Create & Shape Your Personal Brand (Like a Boss)

1. Introduction: Why You Should Care About Your Personal Brand (*Yes, You Already Have One!): Hey, a warm welcome. So in this session we're going to talk all about creating and shaping your personal brand. Now I know a lot of people who hear the notion of a personal brand and they roll their eyes or they say, oh, I don't have one or I don't need one. But the truth of the matter is that we live in an interconnected world and you have one, whether you realize it or not. Okay. So back in the olden days of the early 2000, I was teaching web design, and Google was a new thing. And I asked my class, hey, have you ever Googled yourself? And one of the gentlemen in the class raised his hand and said, not in public. He so, because Google was so new, they were actually treating it like it was some naughty thing. But in fact, if you Google yourself in the non naughty way, whatever comes up is actually part of your personal brand. And if nothing comes up, then that's also part of your personal brand. It could be that you have a website and some social media profiles and those come up to display what your personal brand is or nothing comes up. Or it could be an out of date linked in profile. It could be some random social media posts. It could be stuff that people have said about you. Could be an award that you won, that somebody else published about you. Whatever it is, it's basically your digital footprint. And your personal brand is also what you do offline as well. If you gave a talk or somebody gives you a recommendation for a course that you did or an artwork that you made away from technology, that's still part of your personal brand. That's pretty overwhelming. But the great news is that we can take control over our personal brand and push out the things that we want to accentuate to show up our uniqueness and our awesomeness to the world. As opposed to leaving everything up to chance to algorithms to some random comment that you made that you don't want anyone to ever see again. In this session we will move forward. I will give you some strategies that you can use to help better create and shape your personal brand, your reputation, your narrative. So that you have a public persona and brand that you're proud of and want to actually share with the world. And through this we'll come engagement, attracting the right kind of audience. Possibly getting you some new clients if you are a business and just basically managing your personal name out there in the world so that while you're sleeping, your personal brand is working for you on your behalf. All right, so if you're ready to get started, then I will see you in the next lesson. Take care. 2. Kickstarting Your Personal Brand Journey: Your Goal & Superpowers : Hey, welcome back. All right, in this lesson we're going to talk about two key ways that you can increase the strength of your personal brand. So step one is having a goal in mind as to what you want your personal brand to accomplish for you. So what does this mean? Well, if you want your personal brand to be strong because you're looking for a new job, or you want to get a promotion at work, then you're probably going to want to build your personal brand around your amazing accomplishments and what you could possibly offer a new employer. Or it could be that you're starting a business and you want your personal brand to reflect the products and services that you offer. So whatever it is that you want your personal brand to accomplish for you, just be really clear about what your goal is. Please take a moment if you can, and just have a think on it. Write it down that way. As we move forward, we'll have a better idea of what it is that your goal is and we can make sure we're going in the right direction. All right, the second key step that you need to make a stronger personal brand is to really think on what it is that you want to be known for. What do you want people to think or know or say when they come across your name? How do you want to be described professionally? So some ways that you can think about answering this question are asking yourself, well, what do you do? Not necessarily your job title, but something really clear and specific that paints a picture in someone else's mind about exactly what it is that you do. So for example, I'm thinking about people I know now. Are you a project manager from an international organization that wants to bring better health and wellness into the culture of your organization? Are you an American ambassador in Malawi? Known for really getting into the local culture, being approachable, goofy down to Earth. Hi, Ambassador David. Or are you an international artist and educator seeking to inspire and empower weary idealists to keep showing up and trying to make the world a better place. I know that's a lot, but it's also very specific. The trick is you want to maybe do a couple of exercises to brainstorm on what it is that makes you unique. Special talents. Do you have, what skills do you have? What are things that you do better than most other people I know for me, I happen to be an artist living and working in the developing world where art is not necessarily valued. It's not necessarily taught in the universities, in some of the last two countries I've lived in now, in the universities. So I've really had to reinvent the wheel. It's actually made me a bit tough and kind of like a survivalist, and I love to teach people my survival. And thrival is that a word, Thriving skills as an artist, even in inhospitable environments. So really think about what the how and the why behind what it is that you do. Try to be clear. Try to make sure when you tell it to somebody else, does this make sense or is there any confusion? If there's some confusion, then you probably want to just dig in a little bit more and just refine it a little bit. It doesn't mean you have to throw away what you wrote. You just have to use words that communicate better what it is that you do to your target audience. Speaking of audience, all right, that's what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. So once we've figured out why you do what you do and what you do and why you're so bleeping special. In the next lesson we'll talk about who it is that you're trying to help or want to reach. And we'll figure out where your audience hangs out and how you can best reach them. All right, I'll see in the next lesson. Bye. 3. Your Mission! Be Clear on Your Mission & Find Your Audience : Hi, welcome back. All right, in this lesson, we're going to talk a little bit about who your ideal target audience is and understanding exactly who they are and where they hang out and what are their characteristics. Well, the way that you do that, to even figure this out, is you want to think back to who is it that you're trying to help. Who would most benefit from your skills, expertise, your uniqueness and your services. And going back to your personal goal for having a stronger brand, what is it that you're trying to achieve with your personal brand? If you bring all of these things back together, you start to get a better sense of who you're trying to help. The next thing that you should think about is what exactly is your mission? Once you define your mission or your why, why do you get out of bed in the morning? You have a better sense of what you're doing out there. And then that then helps inform who your products and services and expertise is actually for. How do you come up with a mission? You should definitely think about the following things. Who are you? What do you do? Who do you do it for? And what's the transformation that you're creating? For example, in my case, I wrote something down in my sketch book. I'll try to paraphrase it so I'm not reading it word for word. I'm Kristen, an interdisciplinary artist and international educator. I seek to empower artists and idealists to communicate more effectively, to be seen and heard, and to shine both online and offline. That might be my statement right now, but it doesn't mean that I can't change it or tweak it or make it better as I move forward. That's one way that you can start to cobble together a mission statement. I definitely encourage you to take a moment and really think about this and start to write something down. When you have something that doesn't make you cringe, roll your eyes, something that you are like, yeah. All right. That describes me, then you should definitely put it up somewhere prominent. Refer back to it. Use it to make decisions or to talk about yourself professionally with other people. It will help inform everything you do. If you're really clear on this, and I know it's tempting to skip this part, but I promise you if you just take a moment and really figure this out, it's going to save you loads of time in the future and it will just make you more efficient and awesome moving forward. All right, I will see you in the next lesson where we will continue talking about steps of building a stronger personal brand. See there. 4. Harness the Power of Your Website & Social Media to Boost Your Personal Brand : All right, did you make it this far? So now that we're more clear on who you are, what you do, why other people should care, and how can you help them. We can start to talk about two very important assets that you can begin developing or tweaking if you already have them. They are a personal website and your social media pages, so a lot of people actually don't have a website, especially in the part of the world that I live in. A lot of people just maybe have a Facebook page and they use it as a website. If that's you, that's okay. It's a great place to start. As long as you have a place that you can send people to connect with you further, to get more information, to buy your product, sign up for your services, book a call, then you can certainly use social media like a website. But if you have a separate website, this is a great opportunity because you have loads of control over your own personal brand messaging. You can really amplify and accentuate and show off all the great things about yourself that you want to share with your ideal target audience. A personal website allows you to share a bit more of your personality, more photos, a little bit more about your accomplishments and the things that you've done over time with your target audience. So this makes it effectively better than just a resume or linked in profile, although you can always link to those things from your website. Website gives you so much flexibility because you can share things in a bite sized way and then people can glance at it. But if they're interested and they want to dig a little deeper, they just have to click on your links and they can download a PDF or look at your resume or go to your linked in profile. Follow you on social media. Having a strong website is a wonderful thing to have. It doesn't need to be super fancy. It doesn't need to be hundreds of pages. It doesn't need to be the next Amazon.com A good website can just be one landing page that has some key information about you, about your mission statement. If you have it a way to contact you. Those are the bare minimum things that you should have on your website, but you can certainly delve into all different directions. I have a blog. I have my shop in my gallery, my portfolio, my courses. I have lots of things on my website, but then I have a secret website, simplified just for applying for grants and fellowships, just for a target audience of jurors and people looking for artists for upcoming shows where they only want to see my artists statement, my bio, my artists CV, and my portfolio, Boom. That's it. You control the narrative and you can control what links you give people as well. So you could have a big giant website or a little bitty really focused website. That is up to you. The other thing that you can concentrate on is having a social media profile. And of course there's 1 million different platforms right now. You don't need to be on all of them. You can experiment with them all if you want to, but I recommend find where your audience hangs out. So for example, if you are an artist, Instagram is an awesome place to be. Because a lot of people, it's very visual for one, but a lot of artists and art lovers like to hang out there. Do not discount Facebook. I still think it's the most popular platform and especially good for artists. I've sold a number of artworks and art prints just from posting about them on Facebook and people seeing them and then contacting me within a day or so. That's really good. If your target audience happens to be younger, like the age of 12 to 18 crowd, then Tiktok might be the platform for you, like where my son's hang out. I have a Tiktok account, mainly because of my son's pressuring me, but I don't really use it because 12 year olds and 15 year olds tend not to buy art. I could be wrong. They might buy stickers and you know, stuff. But yeah, my main target audience doesn't really hang out there. However, if my personal brand is, you know, selling T shirts with skateboarding logos and stuff on them, then that might be the perfect place to be and actually build relationships with my target audience. If you are more in the corporate world or humanitarian world, or a nonprofit organization linked in is your go to place, that's where your peers and your colleagues are going to be hanging out. Pinterest is particularly good for people who have a target audience that are women. Especially over the ages of 30, let's say let's say like 30-60 and up Pinterest is a great place to go. Youtube is also a great place, but it's also become a search engine, second only to Google. I believe you can actually use it to drive traffic back to your website. Social media channels are great places to reach out to people. It's where people connect with you and your brand and then follow you along on a day to day basis. Whereas a website people might not go to your website too often, but when they do, they find everything that they need there to contact you, to book a call, to buy a product, to sign up for a course, whatever it is that you offer. All right, So I know this is all a lot, but definitely take the time. I'm so glad that you even thought about your personal brand and you're trying to answer some of these questions. If you rush and try to build a website or start posting haphazardly on social media, trying to be all things to all people, You're actually not going to be getting too far. So just by taking a moment to really think about what your goals are and what it is that you do and who it is that you're trying to help. You're already doing 1,000 times better than the average person who has a website and is on social media. So when you're on social media, when you're posting, you want to try to share and post helpful content that your target audience is going to resonate with. It could be your artwork that you make. It could be a helpful article that's relevant to your industry. It could be posting ideas or opinions about something in your industry. You should definitely like and share the content of others that you're following because this also helps to create a engaged audience. And the more engagement that you have on social media, the more attraction your posts are going to have, the more people are going to see them. And hopefully dinging, ding. Eventually, come back to your website and make that purchase or contact you for more information, whatever it is. The other thing you should remember is when you're building relationships with your target audience, it very rarely happens all in one day. It's a long term game. You want to show up and actually be posting on social media once a day, if possible, or having a weekly newsletter. Over time, people are going to become familiar with you and what you do. They're going to like you over time. That's when they might consider buying something from you, signing up for your service, whatever it is, it's not impossible, but rarely is someone going to come across you for the very first time, say, wow, I love what they do and then buy your high ticket item that very same day, usually, it's just a bit of a slower process and that's okay. That's why we show up every day. Definitely make sure to show up every day. Finally, I just want you to remember, as you're coming up with a strong personal brand, be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not. Don't try to act like someone that you saw people love, imperfect, wonderful you, just as you are. I was just thinking earlier like, oh like my hair today. Maybe I'm not going to film this lesson, but you know what, It's okay. You don't need to be perfect. You just need to be relatable. If I were perfect, if I were reading off of a teleprompter word for word, you would be bored and probably just click away and do something else. People love authentic relatable. Just be yourself and be awesome and build that awesome personal brand. All right. I hope this is helpful. I will see you in the next lesson. Take care. 5. Extra: Define Your "Why" and Purpose: LinkedIn Case Study (*From my companion Social Media Course): Okay, so welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about linked in. But even if you don't yet use linked in or you just kind of use it casually, definitely don't skip this step because I want to share something about letting people know who you are, what you do, and why they should care. And being really clear about that and how that can help you. Not just with linked in, but with all your social media channels and your website, bio or about page and everything else that you do. So I'm going to just go into Linked in. I wanted to share with you my screen. So first thing I want to mention is that with all of your social media channels, not just linked in, it is important that you have a picture of yourself if possible. I know a lot of people self included. I've always been traditionally quite shy to be in a picture or on video. So look at me now. But yeah, you definitely want to have a friendly, smiling, preferably picture of yourself. Maybe a friend can take it for you. Don't wear sunglasses, that makes you look a little bit untrustworthy. And if it's between not having any picture at all and a picture, please just put anything even if it's a pot of flowers or some other representation of yourself. The other thing I want to mention about this linked in profile is you see the cover image. There are different aspects of my art that are very visual. There's some artwork, there's some consulting jobs I've done for the UN, like the mobile health clinic all the way to the right. And an illustration I did for United Nations Population Fund and my teaching, which that is in Yangon, Myanmar a few years ago with my wonderful Fallon International School High School students that I really enjoyed this cover I made using Canva. But if you don't feel comfortable making your own web graphics or images, you could maybe get someone else to make them for you. But you want to be just really visual and descriptive without a lot of text. I like to put my name in an artist professor consultant. But what I wanted to highlight in this linked in profile is this sentence right here. Can you imagine? So basically what I did over a year ago is I did a free, I think it was five or seven day linked in challenge with a fabulous linked in expert from the UK. Her name I believe is Helen, but I'm going to put all the information in the resources for this lesson and in this course so you can actually sign up yourself if you want to delve more deeply into linked in. But the thing that was useful as a she guided the class to change your linked in profile from just a personal one to a more professional page. I forget what it's called, it's like a followers account. You can upgrade that, You'll see it when you go to your linked in profile. So basically what that does is it just gives you your name, has all your visual stuff over here. And then you have a sentence, a very limited number of characters, and then it says, talks about. And then you can put some hash tags of things that you talk about. You might consider, if you're an artist, what kind of artist you are or whatever industry you're in. You can put important hashtags industry in there. You can put your location because it is important. Even if you're a location independent like I am, I still very much do things in Malawi locally, giving talks and working with organizations, and meeting up with students in person. So that's pretty much it, right? So the thing I want to focus on right now is this lovely sentence right here. So you should, in my case, I have artist professor and consultant. So I put artist and I'm a multi disciplinary artist. I'm a professor, but I'm not, at the moment, affiliated with the university because I'm in a country that doesn't have my field in the universities. So I'm a nomad professor, that's why I'm doing online courses and I'm also mentoring people. I'm working with people in person, nonprofit organizations, embassies, refugees, everybody. I would like to think I'm more than a professor. So I'm a nomad professor. Because I do expect to be moving again soon. I don't know yet where. And then I'm also a UN design consultant. One great thing about being a design consultant is when I do graphic design and illustration work, that income from that then supports my fine art practice. So I have lots of little things all working together. Kind of like our social media channels, our website, and our mailing list. I like it when all things work together in harmony. But it's this sentence, I help weary idealists to keep striving for a better world through art and design that uplifts and forms and empowers. So what I wanted to share with you is this five or seven day thing that I did over a year ago. I spent the whole time doing nothing but writing this sentence. And you would think like, oh, a sentence. I can write a sentence in a few minutes, and if you can, congratulations for me. It took me five days, seven days just to come up with this. But once I had it, I said, oh, yeah. Okay. That's what I do. These are the people I help. I help them through this thing, in this case art and design. And what do I help them with? I uplift, I inform, I empower, I educate, you want to be really clear on these things. And then what I was able to do is take this sentence and I was able to work it into my bio on my website and even in my artists statement. An artist bio which I use for applying for grants and fellowships. But also on my Facebook page, I was able to word recraft that little area where, you know, that talks about you and who you are, what you do and why people should care. Twitter or if you want to call it Pinterest, All of them. Youtube channel, all of them. So if you can get one good sentence going, you can kind of use this stuff over and over again. So if you're really clear about who you are, what you do, and why other people should care, then it becomes easier for other people to know who you are, what you do, and why they should care. So I recommend you, do I help? And then here, who do you help? Who is it that you help? If you can be really specific, if it's, um, I don't know, overworked moms who have too much on their plate, or u struggling neurodiverse teens who are smart but are disorganized and everybody thinks they're stupid, Whatever it is. Okay. Try to be as specific as possible. I know that I got in a little bit of trouble by putting weary idealists in the course I was taking. They wanted me to really like pick a gender, pick an age group. Okay, so for me, an idealist, a weary idealist are other educators like me, artists, people who wear their heart on their sleeve, Humanitarians, NGO workers, people that really want to make the world a better place and they kind of are doing it. But it's also really frustrating. So that's my target audience and I have so many things going on. If you can pick one thing, that's great. I tried to keep it mainly to being an artist, a professor, and a consultant. And those three things from me are tied together. But if you can be even more committed to one thing better than me, than you are doing better than I am. But anyway, so I help weary idealists two and then what is it you help them do? For me, it was keep striving for a better world. Keep just basically not giving up. Keep showing up to work every day, in other words. Okay, so that's what I help people do. How do I help them? I could have made it just about fine art. I could have made it just about design. I could have made it just about teaching. But for me, they're kind of all linked together. And I feel like I do better when I use those three things in harmony with each other through art and design. That uplifts, informs, and empowers. And you may have to go into a Thesaurus and just find different ways to say that are using emotional language. So in the end, maybe it's not the perfect sentence, but it's good enough for me right now. At this time, I may rewrite this sentence in another few months and that's okay. Or I might decide to focus more deeply on one thing and then I kind of want to put the other things in the background. That's okay too. So I hope you found this helpful. I hope that you can maybe take a moment to just think about if you had to write a sentence, what do you do? Who are you helping, How are you helping? And through what are you helping? Okay, so this could be a product, it could be a service, it could be whatever. So all right, thanks so much and I will see you in the next lesson. Bye. 6. Extra: How to Really Find & Understand Your Ideal Target Audience (*From my companion Social Media C: Hi. All right, in this lesson, let's talk a little bit about who you're posting for. Who are you trying to build relationships with? Who are your people? Who's in your target audience? So you might actually, well, first of all, the number one thing that students have told me in the past, and this goes way back to like 2000 even, is who's your website for, what's your social media for? And most people will say everyone. If you try to speak to everyone, you'll end up speaking to no one. So it is a good idea, as difficult as it can be, because I've also felt this way as well. It's a good idea to try to think about who's your main target audience. You might have a secondary target audience or other people, some companies, they'll actually create a personality, like a main personality and then a second character, a third character. Then they have five ideal clients that are totally different. But at least then when they're making their content, they know who they're writing for what? All right, I'll explain. First of all, let me just go through this. You might have more than one audience, as mentioned, who would most benefit from our art? Who are we speaking to? If you're an artist, a couple things to think about. What are their demographics? How old are they? Where do they live? Are they educated? Not educated. High school. No school, Phd, whatever. What's their income level? Are they rich? Are they poor? Are they somewhere in the middle? Do they struggle? Do they not struggle? Do they have so much wealth, they don't know what to do with it? Nationality? Gender? Are they male? Are they female? What kind of interests do they have? What are their political affiliations? Are they religious? Are they not? So these are just, or do they have hobbies? Do they collect postage stamps? So just a couple of things for you to think about. And then finally, does your target audience change on social media versus your website? Well, I'm just very quickly going to take you to a screenshot. This is from one of my favorite TV shows as a child, Sesame Street. And this is a screenshot from their website. Now, just looking at their website, you can probably surmise that their target audience are very young children. Very bright colors, lots of pictures, almost no text, and I'm not live on the website. But if I were to roll over things, there might be little animations. Music games to play. So it's clear from this screenshot that their main target audience are young children, right? That's what their TV shows are aimed towards. I think they're in like 100 and something countries at this point. But look in the upper right hand corner. They have a secondary target audience here, grown ups. So if I go okay, so if we click on that, it takes us to this page. This is on their website, but here you can see that the target audience has changed a little bit and yet it's still very visual. There's not a lot of text. But yeah, it's definitely for families, family resources, our work about us support us. Very pictorial again, it's showing us who they are, what they do, and why we should care. And that's great. Then not to give you a trick question, but check this out. Here's the Sesame Street Facebook page. They've got 1 million followers, over 1 million followers. I like that they have their intro here so we really know their mission and purpose is their why. Our non profits mission is to help kids grow smarter, stronger, kinder, and more than 150 countries. I just wanted to point this out because it happened to everybody, even accounts with 1 million followers that Facebook recently reduced the number of characters that you're allowed to have there. And not everybody's noticed yet, including Sesame Street, apparently. So they meant to say something else, but it got cut off. So just be aware that sometimes various platforms, things change without you realizing it overnight. And you just have to check that you look like you're able to write a complete sentence. But anyway, who's the target audience on this page? Well, technically, young children are not really allowed to use social media. It's technically for parents, educators, fans, people like me who were a kid once and are not anymore, whatever. I just show you these examples so that you can be aware of the different kinds of target audiences that you might have for your service business or brand. I'm also going to show you this customer avatar that you can look at and maybe you can start to write down a little bit of the characteristics of your ideal audience. I recommend just start with one. You can have up to five different avatars, but start with one. Think of your absolute perfect customer. It could be a customer you've already had, or an art collector that you've already had. Or just a fan that always likes your posts and is really enthusiastic right from the beginning. They could be a clue as to who your ideal target audience is. I'll let you know. When I started making online courses back in 2014, I thought my target audience was going to be like my university students. Like young male and females in their late teens, early '20s. But as I was making courses, I was getting the most feedback from women over the ages of like, I don't know, between the ages of like 40.45 or sorry, 40.55 And that actually remains probably my strongest target audience. But I was so surprised at the time. It doesn't mean men never bought from me or young people. Younger people because I'm also in my own target audience, I guess, but demographics. So things to think about. Age, sex, location. Are they in Europe? Are they in Africa? Are they in North America? Are they in Cleveland, Ohio? And it's very specific, wherever it is, characteristics. What are their interests? Hobbies. What are they influenced by? Pain. Ooh. What are the problems that this target audience has? What are their concerns, their challenges? Anything that might hold them back from buying or supporting. And then finally, results. Outcomes, desires the gain. So if they were to connect with you, how could you help this target audience I recommend? Before you move on, just think about this a little bit. You could also come back to this and do some exercises. But once you really get a sense of who your ideal target audience is when you're making your social media post. You can write as if you're writing directly to someone in your target audience. And you know better what images to post and where to post, what platforms to put it on. Where do they hang out? Are they in a particular Facebook group? Are they? I don't know, using certain hash tags. So food for thought. I hope this is helpful and I will see you in the next lesson. Bye. 7. Extra: More on How Social Media Works Together with Your Website and Mailing List (*From my companio: Hey, how's it going? In this lesson, I wanted to talk just a little bit about the relationship between your social media and your website if you have one, and your mailing list if you have one. Now I know a lot of people don't have a website or mailing list. Usually they've started with a Facebook page and that is perfectly fine. But what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, and something for you to think about as you grow and get more comfortable with everything, is that you want to have these three elements, the website, the social media, channels, and your mailing list, all working in harmony with each other. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, the website your website is a digital version of you. It's your online calling card that works on your behalf while you are sleeping or on vacation, or just doing other things, or maybe you're in the studio where you really want to be. Your website should very quickly and concisely answer the question, who you are, what you do, and why other people should care. And preferably, in the first 7 seconds or less, what we know that we're completely swimming in data and information, right? Attention spans have gone down. Everyone is completely bombarded with information when they're online. If somebody goes to your website, it should be really clear right from the beginning that if you're an artist, an artist what kind of artist you are. For example, the easiest way to find out about you and to contact you, I recommend even if you don't have a website yet as you start to plan, maybe having a website that you at least have one good landing page that answers those questions. As well as a way for people to learn more about you and how they can contact you. Important for artists that your work is for sale and how can people do that easily with the least amount of stress and strain as possible. You have your website. If you have a website, basically when you visit someone's website, usually you're going on there because you want something. For example, if you're in Malawi and you go to the British High Commission website and you're a British citizen, English citizen, you're probably going on the website because you lost your passport. Or you might be a Malawian looking to study in the UK and you need information on how to get the paperwork that you need. Most people, if they go to your website, are going there for just one time and it's because they're looking for something. You want to make sure that your website has everything that they might be looking for and that it's really clear and easy to navigate. So that's the website. Social media is not your website, although many people treat it like it is. In fact, in Manmar and Malawi where I've lived the past years, many people have a Facebook business page and they have that acting as their website. And if that's you, that is totally fine. Even if you don't end up making a website. If you have a place that you can send people to that has all that important information, then you can use that, a social media platform as your website. However, most of us use it as a tool. And we use social media as a tool to communicate and build relationships with people who ultimately or hopefully become our fans, our followers, and maybe even either future art collectors, or our customers or clients, depending on which industry you're in. Okay, so social media people are not necessarily looking for you when they go on social media. When people are on social media, they're looking to take a break, maybe do something before that big meeting at work. They're looking to relax. They're looking to connect with family and friends, but oops, they've just seen a post from you and it reminds them that you exist. So social media is just a tool to remind people that we exist. B, to tell our stories and build relationships with people. It is an opportunity to invite people to either your website or to join your mailing list so that they can further engage with you or buy a product or take some kind of action. Donate vote on a poll, whatever it is. Okay. And then finally, and this is the one that people usually save for the last, after they've set up a nice website and after they've got their social media channels. In harmony is the mailing list. Mailing lists are a list of E mail addresses that you collect of people that follow you and are interested and love. Hopefully what you do, this is something that you own. If for example X, or formerly known as Twitter crashes tomorrow, for example. As of the time of me making this video, I think I have 23,000 followers on Twitter or X. If it dies tomorrow, I lose all of those followers. I have no way to contact them. Same thing with any of the other social media channels. And you know how quickly things are changing on a day to day, week to week basis. So a mailing list is a list of people that you own. And I do, and I'll talk about this more later, recommend that you send an e mail to your list at least once a week. And if that sounds like way too much, then maybe just start with once a month. There was one point where I was only sending something once a year or twice a year In my earlier days doing other kind of kinds of projects. Now I do about a weekly e mail anyway. So this is just a rough overview of how the three things work with each other. And in general, you want on your website to be easy, for people to follow you on social media and join your mailing list from social media. You want to give opportunities now and again, not all the time for people to click on a link that takes them to your website to complete some other action. Which is maybe look at an artwork or buy something or make a donation or whatever. Attend sign up for an event. And then for your mailing list. You want to make sure when you send out those weekly e mails or monthly e mails, that you're giving people plenty of opportunity to learn more or click on the links and the images in your newsletter to take them back to your website. So if people are interested in buying something, that they can do so easily from your website or you also want to point them to your social media. So in a perfect world, you maybe have these three things and they're all working together in synergy pointing at each other so that you have this nice little loop going. And they're all working together on your behalf, basically being your digital self, while you're doing other things. Anyway, I hope this was helpful and I will see you in the next lesson. By. 8. Thank You for Building Your Personal Brand With Me! : Hey, I want to thank you so much for taking this time to go over personal branding and how to make your personal brand stronger. This is one component of different lessons and courses that I teach for artists and idealists. So this falls under the nourish category. If you look at my growth garden and where we went over a bit more about your mission, why you do what you do, who you're trying to help, and how you can kind of bring it all together to create a stronger personal brand. I invite you to please delve into some of my other lessons and courses that dig a little bit deeper into some of these other areas that will help you better and more quickly reach your goals and connect with me on social media. Stay in touch if you have ideas for other lessons that you want to see for me or other courses, please do let me know. I am definitely open to creating custom content. It's like I'm a bartender, I'm like a J. I take requests. If you have any special requests, definitely let me know. I will certainly consider them. I'll probably even make them. I hope you had a good time in this course mini session and I look forward to seeing you in other lessons. Yeah, don't be a stranger and I will see you next time. Take care. Bye.