Uncommon Advice Ep 23 - From Personal Brand to Profit, Elevate Your Influence in the Digital World

I get it. It's tough for me to, to jump in front of the camera every, every time I do it. It's tough for me to consistently try and create content. But there's ways that make it easier and at the same time, there is massive value as you do it back.

And I'm better than ever. I think I got a vendetta. Oh, now they call me. I seen them.

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Uncommon Advice. My partner in crime, Xenon, is out today, but wanted to get this content to you. It's super important, I think valuable, and you're going to really enjoy it. And I want to talk a little bit, just briefly touch on the power of personal branding. So couple a couple scenarios. Now, these are the extreme scenarios, but I. It illustrates a point that I think is super important for you. So Tesla, let's look at the difference between Tesla and Elon Musk. Tesla has 30 million followers. Elon Musk. Elon Musk has 187 million followers. Personal branding versus company branding. Then you've got Spanx has 400,000 followers, but Sarah Blakely, the owner of Spanx, has 2 million followers right now. These numbers are changing and growing by the day. But it's super important to understand, like the personal side on social versus the company side. And then Virgin has 700,000 followers, while Richard Branson has 15 million. Right. So there's a massive difference. And I want to stress this for you because the value of your personal audience, more people, shocker on social media, want to hang out with people. Right. So you have the ability, yes, you're going to have your company that has its audience and you're going to grow that. But there's also a massive opportunity for you to build your personal brand, to build a following and then use that following to fuel the companies that you are building. So there's opportunity there. So hopefully that, those, that data, that information actually kind of shifts your focus. If you've been sitting on the sideline going, I don't really want to be in front of the camera. I don't really want to create content. You know, I, I get it. It's tough for me to, to jump in front of the camera every, every time I do it. It's tough for me to consistently try and create content. But there's ways that make it easier. And at the same time, there is massive value as you do it. And, but I want to get into. So those are the big numbers on personal branding. But what I want to get into are Some ways, once you have that brand, maybe you don't have a company, maybe you don't have products or services, maybe maybe you do. But I want to talk about six different ways that you can make Internet money when you have a personal brand. And so number one is you can start an agency, right? So if you got a personal brand, you can run paid ads. And so real quick, six different ways that you can make Internet money. One way that you've seen a lot of people do is they start an agency. So they talk about their experiences and the things that they're doing and the value they provide and then they turn around and they create an agency around that. So maybe they're good at running paid ads, so they set up an ad that runs agency. Maybe they're great at design. Maybe this. You know, you build a personal brand, you're great at design. So you want to build websites for people. You know, you can build an agency around that. So on your personal brand, you're going to be talking about design elements and great websites, what makes a good website, what makes a bad website. And then you can also offer to create websites for other people. So it's a huge opportunity for you. Now you could go out to somebody and just talk about setting up Google business profiles. So there's an opportunity in that for local businesses. They need to be able to do that to compete in their local markets. So these are some different agencies that you can create depending on your skill set, right? But your personal brand can kind of talk a lot about these pieces, whatever you're doing inside your agency. Similar to what we do, we talk a lot about newsletter businesses and email marketing and audience growth because those are the things we help people with. Now you can also get into, like I said, managing newsletters and email. If you're good at that side of it, you can get into the inbox. There's a lot of power and value and money involved in that social media management. A lot of people hate it. They don't want to create it. There's been some huge social media management companies that have grown and built and there's also been some great social media manager companies that are just simply solopreneurs. And those solopreneurs build a great little company, they make good income and they grow from there. So it's really kind of what's your goal? But on your personal brand, you don't have to post all that information over on your company side, if you post it yourself, talking about the different pieces, you're going to get More traction. Now, the next one is affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing is where you sell basically other people's products and services and get paid a commission. So from there there's tons of networks out there that you can sign up with to get access to them. They're called CPA networks, which are different ways, cost per action networks where they have thousands of advertisers in their platform that say, hey, for every free widget you give away, I'm going to pay you $15. Or for every water bottle you sell of mine, I'm going to give you $25. Right. So there's these different widgets and products and info info products and physical products that you can sell and people will buy. For example, right now there is an offer that is selling very well right now and it's a Donald Trump bobblehead. So it's election season, obviously a lot of people are talking about that stuff and people are buying a Donald Trump bobblehead converts really well. And the company that's selling it will pay you a fee for every one of your customers or leads that or subscribers that buy it. So really inside of this, you can pick an industry and that needs leads and sell them leads as well. So if you're an affiliate marketer, a lot of people will pay. One of our advertisers comes to us and they basically pay us per lead. We know they need leads and we can send them thousands of leads at a time. And so they pay us a dollar amount for each one of the leads that we send them. So that's another way that you can do affiliate marketing as well. And great opportunity. Another one is I'm actually getting ready to launch. I know there's a very, very good offer, very valuable offer in the real estate space. My past I've been in the real estate space. I did a bunch in the real estate space. When I first started getting into business, I've bought and sold houses, I flipped houses, I've had rentals. We currently custom build homes as well. I have a company that does that. And so I'm in the real estate space. But now, you know, there's a lot of wholesale. If you know anything about the real estate space, there's wholesaling, there's fix and flips, there's all kinds of different strategies for getting involved. And there's a lot of people who sell education. So there's a new, very unique strategy that's popped up that's very, very attractive. That's very high success rate for new people to get into. So we're actually, I'm partnering with the guy who has created that product and service and we're going to actually, instead of selling per lead to him, we're going to take a percentage of the commissions that we generate with the people that we send over there. So that's one. We're specifically going to stand that up, build it out and roll. So super great opportunity to find that kind of stuff and do it. So affiliate marketing, phenomenal way. I actually got, I got my, you know, real start in the Internet world through affiliate marketing by selling actually real estate, education products and other things. So it's a great opportunity. So another thing that you could be doing is another way to get Internet money with your purse. The power of personal branding, right? So you build that personal brand is get into coaching and consulting. So if you have expertise, you have knowledge and you can help people that then they are willing to invest in you for that information. So I would recommend picking out what your niche is. Now don't be one of those jokers that goes and picks a niche that they know nothing about. You don't want to really be somebody who's not doing it, but trying to tell other people how to do it. Right? You gotta be able to deliver results. You gotta be able to get things done for them. For example, for the last five years, we have been honed in on newsletter and email marketing. We send millions of emails a month. We've made multimillions of dollars doing it over the last five years. And then this past April, we started an agency to help other people do the same thing and leverage email. Whether they're affiliate marketers, whether they own their own products and services, whether they're creators that get paid, you know, sponsorship deals, right? So we help them do that. Now, we currently have a business and we are flat out experts in it, right? We are sending millions of emails. We built a massive media company out of it. And, and what we're doing from there is now offering a service as an agency to other people. We're also offering a different piece of that where we will coach people on how to do it. But the. Our company does it day in, day out. We're an expert in it. So I say that to drive home the fact that if you're great at posting cat pics on Instagram, you don't really want to coach somebody on how to build financial wealth. So, you know what I mean? All right, that's extreme example, but either way, I think you get my point on that. So. But coaching is a great and consulting is a great opportunity for a lot of people that have expertise. Now your social and personal brand, you can push the content out around that and then turn around and pick up clients in that manner. Now from here is content writer. So another way to make money on the Internet is through writing content for others. AI makes it actually much, much easier to create content these days. But business owners don't want to do it right. They the last thing a business owner is thinking about doing is sitting down and writing a blog article about a specific piece of their business. They will happily pay money for someone to do that. So you can go ahead and set up a business that creates content. You can build a system where you can pump out even more because you're leverag AI to do it. So that's another opportunity and another way for you to generate some income on, in, in the Internet world. Now. Cool piece. There's this platform called upwork and upwork.com we've, we've hired people over there over all the years. I've hired writers over there, I've hired experts in different niches and design and marketing and all kinds of stuff on that platform. We've even got someone who does our data analyst that we found over there. So upwork is if you have any sort of skill set whatsoever, you can jump over there, set up a profile and get started making some dough. Now you can also, as you build your personal brand and you're talking about writing and content and everything else, you can also start pushing people over to fill out a form to see how you can help them write their content and their content strategy and writing articles for them. So now think about this. If you combine the content creation that you're doing for local businesses with the business profile piece, you're helping them expand their business, expand their reach, and build a better SEO search engine, optimized site and presence to help them generate more leads for their business. And that stuff can be done very, very efficiently with today's tools and resources. So that's, that's an opportunity. So we actually have hired writers and we have hired writers in the past that we paid specifically for articles every day that we need created. So if you like writing, that's a great way for you to create some Internet money. Now the next thing is sell digital products. So we have a digital book that we sell, right? Million dollar newsletters that we sell. It's a book that talks about how to build out a newsletter. And the side of that is it allows you to document your Expertise, put it into a digital product and sell one to many. Coaching and consulting sometimes could end up being one to one. So it could limit your time until you kind of productize your business. And once you productize it and build some different systems and processes, now you can sell one to many. So maybe you want to do a two hour live or, you know, workshop on a specific topic. People will invest to pay for that workshop for you. If you actually set it up and grow it or if you set it up and do the workshop now, what's cool is you record the workshop and then as you record that workshop, you can now go sell it as an ongoing a product that people can buy because it's already pre recorded. It's valuable content. And if it's evergreen, meaning it's something that you don't have to go update every week because something new's happening, even better, right? Because it be has a shelf life at that point for longer an opportunity for you to sell that product that you delivered. You could create a book, you create video courses. If you don't like writing, then create video courses. If you don't like being in front of the camera, you can create, you know, a PowerPoint that kind of breaks down everything down. There's a lot of different things that you can do in the digital product world and build out. Maybe you're really, really good at building like super simple software stuff that has massive impact for companies, right? So you can also create how to do that, right? There's so many things that you can do. Whatever you can coach and consult on. Coach, consult because you got the expertise on. You can also productize that business and sell those digital products. So it's kind of the evolution of how things can, can happen in your business. You can start with affiliate marketing. You can grow into maybe consulting other people on what you're doing in the affiliate side. Maybe you get an you decide to create your own product. Out of all of that, you start selling that. So now you got different, you know, revenue streams coming in. And the next one is actually my favorite one. Okay, so I've done the agency, we have another one now. I've done affiliate marketing. I have paid content writers, I do coaching and consulting. We have our digital products. But the one thing that I love most, because it can kind of drive all of this for you and opens up kind of this hidden gem of revenue opportunity for you, which is a, I bet you guessed it, a newsletter. So newsletters are one of my favorite ways because you're growing an audience so if you're building your personal brand, let's start with that. You're building a personal brand on the social side of things. You want to be able to extract those people and put them on a newsletter that you can now own that audience. On social, your reach can be slashed, your reach can be cut, your accounts can be hacked. Right. Your accounts could be potentially banned. Right. So there's a lot of things that can happen when all your presence is on just the social side. So what you want to do is set up a simple newsletter to extract them out and put them into your newsletter. And now you own that audience and you can communicate also in the email, which a little bit more personal sometimes times. So it's a great way to grow from that personal brand into a newsletter. And now inside that newsletter as it grows, you're communicating a lot of different ways. You can have, you know, maybe you send one thought provoking piece a week of whatever the topic is you're talking about. If you, or you send out just a curated list of the best content pieces you posted that week and now you get more views on them and more traction possibly. What if you don't want to be the right at all? Maybe you just create a curated newsletter where you're just kind of facilitating the medium and email for them and you're putting together different content from around the web to make it easier for them to read. That's another great opportunity for you. So the part, once you have that audience, you own that audience, advertisers are going to come to you and be willing to pay to get in front of that audience. So if you have an audience of, let's say tech savvy solopreneurs, a company will come to you and say, we'll pay you X amount to get in front of your audience. Let's say you've got, let's go with a decent number, you know, 25,000 subscribers, up to 100,000 subscribers. Whoever, whatever size, you know, database you've got, they're going to be willing to pay to get in front of those people. Could be 20 bucks per thousand emails, could be a hundred dollars per thousand emails, could be $400 per thousand emails. Just really depends on your audience and the value they have to the advertiser. Once again, front of you. Now the cool thing, one of the favorite parts. I love reoccurring income, right? I'm sure you do too. If you're watching this, you'd love to have money that you know, comes in every month. These advertisers literally buy month over month over month. You keep getting performance, they keep buying. And we've got advertisers been buying every month from us since 2020 when we launched the media company. So they've been with us ever since then, buying from us all of our different advertising spaces. Right now, some months they buy $15,000 a month, sometimes they buy five, sometimes they spend 25. Right? It does fluctuate a little bit, but they come back every single month and we usually know what months they're going to, how much they're going to spend in different months of the year because they've been working with us so long. So you can forecast all that now. The next thing is you can use the newsletter now. So let's say you've, let's say you've got your own digital products and you, you sell a bunch of products. We have a client we just brought on board that sells a bunch of different products under a person's name. And what they do now is we're going to create a newsletter that is not coming, doesn't get an email from that person, but comes from more of a brand. So what we're doing at this point now is we've got a expert brand newsletter and then we also have we got the expert newsletter and then we've got the brand newsletter and we can give this brand newsletter a free away as a gift every time that somebody opts in over here at expert site. Right. So now we're building a second list, a second subscriber base and we can now promote our own products again to those people inside of that newsletter. As opposed to being some advertisers. Some people who sell digital products, they literally just send promotion emails every day. It's either buy or unsubscribe is their strategy. And so because of that, your lose, your turnover becomes very heavy. You add the second newsletter that you now gains value and you give them a free subscription to it. You add more value to your digital products and you have another way to communicate value to your customers and clients. Inside of email, you've built this other digital asset that has massive opportunity for you to, to not only sell advertising space because now you've got these advertisers will buy from you and say, hey, I'll pay you $5,000 to put this ad inside your newsletter today. And then there's the. But you can also, when you don't have them for that day, you can promote your other products. So that's one way that I, one way that you can leverage newsletters and multiple ways that you can do it. But yeah, that's I had a great opportunity for you. So with that, I appreciate your time. Thank you for tuning in to this more tactical driven content podcast for you. So I hope you enjoyed it. Do me a favor, do me a solid. If you enjoyed it, go ahead, like comment and share. If there's another Internet money strategy that you like that I didn't to talk about, drop it in the comments and let us know. So I appreciate your time. Thanks for showing up.