Build Your Own Brand podcast

It used to be that higher levels of education, certifications or other career credentials, were the key to higher roles and higher compensation. I believe those days are disappearing and that career credentials no longer matter as much. If true, what does make a difference? Simple. Demonstrating your expertise. Specifically, demonstrating your expertise online, which is the topic of this episode. Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

I’m in Omaha, Nebraska this week to attend the very first Clifton Strengths Summit. The Summit is being hosted by Gallup, the company that brings you StrengthsFinder. So for the next two days, I’m going to be hanging with fellow Strengths enthusiasts and geeking out about our Strengths. As I was flying here today, I started thinking about my objectives for the conference. And yes, you should have objectives or goals of some type when you attend a conference. You may recall Madalyn Sklar gave us some great reasons why you need objectives when attending conferences. If you don’t remember, head on back into the archives and check it out. For the next three days, I have identified three objectives I want to meet while I’m here and I thought I would share them with you on today’s show. OH, in case you are wondering, I’m recording this from my hotel room using my iPhone which is why the audio is not quite up to my normal standards. And while it would have been easy for me to just skip this show this week, considering I’m at the conference and my main computer died on me, I thought doing it this way would serve as a great reminder that you really don't need any fancy equipment to produce content. You CAN make due with what you have. Which is exactly what I’m doing with today’s show. So here you go, my 3 reasons why you should attend conferences. With the DICE framework, attending conferences falls into the E or the Engage step. But you probably already guessed that didn’t you. Before I started this journey, I never went to a conference that wasn’t directly related to my day job. In fact, I had never paid to go to a conference myself. Now I go to at least two a year. Conferences are just a great way to force yourself to get out there and push the boundaries of your comfort zone. If it’s true that growth takes place just outside of our comfort zone, then I think we all need to be uncomfortable at times in to stimulate our grow both personally and professionally. Conferences can do both in spades.

Who do you think about when I say the science guy? Who comes to mind when I say Daily Vlog? Did someone’s name immediately pop up in your mind? Why did you come up with their name? Is it because you hear their name often? Or is it because when you google a specific topic, their name surfaces to the top. Maybe it’s because you follow them on social media, read their blog or their books. Whatever the reason, I think you’ll agree their names came to you quickly because you regard them as an expert in whatever the topic or niche you follow. Here’s another set of questions for you. Who do you think about when I say, electrical engineer? Don’t follow electrical engineers, no worries, let’s try CPAs or real estate agents. No? How about human resources? Do any names and/or faces come to your mind? Let’s go deeper. What if I said name a product manager, project manager, talent acquisition specialist, SEO specialist or recruiter? I’m guessing you drew a blank for a few of those, didn’t you? If you did that’s ok, maybe project management is not your thing. However, when it comes to one specific topic you are personally passionate about, I bet you know who all of the “players” are in the space. Chances are you’ve also noticed that the top individuals in this space seem to get all of the opportunities. Whether it be speaking gigs, promotions, etc. Why is that do you think? Well, that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about on today’s show. How your brand, specifically your digital brand, in the eyes of others can lead to additional opportunities and compensation for you. Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

I’m guessing by now, you’re about all Discovered out. As you know last month on the BYOB show, all of the episodes were dedicated to helping you with the Define step of the DICE process. Specifically, how to Define your brand, through self-reflection in order to uncover your natural preferences, your strengths, and in essence who you are at your core. If you’ve taken any of the assessments and you’ve been using that pesky worksheet I recommended you to download at the end of every episode, then you are now very close to discovering what makes YOU, YOU. If you haven’t downloaded the worksheet yet or you're new to the show today, first welcome, second, head over to ryanrhoten.com/selfaware and grab your copy of the worksheet for yourself. You’re going to need for today’s show. Why? Well because on today’s show I’m going to walk you through how to create something, I’m asked about often: Your personal brand statement. Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

Today, I’ll be covering the third and final assessment I recommend to help you more self-aware. In this episode, I'm going to cover the Stand Out assessment by Marcus Buckingham. Discovering your personal brand starts with an understanding your strengths and your inner talents. This is a key step in discovering who you are as a person and what you are good at doing. We’ve all experienced days where when we reach the end of the day, we’ve said out loud, “Wow. Today flew by”. Odds are on those days, you were working in your strengths. Those are the days when you StandOut. Wouldn’t it be nice if those days happened more often? It can if you understand what makes you StandOut. Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

In this episode, we're taking another deep dive look into how you can become more self-aware. Today, I’m going to talk about one of my favorites. The one I recommend everyone take, Fascination Advantage® assessment. The Fascination Advantage® assessment gives you insights on how the world sees you. If you’re interested in taking the assessment, head over to Ryanrhoten.com/FAA, yes like the airline industry. I will get a small commission if you use that link, but it comes at no additional cost to you and using the link will ensure you take the correct assessment. Anyway, let’s dive into the world of fascination and discover how you fascinate. Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

Over the next four episodes, we’ll be discussing a new assessment to help you become more self-aware.  If you feel stuck in your career, your job or you’re not sure what you want to do when you grow up, it's more than likely because you've never taken the time to define your brand. That's why today we’re going to cover one of the most talked about self-assessments out there, StrengthsFinder2.0. This process and the entire DICE process is defined in my book CareerKred. You can get your copy here:  ryanrhoten.com/book Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

Self-awareness is critical to building your brand. Without it you will not be able to fully build your brand. Self-awareness is what the Define step in the DICE process is all about. You cannot Define what you want to be known for, without becoming self-aware. Assessments are a great way to raise your level of self-awareness. Starting with this episode, I’m kicking off Discover month, and we’ll get started by tackling the one thing the Define step is all about becoming self-aware.   Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

Last week, I introduced the concept of the employability score. A score that would be used by employers to rank you against other job candidates. This score would be created by algorithms based solely on predetermined criteria about you found on the web. The show struck a chord with several of you listening so I wanted to expand on the concept of an employability score further today because whether we get to the point of having an employability score or not, I want you to start thinking about how your brand impacts your compensation.

What if the social resume was just the beginning? What if in addition, technology and big data began to play together nicely when it came to our careers? Imagine if using a technology like Blockchain, our career accomplishments, our college degrees, and other certifications were stored in the Blockchain. Each would be individually verifiable. In other words, there would be no need for a resume.  Expanding on that thought, what if your career accolades had a numerical value assigned to them. Each one worth a specified number of "points". Those points could then be added up to give you an employability score. Job descriptions would list the employability score required vs skills. Haven't met the minimum score for a position? You're out of luck. If you really think about it, it's not that far-fetched of an idea.

What if resumes became obsolete? I know that sounds crazy but I think very soon the traditional tools of recruitment, resume and cover letters will be replaced with a social resume. If this happens your career and your livelihood may all come down to two things: 1 - How visible you are online 2 - Your social resume Do you know what your online profile says about you? Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

We each get 168 hours every week but it's what we do with those hours that make a difference in our ability to move closer to what we want to be known for. If you’re going to stand out from all of the noise, you need to be productive during those limited hours. You need to learn how to repurpose your content. Build your own brand, Personal Brand, Digital Brand, Personal Branding, Career, CareerKred, Self-awareness

Create is the third step in the DICE process. For our purposes, create means to evolve from one’sown thoughts or imagination, as a work of art or an invention. On today’s show, I’m going to cover the 3 most commonly used types of content you need to be creating in order to become known for what you know. Content takes the form of audio, video and/or the text you publish on your website or another platform in order to share your knowledge, thought leadership and expertise. In the words of Jane Anderson, from the Jane Anderson, Brand YouShow, you publish content so we can become known for what we know. Your content will largely be composed of things such as posts, videos, presentations (think SlideShare), images, podcasts, eBooks, white papers, etc. If you’ve ever read an article on the web, watched a video or read a downloaded eBook, you 've consumed content. We consume content every day. It’s content that drives the internet and its content we use to become known for what we know. Do you know what your online profile says about you? Find out by taking my Online Brand Assessment. Discover your score and the ways you can start to improve your score today!

This past week a listener emailed me the following question about how to overcome negative search results. “I have an arrest record that still flashes online. It was years ago, I’ve moved on and created a new life helping others but still even 10+ years later, the news article will surface. How do you combat news organizations who, with one article can effectively ruin years of work?" First, thank you for your question, and second, this is a tough position to be in for sure. The answer to the question is simple but fixing it will not easy and to be honest, it’s not guaranteed to fix it forever. I’ll explain why as we go along. At a high level, there are two parts to this puzzle. One you can control. One you cannot.

One question I ask in my online brand assessment quiz is what are you struggling with the most right now. Most people leave this blank, but for those of you who have left a comment, thank you, by the way, I keep track of the responses in a google spreadsheet. If you haven’t taken the assessment yet just head over to ryanrhoten.com and sign up on any of the orange boxes. You’ll immediately be sent a confirmation email and once you’ve confirmed you want to take the assessment, you’ll be taken directly to the start page. One of the top responses that has been surging lately is confusion over the differences between LinkedIn’s new Social Selling Index and the online brand assessment you can take on my site. The differences are pretty big and that’s what I’m going to talk about with you today.

In February last year, I wrote a review about a new personal brand landing page called branded.me. Along with the review, I posted a video showing how to set-up your branded.me page. Since that time, the branded.me review drives a lot of traffic to my website as well as the majority of the comments on the site. In February 2016, almost exactly a year later, branded.me released a major platform upgrade and once again I created another video review. This review is once again driving traffic and comments, but this time, I’m getting some pointed feedback like this comment from Randy who said: “Nice article on (personal brand) landing pages. I don’t see them as very useful since they end up on page 2 or 3 of Google.” Thanks for the feedback Randy. As I have said on multiple occasions, both on the blog and on this podcast, I am a firm believer that everyone should have their own website. The technology has advanced to the point that you can literally have a website up and running in 5 minutes for less than $100. $100 is a small investment to make in your online presence. If you’re ready to make that type of investment in your online presence head over to ryanrhoten.com/blogsetup and get started.

I hear people say it’s Authenticity that matters all the time. Chances are you’ve heard it as well. “You have to be authentic.” “Authenticity is the key to building your brand.” While I agree, being authentic to your brand is important, I also think it’s a given. Like breathing is to living. We all know breathing is a key factor in living, yet no one goes around saying “You have to breathe in order to live.” I view authenticity in the same way. So for the sake of argument and for the “Authenticity” touch bearers out there, I’ll stipulate that authenticity is important when building your brand. But it’s not THE most important thing when building your own brand. Being congruent is. The word congruent is usually associated with Math which is probably why we don’t regularly include the word in our vocabulary but being congruent means to be matching, in harmony or in agreement with something. This is why I feel Congruency is the cornerstone to building your brand. It’s the cornerstone to growing your influence, amplifying your online reputation and impacting your career. Let me ask you, Think about the last time you Googled someone. Once their online profile was returned, even before you clicked on the top result, you scanned the page in order to ensure you had the right person. You also scanned the page because you were looking to see if everything was in alignment, the results matched your expectations. As a podcaster conducting research on guests, I am looking for congruency. Something as simple as having the same headshot image across all of your SM accounts is tremendously helpful in letting me know I have the right person. This is the power of congruency.

Once you’ve started blogging people are going to ask, "Who’s your audience?” You will hear this a lot, “Who is your audience?’ or “You need to write for your audience.” Everywhere you look online someone has a tutorial, blog post or video promising to help you define your audience, develop your customer personas, speak your customer’s language, etc. And I agree, you do need to understand who your audience is but I promise you taking a course to help you find your audience as you get started blogging, isn’t going to help you. In fact, it might hurt. You need to reach a certain level of competence with yourself and your craft before courses or memberships like these will be of any use to you. Until then, these courses will only serve to confuse and frustrate you, which will cause you to delay or worse case, stop before you even get started. Don’t let this be you. Yes, you do need to have some idea of who you believe your ideal reader to be when you get started. However, what is more, important and fundamental to your success initially, is the topic or subject matter you want to become known for. As I’ve said before You need to be “excited” about your topic or area of expertise. You need to have a good baseline understanding of your topic. This will make it easier for your ideas to flow from your head to your fingertips to the keyboard to the screen just to the left of the blinking cursor. Being excited about your area of expertise will keep you going as you move along the path to building your own brand because the simple truth is, in the beginning, you will have no audience. There will be no one paying attention for to ask what to write about or what problem you can help them solve. Instead of having someone to lean on for topics or ask about their pain points, there will only be you, your ideas and your computer. That’s why I believe it’s so important when starting out, not to write for an audience but to write for yourself instead.

If you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, you know I’m a huge proponent of having your own website. In fact, I think it’s a must have today for any business professional. If you want to be taken seriously that is. At the very least I recommend you own your domain meaning you go purchase your first name last name dot com. Why? Because it’s important. You can listen to the BYOB episode on how to build your personal brand, for my specific reasons. In the age of the Internet, a website is a critical tool for both businesses and individuals. As an individual, a website allows you to control what people find about you online. In addition, it can serve as a one-stop-shop for all things YOU. If used properly, it can also give you a leg up on your competition. what’s interesting is The problem that most people have with starting a website is not so much the technical stuff, which I can help with by the way, but it’s really the “what” that they struggle with the most. Chances are if you’re like the majority of people I speak with about starting a blog you are probably thinking to yourself right now, “Ok. But what should I put on it?” I get asked this question a lot. People want to know what they should blog about on their own website. This might be the single biggest obstacle to getting started. And like everything else in the DICE process, the answer to the WHAT is simple but it’s not easy. If this is you rest assured I have some suggestions to get you started. So here are three high-level categories you can choose but ultimately what you decide to write about on your blog, should be aligned with Discover step and what you want to be known for.

What do you want to be known for? Have you ever thought about it? The truth is most of us don’t. When I ask this question to clients most of them look at me like I’m crazy. Or they start their answer off with “ Well, I went to school to be a…” whatever. When the answer starts this way, I know, the question they are really answering is “what are you known for today”. Today I’m an accountant, an engineer, a program manager, a lion tamer etc. Maybe your current position is what you want to be known for. If this is you great! fantastic you probably love your job and enjoy getting up to go to work in the morning. If this doesn’t describe you and I’d venture to say the majority of you listening fall into this category, then what it is you want to be known for? Like everything else in the Discover step, finding the answer to this question takes a lot of self-reflection and self-awareness. You will not arrive at an answer overnight but if you’ve doing the action items from the previous BYOB worksheets you might be starting to get an idea as to what your answer could be. As we close in on wrapping up the Discover step let’s quickly review where we’ve been. So far we’ve discussed your brand at a high level. You’ve maybe taken a couple of assessments to determine your strengths. You’ve identified your skills and traits and hopefully, you’ve even sent emails to your trusted advisors. You took the time to list out all of your past positions and captured what you did at each position and you really enjoyed. As I pointed out previously you should now start seeing yourself differently. You might even recognize the times when you exhibit your strengths and the times when you aren’t. So what now? Now it’s time to tie everything together and take a good hard look at the future you.

Building your Personal Brand is as easy as rolling the DICE. Today's show is the audio file from my presentation at WordCamp Dayton this past weekend. If you've never been to a WordCamp I highly recommend you go. WordCamps are a great place for you to network, hone your public speaking skills and, of course, learn about WordPress. Today's podcast is a great example of how you can repurpose the content you create. I talk about this during the presentation. Other topics covered WordCamps are a great place for you to network, hone your public speaking skills and, of course, learn about WordPress. Today's podcast is a great example of how you can repurpose the content you create. I talk about this during the presentation. Other topics covered Other topics covered include - Personal brand vs. Personal branding - How to integrate your offline self online - The 3 types of content - Why you need to create and curate content - Why you need a website - How your online profile can work against you - Why you need to own your domain - The importance of engagement

At this point in the Discover step you should start seeing yourself differently. You might even recognize when you exhibit your strengths and when you don’t. It’s possible you’ve started to recognize the activities that get you jazzed up and the ones that suck the life the out of you. If so, this is awesome. If not, don’t worry, you will soon enough. In addition to everything else we’ve reviewed and assessed so far there is one more aspect of our personal brands we need to explore before we can start to relate the Discover step to our career and what we want to be known for. We need to know our skills and our traits.

This is the Build Your Own (personal) Brand (BYOB) show where I talk specifics about how to use the 4 step DICE process to Build Your Own Brand. In the last BYOB episode, I posed the question,“What you are good at?” In case you missed it last week, It’s your strengths that drive your personal brand. They run through your brand like a thread in your clothing weaving together all of the various aspects of our personalities. Like our personal brands, we also have a common thread running through our careers. Believe it or not, this metaphorical thread is what links all of our past positions together. For some of us, our career thread is understood and easy to see. We use it as a measuring stick or guidepost when making career decisions. For others, maybe even you listening right now, the thread is still waiting to be discovered. Finding this thread will help you understand your career path.

Build Your Own Personal Brand. Not the brand someone else wants you to build. On this show, I explore and discuss the tactics for the 4-step process to building your own personal brand I call DICE. DICE is acronym for Discover, Integrate, Create and Engagement. The four steps you need to take in order to grow your influence, amplify your online reputation and ultimately impact your career. Today's show covers a question I get asked a lot. How do you discover your strengths?

A friend asked me recently what the difference is between a personal brand and personal branding. Many people believe them to be the same and often use them interchangeably. I told her they are essentially the same, but different. Here’s why. Your personal brand is who you are at your core. It’s your values and your traits. It’s what determines the “things” you naturally gravitate towards. It’s the stuff of Strengths Finder legend. Your personal brand drives your actions, your reactions, your interests and maybe even your career choices. Every interaction you have with someone establishes or reinforces your brand in his or her mind. This is why you have heard so many people say, “You DO have a personal brand whether you know it or not”. Realizing you have a personal brand and understanding what it is, is critical to your career. Why? Tune in to find out.

Welcome to the Build Your Own Brand episode of the BRAND New You show. In this shorter-format show, I'll talk about specific tactics you can use to build your personal brand, grow your influence and amplify your online reputation using the process I call DICE. DICE of course, is an acronym. It represents the 4-step process for building your personal brand including Discovery, Integration, Creation, and Engagement. This is the formula I use and it’s the formula at the heart of building your own personal brand.