if you are an influencer if you are a content creator or if you are a business owner you're thinking of using social media to build a brand to grow your business or just to get a little bit of fame after getting over 8 million followers across social media here are some of the lessons i would like to share with you if you're thinking about being an influencer or being on social media and i want to give you a little bit of warning up front that this video is not politically correct i'm just going to share
with you what i have learned during this whole process going from nobody to now being a global personal brand so i want to take you back a little bit of how this all got started so it was 2015 that i officially started being on social media at the time i had some speaking footage that i've accumulated and i had my video guy said to me hey dan what do you want to do with these videos he was very kind he actually took the initiative and edited these videos and he upload them to youtube i didn't
think too much of it after a few months i have people contacting my company saying that hey i want to do business with you they want to hire me they want to do business with me they want to do joint ventures and i was asking them how did you hear about me and they said i watched your videos on youtube so i thought that was kind of interesting i thought to myself i'm not paying too much attention to this social media thing because i was just busy growing my companies maybe there's something here i never
thought i would be an influencer i never thought that i would have now all these followers and all this attention from all over the world that was not my intention i never set out to do that it was kind of by accident it took me a good 18 months to go from zero to 000 subscribers it took me another eight months to go from 1 000 subscribers to 10 000 subscribers so i thought to myself you know what in the beginning no one was watching my content i upload a video and no one would click
on it i had multiple google account i would refresh and click and get my friends to subscribe again my mom to subscribe because i had no subscribers i would question myself is anyone even watching my content does anyone even want to watch this so i had lots of doubts but i never gave up i never stopped so the very first lesson that i've learned is you want to think in decades not in days if you're thinking about oh i'm gonna try social media or i'm gonna upload a few videos and i'm not getting traction okay
this doesn't work no one likes my stuff i am just going to give up i'm going to quit that's not a good way of doing this instead what you think about is i'm going to do this long term think in decades i'm going to give myself a good 10 year to build my social media not one week not five weeks not 10 days 10 years so when you think in 10 year term now suddenly you're not too hung up on okay i'm not getting traction for the first month or first couple years now here's what's
interesting as i shared with you 18 months zero to one thousand subs another eight months to go from one thousand to ten thousand now i could have given up during that period of time but i didn't and you shouldn't either going from 10 000 subscribers to a hundred thousand subscribers on youtube it only took me one year from a hundred thousand subscribers to one million subscribers winning the gold little button from youtube that only took me another year so within two years we have 100x our followers on youtube so let me ask you this question
what if i would have given up the first couple months so think in decades not in days if you're thinking of going on social media lesson number two many business owners and influencers when they started building their followers when they started getting some traction and now people are liking their stuff and they have a little fan base and when they try to make offers when they try to monetize the audience when they try to sell something they usually get a lot of resistance and pushback from the fan base from the viewers or from the listeners
and when that happens and usually they like oh i'm not so sure maybe i shouldn't sell and then the fans are like oh you know you're selling out why are you trying to sell me stuff and they don't like it and then as an influencer as a business owner then you stop the lesson i want to share with you and that's lesson number two is dollars over dopamine don't kid yourself social media it is a commercial endeavor think about the platforms you're on facebook instagram tick tock right youtube all these companies they're all giant tech
companies it is a commercial enterprise they are building this platform so that they can monetize your content and if they are monetizing your content the content that you have put in blood sweat and tears creating then why shouldn't you monetize it that's the only reason why you should be on social media so i realized that social media this is a commercial activity this is a commercial endeavor it is not just for creativity it's not just to oh i'm here to entertain people i'm here to make people laugh i'm here to create stories give me a
break think about hollywood they create stories to entertain people so that they could generate money from it think about disney the happiest place on earth it is a money machine so if you are going to be on social media you should focus on getting dollars not just dopamine kick lesson number three and i learned this the hard way so in the beginning when i was uploading videos and content on social media what i noticed about myself was i was getting very anxious and i was getting very stressful because every single time i would upload something
i would immediately check oh within an hour how many likes are we getting what are people saying and are they liking my content and and how many comments are we getting and what should i make next and i was in that state of mind for quite a few years and what i noticed is the more i pay attention to those things the more anxiety that i felt and then it stopped being fun and i started thinking about oh maybe i need to create this kind of content that's a little bit more controversial and that would
get more attention and i would get more likes and that's what i wanted and all these things and when i had people who disliked my content when i had negative comments quite frankly lose sleep i would be so upset i'd be like oh why are they not liking me what's going on why are they saying those things don't they know i spend so much time creating content i was not in a happy place and i think a lot of influencers go through this and a lot of creators go through this because we kind of get
our self-worth through our fans and i know it's a good feeling from people not knowing you they're knowing you they're liking you and they they praise you compliment you and then later on they kind of not like you as much and they get tired of you you go through this journey this lesson lesson number three is to let go of the need of being liked because you will see there are influencers content creators business owners they would risk their lives to create certain type of content doing dangerous stunts just to get some likes if you
think about it it kind of doesn't make sense they get the self-worth from likes from being liked by other people strangers even fans and i learned that that's not healthy so instead of doing that i let go of the need for being liked don't care if they like me or not and truth is people who like you don't like you or people see on social media they made a judgment based on one video or one post that you do they don't know you anyway they don't know me so why would you base your happiness on
those people it makes no sense i see youtubers they risk their health because they want to maintain their status they want to maintain their pain and they forgot what is the most important thing in the world and that's their happiness and that's what i've learned so lesson number four which ties to lesson number three is your ego is not your amigo when i was growing my youtube channel my facebook my instagram i had certain goals in my mind i had certain competition certain target and i set a goal to myself you know what in x
amount of years i'm gonna bypass so and so i'm gonna have more followers than so and so right i want to be more popular than so and so i wanted to be famous because i was trying to get my self-worth from the fame but the truth is i was insecure and what i realized is when i bypass those numbers when i bypass the target or the competition it's actually not a competition because no one is competing except in my own mind whenever i pass those numbers when i have more followers than so and so influencers
you know what i realized no one gives a my fans don't give a right my team doesn't give a my wife doesn't even give a the only person that gives a is me my ego oh now i have more followers than him more than so-and-so who cares is not important so don't let those numbers dictate who you are and how you feel just in numbers and the truth is no one gives a except our own ego i learned that the hard way lesson number five you want to monetize from day one you shouldn't think about
how i'm going to build this audience and once i have x amount of followers and somehow the number is always 1 million i don't know why because most business owners i talk to oh once i get a million followers then i will monetize my list my community then i can make money from it you shouldn't think that way when i went on social media i was focusing on monetizing from day one because i knew i couldn't multiply zero i'm not making money from this amount of followers what makes me think that i would make money
from this many followers it makes no sense so what i noticed is i was our company was generating five figure revenue when we had four figure followers not from adsense or ad revenue or sponsorship but from product sales from joint venture relationships from client flow from strategic alliance from opportunities from social media and we were generating significant revenue when we had six figure followers and then we were generating eight-figure revenue when we had seven figure followers so i saw the correlation between followers and our revenue that's the only reason why we're spending resources on it
and i say the same thing to you so you want to monetize from day one because knowing you cannot multiply zero if you're not monetizing when you had four figure followers five figure followers six figure followers that's not gonna help you should be generating revenue or profits from that from day one lesson number six probably the most important one as you gain popularity as you gain followers one thing that's guaranteed to happen is you are gonna get trolls haters and parasites what do i mean by that as i was growing on youtube i think from
a few hundred thousand to even one million followers i wasn't getting a lot of trolls and haters but somehow when i bypassed the one million suddenly it's like the world just comes down to you it just crumbles around you right i was getting haters and trolls out of nowhere people were using my name and i was pissed off right i was thinking about should i sue them should i take legal action what should i do and same thing gave me a lot of anxiety and i didn't understand like why would these people attack me like
this they don't know me right and are people who would fabricate stories about me they would exaggerate they would just make up stories so that they would get likes and they would get attention to the channels or to the social media platforms and in the beginning i didn't know how to handle it i was just upset i was pissed off i was lost it would bother me for days and weeks and now i finally understand why social media influencers especially those with big following that in front of the camera they're happy they're upbeat and they're
enthusiastic but off camera they're actually very depressed and some of them even committed suicide because when you have tens of thousands of people hundreds of thousands of people pointing fingers saying nasty things about you just trolls attacking you for no reasons day in and day out just imagine when you walk out of your home and people saying that you suck you're ugly and you're no good and this and that all day every day 24 7. just imagine that so one of the things i've learned in order to do this i have to develop alligator skin
you know what i don't care what people think i don't care what people say because if you do you get your self-worth from that it affects your emotions and of course it does you're gonna have a tough time doing this because the bigger you get the more trolls you'll get and think about the parasites why do they need to use your name to talk about you to bad-mouth you to put you down to elevate their own status because when they talk about themselves no one gives a no one wants to hear about them talking about
themselves so the only way for them to get their attention to few followers to even have the world know that they exist is they talk about you because you've got a name so now i understand that's just part of the game in fact i don't even look anymore so i don't look at the comments and stuff on social media what people say or what the trolls say what the parasites say what the haters say i don't look at the comments so even though you're my fan i just want to let you know my team looks
at the comments they filter they look at that i don't see any of it not on the messages not anything because i found out that i don't want that to affect my mood started a couple years ago i stopped looking i just create what i want to create what i believe would benefit people which ties to the very last lesson and that's lesson number seven and that is follow your heart a number of years ago i was planning and thinking about creating different types of content not just business or entrepreneurship or sales related content and
i would like to share a different part of me right a different side of me such as my passion in martial art such as my passion in terms of the marvel characters and my toy collection and doing unboxing and i consulted with a number of youtube experts and every single one of them said to me that that's a bad idea it would confuse the algorithm your fans they subscribe to your channel expecting business content and now you're talking about personal life and all these things they won't like it youtube won't like it and your channel
would tank and i listened to all of them and at the end i made my own decision just following my heart and you know what i'm just gonna do it so i started posting different types of content and guess what that took my channel to a whole new level because that somehow resonates with my fans oh i'm also a fan of bruce lee i love martial art or i love hot toys so somehow they gain more attraction it didn't distract my core message it didn't dilute my story in fact i think it enhances it so
when you're creating content yes you want to create content that people are searching for that's fine but i think at the end of the day you want to create content that you want to create that you know that would benefit other people and that's what i've learned so now i just want to make content that i want to make and this is why you see my channel sometimes i upload one or two things sometimes i don't now i'm in a stage where i want to create content when i want to create it it's no agenda
and if i believe here's something that i want to say then i create content if i don't have something to say then i don't create content and i actually don't give a if 10 people watch it or one million people watch this it doesn't really matter to me anymore i don't spend a lot of time on social media although we're publishing a lot of content but personally i spend less than 30 minutes a day on social media i'm busy just with my own businesses and i believe that's the best way to create content and build
an audience on social media is to be yourself be your best self some people would resonate with you they would like you some people won't resonate with you they would hate you who gives a what they think it doesn't matter but if you follow your heart and you stick with this long enough and you notice hey people are liking my content so it's more for myself my own journey for my own video journaling and not just for you as well so comment below and share your thoughts on how you have used social media and if
some of these lessons resonate with you and share with other people because i'm not going to read the comments but do share and i think other people would benefit from it as well
