On May 17th, David Riggs texted me asking if I wanted to co-host a webinar on Personal Branding with him. It would be geared for students, employees, and professionals.
His idea came at a perfect time. I had just recently kicked off my new blog and email newsletter. After hiring a business coach during the quarantine, I developed clearer clarity and vision for scaling my impact on businesses and service to others. And from that, I registered a new business LLC.
This webinar was a small test to identify where to best direct my time and energy with this new business.
Before we jump into the takeaways and highlights...
If you're reading a blog about personal branding, there's a chance you might do some form of webinar or live video content in the future. Hear me out.
It's much simpler than you might think. David and I had a maximum of three short phone calls to plan and execute this webinar. Google Meets was a simple recordable technology solution. Our webinar presentations were made with ease in Canva. And we had about two weeks to promote it.
(Hey, you can scroll down to the end of this blog if you want to jump straight to the webinar highlights)
What were the results of the webinar?
• 110 email signups
• 40 actual attendees
• Social media posts from attendees (Word-of-mouth “marketing”)
• Constructive feedback
How'd we promote it?
We wanted to keep it pretty simple. And we didn't want to come across too promotional.
We shared with our friends via social media when the webinar was happening with a few tweets, a few Instagram story posts, a few LinkedIn posts, and two email newsletter blasts.
Also about $40 in Facebook/Instagram ads spent. Here are the results from the two ads: the clear winning ad costed $34.20 and the remaining $5.80 went into testing two different ads at about $1/day.
The winning ad creative was a 52 second video of me talking into my phone sharing my enthusiasm for the webinar.
My and David's goal were to simply provide a valuable webinar to some friends and learn about the process of hosting a webinar.
We wanted to take a risk by trying something new. But we approached it like an experiment. Following the webinar, David and I both reflected on what we learned, determined improvements for the next webinar, and resonated key highlights.
After testing out our first webinar, we were pretty happy with the results.
We also felt more confident after hosting our first one and are ready to do more webinars in the future.
What was our process?
David initially called me with some high-level ideas on co-hosting a webinar. We talked about which technology to use, how to use a landing page to capture signups, and what our webinar topic would be.
After narrowing down the topic (Fundamental Personal Branding Strategy and Tips), we brainstormed all the information we wanted to share.
Our belief:
David and I did some individual research on preparing for a webinar. We both had ideas on how to best share perspectives and ideas around personal branding being available to anyone. We wrote our presentation in a shared Google Doc and iterated our presentations every few days.
We had a final call three days before the webinar to run a test webinar with Google Meets and briefly go over our content topics.
Key Highlights
Our favorite part?
One of our webinar attendees, a marketing student and artist from NYC, drew the picture you saw at the top of this blog live during our presentation.
Follow Kaitlyn: NYC Marketing Kid.
Highlights from David's presentation:
Define your value proposition.
a. What do you want to be famous for? And what makes you different?
A value proposition is a statement that answers the 'why' someone should do business with you.
2. Choose the right platforms
a. You can’t grow your following on a platform that doesn’t suit you.
The 80/20 rule: 1 platform gets 80% of your time, 20% of your time goes to 2-3 other platforms
a. LinkedIn
i. Are you a writer? Focused on educating others? Sharing YOUR Story? Like networking? Start here.
b. Twitter
i. Do you like quantity? Do you like talking with other people? Do you like one liners? Start here.
c. Instagram
i. Are you an aesthetic person? Do you like visuals? Think you’d be a good vlogger? Start here.
d. YouTube
i. Like going deep into topics? Want to build an engaged audience? Enjoy being behind the camera? Start here.
e. Medium
i. Are you a long-form writer? Like diving deep into topics? Start here.
Highlights from my presentation:
Have confidence in the value that you can bring to others through your content.
Value comes in three different forms. And there's always going to be someone behind you who can learn from you. Whether it's by age or experience, someone can benefit from your perspective, or your personal life experience, or the knowledge you develop through your skillsets.
Content will not only help you add value to others, but it's the vehicle that will get you to your desired goals.
Content creation on social media is a balance of quality and quantity.
A framework to help you create quality content as well as an endless supply of content ideas, is a Topic Wheel Map.
Here's mine below as an example. Once you've done this, you can create a "One minute video/blog list" off of each smaller branch of subtopics. If you want to build this for your own brand, just email me me@jeremyrossmiller.com. I'll gift you a step by step mini-course on how to do this.
I ended my presentation highlighting three people who I admire how they're building their personal brands.
1. David Perell on Twitter
a. The "Writing" guy
2. David Riggs on LinkedIn
a. He created a community of 15k friends
3. Jen Hartmann on Twitter
a. Authenticity advocate. Manages social for John Deere.
One of my favorite ways to learn, is to learn from others example. Follow these great people. Watch how they interact with their community's. And take mental notes on how they create and distribute their content.
"When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research" - Wilson Mizner
I asked Jen if she wanted to give me a quote for me to share in the webinar.
"It goes back to the fact none of us really know what we’re doing...so don’t try to be someone else or live up to an “ideal". Be 100% true to you." - Jen Hartmann
I couldn't have said it any better.
Huge gratitude to everyone who joined the webinar. Thanks to Kaitlyn for the art. Thanks to Shubhang, Ashly, Brandon, Aaron, Ian, Perry for posting about the webinar on social media. And thanks to David for coming to me with the idea.
Missed the webinar?
Watch for free here.
Don't know if Personal branding is for you?
Read this Personal Branding 101 Blog.
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