Building Your Personal Brand

What do most of the ultra successful entrepreneurs you know have in common?  Some sort of seemingly unfair advantage that they’re able to harness that makes them stand out from the crowd.

The funny thing it’s often different for each person.  For some it’s a fantastic network of connections, for some it’s incredible marketing skills, for some it’s an innate knack to know just what to do all the time.  And for some, it’s a giant following of other like-minded entrepreneurs.

This personal brand just may be the one thing that any of us have real control over.  Sure many of us can learn to code, can learn ‘marketing’, and can build our own network.  But an email list that is highly engaged and through which you deliver highly relevant content, is one of those “no brainer” assets to any online entrepreneur.

At the time of this writing I’m quite embarrassed by the size of the email list for this site.  Let’s say it’s in the double digits.  Terrible.

But today I’m embarking on a mission to change that.  I hinted at this in our latest episode of the Nights and Weekends podcast with co-host Ken Wallace.  It’s October 1, and so what better time than to start a new sprint campaign, right?

For the rest of 2016 my sole side project will be to grow my personal brand, and hopefully as a result my email list.

How Am I Going to Grow My Personal Brand?

Of course the proverbial Google search to find a guide for how some people have done this successfully turns up the obligatory Neil Patel article, which is definitely worth a read.  Also worth a read, and pretty similar but with his own style is a lot of the articles by Bryan Harris on list building.

Now I’m not going to be going through any crazy list hacking methods to grow my list, just some organic growth to this site, and hopefully some well targeted list building efforts.

I’ve seen at PodcastMotor the value of high and low quality leads, and that the method you acquire them is extremely important.  Email lists grown through giveaways are fine and dandy, but they often don’t ever ‘convert’…whatever that means for a personal brand, unsubscribe quickly, and don’t engage in your list.  So while I may do a giveaway down the road, for now I’ll not be doing any of that sort of games.

Right now the rough roadmap for my brand and list building is:

• Blogging on this site once a week:  I’ll be sharing my latest lessons, thoughts, and introspections about business and lifestyle design.  On both topics I consider myself an ‘advanced beginner’, so I like that I’ll hopefully be able to teach a bit, and learn a whole lot.
• Being intentional about email list building:  I’m going to create several free resources here targeted at My People – online entrepreneurs who are let’s say below $500k/year revenue.  Lots of roadmaps for starting, business processes, building profitable (not just revenue generating…big difference) businesses.
• Selective Guest Posting: I’ve seen how guest posting can really be valuable with PodcastMotor.  We’ve had the opportunity to guest post on some really huge sites, and it’s done wonders for our brand.  I’d like to do some of that as it pertains to the message and brand that I’m building here.  Will probably be toward the end of the year before I’ve got a concrete brand persona that I’m comfortable sharing with others.  For now I’ll be winging it.

This is a bit of a sprint, to use the popular Agile Development terminology, and I’ll evaluate and iterate on this design in January once I’ve had a chance to see how the work turned out.

What does it all Mean?

What you can expect is for me to write a lot about my business, how it’s evolving, and how I’m thinking about business here in the last part of 2016 (and beyond!).  I suspect that there will be lots of changes to the business next year, but for now I’m quite satisfied with what I’ve built with PodcastMotor and more than ever I’m focused on doing our primary job as good as we can, and delivering our core competency to our customers.

The shiny object has caught my eye more often than I can count.  And while it’s super fun to go chase the “next best thing”, it’s also more often than not just a silly way to procrastinate away the things in your business that are really important.  Things like email list building, writing sales copy, reaching out to influencers in your space.  Those are the things that will make the difference, and actually bring in dollars to your bank account.

Much more on Shiny Object Syndrome in coming articles, but for now let’s suffice to say that I’m highly focused on two things for the rest of 2016:

• Continuing to grow PodcastMotor and further to define our processes and procedures
• Establish my position as a personal brand and grow my email list and overall following

So, stay tuned and I hope you enjoy.  I really am not writing this for me as much as for all of you, so please let me know what you think in the comments below.