Power Learning & Personal Brand Building
Growth hacks for your career and personal brand building.
Building a personal brand is not much different from having a portfolio of works. It enables the potential audience to expect a certain caliber of work.
Building a personal brand with its own assets and lifecycle to acquire and retain followers removes the redundancies of one-to-one communication. I saw this play out at my first startup, where the senior management would be more interested in recruiting top talent via referrals.
In order to remain appealing to recruiters, you have to constantly be in a state of learning. Hence, I’ve created a power learning workflow:
Feedly RSS Reader /w AI — I use the tool to organize all my learning sources via topic and then apply custom filters on them, such that I only see the content that matches my keywords.
To-do app, Download YouTube audio, and Exercise — Being healthy and exercising regularly is really important in reducing burn-out and falling ill. I use Todoist to jot down my ideas, download YouTube tutorials that can be played back as audio files, and listen to them at the gym. If you have apps like Blinkist and LinkedIn learning, they support the audio listening feature natively.
I’m still in the process of building a personal brand, and this newsletter is part of the effort. Before starting, I had to gather knowledge on how to be successful. They are as follows:
On Twitter, I’m assuming you’re following accounts you’re interested in. The Twitter explore feature will also show you trending tweets based on your activity and geolocation. The growth hack here is to go through your timeline and tweet regularly based on the topics you see on your timeline, with your own thoughts and ideas. Tweeting useful content will generally garner retweets and follows. Just rinse and repeat.
On LinkedIn, they lack rich native content like that of Facebook or Medium. Hence, you’ll oftentimes see some statuses go viral based on the value they deliver. If you commit yourself to deliver value on LinkedIn, it’s fairly easy to grow. Avoid links and just publish natively on the LinkedIn platform.
I’m not really focused on Instagram and Facebook these days. If you want Instagram growth, you’ll have to create a new account and follow and react to content that’s only relevant for your niche. Post content, stories, and an optimized bio. Then you have to find accounts that engage with their commenters and follow back (just check the comments). You should do the same with your commenters and followers. Create content that prompts users to engage, with a call to action.
For YouTube growth, you just have to keep posting regularly; with good thumbnails and titles. The same goes for all mediums.
For Podcast growth, you have to find collaborators to deliver combined value and get exposure to their followers. You can find potential collaborators on Rephonic, Listen Notes, and Goodpods. A similar strategy can be applied for YouTube growth.
For newsletter growth, you just have to keep delivering quality content consistently for free.
My strategy these days is to post content on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, and Podcast channels, then funnel those users into my newsletter and other non-acquisition channels such as Facebook, as a simple retention medium. Creating content on one medium can easily be cross-posted to another, to maintain maximum visibility.