Personal Branding

This post was written by our Social Media channel sponsor Full Sail University.

If you want to quickly build a responsive email list in the next 30 days — especially if you’re just starting online and don’t have a lot of money — the following strategy can get the job done. Here’s the story: Several years ago, I was struggling to build my email list and nothing seemed to work.

On the snowy, northeastern Christmas of my 11th year, our parents gathered all five kids around the kitchen table to deliver the news. We were moving to San Antonio, Texas. I was devastated. Texas? I imagined what our new home would look like. We’d be miles from any neighbors — who all walked straight off the “Hee Haw” set — with a dusty, rock-filled front yard punctuated by the occasional tumbleweed rolling by.

Everywhere you turn these days, you hear about authenticity. They say you’ve got to be real in order to connect with today’s social media savvy audiences and consumers. But it’s not necessarily true. Go out and be “real” when you’re having a bad day, and people will quickly call you out for not reacting in the “right” way.

As a professional copywriter, there’s one question that tends to pop up constantly from my readers and clients … “Can you teach me to write like you?” My knee-jerk answer is usually something like, “Um. No. There is no other like me! I reign supreme! Me! Me! Me!” OK, I’m not really that egocentric.

It felt like the walls were closing in, the room growing smaller. My heart was hammering hard enough that I could see my pulse against the back of my eyes. I was having trouble breathing, an automatic function that was suddenly requiring conscious thought. Sounds were too loud. Lights were too bright. The lab’s normal smell of yeast — food for the stock of fruit flies — had grown pungent, vaguely offensive.

Remember learning Greek mythology in school? I’m going to give you one name, and I want you to think about the first image that pops into your head … Hercules. What’d you think about? Was it what you read in that dusty old history book, or was it the unforgettable Disney cartoon?

Have you ever gotten so caught up in a deadline (or your own expectations) that writing anything at all felt … uncomfortable? Too often as writers we measure ourselves by our level of productivity. We get so worried about being productive that we forget to enjoy ourselves. Here’s the rub: if you aren’t enjoying your writing you aren’t truly being productive.

I’ve been blogging for six years now, and in that time I’ve noticed something — anyone can do it. At first, I thought that this was a good thing. But then I realized that every good thing has a shadow side. So here’s the downside of the accessibility of blogging: It makes the already-terrible writers much, much louder.