Hi Reader, welcome back to Brand Credential, a platform where I share insights on personal branding and marketing from my experience as a 10-year marketing industry professional.

This week’s edition will focus on giving away content to make money, what we can learn from college students about personal branding, and the debate about whether or not to use AI for marketing.

Weekly Personal Branding Tip: Give Away Free Value

One of the most rewarding aspects of personal branding is helping others by sharing your expertise, offering mentorship, and supporting your community.

Not only will this feel great, but giving away value for free is a powerful marketing strategy.

Entrepreneur and content creator Eve Arnold captured this idea with the quote above from the article she wrote about her first $1,000 week selling products on Gumroad.

She is suggesting that by investing time in creating free content now and building an audience, you are setting yourself up to receive that value back later.

The more value you provide to your audience, the more likely they are to reciprocate at some point by buying one of your side-hustle products, providing a job opportunity, or offering help on a professional challenge of your own.

This is the central message of Vaynerchuk’s book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World. The book uses a boxing analogy to suggest that people should “jab,” or provide free value, several times before making an ask of their audience in the form of a big punch, or “right hook.”

This is the method you see the most successful content creators and entrepreneurs using online. They post tons of free content to build their followings and earn their audiences' trust. This comes in the form of free tips, advice, guides and resources, and other value-driven content.

For example, I deploy the same strategy with my content. My newsletter, blog, Medium account, and free personal branding book are all examples of ways I am giving away tons of content for free. I make this value back later as I build an awesome audience that is engaged with my content.
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Put value out into the world in the form of the content you create and the way you engage with your audience, and see what comes back to you.

Read more:

• Brand Credential: 5 Must-Read Personal Branding Quotes​
• Medium: 5 Must-Read Personal Branding Quotes​

Insight From the Head of Marketing: What I’m Building This Week

The latest news from my desk is a that I gave my first college guest lecture!

I had a blast, and got some great questions about personal branding, content creation, and entrepreneurship that I want to share in case my responses help you out, too.

"I am already on Instagram. Can I build a business there, or should I look at other channels?"

This was a great question. Choosing the best social media channel or channels to build a presence on is a key decision that will inform the rest of your personal brand strategy.

I wrote a chapter on this topic in my book. I encouraged people to choose their personal brand channels based on two key factors:

1. Pick a channel you know your target audience uses frequently.
2. Pick a channel that plays to your content creation strengths.

For example:

• If you are a good writer, X or LinkedIn may be a good fit. These are platforms where text-based posts are predominant.
• If video is your strength, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are nice opportunities.
• Photographers, graphic designers, fitness professionals, and models can find success on Instagram’s visual platform.

Take my personal brand channel selection, for example. I enjoy writing and find it to be one of my strengths. With that in mind, I am working on long-form content on Medium, the Brand Credential website, and this newsletter.

I told the student that if Instagram is working for him, there is no reason to switch. Rather, he should scale his following there. Once he has an established audience, he can look to expand and diversify his channels (more on that below).

"I want to start creating content, but I'm scared to show my face. Any advice for getting started in a way where I can limit that?"

I loved getting this question because I relate to it personally. I've written about personal branding for introverts from a firsthand perspective.

I am someone who is finding ways to step out of their comfort zone and build a personal brand with a predominately introverted personality. I shared the post above with this student, and also explained the strategies I am using. These include:

1. Starting with written content - I became comfortable with written content first. Now, I am working on expanding to other mediums and channels, like video. Posting written updates lets you ease into the idea of content creation in a way that feels like less exposure than posting images or videos of yourself.
2. Put your best foot forward online - I spent time with the class going over how to optimize social media profiles, like LinkedIn and Instagram. Having a polished profile will increase the confidence you have with your online presence. Having a clean, up-to-date social profile is the digital equivalent of a fresh haircut and being well dressed. It feels good.
3. Be transparent - Some of the students had personal stories they weren't sure they should share in their personal brand content. I advised them to do so. Taking a transparent approach, building in public, and sharing your story not only feels therapeutic, but it will also earn respect from people who can relate to your ups and downs.

Read more: Personal Branding Tips for Introverts​

"With everything going on with a potential TikTok ban and some social media channels becoming stagnant, what can we do to protect ourselves as creators?"

This was an astute question I received from one of the professors. She highlighted a key question that has the marketing and content creator community pondering what will happen with the digital landscape that we all call home for our businesses and audiences.

My advice to her was to build an audience on one channel and look to quickly diversify her channels and audience by starting to create on new channels. That is the only way we can protect ourselves from macro changes that we have no control over.

For example, should things go badly with the proposed TikTok ban, tons of creators who rely on that channel for their businesses will be impacted.

The uncertain future of Google Search is another example. In this piece, I wrote about the future of search engines, and what predictions like an an AI-fueled decrease in search traffic could mean for websites and businesses.

With so much happening with the platforms we create content on, our best bet is to diversify our audiences and personal brand footprints:

1. Diversify the platforms you build a presence on—This tip contradicts one of my biggest pieces of creator advice: build on one platform vs. trying to be everywhere at once. This advice still holds true. However, we need to be looking ahead toward how we will expand our moats. This means building an audience on one platform and then quickly scaling to other platforms. Dulma is a good example—she got big on TikTok, and then leveraged her established audience to start creating on new channels, like her podcast and newsletter.
2. Start a newsletter—Speaking of newsletters, a newsletter is a great channel to be using in an uncertain social platform landscape. That is because you own your audience. You can take your newsletter list with you from newsletter platform to newsletter platform, and you are unaffected by changes that may come to social media channels and websites.

Read more: 3 Technology Trends Marketers Should be Watching​

This Week in Marketing: To AI, or Not to AI

My newsfeed this week had two opposing perspectives on the use of AI technology for the practice of marketing:

1. Personal care brand Dove pledged not to use AI in its communications.
2. Kieran Flanagan, Chief Marketing Officer of Zapier, posted on LinkedIn about how AI tools free marketers up to work on their craft vs. spending most of their time on implementing marketing initiatives.

These two updates present different sides of the AI marketing debate—the primary pro and primary con, so to speak.

1. Brands and audiences are worried about dilution of brand narrative and a decrease in content quality—no one wants to read a bunch of generic-sounding, AI-generated jargon.
2. Marketers and professionals across industries are excited about AI's ability to do busy work for us. This frees us up to focus on more enjoyable and impactful tasks, like developing strategy, being creative, and problem solving.

This is a debate that is just getting started. A marketing leader of Kieran's caliber and a brand of Dove's credibility weighing in recently shows that it will be top of mind for some time in the marketing and creator communities.

I do not disagree with the intention behind Dove's pledge. They want to deliver the most genuine, customer-focused content possible with their marketing program. To them, a hard stand on AI-generated comms is the way to do it.

However, this won't be the right fit for everyone. This is especially true for smaller brands who don't have the human resources to create content at the scale they need to.

This is where I agree with Kieran. AI is an amazing tool for marketers, creators, and small businesses. When deployed correctly, it saves time, cuts out busy work, and leads to greater scale for the results we want to achieve—like creating more content.

Key Takeaways

Whether you choose to use AI or not, I think we should focus on the result and work backwards from that.

The result most brands and creators want is an engaged audience and a steady stream of great content that delivers value to them.

This result can be achieved with or without AI.

For brands like Dove or content creators who do not wish to embrace AI, they can still keep doing what they are doing and see success. Perhaps with less scale than would be possible with AI, or with greater required resources.

For smaller brands, creators, and marketing teams who embrace AI, they can also achieve this result. To do so, they will need to use AI in a way that complements what works.

Using AI to generate content drafts, develop new content ideas, automate content distribution, etc. leads to a better overall marketing program. It's about balance and using the tool correctly vs. abusing it to achieve perceived quick wins that harm your brand and decrease audience trust in the long run.

For example:

1. If a brand or creator uses AI to fill their social channels, newsletters, etc. with mass produced, generic, AI-generated content, then I am totally against that and don't see the value in it. That is because it offers little value to the audience.
2. If a brand or creator uses AI to optimize their content production workflows and is delivering a high content quality bar, that is a win in my book.

I go back to Ivy Xu's point about AI in this LinkedIn post:

The AI marketing debate is going to rage on for some time. Purists will speak out against the use of AI, while AI abusers will focus on using it for gimmicks.

My stance is somewhere more down the middle. It's unrealistic to think every single brand and marketer will pledge not to use AI. Even if 1,000 of the top brands follow Dove's lead, global adoption of AI for marketing will continue at a massive scale.

On the other hand, the gimmicks will continue, too, as people look to hack their way to audience and business growth with purely AI-generated content and automations.

I am in the camp that is exploring where AI can help people do more of what makes them unique and to proliferate their unique voices in the market.

It will be interesting to keep tracking how this plays out as creators and brands make their decisions about whether or not to adopt AI.

More Ways I Can Help

That’s it for this week! As always, thank you so much for reading.

If you’d like more personal branding and marketing tips, here are more ways I can help in the meantime:

• Read more on my website, Brand Credential​
• Check out my latest Medium articles​
• Read my free book, “The Personal Brand Blueprint: A No-Nonsense Guide to Personal Branding in the Age of the Creator”