8 things we learned building an online community and a personal brand

My name is Evelina and i'm the co-founder of Foodgeekz. It all started when we were very young- we've always cooked lots of food at home and loved to be in the kitchen and to be creative. 2016 I educated myself to become a Holistic Nutrition Coach. Both me and Emmy started to cook more wholesome food and started to live our life more holistic and noticed positive changes in all aspects of life. We started to share our story on social media and many could relate. Today we work with our social media full time and keep building a strong community. What we love to do is to combined the digital brand Foodgeekz and bring it to "the real world"; we cook and work at events, yoga and surf-retreats where our followers get to eat our food they see on social media and connect with us in the real life. We've also combined the content creation with cook books , our own products like Swedish premium vegan "FIKA"bars, digital e-books, newsletters and collaboration with other well-known brands.

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My 8 important things I've learned while building a online community and a personal brand:

1. Create authentic content‍

It's important to be yourself and telling a story in your content on social media while building a strong community. Even if you are your own brand or your company. Identify and target your audience and tweek your messages and story to meet your customers and followers.

2. Work online and offline‍

We have manage to combine both digital presence and physical presence with our event and retreats. If you can create your own event, meet and greet with your customers and followers to build a strong community outside the digital world. ‍

3. Help others‍

When you're an entrepreneur and running a small business you have a lots of different kind of tasks. You're often every role in your company- marketing, accounting, sales and networking. Something that is very important is to reach out when you need help and help others as well. There's so many in the same position as you are and if we can help each other, we're all lucky.

4. Be yourself

‍Running a business and follow your passion can sometimes be testing in an environment in the digital world. Because we're always connected and constantly updated about news, trends and lots of information. It's important to stay grounded and be yourself even if it's hard when your past colleagues just updated her Linkedin-title 😉 Stay present in what you want and your business even if it's difficult sometimes not to compare with someone else.

5. Don’t stop learning‍

There's always something new to learn, right? That can be stressful sometimes but never stop do so. Prioritize what's important for you and your business to learn and what you think is interesting and fun. When we keep learning new things, that's keeping us young 😉

6. Prioritize yourself and your health‍

If you're not having a good health, you can't even work. It's important to fuel your body with good energy, nourishing food and workout regularly. The mental health is also very important, maybe the most important one. Take a 10 min break everyday, breath deep and maybe do a short meditation. It's a lifehack!

7. Share free valuable content regularly

When you're building a community and a personal brand you need to give back to your followers regularly. It's important to share free valuable content- in our case: it could be a recipe or a blogpost. Create and publish content that educates, helps or inspire your customers or followers.

8. Analyze your data regularly- what work and what doesn’t…‍

In the beginning of every month we analyze our work past month. It's important to analyze and see what's working and what's not to optimize our resources and see if we're on "the right track" towards our goals.

Foodgeekz website: gofoodgeekz.com

Foodgeekz Instagram: @foodgeekz.se

Foodgeekz Tiktok: @Foodgeekz

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