Do you want know how to build a strong and very profitable personal brand online?
What does it really take to get to travel the world, speak in front of big crowds, charge $22,000 per speech, and make a big impact in other people’s lives?
Well, the simple answer is to build your authority and powerful personal brand online before you actually need it, by putting out really high quality content and providing massive value to your audience on a consistent basis.
To learn more about the importance of personal branding, I interview David Meerman Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and many other bestselling books.
Feature Download: Download Your FREE “Personal Branding Guide” (Download Now)
Listen Now – Interview With David Meerman Scott
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More About This Show
The Lifestyle Architects is a podcast and web show that will help YOU design your life, build your business, and live your dream. It features the most inspiring and successful lifestyle entrepreneurs, thought leaders and other change makers in the world doing extraordinary things.
The show format is both a podcast and web show (YouTube).
In this episode of The Lifestyle Architects, I interview David Meerman Scott, who is the bestselling author of ten books, including the total must read, The New Rules of Marketing & PR.
David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, the bestselling author of ten books, including three International Best-sellers. He is also an advisor to emerging companies, and a professional speaker on topics including marketing, leadership, and social media. He’s an internationalist, having delivered presentations in 40 countries on all seven continents.
Watch Now – Video Interview With David Meerman Scott
(Click the play button and watch the video interview above)
If you want to watch this video on YouTube you can do so here.
Now, let’s break down everything that David Meerman Scott shared about how you can build your personal brand online (and why it’s so important to build your brand before you actually need it), and much, much more actionable stuff you can implement today.
Here are some things you’ll discover in this show:
How David Meerman Scott built his personal brand online
Why you should build your authority and personal brand online in the first place
David Meerman Scott’s take on content creation 2014 and beyond
How to position yourself as an expert in your field (to charge premium prices)
How to promote yourself online the right way
Why creating buyer personas is essential for your marketing
The benefit of just passing out free eBook/content, without collecting information (David Meerman Scott’s take on this)
The 4 ways David Meerman Scott makes money from his personal brand online
And much, much, more!
The Importance Of Personal Branding With David Meerman Scott
Here are some things you’ll discover in this show:
1. How David Meerman Scott Built His Personal Brand Online
2. Content Creation (And Why It’s So Important)
3. How To Position Yourself As An Expert In Your Field & Stand Out In A Crowded Marketplace
4. How To Promote Yourself The Right Way
5. How David Meerman Scott Makes Money From His Personal Brand
6. Conclusion: Summing It All Up
7. Relevant Resources And Links Mentioned
Feature Download: Download Your FREE “Personal Branding Guide” (Download Now)
How David Meerman Scott Built His Personal Brand Online
One of the most important things David Meerman Scott did early on in 1998, was that he decided to use his middle name “Meerman” professionally.
The reason why David did that was because there are many other David Scotts’ out there. There’s a David Scott who walked on the moon, a David Scott who’s an iron man triathlon champion, and a David Scott who’s a member of the United States congress.
David realised that it wouldn’t work if he was just called David Scott, so he started to use his middle name David Meerman Scott and that was back in about 1998 when there were very few people online.
That was one of the best decisions he has ever made for personal branding, and made himself totally unique on the web. There was no other person in the world with the same name as him. And that was a very important decision.
Up until 2002, he was Vice president of a company called News Edge, which was then acquired in 2002 by Thompson. They fired David, and that meant that he went on his own in 2002 and he has been writing books and delivering speeches since then.
From the very beginning in 2002, he had a website. His website was the front page to the world and then early on in 2004 he started to blog, in 2008 he joined Twitter, he joined YouTube right away, he joined Facebook the same week that it became available for non-college students etc.
The personal branding has really been a focus of being his personal brand online and that led to his brand offline.
When people Google you, it’s really important to own at least the first page. What shows up when you Google your name? Do you own your personal domain name (yourname.com or a variation there of)? If not, head to Namecheap right now and buy your domain name. It will be one of the best decisions you’ll ever make for your professional career and personal brand.
Spotting trends
The New Rules of Marketing & PR came out in 2007 in the first edition, however he started writing it in 2005, and now it’s in its 4th edition.
When David first starting writing about all these ideas, were really new. He was fortunate in around 2 things.
Much of his career, he spent in the publishing business. He worked for an American newspaper, the electronic division of an American newspaper company. Then, early in his career, he worked for a big bank on the Wall Street trading floor.
David Meerman Scott learned 2 things before almost anybody else:
1) He learned about real-time content.
2) He also learned about electronic publishing.
He was one of the first few people to realise that the best way to market your business and the best way to sell things online, is to think like a publisher.
And that’s what David did. He focused on understanding the idea of delivering content, not as a form of advertising, but as a form of publishing. And marketing on the web is really all about publishing content.
Fortunately, he was the first person to really to articulate those ideas, the first person to blog about those ideas, the first person to write a book about those ideas.
David Meerman Scott noticed some trends early, and he found that it’s very important to talk about trends if you see them early because so many people are doing the opposite. They’re talking about what everybody else is talking about.
Content Creation (And Why It’s So Important)
On the web, you are what you publish! Click to tweet!
This statement absolutely true. If you’re publishing great content, it means on the web you’re great.
If you’re publishing nothing on the web, it means on the web you’re nothing. And if you’re publishing bad information like some people do, then that means, on the web you’re bad.
It’s about what you create for a couple of reasons:
1) If you’re creating great information, people can find you through the search engines, and they can also find you through social networks.
If somebody is looking for you on Twitter and you’re on Twitter, then great, they can find you. If you’re not, well, they’re not going to find you.
2) The other thing is that when somebody is making a decision about working with you or working with your company, or they want to decide whether they are going to do business with your organisation and you’re publishing great information, you’re really taking advantage of making the “hard” part already done. The hard part is educating people about you.
“Who is David Meerman Scott?
Well, here is who I am. You can check out my blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, and all the different channels that I have and learn a great deal about me.”
For example, now most of David Meerman Scott’s revenue comes from delivering paid speeches all over the world. So if somebody is interested in booking him, they can learn all about him by his online content.
And that’s the same which is true of everybody, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, whether you’re a doctor, lawyer, or you’re selling a product or service online.
Also, and this is important, interestingly it works for finding a job. Most people when they’re looking for a job, still do the traditional route. They make a CV, they send the CV out, and they hope that hey find a job.
But David has seen so many people who are really successful when they create some great information on the web, publish it out and then people want to hire them because employers will find this person really interesting and want to have him on their team.
Build your personal brand before you actually need it! Click to tweet!
Even if you have a job currently that you don’t like that much and you want to become an online entrepreneur, you can start by publishing great content on the web about something you really enjoy and have an interest in. That will help you establish authority in your field and build a powerful personal brand in the process.
If you create a great presence online, it’s available for when you need it.
David Meerman Scott managed to create his online presence while he was still an employee for that company. This was way back in 1998.
And then if you want to continue to be an employee of the company that online presence can still help you, but if you decide that you want to go out on your own, you decide you want to write a book, you decide that you want to do something else with your personal brand, you’ve already got it created. You want to find a new job, you’ve already got your personal brand created.
There’s a lot of people who tend to want to wait to create a personal brand until they need it, and David is not sure if that works as well as the idea of “hey, let’s create something now because I’ve got it to be able to use when I can”.
A lot of people say that they don’t know how to write (“Im not a very good writer”), or that social media is not for them etc. But there’s so many different aspects of social media.
There’s visual social media with things like Instagram. There’s video social media with things like YouTube, Vine and Vimeo.
There’s ways to create a great presence on social media that doesn’t require writing.
You can create other great content as well besides writing, things that have images and visuals.
What’s working for David Meerman Scott when it comes to content creation today?
David Meerman Scott’s most important form of content creation is still his blog.
His blog is important to him because that’s where he starts his thinking process. That’s medium form content, maybe 300-500 words kinds of content (I tend to focus on more in-depth, longer form content as you may know by now, but it’s important to find something that works for you). That’s where he explores ideas that are new for him and that’s where he gets his best ideas out there.
And then, he uses the other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ etc., for the shorter form content where he tends to link to his blog.
What’s interesting about the blog posts is that if he has a couple of blog posts that start to resonate with people, then that might be an idea he might explore in his speeches.
If he has five or ten blog posts that are similar that resonate, which people link to, tweet about, and leave comments on, maybe that’s going to be a good thing that he can use as a subject of a new book. And David Meerman Scott often does just that.
David’s best ideas on the blog become the topics of his future books.
That’s what happened with the book that just came out earlier this year, Marketing the Moon, which is his thoughts about the marketing aspects of the Apollo Lunar Program. He talked about it on his blog and then wrote about it in his book.
That’s a great way to essentially repurpose your content.
Many times when David starts a new book, he might have 10, 20, or even 30% of the actual book done because he can use the blog posts that he has already written on that subject as the starting point for the book. That’s pretty cool!
Joe Pulizzi said that about 75% of his book Epic Content Marketing was actually already out there on the web for free.
David also gives away a lot of white papers, ebooks and stuff like that without people having to even have to register or sign up for something with their information.
Is it just okay to give away as much content as possible or maybe have them sign up for our newsletter and build our list?
David Meerman Scott thinks that either way can work. David personally does not have an email newsletter and collect people’s emails addresses.
People can subscribe to his blog, follow him on Twitter or Facebook and, connect on LinkedIn etc. So there’s many different ways that people can follow up with what he’s doing, and he just doesn’t do that through email.
What David has found is that the more information that he gives away completely for free with no strings attaches, with no registration required, the better it is for him and for his personal brand. So that’s what David focuses on.
He focuses a lot on creating something that is totally free, and that spreads his ideas, it sets up links that the search engines find that get search engine optimisation so that people can find him through interesting search terms, it makes it so people have things that they can share.
People don’t generally share content that has a requirement that you have to give an email address. So David thinks it’s really important to have some content that’s completely free.
David is a huge believe that everybody should have at least some content that’s completely free.
If you choose to have an email newsletter, that’s fine and there’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t assume that you have to make everybody sign up for it, and don’t assume that you have to force people to give away their email addresses by making all the best content on your site available only for a download where you have an email address requirement that people deliver.
David is from the standpoint of giving away as much content as you can for free. He’s not in favor of making people register for content. But he recognise that there is people who have this view point and many people have been successful with that.
Whatever works for you is great, David just would like to see that everybody has something valuable that’s free.
Side note: Most of my guests have said that it’s extremely important to build your email list. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish of course, although I personally believe that everybody who has some kind of personal brand and online business can benefit strongly by building an email list from the very beginning.
Always remember that the “money” is in the relationship you build with your email list.
How To Position Yourself As An Expert In Your Field & Stand Out In A Crowded Market Place
David Meerman Scott suggests that you can do a few things:
1) Figure out a particular expertise that’s interesting to you.
Part of that, is the idea of how can you think of a niche business, a niche market, a niche way of looking at the world that you can take advantage of.
And it may be something as simple as saying;
“Okay, maybe I can’t be the best accounting person who’s talking about the accounting world or who’s an expert in accounting. But what I can do is that I can be an expert in the accounting business for the music industry or for another industry.”
That’s a niche that you can take on and become an expert and the go-to person in because it’s more narrow than just “accounting” for example.
2) Even if you don’t create something right away for your professional life, you can still create something around your personal life, and then you can use that as part of your personal brand.
For example, David talks quite a bit about a couple of things. He talks about surfing, music which both are two things that interests him among other things.
And in many of his books and blog posts, he’ll talk something about live music or surfing.
If you create content around something that really interests you, you’re building your personal brand. You’re separating yourself from everybody else and when somebody is interested in maybe hiring you or doing business with you, they say, “Yea yea, you’re the guy who’s really interested in music, or you’re the guy who’s really interested in surfing”. It’s very memorable and a more personal way of doing business.
A couple of David’s other strong interests; one is the band The Grateful Dead, and he wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.
Another interest is the Apollo Lunar Program, and one of David’s latest book which came out earlier this year is called Marketing the Moon. It’s about the marketing aspects of the Apollo Lunar Program.
So if David never really had developed those two interests, in the rock band the Grateful Dead, and an interest in the Apollo Lunar Program, then he wouldn’t have been able to be seen as an expert that somebody wanted to be able to write those two books.
He had already developed his online presence as someone who has an interest in those two subjects so publishers were happy to have him write books and now people are also more than happy have to David deliver speeches on those two topics.
And it remains that you just have to get that information out there right away.
People buy people, they don’t buy products or companies. Click to tweet!
Storytelling on the web – David is using his interests to do that. It makes it so much easier to create all the great content for him as well since it’s already part of his own personal story and who he is.
People do business with people, there’s no question about that. The more things that you can do to humanize yourself, the better. We, humans have gone through like 50 years of mass advertising.
Mass advertising didn’t exist in any big way prior to television. But when television came around in the 1950’s for the most part in most countries, and then certainly in the 1960’s, advertising became the best way to get your product or service out there.
But now advertising is much more difficult to break through. People crave more humanity today. And the good news is that social networks allow us to be human.
Look at this Skype video interview between David and I for example. We’re 1000’s and 1000’s of miles away from one another, but we’re having a conversation and at the same time we’re creating a great piece of content that can get out there. And we’re also allowing people a little glimpse into mine and David’s humanity. That’s a revolutionary idea. What we can do today is like science fiction, if we look back, just a short few years.
10 years ago, if you would say that you would be doing a video chat with somebody and that’s going to be available for other people see, that’s just crazy. And now we can do just that, and it’s free! It’s pretty amazing if you think about it!
There’s so many of these kinds of tools that allow us to humanize ourselves. So at the same time that people crave humanity, we also have the tools to be able to create something that is human, that is a way of getting ourselves out there.
David Meerman Scott thinks it’s a perfect opportunity for anybody to jump into these new tools if you haven’t already or to expand them if you’re just experimenting a little bit.
David is always looking for new ways or methods that he can use, to get his ideas out there. He’s not necessarily trying every brand new thing that comes along, but he is thinking about what the best ways are that he can use to get himself out there in a bigger way and reach more people.
Additional Resources:
Premium Positioning with Nick Reese
How to Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Cal Newport
How To Promote Yourself The Right Way
David Meerman Scott doesn’t think that there’s one any particular right way to promote yourself online.
He thinks it’s up to a few things:
1) What kind of content are you most comfortable making. What works for you, what kind of content do you like to create on a consistent basis?
That’s the most important thing!
David likes to appear on other people’s podcasts and video channels like he did here on The Lifestyle Architects.
He doesn’t have his own podcast, he doesn’t have a series of video chats. That’s just his personal style.
He likes to write. He enjoys text based content whether it’s tweets, his blog, longer ebooks that he delivers for free or even in a print book (he has 9 books out there!).
So David likes to write, but that doesn’t mean that everybody has to create content by writing.
2) What’s important for your buyers or the people who you’re trying to reach.
Is your particular marketplace more likely to consume content that’s visual in nature, or are they more likely to consume text based content? Or maybe a combination of the two?
Is your market technology savvy and therefore likely to maybe take advantage of the newer kinds of social networks? Are they likely to maybe be interested in SlideShares? Are they more likely to be on Twitter? Are they more likely to be on LinkedIn vs Facebook or are they on both?
That will also help you to figure out where you need to create content, because if you’re trying to reach a particular audience and they tend to focus on one social network versus another, you probably need to think about which social network that is.
Specific example
If you’re trying to reach much younger audiences, they are more likely to be on Tumblr and older audiences are less likely to be on Tumblr.
That’s not true of every single person of course. But for some reason Tumblr skews to younger demographics. So if you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, you probably need to think about Tumblr.
If you’re trying to reach an older demographic, then maybe Tumblr isn’t that important.
It’s really important to have a buyer persona and be clear over that. You can read more about it my FREE 30+ Page Epic Content Marketing Guide I putt together based on an interview with Joe Pulizzi.
How David Meerman Scott Makes Money From His Personal Brand
David Meerman Scott has 4 ways that he generates income from his personal brand:
1) The majority of his revenue comes from speaking engagements. He speaks all over the world, and he has spoken in 40 countries on all 7 continents so far, pretty impressive!
2) He makes revenue from his paid print books. He has 9 books now and some of them has done really well. That’s a pretty good revenue source.
3) He makes revenue because he’s on the advisory board of about 6 companies including Hubspot. For those organisations, David makes money when the companies are successful. He provides advice and then when the company is successful, he participates in their success.
4) The forth way that he generates income is that he has a very small number of coaching clients he works with on a regular basis. He just provides advice over the telephone coaching. That’s a very small revenue and he only does it with a very select number of people, so the vast majority comes from speaking gigs.
But in all of those cases, every single one of them, there all that revenue is generated as the result of David Meerman Scott is having a strong personal brand.
So if you want to become someone who makes money by writing books and giving speeches, a personal brand is required.
David has also positioned himself as a premium brand so he can charge much more premium prices as well for the few coaching clients he has and all the speaking gigs he delivers around the world.
As an example, for a one hour keynote speech David Meerman Scott charges $22,000!
It’s some real money and it adds up. David says that it’s a great way to earn a living because he doesn’t really feel like it’s work, he just loves to speak.
He has to get on a lot of airplanes which is not always easy to travel and be away from his family but it certainly beats working for a living because he doesn’t feel like it’s work at all.
Conclusion – Summing It All Up!
If you were to start over today, building your online presence and personal brand from scratch today, without all the relationships you’ve built up and with limited money, what would be the first few steps you would take?
1) It was very important for David Meerman Scott to have a unique identity to the world. That’s why he used his middle name “Meerman” in his professional life, so he’s David Meerman Scott. That’s what everybody knows him as.
For anybody starting out, it’s very important to figure out how you can be unique on the web.
How can you create a unique company name or a unique branding attribute of yourself? Or if you do what David did, create a unique name on the web for yourself – in David’s case by using his middle name so that when somebody is looking for you, they find you that you can carve out that identify.
2) David Meerman Scott made a mistake when he called his blog some random name. He called it WebInkNow. and it’s a URL that’s meaningless. He wishes that he has called his blog “David Meerman Scott Blog” or “The David Meerman Scott Marketing Blog” or “The Marketing Blog”, or something related to marketing and sales because what he did, is not the best kind of branding. But again, he did it back in 2004 and it’s 10 years ago and he can’t change it back now because it is what it is.
It’s important to think about when you’re creating a niche online, what will you be seen as to people who are trying to reach you.
That’s why having a unique name for yourself and/or your business on the web is very important. It’s also crucial that you give thought to what your domain or web addresses will be, in other words what are the things you call yourself and your brand, so other people can find you easily when they search for you.
David Meerman Scott would definitely create:
A blog – Starting a blog would be one of the first things David would do.
Twitter – He would also set up an account on Twitter, and start building relationships with other people in his niche.
Those two things would be the places where David Meerman Scott would start if he had build his online presence and personal brand from scratch today, and then he would go from there.
And always remember… all of this stuff is fun!
David was a marketing and sales person back in the day when there was no fun. Marketing meant making brochures and advertisements and sales meant picking up the telephone and doing cold calls. It was horrible.
But this new form of sales and marketing, it’s fun, interesting and enjoyable.
Have fun with it!
Relevant Resources And Links Mentioned In This Episode
David Meerman Scott
WekInkNow. - Check out David’s blog!
The New Rules of Marketing & PR - A total must read, love this book!
The New Rules of Sales and Service – David’s new book!
Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program
Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History
Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage
Connect with David on Facebook and Twitter
How to Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Cal Newport
Premium Positioning with Nick Reese
The Principles of Epic Content Marketing with Joe Pulizzi
Getting Your First 10,000 Email Subscribers
If you love listening to audio books, just like me, get your free audio book today, my gift to you for taking your time to watch and listen to this interview with David Meerman Scott!
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Now It’s Your Turn!
What do you think? Have your realized the importance of building your personal brand before you actually need it and promoting yourself the right way online? Leave a thoughtful comment below sharing the MOST IMPORTANT insight you got! Be specific – tell a story, please. I’ll respond to every one.
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Stay inspired,
Navid
The post David Meerman Scott on Why You Need To Build Your Personal Brand Online Before You Need It appeared first on Navid Moazzez.