How to Build Your Personal Brand The Right Way (Guaranteed to Work)

In this clip, we are gonna talk about how you can build a personal brand for this year and beyond. But before we do, if you enjoy clips on marketing and entrepreneurship, don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button if you're on YouTube, or just subscribe from whatever channel you are coming from. Personal branding, it sounds very vain, right? Like, I wanna be famous. Personal branding, you can look at a lot of people out there who sticks out. So I think you have people like Gary Vee. He sticks out as a personal brand because he has a guy following him around with a camera all the time. He's doing podcasts. Uh, he's doing blog content as well. He's speaking at different conferences. That's a personal brand. Now the things that we do over here at Single Grain, so we've got the Marketing School Podcast, we've got the Growth Everywhere Podcast. Um, we have our blog too, which gets a good amount of traffic. You know, I go around the world speaking and we have our YouTube channel too, like over here, YouTube channel over here. And then also this goes over to podcasts too. So, you know, we spend a lot of time on it. In the morning I do my podcast, the Growth Everywhere Podcast. So this morning I did 2 podcasts that are both about 35, 45 minutes each. And then right now I'm sitting here in the office, I'm doing videos and basically it goes over to podcasts as well and we're spending about 2 hours recording. So I spent about 4 to 5 hours, um, probably on at least a week. So maybe 20 hours a month on creating content. That's one way of doing things. You batch things into a day that way it's sane because then I can focus on other areas. I can focus on my software company, um, I can focus on strategy, things like that, uh, recruiting as well. where I just block out Thursday, that's my content day. Now, when I do the Marketing School Podcast, that one gets about a million downloads a month. That one, I, we, those are only 5 to 10 minute episodes and we batch them. So what we do is every 2 weeks we'll shoot maybe 15 episodes or so. Neil and I will get in the office. We'll also record live too. Couple things that we're doing, right? So we're batching episodes, batch creating so we can be sane and we can always, we try to be ahead always by 30 days or so because Neil and I, we have travel schedules. He's also got a personal brand of his own. Um, you can check them out, neilpatel.com. And you know, from there when we're creating content, we're batching it, but we're also— this camera that you're seeing me on right now, we actually push it to live. So we push it to not only one live channel, we push it to LinkedIn Live, we push it to Facebook Live, we push it to Twitch as well. And we're going to be pushing it to Instagram Live too and then YouTube Live too. So we are taking this omnichannel approach and I think that's what you have to do when you are thinking about personal branding. Because if you look at, uh, Gary Vee is a good example. He has a guy following him around all the time. It's unscripted. So, Basically there's a lot of content just constantly coming out. What happens there is that content can be chopped up into multiple podcast episodes. It can be chopped up into blog posts and then it can be, um, he can do some live videos as well. He does live videos on Instagram too. You're basically, you're making the time that you invest in this content and this personal branding go as far as it can go. And the other thing that you have to understand when it comes to personal branding is it takes a long time to get going. If you think about Gary Vee, he published his first book when he was about 31 or 32 years old. Now he's about 43 years old. So it's taken him a while to get to where he is. I'd say like maybe, maybe a good 7 to 8 years to really start to take off and then get to where he is. If I look at Neil, Neil's been well known in the marketing space for a long time. I mean, when I first started talking to him, maybe it was, it might've been 8 years ago and he was starting to take off at the time. So, you know, he's been in business for about 17 years or so. So let's just say maybe 8 to 9 years into it, that's when his brand started to take off. Kind of same thing for Gary Vee too. You know, sure, I have the Market School Podcast. I have this YouTube channel too. It's starting to grow, but keep in mind I've been doing this for maybe 4 years or so where I've really been starting to kind of focus on 3, 4 years or so. If we look at the other 2 people, maybe we can say it takes 7 to 8 years to get going. I still have another, you know, 4 years to go to get it, um, let, let the growth compound even more. So one of the key things you have to understand here is you can get to those levels where you have a million followers, you know, a million downloads a month, 100,000 views a month, whatever it is, it just takes time to compound. Like if I look at our blog, when I first joined Single Grain, our blog was only getting 4,000 visits a month and now we're getting about overall visits, not uniques, just 250,000 visits a month and our email list has grown. And when I first started doing my YouTube channel, uh, maybe this was 3 years ago, we had like 1,500 subscribers. Now we have 22,000, which is not huge compared to other people, but it's continuing to grow. It's continuing to scale. And I do like the people that, you know, if you're watching on YouTube or even podcasts too, I do like, You know, the people that are, that are actively kind of selecting and deciding to subscribe. It's not just, I'm not trying to hit a very broad market here. Key thing you have to know is try to batch your content, you know, go omnichannel and you gotta be patient with, with, with how you're doing things. And, um, you know, you pick, you stay patient with it over time. Eventually the numbers, it just makes sense. It's going to compound. You know, if you grow, you know, uh, let's say you grow like 50% year on year. If you keep doing that over time, you're going to double very quickly. You're going to double fast, right? Um, so, You just keep that part in mind. Now the other thing too, when it comes to thinking about your personal brand is you don't need to have all the bells and whistles in the beginning. 'Cause when I first started doing the Growth Everywhere podcast, I was spending 6 hours a week on it. I was doing everything. I was doing the show notes, I was doing the, I was doing the preparation, I was doing everything, right? So you're going to have to do everything in the beginning if you want to build a personal brand. I went, keep in mind I was at 9 downloads a day and then after the second year I was at 30 downloads a day. So 9 downloads a day after the first year, $30,000 a day after the second year. It just takes time to keep going and most people don't have that in them to keep it going. They want to see fast results. They want— people can't deal with delayed gratification. So the other thing I'll add for you is have a sense of delayed gratification. For me, I'm always playing the long term, like with my, with my business. Um, sure, you know, great offers all the time. You know, sure, you can sell. Um, you know, I can always take money off the table when I get other offers for, oh, you should, you know, take this 8-figure opportunity. I don't want to do it because I'm so focused on long-term and I don't want the compounding to stop. If I'm having, if I'm building something and it's compounding and I continue to put effort into it, eventually it's going to work out. So some people might say like, oh, I've tried so hard on certain things and you know, sometimes, um, no matter how hard I work, it just doesn't work out. Well, you have to also not be working hard, but you also have to be saying, oh, I'm working on the right things. If I'm not working on the right things, I need to be making adjustments along the way. So you have to be flexible with what you're doing and then also work hard at the same time. Eventually you're going to recalibrate. You're going to go off track all the time, but just continue to recalibrate, try to hit the middle and eventually go up in a straight line and you're going to grow no matter what. Our blog, it took time to compound. I mean, I took over the company 5 years ago. Again, we started at 4,000 visits a month. Now it's at 250,000. Goal is to get it to 1 million, 2 million or more. YouTube channel 3 years ago was maybe like 1,000 subscribers or so. Now it's at 22,000. Sure, it takes time. Uh, Growth Everywhere podcast is now at 100,000 downloads a month after the first year, 9 downloads a day, 30 downloads a day after the second year. The Market School podcast, that compounds because I did a partnership with someone else that happens to have a brand, but also at the same time, the way we did it, we're frequently creating more content and it compounds over time. That podcast, you know, 2, 3 months into it, we're getting 300,000 downloads a month, but it did take us 2 and a half years to get to a million downloads a month. So that takes time as well. If you look at every single thing, every single personal brand out there, um, it's not an overnight success. It takes a lot of work to get to that point of becoming an overnight success. Even authors, bestselling authors, for all the success that you hear out there, there's thousands and thousands of failures out there. Same thing with movie producers. It takes a long time to build that personal brand. And I want to tell you, I think it's worth it. Is it worth it at all? Maybe we'll make that another video. But I mean, I literally just got off a podcast the other day and all of a sudden I'm going to be speaking in Australia. Like that's how that works. Um, or I, you know, I met one of my good friends, Yaniv, through the podcast because he listens to the podcast and then I ended up speaking at his conference and then we've become really good friends and we ended up doing another mastermind together. The other thing too, don't do it to be famous because if you're doing it to be famous, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. For me, I'm doing it so I can create the leverage where, you know, if I want to partner with other people, if I want deal flow, if I want to recruit other people, I'm already known. So it allows me to get the access that I need to move faster. to hit the goals that I want to hit. It's not like I care a lot about money. It's I just want to hit my goals because I enjoy playing the game of business and having a brand allows you to do that. 2 biggest things I think where you can get the most leverage is if you have some kind of brand, right? Or if you have something that scales, it could be like software or it can be some kind of business. You have these 2 things, then you're going to be able to really scale for the long term. To me, having a personal brand is same thing as kind of running a business, just different things that you have to do, but same thing as business. You have to stick with it for a long period of time. All right, so I wanna go a little deeper on this topic, so check this out. We are gonna talk about the omnichannel approach when it comes to producing content or it comes to your marketing. When you think about marketing, the question is, what should I do around content? Where do I start around content? How do I build a brand? That's like the thing now. Everybody's gotta be a brand. The quote I've given always is, is Bill Gates said in the '90s, all the companies that are successful in the future are gonna be media companies. So you gotta figure out how you can make yourself a media company. How do you make the most of what you have already? This is the omnichannel approach. If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, he's planning to do 20,000 pieces of content, maybe even more than that in the next year. And if you think about it, it seems really overwhelming, but it's very doable. As long as you can create the process for yourself, you're gonna be completely fine. So just to give you an overview of what our process is, we start with a podcast, right? So Marketing School is every single day. It's the podcast I do with Neil Patel. If you wanna learn more marketing, go check out Marketing School. Don't forget to subscribe. Subscribe. So we start with the Marketing School podcast. And then from there we can make it into a blog post, right? We can actually make it into a long-form blog post because every day we have like one topic. And then you take that blog post, 2,000 words, then you can convert it to 5 different videos. And then you can even take the podcast itself and just move it directly into like on YouTube, for example. You got the podcast, it's becoming 5 different videos. That's 6 pieces of content. It's becoming a long-form blog post. That's 7 right there. It might become Instagram stories. That might be like 5 of them. That's 12 pieces of content. And then LinkedIn as well. That's 17 pieces of content. We might say, let's go do a webinar around it too. So that's 18 pieces of content. We have 5 regular social posts for Facebook and Twitter, that might be another 5. Don't forget taking that podcast using a host like Libsyn, it automatically publishes to SoundCloud, right? That's another piece of content, right? So you're basically republishing to different areas. You're also splicing up, you're splintering content that you have already. So don't think you need to necessarily produce a ton of content, a ton of new content all the time. When I look at all the stuff we've done, we've done 900 episodes of Marketing School in the last couple of years or so. Growth Everywhere, we've done about 400 episodes or so. I have a ton of footage around me speaking. We can easily do more with that. Think about how you can make the most of what you have already, and by the time you figured it out, it's time to party. So let me know in the comments what you think in terms of you know do you want to build a personal brand? Do you think it's worth it to build a personal brand? Do you think it's vain? Let me know. Let me know what you think in the comments, and don't forget to check out if you're on YouTube, check out the next video over there. All right, and if you're on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe. and hit the bell button. And don't worry if you're not on YouTube, I still love you. Just rate, review, and subscribe because it helps us grow and it motivates us to continue creating content like this. So that being said, we will see you tomorrow. Bye.