A Personal Brand for Experts Isn’t Built Like a Creator’s Following
On almost every discovery call I get, there’s a moment a few minutes in where someone tells me they’re excited to finally meet me, and then they bring up Oreos.
If you don’t know me, that probably sounds random. I have a genuine, slightly ridiculous Oreo obsession, and it shows up all over my content. It’s in my posts and sprinkled around my website. It’s never the main point of anything, it’s just there, the way it would come up if we were grabbing coffee. So when someone mentions it on a call, I know something important before we’ve talked about a single thing they need: they’ve spent real time with my stuff.
That’s usually when the call becomes what it almost always is for me now, which is a vibe check. They’re not trying to figure out whether they trust me, because they’ve already decided that. They just want to make sure I can help with what they’re dealing with and figure out what that looks like. I haven’t been on a discovery call that required hard selling or convincing in years, and it’s not because I’m some brilliant closer. It’s because the selling happened before they ever booked.
That’s what building a personal brand for experts actually looks like, and it’s what so many of us miss when we measure our content with a scoreboard built for someone else.
Creators and experts are playing different games
If you’re a content creator, views are the product. Attention is what you’re selling, whether that’s to brands, sponsors, or the platform itself, so for you, all eyeballs are good eyeballs. More reach means more value, and going viral is basically the job.
But if you’re an expert looking for clients, you’re not selling attention. You’re selling your work, and your work is only valuable to the right person. Fifty thousand of the wrong eyeballs won’t do much for you, and five of the right ones might fill your calendar.
That sounds obvious written down, but it’s not how most of us behave, because almost every metric in front of us is a creator metric.
How a Personal Brand for Experts Actually Gets You Hired
The person who ends up hiring you isn’t doing it off one piece of content. They find you somewhere, maybe a post, a search result, or something a friend shared, and then they go look around. They read a few more things, watch a couple more, and poke around your website. Somewhere in those five or ten pieces, they’re deciding two things: whether they like how you think, and whether they actually like you.
That second part is where the Oreos come in, and it’s the part a lot of experts leave out of their content because it doesn’t feel strategic. But a personal brand isn’t just your expertise laid out neatly. It’s letting people get to know you well enough that they feel confident hiring you, and part of knowing someone is knowing the quirky little things about them.
The Oreos don’t prove I’m good at what I do. What they do is show people there’s an actual human on the other side of the work. They also give someone a fun, easy way to start a conversation with me, one that quietly tells both of us they’ve been paying attention. Your perspective is what earns the trust, and your personality is what makes it feel like a relationship instead of a transaction.
I’ve been doing this through Google for years
This isn’t a new idea for me. Most of my leads come from SEO and Google, and they have for years. I’ve never put much energy into social until recently, but the reality is the model works the same way.
Nobody on Google checks your follower count. They search for something they’re struggling with, land on your perspective, and if it resonates, they keep reading. By the time they reach out, they’ve spent enough time with how you think that the call is about fit, not persuasion.
For some reason we get on social and forget all of that.
Why social scrambles our thinking
On social, the numbers are right there on the screen. Followers, views, and likes are the first thing you see, so without ever really deciding to, we switch scoreboards. We start judging a piece of content by how far it traveled instead of whether it said something true about how we see our work.
But it’s the same game. Whether it’s a blog post, a reel, or a carousel, you’re building trust one piece of perspective at a time. The platform changes where people find you, but it doesn’t change how they decide to hire you.
But as the expert we get all wrapped up in the mindset that is truly a content creator mindset, and has a different goal.
Most experts are hiding behind their frameworks
This is where a lot of experts get stuck, and it’s not because you’re bad at content. Most likely you are great at the teaching part. You’ll share your framework, your five tips, your process broken into clean little steps, and all of it is genuinely useful. But then you shy away from showing your face and saying what you actually think. Which is the part that actually builds trust in YOU as the solver of their problem.
I get it, because the framework feels safe. It proves you know your stuff without making you put yourself out there. But nobody hires a framework. They hire the person behind it, and if they can’t find that person anywhere in your content, they don’t have anything to trust yet.
That’s why creating content with your perspective, and yes, showing your face, is part of building a personal brand that brings you clients. It was never about the follower count. It’s about whether somebody feels like they know you and can trust you based on what you’ve put out on the web.
When that’s missing, you end up doing all of that work on the discovery call instead. You’re introducing yourself, proving yourself, and trying to build in one call the trust that could have been built over weeks of them spending time with your stuff. That’s why so many discovery calls feel like a convincing session and a hard sell, and why mine feel like a vibe check.
Going viral isn’t bad, it’s just not the measure
I’m not anti-reach. If something you post travels, great, enjoy it. Fifty thousand people who saw one video and moved on feels fun for the ego, and I get why it’s tempting to chase that feeling. But it won’t necessarily change your client roster, because those people didn’t stick around long enough to get to know you.
The better question is whether the right people are going deep. Are the people who find you coming back for the next piece, and the one after that? Are they showing up to calls already knowing things about you that weren’t in any single post? That’s what’s actually building your business, and it’s the thing most of us never stop to look at.
It’s okay if your content doesn’t go viral
Going viral was never the point. The point is getting your perspective across, clearly and consistently, over enough pieces that the right person trusts you before you’ve ever talked. That’s what a personal brand actually does for an expert: it lets your reputation arrive before you do.
So keep showing up with how you actually see things, and let a little of who you are come through while you’re at it.
If you’re not sure what your website and content are actually saying about you right now, that’s exactly what my Brand Audit is for.
And tell me, what’s your Oreo? What’s the thing clients always bring up that tells you they’ve been spending time with your content?
