E549: The rules of building a personal brand have changed.
2025 is going to be great for them, but not if you waste your time with one cardinal sin.
This is what that sin is - how to avoid it - and the four pillars that will make you an authority in your niche.
How to build a personal brand in 2025… explained in under 6 minutes!
My Exact Social Media Posting Strategy: https://edwardsturm.com/articles/social-media-posting-strategy/
Content Inc. Second Edition: https://www.amazon.com/Content-Inc-Second-Content-First-Successful-dp-1264257546/dp/1264257546/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
00:00 Introduction 00:12 The Decline of Traditional Blogging 00:42 Social Media Platforms 01:40 The Four Pillars of Personal Branding 02:27 Content Type 03:20 Home Platform 03:53 Cross-Platform Distribution 04:47 Final Tips
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#personalbranding #branding #instagrammarketing #tiktokmarketing
This is how to build a personal brand in 2025 in under six minutes. The most important thing to keep in mind is to use platforms where you have built-in distribution. It used to be that you could blog every day. You could have a website and you could blog every day, and SEO would be great for building a personal brand using a blog. That's not the case anymore. If you're writing top of funnel content, content that answers questions instead of giving solutions. That just doesn't do as well on Google anymore. People go to chat TPT to get their answers with that. It's no longer the case that you can make a recipe blog and your recipes are going to rank super well and you're going to get tons of traffic to the recipes and then you're going to build a brand around that. If anything, you should have your recipes on Instagram or on Pinterest or TikTok or Facebook Reels. YouTube as well. YouTube especially, since YouTube videos rank really, really well on Google, but normal blog content does not. If you have a blog, then you need to direct traffic to it using another platform, such as Reddit or one of the social media platforms that I just mentioned. This is the best way to build a personal brand without using a blog. You have four pillars, and I'm taking this. If you want to learn more about it, I built my personal brand. I've made maybe three to 4,000 videos since I started making videos every day. Just short-form mobile videos on TikTok and Instagram Reels. November 1st, 2022, when I started, made three to 4,000 videos since then. I have around 250,000 followers across all my platforms, actually closer to 300,000 now. And I followed the Content Inc. formula. Content Inc. 2nd edition by Joe Paluzzi. You can't recommend this book enough. There's four key pillars. First, you have your niche. You got to pick a niche. I recommend picking something that you really like. If you don't know what you really like, then just start making content and you'll find out what you like as you go. But ultimately, you'll have to narrow down to a niche. And then once you have your niche, you have a spin on the niche. This is your unique angle or your voice, your specific voice on the niche. I talk about digital marketing all the time, but I talk about digital marketing in a very different way than lots of other people talk about digital marketing. I talk about digital marketing in an extremely different way than Gary Vaynerchuk, for example. And he's very different for me. So you have your unique angle or your voice. For me, I like giving specific directions on how to get awareness, especially qualified awareness for a brand. And mostly using digital marketing. Then you pick a content type. So like I said, can't really be written blogs anymore because you're probably going to be making a lot of top of funnel content, answering questions, what, why, here's how to do so and so. That stuff, it just doesn't rank as well on Google anymore unless you are using maybe video on YouTube or video on Instagram or video on TikTok. Podcasts as well, you need to direct distribution to a podcast. Podcasts are hard too. So you need to have a marketing method for the podcast. But if you're using the social media platforms that I mentioned, they will promote your content for you. If you make engaging content and even if it's not engaging, you can learn and you can do trial and error and you can see what works and what doesn't. And as you get better and better, these platforms will push out your content for you. So I recommend if you're starting, social video is great. Especially because you can reuse it across platforms and that brings us to the fourth pillar. What is your home platform? What is the platform that you are starting with? Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? Is it LinkedIn? LinkedIn can work as well if you're doing written content because a LinkedIn algorithm will push out your written content for you. For me, my home platform is TikTok, actually. And I make my videos in a tool called Descript. I export from Descript, upload to TikTok. TikTok recommends music based on the video, on the subject matter, on the lighting, on the way that I'm speaking, on the pacing. I don't put music in all of my videos, but when I do, I use TikTok's AI recommendations, it is perfect. I put the video in Descript, I download the video without the TikTok watermark, and then I upload it to every other platform. I upload it to Instagram Reels, which auto uploads it to Facebook. I have an automation that uploads my videos to Pinterest, to Snapchat Spotlight, to LinkedIn. I manually upload to YouTube Shorts. Manually uploading on YouTube Shorts does better than auto uploading. If you want to learn more, I have a guide on exactly how I post my videos. You can just Google Edward's Stirm social media posting strategy. So my content type is social video, my platform is TikTok. And then I like this platform choice because the videos are used across all platforms. Not just that, if I make a good video, TikTok promotes it for me. I don't have to go and share my video on Reddit to have people see it. If it's a good video, people are going to see it just through TikTok's algorithms, same with Instagram Reels algorithms, Facebook Reels, same with all of these. So to recap, if you're doing a written blog or a podcast, you're going to need to have a marketing method to direct people to this platform, the easiest way to build a personal brand in 2025 is to not do a written blog or a podcast. And instead, pick a platform which is social media that will promote your content for you, pick your main content type, your niche, and your spin on the niche. For me, I have a blog and I have this daily podcast. In fact, this is episode 549 of my daily podcast, 549 episodes in a row doing this. But I started this after I had traction on TikTok. And I was able to direct people to this podcast using TikTok. And then I started doing well on Instagram and using Instagram as well. I didn't start the podcast. I didn't start the newsletter until I first had traction on TikTok, which is my home platform. So that is how to build a personal brand in 2025. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. The article that I mentioned will be in the show notes for this episode. And I will talk to you again tomorrow.
