The one thing most great companies have in common is a strong content distribution model. If you want a successful personal brand, you need a smart distribution model to ensure your content ends up in all the right places to reach your potential audience.
That’s right. I’m saying you need a distribution plan and a distribution model for your content. If you are a content hub, you have got to be thinking about these things. And now there are three things we’re going to talk about today.
There are three key elements to setting up the content distribution model for your brand. Think about how to:
- Create infrastructure for your plan.
- Develop strategic assets.
- Seek out partnerships.
Distribution is key
Now, I’ve said before that I’ve worked for some big companies like Coca-Cola, and the biggest thing I learned from working on Coca-Cola wasn’t about branding. You’d be surprised because most people, when they think of Coca-Cola say, “That’s an amazing brand. They do great commercials. They’ve been around forever. They have those signature bottles that really make their brand stand out, and they were the first ones to do that.”
But what I learned working on the business for so long was that the secret to Coca-Cola’s success as a brand is actually their distribution. They have an amazing distribution model. They know how to put their products everywhere you go — not just on store shelves, but at retail, at grocery stores, at convenience stores and gas stations and movie theaters and theme parks.
They’re literally everywhere. You can’t go anywhere and not find a Coca-Cola. They’re even pushing their soda out to new places and new countries.
Basically, if there’s no infrastructure there, they build it. They build the sales infrastructure, they build the wells for the water, the supplier infrastructure, the sales infrastructure… They build all of that so they can distribute their product.
The success of Coca-Cola’s distribution model made me think, how can you apply that same successful model to someone who’s out there creating content to support their personal brand?
It boils down to those three elements: creating infrastructure, developing strategic assets, and seeking out partnerships. So let’s dive in.
Content Distribution Step #1 – Create infrastructure
From a distribution standpoint, infrastructure is really three things:
- Suppliers: the ones who are bringing you the materials
- Packaging: how you put it all together
- Distributors: how you get your product out to the people looking to buy it
You are your best supplier
Now, from a media standpoint, from a personal brand standpoint, you are your No. 1 supplier. You’re the one who’s creating all this content. You’re the one creating all this knowledge and perspective, so your skills and your experiences are going to be the input to you being a good supplier.
That means the first step in being a better supplier is making sure you are talking about your experiences. If you don’t have them, or even if you do but want to continue to get better, you need to keep developing more skills. Keep developing skills at the thing you want to be known for because that’s another way for you to have more access to more content.
As a supplier for your own content, you should also continue to seek out good interviews. Focus on getting better interviews and getting more and more people on your show. Building your “Dream 100” list of people to interview is a great way to help you increase your supply curations.
Another great way to boost supply is to think about how to pull in other topics and ideas from different places.
How do you read the news and share that information? What about pulling new ideas into your show and repurposing? How do you take other ideas that you’ve already used and bring them back to light?
All of those ideas are going to create a strong supply chain for your infrastructure.
Packaging
Now that you’ve got all of this great information, how do you take it all and package it in a way that a customer wants before you distribute it?
If you’re blogging, good packaging is having the content well written, so maybe having someone edit that blog. If you’re podcasting, it’s making sure you have the sound adapted, adjusted, and edited by a professional editor, or using tools yourself to help get the audio to that sound quality.
But you need another way to approach this. Besides the editing of your content, look at the assets you have that help package it: the logos, the look, the sound, the field. Do you have something consistent that people, when they look at or hear your show, know it’s your show?
I love having an audio logo. I love having an introduction to my show. All those things are recognizable. When you hear it, you know it’s mine, and that’s what the good brands do.
Also templates. Do you have templates that help you continue to have a consistent delivery of your product?
Distributors
The third piece of a great infrastructure is the actual distributors themselves: the people who are helping you put your content in front of the people who want to listen.
One place for podcasters to look at specifically as distributors is obviously directories — not just the hosts and the place where you can listen to podcasts, but the directories where you can be found, indexed, categorized, and searched. You need to get your podcasts into more and more directories so when people are looking, they can find you.
Other great content distribution hubs are publishers. Historically, most popular publishers out there have been around for a long time, so you need to look at how you access them and provide content to them.
Publishers are key to getting featured as an article in a popular magazine, podcast, blog, website, or even a popular Facebook group or YouTube channel. Finding those publishers and finding a way to become a contributor to those will help you get your face, your content, your name in front of more people.
That’s why you have so many people, including a lot of my guests as well, whose accolades list being featured in Inc. or Entrepreneur magazine or Forbes. If you can say that, it adds credibility to you, and guess what. The people who are reading those publications are getting to know you as well.
Influencers as content distribution channels
The last distributors I’d like to mention are influencers. Influencers are potentially the most powerful because even with public and directories, you’re one of a million, right? But if you can get out there and talk to influencers and they like and support you, you can gain great value from that relationship with them because they will introduce you to their following.
All it takes is one good influencer to get you to be known to a lot more people.
So think strategically about who you partner well with — where you’re not being competitive with them, but they really complement what you’re trying to do. And think about the people you’re trying to get around and in front of — who influences your audience?
You don’t just need people with large subscriber lists, but people who actually influence your decision-makers.
Content Distribution Step #2 – Develop strategic assets
So now we’ve lined up your infrastructure: supply, packaging, and distribution. The second step in terms of best practices for your content distribution plan is developing strategic assets.
Strategic assets are things you can call your own that you can point to. It’s something that continues to support you over time.
One example is media properties. Wherever you create content, that is a media property. So if you are a blogger or a video creator or a podcaster, that primary place that you create is a media property. That’s a strategic asset. The content in it is an asset. And the home itself — a profile, a bio, a cover art, a picture, a header, whatever it is — all that is land you own.
That’s your media property. That’s a strategic asset that you can use to support what you’re offering and to develop you as a personal brand.
So your first strategic asset is the media property you create with, but you can expand that by distributing to other media properties. You can repurpose by taking your podcast and submitting it to a YouTube channel or a blog, or posting pictures and social media. All of those are adding a new stake in the ground for you to say, “I have a place where my content lives.”
Those media properties, as you secure them and hold the addresses of them and build them, are assets. And as you grow them over time, those assets make for a stronger distribution plan for you. Because as you have subscribers in different places, you have more people to hear your message.
Another asset — and this is the most obvious — is your email list and the people that are in your Facebook group. Those people are within a place that you own, that you control. Those are places that you can take ownership of and develop and grow over time.
Contributor posts
Another type of strategic asset is contributor posts. I mentioned earlier getting on publisher websites. If you can be a contributor somewhere and put your content on a place where it can be found, you now have something you can point to and say, “Here, read this article that was on Forbes. Read this article that was on Inc. or Entrepreneur or Fast Company,” or whatever it might be. You can point to and say, “This is something that I wrote that you should read,” and that adds credibility.
That’s a strategic asset. Even if you’ve only done it once in 30 years, you were featured there. Even one article that was 500 words long, you could point to that asset for 30 more years. That’s an asset because you will always get credibility from having done it.
So the return on investment there is huge. So do as much of that as possible, whether it’s writing an article or being a guest on podcasts. Then make sure that on your website, you’re listing all these places that you’ve been featured.
Sponsorships
The third strategic asset your personal brand needs is sponsorships.
I actually think, if you’re trying to make a name for yourself, that it’s important for you to get out there and figure out where your people are going and what places would add credibility for you. Then, find a way to sponsor that place.
You see a lot of traditional businesses going to trade shows. I think that’s great. If your content lends itself to a specific industry and that industry has a trade show, maybe you can go to that trade show and network. But don’t just network. You could start by doing that, but you could also buy a booth or sponsor something at that industry event. By doing that, you’re building credibility.
Saying you were a sponsor or featured at an event adds credibility to your show, even if you just do it once. And guess what — it also introduces your show to a lot more new people. That is an asset.
As you secure that spot, you’re also developing a relationship with the people who run that event. That’s also an important piece that you can hold on to and say, “You know what? I’m thinking about my distribution plan. These are resources I can tap into, to grow my audience.”
Content Distribution Step #3 – Seek out partnerships
All right. So we’ve talked about creating infrastructure and developing strategic assets. The third best practice for your content distribution plan is to seek out partnerships.
Seeking out partnerships might not be obvious to some people, but that’s why I put this episode together. I want you guys to be able to think about, how can I make it so my content just instantly finds an audience? To do that, you need to be thinking about this kind of distribution plan and these kinds of assets.
The first thing to think about when you’re seeking partnerships is where you can get referrals and endorsements. Who’s going to be out there that’s going to point to you and say, “This person is an expert in this thing,” or, “I was helped by this person because of something they did.”
If you’re a coach, any client you’ve helped is a good referral. If you are someone who does interviews, any of your interviewees can give you an endorsement. Maybe there’s someone that you’ve worked with over time and added value for. They can endorse you.
At the end of the day, having someone else tell your story for you is huge. And once that story is told, whether it’s audio or video or just written, you have that statement or referral or endorsement. You get them once, and you can hold onto them and share them a million times.
That’s a huge benefit in terms of having something that can be turned on and that leverages more people coming to you. A referral is someone basically saying, “Hey, go check this out now.” And you didn’t have to do any work to do that other than starting a good relationship.
Affiliate programs
Another type of partnership to seek out is an affiliate program. You can actually incentivize the people in your world.
I assume that if you are an expert in a certain world, you probably know some people in that world, either as customers or as influencers. You can get those people to be a part of the promotion program by making them an affiliate and saying, “Hey, if you bring people into my world, I’ll help you with this type of benefit,” whether it’s compensation via payment or a discount in your program or whatever.
Another way to approach this is to think about bartering. If you can get out there and trade your services with influencers of your audience, it’s a win-win. You promote them to your audience, and they promote you to their audience, which expands your distribution and your following.
Find other coaches
The last type of partnership, which is definitely not the most obvious but has been huge in my business, is figuring out how to align with other coaching programs or masterminds.
People within those programs are already looking for new ideas. They’re looking for new people to network with and new ideas to help their businesses. If you invest in these programs, first, you’re getting to know more people who are like-minded that might need what you sell or might just be interested in the content that you are creating. Second, they might tell other people about your brand because now they’re exposed to it.
It’s great, instead of just being a random person, to be someone that’s within this intimate group of 10, 20, 30 people, who are all curious about each other and are willing to take the extra step to listen to what you have to say.
I’ll also mention paid coaching programs because, in a paid coaching program, you sometimes have access to not just the coach who wants you to succeed, but also their audience.
A lot of the times, paid coaches also have private Facebook groups, so once you’re in their coaching program, you now have access to this group. So now you’re sharing your struggles, and they’re sharing their struggles, and you’re all sharing your wins and losses and everything else.
In that program, you might be able to talk a little bit about the things you’re talking about in your content. Those people will get to know you, and then they might get more curious and eventually subscribe and become a part of this audience that you’re trying to develop.
Ready to start with content distribution?
All of these steps are part of your content distribution plan. You have to have some of this infrastructure in place before you go out there and start spending money on ads and doing social media and all that.
So start taking some of these steps so you have built-in infrastructure to help support you developing an audience. You need an infrastructure that has distributors out there so people can find your strategic assets. And you need partnerships that offer an additional way to distribute your personal brand.
Once you have all that in place, you are set to take faster steps and move further ahead.
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