Podcasting is an incredibly effective tool for raising your personal profile or personal brand – more so than most other platforms.
It utilizes your voice and creates a relationship with your listener that other mediums just can’t match.
You’re a thought leader. You have things to say, and people will benefit from hearing them. Podcasting is the perfect place to do it.
I’m not here to slag off things like blogging – far from it. Writing blogs is a really key part of starting to build your brand. But if you’re doing stuff like blogging and making videos, but not also podcasting, you’re missing a huge trick.
Let’s take a look at what personal brands are all about.
I’ve stolen this from Jeff Bezos via Forbes, but it sums things up nicely:
‘A personal brand is the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you who you are. It is how you present yourself to the world. Effective personal branding will differentiate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers.’
A really key word in there is TRUST. If you can build trust with people, you’ve pretty juch nailed it, and your personal branding is pivotal to that.
Intimacy
We all see people on places like LinkedIn who have built a great personal brand. But your voice is such an important part of sealing that relationship. You just don’t have another tool which is quite as effective as your voice.
Your words – exactly as you say them – going straight into someone’s ears. I mean, straight into their brain.
There’s no filter, no screen to look at, nothing to scroll through. Just your voice, and their ears.
Other mediums put barriers between you and your audience. Videos for example are absolutely brilliant, but you can see that the person is somewhere else. There’s a space between you; a barrier.
That doesn’t exist with podcasting, especially podcasting done well, where you can speak intimately and personally to someone. People only have one pair of ears, remember, so they can only listen for themselves. This means using words like ‘you’ and ‘me’ becomes super powerful on podcasts. You really can talk directly to your listener, and put your arms around them with language like ‘we’ and ‘us’ which includes them in the conversation.
Of course, you have to get the format right. That level of personal connection is built best on solo podcasts, which really allow you to talk one-to-one with an audience.
If you’re doing an interview podcast, it becomes a different sort of experience for the listener – slightly more passive, but done well, no less immersive.
Access
Another key benefit to podcasting is accessibility. You can consume podcasts in places where you just can’t with other forms of content – out running, at the gym, driving to work, getting dinner ready… the list goes on.
It isn’t rocket science, but the more accessible your content, then the more chance you have of people consuming it.
Again, just to emphasise, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t be making blogs and videos and other forms of content – you should – but they’ll pick up different audiences.
Content is still king
Important point here – the content has to be good. You can’t just knock anything out and expect it to connect with people.
Poor quality content isn’t going to prove your skills or experience. Maybe the opposite, in fact.
If you’re going to do this, you have to do it well. Your content needs to give value to listeners.