Reading time: 4 minutes
Hey legend, In case you missed it – our Live Interview + Q&A session on Monday night was absolutely epic.
Tom Noske left no stone unturned, as he generously stuck around until he answered every single submitted question.
My head has been swirling all week with the endless stream of nuggets and insights that he shared from his journey of growing his personal brand to over +280k followers on Instagram, while also scaling his digital business to earning upwards of A$50,000 per month.
So in this guide, I’m sharing my 3 biggest takeaways to help you implement Tom’s advice into your creative journey.
And now, you’re the first to hear that…
Today – enrolments officially open for our next 30-day cohort of The Storyteller Sprints!
My friend.
We’re mid-way through 2023.
At the start of the year, did you tell yourself that you were (finally) going to commit to building your personal brand?
And if so, how are you tracking?
OK? Start-stopping? Burning out? Or haven’t you started yet?
Well, if you don’t want to get to the end of the year, only to look back in regret for letting another year go by…
Then let’s start doing it – together.
As solopreneurs, we need help.
A lot of it.
So instead of continuing to push through as a lone wolf, why wouldn’t you harness the power of community to your advantage, just like some of the legends in our June Storyteller cohort have:
If you’re ready to start making serious progress on your content creation, join our July cohort by enrolling before 6pm (AEST) Friday 30th of June and let’s make this the year that you finally went all-in on your personal brand.
And in case you think building a personal brand is complicated, here are 3 principles from Tom that’ll simplify your journey.
1. Start with Your Point of Authority, then Pivot into a Niche of One
Your Point of Authority is something that people don’t question your expertise or talents in.
They don’t need to see a resume.
They don’t need to see a degree.
They can tell by the quality of what you produce or the substance of your knowledge…
…that you know your sh*t
This is important when starting out because it is the cornerstone of your brand.
So make content around this because you’re so well-versed in it, and it flows naturally from you.
And then as your brand starts to grow, evolve your brand to avoid becoming pigeonholed into being a niche (or topic-based) brand, and instead into a personal brand.
This is Stage 3: Seasonal that we covered in CWC 017: Let’s Overcome Your Roadblock where it’s time to lean evolve into an all-encompassing personal brand that incorporates all of your:
- interests
- hobbies;
- passions;
- values; and
- unfair advantages
And this makes you a niche of one.
Because then your audience follow you because of you, and not a trending topic.
That is how you start building an engaged community around your personal brand.
2. Respect Your Ideation (spend lots of time here)
It blew me away that Tom shared he spends more time writing and ideating for his content than he does on scripting, recording editing and publishing combined!
As he shared, your ideas are the foundation of your entire content creation workflow.
Every piece of content, whether it’s a tweet, Reel, carousel or podcast, starts as a single idea.
And the quality of your outputs (published content), are a direct reflection of the quality of your inputs (ideas)
So if your content isn’t resonating or connecting with your audience, it might be because you need to spend more time digging deeper to find the “diamonds in the rough” from your ideation process.
Record every relevant piece of inspiration or idea you see.
Write (a lot) and flesh out all of the ideas.
See what stands out to you and run with it.
And then rinse and repeat to see what lands.
3. F*ck plans, just get started & build your own process
Things rarely (if ever) go to plan.
So stop sinking time over analysing and planning for how you want things to be.
Instead, just start.
One step.
Take it.
And step by step, you’ll slowly adapt your process to what is working (and what isn’t) from the feedback you’re receiving.
But you won’t receive that feedback until you start.
And a final quote from Tom
So many people are like:
“Consistency is the pinnacle”
But it’s actually like:
“No, consistency is the ground floor. And THEN you have to build a business on top of consistency for a personal brand”
So if you’re fighting, just to get a video out every day…
Sorry but you’re not gonna have time to make a product and market it and have a community and do all the things that are actually necessary to building business”
– Tom Noske
I’m just going to type this out one more time.
“Consistency is the ground floor”
Forget about monetising your personal brand through products, community or collaborations.
You’re fighting a losing battle if you struggle to consistently post content.
So if you’re ready to build your own sustainable and scalable process to create content with the support of others doing the same, then we’d love to have you join us for the July Storyteller Sprint.
We’ve just got a few spots left for our next cohort so enrol before 6pm (AEST) Friday 30th of June and let’s level up your content creation together.
See you in the next one legend,
🕺🏽 Mamba