The Celebrity CEO

How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive by Building a Community and a Strong Personal Brand

Ramon Ray

• Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781948080859
• eBook ISBN: 9781948080941
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

The Celebrity CEO is the complete guide to creating a strong personal brand. By developing your personal brand, you will set your business apart from your competitors and become known as the expert in your industry. The Celebrity CEO is the complete guide to creating a strong personal brand. By developing your personal brand, you will set your business apart from your competitors and become known as the expert in your industry. Written for entrepreneurs and small business owners who want to make a massive impact and build a loyal fan base, The Celebrity CEO is the source for celebrity status in business. Learn from the founder of Smart Hustle Media, Ramon Ray, the mind-set of a celebrity CEO and the tools to cultivate your tribe.

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Personal Branding
101

As a child, I loved Pop-Tarts. I’m not talking about the grocery store value brand; the real Pop-Tarts made by Kellogg’s. And like many kids, I also liked Cheerios, the ones made by General Mills. However, I can remember a time in my life when money was tight, and our family bought the “no frills” brand from time to time. Maybe, just maybe, the generic brand tastes the same (I doubt it), but no kid wants a no-frills brand cereal, or any other food. Everyone wants the cereal, or other product, that looks delicious, that looks inviting, that looks amazing. Right? This is what personal branding is all about.

Personal branding is the art and science of being so irresistible and so desirable that your target market wants to buy from you, work for you, be around you, or hear from you. They are chasing you. Frankly, they don’t want anyone else.

A strong personal brand is more than just about people knowing you’re a website developer. That’s easy; web developers are a dime a dozen. It’s about the right customers knowing you’re the best web developer for their needs. This most likely includes not just your technical competence to design websites but your customer service, your design process, and more.

To reiterate, large companies have big budgets to spend lots of money on advertising, sales, and marketing campaigns. They can spend $50,000 or $50 million on advertising to ensure everyone in the USA, or the world, knows who they are. We know their logos and their corporate stories. Even smaller businesses can spend some money to promote their corporate brands. However, a personal brand and corporate brand are two different things.

A corporate brand is about the brand’s promise, represented by its logo and imagery. Think Tesla, Polo, McDonald’s, Nike. A small business, like you and me —it’s all about our personal brand and how the customer feels about us as individuals. For you, a very small business owner, your corporate brand has some importance. Indeed, you want people to know your logo and your brand promise. For most of us, our customers are buying us; they’re buying our smile, our trust, how we connect and make them feel as individuals. Think of the local graphic design shop, the orthopedic shoe vendor your mother-in-law needs, the copy repair company. For these small companies, for you and me, it’s primarily all about us as individuals, about us as people.

It’s not about having a flashy business card or a sleek, modern logo. First and foremost it’s, how does another human, who has a need in his business or personal life, feel about you, and is he even aware that you have a solution for his need?

This is the essence of personal branding. This is what it means to be a celebrity CEO. McDonald’s has its golden arches. We have our handshake and warm smile. Dell has its TV and radio advertising campaign. You have your constant desire to educate customers and showcase how amazing you are for them. Starting and building a strong personal brand is not easy. It takes time and commitment to excellence and the art of self-marketing, promoting yourself like crazy.

In order to do this, you don’t need to spend a lot of money—in fact you don’t need to spend any money. Most businesses are plain vanilla. Nothing is wrong with vanilla ice cream, but for a business to be plain, to be boring, to be unremarkable, is deadly. It hurts the business. They’re not remarkable; they’re not special; it’s hard to tell what’s different about them. It’s hard to tell why you should connect with one business and not another.

Do this small test: Who are your top three competitors? Write it down.

What can you do, or what are you doing, to be just a little bit better than your competition, and hopefully a lot better? Entrepreneur and author Peter Shankman often asks attendees this in his speeches: When you go on a flight, you’re happy if the plane lands safely and you get some peanuts. Right? That’s all you expect. But companies like Virgin do their best to make it an experience. They’re doing things just a bit better or a bit differently than the competition. While being a celebrity CEO takes a lot of work, effort, persistence, and thoughtfulness, part of it is pretty simple. While everyone else is just okay, you need to be a bit better than okay to make a difference in your customers’ minds.

Let’s unpack this a bit more: I’ve been told by brand executives and others that they love my style of interviewing. It makes them feel comfortable during the interview, and they’re able to freely talk with me in a natural conversation. There are a lot of people who do interviews; however, my interview style is different than others’. It’s fun, high energy, and very conversational and relatable.

Think of your business and your brand. What’s that one thing, or many things, you can do just a bit differently than everyone else?

Here’s another tip from “Ramon’s playbook” of being a celebrity CEO: I like to wear bright colors. It’s not a gimmick, it’s me, but it works. There is a picture of me wearing my signature bright-blue sweater on my Twitter.

You want to be different and stand out in two main areas. First, before people even speak with you or hear about you, what does...

Table of contents

• The Mind-set of a Celebrity
• The Making of a Celebrity CEO
• Personal Branding 101
• Insight from Experts
• Your Toolbox
• Website
• Sales Funnels
• Social Media
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Email Marketing: Build Your List
• Apps and Hacks for Personal Brand Building
• Digital Brand Building Stories, Tips, and Insight
• From Small Screen To Stage
• The Art of Public Speaking and Communication
• Event Production
• Video Brings Your Brand to Life
• Write and Publish a Book
• Get Media Coverage: Your 15 Minutes of Fame
• Get Help. Hire Expertise.