COURSE REVIEW WORKSHEET | ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE SECTION 4: DEVELOPING YOUR BRAND ASSETS SECTION 4: DEVELOPING YOUR BRAND ASSETS COURSE REVIEW WORKSHEET | ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE SECTION 4: DEVELOPING YOUR BRAND ASSETS Your First Personal Brand Pillar: Your Website In online marketing, business, or life in general, it is always best to focus on controlling what you can control. The best thing that we can control online, then, is our personal website. By focusing our time on building our personal brands, we can simultaneously set ourselves up for success while learning the necessary skills that will help us as we work with influencers. Your Second Personal Brand Pillar: Your LinkedIn Profile There are several reasons why having a great LinkedIn profile is so important for your brand: ACTION ITEM: Head online and see if your name is available to purchase as a domain — if it is, buy it right away. ● Resources: NameCheap, GoDaddy ● If your name isn’t available, try adding a hyphen ● If still no luck, get creative! ○ Other brand names ○ Other TLDs or unconventional TLDs 1. Research: Second-degree connections are important when reaching out to an influencer. LinkedIn will be essential in helping you find people who work closely with your influencer. 2. Professionalism: Reaching out via LinkedIn is the most professional way to reach out to influencers outside of email. 3. Expand your network QUICKLY: Connecting with tier 3 influencers is a great place to start before you begin to reach out to tier 2 influencers. 4. Discoverability: If your profile is optimized correctly, you’ll be much easier to find in LinkedIn searches. BONUS! It’s an opportunity to stand out because most people use LinkedIn poorly... Not you! COURSE REVIEW WORKSHEET | ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE SECTION 4: DEVELOPING YOUR BRAND ASSETS Avoid This Common Mistake As You Build Your Brand Are you TELLING people what you do... or SHOWING them what you do? This is the difference between getting someone to take action when they notice your brand and the same person seeing your brand and instantly getting distracted and not engaging with you. ACTION ITEM: Run the Cheesy Inspirational Google Images Test on anything you have written about yourself. If you can take ANY word from what you wrote (whether it’s on your website or on your LinkedIn bio), search that word in Google images, and if a cheesy inspirational image comes up, you failed. Don’t be this guy. How Influencers Become Influencers (And How You Can Too) If you looked at all of the most respected influencers in the world and identified what they have in common, you’d find one thing: they all create content. Here’s why you need to begin creating consistent content: 1. You’re more likely to be brought onto an influencer’s team if you have content 2. Content further positions you as a rainmaker 3. Creating content plants seeds to help you reach influencers and puts you in a thought leadership position 4. Having content strengthens your brand, which makes it easier to connect with influencers 5. Creating content helps to strengthen your own knowledge ● When we decide that we will teach something, we are immediately motivated to improve our own understanding of it ● Teaching or writing for others requires us to think of new and alternative ways to understand a subject, and of simpler, more creative ways to transmit that understanding to other people ● Your audience will help you realize what you do and do not know “An immaculately presented, articulate, and well spoken young man, who possesses a passion for excellence” COURSE REVIEW WORKSHEET | ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE SECTION 4: DEVELOPING YOUR BRAND ASSETS How Influencers Become Influencers (And How You Can Too)... Continued Your goal is to establish yourself as a thought leader and peer to your targeted influencers. You don’t have to “go viral” in order to benefit from creating content. There are three kinds of content: Here are some questions to get you started... ➔ What are the current things you have mastered / are really good at? ➔ What subjects do friends marvel at you and say “You make that look so easy!” or ask “how do you do that?” ➔ What are some of the valuable things you’ve learned from other people that you’d like others to learn about? ➔ What kinds of things are you spending money on / are investing in yourself to learn more about? Written You could use your site’s blog, medium.com, or LinkedIn, to name a few. You could even write your very own eBook. Audio You could create a podcast and share it through Stitcher, SoundCloud, or iTunes. Visual You could create videos and start a YouTube channel or build an Instagram page if you are interested in photography. PRO TIP: Start creating content on the same topic that your ideal influencer produces. This will give you a richer perspective of the industry, and shows the influencer that you are a logical person to help them take care of their brand! Icons made by Freepik from flaticon.com