Getting Started with Personal Branding.

"What IS Personal Branding and how do I even get started?"

Personal branding is essentially marketing yourself from a personal or professional perspective, and sometimes both.

You have value, you have knowledge to share, your input is welcome in conversations. Whether you're brand new to an industry or a seasoned veteran, you bring value to others. Both in the written word and through videos.

Getting started in personal branding means getting into your swim lane, start sharing and engaging in conversations, and then, to quote a famous fish, "just keep swimming, just keep swimming."

Thanks to Jessica Cox for the request. Do you have topics you'd like me to cover? Drop me a note in the comments or DM me.

Full Transcript. Apologies for any typos.

0:00 What exactly is personal branding? And how do you get started?

Well, personal branding is really a, it's a marketing campaign for yourself. You're telling the world, who you are and what you do and where your swim lanes and expertise lies. Think of it as a marketing campaign for yourself. And you can tell us about your professional world, you can tell us about your personal world, you tell us about both. Or you can just say, Look, I don't want to tell the world about my personal self. That's perfectly fine. A lot of people do that.

For myself, I kind of split it down the middle where I've got Walter Biscardi dot com, where you can learn all about the things I do and how I do it. And then you can go to Where's Walter dot TV and see all of my recipes and travel advice and mixology tips and things like that. So you can see both sides of me and I don't mind sharing, but some people don't want to, that's perfectly fine.

0:49 Where personal branding comes in to play is especially when you're moving up in your career or you want to switch jobs or you want to switch careers even. The more personal branding that you have out there, the more that people can see, you're no longer just a piece, a name on a piece of paper of a resume, you're no longer just a portfolio of all your work. You're actually somebody that I can see, who is this person? Do they seem like they're gonna be somebody who can fit, you can actually jump ahead of other people in resumes and, and job interviews, just by presenting who you are on camera. You've already taken some of the guesswork out, Okay, I see who this person is. I see how they are. I want to bring them in.

A bunch of you say, hey, you make this look so easy. You just get on camera and you start talking and you just "Go." Well, yeah, I've been doing this for a long time. Okay, I'm, I've done professional speaking, and I've done writing and I've done camera work for a very, very long time.

1:44 But to get started, it actually is easy, and you just have to trust yourself. Okay. The first thing you want to do is pick a topic. So I'm talking about personal branding. That's my topic. Then make yourself a three, a three-point outline. These are the three talking points I'm going to talk about in this video because remember, it doesn't have to be that long. But I like I like videos somewhere, a, for tutorials, say somewhere between three and 10 minutes. That's kind of a sweet spot. Just give me the information I want without a whole bunch of extra stuff. So what are the three talking points that you want to do, whether it's going to be a video, or whether it's going to be something that you write, three talking points to talk about?

2:21 So for this video, What is it? Personal versus Professional. End with the tap dance number. No, no, not the tap dance number. End with a demonstration, yeah, that's what it really is. So give me three bullet points, talking points of what you're going to talk about, and then start doing it.

2:38 Now. Go ahead and record yourself. Everybody has a phone so you've got a camera. So if you're going to start doing video, set up the phone to prop it up, and go ahead and do your presentation and you know what, it's probably going to suck. This is probably my 20th take of doing this particular video right now. So, record it. Look at it, laugh at it, delete it, do it again. Laugh, do it again, laugh, do it again, and just keep doing it. And eventually, and if it doesn't work the first time around, just put the phone or put the phone away. Go take a break, come back, try it again.

And eventually, it might take you 100 takes, you're gonna see something there, you're gonna go you know what, that's actually not bad. I sound like I know what I'm talking about. I've got three good bullet points to share with people. I'm going to go ahead and put this thing out there and put it up on Twitter, put it up on LinkedIn, once you do it once, do it again. And just keep doing it. And it doesn't matter how many takes you know, nobody does it on the first try literally, this is not the first take of this video.

3:39 Keep doing it and keep doing it. Then to further build your personal brand. You want to engage in conversations, respectfully engage in conversations that are in your area of expertise. For me is storytelling, filmmaking, cinematography, editing, things like that. So I look for conversations, I follow people on LinkedIn. I follow people on Twitter. On Instagram that have skills that I want to learn or people that I totally respect and I engage in conversation. When I see something I try to go beyond just Hey, congratulations that looks amazing. I try to you know at least say Hey, that looks amazing. I love the color grade you did on that man the colors really pop really great work. Or I’ll ask a question, man absolutely amazing commercial that shot you did where you come in over the actor that's absolutely amazing. How did, what camera was that, what lens I mean did with that? Was that robotic? Was that all handheld? How did you do that? I want to learn. And that shows me at being an interested party who understands the craft, and I'm being respectful. I just want to ask the question.

4:45 So building personal brand, really you just got to get started. Come up with your bullet points. Right topic bullet point that gives you a little outline to talk about and then start writing. Start shooting video, throw them away.

4:59 I mean, It is as easy as, look you've all seen me do this right here's my GoPro rig Hey Hi I'm Walt Biscardi and we're going to talk about something today look I'm just sitting in my kitchen see this is no big deal this is literally just my kitchen. This window right here just happened to be a beautiful window. You know maybe you don't like to sit down you know maybe you want to stand up so maybe we should just stand up and you know, expose the set and you like to walk around let's go outside.

It's a little nicer outside than it is inside. If I get the door unlocked that would be even better. But hey, look at that. See? Now we're outside. And it's beautiful. And I'm talking to you on a GoPro, on a camera. Because I wanted to share there's look there's the set behind us. It's just my kitchen there's a backyard some nice towels out here. You know I'm not even dressed y'all thought I was dressed Look, I'm just wearing my little my leisure pants and my slippers. So it's all smoke and mirrors. So you have something to share you have value. Build your personal brand, share your stories, engage in conversations. Have fun. It's that easy!