How to build a $1,000,000 personal brand

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It does not matter if you’re an entrepreneur, a doctor, or a barista… you should have a personal brand.

Why?

Imagine this:

You’re a badass barista slinging hot cups of joe at the corner coffee shop.

Now, let’s say you come in on Monday for your morning shift to discover a note on the doors of the coffee shop that say:

“We’re closing forever and always. Sorry.”

A harsh way to learn you’re out of a job, no doubt, but these things happen.

So you dust off your resume and hit the town, applying at every coffeeshop you can find. You get called back for a couple interviews, but in each one of them you’re sitting there having to awkwardly toot your own horn about how damn good you are at making a half-Caf latte.

But the thing is, you’re good at making the drinks, not talking about making the drinks, and so you don’t get any callbacks.

Bummer.

Now, imagine an alternative scenario…

Let’s say last year you decided to start a YouTube channel dedicated to the wily-world of coffee beans. As it turns out, there’s actually quite a lot of wacky characters out there who are obsessed with getting the perfect pour and you (because of your badass expertise) have positioned yourself in their eyes as the Coffee Sherpa carrying them to Caffeinated Nirvana.

Now, when you go in for your interviews, you casually mention, “I’m so obsessed with coffee that I started a YT channel called The Daily Grind”.

The person across from you goes wide-eyed with disbelief because OF COURSE they’re subscribed to your channel. You rock!

Boom. They practically give you the keys to the coffee shop.

Okay, maybe it won’t be quite that dramatic.

But here’s an alternative scenario:

Instead of applying for jobs at all, you just let your coffee-loving community know that you’re in the market and BAM, the jobs start finding YOU.

Now this is an exaggerated example… but it’s not THAT exaggerated.

Which is why if you want to future-proof yourself and maximize the leverage you have in the world, you should be actively building a personal brand RIGHT NOW.

Which raises the question:

How do you build a personal brand?

Or…

Even cooler…

How do you build a $1,000,000 personal brand?

Why a million dollars? I dunno… it’s catchy.

So here’s how to do it:

How To Build A $1,000,000 Personal Brand

(or whatever size you want)

First, we must learn The 5 Rules of Personal Branding (which I have just made up at this very moment off the top of my head.

The 5 Rules of Personal Branding

1. Show Up With Intention

Most people go off the rails right out of the gate when it comes to building their personal brand. They just start putting out content all willy-nilly, which simply won’t work.

The first thing you have to figure out is which YOU are you going to share with the world?

Here’s the truth… you and I… we’re both a little crazy. Inside of us we are home to a multitude of conflicting personalities.

6am-getting-out-of-the-cold-shower-Anthony is an entirely different person from the 9pm-curling-up-on-the-couch-to-watch-The-Office-Anthony.

The trick is to figure out which version of YOU you’re going to share with the world.

Now, don’t get it twisted… I am not suggesting you create a fake persona. Perhaps the most important quality you must embody in building your personal brand is that of authenticity.

So don’t even think about trying to be something you’re not.

With that said, your personal brand is a manifestation of a particular side of you.

Or rather, an amplified version of you.

Listen, I’m not an extrovert. I hate going to parties.

But, you can bet your buns that if I DO go to a party, I’m going to show up as my most extroverted and outgoing self. I’m going to crank that side of my personality up to its max and I’m gonna go have a good time.

And then I’m going to curl up in a ball with my cat, Sparta, for the next week as I recover.

All that’s to say, figure out which YOU your personal brand is gonna be known for and then always show up as that version of yourself.

2. Lead With Value

Building a brand is a long-term game built on a foundation of Trust.

What’s that Trust made out of?

Well, it’s made out of a bunch of things, but the two worth paying attention to in particular are:

Value + Time.

The more Value you deliver, and the longer you do so, the stronger the Trust (aka the foundation) in your Brand becomes.

Here are the two most common mistakes personal brand builders make (myself included):

1. Too Transactional

This occurs when you get TOO eager to monetize your audience. Suddenly, everything you do and everything you create has an ulterior motive of putting money in your pocket.

Nothing spoils Trust or Goodwill faster than doing something simply for the sake of collecting an IOU (which you then immediately try to cash in).

2. Not Delivering ACTUAL Value

This occurs when you create a product or content that YOU think is really cool, but your audience could care less.

The result?

You’re just giving gifts that’re gonna end up in the trash like the oil painting I made of Nelson Mandela riding a rocket that I gave to my dad for Christmas.

The key to building a great personal brand then is to OBSESS over delivering content that’ll solve problems for your audience that your audience ACTUALLY wants to solve.

This… by the way… is incredibly difficult.

3. Be Consistent

Here’s the harsh reality of building a personal brand:

Nobody’s gonna care for a really long time.

See, the thing is it can take decades to build a good reputation, but only a few seconds to tarnish it.

So in this game of personal branding, you’ve always gotta be on-guard not to tarnish your reputation while also remaining vigilant and showing up every single day to do the work.

Now, I wish there was some super secret hack I could teach you that would guarantee your success, but there just…

Oh wait…

What’s this…?

I think I just found something…

Ah, sweet! Check this out.

It’s a super-secret-hack that’ll guarantee your success:

Alright, well.. I guess… just get started and don’t stop.

Got nothing else to tell ya on that one.

4. Express, Don’t Impress

A couple years ago I went to my buddy Rene’s event in San Diego to learn how to be a better public speaker.

At least, that’s what I thought I was there to learn.

Instead, I got kicked in the emotional-nuts and told the reason I was struggling to connect with my audience is because I was being “selectively vulnerable”.

Simply put, I was only sharing stories that showed how badass and awesome I am.

As Rene pointed out, “We admire James Bond, but we don’t connect with him.”

The key to building an amazing personal brand is to realize your audience is the hero, not YOU.

So with that in mind, everything you do, from the stories you share to how you share them, should be done with the goal of EXPRESSING, not IMPRESSING.

It is almost impossible to go wrong if you make connecting with your audience your primary goal.

5. Engage, Engage, Engage

Imagine for a moment that your neighbors invite you over for dinner. When you arrive it’s clear they’ve put a lot of effort into this evening.

The table is set impeccably with the nice china. Music is playing softly in the background. Candles light the room with a warm ambient glow and a woody aroma fills the air from a small fire burning in the fireplace.

You sit at the table as your hosts emerge from the kitchen with an exquisite meal that looks as though it’s taken hours to prepare.

They place it before you and then…

They leave the room.

And they don’t come back for the rest of the evening.

You awkwardly finish the meal and then show yourself to the door, wondering what on earth just happened.

Fast-forward one week and you get a call from your weirdo neighbor who invites you back over for dinner…

Ya gonna go?

Probably not.

Okay, so what does this weird story have to do with building a personal brand.

Everything.

See, this is how most people treat their social media accounts.

They spend hours creating awesome content that they push out into the world, but then when their audience engages and leaves comments, the creator is nowhere to be found.

They’ve forgotten the first (and most important) word in the phrase Social Media.

If you truly want to build a meaningful personal brand, you must ENGAGE with your people.
Don’t just slave over the meal and then disappear after it’s been served.

Stick around and engage with the conversations because THIS Is how you build a thriving community of friends (and not just strangers on the internet).

And trust me when I say that your audience will 100% notice.

​

The Tactics of Building a Personal Brand

Alright, now that you know the rules of building a personal brand, let’s talk tactics.

Specifically, we’re going to create a Flywheel, and to do that we need a Hub and a bunch of Spokes.

The Spokes are the various social media platforms upon which we’ll create and distribute content.

The goal of these Spokes is to overcome obscurity, establish authority, and drive traffic back to our Hub.

Now, we’re actually gonna have two Hubs (your website and your email list), so this is where the wheel analogy kind of breaks down, but stick with me.

Because the end goal is to ultimately get people back to your Hub, let’s start there.

​

The Hub

Think of your Hub as Homebase. This is your special corner of the internet to do as you please.

The most important aspect of your Hub is the fact that YOU control it.

Now that might not seem like a big deal, but imagine for a minute that you’ve poured hundreds of hours into building an Instagram following and then, one day out of the blue, Instagram decides you did something to violate their Terms and Services and they shut down your account.

What’re you left with?

Absolutely nothing.

That audience you worked so hard to build… gone. You officially have NO way to reach them.

This is obviously no bueno.

So our goal in everything we do in pursuit of building our personal brand is to move our audience from out on the periphery of our flywheel towards the Hub.

There are two aspects of the Hub you need to build. Your:

1. Website
2. Email List

Your website is the digital equivalent of your brick-and-mortar shop on Main Street. It’s your headquarters or your clubhouse.

As such, it needs to be AWESOME!

Imagine for a moment you’re scrolling Instagram and you get hit with an ad for a local Bubble Tea Shop just a few blocks away.

You think, “Awesome, I’m always looking to get my bubble on.”

So on your lunch break you pop over there, but as you try to open the front door, the janky thing kind sticks on the hinge a bit and you’re forced to wrestle it open.

Once you’ve overcome that obstacle, you step inside and you’re hit with a funky odor. You look around, kind of grossed out, and notice all the lightbulbs are either burnt out or flickering.

Despite all this, you’re a bubble-seeking missile, so you head to the counter where you twiddle your thumbs for 5 minutes before somebody finally shows up to take your order (despite the fact you’re the only one in that horror show of a shop).

Now ask yourself, how likely is it you’re ever gonna return to that establishment?

Probably pretty low.

This might seem like an extreme example, but this is the experience you can more often than not expect to have when visiting somebody’s personal website.

It’s slow and janky… The buttons don’t work and the design is an eyesore.

All-in-all, not a great experience.

So it’s worth spending the extra time making sure your website is as awesome as possible, because if it’s not, it’s VERY unlikely you’re going to be able to get somebody to join your email list, which is one of your personal brand’s most valuable assets.

Why is your email list so valuable?

For two reasons:

1. You control it.
2. It’s a direct-line to engaging with your audience.

Think back on that Instagram shutting you down example from before.

If you’d been diligent in building your email list, then yeah, it would suck to be shut down, but you would still have a way of getting in touch with your audience to say,

“Hey crew, I’ve moved to a new platform. Come check me out on this sweet new site called MySpace.”

Or whatever…

Here’s another reason your email list is so valuable: Visibility.

There’s nothing I find more annoying on social media these days than when I subscribe or follow a creator and then the algorithm decides to NEVER show that person’s content to me in the feed.

If you’re a creator, you know what I’m talking about.

Depending on the platform, sometimes less than 10% of your audience is actually going to be shown your content on a day-by-day basis.

The value of an email list is that, with the exception of your emails landing in SPAM, there’s a high probability everybody in your audience is at least going to SEE that you sent them an email.

Now, only about 50% of your email list is actually gonna open your email on any given day, but that’s still WAY better than the alternative.

With all that said, the first step in building your $1,000,000 Personal Brand is to create an amazing website full of awesome content and start building your email list.

Once you’ve laid the foundation for your brand, it’s time to start building an audience, which leads us to the Spokes.

The Spokes

Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because the Spokes revolve around the Hub that they are any less important.

The truth is, without your Spokes, the flywheel ain’t gonna turn.

Why?

Because the Spokes are how your audience is actually going to find you.

Thankfully you live in the year of 2023, which means there has never been, in the history of mankind, a better time for reaching millions of people.

Seriously, the fact that you’re reading this right now either on your phone or computer suggests you have access to EVERYTHING you need to reach a million people.

How cool is that?

Pretty cool, if you ask me, but most people are either too intimidated to take advantage of this opportunity OR they’re going about it all wrong.

I’m gonna simplify the process to take some of the overwhelm out of the equation and give you a streamlined way of approaching your social media presence.

First, it starts by understanding the two types of content:

Evergreen Content

This is the type of timeless content that never goes out of style and, more importantly, is searchable and can ALWAYS be found.

Examples include Podcasts, YouTube Videos, and Blog articles.

The beauty of this content is that you could launch it today and somebody might stumble upon it a year from now.

I love Evergreen content because I never feel like I’m wasting my time with it.

Sure, that YouTube video might not go instantly viral, but there’s nothing stopping it from catching fire a year or two from now.

Same with podcasts… You could go back and listen to any one of the thousands of podcasts Joe Rogan has released over the past decade.
That’s incredible!

But here’s the problem with Evergreen content…

First, because it’s going to be around forever, it’s gotta be good.

Second, making something good requires skill, time, and resources.

This creates a bit of a conundrum in the beginning when you first start building your personal brand and you lack all three of these things.

The result?

Sub-Par Evergreen Content.

Not ideal.

This is why I recommend beginning with Temporary Content to develop your voice and systems… THEN once you start getting traction with your Temporary Content, start building out your Evergreen Library.

But wait… what’s Temporary Content?

Great question (that I totally soft-balled to myself). Let’s unpack that next:

Temporary Content

This is the default content you see on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Content barely survives a day or two after posting before it more or less disappears forever in the news feed.

Now, that’s not to say somebody couldn’t scroll through your profile to find your old content, but let’s be realistic…

Nobody is scrolling through your profile to find your old content.

What that means is you have to constantly feed these beasts with new content otherwise you slip-slide into obscurity.

This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

In the beginning, before you’ve really nailed your messaging or dialed in your quality, this is a good thing… because you don’t want anybody to see your crappy stuff.

As you improve, you’ll want to start transitioning to more Evergreen Content, but the truth is, you’ll probably always have to keep creating Temporary Content to stay relevant and keep the flywheel going.

Now, if that sounds like a lot of work, that’s because…it is.

Which is why I recommend just picking two platforms to begin with.

One for creating Temporary Content and one for Evergreen Content.

For instance, that could mean doing a weekly podcast coupled with daily short-form videos for Instagram.

Then again, it could be a weekly blog paired with daily Tweets.

You’ll have to figure out which platforms work best for your personality and skills, but remember the famous words of Marcus Aurelius:

Don’t make the mistake of taking on too much too soon. This is a guaranteed way to burn yourself out and remember, if there’s one key to successfully building a $1,000,000 Personal Brand, it’s this:

Consistency beats Intensity.

You’re playing the long game, so make sure whatever you take on is sustainable.

Monetization

Okay, so now you’ve built an audience, but there’s a big problem staring us right in the face…

Namely, as JK Molina would say:

Likes don’t equal Cash

A lot of creators with huge followings learn this lesson the hard-way. If you want to successfully build a $1,000,000 Personal Brand you have to figure out how to monetize it.

Now, there’s no shortage of ways to accomplish this. Here are a few of the most popular:

• Courses
• Coaching
• Products
• Services
• Affiliate Marketing
• Google Adsense
• Brand Sponsorships
• And so many, many more…

To give all these monetization strategies the time and explanation they deserve would probably require another whole article.

If that’s something you’d be interested in reading about, I’ll tell ya what, just reply to this email and say something pithy like Show Me The Money and if we get enough interest, I’ll do a Part Two deep dive into this topic.

Until next week, my friends,

Stay Hyperfocused,​
​AV

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