Building a personal brand

Editor's Notes

• #4: I am a coder, a developer by nature. I always had a blog – I use the blog to keep my ideas, to share the knowledge with my future self. To keep track of my learning. Nobody was reading, and I was not expecting anybody to read it. It was public, but it was for me. It was around 2015 and I wanted to become an architect, I was just a developer, I believed I was a developer, and nobody was interested in mentoring me or help me to step up. My bosses didn’t care about my idea to growth, no architect in the company had time to mentor me… so instead of sitting in the chair waiting for that to happen. I realized that the main reason why nobody believed in me it was because nobody knew me. When there were meetings, I was not speaking most of the time, I was listening.  When someone asked a question in a group I knew the answer most of the time, but I always let others reply. When someone offer a new activity I let it pass, unless someone wanted to do it with me, eventhough I could do it. I was a coward, I didn’t trusted myself, and I had 0 confidence. One day I got tired of that. I decided that I will start being more active, and taking leadership. I started answering the questions, taking new activites and being more outspoken at work. A while after people started coming to me for questions and for advice. In 2016 I already had stablished myself as a knowledgable person inside the company, and when the opportunity to lead a new migration appeared I took the lead. One thing I was interested in was to keep my team in the loop and share the knowledge that we generated when learning about the migration with the team. So I created a youtube channel. In that channel I shared technical videos on how to do simple things that could help us in our migration. Because youtube is a search engine and because there was no content on this subject, other people outside the team started watching this videos.  And when I realized I started surfing the wave. Somewhere in 2017 I started uploading content regularly to my channel, and I started noticing a growth in the amount of views and subs. Also during that year AWS nominated me an AWS Serverless Hero, because of the work I have done with this channel. There were few videos in the channel by then, but I had started doing public speaking as well. I was not sure where this was taking me. On 2017 also I started creating many online courses, platforms like manning reach out to me as an expert. And also I was getting lots of request for freelance work, that I needed to reject as I was fully employed. On feb 2018 my daughter was born, I had infront of me a long maternity leave. I wanted to see what I could do with it. So I started taking some freelancer customers, create many more online courses and keep on publishing videos every week. I got sponsors for my videos and I was really considering going all in with this influencer lifestyle. I really love teaching. I found that inside me.  And when the maternity leave was coming to an end I had to make a decision what to do. I had 3 options: -Go back to work as a developer/ architect à did some interviews and got a couple of offers. Everybody loved to have someone with my profile in their company. -Try to make this work à the monlhy salary I was getting with this influencer life was not close at all with what I would get pay by a company -Or find a middle ground. And there is where AWS approach me. It was the perfect middle ground. I get to do what I love. And I get a decent salary. Also now in AWS I get the reach of the brand and that takes my personal brand to another level.
• #5: I am a coder, a developer by nature. I always had a blog – I use the blog to keep my ideas, to share the knowledge with my future self. To keep track of my learning. Nobody was reading, and I was not expecting anybody to read it. It was public, but it was for me. It was around 2015 and I wanted to become an architect, I was just a developer, I believed I was a developer, and nobody was interested in mentoring me or help me to step up. My bosses didn’t care about my idea to growth, no architect in the company had time to mentor me… so instead of sitting in the chair waiting for that to happen. I realized that the main reason why nobody believed in me it was because nobody knew me. When there were meetings, I was not speaking most of the time, I was listening. When someone asked a question in a group I knew the answer most of the time, but I always let others reply. When someone offer a new activity I let it pass, unless someone wanted to do it with me, eventhough I could do it. I was a coward, I didn’t trusted myself, and I had 0 confidence. One day I got tired of that. I decided that I will start being more active, and taking leadership. I started answering the questions, taking new activites and being more outspoken at work. A while after people started coming to me for questions and for advice. In 2016 I already had stablished myself as a knowledgable person inside the company, and when the opportunity to lead a new migration appeared I took the lead. One thing I was interested in was to keep my team in the loop and share the knowledge that we generated when learning about the migration with the team. So I created a youtube channel. In that channel I shared technical videos on how to do simple things that could help us in our migration. Because youtube is a search engine and because there was no content on this subject, other people outside the team started watching this videos. And when I realized I started surfing the wave. Somewhere in 2017 I started uploading content regularly to my channel, and I started noticing a growth in the amount of views and subs. Also during that year AWS nominated me an AWS Serverless Hero, because of the work I have done with this channel. There were few videos in the channel by then, but I had started doing public speaking as well. I was not sure where this was taking me. On 2017 also I started creating many online courses, platforms like manning reach out to me as an expert. And also I was getting lots of request for freelance work, that I needed to reject as I was fully employed. On feb 2018 my daughter was born, I had infront of me a long maternity leave. I wanted to see what I could do with it. So I started taking some freelancer customers, create many more online courses and keep on publishing videos every week. I got sponsors for my videos and I was really considering going all in with this influencer lifestyle. I really love teaching. I found that inside me. And when the maternity leave was coming to an end I had to make a decision what to do. I had 3 options: Go back to work as a developer/ architect  did some interviews and got a couple of offers. Everybody loved to have someone with my profile in their company. Try to make this work  the monlhy salary I was getting with this influencer life was not close at all with what I would get pay by a company Or find a middle ground. And there is where AWS approach me. It was the perfect middle ground. I get to do what I love. And I get a decent salary. Also now in AWS I get the reach of the brand and that takes my personal brand to another level.
• #6: A personal brand can help us in many ways. - It can help us to stand out in a new job It can help us to get promoted Help getting more customers as an independent consultant / freelancer It can help us to get to new opportunities This can be internal to your organization as well as external
• #9: Each of this have its good things and bad things, lets go over some basics.
• #10: Each of this have its good things and bad things, lets go over some basics.
• #11: Before jumping into any medium, think about what is your target audience. And your target audience depends on what is the main objective of your content creation. Do you want to do to grow your brand? – Maybe youtube videos more as a though leader, podcast, blog or online courses Do you want to help fellow professionals to learn – youtube tutorials or blogs something easy to search. Do you want to do it to teach kids out of school or college? - maybe tiktok, instagram Do you want to raise professional awareness? – linkedin is where people hang out Do you want to help other professionals – stack overflow, github And also how you like to express yourself, I like video, I like to create audio visual stuff. I like seeing people face, and I like consuming video for my learning process. But you can like more to create images, like infografies or do audio or write. There are different mediums for every taste.
• #12: Now it is time to pick what you are going to talk about. Would it be a technology, like serverless or containers? Would it be a software platform, like AWS Sagemaker or Terraform Would it be a more general topic like Machine learning or Analytics. Here it is good to understand how broad your niche is. For example I like to talk about Cloud Computing – a Topic, with a focus in a technology – Serverless and mostly on AWS. So my niche is very niche… that makes 2 things. 1 people look for serverless and find me. 2 I am an expert in the subject. 3. I don’t grow as fast as other channels that have broather niches.
• #13: Here you can see google trends for the serverless key word in the last 5 years. Looks good, it has been growing But if we compare it to containers it is very small… so this shows
• #14: You can see how the views in my channel and in the search trend tend to grow together. At the end of my curve there is a huge bump, that is another thing that I will cover later.
• #15: This is a good advice that our boss says every time we are worried that we are not getting enough views. When you talk about topics that are very niche you wont have the same numbers as others that are doing very trendy topics. HOWEVER you will be building your personal brand, talking about problems and showing solutions that others really care about.
• #16: For example this is a series, that it is veryyyyy niche, it is about security for API Gateway. But it is very detailed and explains a lot of things that are not even covered in the documentation of the service. Most of this videos get over 100 views a day still today after many months of being published and in average they have over 10k views. So sometimes niching down is good.
• #17: Creating a community around your brand is very important way to grow. People share things that they found interesting. People that like your content are more willing to recommend it. People that are active part of your community would comment and interact with your content more. Community members are also the first ones that would buy your paid products People from your community engage in the comments and chat witheach other helping out. In my case I use twitter a lot for community building. So I combine both platforms to get people
• #19: This diagram changed a lot how I created content for youtube Because how youtube works you need to understand how people behave. This is very particular for youtube and other SEO content. For your particular medium you would need to find the exact funnel Top of the funnel – people find your content – how they do it? Middle of the funnel – people start engaging, and start liking you Bottom of the funnel – true fans and people that might end up paying for your content The content is very different in each of the steps.
• #20: This diagram changed a lot how I created content for youtube Because how youtube works you need to understand how people behave. This is very particular for youtube and other SEO content. For your particular medium you would need to find the exact funnel Top of the funnel – people find your content – how they do it? Middle of the funnel – people start engaging, and start liking you Bottom of the funnel – true fans and people that might end up paying for your content The content is very different in each of the steps.
• #22: Understand how you can create content that can be searched. Youtube and blogs are by natured indexed by Google. For other content you might need to help google out. For example if you do a podcast, have a webpage with the transcript of your podcast. If you do infographics in Instagram, have a blog post where you have a text about the image and tags in isntagram UNDERSTAND your platform capabilities to find content. In youtube it is about title, descriptions and tags. And also how videos are linked together.
• #26: https://www.serverlesschats.com/ Jeremy Daly Podcast All episodes are transcribed He uploads all episodes to youtube He has a newsletter where he promotes the episodes
• #27: Blog https://dev.to/helenanders26 She has a great blog, if you are around medium and you want to get the first certification of AWS you will find her content She has very complex content after that. She is very active in the community, very active in twitter and in the dev.to platform. This way her content gets promoted.
• #28: Twitter https://twitter.com/catalinmpit He has a lot of other mediums, but he creates unique content for twitter. Were he makes treads and engage with people in the community. A lot of twitter creators are just there to interact with community and promote their other content, but he creates content exclusively for twitter and that is great.
• #29: https://www.instagram.com/theavocoder/ Lydia has great visual content, she creates short visuals explaining complex topics. She uses blog posts to cross promote her Instagram account and leverage like that the content she creates in Instagram making it more searchable