Mark Schaefer recently wrote about three paths to a personal branding content strategy, and I was one of them.
Mark is a friend, and he has visited my class. My students read his book Marketing Rebellion, which argues that the most human company wins. That idea runs through everything below.
He compared two people who seem to disagree. Shawn Van Dyke studies the algorithm and shapes his content to fit it. I mostly ignore it. No trending audio, no dance transitions. Mark lands somewhere in between: he pays attention to the numbers, but he doesn’t let them drive.
His conclusion is the part I want my students to hear. The strategy matters less than whether you can keep doing it. The one real mistake is starting something you can’t sustain.
My rule
Be useful, be entertaining, be honest about what I know.
My filter for every post
Everything Lane and I post at Sweet BombDiggity Farms has to pass that test. We share what worked, what flopped, and other people’s wins. And we post every day. That consistency is the engine. It isn’t glamorous, and it’s the real strategy.
If you’re building your brand now
- Pick a format you can repeat. A brand is built by what you do every week, not by one great post.
- Write down your filter. Two or three rules for what you post make decisions faster and make your content easier to recognize.
- Decide when you judge results. Mark watches his numbers weekly but judges success yearly. That keeps one bad week from derailing a good plan.
- Be a real person. People connect with honest and a little unpolished more than with perfect.
Mark’s advice is to choose a path you could still be following a thousand weeks from now. That’s the whole assignment. If you want help with the pieces, start with the Personal Branding and Portfolio resources.