SCALING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND
Tuvimos el gusto de conocer a Bryan durante su visita por Guatemala reclutando startups para su competencia en Sillicon Valley (todavía abierta!). Bryan escribe para Forbes, ha hecho varios Ted Talks y asesora empresas multinacionales. Le pedimos que nos compartiera sus mejores tips sobre marca personal, así que acá va, pero antes un breve resumen de Brian para que sepan por qué valoramos tanto sus sugerencias:
- ¿Quién es Brian Rashid?
Brian Rashid es un emprendedor que inició su negocio en Silicon Valley, actualmente su oficina se encuentra en NY, asesora a grandes empresas en tema de estrategia y comunicación digital entre ellas Intel, KPMG, Salesforce.com, United Nations, European Union, Credit Karma. Ha hecho Ted talks, escribe para Forbes y entrepreneurs magazine y es conferencista internacional.
Estuvo en Guatemala invitando a emprendedores para ganar un viaje a Sillicon Valley todo pagado y hasta $10,000.00 en premios para invertir en en tu emprendimiento. La convocatoria sigue abierta por unos días, inscríbanse!: www.brianrashid.com/participa
Algunos tips que Brian nos dio:
- Identifica tu pasión – piensa en que pasas haciendo en tu tiempo libre, o revisa en que áreas las personas te piden consejo. Esa puede ser señal de lo que realmente amas hacer.
- Encuentra un Nicho – piensa en formas creativas y divertidas de combinar tu pasión con un negocio; por ejemplo si eres una mama soltera que ama pasar tiempo con su hija, estar en la playa, hacer yoga e ir a conferencias puedes iniciar una serie de conferencias de yoga en la playa para mamás solteras.
- Crea contenido de esa pasión, y conviértete en una empresa en medios. La atención de tu audiencia es todo, así que debes de crear contenido interesante. Por ejemplo grabar un vídeo en YouTube y convertirlo en un vídeo de 1 minuto, sube ese mismo vídeo a Facebook, transcribe lo más importante del vídeo en Linkedin y en tu blog y así creas una red de contenido que la gente pueda seguir.
Comprométete con la comunidad que tienes, deja de pensar en los seguidores o cuantos quieres tener y empieza a darles un gran valor a los que ya tienes creando contenido que a ellos les guste.
Los invitamos a leer su entrevista:
SCALING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND
More often than not, people end up working jobs that they hate or being financially dependent on someone or something they are not passionate about. But this 2018 world provides us with all sorts of tools that we can use in order to change that status, create a brand, and scale it. To build a personal brand you love and that you can financially depend on. So the first step is identifying what you love, what you are passionate about, and equally how talented you are in those passions. Once these passions and interests are identified you have to marry them, make them work together. The truth is, creating a meaningful and sustainable brand is a lot of work and I have seen time and time again, that when you do what you love, you are more likely to succeed.
First, you have to start with your interests. This step may be the hardest one, as you have to be honest and raw with yourself. What are those things that you actually do like, that you are passionate about? Take a deep look at how you spend your free time. Here you may find the key to realizing what are those actual things you really love. What do you talk about with your friends? Is it about sports, or about business, or about food. How do you spend most of your free time? Is it reading, or watching videos, or listening podcasts? If so about what? But the most important question is: What do you think about in your free time? These are all things to thoroughly consider when you are trying to figure out your interests.
The second step is discovering your talents. Here, be completely honest with yourself, be raw and concise. You have to come up with the things that you are actually talented at, not what you want to be talented at. Learn, and make sure you understand the difference between those two. In order to find out what you are talented at, consider asking the closest people in your life what they think. And tell them how important it is for them to be honest about that. Most times, because of how human beings behave, being afraid to appear conceded, we are blinded to the talents we have. That is why it is important that the people you ask, knows you the best. Also, think about what people come to you for. What kind of advice do they seek? What are they looking from you? But most importantly, what do you do for a living? What do you get paid for? If you are getting paid to do something, chances are, you are talented at it.
Now that you know what your interests are, and what you are passionate about, how do you marry those interests with your talents? How can you incorporate these things into a brand that you love, and can financially depend on?
This is obviously easier said than done, but if you can take the time to understand who you are, what do you want to do, and what are you really good at, the connection between those things will make your vision clear about what your brand is. Remember that the best brands are either inspirational, educational or entertaining. So where do you fit the most in between those things, and if it fits in more than one, no worries, that is great news.
Now that you understand what the base of your brand is, you need a pillar that will serve as the base of your content. Content creation is the name of the game today. No matter what kind of business we talk about, in the 2018 world, every single enterprise has to create content. So this content pillar can be basically one of the following three things: video, written, or audio. This step is key, as you have to make the proper analysis to decide what pillar better fits your brand and how you want to communicate and distribute that content.
If you are creating video content, what is your focus? Inspiration, education, or entertainment? And remember, these things are not exclusive, you can create a blog that can be educational, entertaining and inspiring. But what does your brand better accommodate to? Is it a blog, is it an educational video or is it an entertaining video? Then, you just have to adjust your brand to the best video content creation form. The good thing is that this process is totally free if you want it to be. If you want to invest money on fancy video equipment and an expensive video team, do so at your own discretion, but have in mind that you do not have to spend money here if you don’t want to or can’t afford it. Creating a YouTube account costs you no money, it costs you 10 mins of your time and an email account. If you have a smartphone, that is your camera, capture all the video content from there. Money is not ever an excuse here, it is completely free, or how do you think all the famous YouTubers started 12 years ago?
Now, if the video is not the pillar that better accommodates to your brand, then you can consider writing. You would think that people don’t read much nowadays, but that is not the story. Written content is still heavily consumed across all industries, and it is mostly done in digital platforms. This is the pillar that serves as a content base for most brands, if not all. Businesses aside from putting out video or audio content, they always have written content available. Take into consideration that having written content published in digital forms is very important for SEO(Search Engine Optimization) purposes. For example, a blog page, which you can create in minutes. Or you can use other publishing platforms as LinkedIn or Medium to publish your own articles. Again, all of these are free. You can create these accounts or a blog webpage at no cost.
In the case you did use video, the written part can become easier, as you can literally transcribe your videos into articles. Just grab those videos and make them written content. All you have to do is transcribe the episode, edit the language in a way that it makes sense as an article, and just click on publish. It is a simple smart process that starts saving you time, while simultaneously scaling your content, which then means that you are scaling your brand. I will expand on this later.
The last pillar you could use is the audio platform. Nowadays, creating a Podcast is just so easy, and most people do not realize it. In your smartphone, you have an app, that comes by factory default on every single smartphone. This app is the voice memo app. You press a button and you record yourself speaking. Upload it to any of the Podcast platforms such as Podomatic, Anchor, or even Soundcloud, and you have your own radio show. People who are not comfortable in front of a camera, but express themselves better by speaking than writing, then podcasts are a great way to start a content pillar for your brand. Audio is becoming very popular within certain demographic groups, so be on the lookout for that, voice is the future, my friends. I can listen to Podcasts while cooking, or while showering, or while driving. Videos, not so much, so as time becomes more and more such a valuable asset, the efficiency of audio can become a gamechanger in how we create and consume content the following years.
At this point, you have figured out several things.
- First of all, what are you creating your brand around, in other words, what is your brand?
- Second, you figured out the pillar for your content. No matter which pillar you have chosen, there are several ways to create more content out of that content. Think about social media and how it moves masses in today’s world. The entire planet is interconnected through social media now. So here you have to be tactical on how you are going to use that already existing content, that is your pillar content, and generate several pieces of smaller content in your social media. Whether that is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, or even Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube or the Podcast platforms in the case you are not using one of those as your content pillar.
So, for practical purposes let’s just say that you have chosen your content pillar to be video. You create a blog about sports news. After you create episode one, you have to be critical about how are you going to scale that content. What other outlets or platforms are you going to use in order to scale that pillar content now? Think about distribution channels and how at the end, the sole purpose is for users to end up watching, viewing, listening, or reading your pillar content. You can do a number of things to that pillar content in order to reach different audiences across all different platforms. Think about how you can curate that content in a way that it fits the demographics of each one of the different platforms you are going to use to distribute.
Grab that initial episode, make a thirty to sixty-second cut and upload it to Instagram. Adjust the link in your Instagram profile to be the complete episode of that cut. Use hashtag optimization so that you can reach your desired target. Re-direct people to your pillar content. If appropriate you can cut the audio of the video, and guess what you have now? A ready-to-go Podcast episode. Create a Facebook video with that same episode and start building a community on the Facebook platform. How about the aforementioned strategy about transcribing the episode. This is a very effective strategy, especially if your pillar content is informative. It is very easy to move and distribute it across the three different content pillars. You have now created an article that you can spread through several platforms. At this point, you start optimizing your SEO across the web as well. Also, think about how you can incorporate Twitter into your scaling strategy.
While all these ideas work in theory, they change depending on the brand. There is no formula that fits any specific brand. Your brand strategy will differ on many factors. It can depend on your goals, whether is brand awareness, sales, or raise funds. It can depend on how the public currently perceives you. It depends on the age o the brand. As you can see, there are several ways you can go about scaling your brand.
For more information and to contact Bryan:
