Making a Name for Yourself: Building a Strong Personal Brand in Commercial Real Estate

I am not much good at creating catchy blog titles and hooks for social media, which puts my content's discoverability at a disadvantage.

So, recognising my weakness, I decided to ask ChatGPT this question:

Tell me 20 podcast episode titles that are about how professionals can grow their personal brand in a way that feels easy and natural. Make the titles catchy and engaging.

The first five answers it gave me were:

1. "Brand Boost: The Secret to Effortless Personal Growth"
2. "Making a Name for Yourself: A Guide to Building a Strong Personal Brand"
3. "The Art of Networking: How to Expand Your Professional Circle"
4. "Unleashing Your Inner Influencer: A Guide to Building Your Personal Brand"
5. "Elevate Your Personal Brand with Confidence and Authenticity"

Based on what the bot told me, this week’s podcast episode is called “Unleashing your inner influencer without shame: building your personal brand in commercial real estate”.

Seeing it was the second suggestion, I’ve decided to title this week’s this blog, “Making a Name for Yourself: Building a Strong Personal Brand in Commercial Real Estate”.

Using AI to help you brainstorm ideas is one of its best features, in my opinion (as a reminder, I shared a bunch of ideas on how you can use ChatGPT a few weeks ago).

As for this week’s content, it’s all about how you can build a strong online presence, with a personal brand that feels genuine and relatable.

I’ll show you how to do it without being full of yourself, but while still sharing your wins.

And I’ll even share some of the mistakes I've made with content (most recently, by trying to make it too easy to create, which impacted its quality), and the lessons I've learnt along the way.

If it’s time for you to grow your personal brand, have a listen to episode 126 of CRE Success: The Podcast - or read the interview transcript below.

And make sure you listen or read through to the end to get free access to training that is usually reserved for our paying members.

Episode transcript:

Ten years ago, when I was traveling in Spain, I met a flight attendant who works for Singapore Airlines.

And one time she came to Korea, where I was living at the time, and we went out for lunch. 

And I remember taking some photos of her, because she asked me to, while we were at lunch, and she insisted that I take about 50 photos so she could get the best possible photo lighting, her expression, all of that. 

And I remember saying to her, "Isn't this a bit much? Aren't you a bit embarrassed by all this?"

Because this was sort of pre-influencer age, it was probably 2014.

And I think people were still a little bit less shameful, if you like on social media.

And that line stuck with me because I thought it was funny. But I think it's also relevant for what we want to talk about today.

And she said to me in a Singaporean accent, which I won't do for you now. But I can do. She said to be, "Darren, you need to throw your shame away."

Because if you want to grow your personal brand, if you want to unleash your inner influencer, then you need to do it without shame.

And I want to share some ways that you can do it in a way which is not shameful, so you can build your personal brand, and still be true to who you are.

That's what we're talking about on today's episode of the show.

Hello, welcome to CRE Success: The Podcast. My name is Darren Krakowiak. This is episode 126. 

I work with commercial real estate leaders so they can develop their people. And so, they can grow their business.

If you're watching us on YouTube, we've finally fixed up some of the visual issues that were existing for the past few weeks.

And now I've got things set up in the new home office the way I want them with the laptop now, with the technology installed, and all of that.

So, thanks for sticking with us well, that visual quality wasn't quite what I would like.

And if you're listening to us on your favorite podcast player, you might not really care about how the video looks.

But I think also that this program I've got might have a small improvement in terms of how the audio is as well. So, I hope that that is coming through for you.

On today's episode of the show, we're actually following up what we talked about last week with Brent Griffiths.

And Brent was our special guest. And we were talking about personal branding.

And he recommended that when you are sharing content on platforms like LinkedIn, that you want to share what you're passionate about, right?

And that was some good advice.

And certainly, what we're going to be doing when we have special guests on the show is the following week, we'll follow up on perhaps one piece of the advice that we've got from the guest and put our take on it and give you some more ways that you can actually implement what they talked about.

So that's sort of why we're doing this episode today. 

And I want to start off by saying that the advice that he gave, which was talk about things that you're comfortable with that you're passionate about was good advice.

Because we want to make content easy for you to create, and also make building your personal brand more effortless.

And if you're talking about things that you're passionate about, then certainly that is going to be the case.

Now, you'll come across as more authentic when you're talking about things that you genuinely like. But what I want you to do also is to do it in a way which is easy for you. 

And I think I've fallen into a bit of a trap recently, because I've been really on a mission to try and do less and achieve more in terms of results.

And I've been really guilty over the past year in terms of the content that I've been sharing on LinkedIn.

I've kind of just phoning it in. 

So taking snippets from this podcast, for example, and just putting those on LinkedIn with a few comments and thinking, "Okay, well, the value lives in the podcast, and I just need to get people to come and listen to the podcast."

But the mistake I was making is that while it's easy for me just to provide a bit of the podcasts, and then put a comment around it and then see if people will be interested in that, it's not the best content to be sharing on a platform like LinkedIn or on Instagram.

It's good on YouTube, because it's sort of an episode that's there on its own, I guess, similar to how the podcast stands alone on its own.

But the purpose of the content on LinkedIn and Instagram is to drive people to the podcast.

If I'm not putting enough effort and understanding around what it is that content is supposed to be doing, then it's not going to achieve the result for me. 

So, it can be easy to create, but it may not necessarily be good.

What I want to get across to you today is that, if you're going to do what's easy, then make sure it's not only easy for you to do, but it's also going to create some value, and then it's going to perform the purpose for which you are creating it.

So, one way that you can think about this is the different types of content that you can create and what's easy for you to create. 

So for some people, it's easy for them to put a camera on and talk directly to it. For some people, that's not easy.

I would recommend that you do try and develop that ability if you don't currently have it.

But if you already have that ability, then that is a great way for you to develop more content, because it's quite impactful. And if it's easy to do, then you can get it done quickly.

If you're not good at writing, then I don't recommend that you write articles.

If you are someone who can write really good short, sharp statements that are catchy and that grab people's attention, then that's going to be a great type of content for you to share. 

And I'll just give you a little tactic here, which is related to something that we talked about on Episode 123, where we talked about ChatGPT.

I hope I'm getting better at creating podcasts, but I've tried to get better at creating the titles and the hooks that drive people to the podcast.

But I think I haven't been as good at that as I would like to be.

One thing I thought of doing with ChatGPT is saying, "Well, can this artificial intelligence help me with this?" 

So, I went into there before this episode, and I said: "Tell me 20 podcast episode titles about how professionals can grow their personal brand in a way that feels easy and natural and make those titles catchy and engaging."

And one of the titles that it gave me was 'Unleashing your inner influencer.'

And it was a slight variation on what I finally decided on for the episode 'Without shame, building your commercial real estate brand.'

If you can do other things that are going to be good content, but you need help with driving people to that content, or you need help with just writing the first line of a post because that's really important on a platform like LinkedIn, where people see that first line of posts and use something like a ChatGPT to help you come up and brainstorm ideas for you.

So, know where your strengths and weaknesses are is what I'm trying to say.

In terms of the types of content that you want to post not in terms of the modality but rather about deals, listings, what's going on in the market, talking about yourself, yes, yes, and yes, but you should be mixing up that content, so you're not always talking about the same thing and you're not coming across as overly self-promotional.

And I do have a podcast episode for you to listen to if you want to know more about how you can mix up your content, to show that you have authority in the area in which you are operating to build up awareness of what it is that you're doing, and also to build up that affinity with people in your network.

It is Season 2: Episode 1 of the Podcast which we released back in April 2021, was with Nina Christian as a special guest.

That was before we started just numbering the episodes in sequential order, but you'll find it Season 2: Episode 1.

Now if you want to know how often you should post, if you're a commercial real estate agent, once a week is going to be fine.

More than once a week will be excellent less than that sporadically not at all. It’s not going to help you develop the content creation muscle and have an impact.

And if you do it once a week, you're going to be doing content so much more often than most people do that you'll definitely I believe start to see results as long as you start to apply some of the tips and tricks that we're talking about in today's episode.

Okay, so we've talked about what you should post? How often you should post? What shouldn't you post?

Well, one thing I wouldn't post is things that's going to unnecessarily repel people who would otherwise want to do business with you.

So, I think that we want to post content which lets people know who we are, so it's going to attract people to us and also perhaps naturally repel people who aren't a good match.

But at the same time, we don't want to be needlessly controversial, just for the sake of getting clicks and comments if that's going to push people who would otherwise be good people for us to do business with. 

So, I think a good rule of thumb is the sorts of things that you wouldn't engage in polite conversation with at a networking event or at a dinner party.

For example, we don't talk about politics and religion. They are some things perhaps to avoid, if you want to, you can do what you like, right?

I'm not the LinkedIn police and in fact, I released an episode called 'I'm not the LinkedIn in place, but..' to help you understand about some things that can perhaps attract attention that you're not looking for on LinkedIn. It's episode 59 of the show.

How can you create content and grow your personal brand without it taking up all of your time?

Well, a couple of things that you can do.

One is to batch create content. 

I actually create these podcast episodes one week at a time.

But when I went on holidays, for four weeks, at the end of last year, I made sure that we created those four episodes and everything that was needed for those four episodes before I went away. So that was a bit of batch creation.

And if you batch create them in a way that it is evergreen.

You can do the same. If you're going to record videos, you could batch create a few videos, and then you've got content ready to go.

So, for example, it doesn't matter if a better idea came up, or something topical came up that you wanted to share, and you just push back that content another week, so you've always got something if you'd like in the vault, ready to go.

And the good thing about regularly creating content in the modality in which you choose to do it, or the modality in which you choose to get better in is that you will get better at doing it, you'll start to see improvements in engagement.

And engagement, I think, we're not trying to get likes, what we're trying to do is get people into conversations, and to build awareness of who we are. So, we become more familiar, when we actually do start to have direct conversations with people.

You get that content creation muscle that gets developed, the more that you do this.

Now if this is something that it's interesting to you, and you want more resources to support you in your efforts, I've got a free resource to help you because you did stick around to the end. 

It's called 'Grow, Show and Know Your Network'. It's a recording of a keynote that I presented to a client's national conference in the US in early 2021, during COVID, so it was presented via zoom.

And it's also the same content that was within one of the modules. That was the first iteration of training that we used to provide for commercial real estate agents. 

And it's free for you if you go to cresuccess.co/personalbranding. 

If you go there, I will also give you 10 ways that you can level up your LinkedIn profile.

Because your LinkedIn profile is kind of like a landing page for who you are.

And I've got 10 specific things that you should be doing to get your LinkedIn profile up to a certain standard. 

I'll also give you that link when you do register for the 'Grow, Show and Know Your Network' webinar.

It's cresuccess.co/personalbranding.

That's all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.