Personal blanding

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Personal branding. Yuck, am I right?

Even writing those words makes me cringe—on behalf of myself, on behalf of all of you.

Any time someone I know in real life says, “I love what you’ve been doing on LinkedIn,” I shrink into a Horton-Hears-a-Who-sized speck of dust and get swept away with the wind.

Even now, only four short paragraphs in, I’m deeply regretting having chosen this as a topic.

But alas, in a world where most of us find jobs, clients, and prospects remotely on the World Wide Web, personal branding is a necessary evil. People gotta know who you are.

Now, I hate to make sweeping generalizations about marketers, especially ones that disparage our entire reading audience, but please accept this backhanded compliment:

I think most great marketers misunderstand personal branding precisely because they are great marketers.

What does every great marketer say is the basis of any great marketing strategy? “Know your audience,” you all say, in perfect union. Exactly right.

So when many marketers go to market themselves, they think, “What does my audience want?” And they land on an answer like “leads,” or “website traffic,” or “affordable articles,” or “advice that solves their problems.”

So then I get about 100 LinkedIn connections per week with a tagline like “I write well-researched B2B blogs that deliver results for your business.” While technically correct, that does not help me understand or remember who you are.

That’s the problem with the audience-first approach to personal branding: it’s not personal at all! You will immediately blend into the crowd.

I also think a lot of us incorrectly think about personal branding as something we have to do. Post on LinkedIn every day. Write a great website tagline. And that’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s not where to start.

I think of a personal brand more as something that has to be discovered or harnessed. Think of every superhero movie plotline where “the power was within you all along,” where they have to go through some journey of self-discovery before they can shoot big lightning bolts at aliens.

In that same vein, a personal brand has to be earned through experience—actually doing stuff. You can’t just wake up one day and decide you’re an expert. The work you do over the course of years and the relationships you build define your personal brand more than what you decide to call yourself.

With all that windbaggery said, I do think there is a lot of value in making content for yourself (e.g., posting on LinkedIn today) as part of that self-discovery process.

Back in January 2022, I decided to post every day on LinkedIn for a month—purely out of curiosity. I just posted any advice I could think of: tips for freelancers, tips for managing freelancers, tools I liked, etc.

It was only through that posting-through-it 30-day experience and the feedback I got from other content marketers that I learned (a) my job history as a one-person marketing team several times was more unique than I thought, (b) I was way more into automation than other content marketers (pre-AI), and (c) people can only know these things about you if you tell them.

Today, a lot of folks know me by my “one-person marketing band” LinkedIn tagline, but that personal brand organically emerged from my experience and the ways I learned I contrasted with other marketers.

So while I don't think posting every day on LinkedIn makes a personal brand, it can be an important step toward self-discovery, nirvana, etc.

Okay, where am I going with all this?

We’re holding another 30-day Superpath LinkedIn challenge where we encourage folks to post every day on LinkedIn, and we’ll all boost each other up. This time, we’re leaning into the cringe and calling it LinkedIn Post the Most.

If you’ve never “invested” in your personal brand, or you’re not really sure what it is, this is an excellent time to find out.

You can join Superpath Pro free for 30 days to participate in the challenge. I promise you’ll learn something!

Cheers,

- Eric

✍ New on the Blog: AMA Recap with Sabreen Haziq

We had a great Slack AMA last week with Sabreen Haziq, who leads brand marketing and creator-led go-to-market at Buffer.

She’s perhaps best known for Buffer’s Team of Creators, a company-wide content initiative that has led to over 20,547 posts published, 22 million organic reach, and $647K in earned media value in 13 months.

Sabreen answered questions from the Superpath Pro community that covered three topics:

Read all her answers here.

📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events

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🎙 New episode of Content, Briefly: Does great writing require great suffering?

We brought the whole gang together to discuss Jimmy’s recent article, The hardest part of content hasn’t gotten any easier.

Jimmy's argument is that AI writing gets you 80-90% of the way there fast and easy, but that ease causes as many problems as it solves—skipping questions like, “Should this even exist at all?”

He’s realized that good writing requires some real friction and discomfort to be of any value, and skipping that step is why AI-assisted content tends to fall flat.

We discussed all of this and more, including:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some links that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:

💼 Who’s Hiring?

In case you missed it last week, we’ve brought back a new and improved Superpath Job Board.

The board will be a mix of jobs we’ve curated from the open web, plus featured listings by employers who want to get in front of you really smart content people!

👉 Browse 100+ listings here.

Jobs are posted on the job board 72 hours late. Superpath Pro members get them within hours of posting.

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