8 Steps To Building an Online Personal Brand Even If Broke.
What is a personal brand?
First thing when building a personal brand, you have to understand what is a personal brand. A personal brand is something you build around yourself.
You already have a personal brand right now. If you google your name online that’s whatever your personal brand is. Whatever comes up, high school team stats, jail record, social media. Whatever you search online, when someone searches your name that’s your personal brand. Everybody has one, some people have ones that are profitable, while others not so much. Maybe its going negative and hurting your bank account.
Search me online, you’ll find major publications like Forbes, Huffington Post, ABC, NBC News, Wikipedia, my website, my YouTube, and social media. You can find everything there, so that’s the type of a personal brand you guys want.
When you start building your personal brand, the bigger you get you’ll want to make sure you have a more solid brand, no matter what. You’ll always have haters, you’ll always have people talking shit on you and people might try to say negative things about you online. That’s why if you have a strong personal brand, it doesn’t matter what’s online that’s negative, because the solid stuff, the positive stuff that’s actually true stomps that out.
1. Channels
First thing you’ll want to do when building your personal brand is channels. You have to know what channels you’re using (This information is very important so you should be taking notes.).
What do I mean by channels, if you went to build a real strong personal brand, you need to be on every single channel.
A channel is a social media platform, and content creating platform. For example, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Sound Cloud, Podcast, and twitter.
Here’s the reason why you can’t have a strong brand on Facebook and Instagram if it doesn’t connect to other platforms. Not everybody is going to follow you, because everyone isn’t on your favorite platform. This is why you have to realize when building a personal brand that, yes its for you, yes its for your brand but it doesn’t matter what you want or like. You’re building your personal brand so other people, maybe people of higher stature buy your products, people who would want to work with you, so they know who you are.
It doesn’t matter if your favorite platform is Instagram or YouTube, if you aren’t on Facebook and that’s where all the people who need to see your personal brand are at, then it doesn’t matter. You have to be on every single platform. Make sure you have these platforms written down. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Medium, Sound Cloud, ITunes, YouTube.
2. Content
Next thing you’ll want to do is you’ll want to to have content.
You may have heard the phrase “Content is king.”
To build a strong personal brand you have to push your content out to the different channels. When you have content, the thing you have to realize is that once you start creating content you have to be consistent on how much you post, how often you post, and the quality of the post. For me I post on Instagram 5–6 times a week, so if I were to not post for an entire week, then I come back, my followers are going to recognize that and they are not going to build brand loyalty. If you want a strong personal brand you’ll need brand loyalty.
I usually post on YouTube 3–4 times a week. If I don’t post on YouTube 3–4 times, I’m going to start losing subscribers and lose momentum. People are going to realize I’m not a reliable source and not constant with the content I put out.
Snapchat every single day and night. 24 hours around the clock, you’re always going to see something on my Snapchat story and Instagram story. It will never ever be blank, not if I’m dead, dying, or sick. I’m always going to have content around my story. My followers know I’m always going to have content on my story. They will never be disappointed if they go. Maybe it might be a little less than tomorrow or it might be a little bit more the next day but there’s always going to be content there.
My followers will see me as a reliable source, someone they can trust, that’s very key if you want to build and make money with your personal brand. Your audience needs to trust you, my audience and supporters, the people that are apart of this community know that I’m always going to be pushing out content.
Not only do you have to put out content, you have to put out relevant content. Whatever audience you want, whatever niche target audience which you are trying to target, you need to put out content that is relevant to it.
On YouTube I’m trying to build an audience around people who want to live a free lifestyle, people who want to create additional income, entrepreneurs, and people who want to become their own boss.
What am I creating content around? I’m creating content around my lifestyle around me, how I’m my own boss, so people can see that and learn how to do it.
Instagram, I want people to become motivated, I want people to work, I want people going out there and achieving their dreams the same way I have done for myself and the same way I’m doing every single day.
So what do I post? Motivational content, inspirational content, my life, my journey, I talk about it on my Instagram and Snapchat, about how what I have to go through to get where I am at. Again Content needs needs needs to be consistent.
3. Expand
This is key, this is crucial if you want to make money off your personal brand, you have to expand it.
A lot of people, I see this as a common problem, they think that they can just post good pictures, post some good captions, post it on their story every once in a while but they never expand. They think that their 1k, 4k, 10k, 20k followers is enough and by posting good stuff you’re going to grow.
You want to grow you have to put in the work. I used to put 6, 8, 9 ,10 hours into building my brand, on top of the 8–10 hours I was putting into building my business. I knew how equally important it is to have a brand as well as a business. The brand will be here 10 years from now the brand might not. You have to be able to expand.
There’s two ways you can expand your brand.
1. Paid
2. Free
Building a personal brand works very well on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, twitter every platform like I said. The two biggest and easiest platform that I would start with if I were you today, in the next 24, that you can start building your personal brand would be Facebook and Instagram.
Free ways to build on Facebook
Here’s what you want to do, lets say you’re in the entrepreneur niche, maybe you’re in affiliate marketing, maybe drop shipping, maybe you’re in SMMA, this is what you want to do. Nobody knows this little secret but its very simple. This is how you build free traffic, huge audience, and huge following, all you do is search your niche and you find Facebook groups in your niche.
Again, before you do this step you have to have the channels right, you have to have a Facebook account, Instagram account, you have to have that good content that is consistent. Then you can expand.
After you have good content you’ll want to go to Facebook and search make money online, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, drop shipping, SMMA and find Facebook groups. There’s tons of Facebook groups ones that have 5k, 10k, 20k, 100k people in these groups. A lot of these groups get spammed, they get spammed a lot to be completely honest with you guys, its pretty annoying but here’s how you filter out the spam and actually build your audience around people who are quality people.
What you’re going to want to do is go to these Facebook groups, look at all the post made in the last week and look at the one that has the most engagement. Its probably going to be someone with a success story or someone with free value, its usually those type of things. Look at everyone who liked it and everyone who commented. These are the most enagaed people inside the Facebook group.
So what do you do?
Very simple, click click click, you add everybody that liked that post without commenting on that post. If you do this in 6–10 Facebook groups next thing you know you’ll have 5,000 friends.
Next step after you have 5,000 friends, that’s a lot of stuff on your news feed and a lot of people you don’t know, but that’s a lot people who are interested in the same thing you’re interested in. Once these people are engaged, once they love your stuff, once they are commenting on your stuff and following you, you can use a friend remover or defriend them and re-add people again, but this comes later.
Instagram, what’s a free way to do it?
Follow and unfollow people.
A Very simple trick not a lot of people do it, because it takes a long time. I built a brand back in 2014 on Instagram following and unfollowing accounts from my local area, sold that Instagram page for a couple of thousands of dollars and it only had 10,000 followers, but it was a very high target niche, that’s the power of Instagram. I did that in high school, when Instagram wasn’t even that cool.
Let’s say I want to be in the real estate industry or the sales industry, I’m going to look at who engaged with Grant Cardone’s pictures and videos on his Instagram. I’m going to follow all of them and if they follow me back, I might stay following them or I might unfollow then, it just depends.
You can make a lot of connections this way, people are going to connect with you, but again your content has to be relevant to what they are interested in, whether its real estate or sales.
So you use the follow and unfollow strategy on Instagram, you can follow up to 7,500 people, then you can’t follow people anymore. But be careful with this because if you go too fast and you follow people too fast, Instagram will block you from following people.
You want to scale, first day follow 5 people, third day follow 15, and you want to increase by 5’s. Once you get up to 50 start going up by 10–20, then 100 a day, 150 a day, 200 a day. You want to increasingly scale, by the end of the month maybe you can follow like 200 a day. I think you can do 300 actions a day, so 200 follows and 100 unfollows would be 300 actions, so you’ll want to do that. But don’t start off too fast, don’t get too excited, don’t go following everybody, you will get blocked and its going to ruin your entire plan.
Instagram is follow and unfollow and Facebook is add everybody that is active inside of the groups that are related to your niche.
Paid strategies are very simple. Instagram you can run paid ads or you can run shutouts. Find an account that is related to your niche, say that I like cars, I’m going to find a car account, send them a picture of a car, and ask for a shout out.
Show them a picture of my car, because that’s the niche I’m trying to build. They might say its $20, or $200, I’m going to pay the amount, I’m going to get the followers, they are going to follow me and now they will be apart of my brand.
For Facebook, you’ll want Facebook ads. Facebook ads are very cheap to run, as long as you know how to run them.
4. Engage
If these people are following you and you’re following them back. You’re going to want to engage with their content. Facebook post, you’re scrolling down and you see all these people and somebody says “Hey just made my first $10k mouth”. You comment “Congrats dude! I’m on my way there too!” or “Congrats man, good work, keep it up!”.
Somebody posts a picture on Instagram of a picture of their car, “Hey nice car dude! I love that car!”. You want to engage with your audience very actively. Try to get them to engage back, ask them questions, if you want someone to engage back with you ask them questions, this is how you build a relationship. “Hey man congratulations on hitting 10k! What’s your next goal?” It makes them have to reply to you because they’ll want to answer your question, instead of you just saying “Congrats” and they’ll say thanks.
That doesn’t build a relationship or your brand. You want to engage with a question. That’s the same thing with Instagram and Facebook, you want to engage, like people’s photos, spam them, you want them to get to know who you are. You want your profile picture and name popping up in their notifications multiple times because you added them first, they don’t know who you are. So you need them to get familiar with who you are, that’s how you’re going to build your brand.
5. Give
Next thing you’ll want to do is Give Give Give.
What you’ll want to do for 6–12 months, maybe three months at the minimum, just give out free value, free content as much as you can. This is how you build your brand; this is how you assert yourself as an authority figure.
Every body wants to start a personal brand or sell shit overnight. That’s how you destroy your personal brand, that’s how you damage your brand. For those of you guys just trying to make money quick off your personal brand and not actually provide any real value or not actually change lives and not have a purpose bigger than you, you will fail and you will make no money.
In a bout 1–2 years you will not be relevant. The way I built my brand I will be relevant 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, I can promise you that, I can put money on that. That’s just the truth, because I have done the proper steps.
I see so many people today on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, running ads and trying to sell shit. They haven’t really done anything yet or given out any free value and they think that just because they buy all this designer shit (You don’t always have to flex designer shit.) They buy it, then they try to sell shit and think that’s how you build authority, that’s not how you build authority, but don’t get me wrong designer shit is cool, I have designer shit. That’s not the point, the way you build authority is by giving, giving, giving vaule.
There’s multiple ways you can do this like give out free E-books. You don’t even have to write the E-books, if you do that’s better, that’s what I did, but I heard there are websites out there where you can license E-books, you can buy it, give it out and claim rights, but I’m not really sure how that works.
Collect Emails, the whole reason you’re doing this is to build a community
Write blogs, share blogs (if it isn’t written by you) if you’re the main way they are getting their information, even though its not actually by you, they will associate that value with you.
Make videos on Snapchat, Instagram put them on your stories. Give out value, have your captions give out value. Inspire people.
Facebook, make 2–3 statues a day with pure value, motivation, pure relatable content for your target niche. You want people to know that you’re that guy or girl that’s always giving value, helping people, letting others win, putting people before yourself. If you’re inside a Facebook group, provide more value than anyone else.
Here’s how you get a lot of followers on Facebook, I have over 8,000 followers on Facebook and I haven’t even used it in a year, I built a massive following on Facebook in a few months and I made a lot of money on it (probably over a few $100,000). So here’s what you do, you go to Facebook groups, opportunity groups, make money groups, you know niche targeted groups and provide value, that’s it. No sell, no close, no dm me for more info, trying to sell people on that bullshit, fuck that just give value.
For example, “Guys here are 5 tips” or “Here is an article on how to do this” or “Here’s what I’m doing now and its working.
Just give value, and what’s going to happen?
Everybody is going to like it, everybody is going to comment on it, now you have the most recent and most active post in that group. People are going to start to naturally add you on Facebook, and if you don’t accept their friend request they become followers (That’s how you build you’re followers.)
Now you have more room to add people from the groups. If you really want to be smart and slick (You have to be careful, some people will catch on.) go to these Facebook groups and provide massive value, then make a post saying “Hey who has Instagram? Lets all connect and follow each other, drop your Instagram user name below. My is @jetsetfly”.
Then all of a sudden everybody is going to comment their user names, but they all are going to follow me first. Now I’m cross promoting my channels. Posts like this usually don’t get deleted, unless its spammy saying “Hey DM me for more info” or “I’m selling this or that.” The admin of the group is probably going to delete it or not post it. Nobody likes snake oil salespeople, but you can self promote your self a little bit as long as you don’t over do it. Its has to be a win win situation for everybody.
So what I would do is provide immense value. “Hey let’s connect, if you haven’t added me as a friend on Facebook yet, add me as a friend.” When they add me as a friend I won’t accept it. I let them become followers because now I’m building, and that gives me more room, more leverage to add new people instead of that many friends. Facebook only allows you to add 5,000 people.
Here’s the next secret, I didn’t plan on talking about this, but this works out. You can actually create your own Facebook fan page, for your personal self and you can convert all your friends and followers into likes automatically by default. Facebook will make them like your page. What you can do is build a massive following. Convert it to a fan page and boom the followers and friends are now likes on your fan page. You can run ads on your fan page, and gives you instant creditability. Which leads me to the next part, once you give, you take.
6. Take
Now here’s your time to sell!
If you have service business you can provide services for people and you can make money.
So give give take. Sell stuff, promote other people’s opportunities, affiliate marketing, referrals, agency or whatever it is. This is your time to sell stuff, this is your time to make money.
You can start doing this in about 2–3 months of providing free value, but I wouldn’t over do it at first, because if you do without asserting yourself as an authority figure, your personal brand is going to die pretty fast. Most people aren’t going to follow you, you’re going to get annoying, and they have no reason as to why they should listen to you. Again, you have to assert yourself as an authority figure if you want to make money with your personal brand.
7. Teach
Last thing is you can do is teach (This is optional.)
You can make YouTube videos, you can sell E-books, you can sell a program, you can sell a course, you can be an affiliate for a course, become a consultant (I have more content coming out later about how to start your own consulting business. I had a consulting business do over $250K in revenue in less than a couple of months.)
You cannot teach, personally I think until you do everything I listed above. If you didn’t do all this first, you’ll destroy your personal brand, you’ll have no longevity, people will not vibe with you, people will not connect with you and its just going to be a sad sad situation.
What I want you to do right now is if you’re still reading this is 1. comment I’m still reading and I want you guys to let me know if there are any steps I might be missing out, anything you want to read about in the future or if you want me to elaborate on.
Review
Channels
Content
Expand (how you grow your page)
Engage (how you engage with people who are on your page)
Give (free value)
Take (sell, promote)
Teach (become a consultant, teach other people, sell things that are teaching products)
You have to go in this order, because if skip anything in this order, I think personally you will destroy your personal brand, and won’t have any longevity.
Again, this is coming from somebody who has a personal brand over 100,000 people at 19 years old and probably has made over 7 figures with it.
So if your reading this right now comment, if I left anything out, if you want me to expand everything, if you want me to go over anything or what you want my next post to be about. I’m doing this for you guys so you can learn different things I’ve done; these are processes I have been through. I’m not just speaking about some random shit.
The reason why I wanted to elaborate on this is because I have done it. I took the long way and the right way to success and a lot of people right now are trying to hop in. They think its too late and they try to skip things.
They try to go from channels to take, and then teach it doesn’t work that way. I see a lot of YouTube doing it, I see a lot on Instagram and Facebook doing it. Again, it works for a little bit, and you’ll make a little bit of money, and that’s cool but if you really want to make some money, you have to take the right steps.
With that said, I hope you liked the post. I will put out my social media, so if you haven’t connected with me please do.
I post a lot of this stuff on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Subscribe to my podcast on iTunes, I have a top 100 business podcast in the world. I’m 19 years old and I have a top business podcast I think that means something.
Like I said I have been featured in a lot of major publications, nothing to brag about and I’m no where near where I want to be, but I think I know a little about what I’m talking about.
The Author — Josh King Madrid
Find Josh here: http://www.joshkingmadrid.com
Instagram: @jetsetfly
Facebook: fb.com/joshkingmadrid
Snapchat: JoshKingMadrid
Twitter: twitter.com/joshkingmadrid
Youtube: JoshKingMadrid
