Question: How do you leverage a personal brand?

Question for John — if you woke up tomorrow and every bit of your savings, every income stream, and all your future book royalties were cancelled — if you had nothing whatsoever except your personal brands — how would you monetize these to create income for yourself?

This is the boat many people are in. I agree that creating a personal brand is a fantastic idea, but how exactly does one convert that into actual capital?

Thanks!

Paula

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Paula,

This a great question and there isn't any way I'm going to be able to do it justice in this post.  

Let's start: You just lost your job.  You don't have any savings.  Ok.  

Frankly, almost everyone I know has been in that situation before, and before online brands were possible it was 10x tougher to recover from it.

If you actually do have an online brand, you should have been leveraging that network for opportunity/income well before your offline world fell apart.  That amount of income/job loss typically doesn't happen overnight.  There are signs, but you need to pay attention to them. 

Let's say you have been preparing for this day by building an online brand (profession/interests/hobbies/etc.).  If so, you are ALREADY connected to people in your area of interest and a significant amount of credible online documentation related to what you can accomplish.  

1. Optimally, you have already found ways to generate some income (even if it is just a little bit) from your network.  If that's the case, you already know some what it takes to make money on your own.  Time to ramp it up.  
2. Ask your network for advice.  Swallow your pride and tell them what you are looking for and remind them of what you have to offer.  Don't complain about be broke or desperate (it doesn't help you one bit).  In most cases, this will generate job/gig leads (good online communities of interest that you have participated in can generate much more work than you think) and almost always great advice relevant to your situation.
3. If you have services or a product to sell, leverage your brand to sell them.  Every area of interest/hobby/etc. is valuable in some way.  Use your network to spread the word.  It's never been less expensive to sell anything today (you can publish a book or pamphlet for free now via on demand publishing, you can set up a storefront for peanuts, advertising networks are everywhere and potentially lucrative if you have traffic...) If possible, use all of them at once!

Hope this helps.  If you do find and decide to take another standard job, make sure you keep as many of the online income streams you can.  

Sincerely,

John Robb