I've known 😉 Mark Schaefer for well over a decade. We met in the early days of the entrepreneurship boom in our city. Mark is not only a friend, but he has also been an advisor of mine. For example, when I was launching GoGrabLunch in 2010, Mark was a source of advice for marketing the idea.

I recently decided to revisit Mark's book, Known, after pinging him for some personal branding advice.

This time around I decided to take notes. So, I thought I'd share them with you. Enjoy.

P.S. If you want to read the book yourself, I recommend it, obviously, you can support Mark ​here​.

🔍 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Becoming known in your industry can unlock a lot of opportunities
2. The key to becoming known is finding your sustainable interest, finding an uncontested space, determining the right channels of distributing your content, and then being consistent.
3. It will take a lot of focus to become known. So, the timing may not be right for you or you may not want to be known because of all that comes with it.

💭 Impressions

It was great to read the book again after all these years. One thing that stood out to me is that I am known for a few things, but they aren’t things that I want to build a brand around. So, I will have to work hard to become known for those things.

Why I choose this book

I’ve struggled with my personal brand for nearly a decade. Because of my eclectic background and a lack of committing, I’ve played around for multiple versions of what my brand should be. So, I decided to read the book again, years after my first pass through. Also, I know the author personally. He lives in my hometown and we try to get together annually, usually at Christmas, for lunch.

👨‍🎓 What the book taught me

💡 Find your sustainable interest and then look for places to share your experience where their are gaps in competition.

🎙️ My Top Quotes

• Sometimes life gets in the way and the best you can do is deal with it in an unremarkable, yet heroic, manner.” This was in reference to the idea that you have to sacrifice everything to build a brand.
• “He said a great speech isn’t a classroom lesson, it’s a performance.”

📒 Summary + Notes

I listened to the first chapter or so on a long car ride.

I picked up reading the book, and taking notes, at Chapter 3, on page 49.

Chapter 3 - Finding Your Sustainable Interest

Exercise 1: “Only I” - answer what it is about you that is unique compared to most other people.

My answer: Only I have my depth of experience around multiple business topics. Specifically my 20+ years in finance and 8+ years in product management, both at an executive level, and with solid results ($800M in funding and $300M in product launches).

One way to answer this question is to focus on the types of things people ask for your advice on.

My answer - people call me about Finance related topics (funding a business through debt or equity and money management).

Ann Handley calls this your rich thing.

You should become obsessed with your “rich thing.”

This Only I exercise isn’t about a job title or even a description of the type of work you like to do. For example, with funding for startups, I don’t help them obtain funding, I help them find the capital they need to grow their business. With personal finance, I don’t help people prepare for retirement, I help them have a stress-free relationship with money.

Mark doesn’t suggest asking your friends for advice on your Only I. Because most people’s friends don’t know them in a professional setting.

Exercise 2: The 2x2 - use a 2x2 matrix to find gaps in the market you can fill

Determine the two most important factors for prospects in your market.

Chart your competition across that matrix to find areas of opportunity and/or low saturation. ‘

Exercise 3: The Core Values Mash-up

Combine a core value with your primary interest or passion.

Ex. Combining a food blog with humor.

Exercise 4: Strengths Finder

The Gallup Company created this to help you find what makes you stand out.

You can find it at https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx or you can try the shortened version that reveals your top five strengths at https://store.gallup.com/p/en-us/10108/cliftonstrengths-top-5?c=1

Exercise 5: The beautiful questions

1. What is your tennis ball? Translated - what is the problem you are obsessed with solving.
   1. For me - its freeing people from feeling trapped by poor monetary decisions that keep them in jobs they hate.
2. What am I doing when I feel most alive?
   1. Helping people with life design issues. Usually they know what they want to do, but they feel like they can’t pursue it because they have to make a living and they have debt weighing them down.
3. What is something you believe that almost nobody agrees with?
   1. That network marketing businesses can be legitimately run and when they are they are the most powerful business engine for your average person as compared to spending thousands on a business or years on a startup.
      1. See b.i. below.
   2. That life is not meant to be this constant droning on of waking up, working, staring at the screen, sleeping, and then rinse and repeat.
      1. I can do this through an advisory business by helping people take charge of their $ and start their own business.
   3. That people are meant to work, but not under the definition that we are currently using.
      1. See b.i. above.
4. What are you willing to try now? What things are you willing to experiment with, rather than read about, to discover if they are right for you to build a brand upon.
   1. What would happen if I followed the WFG model to the T?
5. What’s your sentence? This is your tagline and similar to your Only I.
   1. I help founders attract and grow capital.
   2. I help people design their life by breaking free of monetary limitations.
   3. I help people design their work around their life, rather than their life around their work.
   4. I help people Escape the Hamster Wheel of Life.

Exercise 6: Visualize your future

What does life look like in two years?

My answer - my own business is kicking off six-figures. I am interacting with more people again, but not to the point it is taking up all of my free-time. I have found a group of men to be around (is this the Limitless men + Jason and Roby + a church men’s group?). Pamela is working with me on the business.

Exercise 7: The 35 headlines

List 35 topics you’d cover in your content. This will help you understand the types of problems you like to solve and/or questions you like to answer. It also helps you see if your topic of interest is big enough o be sustainable.

Don’t obsess over these exercises. While you may find some answers in them, it is likely that eventually your interests, passions, and/or brand will evolve. The more content you produce the drawn to your sustainable interest you will find yourself. Also, watch for what content resonates the most with your audience.

Chapter 4 - Step Two: Determining Your Space

Look for uncontested spaces where you can place content.

Consider areas where you can have first-mover advantage

My own input on that - you can be too early. With GoGrabLunch, in 2010, we were the first networking site that thought to turn online connections into offline connections. The cost of educating the market on why that made since, back then, was almost too large to work through.

Failing to find a meaningful, uncontested space is the primary reason people fail in their effort to become known.

A few questions to ask:

• Is your space big enough?
• Is it oversaturated already?

Assessing your niche

Google your sustainable interest and see how much content already exists in this space.

< 500,000 hits is too small; >1M hits is too much

Its sounds like a sweat spot is between 500k-1M

Also use Google Trends to see if the topic is gaining popularity or declining.

A great combination is not a lot of current traffic but trending upwards.

My personal results

Financial planning for startup founders - 26M hits, ouch; 0 on trends

As I thought about this, and thought about my comments above about life design, I realized I could combine financial planning + life planning. Very few advisors touch on this at all. I could also have a career planning component.

Chapter 5 - Eight Space Strategies

1. Develop a unique tone or point of view
   1. That tone should be natural to who you are. Don’t force it.
   2. My response - I could easily use what I said above, about freeing people from feeling trapped in careers because of money decisions.
2. Move to a new social platform within your niche
   1. Review where your top competitors are publishing online and go to different areas.
3. Dominate a content type
   1. Consider three types of content (found by YouTube to be top performers)
      1. Hygiene - serves the health of your audience. Ex. How-to guides.
      2. Hub - content that keeps your audiences interest, even to a point they binge your content. Ex. Sharing secrets of your industry.
      3. Hero - brilliant, dramatic, bold content. Ex. A day in the life.
4. Try a new content form - if text if the normal content type in your space, could video work for you, and vice versa.
5. Focus on frequency - this could be posting more often than your competition or less often but with higher quality and quantity.
6. Find a unique demographic or geographic niche
   1. Geographic - could you focus on local or regional content
7. Connect with industry influencers - leverage the distribution of others by interacting with them and adding a ton of value.
8. Use curation as a niche - pull together other people resources and share them as a way to grow an audience.

Chapter 6 - Step Three: Finding Your Fuel

There are four main types of content for which one can become known:

1. Written - like a blog
2. Audio - like a podcast
3. Video - like YouTube, Instagram, etc.
4. Visual - infographics, photographs

Choose one of those forms of content and stick with it for a while.

Resist the temptation to do everything, everywhere.

To pick the right content to focus on consider:

1. Where are their open spaces?
2. What type of content to you enjoy making?
3. Match the content to your personality type.

Three rules for creating effective content:

1. Add your own story.

Try not to publish content that can be created by someone else.

2. Start with answers and end with insights.

AnswerThePublic.com is a great resource for learning what questions people are asking about your topic of choice.

3. use the RITE method

Relevant, Interesting, Timely, Entertaining

Chapter 7 - Step Four: Creating an Actionable Audience

Myth #1 - you don’t need a huge audience. You need the right audience.

Myth #2 - audience = power. Having a large audience doesn’t mean that they will get behind sharing and interacting with your content.

The key to having an actionable audience, one that will share your content, is building an emotional connection with them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics can help your content become more discoverable.

Social media platforms are a great way to give your audience an inside look at you as a person and to build an emotional connection.

Guest posts on other newsletters or blogs can be a good way to build an audience that you might not normally reach with your content.

Turn weak connections to deeper ones by networking, in-person and virtually,with your audience, when appropriate.

Consider leveraging influencers, when it makes sense.

Chapter 8 - Taking Your Brand to the Next Level

Writing a book is a good way to build authority.

Five reasons to write a book:

• Credibility
• High visibility
• Forging expertise
• Helping people find you
• New income source - but not from the book

He list reasons not to write a book including the sheer amount of investment in your energy and time it requires.

He also dispels the myth that books are often great revenue streams, but compared to the time investment he says they likely aren’t in a direct sense.

Instead, books can help create revenue through consulting services, speaking engagements, selling products, creating mastermind groups, and client access.

The average book is 60,000 words.

One tip is to record a 45-minute speech and have it transcribed.

Test ideas for books through other content first, like a blog post.

Mark appears to favor self-publishing because there are plenty of resources, ex. freelancers, that can provide the services a publisher offers.

Public speaking is also a good way to build authority.

A good speech structure:

• State the goal of the audience
• State the problem they are experiencing
• Share your idea
• Change - what can the audience do
• Action - actionable steps to follow

You are not a speaker, or writer, you are an entertainer.

Chapter 9 - Five Inspiring Stories of Known

Pete Matthew

• Used videos and a podcast to become known in the financial services space.
• He stood out by making things easy to understand.

Zander Zon

• Used YouTube to display his bass guitar skills.

Neale Godfrey

• The financial voice for Baby Boomers
• She even bought a small publishing firm to publish her first book because no one else would.

Felix Kjellberg “PewDiePie”

• Now famous YouTube gaming streamer.
• Mark says his special power is in all the commentary PewDiePie adds to his stream.

Jennifer James

• She already had a successful, 18,000, blog for moms.
• She decided to leverage her platform for good and got her community to support her efforts around global poverty and hunger.

Chapter 10 - Pivots and Grits

Mark’s recommendations for the amount of activity required to build a brand include:

• 3 hours/week creating content
• 1 hour/week promoting your content
• 1 hour/week engaging with your audience

This chapter is all about realizing that there is no perfect path to being known, and that being known is not always right for every person. Some choose not to be known, or the timing of being known isn’t right for them.

If you love what your doing but don’t see momentum after a year, its time to adjust one of the four elements: place, space, consistent content, or audience.

Chapter 11 - The Care and Nurturing of KNOWN

Consistency is the bedrock of being known.

There is no magic amount that works best. The key is always being in a content creation mindset.

If you’ve found this information helpful, I hope you’ll do two things for me.

1) Subscribe to this newsletter. That way, new copies are delivered directly to your inbox.

2) Share this newsletter with one other person that you think might benefit from the information I share.