How to scale your personal brand (and startup) by helping others first

No one can do it by themselves. And thats great news for startup founders.

You need help of those around you. What you may not realize, is the more you leverage other people’s help, the more you stand to build your personal brand.

Let me explain:

Imagine if in your own journey of self-development and building influence, you providing a platform for your audience to feature those who’ve taught and inspired you along the way.

This platform is to showcase their craft and their experience, thus building their personal brand while building yours.

Helping to build others’ personal brands and share their story is one of the most educational things you can do for yourself and others who follow you. 

It’s no surprise that it is also directly related with helping you build your personal brand for yourself and your company.

Interview your 1st degree contacts

If you’re like me, you’re surrounded by people that you look up to for inspiration, learnings, and experience. Often, many of these people are too busy working on their craft to stop and write about themselves. 

In your journey towards having the kind of influence that can helping others and get them to take action, highlighting the stories of others help shine a light on your own values and what your brand (whether personal or company) ought to be associated with.

You may already know several of those people, and you are guaranteed to meet more on the way. As you grow your network, you have something more and more valuable to offer to them in terms of getting their story or learnings heard. In return, they may offer to spread this to their network as well.

This can be a:

• YouTube show 
• Soundcloud podcast
• Series of articles on LinkedIn 

1. You gain pure knowledge straight from the source.

We often learn from others in the form of small, vague, and abstract bites. 

If they’re active online, you may be vicariously learning through the content they put out or just being around them. However, having a dedicated platform to bring together these people to distill their knowledge in a streamlined format has several benefits. 

First of all, it allows you an excuse to ask them to break-down what they do and how they do it. 

Another core benefit is the ability to have it recorded for on-demand access for you and others who may find value in it (e.g: your audience).

This knowledge helps you understand your own craft, market, and audience better.

2. You may get distribution.

If you get into the habit of finding, featuring, and sharing content featuring people you admire, something awesome starts to happen.

You begin to develop a free, targeted distribution channel to an audience of 2nd degree connections — that cares about their contact who got featured on your website. And who knows, they may care about you too.

This wheel of distribution is especially set in motion if you have addressed a topic that piques conversation, where others may engage on it through commenting, sharing with their peers, and so on.

It is imperative to note that this should be seen as an after-effect of the first point, and is not promised.

3. If you’re lucky, you may also get credibility.

This is the third and last for a reason. Credibility does not come overnight, and there are no tactics to gain credibility — thank god for that.

However, by getting into a consistent rhythm of applying points 1 and 2, we’ve seen this exercise aids in building credibility over time through consistent association with the personal brands you’ve come to interact with.

Who would you reach out to first?

What would be the common theme that brings all these people together?

Is this going to be a personal project, or designed for an audience that your business targets?

Whatever you build, make sure it’s built for someone.

Or as Seth Godin may say “a group of someones”.

No point building something that’s selfishly for us. 

By all means, such a project should help bring value back to you or your business, but make sure that it’s equally designed with someone specific in mind. 

Here is a a structure to help guide you here:

“ This is a show for people who care about _______ . It will feature people who achieved _______. At the end of each episode, the audience would have _______. They may decide to share it on if they find the content is _______” 

I look forward to hearing about what you create, and who you choose to inspire. If you’re planning to do this properly to grow your business, leverage our subscription service to go faster and wider.