Speaker 1: Do you feel like you have more to offer the world and you want to use your unique talents and interests to create a strong personal brand that helps others? Building a personal brand the right way not only allows you to make more income, but also make an impact. Today, I'm going to share all my secrets on how to build a strong personal brand as an online teacher. Building a personal brand myself, I've not only been able to build a successful referral business, but also a coaching program. First I'm going to explain what exactly a personal brand is, and then I'm going to go into the five essentials to building a personal brand. And make sure you stay to the end, because I'm going to share how you don't need hundreds of thousands of followers to be able to have a profitable, scalable personal brand. What's up? I'm so glad you're here today. I'm Dani, and I am an online teacher, entrepreneur, and coach. I help people build lives of freedom through online teaching and also building scalable brands on YouTube. Be sure to subscribe and level up your online business with my weekly videos and entrepreneur interviews. Also, if you hit the notification bell, you'll know every time I post a new video. And if you haven't grabbed it yet, make sure you get my ultimate starting on YouTube cheat sheet with the five tips that your competitors don't want you to know and start building that brand on the world's second largest search engine. So before we talk about how to build a strong personal brand as an online teacher, let's quickly just cover what exactly is a personal brand. It's essentially how you are differentiating yourself from others in your field and creating credibility and expertise in order to build influence and make an impact. And also income. So let's dive into how to build a strong personal brand as an online teacher. And my first key tip is to remember and to remind yourself constantly that no one cares about you. What? This is one of the most important lessons that I have learned in personal branding. And it seems almost counterintuitive to a personal brand is that what nobody cares about me. But it is so important to understand that a strong personal brand offers value to others. It's not just you self-promoting yourself and talking about things that you want to talk about. It's really about how you serve others, giving value to others. Think of your favorite social media influencers. You probably honestly like them because they taught you something or they teach you something. Think about what it is. Like for me right now, one of my favorite influencers is this woman who teaches you how to make all these amazing recipes. And because I like her cooking videos so much, I feel like I like to also know the little things about her family. But I wouldn't care about knowing about her family if I didn't first learn something from her, right? She offers value. A good personal brand knows it is there to serve and offer value. My motto in my bathroom is, what can I give, not what can I get. Also I highly recommend putting affirmations in your bathroom mirror so you can look at it every day and make all my clients do it. If you have affirmations that you tell yourself every day, I want to know what they are. Let me know in the comments below. But anyway, I'm an affirmation nerd. Just remember that a good personal brand caters to the wants and needs of others and not to the wants and needs of yourself. Now going along with that, the second key in building a strong personal brand as an online teacher is to pick one person that you want to speak to. Have one target audience. If you talk to everyone, you end up talking to no one. You want to make sure that you pick the one person that you really want your personal brand to help and to speak to. By doing this, you allow your brand to grow exponentially faster than if you're trying to just talk to everybody. For example, I'm a digital nomad, or normally like pre-2020, I'm a digital nomad. But I think I'm getting to South Korea soon. Normally, I'm a digital nomad and an online teacher. And so those are the people that I like to speak to, our digital nomad online teachers. And because those are the people that I speak to all the time on all my platforms with them in mind, I'm able to pull those clients into my business that much faster. If I was just trying to speak to everybody, that's not as relatable. Does that mean that most of my clients are online teachers and love to travel, digital nomads? Yes. Does that mean that all of my clients fit that? No. So by picking the one person you want to speak to, it doesn't mean you're repelling everyone else. It means you're just really honing in on the main people that you want to help. And then others are going to find you too, but the people you most want to speak to are hearing you and they're finding you. And that's the key to growing faster. And if you're having trouble figuring out who's that one person that you want to speak to, then think of the three S's. This is something that I teach in my coaching program, and that's your story, your struggles, and your strengths. And so looking at your story, looking at your struggles and things you overcome, and looking at your strengths and your personality, combine all those things and really reflect on it. And who does that best speak to? Who's the one person that can really help? And I found a lot of times, actually, that one person that we end up wanting to help is like our past self. And that's totally cool too. So now that you know you've got to speak to that one person, the next tip in how to build a strong personal brand as an online teacher is to niche down. I know I'll say it over and over and over again. The riches are in the niches. Niche, niche, niche, niche. I don't know, I say niche because I think it sounds better, but I Googled it and both are technically okay. So don't worry. The reason that it's so important to niche down when building a personal brand is that you're able to be seen as an expert much, much faster. So for example, let's say I wanted to have a YouTube channel that was all about fitness. Well, it's going to be hard for me to be seen as a fitness expert, right? That's very broad. I need to niche down and make it more specific, like I have a yoga channel. Okay, well, there's still a lot of different yoga channels, so how could I make that even more specific and niche down? Maybe I just do yoga for your menstrual cycle. I've seen those channels before. Because it's so specific, it's so much easier to become seen as an expert in menstrual health yoga and then to be able to build up my brand based off of that. And then after I build it up, then I can expand to other things, but you have to niche down in the beginning. You have to become known for something to start with. So what does a good niche statement involve? So a really strong niche breaks down the person that you are wanting to help, your target audience, that one person. And then the problem that you help that person solve, remember a good personal brand offers that value. And then the desired outcome that that person wants to achieve that you're going to help them achieve. So for example, my niche is I help unsatisfied online teachers build scalable YouTube channels that create impact and income. So the person I help is online teachers. The problem that I solve is that they're unsatisfied and they want to be able to build something of their own that's scalable. And then the promise I give is that it's going to bring impact and income. A good niche is something that you really feel called to do. You are passionate about it. It combines different elements of yourself and your personality. I like to think of it like the law of dharma. It's this unique thing that you have to offer the world because you bring unique talents and perspective to the table. And if you're having a hard time really honing in on your niche and how to combine your unique talents and strengths, then definitely sign up for my waiting list for my one week to niche course. In this course, I help take you from having a million ideas and interests to one in order to hone in on your true passion and stand out and scale. I'll put a link to the waiting list for the one week to niche course up above and down below. It's going to be incredible. I would love to see you there. Now the fourth step in building a strong personal brand is to be more weird. What? Yes. Stop trying to copy others. My favorite quote is something I found on Pinterest and it says, I attract success by being my authentic self. Pinterest, Danny J, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott, who got that reference, right? Okay. Anyway, personal brands that copy other influencers and other personal brands are never going to scale big because you're missing the secret sauce and that secret sauce is authenticity. Remember like I talked about earlier, use the three S's, use your story, use your struggles, use your strength because it allows you to have empathy and speak best again to that one person and that really allows you to stand out and differentiate yourself from others. Nobody has the same story as you. Nobody has the same personality as you. Nobody has this unique offer. So use that. Using the unique things about you is going to help pull in your target audience better because they're going to relate to you. There's something in branding and marketing called the blue ocean theory and essentially it means that you create a new open market, this blue ocean where there's no competition because you've differentiated yourself from the other competition. Your offer is unique versus being in a red ocean where there's lots of competition, everybody's doing the same thing, everybody looks the same and everyone's competing against each other. You put yourself in a whole different market. You stand out. The competition becomes irrelevant over here because it's unique and I'll give a quick example of this. One of my former clients, Ashley Liliana, she has an amazing channel now. She's a digital nomad and she loves to travel and she was always so tired of just seeing one type of influencer in the digital nomad world and she wanted to see more Latinx women represented. So she created a channel to be more inclusive to all and gives travel tips and talks about her experience as a Latinx traveler. She used her story, struggles and strength to create a brand that is so unique that is creating impact but again that's a great example of this blue ocean theory. The fifth key to building a strong personal brand as an online teacher is to pick one platform and stick with it and stay consistent. Do not try to grow your brand on every single platform at first. Every platform has its own rules, its own algorithm that you're going to need to learn and master so pick just one to start with. Hone in on that. Focus on that. Master it. Then once you've done that, then you can add on others but it's so key to stay consistent with one in order to scale. So if you need help in figuring out what kind of platform you want to start on, you can ask yourself these questions. How do I like to show up? Do I prefer video, audio, picture? Where is your target audience looking for information? Where does she or he spend time? What social media platform do they prefer? And where are my efforts going to go the farthest? Where am I going to be able to have the most reach? Now obviously we're on YouTube right now and I'm always going to say that I think YouTube is the best platform to grow and scale a personal brand and here's why. One, you can rank and search for years unlike just hours with things like TikTok or Instagram. Two, you're able to be seen as an expert in your niche much faster on YouTube because people go on YouTube to learn things and get answers to questions. And three, less people are willing to put the time and effort it takes to make videos. So if you are, you're able to kind of reap the benefits of that. And again, YouTube's the second largest search engine in the world. So it's a great place to be able to be putting out content that actually can rank and stay for years to come. But regardless of what you pick, pick one platform, learn it, master it, and then stay consistent. In all things entrepreneurship, it's a marathon, not a sprint. I show up every single week on YouTube and now six days a week on Instagram. And I started out with, I just focused on YouTube, I learned the ins and outs, and then I started focusing some efforts on Instagram. But still even now, YouTube is my main focus and priority because I know it's got way more of that scale factor. I'm able to talk to my target audience so much better. Though I will say, if you don't follow me on Instagram, go follow me because my stories can get a little weird. Lots of dance moves, lots of Manny, my dog, okay. Let's move on. Now my last bonus tip that I talked about in the beginning of the video is how you can make an impact and income without having loads of followers if you have a strong personal brand. For example, I don't have a massive YouTube channel, but I have a strong referral business and I have a strong coaching program. Why? Because my audience trusts me. I cultivate the relationships. I know it doesn't matter that I have 100,000 subscribers. I have 2,600 amazing subscribers and I've got followers on Instagram that I love and they know me, right? I get to know them. I try to understand what are their main pain points. I pick that one person to talk to. I show up consistently. I offer value and I'm my authentic self, which breeds that trust that's so important with a personal brand. So you don't need hundreds of thousands of followers. If you do these things, you can create a brand that not only creates impact, but again, really is able to bring income for you. You don't have to be 100 steps ahead. You only have to be 10 steps ahead. People find that more relatable anyway. So remember, offer value. Nobody cares about you, especially at first. What can you give, not what can you get. Talk to one specific person. Understand your target audience very well and their pain points. Have one specific niche. You're able to become an expert so much faster. Be authentically you. Be weird. Let your uniqueness shine through and attract your ideal audience. And start on one platform and then stay really consistent with it. If I can do it, you can do it too. Start scared. Stay weird. Now be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell because next week I'm having my former branding coach, Raquel La Petrie, talk all about how you can better brand yourself as an online teacher. She's an expert. She's worked with four or 500 companies, so be sure to stay tuned for that. While you wait for next week's video, be sure to check out these other videos. You can grab my ultimate starting on YouTube cheat sheet and get on the waiting list for my one week to niche course if that interests you. And if this video is helpful for you, give it a like, shoot me a unicorn emoji down below, and I will see you next video.