Building a Personal Brand Database

[00:00:00]
>> So this one is a thing that we started doing at that I've started having my troops do that I've started doing. And we call this building a personal brand database, it's a little bit different from what they usually call it. I don't know if y'all ever heard this term brag document, right, so you've heard this.

[00:00:21]
So essentially, what this is, this is a highlight page of all the things you've built, you've written, all the talks you've done, and whether you've been at meetups, things like that, all the conferences you've been to, all the positive things you've implemented on projects, all that stuff. This is the highlight reel of it.

[00:00:40]
Now, that now is a part of our personal brand database where we also have the assets, the colors needed for our projects. No, we're gonna use our projects, our portfolio head, our biography, things of that nature, all right? So I think I have mine. So yeah, here's my brand database.

[00:01:01]
I actually made this into a template for you as well. So you can go on to the reap the repo, get it, grab it, I use Notion for everything. So that's just what I've been using Notion. Notion is my new Bible, I put everything in there. And it's like my new brain, I love it.

[00:01:24]
So this is my brand database. I have two sections my brag document and my biography. So my biography I have the picture that I use for everything except, of course, Frontend Masters they decide to use like their own photo of me, boo. All right, I have this very, very long biography, this intentional, so that way I can chop it up based on what's needed.

[00:01:51]
Like, hey, if I want to go to ChatGPT and like, "hey, can you make this the size of a tweet, and they will be like, okay, cool, sure, here you go, right? I have my preferred web font and colors in here. Preferred web font is Gotham, which became famous during Barack Obama's first campaign, so that's been my favorite one.

[00:02:13]
These three colors, we call ' they're the hashflag color. So f6f6f6, hashflag white, hashflag blue and hashflag red. So got a little, bam, right there, that's shareable. And my brag document, how the brag document is. I, of course, start out with here, and I make sure every link has its own home for each one.

[00:02:39]
So my projects all have a link, my blogs all have a link, everything I've written has a link, every article I've been on has a link. I just keep this document going so that way everyone I have this, I can grab from regardless of where I'm planning on going to, right?

[00:02:58]
This is eight years of work. One day, you're gonna be there, like, I started off with nothing, just like y'all. So, here's your brag document. This is how it should look. You should have everything on here. Your projects, take it to another level, make everything searchable on a different format, right?

[00:03:17]
The reason why we do this is that we want to make things, we want to be able to move fast in today's world. Especially when you're building your portfolio, you have to prepare and gather this stuff, right? Cuz you're building your projects first, building your README profiles out.

[00:03:32]
You're doing all these other parts before you're doing a portfolio. When you need a place to store all this stuff. Where's you gonna put your user stories, right? Where you gonna put your case studies that you're doing for your projects, your mockups, right? Like you need to be able to store this stuff in a place that you can quickly grab it as you're building your portfolio out, right?

[00:03:52]
That's the number one job of the database, right, is to take everything you have and be able to help push it to the next level. So it helps you get a polished LinkedIn profile. It helps you have a whole list of things in here for you. So you can identify your brand new elements, i.e your web fonts, things of that nature, as we saw with me, your bio, have your core values, your unique skills and expertise, your professional achievements.

[00:04:24]
And it comes to his passions and interests, personal professional goals, relevant information, the list just goes on and on. You don't have to use Notion. I've seen people use Airtable as well and I've also seen Trello. Having the best examples, I haven't been on Trello, but Airtable and Notion have been the ones that I've seen work the best for this.