Personal branding basics: The content question
“When you come to a fork in the road – take it.” – Yogi Berra While it may seem nonsensical from a logical point of view, Yogi’s advice applies exactly to the content you must create for a successful personal brand. Your content must focus on two areas (although not in equal proportions): Your profession, and Your personality. Consider the successful outcomes you want from your personal branding efforts: You want people to consider you an authority, and You want to be the kind of authority that people like and are willing to listen to. For these reasons, the laws of personal branding basics say that you need to convince people that you know what you’re talking about, and at the same time reveal enough about yourself that they will want to spend time with you. These qualities will serve you well when you want to grow your business or when you start knocking on doors (or sending out emails) to launch a new idea or simply get a new job. I’m not going to spend much time here talking about the avenues you use to establish your personal brand; you probably know most of them. They are all communication pipelines and vary from short Twitter posts (and other social media posts) to longer blogs to video (Internet and broadcast) to presentations made before small, medium, and large audiences. Personal branding basics: Professional content There are two dimensions to the professional content you present: original and curated. You want to create solid original content, and by “original” I mean that it needs to be your ideas and sufficiently unique. (I know that “sufficiently” shouldn’t really be used to qualify the word “unique.” However, there’s really nothing – or very little – new under the sun, so you need to work hard to find the inventive variations that set your content apart from all the other content competing for eyes and ears.) Perhaps you have insights into your niche unlike most others. If so, develop and express those to their maximum benefit. However, what makes you unique, might be more subtle. The Next Food Network Star has been on the Cooking Channel this summer and the judges are always urging the contestants to find and express their own point of view, or POV as it’s often expressed. The unique element to your professional content could be your POV. It might unfold from your worldview, your background, or the way you see the consumers of your product or service. Further, don’t be afraid to swim against the tide. If everyone in your industry is going toward automation to lower prices, why not make the case for higher-priced hand-crafted products? The point is that the “public” needs to have some handle to grab on to when they think of you. Don’t be afraid to be professionally controversial. There’s an old saying: If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. I also like what Ambrose Bierce said: We know what happens to people who stand in the middle of the road. They get run over. I have one final thought here and it connects your professional content to your personal content: Establish your “voice.” It might be that your voice is what separates your professional content from everything else being expressed in...
read moreThe essentials: 15 social media apps and services to improve your marketing
Few business owners question the importance of social media marketing today, but doing a consistently good job with social media marketing is not easy. In fact, it can become very time consuming. Whether you take care of it yourself, or you have someone on your team who’s in charge of your social media marketing, it’s always a good idea to get outside help. This help can come in the form of an agency, a specialist, or any number of apps or software as a service (SaaS) websites. Below is a curated list of popular apps and services. There are certainly many good free apps available that will serve a lot of small businesses quite well. Further, for $20 or less a month you can start to get into some apps that are quite powerful. The apps and services provide these kinds of services: Find content for you to share Provide easy manual scheduling, Provide automated scheduling, Analyze followers, keywords, growth, etc Manage your accounts for followers Browse the list. Find the social media platforms you target and the prices where you feel comfortable, then start comparing all their features. Take some of the paid services out for a free trial run. (Legend: F=Facebook, T=Twitter, IN=LinkedIn, P=Pinterest, TM= Tumblr, G+=Google+, Insta=Instagram.) Service Platforms Free Plan Price Range Service DrumUp F, T, IN Trial $15-$159/mo find, schedule Upflow F, T, IN, P, TM, Y $29-$99/mo find, schedule Social Jukebox F, T, IN Y $13-$100/mo schedule Socialoomph F, T, IN, P, Plurk Y $6.50-$39/mo schedule, automate, analysis management Crowdfire F, T, Insta, P, TM Y $10-$200/mo content, schedule, management Buffer F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ Y $10-$400/mo schedule, analysis Good Audience F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ N $300-$2000/mo agency service Boostagram Insta Trial $80-$160/mo Instagram growth service InstaSchedule Insta Trial $20-$90/mo schedule Round Team T Y $12-$144/mo automate Hootsuite F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+, YT Y $20-$500/mo schedule, analysis, engage SocialQuant T Trial $50-$300/mo automate Hypergrowth T Trial not revealed automate Followed F, T, IN Trial $99-$250/mo content, schedule, automate Sprout Social F, T, Insta, IN, G+ Trial $100-$250/mo schedule, manage, CRM, analysis...
read moreThe essentials: 15 social media apps and services to improve your marketing
Few business owners question the importance of social media marketing today, but doing a consistently good job with social media marketing is not easy. In fact, it can become very time consuming. Whether you take care of it yourself, or you have someone on your team who’s in charge of your social media marketing, it’s always a good idea to get outside help. This help can come in the form of an agency, a specialist, or any number of apps or software as a service (SaaS) websites. Below is a curated list of popular apps and services. There are certainly many good free apps available that will serve a lot of small businesses quite well. Further, for $20 or less a month you can start to get into some apps that are quite powerful. The apps and services provide these kinds of services: Find content for you to share Provide easy manual scheduling, Provide automated scheduling, Analyze followers, keywords, growth, etc Manage your accounts for followers Browse the list. Find the social media platforms you target and the prices where you feel comfortable, then start comparing all their features. Take some of the paid services out for a free trial run. (Legend: F=Facebook, T=Twitter, IN=LinkedIn, P=Pinterest, TM= Tumblr, G+=Google+, Insta=Instagram.) Service Platforms Free Plan Price Range Service DrumUp F, T, IN Trial $15-$159/mo find, schedule Upflow F, T, IN, P, TM, Y $29-$99/mo find, schedule Social Jukebox F, T, IN Y $13-$100/mo schedule Socialoomph F, T, IN, P, Plurk Y $6.50-$39/mo schedule, automate, analysis management Crowdfire F, T, Insta, P, TM Y $10-$200/mo content, schedule, management Buffer F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ Y $10-$400/mo schedule, analysis Good Audience F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ N $300-$2000/mo agency service Boostagram Insta Trial $80-$160/mo Instagram growth service InstaSchedule Insta Trial $20-$90/mo schedule Round Team T Y $12-$144/mo automate Hootsuite F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+, YT Y $20-$500/mo schedule, analysis, engage SocialQuant T Trial $50-$300/mo automate Hypergrowth T Trial not revealed automate Followed F, T, IN Trial $99-$250/mo content, schedule, automate Sprout Social F, T, Insta, IN, G+ Trial $100-$250/mo schedule, manage, CRM, analysis...
read more3-plus IFTTT ‘bots’ to increase your small business productivity
Tech leaders are telling is that just about everyone will be replaced by a bot or artificial intelligence soon, so let’s start leveraging this power ourselves before it’s too late. One of the most powerful (and free) automation services available to us is If This, Then That – IFTTT.com. Trying to get started can be a little overwhelming, so I’ve picked three free “off-the-shelf” IFTTT apps that will come in handy for many small business owners. They are easy to use and will help build your confidence and understanding in the various ways the system can work for you. Scheduling Todoist is one of the most highly rated to-do list apps available today. Many small business owners depend on it. At the same time, many use Google calendar. While both of these have their specific functions, it would be nice if they could work together a bit better. There’s a good IFTTT app that automatically creates a Google calendar event for every new Todoist task. Todoist is extremely handy on your mobile devices while Google Calendar, I believe, truly excels on your laptop or desktop. If you use this app, you can get a complete overview of your daily obligations when you check your Google calendar. By the way, an app that does the reverse – creates an Todoist task when a Google Calendar event is created – is available as well. Follow a hashtag Are you trying to achieve total global domination on Twitter over one or more social media hashtags? To do this, you have to keep track of all the tweets containing the hashtag(s) you’re interested in. This also helps you discover others who are operating in your “space.” There’s a very good app that will create a Google spreadsheet entry every time a tweet with a specific hashtag is posted on Twitter. It’s much easier to analyze these tweets on a spreadsheet than it is to do a manual hashtag search on your browser. For instance, you can sort by Twitter handle to see who is doing the most posting. This is also very handy for finding good content to retweet. Turn your wi-fi reception off…or on I sometimes get frustrated when I’m out running errands – my smart phone starts acting dumb because it can’t find or settle on a wi-fi network to use. It’s constantly asking me if I want to join this or that network, or it just gets hung up. This app will send you a notification reminding you to turn off your wi-fi whenever you leave a specific location. And this one will remind you to turn it back on! The first step in any project is always the most difficult to take. I hope that by adopting one of these IFTTT apps you’ll become more familiar with the system and confident that you can make it work for you. Let us know which IFTTT apps have proved to be the most valuable for...
read moreHow evolving into a ‘tech company’ could secure your future
How broadly do you define your business? We’re living in an age where business success is shrouded in a conundrum. Let me explain what I mean by that. Regular readers of these pages are well aware that I promote finding a niche for your product or service. The “riches are in the niches,” I like to say. And while this is very true, our current commercial climate is also supporting businesses that broadly define themselves. Typically, these are tech companies. They seem to have the okay from market watchers and industry analysts to do whatever they want and find support. For example, while a legacy company like Ford gets judged very strictly on how many cars it sells and at what kind of margins, a company like Tesla – while cars are its main product – is viewed as a “tech” company and is given a tremendously high market value despite the fact that it doesn’t sell all that many cars. We see Amazon selling virtually any item you would find in your local mall and at the same time it sells server space, streams entertainment, develops and sell gadgets, and much more. Google not only provides search results, it powers smartphones, develops gadgets, lays fiber optic cables, and much more. Right now, Facebook is getting a lot of attention because it’s gearing up to create original content, much like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have been doing in recent years. Can a small business or medium-sized business expand in similar ways? Probably not to the degree that we see these major players do it – smaller businesses just don’t have the resources to branch out so radically and take those kinds of risks. However, I don’t think there is any doubt that technology is a major element of many business ventures today. And, if technology is at the core of your business plan, I suggest you explore ways to frame yourself as a tech company, not just a local digital marketing firm, for example. When technology is at the core of your product or service, there’s a good chance you have the talent in-house to expand into other tech areas. You might find some that offer even more potential for success than the area where your current business model is centered. If you’re mining a niche for all its worth and experiencing excellent growth, you can probably put this advice on the back burner for a while. But, I still recommend keeping an open mind to letting your tech tentacles freely explore other opportunities when the time seems...
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