Today we’ll learn how to choose the best media channel to use for your personal brand. As a content creator, finding a place for your content and brand to live is a big priority.
As we dive deeper into my personal brand framework, you’ll find more tools and concepts crafted to build your reputation, and expand your authority as an expert in your industry.
Finding your message is the first step of building your personal brand framework. Your message defines your brand and sets the tone.
But everyone needs a place to tell their story. That place is your media channel.
And it’s not what you think. It’s not social media. It’s a place where you can scale your message and become a one-man or one-woman media company.
There are three stages to building your platform:
- Pick the media channel that matches your personal skills and style
- Make your content searchable
- Be patient
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Picking Your Media Channel Format
Your media channel is a catalog of your messages. It is a catalog of your information that demonstrates to people what you want to be known for. It is the library of your thoughts and perspective.
However, there are a lot of places where you can create this library, so the first step in building a media channel is picking a format.
What does that mean? It means figuring out where to put a stake in the ground. Where do you want to live and catalog this information?
It doesn’t just have to be one place, but it has to be at least one place. And the typical places you can choose are related to the kind of content you create.
You’re going to create content that is an image, or a video, or written or audio content. And there are obvious places people look for this content. If you make videos, they’re looking for you on YouTube. If you create audio, they’re looking for you on a podcast. And so on.
The platforms we’re talking about today are YouTube, podcasts and blogs.
The reason these three are so important is these are the places where most of this content lives. When someone’s searching for a blog, they’re going to Google. If they want to watch a video on something, they’re going to YouTube, which is also a search engine owned by Google.
If they are looking to a podcast, they’ll go to their preferred podcast vendor, probably on Apple or Spotify.
BE REALISTIC WHEN CHOOSING A MEDIA CHANNEL
You’ve got to ask yourself two questions:
- Where can I create content that makes sense from a business perspective?
- Can I deliver there consistently and comfortably?
Now, the things you think will perform best might not actually match what you can realistically create.
If you already know how to use cameras and have a great setting and lighting and you travel a lot, video might be great for you. It’s certainly one of the more effective ways to connect and build engagement with an audience.
But a lot of us don’t have those kinds of skills. You can still work toward that, but it’s probably not your preferred media channel right now.
Obviously I like podcasts. That’s why I’m creating a podcast for me. This is the number one place that anyone can create because the most natural thing that comes to us as humans is conversation and speaking.
So for me, communicating my thoughts and conducting interviews via podcasts are easy. I just turn it on. I have the things I want to talk about, and I talk about them.
But for some of you, even that might not be what works best for you.
FIND WHAT MEDIA CHANNEL FITS
Some of you might be writers at heart. When you want your ideas to form and flow, they might just flow for you on paper. If that’s you, then you have blogs.
The point is you have to pick one of these to be your primary starting point. I’m not saying it’s the only place where you’re going to distribute content. I’m saying it’s where your creativity is going to start.
I start with the podcast. That podcast is then turned into show notes, which become my blog. And then my podcast is embedded into that blog. The clips from my podcast are then distributed as graphics and images via posts on social media. And in some cases I take snippets and I put them on YouTube as videos as highlights.
My point is, I am everywhere a lot of people are, but I had to choose what I wanted my starting point to be.
And I wouldn’t take that lightly. Ask yourself, what can you realistically deliver on? You want to be able to do something that you can continue to create over time and build on.
Be Searchable
That brings me to my second point: Whatever media channel you choose, make sure it’s searchable.
The point of choosing a media channel is that you want something you can build and refer to that is indexed and cataloged. When people are searching for it, they should be able to find the thing you are talking about.
Say my topic is personal branding. I want someone to be able to easily find that within my catalog of content.
That is difficult on social media feeds: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest… They are great for initial attention, but they aren’t easily searched.
But I’ve got something I can refer to. I can just say, “Episode 74 is where I started to talk about personal branding. If you want to hear my main concept around the framework for personal branding, go to episode 74.” That’s easy for me to refer to and easy for you to find.
Then if you go into iTunes and you search for personal branding, you’re going to find episodes about personal branding from me and other podcasts. Same thing for blogs and YouTube.
That’s the power of a searchable media channel. It’s something that you can categorize and sift through.
The Ring System
When you’re designing the model of your personal brand messaging, think about concentric circles. In the outside ring are the things that have the highest touch, that most people are seeing.
That’s going to be your social media channels, where people spend their time and are bombarded with posts. Your job is to grab attention wherever you can from that.
Once you do that, hopefully, you pull them into your world. Drive from the organic social media space or the paid social media space ads into the next circle, which is your personal brand media channel. Bring them to where you create your articles, your podcasts, your videos.
Once you bring them into that world, those places can also drive them to your media hub, which is your website in the middle. It’s where all this content will continue to live and where your sales will be made.
It is your job to bring customers through the rings, down the rabbit hole.
Gathering Information
All of these steps are also a means of gathering information about your customers.
If I’m on social media, on the outer ring, I might say, “Hey, by the way, I’m also giving away this freebie. Maybe you can take advantage of that.”
Freebies are lead magnets, and now I’ve brought that person into my world.
When someone signs up for that freebie, you get their information. Now you can send an email saying, “Don’t forget to subscribe to my show where you can get lots more of this content that you showed interested in.”
Or, “Hey, you’ve been watching a lot of this show. I have a product or service that really might speak to you. Check it out on my website.”
All of this comes through the communication channels.
When someone discovers you, you have to be able to send them somewhere that demonstrates your expertise. It’s a home base. It used to be the only way you could do that was a book, but now you have these online formats where you can build your own media channel.
Now customers can look at all this information and say, “Wow, I want to know more.” It becomes this binge-worthy area where they can look at all the information that’s relevant to them that you’ve created.
Be Consistent and Patient
The power of your platform is based on the length of time it exists and how much value you add over time.
When you start your media channel, it’s going to have low viewership and few subscribers. You’ll basically be exposed to the people who immediately know you and took the time to look at it.
But every piece of content you add to your media channel brings in a new eyeball.
Each new person who comes in is given the opportunity to look at other pieces of content you’ve created and to go down the rabbit hole. Maybe they’ll become a regular subscriber to the new content that comes out.
Let’s say you started with 10 people watching your videos on YouTube or listening to your podcast or who subscribed to your blog.
Let’s say they listened to your first five, then stopped to wait for the new episode next week. But next week you’ve added five more people into it.
Those five people binge-watched the historic stuff, and now they’re also on a list for the next week’s show. Then they told their friends, and it starts to snowball. Soon, you’re bringing it from five to 25 to 30 to 40 subscribers.
There might be some dropoff, of course, but the point is over time, you are creating and you are building.
CUMULATIVE REWARDS
The point is that when you establish consistency, you are giving yourself the benefit of cumulative rewards and compound interest.
That’s not something that every media channel has to offer. Not every channel lets people subscribe and binge listen to things you’ve created. They might become a fan or subscriber, but they may not go back and look at all your historic stuff.
Again, it’s just one more level of you nurturing your potential clients and customers and fans and subscribers. Maybe when they first met you, they were just curious and liked what you said, but they weren’t ready to buy something or work with you. Maybe they weren’t in the market for what you were selling.
But over time, they might be. That’s the power of a personal brand media channel: You are taking people with you on the ride.
Get Started Now
Your show might not be great when it starts, but it might be great when it ends or as it grows and builds. You’ve got to get started to find out.
What I would do is go out there today, set up an account and just start creating. Start putting something out there that puts your flag in the ground and says, “I’m going to get better at this.”
Once you get started, while you’re finding your voice and recording your message, make sure you get those accounts set up. When you record, and when you start to do this over and over again, you will start to identify themes.
You might not realize that’s exactly what your show was going to be about when you started, but now that you’ve done five or ten of them, it starts to feel real. You’ll find the thing you really want to talk about over time, and you’ll adjust and get better and more focused.
I don’t think you should waste your time planning everything perfectly when you are getting started. Let yourself go. Have a general idea of what you want to talk about, and get going.
Once you start, you will find focus during the content creation. And once you do that, you’ll start to define your identity.
By using your voice, you will find your voice.
MORE ADVICE AND INTERVIEWS
If you’d like my full plan for how to build your content marketing strategy, check out my free Content Marketing Starter Guide.
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- What Business to Start with John Lee Dumas
- Personal Branding Masterclass with Chris Ducker
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