How to Stand Out Online with Career Coach: Austin Belcak
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.
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Read the rest of Austin’s personal branding tips on Substack.