[MUSIC] Hey there, it's good to see you again. The next three lessons tie together and fall under the theme building your professional brand. There are a lot of important roles in every company, support, IT, accounting, sales, management. Your role has some special differences. In a perfect world everyone who works in a company is creative, and they're playing their creativity their work, but for you it's much more front and center. It's much more apart of who you are as a professional, and what you get recognized for. In this lesson we'll discuss why being a content marketer is different than most career paths, and examine how to build a platform for your personal brand. You're a lot more like a designer then someone for example, in IT is. You're a creative worker, and a big part of what you bring to the table is your talent and your ability and specifically your individual voice. So that's why it's really important in this course that you not just absorb the information, but that you put it into practice and that you do that where somebody else can see it. Writing content is not like writing a novel, it's not like painting a watercolor where you might work for a long time without showing that work to anybody else. It's a lot more like a play. You don't really know if it works until you get it in front of an audience. And another factor to these is that what you're going to learn in this course to plan content strategy for your clients, or for your company, your organization, you are also going to use to market yourself as a professional. You are going to do your content marketing for the brand of you. And I know personal brand is kind of a overused term, sort of annoying term, but it's the best we have. So your big assignment for this course is going to be to get that, quote unquote, personal brand platform watched. And then throughout the course, you're going to get assignments and an important part of that assignment is to publish what you create on that platform. So you have a couple of options to make this happen. And the most important thing that you have to know about this, is that you want to create this platform on a domain that you own. So if you're not super tactical, a domain is just the www name of your website dot com. It's the specific name of a particular web address. Now, what we recommend most often for this kind of work is, self hosted WordPress. And what that means is, you go to a domain register store, you buy a domain, you go to a hosting company, you get a hosting account, then you install the WordPress software, and you're up and running. And the reason this is good is it's very self contained. You own it, you control it, there really aren't any terms and conditions you have to abide by, you can do anything you want to with advertising, you can have any kind of content you want on there. You don't want to use Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn. Those are great sites for getting the word out about who you are as a professional, but you don't want your brand to live there, because they come and they go, they can and do take accounts down for reasons that are not always necessarily fair and you just don't know what are they going to look like in five years. You don't want your personal brand living on a facebook.com, a LinkedIn.com, it needs to live in your own domain. And of course, you don't have to use WordPress. The advantage to it is it's very flexible, it's easy to use, you can do a lot of things with it, it's robust, it's scalable, and it's also used in a lot of organizations. So, if you are comfortable and familiar with WordPress, that's a good skill to have, and it's not hard to develop if you had your own site. So if you don't have a site, go grab a domain if you don't have one. Ideally it would be your name, it depends of course, on how common your name is. Can be some phrase you like, so I started off my personal site is RemarkableCommunication.com. Doesn't matter a whole lot where you register it but do know that there are a lot of options to those big name brands that take out Superbowl ads.
