it to suit the platform it's going to live on.

Create once. Put it everywhere.

The volume expected just to show up at the table is much more significant now. You need tools that allow you to go pure volume while maintaining quality.

Content repurposing saves 60-80% of content creation time compared to starting from scratch for each platform. Systematic content repurposing can boost your content reach by 300%.

We want to tell our core message in a clean, positive way while maintaining consistency. Consistency and visibility are the kings of 2026.

Be Yourself (Even When It's Awkward)

The way to build a personal brand without feeling performative is to be yourself. That means a lot of experimentation at the start.

At the beginning, everybody wants their content to go viral. The reality is they probably couldn't handle the virality if they got it right off the bat.

Try different things. If you enjoy talking about hockey, talk about hockey. If you enjoy talking about trucks, talk about trucks. All of these layers play into your personality. Your personality is what makes people want to work with you.

Stake a flag in the ground and say, "This is who I am, this is what I want to talk about, and this is what I want to discuss in the public forum."

It doesn't need to be difficult and it doesn't need to be high quality. I've noticed it doesn't matter about the quality as long as the content is good.

People want substance over surface-level polish. They want to see personal brands built on real values, lived experience, and actual opinions.

I recommend for anyone starting in today's world: it's always scary to get started and it's always difficult. More often than not, your early stuff will suck. Get it done and rinse and repeat. You only learn through perseverance, and perseverance doesn't come by not posting.

Stop Polishing, Start Posting

The biggest mistake I see people making is spending so much time on one piece of content. They polish it, they get it perfect, they get it to where they want it. But they don't ever stop to get it posted.

As a result, they have one perfect piece and then nothing. Crickets.

This is a great way to get a lot of views. If you have a really high quality piece, you can end up with a lot of views but not much conversion.

We want consistency and conversion. That way as you grow, you're able to grow with it.

Only 1% of LinkedIn users create content. You're competing against far fewer people than you think.

The biggest mistakes: not putting out enough content and obsessing about small details that really don't matter.

Future-Proof Your Brand

If you're trying to future-proof your personal branding, the easiest thing to do is align yourself with a goal right off the bat and execute based on your plan.

That means spending time building out the branding assets so you have consistency. Templates and things that make your life easier. When you go and record your content or write your content—whatever medium you like to use—you can just use it repeatedly.

Remove as many roadblocks as needed to get to making the content consistently.

That might mean blocking off part of your day on a specific day so you can do content on that day. At the end of the day, if you don't spend the time making sure you have the time for it, you're just never going to end up making it.

Trust develops gradually through repeated interactions rather than occasional moments of brilliance. Psychologically, consistent exposure creates familiarity, and familiarity breeds trust. This is known as the Mere Exposure Effect.

The more often people see you, the more positively they perceive you.

What This Means for You

Personal branding in 2026 comes down to three things: clarity, consistency, and visibility.

Define your three core pillars. Create long-form content. Repurpose it across every platform. Show up consistently, even when it's imperfect.

The professionals who position themselves as experts online in the next two years will have a massive advantage. The ones who wait will be playing catch-up.

Start now. Start messy. Start real.