The possibilities behind books, blogs and podcasts are endless. It’s absolutely something that every company really has to be doing especially now when remote working has never been more prolific. We cannot have face to face meetings, so we must learn how to build relationships online. In my experience the main thing that stops people from maybe not fully understanding the sheer volume of benefits of publishing content is a misconception that they’re hard to do. What would you say about the reasons people don’t actually put their content out there?
One thing I’ve noticed is that people do hesitate because there is a time investment. And so we got round that in a couple of ways. One is that we were prepared to invest that time, and you just have to change your mindset. It’s a worthwhile thing to do. And it will pay off. It will save you money in the long run and it will help you achieve high growth, quicker than if you don’t do it.
It’s a great thing for your people to be doing. People who write blogs, who write books, who talk to conferences clearly love their job, because that’s why they do those things. They don’t have to do personal branding activities. They love what they do and they want to be a known name, just like business owners do, and the known expert, because it’s great for whatever they want to do in their future career, and hopefully that future career will be with your company.
Maybe after 10 years or 15 years, someone wants to change and they’re ready, and they’ve built that so there’s something in it for them. So, what we used to do was give people some time to do this but we also used to encourage people to spend a bit of their own personal time so there’s a bit of a different take on this. If someone wants to build a personal brand, then by all means, give them some company time but also try and encourage them to do some of this stuff in their own personal time too so they can still get their day job done.
There are two ways of dealing with time management when you’re the one writing the blogs. One is that you just hunker down, and you commit maybe an hour a day to doing it and aim to have a blog a week coming out. And I think that would be probably sufficient; you’ll get more and more efficient at writing these blogs and better at writing them. So maybe that time will go down a bit but allow a certain amount of time.
The alternative is quite frankly, you should hire someone like yourself, Georgia, to write these things for you. You can have a podcast created and have a blog written for you just like you can a book. Even by just doing a podcast, you know that people with the right skills can take the information and write it into a blog. Even if you’re not doing a podcast, get someone to spend half an hour over Zoom as we’re doing or any of the other plethora of video conferencing systems, and they can do an interview with you which then forms the basis of the blog. And Georgia’s company will edit it, optimise for web searches and publish it to your site for you, they’ll do everything.
It can be a simple concept that’s the thing. Blogs, books and podcasts, there are easy ways to do it and like you say, it is something that I help entrepreneurs with as well. Can you tell us just a bit about your book as well? The blog has been a big part of what you do, the podcasts are a big part of what you do but you’ve also authored several books.
We’ve been very deliberate, both Cake Solutions, my previous company, and in all the stuff I’m doing now whether I’m working with other companies or starting other companies, in making sure that I practice what I preach. I’ve got one small one-hour read book published around culture. We’re obviously just finalising a second book on culture in technical teams, called the The Cultural Operating System. And also, a company that I founded and I’m a non executive and investor in, The Startup Factory, we are just embarking on writing a book too. We’ve got the whole team involved, we have nine authors altogether, so quite an undertaking, where everybody, all the key people in the business are contributing, including a couple partner companies.
My vision for the book is, if I roll the clock back 20 years, what information would have been really useful for me to know when I was starting a tech product or tech services company. The book is me passing my expertise to other entrepreneurs who want to start a tech company through The Startup Factory or other companies I’m working with.
Your book can be started from scratch or it can be a cumulation of a series of podcasts or blogs. You can really make the most of these types of content and deliver it in different ways to reach the maximum number of people. By doing a series of podcasts, the podcasts generate some blogs, and the blogs can generate a book.
Don’t get me wrong, there is work to be done in between all of those things, but it’s massively reduced compared to if you’re just doing them individually. I’d encourage people to look at a number of ways of getting your message out there, whether it be podcasts people can listen to when they take the dog out for a walk, blogs that land in their inbox or social media feeds, or books they can read in the evenings. I don’t do this yet, but something to consider in the future is looking at doing talks at conferences.
Where can people find your blog and more information about you?
At the moment, my blog is being published on TheStartUpFactory.tech website and we’ll also push it out across social media, particularly on LinkedIn and Twitter as we are a B2B business. If you want to reach me to chat about any of the things raised in this series of blogs or The Startup Factory, my personal email address is guyremond@gmail.com.
For help with building your personal brand by publishing incredible content, you can contact me at georgia@writebusinessresults.com or 020 3752 7057.
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