Seeing as I keep going on about the need to build a personal brand online, and since I am doing that exact thing myself, I thought it would be useful to share a few of the mistakes I’ve made so that you know what to avoid.
So here we go—my top 3 clangers, and why I now view them as strategic errors.
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I Didn’t Produce Enough ‘How To’ Content
There’s an interesting bind you get into when you build ‘the brand of you’ (as some people nauseatingly call it). On the one hand, if you’re anything like me you’re an egotist and you want to talk about yourself all the time. And that’s great—up to a point.
But it stops being great when you realise that, actually, your audience isn’t all that interested in you—they want to take your knowledge to help improve their own lives in some way.
Actually, it’s a little more nuanced than that. Your audience does want to know about you (which is why I always tell you to stand out, polarise and so on) but the balance should be in favour of useful, actionable content that actually helps them in some way.
Last year in the autumn I got far too self-indulgent, talking too much about disastrous mishaps with girls and so on. While that content was certainly entertaining (and people really engaged with it), it didn’t make me any money.
Well, not directly anyway.
Which leads me onto the next point . . .
2. I Didn’t Monetize My Brand As Effectively As I Could
Frankly, for someone with a pretty big audience online (in a particular niche, at least) my monetization strategy has been, ahem, suboptimal.
As you probably know, my main income is from sales of my books on Amazon. And to be fair, they’ve done very well for me. In fact, it was the sharp increase in sales I saw last summer that really convinced me that now was the time to give up my job and do this full time.
I also do consultations with private clients, and that has been very lucrative for me. But there are so many other revenue streams that I could (should?) have explored that I’m only just getting around to now.
For example, affiliates. For those who don’t know, you become an affiliate when you write about a product or service on your website (or in subscriber emails etc) and send traffic to its website. And if someone buys from one of your clicks then you get a commission.
I am in the Amazon affiliate program and I put links for books into many of my articles. But that is small money. There are far bigger affiliate deals to be had, and it’s arguably been remiss of me not to have put the traffic I’ve generated to good financial use.
3. I Have Kept Doing Things For Too Long That Should Have Been Discarded Earlier, And Failed To Start Other Things Until Very Late
This one probably sounds a little opaque, but what I mean is that when you’re in a start-up business (which is effectively what I’m in) you need to try things fast, fail fast and pivot fast.
If I’ve had one fault, it’s that I’ve stuck too doggedly with certain activities that weren’t actually profitable (for example, writing memoir-type articles) while not doing other things that would have been more worthwhile.
A good example of the latter is starting my email list. Now, as pretty much every marketer on the planet will tell you, the most important thing you can do in an online business is build up your email list.
I only got really serious with mine a few months ago, sending out emails every day and advertising it consistently on Twitter and Instagram. Now, I’m beginning to get traction. But it takes time, and I wish I’d started earlier.
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Of course, you could take a different view on some of these points. I am nothing if not an artist, and I’ve perhaps simply been guilty of putting art over profit in some cases.
Well, shoot me!
The other thing to note is that, while doing so probably hasn’t made me any richer, what it has done is build up an incredibly strong bond with my core group of readers. And, while it’s hard to put a dollar figure on that, you can bet your life it’s considerable.
Because once you touch someone emotionally, then you’ve really got them.
Few understand this, of course—but it’s true.
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