If You are a Writer Who Writes to Teach Something, It's Time you Learn Why You Need a Strong Personal Brand
The Key to Unlocking Trust, Relevance, and Influence as a Writer
You’re a full-time writer trying to fix your sleep and build a solid nighttime routine.
Naturally, you start searching online for some structure you can model your own after. You come across two articles:
One written by a fellow student who writes to help other students survive Uni and,
Another written by someone who’s also a writer, just like you who writes to help writers achieve a work-life balance.
Both routines are solid. But one of them fits your circumstances far better—simply because the writer’s day-to-day looks more like yours.
So, which one would you trust to follow?
And later, when you’re looking for more inspiration, whose work would you go back to—the student, or the writer whose life mirrors yours?
And that’s what a personal brand really is: who you are, who you’re writing for, and what you specifically want to achieve with your writing.
For the readers, the most ideal writer to read from is someone who looks like them.
You, as a writer, need to leverage this, so show them what you look like, which is: Your Personal Brand
It’s not enough to just create good content. You also need to show readers why they should specifically choose to read your work.
It’s providing the right content and the context for your content.
People trust people, not faceless information.
The First Importance of a Personal Brand: Trust
Extend your aim from just writing to inform to teaching.
Humans today are bombarded with overwhelming amounts of information every single day, especially with the rise of short-form content.
YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels—every swipe gives you more advice than you could ever use.
People don’t need more information.
What they actually need is someone they trust to filter it down for them.
When you’re teaching something—whether it’s productivity, writing, fitness, or finance—your audience doesn’t just want random information. They want:
The right amount of detail (not too much, not too little).
The right delivery (a style and tone that feels natural).
The right context (how it applies to them).
A personal brand is how you make that packaging effective.
It is your frame of reference for what to focus on and what to ignore.
The Second Importance of a Personal Brand: Increasing the Value of Your Work
It’s not just about what you know—it’s about how you present it in a way that makes sense to your audience and having a clear personal brand makes this easier for you and them as well.
That packaging saves your readers time. It gives them clarity. It makes learning easier, faster, and more convenient. And when readers see that your content consistently does this, the value of what you deliver skyrockets.
The Third Importance of a Personal Brand: Build Influence (Faster)
The third and final importance of a personal brand is that it makes it far easier to build influence.
Why? Because building a brand requires you to be highly specific:
Who are you?
Who are you writing for?
What exactly are you informing those people about?
And how are you going to do it consistently?
This level of specificity doesn’t just make your work clearer — it makes you more memorable.
Readers quickly understand what you stand for, and in a much shorter amount of time, your presence is noticed.
With that comes faster trust, stronger recognition, and ultimately, influence.
And influence compounds. Here’s what it unlocks for you as a writer:
An expanding network → The clearer your brand, the more collaborations and opportunities naturally come your way.
Sustainable growth → Your brand does the “networking” for you. Readers spread the word, and word-of-mouth multiplies your efforts.
Increased authority → When people associate your name with a specific niche or solution, they turn to you first.
Compounding trust → Each article, note, or interaction reinforces your positioning, making your influence grow without you constantly starting from scratch.
In short, the sharper your brand, the faster your influence grows. And the faster your influence grows, the easier it becomes to sustain your writing, attract opportunities, and make your voice heard in a noisy world.
Up Next
Now that you know why a personal brand matters, the next step is learning how to actually build one.
In Part 2, we’ll break down how to build a personal brand as a writer who writes to inform—from clarifying your niche to shaping the way readers perceive you.
And in Part 3, we’ll get even more practical: how to specifically execute that brand on Substack using your articles, Notes, Subscriber Chat, bio, and more.
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That’s all for today!. I appreciate you so much for reading up until here! 😊 If you think this article could help someone, feel free to share it or like it it really helps expand its reach to help others as well. 💌
This is great advice!
send to me @palmer-apps to my gmail