Using your personal brand to power your career with Justin Welsh

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Episode Summary

What is the secret to building a strong brand? The secret is that there are no secrets! A powerful personal brand is a result of hard work, patience, and you guessed it – being yourself! Or, as our guest likes to say, “Don’t be afraid to have strong opinions.”

Justin Welsh, the founder of JW Strategic Advisory, joins Nick Bennett to share the lessons he’s learned on his solopreneur journey. Over the last decade, Justin’s helped build two $50M+ ARR companies, teams of 150+ people, and has helped raise over $300M in venture capital. Then, in 2019 he burned out and decided to start working for himself. Today, he runs an advisory firm, creates digital products, and writes about all things entrepreneurship.

In this episode of the Rep Your Brand podcast, Justin and Nick discuss the benefits of having a powerful personal brand and pinpoint how it can help with your career. Justin shares his hacks for accelerating online growth and talks about his content creation tips. If you’re interested to learn how you can monetize your own brand, tune in to this conversation.

Guest Profile

justin-welsh-bio-pic

Key Insights

“Putting yourself out there for the first time…regardless of what platform you choose…is challenging.”

Justin Welsh

Founder

JW Strategic Advisory

Episode Highlights

The untapped potential of using LinkedIn for personal branding purposes

“LinkedIn is generally considered professional, so most people think of it as a business. That scares a lot of folks. It’s a lot less social than other social media channels. But really, it is a social media channel, and people are figuring out that by creating content on LinkedIn, they can stand out pretty easily. And so what I consider it is just open field right now. It’s still in its infancy.”

“For me, it’s a place where you can go and generate a hundred thousand impressions a day, millions of impressions every year. And you can do one of many different things. You can land a better job. You can become a thought leader. You can end up on podcasts like this. You can sell a product. There are so many different ways that you can take advantage of LinkedIn.”

How to leverage your personal brand using LinkedIn

“I use my brand in several different areas online to power different parts of my business. So my main business, the way that I make my living, is I advise early-stage SaaS companies. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last 11 years is building SMB, SaaS businesses. So that’s who I advise. And I do that through different channels than LinkedIn. I do that through creating SEO-optimized blog posts. I do that through partnerships. And then on LinkedIn, where my audience has been really helpful is I’ve created two courses.”

“Some other interesting ways that I use LinkedIn is I do some one-on-one coaching. I end up on shows like this and other popular podcasts where I can promote my coaching, my advising business, my products. So right now, I’ve got four different revenue streams that contribute to mostly an automated way of making money with 20 hours a week work schedule for advising.”

Four resources to keep your brand fresh

“I really like marketingxamples.com by Harry Dry. It’s probably my favorite place to go to read really well-done marketing analysis. Harry’s a really sharp dude. I like him a lot. I really like Jack Butcher’s stuff on Twitter. I think it always gives me a unique futuristic viewpoint on how to think about content creation.

I like Derek Sivers’s blog. I wouldn’t consider him a modern creator. He doesn’t spend a lot of time creating daily. But he writes blog posts every once in a while, and he turns them into books. And I think the way that he thinks is really unique. 

And I like Daniel Vassallo a lot. I follow a lot of what he creates ’cause he’s someone who, as I was going through my panic attack, was talking about creating and designing a different type of lifestyle. So I hooked onto that and was like, ‘Oh, this is someone that I want to emulate in terms of creating that life.'”