Personal Brand Strategy: Content

Content marketing is at the core of modern marketing — whether building digital marketing campaigns, demonstrating thought-leadership, building a community, or simply sharing what you know and your unique perspectives. No matter what industry you work in, or your level of experience — if you can write or create video content, and if you’re consistently adding to your library of content, you will have a distinct competitive advantage over most other people.

Some ideas for developing your content strategy include:

• Create a blog and catalog your experiences. Don’t worry if others have shared the same advice — they don’t share your combination of experiences and unique perspectives!
• Follow the blogs and articles of thought-leaders, experts, and people you admire — and be sure to comment when you have something to add (Note: always have something to add).
• Expand on past and future works (blog posts, articles, lists) with quotes and mentions of others — using trackback links so that they know where this traffic is coming from.
• Submit abstracts and articles to industry magazines and online communities. This can be an incredibly powerful tool for building your personal brand — and it builds upon itself. Have one article accepted, and you can then point to it as a reference for additional articles.
• Write an eBook or a whitepaper, or provide input on a community paper.
• Publish a newsletter or list blog that aggregates relevant content from others. Of course, you can do some of this through social media, as well, but I’m speaking more of long-form content with links, references, and your inserted commentary/opinions.
• Host a webinar, create a podcast, or live stream your content to expand your audience. Use the content you’ve written as your source material and cross-post between them. The idea here is to provide content in many different formats, as some people prefer reading, others prefer videos, etc.
• Aggregate your own content and create a book, training materials, or other downloadable tools. Write with a plan! I always recommend that people create and expand on an outline. They can jump around and blog about various topics on that outline, but in the end, they have a library of content that can be combined to create a larger content asset for digital downloads.

Of course, this is just scratching the surface of what is possible within your content marketing strategy. But no matter how you approach content, there are a couple of things you should consider:

• First, avoid requiring forms / registration to download or read your content. Companies have become over-reliant on “gated” content and email marketing, thinking that they *must* collect reader information to be able to market to them. Instead, include links and contact information within the body of your content and invite people to connect and find out more. You’ll have higher conversions when people give you permission to market to them.
• Second, don’t hide what you know — hoarding information does nothing to build your brand. Share what you know, and be open with your unique perspective, and you’ll build trust.

Be sure to check out the other posts in this series:

• Creating a Personal Branding Strategy
• Events
• Social
• Differentiation
• Defending Your Brand