It’s Not About You: Why Promoting Others Is Key To Growing a Personal Brand

Influencers spend everyday talking about themselves.

This isn’t effective for sales, connections, or growing brands.

You’re probably asking yourself:

“But, I’ve got this great idea I want to share with the world. Why shouldn’t I be the one talking?”

Simple. It’s more powerful when others talk about you.

Take my friend Eric Jones.

If I’m Eric Jones and I want to be seen as a LinkedIn ads expert, I could say: 

“I’m Eric Jones and I know all kinds of stuff about the latest updates to LinkedIn ads.”

But you know what?

I’m hanging out with AJ Wilcox who’s the founder of B2linked, one of the most well known Linkedin Ad Agencies.

That alone provides more social proof, reputation increase, and trust than anything I could proclaim into my iPhone camera.

This strategy is how Nike beat Adidas in shoe sales. 

Instead of Nike talking about how great their shoes were, how comfortable they are, etc…

They simply gave out shoes to popular people in their target audience.

You have to do the same and find your Michael Jordan.

And that’s done by sharing, sharing, and sharing.

Let me be clear:

I’m not saying don’t gain the expertise yourself or self promote ever.

But for personal brands, it really is about leveraging relationships and authority from those a few steps ahead of you. It also generates interest since odds are they have more traffic than you do.

They have more of an audience. The way you want to reach your audience is not by trying to get all these people to come to your website.

Why would anybody want to come to your website? They don’t even know who you are.

Recording content with Jake Paul is a great example of this practice in action.

I could talk about how young adults can grow their personal brand online for days.

Or…

I could help teach a course with Jake Paul, one of the most well known influencers for young adults.

Tell me – which do you think will have a bigger impact?

Jake Paul, obviously.

Yet influencers continue to ruthlessly self promote themselves instead.

That’s like climbing up a mountain when there’s a ski lift right next to you.

Seems dumb, no?

One of the pillars of the personal branding we teach is the topic wheel.

The idea of the topic wheel is to tie your personal brand to others who cover the 6 topics you want to be known for.

Then, you fill in the names for who you want these people to be.

For me that includes Grant Cardone, Caleb Guillems, Michael Stelzner, and others.

What most people forget is that it’s not just the relationships or appearing on camera once with high profile people. That would be silly and no different than asking someone for a selfie at a conference.

I’m not saying “Go out and find a billionaire to record content with to succeed”

Rather, it’s about the individual stories you have and advice you can share.

For example, Jake Paul knows more about working on television, reaching young adults, and being a YouTube personality than I do.

Where-as I know more about digital marketing than he does.

So by sharing these connections we’re able to promote ourselves to new audiences, which is a win-win.

Not only for growing our personal brands, but for genuinely connecting anyone who watched the content to the advice they need to hear.