A question I occasionally hear from people who are just getting started with personal branding is, “what is the bare minimum I should do online?”
As my friend Doug Karr says, “that’s like being given the keys to a high-performance race car and asking what’s the slowest you can drive. The better question to ask is ‘what is the fastest I can go?'”
Bottom line
When it comes to personal branding, there is no bare minimum. You’re trying to grow your personal brand, to become famous or at least a recognized expert. Why would you want to throttle your efforts by thinking in terms of a bare minimum.
Several years ago, motivational speaker Zig Ziglar would often speak of foundational performance. That was the starting point for the “bare minimum” thinkers, not the end. For example, if you had to make a bare minimum of 12 phone calls a day for your job, the bare minimum thinkers would do 12 a day and call it quits. But for foundational performance thinkers, 12 was just your starting point, 15 was better, and 20 was awesome.
Think performance
We need to think of our personal branding efforts in the same way. Don’t assign a bare minimum value to what you’re doing, whether it’s the number of tweets you can send, the number of blog posts you should write, or the minimum number of LinkedIn connections you can make.
After all, this is your career, your business, and your personal reputation you’re talking about. You’re not willing to work for a bare minimum salary, live in bare minimum housing, or eat bare minimum food. And if you are currently doing that, you’re not willing to stay at that point in your life, are you?
Instead, look at where you want to be, determine the steps and length of time you need to take to get there, and then work to achieve that. Set realistic goals, and then see where you can exceed those goals.
If you know you need to grow your Twitter network to 3,000 followers but you capped at 1,000 because that was all you could handle, then grow it and figure out how to handle all of those new followers. If you’ve only been tweeting five times a day because someone said that was enough, increase it to 10. If you’re blogging once a week, challenge yourself and do it every day for a month.
Goals and vision
Your goals are important and ones you need to meet. If you’re hitting the target every time you aim, you’re too close to the target and your goals are too low. If you’re hitting your personal branding goals, then you’re not setting challenging goals, and you’re focusing on bare minimum thinking.
Remember, you’re competing with everyone else who is trying to build their personal brand too. They’re going for the same job you are, competing for the same clients you are, and fighting to win that top-of-mind spot you are. Someone is going to win it, and I can guarantee it will not be the person who does the bare minimum.
If it is, it’s not something that was worth having to begin with.
Author:
Erik Deckers is the co-owner and VP of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service in Indianapolis. He has been blogging since 1997, has been a published writer for more than 24 years, and a newspaper humor columnist for 17 years. Erik co-authored Branding Yourself: Using Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (Pearson, 2010) and also helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies.
