Building a personal brand that scales and monetizes — Neal Schaffer // PDCA Social

Quotes

• “I started in social media back in 2004, I became one of the first million users in LinkedIn and I started my career in Asia. When I had my first child, we went back to the US and I went through the transition phase of having no local network. Then, I started to spend more time on LinkedIn specifically.” -Neal“With LinkedIn then, if you have the most connections and you have something like B2B Sales Executive for the job market and you did the searchfor that, you would actually end up being number one in the search results on LinkedIn because it was in descending order of connections.” -Neal“So I started doing more network on LinkedIn and I participated in forums. That’s how it started, July of 2008. I had a blog which was just focused on LinkedIn, that blog became a book in 2009. Because my background is more on the B2B sales side and I don’t have an agency background, I began as a consultancy in helping companies with their strategies.” -Neal “I joined Twitter in the fall of 2008 and ended up spending more time there than on LinkedIn. When I launched my consultancy, I realized that I have the opportunity to be the one-trick pony for LinkedIn and there are some like me that chose that path.” -Neal“I thought it was unfair for my clients because they reach out to me with their problems and I don’t want to force them on LinkedIn if that’s not the best solution and I’ve taught about best practices. So I realized that I had to learn the entire scopeof what is possible in social media by being active in all these channels.” -Neal“There are three main types of content. The first is influence derived from content. When we think of influencers, we think of people that are creating content. The content may be text-based, video, or photograph, or could be audio-based.” -Neal“All of these take time but with the consistency of content creation, content sharing, engagement, and really using the platform as they were intended to be used, you can grow that following.” -Neal“For me, video is the final frontier because there’s a lot that does this repurposing the content. But for me to just upload the episode of my podcast to YouTube with a static image is probably not what YouTube was intended to be used and if you compare itwith other YouTubers, it’s not going to be an engaging content so I don’t do it.” -Neal“Part of it is going deep in the platform and being true to that platform. Once you do platform right, you can get to the other. It’s the exact same strategy I use with my clients. Don’t do them all. Start with one or two, AB Test and once you have a working role model, you translate that to the next one.” -Neal“The tools help you scale but more than that, it’s the process and I am what you would call an architect.I don’t want to do the YouTube video without having a process in place that will allow me to do it on a regular basis to build my influence in a systematic way. You need to have a process and you need to have the tools that meet the process.” -Neal “I would rather work with various experts in specific areas because that will allow me to scale. Once you put a system in place, find that magical combination of you owning the strategy, the process, the system, the tools, and obviously that content creation while being able to outsource some of the more menial tasks.” -Neal“There are a lot of mistakes I have made along the way and that I continue to make, which is a lack of products. So I have services and if you’re going to build a personal brand and monetizing it, how can businesses engage with you?” -Neal “It begins with consulting and you might say, I consider consulting more by project and I consider coaching more by the hour. Then you have this fractional CMO type of business model where you are actually in their office actively training and working together. Then you have webinars, live events, corporate training, affiliate marketing, then you can have an influencer marketing stream, digital courses, and creating your own product. That’s a few ways you can monetize.” -Neal