Why You’ll Fail Without a Personal Brand in 2026

Most people don't realize this. If you don't have a personal brand, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to be successful in 2026. So I want you guys to really think about what does it mean to build a personal brand. If you don't have a great personal brand, all you got to do is— Are you impressed by what comes up on Google or are you a little disappointed? If you want to look somebody up, you Google them. That means you're searching with them on Google. And if you're Googling yourself and you're not finding great stuff, then there's room for fixing that really, really, really quickly. Most people, they don't realize that the power of LinkedIn is often search engine optimization. And your personal brand determines on how well you rank on platforms like ChatGPT. Have you heard of this concept called GEO? One of the things that people don't realize is that to own your personal brand, you need to own it on the internet. You also need to own it on LinkedIn, but you also need to own it on the internet. Do you get what I'm saying? And so understanding the basics of search engine optimization, you could understand how to get onto the first page of Google and also on the first page of ChatGPT. And also on the first page of Gemini, because that's where people are moving. Now there's a concept called AEO, answer engine optimization. We talk about this in our strategy sessions. We do a 2-hour strategy session every month inside our Evergreen Networking System. And also in our community, we share a lot of really great things. like concepts like answer engine optimization. Have you heard of Reddit or have you heard of Quora? These are answer engines and these are indexed highly by both search engines and generative engines. Generative engine optimization is optimizing for artificial intelligence engines. 'Cause they're generative. They generate things from scratch. And so if you want to be able to rank in the next 10, 20, or 30 years, come up in eventually Alexa, come up in all the different places when people are talking to their devices, you need to understand how to build your personal brand much better. The reason why people hire me to speak is because I have a great Personal brand. The reason why people ask me to be on podcasts is because I have a really good personal brand. Can my personal brand be 10x better? 100%, it can. But today I want you to know is that the first step to creating a personal brand is to creating assets. And creating assets these days don't have to be hard, but you have to clone yourself to To a certain degree. I call it creating a persona. Do you guys know what a persona is? A persona is training the AI as to who you are, your tone, your voice, what words you usually use. I'm going to show you an example persona now inside Evvy AI and how easy it is to create one. So if you go to evyai.com, and hopefully you guys have an account with Evvy AI, you can click login and on the left side there's a section called personas. If you go into the personas, you can find many, many different personas and we'll guide you. We meet our students every single day. We meet our clients every day at 12 and at 7 to help them sharpen their personas. So I have one here called the Joe Apfelbaum EvAI CEO persona. And if you look through this, There's a lot of detail. I say act as a CEO of a social media assistant with artificial intelligence that helps people in 40 countries around the world be able to leverage artificial intelligence as an assistant for their social media. It includes both a Chrome extension and a mobile app and a web platform, and it helps people do simple things like draft comments, make it faster to leave comments on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, It also helps you write posts and be really effective with a hook, main points, call to action, and hashtags. And it even generates images to use the latest Nano Banana technology that allows you to create images that look exactly like you. I don't know if it's going to do a good job because I've never tried this before, but let's see what happens. If it works well, we're going to go to LinkedIn. Total experiment. I don't know what it's going to do. I'm gonna click on start a post, and then I'm gonna copy the image that I get back from Banana Banana, and then I'm gonna paste it right in here. So I'm gonna copy this image, paste it right in here.

Wow.

Wow. Amazing. It messed up the word Evie. So let's see if we can redo it. I'm gonna press redo, regenerate image. Did I met? Oh, eviai.com friends. Eviai.com friends. Let's see if it gets it this time. Eviai.com friends. I'm gonna hit generate and let's see if it does a better job because it look at that. You see the way it said E Y A I? I didn't quote it, so that's what happened. So let's see if it does a better job at putting all of us in Times Square. Massively. All right, let's see if this is better now. Oh, much better. So I'm going to press copy, paste. Much better. Do you see you guys are in here in the photo? That's really, really good. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to say the following. I'm going to go to the content. I'm going to select a goal. I'm going to select a tone and the persona, which is my clone. And then on the bottom, I can select my language. I'm going to select my LLM. In this case, I'm going to select GPT-5.2, which is the latest GPT technology. And then I'm gonna talk to it. I'm gonna click the microphone and I'm gonna say, create a post about how important personal branding is and how you have to use technology to help you be able to create content consistently that aligns with the phrases that you want to come up with, both in generative engine optimization and also with answer engine optimization as well as search engine optimization because they're all intertwined in one because large language models are using this to help people be able to rank better. Okay, so I'm going to press generate now. And what this is going to do is it's going to write a hook, it's going to write main points, it's going to write a call to action and hashtags, and I'm going to press insert and it's going to insert it into the post. So these are the tools that we also teach to our students on how to be able to do that. So if I wanted to, Take any video, edit the video down, and send it to 15 different platforms and write the content from all of it. We'll teach you exactly how to do that. So if I follow someone on Instagram, I don't automatically get back a follower. Did you know that? Here's my Instagram. I'll share it with you guys in the chat so you have it in case you want to follow me. But you don't automatically follow me back. But on LinkedIn, if I follow you, if I connect with you, you automatically connect with me back. Do you get that? Do you know how many connections you can have on Facebook? Only 5,000. You can only have 5,000 friends. That's your limit. But on LinkedIn, do you know how many you can have? More than 5,000. That's right, Christine. Excellent. You can have 30,000 connections. That means you can have 30,000 followers. That's why it's such a significant platform for a personal brand, because if you're ever going to write a book, or if you're ever going to come up with a course, or if you're ever going to do speaking engagements, or if you're ever going to start a business or have a software product or anything, you need followers, right? You need more followers. On LinkedIn, it's easy to get followers. All you have to do is add connections. Now LinkedIn limits how many connections you can add per week. If you're sending connection requests, but if you're receiving connection requests, you can get unlimited inbound connection requests. And the beauty is, even if you don't accept the connection request, they still follow you. Mike Larkin, you have a question or you have a comment? Either way, share, unmute yourself. And if anybody wants to unmute themselves, go for it. Go ahead, Mike.

Yeah, I just, uh, up for my second year with Joe and it's been fantastic the first year. And I keep learning stuff all the time. So thanks, Joe. The question I have on the personal branding, how much time should we, you know, it's just like SEO or anything else. It takes a little time to get that, you know, to get, when you, when you, you know, Googled Joe Apfelbaum, everything came up. So how much time should we allocate to really get that personal branding? And what are we looking at, a year type thing or what?

I would say it depends on how important it is. It depends on how important it is. I would recommend spending at least an hour a week thinking about your personal brand, like schedule it in with an accountability buddy. So find someone else that wants to be your accountability buddy for your personal brand, spend an hour a week together, and then create content for your personal brand. I recommend creating videos, images, articles, posts, graphics, and then you will see your brand evolve over the next decade. Don't worry about doing it tomorrow. Consider that your brand is forever, right? You're going to be in business for the next 10, 15, 20, 30 years. So spend— if you spent an hour a week for the next 10 years, you would have an unstoppable brand. My brand didn't just start now. I want you guys to really, really consider what is going on, how to be able to build your brand in a meaningful way to help you be able to be more successful. And with that, I wanna give you your time back and say thank you. I sent you guys the prompts in the chat. If you didn't get it, just email us hello@eveai.com or go to the community and you can grab it or look at my recent posts. That's the idea. So if you need any more support, we're here to support you. You know how to find us. If you want that bonus, get the bundle right now. We'll be more than happy to support you or fill out the forms. We'll also be emailing all of you. And if you wanna drop us a line and let us know what you thought, I would love and encourage you to drop us a line. You could message me on LinkedIn directly. You can email us hello@eveai.com. Let us know what you thought of this webinar. Let us know what you're going to implement and let us know how we can support you to help take your life and your business to the next level. God bless you. Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. And I look forward to seeing you guys soon. All the best, everybody. Thank you.

Bye.

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