In this episode, I'm going to show you the three critical mistakes most technical professionals make with personal branding and how to fix them. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert, personal brand, and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions? Or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money, or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build, and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki - welcome to the build your expert business show.

Hi there. My name is Dave Ziembicki. I help senior technical professionals build personal brands and businesses around their expertise. In my career as a senior architect, I've sold or delivered over $200 million worth of it services and risen to the top of some of the largest technology and consulting firms in the world such as Microsoft, Deloitte, SAIC, and others. Today, I'm going to cover the three critical mistakes most technical professionals make with their personal brands. If you're not advancing in your career or income as fast as you'd like, I guarantee you're making one or more of these mistakes and I'm going to show you how to fix them. Mistake number one is thinking that personal branding is marketing bs and just not starting the process at all. Less than 5% of technical professionals have a personal brand strategy team or platform. I get it. We're technologists, not sales or marketing people, but technical professionals like us usually have more of a quiet confidence type of personality, or let the results speak for themselves type of mentality.

But here's the problem. Results do not speak for themselves, at least not loudly enough when it's time for raises, bonuses, promotions, or new jobs. It's the people with the best combination of results and awareness that when having a great personal brand pulling forward at $12,000 a year, raise and investing, that money results in almost $500,000 of additional lifetime income. If you're able to do that twice, you've got $1 million or more extra lifetime income. Now, I also know the term personal branding may put you off - two sales a year that it sounds like marketing bs. You may hate sales and marketing people. You know? For a while I did too. Luckily I had a mentor that completely changed my mindset. He taught me to think about my career as a business. Like any business, it must have a marketing function that compliments the product as an individual.

The product is your expertise. Your marketing is the personal brand that you build around it, so ask yourself this: Would a company that had no marketing team, no website, no social media presence, no advertising, be successful? Of course not. No matter how good their product is, nobody would even know about them. If you're a technical professional and you don't have any of those things either, you won't be successful. This is what separates those struggling to reach six figures versus those of us making five x or 10 x more than that. Mistake number two is thinking that it's all about self promotion for the smart folks who are doing some personal branding. The next most common mistake I see is thinking that it's all about self promotion. You've seen the posts, the humble, the, I'm so fortunate that I won the Joe Schmo word at work this year, or the just completed my ABC certification, or the pictures of the person's standing in front of the logo at their corporate headquarters.

I've been there and done that and had no results to show for it. These are better than nothing, I suppose, but they're not effective personal branding. The key to building a personal brand and positioning yourself as an expert is to provide rather than promote an expert. Personal brand is not shouting to the world about your accomplishments. It's about teaching others what you know and value. The influence and impact that a personal brand enables is fueled by the content and value that you provide. Remember, your accomplishments may impress people, but it's how you help them that creates the lasting impression. Mistake number three is no strategy or content. Now we know that we should be building our personal brand and that we should be providing value instead of self promotion. The final major mistake is just having no strategy or content supporting your personal brand. Again, managing your career like a business.

You know that businesses align their marketing efforts around goals and campaigns. Sometimes it may be just to keep their brand front of mind with their audience, but usually it's aligned to a goal, like the launch of a new product and event or some other objective, and during the period of that campaign, all efforts are aligned toward the goal. You need the same strategy for your personal brand. If your goal this year is a promotion, then your strategy needs to be about providing value to the people between you and your goals, like managers at your company, peers, promotion boards, et Cetera, value that demonstrates you're already performing at that next level or have the ability to do so. This requires a plan for activities inside of your company, what I call your internal personal brand, as well as for activities outside of your company in public, in your industry.

That's what I call your external personal brand. To move the needle in today's world of information overload, you need to be creating and delivering value and content to your target audience at a far greater scale than you're imagining. By content I mean written audio, video assets that truly help your target audience accomplish something. This can range from inspiration all the way to nuts and bolts, step-by-step tutorials and things like that. Remember, sharing your expertise is what builds your personal brand. Both myself and other experts in this field know that in order to break through and truly become seen as an expert and influencer in your company and industry, you need to be delivering 30 to 50 pieces of content per day in your personal brand. At first, this sounds ludicrous, but the ROI makes this a no brainer and there are ways to do this with only a few hours of work per week.

A 10 minute video packed with valuable insight can be broken into 30 pieces of content and distributed across your internal and external brand channels. As just one example to become known, your content needs to be valuable and ubiquitous. So now we know the three mistakes most technical professionals make with their personal branding, not starting at all, too much self promotion, and no strategy or content. Do you see that if you're making any of these mistakes, not starting being self promotional or having no strategy, you're seriously limiting your career and income potential. Do you see that if you fix them and start moving to the forefront of your company and industry, the potential ROI is enormous. 500,000 all the way up into the millions of dollars by pulling forward and promotions. I bet you do. So I want to remind you of the guidance my mentor gave me: The business of you must have a marketing function, your personal brand that compliments the product, your expertise, but just like the business, personal branding and marketing is an expertise and a team you can hire or bring into your career.

Imagine that every day you're republishing 20 pieces of valuable content or insight across 15 different audio, video or written channels, both within your employer and across social media, branded, professionally designed highly engaging content, not spammy and self promotional, but educational and helpful, thus demonstrating true expertise. Now imagine those were all lined around a goal like showcasing your readiness for a promotion or a new role. Imagine those were promoted in a way to ensure visibility by leaders in your company. You exponentially increase your odds of success compared to the colleague sitting next to you who's doing none of those better yet. Imagine if all of the above only required a few hours of your time per week. Sound impossible. It's not. It's exactly what leading executives and professionals are doing to accelerate their careers to help you get there. I might invite you to a free 15 minute webinar where I outline exactly how to start, build and expand an expert personal brand.

I call it the expert brand system. The system I'll outline in the video enabled me to 10 x my income and earn a lifestyle. Most only dream of it has such an impact that I'm dedicating the second half of my career to helping others get there as well. Head over to expert brand system.com to take action and accelerate your career. In the video I'll show you how it's possible to establish an expert personal brand and how all you have to do is bring your expertise for a few hours each week and the rest can be done for you. Again, head over to expert brand system.com to take action and accelerate your career. I hope to see you over there. I want to thank you for tuning into today's episode of the build your expert business show. As a quick reminder, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and also head over and leave us a rating and review. I'd love to get your feedback on the show, the content length of the episodes, any other feedback that you have. We read through all of those reviews and we'd like to improve things, make things better for you. So it'd be great if you could, uh, give us an honest review over there and we'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success.