Personal Branding for
Digital Startupers
Luka Khakhnelidze
A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.
Some things that are hard if no one knows who you are:
- Trying to get a job (or better job)
- Trying to find a business partner
- Trying to promote a new thing you made
- Trying to get customers!
Discovery
Value Proposition
Trust
Three things you need:
Discovery
- Meetups and Conferences (events)
- Blog
- Forums
- Blog
- Website
- Social Media
- Open Source Projects
Value Proposition
- What do you do?
- What are you passionate about?
- What are you good at?
- What can you offer?
- To Customers
- To Business Partners
- To Your Current or Potential Employer
Trust
- People sticking their neck out to recommend you
- Social Proof
- Letters of Recommendation
- Linkedin Recommendations
- All with permission to republish
Pre-Requisites
Your Everyday Work
- Do a good job
- Be nice
- Get Recommendations
Recommendations
- Ask for them!
- Get them in writing on LinkedIn
- Get them with permission to publish
Ok, let's go.
Step #1: Get yourname.com
#2: Make a Landing Page
#3: Get a great headshot photo.
- Recognizable
- Non-sketch
#4: Pick a Unique Screenname
KnowEm.com helps
Your Website
Make an About/Contact Page
Create a Blog
Self-Hosted Wordpress OR Custom Domain @ Medium.com
Blog Content Ideas
- How-To
- Story
- ProTip
- Break/Fix
- Review
- Top 5
- Introducing ___ (!)
SEO
- Don't game it
- Have a Descriptive title
- Use an SEO plugin
- Write well
Social
- Meet other startupers where they are
- Help influence other's ideas
- Go to social events
- Be excited!
Social
Media
Your Profile
- Have a consistent photo
- Link back to your website!
- Have an interesting bio
- Plug your project updates
Where To Post?
- Twitter?
- LinkedIn?
- Facebook?
- Snapchat?
- Instagram?
- Google+?
Where To Post?
- Twitter has the largest tech focus
- Medium.com for long form
- Follow the attention
- Get in on new networks
- Engage (very cliche, but works)
What to Post?
- Curate (repost) Great Content
- Retweet w/comment
- Your Blog Posts
- Updates
- Images are more memorable
Timehop
Your Content: The gift that keeps on giving
Buffer
Post once to everywhere
The Content Pipeline
your idea
Blog
Timehop
Social Media
Talks from the meetups
Project updates and explanation
Speaking and Talks
It's a Blog Post in Verbal Form
- Speak clearly and loudly
- Shorter is actually better
- Q and A
- It's OK to not know!
- Speak on topics you know without slides
- Aim for 75% of the room
At the Meetup
- Introduce yourself
- What do you do?
- Where do you work?
- What do you work on?
- Follow people on social media from the meetup
- Engage!
- Write a post about the talk you saw
Analyze
And
Capture
Get Google Analytics
- Find your most popular articles to share
- Find where people are coming from and target them.
Capture with a call to action and build an Email list