Marketers Unleashed

Just F@cking Post It: How to Build a Personal Brand

• Kathryn • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Join Kathryn Strachan on this episode of Marketers Unleashed as she welcomes Amelia Sordell, founder of Klowt and leading personal branding expert. Discover why authenticity is your most powerful marketing asset and how Amelia’s bold mantra—“Just f*cking post it”—is reshaping how professionals show up online.

Amelia shares raw insights on overcoming fear of judgment, building a magnetic online presence, and how storytelling can generate leads and build lasting trust. Explore how personal branding goes beyond social media, why vulnerability attracts ideal clients, and how to strategically use AI tools to streamline content creation.

Key Takeaways:

  • Why authenticity beats perfection in personal branding
  • The value of vulnerability: attracting clients with your real story
  • Amelia’s mindset hack: Just hit publish
  • Managing the balance between personal and professional identities online
  • Time-saving content tips using AI

Perfect for: Entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, marketers, and thought leaders looking to build a memorable and effective personal brand.

Resources & Mentions:

Welcome to Marketers Unleashed, the podcast where marketers break free from the noise and dive deep into the raw truths of the marketing world. We're here to go beyond best practices and uncover the bold ideas, untold stories, and hard lessons that shape real marketing success. From dissecting daring campaigns to confronting the challenges keeping us awake at night, we're unleashing honest, unfiltered conversations to inspire, educate, and challenge you to think differently. Get ready to conquer the untamed side of marketing. I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, and this is Marketers Unleashed, where we're not just talking marketing, we're redefining it. For anyone who doesn't know me yet. I'm Kathran Strachan, author of Scaling Success Building Brands that Break Barriers, international keynote speaker, and fractional CMO for cutting edge brands. I have spent years navigating the ever-changing world of marketing and have seen it all. As your podcast host, I bring my expertise and curiosity to the table. Diving deep into honest conversations with industry leaders to uncover the insights, challenges, and bold ideas shaping our industry. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Marketers Unleashed. Today I'm here with Amelia Sordell, who is an expert in personal branding and is gonna be telling us all about how to build your personal brand, how to elevate yourself as thought leadership And some of the things that you should be thinking about when you do that. Thanks Kathryn. Yeah, so my name's Amelia Sordell. I run a personal branding business called Clout. we work with founders and executives of enterprise organizations build their personal brands. and we typically do that for lead attraction like demand gen. but also talent attraction, fundraising awareness, and just generally legacy planning the career of the executives that we work with, because ultimately, like attention is the number one asset, whether you're a person or a company. and so yeah, we help businesses do that. it's super valuable. I know that you have a strap line called Just Fucking Post It, fucking post it. Yeah. which I love. but do you wanna tell people a little bit about that means and where it's come from? Yeah, look, I help people build their personal brands, right? And typically there are a number of reasons that are common as to why someone won't build their personal brand. So it will be, they dunno what to say, it'll be that they dunno where to start or normally, and almost always it is that they're too scared to say something and be judged for saying that thing. and the whole concept of just fucking post it came from people literally will look at your content for three to seven seconds. You're never gonna meet any of these people online. So why are you holding yourself back from building thought leadership, from building true influence and having access to all the opportunities that you want? Because you're worried what some stranger's gonna think about you. So like just fucking post it. And I think that, just fucking post it at mentality. Transcends far beyond social media. It's also like you wanna start that business, so just fucking do it. You wanna ask that person out, just fucking do it. there are so many things that people don't do because they are worried about what the outcome is going to be. Whether they're gonna be judged, whether they're gonna fail, whether they're gonna be not good enough, whether they're gonna fall down. And if you just fucking do it, you then take a step forward for to actually be successful. Yeah, you get that a lot where people are really scared to go out there and post something to make a mistake, to say something that, maybe people don't resonate with or that gets perceived wrong. what's the worst case scenario? What's like the worst thing that could happen if you posted something that didn't like or didn't? Land the way that you thought it was going to. it's happened to me a couple of times, and just for context, I post seven times a week, right? I used to post twice a day, seven times a week. So there's a lot of content going on every single year and. There's been maybe two occasions that I can remember where I've had a really overwhelmingly negative response to something I've said. And I think there's two things here. One is you can have a negative response where people disagree with you. So you say something, you believe in what you've said, you've been authentic in what you've said, but fundamentally people are like, I don't agree with you, and here's why. That type of engagement I think is good because one, it might teach you something you otherwise didn't know, but two, it shows that you are open to having a dialogue with people and I think fundamentally, if you're a good human and have good values and you're a nice person, there is very little you're going to say that's going to genuinely upset people. They might disagree with you. They might think you're wrong and tell you why, but that's an incredible opportunity for you to have a discussion with that person in the comment section, which by the way is the best place to build your personal brand is in the comment section, not in the content that you post. You can have a discussion with that person in the comment section and learn something in you or defend your position. You then have the other side of that where what you've said has been misunderstood in more cases than not. And that is where, potentially reputational damage can happen. And all of the things that people are actually scared of, like being canceled, like whatever that means and all that kind of stuff. And the likelihood of that happening is so rare. Like people who are incredibly famous these days and who are famously horrible human beings. Just live their lives and enjoy everything despite posting horrendous stuff on the internet and like you are worried about potentially saying something that might upset one person, like it's not that big of a deal. It's very unlikely that anyone's ever gonna say anything that is hugely reputationally damaging to their personal brand and their company brand. Like it just doesn't happen. What were your negative experiences? What happened? the one that kind of springs to mind is I basically posted something. About Jacinda Den, who was the then Prime Minister of New Zealand. And it was a PR perspective take on her announcement that she was stepping down. and I basically said from a PR perspective, this is what I think this looks like. And a lot of people kind of misunderstood what I was saying and took it as me saying that she was like, not. Doing the right thing by stepping down and they made it something it wasn't. And that's because I hadn't been clear enough in my communication. I'd only said from a PR perspective one time, I didn't control really the narrative of what I was talking about. I should have repeated that sentence. And actually in hindsight, I should have done it as video.'cause I now do those kinds of video posts. A lot where I'm like, from a PR perspective, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, as a personal branding strategist, da dah. And people really understand that, and they see it as an observation rather than a personal opinion. so yeah, but I came back from it, right? it wasn't a huge deal. was like, oh God, shit, people took that wrong. Let me just reiterate what I meant. And then we move on and we have lunch and we move into the next day. like nobody even remembers. I've been connected with you for a long time and I never saw that post. no one remembers new cycles. Move on. I think that's the thing people get wrong with social is it's often thought of if you post something it's gonna be there forever. so everything you have to post has to be perfect. And if make a mistake or say something wrong, you know it's gonna always be there. Where social's such a fast moving platform and the shelf life is so short. That, yeah, you're moving on quite quickly from these things. So mean, the risk of saying something that people don't like is. Quite minor. when you have a culture of like you are watching the press dig up old tweets from celebrities and old social media posts from people and being like, Hey, you are a horrible human being because when you were 15 you said that Lindsay Lohan was fat. that is the culture that we live in. And so people do have a fear to post stuff because they're worried that in the future that it might be wrong. Or even today it might be wrong, but. The reality is like raw humans and authenticity is such an important part of building a brand, which is why marketers say be authentic. And unless you are willing to put yourself out there and potentially be judged for it, it's very difficult for you to build a brand of any kind.'cause you need to connect with people on some level, and in order to connect with those people, you're going to have to disconnect from others. So being disliked is not an unpowerful thing. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that actually, because LinkedIn gets a lot of pushback about being like too much like Facebook and how do you get the right balance between being authentic and sharing yourself and being vulnerable and promoting the business and only talking about what you do. You know what's, so that really interesting? I get this question a lot, is like, how personal should your personal brand be, right? The reality is people buy from people. You can't just shove. Marketing approved collateral down people's throats on Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn and expect everyone to be like, oh my God, this is an amazing brand that we have to follow and buy from. People buy from emotional connection. They buy painkillers, they buy dreams and lifestyles and it's very difficult for them to. See themselves within those things. If all you're doing is shoving a logo down people's faces, which is why personal branding works, right? Because when Grace Beverly talks about this incredible coat that she's been wearing, and she loves it so much and it keeps her warm, people are like, oh my God, I want that coat. Not because a company has shown them that coat. A person who looks, acts, feels just like them, is advertising that they love that coat, right? And so that is really important. But on the other hand, there is a line between. Being strategic about building a personal brand and just sharing your entire life. And I'm not the person to tell you where that line is something that you have to figure out for yourself. But there are people who've built massive businesses and brands off the back of vlogging their entire life. like Anna Paul is a great example of that. Grace Beverly, to a degree, as an example of that. There's plenty of other examples I can think of, particularly on TikTok, where people just share their entire lives, the good, the bad, the ugly, right? And they have profited off that. However, if you are building a personal brand from a business or career development perspective, you've gotta understand that prospective clients, prospective customers, and prospective hiring managers will see that content and will judge you on what you put out. And that's not a good thing or a bad thing. That's just. The reality. And so when you are strategic about the vulnerability, the authenticity that you show, that enables you to craft what you want people to see and therefore judge you upon. So I am very honest and very authentic. you said it right off the bat. My headline on LinkedIn is just fucking post it. There aren't many people who will curse on LinkedIn. Least of all put it in their headline. However, I'm not going to be sharing the same stuff that I share with my friends when I'm ranting over a glass of rose on Friday night, as I would on LinkedIn. And although that person ranting on a Friday night is being authentically me, also posting what I post on a Monday is authentically me. There are different layers of me, and I don't think that you would be the same person with your friends outside of work as you are with your friends in work. there are two different versions of who you are, different layers of who you are. And so working out where that layer is, I think is really important, to building an authentic personal brand. The best example I can give you, and this is something I said to someone recently, they were like, oh, I can't talk about football. And I was like, would you use football to build rapport with your clients? And he was like, yeah, of course. And I was like, there you go. Then you should share that online because it's basically building rapport at scale, right? if you would do it with your favorite client, why wouldn't you do it with your audience of people who are just like that client that you're trying to attract? And the stories that you're telling in the workplace that are already landing in like one-to-one conversations are a really good gauge of what would land with your wider audience. Exactly. So when I started building my personal brand, I was very much talking about copywriting and content marketing 'cause that's what I was doing at the time. But it took a lot of confidence and a lot more vulnerability to learn how to talk about like my personal life a bit more and to talk about, the things that were happening outside of work. When I embraced your philosophy of just fucking post it, that content performed incredibly well. Talking about my marriage and marriage therapy not only acted as an example for other people that they could get support if they needed it, and the that it could make, also helped me to attract people and clients who resonated with that. One of my new fractional clients, specialize in lived experiences and they actually saw that post came to me because I had been talking about my lived experience with therapy, and that's exactly what they do. you attract your tribe when you're talking about some of these things that are more personal to you. I saw a post that you did, talking about how some of these posts that were not directly related to work led to some of your biggest opportunities. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, I mean look, I can tell you about a client we had, which is quite interesting. He. followed the format that we teach and, implemented all the suggestions. And I kept pushing and pushing until I was like, you need to show something about you. You need to share your vulnerability. And, he did this post about his Christmas party on LinkedIn. I. And why he spent so much money at his Christmas party, why it was important to celebrate his colleagues and why it wasn't just like another sit down tart, boring Christmas party. And that post then led to a conversation with then their biggest contract of that year because the CEO had seen that post and go, wow, we also really value our team. We also do this, we also have the same values. this is really cool. And they reached out to that client and said, really resonate with what you said, would love to have a conversation that turned to a million pound contract. The sharing who you are online, whether it feels like work or not, is what connects us as human beings. At the end of the day, people buy in the same way on Instagram, on TikTok, on LinkedIn as they do at work, right? It's just the setting has changed and the format has changed. but to your point about my post, so one of my best. Performing posts in terms of ROI, like as in actual revenue that's walked through the door, was me talking about my divorce. And I said it's hard. Like I'm going through a divorce, like it's horrible. And I said, the first thing that people say is, I'm sorry. And I was like, well, I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry that I have these amazing two children. I'm not sorry that I managed to co-parent with this person. I'm not sorry that he's a great dad. And I went through this whole thing and I was like, look. Divorce happens, shit happens. And to be honest, it's much higher in people running businesses than any other kind of job because you know it's hard to be married to an entrepreneur. But I was like, I'm not sorry. And that's how I feel about it. And I had hundreds and hundreds of messages from people who were also business owners and founders saying, I've never related to anything more, thank you so much for saying it. And those conversations then turned into business conversations that then turned into money. So this idea that like you can't be personal and be professional at the same time is absolute nonsense. You are professional when you're being personal. It's just, you have to find the line in which you don't wanna cross. So a good acid test of that is like, what do you talk about with your favorite clients? That then be what you share online? How do you move from talking about your product and what you do to being more authentic if you find yourself stuck in that place? We kind of reverse engineer strategy a little bit and we go, what is your goal? whatever your goal is with building a personal brand or even building like any kind of brand, right? Who are you trying to attract to make that goal happen? So if you're a business owner and your goal is to generate leads through your marketing of any kind, then who do you need to attract to make that goal happen would then be your customer. Right? So what does your customer look like? And whenever I ask that question, people go, they're an enterprise organization, they've got.... I'm like, no. Who is your customer? Who is the actual person making the buying decision? And then working out what that person gives a shit about. Is there where you get into what you speak about? So what does that person care about? And then what is the intersection between what you know? As a human being, not as a company, as a human being, that's going to compliment and make that person feel seen in what you're saying. And when we talk about brand, I think that's fundamentally what that means. It is making a community of people feel a certain way about your person or your business, so much so that they have such a positive affirmation about you. They want to buy from you. Yeah. and only you. Yeah. I've had this happen and I know that you have, where they decide that they wanna work with you before you even walk in the door. So you did a post, about landing one of your biggest clients because they saw your content they already knew who you were, they wanted to buy from you. And that's really the power of building a personal brand, building that trust and that credibility before you can even sometimes talk to them. Yeah, I mean, Building your personal brand as a business owner puts your like top of funnel sales activity on autopilot. Most of the stuff that most companies do, which is like email outreach, organic social, paid social, Google Ads, all of these things are to generate top of funnel traffic, right? Your having to know where those people are and the touch point in order to pay for them to be a part of that funnel, right? When you build your personal brand, you put that first three to six months. On autopilot. You don't even know these people are in your funnel. They're just there, and it means it happens at scale. I remember when I first started doing sales. I was handed a phone and told to make a hundred calls a day, right? I now post one thing and reach half a million people in a day. like that's really scaling, laying out my sales activity. So when they come to me, they're already ready to buy. Which means that I have gone from having probably a hundred phone calls a week to generate business, to having four a week. And they all close. When it comes to creating content. what is the frequency that you need to aim for if you wanna build a successful personal brand? I think that there's a big difference between frequency and like actually showing up. gurus online that like if you post seven days a week and you do seven comments and you do dah, you will a hundred percent get a hundred thousand followers. And it's that's not how this works. I'm much more interested in the quality of what I'm putting out and reaching people, as I said, on that emotional level than I am on the times in which I do it. However, I also understand that there is a volume piece of this game because when you go on Amazon, you add a light bulb to your cart, and then you look at it and it's 7.99, you're like, I'm not paying 7.99 for a light bulb. So you move on. Every other website, every other social media channel, you then go on for the next 10 days will be advertising this light bulb to you because they know you've added it to your car and they want you to check out. So personal branding is a really similar way. You see one piece of content and you like it, you engage with it. You think it's cool, you move on with your life. If I don't continually keep putting content out, the algorithm won't then feed people with more of my content. I need to be top of funnel to make my sales activity at the top, automate. I would be very focused on whichever channel you're gonna get the best results from for your audience. So if you are a B2B marketing agency, you're probably best off on LinkedIn. If you are someone who's trying to build a wellness brand, you might be best off on Instagram. an e-commerce business, you might be best off on TikTok, right? Where are your people? Don't try and force them to come to a channel. They're not already natively sitting on. Then you can go, okay, what is the best practice for those platforms? Generally speaking, you can post four times a week on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and get very good results from those four posts. You don't need to post seven days a week, but there does need to be an emphasis on quality, and obviously when you get into doing high production value videos and all that kind of stuff, there is a huge cost that comes with that. But actually what we see on LinkedIn and also definitely on TikTok is. When you invest money into video production, unless it looks like it's under produced, you don't get the same ROI like. It needs to feel organic and authentic and like you have just shoved your face on a phone, even if it is with a beautiful lighting and setup. So don't overthink it. Try and focus on quality over quantity, but also know that you need to be posting at least three to four times a week for people to see you enough to make an impact. Some of these channels are obviously very video driven, but on LinkedIn, is video the new norm? Or can you still get good engagement with static photos and text only posts? What should people be thinking about when think about the type of content? content. I always say, what is the medium that you are the most confident in producing in, at least in the short term, right? Like I first started out on LinkedIn with video, so this is before it was even optimized for video because I think I'm a good writer, but I'm much better in person. I'm much better at doing this than I am doing written stuff, right? And also to be honest, Kathryn, what can I execute as quick as humanly possible? And it was always, what's the topic? What's the thing? Let's just deliver it down the phone, edit it, and get it out. So to answer your question, like is video more normal? Yeah, it's becoming more normal because I think LinkedIn is realizing that there needs to be a diversity in the feed. It feels natural to scroll and read and observe and whatever, but there has been a massive increase in the viewership of video, the virality of video. I think videos get 5.3 times more engagement than normal. content on LinkedIn. At the moment, and that is because in my opinion, that video feature is a new feature. So LinkedIn wants you to use it. So it is giving early adopters, lots of virality to continue making video to continue to use that feature, and then the algorithm will settle down again and it will go back to normal. So don't focus on the medium, focus on the message. It doesn't really matter how you deliver it, as long as the message that you're sharing resonates with the people that you're trying to attract. I, I think that's a really good approach, and I think for people too, it's about whatever you feel comfortable with, like you said. You, um, mentioned that you're on four different channels. Do you think that other people should be on as many? Obviously, you're a professional, you're a pro at this, so you're much better at creating content across all the channels. But what about for other people who maybe aren't as experienced as you are? So I built a hundred percent of my business on LinkedIn until 2023. So I didn't have any other channels outside of a podcast that I launched. Right? Everything else was just LinkedIn. And that's because my audience was on LinkedIn, the people paying me was on LinkedIn. Like, why would I build anywhere else? There's so much advice that goes like, diversify, diversify. What if you lose that channel tomorrow? Like you've lost everything. Cool, great advice. But also if you try and build on four channels at the same time, unless you have 20 grand a month to spend on an agency that can do it all for you, where are you gonna get the capacity? I'm a professional at this and I still struggle to generate that volume of content and I have a team that helps me. So I think you need to focus on where are you gonna get the maximum ROI. Go all in on that channel, understand that channel, build on that channel, grow that channel, monetize that channel, and then you can start applying similar principles and your same messages to the next channel. That might be useful. We're focused on the things that are gonna make the maximum impact in the space in which we wanna make the impact in. And then we start focusing what we call the ring of influence. So if I'm trying to reach CEOs on LinkedIn, their admins, their marketing managers, their social media managers are probably on TikTok. So we need to be there too. If you're trying to reach like the average founder, the freelancer, the burned out nine to fiver, who's scrolling in their lunch break they're probably gonna be on Instagram. This has to be sustainable. Brand building is a long-term play. Unless you can commit and show up every single month on all of these channels, there's no point in you doing it, and then it's just a waste of everyone's time. Yeah, that's a really good point. For founders who are thinking about building their personal brand, Martha Stewart was one of the first people to really build a multimillion dollar personal brand. And some of the pushback like she got from investors was that if she got hit by a bus or something happened to her, then like the whole business would collapse. So initially investors were quite hesitant to invest in her multimedia company because it was centered around her. So I was wondering if there's a risk of having too strong of a personal brand? think there's pros and cons with everything, right? There's a risk taking investment. There's a risk only scaling a company brand, right?'cause people don't relate to company brands in the same way as they relate to a personal brand. I think in the ideal world, you scale both, right? You've used Martha Stewart as an example. I could also say Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian. Like what happens to skims when Kim Kardashian's not around? What happens to 818 tequila when. Kendall Jen is not around? these are businesses that are built off the back of influence, off the back of personal brands. But those businesses haven't scrimped on marketing like they're still marketing those businesses and spending money on marketing those businesses in the same way they would, whether that person was attached to it or not. So most people know Casamigos without. George Clooney, most people know Aviation Gin without Ryan Reynolds. Most people now would buy skims without knowing it's owned by Kim Kardashian they might have launched the brand off those kind of personalities. But we're so invested in those brands now because they've done more around the marketing to scale that business up without that person involved. Looking at it with my founder hat on. I've always invested in building my personal brand, of course,'cause that's what I do. But I've never, ever once used that as a replacement for company branding. So I have a dedicated social media manager that manages clout stuff alone. And there's only seven of us in our team. Most companies who have got 50 in their team don't have a dedicated social media manager for. their company brand. So you need to scale both because a company brand is infinitely scalable. A personal brand does have a ceiling to a degree. Although if you look at Tony Robbins' 5.1 billion in the bank, I don't think you would say that was infinitely unscalable. Yeah, it is much harder to scale only a personal brand because one person only has so much remit. mean, one of the challenges that a lot of founders run into is even having the remit to create content on a regular basis, and I guess that's. Where you guys come in, what's the trade off between? Should you create the content yourself? Should you use an agency? If you use agency, how do you create authentic content that is in your voice if you're not the one that's actually creating it? I always. Always want founders to do it first themselves. Like we have a rule that we generally don't work with clients who've never posted online themselves because unless they understand the work, the volume, the effort, everything that's involved in the execution of it, they're never going to get an agency to be able to do it that well for them. The second thing is when on agency, we're practitioners, and so what we mean by that is. We don't want a 12 month contract with you. We wanna work with you for a period of time where we basically build your strategy, accelerate the execution, and then we hand it back through a skills transfer to your team. So then your team manage it, or you can manage it if you want to, but it is never the ideal that we are managing it long term because it is your personal brand. And we all know what it's like working with agencies. It's a merry-go-round, right? For you to have to onboard with someone, go through the whole process of like your stories, your perspective, your this, your that, and the other thing. And then in 12 months time, be like, oh, we're gonna go and do something different. Like you have to be committed to this long term. And our value is in the strategy, right? Like the content creation is easy once you have the strategy, like you just need to know what to talk about. So we build the strategy, we help your team understand the strategy, we make it idiot proof, and then we hand it back to you and go, cool. See you later, and if we need to continue to maintain your personal brand for a period of time while you. Get the right team in place, or your team gets up to speed, or you even hire someone to do this full time, which is always the best way to do it. We then have maintenance programs that we put people on for three months rolling. So it's never like this long term commitment because we don't wanna work with clients long term because we know the best and the biggest personal brands are the ones where the actual person is invested in doing this. And it's very hard to do that when you've outsourced it to an agency. What kind of impact do you see going from being somebody who posts online to working with a practitioner like yourself? What kind of transformational difference does that make? it depends on the client, right? So some of our clients have come to us because they wanted to be in like the king's honor list. We achieve that and within six months we've had other clients who wanted to raise funding within seven months of working as we got 1.5 million funded for that business, and another a million pounds in debt line as well. So it depends what the client wants. Generally speaking, we measure ourself on audience profile and validity metrics because for us, as I said to you earlier about building that strategy. Unless the audience profile is correct, you will never reach that goal. So followers are lovely, impressions are great, but unless they're from the right people, then we haven't done our job properly. So the way that we always measure ourselves is we'll get a 200% increase in impressions from these people. And so that's the strategy we follow is who's following you? What are they doing with your content? Is it the right play or do we need to optimize for or against what we've been putting out? And since they've been posting content before they've come to you, I'm sure that you see a lot of things that they may be doing right and a lot of things that they're doing wrong. What are some of the biggest mistakes that people make? In that like early stage of their journey and before they work with, people who actually know what they're doing. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they put this like mask on. they go from being a really relatable, interesting person in this kind of setting to being like, I'm the CEO and I have to be everything perfect and I'm going to write like I'm the King of England And it's so unrelatable and so uninteresting and like it's written like a white paper or produced like a white paper. It's like this is social media. It doesn't matter which channel you're building or whether it's TikTok or LinkedIn, it's social media. So you need to socialize with people, not talk at them. And that's why I see that a lot. I also see people. think that, by just talking about a topic, it's gonna automatically mean that it's interesting, like just because a topic's interesting that their content is gonna be interesting. And actually people don't give a shit about the topic. They care about your perspective on it. So if anyone can take one piece of advice from this, conversation we've had today, it's that if you really want to build thought leadership and really want to build a personal brand, talk reactively about stuff. Sure. Talk about your knowledge, your experience, your. whatever. But talk about it from your perspective, not just announcing that something's happened, not just talk about something's happened. What do you think about it from your perspective? Because it was information that people wanted. They'd go to Google, but they don't want that information from Google. They want your information. And then the last thing is inconsistency. So inconsistency in messaging, inconsistency in what they talk about, inconsistency in how they communicate as well. Like trying loads of different things because they saw some other creator did it and they went viral. Like newsflash. Just 'cause it worked from someone else doesn't mean it's gonna work for you. Like most people benchmark themselves against huge creators who've got massive teams of people. Who are pumping content out and more importantly, they're famous. So they could say anything and they'd probably go viral, right? You are not the same person. You are different. You've got different values, different experience, different knowledge to add. So be different.'cause that's the only reason why you would build a personal brand is to stand out. So why do you wanna do exactly the same thing as everyone else? So that's the advice like I really give to anyone, is don't do things because someone else is doing them. Do them because no one else is. And that's how you build a strong brand. That's how you build differentiation, and that's ultimately how you stand out, which is the entire point of building your personal brand in the first place. Yeah. And how you position yourself as the thought leader. wanted to ask about obviously AI in the age of personal branding.'cause one of the things that AI is doing at the moment is flooding LinkedIn feeds. You see it all over LinkedIn now. It drives me crazy. But can you use AI in this process? Is there a right way to use AI in building a personal brand, or should it be like avoided at all costs? I I think it's a, it's an interesting topic. I love ai, so I love chat. GBTI have chat, GBT Pro, I've got a GPT, I call it my strategic advisor. So I've trained this GPT to be like my no bullshit strategic advisor. I've got another GPT that acts as my barrister, so I spent. Hours, like training it on like its background and the cases that it's for and like its knowledge and all this shit. And I fed it with all this stuff that I found online and now it's my barrister. And I have a newsletter one, I have a post one, I have a content idea one, and I think probably just to round it all off. I love AI 'cause it's shortcuts so much grunt work, manual bullshit that you used to have to do yourself and now you don't have to because this amazing little robot thing will do it for you. But I never use it to execute. So I use it to inform, I use it to help me structure, I use to help me like data, sweep my old content and give me ideas of what did really well and why it thinks it did well. Like it's very good at doing that kind of stuff. And you can get it to write your reports and you can do side by side posts. So like this posted well, but this one didn't. Why do you think that this one did better? And why do you think this one didn't? And it will write a report on why it thinks you are posted better or worse. And that's really valuable, but I don't use it to actually write my content. I use it to inform my content. I use it to help me write my content. I use it to be my little copywriting colleague, but I actually execute everything. I think that's important because AI can do all of that manual nonsense research stuff for you. But actually, if AI can do that, it can do it for everyone else. And to my point about standing out, democratizing access to information has been fundamentally game changing for business, game changing for branding and marketing, but also game changing for you, building a personal brand because you now have access to all of this stuff at the click of a finger, so does everyone else. So unless you're applying your personality, your personal stories, your knowledge, your vulnerability, your, I remember when I was fired for my first job at 16, which attribute doesn't know. You're never gonna be able to build a brand because everyone else is doing the same thing. Yeah, people are really connecting with, especially on social, is you and Chat GPT can't be you. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you about any final advice that you would give the listeners who are interested in building their personal brand and really starting to celebrate themselves as a thought leader. I love that you just said, celebrate themselves as a thought leader. First of all, don't be afraid to celebrate yourself. I think so many people are scared to talk about their wins and their successes and, things they're proud of because they're worried about people judging them. Like, fuck, being humble, put yourself out there, like you should be proud. Win loudly I think is really important. but some kind of general advice if you're thinking about getting started with your personal brand. I would just post whatever you wanted for six weeks, and just get your foot in the door. Because step number one with building a personal brand is mindset and attitude. It's not strategy. It's not should I use hashtags or not? It's not what time should I post It is your attitude and your mindset towards the activity you need to get comfortable with. Just posting it. Just fucking posting it, right? So step number one, just post whatever you want for six weeks. Once you've done that, you will become very apparent to you what's worked, what hasn't worked, what you felt most interested in talking about, what you weren't that bothered in talking about. Optimize for that. Optimize what gives you energy and makes you feel good when you're posting content. And then after that you can go, what does the audience look like? And then you can start optimizing for who you're trying to attract. But to begin with. Just post it. don't worry about whether or not it's strategic or whether or not has a call to action, like just fucking post it for six weeks.'cause I promise you, by you just committing to do it for six weeks, you will get more traction in that six week period than if you spent an entire like year building the perfect strategy. Just go for it. Just post it. That's how I started. And now I've built like a $4 million agency off the back of it, like six years later. Thank you so much for being on the show Thanks for having me. Fantastic to have you. I've learned so much myself. Thank you so much for having me. I love doing this stuff with you. It was great fun. That's a wrap for this episode of Marketers Unleashed. Thank you for tuning in and diving deep with us into the unleashed world of marketing. We hope you're leaving with fresh insights, new ideas, and maybe even a few aha moments to fuel your next big move. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new episode. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a review or connect with us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts and join in the conversation. Until next time, keep thinking bold, challenging the norms, and unleashing your inner marketer. After all, what's the worst that'll happen? I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, over an out.