You Ask, I Answer: Building a Personal Brand in 2020?

In today's episode, uh Misha asks, do you think it's easier or harder to build a strong personal brand now than ten years ago? It's different. It's different now than it was ten years ago. Ten years ago, uh social media was still v relatively new. Uh you know, we're talking 2010, Facebook was I don't remember if Facebook was even open to the general public again.

Twitter was still a thing, um, YouTube was a thing, uh, but certainly uh Instagram just opened up because they just celebrated their ten year anniversary. So it was easier to be seen as an early adopter of what would eventually become some of the major platforms. Whereas today, uh social media, at least on mainstream networks, does require you to spend some money, right? To require some ad spent. Um today uh there are tons of niche social networks that provide the same opportunity, right?

You can become uh well known within a a single Discord or Slack server. You can be on uh any number of uh new apps, you know. There's certainly no shortage of rising TikTok stars, right, that have amassed huge audiences. Uh you can still get a lot of attention for having a really good YouTube channel. Uh it takes time.

Um and things like SEO, it's it's more competitive because there's just more people online, but the way the algorithms have changed uh really does reflect and and value domain expertise now more than it did ten years ago. Ten years ago is it was mostly a game of SEO tricks, whereas today those tricks work uh much less well than they used to. So, from a tactical perspective, it's about the same. It's about the same to build a strong personal brand. Um measurement of a personal brand is much easier today.

Much, much easier than it was ten years ago. Uh ten years ago, we didn't even have multi-channel uh attribution models, right? That were generally available. Um today, that's something that any person can have in inside their Google analytics. Uh, your social media analytics are easier, um, your brand uh analytics are much easier.

The thing that the the thing that's remained the same, and the question that everybody who wants to build a personal brand has to answer that is completely the same as what value do you offer the world? What value do you offer that other people's need other people need? Um if you are just another talking head talking in the space, you know, talking to the air, uh ruminating without any point or any focus, and most of all any value, then yeah, you're it's gonna be almost impossible to build a personal brand because nobody needs that, nobody wants that. Um we do live in a more crowded uh online space than ever before, right? Nobody needs another podcast with you know the millions of them that are there are uh now.

So, what do you offer? What is your value, and not what is your brand's value to you? We know everybody understands that part. Uh, what do you have to offer the world that the world wants and needs? And that's the question that was true and and tough ten years ago.

It's the question that's tough and true today. What is your value to the world? And if you're not sure, don't worry about building a personal brand. Figure that out first. Figure out what you have to offer the world first that is of value that the world needs, the world can't do without, and then building the personal brand, I don't want to say it it builds itself because it doesn't, but it's a lot easier to build because you are clear about your message, you're clear about your purpose, you are clear about the reasons why somebody would talk to you.

In terms of measuring your personal brand, uh there was a fantastic essay from twenty two thousand nine, two thousand eight, um, by Kevin Kelly at Wired, I think it was at the time, um, who described what it takes to be successful in the new economy, and uh that is you need a thousand true fans. Now, the these are a thousand true fans, these are the people who show up when you say you're gonna do something. You're gonna go live, you're gonna be doing an Instagram channel takeover, you're gonna be, you know, doing this or that. And if a thousand people keep showing up for you, you have the ability to make a substantial living, right? Because if you get a thousand people to sh to give you a hundred bucks a year, um that's that's a hundred grand.

Right? That's that is that's a living money. Um, especially um in other parts of the world where costs of living are are lower compared to say, you know, the the the most expensive nations to live in. If you have if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year and you're living in, you know, Belize or uh Croatia or uh you know uh parts of Malaysia, you're living like a king, right? You you're doing super well.

Um if you're living in Silicon Valley, not so much, you're in a cardboard box in somebody's backyard. So the question for your personal brand is how many true fans do you have? And again, this is something that you can tell really easily by appointment setting, right? Um you say that you're gonna go live, you know, uh Fridays at noon, right? How many people show up?

How many people keep showing up? How many returning users do you have to your website, right? How many people consistently engage with a post you put up on Facebook or Twitter or wherever? If it's not a thousand, the thousand is what to aim for to provide so much value that a thousand people reliably show up all the time. May not be the same thousand, but a thousand people show up reliably all the time, and that's when you know you've you've succeeded in building a strong personal brand.

Uh I'm somewhere in the 35 range, right? So I've got a lot of work to do uh still to make sure that people show up, right? Uh if you send out an email newsletter, do a thousand people read it, right? Do a thousand people click on stuff in it. Um I'm doing better on that part.

Um to give you a sense of what scale that is, that you're talking, you know, you'd probably need like a hundred thousand audience members to get a thousand people to reliably do something, you know, one percent of that audience. So your personal brand, it isn't harder, but it requires more forethought now. It requires more systems, I think. Um, and it requires you to constantly be uh harvesting from from places that aren't yours. So that means getting people onto your email newsletter or subscribe to your podcast, or the things that you own are under your control.

It does not mean building, you know, a million followers on TikTok. You can do that, and you should do that if that's your thing, but you don't own that. The same as we said ten years ago, you don't own your Twitter account, you don't own your Facebook page. Uh other companies own those, and you have no control over visibility and and things on there, which a lot of people found out the hard way when they spent you know years and big buckets of money on Facebook trying to build their Facebook pages, and then Facebook in you know 2015 just turned the knobs and said, Okay, now you everyone now you gotta pay to be seen, no matter how large your following is. So a thousand true fans in your in systems you control.

But yeah, it all still comes down to what value do you offer that the world needs that people will seek you out for. And it's an ongoing thing, it's a it's a living thing. Your brand ten years ago should not be the same brand as today because the world ten years ago isn't the same world as today. Heck, the world ten months ago is not the same world as we live in today. There was no pandemic.

So you choose what you want to be known for and work on building to that that audience uh base of a thousand true fans. Um that's how you build a strong personal brand. Uh it's a good question. We could spend a lot of time on this, but um start there. Start there.

If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

Visit TrustInsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.