Leveraging Your Personal Brand To Achieve Business Goals: An Interview With Alex Houg

At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Alex Houg of BlitzMetrics about the importance of personal branding.

This is a topic Alex is quite passionate about, as he believes what you do as an individual ultimately makes its way up to the company level. In the video below, Alex shares tips on how to build your personal brand in a way that will help you reach your business goals.

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

• Anyone at any stage in their life can build a personal brand, Alex says. Depending on where you work you can leverage that for your personal brand.
• Building your personal brand means writing content that reflects what you are passionate about sharing it, eventually building up enough notoriety that you can interview thought leaders and use that as more content for your personal brand.
• Personal branding is good for moving laterally as well as vertically. You can use it to move up within the company, or attract interest from other companies you might like to work for.
• Building a personal brand also means creating connections with other industry experts. When you become known, you’ll start getting mentioned, and it’s very important to nurture those relationships with other thought leaders.
• As a CEO, Alex encourages his team to build their own personal brand by having one-on-one conversations to identify their individual goals, and then seeing what can be done as a company to help build their personal brand to achieve those goals.
• When creating content don’t limit yourself to just writing. You can also leverage audio in the form of podcasts, or video interviews, or even utilizing visuals like infographics and slideshare.
• When Facebook introduces new feature,s they place greater importance on it in the News Feed, so keep that in mind when it comes to deciding what kind of content to create. For example: Facebook recently released some new video features, so video posts have received greater reach lately.
• When asked to give just one Facebook marketing tip, Alex said you need to amplify content to the media through post targeting. Understand your goals, have content to support your business goals, and then amplify that to the media in order to maximize shares and brand advocacy.

Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.