How I Plan to Grow My Personal Brand (and the Entrepreneurial Community) in 2019

Hey, guys, in this video, I want to talk a little bit more about the strategy behind these videos as well as some of the other stuff that I plan on doing to kind of help other entrepreneurs and also kind of grow my personal brand in 2019 and beyond. I kind of took a break from a lot of the content creation stuff I do around entrepreneurship in 2018 to focus on exclusively on MarketBeat 4 year, just to kind of see how much we could grow the company if that became the focus. So I didn't write any books last year. I didn't do any video content or I didn't do a whole lot of video content. Like, we didn't do a second season of the podcast. I didn't do a whole lot of interviews on other people's shows. Really the focus was growing MarketBeat and making it a serious business. And it did work really well. We grew the business from three and a half million to six million last year, and we're targeting about eight million in revenue for next year. So we built a fantastic business. We nearly doubled it. But the consequence of that is that I didn't get to do a whole lot of kind of more passion projects and things that I care about in terms of helping other entrepreneurs, developing a personal brand, doing community building. That did kind of take a back seat in 2018. I did just bring on two new employees, and that will hopefully lessen my workload pretty significantly. Between my time and Rebecca's time and Stevie and Don's time, we had about 120 hours of work a week going towards MarketBeat. And now with Ryan and Will, that will go up to about 200 hours of work a week put into the company. So that'll free up a little bit of my time and I'll just create some bandwidth to do some projects that were one just help educate and inform and inspire people about entrepreneurship. Of course, I believe entrepreneurship is a fantastic thing. It creates jobs, it changes people's family trees, it creates wealth and financial freedom. And it allows people to be generous and charitable and fund charitable efforts and raise other people up. So I just think that is naturally a good thing. And my goal is to get as many people who should be entrepreneurs. Not everybody should be an entrepreneur, but people that have that dream and that desire, my goal is to help as many of those people get to the place where they are creating their own income as possible. So I'm going to put more of my folks back into that next year. And in doing that, I'm hoping to help educate and inspire others and Also kind of solidify my personal brand as a thought leader in entrepreneurship in a region. And I'm going to do that through some community building efforts and also through some content creation that I plan on doing. So I've got kind of three things that I'm kind of chewing on my brain for next year, and I think these are going to be the things that help accomplish these goals. First, I'm going to do more video. You've seen I've done maybe one, two videos a week the last few weeks now, and I really enjoy doing them in a way that I think I enjoy more than writing and more than doing some other forms of content, because it is more personal. You get to see my face, you get to hear my voice inflections, my hand gestures. You get to see where I work in my home office here. It's just a fun medium. So I want to do more of these videos. It's not going to be like, start Q and A, though. I had a podcast where I'd answer people's questions, 26 episodes, and it was a fine project. We had a few hundred people watch each video or listen to the podcast every episode. But it felt less authentic than me just talking about what's going on in my business, in my life, and the stuff I'm actually working on. I always felt the Q and A stuff, I was attacking it from more of a theoretical standpoint. And I feel like the content that people really enjoy are when you're kind of talking about what you're working on and the actual stuff you're doing in your own business. Somebody telling their journey of how they got out of debt is always going to be more inspiring than a theoretical game plan for getting out of debt. It's the personal versus the theoretical. So my content in 2019 on video is going to be more than personal. So it's not going to be edited. I'm not going to have a flashy intro or an outro. You know, Rebecca did all the editing for startup Q and A. She's busy doing lots of work for MarketBeat, and that's what I want to keep her on. So I'm not going to involve her in these videos. So they're going to be unedited, they're going to be raw. I'm going to say stupid stuff that normally would be edited out. And that's, you know, that's, that's okay. These are just going to be more amateur videos, but I think it's going to work. So that's the plan. I'M going to do one video a week, maybe two. We'll see how ambitious I am, but definitely at least one video a week and we'll talk about stuff like this, about stuff. I'm working on different topics every week. I just did a video on core values. I've got another one coming up on. Okay, I can't remember the topic, but stuff that's relevant to what I'm thinking about in my business life right now. The second thing I'm going to work on, which is kind of a big announcement. I am going to do a second edition of my email marketing demystified book. Some people don't know, but I've actually written eight personal finance and entrepreneurship books. I haven't done anything in the last year for the reasons I said, but I do think it's time to give that book an update, mostly because there has been some things that have changed in the last four years. The book came out in early 2015, so I think early 2019, four years later would be a good time to give it a second look. Go through every chapter, make sure everything is still correct, accurate and up to date. I have started that process already. I've updated two chapters and the big things that were missing were kind of the GDPR General Data Protection rule stuff in Europe. That's kind of new since the book came out. So that stuff will all get added in. And also web push notifications. Web push notifications and little notifications that show up in your bottom right of your browser and Facebook uses them, a lot of people using them and they're just an incredibly powerful marketing tool. We have more than 300,000 subscribers on our push notification list now make a boatload of money from it. So we're going to add an extra chapter on how to do web push notifications because they really are kind of a second email technology. I think every Internet business owner should use them. No matter how big small you are. It's just another opportunity to collect subscribers and it's fantastic. So I'm kind of targeting kind of March April to release that. I'm working on it now. It'll probably take me a month or so to get everything updated to get the additional chapter written. Write a preface to the second edition. But that will probably be my one book project for 2019. Right now I'm not planning on doing anything else after that, but I do think I will probably start updating my books with second editions as they become necessary, as they become a little bit out of date. So that's that the third thing I want to do is do more kind of in person events for my Entrepreneurs of Sioux Falls Facebook group. We have about 5,700 people that talk about entrepreneurship in the Sioux Falls community on Facebook. We did some events in fall 2017 calling them open Startup Coffee and we just haven't done many of them lately. I do think there is demand for this. There's a gal named Kim Vanderpoel and she does a ladies coffee event and it's not uncommon for her to get 25 ladies to come out on a Thursday morning to talk about entrepreneurship. And that's great that she has done it for our community. But I think there's definitely an element or there's a need not quite being fulfilled by Zeal and the Million Cups and the other events that target entrepreneurs in our city. I do really think people strive for community. Entrepreneurship is just a very lonely thing and nobody really understands what you're going through unless you're doing it. So having that community support, I think it's a good thing. And hopefully I'm going to try to do an event maybe once every other month to help create some more of those that community and those connections. Yeah, I haven't really done a whole lot of thinking about like what that's going to look like in detail. I just know that's going to be a focus in 2019. These probably won't be super formal events. Maybe they'll just be open networking events. Maybe they'll be more startup coffees like we did before or speed networking. I honestly don't know today. But I do know that I want to do some more in person networking events for entrepreneurs in 2019. So those are the kind of three things I'm going to do to help grow the community of entrepreneurship in one sense and also kind of build and solidify my personal brand at the same time. So we're going to do more videos just like this one. Going to do that second edition of Email Marketing Demystified. Then I'm going to try to do some more in person events. So if you are going to do anything to grow entrepreneurship or even grow your personal brand in 2019, I'd love to hear about it. I'd love to get your ideas. I'd love to have a two way conversation and discussion about this. So if you have some big plans to grow your brand or even grow entrepreneurship in any way, I'd love to hear about them. Feel free to put that in the comments below if you like this video, there are on YouTube so feel free to press the like button, press the subscribe button, and then new videos that I view will come to you automatically as they come out. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.