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Welcome to the Party

So, rather than spending every day on the phone, Erik started attending Rainmakers meetings (a local networking organization), a business book club, and local Chambers of Commerce get-togethers. He attended at least two to three events a week, at 7:30 in the morning or 5:00 in the afternoon. By meeting other people in the business world, he hoped to learn about new opportunities, meet possible new clients, and find new partners who could act as evangelists to their clients on Erik’s behalf.

Around the same time, he attended a half-day seminar on social media and blogging. Erik had been blogging infrequently up until that point, but he began to take it seriously in 2007. He studied blogging by reading other blogs and books about blogging, then experimenting with some of the new techniques he was learning.

As part of his networking, Erik had coffee or lunch with people he met. He learned as much as he could about them and asked if they could refer him to anyone else who would be interested in learning about his direct mail services. They often asked also about blogging and social media, so he would teach them as much as he could. He spent a lot of time online, blogging, promoting his blog, and communicating on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Smaller Indiana, a now-defunct local social network.

Those connections have led to many opportunities—sales, speaking gigs, blogging opportunities, a job, and even this book—that never would have happened if Erik had limited his job search to just the job boards, and especially if he hadn’t drunk enough coffee to float a battleship.

In 2010 when we were first discussing how to write this book, Kyle said, “We need to write it for the you from 2007. We need to create a game plan for that guy on how to brand himself and promote himself online.”

When we started discussing this latest edition, we realized the principles were still sound, only some of the tools had changed. In that time, our own circumstances have changed as well. Erik has moved to Florida, while Kyle moved to Massachusetts and then back to Indiana. In both cases, we found we had to re-grow our networks, meet new people, and build new relationships. We basically followed our own advice and built up new circles of friends, fans, and trusted mentors.

And we learned a lot of new lessons about personal branding and networking. This edition reflects what we’ve learned.

What Is Self-Promotion?

Self-promotion is just what it sounds like: promoting yourself, your events, your accomplishments, your victories, and even your defeats, problems, and hard-won lessons. You do it so you can increase your visibility, traffic to your website, and sales, as well as to get more speaking opportunities, exhibitions, and gigs—more of whatever it is you’re looking for.

You promote yourself so you can get even more opportunities, which you can then tell people about.

Self-promotion is also called “branding yourself,” because that’s actually what it has become. (That, and it’s what we wanted to call the book.) Think of it as personal branding because you need to think of yourself as a brand, just like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Google, or Facebook.

Why Is Self-Promotion Important?

You can’t count on people calling you out of the blue to hire you, buy your service, or book you for an event if they don’t know about you. The only way to get people to know who you are and what you do is to tell them. And you want to tell as many people as you can who are actually interested.

Self-promotion can help you make those important connections that will further your career and improve your professional standing. It can be as simple as introducing yourself to the organizer of a conference and telling her you are interested in speaking at her next conference, or it can be as involved as writing a book or two and then spending a day emailing every conference organizer you can to get as many speaking deals as you can.

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@kyleplacy: Is that a shot at me?
@edeckers:  No, not at all, Mr. I-Don't-Have-Time-for-Lunch-Today.

What Self-Promotion Is Not

Self-promotion is not bragging or boasting. It’s not acting bigger than you are. It’s just letting people know who you are and what you do.

It’s perfectly acceptable to promote yourself without looking like an arrogant jerk. People are going to be out promoting themselves and their personal endeavors and small businesses. If you’re not, you’re missing good opportunities, and others are going to beat you in the competition. They’re going to sell their art, get their speaking gigs, get more web traffic, or whatever they’re competing with you for.

What Can Self-Promotion Do for You and Your Career?

Without question, self-promotion can make you successful. And if you’re already successful, it can make your personal brand huge. You don’t become a success without knowing a lot of people and having a lot of people know you. If you want to be stuck in a little gray cubicle for your entire career, never rising above lower middle management, keep your head down and don’t attract attention. Actually, put this book down. Stop reading!

But if you want to make a name for yourself, establish a good reputation, finally get that corner office, or even own your own thriving business, you need to promote yourself.

To do that, you need to be passionate about two things: the work you do and yourself. If you’re not passionate about what you do, find the thing you’re passionate about. If you’re not passionate about yourself, seek professional help. The person you should love the most, admire the most, and treasure the most is you. And when you share that confidence in yourself, others feel it, too.

So maybe it’s time to change up your life. You want to get out of your cubicle, get off the road, get out of the factory, put down the hammer, or change careers completely. Or maybe you’re about to start looking for your first job after college. Figure out what you want to do, make it happen, and then start telling people about it. Let them know that you are good at what you do. Let them come to you for answers and information.

Personal Branding

If you ask 100 people what personal branding is, you’ll get 100 different answers. But our answer is this: it’s an emotional response to the image or name of a particular company, product, or person.

Think of some corporate brands you have positive or negative feelings toward: McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Indianapolis Colts, Chicago Cubs. These brands are popular because they have created a lot of positive feelings in their fans, even if they also engender negative feelings in their detractors. Even companies that people hate are still considered brands, because they’re still creating emotional responses.

Similarly, people have emotional responses when they see you or meet you for the first time. These responses can be feelings of joy, pleasure, love, dread, fear, or anger. When they hear your name again, they will either have new experiences and emotions, or they will relive the old ones. The kinds of emotional responses they have depend on you.

What Is Personal Branding?

Branding yourself means that you create the right kind of emotional response when someone hears your name, sees you online, or meets you in real life.

The “right” kind doesn’t mean being someone you’re not. It’s your personality, your voice, your interests, your habits—everything about you that you want people to know. The information you show to other people, the things you say, and the photos you post should all fit within the theme of your personal brand.

If you’re a stand-up comic, the theme of your brand is “funny.” You want people to see that you actually are funny, which means posting some of your jokes and posting links to videos of your routine to your blog.

If you’re a freelance graphic designer, your brand’s theme is “creative.” You want people to know you have artistic skills, so you’ll show samples of your work through an online portfolio, possibly a blog.

If you’re a cost reduction analyst, your brand’s theme is “saving companies money.” You can demonstrate your knowledge by answering questions on LinkedIn, writing useful articles on your blog, and giving talks to Chambers of Commerce meetings. (We’ll talk about your blog in Chapter 3, "Blogging: Telling Your Story.")

Go Brand Yourself

Ask yourself: “What do I want to be known for? What qualities do I want people to associate with me? What is the first thing I want to have pop in their heads when they hear my name?”

Next, create a list of those qualities. Write down everything you can think of in five minutes, even if you think you’re repeating yourself. Don’t edit yourself and don’t leave anything off. This is not a time to be humble or to think, “No one will see me that way.” Come up with every adjective and noun you can think of, no matter how outlandish or weird. It may just spur another idea that actually does fit.

Let’s say your list looks like this:

Creative	Funny	Interested in people
Musical	Well-read	Detail-oriented
Networker	Outgoing	Singer
Knowledgeable	Songwriter	Teacher
Intelligent	Dedicated	Organized

From here, you need to start grouping things that are similar. In one group, you have musical, songwriter, singer, and creative. In another, you have knowledgeable, intelligent, well-read, and teacher. In a third, you have networker, outgoing, and interested in people. You may have a few items left over, but the important thing is that you start looking for trends and groups.

You can call these groups anything you want, but let’s stick with Musical, Knowledgeable, and Networker. These groups are the start of branding yourself. They’re the areas you should concentrate on being known for—the areas that can define you for other people. They may know you for more—being a good cook, a budding actor, someone who’s fun to hang out with at parties—but those are reserved for your friends, not something you want to focus on professionally. These latter attributes can be an additional side to your brand once in a while, but they shouldn’t be the main focus of your personal brand.

How to Build Your Brand

The remaining 14 chapters of this book focus on how to build your brand. You’re going to learn what you need to do to promote your personal brand with each of the social media tools and real-world events discussed, whether it’s writing a blog post, posting messages on Twitter, or giving a speech.

Before you start, however, you need to understand the foundation of personal branding.

The Five Universal Objectives of Personal Branding

Whoever you are, whatever techniques you use, whomever you want to reach, five basic ideas, five universal objectives, are the same for everyone who wants to grow their personal brand.

1. Discover Your Passion

Passion is fundamental to achieving your goals.

What do you love to do? What gets you out of bed in the morning, fires your imagination, and revs you up? What do you think about when you’re daydreaming? How do you spend all of your free time?

Some people are passionate about their work. They love what they do, and that’s where they focus their time and energy. These people—usually entrepreneurs—have found a niche that makes them happy, and they want to find a way to make money from it. They wake up early, stay up late, and spend every waking minute thinking about, talking about, and actually doing the work.

In his book Crush It!, entrepreneur and social media celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk talks about how he spends hours and hours leaving comments on other people’s blogs about wine. It’s not because he enjoys leaving comments or because he wants to boost his web traffic. It’s because he loves wine. He loves selling it, talking about it, and writing about it. His passion for wine has turned him into a celebrity and helped him sell plenty of wine for his family’s liquor store.

Others are passionate about their hobbies. Whether it’s painting, playing in a band, fixing up classic cars, analyzing baseball statistics, or collecting vinyl records, some people love their hobbies and pursue them with an obsessive fervor. They view their day job as a means to an end, which lets them fulfill their passion.

And still others haven’t found their passion. Or they have no passion at all. They go to work, they come home, they eat dinner, they watch TV, they go to bed. And then they do it all again the next day. The idea of enjoying life has been drummed out of them.

These people are dead inside, whether they know it or not. The only thing that gets them out of bed in the morning is the alarm clock and the fear that they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t. They eat for fuel, not pleasure. They have friends out of habit, not because they love being around people. They watch TV not because there’s anything good on, but because they’re afraid of what they’ll learn if they’re left alone for too long with their own thoughts: Nothing in their lives is truly exciting or enjoyable.

You need to have at least one passion in your life. It can be something you are known for, something you build your personal brand on. Or it can even be something you never tell anyone about, preferring to do in private. But the great thing about sharing your passion is that you get to know people who share your interest and create some beneficial relationships.

All this is our way of saying you need to find your passion if you want to achieve your professional goals. More important, your goals need to tie into your passion because that’s how you will achieve them.

If you want to be fulfilled and enjoy earning a living, make sure your goals are achievable through your passions. For example, if your long-term goal is to own a million dollar home and drive an expensive car, you probably won’t get there providing knitting lessons to at-risk teenagers.

We won’t tell you to change your passions. Don’t give them up! If you love giving knitting lessons to at-risk teenagers, by all means pursue it. Just understand that there’s not much money to be made giving knitting lessons, so getting an expensive car this way is probably not feasible. If that’s what you love to do, make sure your goals align with your passion.

However, if your passion is to create a new social networking tool, and you devote every waking hour to programming and promoting it, you have a better chance of getting the mansion in Silicon Valley and Tesla Model X.

It’s a matter of making sure your passions and your goals are in alignment and that you can achieve the one through the other.

We hope you have already found your passion because this book is based on you being passionate about at least two things: (1) yourself and (2) something else.

2. Be Bold

It’s okay to talk about yourself.

Despite what your parents and teachers told you, you can tell people about your accomplishments. Actually, we want you to do that.

We understand that it’s hard to do. You’ve been taught that talking about yourself is bragging. You’re supposed to be humble and quiet about your accomplishments and let your actions speak louder than words.

Think about the past several times you saw somebody boasting about his success, his money, his love life (at networking events, parties, nightclubs, and high school reunions). We can imagine some of the words you used in reference to that person, none of which were flattering, and none of which our editors will let us publish here.

In the movies—like Mallrats, Karate Kid, Gladiator, and The Princess Bride—the braggart always gets his comeuppance at the end, receiving some cosmic justice. “See?” you tell yourself. “This will happen if I brag about what I do.”

The problem is that we associate self-promotion with bragging. We believe telling others about our accomplishments is the moral equivalent of bragging about how much money we make. We associate letting people know we published an article or are giving a talk as the equivalent of showing up at our high school reunion in a $200,000 red Italian sports car.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Self-promotion seems to be especially hard for people from the Midwest, where we live. We’re your typical Midwesterners, only we got over it. We realized we had to be bold without being arrogant. We knew if we wanted to make a name for ourselves, and earn reputations to attract bigger clients and bigger opportunities, we had to overcome this Midwest shyness and be willing to talk about ourselves—a lot.

Self-promotion is just letting people know what’s going on in your lives, keeping people apprised of your special events, occasions, and accomplishments.

Table 1.1 shows a few key differences between bragging and self-promotion:

Table 1.1 The Difference Between Self-Promotion and Bragging

Self-Promotion	Bragging
A Twitter message that says, “I just published my book.”	A vanity license plate that says, “Gr8 Writer.”
Announcing the birth of your child.	Announcing the birth of your eight children at a national press conference.
Telling your friends you’re engaged.	Telling people how much he spent on the ring.
Telling your colleagues about your promotion.	Demanding undying fealty from your underlings.

The biggest difference between self-promotion and bragging is the motivation behind why you’re telling people. If it’s something you’re proud of, something you’re excited about because you just gotta tell someone, that’s self-promotion. If it’s something you want people to do, see, visit, or even buy, that’s self-promotion.

If you announce something so other people will be envious or think you’re cool, that’s bragging, and people won’t like you.

Creating your online personal brand means showing the best parts of your personality so people do like you. What makes you unique and interesting? Why should they want to spend time with you? Why should they care what you have to say? If you’re a fun person, show it. If you’re interested in a lot of different things, share them. If you like to create new relationships, seek out other interesting people.

The important thing is to realize that (a) people are interested in what you have to say and (b) it’s perfectly all right to say it. Just don’t brag about it.

3. Tell Your Story

Your story is what makes you special.

This is the tricky part. We just told you it’s okay to talk about yourself, but now you have to do it without talking about yourself.

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@kyleplacy: Huh?
@edeckers:  Be patient.

Effective personal branding isn’t about talking about yourself all the time. As much as everyone would like to think that friends and family are eagerly waiting by their computers hoping to hear some news, any news, about what you’re doing, they’re not. Actually, they’re hoping you’re sitting by your computer, waiting for news about them.

Believe it or not, the best way to build your personal brand is to talk more about other people, events, and ideas than you talk about yourself. That’s because if you talk about other people and promote their victories and their ideas, you become an influencer. You are seen as someone who is not only helpful, but is also a valuable resource. That helps your brand more than if you just talk about yourself over and over—that gets boring.

But there are other ways you can tell your story, without saying a word. You don’t tell people what you believe; you show it by living it.

The next chance you get, watch people. Study what they wear, what they eat, what they drive. Act like Sherlock Holmes to make simple deductions based on what you observe. You can get a clue to their personalities by noticing simple things like clothing and cars.

That woman over there wearing the New York Knicks T-shirt is probably a basketball fan. The skinny guy wearing the running shoes is a runner. The guy wearing a Green Lantern T-shirt likes comic books. And the woman who drove by in the Toyota Prius with the “Love Your Mother (Earth)” bumper sticker wants to help the environment.

You learned a small part of their personal stories, but they didn’t say a word. The symbols people wear and brands they support tell a story. They let other people know, “This is something I believe in, and I want you to know about it.”

It’s the same for telling your own story. Rather than wearing a sign that says “I love comic books” or sending daily emails to your friends about your obsession with comics, you could write a blog about the comics industry and your favorite titles and characters, or you could publish your own web comic. You could produce a weekly podcast about comic publishing news, cover the news from local and national comic conventions, and even interview other comic artists and publishers. By blogging or podcasting about your passion, you tell the world your story—“I love comic books”—without actually saying it over and over or being a pest about it.

Besides, the sign starts to chafe after a while.

4. Create Relationships

Relationships lead to opportunities.

What’s marvelous about social networking and real-world networking is that you never know what kind of opportunities are going to come your way. Without sounding too mystical or cosmic, you must leave yourself open to the opportunities that may arise because of your efforts.

Erik jokes that this is “faith-based networking”: You will meet the right person at the right time for the right opportunity. As long as you continue to put yourself in the situations where those possibilities can arise, sooner or later, they will come.

The creation of this book is a prime example of the right people meeting in the right place at the right time. We both belonged to a social network called Smaller Indiana, having joined within the first couple weeks of its creation. We met at the first event that the founder, Pat Coyle, organized on Martin Luther King Day 2008.

During our initial meeting, which was already filled with friendly teasing and Kyle accusing Erik of carrying a “man bag” (something Erik flatly denies even now)—

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@edeckers:  It was a leather messenger bag, I swear!
@kyleplacy: Okay, whatever.

—we arranged to get coffee together the next week. In the following months, we continued to bump into each other, get coffee, get lunch, attend the same networking meetings, collaborate on projects, and refer speaking and work gigs to each other. Eighteen months later, Kyle asked Erik to help with another book he was working on, and that led to this one. But it all started with being at the same place at the same time in January 2008.

Whether you’re online or out in the real world, treat every person you meet as a possible future resource. You never know if the person you met at the last Chamber of Commerce meeting will become your next employer. The person you have coffee with one day (or even the one who serves your coffee) could become your business partner. And the person who connects with you on Twitter could end up hiring you to speak at an event two months later. (Just remember to be genuine, and do this without being creepy or seeming predatory.)

You need to treat each of these new relationships with care. Nurture them, help them grow, and tell people your story.

“But how will we have time to grow those relationships?” people usually ask. “We have work to do.”

That’s the beauty of social media. It lets you stay in touch with people in between the times you meet face-to-face. It lets you share your story without doing a big information dump in the first 30 minutes of a one-hour appointment. It lets you find out about a lot of other people all at once, without buying lunch every day. It lets you learn about the details of your lives so that when you do get together, you get to spend more time talking about deeper issues and bigger ideas. And that is where those opportunities are going to come from.

5. Take Action

Even a small step is a step forward.

There’s an old saying that if you hit a rock with a hammer 1,000 times, it wasn’t the 1,000th blow that broke the rock; it was the 999 that came before it.

All the plans in the world don’t amount to much if you don’t actually put them into action. If you want to be someone notable or be considered an authority in your field, you have to start somewhere.

Although you’re not going to become famous with a single blog post or YouTube video, you can’t start without your first one. It’s a matter of writing post after post, creating video after video. It’s publishing those 999 posts or videos that makes the 1,000th effective.

Ask how other people became successful. All of them will tell you that they worked hard—harder than anyone else. They got up earlier, stayed up later, and worked longer in between.

Earlier, we mentioned “faith-based networking” and the idea that you will meet the right person with the right opportunity at the right moment. Whether that meeting was divinely inspired, you also met the right person because you’ve been to hundreds of meetings talking to thousands of people and communicating the same thing: the kind of opportunities you’re looking for.

Just like the rock that took 1,000 blows to break it, you had to meet 999 people before you finally met that one person who changed your life.

We wish we could tell you the secret phrase or handshake that would let you meet that 1,000th person in the first 24 hours of your new personal branding adventure. Unfortunately, we can’t. There isn’t one. But if you follow even half the steps outlined in this book, you’ll eventually get there, and you’ll have fun doing it.

Who Needs Self-Promotion?

Everyone needs self-promotion and personal branding. It’s how you’re going to grow your business, advance your career, and expand your personal network. Few people don’t need self-promotion of some kind. (Actually, all we could come up with were spies and hermits.) Even if you work for a large government agency in some half-forgotten division, sequestered away in the basement, working on some underfunded project (especially if this is the case; see Chapter 15, “Personal Branding: Using What You’ve Learned to Land Your Dream Job”), you need to brand yourself.

Self-promotion is for everyone, not just business people trying to get a job or earn a promotion. Even those outside the corporate world can benefit from promoting themselves.

• Book authors: Although your publisher—your kind-hearted, giving, generous-to-a-fault publisher—

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@edeckers:  Forget it; they said we already blew the
            promotions budget on the launch party.
@kyleplacy: Seriously? I knew we should've skipped the
            lobster.

—will be doing everything she can to promote your book, it’s also up to the authors to make sure they’re promoting their book with websites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, YouTube videos, and several other social media tools and real-world networking opportunities.

• Musicians: Musicians are at a personal branding advantage because they’re already promoting themselves as a brand. Think of your favorite band and everything you like about them: their music, t-shirts, interviews, website, fan pages, and anything else you can find.

All these things go toward maintaining their public image and persona. As a musician, you’ll want to explore every free social media tool where your fans are gathered. It could be Facebook and YouTube, posting videos of your last show, or even a social network devoted strictly to bands in your city or state.

• Public speakers: All public speakers, except for the big-name celebrities who belong to speakers’ bureaus, must promote themselves to conference organizers, meeting organizers, trade associations, and anyone else who hires speakers.

You need to provide evidence of your speaking abilities, but thanks to social media, gone are the days of sending out video tapes or DVDs of your talks. Instead, you can refer people to your website where they can watch videos of your talks, download your one sheet (a single sheet about your qualifications as a speaker), and even read some of the articles that you discuss in your talks.

• Entrepreneurs: This will end up being one of the best marketing campaigns you could run. By equating you with your company, you both become a synonymous brand. When people hear your name, they think of your company, and vice versa. By offering yourself as an expert in your field on a blog and Twitter, people will come to see you as a resource and someone they need to hire for a project or even a long-term contract.

• Salespeople: We’re seeing a major change in the way sales are done around the world. A lot of sales coaches and experts are telling salespeople to put down the phone and quit making cold calls. They’re inefficient, ineffective, and just plain boring (cold calling, not the coaches). Nowadays, salespeople are building relationships rather than databases, providing information and knowledge, and networking with as many people as they can.

We understand that many salespeople still have to slog out their time on the phones, but by keeping track of your sales funnel (see Chapter 11, “Measuring Success: You Like Me, You Really Like Me!”) and finding where your best customers are coming from, you may learn that networking and branding yourself are much more effective than cold-calling some name from a list.

• Job seekers: These are people who need personal branding the most. Every element of a job search is focused on what people think of when they hear your name. You email a PDF or word processing document with your skills and experience on it. You have three or more conversations with several people about how your skills and experience can help their company. And nowadays, you’re searched online by people who make a hiring decision based on what they find. By carefully planning and creating your personal brand and then living up to it, you can greatly improve your chances to find a new job, compared to those people who still think FaceSpace is just for teenagers and perverts.

Meet Our Heroes

We talk to a lot of people about social media, especially in the small business world. And we have met people who are or were in the same boat as Erik, trying to redefine, or even define, themselves—to launch a new phase of their career, make a name for themselves, or just reach people they’ve never reached before. These four fictional people are amalgamations of actual people we’ve worked with, although you can find their "archetype" in most situations. We created them to help illustrate the different lessons in each chapter: the Influencer is well-regarded in their industry, and influences others; the Climber is working their way up the career ladder; the Neophyte is new to an industry or field, even if they’ve been working for several years; and the Free Agent is the person who bounces around from job to job, less concerned with moving up in rank than they are in finding new challenges and higher salaries. You can see how each of them can apply what we discuss in their own lives.

• Allen (influencer) was an account manager for a marketing and advertising agency for 14 years but was laid off six months ago after his agency lost its biggest client. He has many contacts in the agency world and is a member of a professional marketing association.

Allen is an influencer because he may switch jobs, but he stays within the same industry. Influencers are usually hired because of their network and industry knowledge. A lot of salespeople tend to be influencers, hopping from company to company, but staying within their industry and not actually moving up the career ladder.

• Beth (climber) is a marketing manager for a large insurance company. She has been with this company for 10 years, but this is her second insurance company. She has moved up the ranks in this company, as well as with her last employer.

Beth is a climber because she changes jobs to climb her career ladder, but she will stay within the same industry and even the same company to do it. Her ultimate goal is to become the chief marketing officer of an insurance company, preferably this one.

• Carla (neophyte) is a former pharmaceutical sales rep who was laid off after eight years with her company. She is interested in working for a nonprofit, either as a program director or a fund-raising specialist.

Carla is a neophyte because she is not only changing jobs, but changing industries. This means she is starting over in terms of knowledge, influence, contacts, and even possibly her skill set. A new college graduate would also be a neophyte.

• Darrin (free agent) is an IT professional who leaves his job every two or three years in pursuit of more money. He is a free agent because he’ll stay at roughly the same level of job, regardless of where he goes, but he can make more money because bigger companies require his expertise. Darrin is not considered an influencer because he jumps industries every time he jumps companies, which means it’s harder for him to make a name for himself in any given field.