OK, so let's talk about personal branding.
So previously we discussed what exactly a brand is and how it functions and the sole purpose of it.
And so now we want to talk about personal branding, because that's where we're really concerned with
because for the most part, when you're creating a brand, it's going to be something where it's personal.
And so what we're going to do here is dive into what exactly the differences are between a personal
brand and a regular brand.
And just at a very high level, if you think about a personal brand, it's really where you are, the
actual brand.
Right.
It's the same type of concept here as an actual brand.
And so let's go ahead and jump in here.
So just like I mentioned, a personal brand is going to be the same as an actual brand, except you
are the brand itself.
OK.
And when personal branding is really about your online persona.
Right.
Because that's where you're going to be known.
That's where people are going to be able to look you up on Google, look you up on various social media
platforms.
And so that's where you are going to be doing a lot of your branding.
And with the personal brand, it allows the outside world right.
Employers, potential clients to really be able to perceive your skills, your personality, your experiences
and what you're ultimately known for as an ethical hacker.
And so personal branding has a ton of benefits.
And one of the things here that I want you to understand is that it really puts you into a strategic
position to broadcast your value to the entire world.
Right.
As to what you bring as an ethical hacker.
Now, here's the thing about personal branding, OK?
Because if you are, let's say, the number one top ethical hacker in the world as far as your skill
set.
Right.
Not as far as people knowing about you, but let's say, you know, all the tricks, all the, you know,
unique methods to break into different places.
However, if you're alone in your basement and nobody knows about you, then it really doesn't matter.
Right?
You want to be the person that has, you know, medium skill or.
That's pretty good, right?
Because you can always improve and increase your skill set.
Right.
You want to have a medium amount of skill for the most part, and then obviously increasing that because
that's always going to trump somebody else that has a ton of skill, but nobody knows about them.
Right.
So having medium skill and a reputation and online presence is always going to trump somebody who's
the best in the world.
But does it have any kind of reputation?
Right.
So very important to understand that concept.
And another thing to keep in mind here is think about ethical hacking in terms of the areas that you
would want to most likely focus on.
I know that cybersecurity, ethical hacking, there are a ton of different topics within that space.
And perhaps when you're just starting out, it may be that you are just focusing in on the entire cybersecurity
market as a whole.
However, as you progress in your career, as you find different areas that you resonate towards more
or that you connect more with.
Right.
You're going to want to get a little bit more specific as to what you focus on.
Right.
Maybe you can be the best penetration tester or somebody who focuses on just the vulnerability assessments
or policy documentation.
Right.
And another thing is to think about a specific industry that you may want to work with then, or maybe
a few select different industries that are, you know, similar or connected because with being able
to get more specific as to what exactly you focus on as far as, let's say, penetration testing and
let's say you focus only on health care, that's going to really allow you to set yourself apart from
all the rest of the, you know, regular cybersecurity folks or just, you know, a simple ethical hacker.
Right.
If there's an ethical hacker that does everything and, you know, pretty much a jack of all trades
versus somebody who is looking to compete and go after a job for a health care company, and they only
work with health care companies and they only do penetration testing.
Right.
They're going to have that edge.
So very important there to keep that in mind as you progress through your career as an ethical hacker,
as a cybersecurity professional, that you look to me for something that you want to do as far as the
branding element, look to kind of niche down within a certain market and a certain type of service
that you may want to more or less focus on.
Right.
OK, so now let's talk about social media profiles.
Now, as far as your personal branding and branding in general, this is one of the most important things
that you can do as far as getting your name out there because you want to be.
On the most relevant social media profiles, because that's what's going to come up on Google when you
have an employer, when you have, you know, potential clients that are looking you up, they want
to see that you're active and that you actually have some sort of online presence.
Right.
So for ethical hackers, the most important platforms that you want to be on are LinkedIn, Twitter,
Facebook and Instagram.
I would say if I had to choose maybe top two, I would say LinkedIn and Twitter, because those are
the most widely known.
Those are more like the professionals, right.
LinkedIn be to be Twitter's more B2B as well.
And Facebook is going to be more on the consumer side.
Same thing with Instagram, but even if you just have LinkedIn and Twitter and then you're active on
those, but then on Facebook and Instagram, you're more or less just have your profiles there and maybe
you post every so often.
That should be just fine.
And then here's the thing.
You don't have to post every single day on your platforms, right.
Once a week should be fine.
Maybe, you know, even once every couple of weeks.
It's just so that people can see that you're active in months and months and not going by without any
kind of posting.
Right.
So very important there to have posts going on maybe once a week, once every couple weeks, just so
that you stay up to date.
And here's the thing.
But you can also do instead of actually spending time going out there, writing your own posts or looking
for content to share, what you can do is spend twenty dollars a month and fully automate to your post
with curated content using platforms such as Buffer and Q Now we're going to walk through both of those
here and I'm going to show you how they work.
Essentially, Buffer is in automation platform where you connect, let's say LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook
and Instagram to it.
And then you go out to Q and you find content that's already curated that they have a ready for, let's
say, ethical hacking, cybersecurity, and you can actually plan out your posts through the buffer
tool and you can have your posts automatically be posted on your profiles either once a week, twice
a week, and it's all automated.
So that's something that you should consider because it'll keep your profiles up to date.
It'll keep them active and it'll show people that you actually know what you're talking about.
Right.
And so let me show you here.
I want to show you an example of a buddy of mine who has used these two tools and has used them exceedingly
well.
So let's go ahead and go over to my computer and I'll see you there.
OK, so here we are on Twitter and I want to show you here a buddy of mine who is not active anymore.
This is when he used to work for a startup.
He used to work for a company called Lozito.
They're no longer in business.
And what he did to actually grow his own personal network profile as well as the companies is he signed
up with Buffer, I believe it was.
And he used a constant curation software such as Q And he posted daily through his automation.
And you can see here he has four sixty four thousand following and sixty three followers as far as sixty
three thousand.
And you don't need to go and actually go and follow people if you don't want to.
Maybe you can if you want to get some people there following you there.
However, the automation posting is really just more for you, for your personal brand to let people
know when they land on your profiles that you're actually active.
Right.
And so you can see here all these different posts.
Sometimes they were if you go down to like twenty, seventeen, eighteen, they were pretty much like
twice a day, two to three times a week, depending on how much he wanted to post.
And this was all automated.
You can see here.
Well, you know, one fifth of the calls, this is when he was working for March six.
Now he's working for a different company and his online presence really isn't that important anymore
to him because he's doing something completely different now.
So as you can see here, all of these posts here are different content that he's sharing, used to work
for this company here and they recently got bought out.
And so he helped them grow their social media quite a bit.
They're through using those automation tools.
So as you can see here, you can find different things that are related to your industry and have all
of these be posted automatically.
Now, let me go and show you here.
Let's go to Buffer.
And we'll be able to look at exactly what this does, so you can see here the pricing thing, it's like
ten dollars, fifteen dollars, OK, so 15 dollars a month and 14 day trial.
You can connect a social account and you can do one hundred scheduled posts.
So basically, I mean, if you had, let's say, you know, one post a week or one post or two or three
posts a week, I should be just fine there.
So let's go to the four home page here.
And as you can see here, pretty much you can publish your content, plan it all out, plan a whole
month's worth of content and a couple hours.
And you won't need to do any of the actual work yourself as far as manually going in there to publish
content.
Right.
And you can get the different metrics, engagement.
As far as how many people clicked on your post, did they engage with it?
Did they share it?
Did they like it?
You know, things like that.
And so now let's go to Q.
And let's pull this up here.
And so this is where the power comes in also as well.
So you have a buffer, that's the actual automation posting.
And then Q is where you find the content.
Right.
And you can find essentially articles that people write from different syndication publication sources
and be able to share those.
Because, I mean, I remember when I was going heavily into the acquisition phase and I was reaching
out to a lot of businesses on LinkedIn.
One of the things that I did to really spice up my profile is I set it up so that I had my LinkedIn
posting different news articles, news information once a week or so, maybe even a couple of times.
And then I started reaching out to businesses, providing value right up front.
And then they would go and check on my profile and see that I had relevant content being posted on my
profile and that added value to them.
And so I had a bunch of people that I reach out to tell me, hey, I can tell, you know, what you're
talking about with the posting that you're doing on your profile.
I can tell that you're an expert, right?
Because automatically I had all those posts that were adding value about my topics.
Right.
My area that were automatically posting.
So very, very important as far as, you know, what this can do for you and the power of this.
So this essentially allows you to go in here and find different topics and you connect your social media
accounts.
Right.
You connect buffer to it.
And so you got a buffer with all your social media.
Then you have Q with all the content and then they work together and the buffer actually does the actual
posting for you.
So I think this is like ten dollars as well.
OK.
Nineteen dollars a month.
So yeah.
I mean twenty bucks a month is going to allow you to have fresh content every single day if you want
it to be right on your profile so that you are being able to build that personal brand and be able to
separate yourself from the competition there.
OK, so highly recommend here, buffer and queue for social media profile posting automation.
If you don't want to post different things on your own and have to spend the time looking up for content,
buffer and queue is a perfect combination.
And like I mentioned, it's only going to be about twenty dollars per month.