Welcome To Brewing Your Brand -- My monthly musings, tips, and advice on LinkedIn, personal branding, and content creation.

This newsletter has been a long time coming. It took me close to four years to start my first newsletter (on LinkedIn). Now that The Caffeinated Chronicles is well established on the platform, I wanted to start something new, exclusively for you. Thank you for being here and for reading the inaugural issue of Brewing Your Brand.

If you’re here, I likely don’t need to overemphasize the importance of building a personal brand. You already know that having a memorable (I call it “sticky”) personal brand is the key to unlocking opportunities and standing out on a crowded playing field.

It’s possibly a bit contrarian to have launched my newsletter during December. But, December is my birthday month, so in a way, it is fitting. It also gave me the opportunity to share some heartfelt advice.

December is a month that can be easy to coast through. Thanksgiving was so late this year that it seems like Christmas is just around the corner. The first night of Hanukkah is on Christmas Day this year, and Kwanzaa is on December 26th. I wholeheartedly embrace taking time to refresh and recharge, and I also know that this time of year is challenging for many of us, for a variety of reasons.

But, if you are building your brand, your business, your network— my advice is to pause but don’t stop. This is especially true if you are leveraging LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a platform of one billion users. They come from a variety of backgrounds and lived experiences. Many of them will be active on the platform this month — even if you don’t see them. If you take one thing away from this newsletter, I hope that it is the power of the silent community on LinkedIn.

We get so tied up in vanity metrics— impressions, likes, comments. And those do have relevance. But remember: likes aren’t dollars. Some of my

best clients are people who never engaged with my content. Not even a like. But they know what I have written, they reference very specific posts, and they know why they want to work with me. So, if you’re a solopreneur or a small business owner and you aren’t yet sold on why being on LinkedIn in a non-negotiable, take to heart the words that a very wise (and very direct) business coach shared with me. “If you don’t put yourself out there, you’ll put yourself out of business”.

Let me close with an exciting new LinkedIn update (that is rolling out very slowly). **If you didn’t know, when LinkedIn rolls out an update, it goes in waves. I do not yet have this feature, but I can’t wait to have access. So what is it? Rolling banner images. Currently, we have one static banner image that does not change. For those of us that have different business ventures, or who have a project they want to highlight in addition to their work (a book, a podcast, a speaking engagement), it can feel frustrating not to be able to highlight more than one thing at a time.

With this new update (rumored to be rolling out only to Premium members but to be confirmed), the banners are dynamic - you can choose multiple cover photos, and they will scroll across horizontally. Want to see it in action? Check out my friend Cher Jones’s profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itscherjones/

Do you have this feature yet? I have only seen it in action on a couple of profiles. If this is beta testing, it could be a while until all users (or all Premium users) have access, much like the video only feed.

And with that, thank you for reading this first edition of Brewing Your Brand. I am always happy to hear from you and get your feedback on what you would like to see me talk about. Reach out at [email protected]

Enjoy the rest of 2024 — make the most of it and take good care of yourselves.