Right now is the greatest time ever to be alive.
Well not right right now. Right now is challenging. Let me rephrase. The last 10 years have been the greatest time to be alive. Higher life expectancy, advancements in healthcare, increase in quality of life, better technology and communications, and more.
It’s also the best time ever to build a livelihood based on your passions. To turn your dreams into a career and find true happiness in how you spend your days. And it’s all possible thanks for digital.
Life has slowed down considerably due to the global health crisis and you have more time on your hands than ever. Invest this time in yourself and into your passions and change the course of your life. Here’s how to build your digital presence and personal brand.
Social media: the tools to unlock your dreams
Do you have a passion for food? To turn that into a career pre-2005 your options were limited. You could be a chef – but if you were a terrible cook then you were a bit SOL, aside from maybe starting a restaurant or a food brand. Not many options and not easy.
Fast forward to today where that same passion could have you traveling the world, dining at top restaurants, posting creative content to a community of thousands of engaged followers, and receiving hefty paychecks for each post. Heck you could even start a blog to review the influencers who review the restaurants. But everyone knows the dream of the food/travel influencer. And this story gets better.
The rise of the micro-influencer
The micro-influencer: an expert in any field, mainly professional, with moderate social follower numbers (could be 5-10k). It’s the future of influencer marketing especially in professional areas. Moving from high-volume and low-quality reach, to high-quality and moderate-follower niche partners. Micro-influencers will become a lucrative industry moving forward and the playing field is open.
Your motives don’t have to be financially driven. Build your digital presence because you get one chance at life so give it as much meaning and purpose as you can. Here’s how to start.
Step 1: Start with your passion
The step where our parents let us down a bit, and fair enough since back in the day you couldn’t be successful in music sang like a frog. In the 2020s there are hundreds of ways you can turn your passion for music into a career.
“The average person spends one-third of their life working.”
The important part is to start with something that will drive you every day so that the journey towards success fulfills you. Say goodbye to demotivated mornings, Sunday night blues, and counting the time until holidays.
The average person spends one-third of their life working. With all the tools we have today, doing anything less than something you love is a damn shame, and the perfect road to unhappiness.
Start 2: Build your personal brand
Faceless companies don’t exist today and people are the brands they work for. This means you should work on yourself before you build the company.
Your personal brand is made up of what you communicate and how you make people think and feel. It’s the impression you leave with others based on your actions. Don’t try to be everything to everyone and definitely be authentic. Focus on your select topics and think about tone of voice.
Social media makes it incredibly easy to build your personal brand, but it starts with deciding who you want to be and what you want to be known for. Follow steps 3-5 to build your personal brand online.
Step 3: Build your digital presence
Think about the where your audiences lives and the channels they use. A tattoo artist can achieve their goals with Instagram alone. If you want to be a micro-influencer on health tech you’ll need a channel with long-form content and professionals, so you can’t forget LinkedIn. Want to do it authentically? Think about mixing personal and professional, and select the channels that enable that.
The number one thing to nail with your digital presence: frequency and consistency. Create a plan for posting, often, and stick to it. Make sure to do a regular audit of your digital presence also.
Step 4: Publish lots of content
If I haven’t sounded Gary Vee-ish yet, I’m about to. In 2020 content is everything to your brand and business. The more value-adding content you can share the better. If it’s interesting and valuable to your audience you can’t share enough, and you don’t need a production team to get it done. Gary believes that those who win in content will win in business. Every brand should become a media company – creating and publishing content everywhere. Check the link at the end of the article on how to create 64 pieces of content in a day.
Share third-party content with your own perspective. Create in-stream visuals and vertical/Story formats. Shoot professionally or even better, informal video content. Also taken from Once you create one piece of content like an article, turn that into 20 other pieces by breaking up and turning into visual sound bites.
Step 5: Create your Home Base
Personal websites are boring. They’re easy to start, difficult to complete, and become stale as soon as you hit publish. But like a company you need a home that’s the center of your digital presence. A destination to showcase who you are, and to curate and create content.
That destination is your Paper.
With Paper.li you’ll have your own personal website in 5 minutes, updated daily with the best content from the web on the topics you want to build your brand around. It adds excitement to the personal website and makes personal brand building easy. And it’s designed to help you with steps 1-4.
Your paper is a combination of curated content, and integration of social media accounts. It’s your own publishing house, always fresh with content. And of course you can personalize it with the things that matter to you and the actions you want your visitors to take.
Start creating something today and you will be known for something tomorrow. Build your digital presence and your personal brand. It can be the first step to turning your dreams into reality.
Source: How to make 64 pieces of content in a day – Gary Vaynerchuk
