Personal Branding Social Media for Success
How do we brand ourselves for success on social media? What personal branding strategies do we use to get the most followers to help people find us everywhere? What has worked for me?
I'm Jerry Banfield, and I'm grateful to share this experience with you today, based on making millions of dollars online, getting millions of followers online, and I appreciate the chance if you are a subscriber with us, or if you're not, you'll join us on YouTube and or on Facebook.
I appreciate the chance to serve you every day with new videos.
What have I done, that's really made a huge difference with my personal branding?
First, I'll tell you what I did originally, that left me struggling as most people do and then I'll tell you what I did that helped me go to the next level.
When I started my business online, I made a website named gamingaddiction.net. I had my personal Facebook profile, then I made a Facebook page for Gaming Addiction and a YouTube channel off of my Xbox name.
After that I made another company website Real Productive Life. I made another company website Banwork, I made another company, Facebook page for BanWork, I made a Pinterest profile under my name, I made a Twitter for BanWork.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
The first few years of my business, my social media and personal branding were very inconsistent. If you saw my website, and then went over to my social media, they often did not match.
If you tried to just search for one thing, it all often was poorly done because it was scattered all over the place.
I did that for the first few years of my business and constantly struggled to build any kind of a following and was not on my way to building this kind of following or making this kind of money.
What I did that made a difference was I branded everything in 2014.
After nearly going out of business, I heard some really good advice that aggravated me at the time.
The advice was, "You need to be consistent with your branding," that if it's Jerry Banfield on Facebook, it should be Jerry Banfield on YouTube. It should be Jerry Banfield on your website, it should be Jerry Banfield on your Twitter, it should be the same everywhere.
That way, when people go to look for you and get to know you. It's obvious it's all the same.
Additionally, I realized I changed what I did so often that when I'd set up a company page designed to do one thing, and then I'd abandon it and start a new company page. Made me lose all of the valuable startup work done on that original page.
I see so many entrepreneurs continuing to do this same strategy of making all these different websites and social media profiles asking to like pages and then neglecting all of them.
I value any of your questions, comments or feedback. Leave a comment on the YouTube video. I respond to almost all of my comments or at least read them.
Here's what you can do that worked really well for me that will give you the best chance to brand and build success in your social media.
Let me show you what I've done that has worked really well that I started doing in 2014.
What I do now is I brand everything, "Jerry Banfield."
It's all Jerry Banfield my Facebook page is Jerry Banfield, my YouTube channel is Jerry Banfield, my website is JerryBanfield.com. My Twitter profile is Jerry Banfield, my Instagram is Jerry Banfield, my LinkedIn is Jerry Banfield, my Pinterest is Jerry Banfield, etc.
Everything is now Jerry Banfield, everything that I do is Jerry Banfield.
This has allowed me for years as I focused on doing everything in one place.
Now yes, I recognize there is a place for using something besides your name, I have my courses now, for example, on Uthena.com, which is a website I've launched to help other instructors all collaborate and make a collective marketplace.
Yes, I realized there is a place for having things besides your name. That said, when you're starting out and building up until you have a self sustaining business that pays you full time as I have had now for years —if you can look at the income data, you can see I've averaged 150,000 a year profit now, which is over 10,000 a month profit for over four years.
Until you've got something like that you're not usually in a good position to bring people together on to some new brand it's essential to brand everything at least to begin with them for the first several years with your own name. Most of the time, there are exceptions, but most of the time you want to use your own name.
When you use your own name, you've got flexibility.
Many of us see a lot of advice saying, "You've got to pick a niche and stick with it and just keep doing it even if you hate it, grind it out. And then you can do other things" Yes, I realized on YouTube, if you make a specific channel about a specific topic and just grind it out, that can be one of the fastest ways to grow.
However, we're not looking at fast short term growth, for branding, you want long term, my brand is good for the rest of my life now.
I can do whatever I want for the rest of my life. It all falls into all of my existing branding. I even have a startup on Uthena.com. And still, this has a very limited scope. I'm able to build something now like Uthena.com because my personal brand is so big, I can now send people over to anything.
When you're starting out and when you're building up and laying a foundation, it's essential to make the most of every single person you come across.
You really need thousands of dedicated fans to have a rock solid foundation, and it's hard to get 1000 dedicated fans when your branding is inconsistent.
When somebody on your company website doesn't realize what you have in your Facebook profile under your name, when they don't realize those two are related.
What you want is for your personal branding to be consistent, so you can get those super followers.
People like you may be that follow me that go to my website, subscribe on YouTube, like my Facebook page, connect on LinkedIn, follow me on Instagram and follow on Twitter.
When your branding is consistent, one person can build your following on all the different platforms.
It's critical to have a regular content publishing schedule, wherever you are branded, the downside of doing several different company websites and social profiles and then having your own personal ones is you don't have consistent publishing.
If you don't have consistent publishing, it's hard to keep the people who are following engaged.
If you look at my Facebook page, I publish new posts every few hours every single day. As you can look back, you can see three or four new posts every day on Facebook, two or three new videos every day on YouTube, new blog posts every day on my website, new updates on my LinkedIn profile every day, new photos on my Instagram almost every day. New tweets on my Twitter profile almost every few hours.
That consistency allows people to stay up to date with what I'm doing and to know that, rather, it's Jerry Banfield on Instagram, LinkedIn on my blog on my YouTube channel that it's all the same. And then it's all me.
When you go try and go narrow to start with often you need that flexibility to jump into another area and you can't see that you're going to need that ahead of time.
When I started out, I did my business on video game addiction and I couldn't imagine doing anything else for the first month or two. Then once I got the video game addiction business setup, and there was no money to be made, I started imagining doing something else.
Then I went through and made several different websites.
When you make a website, the hardest thing to do is lay a foundation with it. My website gets 1000 visitors a day for free because I've continued to put blog post after blog post, I have over 800 blog posts on my website and this allows me to build a foundation of people who come in and read new blog posts all the time now.
Whereas on every company website I did before I constantly would switch, I'd get excited about something and then nothing would happen and I'd say okay —well, this is dumb, I'll go do something else— then I'd get a little the same thing. I'd move all over the place. And it was so inconsistent with personal branding, for social media success.
I've said this in so many different ways. So it really sinks home, you want consistency that'll lead to success on your social media.
That said, there are times in places where you might want to work for a company; if it's a company, you can stick with it indefinitely through all kinds of change.
For example, real estate agent, I wouldn't put a Facebook page with that particular real estate agency, because I've seen how many times my friends end up changing their page is this real estate company and then next year, it's that real estate company and next year, it's not real estate anymore.
If you have something like a startup you're building that does make sense. And in that case, you want to brand it but the only practical time you want to do anything with a company is when you are truly a group of people working together.
For example, on Uthena.com, we have a bunch of us working together on here, we've got 416 courses up I'm paying several people to help out to build this and Uthena.com then is a different brand from Jerry Banfield.
This is a brand that lots of people are working on making. That said, it's still ideal to get help building your personal brand before trying to build something like Uthena.
It takes a lot more cleverness, inside it takes a lot more effort to build a great company brand versus just building yourself.
It's just easy and natural to build your own brand. But it often takes a lot of thought, a lot of poor choices, a lot of failure to successfully build something that's outside of your name.
If you are wondering, well how do I brand my name...
Ideally, you want to brand in a way with your name that when anyone searches for it will always guide you on the first result.
That means if you've got a very common name like John Smith, then you want to find a way to make it unique, something like put your middle initial in, or you could put your location in. Or if you're the third, something like John C. Smith III, take a look around and see what other people are doing with their names that have common names to stand out.
You could also abbreviate things you could have something like Jsmith.com, or you can get creative with it, you can use a nickname.
My name's not Jerry. It's a nickname. I used Jerry Banfield for personal branding because that's when I started out, there was only one other Jerry Banfield Facebook profile, which you can't even find now, because there's so much of my branding, clogging up the search results.
I picked a name that when I set out to do it, it will be the only one on that name.
You can ask your friends and your family for help. The key thing is if you've got a name that you can't just do a yourname.com be creative with it and do something you're willing to stick with forever.
What you want to make sure to do is think about the brand name you'd be happy with within 10 or 20 years.
If you're young and single, you might think of some cute nickname that when you're married and your kids are starting school, you might not want that nickname anymore.
Think of something that you can use for the really long term for your branding, because every time you change your branding, it costs you something in your following.
I lost a lot of people that I had worked so hard to find all my company websites, who have no idea that Jerry Banfield is related at all to those company websites. You want to make the most of every person you come across with your personal branding.
I appreciate you reading this, thank you for experiencing it and I hope this was helpful.
If you want more help from me or go to jerry.tips/hire where you can get one-on-one calls coaching collaboration and services.
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I love you. You're awesome and I will see you in the next post.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
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