Personal Branding vs Marketing: Tips for Podcasters

Isaac Mashman0:39

Of the podcasts. Trade Isaac. Absolutely, Jen. Thank you for the invitation. I decided to talk with you today.

Isaac Mashman0:51

Absolutely. Well, my name is Isaac Mashman. I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, now living in little Rock, Arkansas, which is where I call my home. I specialize in personal branding and I've been involved in the business world for the past six years. It's kind of crazy to think that a couple more years will be the decade mark and my main focus is working with emerging and established public figures to optimize their personal brands and scale them up to a large degree and super excited to just be here for this conversation.

Isaac Mashman1:34

Well, there's a big difference between branding and marketing. Branding is what you were known as or known for and then marketing is how you get more people to know about you. It's important to know the distinction between a personal brand and a company brand. So your personal brand is you. It's who you are. You've had it from the moment you were born, came out of Mama's womb, and you had the name, the political affiliation, the religion, your experiences, where you were born, all of those details. Then you have your professional career now as an adult that all contributes to your personal branding makeup. I'm a huge believer in leveraging and growing your personal brand. So you can gain certain results in whatever area you want to, whether that be money, vanity, or a mission that you.

Isaac Mashman2:28

Well marketing are the tools that you can use in the methods to grow your personal brand. So for example, I'm Isaac Mashman and you can find me all across social media but social media is a tool that I can use for marketing to reach more people and to get more people to know about me and what I have going on in my mission and grow revenue, grow relationships.

Isaac Mashman3:13

Well, a really easy strategy is to align your personal brand with your podcast. So for example, if it's called tools of the trade, it should be tools of the trade with J. Rosemary Francis. Or in my podcast, for example, that I'm launching, it's called call it Excessive with Isaac Mashman. The benefit of doing that is, number one, it shows your name at the front of the search results when people are searching up your name specifically in Apple podcasts, Spotify, breaker, wherever they're listening to their shows, you are going to be able to show up. The other cool thing about that is in the Google search results, when your name is searched, your podcast has high domain authority on many of these sites and many of these directories, which means it's more likely to propagate the first pages of Google and the SERP or search engine results page. So you can get more visibility and more attraction that way.

Isaac Mashman4:22

Yeah. Well, and most podcasters don't think of this, and they don't think about running a search before they even name their show. So when I was in the process of coming up with the name for my new podcast that's coming out before the end of this year. I went through dozens and I would dare say probably a hundred different names and potential combinations of words. If I were in a search using Spotify or Apple podcasts and there was another show with that name, well, am I going to want to compete with them versus coming up with something that's entirely unique so I don't have any competition?

That's something I would highly recommend any podcaster. Even if you're establishing, considering a rebrand to go and dive deep into search results and your competition because you are competing for attention at the end of the day. That's the God on us truth.

Isaac Mashman5:27

Definitely. So Mashman Consulting Group is a consulting firm based out of little Rock, Arkansas. We specialize in helping emerging and establish public figures, optimize and scale their personal brands. So what does that look like? That looks like somebody such as yourself, a podcaster who wants to improve the distribution of their show, their image, what pops up in Google, optimize their social media, or working with authors who want to self publish and go that route. Speakers, business owners, a bunch of different industries and niches and verticals. My philosophy and what we're building the firm on is called Identity Positioning™. So we take the personal traits and the personal identity, that makeup of the individual.

We tie that with their professional career, their professional accolade certifications. We use that to basically position them in the public's eye as a public figure. I'm really easy to find. You can go to Google and type in Isaac Mashman. I can't be in the personal branding space if I don't have the ability to say that. Right. You could also go to my company's page, MashmanCG.com, and you could find a little bit more information about MCG that way. Okay.

Isaac Mashman6:55

There? It would boil down to prioritization. Just like you're launching a business, you have to prioritize revenue generating tasks, but you also need to balance that out and do things to build out your brand, get listed on directories, build out visibility, collect testimonials. There are so many different things that you need to do for your business, and especially in the startup stages, you might not have the funding to delegate those tedious tasks. So building out my own personal brand, I've had to really prioritize, well, am I spending a lot of time doing podcast interviews? Am I spending a lot of time working on my upcoming book?

Am I working on outreach and connecting with new people? So one other tactical piece of advice that I would give your audience and the listeners is leverage what I call the power of three. You connect with three new people every single day. You do that for a month. You connect with 90 new professionals, 90 new people in your network know about you and what you have going on. You do that consistently for an entire year. You now connect with over a thousand people by years end who would want to see you win, send referrals, support you, watch your content, engage with you. That would be honestly probably the biggest challenge that I've faced over the past couple of years. It's prioritization.

Isaac Mashman8:44

Why wouldn't I? I've obsessed over that for months on end when I was younger, trying to figure out, every self-help guru tells you to find your purpose and find your why. Well, after a lot of obsession, I finally came to the conclusion that my purpose in life is to live up to my potential in all areas. My why, so to speak, is well, why not? Why wouldn't I? I've kind of adopted that philosophy. If I'm given this opportunity by God to really build something and to live this life, why not take it to the highest degree possible? From there, life improves because the pursuit of self-improvement and self-development is very rewarding and fruitful because at the end of the day, it prevents problems from coming up down the road.

By setting yourself up for financial success, you're able to handle worries and concerns and emergencies that arise by building yourself into a strong capable individual, you're able to be that man or be that woman, that role model for your future family, for your family, for your friends and for your employees and contractors.

Isaac Mashman10:06

Oh, I love that question. Today I'm grateful for this beautiful office that I moved into earlier this year. It's something that I'm extremely proud of and I'm already looking to scale up, but it is a space to call my own. I think about working from home and there's nothing wrong with that, but I myself couldn't find any productivity at home. But having my own space, productivity levels have skyrocketed and I'm just really grateful for this beautiful view and this beautiful city.

Isaac Mashman10:52

I liked that quite a bit. I would tell them to number one, put yourself out there on social media if you could secure your handle. So everywhere on social media, I am at Isaac Mashman. Now, if you don't have a unique name such as myself, you can use, get your first and the last name and then put real at the end. So let's say it would be gin Francis real, R-E-A-L at the end for your handle. The reason you do that is to create a seamless brand. If you have a name that's competitive, you might think about using your middle name or your middle initial.

So in my case, it would be Isaac S. Mashman or Isaac Samuel Mashman. If I was to use myself as an example, I would also tell anybody listening to create content that is algorithm worthy. So this would be short form vertical videos. These are performing exceptionally well. They have been for years now. If you have a podcast, you can take your podcast clips and you could clip them up, cut them up into a bunch of segments that are 30 to 45 seconds long, vertical, and you post that on YouTube. You post that on TikTok, on Instagram, on Facebook, and you get that wide scale distribution. So you have multiple platforms that are working for you and expanding your reach and your visibility.

Isaac Mashman12:32

Monetizing it. I have a survey that we've created for our clients and in every prospect, I send them this form and I have them fill it out. It's about 30 questions long. One of the questions is, what is your current struggle with your personal brand? Already, in the first couple of weeks of implementing this form, the biggest answer, the number one answer is monetizing monetize it. It can be, growing up, you don't really talk about finances around the dinner table. It's not a sexy topic. Yeah, let's talk about bills coming up. I believe that that needs to change, to have those fruitful and transparent conversations about money and all they are numbers.

So you need to think about, all right, is my personal brand making me money? What are some monetization channels? Whether that be offering merchandise for your podcast, doing affiliate deals, sponsorships offering your own services. If you're a podcaster, well, you can help other podcasters get their name out there and launch their own shows, for example. So myself, I'm able to build my business in Mashman Consulting Group and other avenues and leverage my personal brand to drive traffic to that company and to that service. But if you are starting out and just building out your personal brand as a content creator, as a podcaster, you might not see the path to monetization as clearly.

That's okay. So I would evaluate what opportunities might exist to where you could start at least breaking even and paying for your equipment, being able to invest in better equipment as you grow and as you scale. At the end of the day, a business that isn't making money is a nonprofit. Not for great, but you don't want to build a nonprofit if you're trying to build a business. Don't be afraid to have those conversations or to ask for the close, ask for the sale.

Isaac Mashman14:41

Absolutely. Well, there's a distinction between hiring a coach and having a mentor. You don't pay mentors. You don't pay them anything. Mentors give you that for free. That's kind of a big distinction. But some of my most notable mentors would have to be old world new thought leaders. I know that's kind of an oxymoron, but people such as Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, Bob Proctor, people who were talking about the philosophies of success and things that, the way that you think affects your physical outcomes and the law of attraction, for example. Those would be some of my biggest ones. I'm a huge collector of that kind of material.

So I have some early Earl Nightingale vinyls that I play, such as the strangers Secret, which is an audio that's available online. I'd recommend everybody listening to this show, go out and listen to that after this. Earl Nightingale, the strangers Secret. He talks about how, why do people not succeed? If you take a hundred men that start out, you'd have 60 of them, every single one would want to be a success. They would say, absolutely, I want to become successful. But as time goes by, 60 of them would be average. You'd have 30 of them working high-cal, decent careers. You'd have five of them who are, successful and then only one of them would be a massive success, who's accomplished everything that they set out to.

The reason why is we don't think for ourselves. We just get into this flow. We go in the autopilot. Whenever you catch yourself going in the autopilot, that's a good indicator that you need to change something. Wow.

Isaac Mashman16:26

Would say reach out don't be a stranger there's absolutely nothing wrong with reaching out even if you're not in the position to hire somebody you can always get information and know what you can build towards okay, thank you. I appreciate you absolutely Jen. Thank you for the invitation. I enjoy it.