Sure you can make money on the internet, but it’s infinitely more important to build your brand. Think about it this way, you can have a customer spend $1000 today, or you can have that customer spend $100 today, next week,?the week after, etc, and then tell all their friends about how awesome your company is.?If you have a strong brand that people can believe in, then the money will come eventually. When you are first starting out, you should focus on building excellent content, and most importantly on delivering that content in a way that embraces your personality. In his third chapter, Build your personal brand, Vaynerchuk discusses this in detail using his website, tv.winelibrary.com as an example. He didn’t start the website to sell wine, but instead to build a brand. While he’s excelled at both, it’s important to remember the order in which this took place:
- Build a strong brand
- Monetize the brand
No matter what type of content you create (video, text, pictures, online radio), it should be something that you are passionate about and can communicate in an honest and authentic way. This means you should be yourself. Your website shouldn’t look like mine, it should look like yours. This is what will differentiate your brand from all the others out there doing the same thing. Once you have great content up on your site, you should begin using online social networks to build strong word of mouth and create a community.
How are you currently building your personal brand (both online and off)? Let me know at edwardviator [at] evil-marketer [dot] com
Notable quotes from this chapter:
- Developing you personal brand is key to monetizing your passion online.
- Consumers want you to tell them the truth.
- Leveraging social networking platforms into effective conduits for your personal brand is all about building word of mouth.
