Personal Branding

Tools to take you to the top

Coaching is one of the fastest growing sectors and worryingly, it is almost completely unregulated so anyone can call themselves a coach.

In a sea of wanna-bees, you need to provide a valid a reason to choose you, the credibility of consistency which is usually the realm of the big brands.

Big brands know that frequency and reach are vital, surrounding your ideal client, so that when the time is right, you are top of their list.

Building a personal brand as a coach requires tenacity and dedication (along with a touch of insanity) to become a stand-out, in demand brand.

Before you take action though, you first need a strategy.

Take time to choose the #1 thing you want to become well known, well paid and wanted for. Then you can set a clarity of purpose and direction with your marketing strategy, otherwise you’ll get distracted and overwhelmed.

Once you’ve done that, there are some awesomely easy tech, apps and tools available right now to help you rocket launch you, your brand and your coaching business, or increase your chances of being selected.

Sure you can Google your name to find out what’s online about you…(remember to do an incognito search to avoid seeing what your search history brings up)…

But what if you could not only discover what’s being said online about you, and rate it as important or not?

You can monitor the influence you have online with a simple tool you can get for free called www.brandyourself.com

The nicest thing about brandyourself.com is that not only can you manage your online presence, you can also track where your comments, articles, mentions etc have appeared, and share them in your own feed, creating great interconnecting links.

So, what kind of content is the best to share in order to rocket launch your personal brand? Here’s the next free personal brand building tool…

As a stand-out specialist, you need to be creating good content that you KNOW will get clicks and comments. And it’s all about asking the right question.

Wouldn’t it be great to read the minds your prospects to discover what questions they really, really wanted answers for, so you could create content and headlines that engaged?

That’s exactly how answerthepublic.com can help you build your personal brand.

Simply type in the topic you want to know the questions for, buying a house, appointing an accountant, hiring staff, finding a lawyer, using a coach…and get all the questions that are asked on search engines so you can format your headlines and content.

If content is king, then engagement is the queen of hearts, so by sharing valuable, relevant content when it’s most needed, is the best way to engage with your ideal prospect. The benefit is that not only do you get to share your top tips and best content, you are almost guaranteed it will get engagement.

Tip: It’s also a great way to find keywords to include in your website, blogs and marketing to improve SEO and of course creating click-worthy headlines.

And here is another very cool, free tool to check if your headline is going to resonate.

The headline you use on your content can make all the difference between going viral and hearing crickets… www.subjectline.com gives you a score out of 100 for your headline, along with tips on what you’ve done well, what you have missed out and how to improve it.

Use it to check the headlines on your ads, emails, landing pages and even your printed marketing material.

Scheduling posts makes huge sense when you are building your brand and Buffer has got to be one of the easiest tools to do exactly that.

It can schedule your posts to Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Linked-In, Google+ and Facebook. It’s free to get started with 10 posts and if you want the full package with as many channels as you like with as many posts as you like, it’s just $10 a month.

https://buffer.com also gives you stats about your posting, enabling you to repost the popular posts and tells you what day and time your posts should go out on based on your audience behaviours.

Super Tip: To become a well-known and respected personal brand online, your content still needs to be engaging, not just me, me, me all the time…

Google Alerts sends the latest topic relevant news into your inbox for free. Simply go to GoogleAlerts and set it up to automatically direct any article posted online about the subjects you have chosen to get alerts for directly to your gmail account (gmail is free too).

Tip: You can select which inbox it goes to - I use Forums to put all my google alerts so they don't clog up my primary email.

Get started by selecting a couple of topics that you could get information and news for, perhaps 6 to start with and set it going. Once you have a few alerts, set aside perhaps 1 hour a week to scroll through for relevant articles to share. You can always update the alert topics you get over time, based on the results you get.

So, here’s a formula for you to share the right content that builds a trusted personal brand, because the last thing you want to do is only talk about yourself.

The 30/30/30/10 Rule

30% about you - your story, content, events, case studies etc 30% news about your industry - shows you’re at the coal-face 30% information - be generous with your top tips to create value 10% fun or inspiration

So what’s the point of sharing other people's articles and how does that help your brand?

Sharing news indicates that you are up with the latest happenings in your industry, that you are an informed specialist and worth listening to.

There’s also a very cool free tool that adds your brand to what you share….

Now you have some great content, with perfect headlines that improve your chances of being seen, and listen to, how do you ‘get it out there” without taking up all of your time?

So where do you find great content to share with information and news pertinent to your industry?

That’s the next fabulous free personal banding tool I absolutely love…

When you share any article online, you can now add a call to action footer to encourage viewers to click back to your brand and business.

This includes an image (which I suggest is your headshot, so people know they are dealing with a real person), a short headline and a clickable link to your web page.

You can get 1000 clicks and one CTA for free and upgrade to do more, including split testing. At time of publishing, the basic personal branding package is just $29 per month.

snip.ly also integrates with Buffer, making it a very cool way to automatically share great content that helps your expert authority and gives your followers a clickable link to your brand. Big tip: Always use an image when you post online. Posts with images get noticed 100 x more than simple text-based posts.

Video is even better, of course there is a free tool for doing just that which you are going to love…

If you are creating all this great content and posting blogs or articles, this is the easiest way to repurpose your written content and turn it into an engaging video.

Simply grab the url of your blog post, paste it into lumen5.com, and voila! All the images and content is there with a basic layout already started.

Simply edit the key points, change images if you need to (they have thousands to choose from, including still photography and moving video images), set it to music and save.

Then share your video on all your social media platforms.

Sharing images on social media is great but remember to also share your fantastic content with your raving fans, delivering your ‘gold’ direct to their inbox…that’s right, email is not dead.

SpeakerHub connects speakers to events and offers you a free listing to be found, but more importantly, they send you loads of tips to get gigs, create professional presentations and alerts for speakers wanted.

Go sign up to https://speakerhub.com and share your genius one to many. It’s a fantastic way to build your personal brand as a credible coach in a sea of also-rans.

MailChimp

How many times have you been told, that in order to become the go-to coach, “Grow your list”?

MailChimp is extremely popular, with over 15 million users and is possibly the easiest email marketing tools to get started with. It’s free to get started and you can easily use one of their many templates, with simple drag and drop function to create great looking emails. MailChimp also helps your email avoid your recipients spam folder and handles images and video links with ease.

You can upgrade to get an opt-in box to put on your website and it links with Facebook so you can capture leads and use autoresponding emails to connect with your audience when they opt-in to your database.

It now also has an e-commerce function, with great reporting so you can use MailChimp as your sales funnel.

Now you have the systems to get out there, you also need to be seen and heard in person - ideally as a guest speaker.

Lauren Clement

Lauren is an International AwardWinning Personal Branding Specialist with over30 years experience in brand management working within world-leading advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Ogilvy and Clemenger BBDO.

A five-time bestselling author and International Award Winning Neurobranding expert, she uses her dyslexia disability as hergreatest asset - helping entrepreneurs understand how the brain sees brands. She is also a keen sailor, golfer and vodka quality control expert.

Find out more at www.theaudaciousagency.com