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Make More Money (How to Build and Monetize Your Personal Brand)

Make More Money (How to Build and Monetize Your Personal Brand)

The four stage approach to your brand

Howie Chan
June 16, 2024

Welcome to Legend Letters. A rebellion against the ordinary, a threat to the 9-to-5. This is the place where courage is kindled and common is extinguished.

Howie Chan - Creator of Legend Letters

HEARTSET

You are a gift.

Do you know the odds of anyone of us being born is 1 in 400 trillion! Mind = blown. For context, there are about 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe 😱.

The right boy meeting the right girl, that chance meeting resulting in having a kid, the right sperm meeting the right egg, and every one of your ancestors reproducing successfully.

A miracle is an event so unlikely that it’s deemed to be almost impossible. You are that miracle. You are that gift.

“You have been given this ridiculous triple miracle… please squeeze the sh*t out of your one life”

Gary Vaynerchuk (55 second video HERE)

It’s time for more people to experience the gift which is YOU.

Get inspired, take the steps, and most importantly, JUST START.

MINDSET

Money is just a way to keep score. The score for the number of people you are helping and the level of help you are providing.

And brand? Your brand is other people’s perception of you. For example, when I say HOWIE CHAN. How do you feel? What words pop up in your head?

I can shape that feeling, I can try to have the words I want pop up in your head, but I can never control it.

In other words, my brand is not what I think it is, it’s what my audience think it is. I cannot control it, but I can shape it.

And how do you shape it? By projecting a clear image of who you are:

The clearer it is, the more specific it’s reflected back.
The more consistent you are, the higher the probability it sticks.
The more people you share it with, the bigger your audience.

(E.g. Volvo has been shaping the perception in millions of people’s minds that it is a SAFE vehicle - that’s their brand and if you care deeply about safety, Volvo will always be one of your top considerations.)

Can you now see how by shaping your brand, you can make more money?

When you invest in your brand, you increase the number of people you are helping by attracting the right people for you to help. Read that again.

More people helped = more money earned.

So I leave you with this:

Shape your brand, attract your people, make your money

Here are 5 ways your personal brand can help you make more money

Get promoted
↳ When your bosses and the peers of your bosses know who you are and what you can do during the promotion cycle, they will more likely approve your promotion. “Oh I know Sharon, she is a go-getter”
Get job offers
↳ By helping other people see your skills and what you bring through the content you put out on LinkedIn, companies and recruiters will start to call on you. (Last 2 weeks alone, I have over 1,000 HR folks look at my profile. If I was looking for a job, I’d have a better chance.)
Increase the chances of being hired
↳ When you are in the interview process, all they have is your resume, your interview and references to make their decisions. What if you had a body of work in the public? Your posts, your profile, your following can sway them in addition to your stellar performance on the video call or in-person.
Attract the right clients and/or customers
↳ When you put out your point of view and your audience starts to know what you can do and what kind of a person you are, that’s when magic starts to happen. The right clients approach you. The right customers find you. (I’ve closed so many new clients and projects because I showed up and shared my views over and over again.)
Receive sponsorship opportunities
↳ When you have an audience and a following, companies will want to sponsor their message to them. And guess what, they will find you. (I’ve since worked with a handful of companies and the numbers are starting to add up.)

These are only a few, you can get speaking gigs, affiliate earnings and more!

SKILLSET

Since being serious about my personal brand, I’ve grown to 77,000 followers on LinkedIn and ranked among the top 30 LinkedIn creators in the world (Favikon Top 200, May 2024). I’ve coached more than a dozen people on their brand and want to share with you my approach.

4 stages to launch your personal brand:

1/ Your driving purpose

Everything starts internally. Branding is about matching your outside with the inside.

So the first step is to understand what drives the value you want to provide. Let’s say Jane is a project manager and her value is giving structure and keeping all the various moving parts in motion to get it to completion - but why does she feel so inclined to do so?

Heartache: I can’t stand it when things are a mess and unfinished. It kills me.

Driving purpose: I give structure to messes and get projects to the finish line - for a sense of calm and completeness.

Your purpose doesn’t have to be about changing the world, it just needs to connect with you emotionally.

2/ Your positioning

Positioning is making your value highly relevant to your target audience and highly differentiated from your competition.

Jane the project manager is trying to get a director level job, her target audience is a senior director or VP of project management, it can also be a recruiter. What’s going to be highly relevant to these targets?

And who are the other candidates? What are they usually like?

Turns out, project management VPs need a leader who can handle beefy and complicated projects - RELEVANT

And other candidates typically talk about their experiences, but often fail to connect it back to the business objectives, plus you have an MBA - DIFFERENT

So for Jane the project manager, her positioning could be this:

Complex projects handled with the business in mind

Know that these are decisions. Strategy is about making a decision about your focus. If it’s something everyone is doing, that’s not strategy.

3/ Your personality

What are your traits?

Fun loving? Dry humor? Quiet and thoughtful?

This is where you choose which traits to highlight. Your brand doesn’t need to showcase ALL of your personality traits. It’s about finding the right ones to highlight.

Jane is sassy, smart, witty, kind, resilient and honest.

She feels that showing up as sassy and kind really speaks to her and if there is anyone who couldn’t handle that, she’s not going to feel like her true self

4/ Your plan

A brand is shaped through interactions. For Volvo, it’s everything from their ads, to their websites, to their dealers and the entire experience of driving the car.

For people, it’s what you say, the emails you write, the voicemails you leave, the profiles on your social channels, your posts, your content etc.

For Jane, her goal is to get a new job outside of her current company.

This is her plan, using her driving purpose, positioning and personality attributes:

Channel: LinkedIn
Update profile page
Look for companies she might want to work for
Follow project management leaders
Post 3 times a week about
1. How to tackle complex projects
2. Why being business minded is critical
3. Her joy of organizing messess and completing things
Build relationships with anyone who comments and likes her posts
Turn them into informational interviews and more introductions

I can guarantee that within a few weeks, this investment will pay off for Jane. Her sassy and kind posts will attract the people she want to work with and repel the ones she doesn’t - all without even getting on a call.

Sure you can just skip straight to the last stage of planning: posting online and showing up, but are you attracting the right people into your world? Are you putting forward the best and most valuable version of yourself?

“Every journey begins with a single step.”

Lao Tzu

I really hoped this can help you jumpstart your personal brand journey.

Start shaping your brand today and reap its rewards tomorrow.

Live your legend 🤘🏽,