Transcription
[Music] So you want to build a personal brand but you don't know [Music] how. If you're like the thousands of others watching right now, you're stuck with a low follower account and bad posts. Maybe you've tried and failed a bunch of times already, or maybe you're too scared to take the first steps. This video is for you.
One of my biggest regrets is not building a personal brand sooner when the evidence was right in front of me. Tesla has 30 million followers. Elon Musk has 187 million followers. Spanx has 400,000 followers. Sarah Blakely has 2 million. Virgin has 700,000 followers. Richard Branson has 15 million. So I took action, and I relaunched myself online as the face of my new company and became the mentor of founders scaling to $5 million profit a year and a master of systems.
In this video, I'm going to give you the blueprint to building a profitable personal brand in the next 30 days. That's all it takes to go from no leads, inconsistent growth, and no systems to building a strong personal brand that is a magnet for opportunities, customers, community, and endless cash flow. I know this blueprint works because I've used it on my own personal brand, which has brought me four profitable companies, an audience of over 2 million people, and a portfolio of online businesses that generates over $13.8 million in revenue a year.
And the best news is I documented, analyzed, and packaged every step of the process to create this personal brand system that you can use to do the same. It all comes down to five pillars:
1. **Brand System**
2. **Compounding Content**
3. **Audience Growth Systems**
4. **Monetization Moments**
5. **Core Team**
All buildable and doable within the next 30 days after you finish watching this video and subscribing to this [Music] channel.
**Number One: Brand System**
Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. Whether you know it or not, you have a personal brand. The question is, are you intentionally growing it? Are you comfortable with how you portray yourself online? Are you intentionally leveraging your personal brand to grow your business? We are all brands, and you own 100% of it.
So how do you create a personal brand that is a magnet for your dream customer? You need to get clear on your vision, your mission, your values, goals, target market, content categories, content IP, and content ideas.
What is your one-sentence statement that outlines what your company does, why it does it, and how it gets it done? My mission with Found is to help over 100 million entrepreneurs accomplish their dreams through proven systems.
Your values determine the tone, voice, and personality that you're going to have online. From there, you want to determine who you are looking to target and then be specific. At Found, I target high-growth founders that are looking to go from seven figures to eight figures to exit through proven systems.
Now that you know exactly who you want to target, you want to get outside the building and actually go in, speak to these people, survey them, ask them questions, talk to them. Understand: What is your biggest challenge? What are your biggest aspirations? What are your questions when it comes to the space or industry that you operate in? If you could wave some magic wand, what would be the biggest accomplishment you would hope to achieve this year? The answers to these questions are going to help you then formulate content ideas that are going to serve your dream customer.
Now that you're clear on who your target market is, you want to come up with your four content categories. Content categories are the drumbeat of your marketing, right? These are the things that people are going to come to know and love you for. They identify the general themes you want to talk about online. My content categories are audience growth, systems, personal stories, content creation systems, and scaling. These are the things people come back to me for again and again.
Go and get a pen and paper out and write down your four content categories. Now that you have your categories nailed down, I want to cover a little-known but highly impactful secret. It's called content [Music] IP.
Casey Neistat's sunglasses, Daniel Dal's thumbnails, Peter McKinnon's "What's up, what's up, everybody, Peter McKinnon here." They are trained elements that consistently are woven into every piece of content associated with their personal brands. As you grow your brand, audience, and offer, developing unique phrasing and language is essential. When you create unique names for your processes, you own those processes.
You want to define your core ideas, and a bonus: if you can think of a group of words that you want to be associated with online, for me it's systems, audience growth, and organic content funnels. What values or principles are consistently present in your story? Create a short list of principles that best capture your identity. Often you'll find certain terms or expressions that you use often, even ones that you've invented.
You're going to look for these defining terms—terms that you can use across multiple concepts or categories. For instance, at Founder OS, we focus on operating systems, so it's only natural that when I go and create different lessons or titles for different concepts that I use the word OS. The combination of the words, sentences, and phrases that you own creates your own content IP—this universe of content that you can become known for online.
A little test that you know if you have your content IP down and effective is people are going to start actually copying you online. But don't worry, no one is you, and your personal brand is safe as long as you remain consistent.
And this is where compounding content and my content waterfall system come into play. "If you build it, they will come" might be great advice for a baseball stadium, but it is terrible advice for anyone trying to build an audience. To get attention, you need to be in front of your ideal audience regularly. I recommend picking two social media platforms to begin with and committing to publishing two times daily. It's better to be the best on two platforms than mediocre on five.
Let's pick a channel with a low barrier to entry. You don't want to have to buy a camera, expensive gear, or pay for extra tools to get started and trying things out. Pick a channel where you feel comfortable and where you can get writing immediately. My top two recommendations for your first channel to grow on are X and LinkedIn. These are the Grand Slam platforms; they use written text, which means that you can just make it yourself and start practicing your copywriting immediately.
Lastly, you want to implement the most powerful content system in the world: my content waterfall system. Building a brand and growing an audience of raving fans is key for achieving both with your business and revenue goals. However, there's a classic catch-22 that comes into play. To build and sustain a personal brand, you have to post engaging content daily across multiple platforms, and anyone that tells you differently is either getting lucky or just lying to you.
The answer lies in implementing a system that maximizes output while minimizing effort. I call it the content waterfall system. The foundation of the content waterfall system lies in creating a pillar piece of content. Imagine this cascading waterfall, right? The pillar piece of content is the source of the waterfall, and the subsequent content pieces are the streams that branch out from it. This could be a blog post, an X thread, a podcast episode, a YouTube long-form video—any piece of content that offers value that can be broken down into smaller pieces.
I use an X thread as the pillar piece of content. This idea and the copy from that X thread becomes inspiration for 10 more short-form tweets. They become content like, "Three principles I live by," "How to start a business from nothing," "Seven marketing metrics," "Building an audience," "Writing online," "How to deal with being unfocused," and "Going for a run—nature is the greatest mentor," "Applying the 80/20 rule to everything," and "If you want freedom, build systems and outcomes—fall in love with the process."
The same idea from the X thread becomes three short-form animated videos. This adds 12 additional posts to the content waterfall, so now we're at the X thread plus 12 video posts and 12 short-form tweets. The short-form animated video also becomes a tweet, as seen here. The same video becomes a short-form talking head video, as you can see right here, and this goes out on Instagram, YouTube shorts, TikTok, and X—that's four more, so now we're at 26 posts.
The lessons I share in the original X thread also become pieces of this YouTube script that was around how I went from $15K in debt to $8.7 million a year, and it becomes a newsletter now a month later—so that's 28. It also becomes a long-form LinkedIn post and an Instagram carousel, so now we're at 29 posts and a B-roll video on Instagram—that's 30.
You can use this chart below to map out all the content you want to make from that one X thread or long-form piece of content and turn it into 25 other pieces of content. Focus on content that inspires, educates, entertains, makes people think, and triggers some sort of emotion.
If you're looking to come up with 100 content ideas in just 30 minutes, I'd recommend using my content idea [Music] machine. Let me go and show you this content idea machine prompt for ChatGPT. Heads up, this thing's a beast. The prompt reads like this: "You are a viral content expert. I need your help generating compelling content ideas. Take inspiration from viral YouTube video ideas and viral Twitter threads with over 5 million views. Make the copywriting impeccable and memorable."
Then what you're going to do is replace this info below with your own overview of your mission for your own brand. I have here, "I'm a Founder creating content to help founders reach $5 million per year through proven systems for audience, brand, and community growth. Our mission is to help 100 million founders automate their business and hit $5 million profit a year."
I want to generate viral content ideas by creating a table. In the table, the X-axis has content groups (meaning ways to present a content category), and the Y-axis has content categories to be matched with the X-axis.
The X-axis has content groups formatted the following way, and then it gets into the ways to format this. Right? So it's going to have:
1. Educational content: Lists, best ofs, tools, facts, guides, systems, summaries, and frameworks.
2. Emotional: It's going to drive some type of emotion and get the reader to feel some type of way that causes them to share with five friends.
3. Deep dive: Data, math, reasons, trends, expert quotes, research, and industry breakdowns.
4. Reflection: Hidden secrets, lessons, mistakes, successful routines, personal experiences, and advice to yourself five years ago.
5. Vulnerable: Failures, obstacles, insecurities, skills you want to learn, what things shape you, what things you wish you knew, and the best advice you were given.
6. Edutainment: You're going to create content with amazing storytelling, practical value that is captivating, compelling, and makes people want to share it with five friends.
7. Lists: Provide useful lessons, steps, systems, processes, tools, and resources about the content category.
So the Y-axis is going to contain the content categories. These are the ones that you went and wrote down earlier in this video. Mine, as an example, are:
1. $5 million founder systems
2. Automating your business
3. Controlling the four W's (which is to work on what you want, when you want, where you want, and with whom you want)
4. Community building.
Let's see what this thing generates here. You can see it now going and generating a table with viral content ideas in each cell of the X and Y axis. It's going down all of those different content types and then in each of those categories that I went and formulated, like "$5 million founder systems," "automating your business," "controlling the 4Ws," and "community building," it's generating me a table of ideas for each of those areas. So, pretty freaking powerful!
If you want a copy of that prompt and my content machine template, you can get it for free via the link in the description. There's a lot of value in there, so you're going to want to go check it [Music] out.
Now let's move on to pillar number three: audience growth systems. Consistency is key—put in the reps, and if you are consistent, good things will happen. I promise you. But it's hard to be consistent if you don't have the right system in place.
The only way to excellence is first through repetition, and I recommend that as you build your personal brand online, you batch your content creation. This is key: create 15 videos in one day, write 20 pieces of content in 2 hours. This will help you avoid creator burnout, and it's going to get you off the content hamster wheel.
You don't want to be dreading having to create content every single morning; that gets exhausting. Batch your content creation to achieve time freedom. From there, you're going to schedule your content so you can grow on autopilot and build your audience while you sleep.
Here's a breakdown of all the tech that I use across Founder OS:
- Hype Fury to schedule X content
- Tweet Hunter X to find inspiration for X content
- X Analytics for X stats
- Tapoly for LinkedIn analytics
- Tapoly X for LinkedIn inspiration
- Convert Kit for our newsletter
- School to for the Founder OS Community
- Stripe for payments
- Webflow for our website
At first, I was using Kajabi, Doc testimonial to collect testimonials, Notion for my company wiki which houses all of the systems across Founder OS, Google Drive for things like photos, videos, and B-roll, Google Docs to document all of our systems, Zapier for automations, Figma for designs, Loom for screen recordings (and I also use this to reduce my meetings), Typeform for a Founder OS application to get feedback from founders, and Asana for project management.
To maximize your audience growth, follow the data. After you've been consistently posting for a little while, it's important to take some time and look over your data. You're going to want to see trends around what's working and what's not. You're going to see what really resonates with your audience. You're going to double down on what's working and do less of what isn't. Execute, optimize, repeat.
**Number Four: Monetization Moments**
Monetizing your personal brand is essential so you can reinvest into people, product, and your vision. Monetization moments are a crucial element of your organic content strategy. They guide your audience to take specific steps such as subscribing, sharing, or purchasing. CTAs, or calls to action, are the best way to drive people from your social audience to customers.
Think of your audience as this vast ocean of attention, okay? And your CTAs are like this net that's going to help catch the fish and then drive them to revenue. The key is to strategically place the CTAs in your content and ensure that you do them in a way that fits the subject of the content that they're in.
What do you need to scale from just a personal brand? You need to build a core team. You don't just want to have a personal brand, right? You want to have a personal media company. The personal media company is nothing new; it's been used for ages to build the world's biggest companies. Benjamin Franklin owned and published the Pennsylvania Gazette to influence public opinion, and it became his personal media company. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post to have his personal media company, and Elon Musk bought X to have his personal media company.
The difference between you and these folks is this: you don't need to buy a media company. You can become the media company. Picture this: you own a personal media company that grows everything around you. It drives attention to your products and companies; it brings you a flood of new customers, cash flow, and opportunities, and it attracts top talent so you no longer need to chase people.
It is a beacon for your people—creatives, dreamers, investors, builders, founders, and innovators. You build a community of people online, you grow your digital reputation, and you become known and respected. This is the power of your personal media company—infinite leverage at your fingertips.
To scale a personal media company, you need to build a team of weapons—an individual who, when brought onto a company, has the ability to 10x their area. They go above and beyond to fulfill the needs of the company and the mission. They hire more weapons and elevate your culture and speed of innovation.
Here are the areas where weapons can help you in your business: tech, sales, video, photos, design, writing, funnels, animations, operations, video editing, and social posting.
In the last 20 months, I grew an audience of over 2 million people around my personal brand. I haven't done this alone, though; I've had an incredible team around me. Here's my org chart from Founder OS, but you don't need all of these folks to get started. Over time, you're going to likely build a team such as a social manager to post all your content, a writer to help you craft your content, a video editor to edit your videos, and a videographer to then shoot your content.
These four weapons can do damage. This is the profitable personal brand playbook. If you want more systems to grow an audience to 1.8 million just like I did, check out this video on my system to get your first 100,000 followers.
So if you enjoyed this video, you're going to love my next video, so be sure to like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one. [Applause] [Applause] [Music]