Seth, whom I had collaborated with before, agreed to work on it with me. Seth guided the design and is the reason the graphic went viral. He promoted the hell out of it, pitching it to publishers relentlessly. He repurposed it as a SlideShare and gave it a wider set of wings.
While I did the occasional interview or talk on personal branding, the A to Z Guide was in my rear view mirror. But not Seth’s. Sharing personal branding lessons had become a bit of an obsession for my co-author. He created an amazing website entirely focused on personal branding. He made some big plans.
Then he called to tell me about them. Seth declared these lessons shall become a book. He said (or was it threatened?) he’d create it with or without me. So we did this thing together—me with the “I’ll get to it when I can” attitude, Seth with the whip.
I wrote the copy for that infographic in a few hours. I simply tossed my ideas down following my instincts, drawing from experience, and sharing ideas I had picked up from Michael Hyatt, Dan Schawbel, William Arruda, and Karen Kang (all authors of inspired personal branding books).
This book was no high-speed affair. We’ve been bouncing ideas around, writing chapters, collaborating on the design, changing and making up our minds, and scheming launch and promotional plans for nearly two years.
The Road to Recognition could be 26 books. Each chapter covers a big and important topic. And each topic actually is the focus of business books. Our aim is to give you the skinny on each—the need-to-know stuff that’ll rev your engine.
I want this book to have a profound affect on your career (and thousands more). I want you to learn from my mistakes, gain from my experience, and above all, I want you to get to work.
How about it? Ready to rally? Ready to rock? Awesome.
Let’s roll.
Barry Feldman
Preface 2
I’m Seth Price. Can I help you?
The Road to Recognition could be the story of a personal journey to take control of one’s destiny. In many ways it is. But it’s more than that. It’s a modern-day toolkit, one that I’ve used to navigate the digital world, build the career of my dreams, and help countless others to do the same.
My upbringing was hardly storybook. I grew up the latchkey son of a young divorced father. I started working at eight years old. I dropped out of high school to go to college, dropped out of college to start a business, became a chef, entrepreneur, executive, and at times, a leader. I’m telling you this because personal branding was instrumental to my survival.
But this book isn’t about me. It’s about achieving success in the age we live in.
There is no singular path anymore, no great idea that doesn’t require promoting, no guaranteed career, no diploma that will ensure success.
The concepts here are not new. In fact, many can be found in blog posts all over the web. You may have even utilized some of these ideas during your journey to where you are today.
What is new is the focus on creating a roadmap to follow, a coach whispering in your ear the things you need to do to set yourself up for success as you choose your own adventure.
This isn’t personal branding theory for marketing geeks. God knows the world has enough of that. This is an actual roadmap for everybody else: the makers and doers of the world.
When it comes to building your brand, it’s a jungle out there. Between blogging, social media, networking, websites, content marketing, landing pages, email, and PR, there’s so much to manage in today’s always-on, always-connected universe.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, student, consultant, artist, yoga teacher, designer, chef, photographer, or retiree, you are a brand with a reputation to be recognized. There’s no reason to leave that to others’ control.
This book was created to help you cut through the noise and guide you to personal success with organized tips and tactics, clearly outlined in every chapter.
We focused on making the book easy to read and beautiful to look at, simplifying complicated concepts to remove the fluff and jargon that often get in the way of an idea being truly actionable and useful.
I have held every “go-to-market” responsibility imaginable in growing four multimillion-dollar businesses from the ground up—in industries as varied as hospitality, Internet security, real estate, and digital marketing. I’ve slept on the floor in the office, in the rental car before meetings, at the airport, and on the mats after cleaning the kitchen.
There is no substitute for hustle, but there is a path that has been well worn by the success of many others before you. It’s The Road to Recognition in the age of digital media.
This road is yours. Buckle up and drive.
Seth Price
Understand your
brand’s all about
the real you
You, my friend, are a brand. Anything other than the real you won’t do. Discover exactly what makes you fascinating. Build your brand on your true strengths and allow it to navigate your road to recognition.
A is for Authenticity
You might think buying this book is the first step in your personal branding journey. Think again. You already have a personal brand. So let’s not pretend you’re about to create it. The best you can do is develop it, ideally, with purpose and passion.
If personal branding is a road (as the book’s title suggests), your challenge is to steer. “Brand” is a tricky thing to describe. In the classic marketing world, most companies try hard to define their brand when, in reality, the market, or more specifically the audience, defines it.
We’ll dive deeper into a working definition in Chapter D, but let’s start with this. The brand is:
The impression formed when the brand’s name is read or said
The sum of the experiences a person has had with the brand
Reputation
How people describe the brand (not how the company, or person, describes him or herself)
All of the above applies to your personal brand. You don’t “spin” your personal brand. You live it. It’s what’s true about you.
When you achieve success with your personal brand, people recognize you as a specialist. For example:
AJ specializes in helping entrepreneurs use marketing automation to sell information products online.
BJ is a life coach who works one-on-one with CEOs to help them avoid burnout and depression from workaholism.
CJ
