Nicolas Cole argues personal branding advice gets it backwards. The goal isn't a huge audience but being known for one specific thing. Ryan Holiday makes money because people associate him with stoicism, not because he's famous everywhere.
The vast majority of content on the internet about this idea of personal branding is so unbelievably off base. And I know, especially because I was literally one of the first people in the mid-2010s to write about personal branding. My whole column on Inc Magazine was about personal branding. It was all about thought leadership. And I think that when people talk about personal branding, the thing that they get wrong is that they put the emphasis on the attention result. So building a personal brand is all about you becoming known, attention. And that is not what building a personal brand is about. The nuance that people miss is that it's not about being known for the sake of being known. The benefit of building a personal brand is for you to be known for your association with a topic. And that nuance is incredibly difficult for people to wrap their heads around. It doesn't matter if you have a million followers. It doesn't matter if you are known generally. The amount of money that you will make and the success of your businesses is almost directly correlated to the level at which you are known for a topic. Topic. One of my favorite examples is Ryan Holiday. If Ryan Holiday created a how to stay married ebook or course tomorrow, yeah, maybe there would be some subset of people in his audience that are like, I just love Ryan Holiday, I'll buy whatever he puts out. But the vast majority of people who follow Ryan Holiday are not following Ryan Holiday for his opinions on how to stay married or how to not get divorced. They're following Ryan Holiday because of his perspectives on stoicism. And so as long as Ryan Holiday writes books about stoicism and creates products about stoicism, Ryan Holiday will continue to make lots of money because he is directly associated with that topic in everything that he does. If Ryan Holiday starts branching out to any topic, he would see a dramatic fall-off in profitability. If Ryan Holiday went to his publisher tomorrow and said, "I want to write a dating book," do you think the publisher would be excited about that? Or do you think the publisher would be like, "This is a huge catastrophic mistake." It's a mistake. There's a reason why almost every book he writes is like, "Stoicism, and here's what Marcus Aurelius has to say about Stoicism, and here's how Stoicism gets applied to leadership." Yeah, maybe if it's Stoic dating, you have to maintain the congruence in some way. People build this idea of building a personal brand up in their heads where they think that they have to become popular, or they think that they have to become internet famous, or they think that they have to have this huge audience, or they have to talk about things that they're not interested in but get attention. All of that is wrong. All personal branding is, is your association with a topic.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
