What is The Best Way to Build Your Brand?
You Need to Make Money First
You can pay down your bills, work from anywhere you want and become your own boss. If you’re lost on how to start, I can relate. I felt the same way and spent years researching how to make passive income. Now I wake up every morning and check my email to see how much money I made in my sleep, and this could be you too!
If you don’t make money with your brand, you are role playing at business. If you are serious about building your brand, you need to make money first. Period.
Many people make excuses or will procrastinate this. You might say you don’t want to start selling until you have 100 email subscribers or 1,000 social media followers. Bullshit. You’re scared. Start now.
Trade in florescent lights for natural warm sunlight. THIS could be your new office!
How many followers do you need to make a sale?
One. If you have at least one follower, it is time for you to start selling. You need to have a core offer or you are wasting your time.
By starting, you’ll learn 10x faster than by sitting on the sidelines over-analyzing every little detail.
You need to make money first! For example, don’t waste your money on a logo until your brand starts making money. Then use that money to pay someone for a good logo. On my first brand, I made this mistake. I had a great logo, but I hadn’t really developed my product or business model.
I see many people, myself included with my first venture, focus on inane nonsense that isn’t going to get you paid. Skip the temptation to merchandise your fancy logo. No one gives a shit about it, but they will. If you build up your brand and attach ideas and emotions to it, people will take notice. Before you start selling T-shirts with your fancy logo, focus on creating content consistently. People will notice you then.
The most important part of building your brand is to be seen.
You need to promote, but you need to sell. How do you balance this? Give away the what and charge for the how.
Example: I sent out an email to my subscribers that gave away part of the first chapter of this book. I gave away what you can do to make money, but not how you do it effectively. Thus, hooking you into buying this book, which is available right here! And now you can learn how you can make money.
In my second brand, Path to Manliness, I began selling my services on Fiverr. Most popular was editing and writing. I didn’t push this too hard but getting a few sales under my belt gave me the money to buy my current logo.
The point is, you don’t know what works and what will be ignored when you are first starting out. In fact, you should try a few things. See what you are good at and what there is a demand for. Once you have a game plan in place and money is flowing in, then you can focus on the trivial fun stuff such as creating a logo.
You absolutely must be selling something if you want to build your brand. If you aren’t selling, you’re another social media addict wasting your time online. Tweeting for the sake of tweeting is an infinity pool. An infinity pool is a mindless and endless waste of time. Tweeting to grow and sell is brand management. Know the difference!
Ways You Can Make Money
1. Sell a book or eBook
What are you good at? Write about that. Start a blog and after you’ve been writing long enough, turn these blog posts into a book. All you must do is take your ten most popular posts and make them flow cohesively. Expand on the book and polish the nitty gritty details. Sell it as an eBook.
If it doesn’t sell, you can always give it away as a gift for email subscribers. (More on email in chapter 3: Build Your Email List on Day 1!)
2. Sell a guide
What skill have you learned? If you have done a good job of documenting the process, turn your notes into a helpful guide so that others can avoid your mistakes. Help them figure out the path to success.
Most people are really hung up on simply getting started. What may seem simple and obvious to you, could be challenging and frustrating to others who are starting out. Help them avoid this pain.
3. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is simply advertising someone else’s products or services for a commission. By signing up for affiliate marketing, you receive a link that you can share to earn a small piece of every sale you generate by advertising on your blog, email or social media. (More on this in Chapter 4: Section: What You Need to Get Started)
This is the easiest way to make money. If you are good at selling, then you can help market the products you enjoy. If you don’t know anything about selling, buy a book like Cashvertising. It has some great tips on understanding the nature of selling. Then you simply need to find some products you like and sell them to your followers.
One competitor to Amazon on the publishing front is Gumroad. Gumroad is excellent about this and will often pay well. Ask a Gumroad author for an affiliate link and they’ll most likely be happy to oblige.
Navi: Hey Listen!!! Send me a Direct Message on Twitter asking to affiliate market this book!!!
In the beginning focus on the free methods of building up your brand. Free methods include using email, social media and blogging. All three of these can work together to grow your brand and they won’t cost you anything to get started. Focus on problems that you or your audience encounters. Think about the solutions you have found to problems that you encountered. Tweet, email or blog about these and people will see you as a valuable resource.
Use your face for your profile image or go on Canva and create your own logo. It may be amateurish, but it will be original. This will also give you the opportunity to practice your graphic design skills.
You need to showcase your personality. So how do you do this? Well, it depends on your personality. If you are funny, be sure to let that show. If you are obsessed with running marathons (or Spartan Races), then discuss your training and the races you run. Even if it doesn’t fit in with your brand, it is helpful to appear human. If all else fails, show pictures of your dogs. 100% foolproof.
There should be sayings that people associate with you. Much of this will come naturally, but you can create your own tagline. I often said Reclaim Your Manhood. Maybe not the best, but people associate the phrase with me. Everyone knows the Tell Your Son This tagline. In fact, I’m confident that it will be the name of Illimitable Man’s book when it gets released right after Half Life 3 comes out.
Your name itself is important. Path to Manliness is a simple name that is easy to remember. Not only that, but people immediately have an idea what my brand is about when they see the name. Don’t overthink this. It is better to be understood than to be clever.
Focus on activities that will build your brand. Sounds obvious, but it needs to be said. I have over 30,000 followers and only a small percentage of them will send a Direct Message or DM with the intent of networking. Now the DM game can be tricky as most get ignored.
In these Direct Messages, you can have the most personal conversations. Many moons ago, I was talking to someone on Twitter and he saw a tweet of mine where I said I was learning to speak Spanish. This person was so kind, he began giving me pointers and speaking with me in Spanish right then and there. I complimented him on his English, which was better than many who speak English for their first language. I have grown very close with this person and have even worked together on a book. That person is Jose Rosado.
If you want to connect with people through DM, you need to provide value. Don’t simply ask “Please help.” If you message me that, I’ll delete it and possibly mute you. Send something specific and more importantly, offer something. If you simply want someone to spend their time mentoring you, then you need to offer something of value. Or pay them. Look at it as an investment in yourself.
If you want to emulate someone who has already found the path to success, then learn from their teachings and save yourself a shitload of time and headaches. You see people who build amazing brands that are successful. What you don’t see is how they were banging their heads against the wall in the beginning or how they sought help from their own mentors. As they learned from them, they grew their brand and now are teaching the next wave of aspiring minds to reach more people. Welcome to the Layer Cake son.
Make money while you sleep!
For more information and advice like this, buy my book: The Path to Brand Management.
In this guide I’ll explain how you can build your own personal brand.
I’ll show you how you can make a passive income.
I’ll teach you how to effectively make money online.
I’ll help you avoid the most common mistakes that beginners run into.
I’ll teach you how to build a good email list and how to write emails that sell