Archive for March, 2011

How To Market Your Personal Brand: A Case Study

2 comments Written on March 23rd, 2011 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Marketing, Personal Development
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My original title for this post was How To Become A Self Promoting Slut. I thought it would be bold and a lot more attention grabbing than “Marketing Your Brand” which is what this post is about. Just so you know, I even went to the trouble of seeing what other people on the web thought of the s-word and opinions seem to be divided so I figured: I'm going with it! The original title was also extremely accurate: once you have developed your personal brand, your full time job will be to market that brand non-stop. Anyway, for this part of our 4 Easy Steps To Creating The Brand Called You, I thought I’d do something a little different. This post on marketing your brand is going to be a case study in personal branding. Even though I dis’d his home studio in a prior post, Aaron Marino, the man behind Alpha M Image Consulting and ever the gentleman, graciously gave of his time and described for me how he built and marketed his personal brand. Which also explains why I had to change the title: I was looking at the finished product with the picture of Aaron right under the title and I knew someone was going to get the totally wrong idea. My shock marketing tactics will have to wait for another day, but at least I feel better about the whole thing! In any event, on with the case study:

The Brand

The guy’s guide: image, style and fashion expertise for the average, everyday guy from a regular, heterosexual guy who happens to have a distinguished talent for fashion and image awareness.

What It Means

Aaron’s brand stands for redefining the alpha male.

Aaron’s Story

Aaron is a YouTube sensation, providing advice to men on how to manage their image. Aaron covers everything from fashion, style, hygiene and character development for the average, everyday guy. His short video segments are immediately appealing, accessible, and helpful, and as a result they garner thousands of views. He’s a regular guy with a developed fashion awareness: a guy who happens to know about cuts, fit, fabrics and threads. He teaches basic fashion and image lessons that work for real guys. As a result, Aaron has established himself as an authority on men’s style and image on the internet. Through his YouTube channel, his reach is global and he is now sought after for fashion advice and image consulting from men all over the world.

How It Started

Aaron started with a web site, blog and ebook called Male Style Guide. His early target market was middle aged, recently divorced men trying to get back out into the dating scene. As Aaron got busier, the blog became harder to maintain and he started making videos that he published on YouTube. The videos were a huge hit and opened a whole new set of opportunities. Aaron, now 35, noticed that his videos appealed not just to middle aged guys, but also a younger audience: young men looking for basic skills in fashion and image. When Aaron started posting videos, there were tons of videos and channels on YouTube dedicated to women’s fashion and style (try searching for "makeup" or “outfit of the day” and you’ll see what I mean), but there was scarcely anything on the topics of fashion and style for the regular guy. Aaron took a first mover advantage on YouTube for the everyday male fashion and style market segment. The brand has evolved beyond male fashion and style to include character development. Aaron now advocates a rebirth of chivalry to go along with the confident and self assured character that comes with looking good.

Marketing Channels

In the early days when he was promoting his web site, Aaron used Google Adwords and described it as the “best bang” for his buck at the time. While Adwords were good, the development of the YouTube channel was a game changer: his reach became global and has resulted in his business taking off. Just like the YouTube videos, Aaron recommends going after free press over advertising. He suggests emailing the editors of magazines and newspapers relevant to your target market and pitching actual story ideas. You’re helping them and helping yourself at the same time, and it doesn’t cost anything.

Highlights

Aaron told me that he receives emails almost every day now by men telling him how much his short videos have helped them turn their lives around. Knowing that he impacts the lives of others in a meaningful and significant way means the most to Aaron. I could feel a bit of the emotion in Aaron’s voice when he told me about this, and it’s a reminder that what we do as a contribution to others that is the real payoff - not the business or the money. One could only describe Aaron's videos as a genuine service to the fashion challenged male.

Words of Wisdom

Once you’ve defined your brand and your passion, think outside of the box: besides your niche, what is your “gimmick”, what is that thing that you do differently that makes you memorable. Go with it, and become a self promoting slut. Identify all the avenues and streams to get the word out!

Bonus Material!

Besides sharing the story of his brand and how he markets it, Aaron also provided some tips for the average guy on how to “package yourself”, because as we know, how you look is an important component of packaging your brand:

  • Grooming: Spend an additional 3 to 5 minutes per day on grooming. Develop a schedule so that your appearance is always maintained in an efficient manner. For example, trim nose hair on tuesdays and thursdays, trim your nails on wednesdays, eyebrows on fridays, etc.
  • The gym: Engage in some kind of physical activity for 30 minutes 6 days a week. If you can only get out 5 days a week, bump that up to 40 minutes. It doesn’t have to be the gym: it could be playing racketball, hockey, etc...
  • Dressing on a budget: Good clothes don’t have to cost a lot. Some discount stores will sell designer suits for $120 and good shoes for $59. Be patient and spend the time looking around for these deals. If you are on a distressed budget, even thrift stores can be the source of good clothes.

Finally Aaron's must have wardrobe. Every guy must have at least the following in his closet:

  • One pair of great jeans (not necessarily expensive, just great fitting).
  • One pair of black loafers that you could wear with jeans or even a suit.
  • One good belt to match the shoes.
  • One great fitting white dress shirt.
  • One suit, preferably charcoal grey (a color that could be worn on virtually any occassion).

For more information on Aaron Marino, check out Alpha M Image Consulting and definitely go to his YouTube channel. Besides being helpful, the videos are extremely entertaining. My wife and I have had a good laugh watching some of them, usually because I’m guilty of various fashion sins described by Aaron. If you’ve suffered a fashion crisis your entire life like I have, you might want to consider getting in touch with Aaron. He’s the real deal when it comes to male image and a really great guy. Thanks Aaron!

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Top 5 Ways To Package Your Brand

No Comments » Written on March 14th, 2011 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Marketing
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This post is the third in the series 4 Easy Steps To Creating The Brand Called You, and describes the second step in a four step process for creating your personal brand. If you haven't read it yet, you might be interested in reading the introductory post on personal branding and the first step: Developing Your Brand.

I always thought it was David Lee Roth of Van Halen fame who said:

It's not what you do, but how you look.

I tried looking it up (I Googled it), but alas I can't verify the quote. Maybe someone can verify that for me. In any event, it doesn't really matter who said it. Even though we may hate to admit it, there is some (i.e. much) truth to it. As we've all been told: first impressions mean a lot, if not everything, and first impressions are based on the package you come in - on how you look.

Since your brand is you, the question is how to package yourself. Let's look at the most important aspects of the package that you come in:

Your Name

Avoid the temptation to create a cool sounding company name for your brand. Since the brand is you, the brand name is your name. Let's say Sue Smith is an accountant and her brand (her promise of value) is "great bookkeeping for real estate agents". She shouldn't package this brand as "Great Books", or "Real Accounting", or whatever else sounds neat. Sue is the brand and so the name of her brand should be "Sue Smith". Maybe people like to use another name for their brands to make them sound bigger than themselves. I don't know, but this is an absolute show stopper for a personal brand and completely defeats the purpose. Now the brand is something else (xyz inc.) instead of you! Think of some great brands:

  • Cartier
  • Mercedes Benz
  • Ford
  • Armani
  • Prada

These are all people's names! Consider most professional practices, law firms and accounting firms: same thing, all named after people.

Business Cards

You need a business card. I know this is the 21st century and everything is online. But there will be lots of opportunities to market yourself and you won't be online or near a computer. You'll need to pass people your calling card. Unless you are a graphic designer (by the way, just because you know how to use PhotoShop does not make you a graphic designer), don't design your business card yourself. That great thing about having the design work done professionally is that you can reuse the design on other collateral materials you may need, like letterheads, resumes and thank you cards. For God's sake don't print your cards on a printer at home. It only costs a few dollars these days to have cards professionally printed.

What's on the card? Your name of course (see above). Get your own business telephone number and put that on the card too. You can get your own number for free on Google Voice, or use a service like Ring Central. You'll also need an email on there, so read what's next:

Domain Name

Reserve your domain name now. If you name is "Sue Smith", register suesmith.com. It will only cost you about $10 or so, but now you've got a personal domain name that you can use for a couple important things:

  • Email: You want this for your business card and for communicating with others. Nothing says amateur like a Hotmail or Yahoo mail address. Once you have your domain name, you can use several services such as Google Apps for your Domain to set up email on your new domain. Google Apps for your Domain is free for a standard account.
  • Website: You need a web site. The first thing people are going to do is Google you. Your own site on your own domain allows you to control some of what see about you when they go out on the net. You might consider hosting a blog there where you write about your passion - the promise of value that is your brand. Maybe that's too much of a commitment, so perhaps you can simply put up your bio or even just your contact information (remember the stuff on your business card? use it here too!) and links to any online profiles you maintain on sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

Physical Appearance

If your brand is Great Tax Preparation for Wealthy Seniors, you cannot have uncombed hair and wear a hoodie and sneakers! Our physical appearance can be a very personal thing. I suppose it's not fair that how you look is dictated by what others expect. But hey, who said the world was fair? The thing is, perception trumps reality. It really is not what you do, but how you look. Actually it is what you do, but no one will get to that if they can't get by their first impressions. So how you look is as, or even more, important than what you do. For some people (women), style, hygiene and fashion seem to come naturally, for others (men) not so much. For the style challenged males out there, I'm really digging Aaron Marino these days. He's the man behind Alpha M Image Consulting (how I wish he had just used his name for his brand), and has an amazing YouTube channel with tons of great videos. Maybe as he gets his brand going he'll get a better studio for his videos!

Workspace

Your workspace says a lot about your brand. If your workspace is where you will entertain clients (or your boss, manager or employer) then having a workspace that is consistent with your brand is critical. If you are working for a big company and your brand is IT Projects Done Right - On Time, On Budget then have a disorganized cubicle with reams of paper all over the place is not going to work. It doesn't communicate a sense of the fantastic organization that seems to go with that brand.

Coming next in the series: Marketing Your Brand. Stay tuned. Better yet, subscribe to the Life Sutra and you'll always be up to date!

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News Addiction: 3 Ways To Break The Habit

No Comments » Written on March 5th, 2011 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Productivity
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According to my twitter stream, Rolf Dobelli made a case at TED this week for avoiding news at all costs. According to Rolf:

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body...News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking...We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be and we are learning to take the first steps toward an information diet.

In the paper that led to his talk at TED, Rolf describes in detail all the dangers of news, including the costs of following it. He personally went without news for over a year, and describes the freedoms he gained:

  • less disruption
  • more time
  • less anxiety
  • deeper thinking
  • more insights

It's a pretty compelling paper. Rolf isn't the first one to advocate avoiding the news, and I used to do this fairly successfully. At one time I made a point of not watching the news on television or reading it on-line. I had an extended stay at the hospital last year, and with my computer, newspapers and a lot of idle time, I admit that I fell into the news trap and even up to today, Google News is a diversion several times a day. Well, that stops now. Here's how I plan to break the habit:

  1. Block news websites. After reading Rolf's paper I toyed with the idea of creating a browser extension to block news sites, but of course there is already an app for that! If you use Chrome, consider trying the StayFocused or SiteBlock extensions. I've tried them both out. The former is more feature rich and more geared towards setting time limits on viewing certain sites (which can be set up to include whatever news sites are slowly killing your mind), while the latter is a very simple url blocker. However they can both be set up to block something completely or set time limits.
  2. Stop watching the news on television. This can easily be achieved by simply canceling cable. Cancel any newspaper or news magazine subscriptions.
  3. Get out and do something else. When you have to read, read books.

On that last point I have a good story: I've always enjoyed watching professional hockey live and on television. A friend once asked me why I just didn't play hockey instead of watching others play it if I liked it so much. Good Advice.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Tom T

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Developing Your Brand

No Comments » Written on March 4th, 2011 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Marketing
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This post is the second in the series 4 Easy Steps To Creating The Brand Called You, and describes the first step in a four step process for creating your personal brand. If you haven't read it yet, you might be interested in reading the introductory post on personal branding.

The first, and probably most difficult order of business when creating a personal brand, is to actually specify what exactly is your brand. This starts with an important distinction: your brand, like consumer brands in the marketplace is not the logo, the packaging or look and feel of a product or service (although these things are important). A brand is a promise of value. It helps to think of a specific example: when you think of the Volvo brand, very often the first word that comes to our minds is safety. Yes, the packaging is nice, they have a recognizable logo and their cars have a fairly consistent look and feel, but their brand is the promise of an extremely safe car. So the question of developing your brand becomes quite simply: what unique value do you promise others? For many, this can be a hard question to answer. To get you working towards an answer, try answering the following questions:

  • What do you stand for? What is truly important to you?
  • What makes you different? What to you do that is different or unique?
  • What are you most proud of?
  • What have you done that you could easily brag about?
  • What would you like to be famous for?
  • What do your colleagues, clients and friends say is your greatest strength?

So the first step in developing your brand is to ask yourself these questions. Better yet, ask yourself and ask others! Write everything down. Don’t worry if there are paragraphs and paragraphs of apparently disjointed themes. Getting everything on paper makes it tangible and manageable.

The next part is easy: put it aside for a few days and simply let is percolate in your subconscious. Our minds have a great way of working things out in the background. There are countless stories of scientists and inventors literally solving big problems in their sleep! They immerse themselves in the problem, and then when they put is aside and sleep, they wake up with the solution. There is probably good reason the advice to “sleep on it” is given out so often: we are subconsciously aware of the power of our subconscious!

Finally, we need to get everything down into an elevator pitch, a description of the promise of value you represent in 15 words or less - that’s one or at most two sentences. Read it over again, and again, and again. Refine it. Does it resonate? It should, and if it is truly “you”, it will. If it doesn’t, sleep on it again or talk it over with a friend. Get your promise of value down to it’s very core. Don’t rush this step, it’s the foundation of your brand that everything else will rest on. If you are still having trouble, consider the following: what for you is a must and not just a should? For example, perhaps you should always create a nice deck of powerpoints and rehearse for any presentations, but you must always, always have accurate data. Your brand is accuracy, and perhaps not so much public speaking.

Sometimes there is nothing like a real world example. People who go to business schools would call it a case study. Let me give you one: Garr Reynolds, the man behind Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. Honestly, I don’t know how he would articulate his brand, but the promise of value he represents, his brand, is easy for me to articulate and I can do it in three words: make great presentations. What Garr does differently is presentations, particularly how to effectively use powerpoint and other slideware in presentations.

The next post in the 4 Easy Steps To Creating The Brand Called You series is Packaging Your Brand.

Be sure to subscribe to the Life Sutra and you'll always be up to date!

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Change Is Good

No Comments » Written on March 3rd, 2011 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Web & Tech
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Shine a Light
Creative Commons License photo credit: Ryan Kilpatrick

After three years and almost 100 posts, I decided that the Life Sutra could use a bit of a face lift. I updated the software (WordPress), and updated the theme (something nice from Simplethemes). What started off as a journal that would track my progress towards a 4-Hour Workweek, has evolved into a blog on my Rules of Life: things that I have discovered that help me work smarter and live happier. I'm still working more than four hours a week, but mostly out of choice. Alas, some guy in India is not making appointments for my oil changes. I've come to the conclusion that it's not actually about working only four hours a week and outsourcing all our tasks, but having the power and freedom to choose how one lives their life. I've been busy starting my own company (a "muse" in Ferriss speak), and doing a bunch of other stuff. I'm looking forward to sharing more of the things I've learned along the way. Stay tuned - the best is yet to come!

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4 Easy Steps To Creating The Brand Called You

No Comments » Written on March 3rd, 2011 by Brick
Categories: Articles, Marketing
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Note: this is the first article in a series of articles on personal branding. After reading this article, you'll enjoy reading the next article in the series: Developing Your Brand.

It’s been a while since I looked seriously at personal branding. What is personal branding? According to Wikipedia:

Personal branding is the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands.

Think of personal branding as self-packaging vs. self-improvement or professional development. I recall reading the 1997 issue of Fast Company and Tom Peters’ first article on personal branding in my office. Fast Company was a really cool magazine at the time, totally geared towards 20 and 30 somethings on epic career paths. It was the dot-com era, irrational exuberance was in full swing, and here was a magazine about working 80 hour work weeks, getting jacked up on coffee (not any coffee mind you - it had to be Starbucks) and loving it.

At the time I was really convinced that we would all soon be free lancers, literally. It was obvious to me that the days of a single employer and working in an office were nearly over for everyone. Marketing ourselves from one client to another would be essential in this brave new world and so the article really resonated with where my mind was at the time. For some reason I thought I was where, or at least near to where, the action was - even though I was actually working for a very traditional insurance company where they kept track of when you arrived and left work every day. The office looked like a set from Mad Men except with computers (crummy old ones mind you). You had to get special permission to have access to the internet. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Well, most of us still have an employer, including myself. However, when you consider career change, whether it be voluntary or thrust upon you, the idea of personal branding is as important today as it was in 1997. Perhaps even more so: with pervasive search and the social web it would seem that if you don’t brand yourself, others will do it for you! Let’s face it: the first thing a potential recruiter, employer or client is going to do is Google you. So I decided to look back at Tom Peters’ article and other resources on the web and distill what personal branding is all about. I’m going to break it all down into the four easy steps you’ll need to take in order to create your brand:

  1. Develop Your Brand
  2. Package Your Brand
  3. Market Your Brand
  4. Maintain Your Brand

I’m going to describe each step in a post of their own: bite sized pieces that can be consumed in minutes in a single sitting. Here’s a teaser for the first upcoming post on Developing Your Brand: your brand, like any consumer brand in the marketplace is actually not a logo, packaging, or the look, feel or style of a product or service. A brand is a promise of value. What is a promise of value? Tune in for the next post to find out. Better yet, subscribe to the Life Sutra so you don’t miss anything in this series on personal branding!

This is the first article in a series of articles on personal branding. I think you'll enjoy reading the next article in the series: Developing Your Brand.

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