Fame is obligatory – Hank Norman
That quote is the most important thing on Twitter right now. Fame is obligatory. There is no other game in town.
Why? Because fame means that you’re known. People have a perception of you, a sense of what you’re like. Maybe they feel like you’re a friend, even if they’ve never met you. And increasingly, in our interconnected world of Facebook, Insta, Twitter etc., we’ve come to value certain things:
- People we’re ‘friends’ with online, even if we haven’t met
- Accessibility
- Honesty
- Vulnerability
- Storytelling
- Entertainment
- Drama (anger, lust, fear, joy, laughter etc)
If you can supply those things to people through content you create online then some of them will hate you – because they would have hated you anyway – but a hell of a lot more will love you. Seriously. They’ll love you so much that they’ll make you a regular part of their lives. They’ll read all your Tweets, they’ll watch your Facebook Lives, they’ll listen to your podcasts.
And – and this is the crucial bit – they’ll buy your products.
In fact, there approximately 1,000,000X more likely to buy whatever products you have to sell if they love you than if they don’t.
(Figures are approximate, but you follow my thinking).
OK. but what does this have to do with you and why am I talking about it now?
Freedom
My mantra for a long time has been ‘live the life you want, not the life you think you should’. And if you want personal freedom – that is, the freedom to date who you want, to be your own boss and to live anywhere on the planet – then building a personal brand online is 100% the right way to go about it.
In fact, it’s the only sustainable way.
Why? Because when you build a personal brand you are – by definition – making yourself the focal point, rather than your subject matter. And that is crucial, because it means that once you’ve built up an audience (or tribe) then you can broaden out what you talk about to include new subject areas as your tastes and interests grow and change.
In fact, your audience will even help you with this, since they will reach out and tell you what they like, what they don’t like and what they wish you would cover more.
It’s a virtuous cycle where the brand of ‘you’ is formed and grown in collaboration with your audience.
For example, say you are a photography fan. You decide you want to build a personal brand, and so you start a YouTube channel. You also put up a blog and publish articles. You talk about photography, but it’s very much your personal take on photography. you insert bits of your narrative. You tell you story.
After a time your work gets known and people start to follow you.
One day a fan contacts you and asks how you set up your blog and YouTube channel. Several more people start asking similar questions and so you decide to write an ebook on how to create a successful photography blog.
Now all of a sudden you have two subject areas – photography and blogging.
It might also be that you love to play guitar. Now, it would be a bit of a stretch to shoehorn guitar-playing into a normal photography site. But if you have always presented your site and channel as being primarily about you and what you’re interested in, then you can start to sneak in little mentions of guitar playing.
If these prove popular then you can increase their frequency until in the end you’ve transitioned and now you’re talking about guitar playing more than photography.
That’s a fairly radical example, but you see my thinking? Once you have a platform and you have followers then you can lead them wherever you want to go (within reason).
Money, Fame and Success
You also asked why now. (Or I asked it on your behalf, anyway).
OK, I’ll tell you.
You need to start building your personal brand online now because that’s the way the world is going, and if you don’t you’ll be left behind.
That’s putting it bluntly and I’m not trying to scaremonger here. But the fact is that AI is coming and it’s eating up the job market like a hungry kid with a packet of Haribos.
In not too long at all many of the jobs we take for granted will be gone – including in what we previously regarded as highly-skilled areas like law and medicine.
Face it. The old ways are dying out. And the notion of getting a job and staying with the same company for life, or even in the same industry, is dying too.
There is no ‘normal’ anymore.
Build Your Tribe
If you build a personal brand online and start to grow an audience then you are future-proofing your career. You don’t need the whole internet to love you. You only need a small, loyal tribe to whom you can sell products to keep you in a very good living for the rest of your life.
What will I sell them? you might ask. Books, coaching, mentorship, courses, private memberships site access – the possibilities are endless. You will sell them more of you. You will give them a huge amount for free – you will deliver preposterous value without asking anything in return – and then once you’ve hooked them in you’ll offer them more content, for a small, fair price.
This is exactly how I make my income now. I use this my email list, this website, my Twitter feed, my podcast, Youtube, Facebook and Instagram to give out free content to my audience. And then I sell my books on Amazon and Skype coaching. Every time I put out a piece of content, like this article, there’s a link through which anyone interested can buy something from me.
I don’t do the hard sell. OK, during launch I’ll talk up my latest book. But I’m not forcing anyone to buy it, and I don’t use cheesy marketing-speak, or landing pages or whatever. It’s not my style.
And I don’t need to. Just by putting out a ton of free content and publishing my books I started making enough money to give up my corporate job last November to do this full time. And as a bonus I can work from anywhere in the world. All I need is my laptop, iPhone and WIFI.
The great news for you is that you can do exactly the same thing too. The tools are there. The help is here, on the content I’ll be putting out this site and in my daily emails. All you need to do is start creating and publishing content online, and keep doing it consistently over time.
I can and will help. I want everyone who reads this site to be free to live the life they want, not the life they think they should. And so I’ll be sharing everything I know and everything I learn along the way to help you build your personal brand, escape the 9-5 grind and make big money.
Watch this space. We’re in this together. And shoot me any questions or comments you have in the meantime.
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