Personal brand: Week 04, 2021

So what happened on the marketing front last week. What worked and what didn't?

Few changes happened, a lot of friction popped up.

Here's the reality. Making content takes an infinite amount of time.

Tweets and LinkedIn, FB posts need to be prepared in advance: photo, link, text, hashtags. Weekly days are too hectic to have the time to creatively think and come up with an authentic finished tweet on the fly.

In the following lines, a few things I learned along the way.

SEO

If you type:

site:zigabrencic.com

into google, you'll see how parts of your page are ranked.

I know I could do more on the SEO front, but I'll probably find the time for this aspect in a month or two.

Once I get the Twitter process figured and polished I'll dive into the SEO.

I'm trying to polish one process at a time. So the whole thing is manageable.

Twitter

"Twitter is like the bar scene after a large conference where you discuss things in an informal way over drinks. LinkedIn is the formal part of the conference where people exchange business cards." Matthew Kobach

I've developed a writing habit, but I don't have the Twitter/marketing habit yet, and I'm sending things into the void. For marketing, I have no strategy. Need to change that.

I've spent the whole weekend studying Twitter.

If this is true 🙂 it's pretty awesome, and the platform is worth the investment.

The most frustrating part for me is that I have no audience and that I have to build one. There are no conferences I could attend at the moment and do mass introductions. So I need to hustle—one person at a time.

I started curating my feed (whom I follow) to have a peaceful, productive environment on Twitter.

Few lessons:Retweeters that post occasionally. Stop following their retweets.

• Turn on notifications by people you don't follow. So you see when people reply to you on top of your replies across the whole board.
• Suck it up and open DM, yes it means some spammers, ... but you open yourself up to a whole new world.
• Don't be afraid of publishing stuff. The whole web won't notice you in an instant 🙂

Iterative Twitter thread design on paper:

writing on paper helps remove the mind friction so much—version over version over version. At every step, you focus only on the improvement on the micro-level instead of holding all of it in your head.

Twitter takes a lot of time to become a source of value. So I plan to:

• Spend 1+ productive hour on Twitter per day.
• On a regular basis review which efforts worked and why.
• Spend time finding people that invest in Twitter and are worthy of following.

One of the YouTube Workshops that really helped me a lot was How to Crush it on Twitter? by David Perell and Matthew Kobach .

I want to use Twitter to share with the public how I'm building the freedom business.

Newsletter

I announced on Facebook that I wouldn't be publishing the newsletter publicly any more, and that resulted in a few new subscribers.

The second thing that I'm observing is that a lot of people enter their email into subscribe field but don't confirm the subscription. I'm not sure if its spam or I get kicked to promotions tab on Gmail too often. Need to implement something for spam filtering in the future.

One thing I had to do was update the confirm subscription page:

Writing

I realised that writing nine pieces a week is doable, but still, need to figure out the promotion part. Promotion is a separate full-time job I've been ignoring. I'm shouting into the void.

I'll scale to 3+ pieces of content a week and make sure to start getting traction first with what I work on. Then I'll crank up the writing.

The funny thing is that when I pushed for nine pieces a week, I pushed forward on the marketing front as well.

When I write more, I push myself way further. It's way more stress-full, but progress is huge 🙂

The outline for the week:

Plan for the marketing this week 2021-03s:

Yes sharing on FB is yak. But it still bringings me the most momentum and subscribers at the moment. It's the only growth I'm seeing at all at the moment.

Things to try

I want to try and write one long-form piece every two weeks instead of two short pieces per week.

Why? The longer blog posts require different writing skills than writing short pieces and tweets. I need to be able to write long coherent texts if I ever want to publish a book worthy of reading.