how to become a celebrity (by September!)

Welcome to Hot Rich Summer School. And this summer, we are talking about one thing and one thing only: how to become a celebrity.

Now, stay with me here. Stay with me. Not in the traditional sense. I am talking about becoming the celebrity of what you do. The celebrity of your niche. Whether that is skincare, whether you're a UGC creator, whether you're a YouTuber, or whether you have a business or you are building a brand, we are going to get you to the top of that food chain by the end of summer.

Now, what I am not talking about is needing millions of followers or actually becoming a celebrity and becoming like a caricature of who you actually are. Unless you want to pop off, sis. What I'm talking about is becoming known and recognized and referenced for whatever it is that you do. For example, if somebody says the word Korean skincare, they think of you. If somebody says the word eyeliner, they think of you. If somebody says the word celebrity brand or business, they think of you. You are the go-to person.

And we're going to be talking about one big, bad problem today: the memorability problem. Now, I'm going to hit you with something that I mean with so much love, okay? But most of you are playing on hard mode. We think to actually get to the top of our food chain, we need to do the best, to be the best, to improve our camera quality, do the most, post more. That is the very first place that our mind goes to. Well, that is very noble, but there is actually an easier way. And an easier way that your competitors have probably already figured out.

It is not that you're not good enough at what you do. Most of you guys, I'm sure, are absolutely incredible at what you do, probably far better than your competitors. But you are losing out on things because nobody remembers you or nobody takes notice for long enough to get to the good part. And that is exactly what these next 12 weeks, this summer school is all about.

I want to welcome you to my yearly series. This is something that I do every single year inside my membership called Hot Rich Summer. Now, this is not a plug. Do not worry. I'm not going to encourage you to join the membership unless you want to. But every single year during these summer months, I run something called Hot Rich Summer with the simple purpose of us getting hotter, richer, and smarter before the end of summer. And this year, I did bring it to the podcast last year, but this year I wanted to bring it to the video podcast. So that is exactly what we're going to do over the next 12 weeks. I'm going to be dropping an episode every weekish teaching you how to stop blending in on the internet, how to build up your reputation and your name within your niche, how to dominate social media like a celebrity, like an ethical celebrity, may I add, and how to build a brand that actually positions you as the celebrity of your niche. Welcome to class. Welcome to episode 1. I am so, so, so excited. I hope you love this series as much as I loved creating it. Let's get into it.

How do we become a celebrity? Okay, so let's dissect what does being a celebrity in the online space actually, actually mean? Because I know some of you guys are going to jump down my throat and say, "Celebrities are evil." And I'm going to give you these timestamps right here. When I say the word celebrity, what I'm not talking about in context to this series in particular is the type of celebrity with paparazzi, which is where our mind naturally goes, right? That is not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about, especially when it comes to this series, is recognizability.

And here is what I've kind of learned, especially over the last couple of years studying brands and studying creators and even just having a business myself for over like 10, 15 years at this point. What we do is not a talent competition. The competition that we are in is a memory competition. That is it. That is the name of the game. So if you're ever sitting there and you have lost out on a job or an opportunity and a competitor has got it and maybe they're not even as good as you, it is not because they are better than you. They're probably not. It is because they are more memorable than you. And if you're ever sitting around and you are not booked or you are not getting brand deals or you are just not getting the opportunities that your competitors are getting, that is a memory problem.

The people that are right now kind of winning in the business and branding space. Those people, I'm here to tell you, are not the most talented. And sometimes they're not even the most consistent either. They are not always the best at what they do. But here is what they are. Here is what they do better than you: they are placeable. They have great packaging. And packaging is what helps us remember them.

So, let's break this down. I want to talk about how the human brain actually works for just a second. The second that you are scrolling online and you encounter somebody, your brain immediately tries to put them into a box. What this little thing up here likes to do is it likes to file and categorize and put people into neat, tiny little boxes. So, if you see somebody, you might be like, "They're the business girl." "Oh, they're the skincare girly." "Oh, they're the girl that talks about celebrities, brands, and businesses for a living." But if your brain can't give you a box, it will categorize you under nothing, which is the equivalent to a swipe. If somebody cannot define you or describe you in one sentence, then your content or your work or your art has no mental shelf in their little brain.

And this is why, and I see this so much. I see this all the time in my membership as well. This is why talented people stay invisible. It is not because they're not good enough. It is just simply because people do not know what to associate them with. So they get forgotten. So the very first problem that we need to solve in episode one is we need to make you memorable.

So, notepads at the ready. If you have ever done a series with me, be it on the podcast, be it on the YouTube, be it in my membership, you will know that I like to give you action steps. I really like to treat my videos like a mini school of sorts. So this is your very first action of Hot Rich Summer School. I want you to think about the creators in your space and the top creators in your space or whatever niche that you're in. Whether you're in art, whether you're in music, think of the people who are sitting at the very top of your food chain. And when you visualize them, what do you see? What we often see is a visual. We might see a certain color or font that they're associated with. We might hear like a catchphrase or a sound bite that they say over and over again. We might see a certain emoji or like a certain makeup style or editing style of theirs. What is the one thing that they are associated with? I want you to write that down.

So now I want you to think about yourself. If somebody had been following you for quite a while right now, if they were asked how to describe you, how would one of your random followers, how would they describe you in one sentence? What would they actually say? What have you given them to work with? And then once you've written out that sentence, and this is not the sentence that you think, this is the sentence that somebody else thinks of you, right? Once you've got that sentence, you are going to instantly know whether that is good enough. Do you like that sentence? Is that sentence boring? Or did you struggle to come up with the sentence? If you're in that camp, we have some work to do. The first reason that you are losing out is because people cannot categorize you or associate you with something. So that is the very first thing that we need to solve this week.

So here is what I want you to do now. Underneath that sentence that you just wrote out, I want you to finish this sentence: "She's the girl who..." or "They're the person who..." You finish that sentence for whatever it is that you want to be known for. So for me, it would be, "She's the girl that talks about and breaks down celebrity brands or businesses." "Oh, she's the dope dressing girl." "Oh, she is the GOAT of Korean skincare." "Oh, she's the shade matching witch." By September, our challenge is this. That is the goal of this entire series: is we are going to make you that person and that everybody who follows you can finish that sentence too, immediately, without hesitation. Are you ready for that challenge? Let me know.

Now, this is often something that people really, really struggle with, especially in kind of my membership and even just like the comments that I get over here on YouTube. Something that I hear a lot of is, "Kay, I do not know what my special sauce is. I don't know what my thing is." And there's a lot of contradictory advice that kind of goes around the online space right now that says, "You don't need a niche. You don't need a niche because you are the niche." And I get that. I think that's really well-meaning advice. But here is why it doesn't actually work in practice. Number one, I think it doesn't work in practice because the people that are taking that advice are brand new to brand building. And what those people need, if you're brand new, is you need creative constraints and you need some kind of guidelines to get you started. The second reason why this advice doesn't work is because people need a reason to follow you. And from a human psychology level, they need a thing to categorize you as to even care about you. And that is why the advice "you are the niche" doesn't really work for me because you are not above human psychology, bestie. You need a thing. You need a niche. You need something that your audience or a stranger can categorize you as to be remembered or even to be cared about. Otherwise, you are quite simply forgotten.

Now, another question that I get asked a lot, especially when I did this video here, which was all about how to brand yourself like a celebrity, one of my most viral videos. The biggest question that I got asked in that video was, "Kaylee, what if I have a lot of interests? How do I brand myself when I have tons of interests?" And guess what? I actually have a lot of interests, too. But the key thing I have done is I have not made all my interests part of my brand. We're going to do more work on this kind of as the series progresses. But I want you to think of kind of your brand as a motorway. There's four lanes on that motorway, maybe five if it's like a crazy motorway. But one thing that a motorway doesn't have is it doesn't have 100 lanes. It has around four, four things, four lanes that directs your brand. I want you to think of those lanes as your topics or things that kind of make up and encompass your brand. Of course, outside of your brand, you can go on as many motorways as you want. You can have as many lanes as you want, but with your brand, you need a direction. And you need three, four, or maximum five things that you talk about that are kind of semi-woven together. Of course, outside of your brand, you can have as many interests as possible, but the point of having a brand is we are packaging some of those and making them part of our brand identity. There are so many things that I love outside of what I do here. I love anime. I love Disney. I love reading. I love propagating little plants. But are those things part of my brand? No. Because number one, sometimes things are sacred for you, right? They're not for everybody and everything in the world. But also the more that you add, the more watered down your brand is and the more hard it is for a human brain to categorize you.

Another big tip that I have for this is to not be boring. And I know that's probably a really, really hard pill to swallow. Whatever your sentence is, "She is the girl that..." I want you to make sure that it feels just kind of semi-unique. I know that being unique is actually something that's very, very hard to do in the online space because, listen, there are millions, literal millions of skincare influencers and fashion creators and it can seem like a momentous task to figure out like what your special sauce is and makes you special and what makes you stand out from everybody else. So, for example, if you have said, "Oh, she's the girl that loves natural makeup." That is just too broad, bestie. That is not enough for somebody to just remember you because, guess what? Millions and millions of people have that exact statement, too.

So, what I want you to do is I want you to kind of go three or four levels deep. What kind of makeup? Okay, so you've said natural makeup. So, now we're going to go another layer deep. What is special about that natural makeup? Okay. Well, what makes my natural makeup very, very special is that I'm really good at skin and blush. Okay. What's special about that? We're going another layer deep. Okay. Well, my blush is really nice because it gives the cheeks this really unique, juicy look. And that right there is the uniqueness. That right there is the sound bite or the thing that you were looking for? Because tell me what you prefer. What do you remember more? The girl that loves natural makeup or the girl that has patented the juicy cheek look? Do you catch my drift? It should feel so uniquely yours. And if you have even like the tiniest inkling in your tummy that yours is a little bit on the boring side, I encourage you to ask yourself just three or four times, "What is special about that? What is unique about that?" and just see where you land doing that exercise. So that right there, you have just found your very special sauce, your unique thing, and that is going to help you become a heck of a lot more recognizable.

Okay, so we know what we're working towards, which is recognizability. Do you want to kind of know the cheat sheet for memorability and recognizability? This word here: association. Here is a really common thing that I see when I'm doing like my Instagram audits or when I'm helping like a creator build a brand is I will look at their grid and their grid will have like three or four different fonts and it will have three or four different colors and every single piece of content will be kind of unrelated to the piece of content next to it. What I want you to do is I want you to think of your grid as a beautiful tapestry. And every single piece of content that you put out, it needs to have a thread woven through it connecting every single post to the next one. This is your thread of consistency. And it is not consistent in like how often you were showing up, but consistency in your visuals. Yes, you might be in every single piece of that content, but you need a thread that ties it all together to create a beautiful tapestry of consistency.

Here's what happens when you post something that doesn't reinforce your identity. You are not just posting random content, okay? And no more doing that. No more posting random content for the sake of posting random content. This is your art we're talking about here. But what you are doing when you post something random that could be made by anyone on the internet is you are resetting your audience's perception of you. And your audience never gets the repetition that they need to form a strong association with you. But you can help them. You can help them do this by giving them little things, little elements to help build up that recognizability. I call these my associations.

Here are some of my associations that kind of help drum home my brand for you guys. The fairy godmother thing. I always say in pretty much every single video that I'm your branding and business fairy godmother. It is in my bio on Instagram. It is in kind of any bio that you will see of me. I always use like the fairy emoji. I'm literally telling you what I am and I'm telling you what I want you to associate me with. Another one is yellow. Particularly the yellow heart emoji or just like this tone of butter yellow in particular. Gosh, I just hate how over the last six months in particular, this yellow that I was using last year has just gone everywhere. Like also another thing is my glasses. Every single video I'm wearing glasses and this is just a testament to how kind of much you have to make this a part of your brand DNA. For example. So, I actually sat down and recorded this video and I was wearing just like a normal white t-shirt. It's pretty hot here in London today and I didn't have my glasses on and I was like, "Wait, you know what? Let me go and get a little bit more on brand." Because anybody can wear a white top, that is not going to help build up my memorability. So, I'm going to wear something that's a little bit more on brand when I'm showing up as my brand. There are certain things in my brand that just don't move. They stay the same. They always stay on brand. And what that does is it starts to build up this recognizability with my audience. And this can extend beyond like the things that you're wearing. It can extend to your editing style. I like to think like my intro on YouTube when I'm doing my behind the brand breakdowns. It's like it's always got classical music. It's always got a really chaotic editing style. And I like to think that is now part of my brand. So even things like editing styles or the way that you talk, the way that you start videos, all of these little things can also be associations.

And here is something that I need you to hear that kind of relates to my point earlier about niching and kind of packaging your interests. You don't unfortunately get to be multifaceted before you're memorable. And that might be really hard advice. You might disagree with that. But the internet and the world, it just doesn't work like that. I know we are all complex, interesting, layered human beings with loads going on. And I love that for us. But the internet first needs to know what box to put you in in their head first. Once they love you, once they feel connected to you, then you can start to reveal more layers. This is why a lot of like the lifestyle vloggers that you kind of might watch, they didn't start out like vloggers. If you think of the likes of Remy and Alicia, they were both beauty YouTubers, which have now kind of transcended to vloggers because they have earned that right. They've earned the trust. They've earned the audience. And they became memorable first. You have to be placeable before you get to be complex. And that is just how it works in the online space. Nobody cares about anyone anymore until you have earned that right. You got to make someone care before you've earned the right to expand.

So here's what I want you to do right now. You can pause this episode or you can do this on the back of this episode: is you've now got your thing, but now we need to figure out your associations. So I want you to pick five associations. I actually think it's way more fun to have like a few that you can dip into. It doesn't have to be big, ginormous things. This could be like amazing nails. This could be like big earrings. This could be a certain editing style or a color. That is step two. Okay, step one, you figured out your thing and step two, you have figured out your associations. But you might need a little bit of inspiration to get the cogs turning. I got you.

Let's take Olivia Rodrigo. Olivia's thing is she's the girl that talks and sings about heartbreak and angst. Her associations are the color purple or more recently the color pink, but also her little punky way of dressing, her little cat flick and red lip. This kind of DIY homemade, very torn out branding and typography that she tends to lean towards. Let's look at another one. Charli XCX, especially Charli XCX in the Brat era, she very much lent into this party girl thing, right? She was the party girl and she created music that you could sing and dance and have a good time to. She created club music. And her associations were this shade of green, those silly little flippy flirty dresses, big chunky boots, St. Laurent sunglasses, and this Nina Park smudged style of makeup. These things never really change. Like every time you saw Olivia Rodrigo in that era, she was always in purple. She was always dressed very punky. And it's the same with Charli. These things become inherently part of your brand or at least this era of your brand. And now whenever I see kind of a lime bike on the streets of London, I literally think, "Oh, that's Brat, that's Charli." Literally, three years later, and that, that is the power of an association. The power of an association lies in the repetition.

Okay, so we've established the problem: you are not memorable. We've talked about why it happens because you have no brand. And we're on a journey to fix that. Now, let's talk about how we hit this [ __ ] home. The internet very much rewards patterns. And when you think about like, I'm going to encourage you to think about creators that you know, creators that you love. What do you actually remember about them? I promise you it is not their best post. It is the thing that they say repeatedly. It is the format that they always come back to. It is the phrase or the sound bite that they continuously say over and over again. It is the visual that you clock a mile away and it's the associations that you see over and over again. People do not remember the one thing that you said once. They remember the thing that you have said five times over and over and over again.

This is what I call an association loop. An association loop is when you take one core idea, one core teaching, one core piece of content, and you keep returning to it over and over and over again. It could be a different angle, a different format, but the underlying idea or the thing that you are saying remains the same. Or it could be the same angle. It could be the same format. It could be the same thing over and over and over again. This is why a lot of content creators, especially like fashion content creators, they will have like, if I think of Wisdom K, he has a very similar format. The clothes might change, but the format remains the same. This is what I'm talking about.

And this is honestly something that I really, really struggle with because I like to talk about a lot of things. I like to talk about money, business, branding, celebrities. I don't like talking about just one thing because that becomes very repetitive to me. But also a part of me thinks that if I'm repetitive, I will become boring and annoying. But here is what I tell myself that I'm going to tell you today. If you kind of have these same thoughts, you are not repeating yourself. You are reinforcing yourself. And I think this is a really hard thing if you're a creative, like if you're inherently a creative or if you do a creative job. Creatives, we have this need and this brain that needs ever-changing. Creatives, they tend to get bored with repetition and consistency because once something becomes not a challenge anymore, it becomes boring to us. And the human brain, we inherently crave that little dopamine spike when something is challenging. But the thing that you have said 47 times, your audience is hearing that maybe for the third time or even the first time. They are not on their 47th time of hearing it. And you are never at the same point in your journey as they are in their journey with you. What feels like a broken record to maybe the creator feels like brand new, fresh information to someone else. And I think this is the hardest part that I struggle with as a creative is this battle that I seem to have in my head with the audience and the audience's brain and the repetition that we need to become memorable to them. But also the consistency that it takes and how boring this can feel as a creative to just repeat yourself over and over again. Does anybody else struggle with that? Please let me know.

But the kind of fix that I have for this, and this is just the reason that I've been able to stay so consistent for like 5 years, is I truly believe it is important to have a creative outlet beyond content or even beyond your brand. For me, what I do here, this podcast, this YouTube channel, this is very much my work. And I love, I love this work. I'm so lucky to be able to do this work. And I know I've got to play a game here. In order to succeed, I have to be consistent. I have to repeat myself. But that right there, that challenges my inherent like yearn to be a creative and to talk about multiple things and to seek out new challenges and to start a new business tomorrow. So the way that I get that fix is I get that fix outside of my brand with new hobbies or new outlets that I don't need to show the world.

I always say to my students, especially if they feel like, you know, some of my students are makeup artists in the bridal niche, as an example, and you know, they have been posting for years and years, maybe over a decade, about the bridal niche, and they'll come to me and they'll say, "Kaylee, I'm so bored. Should I give this business up?" They love what they do. They're just bored of creating the same content over and over again. So, I always recommend them to make a personal account, like a silly little TikTok that is just for them. A place where you can creatively experiment without it being inherently tied to your brand and to your money maker. But I also think alongside that, it's important to have hobbies that are not on your phone, are not on camera, are not behind a screen. For me, there are certain hobbies that I have. My main one, I know this is really boring, is walking. Just walking without a device. Like going for a walk around London with my fiancé, with my dog, going to new areas. I find that so inspiring for some reason. But also another thing that I do is journaling, video games. I have different outlets that can kind of continue to challenge myself without it being monetized.

And one thing that I've really kind of learned, especially this year, this has been a new lesson for me, but our art isn't just what we put online. A lot of us think it is. A lot of us associate like success and work and how well we're doing and just the the value of our art and what we do with how well we are doing in the online space. The way that you tackle this if you find yourself comparing yourself or you know just really downplaying your own art is to actually create art that nobody ever sees. I think that's important to create art that isn't for sale, that isn't for growth, that isn't for a means to an end. Art that is just for you or art that is just to improve your skill set or art that's just for fun. And for me, there are certain things that never see the light of day. There are certain pieces of writing that I do, scripts that I do that I just do to write. And heck, I didn't buy this beautiful camera. By the way, we're being filmed on an FX3. And if you know nothing about cameras, this is a cinema line camera. And I didn't just buy this camera to film talking head videos. There are some videos that never see the light of day. There's a skill set that I am developing that is completely out of the realms of the public eye. And I think it's important to have both. Important to have your brand, but also have things that you do, hobbies and skill sets that you nurture that are away from the online space and away from metrics.

And this is something that I think I've actually learned from actual celebrities. The likes of Olivia Rodrigo, she has a documentary on Disney Plus where she kind of goes on a road trip and she shows you the creative process behind making her album Sour. And I was watching that and I was realizing, especially as she talked about the writing process, that none of this happened behind a laptop screen. None of this happened sitting at her phone consuming somebody else's life. It happened writing about her own. Taylor Swift, she did not create the Tortured Poets Department in a boardroom with 10 different opinions on it. It wasn't strategized. It was created in the margins of her world tour. And by tapping into her feelings and her emotions and just writing, your best work sometimes comes from being offline and getting offline, having experiences offline. I want you to remember that all the talking that I do about content creation and algorithms and things like that, the biggest thing that I teach is to not be a slave to them. Okay?

So, what we are doing this week out of this little 12-week summer school that we're about to do is we are finding your thing and your associations. That is what I want you to figure out this week. And if you want a little bit of accountability, you can comment it wherever you are listening, Spotify, YouTube, leave it in the comment box and I will read and reply to every single one and I will let you know. Like, please comment and be like, "Kay, is this boring?" Because I will tell you because I am your business and branding fairy godmother. But I want you to end this week knowing those two things. And do not advance to next week until you do.

And remember, if you want more content like this, if you want to join the Hot Rich 75 that we're doing in my membership. If you actually want to do this inside a university, I actually have one. It's called the Level Up University. It is my membership for women who are in content creation and business. We talk about business, branding. I literally give you a major. Like, you can choose a major. We have five majors in there. We have one coming in September. I will leave a free code somewhere in the descriptions or in the comments. So, come and join us if you are intrigued.

With that said, I'm going to see you next week, guys. I'm so, so excited for summer. I truly believe summers can be so transformative. Last summer was so transformative for me. And this is really a time where you can fill up your own cup and work on yourself so that when September rolls around, you are not a different person because that's not what we're doing here. But you are an elevated version of yourself. So, who's doing Hot Rich Summer with me? If you are, I want you to comment "Hot Rich Summer" somewhere where I can read it. I'm so excited for these next 12 weeks. You have no idea. And next week, what we're going to be looking at is the death of beige branding. I'm so excited for that one. I'm so over beige branding. So, stay tuned for that.

And thank you so much for tuning in today. And thank you as well. I know I've had a bit of a podcast break because I was prepping for Hot Rich Summer and I just everything that I was producing was not as good as Hot Rich Summer. So, thank you so much for bearing with me. I know, especially on like Spotify, there was loads of like private episodes going up and I imagine that's really frustrating, but we're back. We're back, baby. I just needed time to cook, so I really hope that it was worth the wait. So, here is to a hot, rich summer. I will catch you next week. Bye guys.