🎙 The Digital Nomads Daily Podcast Episode #70

Why You Want To Create Your Personal Brand With Marina

👇 Or listen in your fav podcast apps👇

listen on google podcasts digital nomads daily (1)

listen-on-apple-podcasts digital nomads daily

Listen to our interview with digital nomad Marina:

🔥Why you want to create a strong personal brand in 2023
🔥Business and mindset tips for building and pivoting your business
🔥Things you want to avoid as a solopreneur and focus on instead
🔥🔥🔥 And so much more must-know digital nomad lifestyle tips for (aspiring) digital nomads!

banner_ want to reach a digital nomad audience with digital nomads daily

“You are the one that gets to decide what the narrative is.”

Meet digital nomad and personal branding expert Marina

Before working online from anywhere, Marina was already into traveling and her travel journey started in 2015. She is originally from Egypt and is an entrepreneur who started as a freelancer offering creative services. Marina also loved to travel and create content like writing and photography and shared her travel journey and tips on her blog. She has 4 years in business now and 2 years as a digital nomad.

Other digital nomads who joined the podcast, like Tiff in episode 15, Anne in episode 22, and Steve in episode 49, Marina’s business also pivoted multiple times. Today she is focused on personal branding and helps other entrepreneurs create a strong personal brands. You might wonder, what is a personal brand? Here is how Marina describes it;

‘‘Personal branding is taking the persona and their skills, what they are and what they represent as a human and packaging that and teaching them how to show up online in a way that matches their personality.’’

A big benefit of having a personal brand is that more aligned opportunities will appear and you can monetize your skills. So a personal brand is great for anyone with a serviced based business, especially speakers and writers.

How to pivot your business

So marina’s business looked very different today from when she started. While this is entirely normal, it can be overwhelming. Marina shares that something is off if you are still running the same business as when you started. Transformations and pivots are part of the entrepreneurial journey and you have to find a way to deal with them. Marina shares a few things that help her go through these transitions.

Getting outside support

Steve also experienced this and got, just like Marina, a business coach to help and see other opportunities. Together with her coach, they focused on what Marina was passionate about and skills she could monetize. Then, she morphed that into a signature service that combined the things she liked. It resulted in her signature service as a personal brand coach, where supporting people through coaching and design comes together.

Avoid focusing on what others would think about you

As silly as it might sound, a mindset struggle Marina and so many other digital nomads face is worrying about what other people think whenever you post something. Having a personal brand helps feeling more confident because if it’s aligned with who you are and your values, it shouldn’t matter. Marina says in the podcast episode that she adapted the mindset of not caring if people would cringe at her content because she decides her own narrative. It’s her responsibility to show up as true to herself as possible because that is how she can sustain her business.

There is no such thing as one size fits all strategy for your business

Some years ago, this massive wave of content where people would focus on 3 steps, 4 steps, or 10 steps frameworks were booming. We have discussed this with other creative digital nomad entrepreneurs on the podcast and our conclusion is that it doesn’t work. Even though there are success strategies and great ideas to implement that could drive success, every business has its own process and timeline—especially those who are combing this with fun things like traveling the world.

Manifesting itself won’t be enough

The same goes for manifestation techniques. You may have read somewhere that people manifested cars and successful businesses and found happiness and fulfillment through manifestation.

At Digital Nomads Daily, we love manifesting but we 100% with Marina that it only works with action. Behind all that result of others, there are smaller steps taken that got the person there, and this is not what you see online in a 30-second reel. Your business is an ongoing process and it takes time, energy and other investments to make it work.

Solopreneurs can’t be online all the time

Solopreneurs wear many hats, and they need to take care of everything, including accounting, HR, personal well-being, promotion, and serving their clients. So let’s get one misconception out of the way first. Marina shares that it’s an illusion to manage all platforms, thus being online everywhere and showing up authentically.

When she started her business, she focused on mastering Instagram because that platform had writing and photography, two things she enjoys doing. She began sharing blogs and newsletters and over time, she gathered a team and created a workflow that enabled Marina to show up on various platforms. Getting support and outsourcing tasks only happened once her business started picking up, which was a strategic decision for her. Today she creates the main piece of content and her team members will turn it into blog posts, newsletters, TiktToks, etc.

Digital nomad life advice Marina would tell her old self

A question we love to ask our guests is “If you could give your old self advice, what would that be?” In this episode, we also popped the questions and Marina shares 3 things you want to know too.

💙 Get rid of things that don’t work faster.

💙 Prioritize your energy

💙 Take care of your health.

Marina shares that it’s always good to try new things when you run a business, but if it clearly doesn’t work, just get rid of it and don’t force it upon yourself. As a last piece of advice, your energy and health are part of your business and a successful business goes hand in hand with a healthy YOU. So take care of yourself and get regular health checkups, implement healthy routines, eat well, exercise, socialize etc.