How to Become Known for Something (Instead of Posting Random Content) | Ep. 353

For all the people looking to win out there, did you know that the people getting invited to speak, landing clients, and getting recognized aren't just creating content? Nope. That's right. They have IP, personal brand IP.

That's intellectual property, things that belong to them, that are unique to them, that they own. They have ideas, frameworks, and perspectives that people can point to and say that's theirs. So in this episode, I'm gonna show you how to build your personal brand IP so you're not just another voice online. You're the person known for something.

Check it out Hey, hey, what's up everyone? I'm Brandon Birkmaier, your personal branding coach, and today we are talking about how to build your personal brand IP. This is something that I've been doing all along the way. Every time I take on a new project, I try to figure out, is this something ownable that I can build, that I can look back on, and it's a little bit of a milestone, a marker that is mine, that is recognizably mine.

And that's really the goal, is to go from just randomly posting content and from being all over the place to being recognized. So today we're gonna try to take you from random to recognized to being the authority in your market with some clever little ideas turned into bigger brand IP. So some simple steps to doing that. Every time I think about an idea, there's a few things that I do to take it from just something anyone could talk about to something that is specifically mine.

And I really solidified this process when I was building the book for Front and Center Leadership, which was me saying, "How do I teach personal branding to rising corporate leaders?" And the first thing I had to do was figure out what problem was I solving. And as somebody who teaches personal branding, I could solve a lot of problems, but solving the problem of rising managers meant - Well, I chose that audience, right? I chose who it's for, and then, okay, well, what am I helping them do?

Well, they have a lot of leadership things that they could solve, but the personal branding thing is something that I could help with. So step one, solve a problem that people have. So I went in and say, okay, rising leaders are the people, and the problem is their obscurity. They're not getting recognized for promotions.

They're being overlooked for training opportunities or projects. And then I applied my topic, personal branding, to that area. And what was fun, this doesn't have to be boring, what was fun is going through and saying, "Okay, what are some ways that I can talk about personal branding that are memorable? What are some metaphors?"

And every week I would write down a new idea, a new way of thinking about how I would explain this to someone in a very simple visual way. And the way that I came up with it was the idea of front and center leadership, which meant to me being front and center, being the person that instead of hiding in the crowd, steps up, takes center stage, and leads. And that analogy allowed me to paint a picture and tell different stories along the way, but that little metaphor is what helps me explain it to people.

But it started with having a problem that I wanted to solve, and I had to seek that out. I said, "Okay, within that metaphor, what are people actually struggling with?" And had to put words to that. So the words that I put to it were, the thing holding people back from personal branding is their own reluctance to put themselves out there.

We don't always want to raise our hand and be noticed. And then how do you get past that reluctance? Well, you have to take some initiative. So I created this yin and yang, right?

This light and dark, saying, okay, the problem of reluctance and the solution of taking initiative is the core premise behind this personal branding book that I called "Front and Center Leadership." So I found a very specific problem to solve and created a language, a way to talk about it that worked in my book So once I solved a problem or knew a problem I wanted to solve and I went through, okay, here's all the steps I would do to help people, give them ideas on how to do that, the next thing I had to do is I had to take those ideas and make sure that they changed how people think.

So number two is you have to have a new idea that changes how people think. Ideas are fine, but they're not brand IP if they don't change what people think. Like for anyone out there that was a rising leader, just telling them, "Hey, do personal branding," isn't thought-provoking. It's not ownable.

Anyone could tell you that. "Hey, put yourself out there more. You should be online," right? I had to go and figure out a way to change how they thought about it.

I had to say, "Okay, personal branding isn't a problem of you just getting out there more. It is actually you overcoming your own personal reluctance of being out in the crowd and understanding what creates reluctance," and I'd go through that with them. So the idea of being front and center was really about overcoming something and changing the ideas of what is worth doing and what's not worth doing. So it might not be groundbreaking, but at least it was a different way of thinking.

So any idea you create, there's a standard way, and then you have to come up with, well, what do I think that is different than what oth-other people standardly say? Most people say this, I think this. That's an easy construct to come up with a new idea. So for me, most people say post online.

I say overcome your reluctance. Find a way to stand out. And then the third thing we need to do after you've solved the problem that people have, create a new idea that changes how people think, the third thing is to frame that idea in a way that is easy to understand and remember. Frame that idea in a way that is easy to understand and remember.

I think the mistake that a lot of people make right here is they just take an idea, any idea They figure out what their steps are for that idea, and they just organize them in a clever acronym, right? We have my steps method or my fire method or whatever the thing is. And to be honest, it's pretty forgettable. Those methods that are labeled, sure they make them easier for you to remember, but they're not doing the job, which is to paint a picture to other people and make them interesting.

So I'd like to challenge you to say, if you've solved a problem and you have a new idea, which most people skip, what are ways that you could frame it that helps paint the picture for them? And this might be instead of just defaulting to steps, maybe try to figure out, well, what does this look like? What is the imagery that I could use that would help people understand this? Or what is the metaphor I could use that would help people understand this?

And then if you have steps, great, you could have steps and a system. But if you connect those steps to some sort of imagery or metaphor or a way of understanding, then it has a better chance of moving forward. One of the great examples is the Simon Sinek speech about starting with why. But the reason it's memorable isn't 'cause of his specific steps, it's because of that concept that is easy to remember, that new idea that don't start with how, start with why, right?

It was a new way of thinking about it. And then you had the imagery of the golden circles, right? The, the concentric three circles that on the outside what we solve this, in the inner circle is how we solve it, and the most inner circle is why. And it's just a very visual, memorable thing to burn into someone's memory.

And he's on stage in a TED Talk showing it on a, a whiteboard, and that imagery is what sticks with people, and it was a good metaphor. So the steps necessarily aren't what matters, but really figuring out how do you frame it in a way that takes the idea, turns it into something that's structured and ownable that only you've ever created, but also is memorable because it ties into a metaphor or imagery of some sort. So if you wanna build authority in your market and go from random to recognized, take those three steps.

Solve a problem that people have, create a new idea that changes how people think, and then frame it in a way that is easy to understand and remember This is part of how I teach people to build their brand IP to come up with new ideas. If you're interested in working through some of that together, I'd love to talk to you. I work on people's brand IP with them and also their content systems, creating authority content that gets them not just recognized, but also brings them clients.

If you wanna talk with me about that, feel free to reach out. You can go to brandsonbrands.com/scorecard, and there's actually an assessment you can take, 10 questions that help identify some of the things you could be working on all for free, and it gives you access to book time with me for free for 30 minutes so we can go through it together. That's brandsonbrands.

com/scorecard. I'd love to get to know you better. That's it for today.