Hi. This is Val Campbell. In the last Post, we were talking about the reasons that you might want to create a brand and create social value online in your efforts to create sustainable income streams not related to employment. In this article, I want to explore the techniques and methods that you might use to create your brand, your persona if you will, online. Now, why would you want to do that? I would suggest that you'd want to do that because you now have the opportunity to figure out ahead of time who your audience is going to be, who's gonna see you online, what do you want them to see, who do you want to be to those people with your end destination, your end objective in mind. 
This is your opportunity to create yourself in a professional light and determine ahead of time what you want that image to be. So your brand is really nothing more than your persona, your personality, your identity online, and you want that identity to be consistent and to be delivered professionally, and you want it to have a message, a consistent message.
So one of the first things that you're gonna need to decide is what do you want your social media home to be? You need some kind of a place where you are focusing most of your efforts. Now, there's a couple of reasons for that. First off, it's hard to be really good at all platforms on social media. It's a huge marketplace, so you need to spend a little bit of time, perhaps talk to your mentor about what is your target market, what do you want that to be, who is it, what's their identity, where do those people live, where do they spend most of their time on social media? Okay.
The next thing is you need to decide if you're going to have your home base, so to speak, in a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram or YouTube perhaps, or are you going to create a blog site? Are you going to be writing most of your content? Or do you want to have a domain name? You can purchase a domain. Probably the most important thing that you will be deciding is what is going to be your brand name. What do you want that identity to be? And there's two different streams of thought on this mostly. One of them is you want something very unique so that there's not a lot of other people online, hopefully nobody else online, using that name. The other school of thought is you want that name to be something that's likely to respond to search engines, people searching for that string of words. And that's why, for instance, my brand name on Facebook is Skills for Success, you know, Creating Success Online. That's my brand awareness because that's the market that I'm looking for: people that want to be successful.
Now, one of the reasons that you might want to create a separate name other than just using your name is, you need to decide: Is your name easy to remember? Is it something that's easy to spell when they're doing searches? Does it have some significance perhaps to what you're trying to do? If you're looking to create a persona that has a specific message, you might not want to use your personal name. You might want to create literally a brand name and promote that brand name instead of you personally. But if you're trying to build personal relationships, then maybe you'd want to go ahead and promote your personal name as your brand awareness.
Like somebody just the other day had one that said "Work with Renee" or something like that, you know. It's "Work with Joe," "Succeed with Renee." , there's different ideas on this, things that you can do. But these are options for you to explore, and I do suggest talking to your mentor about this and kicking this back and forth so that you can decide ahead of time what you want that name to be for your brand.
Now, if you do decide that you want to have a domain name and you're looking for doing some searches on that to see what's available, there are a lot of places you can go. You can go to... I use WebsitePalace because years ago when I was doing a lot of this research, I kind of fell in with Lisa liby a little bit. She's got some great content on YouTube, and I got a lot of knowledge from her, and she had an affiliate program with WebsitePalace, so I just decided I'd support her and use that. But there's Hover. That's a good one. GoDaddy has some features where you can go and you can search what domain names are available, and you can kind of try this idea out a little bit as to different domain names you might want to use.
Probably the next thing is that you're going to want to create an email address that communicates a message, what you want that to be. Okay. Now, in my particular case, for my marketing business, I chose emsandval@protonmail.com, and the reason I did that is because I'm trying to create a personal connection with EMS and I as a couple working towards being successful, and we're out there looking for personal relationships to build with people. That may or may not be exactly what you're looking for. I'm just giving you an example of what you might do in terms of an email name because that email name is going to be one of the first parts of the consistency of creating your brand.
Now, one of the touchy subjects here in this area is the idea of being consistent across all of your brand platforms. And I say that a little bit loosely because I really recommend just focusing on one to begin with or maybe two, like Facebook and YouTube or Instagram and YouTube, something like that. YouTube is a good hosting site. I use Vimeo a lot also. Hive is also a great place, I use Ecency and looking to explore spknetwork/3speak for the videos and shorts I will be uplaoding soon, There's pros and cons each way, Vimeo and YouTube, as to which one is a better hosting platform for video content. But obviously, my primary home is in Hive and facebook because I'm looking to build relationships with people. Those are great platforms to be able to do that in, not only domestically but internationally.
But whatever you're doing, I suggest being consistent in your appearance, your grooming, the clothes you wear, the background in your videos. You know, be as consistent as possible. It's not saying you have to wear the same thing all the time. I tend to wear black or white t-shirts a lot because I'm working with a green screen and I don't want to conflict with that, right? And those two colors are pretty non-conflicting with green. But whatever that is, whatever your appearance is that you're promoting, be consistent. Make sure that that appearance is in conformity to the message you're trying to send to people.
The other thing that I would probably recommend strongly is to look at this grooming situation. Make sure that every time you go out in public, meaning in social media, you are presenting the same image over and over again, and the image that you're presenting, you want that to be attractive. This is attraction marketing. You're not trying to antagonize people. You're not trying to prod people. You're looking to attract people to you that want to come and see, "Wow, I want to know what she does," "I want to know how he does that because I want to create that lifestyle that person's talking about." In our industry, that's a key thing. If you go study the super performers, they all have a very consistent social media presence. They all have a very consistent message tone, the tone of their message. So now that comes down to content, and again, a little bit of a tricky subject because people say, "Well, gee, you mean I need to change everything about myself?" Well, no, not really. But is your everyday image the image that you want everybody to see every day when they're searching for you online? Is that what you're trying to promote? And in that regard, you need to be very deliberate and very intent on what your content is, right?
So you want to be sure that you're grooming your speech patterns and things like that on the scene, but also the tone, the tone of what you're doing. Now again, a little sensitive about this because a lot of people are on social media and they're out there putting out a lot of negative content, a lot of negative tone. I'm just going to tell you something: That is not generally thought to be positive and attractive to people that are looking to improve their station in life. In other words, they're not likely to come and look at that and hear about all of your personal problems. Everybody's got them, but you don't need to share all of them online. And they're not likely to come and go, "Gee, that's I want to be just like that person." They're more likely to come and say, "I don't know why I'd want to follow that person. They don't seem to have their life put together. They're all they're doing is complaining all the time and have a lot of language that's not really edifying." Okay. So this is another reason why sometimes in social media, people have a professional side and they've got a personal side. And I don't necessarily recommend that because if you are completely different between your two brands, your two personalities, somebody's gonna find you and they're gonna look and they're gonna go, "Wait a minute, that's not really who that person is." So as I said before, I suggest you pick one platform to start with or maybe two, and then expand from there if you need to. And what I have personally found is that it's really hard for me to get out of Hive, Facebook and YouTube and expand over into Instagram or some of the other platforms because I'm so busy dealing with all of the business being created there that I don't really have the time or the bandwidth to be able to deal with another platform. I've just never been able to get there, even though I think it's interesting. I think it's an idea. I think there's value to being all over the place. But I am highly suspicious, let me put it this way, that people that I know that have all of that social media presence probably have somebody helping them who does nothing except work on the social media presence and the branding for their employer, and I think there's quite a bit of that out there, a personal assistant if you will. But as you're making this decision, and again, you can talk to your mentor about this, if you have somebody on your team that really is aware of all of the different options and what they're really about, but you want to pick a medium based on what your purpose is. Okay? For instance, maybe if you are an interior designer, you might want to really focus on Instagram because Instagram is image-centric. Does that make sense? And as an interior designer, you're gonna really be putting a lot of images of your work out there.
If you are looking to develop relationships, Facebook probably is a great place to do that. Get the point? So the next thing is what is your content? What's your communication medium going to be? Are you mostly written word? Then you might want to create a blog site. Most of your content video? Then maybe you want to be on one of the sites. So you know, you might want to have a video blog site, a vlog site, or you might want to work with Instagram, or you might want to work with Facebook. There, Facebook has started hosting more and more video. And of course, then if you're in video, you need to make a determination if you want to work with YouTube, Vimeo, or both, and why you would want to use one versus the other in what situations.
These are just things that you can learn. Okay? There's a world of content on site that you can learn about these different ideas. Okay? And and of course, you know, you can get a hold of the person on your team that's developing content, pick their brain as to why they pick different things. Okay? The next thing is how do you present yourself? Again, talking about video, writing, live feeds. If you want if you're going to do live feeds, then you're probably talking about YouTube or Facebook. If live feeds are going to be most of your branding content. And there's different reasons why you might want to do live feed or you might want to do more prepared video like I do mostly. There's different reasons to do these things.
So the fourth thing is who and where does your audience live? Now, if your audience, let's say, if you're an interior designer and you are doing mostly image work, your audience is probably going to be on Pinterest or one of the other image-oriented sites. That makes sense as opposed to more of a video-oriented site like Vimeo or even Facebook. Facebook is really starting to orient more and more and more towards video and live feed.
So you know, explore these, talked about this, but these are four critical decision factors that go into how are you going to position yourself in social media and what are you going to do with that. So my final two points here are: First, to make sure that the content that you're presenting as you're developing your brand is in conformance, it's in alignment with the values of your audience. And I'm not talking just who they are, but perhaps who they want to become, because that's really important. That people are looking at you and trying to make a determination, at least in our business, is this a person that I want to create a relationship with and follow, who's going to help me become who I want to be, to get solutions to my challenges? And that's the next point: to create value. And of course, all of this article series we're talking about creating value, right? But what is that? Often that value is represented in a solution to some of the challenges that they're dealing with. Now, you might not be a subject matter expert. You might not be able to talk authoritatively on all of these subjects, but you can introduce others. You can bring them to Hive. You can bring them to people in our communities or that we bring in as subject-matter experts. Does that make sense? So you just want to be sure that you're creating value, solutions, a reason for them to return to you and to tell others about you because that's really what we're looking to do, isn't it? We're looking to create traffic, and the best way to create traffic is to create value. And that's really what this is all about: to create a brand awareness, to create a personality that is seen as being a place where they can get help, solutions, and support to be the person that they want to become. Okay?
This is Val Campbell. I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions, you want any more discussion on this, please get ahold of me. You can reach me in comment section of this post. That's probably the best place. And of course, you can see the credits before and afterwards; you know how to get hold of me. Okay?. I will see you on the beach in the next post.
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