Adam Torres and Alex Nigmatulin discuss personal branding.
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Show Notes:
Why is personal branding essential for entrepreneurs today, and how does it impact their visibility and credibility in the digital space? In this episode, Adam Torres and Alex Nigmatulin, Co-founder and CMO at PRNEWS.IO, explore PRNEWS.IO and personal branding.
About Alex Nigmatulin
Alex Nigmatulin (aka Oleksandr Nihmatulin) is a marketing and digital communications expert with over 15 years of experience in sales, marketing, product design, team building, and partner management. As a visionary board member, he spearheaded the expansion of PRNEWS.IO, a robust big data platform into foreign markets, revolutionizing companies’ engagement with new audiences and amplifying their global reach.
Alex has dedicated his career to empowering brands to drive their narratives on transparent and predictable terms. With PRNEWS.IO, he provided a unique opportunity for publishers to focus on their passion – creating exceptional content. Over time, PRNEWS.IO has evolved from a blog with press releases to a global marketplace for sponsored posts and native ads, meeting the growing demand for media coverage in 96 countries worldwide.
Creating and building a global company is no easy task, but Alex’s determination and innovative leadership have brought this vision to life. PRNEWS.IO’s achievements include winning the Go Global Awards twice in the Newswire category, demonstrating the platform’s global influence and industry recognition.
About PRNEWS.IO
PRNEWS.IO provides guaranteed placement of sponsored content in online media around the world. The Platform will help you to increase awareness among your potential partners and investors, boost your sales, and gain link juice.
No more fuss about searching hundreds of platforms to share your news or story. In the digital world, anyone can get noticed online with just a few clicks from any place on the Earth.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So did I have Alex Nigmatulin on the line and he is co founder and CMO over at prnews.
io. Alex, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Nice to meet you. From Estonia. Yeah, I’m glad. I don’t know the last time I had a guest from Estonia on the line, so I’m excited to get into, meet you as well, and also to to get into the work that you’re doing over at prnews. io. I’ll tell you that a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives watch this show, and one of the things that we talk about pretty often is, Personal branding, different ways to get your message out and and how to be effective doing that.
So I’m excited to learn more about prnews. io and also just your thoughts on personal branding. Just to get us kicked off here, Alex I’ll start with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So at mission matters, Alex, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, for executives, for experts.
So that’s what we do. Alex, what mission matters to you? Mission matters to me is to deliver as a nice result and go with your clients to help them to implement their strategy online. And in the end of the day to say that mission accomplished. I like it. Mission matters cause midterm your mission accomplished.
I’m in so just to get it kicked off here personal branding and online marketing. Like how, did you get into these? It’s when you want to be presented online effectively, you naturally go to that because now it is just nice to have, not nice to have, it’s a must. Today, people research entrepreneurs before doing businesses with them, whether it’s a potential client or a partner.
So people look for your search results. They look articles about yourself on LinkedIn discussions, or even the use AI driven tools like chat GPT and it will reinforce you as someone worth listening to. And studies show that people trust companies more when the leadership team of this company has a strong personal brand.
Because in the end, people trust people, not just companies. how’d you first discover the personal brand space? where’d that come from, to even know that it was a thing? I remember like, when I first started, I’m like, I didn’t even know that it was a thing.
did you discover it? I discovered it myself when I found out that someone once reached out to me. Actually, it was not like I was doing it myself. Uh, I was, someone reached out to me and asked because they know my name and they wanted to work with me, not with the company or with the service I present because word of mouth exists there.
And people just recommend other people. They understand that I can benefit from that. If I can build a nice personal brand. Another thing that we see how people use our platform, I’ll tell about this later, and we see how they use it, and we see that they don’t use it only to distribute press releases, but also to publish articles and put themselves as experts in online space. this is their main idea. And also, but why they do that? There are different things. Someone do it just to be famous. Someone doing this for dealing with banks or investors. Because you have to understand when people want to give you money, before they try to Google you and try to find whatever they find about you.
Also if they, you want to sell more you can use personal brand because people are willing to pay more from, for recognized experts. And when you have a nice authority you can command higher prices. You can cause deals faster and handle objections much, much more easily. Mm-hmm . And also.
Personal branding helped myself with networking and I understand that anyone else can benefit from that because you are not chasing their connections, but people come to you because they want to deal with someone with a strong personal brand. And so what are some strategies? So for people to like stick out when they’re building their personal brand, like what have you seen?
The strategies yes, you need to understand what is the beginning , how to start and sometimes people think that it is something hard to do, but the good news is with a simple strategy, I’ll tell you, you can start to build your personal brand online. The first step is to determine which name you will use for your personal brand.
Because you know that many people have multiple names, your passport name, your nickname, your pen name, or a business name. And if you want to build something online, this can confuse Google and AI algorithms. For example, my name in my passport is Oleksandr Nihmatulin, but I decided to brand myself as Alex Nihmatulin for business.
So you have to pick a name and stick to it across all the platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, websites, or even domain names. This will help search engines and AI recognize you as a single entity rather than a fragmented mentions across the internet. Before you build your brand, you need to understand where you stand today.
To do this, try to figure out what Google already knows about you. Try to search your name on Google, look at the results, what’s showing up. Is there any outdated or incorrect information? Also, you may have noticed that when you search for someone famous or well known, the search result page on Google doesn’t always look like a regular search result.
Instead, you see all these rich snippets, pictures, I don’t know, links to social media profiles, even if you’re an actor, you see the height of the person. This is called the Google Knowledge Graph or Google Knowledge Panel. And the good news, you can control how information about you appears on Google.
Google provides you a special tool and you can check whenever they already, you have this knowledge graph about you or not. If you have, you can go through a free verification process and you can claim it. You just need to provide your, I don’t know, screenshot from LinkedIn and Facebook or a picture for your ID.
Then you can control what appears about you on search result page. And now the idea is to gather information about yourself. In the beginning, I recommend to create some document, maybe Google spreadsheet, and to keep track about everything about you, what you have and which websites you are represented right now.
You likely have already profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social platforms. So collect these links. to these profiles into the document and check is the same name is used in the descriptions on these websites. If not, update it. Then you have to fill out all your social media profiles on across the web.
There are a lot of social networks. You can go through all of them, or you can hire someone on Fiverr who can do this for yourself. And also pay attention to their profile, URL, you know, then you sign up somewhere, you get randomly assigned numbers. You have to update to your name. So you have this, I know, LinkedIn dot com slash Alex Sigma Tulin, not just Alex.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So we have to do that. Mm-hmm. The second step is to launch a personal website. Now, you can do it easily with GoDaddy, they even provide you, after you register a domain, then you can build a small website about yourself, like a, I don’t know, biography or demo website. Mhm. Or you can use Framer for advanced representation.
On your personal website, you have to put your, biography and also links to the social media profiles. General information about you. This will help search engines better understand and display your information. If you need more information about that, you can definitely reach to me on LinkedIn. And now we will give you the instructions.
Hmm. Once you have created your personal website with your name and domain and registered on media platforms, you need to reach to online media. The usual approach is to pitch journalists by offering yourself as an expert, but this method doesn’t always yield results. If you are new, if you are looking for a faster outcome, I recommend using our platform.
PRnews. io, which simplifies and accelerates the process of getting media coverage. With PRnews. io, you can easily select popular media outlets, including tier one, niche, or regional publications. The platform works just like Amazon, but for articles. You simply choose a media outlet, check its placement pricing, make a payment, and Voila, your article is sent to the editorial team and published in a short time.
This way you don’t have to spend time pitching journalists. You get direct access to the media you need quickly and efficiently. Why getting mentions in media nowadays is more important than before? Because of raise of CGPT and other LLMs. So they scrape the data from media outlets, so you need to feed this data to them.
So next time when you ask CGPT who is this guy or who you can recommend as an expert in this or this field, you definitely need to show up in these results. So you collect all these media mentions and published articles in one document and on your personal website. When journalists will show interest in you, you just share a link to this website.
It will use and serve for you like a media kit. A set of hardware information is gathered online. And don’t forget about social media. So engage in conversation, share insights on platforms like LinkedIn, or even participate in podcasts like Mission Matters and help reinforce your thought leadership.
Yeah. You don’t need to post every day or go viral. The key is to maintain a steady approach. This is like the one on one approach for building your personal brand online. Where do you find people go wrong when they attempt to start building their brand? Like what have you seen where you’re like, ah, I wish they wouldn’t have done that.
Like that’s probably not the best way to do it. what are some of the pitfalls? People start to do this as I don’t know, like really. Pushy and post every day, they start to post this video on Tik TOK on Instagram every day, but it is hard work. And in one week or two they will lose their power and they just drop it.
So don’t do that just to think, okay, I need to make free appearance in a month, I don’t know, or in a week. Yeah. Do this. Steady. Don’t try to be everywhere at the same time. This is the biggest mistake that people just don’t have time for that. Yeah. I like that. That’s a good one where you see, they just start putting out random stuff.
Maybe it’s not on brand. They don’t have their like a good mess, like messaging. Talk a little bit about the messaging side. Cause all the things that you’re mentioning your platform, of course, Makes it very simple for people to get into the media and to get a different you know, articles done, press releases, other things, but talk a little bit about the content side of what they should put in these articles or in these press releases or, or media pieces.
Cause now they’re going to, unlike writing a blog or something that might maybe if they have a small website, doesn’t get much reach, now they’ll be putting stuff in the media like it’s a different, like there’s more people that are going to be watching this. So talk a little bit about the messaging.
Messaging is people, like I told in the beginning, people like to talk to people and people like to see the people behind the brand. That’s why make it as personal as you can get. But don’t just show the thing you ate for breakfast. Show something useful for that. You can make a picture of what you have on your table and say how they can benefit from that show your expertise for the things people like this behind the scenes approach, you know, this featurette and other things people like to see how what’s going on behind the scene, how it was done.
So create this cases with other, with your customers, with your clients, with everyone and share how you achieved their, their goals. What about for the media side, like the articles, like for whether it’s what, like the articles that they’re placing, especially in like larger publications. What about the messaging there?
It depends on the publication, if you, you have to understand when, if there is like a big publication with a big audience, you have to understand that it will be hard to get the right people to read this article. For example, when people publish something on Yahoo, definitely hard to find the Perfect ICPs for, and readers for this, this article.
That’s why you usually do that, I don’t know, for featured on section on your website on a landing page, that you are featured on, I don’t know, on Forbes or Yahoo Finance or somewhere else. That’s why if you want definitely people to read your story, to read your example, to read your case, you have to go to the niche publications and to the trade publications.
May have 1, 000 subscribers, but people read everything that is published there. And to find the genuine masterpieces nice websites in your niche, or niche you can represent it, it is a nice thing. In this case if you don’t know where to find these things, try to Google your competitors and to pick up their websites they are already published in.
Maybe they will pick up your story too. Yeah, that’s a good idea. I like that, to look at your niche and look at even the main thing is there’s different reasons, and I see the way that your site’s left laid out too, so some of the reasons, it could be for brand awareness, it could be for traffic, it could be for, there’s a number of reasons why you may do an article, right?
You may be doing it to co brand or you want, you want a certain brand like Forbes or something else on your, you know, to be published in that so there’s different reasons Two to do it for branding versus traffic. Maybe, maybe talk a little bit about that. Like some of the reasons. Yeah, one of the, like, the main reason is to bring information about yourself to the public.
To present yourself, that you have updated your product or you just introduced new product into the market. Another thing, if how people use our platform. Is they want to be presented on a new markets, for example, you go to the conference in Las Vegas, like in your case, but there is nothing in the local media about my company there.
So if I go to the conference in Las Vegas, I will definitely will publish something about in the local business publications about that. There will be. I don’t know, some event and PR news will be presented with a booth at this event. Please come and check and do that as much as I can. Also, another thing that people use it is people use it for SEO purposes.
So they publish articles with the backlinks to their websites and it will also increase their popularity of your website on Google. When people will search for some keyword, they will, your website will appear. With that, another thing, if you want to sell something, you can create this large, I don’t know article or listicle about if you, I don’t know, run an e commerce website there is Valentine’s day.
So you have to prepare an article about the best presence to your best half to put your product in this list. So it will bring the traffic to your website and bring the sales to your website. Yeah, it’s great. Alex, man, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show today. And I learned a lot.
I hope my audience did as well. If somebody would like to follow up and to connect and to learn more about your PR services, how do they do that? Reach out to me on LinkedIn, or if you want to learn more, or you can just go to prnews. io, our cost effective content marketing platform. Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you can just head on right on over to prnews.
io. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Alex, again, appreciate all you do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Adam, for having me. Congrats.