How To Build A Better Personal Brand Than 99% Of People

I never thought that I was going to have a personal brand. Back in 2016 or so, I was a freshman in college and my friend and I who lived on the same floor started a YouTube channel. It's actually this YouTube channel that you're watching right now, but all of the videos are deleted.

So, I've had this channel for that long. And in the past, we made like videos on calisthenics. We did eating challenges, like a 10,000 calorie challenge and other like talking head videos.

and it didn't get anywhere. We didn't know what we were doing. But that wasn't the end.

I always had this desire to do something creative. I didn't think it was going to be a personal brand by any means, but I wanted to do something. And so naturally, I started experimenting with other things and I got into photography/digital art/editing.

I really like the editing portion of it. And if you scroll to the bottom of my Instagram, you can see those edits. And that's technically when the name the Danco or my handle was born.

I was a lifeguard over the summers and I was trying to think of, "Okay, what should I name my Instagram page? " And the my co-workers at the time were like, "Oh, what if you just shorten your name to this? " And I'm like, "Okay, whatever.

" And it just stuck. Now, I gained some followers doing the digital art and editing, but I eventually burned out because I tried to do one edit a day and I couldn't handle taking Adderall every morning and busting out 6 hours staring at Photoshop. So, that failed.

But I really, really, really didn't want to get a job after graduating college. That was like my driving force. I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I did know that I didn't want to be like most people.

So, onward to more businesses. I tried building three e-commerce stores. One was drop shipping rave clothes, the other was minimalist wallets, the other was blue light glasses.

And after taking courses on Facebook ads and borrowing $8,000, not $8,000, borrowing $2,000 from my dad, I eventually racked up a total of $8,000 as a junior in college. And that was just after a bunch of short-lived ventures like the three e-commerce stores, an SEO agency, a content marketing agency, trying to do web design, trying to do Facebook ads, trying to do all of these things, and being $8,000 in debt as a broke college kid who's already living with seven other dudes trying to lower their rent to like 200, 300 a month while working part-time. That's not a good spot to be in.

That's a lot of stress. Now, for the climax, I ended up getting a job. I had been studying programming because I learned that it was something that I could do without a degree.

And I thought, okay, well, if I learn this, maybe that's my backup plan, right? I I don't I'm not going to be able to get a degree in programming, but I know I can learn it very quick because I'm good at self-educating. And so that's what I did.

And I ended up getting a very base level web design job at an agency in Arizona where pretty much I would spend the first few hours of my day working on my own stuff because I learned the brutal reality of working a desk job early on is that most of your work is just procrastination. You're not really doing anything. Most people that work a desk job, I say most people, I know there's exceptions, most people can work on their own stuff, procrastinate their work like I did until the end, and then just copy paste templates for the e-commerce stores that I was working with and call it a day and get paid.

But I knew that if I stayed in that job for too long, I would get comfortable. the wife, the mortgage, the kids, the responsibilities. Nothing wrong with those things, but it would just like pile drive me into the state of not having any time, money, or energy.

My life at that point would then just go on autopilot. Now, to keep this brief, I ended up making freelance web design work. So, while I was at my job, and I procrastinated all my work, I would just try to land freelance clients for my web design stuff because that's what I worked in.

That's what I understood. I had a general understanding of how to help people with web design. But after making the freelance web design thing work, I realized that I had just built myself into a second 9 to5 because I was still working on client projects.

I was still working on projects that I didn't care about. So with all of this stuff circulating in my head, it's not just like one decision of, oh, should I start a personal brand? I was in this job, well, I was in a job that I hated.

Then I went into freelancing which I hated and I had already tried so many different things. So I had like my brain was primed to make this decision. That's when I really discovered the power of social media.

People were just posting about their knowledge and interests and I felt like I could write similar to what they posted. They didn't have to constantly reach out to clients because their content attracted the clients. And I saw web designers selling digital products that required zero effort kind of beyond creating the product to make money.

So, it checked all the boxes, but I had already tried that, right, with the YouTube stuff. And I had already built some kind of an audience with the digital art, but I had no idea how to monetize that. Now, as time has gone by, as you guys can see now, I have a rather successful personal brand, if that's what you want to call it.

And I had learned so much from my prior business failures and my freelancing stuff and building web design, digital products and other things of that nature that I eventually started helping people with their brand, right? I was a brand adviser for like a year or two and I that's still kind of what I consider myself. If I were to label myself as two things, it would be a writer because I am an author.

I write content. That's what I like doing. and then a brand adviser where I help people set up their brands to do what they want in the unique way that I've discovered.

So part of that is what I'm here to share with you today. I want to give you the pieces that help you build a better personal brand than what 99% of people can do. So let's start with a quote from Naval.

Artists are by definition authentic. Entrepreneurs are authentic too. Who's going to be Elon Musk?

Who's going to be Jack Dorsey? These people are authentic and the businesses and products they create are authentic to their desires and means. That is from Naval's piece called Escape Competition Through Authenticity.

Now, let's speed this up a bit. You're here because you have interests or skills that you want to turn into a futurep proof income source, but you don't want to become a hollow shell of a human being. You don't want to put yourself into a box.

You don't want to build yourself into another 9 to5. So, I want to go over the highest impact things you could be doing. And these are the things that most beginners don't know because they haven't started or they just glance over because they're told that other things are more important.

Forget about your niche for now. Forget about your bio and banner and all of that stuff. It's important, but there are plenty of people with no bio and a blank profile picture doing just fine.

Your content and the quality of ideas you post over a long enough time period are what create a brand that people can't help but trust. That's your entire business strategy. Trust.

Money is a measure of trust. Now, I'm going to teach you what I call the trust matrix. It's composed of three parts.

There's growth, so doing what works to attract people. There's authenticity, which is expressing your core beliefs. And then there's authority, so displaying your expertise.

Now, when I was a brand adviser a few years ago, this I I called this the social matrix, and there have been spin-offs of it since, which is great because it's going around, but this is kind of like the baseline of what you need to focus on. This is the big picture of personal branding as a whole. And then after we talk about the trust matrix, we'll talk about monetization.

Like, how do you start to think about monetization as a personal brand? So, the first pillar is growth. And with growth, you need to build your idea to execution muscle.

A pattern I've noticed in successful creators. The moment they notice an idea at the intersection of performance and excitement, they drop anything they were doing and write it down. These ideas typically come to them on a walk, while listening to an audiobook or video, while reading a book or heavy content, not brain rot social posts, or while having a conversation with others.

Now, there are two pieces here. First is performance. So they understand how to articulate ideas in an engaging way.

The ideas have the potential to do well. And then second, there's excitement. So they have a genuine interest in understanding the idea or articulating it in their own way.

They see their brand as a collection of notes of these ideas. So that's how you generate ideas to talk about under your personal brand is performance. So will other people like it?

Does it have the potential to do well? And excitement. Do you like it?

Do you want to write about it? Everything becomes a source of ideas when you know how to articulate an idea in an engaging way and when you want to write about it. The reason most people struggle to come up with ideas worth writing about are those two reasons.

Their mind isn't trained to be articulate and they don't consume information at the edge of their understanding. So the single most beneficial thing you can do here for your writing is to use high-erforming post structures as training wheels for your articulation. So when you have an idea, you can turn it into something that other people may like as well and it will get shared and you may gain followers.

So if you want to practice this, pull out a notebook or open a note-taking app. Write down five to 10 writers, thinkers, or creators who you admire for their articulation. spend 1 hour a day for the next week scrolling through their social accounts.

And this part is important. Find their anomalies, the posts that have at least 2x the engagement as their other posts, and then screenshot or write them down in your note-taking app. The key shift here is you need to stop reading ideas on the internet as a consumer, and you need to start doing so as a researcher.

You're doing it to generate ideas for your own writing. You aren't doing it for entertainment. Now, when you have saved or written down at least 20 to 30 posts that represent the articulation you want to adopt, break down why these posts work so well.

So, you have this note or document of other people's posts or ideas inside of it that you want to be able to articulate in that way. Under each of those, you write down three to five bullet points of why it did well, what psychological patterns are being used, how did it capture attention, what's the value there, why do people care, why did it do so well. Another thing you can do is just use this prompt where you can pause the screen right now, take a screenshot of it, and then copy paste it or do whatever.

But you paste this prompt in, you add the social post to it, and then it will break down exactly why that worked, how it's structured, and how to replicate it because it gives you a step-by-step way to replicate it with your own ideas. Now, the point with all of this is that you are dissecting why already validated ideas have done well. When you practice writing in a way that stops the scroll and nearly demands readers to absorb the idea, growth is a byproduct.

So that's why this is called the growth pillar because it helps with the growth of your audience. If your audience isn't growing, then you don't have an influx of traffic, so you won't get paid. You don't need to grow by thousands or millions of followers.

You just need to be growing. Now, the click with this growth pillar is that validated ideas or things that make people grow are already out there and it's up to you to find those, take those and make them your own and experiment until you see consistent growth. Now, pillar two is authenticity or the core beliefs to attract the right people.

So far in the growth pillar, you know how to turn any idea into a social post that people can't ignore. But people don't follow ideas. They follow people who share ideas.

Two people can write the same thing and people will perceive that post in drastically different ways. So take James Clear versus a random guy off the street and imagine they both tweet, "Habits are good for you. " Tens of millions of people know who James Clear is.

They know his story. They've read his book on habits. They have a deep yet indirect relationship with him.

Most people who read the tweet from James Clear will like and repost simply because it's James Clear. The fact that James Clear is saying it brings other ideas that the people are already aware of that they're perceiving the tweet from. But if a random guy posted it, habits are good.

People would either ignore it or they would comment, "Yeah, no shit. " So there are three things here. The first is time under attention.

The more attention people give you, especially in long- form content like articles, books, and videos, the more they perceive your posts through the rest of your ideas. So, that's something to watch out for is that I have two books now. I've been making YouTube videos for a long time.

I have a lot of newsletter subscribers and get over a 100,000 views on each newsletter article that I send out. So, I can send simpler stuff. I can post simple content and people read it through the lens of, oh, Dan posted this.

I know his entire philosophy. I know everything else. I'm going to like this.

And that's a boost in engagement. Your engagement isn't only determined by the quality of the idea. It's determined by both the quality of the idea and your time spent in the game.

That's why most beginners quit because they never give themselves enough time so that people spend enough time with them. Now the second thing is alignment of values. So when people know who you are, where you came from and what you stand for, they form a deeper relationship with your ideas as a whole.

And then the third is authentic polarization. Because if you're liked by everybody, you're liked by nobody. You need to give people reasons to heavily disagree and thus heavily agree with you.

This is the difficult part of putting yourself out there. Now, all of these things don't need much explanation. You can directly observe that you feel a stronger connection with creators whose story and core beliefs you resonate with.

Imagine someone that you hate on social media. Many people hate me, but they will go and look at someone else who is saying the exact same thing, the exact same idea, but they're saying it through a different story, a different set of beliefs, a different lens, and they love that person. So, it's typically not that you hate or love the specific person that you're following.

It's that you resonate with them more. This is why it's difficult for personal branding or the creator economy to get saturated because everyone is talking through their own lens, their own story. It doesn't matter if that guy has already said all the ideas that you want to say because they're brought to a completely different light when you say them.

And if you were presented a product to buy from some random brand and a creator selling the same thing that you love one, you're probably not even going to know that the other brand exists because you follow the creator. But either way, if you're presented with both, you're going to buy the one from the creator because you trust them more. So, how do we replicate this in our own brand?

We need to illustrate our story and core beliefs often in our content, both as content topics and as ways of reframing ideas. As a content topic, I could talk about how I failed at seven different business models. As a way of reframing an idea, I could talk about how to build a personal brand, which is validated and has high potential, and make that topic unique to me by starting with my story.

That's exactly what I did at the start of this video. I started with a story and that's what makes me talking about personal branding unique. Now in terms of my core beliefs as a topic, I could talk about how I personally think that digital products are the best way for beginners to start while other people think differently.

But I have reasons behind why I think that is. Or since that's a belief of mine is like digital product, I could also reframe classic advice on building a product. I could go and learn how Steve Jobs builds a product and I can frame that under a new lens either for digital products or just for being a creator as a whole rather than building a Fortune 500 company.

So to do this well, write out where you were, what sparked change, and where you are now. For each topic or theme you talk about, list out core principles that you hold with conviction. Now, the thing about this, this is always difficult when you're just like sitting in front of a blank screen and trying to spit your beliefs on paper because they don't all come to mind.

They aren't just all sitting in your conscious mind. You have to dig them up from your unconscious. You have to think about this for like a week.

You need to go and listen to content and let the ideas from that bring up ideas for you to write down along the way. But another way to do this is to just use AI to help guide our thinking. So, I created a prompt that helps you extract your story and your beliefs and then it tidies them all up nicely in like a singular document for you.

So, link to that is in the description and also just while we're talking about it and I know this is the same topic as the YouTube video that's for a reason if people are actually interested. But if it is a goal of yours to start a personal brand, then I am running a challenge, a build a profitable personal brand in 30 days challenge every single day. You get an actionable lesson similar to what we talked about today.

And you get the action steps for that lesson. It takes about 30 to 60 minutes a day, but by the end of the 30 days, you will have a foundation. You'll have an incredible personal brand that is ready to monetize.

That starts on June 16th for those interested. Now, pillar number three, and arguably the most important, is that persuasive education changes behavior. Most creators build education businesses.

They teach their skills and interests. Now, of course, you can try to be the next big celebrity or Only Fans model, but remember, we're aiming for some form of positive impact and meaningful work. Now, the thing is, there are so many creators who already teach what you want to teach.

You can search any skill on YouTube and find a ton of videos on any topic. That's what trips up most beginners. They don't believe that people have a reason to follow them.

Why would they learn from you when there are already plenty of people to learn from? So, there are two solutions here. The first is to teach through a new lens, which is similar to what we just talked about.

I could reframe a topic through your personal story or your core beliefs, like how I can talk about something as basic as personal branding, but I can frame it with my story. Or another way that I like to do this is by reframing through a novel idea. If you're following the instructions I gave you in the growth pillar, then you're consistently consuming or researching information to find ideas.

For me when I do this something like Naval's ideas on ideas are the new oil and this generation is getting rich in idea space not physical space then I can introduce the topic of a personal brand through that idea and it's much more compelling and unique. So this generation is getting rich in idea space not in physical space. So then I can say okay here's the traditional business models of the past.

You need a physical location. You need all of these things. But with a online business, with a personal brand, you just need ideas.

Now, the second solution is to persuade the non-interested. This answers most of your objections when it comes to building a personal brand. Most people on social media aren't intentionally trying to learn.

If they were, they would physically search for a video, course, or article on the topic. And you are being spread to random people on social media. You don't control who sees your content by typing in their interests and demographics into something like Facebook ads.

So, you need to frame your ideas as broad and desirable. If I want to talk about personal branding, I don't go straight into giving people instructions on how to pick their topics or create a bio. That's boring.

It won't get enough reach to spread to a new audience. What I would recommend going to research is the five levels of awareness in marketing. You have to know what level of awareness you are speaking to.

When you create a product, you're speaking to a much higher level of awareness because they were aware enough of their problem to buy the product. So, you don't have to start with all of that introduction and broad stuff that is better suited for social media. You just get straight into the details for what they purchased.

But on social media, nobody is thinking about that. They're not trying to scroll for 10 minutes to find, oh, okay, here's how I build a personal brand. Oh, here's how I design a website.

Oh, here's a they're discovering new things. So, the best way to practice this is to just start thinking in pain points and desired outcomes. So, I could start with some permutation of if you want, which is a desire, or if you don't want, which is a pain point, then most people at least have a chance at becoming interested in what I have to say.

So, as an example, I can say, if you hate the thought of building someone else's dreams for the rest of your life, start a personal brand. I could then go on to list the benefits of starting one, how low risk it can be, and how you can sell almost anything from digital products to software to physical products. I can make a compelling argument as to why people should start a personal brand and present it as an option for them.

So, that was the trust matrix. Now, let's talk about quickly the best way to monetize as a beginner. The best way to monetize is any way.

They literally all work. ebooks, templates, cohorts, coaching, paid newsletter, sponsorships, freelancing, selling a physical product, whatever. What most people don't understand is that a personal brand isn't a business.

It's a traffic source. Founders build a personal brand to get users for their startup. E-commerce brands use UGC to sell physical products.

You can quite literally sell anything from bags of coffee to nudes if you have a trustworthy personal brand. Those without a personal brand need to build trust fast or leverage deeper psychological tactics in the form of direct response marketing to secure the sale. They need to go from ad to conversion as fast as possible.

That opens up room for potentially unethical tactics and a sole focus on making quick money. So, since we're focused on building a personal brand according to the trust matrix that we just went over, you're in a very good spot. You already have people that want to buy from you.

You don't need to worry about the optimization of your landing page or your headline or whatever it may be because your content has already done the selling. Now, I could list out the pros and cons of which kind of product you should build first, but instead I'll say this. I'll just give you a metric.

Your first product should take no longer than a week to build because you probably already have a product lying around. As an example, John Hugh from Stan, which is a creator platform that allows you to host digital products and so on and so forth. He won.

Congratulations to him and the stand team. We've grown closer over time, but they recently got Steven Bartlett from a diary of a CEO podcast on as a co-owner, which is incredible, and they're going to continue growing. So, if you need a creator platform to start out on, I would bet on Stan.

And they're the most affordable and well-rounded option to go with anyways. But John Hugh started as a creator on Tik Tok. and he made career advice videos and he realized that a lot of people were asking him, "Okay, what did you do to get the job at Goldman Sachs that he got and he mentioned his resume here and there and he eventually just realized, oh, I could just take this resume, put it up for 10 bucks as a template and he made thousands of dollars doing that.

He didn't over complicate it. " So, here's some ideas of what you could do. You could record a 30 to 60 minute training on how to do one impactful thing based on the topic that you talk about.

Or you can find an old asset that allowed you to get a desirable result and turn it into a template. Or you can take a social post that's received good reception and turn it into a short guide or template. Now, we aren't trying to make the big bucks here with this strategy.

We're trying to validate an idea that's worth paying for. So, start by charging something like $10. Then if your conversion rate is like 2.

5% or higher, then consider turning it into a more fleshed out product. That way you don't waste your time building something that people don't want. It really can be that simple.

Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe. Remember, the build a profitable personal brand in 30 days challenge starts on June 16th.

And if you'd like deeper letters sent to your inbox every week, consider joining my Substack. The links to both of those are in the description. Thank you for watching again.

I'll see you in the next video. Bye.