Personal Branding Tutorial

Key Takeaways

I love getting requests from you guys on different topics you want me to cover and issues you want me to address so please keep them coming it makes my job easier trying to think of different videos to do every week um and today's request came from a Twitter direct message from Heidi Heidi is a photographer and a filmmaker and she wants to know how to build her brand so this is what she wrote to me she said I'm trying to learn how to Market myself online as they want to sell my photos soon would love any advice could you do more videos on how to self-promote as that's always an interesting exercise yes the idea of self-promotion is a bit of a weird one and actually that phrase kind of makes my stomach turn because it gives you the misconception that it's all self-serving but the reality is you build your brand online and you build a loyal following by adding value to people's lives and adding so much value that they just can't get enough of you so here are my top five elements of successful self-promotion first and foremost your credibility is everything one of my favorite things is credibility is virginity once you lose it you can't get it back what is the purpose of building your brand I hear so many people say that they want to blow up and they want to get all these followers and all this stuff but why why should people be following you you need to get really really clear on what your mission is behind your brand and then communicate that with every piece of content that you put out because a lot of the times you know Fame is really fleeting and people will get a lot of followers really quickly sometimes but they're not necessarily going to last if it's based on superficial reasons when I say credibility I don't mean you have to be an expert in your Niche you just have to be really honest with where you're at so be authentic about the fact that you're just starting out in your industry and that you are just starting a YouTube Vlog or whatever it is that you're trying to do because your audience will trust you more if you're honest with them off the bat so don't try and be anything that you're not that's the quickest way to kill your credibility because you will eventually get caught in a lie another key element in building trust with your audience is through consistency so this comes through your voice your tone punctuation grammar spelling all of those things should be consistent across platforms the ideal situation is that someone sees a tweet from you or a Facebook post or some sort of online communication and they don't even need to see your name but they know that it's coming from you because you're being truly authentic and remember you're the only you in the world so you're the only person who talks like you do so you need to really hone in on your own unique uh voice and harness that and use it on all of your platforms to make yourself easily ident if iable consistency also comes through in all of your visuals online so if you're using Graphics or you're making your own Graphics or um you're on Instagram try and use consistent filters cropping some kind of a theme that's unique to you maybe put your um Twitter handle or your Instagram handle on your graphics whatever it is just make them look kind of uniform across platforms because that's another way that people can easily identify you and finally content is really important when it comes to consistency so for myself I put out a new YouTube video video every single Tuesday so you guys know to expect that from me and that builds trust in our relationship um and so if you're a blogger or a vlogger or whatever kind of content it is that you put out make sure that you're consistent with it even if you're just tweeting um a couple times a week make sure that you're at least putting out one new uh piece of content per day so that you're keeping your account active and people stay interested in your presence online next is collaboration so I always say this but if you're true to who you are and you're uniquely us you don't have any competition CU there isn't another you in the world so if you see people with similar audiences or in they're in the same Niche and you're viewing them as competition don't look at it that way look at them as opportunities to collaborate reach out to them see if they want to do maybe um a collaboration on a blog post together or a video together um work together with them somehow some way and that's going to open you up to their audience and them up to your audience so it extends both of your reach and it's mutually beneficial and you don't always have to get something out of it either just support other people and they will support you eventually so whether that means you need uh to promote somebody's work for them or somebody has a contest going on or maybe you need to make a connection for somebody uh to someone that you know just build relationships with people like you would offline help them out and don't expect anything in return but eventually something will probably come back to you that will benefit your own business your own brand or your own life you wouldn't walk up to somebody on the street and immediately say hey do you want to buy my EB book so don't do it online that's not a real way of communicating with somebody make sure that you're adding value to other people's lives before you expect any value in return building your brand online is all about relationships and the best way to create relationships is to actually have dialogues with people so use tools where you can set up search streams like things like hoot or tweet deck or whatever tool that you may use and use search streams to look for people in who are talking about things in your Niche and reach out to them before they have to find you that's a great way to extend your reach almost immediately and remember to respond to people and to retweet people's content and to favor content and to actually engage with your followers because that way you keep them engaged with your content and it's a give and take relationship as opposed to you just having a monologue and talking at people fourth element of self-promotion is relevancy so research research research figure out who exactly it is that you're trying to Target and what they want to know and what kind of problems are they're trying to solve and an easy way to do this is going to blogs in your industry or media Publications and looking at the comment sections on Facebook or um on the website itself and seeing what kind of issues people are having and what people want to talk more about and then interjecting those in those conversations in a really natural way or writing Blog blog posts around them because you know that people are searching for those topics so that's a great way to sort of reverse engineer your content to be really helpful and relevant to your audience and this doesn't mean that you have to create all this content yourself every single day take about 15 minutes and go through all the leading Publications in your Niche and figure out what the top news stories of the day are what people are talking about and then schedule that content and links and articles and all those things to go out on your own profiles on social media throughout the day the final element and probably the most important is being humble please don't take yourself too seriously and please don't call yourself an expert let your work do the talking for you when you do really good work people recognize that and they'll start calling you an expert but try not to Proclaim it yourself focus on doing your best work finding the Right audience in your Niche Distributing really valuable content and I promise you your following will increase whether you have a following of one or 1 million right now keep in mind that those followers are real human beings who care about what you're doing and care about your initiatives and your content so be grateful for that because the minute that you take that for granted is the minute that you kind of kill your own brand too much ego will kill your talent and that's definitely the case when it comes to building your presence online this is a really lengthy subject and I'm sure I've just scratched the surface today but if you want to dive a little deeper three of my favorite books on this topic are utility by Jay bear jab jab jab Right Hook by Gary vaynerchuk and tribes by Seth Goen I'll put links to those books in the about section below if you found this video helpful please share it with your friends and hit the like button below and make sure you subscribe because I post new video marketing and social media tutorials every single Tuesday if you have a request for a video like hi did on this one please let me know in the comments section below thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next time