How to Stand Out Online with Career Coach: Austin Belcak

Happy sunny Tuesday from Vancouver! Welcome back to the 15,921 of you opening today’s newsletter. I’m back with another great guest that's drummed up some killer advice on how to stand out in today's digital world. Let's jump in ??

The Setup:

?? Get a fresh perspective on niching down and repetitive creating

???? Meet Austin Belcak, former Director of Partner Development at Microsoft turned Career Coach with 750k+ followers

?? Learn how consistency & revision can solve your personal branding problems

Intro:

Austin Belcak is a former Microsoft Director of Partner Development turned career coach.

Guess where I first got to know him? It’s no surprise… right here on LinkedIn. A couple comments on each other’s posts turned into messages back and forth, and then it grew to a Zoom call, and now I just try to stay in touch with all the crazy projects he’s a part of… This time, I get to feature him and what he’s learned scaling to 750,000 followers on this platform.

Austin started his personal brand in 2016 after he got a job at Microsoft. People started asking him how he did it, so he wrote a blog post about the things he learned through his job search and how he made it happen.

It was focused on referral and value-validation projects (and not applying online). He put some promotion behind it, and it had a great response. Ever since then he’s continued writing for his blog for the past six years. ?? 

He joined LinkedIn two years ago and committed to writing content and creating content, which he has done almost every day since then.

His job-seeking strategies have been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., Fast Company, and The USA Today, and he’s helped thousands of job seekers land offers at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Uber, Spotify, Deloitte, Accenture, Sequoia Capital, Tesla, SpaceX, ESPN, The NFL, and more.

Austin sent us over a bunch of gems.?? Get ready to take some notes... 

JH: What’s your #1 tip for building community around your brand?

AB: I have two tips, actually. Although you can do alright with just one of them, you need both for significant progress and be successful.

Tip #1: Choose a Niche. 

I’m in the career space, and there are 800,000 career coaches on LinkedIn. Yes, 800,000.?? So how do I stand out? 

And this is true for any industry 一 personal branding, side hustles, online marketing... anything! 一 it’s probably saturated already.

So how do you differentiate yourself?

= Through specificity and through your offering.

I’m known for helping people land jobs without applying online. That’s what people come to me for. Yes, there are 800,000 other career coaches, but I didn’t find anyone else who offered “landing a job without applying online.”

Online applications is something that people are often frustrated by, so when the advice from all the other career coaches on online apps doesn't work, they come to me.

This is how I’ve differentiated and separated myself. I don’t even play in the online apps game at all. I let other people focus there. You can do that, and if it works for you great, but if it doesn’t, you can come to me and I can help you out with some different strategies. ??

Through this, I’ve distinguished myself from the competition. Everyone knows me as the guy who helps people get jobs without applying online. 

So what is that thing, that differientiator, that niche, for you?

Tip #2: Authenticity.

I’m very open about my story: I had terrible grades, I didn’t study very much, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t try very hard. I also went into $15,000 of credit card debt after I graduated because I made poor financial decisions. 

And I still share about my life. I talk about mental health. I share what’s going on with me personally outside of just business stuff. And I think my audience really connects with that. A lot of people tell me they’re surprised they get responses from me, or that they didn’t think I would be the way I am. I guess they expected someone different based on who I am and how the conversation went. 

What I’ve learned is people love it when you’re being authentic and true to yourself. I know it’s cliched advice, but it works. People like when they can hear both the positive and negatives, because it reflects life. And you can share along the way; you don’t have to be at the end of the journey to share this stuff. 

So to win at building a community around your brand, you have to find a niche and you have to be crisp, authentic, and sincere when telling your story, because that’s really what people are going to resonate with.

JH: What do you consider to be signature elements of your personal brand?

AB: Actionable advice. 

That was the goal when I started my brand, and the #1 piece of feedback people constantly tell me is that they love my content because of how actionable it is. 

This stemmed from when I was a job seeker, and I was out there reading other content: I was really sick of hearing what to do, without them telling me how to do it. For example, “Go network” isn’t very meaningful unless you tell me how to actually network.??

So when I started my brand, I aimed not just to tell people what to do, but show them how to do it. In a lot of my posts you’ll see, first the “here’s what you should do” and then the “here’s how to get it done.” For example, I recently made a post that if you’re researching a company, you should reach out to former employees. But how do you do that? Then I broke it down step by step and included an email template for reaching out. 

Going the extra mile is really impactful and has generated a lot of buzz and growth around my content. 

JH. What do you think differently about community building that others would think is weird? 

AB: The biggest thing that I did that I didn’t necessarily see others doing, was doing non-scalable things for a longer period of time. ??

What do I mean by that? 

As I was growing my following on LinkedIn, my community, and my email list, I was in the 10’s of thousands of people in my network, and then hundreds of thousands. Up until recently I was responding to every comment, every email. I was occasionally scheduling calls with people or sending them personalized Loom videos. 

And I think that when you’re starting out, everyones looking for a way to fast track it. You want to share one photo, get a million likes, and not have to lift a finger.

But really, the biggest advantage you have when building a business is you. 

Basically every business idea has been done before in some capacity. And guess what? Other people have more money, resources, experience. The thing that’s truly unique is you.

That’s why a personal touch can go a long way. 

I started out doing super non-scalable things, like getting on 30-minute calls with people, but over time I scaled up by using Loom to do a 1-way 2-minute video. People still get to see my face and I got to interact with them. 

Especially as you’re beginning, that's your differentiator: Make people feel like they’re being seen and heard by you. That’s where you start to build loyal fans.

And then as you grow you can surprise and delight a lot of people by showing up for them. And it doesn’t have to be a 20-30 minute conversation, it can be a 120 second audio message over LinkedIn that says, “hey I appreciate you.”??

A lot of people say you have to scale and create content -- and yes, obviously you do have to create content and you do have to have a growth mindset -- but it also comes down to the non-scalable one-on-one interactions that truly lead to a super strong community.

JH: What’s the best book to read on marketing? 

AB: In today’s world, one of the most valuable skills you can learn is copywriting. 

Everything we do is written. Sending emails. Texting. Writing posts. 

If you don’t understand the power that you words have or how they can be used in your favour to gain an advantage, you’re missing out.

So copywriting is essentially the study of how to persuade people with writing. The more you learn about it, the more effective you’re going to be no matter what you’re doing.??

My favourite copywriting book is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. It was written in 1923, and a lot of quality copy writing books were written earlier on because the written word was all people had and they studied the crap outta’ it.

JH: What’s the best piece of brand advice you ever heard?

AB: You should really focus on consistency when you’re starting out. 

What happens is that people consume all this content (find your niche, find your passion, bla bla bla), and while it’s actionable immediately, the results aren't immediate.

The whole thing is the daily practice.

It’s showing up and doing the same thing everyday.

Do you want to be a podcast host? Record a podcast everyday.

Want to be a writer? Write every day.

Want to be an Instagram influencer? Post every day.

?? It’s reflecting, experimenting, getting data, and redirecting.

My goal was never to have thousands of followers on LinkedIn. It was to create one quality piece of content daily.

I knew that even by doing this, I wouldn’t scale from zero to 100,000 followers in a month. So instead I decided to focus on being good at my craft and engaging my audience. Then the growth would eventually follow. 

Be as ruthlessly consistent as you possibly can with what your output. You don’t always have to share it, but just do it to hone your craft. And don’t just be creating to create, be creating to analyze, experiment, iterate, and reflect. That’s where the exponential growth comes from. 

Personal brands are not built overnight. And they’re not built in 8-hour sprints on two Saturdays a month. (mic drop)

They're built in 20-30 minute increments every. single. day.

If you’re serious about building a brand, you need to show up and do the work daily to become the best at your craft.

ACTION BYTES ??

Start by identifying: 

??What’s your niche? → Build your brand around that.

??What’s your end goal? → Start creating on that platform daily.

Then spread some love to your audience. Find someone who often engages with you on LinkedIn and tell them you appreciate them. Personalize it and support them in some way. Recognize people and let them know you see them.

Riff of the Day

Need resume help? Try this new, job-winning resume builder -- it's 100% free and it's been used to create over 100,000+ resumes!?? Austin also has a ton of other resources for job seekers over at Cultivated Culture.

 Special thanks to Austin for joining us on the Personal Brand Brief today.

If you have any ideas that sparked or you want to suggest someone to be featured, drop me a note here! 

Stay outta’ trouble and catch you next week.

??? Joel

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