Speaker 1: Every content creator knows that if you want to earn an income doing what you love online that you need to build an effective personal brand. Because if you want brands to reach out to you, they need to know who you are, and even if you have your own digital products that you want to offer to a community, then they need to trust you and they need to see you as an authority or someone who can solve their problems. And the easiest way to position yourself in any market is to focus on building your personal brand. And if you build your personal brand the right way like I'm going to show you in this video, then you're going to be able to do all of those things and so much more. This is Start With Why by Simon Sinek, and it's a classic. If you want a copy of it, I'll put a link in the description or an audible copy so you can listen to it. One of the most powerful things he says in that book is that people buy why you do it, not what you do. And so often content creators get caught up on what they do. I make reels, I make TikToks, I make YouTube videos, and they completely forget about why they do it. I create these videos because I want to help as many content creators as possible earn an income doing what they love. I am an evangelist for the digital marketing age and for the opportunities we have to connect with people and build community online, even though we're separated by hundreds and maybe even thousands of miles. And now that we're moving into the age of AI, I'm incorporating that into my mission statement and my brand as well. And after you figured out why you're a content creator, the next thing you want to think about is who am I creating my content for? Who is my audience? Who is my ideal viewer? Every video I create, I'm thinking about the people who view my content and what they want to see from me, because there've been plenty of times I made videos without thinking about you. And every time I did it, you let me know, Corey, you weren't thinking about me when you made this video. You know how I know? Because you didn't watch the video. But seriously, you just want to try to make videos or write posts that your people actually want to see. And as your audience grows, you're going to expand out into different topics that everybody may not be interested in, and that's okay. But make sure that you're focused on your audience with all of the content you're creating and you're focused on why you became a content creator in the first place. Number two, you want to choose the right platform. In the current day and age, you can be a content creator on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch. You can even focus on creating videos for Amazon if you're an Amazon influencer and you have access to that feature. The possibilities are endless, but you don't want to try to be on every platform at the same time because you're only one person and trying to do too much can keep you from doing anything at all. So pick one platform to focus on and use your spare time to possibly branch out to other platforms as you optimize and streamline your workflow on your priority platform. My priority platform is YouTube. So I don't spend a lot of time trying to grow my Facebook page. I don't spend a lot of time trying to grow my Instagram. And the reason I focus on YouTube is because it's the most powerful platform for building a personal brand. And any other platform where people will find you and spend more time with you than they do on YouTube. Some people are going to say TikTok or Facebook, but on all of those platforms, people divide their time up between dozens of creators. When I come to YouTube and I sit down for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, two or three people are going to get my time because the content is deeper and more meaningful in my personal opinion. And so maybe you want to start with YouTube. If you do want to start with YouTube, I'll put a link in the description that's showing you exactly what I did to get started and how I started growing and how you can too. But now that I have this library of content on YouTube, if I wanted to start focusing on Instagram and Facebook within the next couple of weeks, all I would have to do is take my content, place it in video.ai and it would automatically create reels for me with captions and with my personal branding so that all I had to do was download and post it and have ChatGPT write the captions. But I can't do that if I focus on other platforms first. This next one is a very difficult one for me, but you have to develop a consistent visual identity. Now, one thing that's going to fall in this category is a logo, but your logo is not your brand. It's just a symbol that represents your business or a product that you possibly sell. If you're a content creator, the thing that's going to represent your brand more than anything is your smiling face. But there are visual elements and graphics that do need to be consistent. The next thing you want to work on is your personal story and what makes you different from every other content creator on the platform. I know for myself that part of my personal story is the story of the underdog. I've been counted out so many times in my life, but every time I've always come out 10 times better and 10 times more well off than the people who counted me out ever thought I would be. And so I know what it's like to be the little guy, to be the person that's just starting out at something. And that's what a lot of you are. You're beginning content creators. You're struggling to find your way. You're trying to see what works. And I can empathize with that. I remember how excited I was when I got my first 100 subscribers. And I was thinking there are a hundred people who subscribed to my channel to watch these videos I was putting out that were nowhere near what they are now. And I'm not even saying that the content I'm creating now is awesome. But even when I was sharing my experience and the things I was learning, there were people who were ridiculing me and saying I should be quiet and I shouldn't talk about certain things until I had more experience. And I'll be happy to let you know that I'm still doing to this day, the same things I did back then, but I'm only doing them better. Nothing's changed. So if you have people telling you, well, maybe you should do this and maybe you should do that, but you're seeing results with what you're doing and you know that what you're doing is working for you, then keep doing what's working for you. And don't listen to people on the outside because that is the story of my life. There's a verse in the Bible that says you get praise when you do well for yourself. Everybody loves a success story, but nobody wants to be present when it's a struggle story. And so right now you may be struggling, but if you subscribe to the channel, you watch some of the videos that you believe are most meaningful to you and you take action on some of it, it's going to help you become a success story. And if you can get a vision of what you can accomplish because of your consistency, you can be in a place next year that makes them eat their words. I promise you. So make sure you subscribe to the channel and watch the rest of this video. The next thing you want to do to build a powerful, effective personal brand on social media or anywhere online is to create engaging content. And we already covered this, but you need to put the reps in and do the work so that you get better every time you press record. Every time you write, every time you create an infographic or another graphic or whatever it is you do to create content, be yourself on camera, especially in today's age with artificial intelligence. People want to know that they're talking to a real person with real problems and real needs and real solutions and not just some scripted video that has no life, no soul, no experience in it. Don't be afraid to be yourself on camera and share different parts of yourself that don't necessarily line up with what somebody else doesn't believe. Be who you are, embrace it and share it with the world. You want to build a powerful and effective personal brand on social media, then you want to monitor and adjust your strategy. Always look at what's working. If something is working, then you want to double down on that. And if something isn't working, you want to move away from it. It's really that simple. Don't let it become overcomplicated and don't let the metrics fool you. Your audience will let you know if they want to see something or not by whether they view it or not. The next thing you want to do to build an effective personal brand, and this is something that I'm actively getting to do myself, is you want to network with other content creators who have personal brands to build themselves. Have you ever heard the saying that a rising tide lifts all ships? If you can help other people become stronger and better as content creators, that's only going to help you yourself. In the coming weeks, I'm going to be starting a podcast for content creators, and I want to bring on guests who align with my brand and the purpose of my brand, which is to help content creators earn an income doing what they love. Because not only am I introducing them to my audience and boosting their brand awareness, but they're introducing me to their audience and boosting my brand awareness. It's a win-win situation, and it's perfect for content creators who have the mindset of collaboration over competition because the market is so huge that there's room enough for everybody to sit at a table and put their elbows on it without feeling like they're taking space away from anybody else. This is socialblade.com, and this is a website that tracks analytics and metrics for all types of platforms, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, just so many different platforms, right? And right now I have it set to YouTube, and all I have to do is type in any YouTuber's name, and it's going to bring up statistics on their channel. So I typed in my own name, and you can see the public data that's available on my channel, how many views I got, my rank that they give me, and all of this different stuff. Socialblade will even try to predict how much money that person is making on their account. Socialblade says my YouTube channel is making anywhere from $14 to $231, and that's off, way off. But the rest of the metrics are pretty good, pretty accurate, but what I want to bring your attention to is future projections. I came to Socialblade several months ago, and I was looking at my future projections, and my content library and my audience of viewership was way smaller than it was right now. And Socialblade predicted that I would hit 50,000 subscribers within five years. But now if you go and look, I should be close to 50,000 in about a year. The reason for the discrepancy and the only thing that changed the metric I got now versus then was the consistency in the content that I've created in the meantime, and especially with my new focus on rapidly creating content and frequently posting valuable content to my YouTube channel that other people are not creating because they're afraid to pick a side and they're afraid to be direct and they're afraid to have their own ideas. This number is only going to get lower, and I'm going to achieve my goals even more rapidly than they can predict. If I or anybody watching this video wants to build an effective personal brand online, we have to be committed to the process, and we can't entertain these childish ideas that are supposed to happen overnight. It takes hard work and dedication and consistency above all. If you just stay consistent, you're going to beat 95% of the people anyways because they're going to quit. Most people quit. If you want to win, all you have to do is stay on the conveyor belt, and eventually it's going to move you to the front of the line while everybody else jumps off.