This week we’re talking about what to do before you start a personal brand. There are three things that you can start doing today that will prepare you down the road of getting this personal brand built.
Before I jump into it, there are going to be people out there who asked the question, “Brandon don’t you always have a reputation? Aren’t you always branding yourself?”
Yes, you are. However, before you start to position yourself in your business, in your area of expertise, and in your industry, before you start taking that plunge, there are three things you can start doing today that are less intimidating. They will get you moving in the right direction to actually hone in on what that personal brand is going to be.
START TO LISTEN TO EXPERTS IN YOUR INDUSTRY
Those three things are very simple. They are Listen, Speak, and Meet. (If you wanted to come up with a funny acronym that would help with that, you can call them the three C’s: Curate, Create, and Connect.) I’m just going to use Listen, Speak, Meet.
Listen is the first one. Before you get started thinking about building a website, positioning yourself in your market, getting a logo, building a podcast or a YouTube channel, before you do all that stuff, I want you to start listening. Listen to the things that are interesting to you.
I want you to find podcasts and YouTube videos. Find creators who are saying the things that you want to hear. I don’t mean the things that are entertaining. Find the things in your industry that you want to talk about yourself.
LISTEN TO OTHERS WHO INSPIRE YOU
Find other people that are talking about those same things. Listen to them and curate the best of everything you can hear that is in the category that you want to talk about.
What you’ll find is you will be inspired because either you’ll see how easy it is or you’ll have opinions based on just listening to those conversations. You’ll have areas where you’d like to chime in and give a counterpoint to what you’re hearing, or you’d like to agree with what you’re hearing and give your own examples.
Start by listening because listening inspires perspective. When you hear other people talking about the things that you’re passionate about, it inspires you to have an opinion. Becoming aware that you even have these opinions is one of the first steps that is important before you even start creating your personal brand in a way that is intentional.
Pick some blogs, some podcasts, some creators out there that you respect. Write them down, subscribe and start listening. Make a habit of it. Every day you pick a time, whether it’s during your drive or during your workout, where you are listening to the people that are leaders in your space.
WHERE TO START YOUR INSPO SEARCH
If you have trouble finding who those might be, what I would do is start on three different platforms. Go to Amazon and look up the #1 books in your category, the ones that are the most popular, that have the most reviews, that are trending. Look at who those authors are that wrote those books and go to those author’s websites. See if those authors have other channels that you can follow.
Read the books that they’re writing and then see if they have a YouTube channel. See if they have a website or if they have a blog and read a few things here and there that they are writing so that you can start to immerse yourself in what content it looks like in your space.
START WITH KEYWORD SEARCHES
The second thing when you’re still listening is to look for people who are podcasting. Only so many people write books, but a lot of people are starting to create podcasts.
Go to your podcast provider and type in the keyword that you are interested in looking at. For me, I typed in the word “Marketing”, “Branding”, “Startup,” and “Entrepreneur”. I use that to help serve me content for people who created shows around this content.
What’s great about that is instead of finding the one-off article or episode about something, you’re finding an entire show about all that content that you are interested in. You can pick and choose the episodes within that show that are interesting to you.
Again, once you’ve found someone’s show, go to their website and find out if there are other things they created as well. Did they also write a book? Do they have a course? Do they have a free video that you can watch? What are they talking about? How do they describe the things that are interesting to you?
See if there’s something that inspires you to be thinking about things differently, that inspire perspective.
GOOGLE AND YOUTUBE ARE HELPFUL TOO
Lastly, I would do a Google search and a YouTube search. Type in the same thing. Type in your categories and see what pops up. What are the most trending, popular articles that come up in that space?
Become someone who is immersed in their category. Right now you’re at the learning phase. You want to understand what is being said, what is being taught, and be a sponge for all that content.
What I don’t want you to do is to go to social media, start scrolling all day, and seeing what random posts are popping up from all the different people.
That’s a whole different thing. It’s a rabbit hole. That’s going to suck you down and waste your time. I want you to actually look at where people have created content, where they have taken the time to write full content, categorize things, and put it in a way that is easy to listen to and understand.
You’re not going to get that in these quick-clip, one-minute bursts of information. Those are highlights. They’re not actual deep dive pieces of content. It doesn’t need to be a full three hundred page chapter book or whatever else, but it does have to be something that’s more than fifteen words. That’s a quote that is inspiring.
It has to be more than that. It has to be something that has some thought put into what their perspective is. I want you to be seeing how other people formulate perspectives, and then you can come up with how you agree or disagree with that and create your own.
START TO HAVE A BRAND PERSPECTIVE BY SPEAKING
Phase one is listening and curating. Phase two is Speak. What I want you to do is get out there and react. I want you to have your own perspective. I want you to create ideas and share how you feel.
The secret to this is to do it privately. Create something that you write like a document. Write in that document your reactions to the things you’re hearing, but do not share them. Do not post them publicly. Don’t post your feelings on social media.
Create content that is a reaction or perspective and save it somewhere. Title it and then create it again. Create reactions to everything you are listening to. If it inspires your own idea that you want to share, a concept, or just a feeling you have, share it. Write it down but do not put it out there into the world. Keep it private on your computer.
This is going to be something that you can pull from later when you’re ready. Right now, this is just for you to get in the habit of creating perspective and putting it down on paper.
You could write. You could also capture it on video. However for me, what I found easy was sometimes writing, but a lot of the time was actually turning on the microphone of a podcast and recording something. I could even ask myself a question and answer it. You can do that. You can just start with an idea.
BRAINSTORM YOUR FEELINGS AND KNOWLEDGE
Think of three things you want to say about that idea. Then start talking about that. Get your perspective out of your head. You have so much knowledge inside of you and hopefully some feelings about that knowledge you can share with people.
Getting it out of you is the first step because you realize that after you do this over and over and over again, you’ll start to get into the habit of getting better at honing how you describe things, how you explain how you think, how you feel and hopefully how to help other people move through some kind of process.
If you are in an educating space, hopefully within this practice you are getting better at teaching. A lot of the time that’s what people want to do–learn from you. You have to get into the practice of teaching to get good at that.
I’m not talking about building a curriculum. That’s a whole other class of study. I’m just saying use your voice in a way that helps people pick up one piece of knowledge from you at a time. That practice of speaking is going to help you solidify what you’re all about.
RELATED: Build your personal brand with the Content Marketing Starter Guide.
DON’T START BY TRYING TO FIND YOUR NICHE
I think a mistake a lot of us make when we get started is we’re trying to strategize in our head who we are. We’re trying to understand, like on paper, all of the complicated nuances of our personality, to identify and try to hone it down to a niche, which is what confuses a lot of people.
Niching down is a tough decision that is not going to be made in a vacuum, with you a box without any inputs in it. What you need to do is sit down, continue to create content, and share your perspective in a way that helps you over time start to move closer and closer to what you’re about and who you are.
It will come out of you because it’s your perspective. You’re sharing it. Over time that becomes thematic. You start to say things over and over and over again. They become a pattern that is really the truth about who you are.
When you speak your truth every week, you can’t help it. We start to formulate around a concept of, “This is what I believe.” Those beliefs are what shape your identity.
START SETTING UP INTERVIEWS
The other thing I’d like to do is if you’re out there creating perspective, bring other people into a conversation. Don’t be afraid to create a show that you may never distribute, that you may never publish. Have an idea and say, “At the end of the day what I want to talk about is this general topic. I want to talk about it with these types of people.”
Invite people in to talk about that topic. If they are an expert in something, invite them on to talk about their expertise. You don’t even have to have the show named. It’s better if you do, but if you don’t, come up with a tentative name that you can use. Invite people on, bring them on a zoom call.
You interview them and ask them questions. Get into that habit because in those conversations, you’ll find some interesting concepts that you can react to in real-time and share your perspective in that way. These are all going to be creating tools for you to use in the future.
You’ll be sharpening your ax as a content creator. As someone who needs to figure out how to tell people what you do and who you are, doing that just through conversation I’d say is easiest. The most natural thing we can do as humans is to have a conversation with another person or to share how we feel about something that’s right in front of us.
What I’m saying is, use those natural tools to start to hone what your identity is and look back at it later.
It’s easy to look at things that you created over time and say, “Well, it looks like I’ve said a lot about this kind of thing. This is something that I continue to be passionate about.”
That’s the second phase, speaking as much as possible, creating content in a way that is natural to you.
DON’T FORGET TO START MEETING PEOPLE
Listen, Speak, and then lastly Meet. Meet is all about people. It’s about connection. I want you to get out there and meet people that are in your industry that are talking about the things you want to talk about. Get to know other people’s perspectives, not just by listening, but by actually interacting with them.
This connects to the speaking part, but I actually want you to put yourself in positions to meet people. A lot of the time trying to reach out to someone via email who has never met you before is difficult. Go to places where people are, whether it’s your local networking group, co-working space, or an event in your neighborhood or industry. Just pick one big one for the year.
Show up with your heart and your eyes and your ears open. Listen to speakers, get to know people in the audience. If you have a chance to speak to some of the speakers, go and talk to them. In those conversations, you will start to also come up with your own perspectives.
The bonus of that is you being in person starts to grow your relationships with people who then could come onto your show and be part of the conversation. There’s nothing more important than you meeting those people. It starts with listening and speaking and then turns into this meeting part.
YOUR BRAND WILL START TO GROW
When you start to show up, you want to have something to say. Usually, it has to do with your ideas and your perspectives on things that are common topics of conversation in your field.
That’s step three. This is all before you ever create a website or start a business or whatever else. You can do this on the side. Sure, if you have something to sell, do it. What I’m saying is you don’t need any of that while you are having this idea that you want to move towards being a reputation, not a resume.
If you want to be a business that is your own instead of employed by someone else or start some kind of side business that brings in additional income, before you do any of that, you can start with these simple steps.
YOU CAN START THESE 3 STEPS RIGHT AWAY
Listen to as much as possible in your industry, speak on your perspectives and the things that you would do differently, and meet all the people that have influence in your space.
Be a part of that circle, because guess what? When you start to turn the page and say, “I’m ready to build these things that are going to help me with my business and my content,” and you start to publish that, get reactions, and develop your audience and potential customers, what you’ll find is you will have a community of support.
You will have a body of work to choose from, and you’ll have ideas that are naturally flowing out of you without all the blocks that would get in your way. Things like imposter syndrome, getting started, or the roadmaps of not knowing what to do next because you haven’t learned from the people who’ve been doing all that already.
Even just the simple doors you might need to be opened that now you can have open because you’ve met the people who might have them as opposed to you having zero network. These are the steps that I think might help anyone out there before they start their personal brand.
Listen, speak, and meet. Speak your truth. Listen to all the stuff in your industry and meet as many people as possible.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like more content about how to build your personal brand, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
And here are some more of my most popular thought leader interviews!
- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
- Built to Serve with Evan Carmichael
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Talk soon!