Personal Branding: How to Create and Market Yourself

Want to reach more subscribers, fans, or prospects?

Wondering how building a personal brand can help?

To explore how to build and use a personal brand, I interview Chris Ducker.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Chris Ducker, serial entrepreneur and author of Rise of the Youpreneur. He's also host of the Youpreneur Podcast and founder of the Youpreneur Summit.

Chris explains how to define your niche of expertise and why doing so helps your business succeed.

You'll discover tips for promoting your brand on podcasts, social media, and at live events.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Personal Branding
Chris's Story

Chris considers himself a traditional, old-school entrepreneur. Until around 2008, he used the Internet only to check email and watch YouTube videos. The businesses he owned had brochure-like websites that were boring and stuffy.

By late 2009, Chris had burned out, as a lot of entrepreneurs do. In 2010, Chris and his wife set a goal: remove him from the day-to-day work of his businesses as much as possible. By October of this "virtual CEO" year, he had hired eight people to replace him, no longer worked in the office, and was working only 4 days a week.

In his newly found spare time, Chris started podcasting, blogging, and shooting videos. He devoured Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It! in 2 hours and saw a way to build a business going forward. By the end of that year, he had created an email list of about 5,000 subscribers and people were genuinely tuning into the Chris Ducker Show.

A couple of years later, while Chris was recovering from back surgery, he began taking stock of how businesses were growing, where they were growing, and what people were doing to build them. That's when he came to a huge realization about the value of personal branding: In all of his companies' big acquisitions, people wanted to do business with him first. Only later were they working with his companies.

That's when Chris launched ChrisDucker.com and his personal brand.

I ask where "Youpreneur" came from and what it means. Chris says after his personal brand was in place, he started to attract people of the same mindset. These were speakers, content creators, authors, coaches, consultants, YouTubers, and live streamers. They were all building businesses based on themselves, their expertise, and their personalities.

A Youpreneur is somebody who's building a business around who they are, what they stand for, how they want to be known, and whom they want to serve. Youpreneur launched in 2015 as an online community and continues to grow. Chris wrote a book and launched the inaugural Youpreneur Summit last year in London. The summit sold out 4 months before the event. It was a huge success and they're doing it again this year.

Listen to the show to discover why Chris is happier working as an entrepreneur.

The Importance of Personal Branding

Personal branding has been around for a long time. For instance, Zig Ziglar is a personal brand everyone knows. What Zig did brilliantly, Chris explains, was to create a brand around his message and how he could affect change. Years after his passing, people still talk about Zig all the time. Some might call that a legacy. Chris calls it leaving a stamp on the world, because of an incredibly strong personality and personal brand.

Most importantly, when you talk about people of influence, like Zig Ziglar or someone living, such as Sir Richard Branson, their reputation is their brand. It's what people say about them when they're not in the room, at the conference, at the dinner party,