Unlocking the Power of Personal Branding: An Extensive Guide Inspired by Jens Heitland’s EIA Porto Workshop
Personal branding is no longer simply a career asset or a buzzword tossed about in digital marketing circles. In today's hyperconnected world, your personal brand is the sum total of how you are seen, remembered, and engaged with by anyone who encounters you, online or offline. Whether you are building a business, leading teams, seeking a new job, or growing an audience, understanding and actively shaping your personal brand can be transformative. This comprehensive guide draws extensively from Jens Heitland’s workshop at EIA Porto 2025, revealing not only a philosophy but a concrete, step-by-step system for building, nurturing, and leveraging your personal brand for a lifetime of opportunity and impact.
1: Redefining Personal Branding—It Begins With You
At the outset of the workshop, Jens offered the reassurance and the challenge found in authenticity. Everyone in the room already had a personal brand, whether carefully constructed or simply left to emerge by chance. The question is not whether you have a personal brand, but whether you are in the driver’s seat.
Personal branding, Jens pointed out, does not mean inventing a fake persona or chasing internet stardom for its own sake. It is about learning to be powerfully and consistently yourself and then using that self-presentation as a lever for your chosen goals. The real opportunity is to show up as your best self, again and again, in every aspect of your life, with intention.
Jens’s own background as an organizer, thought leader, and passionate connector of people set the tone for the session. He reminded everyone that every opinion about personal branding is valid—what matters most is how you adapt wisely to your unique goals.
2: Influencers, Thought Leaders, and the Value of Impact Over Attention
A key distinction surfaced early: the difference between influencer strategy and thought leadership strategy. Influencers often chase clicks and likes, and while this can bring short-term attention, it rarely results in meaningful long-term respect or opportunity. Jens noted how even a video of him singing with his daughter would likely generate plenty of digital engagement but offer little real-world impact among his core audience.
By contrast, what Jens strives for—and what he recommends to others—is to attract clients, collaborators, and community members who care about positive impact. Drawing in people ready to invest in building schools, nurturing innovation, or leading teams for good means setting different goals and using different signals. The key performance indicator shifts from likes to lasting effect.
3: The Visibility and Credibility Equation
Jens’s oft-repeated formula is simple but fundamental: credibility multiplied by visibility equals opportunity. He illustrated how influencers may have high visibility but sometimes lack the credibility needed for serious trust or leadership. Many others are highly credible but nearly invisible beyond their closest circles and miss out on opportunities as a result.
The journey, then, is for each person to locate themselves on this grid. Are you credible, but not visible? Visible, but not credible? Recognizing your current position shapes the actions to follow: increase the missing factor to unlock fresh openings in your life and work.
4: Exercise—The Power of Looking Yourself Up
Early in the workshop, attendees were challenged to search for themselves online—first using Google, then within generative AI tools. The search results offer a window into personal branding as the rest of the world already sees it. Are you easy to find? Do credible articles, social accounts, or your own website appear? Is there confusion with people of the same name or disappointing silence? If the internet cannot reliably locate you, neither can opportunity.
What emerges from this exercise is the importance of owning your narrative. As Jens shared, your digital presence will exist whether you curate it or not. By creating and regularly maintaining your own personal website, securing your domain, and feeding the digital ecosystem with purposeful content, you ensure that your story dominates over time.
5: The Hub—Your Website as the Anchor of Your Brand
In Jens’s system, the centerpiece is not a social profile, but a personal website. Social media comes and goes by platform trends and algorithm updates, but your own website is fully under your control. This digital hub becomes the ultimate reference for anyone looking for you, AI, recruiters, collaborators, and future clients alike.
Jens advocates for establishing a personal website as early as possible—even purchasing domains for young loved ones—because ownership provides long-term leverage. Everything else should point there: thought leadership content, podcasts, achievements, contact forms, and more.
He recommended several essential pages for a personal site:
A homepage that quickly communicates your mission or why.
A detailed story or about page tracing your journey and motivations.
A blog or content section featuring your best insights, learnings, and media.
Dedicated sections for contact, speaking, and all key links—making it easy for any interested visitor to take their next step.
Jens’s own journey demonstrates how this hub not only secures your story against misrepresentation but allows steady organic growth, drawing tens of thousands of visitors over time.
6: Uncovering Your Superpower—The First Step to Authentic Branding
One of the most interactive portions of the workshop involved uncovering each attendee’s unique superpower. This is not about crafting a glamorous job title, but about reflecting honestly on what you consistently and naturally excel at.
Tracing your timeline from childhood—identifying recurring interests, behaviors, and roles—helps reveal inherent strengths. For Jens, the pattern was clear: from organizing playground football games in elementary school to convening global endurance events, the theme was always connection and leadership.
Workshop exercises encouraged all participants to list activities and behaviors they are proud of, seek the underlying theme, and then attempt to distill those into an overarching personal attribute. Recognizing this core superpower is foundational to authentic personal branding, job interviews, and personal fulfillment.
7: Getting to the Core—Values and Purpose
Personal branding without values is a shallow exercise. Taking the time to identify what you value in others and in yourself uncovers the principles that should guide your actions online and offline. Participants listed reliability, honesty, respect, creativity, loyalty, ambition, kindness, and curiosity—admittedly, many had never articulated these before.
Building your brand on moves that honor these values makes for a sustainable and trustworthy reputation. Jens pointed out that while values may evolve a little over a lifetime, most remain remarkably consistent for leaders and high performers.
He also introduced Simon Sinek’s concept of starting with your "Why." Purpose is at the apex of your brand. Why do you get up each day? What lasting change do you hope to make? Even if these answers are tentative, beginning the exploration ignites deeper passion and meaningful direction.
8: Storytelling—The Engine of Memorable Branding
Jens’s own story—spanning construction sites, innovation roles, and entrepreneurship—showed how origins and turning points can be transformed into compelling personal narratives. Invoking the tried-and-true Hollywood framework, he explained how to shape personal stories in ways that forge emotional bonds, drive home lessons, and make the teller unforgettable.
He encouraged everyone, whether for job interviews or public speaking, to practice telling their origin stories in brief and longer forms. Use relevant hurdles, learning moments, and aspirations to forge a relatable narrative. With repeated telling and refinement, your story becomes a powerful vehicle for attracting allies and opportunities.
9: Brand Pillars—The Architecture of Consistency
Every successful brand rests on a set of recurring themes or "pillars." Rather than producing scattered, unfocused content, select a handful of key topics that repeatedly showcase your expertise. These might include your business specialties, deep-seated passions, or extracurricular interests. For Jens, the blend included leadership, thought leadership, sales, and endurance events. For you, it may be product design, sustainability, creativity, or teaching.
Mapping out your pillars allows you to develop content calendars, rotate topics for freshness, and ensure audiences know what you stand for.
10: Systemized Content Creation—The Multiplying Effect
Content production need not be a chaotic or overwhelming task. Jens revealed his approach to maximizing reach and efficiency—beginning with cornerstone content such as a long-form video podcast. From one recording session, you can extract transcript-based blog posts, short-form social clips, video snippets, and quote images, distributing them across platforms at planned intervals.
He encouraged attendees to batch-produce content, sometimes recording dozens of pieces in one go, and to use content scheduling tools for regular visibility. Whether you are a full-time creator or simply interested in building your professional presence, such systems enable continued growth without burnout.
Participants discussed the importance of emotional connection—why video so often outperforms text in relatability—and suggested tools for creating impactful clips from longer works. Jens’s rule: Post consistently, even daily if possible, to build momentum. Average weekly reach almost always beats sporadic bursts, and you will refine your craft as you go.
11: Personal Brand Versus Business Brand
Jens strongly advised that your personal brand and your business brand remain distinct, though connected. If your business is ever sold or sunsets, your personal reputation and digital hub will persist. This dual-track approach provides both resilience and the ability to pivot or scale with changing opportunities.
Even if your business is highly personal, as with creators or educators, Jens advocates for thoughtful clarity about which voice governs which message, and recommends always maintaining a personal web presence distinct from the business site.
12: Mastering LinkedIn and Public Profiles
Time was devoted to tactical branding on social platforms, especially LinkedIn—a primary site for professional visibility, credibility, and discovery. Key steps:
Use a clear, high-resolution face photo.
Create a custom banner image that immediately signals your core value proposition.
Write your headline for clarity about your target audience and core offerings.
Draft an About section that weaves your personal story and aspiration.
Keep skills and roles current and focused, avoiding clutter.
Collect recommendations regularly—every few months—to reinforce credibility.
For every role or job, highlight not just tasks but unique learnings and achievements.
Regularly publish or engage, remembering it is about consistency, not viral hits.
13: Audience Engagement, Criticism, and Emotional Resilience
Sharing yourself publicly means confronting negative feedback and learning not to be deterred by judgment. Jens was direct: “Give a fuck, but only about the right things.” As digital presence grows, some criticism is inevitable, but it need not derail your journey. Instead, focus feedback through your values, your purpose, and your intent. Thoughtful critique from trusted peers can help you grow, but random negativity deserves no space in your self-image.
14: Overcoming the Fear of Starting—Action Fuels Growth
A core insight is the value of “just starting.” From daily vlogs to imperfect first posts or podcasts, putting yourself out there builds your skill, confidence, and audience over time. Many successful personal brands simply endured longer, posted more, or outlasted competitors who quit too early.
If you are new to video or afraid to be seen, begin with private practice, then share in supportive communities, then expand. Documenting your journey, even the awkward parts, helps others relate and encourages your growth.
15: Name Challenges, Market Saturation, and SEO Reality
Address the reality that you may share your name with many others—or face strong legacy brands in your space. This is where consistency and volume matter: over months of regular content—on your site and social platforms—search engines and AI will begin to associate your chosen name with your story. The more unique identifiers you can consistently use (middle initials, photo, topic specificity), the faster you will rise in results for your own name.
Past participants have found creative ways to stand out, such as including a unique middle initial, consistently using a longer version of their name, or steadily owning a niche topic.
16: Final Questions and The Long Game of Personal Branding
The final moments of the workshop reinforced that personal branding is a marathon, not a sprint. As you grow, your brand will evolve. But with the right systems—clear superpowers, values, origin stories, pillars, and content calendars—you can make your digital presence an accelerating asset. Establish rhythms for reviews, recommendations, and goal setting.
Whether you are a student, entrepreneur, CEO, or creative, this system helps you control your story, attract the right people, and open doors you never imagined.
Own Your Narrative, Shape Your Opportunities
Personal branding is not about becoming someone you are not, chasing clout, or seeking shallow validation. It is about deepening your self-awareness, clarifying your purpose, and sharing your unique gifts and journey with the world. When done with integrity and intent, personal branding becomes a vehicle for lasting opportunity, meaningful impact, and personal satisfaction.
Begin today. Own your domain. Tell your story. Live your values. Share your lessons. The world is waiting to discover the real you.
Links:
Full Presentation
Vision, Mission, and Story cheat sheet:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11RFOIH3NkYxfaeGo7ZN-DHMCo2NQayH6bzTAWSgWGpE/edit?usp=sharing
24 The Planet
Rising Stars Community
https://risingstars.community/
Heitland Media Group
Transcript:
Jens Heitland: [00:00:00] Personal branding. Let's start with this. I mean, most of you have heard about me until now, so I will not go into all the details. Three things that I'm, I'm doing, um, I'm organizer of 20 for the Planet, which is a fundraiser for a good cause, and I'm the organizer of Germany. So I, I was just doing a 24 hour walk in Germany a couple of months ago.
If you're interested in 24, the planet that goes around the world, uh, I have zero profit from this. I have no affiliation to that, but it's an interesting organization that pushes people beyond the boundaries and does that with a good cause in mind, rising stars. So we will see that on the slides. I have a personal branding thought leadership community with 600 something people.
Um, everything for free never going to be paid. You are welcome to check that out because there is like, I don't know, hundreds of videos of me explaining this. [00:01:00] In different ways. Um, and that's my company. If you, if you know a CEO that needs personal branding support, you are welcome to send them my way. Or whenever you are CEO later, you are welcome to contact me as well.
So that's the only promotion I do. And we go through all of this. So we talk about a systematic way of personal branding. I'm German, my brain is an Excel table. So for me, everything that has not a systematic way that I know that's going to work, I'm not doing it. So I'm telling you things that I have done the last couple of years that are working.
There are hundreds of thousands of ways of explaining this. And there are a lot of opinions about personal branding. They're all valid. It's, it's always about how you utilize that for yourself and what your goal is. So there's nothing wrong. As well in the other topics, I'm just showing you what has worked and what is working [00:02:00] for top CEOs in the world.
So we look into how you build a personal brand. We look into how you build a hub. I will tell you later what that is. We look how you can create content. We look in how you can distribute content, and as part of that, we, I put that into the end. Like in YouTube videos, uh, if you stay until the end, we'll do a LinkedIn profile pimp up.
So either we choose one of you and we do this live, or we use my profile where I can show you how you can pimp up your profile on LinkedIn to be like, either get more clients if you have a business, uh, helping you with your career and so on. And then a couple of strategies, how you can utilize that for business and career in the end.
And you're welcome to ask questions. This is kind of a workshop. I know it's pretty, uh. Narrow here. So we don't have too much space to do real workshop style. And normally that takes two days. [00:03:00] So I'm doing this normally for two days. So I will pack a little bit more into me talking, and then we do exercises in between.
But questions are welcome. Discussions are welcome. There are no stupid questions. So before we start,
Speaker 1: who is this? Who is this?
Christie Lagar. Yes. Who is this? Who is
Speaker 2: this? Mr.
Speaker 1: Who is this
good?
Jens Heitland: Ooh. The most difficult.
No, it doesn't work. It's not an iPad. It seems like a runner [00:04:00] person. Most successful ultra distance runner in the world.
The fun thing, she has more than, I don't know, 5 million followers and you have never heard about her. It doesn't matter. So what they all have in common, maybe not every single person, but they're all visible in the internet. They have all a very unique personal brand that some of them, you di directly shout out who that person is.
Like literally we have how many billion people on, on the planet, 8 billion something. And you know who this person is. You, you just see a picture of that person and you know the person and you associate that person with something. So if you, if we, let's do a fun one. What do you associate with that person?
Innovation.[00:05:00]
Yeah. I know there are a couple of political tensions and, and that, but in the end, you, you know, the person and you associate that person with something and with the others as well. If we take Mr. Beast, do you know Mr. Beast YouTube? Exactly. Number one. YouTuber in the world. So you associate him with YouTube, with what he does.
And the cool thing is if we take this gentleman, Jim Quick, he talks about how you use your brain and teaches since, I don't know, I know him since more than 10 years. Amazing guy. Super, super, super deep nerd when it comes to the brain and the development and how you use your brain and you have never heard about him.
You good? He has more than a couple of million followers too. And it's not about the followers, but it is about that there is a person [00:06:00] that you know and you will remember. 'cause it doesn't matter what happens with Elon in the next five years, you will still remember him. And that's going back to my keynote from from Sunday.
You can do whatever you want to. I didn't put real influencers on this because I'm not a fan of a influencer strategy before we go into the rest. So the difference between influencer strategy and I call it thought leadership strategy. Influencers put things out to get the most possible clicks, the most possible likes, or just giving the example before with, with a small group here, if I put on LinkedIn a video where I am singing with my daughter, seven years old.
I will get a lot of likes, but my key PI for my personal brand is impact to my clients. [00:07:00] I'm working with CEOs and I'm only working with CEOs that do amazing impact in the world. So it's not elo? No, not talking about it's, it's, it's, for example, I'll give you an example. We work with A CEO that is building schools personally investing all his personal money into building schools in countries that cannot afford a school.
These are people I work with, so my key PI is how do I attract this type of person into my ecosystem? Get money to help them to create the impact. That's the difference between thought leadership, which is. I want to make an impact in this world to influencer, not, not, it's not bad, but it's just a different strategy.
So me, again, singing with my daughter gets a lot of likes, but doesn't bring impact in this world. It's just like keeping you scrolling on TikTok. [00:08:00] So why personal branding? The best thing about personal branding is that you don't need to do anything than being yourself. Every one of you has a personal brand right now.
You might not like it, you might not utilize it, but you have a personal brand. Everyone. If you, if we take your teams, the, the teams of five, you know, already kind of what the other people are about, that's their personal brand. The way you show up every day, that's your personal brand. We often think about it only in the internet and in social media, but you have a personal brand.
In the real life as well, in physical life. I mean,
and that's, that's the biggest opportunity you have. I was sharing that before as well. I wish I would have started in your age with putting myself out there, [00:09:00] challenging myself to go into the internet, talk about what I believe and help people to understand my way of thinking. Because over time, what is interesting, one thing is you will understand what you are about.
'cause in the beginning I have had no idea. I just did a daily block on LinkedIn. You can still find that on YouTube. Um, I was just talking about random stuff. And the cool thing was because I did videos, I learned how to talk on videos. I learned how do you, how, how articulate, how do I articulate myself?
And that helped me to shape myself and the way how I communicate. So personal branding is the biggest differentiator that you have in your whole career because you are going to be you whenever you do something. And as more you show up as yourself, as more people [00:10:00] will be attracted to you because people like you as you are.
If not, then it's the wrong people. It's not that you are wrong, then you're in the wrong circle. And that's, I believe, very important for, for young students. Question, sorry. I saw, saw an idea that you should pause this like kind of next step of what you want to be. So if you want to be kind next person that goes into strategy.
Yes, that's possible. If you want, let's take this quickly. So if you want to make a career in a, in a large organization like I did, it's very simple. So you have a manager and you focus on the person above that manager, not on your manager. Yes, you need to take care of your manager, but you focus on the manager above.
If you do social media, you can do the same like you project yourself, how you dress, how you speak one level up. That's kind of one strategy, but do that so that it is you not [00:11:00] kind of playing a game or playing a role. So I use this formula a lot. So credibility times visibility equals opportunity. Let's go back to influencers.
They have a lot of visibility. Would you ask them to be the CEO of your company?
Maybe not. Never, but most probably not. And then there are a lot of people, like most probably 80, 90% here in the room. You have a lot of credibility, like, you know, things. You know what you talk about. And that can be, Hey, I'm, I'm, I'm having a hobby. I'm a runner. I do this. And I know really a lot about that.
So you have the credibility from the people that you are connected to, but you have no visibility. So if you want to create impact in this world, you need to move your, uh, visibility up. And if, if you're more [00:12:00] here, if you're more visible than credible, then you need to move your credibility up because still credibility times zero is, you know, the other way around.
The same,
you're almost done with the theory. Social proof. Let's do a fun thing. You go into your favorite, every one of you has a phone, I guess go into your favorite, um, search engine, put in your name. And enter
Speaker 3: full name, right?
Jens Heitland: Yeah. First name, last name. Enter nothing else. If you want to be really good, then you, you open an incognito window, but it's okay if you just do the normal one.
Any one already done? Yes. What comes up?
Speaker 4: My
Jens Heitland: photos [00:13:00] now. Your photos good. Embarrassing photos or photos you would like people to see? I don't mind them. Good. No. My LinkedIn profile comes first. LinkedIn
Speaker 1: profile. LinkedIn
cv? Yeah. How did you do that?
Ah, okay.
Jens Heitland: Let, let's keep one discussion. Sorry. So in my hometown, that's a pretty weird competition. He has exactly the same name as I. Okay. What, what could you have? We, we get to that. That's a good, good, bad example. So some of you have found yourself very good, which means if, let's say, if I want to hire you, what do I do?
Google. You. I will. I will Google you. I will use LinkedIn. [00:14:00] If I cannot find you, I cannot dig deeper into you. So let's do the same thing with ai. You most probably every one of you, is using one of the many AI tools. Put your name in. My name in ai? Yeah. What do I ask? Who the person is? Or just, just your name.
You can ask who is first name, last name.
Speaker 5: Well then what if you already like provided the AI with information about yourself? Know who you are,
Jens Heitland: use talent, then use a different ai. I mean, if you have memory function, obviously then, then it's cheating.
So what comes up? A summary of
Speaker 2: what I've done
Jens Heitland: article, what, what, what are from articles. So let, let's have one, one conversation here. So tell, tell, tell the rest what con
Speaker 6: I got a summary from what I've done, [00:15:00] um, from
Jens Heitland: articles that were written. Articles. What, what kind of articles? It's from like, volunteering, rotary International.
Good example. So if I search her name articles come up that have been published in the internet about her volunteering, which means if I'm the employer, if I'm, I'm, I'm, let's say she has a CEO business later on and, and. She's running a business and I look her up, that comes up, which gives me credibility to her.
Anyone else? Same ish. Same ish? Yeah. Also articles. Uh, yeah. About education specifically. Good. So that means you have published something or some, someone to her case where it has been published about. Okay, good. Let's take a mail. Sorry, I got nothing. Not at all. Like, like empty or is it, [00:16:00] what does it say?
Speaker 3: I couldn't find any notable person.
May.
Jens Heitland: Okay. Good example. I basically scrap my LinkedIn profile, but picked the photo of some different guy, like just somebody. Okay. Let, let's, let's, let's use my name yz. He, I don't have it. It's here, but it's very small.
H-E-I-T-L-A-N-D.[00:17:00]
Good. Okay. Does anyone have have my profile or found me? Let's, let's use someone else from this side. Sorry, I didn't find you, you didn't find me. Which, which tool did you use? It find the, uh, an an actor and the psychologist. Are you writing my name properly? Yes.
Ah, okay. So I'm not an actor only sometimes. So what, tell, tell me what, what you find about me.
Speaker 6: Innovation, leadership, strategy. Um, he is recognized for his experience in innovation and his focus on human approaches to leadership and organizational transformation. And then about the career hero?
Jens Heitland: Yeah. What are, what is the source of that? Just, just give a little bit your [00:18:00] website mostly. Um, then scam speakers.
Premium speakers, like websites. We talk about your business. Hyper media group. We're succeed and be too match and investing in Africa. So just, just to repeat that, the number one source of what you read about me is my. My personal website, y hyland.com. That's why I had it on Sunday. If you have seen that as as the link, the interesting thing about that, and that's part of the systematic way of doing this, I'm a hundred percent in control what I'm writing on my personal website because nobody has access to my personal website than me.
Maybe a couple of hackers. But, um, so if we take the article example, you have no control what is written there. If, if, if you are somewhere mentioned, it can be wrong. It, it can be a [00:19:00] different photo, which is not you if you, if you have something in the internet that you own, it's a personal website and it's super weird.
I know this, but I have already bought the domain of my daughter's name. She's seven and I bought it when she was like two. Because I want her and, and have her name already registered to me. I mean that we own the domain so that we can build our website that she utilizes Everything that I do in my whole career, I've heard of my domain roughly before 10 years ago, didn't really succeed in having a big career.
So I like the domain one out now. Yeah, you could have sold it to him at least. Yeah. Yeah. So what, what I want to say is you are in control of what [00:20:00] is in the internet. If you produce yourself, if you don't produce yourself, other people are driving the narrative. What is in the internet about you? You had a question?
Yeah. Uh, isn't it more credible if
Speaker 2: you, uh. Like personally, if you wanna get to know about something
Speaker 5: about the person, like if you find something that like is not like if I, if all the information was from someone's investor, like they can
Speaker 1: also write anything they want there. Right? Of course. And if it's like, that might not be true, but if it's like from other kind of sources,
Jens Heitland: it's adding to that.
The tricky thing is, and and, and we are going into a world where we are not really verifying anymore, like all the 50 links that are in Google because the old Google is almost gone. You are, I guess in a year from now, we are only using AI and then you get fed an answer. And that if you're not in control of that answer and feeding the internet with your story, then it comes up, whatever [00:21:00] comes up.
I do this with CEOs. It's super funny when you do that 'cause there is sometimes really crap about them in the internet and they don't want to have that scene obviously. But they, they don't own anything. So it's, it's just a, a huge opportunity. Let's go into the system.
Speaker 5: Would you always say, I can make it .com
Jens Heitland: Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. You can do .NL
So everything starts with you, your personal brand, and we will go deeply into, into that. I'm just showing you the system that we use. Um, your personal brand lives, I mean everywhere. But first and foremost, in your hub, that's your personal website. Everything I do is in my personal website. Every single post that I do on social media is in my personal website because I want to feed the internet with what I want, want the internet to know about me.
And you don't see me posting about my daughter, [00:22:00] about my personal life. You are a hundred percent in control what you put out there. So it goes into the. Only then based on the personal brand and the strategy that we have, we create content, and that can be a vlog, can be a block, can be social media content, can be a podcast, can be whatever.
That goes first and foremost into the hub and only then it goes into social media. I use social media as a multiplier because it's free and I can reach as many as possible people. That's why I have a TikTok account. I'm not dancing on TikTok. Um, I'm literally using the same thought leadership pieces that I post on LinkedIn, on TikTok, and there's a couple of hundred people still watching that.
I don't get it, but it works. Same on all the other platforms. With this, I enable them [00:23:00] to be interested in me and. I mean, you most probably have heard about the marketing funnel. First is awareness. If I have never heard about you, and we have seen it with some of the people from the first picture, you cannot look into them.
But if you're interested in Elon Musk, you will find more about Elon Musk for sure, if you want to. So what you do then you go into AI and you search and you go into search or the, the normal browser, and you search and you will end up somewhere. And if you want to, to guide people to find you, then you move them to the hub.
And then that's, that's more the business part, but also career strategy part. You built kind of a career funnel so that people find you, I'm here because of that, because Kalina used chat, CDP, and we laughed about that yesterday to look for a speaker that, that she was looking for. And I came up [00:24:00] and that's why I'm here.
I'm here because of Chet p.
So that, that is just a systematic way of doing that. Now we go real into the workshop question. How does people get to your website?
Speaker 4: So I mean if it post content on social media link, then they post link, link to your website or how, how do you get people from Link and into your website?
Jens Heitland: Sometimes I'm adding the, the link so you directly go to the blog post and sometimes I'm not because like algorithm stuff.
In the end, if you're truly interested, you will Google me, you will use chat. CTP, you will use and you will f find me. But if not like kind of
Speaker 4: little bit your website, it'll not be searchable as well. It can be just can dial of page.
Jens Heitland: I wouldn't say it, it does not, I mean of [00:25:00] course I have the link somewhere in, in LinkedIn as well.
To my personal website. But the interesting thing with the internet, if done right, you have SEO and all these strategies, you just pop up. I, if we take me, I have 50,000 people on my personal website, it's nuts. I mean, who, who of you would like look into like 20 block blog post of me? It's, it's not that interesting, but it's 50,000 people, unique visitors on my personal website and some of them end up to be my clients even half a year or a year later.
That's why I do this. So personal branding, first exercise for all of you is what is your superpower? And I have a tool that helps you, you, you can use the paper and, and pens. Um, do that on any digital device. So it starts [00:26:00] with childhood. And it ends today for you. It's growing still further from, from today.
So that's the, that's the timeline we have and then we look into what were the activities in your lifetime that, that you really enjoyed doing. The things that you say, I'm really good at that. I give you my example just to trigger you a little bit. I have been German school system in, in the basic school in the beginning, and I was the guy 4, 5, 6 years old that was dragging the other kids to the playground to play football.
I was the guy who was dragging people when it, when I was 18, 19, 20, to the Let's go out drinking. I was the guy who was organizing this. I am, if we just go to [00:27:00] today, I'm the guy who is organizing a freaking 24 hour walk in Munich, in Germany. So I'm the person that is organizing, connecting people and, and help them to get towards.
So that's my superpower. So if you look into activities backwards and then you look into what are the behaviors that are linked to that activities. So what did I do when I brought the kids to the, the football field? Like how did I do this? How did I behave to get them motivated? So take a couple of minutes.
I give you maximum three because we don't have too much time to look into activities. And then I will pick like two, three to share that. Okay. Go. You said.
Speaker 5: It also be like,
Jens Heitland: but then it's not a superpower.[00:28:00]
If you repeat it,
it it's something you do all the time.[00:29:00]
Anyone already an idea that you want to share
Speaker 3: the activities? I put, uh, since I was a child, I put swimming, working out, boxing, painting, cooking, and the behaviors I put perseverance, empathy, hard work, and creative.
Jens Heitland: How do you summarize that to one overarching superpower that you have? Uh,
Speaker 3: I think overall empathy connect mind most
Jens Heitland: Good. So empathy. Yeah.
Speaker 6: My ability to learn. So if I have trouble figuring something out, I work until I get it. So, for example, I used to be really bad at public speaking, but now I'm a public speaking consultant for my university. So now I help other people with [00:30:00] their public speaking skills.
Speaker 3: Nice. People always told, told me like, uh, you, you need to be a teacher because you can, you can bring something to people by telling, by doing.
You can inspire
Speaker 1: educator, good people behalf someone else if that feels too
Jens Heitland: scary for them. For example, someone who needs school. Good. So these are all examples. Of course, you will not have this after three minutes, but dig deeper, look into into it what it is, and then use this over. The next years el Well, to fine tune it, because if you know your superpower, like for me, it, it costs zero calories to stand in front of you right now because I love to connect people.
I love to organize things. It's like literally zero calories. Like I, I [00:31:00] should pay to be here, which I do.
Speaker 2: You maybe also
Speaker 6: focus on that of like, what does hire
Jens Heitland: you? Like, what could you do? Like it's, it's part of it. So what is the thing that doesn't really takes energy of you, but if you compare that with other people, like other people are completely stressed out if they need to organize something.
For me, it's like, yeah, cool. Let's do it.
So when you're doing it, you, yeah. So the thing that you enjoy. Good point. So use that going forward. Because the cool thing about this, if I would be interviewing you in a job as an example, and you give this energy to, to me that you are doing this thing, I mean, you package that in a story in an interview, but kind of you give me the, the, the possibility to understand what your superpower is, then I see already how can I use you as part of the organization to say [00:32:00] she would definitely be the best person in that role, not in that role.
So that's the opportunity that you have. Why? By being clear what your superpower is, you, you just enhance that by understanding it and then use it for yourself and share it with others.
My values, that's a long exercise. We do just, just an easy version of that because we could do this like a whole day. Um. The interesting thing is when you dig into your values, let's just do the upper part here. What do you value in other people? Because what I have found out doing this with many, many, many people is what you value in other people is, is closely linked to what your values are.
So, so take two minutes and, and dig deeper into what do you value in other people?[00:33:00]
Occasionally or personally? Personally, I mean, mix both.
Anyone already willing to share [00:34:00] all of them or just one? Just as as you wish? So the first one I put down was reliability. Like if I can rely on someone, like account them regardless of the situation. Reliability. Yeah. Good. Should I get more? Okay. Um, I also wrote down honesty and empathy. Honesty and empathy.
I wrote down, down, honesty, commitment, discipline, intelligence, kindness, pragmatism, good.
Speaker 6: Respect, good, nice. I have both. From as understanding, curiosity and respect, integrity, ambition, and kindness. I appreciate someone who
Speaker 7: takes time, uh, and empathy. Um, I put trust someone I can trust someone that has a lot of energy so that it's easy to talk to them.
It doesn't just drain your energy with it. Some of that [00:35:00] is interested in things and also I put. Loyalty voices, creativity and humility and open-mindedness.
Jens Heitland: Last one. Sorry. How you understanding honesty, kindness, experience. Good. It's not that difficult, right? It's just that we, we often don't think about our values except you put into a situation like this right now.
It, it's more that you act with them every day, but you're not consciously thinking about that. And, and, and if you use that, and we will put all of this together later on, it's super, super powerful if you understand that and then you act and you use them in the way that it is helping you. This is a huge exercise.
So we, we, again, we do a very, very small version of it. I have a cheat sheet, which, which, um. You can access through [00:36:00] that, uh, QR code and you will get the slides later on as well. Um,
we will do a simple version of that right now. I have a couple of prompts that will help you. I mean, not AI prompts, but,
so you, you can, you can do the deep version at home later on and, and look into that.
All
Speaker 1: good. Will, these slides
Jens Heitland: are made available after, so we can, yes. Yeah, so I will, I will get you access to the video recording, the slides and the documents. Yeah, I know it's tricky here. So let, let's, who has, who has heard about Simon San. Couple of, so Simon Sinek is one of the [00:37:00] bright minds thought leaders in leadership philosophy and so on.
One of the things, and he has an amazing Ted Talk, if you have not seen that, I highly recommend to watch his TED talk about why, how, what? I don't know how it's called exactly.
Speaker 2: Golden Circle
Jens Heitland: Exactly. So what, what, what he starts with is the why and, and you use the same thing for business, by the way. It's super powerful if you talk about why you have this business that links by the way to the problem that you're solving.
So you have a why that is the, the highest level, your visionary, why of, of your life in this case. Like why do you exist? We will go into this now. So here are a couple of things and it's super difficult. I've done it with students before and everyone says like, I'm 20. I have no idea about that shit yet.
So it's just a starting point to not you into that. [00:38:00] 'cause normally there's a question as well, what gets you out of bed in the morning? Like my mom kicking me out. So it, it's, it's, it's more this type of questions like what impact do I want to make in this world? And I know it's super, super, super high level and very philosophical, but if you dig into that and if you understand what you want to create in this world, it helps you because it's a driving force.
And then the next question is, what am I most passionate about in my life and career? And of course that's changing for you still quite a bit for me. That's not too much changing anymore.
For me, I just give you my, my example or a, a version of it. At least. I believe that [00:39:00] people will make the difference, like I said on Sunday, you all can make the difference. And I want to enable people to do that in a way that they do positive things in this world. That's why helping CEOs that do impact, so I help them to make their credibility more visible so that they're more successful with the business they're doing so that they have more money in, in the example case, to build more schools.
So with what I do, I do good in this world. So that's why I do what I do and I'm focusing on the human because I believe the humans is the most important thing in the world.
So that's, that's the first step.
And then you go to the how.
So how, how do I live out my purpose on a daily base? I know, again, very, very [00:40:00] high level. It's difficult. That's why I have the cheat sheet for you, for, for home as well. What are my core values that shape the way I work and live? Because in the end, if, if you are truly going through that exercise, and I do this for example, with the CEOs that I work with, we do this in a three hour session When we go deeply into, into this topics for them personally, 'cause even 50-year-old CEOs have never done that for themselves.
And then the next one is, what strengths or skills do I consistently use to achieve my goals? That goes back to your superpower because the way you do things are making the difference.
We had that yesterday a little bit in, in, in the small, uh, room and, and some at least, um, have seen that life [00:41:00] from me when, when I came into the discussion. I've never given you the answer because I believe you are strong enough to find the answer yourself. I just not you in a direction. That's the way how I do it.
I'm not doing this because I mentor here. I'm doing this all the time. I've led global teams in Ikea in the same way, like I did it yesterday in the room. There's never a difference. These
Speaker 8: questions, I went through some similar ones, uh, for this workshop already, and I always struggle with the thought. I know there are a few who are doing these things so much better, so how to work with them,
Jens Heitland: don't care about other people.
In that sense. So the, the difficult thing, and everyone has that, is this imposter syndrome that, ah, the other person is way better than me in this, in the end, it doesn't matter how good the other person is. Look at them and say, okay, what can I learn from that person? [00:42:00] It's, it's less about I'm bad. I'm, I'm not as good as that person.
It is like, Hey, if I do things, I will get better. It's, it's like in, in your case, martial arts, the first day on the, on the mat, you're, you're not going to be a good fighter for sure, but you have done this most probably over two decades already. One, okay, so let's say one decade and you got better and better and better to the point that you are today.
It's with everything in life, as more we work on something as better, we get and as more we learn to believe in ourselves as, as better we believe in ourself. I mean, I can do the same. There are hundreds of thousands of people that are much better than me doing this, but it's them doing it their way, and it's me doing it my way.
And I believe for myself, that's a cool thing.[00:43:00]
And I know that that sounds awkward. I would not say this in other settings, but that, that's just, you are get, you're convincing yourself if you don't believe in yourself. It's, it's like the thing that always holds you back. That's why it's, these things are almost like coaching things that get gets you into that.
And then in the end is, is really what you do. What do I do specifically? So in my case, I help CEOs to make their credibility visible. That's the what I do, and run their social media. That's like the, the detailed version of that. So for yourself as well, what is the thing that you're doing?
And that can be maybe today a little bit more narrow where you say, Hey, I'm training kids [00:44:00] that struggle in school with their, their, their self-doubt and teach them martial arts.
That can be, I help my team inside of the EIIA to succeed by doing this can be very narrow, but that's what I do. I'm the person that organizes the beer afterwards even. That's good.
So then the next question that helps you to get into that, what are tangible results that you create through your work? Like through what you do. So go back to my case. I help the CEOs or this specific CEO to get a new client through his visibility so that he can invest 5 million into a school.[00:45:00]
And then the last one here is, what impact do I have on the people or industries I work with? Like what are the specifics?
And if you have digested all of that, then you have kind of, I, I think there's even a, a sentence in, in this document, which helps you a little bit more in fine tuning that and a couple of more questions. Then you have that. And then you can fine tune it with AI if you want, but it's, it's, it's just if, if you understand that for yourself, this is, this is why I believe in what I believe this is, are the values that I connect to that, this is how I do that.
Like I work with the CEOs in the same way that I worked yesterday with the teams in my classroom. I work with them to empower them to, to [00:46:00] do the things they're they're going to do. And I take the operational part for them. That's why they pay me and I help them to shine. It's very, very simple. And then you connect that back to your why, which is helping people to succeed and helping people to make impact in this world.
Next exercise is your origin story. Who remembers this story that I told you on Sunday, the first one? I'm not sure who tell what, do you remember your origin story, how you started to work in the construction site when 16, when you worked at Ikea? Started in sales, I believe.
How random is that? That she remembers that? I, I started on construction sites and, and some of you may be as well, completely random. I have nothing [00:47:00] to do with construction today. So what I, what I used, I used a storytelling framework to tell you about me, who I am. I am the person that I am today because that's how I started, which connected you emotionally to, to who I am.
And storytelling is the way how you, how you do that. So the origin story is actually what I did in a very, like in a one minute version. And there's a, there's, there are topics in that sheet as well. This is the story, um, origin Storytelling Framework. That's the one that Hollywood is using. Who have you have seen A lot of the rings, or at least heard about it?
Lot of the Rings is a movie where like a hobbit goes and then throws the ring into the fire. That's the short version. Right? So it, it, it's, I will not go through the whole movie, but it's, it's [00:48:00] actually happening in that movie. And, and every Spider-Man, it's the same thing. It's a person that is just a normal person like Spider-Man, I dunno.
Peter Parker. It's Peter, the, the nerd, and then he got bitten by a spider
and then somehow he meets a mentor. It's, it's easier with, with lot of the rings because people, at least I remember, that's. So if we take a lot of the rings, Frodo was in the, in, I don't know, the English version, Hobbit land. So he was just, just a hobbit. And, and they, there, there was this party, if you remember, and then there was this call to action where he got the ring and he refused it.
So that's part of the storytelling. And then he found the mentor, which was, see, you even remember that? [00:49:00] Most of the time it's a senior. I've used that storytelling yesterday as well. Like I talked about my mentor in a different context, and then he's crossing, crossing the threshold. So he's going with Sam out of the field, and then Sam is saying, I've never, this, I've never been further away from home than this.
And then they go jump on that boat when the, the, the, the horse riders are behind them. And so. And then in the end they're winning and come back home. That's, that's a storytelling format that you can use. So what you can do, you take this, you use, use this storytelling framework, and you ask chat, GDP or any ai, ask me questions about myself to fulfill a origin story.
That's the fastest way how you can do that. The cool thing is then you use, let's say chat, GTP as a coach, ask me [00:50:00] questions to, to develop my origin story according to that framework. And then you have your original story. And that might be, I grew up in a small village and struggled in school and then developed like this, and today I'm a student and I'm freaking in Porto.
The cool thing about that, people will remember that your story.
And this is, this is so basic, but it's so powerful. I've used that all the time on huge stages, and there are people afterwards coming to me and asking me about details. Why do you, why do you do what you do is super, super powerful. Think about you go to a job interview and you have that in mind. You will not tell the whole story when fighting with the dragon, but you, you can put snippets in if you are prepared, [00:51:00] you understand the person that is in front of you, like you know the person that you meet for a job interview.
I use job interview because that's maybe something every one of you is, is going to experience in the future, except those that are building the startup and already scaling from next week on. So you are in a job interview. You know that you're meeting a person, right? You have the name of the person. What do you do?
Research. Exactly. So you check that person out, chatGTP, Google, LinkedIn at least, and then you know about that person. Let's say you, you find me and you find out that I'm German. If you are German or German speaking, you can use that in your story to, to make the link, Hey, we're bros. We are the same. So, and it works all the time as more connection points you find.
I do this in sales, for example. [00:52:00] I had a person that worked like for two years in Sweden and I lived in Sweden and my daughter is born in Sweden. So I used that to get this guy bought into what I do. It's like, because what I did, I had a background, real background and I put the Swedish flag in my background.
Like, seriously no joke. That's so, and he, and he was like. Why do you have a Swedish flag in your background? Click. I had him.
So this is, this is a super simplified version that you can use, um, for, for this, for the story. I, I will read it for those that cannot see it. So I grew up in dot, dot, dot small village. This situation where you did whatever, that's the normal world. Like I am grown up in Hobbit land where I had a party with the other hobbits.
When I, you [00:53:00] did something, you faced the struggle. It's kind of the, the, the call to action where you faced the first struggle. But it taught me something. One day I realized that do, do dot. That moment was turning my point for me was my turning point for, for me because of whatever it was. So did I tell this story with when I, when I got made redundant?
No. Okay. Normally I tell that story as well. Um, so, so you always have turning points in your life. Some of you might have turning points that, that brought you here. That was the turning point. Most of the time it's negative turning points. So I was made redundant when I was 24 because the construction industry was completely collapsing.
I mean, was bad in Germany at that time, and they needed to let go of people. I was the youngest. So [00:54:00] you're part of the first group. That's why I'm here today. That's what, what, what's what's driving me still today? Because I said at that day, I'm never going to be dependent on anyone else anymore. I will put my luck into my own hands and I'm going to drive it to whatever I want to.
And since then, I started in Deutsche Bank, moved into ikea, built my own businesses, and never stop. So that's kind of my piece of that struggle that I used into my superpower and, and what I do better to present a good turning point or better turning point. Bad turning point is always better. Yeah. It's more powerful.
It's weird, but, but humans, somehow, psychology wise, I have no idea. I'm not an expert, but we focus on the negative so people will remember the negative. So you use that and then you decided to what you're going to do and you kind of go towards the, the future. [00:55:00] And then, um, you go into, now I do this and my journey has made me whatever you are.
And then looking ahead, I hope to whatever super simply. But it just helps you to trigger your, your mindset a little bit. So we will not be able, normally I'll love to do that with all of you. Like go into your original story because it's so powerful. Try to dig into that. Do it at home. Do it. Um, maybe not the next three weeks 'cause you're busy with building the startup, but just have that in mind and you can test that.
I mean, if you want, you can just do a basic version of that and you test it with the other people. When you introduce yourself, whenever you introduce yourself, use it. I use it all the time because I know that the power of the story is, is always working and people will remember you completely different than if you're not telling a story.
If I, if I would stand on stage, I'm YI was the global head of innovation. Let's go into the topic. [00:56:00] Boring. You might not. And, and what I want you to do, and that's a little bit my tactic, I want you to be emotionally invested into me. As part of the keynote speaker. 'cause it's not the topic that I talk about.
It's, it's, it's me. I, I'm the focus, when I'm a keynote speaker, I want you to, to, to blend everything out and, and listen to me. And if you use stories, it always works because you're just like emotionally more invested into the topic. So brand pillars. The cool thing about brand pillars is if you have brand pillars, they will help you to know what you're going to talk about.
They will help you to understand what you are about. Simplified version.
What are you excited about? Because we, we are not going into huge branding exercise now that will take too, too, too long. But what are the things you're excited about [00:57:00] that's important for you? Like, I'm excited about humans, I'm excited about leadership. I'm excited about. Long distance events, running and cycling and so on.
I'm excited about whatever you are, cupcakes,
because you can talk about these things and I, of course use that for my business, what I have for my business. If you, if you follow me on social media, I'm sorry, but you are going to see this all the time from now on. I, I will talk 80% about my business topics. So I have three pillars that are business and two pillars that are personal and it always works.
So what are your, what are, what are you knowledgeable about? What are the things you deeply care and you know, and know more than anyone else in, in your ecosystem? There are always things where you are the nerd in this topic. You might not share that openly, but there are things you really know and [00:58:00] know more about than.
What would do you other, what, what would you like to learn more about? Like what are the things you would love to dig deeper into? Because if you're excited about a topic you will dive deeper into and then you getting the expert over time. And what would you like to be known for? So my number one thing that I want to be known for is that I'm the person that is doing the human way of doing that, whatever it is, I want to be known as the human person.
Not, not me as a human, but the person that does it, the human way. And that's my number one thing that I'm, I'm getting across. So I later, shit, there's a slide missing. It will come later. So if, if we go back to this pillar structure. [00:59:00] Your, your brand in the end is built out of all of this. So you have your values, which is the foundation of, of the house.
Your values are not going to change. I mean, slightly aep most probably, but what I have experienced with senior people, they had the same values throughout their whole life. That's the foundation. Then your vision and mission is the roof.
Your why and your how and and so on. And then the pillars are kind of how you connect the values. With the vision. I give you my, my pillars, just to give you an understanding, is leadership, personal branding and thought leadership is kind of two. I often talk about sales 'cause one of the things that people don't get right.
And I of course talk about long distance stuff, um, doing challenging things in your life and so on. [01:00:00] And I do this all the time. Why do five very simple. Monday to Friday you can do three, it's fine. Two, I do Monday to Friday because in my social media strategy, I'm posting every day, at least twice. So every weekday, I'm posting twice.
Every single platform is part of my strategy. We will get into that. So Hub, any question until now on different days? What different pillars, how it works? Exactly. So I do every day a different pillar, which nobody sees. If you don't know the strategy, you prepare your content. Yeah, of course. We'll get to that.
We'll get to that. So HOP is the personal website. I'll give you a simplified version again. Um, structure. I mean, every one of you has seen a website, right? So you have different pages [01:01:00] in websites. So the number one is the homepage. Then what I recommend, and that's if, if you check out my clients, they all have that homepage story.
What is the story, origin story exactly, origin story. I have a fine tuned version of that. For, for, for what we use. But it's in the end who I am. Then block, which is content, and that can be podcast, that can be whatever. I have different pages like this because I have two podcasts. I have a blog, I have whatever contact.
If you don't have a contact page or a contact opportunity on your website, nobody will be able to reach out to you. I even have, uh, WhatsApp thing speaking. For those of you that want to do public speaking like I do, you have a speaking page which showcases you as a speaker. That's why I'm here. Chat. [01:02:00] GTP, Carolina used chat.
GTP found me. What she did, she looked at my personal website. She looked at my speaking page, she has watched the videos of me and then reached out to me. That's why I'm here. And then links. You most probably have seen that in the internet when, when you have someone you, they, they have like click on my website.
Then you lent in a link distribution page. Have you seen that before? Mm-hmm. Well, a lot of people do. They use an external tool. I use my own website to do that. So I have one page, which is just all the links, like all my social media, all my podcasts, everything that I want to, to help people. The reason for that is.
I am not making it a landing page where you cannot click away from, I'm making it so that you see the rest. So you land on my, my link page and this. Oh, that's an interesting, then they go to the homepage, drag to the story page, and so on. So that's, that's the pages [01:03:00] I use and I recommend to, to dig into. By the way, website is not difficult.
If you have never built a website. You can use AI these days and it's done in, I dunno, half an hour or you use, um, Squarespace or any of these tools, like slides. It's very, very simple and I am pretty sure it's like super cheap. I don't know, I, I guess it is for free. There, there are possibilities. You can do that for free.
You buy a domain for $18 per year and then you have your domain. So let's go a little bit more into the, each of the pages and you can look at my personal page to, to see that structure life. Um. Hero section is the top. It's the biggest banner that is on top. And what I always recommend there have your, your why connected to that so that people that land on your page know exactly what you're about and then have a possibility to hook them to something like, sign up [01:04:00] for my newsletter in my case, and then I go into story.
So what I want to do with my personal website, 'cause in the end I want to get them to the business, but if I, I directly do, Hey, buy this, people are off. What I do the same thing I did with you on Sunday. I want them to be invested into me as a person. So I have one section, this, these things are called sections where I have the hook to, to my story.
And I have measured this over time. Like I know how many people click this button to get to my story page. Which is fascinating. How many people lent on your homepage and then go to your story? It's huge amount 'cause people are just interested. Tell me more. If done well, then I have the call to action, which in my case is my business.
Um, I have this the other way around, but doesn't matter. And then I have content. So you can find my podcast, you can find a section where I [01:05:00] promote the blog posts that are only for personal branding, which is, I dunno, hundreds of videos into blog post format. So that's my homepage. Then you go into the story page, which is who you are.
It's your origin story. What I have done, I have deleted that, uh, lately, but I have now done a different version of that. I have built my CV that you normally have on LinkedIn. On my story page, I have now swapped it to a about page, but still, still the same strategy. So I, I did. AI did not meet, but I used AI to write my CV in a text format so that search engines can, can, can use it like a bio format.
And then I still linked every single company and everything to it. So that's indexing in the internet SEO strategy. The cool thing is when you now ask Chet DP or something about me, then it comes up like Che DP or Gemini or whatever [01:06:00] will then tell you Jenz has been working in this company and has achieved that.
That's all done from me.
Speaker 8: So I, one of the older ones in this room. So when I was young was huge, and nowadays it's just random. I mean, you have apparently have to pay Google to appear somehow if they don't
Jens Heitland: really do something. Yeah, I don't know about Google, but it still works a hundred percent because AI is not different.
So AI is using, is indexing the internet. What AI does, as far as I understand, I'm not the scientist. AI is reading literally the text that is on the web, uh, watching the videos. Let's say it like this, everything. And then it's looking for, for that. And if you have a question to that specific topic and you have done it well, then you pop up, your topic pops up and as more credibility.
That's the cool thing. Like we discussed with the source, [01:07:00] AI is validating the source still. So if you, if you own the domain and it's your name, it's always ranked higher on Google as well. That's why if you Google my name, it's even more crazy than on, um, chat GT P right now because you cannot find anyone else.
I know two people that have the same name. Nike, I have. They're done because you need to get, get to, which nobody does. So you're on a desktop like this. You go to Google, put my name, and you need to go to page four or something for, to find them. They're done forever.
Speaker 8: How do I find this publication with the social media?
Jens Heitland: He just do better content,
have a better strategy than him show up more often than him is. It's not that difficult,
Speaker 2: which I do use most. [01:08:00] Um,
Jens Heitland: I just moved this week to perplexity because of the new, uh, engine. They have both perplexity, but in the end it's all the same. They're using chatGPT, Claude and so on. I used all of them. So story page give, give the internet your story so that people can find it. Block page.
Whatever you are about, like have a description and then have blog posts, um, go deeper. I'm going a bit quicker. Contact you have a contact form. I, I guess that's clear, right? And then the, the, the speaking page, let's not go too much into that, but in the end you have a call to action that, that, that you get people in the best case, that's why I'm having cameras with me.
You take the video and you put it onto your speaking page and people can see how you speak. And then they say, ah, I had this, by the way, I'm speaking in Germany in a couple of weeks from now. And the [01:09:00] assistant of the board of that, uh, big company, has seen my, my speaking video. And she said, we need him as a, as a keynote speaker.
They were not able to afford me at the first event they asked me, but then they knew my price and they just bought, uh, an hour keynote of me. I give you so much in Ikea time. I needed to work two months for that money I get for one keynote. And it's only because of I have the video on my speaking page, links page, whatever you want.
I have in, in the top, top. It's like I have the topics I want you to, to figure out sometimes sales than, than other topics, social media, business and so on.
Content system we had, we don't have much time anymore. Anyone of you heard about pillar content? So how can you do, how can [01:10:00] you produce as much as possible content without going nuts? So what I do, I give you the example on my podcast. So I have a long form podcast, which is a video podcast. So what do I have?
I have a video, I have audio, I have pictures in the end. Three form of content. So I'm producing one thing and I have three things. Now. You use ai, you take the audio, move that into Spotify, which is a normal podcast. You of course move that into your hub. So in My Hub, you can check that in my in My Life website.
Every single podcast episode is a video, is text, which is the blog post created from ai, from the transcript with specific prompts. It's on YouTube and it is at least 3, 4, 5 social media posts. And then you just put that into the internet, [01:11:00] not every day. I mean, not everything the same day, but I'm sprinkling it out.
So I have the main episode, let's say, goes out on a Tuesday, and then I have a video short form version of that TikTok style that goes out on Thursday that links back to the main episode. You see this all the time from other influencers and people that do things. So it's, you produce one thing and then you, you use different formats and show that to people, and you can do this even with short form, which a lot of people don't understand.
I have, that's why I have two podcasts. I have one where I do interviews with people from around the world, and one, which is my short form podcast, which is the TikTok videos. Every single TikTok video is a podcast episode, because if you post something on TikTok, it's gone after two days, maybe a week. If you're lucky, nobody will watch your TikTok video anymore.
If you put it into, uh, let's say Spotify or Apple Podcast, people [01:12:00] will consume it. I still have people that listen to my first ever podcast episode, which years ago. Nobody does that in TikTok, like I most probably have never scrolled to the first post of someone in TikTok.
Speaker 5: Um, yeah, for everybody who's interested about this, there's an app, there's multiple apps, but the one I use is called Opus Clips. So you insert the link of your episode, so you have a 20 minute podcast video and it creates like 30 viral clips of that specific episode with captions and everything. You can edit it a bit if you want it to be better, but it's perfect from the social media.
So then you create a system that you output
Speaker 1: constantly, and then that's how you create content for yourself. Exactly, exactly. Please. Opus clips, opus clips. So I'm having a
Speaker 8: personal Instagram page where I used to write about, and I'm a reasonably good write that people got in contact with me. Um, but it's a very tedious thing to write a reasonably good post.
So at some point it [01:13:00] was okay, judge PT can do that probably better, and people don't care about the book. So started to write myself again, and it works again.
Jens Heitland: You can teach AI. So the, like, you all know. So what you can do is you can teach AI to write like you, so when, for example, we do this for other people, so it's easy for me because it's me.
But what we do is we do this for other people, like for our CEOs as part of their brand building. We build their tone of voice, we build, build specific ways, how they talk and how they write. And, and we just put that into the prompt. Use this tone of voice, use that, and use that.
Speaker 4: Thinking about video, I mean the reason understandable have like interview, you can easily have like 10, whatever, but what if you want to have like just text content, like block plus content is any good idea. [01:14:00]
Jens Heitland: No video is just the, the, the most bang for your buck. 'cause you have the highest, highest form of content.
If you do text only, still possible. You have. A blog post that is, let's say five pages, and then you just take small, small things from that and you share that to trigger people still works. The missing piece is that you're not having this emotional connection straight away. Like a person needs to read the whole text to have the emotional connection with a video.
They, they watch like three seconds and you have them hooked. If you, if done well, that's video works for everybody or Yeah, yeah. That, that's, maybe you should do this. Maybe that's a fun thing. What I do in my community, we have one, one like conversation area where, where we did a 30 day challenge, 30 day video challenge because what I did, I did 365.
Don't do that. [01:15:00] That's crazy. I did, um, 365 days of me vlogging on LinkedIn, 2020 or something. The cool thing about that is you learn so much about how you talk and how you pace and, and, and your tone of voice. It's dramatically changing after 30 days. It's huge difference because the first one is like, yeah, I have no idea if, if you're, have a look at the community.
It's really funny. If you see the first videos of people, there's, there's a lady called Adelina. She lives in Switzerland. The first videos is so crap. She says that as well, so I can say that it's really bad. She's like, yeah, I'm, I have no idea what I'm going to say. And, and then after 30 days, she's crossing it, it, and there are people who are doing it forever already.
And it's, it's just, I, I want to challenge every one of you. The best way is you just record every single day of video and you, you [01:16:00] can do it for yourself only, but it's even better if you put it on TikTok. Okay. Yes, TikTok, you don't care that much. LinkedIn, I guess, is a bit more difficult, but it's better if you share it because it's higher, higher pressure environment.
You'll see huge development of yourself. If you, if you do that, if you're scared about videos, that's exactly what you should do. Was that not
Speaker 6: interfere somehow with the idea that everything you put out is part of
Speaker 1: your personal brand? Oh, it's still you,
Speaker 7: doesn't it? Like
Jens Heitland: I agree. The, the, the, the thing I'm, I'm about is you are all in the beginning, like nobody, if you, I guess is at least is doing this daily right now, so if you want to, to get to a point where you are comfortable sharing it on LinkedIn, which is, I think for us at least business wise, it's the most important platform.
You need to get to a confidence level that you say, now I'm ready to post it on LinkedIn and to get there, you just need to do it. [01:17:00] Yeah, that's, that's why I'm, you can do it. Like, you don't need to share it on social, but it's, it's more pressure. What was the common trait the successful people shared who went through this 30 day, uh, 30 day journey?
They just did it. Yeah. Just doing it daily. And they were all, like, I've had a lady, she was 42. She has never recorded a video of herself. I guess most of you at least have done video with friends somewhere. She has never done a video and now she uses videos as part of her promotion. So that's just one example of how you can create on, create content on mass.
I do this professionally with people. Next week I will be in London to record podcasts of CEOs. Not my own podcast, but one of our clients. So I travel with him and we have like whole setup and, and they do a podcast interview and we produce the podcast for him, and then we distribute exactly like this.
Because the, the [01:18:00] biggest bang for your buck, plus if you have a video, and that's just important to understand. The emotional connection is there. You can tell the story. You can do things in a way that you cannot do through text. That's why TikTok is working so well. You just need two, three seconds to hook the people.
We will not be able to go into how to create videos. That would be a fun one. If, if, if you are interested in that, I can ask to get another slot.
Speaker 5: Can we do that?
Jens Heitland: So same thing, just in different visual. So there's a flow. You create a video, you put that into your block, you put that into social media, and then you try people to get into your way.
It a hundred percent works business wise as well. A hundred percent. So if you create a social media strategy for the business marketing strategy into today's world, this should be part of your strategy. Yeah, because you are creating [01:19:00] content that drags people into your direction, and then in the best case, you, you get leads out of that.
My business is working 80% on inbound. I don't need to reach out to people too much to get clients because people just see me and follow me. And then over time they say, Hey, can you do that for me? So I'm the best credibility booster of our business, which helps
important when we come to content, every single thing has to have a goal connected to it. My 99.9% of everything I do is how do I get people attracted to me to get them into my business? It sounds selfish. I get that. But it's a strategy because if, if you are emotionally invested in me, let's say you would be a CEO.
And our target audience, you would be emotionally [01:20:00] invested into me. You're interested in what I'm talking about, and then you will consume the content. And over time, I'm, I'm literally moving you into my funnel. And that sometimes takes a year, but it's happening. I had someone who is now a customer, he said, I followed you since half a year.
I really love your content. He has not liked a single video of me. Never. I didn't like it was in behind the scenes. He has seen all of them, but he has not liked one. And then he reached out to me. So, so key pardon? That goes to videos as well. So when you want to be seen as a thought leader, that's not influencer strategy.
There there are three things that you can do. Entertainment. So entertaining people. There are hundreds of millions of videos that come to your mind right now. There are only about entertainment then. Yeah, there are more inspirational videos. You connect [01:21:00] people to their why. You connect people to something bigger that where people are inspired about what's happening.
And then the most powerful, in my perspective at least, is education. If you educate people about what you know is the most powerful thing, and you, that's like a hundred percent YouTube strategy. You see this all the time. Like I, I don't know how many YouTube channels are out there that are doing only educational content because what they do is they attract you through educating.
And the cool thing, does any one of you know Alex Mosey? Not that many. Okay. Alex Mosey is like one of the guys there, like entrepreneurship one-on-one and so on. Um, I had the possibility to meet him and spend a week with him earlier this year in, in his office.
I cannot tell you No, I was invited. I didn't pay. [01:22:00] So I, I, I was able to, to spend a week with him and I've seen how they do that and, and what I adapted before already. I used the same strategy. He's putting everything out for free and the, the, the in depth knowledge that he shares is so deep that people just want to give him money for the knowledge.
I have used his books and things in the past and just through that, I have already made, I dunno, hundreds of thousands of euros. So if you put out content that's so valuable to people, Alex or Mozy, Alex Hormo, HROR, Mozy, uh, a guy who has a beard, always has a muscle shirt and shorts.
We have talked about the pillars. So when, when you create content, you have a goal in mind, so you want to educate people. Then what pillar do you use [01:23:00] to educate people in? In my case, personal branding, thought leadership, endurance stuff, whatever you are about.
So in the end it's, I will just go a bit quicker, and then you produce, so you have the goal first. You know, the, the pillar that you're going, going to, to, to educate in, and then you produce, you do the other things first. You're not just creating something and then figure out the rest. You're doing everything with intent.
When I'm recording videos, I mean, I'm not doing this daily anymore. I'm badging for two months. So we did the session the other day where I recorded in couple of hours, 40 videos. So it's 40 videos that were all prepared before. All with the goal, all with the pillar, and then we record it. And now I don't need to do anything for two months.
So we don't have time to go really into depth how you produce videos, but [01:24:00] because it's, it's a super deep topic and it's, um, taking too much time. What do we have?
We had that distribution system. There are tons of different platforms that you can use to post on all social media. So what we do, we use one tool that helps me to distribute everywhere because it's just efficiency that costs money that I have. But you can, for example, program post inside of LinkedIn, most probably everyone.
I've seen that right inside of LinkedIn. You can click, uh, a little clock or something when you post, and then you can program it for tomorrow. So that's what we do. So this week, for example, I have zero to approve because it's all. I'm only approving, this is my business. So my team is creating the things.
So what you can do is you do, you, you, you say, I want to be visible from next month. You start [01:25:00] creating today and you program it for next month. 'cause then you always have a four week window. You never go into the stress situation. I need to post something today. And then it should, especially on LinkedIn, always prepare before, do things with intent and then shoot it out.
A very powerful, I think I mentioned that in the morning to to, to some of you, a very powerful thing that you can do in your age. Document your journey. This is what I learned in this seminar. This is what I learned from that keynote. Even one of your professors is doing that. It's quite cool. He did it on LinkedIn the last days and tagged all of us, which was smart.
So. Share your journey because people are interested in the journey. How did you get to where you are? It's, it's a very, very simple strategy for all of you. I mean, I don't need to explain any of the social medias, right? [01:26:00] Like there are hundreds of thousands of tools. I recommend you to be everywhere. The reason for that is, and that's also the reason why I'm creating TikTok, uh, uh, channels for every single CEO that we do this.
You are in a different mindset when you're using different tools. You're in a different mindset when you're using TikTok than when you're using LinkedIn. When you're using LinkedIn, you're more about business topics. When you're using TikTok, you're more about entertainment topics or whatever you're about.
The cool thing of that is if you are everywhere, people can figure you out from a different mindset perspective. Like, you are not expecting me to be on TikTok and I pop up and talk about personal branding and hey, build a hub, or whatever I talk about. And then you say, oh, that's interesting. If the, the same content on LinkedIn you might not be interested in.
Same on TikTok, [01:27:00] same, same on the other platforms. So you can use that to your advantage by being everywhere. And the good thing is you don't need to create this different content. You can just use the same content and fine tune things a little bit. 'cause the vo tone of voice on TikTok is slightly different than LinkedIn.
I still use a hundred percent the same video because I believe it's not worth it for us right now to do a separate TikTok strategy.
Speaker 10: Uh, how we can like have equilibrium between quality and. 'cause I think if I do like a content for like all days won't be good. You know?
Jens Heitland: That's why I'm saying prepare before, I would recommend you at least to do post three times per week. You don't need to go as crazy as I am, but better is more, is uh, more is better.[01:28:00]
It sounds super weird, but it works. I always, so for, for me, for me it's quite interesting because I do this since a couple of years and we always measure, like I'm an engineer. I look at the average of the week and the average of the week is way higher when I'm posting every day than I post twice. But if you look at every single post, if I post twice per week, every single post has more engagement and more reach.
But if you look at the average over the week, it's way higher. So meaning. More eyeballs see me when I'm posting more often, but I have less likes and I don't care about likes because my goal is business. I'm not an influencer. So it, it's, it's really something that you need to decide for you. Do you want to use it to be seen and, and drive your business or something into a direction?
Then I always recommend do more, do [01:29:00] first more, and then do better. Because while you're doing more, you are getting better. You will see that in my first videos is if you check them out, they're crap.
Speaker 2: How much of your daily time does it take away to create all
Jens Heitland: that content? When I did everything myself, same system, half an hour per day.
But I mean, that driving business is still peanuts from a, from a focus perspective. So if you say you're investing half an hour every day time, seven is, is not that much to get inbound leads for your business and. Half an hour, all of you have half an hour easily, like switch off TikTok. There's a cool startup in my group.
They're focusing on that.
Speaker 2: Uh, when you mentioned
Speaker 10: production, like how important is it for like storyboarding and shot list and script? Is that what you mean With the preparation
Jens Heitland: phase? Yes. If you really want to get into that, weeds [01:30:00] do it. But I right now for most of you it's just better start, start documenting.
I have a very good example. Um, he's a fashion guy from Berlin and I, I was kind of coaching him a little bit in the beginning and he was crap in videos. He just posted it. He was just keeps on doing and he's amazing. Right now he's fashion designer in, in Berlin
Speaker 4: about, uh, judgment. Others in posting
Jens Heitland: you Yeah. Need to get over it. Very good question. Give a fuck. It's difficult, especially in your age. I get a lot of negative comments, not on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is easy peasy, but on, on, on TikTok, like, who is this stupid dude? Like he, he even doesn't have hair. Whatever. I give a fuck, I give a fuck.
Like, I don't care at all because I, I don't [01:31:00] let other people define my value. That's something you need, you need to learn. It's very difficult first him. Uh, we don't have a business
Speaker 3: that we profit, which will be like the best projection for, for the ation itself to get.
Jens Heitland: A different strategy. So if you want to get paid for the content that you create and do brand deals, then you need to do an influencer strategy because brand deals only come with the audience size and the engagement that you have on every post. I don't care about how many likes I have. I care about how much money gets into my pocket through my business and the impact that my clients do.
Different strategy. So if you want to go towards influencer, it's all about what is the most crazy thing you can do so that you get the highest engagement. That's like figure out how to how, how to go viral, [01:32:00] literally. And that's the number one priority. That's that's Mr. Beast thing. Mr. Beast is so obsessed, how do I create engagement as much as possible and then building that huge engine.
For example, when you talk about the types
Speaker 3: of content, example, it's about teaching. It's. For example, teaching and being great at the same time would be like your opinion on how
Jens Heitland: you can perform if it fits to you can perform. I have no idea. I don't do, and I don't recommend, at least in my world, to, to do influencer strategies.
'cause if you just think about, we use your example. Let's say you have, if you're lucky, 10,000 followers on Instagram. If we take this, 10,000 followers give you maybe whatever, if the people directly pay you, let's say you get one euro from every person that follows you, it's 10,000 euros. How often do you get one euro from every follower that you [01:33:00] have?
It's very unlikely that they're going to pay you. So it's always a percentage of the percentage. If you build a business, in my case, the average ticket that we have is 55,000 euros average ticket. So if I have one person that follows me and it gets to be a customer, it's 55 plus thousand and it's one person different strategy.
Do you use critique? So not just negative judgment, but critique. Do you use that sort of like as a market research and as data or not? I don't, because most of the things we do are with a strategy in mind. And the, the, the difficult thing for other people that, let's say you see one post, you don't know what intent is behind that post.
So I'm, I'm taking it and I'm thanking people when I see it, but I'm not, most of the time not taking it in. [01:34:00] I had a fun video last week, so I talk about CEOs and, and the editor did a mistake in the beginning, which was SEO instead of CEO. And I said, let's keep it into, see how many people see it and contact me.
And it was so fun that people reached out. Ah, you have, you are so stupid that you use SEO. So thank you for reaching out. It's amazing. How can I help you?
So, and I have seen it before we post it, so I've not seen it afterwards. Obviously. I said, let's keep it in to use it.
Speaker 5: I have done a personal question is not regarding to this. Um, so I recently opened up my own media production company, and I have a question, since I don't have large projects to show up to, how can I create credibility and visibility for my brand so I can approach clients, and clients can approach me?
Jens Heitland: You mean product projects or you,
Speaker 5: um, for, [01:35:00] well, for my company, and that's a different question. Should my personal brand be different than my company's?
Jens Heitland: Yes. Okay. So my personal brand is me. It's always going to be different than my company. My company's. We focus a hundred percent on CEOs, a hundred percent on thought leadership.
I can talk about green shoes, sustainability, whatever I'm passionate about. I cannot do that inside of the business. Like if I talk about, Hey, let's walk 24 hours on on my business, everyone was like, are you not? So me as a person, I can do that, but I'm still attracting through my diversity people to my business.
Let's tackle your business part after I can, I can share. I appreciate that very much. So let's, let's quickly end with the LinkedIn. I'm sorry we're running out of time. LinkedIn pimp up. We use my my case as an example because if we do this live with someone, it takes a long time. Number one thing is [01:36:00] when you, when you open up LinkedIn on your phone or on desktop, doesn't matter.
People will look at your photo. If your photo is crap or ai, people will see that. Put in the highest quality photo where your face is visible because like you have seen in the first slide with the, with all the people, we are humans. We are interacting with our faces. You will not remember my name after two weeks, most probably, but you will remember my face.
So that's why it's important. And as you can see, there's a banner behind. I don't want to, to look into how many people of you don't use the banner. It's a lot of people you don't that don't use that. It's like a business card that you have. I double my photo because I know the power of the face. That's why I'm using my photo.
It's a strategy. So have a banner. That's key thing. That's the thing behind your head. And then I always [01:37:00] recommend put something of your why into that banner so that people know straight away what you're about. Obviously I want drive people to my business. Next thing is under your name, you have a possibility to write your title, whatever you are about.
Make it in a way that people understand what what you do. I give you my example for those that cannot read it, CEO of the CEO Thought Leadership Agency, it's pretty much clear whom, who is my target and what we do. CEOs thought leadership, and only then I go into the the company making credibility visible, and then I added a personal thing, which some of you have seen and talked to me already about.
I'm a nerd when it comes. I did. I don't write nerd Ultra Endurance enthusiast. That's the business version of that. Again, a personal thing that differentiates me to everyone else because there is, I have this [01:38:00] right now, a client who is as well, an ultra endurance person, and he said, I want to work with you because you know my mindset.
Just because of this freaking thing on, on my LinkedIn page, and you can use that to yourself. Another thing I have here, that's the last one, is keynote speaker. If nobody knows that I'm a keynote speaker, they cannot book me and pay me for it. Another thing, what you should then add over time, which connects to one of the question, visit my website.
So when you click that website, you're ending up in my funnel, which is my personal website. So that's, that's the upper part about, there are a lot of crappy about sections, about section is the thing where you can write whatever you want. It's like 6,000 I think, um, letters or however you call that. What I do here, I do a mix of my vision and my [01:39:00] origin story.
Because what I want people, so my first, uh, first sentence is I wasn't always an innovation leader and entrepreneur. My journey began on construction sites in Germany. Think about it. I, I, I'm the person that is going to hire you or looking into your profile to potentially hire you. And I get dragged into your stories like, oh, that's interesting.
Instead you're saying, I'm the best CEO of the world and I'm like, business, business, business. Completely different. Um, another section that you functionality in LinkedIn, you can highlight your top skills in the upper section. A lot of people don't do that. Think about it as a platform. LinkedIn has a search functionality internally, and if you look at, which I did in the past, if you have the subscription of hiring people, like HR people that are going to hire people, they can search for these keywords.
If you don't have that [01:40:00] keyword, which is. Skill, they will not find you. So make sure that the things that you are good at and the skills that you have, they're visible on your LinkedIn
content. And we have talked about this a lot. I try to do a mix of videos and photos and text, and I post two times per day. Minimal. That's just, and you see, it's not that much engagement, at least. I mean, that's four hours, it's four people likes, I don't care. I don't care at all.
The CV section super important because that's the thing that recruiters will look into and other people as well. In my case, clients, this is all the credibility. I mean, I have done 200 jobs or something. Um, you maybe have not, but you can write, for example, right now you are a, a alumni of E-I-A. [01:41:00] This should be in your in, in your LinkedIn profile, in your cv, and then you can write, which is the next part.
What did you do? Not just, this is the program and that's, that's what the program is about. You talk, this is what you learned. This is the story. So I start here, which is another hook. Tell a story. In 2019, I left corporate life to build something of my own. I started pipeline innovation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then I tell a story about my debt in my cv.
Speaker 6: Always something good
Jens Heitland: doesn't matter. It's a story. Again. Then you have, in every job, you have skills that you can add. A lot of people don't do that
Speaker 10: in LinkedIn. We can put like as many skills as we want. Yeah. But I've heard already that is better to put like the ones that are the best.
Not like having 30 skills.
Jens Heitland: I mean, nobody has 30 total skills. Like I would put [01:42:00] the, the ones that really like top five or whatever.
Speaker 10: Oh, okay. Yeah. For example,
Jens Heitland: yeah, you see it here. I have one, two and plus six. Oh, this is eight. It's still too much. But they all fit. I just use the algorithm. They're
Speaker 10: a specific number, like a global number.
Jens Heitland: No, I don't think so. So add your skills and then if you have, if you ever have a startup, have your pitch deck here or the link to your website. Um, and then the title, make the title understandable from what you are. Even today, you're like alumni or student, startup student, whatever you have so that people understand what it is.
There are a lot of weird job description. If you work ever in a bigger company, they name whatever the f. The position is, but nobody understands what it is because it's company internal policy that you are not allowed to be a manager or whatever it is. Put something that everyone understands.[01:43:00]
A super, super important thing for all of you. Get recommendations. There's a recommendation function inside of LinkedIn. Put this into your task list and, and put it on outdoor, which is reminds you every three months, every three months pop up and then ask someone for a recommendation on LinkedIn as more you have credible people giving you a recommendation as better it is what I would be you if I, I would be in, in your shoes.
Ask the mentors that work with you over the next couple of weeks to give you a recommendation. Ask your professors, ask your support teachers, whatever it is that are credible and can give you something personal. My top two are two clients. That's the be best promotion I can have. They wrote me a recommendation and one of them is chairman [01:44:00] of a huge company in Asia and and Europe.
So think about it, me hiring you and I will look at the recommendation. I will check, is it your buddy that is writing some, some or your sister, your brother, or is it like your professor that is well known and, and they're not going to do that for everyone. So be thoughtful whom you ask, but put that into your calendar so it pops up every three months.
'cause there are a lot of people who have nothing there. You miss out the credibility.
Last piece quickly. I know we are over time. This is how the programming looks. That's, that's a couple of weeks ago.
Career development. If you want to develop your career, show up as yourself. Make people [01:45:00] be part of your journey. If I search for you, when I want, when I go into a job interview with you, I want to know as much as possible about you. Feed me with what you want me to know. It's a strategy. It's not random.
Feed me what I want, what what I should find about you. 'cause the cool thing for all of you, you are in the driver's seat of the narrative that, that the internet knows about you right now. Not because it's from external articles, but if you have your own content, it will be more and more and more. It takes roughly three months and you're dominating it.
If done well with SEO and your personal website, this, this system takes you three months and then you're ranking every. I'm doing it daily with my clients. It, it roughly takes three months. Maybe with a politician, it might take a little longer if you have, yes, it, that's the tricky thing. If you have a very common name [01:46:00] there, there, there are hundreds of people.
Or if you have like an actor and famous Hollywood movie producer, it's difficult to rank. But still, if you do better and more over time, because they give, uh, f most of them, if they have the same strategy, then it's difficult, but most people don't. So you can always dominate and, and show up.
Last round of questions, then I let you go.
Speaker 3: If someone has a really common name, like you, shouldn't, you use like two last names, for example, if you have time to separate or,
Jens Heitland: I would always use your name because that's, that's most of the time never going to change. So it says more, you use it as better it gets.
Because when I started, I was not visible at all. In, in, in the, in the internet, zero. And it was the others because one of them is football player, but now you cannot find him anymore. So use use your own name, even if it's a [01:47:00] common name, as more you do as better it gets because it's, it's, it's about the system, not just about your name.
If they're not producing the internet will understand that over time. And then it's just ranking you because as more you produce, as more people will click and, and look at you. And as more people do that, as more the internet understands AI as well to drive people towards you. Uh, following his question, my name has like seven names, and if I Seven names.
Yeah. And then if I have my name, my
Speaker 6: full name, like it's a full on frame. Should I use
Jens Heitland: everything? Yeah, yeah. No, that's maybe a little bit much.
Speaker 6: Okay. So I just like. Three, please.
Jens Heitland: What, what is the one that you, you use normally? Like what are the what? How do people know you?
Speaker 6: My first name and my surname is like the most, uh, common thing in Portugal.
Like everybody has my name.
Jens Heitland: Okay. But like, if I use every single thing, they don't have every single, I, I give you an example, what we did with the client. So we, one of [01:48:00] the CEOs is, his name is Peter Kovac. He's Hungarian and it's like every second person is Peter Kovac. When I searched first time, I have not found him.
It was like 108 people, same name, but he has a middle name. What we did with him was Peter m dot Kovac. But that's something you, you need to decide for yourself. What is the, the, the name you want to push the next couple of years? 'cause that's the thing you need to push. And for him, we decided on this mdot to make it very, very clear.
There's only one mdot. We have searched about that. Okay. Any, when aligning your personal brand with a company brand, do you recommend always to have separate accounts or somewhere to make it like a separate, always separate business. A hundred percent business, personal [01:49:00] brand, a hundred percent personal brand, or you can link it together, but it should be separate because think about startup, you want to sell your business,
they might switch off the website and everything is gone. If you put it together. If you like, you don't switch off your personal website.
Speaker 9: Thank
Speaker 3: you. What if your business is your personal brand,
Jens Heitland: then you're an influencer. Yeah. But like
Speaker 3: how are you gonna do.
Jens Heitland: Then, then most probably you're selling something, education or brand deals, then it's just your name.
Then you have no, then then it's not a real business in my, in my perspective. Yeah. Then it's just your name. Exactly. So it's like business is like I am building a company that has employees and everything.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Jens Heitland: Past [01:50:00] one.
Speaker 9: Um, I
Speaker 6: business, um, that I do not wanna my face. Own. Own.
Speaker 9: Or should I?
Jens Heitland: It really depends what it is. The, the most powerful and that's the, doesn't matter what business you do, if you put yourself to it, it's always different than any other bit. Like there are hundreds of thousands media agencies. It's still different and, and I'm still attracting different people than he would just because of me.
Even if we would do a hundred percent the same thing, it's still different people because people are attracted in the way how I communicate and how he communicates. Nothing wrong with that, but because of me it's different. And over time you are building the brand. If we take IKEA as an example, it started with one person and who was the founder and he was making the difference.
Speaker 2: Like [01:51:00] IKEA is not known for the person.
Jens Heitland: Not anymore. I mean, it's hundreds years old.
Speaker 2: Can we talk about
Jens Heitland: this? Yeah, absolutely. I'm here the next couple of days. If you have questions, let me know. I'm happy to support. Thank you very much.
