Speaker 1: But you've got to get in the game, you have to, I think a big part of finding your personal brand is making the decision to get off of the sideline and really start playing the game. So please don't let numbers determine your output right now, don't let numbers even be a factor in letting you know or communicating to you like if what you're putting out as your personal brand is successful or not. It's gonna take trial and error, it's gonna take practice, and the quicker you get to practicing, the quicker you get to failing, the quicker you will find your personal brand. That's truly what I believe in. When you have a strong personal brand, your business, your YouTube channel, whatever it is, will grow quicker, be better, because you've done the work to have a solid foundation. People connect with people, people don't necessarily connect with businesses or brands in the same way they would connect to a person. You can rely less on brand deals if you take the time to build up your personal brand, invest in your personal brand, scale it up, level it up, however we want to put that. And you can create a more financially secure future for yourself by understanding the power of your personal brand as a strategy to build a successful business, YouTube channel, make six figures online, or whatever it is you aspire to achieve. The number one mistake I feel like people make when trying to build their brand on YouTube is giving it all, all at once. It's just so much of who they are, every single aspect they feel as though they need to put onto their YouTube channel, which makes their YouTube channel feel scattered and not cohesive. And I feel like the number one way to avoid that is figuring out what is level one of my brand and how can I package that into my YouTube channel. So once you figure out level one of your brand, you want to turn that into a clear and consistent message for your YouTube channel. So the lighthouse strategy is the bigger picture of what do you want to be known for, and it's essentially finding your bigger message, your bigger meaning in all your videos or your content. It's a through message. And let's talk about a little bit of this analogy of lighthouse, like why is it called the lighthouse strategy? So to my understanding, when the sailors and everybody's out at sea, the lighthouse provides direction to where they're going. And your mission statement should stand as a direction to where you're leading and inspiring people to go with the content that you put out, everything that you do in regards to your personal brand. So your mission is simply where are you leading people towards? Like, what is that thing that you're here? Like, what is the purpose? You know, what is the ultimate purpose of the things that you do online? And we can just keep it in the online space, but of course, that works offline as well. But essentially, it's just the purpose, the why, the reason that people should want to even interact with you. It always goes back to interactions, impressions, and experiences. Why should anyone want to engage with you? All of those words are synopsis. I can't say that word, but I'm trying to say the word like synopsis. I just can't say that word, but all of them are synonyms of each other. And your mission should be a very clear, succinct messaging in your mind for why people should want to engage with you in the first place. You want to have that one mission statement, that one lighthouse strategy, whatever you want to call it, but ultimately, you need to know the direction where you are leading people towards. No one wants to, if in the age of social media, however you want to call them, supporters, followers, subscribers, no one wants to follow somebody that has no direction. And when it comes to your personal brand, you need to be very clear on the direction that you are bringing people, because that is what is going to just spark emotion in them and make that person want to follow you wherever it is that your journey takes you. It goes way beyond the clothes when you're truly developing your personal style. One of my favorite little hacks, tricks, I don't know what to call it, but when I was learning, when I was on my own journey of developing my personal style, which I'm still on, is this whole thing of your three words. I'll just go ahead and insert the woman who I got it from and her explaining it because she does it the best. So what are the

Speaker 2: three words or what is the three word method? There are a couple of stylists and designers who do a lot of deep dives into this as well, so I'll have a link their content down below, but for me, I think your three words are adjectives or descriptors that not only describe your personal style, like the aesthetic, but also an aesthetic or a style that you aspire to. I also think these adjectives and descriptors are almost a reflection of who you are on the inside as well, so they're not necessarily the common fashion descriptors that we often see, like bohemian and I don't know, classic, even though I'm going to use that one. I think we can go a little bit beyond those traditional descriptors and think outside the box, like maybe powerful or creative or pragmatic and analytical. I think when we look at these three words from a personality perspective or a lifestyle perspective, it can also help us make decisions that are more in alignment with who we are and

Speaker 1: what we do every day. So yeah, I think if you take some time to figure out your three words, right? Let's just go with mine. It's clean, classic, and cool. I think those are my words. Maybe I'm still figuring that out, but that's where I'm at right now with it. Clean, classic, and cool. You want to take those same three words and try and show that within the elements. Maybe it's your colors, your fonts, the style of your thumbnails here on YouTube, and other different content related elements. You want to show those three words within your personal brand. Those three words can guide a lot of things that you do in the way that you show up here online. So if you're unfamiliar with me, I talk a lot about growing on YouTube and my philosophy or what I think is that in order to build a strong online presence, you're going to have to have a YouTube going up and running. I'm not saying it has to be you have to get 100k subscribers or anything like that, but you need to be posting content consistently and growing an audience and really just showing up in the YouTube space. That's where your content pillars come in. Content pillars are the key themes or topics that align with that first version of your brand. They act as a guide for the kind of videos you should create to reflect your message consistently. So once you've figured out where you want to be and what that version of you looks like, ask yourself what are the three to five main topics that support that vision and message. Those topics will become the core of your content strategy and make it easier for you to create videos that align with your brand. So what's the best way to actually choose these content pillars? The goals that you want to achieve in five years should be the primary source of information for what your content pillars should be. Why is that? That's because you want to use your YouTube channel to support these goals. You want to use your YouTube channel to help you achieve those things. That is why you want to brand yourself on YouTube. You want to learn when you're talking with people, when you're networking, how do I show my personality? You don't ever want to overwhelm anyone online, offline. But it's like, don't be a bland cracker. An unsalted cracker. You have pizzazz in there. Everyone's pizzazz looks different. Everyone's special sauce and everything like that, it looks different for everybody. But when you want to have a personal brand that stands out, you allow your personality to inform the decisions that you make in terms of how your content is set up and the way your videos are and how you talk, how you move. You think about your personality. You let it be big that's appropriate for you and as bold as appropriate for you. But YouTube is about personality, okay? So you got to let it shine. You have to let it shine through everything that you do if you really want to stand out. A person who is building a personal brand is unafraid of letting their personality be the star. Think about who's next to you, who's in the race with you right now. If you network with people that's in your area, in your niche, if you network with people that want to be known for similar things that you want to be known for and you get yourself in front of their audience, now you've given yourself the opportunity to expand your own audience. And that's what I'm trying to say. It took a little work to get the words out of my mouth, but just to kind of quickly recap that part, you gotta rub elbows with who's next to you in the fight right now, which can sometimes be hard to find. From my own experience, it's been hard to find people who's as passionate as I am about my particular niche, but I'm going to find them one day and I'm going to work with them. I want to take things a step further and have a website for myself and when people look me up, I want them to see an array of different things. Perhaps I've been interviewed on this podcast, I wrote this article, or you know, I just want to have a lot of digital real estate and to me that's equivalent to building my online presence. Just having IG, just having TikTok, just having YouTube, that's not enough for me and I need my own website. And I'm not saying a personal brand is just having your own website, but I'm just trying to say that a personal brand is a necessary ingredient to my way of building or how I want to build my online presence. One thing that we can learn from bigger brands, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Nike, you name it. These bigger brands know they don't have true faces of their company, but what they relied on was their brand story. Do you know your brand story? Are you using the power of storytelling to connect with your audience? Because if you're not, it's a missed opportunity. Story branding is a very, in the skill set of YouTube and content creation and building a personal brand, I think story branding is one of the hardest ones. But when you realize you are your own product, the possibilities are endless. They truly are endless. For me, it's kind of like, have you ever heard people say you're a walking billboard? If you ever wore maybe a designer brand or something, there's this controversial thing sometimes on people who wear overt designer clothing, where it says the logo everywhere. They have the logos all over themselves. I've heard people refer to those kinds of people as walking billboards for those brands that they're showcasing. I bring that up to say, are you going to be a walking billboard for yourself? Are you going to be a walking billboard for your own brand that you're building later down the line? Become dangerously self-aware. If you don't know who you are, you don't know your strengths, your weaknesses, your likes, your dislikes, and your values and your beliefs, it's going to be hard to craft a personal brand. You really find your personal brand by taking action. You can only write and work on a document about it for so long. What do they call that? It's a living document. This thing that you're going to create, answering these questions, it's a living document because every time you create a piece of content, you're going to figure something out about the personal brand you want to build. You're going to have to tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak the messaging, tweak, and tweak it until you get to a place where you really love it. So I was saying all that to say, if you're going to be brave enough to do this while creating content and not wait a whole bunch of time for you to get clear a hundred percent, you cannot worry about the numbers right now. You can't worry about the numbers right now. I'm a big believer in the fact like post the content. The content will tell you what personal brand you're building. The content will help you find your personal brand. Having a personal brand is a currency. I want to read to you what I wrote down when I was coming up with my bullet points for this because I really like how I said it. If I have a strong personal brand, I'm able to leverage that to create more opportunities for myself. To put that another way, similar to how currency is exchanged for goods and services, a strong personal brand can be traded for opportunities, influence, collaboration, and career advancements. I just feel like having a personal brand opens up a lot of doors that only having social media accounts doesn't.