Personal brand: Week 06, 2021

This week I didn't do that much on the personal brand daily, but in the end, many things accumulated.

• Signed up for the Blogging for devs accelerator: Twitter track.
• Two new newsletter subscribers through the meetup on Knowledge entrepreneurs.
• Some positive feedback on my writing.

Was in AMA (ask me anything) this week and the indie hacker said:

"Sure there are 1000 tutorials out there on topic A, but I wrote none."

It's highly egoistic but true. Although if you can write in the niche that's not too competitive, your life will be easier.

If you work on something special that's a unique combination of different skills, topics people will sooner or later find you.

Embrace being a beginner.

Creative Studio

I almost gave up on the studio and home workshop because of all minimalism philosophy and all. However, then I came across Casey Neistet and realised how to leverage a studio for the creative benefit.

Reading part of the studio is pretty much done. Need few final touches and to sort the books.Writing and coding setup done. However, the desk for the main development PC is clunky and not high enough. Need to upgrade this in the future.

In the last month, Casey's YouTube channel had a pretty significant influence on my opinion of how I produce content. Now to be clear I don't like all aspects of his style, but parts of it.

In the environment that I'm in, I can't reproduce his type of studio. Nor I want to.

I'm not sure how the creative studio will fit into my life. But I know I'll keep building one for the next three years, while I do my PhD.

Luckily I won't have to disassemble the studio once I move to another place. House I'm in is family-owned and will stay family-owned for a while.

My current status:

The setup is far from finished. But with everything in front of me, things are becoming more evident.

The funny thing is that many possessions have a story behind. Somehow I've been creating a creative studio for a while now without realising it. 😬

And before anyone busts my ass. Here's how Casie's studio looked in 2016 (left) and then in 2019 (right).

Casey used to have a super "messy" parts of the studio if I can get mine set up in the order in less then 10 years it will be a win. We'll see if I'm capable of building something magical.

So what will be the role of the studio? A place that helps me create unique content when I can't travel (CORONA ...).

• The workshop bench doesn't exist yet.
• I need to get the fisheye camera lens to be able to capture wider shots.

Writing

By blogging and writing daily, you change the way you think. After years of writing, I'm starting to notice the changes. I can crystallise my thoughts way faster.

Few other random thoughts:

• I wrote a longer piece on the plan for 2021
• By writing every day, you figure out what you want to say way clearly.
• I have more to say because I sit down every day and figure out what I'm thinking about.
• Writing isn't just about communicating with the world but also about communicating with yourself.

What is value?

Everyone is slapping around provide value. For each person, value is a highly subjective term.

Some examples of how to end consumers/readers/audience approach value:

• Learning small bits of interesting information is of value for me.
• If you teach me for free on how to solve problem x by doing y you're providing me with value.
• I'm interested in what you do as a person. If you are sharing your personal story, you are providing value.
• ...

Personal brands and inbound marketing are based on providing some value first and then selling to the customer. In some sense: Get the reader, audience addicted enough and sell them the product they can't live with later.

Twitter

Brand separation:

Going over tweets and figuring out how to improve them:

I haven't figured all the details yet, but the storytelling power is essential.

One idiotic thing on the phone is that I can't figure out how to type spaces in Tweets. I'm able to style the content way better on the PC.

Figured it out. Newline button is on the numerical keyboard.

Two interesting Tweets:

• ❌ Convert the personal brand reports into a weekly Twitter thread for @ziga_brencic

• ❌ Regularly go over the Twitter replies and see if there's any valuable content that you can recycle for the newsletter. Or even join them into a thread, ...

How to start a journal like a newsletter?

Style simple emails in the Gmail, Apple mail editor (titles, bullet points, pictures) use bcc and send emails to a few close friends. That's what I did for a year and a half. Well till the beginning of February 🙂

Wrap up

You might notice that I've enhanced the writing with:

• sketches
• photographs
• Twitter screenshots
• hardware studio
• library
• coding
• ...

Why? My life isn't just about writing. It's a lot more. I'm not particularly good in any single of the above skills. But combine them into coherent storytelling, and you get an excellent package. 🤗

So yes, focus on one topic you create but use and merge different mediums. Create your style. There are so many writers out there. But very few that can enhance their writing with sketches, photos, ...