So you want to build a personal brand. Congratulations,
and you want to use Instagram as your platform of choice smart choice.
Now is the best time to dive in and build that personal brand on Instagram.
Because speaking from experience,
I know how powerful a personal brand is for business.
And I know how powerful Instagram is for business.
It's an amazing tool to monetize your offers,
to monetize your brand. So let's dive in,
Welcome back to my channel.
I'm Elise Darma and in today's video for the first time ever,
I'm going to walk you through how exactly I built a personal brand from scratch.
Using Instagram as my platform,
this personal brand has taken me from five figures in revenue every year to six
figures to seven figures in revenue every year,
and stay tuned until the end where I'm going to share with you how to monetize
your personal brand as fast as possible. It's the recommended path.
I'm going to share it with you at the end. So for a little background,
when I first started in the online space, back in 2013 as a freelancer,
I didn't want a personal brand.
I didn't want to be the face of the brand in university.
I had studied radio and television arts, and I thought I wanted to be on camera.
But when I started doing internships,
I realized that I wasn't really a natural performer. I was shy.
I was kind of an introvert. And on top of that,
I enjoy jobs that put me behind the camera,
like being a producer and a screenwriter.
So when I broke out on my own and I started freelancing, I thought,
I don't want to be the face of the brand. I want to be behind the scenes.
So in 2014, I created an agency called canopy.
I designed the brand so that it had its own personality outside of myself.
And it did fine. My agency grew for the first couple of years,
mostly through word of mouth and mostly through referrals in university.
I was kind of surprised that I wasn't a natural for the camera,
but then when I thought back on it, when I looked at myself in high school,
I was a wallflower.
I was mostly an introvert who wasn't a natural attention seeker,
even though I did show up dressed as a carrot for Halloween,
I really didn't want attention.
I just wanted to be dorky with my friends fast forward to 2016.
When I realized that my agency actually wasn't making more money every year I
was flat-lined. So in order to bring in more sales,
I decided that I needed more clients and to get more clients,
I decided since I was in Instagram marketing,
that I would grow a personal brand on Instagram,
as proof as a portfolio piece to clients that I can grow their
Instagram is he 2016 was the first time that I decided to make Elise
Darma a brand. And it all started on Instagram. By the end of that summer,
I had 30,000 followers who were following me for my travel stories and my
travel images, but I had nothing to offer them. They weren't e-commerce clients.
They didn't want my agency services. So from 2016 onwards,
I have learned the ins and outs of monetizing a personal brand.
And that's what I'm going to share with you right now,
from that experience of having started with an agency brand and then really
seeing the Elise Darma brand.
What I learned was that my businesses revenue grew when I started to show up as
a personal brand,
2016 was the first year that my business hit six figures in revenue.
And then it just went up from there. And to be honest,
I started to invest more in the least Darma brand than my original brand,
because that's where the momentum was. Why that's the case.
I believe it comes down to these exact reasons. Number one,
to build a personal brand, you got to show your face.
Now I know it sounds obvious, but it wasn't obvious to me. When I first started,
I thought that I could grow a brand without being the face of my business.
I wanted to hide in the corners and not be seen, but I wanted a business.
But once my business stalled, I decided to try something new,
which was grow a personal brand, the Elise Darma brand.
And that's where my business finally cracked. The six figure mark. Since then,
I've only continued to show up even more as a personal brand.
I'm showing my face today more than ever before.
And the reason for this is because I believe that people do business with
people. People resonate with me and they want to do business with me.
The more they get to know me as a person seems obvious,
but we all need to be reminded that people do business with people.
So the more you can show up as a real person,
the more you can put your face out there.
I believe the more benefits your business is going to see from it.
The second key step to building a personal brand is to choose a niche and get
specific and then get even more specific.
You want to be specific at the start.
You can't try to appeal to everyone because then you're really going to appeal
to no one. And this is something I had to learn the hard way.
When I started out as a personal brand, I was many things.
I branded myself as an agency owner, a travelpreneur, what did that really mean?
No one really knew.
A freelancer and I dabbled as an Instagram influencer as well.
But when I would go to business conferences, starting in 2017 and 2018,
my business friends would introduce me to their friends as Elise,
the Instagram queen.
Now I did not call myself that I never gave myself the name, Instagram queen.
It's not what I would do, but that's how my friends remembered me.
They didn't remember me for the digital nomadism by agency, my services.
No, they knew me as the Instagram queen.
And so when that light bulb went off, I realized, oh,
I need to stop trying to push all these other messages and all these other
angles. I need to go all in on being an Instagram marketer.
So 2018 is when I decided to go all in as an Instagram queen. And since then,
my business has grown even more. Now,
when you're starting out and you're worried about being too specific with your
niche, remember this, people will remember you for one thing.
So make it a memorable thing. Even when you look at other big names out there,
other big brands that you follow,
they might now be known for a broad thing or a general thing,
or maybe many things think about Oprah or Lewis Howes, for example.
But when they started, they were not big broad, general brands.
They were specific Lewis Howes started off as a LinkedIn marketer. Today,
he runs the School of Greatness.
Amy Porterfield started off as a Facebook marketer. Today,
she is known as a course and webinar queen.
That's the title I gave her just then. So today she has a broad niche today.
She is known for multiple things, but when she got started,
that was not the case. And same with me. When I got started,
I was trying to be known for multiple things and it just wasn't working out for
me. Once I honed in on one specific niche, that's where my audience grew.
And now today I have the ability to be a little bit more broad and a little bit
more general only because my audience is big enough.
The third key to building a successful personal brand is to decide what
value you're going to bring to your audience. Now,
value is a funny term and long ago,
I decided to define the word value in three different ways.
There's three ways you can give value to your audience.
One way is information just like this.
I give a ton of free value away on my YouTube channel by giving away free
information and how to steps. The second way is inspiration.
So remember when I dabbled as an Instagram influencer a little bit there,
that was me trying to inspire people.
And that's definitely a way that you can add value through your brand.
The third way is entertainment. Yes. If you can make someone smile or giggle,
that is value that you've just added to their day,
Instagram itself has even confirmed that it's prioritizing funny and
entertaining content. What if I'm not funny? What if I'm not a joker? I get it.
The pressure to be on or funny can be paralyzing. There was one time.
I was an intern at Canada's top morning radio show called chum FM.
And one morning the host turned to me, asked me a question off the cuff.
And all of a sudden I could just picture all of Canada's ears,
listening to me in that moment.
And I saw their eyes on me and my heart started pounding in his chest.
Literally jumping up to my throat. My throat felt so tight.
I could barely squeak out words. I almost choked on air.
I think I squeaked out some words, but to be honest, it's all a blur.
I barely remember it. I went home that day,
kind of with my tail between my legs.
I felt a little down because here I was studying to be an on-air personality.
And I couldn't even think on my feet, I was choking on air. So what did I do?
I signed up for improv classes at second city.
I never wanted to freeze up again.
So I signed up for improv so that I could learn how to react better on the fly.
And to be honest, I did a year of improv classes after that.
And it's a skill that I use in my business to this day, to this day.
If you can relate to this at all,
and you just want to feel a little bit more prepared when it comes to being on
I'd highly recommend to sign up for an improv class.
It's so much fun and there's literally no pressure to be funny.
The fourth key to building a personal brand is to do it without the overwhelm.
When most businesses start out building their personal brand,
they're often a solo preneur, and they also are thinking,
how do I get myself out there? There's so many channels, which ones do I choose?
Do I do them all? Do I just do Instagram? And here's what I recommend.
Instagram is an amazing relationship tool. So good,
but it's not a search tool.
People are not going to go to Google and find your Instagram posts, not likely.
So what I recommend is to choose one relationship building tool like Instagram.
It's why you're here on this video. You've already chosen that.
And then the second platform I want you to choose is a search based engine.
So that could be Google.
So if you commit to writing blogs for your personal brand,
you're going to show up in Google search,
or you can do exactly what I'm doing here, which is YouTube videos. Again,
YouTube is an amazing search engine.
So if you decide to commit to written content or video content choose one
way, and that's going to generate free traffic over to your personal brand.
Ideally bring people over to your Instagram where you can cultivate those
relationships.
The cool thing with long form content like blogs or videos is you can make one
long form piece of content and then break it out into smaller pieces of content.
So this video, for example, will be on my YouTube channel,
but it will also go on my IGTV and we can even pull clips for my reels or my
Facebook page, whichever channels or content types you choose for your brand.
I always recommend to batch create. So for more on batch creation,
if you're not familiar with this topic, check out this video right here. Lastly,
when it comes to cutting out the overwhelm,
when you're building your personal brand, I also recommend to use templates.
Yes, there are products out there where the work has already been done for you.
The brainstorming has been done. The caption writing has been done. In fact,
I'm the creator of a lot of these products.
So if you're interested in 800 story ideas that you can use to grow your brand,
you'll want to check out Story Vault.
If you're interested in 300 caption templates,
captions that you can adapt to your voice to your brand,
you'll want to check out Caption Vault.
And if you're interested in Instagram reels,
so creating ten second videos for those viral views,
you'll want to check out Videos Vault.
All of these Vaults are designed to save you a ton of time.
And this is a key step in cutting out the overwhelm as you're building your
personal brand. If that sounds interesting, I want to give you a gift.
I want to give you 12 free caption templates so that you can see what caption
templates are. Head to elisedarma.co/captions
and grab yours today.
The fifth key to building a personal brand and maybe the most important is
knowing how and when you will monetize AKA make money,
because that's why you're doing this right.
You're building a personal brand to bring revenue back to you and your business.
So there's a couple of ways you can make money.
You can offer services as a coach. You can offer freelancing services,
which is what I did, or you can create products.
You can also get paid as an influencer.
So brands will pay you to share their brand or their product with your
audience. But of course you need an audience built up to do that.
So while there are many ways to monetize your personal brand,
even more than what I just mentioned here,
here's the fastest path I recommend for you to monetize.
Start out by offering services, whether that's coaching or freelancing.
That's exactly what I did.
Services are powerful because you only need a handful,
maybe even less a handful of clients to give you a full-time income after
you've sold your services.
And you've seen success from that you've gained experience.
Then I think it's a great time to look at products,
whether digital like courses or physical products,
because now you have a bit of an audience built up. You have your clients.
You've already been on Instagram for a couple months, maybe a year.
And so products are usually lower priced.
They're usually less than a hundred dollars.
Now you have more people who perhaps can't afford your services,
or perhaps they've already worked with you.
Now you can give them something fresh and something new. Now,
digital products can be more than a hundred dollars, of course,
but oftentimes your services will be your top tier package because they're
getting you, they're getting your time.
And then digital products are a great second option for those who maybe can't
afford you, they can't afford your one-on-one time,
but they can go through your course and learn from you that way. Hint.
This is all called scaling. By adding in products to your business,
that don't require more of your one-on-one time.
Meaning you can add in a hundred customers overnight, your course,
and your business. Won't break scaling.
After you've added in products to your business only then would I recommend you
go the influencer route?
Because by now you have a larger audience and brands are taking notice of you
and they'd love to have you give them a shout out or they'd love to have you
vouch for them.
I used to work as a travel influencer where I would get free trips or free
co-working stays.
And then when I stopped doing the whole travel thing with my brand,
I still worked as an influencer with software brands or apps.
So it's not a huge component of my business today,
but because I've built my personal brand over the last five years,
it's a large audience. I have that as an option.
It's an opportunity if I meet the right brand, of course,
now you have the keys to starting an amazing personal brand.
This is the information I wish I had back in 2016, but it's okay.
I learned on the go.
And now for all you need to do is take the next step to ease and revenue.
I'll see you in the next video.
If you enjoyed today's video check out even more videos I have on Instagram for
business.
And if you haven't yet be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any future
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