Personal brand: baby steps

Week 02, 2021: 4.1. - 10.1.

The promotional efforts of my online work so far were pretty bad. OK, really bad.

I mostly didn't give much attention to the audience growth, so in 2021 I decided to promote my work every day strategically.

If any past success in other areas of my life can be of any reference, iterative work should get the job done. Sooner or later.

I'll try to write recaps what happened from week to week in 2021. I use the same review process for my physics PhD work, and it's been paying off pretty nicely. So let's apply it somewhere else 🤓

Maybe someone finds this journal useful. Maybe not. Either way, I'll practice my writing and content creation 🙂

But before we dive into what happened in 2021 week 02, I want to touch one more important question.

How to build an online presence?

Marketing and promotion is an entirely foreign concept to me; apparently, if you want to sell something, you need to market it. Who knew?

But to market things to someone, you need an audience, a platform/group of people you "sell to".

There are several ways how you can reach people online:

• with adds (I hate that stuff),
• through the promotion of products directly (not appealing since it's a one-off),
• through building a personal brand.

There are other ways for sure, but those are the most obvious ones. For me, the natural choice is promotion through a personal brand. Everything else is sleazy and yak 🤮

Why personal brand as a marketing channel?

It's something authentic. You control all the aspects of the brand (a massive plus for control freaks like me). What you stand for, what you advocate, ...

You do you.

I have a vision for my brand, although I might not be sure yet how I'll realise my dream. I know that the result will be pretty glorious.

I'm not in it to make quick bucks but build a brand for life. If the web exists for that long 🙂 So yeah I'm in it for the long hole. Hopefully, I'll figure things out at some point.

I don't want to practice the spammy marketing tactics, adds, or other un-ethical sales tactics.

Authentic creative process. That's it.

My early work shows that there is at least a bit of audience for such work out there. It's still small, but it's growing 🙂

So what really got me off my ass?

At the end of 2020, I joined the Blogging for Devs community , and I took a deep dive into Why I struggled with writing? .

Then to top it off, I read this article: How your "Fuck This!" moment changes everything by Amy Hoy. Yup, I was procrastinating and avoiding the hard truth. I realised and accepted the truth that my plans will require a lot of work before they are executed.

And so it began ..

Status on 2021-01-01

So in the past two years, I've been hoarding ideas to publish. Now it's time that I actually publish them and try to reach more people.

First, what's the status I'm starting with at the beginning of 2021:

• Newsletter readers: Life Experiment (20), Minimalistic Software (1)
• LinkedIn: 306 connections
• Facebook: 498 friends (I think I exhausted my options here).
• Dev.to: 1615 followers (but I think the actual number is way lower).
• Twitter: 63 followers

I also tried Medium in the past, but I didn't find the platform that appealing.

So I'm starting with a small, practically non-existent audience. But you have to start at some point, right 😎

My main focus for 2021 is for now Twitter. Once I polish that process of creating content for it regularly, I'll take a more serious dive into the SEO.

Some of the Twitter efforts already paid off. A small win, but an essential first step.

First 2021 accident win

Something pretty cool happened this weekend, by accident, I posted a comment as a repossess on a feed of someone with massive (OK only 50k) following:

Engagement went through the roof. I got more traction with one Tweet comment that I did in the past five years on Twitter. The simple move resulted in ten followers, a 10% increase, not bad. Sure it could be better. My blogs got quite a few hits (for my little traffic). Finally, a move that paid off. It sounds small, but its a really import win.

You see this is what happens when you test things out, try and experiment. Eventually, something works. (Sure if I googled a bit I would have gotten here faster 🙈).

I finally started using Twitter analytics . I mean you have to generate some data first, but:

Most of the response and effort is from one tweet comment ... So yeah, in this case, it's not 80% results from 20% of the action, but more like 99% results from 1% of the effort.

This command-line logger idea is getting some traction for whatever reason—time to further explore this weak signal.

I also tried shooting a short video. It was soooo crappy. Too much am's, shaky camera, bad lighting, bad background, ... went straight to trash. But again, it was the first step.

What's my strategy for the remainder of the year?

Practice my craft. I've been brutally improving my skills for years now. Every day for 5h+ a day. Reading, coding, writing, drawing, photographing, ... every little skill one needs to produce original and high-quality content.

But not the content publishing part. Skills required to create finished work. So for now, I doubled down on publishing, writing, promoting, engaging, ...

I've created a few processes:

• A content manager. A place for all potential post ideas.
• Daily content brainstorming. I make sure to capture as many ideas as possible throughout the day.
• Creating a marketing plan for each week.

I'm following a pretty strict writing schedule at the moment. 3 - 4h each evening. I don't do it in the morning yet, because my sleep schedule is all over the place, but each week I write:

• On Monday: Life Experiment newsletter.
• Monday, Wednesday, Friday: Life Experiment blog post.
• Each weekday: short coding tutorial for Minimalistic Software

That's nine pieces of content per week, plus social media promotions. We'll see how long I can push this, but I'm enjoying it so far. It's also starting to become easier and easier, now that processes are settling in.

Things to try

This week I'll try to ramp up my engagement in a few more online groups to see if any of them is appealing.

I'll try:

• to record an audio file of a blog post,
• posting on Indie hacker ,
• posting on Hacker News ,
• engage in online communities to connect with fellow creators: Blogging for devs, Ness Labs.

I'll try stuff out. Whatever happens, happens. I'll keep the cool stuff and throw out the rest. Then repeat the process—another great effort in my Life Experiment.