The Personal Brand Builder’s Case For Creating With Abandon
In the hotly competitive market for potential customers’ attention, it takes a lot of effort for the world to start caring about you
I’ve discussed here before about how — prior to moving from Ireland to Israel — I decided to change surname to my current one.
Overnight, the reputation that I had been carving out as a budding journalist, writing both for my own news website and an Irish-American media portal, vanished into (digital) thin air.
I went from having several hundred bylined clips floating around the internet to …. precisely zero clips. It was starting, figuratively and literally, from the scratch.
The Case For Accepting Every Byline You Can
My first few years living in Israel (I moved roughly six years ago) were dominated by …. various facets of life.
I had to come to grips with life in a new country. Make a new circle of friends. Learn a new language. As a result, there wasn’t much time left at the margins for thinking about things like building a personal brand.
At the same time, I was dabbling for the first time in freelance writing.
But not the type of freelance writing I’d dabbled in before, writing for media publications. This type of freelance writing was freelance content marketing writing — helping companies produce “content” to drive lead generation and sales.
When I first ran my name through Google — around this time — I didn’t like what I saw on the search engine result page (SERP). There was nothing (bar news of a distant relative’s wedding).
But I also saw this as an opportunity of sorts.
I didn’t feel a sense of ownership over the content marketing that I was doing on behalf of clients — and the ghostwriting I was precluded from bylining anyway.
Unlike journalism, even though I was being paid for it, it wasn’t really mine. I was writing to help companies sell and not because I necessarily felt passionately about the topic.
I insisted that my old employer keep my name off press releases that I authored on behalf of the company.
I turned down every opportunity to accept a byline for the freelance writing work that I was doing.
If I was starting from digital zero, I wanted to make sure that the stuff I put out to help build myself back up was quality. That if I was putting a foot forward, that it would be my very best one.
This, I believe, was a mistake.
The World Doesn’t Care About You Until You Make It Care About You
Why do I care about building up a personal brand at all, you may wonder?
I think that inbound marketing is enormously powerful — I’ve written lots about it here before — and I reckon that being known as a technology ghostwriter will make working as one a lot easier.
Inbound — attracting people to you — is where marketing is at, at least these days.
But in order to attract people to you, you have to create content that attracts them into your orbit. And if you’re keeping yourself anonymous, there’s simply no way that that process can work.
In marketing, we talk (and think) a lot about funnels. If you’re self-employed and the funnel doesn’t lead to you, then — again — there’s just no way for it to bring results. Bottom line: if you want to attract inbound leads, you’re going to have to both create content and stand behind it.
I can already see the first fruits of the work that I’ve been doing.
About a year ago, I began receiving a slow trickle of inbound leads. From my perspective at least, it’s a lot better than going out looking for clients.
But getting back to my personal branding story.
So if I were starting my freelance content marketing journey today, here’s what I would do differently which is essentially the exact opposite of what I spent years doing.
Unless there was a very compelling reason not to, I would insist on slapping my byline (that’s the ‘By me’ line) at the top of every piece that I could.
Even if I didn’t feel a complete sense of ownership over the work. Even if I had a strong suspicion that I would look back in a year on what I had written and feel like I could have done a lot better.
Instead of finding excuses not to be bylined for my own writing I would actively push for them and contest every decision to take my name off a piece.
Because what I’ve come to understand is this:
In the world of building up brands — whether for businesses or people — things like bylines are currency.
And you need to make a lot of deposits into the checking account for the world to even give the very slightest of cares about who you are, what you do, and what you stand for.
There are (at the time of writing) about 7.9 billion people in the world.
Roughly 360 million of those speak English.
That creates a hotly competitive market for gaining the attention of potential customers.
If you want to capture even the tiniest sliver of it, you need to give yourself a chance to make that happen.
What are you going to do to attract opportunity to you?
