We’re back on Day 2 of the Personal Branding For Business Owners blog series! I’m joined again by personal branding connoisseur Guy Remond; Non-Exec Director, Investor and entrepreneur.
Guy, it’s fascinating to hear the impact just putting yourself out there and enabling your people to do the same has. I think it’s fair to say every single aspect of your business was positively affected. Obviously the power of books is undeniable; it’s such an intelligence and personal way to package up kind of you know who you are. You found a way to make blogs personal to the people writing them, as well as to the company itself. What do you say to people who are treating blogs almost as a quick, let’s just get something out there form of communication. Do you think there’s a better way of going about it?
First of all, it’s well worthwhile for any company to write a book and do it properly. But that aside, they’re a big undertaking. Therefore, there’s less competition out there. So when you write a book and you push it out over social media, there’s less competition. A blog, you’re quite right in pointing out there are millions of blogs out there and that will only grow, so effectively what you’re saying is, how can people rise above the noise?
And so there’s two ways. The obvious way when you write the blog is to just to make sure that it’s of good quality, so we had a process. When someone wrote a blog, at least two other people read it, and checked it for the quality and checked it just to make sure the grammar was relatively good. It doesn’t have to be perfect, by the way, but you know you want to have a certain standard in terms of the grammar and the way it’s written. But the most important thing is that it has to be technically correct in my world from a software engineering point of view. And I guess technically correct in other industries as well.
I think if you do that and then you push it out there, you’re gaining reputation. You’ll build that up and over time you’ll gain a following, or the individuals writing the blogs will gain a following, and because the individuals gain a following, your company gains a following. That’s the key point; I keep mentioning this all the way through. The important thing about building personal brands is that you will build your company.
The second important point is about blogs. I talked yesterday about partnerships, and I think by making sure you partner with other experts and make them aware when you publish a blog, social sharing kicks in and that is really powerful. There was almost a palatable cheer in the office when one or two individuals who had found literally 30-40,000 followers on Twitter retweeted one of our blogs, because that was a big thing. You knew then that it was reaching a far wider audience than you can reach on your own.
So make sure that when you build your social media profile and you push your own social media and your company social media, that you get your colleagues to like and share it too. Build relationships with partner companies to push you out there as well and if you do that, then very quickly you build credibility. It’s all about building credibility.
The whole blog thing is, your results don’t happen in any massive way for the first six months, and you’ve just got to keep pushing content out there. You’ve got to have faith, but it will work. It does work if you’re putting stuff out there that interests people. They will read it and you will build a following, but it will take a little bit of time to do that. So you need to put the groundwork in, and honestly six months to two years makes a huge difference.
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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