how to build a personal brand faster than 99% of your competitors

Making money on social media is the new norm.

Teenagers are becoming millionaires.

Matter fact, even toddlers.

The internet has completely shattered the time it takes to get rich.

You've probably had a few conversations with your friends, that went like this,

"We could definitely start (insert side hustle) and become rich."

Or maybe,

"look at this 17 year old, making millions of dollars, there's no way he's smarter than me."

And slowly, you start to go down the rabbit hole of new side-hustles and businesses that you can start.

Scrolling on YouTube at 2am, watching video after video.

Pumped up with inspiration and ready to take action.

But then…

Your mind starts racing, a million questions at a time.

"Will this work for me"

"What if I'm too late"

"What if I'm not good enough"

"I don't have enough information yet"

the list goes on and on.

Next thing you know, your shoulders start to get heavier by the minute and the crippling fear of anxiety comes over you.

You want to believe in yourself and take a leap of faith.

Yet, you just can't take that first step.

It feels almost impossible.

So, you go to sleep, wake up, and the next thing you know 6 months flew by.

Deep down in your heart, you hate your life.

Your constantly asking yourself, if this is it.

"Is this all my life is ever going to be."

I know cause I've been there. (more than once)

And I grew sick & tired of watching from the bleachers. It was time that I got in the field and started playing.

But you see, the only difference between you and that inspiring creator you've been binge-ing, for the past 3 years of your life is attention.

That's it.

Attention creates opportunities.

Attention creates income.

Attention creates luck.

Luck naturally gravitates to you once you've stored up enough attention.

Most of the time, without even lifting a single finger.

But a life without attention, well, that's a life we both know all too well.

At this point, you have two options.

Keep living the same 6 months over and over again.

Or learn how to capture attention, that allows you to experience a new side of life.

The side of life you've been dreaming about since you were in diapers.

advantage:

I don't know about you but I personally hate the word "personal brand."

In the past 3 years or so, it's become more of a buzz word.

Everywhere you turn, someone is talking about building a personal brand.

And their big ideas for creating a unique brand, so on and so forth.

But there's one thing you can't deny.

Having a strong personal brand exponentially decreases the time it takes to create monumental wealth.

And where the world of making money online is heading, without one, your business, side hustle, or new project becomes 10x harder to grow.

So I bring the question back up again, what is the difference between you and you're favorite creator that inspires you?

Attention.

A personal brand increases the amount of attention you have around your life.

More people know you.

More people connect with you.

More people feel seen by you.

More people are inspired by you.

And as a result, more people trust you.

They build a digital relationship with you.

Are you starting to see the bigger picture here?

A personal brand isn't just some cringey internet buzz word, it's your unique traffic mechanism to getting paid to be yourself.

You probably already have an idea of the business that you want to start.

A few plans in your notes app.

Maybe even a business plan that you drafted a few months ago that's collecting dust.

But then the question comes up after, "where will I get customers from"

"nobody knows me, how can I make a profit"

"I don't have a big audience, no is going to buy my (insert your product/service)"

And that right there my friend, is what 99% of people with your same business idea are thinking right now.

At this very moment.

And the easiest fix to that problem is building a personal brand.

In the olden days, everything was more manual.

Or waiting for your customers to come find you.

But social media has flipped advertising on its head.

You only need a phone and a wifi connection to start.

Let's take a clothing brand for example.

It's about to be your very first launch, you've worked so hard on perfecting the design, material, measurements, the "aesthetic" and you've finally perfected it.

Your friends and family are hyping up your clothing.

"Yea this shirt goes hard, people are going to love it"

"It's going to sell out immediately, this design is soo unique"

You spend hours working on your website.

Your landing page is finally setup and you're ready to launch.

But something in the back of your mind pops up.

Looking back, you realize you didn't do nearly enough marketing as you did crafting your product.

You start to become skeptical.

Regardless, you march towards your launch date.

And it finally happens, your first product is live and out in the world.

You refresh your shopify dashboard and you see 5 sales at the end of the day, 4 of which were friends and family. The other was just some random that you had no idea where they came from.

A surge of defeat comes over you, as you look at all the inventory you have in your tiny room and the money you've spent to launch.

You jump on your bed, scroll on TikTok for a bit.

And you see another clothing brand owner who just posted that they launched today too.

They turn the camera to show their shopify dashboard and you see a whopping 500 sales on their first day.

As you head over to their website, certainly comparing the quality of your shirts to theirs, you instantly see that they're designs are disgusting.

Something you'd never wear in a million years.

But yet, they were still able to bring in 500 orders on day 1.

You go back to their profile and see that they're sitting at 24k followers, and you're at 189.

That's the power of a personal brand.

And the cool thing is, it doesn't just apply to clothing brands.

It also applies to course creators, service providers, ugc creators, consultants, agency owners and a bunch of other business models.

A personal brand amplifies your ability to get traffic to whatever your selling.

That is why the difference between where you are vs. where you can be, is attention.

The question you may be asking yourself now is,

"okay, I get it but where do I start?"

Here's the gameplan.

Building attention (with the intention of selling a product/service) boils down to one main factor.

So let's break it down.

My personal philosophy for building a powerful personal brand is something similar to Y-Combinator.

You have to have lived in the same shoes as your ideal avatar.

Think about it for a second.

Who knows them better? Someone who just wants to make a quick buck off of them or someone who's lived in their shoes and has experienced their pains?

I view that as your trump card.

Take this newsletter for example, I can speak on personal branding, not because I'm an expert and know everything. But because I'm someone who is currently in the process of building my own from scratch.

I know how it feels to create content and not get any traction.

I know how it feels to be up at 2am on YouTube looking for different strategies.

I know how it feels to say I'm going to be "consistent" and then end up not posting for 2 weeks.

I've lived in those shoes.

And I'm STILL living in those shoes.

So what I share with you now, isn't an expert opinion.

It's what I've learned at my current stage of building a brand through so many failures.

And the number one thing that held me back is not knowing exactly who I'm speaking to.

In the business world, your always taught that the customer comes first.

Well, if you plan to create content to bring in customers.

Why would it be any different?

Exactly.

Your viewer comes first.

As your building your brand, as your creating content, as your editing, your viewer should always be top of mind.

So what's the best way to understand your viewer?

I think of this in 3 main parts.

Pain farming, as I like to call it, is just the simple process of asking yourself a set of questions paints where your avatar is currently at in their life.

It goes something like this,

This helps you pain a clear picture of where they are currently in their life, what they're searching for, and what their big goal is. The number 3 is minimum, by all means, if you'd like to find 6-7-8 more pain points, that's fine.

But the goal here is to focus on their BIGGEST concerns, something that they are itching to solve right now. Tying back to my example earlier, if I was a clothing brand owner, my ideal avatar is probably searching for clothes to go to an event or an occasion and they want to wear something no one else has.

Or they might be looking for a specific outfit to match a pair of sneakers they purchased.

It's a bit broad but you can probably see where I'm trying to go.

And as you can continue to list out the different pains and ideal transformations, you will slowly start to understand what your avatar is looking for.

Now, that is only one third of the equation.

Remember those 3 channels/profiles that they are currently watching.

Your going to use those to conduct your market research.

And if you don't know what market research is

Simply put, your actively looking at other channels that already have the viewers you want.

Go through their

Just about whatever you can get your hands on.

The objective here is to identify what their customers like and don't like, with the goal of finding patterns.

Write down what you find and look for any patterns, this will to give you a hint of how you can stand out within your own brand/content.

Note: This works for content as well as your product/service. Keep this in your back pocket whenever you are launching a new product.

Here is the single most important part of this entire newsletter.

As humans, we naturally like to have bias in whatever we create and spend a lot of time on.

A business you've been planning for years.

A product you've been sampling for months.

A course you've been recording for weeks.

A video you've been editing for hours.

And we tend to assume that because we spent a lot of time on it, therefore people should appreciate the level of hard work that was put into it.

Wrong.

People don't care about your hard work unless it benefits them in some way, shape or form.

Feedback loops are the fastest way to know if people care or not.

You can do all the pain & transformation farming or market research in the world but if you don't ever post your content you'll never know if your audience will like it or not.

To put this into perspective, if I spend a week "planning" one piece of content before I post.

In the time I spent planning, I really don't know if my viewers will like it or not.

On the other hand, I spend a few hours planning and creating one piece of content, then post it the same day.

Within 24 hours, I can know if it worked or not. (granted some content can do well after some time)

But generally speaking, you'll know if it was a hit or a miss.

Which then tells you that something needs to be fixed. Allowing you to go back, work on your next piece, put it out and get even more feedback.

Within a 4 week span, which person do you think learned the most?

The one that took 7 days to plan or the one that took less than a full day?

Exactly.

Content works in the same way.

Note: If you're an expert already and know what works vs. what doesn't this doesn't apply to you. This concept is aimed at beginners who want to start building a brand.

Your first 100 posts are going to suck, as Hormozi likes to say.

And it's true, it is going to suck.

This newsletter might even suck as it's my first real newsletter post (I've wrote a few in the past but that was for a different project).

But on a long enough time scale, you eventually get better.

That's 100 pieces of feedback.

100 learning experiences.

100 chances of getting better.

99% of people don't ever make it to 100.

Most of your competition is running on slow feedback loops, scared to put any of their work out into the world.

The best of the best know that the faster you fail, the faster you succeed.

Remember. To get, you must first give.