This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 52: Personal Branding For Writers.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And today we’re going to be taking a look at something that’s really uncomfortable to talk about with writers. And no, it’s not love scenes. But first I have some sweet new iTunes reviews that I want to share with you.

The first one is a five-star review from iTunes listener, thebusinessdude. And this person says, “A staple for a professional and writer . Very detailed and educational for a writer. As I begin my writing journey, after many years of wanting, I have been searching for insights and the ‘how’ of the business. Sarah is able to explain her opinions and is very convicting with facts about what goes on in a writer’s life that is intertwined with several other world hats. Thank you for the excellent work!” Thank you, thebusinessdude. You’re awesome.

And the other review I’d like to share is a five star review from podcasts listener, Sara D.L. who says, “Inspired to Write . This is a gem of a podcast. The shows are very thoughtfully constructed and the result is a high quality podcast that I can’t get enough of. So often creative focused podcasts can feel like an advertisement for the guests on the show, but Sarah does a wonderful job of formulating questions and facilitating natural conversations that evolve beyond the superficial. I am not educated as a writer, but realized my passion for writing during my early professional career. Sarah’s podcast has given me insight and helped encourage me to pursue writing on a daily basis. Listen now!” Thank you, Sara. And also you have a really great name.

One of the things that thebusinessdude mentioned in his review was the fact that we wear many hats. And I try to address that in the show when I talk about the work life writing balance. But something I haven’t talked a whole lot about is the many, many other hats that a writer needs to wear. And this is true for both traditionally and self-published authors as I’ve come to learn from the different guests that I’ve interviewed on Coffee Break, which is the sister podcast to Write Now. And that is where in the olden days, when you would submit your manuscript for publishing, the publisher would just take care of everything. They would schedule you book signings and make sure you had a sweet cover on your book and market it for you and do all this cool stuff. And from what I’ve heard again, I’m not in New York City traditional polishing, but that’s not quite the case anymore. It may be for some authors, but from the majority of authors I’ve talked to, it’s not.

And so when they finish their book, they say, “Okay, I’m done,” but they’re not done because when you finish writing a book, what do you want to do next? Do you want to lock it up in a chest and hide it in your attic? Well, maybe you do if you’re not proud of it or what ha what have you. But I’m assuming that you want people to purchase it or read it so that they can either support your life and pay your mortgage and your heating bills and what have you, or so that you can share the message that you’ve spent so much time crafting into a book.

So let’s say you finished writing this book and you want to get it out into the world. And you’re self-published, or you’re with a traditional publisher that just publishes and they don’t do any of these other fancy services. What are you supposed to do? Now, before I go any further, I want to remind you that the most important thing you’re doing right now is working on your book. You’re writing your book, right? Because at the end of the day, if you get to the point where you’re ready to market it and brand yourself and do all these things, and you don’t have a book to sell, this isn’t worth a whole lot. So go on, finish your book, but also pay attention to the stuff I’m going to share in today’s episode, because hopefully down the road, it will help you.

So I’ve talked a little bit about this in past episodes, but for those of you who maybe this is your first episode listening, I’ve worked in marketing for about 10 years now, maybe a little more. And I know, I know, we hate marketing. I work in marketing and I hate marketing, right? It’s got this icky reputation of being sort of pushy, convincing us that we need things to feel special or that we want things that we can can’t afford. I think marketing has done a lot of harm in how we see ourselves and the world, but marketing is kind of like mold. Sure, it’ll destroy your house and your ceiling and make your food go bad and smell it disgusting and taste worse, but it can be also used to make life-saving penicillin.

So our job as good people is to use marketing for good and not for evil. Marketing is a tool just like, well, I don’t know if mold is a tool, but just like a hammer is a tool, right? You can use it to hammer in a nail and build a house, or you can use it to hit someone on the head, which you should not do, right?

Today’s podcast is not going to be about Marketing 101 because that would take a lot longer than 30 minutes. But what we’re going to do is touch on something called personal branding. And this is, I believe, the cornerstone to understanding what marketing means for you as a writer and an author. In my previous episode, Episode 51, I asked, “Should I use a pen name?” And while I was talking about that, I mentioned your personal brand, and whether or not you use a pen name, no matter what your name is, you have a personal brand. Whether you know it or not, or whether you want it one or not, you’re stuck with it.

In some terms, you can think of this as a public perception of your reputation. And where is a writer’s reputation most visible? There’s probably multiple answers to this question, but I’m going to go with the one that I have here written down in front of me. And that is when it’s printed on the cover of your book. Your name on the cover of your book is like seeing a coffee cup stamped with the McDonald’s logo or the Starbucks logo, or, if you have a different favorite coffee shop, that logo. It alters your perception of what’s inside. All three of those cups might have the same coffee in it, but people are going to reach for the one of the brand that they trust, the brand that they prefer.

And the same is true for books because the truth is, we live in a cult of personality. I don’t know if I coined that term or not, but I’m using it. And what this means is that our perception of something is shaped by the person who endorses it. So would you listen to this podcast if it was Write Now with Jeffrey Dahmer? Maybe you would. I might actually. Would you listen to it if it was Write Now with Annie Dillard? Heck yes. I would probably listen to her version of my show more than I would listen to my own. When Dr. Oz appears on TV and tells people to buy something, they buy it.

Where I’m going with this is you stamp Starbucks on something. You stamp McDonald’s on something. You stamp Dr. Oz’s name on something. You stamp my name or Annie Dillard’s name on something. And that means something to us. Now it’s not always something good. Like I said earlier, you may prefer one brand of coffee over another, or you may pick up a book that has an interesting cover and see an author’s name on it. And either immediately hug it to your chest or throw it in a pile of refuse. It’s all about how that name or how that personal brand or how that corporate brand makes you feel.

So what we’re going to be talking about today with personal branding is when you look at your name as a seal of approval, as a brand of something you’ve created, how can you shape that to make it be something that people react to positively? How do you infuse your name with trust and admiration, and wow, I can’t wait to buy this person’s book?

A quick caveat. You can do personal branding for free. I am not sure to use this podcast episode to try to get you to buy thousands of dollars in advertising. I mean, that’s not what I’m here to do. So everything we’re going to talk about today is 100% free, I promise. So just to loosen any anxious knots in your stomach there.

All right. Step one. This is going to sound a little silly or gross, but stay with me, Google yourself. Okay. Seriously. Put your name into the Google search engine, or if you’re a Bing or Duck, Duck, Go user, whatever it is, put your name into that search engine and hit enter. What comes up? Maybe your LinkedIn profile or a Facebook page, maybe your own personal website if you have one, or maybe nothing. It used to be that your first impression of someone came when someone else introduced you personally face to face. Maybe you met over coffee or at a awkward conference thing. I don’t know. But while you still meet people in daily life, the most common way to make a first impression these days is online. If you’re looking for a new job, chances are your potential employer will Google you, will look you up on a search engine before they even call you in for an interview.

So go back to those Google results. What do people see when they look up your name? For me, when I Google Sarah Rhea Werner, I get a long list of digital properties that I own, my LinkedIn profile, sarahwerner.com, my Twitter. I’ve made it my business to own as many of those digital properties that come up as possible, because this is where we begin to set our personal brand, our personal reputation. This is where we begin to build our name.

So how are you portraying yourself online? And do you like what you see? Are you looking your own personal website and maybe some images of a book that you published, or are you looking at a sad display of nothingness or piles of dirty laundry? Is that nothingness/dirty laundry defining your brand? I said earlier that your online presence, your personal brand can either help you or hurt you. We’re going to make sure it helps you.

The biggest step you can take in building your personal brand online is by creating a website, a piece of digital property that you own. I know a lot of people are on Facebook and Twitter and some other what we call third-party sites, so sites that you don’t own, and that’s all well and good. But on the day that Facebook shuts down, are you going to lose your personal brand? Have you put all of your eggs in the Facebook basket? That’s hard to say, Facebook basket. So yes, while I’m on Facebook, I also have my own website, sarahwerner.com, where I know that it will not go down until I decide to take it down.

Your website will give you a sort of home base where you can talk about your books. You can have a blog. You can have a headshot of yourself displayed. You can essentially prove to the internet that you are legit. You can control 100% of the things that you put on your website. So take advantage of that.

An important part of your website that often gets overlooked is the URL. URL stands for uniform resource locator, and it’s basically the address of a website. So for me, my URL is www.sarahwerner.com or simply sarahwerner.com. It was very deliberately and very purposefully that I chose to make my URL sarahwerner.com. For one, it’s easy for me to remember. And it’s easy for me to share with people. It’s just my name. And it ends in .com, which is very common and very easy to remember for most people. I could have named my website booksareprettyamazingdontyouthink.com or coffeeisreallyawesome.com. But I didn’t because when I built it, I had in mind my ultimate goal, and that was to publish a book under the name, Sarah Werner. That way, it would become the cornerstone of my personal brand. And it would mean that when somebody Googled Sarah Werner, my website would come up really close to the top of the search engine results.

If you’ve ever heard anyone talk about SEO, that stands for search engine optimization. And that’s just a fancy way of saying, getting the stuff you own online to the top of the search results in Google, so that you don’t have to go to the 12th page of Google to find my website. If you Google Sarah Werner or Sarah Rhea Werner, my website should be pretty close to the top and easy to find, easy to access, and, hopefully one day when I publish my book, easy to purchase my book from.

A common question that I get from writers and authors is, “All right. I went out to purchase my URL, my domain name, my website address, and my name is Jane Smith. And janesmith.com was already taken.” This is where you maybe need to get it a little creative. And I don’t mean putting a lot of extra letters and numbers after your name. So don’t be like janesmith1257913.com. That’s a bad idea because you will never remember that and neither will anyone else. Instead look for creative alternatives. So maybe you’re janesmithwriter.com or janesmithauthor.com or janesmithwritesbook.com or janesmithwrites.com or janesmithbooks.com. You get the picture. Make sure that it’s relevant to who you are and what you do. And it will be the first great step toward building your personal brand.

Another very small thing you can do to improve your personal brand is to make sure that your email address is professional looking. So if you email a potential agent or someone who wants to work with you, you’re not sending an email from clownpantshotfire101@aol.com, but you’re sending it from janesmithbooks.com or at least gmail.com. Take a good hard look at your email account name and ask, would I take this person seriously if they sent me an email?

Next on the list for building your personal brand online is social media. This is also where I get a lot of questions from authors and writers. They’ll come to me and they’ll say, “Sarah, I’m so overwhelmed. There’s Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp. And those are just the ones I know about. What do I do?” If you’re on a lot of these social media platforms right now, and you’re super comfortable with what you’re doing and you feel like you have a great presence, that’s awesome. You can kind of ignore the next bit of what I’m going to say. But if you are overwhelmed by what is out there and what you should and shouldn’t be on, we’re going to make it really simple.

Right now, it is early 2017 and you’re not really out there on social media yet. I would suggest joining either Twitter or Facebook. Now I know that Twitter’s initial IPO did not go super well and that their investors are super nervous and they’re going through all this turmoil right now. And so maybe when I release this episode, Twitter won’t even be around anymore, which is again, why you should build your permanent personal brand on your own website that you own. But I digress. I like Twitter because it has a sense of community that Facebook really doesn’t have yet. I think that Facebook is getting there with its groups, but I think that Twitter has a huge number of authors on it already. And there’s a huge number of hashtags that can help connect you to other writers. It’s also a great place to grow and nurture your personal brand. Because if your website is like your cornerstone, your foundation, your home base for your personal brand, your social media presence or presences is your soap box.

Do you need to be on social media? I hate to say this, but I think you should be on at least one kind of social media, unless you really purposely don’t. If you want to be very reclusive, like JD Salinger, then make that work for you. That’s awesome. But I think you’ll get a lot more attraction if you have some sort of social media presence as a writer.

Some of you may have heard me drop the word hashtag a few sentences ago and just went blank and that’s okay. We’re going to go through this starting with Twitter. Both Twitter and Facebook are technically free to use. Even though they market to you with ads so they’re actually making money off you, but you don’t have to pay to use either one of these platforms. You should be on Twitter if the idea of just typing out quick sentences and responding to other authors and quick sentences is appealing to you. You’re also more likely to interact with a more educated and a little bit younger of an audience.

You should be on Facebook if your audience is a little bit older, and if you don’t fancy the lightning quick sort of update system that Twitter demands. Say, if you want to post pictures of your dog and your book and your family, or if you just want to do a sort of longer update every once in a while, Facebook is great for that. Facebook is also great if you want to join or create a group, which is sort of like an online forum. You do have to be a member of Facebook in order to use these forums.

Going back to Twitter. When I talk about using a hashtag, what I mean is creating a word with the little pound sign in front of it, which creates a link so that if people are searching for the word that you’ve hashtagged, your tweet will come up. Common hashtags for writers are #amwriting, which is A-M-W-R-I-T-I-N-G, which you can use in posts when you’re in the process of writing something, #writing, #creativewriting. Again, all of these are with no spaces. And then going back to the amwriting sort of thing, often people will append a genre to that. So #amwritingsf for science fiction, or amwritingpoetry or amwritingfantasy or amwritingya. What hashtags will do on Twitter is help you get discovered. So if somebody is looking through #amwriting tweets, they might discover you if you’ve written a tweet that has that tag in it.

The next few tips apply to both Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and whatever else you’re using. Number one, be sure that what you’re posting is in line with your personal brand. A great way to do that especially if you don’t have a creative brief or if you don’t have your brand to find is go back and listen to episode 46 of the Write Now podcast. It’s called Crafting Your Mission Statement. This is one of my favorite episodes, and it’s one of the episodes that I’ve gotten the most response to. And what it does is it coaches you through understanding what you stand for as a person, what your reputation should be as a writer, and by extension what your personal brand should envelop. So keep your mission statement in front of you while you’re writing, while you’re tweeting, while you’re crafting content for your website. And make sure that if your personal brand is one of encouragement and positivity, say like this podcast, that you’re not tweeting things like, “Boy, life really sucks” or dropping lots of F-bombs because this is a family-friendly show.

Remember that whatever you put on the internet is public. Even if you have your account protected, even if you think no one can find it, someone can find it. Keep whatever you post public friendly and on your personal brand.

Tip number two is sort of going along with that. And that is think before you post. I work in digital marketing and I’ve heard so many awful stories about people who have been fired over stuff that they said on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or what have you. They’ll write things like, “Oh, I hate my boss” on Facebook without remembering that their boss follows them on Facebook. So if you take the opportunity to tweet “Everyone who reads my book is a stupid idiot,” don’t expect good things to happen. Be kind. Be helpful. Remember your mission statement and think before you post anything.

Tip number three. If you have a website and maybe a couple social media accounts, make sure you’re using the same profile picture on all of them. This may seem like a really small nitpicky fact, but the thing is we’re visual creatures. And if I follow you on a whole bunch of platforms, it can be very confusing for me if I see that you’re using your selfie of you and your puppy in one, and then you on stage giving a Ted Talk in another. It creates a really weird mixed message that we call going off brand. So use your same profile picture and maybe even invest in a headshot. I know they can be kind of expensive and there’s actually no reason that you need a professional headshot other than it looks professional. But maybe have a friend take a picture of you so you’re not giving a duck face selfie in a bathroom because that’s not great.

Next tip. Use the same name across all of your accounts. This goes a little bit back to the last episode where we talked about what name you’re going to write and publish under. I should have checked before I started recording. If J.K. Rowling has a Twitter account for both her own name and her pen name, Robert Galbraith. Maybe she does. I’m not sure. But if Robert Galbraith starts tweeting about Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling starts tweeting about The Cuckoo’s Calling. As someone who is following her brand and trusting her brand, I’m going to be really confused. Plus each one of those Twitter handles probably has a very different audience and people who read the Harry Potter books might not be interested in the gory murder mysteries that she writes under the name Robert Galbraith.

Similarly, it’s very confusing for people if my name is Sarah Rhea Werner on Twitter and Sarah Werner on Facebook and the Write Now Podcast on Instagram. So what I did is I went back and I changed everything so that they were all the same. You can now find me at Write Now Podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and Pinterest too I think. Consistency is key. It makes it easier for your audience to find you, which ultimately is the whole reason we’re doing this.

Finally, the last social media tip I’ll give you is remember the 80-20 rule. If you remember nothing else from this show, please remember the 80-20 rule. So the 80-20 rule is a ratio for adding value and selling. I follow this one guy on Twitter who shall remain nameless and pretty much every single one of his tweets is “Buy my book, buy my book, buy my book, buy my book.” After a while, it gets really old. And I begin to question, “Why am I following this guy?” A, I’m not getting anything out of following him. B, it’s annoying. And C, it’s the absolute worst kind of marketing that you can be doing. It’s the kind of marketing that we talked about in the beginning of the episode, the kind of marketing that says you need to buy this for no particular reason.

What this gentlemen should be doing is instead of having every tweet be “Buy my book” with a picture of his book, the same picture in every single one of his tweets… And nothing against this guy. He’s just kind of irritating. What he should be doing is following the 80-20 rule. Eighty percent of his tweets should add value to the person who’s reading them. So like 80% of his tweets should be, “Hey, here’s a really cool article on writing that I found. I’m going to share it with you,” or, “Hey, here’s a behind the scenes photo of this delicious coffee I ordered while I was working on my new novel that you’re anticipating,” or “Here’s an inspirational quote that is really helping me out right now.”

Or maybe you’re linking to a helpful blog post that you wrote on your website that has your URL. Maybe you’re tweeting something about the writing process using the #amwriting. Whatever it is, decide what’s valuable to your audience and tweet that 80% of the time. Now you can do some selling, but this should only be done 20% of the time. Let’s be honest. No one likes to be sold to, but you can slip one in there every once in a while as long as it’s not just like “Buy my book” in all caps with a link to your book on Amazon. So maybe it’s, “Hey, get a sweet new view of what it means to be a psychopath in my latest thriller, The Psychopath’s Mansion.” I don’t know. Whatever that would be. You can do that 20% of the time.

All right. Outside of the realm of social media, just a few more tips on personal branding. The first one is if you’re online, like if you’re on a forum or on YouTube or anywhere that has a comment section, and you see somebody who is just outrageously incorrect about something and you feel moved to comment and tell them how wrong they are and what a terrible person they are, don’t do it. Seriously, don’t do it. As my friend, Chris Prendergast likes to say, “Nobody’s mind was ever changed in the comment section.” People go there to yell their opinions and then leave without listening and without creating meaningful dialogue.

If you want to go and say something in the comments that is consistent with your mission statement and then is helpful and kind and useful and thoughtful, then by all means do it. But if you’re going to go out there and spew the same hatred that everyone else is spewing, do not do it. The internet as a community will begin to tie your personal brands to these things that you’re saying in the comments sections. And it’s not pretty. But again, if you’re going to be constructive and kind and helpful, then by all means, go ahead and comment. Just don’t expect to change a whole lot of people’s minds.

Okay. Second to last tip. Are you ready? You can monitor what people are saying about you online with the use of a free tool called Google Alerts. I have a ton of Google Alerts set up for my name and they’re free to set up and they’re free to use. You just have to Google Google Alerts, and it will show you how to create one. So basically whatever phrase you create. So one of mine is Sarah Werner. Another one is Sarah Rhea Werner, which is my middle name. Another one is the Write Now Podcast.

Whenever content shows up online with these phrases, I get an email notification. That’s actually how I found out that an article about me came out in our local paper was I kind of Google Alert. And I said, “Oh, I guess that interview is coming out today. Awesome.” It’s also how I can tell if people are talking about the Write Now Podcast online, which I know it sounds super creepy, doesn’t it? It’s like I’m Big Brother watching you, but I’m not. I just keeping an eye on what people are saying about my podcast. I’m not going to track you down, probably.

So set up Google Alerts for your name, maybe the title of your book. Keep it specific. So if the title of your book is Tragedy, you’re going to get a Google Alert about somebody writing about tragedy once a second for the next however long. So keep them specific. Maybe Tragedy and your name, or whatever. Maybe use your middle name if that’s what you publish under. Use your pen name if that’s what you publish under, but use Google Alerts to monitor your personal brand online.

All right. My very last personal branding tip for you is going to be the same as my very first personal branding tip for you. And that is finish your novel. Finish your book of poetry. Finish your memoir. Finish that article you’re writing. Finish that blog post that you started 10 weeks ago, and you’ve just never wrapped up. Finish it. Finish that paper you’re writing. Like I said in the beginning of this episode, personal brand is not going to mean a whole lot if you don’t have something that you eventually want to market. I mean, yeah, your reputation’s important, but if you want to get the most out of this and if you want to make the best use of your time, your writing is the most important, not only piece of personal branding that you can create, but it’s the most important thing you can create, aside from your children. I feel like I’m really screwing this up.

In all seriousness, I know from personal experience that being on all the social media platforms and having multiple websites and spending time monitoring your brand online can take away all of the time that you need to write. So I would suggest either finishing your work first and then working on building your personal brand or building your personal brand in just a few minutes here and there every day. Use a free tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to preschedule your tweets. So it looks like you’re always online. Write a bunch of blog posts during a weekend and then set them to come out once a week or what have you. Decide to be on just one social media platform like Facebook or Twitter instead of all of the social media platforms. Make sure that you give your best creative energy and the best time available to you in the day to writing.

I hope that today’s primer on personal branding was helpful to you. I’ve been thinking for a while about creating a little ebook about social media for writers and maybe Marketing 101 for writers and that kind of stuff. So if that’s something you’d be interested in, let me know. I have some free time coming up. For what? I don’t even know.

If you have any questions about anything that you heard in today’s episode, please do contact me. You can get in touch with me a couple of ways. First and foremost, if you’re not tired of hearing it already, you can go to my website, sarahwwrner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com and navigate to the Contact tab. And there’s a handy little form you can fill out there. You can alternately email me at hello@sarahwerner.com or you can leave a comment in the show notes for today’s episode, episode number 52 over at sarahwerner.com. The show notes are also a great place to get a recap of everything that I talked about in today’s episode. It should be all laid out there for you very nicely. So enjoy.

Creating this podcast is it’s a labor of love, and it’s also something I love to do. And it’s something that I feel compelled to do and called to do. And I’m very happy to create it for you. There are several people who helped me out along the way both through encouragements and financial support. So I want to give a special thanks to these folks, especially my financial supporters over at Patreon. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that lets users like you, listeners like you give a dollar per episode, $2 per episode, a billion dollars per episode, whatever it is you feel would be appropriate.

You can do that. You just sign up and then it has a little recurring cost on there. So every time I release an episode up to a certain number of times per month, so say four times a month, it will send me a dollar or send me your $2 or however much you decide to put in there. I do only ever set up four episodes a month. So if you’re doing a dollar per episode, it will only cost you $4 a month and I would greatly appreciate it. You can find the Write Now Podcast on Patreon, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, by going to patreon.com and searching for the Write Now Podcast or Sarah Rhea Werner.

Special thanks go to official cool cats, Sean Locke and Rebecca Werner, official bookworm, Matthew Paulson, official rad dudes, Andrew Coons and the Sioux Empire Podcast, and official caffeine enablers, Paul Sating and Colleen Cotelessa. You are all super, super awesome. And I’m so grateful that you have chosen to help support my show. Thank you.

I hope that you found today’s episode helpful/useful. If you have other topics that you’d like me to speak about concerning marketing or social media or any of that kind of stuff, just let me know by sending an email to hello@sarahwerner.com. Otherwise, I wish you the best of luck in personal branding. It’s kind of fun. It’s kind of scary. It’s kind of exciting. It’s all of those things, maybe more one than the other for you, but I know you can do it. And with that, this has been Episode 52 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner and that’s my personal brand.