Sunny Lenarduzzi: How do you build a powerful and profitable personal brand from scratch?
Well, I have built my personal brand from zero, and I have a few tricks up my sleeve
to help you do the same.
Trick number one is set yourself up for search.
So, whether you're using Instagram or YouTube, and those are the main platforms I'm going
to focus on because they are the most powerful platforms, in my opinion, when it comes to
building a personal brand and what I've used the most.
On Instagram, you want to make sure that you're searchable.
So, what does that mean?
Let me show you.
This is definitely the easiest way to do this.
So, you can see on my Instagram bio that in my title it says marketing expert, and you
would be shocked at the amount of people who find me every single day and follow my account
because they're looking for this term.
Another example is my friend, Rachel Bell, and she has business mentor in her header
right here.
So, this is searchable, and you want to make sure that whatever it is that you do or whoever
you're trying to attract, they know exactly what they're looking for, and when they look
for it, they're going to find you.
And you can see in Rachel's bio as well.
It's super clear what she does, and so, another example of this is if I'm looking for, let's
say, a fitness expert, when I type in fitness expert, and I don't even know exactly who
I'm searching for, I'm going to click on the top couple of examples here, and all of these
people have fitness nutrition expert, fitness expert, fitness shred expert in their bios.
And that shows me ... and you can see how many followers this guy has.
That shows me that this person is obviously who I'm looking for.
So, this is an easy way to get an advantage on getting found by the right people.
Very similarly on YouTube, you want to include a lot of the same elements that you would
in your Instagram bio on your YouTube channel header, and in the Boss YouTube channel checklist,
which we'll link below, it'll show you exactly how to set up your channel headers to stand
out and to build your personal brand.
So, this is one of our 30 Accelerator clients, one of our new clients, and you know exactly
what you're getting when you go to her channel.
Heal Your Face with Food, you know that she's going to be talking about diet to get rid
of acne or have clear skin, and so, you can see here that her opt-in is linked right here,
and that's going to help people get on her list, which builds her brand faster, and Jill
has done a great job of putting her press here as well.
So, even if don't have this, as long as people know exactly why they should be on your channel
and what you're going to talk about, you're going to build a really targeted, powerful
audience and build your personal brand a lot faster.
So, whether it's Instagram or YouTube, tell people what you do, why you're an expert,
what you can help them with, and why they should follow you or subscribe.
Trick number two is polarize.
This is going to be super uncomfortable, but it's really important when you're building
your brand, and it's what a lot of major companies, corporations do.
Prime example is in politics.
It's either red or blue.
Not the greatest thing in the world, wish it was more unified, and I don't even live
in the states.
So, I have no opinion on this.
Please don't yell at me, but you will notice that if you just use it as a case study, there
are certain things that red states will do that are very different and opposite than
blue states, and those belief systems are very different, and that's how it works when
it comes to branding, too.
You have to make sure that you have a belief system set up, that you have words that you
use, that you have colors that you use that are very opposite and polarizing from what
other people are doing or other brands or companies or influences are doing.
So, that's how you stand out from the crowd.
Another good example is if you look at fast food chains, looking at Burger King versus
McDonald's.
You have very different brands in the same market.
Or you could look at car companies.
Again, there's so many different kinds of cars out there.
How do they allow themselves to stand out because they're all doing the same functionality.
They're all serving the same purpose, getting you from A to B, but why do you go with a
Chevy versus a Pontiac?
I don't know.
Random example, I'm not a car person either.
But polarizing is really, really important.
Trick number three is hashtags and keywords.
So, very similar to what I talked about in step one.
This makes you searchable and discoverable.
So, you're not just publishing a video or posting a piece of content and having that
immediate success but no long-term results.
So, making sure that you're using hashtags, and you're using keywords.
Hashtags on Instagram, keywords on YouTube, and now, actually, you can use hashtags on
YouTube as well to categorize your content and get found.
So, make sure you're using them so that you show up in front of the people who are looking
for the topics that you're talking about.
I went into detail on this and how I do my hashtag research in this video about how I
post on Instagram.
So, make sure you check that out.
We'll put it in the description below, so you can see more so of what I do with my strategy
there.
I'm really curious, before we dive into the next step, what are the keywords that you
know your audience is looking for?
We all have them.
It doesn't even mean that you have to be super, super niche down, but you know where you want
your brand to be.
You know where you want your brand to be positioned.
So, what are people searching for?
Comment below with what those keywords are, and let's see if we can support each other
in finding the right audiences.
Trick number four is going to be unpopular for sure, but it is the truth.
You may notice that if you follow me on Instagram that I have started posting a lot more real
photos, a lot more authentic photos.
There was a long period of time where Instagram became this very magazine-esque, model-esque
platform, and everyone looked picture perfect.
I'm over it.
Instagram is over.
The algorithm's over it.
What people are craving right now is authenticity.
So, if you look at examples of major celebrities, i.e. look at Jennifer Lopez on YouTube as
well as on Instagram.
She's posting behind-the-scenes.
She's posting just selfies.
She's posting things that are very authentic and very real, and she's very much so capable
of only posting photo shoot shots, but she is doing that because it makes her relatable.
People want to relate with you, and that's how you build a really powerful personal brand.
The only way to build a personal brand that people are actually going to be invested in
is if they feel like they know you, they can relate to you, and you build that know, like,
and trust factor, which is the most important thing when you're building and kind of brand
at all.
Step number five, which is probably the easiest thing you can do when building a personal
brand is identify the kinds of colors and fonts that you want to work with and stick
with them because you get known for them.
As you guys may notice, I use a lot of yellow in my branding because my name's Sunny.
So, for me, it's super obvious, but for you guys, it might be a little bit different,
and what I always recommend is just gravitate towards the colors that you normally would
gravitate towards.
The thing about your personal brand is you already have a personal brand.
Whether you have one follower or zero followers or 100 million followers, you are a personal
brand.
So, if I went around, and I asked your friends, "What do you think of so and so," what would
they say about you?
Whatever they say about you is what your personal brand represents.
That's your values and your vision and your mission aligned with who you are as a person.
So, all you need to do is just continue to capitalize on that.
So, the things that you naturally gravitate towards, i.e. colors, you want to incorporate
those into your personal brand because then it makes it authentic to who you really are.
Trick number six is competitive research.
So, this is really scoping out the people who have a very similar audience to you and
figuring out what they're doing right and what kind of content is getting the most engagement
that they're posting and taking that and using it for your own content and using it in your
own unique way, providing your own unique experience and intel and thoughts and things
that you want to share with your community.
But you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
I think that's the really important thing to understand.
You're not starting from zero, even if you do have zero followers right now.
There are people out there who have the audience that you're trying to attract.
So, study the crap out of them, learn what they're doing right, learn what's resonating
with their audience, and figure out how you can take that and do it yourself but in your
own unique, so you're not actually copying them, and that works really well with trick
number two, which is polarizing.
So, you can create the same kind of content on the same kinds of topics because you know
your audience's interest in it, but you do it in a way that is totally different, completely
polarize, and helps you stand out from the rest of the people doing it.
Trick number seven is HARO.
I mentioned this in a video a long time ago, but it's Help a Reporter Out, and it's an
amazing site for when you're first starting to build your brand because, basically, what
you do is you go on there, and you look up the content category or the niche or the topic
that you're trying to build your brand in, and there are constantly going to be updates
from reporters looking for people to feature in their articles, and it can be on sites
from all around the world, big sites, small sites, whatever it might be.
So, use Help a Reporter Out to start getting press mentions and start being featured as
an expert and a thought leader so you can elevate your personal brand a lot faster.
Trick number eight is quotables.
What are some of the things that you say on social media, whatever platform it might be,
that really get a lot of engagement?
So, something that I will do is I'll post something on Twitter as kind of a testing
ground and see what kind of engagement I get, and if it gets a ton, then what I'll do is
I'll turn it into a graphic on Instagram because I know it's already proven to succeed.
So, you don't have to, again, reinvent the wheel, and you don't have to be making new
content for every platform.
You can strictly find out what works somewhere and repurpose it somewhere else in the format
for that platform.
So, that helps you create thought leadership because you're creating content that's unique
to you, came from your brain, use it as a quotable, graphic on Instagram, text on Twitter,
post it on Facebook.
You can even use it in a video, or if you say something in a video that gets a lot of
pick-up, you can turn that into text or graphic as well.
And that leads me into trick number nine, which is my final point that you want to build
across platforms, but you don't want to be active on all platforms at all times because,
realistically, you won't be able to do anything else.
So, try and pick one hub platform and then just repurpose content from there, and another
point that I wanted to add onto this is that you really want to make sure that you're doing
the five minute rule.
So, this is something that I recommend you do on the platform that you're focusing on.
So, if it's YouTube, I want you to go to similar channels as yours every single day for five
minutes a day, and I want you to engage in the comment section, answer questions, respond
to people, and see if you can get them to really engage back with you, and then, go
and follow your profiles.
That's an amazing way to start building your community from the ground up.
It's something that I did for 20 minutes a day, every single day, for the first year
that I was building on YouTube.
So, if you're on Instagram, you can do the same thing.
I've got a lot of little tricks there and other videos on that topic, but the five minute
rule strictly means spending five minutes a day cultivating a community because if you're
waiting for people to come to you and to find you, you're going to be waiting forever.
You have to go out there and build your community and build momentum on your own, especially
in the beginning, and then, your 1000 true fans, the people who were totally bought into
you from the beginning, will be the people who help you build that audience faster because
they're going to be your biggest advocates.
I wanted to show you a recent post inside of our YouTube for Bosses group.
One of our members posted this and said, "Okay, I've only done this twice, but it really does
work.
Last time, my comment got 95 likes and pushed me to the very top comment under the video,
and that's caught a couple million subscribers, and it helped me to gain new subscribers,"
right?
So, this works, and she said, "This girl just subscribed to my channel, and it took me a
minute to share that with her."
So, it really does work, and if you do this for five minutes a day, you'll really start
to see momentum in building your personal brand.
YouTube is truly, in my opinion, the most powerful platform to build your personal brand.
I do love Instagram as well, and I think they work super well together, but YouTube works
as a machine for you at all times, and it's just building your audience on autopilot.
So, if you want to learn more about that, we have a free training below this video.
Make sure you go check it out, and I'll teach you how I 100X my subscribers and doubled
my revenue in my first year of doing YouTube.
Now, I also can't forget to mention our amazing comment of the week.
Thank you guys so much for being here and for taking the time to comment.
It seriously means the world to me, and I just love reading everything that you guys
have to say and all the feedback, and it truly helps me create the right content for you.
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Hit that like button.
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was from this video and what you're going to do to start building your personal brand
today.
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Thank you for watching.
I hope this was valuable for you, and I will see you in the next video.