How to Promote Your Personal Brand to Millions of People for Free

Pop Quiz:

What advertising platform let’s you run an ad to millions and millions of people without paying a single cent?

Answer:

Facebook (as if that wasn’t clear by the huge facebook logo)

But how?

You would think to promote your personal brand to millions of people you would have to pay out the wazoo for it, right? Well not anymore. Using the facebook advertising platform in a very creative way you can actually spread your personal brand to your target audience for absolutely nothing.

How?

Well, if you have been on facebook lately, and odds are you have, you have probably noticed by now that ads are showing up in many more places than they used to. Odds are you saw some of these, read some of them, and maybe even clicked on some of them.

But you probably haven’t played with the back end of the advertising platform to uncover all of the possibilities of facebook advertising.

The facebook ad platform has two distinct features that are going to allow this tactic to work for you to promote your personal brand.

1.) A CPC (cost-per-click) billing option
2.) The option to insert an image

Do you see where I’m going with this?

No?

Ok, let me explain.

Cost per click means that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, so if you intentionally keep your clicks down you can reach millions of people for a ridiculously low cost.

Normally this wouldn’t work, but the fact that facebook allows you to insert images in your ads gives you the ability to promote your personal brand using your recognizable brand images – or the images you hope to become recognizable.

This can be a picture of you, your logo, a book cover, an event, whatever you want. It just needs to represent your brand and it needs to be consistent throughout the ad.

In facebook you get three fields to make up your ad.

Your Headline

An Image

And Your Ad Copy

Now obviously the better your ad is, the more clicks you are going to get on that ad, right?

But we’re not going for clicks here. Clicks cost money, and we don’t want to spend money. We just want to promote your personal brand. We just want to get our name out there to generate awareness that we exist. We want to establish a name in the market.

So how do you do this?

Easy. You create an intentionally dull and boring ad, and you advertise is to an extremely wide target market. That should be easy enough right?

Take the ad above for example. It’s pretty bad. Granted this one isn’t made by Burton so this was obviously done by mistake, it is still a good example. The ad keeps the Burton brand in front of the reader very well, and it probably hasn’t cost them a lot of money. I know I haven’t clicked on it.

But I’ve seen this ad dozens of times in the past few weeks and I can honestly say I’ve been thinking about Burton snowboard jackets lately, especially with how cold it’s getting in Louisville.

Now, normally this would be a terrible investment, because it didn’t get me to take any sort of action. But in this case, since facebook allows CPC billing, they have successfully advertised their brand to me and it didn’t cost them a single penny.

You can do the exact same thing.

The Strategy in Detail

So to lay it out straight for you – if you want to promote your personal brand extremely cheaply you want to be very dull with your ad. Put your name as the headline. Put an ordinary personal branded photo of you as the picture (make sure it still grabs attention). Then write some dull mundane copy about yourself.

Your goal is to reach as many people as possible with as few clicks as possible, without coming off looking like a total moron.

Yes, there’s a fine line here, but if you walk it well enough you can get your face in front of a ridiculous number of people and still look pretty good for next to nothing.

And just in case someone does click on your ad, you won’t want to send your traffic outside of facebook. Crappy ads convert poorly on the back end, so your money is going to be wasted.

Instead, drive traffic to your internal facebook fan page. Clicks are cheaper to facebook pages. This way you’ll gain some fans which you can later market to.

If you have questions toss them in the comments below and do my best to help you out.

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