Transcription
Six years ago, I just graduated from university straight into a global pandemic with no job. Today, well, it's my 27th birthday, and a quick calculation tells me that I've just crossed a little over $3.9 million in revenue across my businesses over the last few years. And that's not because I had a trust fund, inherited a business from my parents, or had connections at some huge venture fund. Quite the opposite, actually. I started with less than $100 and bootstrapped my simple little business from scratch using LinkedIn and my personal brand.
And in this video, I'm gonna share with you exactly how I did it. Firstly, because, well, it's my birthday, and I'm feeling generous. Secondly, because LinkedIn is taking off, and I know that those who get ahead now will win when the platform gets more competitive in the next few years. And look, the system that I'm gonna share today works wherever you're at, whether you're just getting started in business or you wanna have one in the future, or you have an established business already. It will also work whatever industry you're in.
How do I know? Well, because I've already helped over 350 people to implement this system successfully, everyone from startup founders to the execs of seven, eight, and nine-figure companies. And over six years of doing this, I've made a lot of mistakes. I've got a lot wrong. I had to learn all of what I'm about to teach you the hard way. But today, I'm gonna lay it out simply for you so you can save yourself the years of trial and error that I went through.
And by the end of this video, you're gonna understand how to become the number one authority in your niche, how to build an audience of people who are ready to buy, how to turn the knowledge you already have into a consistent stream of leads, customers, and opportunities, and how to create a life-changing personal brand that works for you for years to come. And all of this, every single thing, comes back to one single principle: selling is 10 times easier when more people know you, like you, and trust you. So if you can get strangers to know who you are, like you, and trust that you're an expert at what you do, you will be able to get them to pay you even if you're not a natural salesperson. For most people, it takes years to earn that level of trust. But with a personal brand, you can condense that time into weeks or even days.
And the first step to doing that is what I call positioning. Look, imagine if I showed you these two guys. Which one would you trust for your investment advice? Who would you pick? Obviously, the one on the right, Warren Buffett. Now, you have no idea that my mate from down the pub isn't an investment expert. But in the images I've shared here, he's not positioned as one. So you make a snap judgment, and you favor the person you know and trust instead. Even if they gave you exactly the same piece of advice, you'd trust Warren Buffett more.
And this is happening in your industry right now. Whenever people come across you, they are making a snap judgment within three seconds. And if they're gonna make that judgment anyway, well, you might as well bias it into a positive one, and that is what we do with positioning. So for those of you that think, "I don't need to do this. I've got a great product," or, "I'm already an expert," or, "Our work will do the talking," unfortunately, it won't anymore. We live in a far more competitive world now than we did, say, 10 years ago, when that would've worked. Today, those are table stakes. It's expected that you have a great product. To truly stand out, you cannot expect your work to do the talking. You have to do the talking for your work.
Think about this. How many brilliant founders, operators, executives are there out there that have built great products, solved real problems, and had incredible ideas, but they were completely invisible? There's a graveyard full of them somewhere, and they fail because nobody actually knows how good they are at what they do. Maybe you've even felt that before, right? Now, imagine if they had built an audience and a brand alongside the work they were doing, if they had tens of thousands of people that knew who they were and saw them as an expert simply because they shared their processes and, and knowledge and ideas online.
And this is happening real time right now in your industry as well. Someone out there is equally as skilled as you, but they're more active in building their personal brand, and that's why they get the keynote invites, the podcast features, the deals. They never struggle for customers, clients, or opportunities, not because they're better than you, just because they're more known.
So once you've built your positioning, you need to optimize your profiles online, especially on LinkedIn. Your profile is like your, your business card, your website, your shop window, and your sales deck all in one. Yet most people still treat theirs like a glorified CV. So look, in the next few steps, I'm gonna show you how to create a wildly successful content strategy that gets people queuing up to pay you, but none of that is gonna work if your profile isn't set up properly.
So first, you need to have a clear and authoritative profile picture. Honestly, anything high quality here is better than what most people have. But if you look at mine, right, you can see that I'm actually speaking on stage, right? This is actually a mastermind from Slovenia, I think it was, which gives you this subconscious trust that I'm an expert. If I'm on stage, I must be an expert, right? And this is the thing: it's completely superficial, but people will judge you within seconds. So as I said, you might as well control that reputation.
Your tagline should tell people what you do and why you're credible instead of just what your job role is. Something like founder at company tells me nothing about what you do if I'm a complete stranger, but that's what most people have here, and it's why they're wasting opportunities every week. Your About section should be structured like a sales letter, taking the reader through the problem that you solve, how you solve it, and the results you have achieved. Your Featured section should spotlight your key resources, lead magnets, or website pages in order to convert your audience off the platform into leads. I use this space personally to promote highly valuable lead magnets. So if you're a stranger landing on my profile, it's immediately and abundantly clear who I help, what I help them achieve, and why I'm worth listening to on this subject.
And you can use the three-second 30-minute test here, right? So if someone spent just three seconds on your profile, would they see you as an authority figure? If they then spent a full 30 minutes on it, would they still see you as the number one authority in your niche? If you can pass the three-second, 30-minute test, you've got a great profile.
Next, we have to start sharing content. So content is your 24/7 salesperson. It can reach, educate, and build trust with more people in a day than you can in a month. It doesn't get sick, doesn't take leave, it doesn't need a salary, it doesn't need meetings, and it works around the clock. It is literally like the engine room of your reputation. Producing content is the best investment you can make, and it's one of the most important skills that the modern business owner has to learn. Why? Because, well, as I said, you are the number one ambassador for your business. Producing content allows you to scale yourself. Every high-quality piece of content you put out is an asset that's working for you, building your personal brand in the background. If you don't publish any, well, you're never gonna reach the top of your industry. If you do manage, though, to produce a consistent base of high-quality content, you'll be able to reach, influence, and persuade millions of people at scale and turn your connections into clients.
Now, I actually only post three types of content. I post what's called growth content to build my audience, and this content is designed to engage the whole industry that I'm in, right? It's designed to get in front of new followers. It's things like widely relevant advice and personal stories. It helps me turn a complete stranger into a follower. I'm not looking to actually win a client from it, I just want more people to know who I am. What I then do is I back that up with what's called authority content to build trust with my existing audience. This content is more targeted at my niche, and it's purely about demonstrating expertise. So I use systems, frameworks to explain how we're getting results for our clients, and I try to make this as simple as possible for my audience to understand. Then I post conversion content to turn the trusting followers that I've built up so far into actual leads for my business. So I use case studies and lead magnets here to tip people over the edge of being passive consumers into interested leads.
And alongside my content, I connect with 100 potential clients every week. I start simple conversations that add value to them. And between my content and my connections, I have a few hundred potential clients joining my network every single month. It sounds so simple saying it out loud like that, but that's exactly why this system works so well. Look, best case from this, you generate a consistent stream of inbound leads and opportunities. Very worst case, you build an audience of people that will advocate for you, they'll refer you to their friends. Both of those sound like pretty good options to me, right?
How do you actually generate sales from your personal brand and your content? Well, your content is all about bringing people into your world. So whenever I post, I'm not actually trying to make a sale straight away. I just wanna bring people into my world where I can nurture them. I do this with social selling. By my world, by the way, what I mean is people engaging in my content, following me, viewing my profile. And these are all signals from your audience that they're interested in what you do, right? They're warmed up to the point where they will welcome more information or even a soft pitch maybe from you.
And you know why this works so well? It's because most people are just, like, sending and spending their way to leads. They blindly send more cold emails, or they just spend more on ad. And sure, that can work, but you're converting 0.1% of your audience whilst pissing off the rest. Whilst with my approach, we're converting 5% of our audience now, and we're turning the rest of them into advocates for us.
How I do this is by creating highly valuable lead magnets. Each one offers to solve a very specific pain point for my audience. In exchange, they share their email with me and allow me into their inbox. Each week, I send valuable insights on building their personal brand. They're happy because I'm helping them. Some of them will even reach out to us to work with us organically. Occasionally, I'll offer to help them in a more structured way, both of those methods, but calls in our calendar. So for those that never buy, they're still speaking highly of us. They re-share our content, and they refer our friends because we're giving them so much value.
And now this is where strategy really makes money. Honestly, I attribute most of the three point nine million dollars I've made to this. If someone books a call to discuss the idea of working with us, I want them to turn up to that call as close to being ready to buy as possible. And most of the time they are. Uh, that's because by this point, they've seen some of my content on LinkedIn. Maybe we've had a short conversation. They downloaded one of our really high-value lead magnets. So they know how we do things, and they trust that we're good at it. Maybe they've read a few more emails. They've probably checked out our website. They've seen a load of case studies on our site. They've read our sales page, and then they've booked a call.
Google's seven-eleven-four rule states that it takes seven hours of interaction across eleven touch points in four locations for someone to trust you enough to buy. And with this system, we condense that timeline for building trust by getting these hours of interaction and touch points in. So my personal brand has been working around the clock for me, building trust with them, getting them to buy into our philosophy, showing them how we do things. I don't need to be a master salesperson or have a crazy sales team to get them to buy, and that's why I was able to sign over three hundred and fifty clients before I turned twenty-seven. It's also why I'll sign fifty to a hundred more before I turn twenty-eight. And yes, it took me years to build, test, and perfect this system, but now I can rely on it to build my audience, my reputation, my influence, my network, and my business for the next ten years.
And if, by the way, you wanna work with me and my agency to save you hundreds of hours of trial and error, install our personal brand system for you, just like the one I use myself, that's actually what we do every day. All you've gotta do is hit the link in the description to grab some time with us and see if we're a good fit. If you're not quite ready yet and you wanna just keep learning from videos like these, click that subscribe button, and you'll be the first to know about next week's video.