Dan Murray-Serter: How to build a personal brand whilst running a business (and why you should too)

0:03And that's the dirty little secret that everyone keeps from everyone. Any guru that talks about building a personal brand online will tell you it's all about the content and they won't tell you that the actual secret that's 50 % of the job but they pretend like it's 100 % of the job The other 50 % is distribution

0:29That's Dan spilling the secrets on building your personal brand This is the stuff that doesn't get talked about but makes the difference If you're British, or just happen to be like me, you might be thinking, well, this is a waste of time, because even the thought of building a personal brand is icky. I get it. I can't bring myself to post. But today we're going to find out why I'm probably a mug. This is Secret Leaders, and I'm Will Stollerman, the head of podcasts here at Kindling Media. Today, our usual host Dan is going to explain why building your personal brand is something you should think about, and how to do it well.

1:02Dan just passed 150 ,000 followers. And this is honestly one of the things that impresses me most about him. How does he run three businesses whilst being that active on social? He's everywhere. We're going to lay out some of the key steps to success and how you can do it alongside your day job. Plus, at the end of the episode, we're going to reveal those dirty little secrets which can give you a leg up over the market. But first of all, I've got to know, is it even worth it? Is it worth it is a great question. I think a good way to start the theory of it is, you know, is actually by saying that everyone has a personal brand.

1:39It's just your reputation. Before the age of social media, that was exclusively reserved for people on TV or in the media or, you know, highly revered specialists, authors, you know, famous CEOs, Jeff Bezos, etc, etc. etc. But now with social, unless you like exclusively set everything to private or anonymous, you can just assume that your personal brand is being discovered and judgments are getting made about you, whether that's fair or not, whether you like it or not. You know, I've thought about it over the years. I think you have some choices, obviously. You can accept that and you can do the bare minimum about it.

2:14People are going to find your profile and content and they're going to think what they want. You can do something about it and you can start to think about how to craft the external vision of what you want to be known for. And that can be very different personally to professionally, right? How you show up on Instagram can be super different to how you show up on LinkedIn. At bare minimum, you curate what you post and make sure that at least the descriptions of you on bios, right? Like, you know, that actually represents what you want people to think about you because first impressions count and that's going to be essentially your digital landscape for your first impression.

2:48Another option is you can craft a more conscious narrative about what you actually want to be known for and start to build an audience who are interested in your opinions and your personal journey. Or you can do what I'm currently doing, like taking that next step and actively decide to grow an audience and become a content creator, which is taking it more seriously and giving it more thought, really trying to hone in on not just the content you want to be known for, but also the people that you want to discover you, aka your audience. Those different stages are viable at different times in someone's life.

3:19So the context for these thoughts today, when we're chatting, really, I think they're focused more on our audience at Secret Leaders, right? So ambitious professionals who are either founders or working hard to build their careers and build a personal brand along the way versus people who can just commit to being full time content creators, right? So I think it's really important to sort of know who you're talking to. And in this example, that's exactly what I'm defining. And also where you are on that journey. So for me, I've certainly gone through all four stages of what I just described. And I've only gone from stage three, which is, you know, actively posting more about my journey, things like building in public with heights to suddenly trying to take that step of understanding, okay, well, what is a content creator, so to speak?

4:04What does that really mean? And that's kind of where I'm at at the moment in that current journey. Awesome. And so what would be some of your favorite examples of how building your personal brand has benefited you? What is the value? Because often you're spending a lot of time on this thing. What is the payoff for people? Obviously different for different people. There are some really obvious ones to me. I met my main investor doing Secret Leaders. She's become a super close friend. I met her on this show, you know, and so Heights has benefited massively from putting myself out there to an extent and creating content, which is obviously what Secret Leaders is.

4:46Similarly, you know, the reason I was invited on Diary of a CEO with Stephen, you know, other than he'd already been on Secret Leaders and we were the first podcast he ever went on, other than stuff like that, is that because I post about my mental health on social media, because I post about not just having the sort of shiny everything's perfect vibe and building in public and talking about all the challenges because I have chosen an approach with my personal brand which is to be vulnerable and show up in that sort of messy middle of how things really are. He really resonated with that content and he sees that right so I think one of the unintended consequences you don't even know who's looking and the perfect example like Stephen doesn't like my posts he doesn't comment like so you wouldn't objectively know that he's looking or watching or whatever but he messages and he's like, do you want to come on Diary of a CEO and talk about this stuff?

5:33Because I find it really interesting. So that's a perfect example of you really don't know who's watching and that can be a positive and a negative, right? Obviously your employers might be watching, your future employers might be watching. All of that is true. So you might want to be conscious of how you show up. But I think that the sort of serendipity of sort of leaning into what you're trying to express to the world can create an amazing opportunity. There's also, I'd say on the other side of things like where there's a positive, and I do think this is really true, it's sort of in the area of self-discovery, like identity, really understanding what you stand for and what you don't.

6:15That might sound really weird, but going into the content creation process, like let's just say writing a post on LinkedIn, by the time you're done writing it, you have quite a clear idea of, okay, what am I really trying to say to the world? What do I care about? So if you compare two people, me and you, just for the sake of it, because I go through the process of writing my thoughts down on LinkedIn and understanding that they're going to be met with feedback, be met with the cold reality of an audience who might have opinions and thoughts on what I'm trying to say, and they will be making assumptions about me as a human being and what I think.

6:49Because of all of these things, I'm honing and crafting and understanding a viewpoint of how I see the world and how I want other people to think about how I see the world, which is making me think about what am I really trying to say? And therefore, what do I really think? And I'm not saying that you don't think, but what I'm saying is that is a repetitive daily process that forces a conscious question about what am I trying to say? What do I think? What is interesting? What is not? And I will go through that process more so often than you will on the basis of my content is going to see the light of day in front of people.

7:24So I have to think about how am I going to formalize my thoughts down? So there's also a benefit, like, you know, talk about the positives. There's a benefit in sharing your journey of the thoughts, the things that you're learning about and you're curious about in the world and them seeing the cold light of day of reality of people who are questioning your values, questioning your judgment and challenging you. And those things also are character building, you know, jokes aside. and I've had my fair share of trolls, they all give you an opportunity to learn something, right? They are an opportunity to grow.

7:55Like me trying not to react defensively to a pointless troll on the internet who's just trying to wind me up. You wouldn't think that I would say that's a positive side of growing a personal brand because it sure as hell feels negative, but it is a growth opportunity. Like I should know better than to rise to that kind of bait and yet I still do. And so I get to reflect on those moments sometimes as well and think, oh wow, there's still like a really is a little child in me, isn't there? Like just loves to be wound up and can't rise above it. I've got work to do. Yeah, I think that's, I think that makes complete sense that, you know, it forces you to sort of organize your thoughts and your thinking.

8:30And then I think for context, for our audience as well, I know that, you know, Diary of a CEO, great bit of press, but it also led to, it was a good return on investment, should we say, because it led to, you know, bumps in customers for heights when you were in your infancy and stuff like that. So that is real demonstrable value occurring years down the line basically after you've first made that social online connection with with steven and didn't even know about it totally and and credibility like on that note will you know there's been quite a lot of people who on our journey building heights have joined the bandwagon so to speak from you know russell brand and steven fry and you know all of these amazing people.

9:14And like, there's a bunch I can't talk about currently that we're speaking to right now who are even bigger names than that. And, you know, what's the first thing someone does? You're trying to speak to them. They go and have a look at who you are. How do you show up in the world? What can they find out about you? Is there a sense of trust? Is there a vibe that you can give them as a starting point? I actually think that there's, you know, the very fact that the things that I talk about are authentic. They're my actual beliefs and they show up in the form of, you know, criticizing shit entrepreneurs and hustle culture and trying to, you know, push for more sense and balance and entrepreneurship and health and wellbeing.

9:54They will go in and see that those are the things that I stand for and they don't care whether I'm famous or not. They'll just see here's someone that's fighting the good fight on the things that align with their values and be like, well, I could work with this guy. So there are all those like little touch points as little moments of when you're trying to build a reputation for the product service or brand that you're building as a business owner and the unintended consequences that come from how you show up on social and who is seeing it and they're all forming ideas about who am I about to enter into a business relationship with this is like essentially trying to remove the guesswork from them.

10:32This is almost like trying to force your ideal persona and values and beliefs on that person to do part of the sales message for you rather than leave them with doubt and mystery and concern and having to figure out whether or not this is worth their time. This is like actually in many ways like time-saving in those kind of in those aspects, right? You're enabling someone to say, come peek inside the shop window of my soul. I will bear an aspect of it and hopefully I'll be able to penetrate the insight into your brain about what I'd like you to think about me. Yeah, yeah. And before we get into sort of the practicalities of how you build a personal brand, you've just described some of the positive, why you should do it.

11:17What are the some, what are the some of the downsides to it? Are there any hidden downsides that you weren't really expecting so our listeners understand the potential cost? Well, I mean, I talked about trolls as an upside, but there's a downside. I think one thing that's really interesting is understanding once you've had a few negative experiences, like your comments, listeners that follow me will know that I got hacked. I got hacked and there was a Bitcoin scam that ran through my account on Instagram and Instagram is shocking at trying to actually help you resolve through this. And, you know, these are things that happen to you if you build an audience, you do become a target, right?

11:57And you have a target on your back because people know that you're building a reputation of trust and if they believe that you have followers that trust you they will do what they can to manipulate that so that's a big downside another downside is just the reality that once you start on the hedonic treadmill of trying to build an audience and grow followers you start to step into or certainly let me speak from personal experience I definitely start to step into some quite negative behaviors so lots of things I've tried to learn out of start to creep in so if you get a viral post on Twitter I mean it's just impossible the dopamine hit is just so high I just cannot help myself but just like re-scroll every like 15 minutes to see how many new likes and followers I've got.

12:48You know, there was a recent tweet that I did on Elon Musk and, you know, I gained, I don't know, three or 4 ,000 followers off one post and 13 million impressions. And I mean, it went so completely viral and that was just a really addicting feeling. And that's not a positive thing because actually you spin out into some embarrassing, clout chasing, hungry, you know, you should be better than this, but you're not lower level of yourself. I haven't yet got myself into a better place around how to do that and I think that's because the novelty of having a few hits you work so hard to get some attention ultimately for your content to resonate with people that when it finally comes you suddenly get sucked into a whole addictive nature of it so that's certainly a downside and then the other thing is comparison you know they say comparison is the thief of joy but absolutely when you're starting to try and actively build audience on your personal brand I certainly speak from experience when I say a lot of the time I will post what I think is uh very similar as high quality content as someone else on say LinkedIn about my lived experience from someone who you know I might be comparing someone who has one year's experience in the job market versus me and we're saying almost identical things and that person will go completely viral and I'll get like five likes and I what is the objective difference between these two things.

14:14It's virtually impossible to say anything as I actually have far more experience to share and no one cares and no one likes me. And you go into that downward spiral of actually questioning why you're doing it all and why no one cares about what you think. And it sucks. It sucks. And actually spent a lot of time, you know, trying to build up my confidence and trying to, especially this year, like my word for the year is confidence. It's been a real struggle this year because my word for the year was confidence and I had to let half my team go in January and I just started the year off the first three months was so low and so negative that I delayed my whole you know I want to grow my personal brand that I just delayed it all because I just felt bad and embarrassed and awkward and so there's a lot of the sort of negative moments that happen in your life and then also the little micro moments of people not engaging with your content and not liking it, even though you put time and effort into it, that make you feel bad about yourself and make you not want to show up the next day.

15:13So I'd say that's a regular negative thing. It happens to me a few times a week. I get that. I get that. I mean, as you know, I'm not really on social and that's honestly one of the primary reasons why, you know, you'd post something, you'll put your post on me and you're like, oh, am I going to get like, how many people are going to like it? It's just ridiculous. I don't want to feel like that. So that is definitely, yeah because because you're protecting your ego will yeah i want to feel good yeah i get it i get it but this is the interesting thing like so i have a slightly different motivation and in a sense you know i like to say i do anyway whether or not it's true you are protecting your ego and it's a natural thing to do the ego wants protection whereas i am trying simultaneously to be on a spiritual journey where I am open-minded to having my ego battered to shit because I think I'll come through the other side better and so I put myself in these situations more consciously and I tell myself the narrative going into them that this will be good for me because another opportunity to sort of reflect on how it makes me feel and why it makes me feel like that and to not be taking myself so seriously and you know not to be so defensive and all of the other things however in the cold light of day I then still react exactly the same way that you would react which is I feel embarrassed I feel shame I feel like why did I put myself through this and I feel like I don't want to do it again.

16:39Getting into the practicalities of this someone wants to build their personal brand you know there's obviously a spectrum of how much effort they could put into it but you've got to know an area, a type of content that you're going to be focusing on. So how do you find your topic? I mean, look, you should always start from some aspect of your own lived experience. So in my lived experience, you know, I'd had this sort of amazing experience with mental health and nutrition. So and that was an area that I was deeply curious about and I was learning actively about. and so there's a saying in neuroscience which is if you read something you learn it once but if you share it you learn it twice cementing new neural pathways in your brain so it's the best way to learn so I've always taken that as a really great framework to think about okay what should I be posting about on social or in my newsletter or whatever or quite often it's the thing where I'm most curious and I have the most to learn because learning something the way that I you know for example, the way that I was building my newsletter, I was reading science papers.

17:44Well, that's boring. I happen to be interested enough in the science papers, but boy, were they dull and boring. The art of rewriting those science papers and turning it into plain English in this newsletter was the real skill that I was honing. And the art that I was sort of projecting at that point to gain followers or subscribers to the newsletter was the ability to turn jargon and complex science into something that was readable and fun. And by the very nature of doing it, I was learning way more. It was really cementing in my brain because I was finding a way to tell stories. You know, this is all a wall of text and I'm figuring out what's the narrative arc here that I can tell.

18:23That's valuable for me and it's valuable to other people. So I think there's a really valuable insight there, which is just about, you know, to pick a topic you want to talk about, it's great to share something you're learning about so a more recent example is you know with AI everyone's learning about AI and if you're not you bloody well should be and I was like well Twitter is a great place for me to be learning in public so I'm trying all of these AI tools I'm messing around with it for a few hours a day to see how it can make me more productive in every different aspect of my life why wouldn't I be trying to then figure out how I can turn this into a story I'm literally messing around with it for two to three hours but by stringing together the things that I'm doing into a Twitter thread, for example, and then a LinkedIn carousel, but the art of knowing that I'm going to have to share my process with other people, I'm going to be by the very nature, tightening up that narrative process and tightening up my own process to make sure that I'm actually learning it in a way that's good to teach.

19:23And that's really valuable for me. And it's really valuable for other people as well. So I would say that like a really, a really strong recommendation is if you are looking for a topic to share with people, pick something that you're passionate about, pick something that you're curious about and start learning in public. Like the very process of creating the narrative arc and narrative framework will actually probably create good content for you. Another approach, incidentally, is picking things that are trending, right? So it's a very different thing, but at the end of the day, there's sort of two sides to it.

19:55One is like quality content that's sort of sharing what you're interested in. And then another is trying to build like a bigger audience faster. And there's always going to be more attention going on the trending thing. So I'm not saying that that is necessarily like a credible way to grow. But certainly in my experience, for example, I mentioned earlier, I did an Elon Musk thread when he changed to X and it blew up. It's one of the most popular Twitter threads around at the time. 13 million views in about 48 hours, like it really blew up. And the reality is, I'm no Elon Musk expert. But I picked a topic that I knew was trending, I knew was interesting, I knew people were going to be talking about, I found a really valuable way to create a narrative arc through it.

20:41And I got lots of attention. And I picked up a few 1000 followers in 48 hours, which is more followers than most of my valuable content. So I think this is one of the things we're trying to learn about building engagement versus building audience. You kind of have to have little hacks for both and not all content is going to do both things. So you need to be a little bit more flexible. That's one of the things I've learned this year. A little bit flexible with your approach to how to build an audience. Sometimes you have to do the thing that's in the zeitgeist, even if it isn't like one of your core topics, right?

21:13That's not about mental health or nutrition. I don't really care that much about Elon Musk. I think he's interesting as much as the next person, but it worked. And now I have more followers and I can educate them with the things that I want to say. Okay. So can you summarize for our listeners, uh, the key tactics, the key methods for finding their topic? Yeah, absolutely. One is where you're most curious, right? So the most obvious thing is where you're most curious. Is there a place where you're trying to learn at the moment? You're guaranteed to make more interesting and valuable content if you're really passionate and interested in this topic as well.

21:44Number two, actually, you know, things in the zeitgeist. So things that are trending. If you want to build audience and engagement and more eyeballs on something, pick something that people are interested in right now. So actually follow the trends and try to figure out how your topics and your curiosity aligns with that zeitgeist. That is going to create the best, most viral content you possibly can. And then third, obviously, seeing as we're speaking to professionals, busy professionals, write content about your niche, about your sector expertise. If you're in HR, write about HR. If you're in technology, write about technology.

22:19If you're in sustainability, share in sustainability. Just know that you don't have to stick to that thing all of the time. Ideally, if you're trying to build a personal brand around reputation, engagement, and audience, it should probably be a mix of those three things. That's what I've learned so far this year. So you've passed 150k followers, which is a huge accomplishment. I'd love to know what tactics you've used to help that growth. What has been most effective? The most obvious one, like everyone will tell you anyway, which is true, is consistency. So, you know, there's many videos that you can watch that do go viral, which is, you know, how do you grow?

22:58And you've got someone talking about how they'll create 10 videos a day versus someone else who creates one video a day. And one of their 10 goes viral and brings in most of their viewers. And so they're doing that seven days a week. And so there's a big difference, obviously, between the people who are full-time content creating and really able to not just hack the algorithm, but also find the bangers, find the bangers that are the right message for the right audience and really get the right reach. So if you're only posting once a week or you're posting once a day, or you're posting 10 times a day, there probably is going to literally be a forcing function of how fast you grow and how you reach people.

23:38A side of it is, you know, actually how are you able to focus on your priorities? So for a lot of people, and this is one of the things I struggle with, a lot of the people that I compare myself to, they're actually full-time or part-time creators. You know, they have far less daily responsibilities than I do. They're not running companies full-time, but yeah, I still compare my results to their results. So that's something that I'm learning slowly to stop doing. It's really hard to do because objectively I see success and I want to emulate success. But from a practical point of view, I know that they're putting in more effort into their content and they're putting out more regularly and they're really trying to spend their time honing in on how to make it win.

24:20Versus me, I'm trying to fit in the content creation process into my existing busy life, busy schedule and three businesses that I run along with being a dad. So I sort of give myself these unrealistic expectations about it, but I still feel like showing up at least five times a week has been a big step change for me. Last year, I used to do maybe a couple of threads on Twitter a week and two or three posts on LinkedIn and maybe two or three posts on Instagram. This year, it's almost every day and that's the major difference. And so how, which would be your next question, is scheduling. So making sure that everything is done, you know, for the content creation process with video, I set aside one day a month currently and I record everything in one go.

25:16With Twitter and with LinkedIn, every Monday basically, I go through all the stuff that I want to publish and schedule for the week and I do it all in one go. So one of the things that I've learned about myself is if I don't have a rigorous process or a system like that, it's never going to happen. Like my life is far too chaotic and I've got really poor discipline to do it any other way. So unless I like literally stick those things in my calendar and force myself to do them then and there, they don't get done. And so the consistency fails. So if you want to build a bigger audience faster, you're going to have to put out more content.

25:53And if you want to put out more content, but you're constrained by time, you're going to have to get good at scheduling and protecting the time that you actually have in that creative process to make sure that the content you're doing is great. Okay. So consistency, obviously very important, getting on top of the op side, the scheduling, running your calendar. What are some other tactics that our listeners might not have heard of that you've used to unlock growth? Yeah. Well, I think there's one of those sayings, right about your you know you're the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with so over the last few years running a business you know I've obviously tried to surround myself with business people who understand investors or ops or e-commerce or whatever that thing is and this year wanting to for example grow LinkedIn I've decided to reach out to people who I can objectively see and you know relative strangers include and friends alike who I can see are doing a really good job of growing LinkedIn and asking them, how have you done it?

26:50And some of those people were like, you know, super generous and like, let's jump on a call. I love what you do. And I'd love to tell you. And some people are like, yeah, I sell this course. It's, you know,$150 and I do this coaching call that's like$500. And you're like, ugh, you know, part of me is like, oh, the ick. Like, how could you live with yourself like that? And the other part of me is like, wait a minute, this is this guy's job. And this guy's done a great job of this. And actually I need to get over myself because I am literally looking for the answers that this person personally has demonstrated visibly that he can do exponentially better than me, which is precisely the approach I take in business when I'm looking to upskill myself in any kind of area.

27:36So I sort of go through the psychological motions of like, how dare this person charge me loads of money and send me a fucking PDF. So suddenly being like, wait a minute, that's exactly what I need and what I want. So I've actually probably invested so far this year,$1 ,500 in coaching on different social media platforms with different teachers. That's actually been super valuable because it's provided me both with process ideas and things that I didn't already know, but also sort of like little hacks and little tweaks to things. And like, they're all obvious things now, but even just like changing my banner on LinkedIn, which previously said, you know, it had a screenshot of secret leaders at number one and Tim Ferriss at number two.

28:15And they're like, look, that's super credible. But people that go to your profile don't have the context. And so what are you actually teaching them? And so now it says, you know, follow me to learn about AI, mental health and leadership. And that is a much better call to action banner. And so more people that visit my profile after I've created good content actually convert to follow me. So little hacks like that, and you collect all these, you know, sort of Dave Brailsford 1 % marginal gains. You collect a lot of these 1 % marginal gains from all these different teachers. And before you know it, things are starting to compound and starting to work.