​Click here to read this on the web​

Hey everyone

This is The Steal Club, a newsletter for creative entrepreneurs.

We share lessons, strategies, frameworks, and templates to grow your audience. “Stolen” from the best creators in the industry.

Before jumping in, next week I'm running a live workshop on building a sustainable content creation schedule.​

After the 60 min workshop, you'll go from having to find time to create content to being able to create a month's worth of content within a few hours.

This is a beta program so it's way cheaper than it will be when it's 100% done. Also, the spots are limited for this workshop to ensure a better experience.

​Take a look here if this sounds interesting! Now onto this week's content.

Time to read: 3 minutes, 47 seconds

3 ideas to brand yourself

Personal branding was not really popular a few years back.

Mot people talking about it had this “snake oil salesman” vibe. Much has changed since then.

The pandemic pushed all of us online. And more and more people started to recognizing the value of strong online brand.

It just makes things easier. It opens a lot of opportunities.

But the thing is that as more people are aware of this, the harder it is to succeed.

That’s where the “brand” part of personal brand comes in. Strong online brands are clear. In a matter of seconds, you get what they are all about.

Since I’m not a branding expert, I took a look at what some of the best creators do to brand themselves, and found 3 main things.

Let's steal them:

1/ Owning a color

Imagine this: You are scrolling through Twitter’s or LinkedIn’s white pristine feed (or using dark mode if you are a weirdo).

Everything looks plain and boring until a spark of color makes you strop the scroll.

It’s a yellow profile picture that immediately contrasts with your plain feed and makes you stop and read the content

This is why some creators (like me 👋) have a high-contrast colored background on their profile pictures.

They catch your attention by breaking the pattern with a strong color. This effect gets even better if we add pictures to the mix.

Denis Shatalin @Denis__Shatalin You can add $13 000 in revenue in 1 week. The best part? You can do it without even touching your product. Steal my pricing tactics that have brought easy sales for 50 startups: pic.twitter.com/KzPHg2RFgJ September 20th 2022 485 Retweets 3536 Likes

Even companies are starting to think like this!

Jared Smith @jareditor Smart branding from @workweekinc 👏 Those gold circles jump out, building awareness for the brand each time a creator tweets. Feels like gold is all over my feed these days. pic.twitter.com/PybG6I7ByC May 12th 2022 7 Retweets 64 Likes

One of the first things I ever did when I started building my Twitter audience was picking one color for my profile background.

The fuel behind this idea was this quote: "Make one decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."

Besides the mentioned attention-grabbing effects, picking one color helps non-designer people like me worry less.

The idea was (and still is) to use that color for EVERYTHING.

Upload a picture? Use that background

Make a visual? Use that background

and so on.

Owning a color also applies to any social platform. I've seen people "own colors" on LinkedIn, Instagram, and even Youtube!

2/ Owning an emoji

Some creators go one step further and also try to own an emoji:

Chris | InfographiKing 👑 @thechrisbaumann I’ve heard about owning a COLOR for your brand but haven’t heard much about owning an… EMOJI Best example of this for me is @KateBour newsletter Everytime I see the 🧠 in my inbox I know I’m in for some good value. Let’s see if I can win the crown 👑 September 30th 2022 0 Retweets 34 Likes

As the tweet above mentions, a great example is Katelyn Bourgoin (who also brands herself with yellow). Some of her tweets include the 🧠 emoji:

Katelyn Bourgoin ⚡️ @KateBour Geeky Brain Fact 🧠 Social media is addictive (you know that) Each Like, Comment and Share triggers our brain to release dopamine But did you know that smiling releases dopamine too? Next time you crave a dopamine fix, resist the urge to pick up your phone and smile instead September 28th 2022 7 Retweets 81 Likes

Slowly, this starts to build a presence on her audience’s head that the 🧠 emoji belongs to her.

This works because Katelyn uses it with a clear purpose, not just because.

She talks about Customer behavior and psychology, so using the 🧠 emoji makes a ton of sense for her and her brand.

If you want to own an emoji, make sure that it makes sense on the bigger context of your brand.

I for example, am trying to own the 🕵️‍♂️ emoji because of The Steal Club.

Speaking of visual branding and design, it’s time to introduce our first sponsor 👇

3/ Being the “guy or gal”

A more tactical application to branding yourself is including a tag. See Matt Gray for example:

His message (or Red Pill) is that scaling your brand and community is way simpler if you use systems.

That’s why he’s the “Systems Guy”.

Branding himself is one more layer of clarity to his brand. When people check his profile and read “The Systems Guy,” they have a clearer idea of what to expect from him.

Another example of this is Christine Carrillo or how she brands herself “The 20-Hour CEO”.

As you can see, tagging yourself as “the guy or gal” is one very effective way to solidify your online presence.

Slowly, people will start to recognize you because of that tag 👇

Alexis Grant @alexisgrant I took @ChristineCarril's course, The 20 Hour CEO, on @MavenHQ two months ago. I've been thinking about it ever since. 3 things I learned 👇 pic.twitter.com/gwXoN1u2RN August 11th 2022 1 Retweets 17 Likes

Moving forward

Now this doesn’t mean that you should now go out and pick a color and emoji and call yourself “The Frameworks guy or gal”

Do you need to put all of these into action to have a strong brand as a creator?

Absolutely not

For me, the absolute basics would be:

• Visual consistency (easy to do with using similar color palettes)
• A clear message to your audience aka Red Pill

The rest is just icing on the cake.

If you are unsure on where to start with branding yourself, the first thing I would do is build a strong follower funnel. You can see how here.​

And before moving to the last part of our email, let me thank you our second sponsor for today's content 👇

💰 The Stash

💡Grow your audience and build your business with the IdeaEconomy newsletter. Join over 2200 creators and solopreneurs getting the best content of the week to help start and grow their online business.

🐦 Using Twitter as your portfolio...literally.Super cool example on how Grace built her personal site as a Twitter thread

✍️ Basic but effective structure for your LinkedIn posts. I'm trying to grow over there (doing a 30 day challenge right now) and posts like these are super helpful

​

And that's it for today!

What do you think of today's email?

Your feedback helps me improve The Steal Club. Vote below:

• ​👍 Worth it​
• ​😐 Meh - was ok.​
• ​👎 Not interesting to me​

Thanks for being part of the club!

Alex Llull Thief Master The Steal Club Share this newsletter | Say 👋 on Twitter | Sponsor this newsletter

PS: Remember that you can now join my upcoming live workshop on building a content creation schedule so you stop struggling with making time to create.