The time is 1:26 am, and I’ve just wrapped up my emails and messages that are more than 600 a day. Though it’s unbelievable, someone stole our cameras with all recordings of the presentation I gave at CEO Lawyer Summit. So, now I have to re-film it.
Deadlines are deadly
It will take me at least 2 hours to complete — but deadlines are just ahead of me, and the buck stops with me. My life may look to you like a simple “4-hour workweek” only if you see it on social media. But I’m living like this for more than 30 years.
In the start, I only consumed the off-the-dollar menu at McDonald’s to save some money. At that time, I couldn’t afford to stay in luxury conference hotels, so rather I stayed in fleabag motels and filled my pockets with food to eat later.
I had to borrow money from my friends so that I can make my payroll. And yet I do not feel that I’m “successful” as a digital social marketer.
Entrepreneurship and overnight success
Entrepreneurship is not as easy as it looks from the outside until you experience it yourself and face very frequent table problems. I interviewed a person yesterday who, overnight, earned 87 million dollars.
And this overnight success means the person took credit card debt for about 8 years, which was just paid only last month. You will see some people on the internet achieving the success you want in a few years. On the other hand, you could be just half of them, but don’t be discouraged.
Either they are not giving you the whole information about their journey, or you might not be aware of the fact that it has taken them a decade or more to achieve that milestone. In this way, most people leave during the journey getting disappointed, which they shouldn’t.
A company stands out in the crowd – in terms of increased sales, more awareness, and better customer experience as a result of a strong, value-focused brand. For instance, the Adidas brand is a company known for sporting success.
As a sportsperson, you are confident about whatever product you see the Adidas logo design on. This is the value the brand has projected to its customers over time.
In the corporate world, branding is a reflection of the values of a company, how it acts and serves the people, as well as how those values are projected.
Branding is what the company stands for. But branding isn’t just for companies.
Professionals have their unique goals, interests, skills, values, and stories to share. And in an ever-growing digital world, a personal brand is expected.
I want to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how you can grow your personal brand because whether you’re a founder or an entrepreneur and you don’t define your personal brand, it is hard to get known.
So I’m going to give you a little tour of how it’s actually done. My hope is that by the end of this article you’ll see what you need to do to be able to develop your personal brand, be able to be seen on social media, know what to say, know how to connect, and use some really pro-level tips.
So are you guys ready? Here we go.
What is a Personal Brand?
A personal brand is in many ways similar to corporate branding – which is a company’s all-inclusive marketing strategy – but more personal as it is who you are, what you stand for, and the values that you want to be projected to others.
Personal branding is steps/plans, actions, and guidelines that prove that you are who you say you are in terms of your identity and values.
A personal brand helps individuals market or communicate their identity and core values to potential employers or clients.
There are several aspects involved in building a personal brand, but in an ever-growing digital world, building your personal brand in the online space is vital.
Having an online personal brand can also be said to have an online presence. This can be achieved by growing an online presence on social media platforms and through a personal website or portfolio.
I’m going to show you what it means to build your personal brand across different social networks.
How To Build A Personal Brand On Facebook
A lot of people use Facebook as a user. For instance, if you click on me as a user, you can see my profile, you can see posts, videos, and photos that I’ve made, and also the number of friends I have on Facebook.
But what I want you to do as a young entrepreneur is create a public figure page. So if you look for me, there’s me as a normal Facebook profile, and then there’s me as a public figure. It’s a business page called Dennis Yu.
With a business page, you have access to ads and analytics, and you can see that I’ve got a different set of posts that look personal and friendly.
In many of the posts on my Business page, I am seen interviewing other people that are in our industry, I’m speaking at conferences, and I’m hanging out with clients, right?
You want to use inception here where you are influencing the people that influence the people that you want to be able to buy your product or service, especially if it’s a SaaS.
You want people to see who your other customers are in a non-sales kind of way. So I can come here and create ads.
Another thing I want you to know is the power of video. When you make short little videos, it doesn’t look like an ad, especially when you do it on your cell phone. Making it at a vertical angle, not horizontal.
When you make videos like this you get people to believe that you’re bigger than you really are. Right. That’s the whole thing of trying to look big.
So I asked my buddy, Grant Cardone to make a video on how we should make one-minute videos and this is what he did.
Grant Cardone speaks on making a one-minute video.
So Grant made a video rather than just talking about making a video. And the key is when you make one-minute videos like that and you capture people’s attention and you’re using your phone and your little girl comes in and interrupts it’s totally okay.
What he did is get your attention. You’re not trying to make a professional video, you’re just trying to humanize.
Now, what I did next was to boost the video using ads so 130,000 people saw it, many of who were fans of Grant, and I got this for maybe half a penny for each person to watch my video.
So think about the stories that you want to be able to tell, and think about your product. Think about your idea. Think about the story of you as a founder.
Talk about how you’re solving problems, everything except for “Hey, we have a really cool software product sign up for a demo. I’d love to get 15 minutes with you”.
I mean, you could certainly do that, but you want to earn the right to people’s attention, and you can see here that this is driving more people who want to engage. This is how you’re building relationships at scale.
How To Build A Personal Brand On LinkedIn
Now, I want to show you the same thing on LinkedIn.
So if we come over to LinkedIn, I’ve got 30,000 connections. I make different posts and I often just cross-post from other channels like Twitter where I take a screenshot and then I say “Hey, who’s with me on this one?”.
This moves people to engage by liking, sharing, and dropping their comments which I also reply to and engage in further discussions. This is how you drive engagement on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is going to be fantastic for you to drive business development and partnership kinds of deals because you put things out there about what you believe in that is tied to the values of your product and talk about challenges.
When you’re real and authentic, which you’ve heard before, but this time in a way that’s professional and empathetic, then you’re going to see all these people want to engage with you.
Engagement on LinkedIn can also be driven by resharing content, honoring people, or just writing a realization that you had. You help people learn about you when you put out content.
I’m literally showing you how to build more leads. You need people to buy your product at scale, you can do that by hiring salespeople, and by taking lots of meetings.
But the thing I see with lots of young entrepreneurs is they listen to the advice that their friends and family have, and those people are well-meaning but you need to talk to the people who are actually your customers, who actually will buy. Someone who really has the pain that you were trying to solve.
How To Build A Personal Brand On Twitter
Here’s what we do on Twitter.
Here is an example of what I did with my friend, Yan, who runs the virtual summit mastery, which is to help them drive more sales by making a tweet he gave me right from my account because I got the blue check and over 70,000 followers.
What I did next is to make another tweet to edify him by saying, “Hey, I learned this from Yan, he is amazing”.
This is a great chance to learn how to run profitable virtual summits!
This is another secret of content creation a lot of people do not know, the Key Secret of INFLUENCING is a technique we use for building business relationships, and it works across all channels. I think you’re going to be able to apply it right away.
Looking at my analytics, I’ve tweeted 518 times in the last 20 days, which is about 20 times a day. And what I’ll do is I’ll just go on a rampage, tweet 10 times at once just ‘cause I had a thought in the shower, anytime I have a thought I’ll just go ahead and tweet that.
And some of the things where you’re honoring other people, or you’re providing thoughts on your food or, you know, just showing you’re a person, and not just being a consumer. That’s how most people use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
And there’s also always some kind of angle that ties back to what I’m doing and what I care about and my knowledge and relationships that I have because that’s ultimately going to sell my product. Right? Because people buy from the fact that they identify with who you are.
How to Drive Engagements and Reach More People
Over 20 days, I got 861,000 impressions from my tweets, that is maybe a quarter million. On most days, some tweets get a large number of impressions of up to 60,000, and on other days it gets as low as 30,000.
You can’t necessarily predict which tweets are going to take off. So just put a lot of stuff out there.
Here’s the point. There is no limit to the number of tweets you have, there is no penalty. With Facebook, you can post once or twice a day, on LinkedIn maybe once a day, and on Twitter, you can post 50 times a day with no penalty.
Isn’t that kind of cool because if you post it will just go right to the top of the feed. So the more followers you have, the more people that could see it, and the more engagement you have to drive the algorithm, which then gives you more reach.
A couple of weeks ago, I made a post where I talked about a failure that I had. It was originally a LinkedIn post but I re-posted it to Twitter.
And this can go for my other social media posts too, I’ll take my top Facebook posts and post them to Twitter or YouTube, or take my YouTube stuff and post it to a blog. I can reuse stuff between all of these different channels.
This is to show you that you can reuse content from channel to channel so you don’t have to worry about trying to create different content for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, your blog, or whatnot.
I got 1000 engagements out of the 10,000 impressions on the post. That is a 10% engagement rate in general.
On social networks, you want a 10% engagement rate. That means that with every 10 people that see something, you want one of them to be able to like, comment or share, when that happens, you’re going to keep getting more reach.
So those of you who are not getting engagement on your social media, that’s okay.
You just need to get a few people to start engaging and you know, even just one person engaging can be enough to drive a deal, and that one person can run a conference or invite you on their podcast, which then gives you access to another 10,000 people in whatever industry you’re in.
Is Paid Social Media Post Boosting An Option?
Now I’m going to show you a little secret most people don’t know. They’re not aware that you can boost a post to get lots of extra traffic and how easy it is. I’m going to show you this.
I’ve got a whole course on this because you can go deep, but I want to show you this one simple thing that you can do to boost important posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to make sure that you get the right reach.
Posts that get engaged with on social media will reach quite a number of persons organically. But with post promotions or boosting, you have the advantage of micro-targeting to the exact audience which you intended for your post.
Some of these posts show they’re promoted. So what does that mean? It means that I spent money to drive ads against it. I can micro-target people who are fans of a competitor or someone else. If they follow a particular person, then I want them to buy my software.
If you are looking to boost your social media posts, ideas, blog, products, services, or books, organically, there are two ways to go about that. First, you can allow an anonymous user to share it on their timeline. This is exactly what I did with Yan.
Secondly, you promote it on your timeline with your followers. But to implement the second part, you have to focus on increasing your audience so that your voice becomes louder.
Write more posts and share regularly to build on the audience, and if you have limited posts and do not write regularly, repurpose the headlines (including curiosity phrases) of your post and add interesting images to portray your idea.
Building a successful personal brand on social media comes with time. It is a marathon and not a sprint. So keep posting regularly and you will see the benefits in the long term.
6 years ago, Mark Wagner, had a mission to build a software company. Here’s his YouTube live:
And today, he is co-founder at Gantry Technologies, creating dashboards for companies who want to get the most out of their Kubernetes infrastructure.
Most people are afraid to vocalize their goals– keeping them inside, fearful that letting others know could lead to ridicule if you flop.
But the brave few who take the initiative to put their goals on display for all to see will attract help from all corners of their life— people they didn’t even know could help.
Witness the power of the one minute video. In this case, more like 10 minutes. And for good measure, Mark made another one, this on what he’s hoping to do after college.
You can use video to also ask questions and as an exercise to help you clarify your thoughts.
People think video has to be “perfect”, so they postpone making it, robbing them of the opportunity.
Being on video is unavoidable, so we must all build skills here– whether Zoom calls, client meetings, trainings, or even hanging out with relatives across the country.
As entrepreneurs, we all know the importance of telling our story and sharing it with the world.
Making videos is a great way to do this- but what if you’re afraid people will judge your video or not like it? You may be suffering from perfectionism in which case you need to start making one minute videos that tell your story so that others can see who you are and help make your dreams come true.
It’s time to take the plunge and start making videos. Yes, videos are scary but they can also be very rewarding when you share your goals with people who want to help you reach them. We recommend starting out by telling your story in one minute or less using a video blog (vlog) format.
This will give you practice editing and screen shooting while sharing what motivates you most about running your business without being too overwhelming for yourself or others. If that sounds like something worth doing then let us know! Our team is ready to partner up with you so we can create an amazing marketing plan for success together.
This morning, one of my managers requested a raise to the highest pay tier in the company.
And he requested that we promote a few other people to manager.
He has the worst performing team in the company by far.
A younger Dennis would have been mad— I would have said “How dare you ask for a raise when your team is wasting money like crazy.”
But extreme ownership has taught me that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
Because I didn’t make his team’s performance more clear and consistently enforce our standards, he would have thought that merely punching the clock was enough for advancement.
And so his team members believed the same, too– that automatic advancement is guaranteed, even if the performance isn’t there.
If you want a goal-oriented team, focus on the results, not how much time they’ve put in or how hard they’ve worked.
Then you can gladly reward those who get the job done.
The larger teams have given me a bigger “empire” of people, projects, and gross revenue.
But when it comes to profit, I did far better years ago.
You see, the more people you add, the more overhead you have to manage.
And it’s harder and harder to catch low quality team members trying to sneak in— the unemployed brother of one of your employees and the slacker who believes you are rich, so they can just coast off your hard work.
Yet if your company is not growing, you’re not creating upward mobility for your good people, who will leave.
No matter the industry, your #1 challenge as a business owner is recruiting leaders who care about the company almost as much as you do.
