How to Build a Brand as an Entrepreneur - Masterclass with Linguamarina

If you want to become a creator and an entrepreneur, you are choosing one of the coolest careers we have on the market right now. But it can also be really challenging. I started as an entrepreneur and then became a creator. I'm going to talk about growing my brand and how I perceive my brand in relation to the business that I'm running. My name is Marina Mogilko. Some of you may know me as Silicon Valley Girl or Lingua Marina. I've also co founded a company called Lingua Trip that helps people learn languages and study abroad. One of our first advisors, when he was looking at our name, he, he was like, you know, are you doing something with servers? We're like, no, no. We're booking platform. And they're like, nobody says reserve a hotel. Everybody says book a hotel. You know, when you have no understanding about branding businesses, I started searching for a better name. I wanted something that's going to be consistent with the overall branding. I was like, okay, we have Lingua Trip. Let's say the channel Lingua Marina. And this name became the title of the channel, of my Instagram account, of my TikTok account. When I realized that my media business is also grow, I had to incorporate the business for just my media activities. I started a company called Lingua Marina Inc. Which is basically a company that incorporates Lingua Marina channel, Silicon Valley Girl channel, all my Instagrams, et cetera. So it actually really worked out. The channel became associated with a company on my linguamarina channel. I started wearing Lingua Trip swag and we definitely saw increase in traffic, an increase of brand awareness. I also wanted to quickly touch upon Silicon Valley Girl brand name. When I came up with that brand name, all I wanted to do was show the audience that I will be talking about Silicon Valley. I wanted to have friends in Silicon Valley, let's be honest. So I was like, okay, let's just bluntly call my channel Silicon Valley Girl so that people in Silicon Valley can relate. And it did an amazing job. You know, your branding should also reflect your target audience. So I started getting brand deals when we hit maybe like 30,000 subscribers, which was great. Now if you're looking to expand your brand, I've got the ultimate guide for you. HubSpot just dropped a full guide and template based on the Hustle newsletter's own success success. Now you can steal a page out of their playbook to expand your own brand if you want it. I'll drop a link in the description below. Now let's talk about product development and positioning. Now when we start something, we want to show how proficient we are. But in reality, and we do this all the time at Lingua Trip, we ask people what their level of English is or what their goals are. Or in Silicon Valley, girl, I asked my viewers, where are you now in the process of developing your business? And everyone's just a beginner, maybe just thinking of starting a business. When it comes to learning a language, most of your audience are probably beginners or pre intermediate. Your branding and marketing should be accessible to complete beginners. Sometimes when people are building a brand or business, they think that their brand and marketing messages will be consumed by professionals. And this is not true. For example, a lot of personal trainers I see or even like English teachers, they start talking about their unique methodology. In reality, however, people are primarily looking for quick ways to lose weight and that's it. And as a result, much of the branding and marketing material is based on what the founder thinks rather than what customers actually want. So when you're branding something, think about the need of your customer. Like for example, we branded one of our courses from intermediate to advanced because people want result in their English. It shows people the results, it shows people the value that they're getting. So it's crucial to start any product with a customer development process, such as asking people about their problems, their capabilities. And you might be surprised to find that most people are complete beginners. Let's talk about creating social media accounts. Here are a few important steps that you need to take if you're building your personal brand at the beginning of your journey. Do most of the work yourself. The most important step, step number one, is to find your unique voice. What I developed through these years is when I see some like piece of content or product that somebody suggests, I can immediately say no or yes based on whether this product is me or not. This deep feeling of understanding who you really are is super important. And if you start hiring right away, like I'm going to start somebody who's going write a script for me for a YouTube video, somebody who's going to come up with reels ideas for me. No, it's not going to work. So the best approach is to do everything by yourself at first. Think about your messaging, engage with your audience and monitor their reactions. What was the thing that you said that made them like the post? If there is no response, it indicates that the content might not be resonating. Many people mistakenly believe that the low view counts are due to algorithm bans or Instagram doesn't like me anymore. But Often it is simply because the content is not engaging, which means you have to keep searching. Thing that I tell everyone who's starting on social media, invest your own money. Sometimes we think that, you know, in order to start a successful social media business, I need to maybe attract investment. My strategy is a little bit different. You find your voice, you make your first dollars and then you start investing in your business. So when I made my first $100 from Google AdSense, I invested in a tripod and a lav mic and started to gradually improve my setup. Since I was already running a business, I realized I could invest more in my channel. So I hired a video ed help me edit. But this decision came after my channel started generating revenue for my business. Now let's talk about AI a little bit. Two years ago, AI has started changing everything and I always wanted to be super international. So we decided to start translating my content into different languages by using AI. So basically translations are by AI and voiceovers are by actors. And now we have Lingua, Marina, Spanish, Arabic and Korean. And one of the things that I wanted to highlight is that we use them for shorts. And then later I realized I'm not just looking for people to recognize me. And shorts is basically okay, I know you. That's it. I wanted these languages to also monetize by themselves. So now we only dub long videos where we see good affiliate links conversions. So I feel like for creators like Mr. Beast or maybe NAS Daily, translating into different languages might work because they get so many views, because their content is entertaining, they get a lot of views and they can monetize those used to short videos. In my case, my shorts don't get that many views. I'm not in entertainment, I'm more in business. So for, for me, I either have to hire a sales manager for the Spanish market or I just need to make sure my videos monetize by themselves. And for me, this is long form. There are some cool AI tools that we use almost on a day to day basis. So Opus Clip is a tool that helps us create short videos out of a long form. Video Perplexity is where we do all of our research. Oh my God. Like Reflexy is one of my favorite tools. It basically researches all the article on the question that you asked and comes up with a text or the answer to your question. We use VoicePal if I am doing like an article with a journal because they ask me questions and I just talk to this app and it creates a beautiful text for me. Then we use Midjourney to Generate images for B roll on YouTube. Sometimes we do brand deals and brands come back and say like, hey, can you change the messaging? And I'm traveling, I don't have access to my microphone. So we use 11 labs for various voiceovers. Let's talk about businesses. Let's talk about several lines of business that Lingua Marina Inc. Has now. Number one, let's talk about payment platforms. And of course, Google adsense is the most generous thing you can think of because basically YouTube pays you for views. The first step was connecting AdSense monetization to my channels. Basically you need 1000 subscribers to get monetized on YouTube and at least 4000 hours of view time. But it shouldn't be a primary source of income because it fluctuates with views. And there are a lot of other ways to monetize your brand. Online Instagram started paying bonuses for reels, but again, they're so unpredictable. Some months I get thousands of dollars, which is cool. Sometimes I get zero and you can't predict it. As I mentioned, this is probably 10% of my income. I have my companies and I have my courses that we're selling through my channel. So my company helps people learn languages and my channel, Lingua Marina primarily promotes these products and we drive significant traffic to Lingua trip through my channel. However, it's important to understand that YouTube is a great platform for building awareness and interest. But you need to create sales funnels and sell through email or targeted ads in order to see money. Of course you can sell from YouTube directly, but we also like to work on different funnels from YouTube. So you know you're downloading a cheaper product like $9 workbook and then we send you an email upselling you for a course, for example. And I would say my own products, courses, consultations, Lingua trademark products are probably 30 to 40% on my income now. Then we have brand deals and brand partnerships account for 20 to 30% of my income. There's something you need to understand though about brand deals. The problem is they are so unpredictable. Some months our revenue just exceeds expectations, while others we see a decline. So this is why I strongly recommend having your own product to avoid this dependency on brands. The next source of income is huge for a lot of creators and it is called affiliate programs. We work with companies on affiliate basis. When I promote their products and earn commission if somebody makes a purchase. If you watch my videos carefully and look at the description, sometimes you see a video like top 10 AI apps that I'm using and I'm actually using those apps, but also registered as their affiliate. And this is why every time somebody makes a purchase after watching my video, I can get 30% of what they paid. And you can become an affiliate by simply going to a company's website, signing up and inviting friends. There's another website called Partner Stack where you can select brands that you want to work with. Of course, you need to qualify first, you need to have your media outlet, your channel. You have to have the right tone of voice. And sometimes companies take time to approve you. So do this beforehand. Let's wrap up this video by going over one of the biggest mistakes creators make. First of all, it's really easy to try to copy somebody else. And by the way, a lot of people take inspiration from others, but if you just copy everything, it's not going to get you too far. Although again, I know creators who just copied everything from Mr. Beast and grew a lot. But they also got a lot of backlash from their followers because they recognize the video. They recognize the concept is to analyze the channels that you already like, analyze the type of content that is already performing, the types of brands that they're working with, Try to create something similar, but something that is. You remember I was talking about this this is me concept. So try to create content that really reflects you. So in order to win, you have to be serious about what you're doing and also super passionate about it. Your unique personality and perspective is what really matters on social media. Yes, you engage with your followers. Yes, you listen to what they think. But ultimately you need to ask yourself if this is what you really want to do and if social media is making your life better. And everything I said in this video has been effective for me for the past decade as an active YouTuber with over 10 million followers on YouTube alone. And before you go, if you're looking to expand your brand, don't forget to grab the how to expand your brand guide and steal a page out the Hustle's playbook for your own success. Thank you so much for watching this video. And if you've been working on a creator journey and growing your brand, please let us all know what worked for you in the comment section. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Subscribe for more great marketing tips and tricks from HubSpot. Have a good one.