Ep 86 - Build A Personal Brand in the AI-Age

In a world where AI is taking over more tasks by the day, your personal brand is protection and opportunity.

In this episode, Aaron shares three powerful strategies you can use to raise your profile, position yourself as the go-to expert, and future-proof your career or business in any industry.

You’ll learn:

• How to get featured on podcasts (and why it builds instant authority)
• How to craft a keynote and use small events to attract new clients and paid speaking gigs
• How to consistently create content that gets discovered and drives opportunities

Bonus tip: Build your personal website, house your content, and create a digital footprint that works for you 24/7.

Want help building your brand from scratch? Send @AaronWitnish a message, he’s easy to find.

If you got value from this episode, hit subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and share it with someone who needs to grow their influence.

Transcript

Strategically building your personal brand. In today's podcast episode, I'm going to cover off three strategies that you can do to raise your profile in the industry and sector that you operate a business in or work in. And the reason why I believe that's an important move to make right now is AI's going to replace a lot of human roles and tasks and functions, but the people that have profiles, that have positioning, that have authority inside different sectors will get called upon for consulting. They'll be the ones that are advising the AI learning machines and training them up. And number two, overseeing the AI that's running a department of what was once human roles and responsibilities. So the three strategies we're going to cover off is number one, how to be an expert guest on podcasts. Number two, how to fill very small events, which I touched on in a recent podcast episode. 

So you can build up a keynote, a presentation, and get known for something very clear and specific inside your industry. And number three, basic content creation. So you can be very consistent and constantly have a presence online so you're easy to discover on social media and in the search engines. If you're new here, my name is Aaron Whitney. I've been running a marketing agency for the last 15 years. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you can catch all the future episodes on demand. And I'm sitting here recording in a Sydney hotel room. And if you're watching the video version, you can see that. And I'm here to do two speaking gigs, one on Thursday, one on Friday, on topics that are very relevant and that's what sparked the conversation for today's podcast episode. So let's dive in. Getting on podcasts is not as hard as it used to be. 

And I have spoken about this before in earlier episodes. There's a tool called Pod Match, and it's like the Tinder for the podcast world. And what it does is it pairs hosts with expert guests that they can interview inside their niche or industry. So whatever sector you work in or operate a business in, if you head over to Pod Match, you'll get paired up with hosts that are a good fit for you to go on their show based on the information you put on your profile. And then you can make contact with that host, come up with your angle to add value to their audience in an episode, and then if it's a match, they invite you to come on their show. Why that's powerful is one your interviewed as the expert. So the framing and positioning, even if you've never done it before, put you as the authority from the outset. 

The podcast host produces the episode, puts it in front of their audience, and does all the exposure for you on social media. Then with their permission, you can take that episode, you can put it through a tool like Opus Clip and cut your own clips to use on social media that can drive audience back to those podcast episodes. So if you set a goal of getting on a podcast a week, which is a pretty lofty goal, imagine where that would position you 12 months down the track and your personal brand and credibility inside an industry. So that's strategy number one. Go check out Pod match, and it's a nice easy way to start getting on podcasts and you can work your way up to the biggest shows as you get more and more confident and better at delivering episodes. The second strategy is what I touched on last week, which is filling small events. 

So if you can establish a keynote that helps deliver a specific outcome to an audience using a framework. So three steps to X result as an example, you can start using Eventbrite to put on small boardroom events. Just hire a coworking space, get some people in there and just practise your keynote. And you may want to monetize by making an offer for some training or consulting at the end. But if you set up Facebook ads, you can even use the eventbrite's inbuilt marketing systems. You can even message some people to see if they want to come along that are local or in your network. And if you build a keynote that can get transformed into a book, a signature session, something that you might put on your personal or business website that people can check out and review. And once you have that in place, it gets much easier to get other gigs. 

So for example, I was invited to do a paid speaking gig for Business Connect, which is funded by the New South Wales government in Australia because someone saw that I had a framework and watch that training and said, can you come and do that training for the business owners over here in New South Wales? And that's been a recurring paid gig because I had that keynote in place and they trusted a system and process. So if you have an A to Z of how you get someone from stuck with a problem through to the outcome that you were specialising as a business owner or as an employee, then put that into a presentation. Jump on Eventbrite. Get a small number of people in front of you. Take some photos because it's great social proof to share them online. Do the keynote a number of times, get really, really good at it, and you can leverage that online. 

But like I said, you can also have an invitation for people to come and do some work with you at the end of that session if they enjoyed it to get some implementation help, to get some personal advice and done with you, some done for you. So it can also be a payday. And the faster you're able to master that skill, the more opportunities will come your way because you can present and you can deliver and you can put expertise, package it up. And IP is a massive currency heading into the future that we're heading into. So imagine having a keynote that's available online and constantly getting small groups of people that you deliver to. The third and final strategy is touching again on something that has been covered off in podcast episodes before. That's the 30 days in 30 minutes content system. So this is just so you can consistently show up with brand new content online in the video format where people can see you, hear your voice, but also solving questions or answering questions and solving problems for your target audience online. 

So if you go to Google and you type in a search that your industry might look up and you scroll down to the People US section, you're going to see what queries and questions they have. If you set up an interview once a month where you have 12 questions and you go ahead and you answer each of those questions and you record it, then you can repurpose that conversation into say, 12 clips. They can be your video content for the next 30 days. And what that means is you're solving your industry's problems and you're constantly adding value and goodwill through these videos. So you'll create more digital assets, more URLs to that will show up online so you're easier to discover and each time someone sees one of those videos, you're helping them and that'll rapidly boost your profile if you do it consistently over several months. 

And then you can also take the video, transcribe it into text, and then repurpose your answers into written posts that you can use as articles on say LinkedIn, on a website, on a blog. So you can hit off all different content formats being original, your own thoughts, which makes it your IP and not someone else's. That's cheating with chat GPT that might get caught out and building up your own expertise positioning inside your marketplace. So there's some ideas for you, and it wouldn't hurt if you haven't got a website for your personal brand or yourself. They're very easy to build. A lot of websites now are just templated. You just sign up. There's a lot of free services out there. Just Google website builder and build one under your own name and have that sitting there. And that's where you can put your keynote, you can put your content, you can put your articles, and that should start to show up in search results down the track if people Google your name and then they can see that you've positioned yourself, you've got IP that you're an expert in the space and that will open up the doors for you. 

So there's three strategies for you to start building your personal brand. If you want a little bit of help with this or you're not sure where to get started or what your expertise is, just send me a message on social media. I'm happy to point you in the right direction. Aaron Whitney, I'm very easy to find. There's not too many of me. And again, if you enjoyed this episode, hit that subscribe button, leave a five star review so more people can discover the show.