My Personal Brand: Nerdiness to a New Level

This morning I read a blog post advocating that young professionals take care to present a consistent personal brand throughout all of their social media accounts. Despite my numerous faults in life I can say that this is something that I do a decent job at. I take pride in making sure that I utilize all of my personal social media channels to give my audience different content through each one while still promoting my brand and blog.

But I don’t stop pushing my consistent personal brand at a social media level. Rather I like to take it to a different, much nerdier level. I won’t sit here and lie by saying that I don’t try to acquaint people with my brand through promotional items. Before today I had premium stationary and a clothing line (okay, one t-shirt) dedicated to my blog and social media channels. Those items helped me reach an audience that doesn’t check Twitter 24/7 or own an iPhone but it wasn’t nearly enough. With my cargo that came in today via UPS I stepped everything up a notch.

Self-promotion at a totally shameful level.

Self-promotion at a totally shameful level.

Just a quick backstory before I get right to my newest item: A quirk about me that others like to make fun of is that I always carry pens with me in my pocket. Since about the age of 13 if you ever needed a writing utensil and you happened to be around me you didn’t need to scramble. You just asked me. To this day I am constantly whipping out pens for friends, co-workers, and random people to use. But I pack them more for me than for the convenience of others. I am a compulsive writer. Even though I mentioned last night that I use my iPhone notepad a lot I also jot down ideas and notes the old traditional way as well. Also, as I am a huge journaler I use ballpoint pens to write long passages every single day. Do you get it?…I use pens a lot.

When in discussion with our promotional provider rep at Grizzly Athletics, Pete, I noticed he had an interesting proposition on his e-mail signature. Advertising the special of the month it presented a very intriguing deal. For just $94.95 a customer could receive 250 custom made pens. Of course a light bulb immediately went off in my head that screamed Personal Brand + Practical Use Item + Great Deal = No Brainer. I immediately told Pete that I wanted to work with him as an individual customer for once as opposed to purchasing on behalf of my work. Within a short window of probably just 12 hours I had provided Pete with my color scheme and art work and he submitted the order.

Look how nice these turned out!

Look how nice these turned out!

Fast forward to today and I was grinning from ear to ear when I picked up a cardboard box full of my newest personal marketing item. With 262 total pens (yep, the manufacturer threw in a few extra) I knew I had to start spreading the wealth. Upon getting back to the office I distributed the blue trimmed writing utensils to my co-workers throughout the athletic department. That managed to clean me out of about 5% of my stash. With still a plethora of high quality, personal branded pens left that would take me 15 lifetimes to draw all the ink out of I know I need to find another way to get these in the hands of more people.

Read below and I will tell you how you can get one of these pens I am holding.

Read below and I will tell you how you can get one of these pens I am holding.

With that said, I would love to give my loyal readers a Don’t Blink pen. To make the request process legitimate and to protect against randos spamming this blog in island countries you must text me if you want a pen. If you don’t know my number and are not a spammer, reach out to me over social media and I will hook you up by mailing a pen off to you.

These pens work great!

These pens work great!

Thank you to Exact Image and Pete Aklestad for doing an awesome job on my order and providing me with a great product. You won’t believe how beautiful these things write. Don’t Blink.