Attention on Tap: How to Bake Serious Buzz 🐝 Into Your Personal Brand Based Business

Part 4/4 of the multi-passionate personal brand-based founders guide to a business that prints cash, serves well and sets you free.

Apr 21, 2025

This is Part Four in a series to help you set up a personal brand for success. You can view Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here. This is the final edition in the series.

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For a personal brand-based business to really SING, it needs a ‘talkaboutable edge’!

(Note: This is the final step in our four part series on setting your personal brand up for big attention and success).

Getting this right is like sprinkling magic fairy dust on your business.

Having a talkaboutable edge bakes BUZZ right into the very fabric of your business.

It makes people stop, sit up and pay attention when you start talking about it.

And, it makes everything you do to try to get attention after that point about fifty million times easier.

Think of it like the invisible ‘cherry on top’ that makes the tactics and work you layer on top pay off, like so —

Instead of creating social media posts to crickets, your posts POP.
Instead of pitching for guest podcast spots to polite ‘no thank yous’ (or more likely, radio silence), you have people begging you to appear on their show.
And, instead of trying to beg, borrow and steal for people to find out about your business, they’re coming to YOU.

I kind of liken it to making your business the ‘it guy or girl’ – you know the ones, every generation has them.

(Daisy Edgar Jones right now, by the way).

There’s something about them, but you can’t ever quuuuuuite put your finger on what it is. They just seem to stand out, shine, and capture hearts and minds... making it all just feel so effortless to boot.

Crafting your ‘talkaboutable edge’ is designed to give your business that kind of vibe.

Dig it?

Get this final step right, and your future business you will come back and thank you with flowers, chocolates and fancy date nights forevermore.

The problem? Businesses HARDLY EVER DO THIS AT ALL.

Creative industries HAVE to do it – their products live and breath by their ability to do so!

Imagine Netflix coming out with a brand new series.

‘It’ll be a smash hit!’, they announce.

You wait and wait – how exciting.

When it finally airs, this is the title and tagline.

How to Automate Your Investing: Three Simple Steps Invest (A Series).

*Womp womp*

You wouldn’t tune in, right?

And yet, founders talk about their businesses like this every single day and wonder why they don’t stand out.

They try to get on podcasts with something like this:

“Hey! I’d love to add value on your podcast, I talk around the topic of investments and automating your investments. I think you’re listeners would love it!”

They create social media posts like this and wonder why they get zero engagement:

“How to Invest With Vanguard: 5 Minute Tutorial”

And they try to attract business with the same pitch.

*Womp womp WOOOOOOOMP*

Boring! Blah! Vanilla! Going around boring everyone to bloody tears.

No wonder they’re invisible.

Let’s instead think about how we could craft this into something with a talkaboutable edge.

Personal finance expert Ramit Sethi does exactly this! He creates a talkaboutable edge for his personal finance and automated investing education business.

Central to a great talkaboutable edge is to integrate into it a big MISSION that others can get on board with. The mission is the way you want to not just sell things, but make the world better. It should also pioneer a completely new way of doing it, too.

His big mission?

Inspiring others to ‘live their rich life’.

To expand, here’s an excerpt from his website:

Living a Small Life is a Tragedy:

Why does typical money advice focus on restriction? Don’t buy lattes. Don’t go on vacations. Don’t get new jeans. Just eat asparagus and hoard your money and maybe you can use it when you turn 80. Here’s a radical thought: What if you used your money to say “yes”?

Living your Rich Life isn’t about frugality — there are plenty of sites that will lecture you about disabling your oven light to save $0.11 per year. I wholeheartedly disagree.

A $5 coffee is not going to change your financial life. But learning how to automatically invest, how to select the right asset allocation, and how to negotiate a $15,000 raise will. Ask $30,000 questions, not $3 ones.

See how this flips the concept of investing on its head and instead leads with something that feels interesting and stands out?

That’s what we want!

Here’s EXACTLY how to do it:

How to Create a Talkaboutable Edge For Your Personal Brand Business

Step One: Define Your Thought Leadership

Crafting a talkaboutable edge requires thought leadership — in other words, to lead the thought in your space.

Thought leadership stops your business from becoming a commodity, something you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT TO BE.

The definition of “commodity” is: “to render (a good or service) widely available and interchangeable with one provided by another company”.

Most business ideas are commoditised.

Anyone can do them, and there is no real differentiator.

Getting more specific with your niche and market helps to offset this a little, but ultimately others could simply choose the same niche and market. Even if you pick a specific niche and market that no-one else is serving, the moment its successful? You’ll have competitors come and join.

Before you know it, voila – your business is one of two, and then seven.. and then more.

The problem with your business idea being a commodity is that commodities usually compete on price, because it’s the only real differentiator. One business starts, and the other business undercuts them a little, and back and forth until its profitability is smashed to smithereens.

That’s a race to the bottom, and absolutely NOT where you want to end up.

Here’s how to define your thought leadership to avoid it!

Step One: Identify a (Big) Problem With the ‘Status Quo’

Rather than simply sounding the same as everyone else, and delivering the same solution, and having the same opinions – something most industries are guilty of doing – your job becomes to identify what’s fundamentally WRONG with one or more of those things and showing that there is a different way of doing things.

So, step one in defining your thought leadership is to identify a big problem with the status quo.

Take out a piece of paper (or build a two column table in Google Docs!) and divide it into two columns. Label column one ‘the old way’ and column two ‘the new way’.

In column one, make a big list of all of the things that are wrong with your industry.

What’s broken in your industry?
What are the tired old ways that other businesses are doing things?
What’s something wrong with the standard ‘way things are’?

These are all the ‘enemy’; the old way of doing things that haven’t worked.

Your job is to highlight this!

Step Two: Flip it on its head.

In column two, brainstorm ways that you could flip each ‘thing’ on its head.

Give people a completely different solution or way of approaching the problem they have.

This new approach should intentionally ‘make an enemy’ of the old way, and use that stance to show people why your way is the new way.

Let’s use Ramit Sethi as an example to illustrate how this works in practice.

Ramit runs a lifestyle business selling productised IP.

His business niche is three layers deep –

Wealth > Personal Finance > Automated Investing

His market is (or at least, seems to be) people with traditional ‘jobs’ – they earn a salary for a paycheck.

All fairly ‘commoditised’ so far – there are PLENTY of finance experts that operate in this space.

The business positions itself in a category of one with a unique concept, which pits the ‘old way’ of managing personal finances with a ‘new way’.

The old way, and Ramit’s ‘enemy’:

The traditional ‘frugal’ approach to personal finance. Cutting back on things you love. Hoarding ALL of your money so you can finally use it when you’re 80. Worrying about spending on small things you love, like coffee. Pinching pennies and operating within restrictive budgets.

The new way, and Ramit's ‘new paradigm’:

Living a rich life now. Spending on all of the little luxuries you want to (because it’s the big decisions that actually matter more). Cut costs, but only on things you don’t love. Say yes to the things that light you up. Automate and forget.

The difference is night and day.

It’s the difference between:

I teach you how to manage your finances and automate your investing.

And:

I teach you how to Design your Rich Life. Design the life you’ve always imagined WITHOUT pinching pennies. Spend confidently on the things you love, and cut back mercilessly on the things you don’t.

You can FEEL the difference, right?

A talkaboutable edge takes something broken, old or wrong, flips it on its head and in doing so, STANDS OUT and rallies people around you.

The right people – the people who have tried the old way, or they’re tired of it – will join you.

And importantly, it won’t appeal to everyone, and so there are ALSO people who will be repelled by it. That’s a GOOD thing; if your edge is something everything is on board with its likely not polarising enough.

Step Two: Set Your Mission

The next step?

To develop a mission for your business idea that has your thought leadership wrapped into it.

Thought leadership requires you to develop a unique perspective.

Mission takes what you do, and makes it about MORE THAN YOU.

Together, they are magic.

Your job?

To position your new way as mission based - where it’s no longer just about you or your business idea, but how you’re going on a MISSION to use that idea to help people to experience that better way.

Example: I’m on a mission to help 1000 founders stop pinching pennies and live their rich life now.

Step Three: Develop Your Concept

Once you have your mission on lock, you can wrap a concept around it. A concept takes an idea, and makes it POP.

Founders aren’t accustomed to the art of developing a concept, but it’s ingrained in the book industry, the TV industry and the advertising world.

An idea is a commodity.

Anyone can have one.

A concept is a unique perspective through which someone looks at an idea, that stands out by virtue of being different and something people haven’t seen before.

Here’s an example of pitching a business idea:

“I help white-collar workers automate their investing so they can retire ten years earlier”.

There’s nothing WRONG with this as a business idea.

In fact, it gets five stars! It’s positioned to perfection with a specific niche that goes three layers deep, and its angled to solve a problem that a specific market has.

But as a concept? Something to get people to sit up and really pay attention?

It’s lacking.. zing.

A concept takes an idea a step further and gives it a talkaboutable edge.

It packages an idea up and delivers it in such a way that makes the person hearing it think – ‘wow, that’s really something!’

Let’s go back to our Ramit Sethi example, because he has achieved exactly this BOTH in the business world (where most people don’t!) and in the book and TV world too (where it’s a necessity to get picked up!)

He used it to pitch a TV Show which successfully went on to be a a six part Netflix series:

How to Get Rich: Financial detective Ramit Sethi embarks on a mission to help seven families fix their money problems, and make their lives richer – in just six weeks.

He used it to pitch a book to a publisher which went on to become a New York Times Bestseller:

I Will Teach You to Be Rich: Stop pinching pennies. Boost your income, spend on the things you love, and cut back mercilessly on the things you don’t. Live your rich life in six weeks.

And, he uses it as the fuel to drive attention and sales for his personal brand business, and the offers in his product suite.

All because he turns a basic idea into a bigger mission and wrapped an attention-grabbing concept around it.

Step Four: Infuse Your Concept into Everything You Do

Your concept is going to be the BIG through-line that you will use to colour everything in your business with your unique perspective.

You should use your concept for everything you do.

It will help you to stand out.

It will land you PR and guest podcast spots.

It will get people to listen to your podcast or tune into your Youtube channel.

It will give you a talkaboutable edge.

Use it to craft:

a) Your business pitch:

Your pitch is how you talk about your business to others. When you’re talking to other about your BUSINESS in circumstances outside pitching your offers, use a mission based concept.

b) Your long form content:

Come up with a concept for your long form content that ties everything together and makes it stand out, instead of just creating random pieces of concept.

These days, EVERYYYYYYONE and their dog is publishing content. This has picked up steam x 1,000,000 since AI marched onto the scene and made it easy for anyone to create it.. at scale.. in about 2.5 seconds.

So, the act of simply publishing is no longer enough to capture attention.

There are already a gazillion newsletters with boring ‘how to’ content being produced that could be Googled in two seconds. And eighty seven billion podcasts with people interviewing each other and going through their boring back stories before sharing a couple of tips.

How to do this is best illustrated using examples:

Example One: James Clear, Atomic Habits.

James Clear has a best selling book called ‘Atomic Habits’: An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones.

Niche: Wealth/Health > Productivity > Habits.

Concept:

Old way: Setting big goals and not meeting them.
New way: Tiny habits, consistently repeated
Mission: Compounding success through 1% actions every day.

Newsletter:

The 3-2-1 Newsletter: The most wisdom per word of any newsletter on the web.

He has applied this “tiny” concept to his newsletter. His newsletter uses a creative 3:2:1 approach, with 3 short ideas, 2 quotes and a question to ponder.

It is a productivity and habits newsletter, yes. But it stands out because he has developed a concept around it that aligns with his mission.

Example Two: Ellen Yin, Cubicle to CEO.

Ellen Yin has a podcast called ‘Cubicle to CEO’, where she shares financially transparent case study interviews..

Niche: Wealth > Entrepreneurship > Online Business For Service Providers and Coaches.

Concept:

Old way: Traditional business gatekeeps and is male dominated.
New way: Financial transparency.
Mission: Empower female entrepreneurs and people of colour who are statistically marginalised to achieve financial success.

Newsletter:

The Cubicle to CEO newsletter and podcast shares behind-the-business case-study interviews with leading entrepreneurs and CEOs who share a specific revenue growth strategy they've successfully tested in their own business, how they executed it, and what their results were.

It’s not just an ‘interview’, it follows a specific format and keeps financial transparency at the core of every episode.

c) PR and outreach:

What do you think is more likely to get you a spot on a TV station, guest podcast or a guest article?

Saying this: I help people to build local newsletters.

Or, this: Lick is on a mission to power 1000 local newsletters by 2030 to help revitalize small towns across America using technology.

This is an actual concept by Ash Ambirge, and NO DOUBT she could use the latter to pitch for PR and likely get picked up. Why? Because it’s mission based (revitalising small towns!), introduces a new way (using technology!) and feels unique and different (thought leadership!).

And more.

So, there you have it.

How to infuse your personal brand with a talkaboutable edge to make it ZING!

Start with your thought leadership, make it mission based and then wrap a concept around it and infuse it into the very fabric of your personal brand.

This is Part Four in a series to help you set up a personal brand for success. You can view Part One here, part two here, and part three here. This is the final edition in the series.