Further to the last post, ‘Building Your Personal Brand – the 3I’s: Inspect, Iterate, Invest’, I am narrating my true story.
Careful planning
I launched my website www.ksramanan.com in Nov 2017 after careful planning.
I wanted to be sure that I could actually churn out posts at regular intervals. For this purpose, for about 8 months prior to the launch, I wrote two posts every week on Facebook as a part of what I termed as the ‘Good Morning’ series. The posts covered areas such as leadership, career, relationships, parenting, travel writing, and some life lessons. These posts reflected what my website would finally represent.
Having got the confidence that I would be able to write posts at regular intervals, I launched my website on my birthday, Nov 17th.
In these 15 months, much water has flown under the bridge.
Adopting and adapting
It has been a journey of learning and adopting new technologies and approaches. Being a newbie in the digital world, I began reading a lot and watching other similar websites. However, I also wanted to retain my authenticity in this process.
To begin with, I experimented with posting at different days of the week and watched the response of the audience. I got some clues of the preferred days. Likewise, I posted at different times of the day and saw the responses spike or dip. I was getting the drift.
Experimenting with different types of posts, I was getting a lot of feedback – some on the site and many comments on Facebook and Whatsapp. While every post was received quite well, it appeared that my audience was really enjoying life lessons based on anecdotes. Such posts did extremely well. My travel stories were getting more and more popular.
I would quickly go to Google Analytics and observe the trend. The trend informed me that over 90% of my website visitors were using their mobile device to visit my website. This was good news because I had chosen a website format that was compatible with mobile phones.
Taking risks
Given the new research finding that the human attention span has drastically dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, I decided to introduce short-form content under the category ‘Seeds’. This content is bite-sized and can be read by just one swipe-up on the mobile phone.
I began writing a new Quote every day. The 366 Quotes that I created, generated a lot of interest, particularly on Instagram where I now have hundreds of followers. These Quotes have now been compiled as a book, ‘366 Insights for Life’.
Since it was also about my personal brand, I began looking at all the other social media formats of mine. I was appearing in different forms on formats such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Since my writing was directing my audience to these formats, I made them look consistent.
In the meantime, apart from other things, I also learned about Permission Marketing. Based on what I learned, I introduced a newsletter for my subscribers and offered them a 66-page free e-book, ’31 Ways to Reclaim Your Happiness’. It was a great success and today, I have hundreds of subscribers on my website who receive my newsletter regularly with global content specially curated for them.
Everything works out
Given that my website was meant to be an extension of my brand, things seem to be working out as planned. I get a lot of requests for Life coaching and career coaching through my website. Currently, apart from clients in India, I have coaching clients in the US, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia and just last week, a client from Kenya. People buy my book of original Quotes, ‘366 Insights for Life’ by visiting the Products section of my website. A monk from Kolkata who read my book and wants me to co-author a book with him has invited me to a Retreat in the Himalayas in the first week of April. I am going.
As the last post suggests, it has been a journey of learning, getting feedback, changing some elements and watching the response, reviewing feedback and revisiting the road map. With every new learning, there is an opportunity to iterate and take some risks. The learning process continues.
A couple of years ago, who would have thought that I would even relate to words such as tags, keyphrase density, meta description, Flesch Reading, subheading, transition words, paragraph length, outbound links, Image Alt attributes, and slug?
As my Quote #207 says, ‘Life’s exciting discoveries are located just outside our comfort zone.’
Go out and conquer! The world is waiting for you.
But before you step out, make sure your personal brand is sorted to give you that much-needed leverage in today’s competitive world.
One of my special expertise areas within career coaching is about how to leverage LinkedIn as a platform. Are you using all the powerful features of LinkedIn to your advantage? Is your brand fully visible?
Interested in getting career-coached? Don’t put it off. Get started today.
Contact me at [email protected].
