EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Expert Tips on How to Build a Powerful Personal Brand with Laura Pearman:
- Create revenue and build a powerful personal brand before spending a lot of money on other things like a website
- We’re in the middle of a digital renaissance, but stay grounded. Focus on personal connections.
- For personal branding, you have to know what you are going to share and does that lend itself well to your brand? “…a picture is a thousand words, so what do we want those thousand words to be?”
- Record everything and give people the inside scoop.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SHARE THIS EPISODE: – EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
How to build a powerful personal brand with photographer Laura Pearman
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: Well, welcome to the real marketing podcast, Laura, how you doing today?
Laura: I’m great, thank you so much for having me on the show, Doug.
Doug: Well, I’m so excited to connect with another fellow Youpreneur and someone in one of the favorite places in the world that I love to travel. So do you want to share with our audience a little bit about kind of your background and how you transitioned from marketing into photography?
Laura: Sure, yeah, that’s actually quite a fun story. So my first degree I did the traditional a levels, as it was at that time here in the UK, and then went straight into university. And the way that I chose my degree was because you remember the show Sex and the City, right? I mean, famous show. I picked public relations and marketing as my degree, my joint major because I was in love with Samantha from Sex and the City. True story. And I thought, okay, I just really want to leave home. I really want to be an independent girl. This is the coolest way to do that. So I picked a university that was at the other end of the country to where my parents lived.
And I loved the degree. It was great fun and I love learning about the science around marketing. I really loved learning about the way that you can bend the truth in public relations and you know, all of the writing tricks that you get from a public relations part of a degree.
But the most things that I think I took away from that degree, it was the social skills, you know, like how you live away from home and what it’s like when you live with a bunch of girls and all of those things that go with moving out from your home for the first time.
So I did a dissertation in my third year about how codes of ethics in public relations, because this is when the CSR thing was starting to really build up. It was the turn of the century. So like 2003, corporate social responsibility was really starting to come with the dotcom boom. And a lot of people, you know, big businesses were putting their CSR policy out on their websites and this was a new thing that was happening. So I did my dissertation based on how that affects actual real-life ethics in the real world.
Well, you can imagine after looking into that in a very detailed way, I felt a little bit disenchanted with the way the world was and I remember coming home for a break with my parents and sitting down at the dinner table and announcing to them quite matter of factly, yeah I ain’t doing this as a career, and they hit the roof.
So after that, I was kind of at a loose end, I got a good degree and I thought I don’t really want to do this. I don’t want to lie for my career, I don’t think I could do that for 45 years. So I got a job working part-time in a PR agency and that just really cemented my decision that this wasn’t for me. They were promoting weaponry for different arms companies around the world. I mean, as a 21-year-old idealist girl that’s just not gonna fly. And one of my other jobs was, Britain in the euro was quite a hot topic then, and this will give you an example of what email marketing was like then, I had to get the physical newspapers and sit and read them all and then pull out the news content, anything where Britain and the euro was mentioned, write an email in outlook and the BCC like 200 or 300 different people in. And we were trying to change the [inaudible 00:03:40] for the local MP and, you know, no MailChimp, none of this. It probably goes against all like data issues now.
But that was my little job. So I decided to screw this, I’m going traveling. So I was a backpacker for about a year and we got to Australia, realized we had no money and I somehow managed to talk my way into a job being the marketing executive of the Sydney office, of a tax break company. So they were called Tax Back. And they used to get tax refunds for backpackers. But I managed to get in there and I said, look, you haven’t got a marketing plan, let me help you with that. So there I was, this 23-year-old girl, you know, I packed my bikini in my hand every day and go to work and you know, do a couple of hours in this office and go to the beach after work. It was quite a cool job. But it was interesting to see how people actually do marketing in the real world, compared to all those Venn diagrams that I learned at university.
I came back from that and then worked as an auditor, very random job. It was a high paid job and pretty easy to do and my Lord, those auditors like to drink. And then I decided to go traveling again and I fell in love with a boy who was a photographer. So this is where the story starts to change. We were traveling and he’d be sent, he does landscapes, and he said, you know, Laura, we have to be up at 4:00 AM tomorrow because I’m getting the sunrise over there. Are you mental? So this went on for a period of months and over time I was effectively being his assistant. So he would have me set up the tripod or pass him a certain lens, and I think we got to Wellington in New Zealand and I said, look, this is pretty cool, this photography game, like how do I get more serious?
So he said, step one, give me that little digital compact camera that you think you’re being Annie Leibowitz with. So I handed that over and we went into a secondhand store in the middle of nowhere in Wellington and I got a film Canon camera and he’d have me do like little assignments. So each day when we were out on the road he’d say, right, try and get something really close up, try and get this, give me like little tests so that by the time I came back from that trip I had a proper body of work, like a portfolio of work. And I walked into a local art college here in Newcastle in the UK and I managed to talk myself into a photography doing. I had no qualifications whatsoever but based on that portfolio, the tutor, God bless her soul, said, yeah, sure. She was like, yeah, you’re on the course.
Doug: That’s really cool.
Laura: So that’s it. And then I worked my tail off doing that. I was like the grandma and the class compared to all of these young whipper snappers, and I had a few part time jobs at the same time and worked and worked and because I was the one who worked the hardest, I was the one who was given the photographers assistants jobs, which then meant that when I graduated from that degree, I had a job waiting for me and I did that for a few years, learnt the business side of photography and then I went off and set up on my own and had my own studio.
And then after having a studio for a couple of years, I realized wait a minute, I know a bunch of stuff about marketing, and I haven’t really applied any of those things to this business, that doesn’t make sense. So that’s where the headshot side of it came in and I realized that a lot of people who are setting up in business are not so great at branding themselves and they’re certainly not very great at promoting themselves very well. And if you can combine the marketing plan that you have with the visual side of photography, you can get a branded headshot, and this was like 2014 before everyone was talking so much about personal brands and branded photo shoots. So I kind of jumped on that before we saw it into this, we’re not in saturation yet for it, but it’s getting a lot more popular now.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SHARE THIS EPISODE: – EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
How to build a powerful personal brand with photographer Laura Pearman
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: Well, so what, what do you think the issues are with entrepreneurs and small businesses? Why don’t they invest the time and money in doing proper headshots?
Laura: Oh, I think when you first set up in business you’re terrified about spending any money, right? Like, especially if you’re bootstrapping, you have no money. So the first thing that everyone thinks they have to have when they set up in business is a bitchin’ website. And that is not really the case, let’s be honest. I mean it is great. You need a website and it should work. Like if you click on something, it should lead you to what it says it’s going to lead to. But let’s face it, when you’re starting from scratch with no budget, you probably want to do something a little bit yourself and then get some clients in, get some revenue in and then upgrade it from thee. That’s where I think that you to be looking. But I think people get suckered in, you know, they go to these start-up fairs and trade expos and people sell to them and that’s where the budget goes.
But really you want to be developing that, I mean Chris says this all the time, the people to people connection. And if you have a great image of yourself, and it shows that you can look me in the eyes on this social media platform, or look me in the eyes on my little DIY website while I’m getting a bit more money in before I upgrade. That’s gonna get you a lot more sales through the door. I don’t care what it is that you do, but if you can see someone’s face, it’s a lot more trustworthy than if you’re just looking at a faceless or soulless business.
Doug: Absolutely. I mean I do that even on my podcast because I can’t see you, I’ve got a picture from your Facebook page up, so it’s almost like we’re sitting across from each other having this conversation.
Laura: I love that. That’s a great idea. Yeah. It makes all the difference, doesn’t it? You’re looking into my eyes. They’re still and pixilated, but you’re looking into them.
Doug: There you go. You’re right. I mean I talk a lot of people out of spending money on things like websites because I think sometimes it’s an excuse to procrastinate, so instead of picking up the phone or making a sales call, you get busy on a project and the project is rebuilding my website. And so yeah, to your approach, say hey, go make some more money and let’s generate some sales. And then when you have a whole bunch of new sales, then consider rebuilding your website. So you’re right, so photography, images, huge these days. The selfie revolution, I don’t know if that’s a word, but certainly, we can’t go anywhere without people taking pictures of themselves.
Laura: I totally agree. I feel that we are in the middle of a renaissance. So if we could jump in a time machine right now, the listeners and you and I, and we could shoot back to like 1965 and we come out of the phone box. So we say, oh right, where are we? Oh, it’s 1965. I’m sure if you stop someone in the street and they weren’t like a full-on hippie and you ask them, do you think we’re in an artistic renaissance, they’d be like shut up, no, it’s 1965, let’s move on. But I really feel now when we look at this time in 10, 15, maybe 20 years, we will see this as a digital renaissance. I really feel that.
And I think we’re progressing so rapidly with this and where we keep coming back in these interesting loops where people are getting on board with social media and then it kinda goes off a little. And then we come back to the personal connection, and it always comes back into ego and people and that is what it’s always going to be about. I think that’s where a renaissance is always grounded, the people and the people creating it.
Doug: In terms of, you know, following that forward and where we’re at. I’d like to talk a little bit about social media and photography and how you would maybe recommend businesses take advantage of what you’re doing. And I’ll just expand a little bit on that. In terms of social media, in terms of posting, kind of the rule of thumb that I would use is, you know, you might make six, seven, eight, nine posts of valuable content for your readers or your listeners and then you would put in a promotional piece for your business. But like you’ve said, we need to have personal pictures. So what do you recommend and how do you typically work with people? Would you actually, you know, if I was working with you, would we go say, tour the city and do a whole bunch of casual shots in a day? Spend one or two days shooting so I could use them over six months or eight months, or what do you recommend?
Laura: This is interesting. I have a few different packages for my headshots. I have one that kind of covers what you’ve described, that I call the turbo, so that if somebody has a specific campaign or they want to just get a load of pictures for their Instagram, maybe even parts of their body or something very specific to a certain message. We meet up and it’s just a very quick fire half hour. I always try and shoot on location as well. That’s just in vogue at the moment, so I would pick somewhere, plan out a route, contact people if we need to get certain permissions.
Then if you want to go up a little bit more in time, you would step up with me to the quirky branded headshot, so there we’re going to go in a little bit more of an hour. Now I tend to find that most people unless you are a real pro and getting your headshots done all of the time, I think that you need a little bit more than half an hour to get really comfortable with somebody taking your picture, especially if it’s in a public place. People feel a little self-conscious, so I recommend that if you know you’re going to be a little uneasy or you definitely want to get those shots where you’re looking right down the lens, but you want them to be authentic. So that’s where we go into the two hours.
Then my top tier services, Doug, that’s where I bring in what I call my fox force five teams and I have my stylist, I have my hair and my makeup people. I even have a special effects guy that I use as a supplier, and this is where we go to town on the planning of the shoot and then the execution and then the wrap up of the shoot as well. So we plan things out in like militant detail, I love a good plan, I was telling you before we started recording how I like to be organized.
This is where we do almost a little bit; it’s like marketing consultancy, so I’ll have a meeting with you. I might ask for your graphic designer or even your business coach or the other people on your team to be in that meeting and we kind of take a full overview of what you’re doing with your brand, and this is a little bit more of a long-term base shoot, so we’re looking at the next two years of where you are in your business and the kind of message, the overriding message that you want to be projecting out in your photos. Then I’d go away and I’d plan out a couple of mood boards. We’d look at different influencers. My stylist will go off and start looking at ways that we can pull that and push it through your clothing. It goes into a lot of detail.
Then on the shoot, the shoot is planned, like I say, I like it to be a military organization, so we have things down to the hour, to the outfit change. If we’re changing your hair or your look or something, you know, you might be getting wet in a swimming pool that we have to allow time for you drying off, all those sorts of things, and I do that in a half day and then in a full day. And then the wrap up from those shoots is where we go away and we blast it on social media. So we’re covering your shoot live on Instagram stories, we’re telling everyone about it, so it’s like a social media event for your business in the run-up, and then afterward we all write long-form blogs describing how things happened from our point of view. So my stylist will talk about why she selected the certain outfits that she did and how this is a really translatable look and that kind of thing, and she’ll mention key brands. I’ll talk about what everyone else did from like the director kind of angle. I always recommend that my clients then do a blog that ties in, so we kind of plan the release of those blogs as well. So it’s taking it more to a media angle in the follow-up.
Doug: That’s really an interesting approach. I had a conversation with somebody on a podcast not too long ago, talking about video, and the conversation was about being intentional, so instead of just shooting a video for the sake of the video, be intentional. And I think that’s what I’m hearing you say here, if I look at people’s social media accounts, some people are very organized and the accounts look very good. So they’ve obviously thought about it. And other accounts just looked like a smorgasbord of whatever’s happening at the moment. It’s just kind of thrown in there. There’s no intention to move people in a certain direction.
Laura: You have to have your overriding messages, and I suppose this sounds very public relations of me, doesn’t it. You have to know what it is you’re trying to share. Even if you just know that you want to share a piece of your personality to build up a little bit of trust, you have to decide which part of that personality it is that you’re sharing? And does that lend itself well to your brand? You see so many people talking about the brand and they think that it really does just come down to the colors and your logo, but it’s so much more than that. It’s behavior, personality, the way you speak. And all of those things, I like to always say a picture is a thousand words, so what do we want those thousand words to be?
Doug: Well, and I hear you with the behind the scenes, I realize that that’s important and I’ve never done of that and I think it’s just, I haven’t taken that time to plan it. I actually did, I’ve done photo shoots, I’ve done headshots, but I actually did a very uncomfortable photo shoot a year ago for a fitness magazine. So it was a little different than just getting your headshot when you start stripping down to your boxers and they’re rubbing oil on you and getting the lights set up. Okay, now this is getting really uncomfortable, the whole crew of people standing around there, going “Look natural.” Thinking this is my natural state.
Laura: Yeah, that’s it. You have to feign that natural vibe. It’s hard when you’re not doing it all of the time. It is a really hard job to model. People think it’s the easiest job in the world, but it’s not. It’s really hard.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SHARE THIS EPISODE: – EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
How to build a powerful personal brand with photographer Laura Pearman
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: Yeah, well it was for me anyhow, it took a while and we were there for several hours, like you said, to kind of work through that whole process and I don’t know how many photos the photographer shot, but a lot, and I was just happy to get a handful that looked good.
Laura: Yeah.
Doug: I want to expand a little bit on something you mentioned there because I’ve never heard anybody in the creative space mention this. Do you want to talk a bit more like in terms of your value-add, so you’re saying while you’re doing the photo shoot you are actually doing live and you’re doing promotion for your client, so what does that look like?
Laura: So it’s kind of like in reverse engineered back to me saying, look at me, let me show you what I’m doing. I’m documenting what I’m doing. But that is really just the last layer. So what I’m doing is we’re putting the client on a giant glittery golden pedestal for the day and we’re telling all of our shared audience, so my stylist is telling her fashion peeps, my makeup artist is telling all of her beauty peeps, and you know, on and on it goes, that there is this really major, important client and we’re all about to work for them, go and follow them and check them out. And that makes them feel really, really important. So you know, tongues are wagging and people are thinking, “Who’s this person, oh they’re a coach, oh they have a podcast. Well, they’re obviously very important if they’re going through all this trouble for their headshots.”
So then by the time, we start going live, and I usually start with me like drinking a coffee or like back combing my hair in the early morning, especially if it’s like a sunrise shoot or something, and I’ll cover the whole thing from behind the scenes. And people are compelled to just watch it. So sometimes we have equipment break. I had to shoot a couple of months ago where I had a big reflector and it snapped and fell down the side of a cliff, but we might manage to record it all on live, and people loved it and I kept getting DMs saying, “Hey Laura, have you replaced your reflector yet and why don’t you try this one?”
So it’s giving people that inside scoop, but really what the client gets from it as their value-add is all eyes are on them, you know, we’re tagging them throughout those live broadcasts so that by the time we release that long-form blog, which is a very detailed blog about why they’ve done the shoot and you know, here’s links to their [inaudible 00:21:09] and what have you, people are already invested. They already really care and they, they want to see how the pictures turned out after the retouch because they saw them being shot in real time.
Doug: That’s really cool. I like that idea. I’m going to creatively borrow that when we talk about other opportunities with media and be asking our suppliers to participate at that level. So how did you come up with that as a concept?
Laura: I don’t really know. I think we just have a real fascination right now with reality TV, don’t we? We love watching things go well for people. We absolutely love it when it goes bad. I mean Real Housewives wouldn’t be the franchise it is now if we didn’t enjoy that, but people just love to see behind the scenes. So I started thinking, right, okay, well how behind the scenes shall we go? And I thought, well I love Instagram stories. Let’s just share everything, let’s just keep sharing everything. I mean obviously, we keep us people’s privacy, if they’re getting changed and stuff. I’m not going to go that far, but we, we just tell them and I thought, well if I give away all of these secrets and all of these tips about why we’re putting the light here and not there and how we’re changing the client into this outfit now and this is what it represents for their brand. It’s showing people the level of care that we all go to as this client’s supplier and it shows how it’s a high-end headshot as opposed to that quick, [inaudible 00:22:38]. Okay, I’ll meet you for coffee and you know, we’ll do a quick half hour [inaudible 00:22:42] the city job.
Doug: Yeah, absolutely. So what’s the biggest myth about photography? So, as a business owner or a speaker, what are the biggest myths that prevent people from doing this?
Laura: Oh, biggest myth being a photographer is that it’s all in the camera, you buy a good camera, drop 5 G’s on a camera and that’s it, you’re Ansel Adams.
Doug: I’m thinking more from the entrepreneur or the business owner. What’s the biggest myth that prevents them from engaging somebody like you, or in this industry like in terms of photography for your business?
Laura: Ah, okay. I think that people don’t see the value in sharing their own story. They don’t see the value in putting themselves out there a little bit. We’ve had such a long period of time of people sticking in that rut and you know, we were established in 1985. That’s the copy, and then next to that boring ass beige copy is a picture of a man in a gray suit standing next to a really boring gray backdrop that’s in a photographer’s studio, and the reason he’s got it in a photographer’s studio was because it was $20 and it was cheap and you could just walk up on the day and the photographer was probably having a cup of tea or something. He was like, yeah, stand in front of that backdrop, okay, cool job.
Laura: It’s pretty much like a passport photograph. It says nothing about who is that man? Does he have a family? Why does he do this job? And people care about that detail now because that is the time that we’re in. We’re in a digital renaissance. You’ve got to share part of your story. You might not want to share all of it. You don’t want to put all of your dirty laundry out there but you’ve got to share something. Otherwise, people will just lose interest and they won’t buy from you, and I think that is the biggest myth that we’re trying to overcome and that’s why I go to such extents to share all of the detail that I do behind the scenes.
Doug: That’s really cool. Do you have a short story or an example you can share of how you were able to use this for a client and they got a really big win from it?
Laura: Yeah. So I only started going to this extent in like 2014 and then we took it up a notch. I’m trying to think of one of my best success stories for you. I have a couple of clients that I can think of here. So I have one lady who is a sales trainer and she has, her business called Buzztastic and she’s really colorful and really, really energetic. You can imagine if you’re training a lot of people on how to sell stuff you need someone full of energy and full of beans to encourage the team. So we made it a really bright and colorful shoot, but we incorporated the colors in like flowers, we had bumblebees in there because of the Buzztastic, like that’s the reason, I found out the reason why she named her business that, and those images have got her some major clients.
Laura: I’ve literally just been emailing her today about doing another shoot and she said, look, I’m booked out for the majority of the rest of this year. But she’s got major clients, and she’s in an environment where she’s surrounded by a lot of men who are the same high energy but very macho guys. And we decided the aesthetics for her images should be very on point, glam, very female, you know, not at all butch. That’s not her style, but that makes her stand out even more amongst her competition, which is very fierce in the sales world.
Laura: So it’s really kind of put her on the map, not regionally but nationally here in the UK. And that’s the difference. She says she uses them, those images in all of her slides while she’s training. She now has the speaker profile. So if people want to book her to do talks, I think that’s a new avenue in her business that she’s looking to work with, but she’s got the shots already from this bank of images, all through her website, and she’s getting phone calls and people want to know “What are you about? You look very interesting from the last eight men I’ve seen. Why, why should I book you.” And then obviously she [inaudible 00:27:05] her magic being the sales trainer and she can get herself in the door now for meetings.
Doug: That’s amazing. I mean you’ve opened my mind to new ideas because you talked about the lengths you go to understand your client and their vision and their goals and I’m thinking it really is an opportunity to reveal your personality. I mean, if you hear somebody speak and then you meet them, you’ve obviously got a connection because you’ve seen them, heard them and talked to them, but in a static world more you’re looking at just a picture and a website, there’s really no way to get the feel of that person, the personality unless you’ve done, you know, like you said, taken photography that represents the whole person, their business, and their brand.
Laura: That’s right. Yeah. And you can really have fun with that orchestration and you know, be very selective and careful. It’s like making a wonderful recipe in what you do with those photos. Don’t just throw on an old pair of jeans and a tee shirt, unless, you know, you have a whole 50s greaser boy attitude in your brand. You want to really think about it. You can have so much fun with it. That’s one of my most favorite parts of what I do. The breaking down and the analysis of somebody and then I say, you know, you’re always talking about this, why is none of this and your business? And they’re like, Oh, do you think I could do that? Hell yeah, of course, you can! Let’s get some of that in the photos. And then before you know it, I’ll go back and check on their social media account like four months later, it’s all over the feed.
Doug: That’s cool.
Laura: Yeah.
Doug: So what are you most excited about as it relates to your business in the next six to 12 months?
Laura: So I’m obsessed with how we humans behave. I’ll never get tired of watching people, that’s why I have a camera in front of me all the time. But for me, the predictions that Pat Flynn made at this year’s social media marketing world were hugely exciting. So a lot of, when I was there in February of this year, a lot of what people were talking about was, oh, the algorithm changes are going to crucify our businesses and isn’t it terrible for us marketers. Pat turned it on its head in his closing keynote and he was advising all marketers to work on creating super fans and he did this wonderful talk about the backstreet boys. For me, I think it really is truly the best way to overcome any of these changes in algorithms and technology. If you have a tribe, it’s like taking that tribe concept and putting it on steroids. People who do want to see every little thing of your behind the scenes and you know, creating that through the stories that you’re telling is the way to do this.
Laura: So I’m really excited to see now and watch how the big brands do it. Are we going to come up with a really clever way to create superfans? Are we going to see some new revelations from the big coffee people, and watching it in the big companies is going to be interesting because it could be done really badly, I think from those guys. You know, like we have a loyalty card, so what more do you want? But I think in small businesses and small solopreneurs I think this is where we’re going to see some people really rise to the top really quickly because they have this tribe of superfans just kind of fueling, like their rockets shooting in the space.
Doug: Yeah, no, I think. I think you’re right. And I think the downside, and I’ve talked about it a number of times with social media, is that people aren’t using it for social. They’re calling it social media, but what it really is broadcast. They’re just broadcasting their message and there’s no interaction. And I just frankly, I don’t understand it. They might as well just stay off social if you’re not going to communicate with your tribe or respond to them. So yeah, I totally agree.
Doug: So let’s move along and I got a couple of questions for you. I’m going to leave the toughest question for last. So tell us, uh, where can our listeners find you, learn more about you, see you on the street, maybe having a coffee or, where can they track you down?
Laura: So I’m on pretty much all social media. The only one I ditched is Snapchat and my handle are the same on all social media. So I’d say to all of the listeners, you pick your best favorite social media and come and find me. It’s LPearmanPhotos. That’s my handle everything and we can have a chat there. I think it’s better to just kind of put it in the lap of you guys and where you like to hang out if you want to come and exchange some witty quips with me on twitter, let’s do that. If you want to share some pictures, let’s do that on Instagram.
Doug: And I was looking at your portfolio and as a fan of Sex and the City, I didn’t see any photos of the Manolo Blahnik shoes.
Laura: Oh, well if anyone wants to send me some Manolo’s, I’m totally open to that. Oh, you know, maybe a Manolo’s buyer is on the line now listening. It’s LPearmanPhotos.
Doug: Shift them over, what size would that be? You can tell me off air, that’s fine.
Laura: Okay.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SHARE THIS EPISODE: – EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
How to build a powerful personal brand with photographer Laura Pearman
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: So we talked a little bit before we got going here today and you said you’ve got a couple new things happening in your business in terms of tips and a selfies course coming up soon. So why don’t you share the details?
Laura: Okay, cool. Thank you. So I do. I have decided that also I work very hard and I’m always busy doing headshots for people, I’ve been wondering how can I serve more people? And I think of the interesting things that I’ve been noticing over the last year is the questions that I’ve been getting on DMs all over social media about selfies and I thought, yeah, this is an interesting space. Not many people are teaching how to do great selfies, and for me as a headshot photographer, I’m more than happy to share, so I have a little free giveaway for all of the listeners to do, we’ll put that in the show notes, and if you want to download that, that’s just a quick top 10 tips on what you can do right now with your phone to get some better selfies.
But we’re going to go a little bit deeper, so I’m planning on doing a five day challenge next month and we’ll probably do that on Instagram and Facebook, so you can join me on some live broadcasts and we’ll play around with our phones together, and then if you love that then we’ll be talking about the course after that, so we’ll see how it grows. I think I’m going to call is Selfie Skool, Doug, but we’re gonna call it school with an S K O O L.
Doug: Excellent. So the five-day challenge is next month, so that, we are in May.
Laura: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. May time is the challenge. People who get that free download, I’ll be able to let them know where they need to go and when they need to go there for the challenge.
Doug: Well, excellent. I’m not sure whether you’ll be back at Youprenuer this year. I was there last year and I don’t know…
Laura: Wasn’t it amazing? Yes, I am definitely going to be there with bells on.
Doug: That was a great trip. I mean we joined Chris with one of his events in the Philippines, but we really liked hanging around London and spending some time.
Laura: Yeah. Awesome.
Doug: So now for the question that stumps all of my guests, who’s one guest that I absolutely have to have on my show?
Laura: Oh, I see. I was listening to the cast yesterday in preparation and people have really good suggestions. It’s intimidatingly good, so I’ve been wracking my brains for the last 24 hours and I’m going to recommend my friend Pauline Stockhausen comes on your show. She’s in New Zealand and she has the great community online called The Content Lab. She’s a fellow podcaster like you, but she does social media for some seriously influential people. No, I’m not going to name drop, I want to name drop, but I don’t know what she can and can’t share, so I’ll leave that for Pauline to tell you.
Doug: Excellent. Well, that sounds really good. I like New Zealand as well. I’ve spent some time there is and it’s a beautiful, beautiful part of the world.
Laura: Oh, it is so beautiful, isn’t it? So every corner you turn, there’s a waterfall. That’s what I love about New Zealand.
Doug: Well there we go. Well, thanks so much for sharing some of your knowledge and your background and backstory. I really appreciate it.
Laura: Oh, you’re totally welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
Doug: So there you go, listeners. There’s hopefully some food for thought, some new ideas on why you want to invest in getting some professional photography to grow your business, to use in your social media. And if I was you I would be either reaching out directly to Laura if you’re in that part of the world or I’d be looking for someone and I’d be asking for the stuff that she’s offering, in terms of the backdrop and the additional promotion. That’s a great tip. I often do that when I’m hiring suppliers. I ask, what are all the things you’d like to do that everyone says no to and find we get huge value from that. So thanks for listening. Make sure that you subscribe to us on iTunes. If you’ve liked this episode, feel free to share the episode and leave us a review. If you’re interested in updates on what’s happening in our world and the stuff that we’re working on, make sure you sign up for email lists. So thanks again and we’ll tune in for our next episode.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SHARE THIS EPISODE: – EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
EXPERT TIPS ON HOW TO BUILD A POWERFUL PERSONAL BRAND
How to build a powerful personal brand with photographer Laura Pearman
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Get in touch with Laura
- Laura on Twitter – @LPearmanPhotos
- Laura on LinkedIn
- Laura on Facebook
- Laura on Instagram
Resources
- Laura’s top ten tips to better selfies: http://bit.ly/LPearmanPhotosSelfies
- Laura’s Website
- Youpreneur
https://twitter.com/LPearmanPhotos