Personal Branding vs Marketing: Tips for Podcasters

Isaac Mashman0:39

Absolutely, Jen. Thank you for the invitation. I'm [delighted] to talk with you today.

Isaac Mashman0:51

Absolutely. Well, my name is Isaac Mashman. I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, and I'm now living in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is where I call 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. 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 I'm 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 are known as or known for, and 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. 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, and 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 [have].

Isaac Mashman2:28

Well, marketing is the tools and the methods that you can use to grow your personal brand. 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 to grow revenue, grow relationships.

Isaac Mashman3:13

Well, a really easy strategy is to align your personal brand with your podcast. For example, if it's called Tools of the Trade, it should be Tools of the Trade with J. Rosemarie Francis. Or my podcast, for example, that I'm launching is 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 [populate] the first pages of Google and the SERP, or search engine results page. So you can get more visibility and more traction that way.

Isaac Mashman4:22

Yeah. Well, 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 ran 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 to any podcaster.

Even if you're established and considering a rebrand, 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's honest 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 established 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™. We take the personal traits and the personal identity, that makeup of the individual, and we tie that with their professional career, their professional accolades, certifications.

Then 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. You could also go to my company's page, MashmanCG.com, and you could find a little bit more information about MCG that way.

Isaac Mashman6:55

It would boil down to prioritization. Just like when 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 to leverage what I call the power of three. You connect with three new people every single day. You do that for a month, and you connect with 90 new professionals. That's 90 new people in your network who know about you and what you have going on. You do that consistently for an entire year, and you've now connected with over a thousand people by year's end who would want to see you win, send referrals, support you, watch your content, engage with you. So that would honestly probably be the biggest challenge that I've faced over the past couple of years. It's prioritization.

Isaac Mashman8:44

Why wouldn't I? I obsessed over that for months on end when I was younger, trying to figure it 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, and 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. Having my own space, my productivity levels have skyrocketed, and I'm just really grateful for this beautiful view and this beautiful city.

Isaac Mashman10:52

I like that quite a bit. I would tell them, number one, put yourself out there on social media, and secure your handle if you can. Everywhere on social media, I am @IsaacMashman. Now, if you don't have a unique name such as mine, you can get your first and last name and then put "real" at the end. So let's say it would be JenFrancisReal, 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. 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. This would be short-form vertical videos. These are performing exceptionally well, and they have been for years now. If you have a podcast, you can take your podcast clips and 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 every prospect. I send them this form and I have them fill it out. It's about 30 questions long, and 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 it. 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 needs to change, to have those fruitful and transparent conversations about money, because all they are is 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. 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, and that's okay.

So I would evaluate what opportunities might exist 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-profits are] great, but you don't want to build a nonprofit if you're trying to build a business. So 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, so 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 like how 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 Strangest 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 Strangest Secret. He talks about why people do not succeed. If you take a hundred men who start out, 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-caliber], 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, and we go into autopilot. Whenever you catch yourself going into autopilot, that's a good indicator that you need to change something.

Isaac Mashman16:26

I 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 enjoyed it.