I’m so glad you’re here! If you’re anything like me, you want to create a life around doing what you love.
I discovered a process for promoting my personal brand online and want to teach others how to do it, too.
I’ve worked in sales, marketing and advertising since college. I’ve spent a career helping business promote their own brands and know the power of building a strong online platform.
Why the heck am I doing this?
I’m a super shy introvert. I consider myself to be a very private person. I don’t seek or want the limelight. I don’t want to be famous. I’ve always felt more comfortable promoting someone else’s brand and business.
My husband talked me into it.
My husband, Rob Bertholf, excels at just about anything related to the web (and beyond). He’s a “search engine optimization expert” (google it, he’s #1), a software developer, a website developer (he’s launched over 1,000 websites) and an early social media adopter (@Rob was among the first on twitter). There’s actually even much more, but this is supposed to be about me, not him.
I wanted to build an online presence and create a brand to launch an online educational product we were working on. Because I had almost zero presence on social media compared to him, I thought it was best if we leveraged his online following and build our brand around him.
He asked me why I didn’t want to build a brand around myself? I thought about it. Three reasons:
- I didn’t know how. It seemed very natural for him, but I never felt like I really had much to say on social media. I can create a marketing plan for a brand, but I hate talking about myself.
- Social media takes a lot of time, and
- I was deathly afraid of what people would think about me. I was afraid of being judged and criticized.
Let’s address number one, “I don’t know how.” Rob said he would teach me, step by step, what I needed to do to establish my personal brand online and promote myself.
Then, we agreed we would work on a process and leverage online tools so it wouldn’t take too much time.
So that left me to deal with #3. I remember going through a tough time in my life when I had to do some public speaking to promote the launch of our software product. As I prepared for each speaking engagement I hoped I would get hit by a car so I could get out of it.
How did I get through it? Deep down, I knew that I didn’t want fear to control my destiny. I made the decision to work on not letting the opinion of others control my life. As a chronic people pleaser, this does not come easy for me.
I wanted to overcome my fear, step out of his shadow, so I could make a living at doing what I love…sharing my knowledge.
I decided to document each step in my process to establish and grow my online platform to build an audience that wants to learn how to grow theirs too.
If you want to build and promote your brand and create a business out of it, I’d love to share my process with you.
Professional Bio
Ann Boots has over 15 years of sales, marketing, advertising and sales management experience. She worked at Cox Media Group running a sales team selling radio advertising to business in Hawaii. She created successful campaigns and promotions for Weight Watchers, Times Supermarkets, MercedesBenz, Central Pacific Bank and many others and later started and lead their Digital Marketing Department.
In 2009 she co-founded a leading digital marketing company in Hawaii, working in website and software development, SEO, PPC and social marketing strategy.
She now lives in San Diego with her husband Rob Bertholf.
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