Page 99 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Heroic Brand

“When people believe that what you believe is what they believe, they turn
you into a belief.” – Michael Bassey Johnson

In Chapter 1, I shared a story about content ignition—blogger and entrepreneur
Chris Brogan’s 37-word blog post about talking over slides that went viral. This
example doesn’t seem to follow any of the guidelines I’ve covered in The
Content Code so far. Why did this modest snippet of non-epic content set off a
social sharing firestorm?

It had nothing to do with the emotion of the content, clever headlines,
shareability tricks, or the Alpha Audience, did it? But it had everything to do
with the individual who created that content. This chapter explains how content
can ignite simply because of who you are. It’s the “B” in the BADASS formula
—your Brand.

Every person reading this book has a personal brand based on what people
believe about you (not to be confused with the facts about you!). Do people
believe you to be quirky, dependable, passionate, creative, funny, driven, or shy?
Those impressions eventually coalesce to form your brand. The impressions may
vary slightly from person to person depending on how well they know you and
your company, but there are likely general themes that form the foundation of
your perceived brand across your audience.

Everything you say online—and everything you don’t say—contributes to the
story about you that plays in people’s heads. While everyone has a personal
brand, not everybody has a Heroic Brand that can put content sharing on auto-
pilot. And Chris Brogan has a Heroic Brand. Here’s the connection between his
powerful online persona and content ignition, in his own words:

“Some people share content just because they believe in you and what
you stand for. I believe there are three core elements of personal
branding, at least for me, and they are very intertwined and related.