Best Tips for Building Your Personal Brand

Happy Wednesday!

Can't believe it's already February. The past month flew by and now I'm dealing with my new biggest stressor... the Super Bowl landing on Valentine's Day weekend. If you guys have any suggestions on how to ensure I'm home in front of the couch with some wings by 6PM please let me know. 

On a less serious note, I want to take this newsletter's week to talk about personal branding. I'm by no means an expert or some type of celebrity, but I am damn fortunate that thousands of you read and respond to this every single week. That's got to mean something right? So if you're on the fence about putting yourself out there I promise you it's worth it. 

Benefits of Personal Branding: 

• Appearances on podcasts, television, and interviews

• Aligning your brand with popular publications that are a trust badge for your customers. CROSSNET getting a home page write up on Forbes & then adding that logo to our site was a huge win for our future mom and dad customers

• Meeting incredible people who I promise you will learn from, make money with, or work with and for. Some of the coolest CROSSNET partnerships (sunscreen, coolers, clothing) have all started with a 30 minute Zoom call of shooting the shit and just getting to know each other as peers first

• Social engagement. My average LinkedIn post gets around 7,000 views per post. If I post 3 times a day thats 21,000 impressions daily. If I post 90 times a month thats 1,890,000 impressions all for free!

Ways to Do It:

• Make sure your content isn't shit

• Don't steal content

• Be honest! Talk about what's going on in your life. With your company. Regardless if you sell on Amazon, run a Shopify store, or own a bakery. Post about what is relevant to you. You are going to be so surprised by how many people are going through the same shit.

• Fire it off. Just hit send. Don't spend all day thinking about "the perfect Tweet". If it doesn't work, who cares you got another one that's ready to go in just a few hours. It's all about how many reps you get up. It's the most frustrating thing when a tweet you posted in six seconds while you were pooping before the shower outperforms your master post that you've brainstorming for like 72 hours. It's going to happen.

• Don't brag about numbers. I used to think it was so cool to show off our million dollar dashboards, but it's not. There's no reason to do it and you can get your message off across without sharing company data. Don't let dashboards be a cop out for shit copywriting.

How To Get Started:

• Build out a social media profile on each platform. Update your photo, have a consistent bio across all platforms and showcase your best work. Pretend you're preparing for a job interview and each of these platforms are a resume.

• Pick and chose one platform to start with! Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Nobody could possibly be an expert at all of them. Jack of all trades, master of none is the expression used here.

• I wanted to get into retail and meet good people in the press, I figured LinkedIn was the place to be. I went all in on LinkedIn. Posted dozens of times a week and grew a following of almost 20,000 people. Eventually I felt like I was ready to start Twitter and I used my network over there to build up my Twitter following.

• If you're not following me on LinkedIn do so here. You'll see I often show my tweets on LinkedIn and vice versa. It's important to let your followers know they can find you elsewhere.

Things to Caution:

• You may want to hide your profile from your biggest competition. Everyone wants to build in public, but we all have those few people where we'd be okay if they didn't see our stuff.

• Spending time on your personal branding is amazing but I caution you of over doing it. People care about you because you are in the weeds, have a great business, or story to tell. If you're spending all your time on your phone watching Tik Tok's your eventually going to run out of things to teach people.

Apps & Ways To Stay Focused:

There's no one right way to manage productivity but I do know that my notepad on my phone, Basecamp to log ideas and projects, and setting a time limit on my social media apps so I am forced to stop using them are key to productivity.

Regardless of the platform I have found that short, choppy and to-the-point copy always works better. Write like you talk. For me, that means swearing a bit too much, short sentences, and being very direct with no fluff. Nobody wants to have to google the words you're saying. You're not impressing anyone. 

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas TweetHunter generously reached out for this week's newsletter and wanted to offer their help. Pretty much everybody when they get started is so damn nervous about what they want to post or can't come up with something witty. TweetHunter will actually help you with all of that. 

TweetHunter is offering a FREE 7-day trial that they guarantee will give you: 

• 250 new followers in the first week

• 125 tweet templates that are pre-created with amazing ideas and topics

• Helps you schedule and automate your posts so you can focus on doing what you do best during the day

• Artificial intelligence that helps you create amazing tweets

Tips & Tricks:

• Go to your top 5-10 favorite follows and follow everyone they follow (within reason). I promise you'll find some incredible new people you didn't even know existed.

• Responding back and being active on social is 50% of the work. It's awesome to have amazing content, but nobody will engage with it if you don't engage with them in the first place. Show people love and they'll show it back.

• Leave actual valuable insight or provide help and introductions. Nobody wants to see you spam three fire emojis under every post.

Homies for Hire: 

You guys loved this section last week so I'm 100% going to keep it going. Here's who I got this week: 

Legal: Need a dope lawyer? My guy Goody is the best of the best. Tell him I sent you. My favorite quote from him is, "Cheap advice is really expensive." You can reach him at [email protected]

Product Packaging & Brand Guidelines: If you don't have one I immediately recommend you build a brand guidelines document or site. You can see ours here. If you need help and want the person who has helped design every single CROSSNET retail box hit up Lyndsey Townsend at [email protected]

Video & Photography: Did you know every CROSSNET video we have ever done has been under a $10,000 budget? You know why? I've used my college homie Matt Kelly who is a stud. So damn talented. Always on the money and super affordable. Reach him at [email protected]

Finally, I'm going to be ending this week with a cool little section called App of the Week. Each week I'm going to try my best to showcase a new tool that we're trying to use internally. It's easy to get overwhelmed with thousands of apps out there but I think Groupshop actually has a solid chance of being a big player in CROSSNET's tech stack. 

If your customers are like ours they are either young parents looking for extra ways to drive in some additional income for their family or hungry teens/college kids who are willing to do the wildest things for a couple hundred bucks. This is a cool position to find yourself in because if you have loyal customers who love your product then turning them into sales reps to promote the brand should be a no-brainer. 

This is exactly what Groupshop does. You know that pretty girl on your timeline who's always selling something or that ripped guy who never leaves the gym and always has the coolest brand deals. Well, now you and your customers can build your own store filled with your favorite products and make money selling to your followers. Your customers earn cashback when their friends shop. Friends earn discounts. It’s that simple!

They’ll be onboarding select eCommerce brands in the next few months. Signup for their waitlist and follow them on Twitter for product and company updates. They told me that if you mention that I sent you they'll let a few of you skip the line.

Now go out there, build your profile, and start connecting! I hope this was helpful. I'll see you next week.

All the love in the world,

Chris