Have you ever wondered why your product or service didn’t get much traction on social media even though you post all the time? According to Michelle Knight, it’s all about your personal brand (or lack thereof). Maybe you’ve heard the term before, but what does “personal brand” really mean? Luckily, Michelle has us covered! She’ll tell us all about why you need a personal brand and how to craft one. In Build Something More, we talk Star Wars in the pre-show and social media dos/don’ts, traveling, and schooling in the post-show. This has been one of my favorite conversations so far this year!



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Joe:Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about theBuild Something Weeklynewsletter. It is weekly, it is free, and you will get tips, tricks, and tools delivered directly to your mailbox. I will recap the current week’s episode and all of the takeaways, I’ll give you a top story, content I wrote, and then some recommendations that I’ve been using that I think you should check out. So it is free, it is a weekly, it’s over at howibuilt.it/subscribe. Go ahead and sign up over athowibuilt.it/subscribe.


Intro:Hey, everybody, and welcome to Episode 210 of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, How did you build that? Today’s sponsors areMindsize,Restrict Content Pro, andTextExpander, who you will be hearing about later on in the show. Now, if you are aBuild Something Clubmember, if you’re subscribed to Build Something More but you happen to be picking up the normal feed, definitely get the Build Something More feed because we, Michelle and I, had a fantastic pre-show conversation, which is a show first. I’m sending out the pre-show because it was really good. Speaking of, my guest is Michelle Knight. She is the personal branding and marketing strategist over atBrandmerry. Michelle, how are you today?


Michelle Knight:Oh, great. Thanks for having me. Loved our little pre-show chat.


Joe: Likewise. Likewise. Thanks for joining me on the show here. Thanks for joining us. It was a lot of fun and nerd culture and WandaVision. First of all, if you’re not watching WandaVision, you should watch WandaVision. I guess by the time this comes out, we will actually be behind. So, if you haven’t seen it, spoiler alert. But if you’re all caught up, you know, don’t tell past us what happened. That’s what we’re talking about today.


We’re talking today about how to market your business without relying on social media, which I’m really excited about. I was looking at your website, again, personal branding consultant. I think this is a really good topic to talk about because I feel like I was telling my students about this like 10 years ago. I was teaching at the college level, college freshmen a computer literacy course, and I’m like, “You need to have a personal brand.” And they’re like, “Who cares?” But now fast forward to 2021, I feel like that’s even more important. So before we dive into the kind of social media stuff, I suspect having a strong personal brand will help with that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what you do there?


Michelle Knight:Yeah, absolutely. I founded my companyBrandmerryright after my son was born in 2016 out of just the need to be home, to just not want to commute to work anymore. I had a background in PR, background in communications and I dove headfirst into creating my online business with really kind of wearing this coach consultant hat. I struggled a lot. I had no idea what I was doing. I felt like I was mimicking everybody else. I spent months creating a website that then didn’t look like or sound like me, which is highly relatable to a lot of people.


About nine months into it, when I was planning on leaving my nine to five, I was like, “Something needs to shift.” So I started to do more and more research outside as well as some internal research to figure out who I was and what I really wanted to build a brand around. And everything really