Using your personal brand for investing...

One of the largest advantages in business is to have a personal brand. The power it holds is unlike anything else.

Recently, someone started working with me 1-on-1 for 3 years. They are extremely successful in what they do, however, they are a total ghost and they want to change that and be a business influencer.

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When they came to me there was a variety of reasons. However, one of the largest? To be able to utilize their personal brand for better investment deal quality and quality.

While I never built my personal brand for this reason since 2018 it has allowed me access to investment deals and business partnerships that would be impossible if I simply had capital.

A great example: In 2022 I invested $300,000 into an education and media company at a valuation of $1.2M. That same company only 6 months earlier turned down capital that valued the company at $4M. Why? Because they didn’t need capital they needed expertise and audience.

Another example: In 2021 I invested $220,000 into a software company and that same investment gave me a total of $900,000 worth of stock simply due to the expertise and audience I had.

In both cases, these deals weren’t public and I was able to take a smaller amount of capital and utilize it in a very large way.

Obviously, this assumes you don’t just have a personal brand.

It assumes you have a combination of capital, influence, audience and expertise. 

I stumbled upon this discovery over the past number of years and it is the leading reason I have a portfolio of companies today alongside the reason why I rarely invest in anything besides private companies.

Without my personal brand, none of this would be possible.

Okay… back to the guy that hired me because I want to share the high-level strategy so you can do that same.

In general, this strategy is fairly similar to those that I work with that are looking to approach a more intellectual consciousness audience (more on that here: http://thelevelsguide.com).

The overall strategy is to allow for him to put in $1 to growth and get back $1 without having to coach, run a community, sell courses or do anything besides create content. The main focus is to inspire others, while building an audience that will allow him to get better deal flow and quality for the investment side of his business.

The following are the parts I’m focused on with him. While I am mentoring him through this process, he has also hired various other companies that I own to take care of the various elements of the personal brand with the focus as we get established to bring this in-house and have a small 4 person team running his personal brand as it expands.

The beauty of starting from zero with a personal brand is that it can turn into anything. I’m excited to be on this journey with him, alongside of sharing it with you.

Relevancy

Whenever I’m working with anyone the major thing we must start on first is Relevancy. Part of my marketing framework (The R.O.I Method) has Relevancy as the first element.

Why? Because without Relevancy no one is going to know why they should listen to you. In the case of this person I’m working with the relevancy is really simple.

We are looking for 18-40 males that are Entrepreneurs or Entrepreneurial. While we don’t need those who are following us to be successful the client is desiring to both be motivational/inspirational while at the same time to attract potential businesses and opportunities for investment.

The problem with Relevancy is that it can be extremely difficult to define. While when people work with me in my group programs, I use this workbook. When working with someone 1-on-1 we go with a much simpler version that we then narrow in from— simply put, we use real world data versus overthinking to get the result.

Personal Brand

At the beginning we opt’d of doing a full general branding exercise or even a website. Simply put… momentum is the best friend of an online brand and which would I rather have…

A beautiful website or 10,000 people on an email list. The newsletter and audience is always going to win.

While we will revisit this later, we believe we’ll have a better grasp of the online brand in general a little later and it allows us to build momentum without having to wait months in order for it to happen.

Newsletter

An email list (or newsletter— whichever you want to call it) is by far the best centre piece of a personal brand. It doesn’t really matter how you look at it the advantages of a truly “owned” audience versus a rented audience (social media) that cannot be censored is simply not just the best option for building a personal brand… I believe it’s critical to it’s success.

We’re hosting the newsletter from day one on Beehiiv and we’re aiming for 2-3 emails per week that is focused on the journey of entrepreneurship. I believe we can grow this extremely fast simply due to the setup of resources and the velocity of potential of the person I’m working with.

SMS

As part of our email strategy, is also an SMS strategy. Personally, I believe people are snoozing on SMS. My personal SMS list has a 10-20% CTR when I send things and 80% of the time I send pure value.

It works, like a charm.

As part of his strategy we are going to use SMS to engage more deeply with those that are more bought in by delivering value in an easier bite-size way.

Meta Ads

For this client, we are going to go heavy on Facebook and Instagram ads. While I do believe other platforms will work, having so much experience with these ads allow me to understand costs and audience quality.

However, as we are not looking to “sell” anything but rather build an audience and relationships we will be directing traffic directly to the newsletter much like we would on a property such as http://onlinebusinessowner.com/digest.

Generally speaking, with a broad audience like this that isn’t just American, we should see extremely positive ad costs.

That page above is producing the following (this was from yesterday— testing a variety of ad angles— obviously the $3 one being an entirely new set of ad angles/audiences).

Sponsorships

Perhaps one of the best sources of extremely high value traffic is through sponsorships of other newsletters. While Meta traffic is useful we do know that are certain amount will be unengaged quickly whereas sponsorships allow for higher valued audience which generally will help the overall brand much more quickly.

Through Sponsorships.com and their DFY service we are allowing the client to be completely hands off with this approach. Instead of needing to hire a team member they take care of all of it and the relationships with the newsletter. While the cost per lead isn’t as predictable, generally, we know the value is much higher.

Monetization

In most cases when building a personal brand we are waiting to profit on the front-end. In this specific case, the client is looking to simply break-even on the front end with the larger return coming from deal flow and the advantage of having a personal brand.

Thus, the major way we are doing this is through lead sharing. Using a variety of software and relationships we are going to essentially re-sell the lead flow based on engagement and self-surveyed segmentation to those that are looking for those leads.

This is one of the easiest ways to be able to get $1 for every $1 you spend. However, it’s not a great way to profit, or even take care of the other costs of the business.

In this case, it’s the best way to take care of monetization and due to my net work of Entrepreneurs with businesses that want more high quality leads, it’s an easy 1+1 to put together.

As it stands at the moment, this is the only planned monetization on the front-end and this client won’t be using courses, coaching, etc. to generate revenue.

Omnipresence

Omnipresence put simply is the ability to increase the frequency of your content in front of someone which increases the trust of that person with you, automatically.

Think about it this way:

If you sent 100 emails across a span of a year it’s likely that someone is only going to open 40 of them and fully read 10 of them.

However, if you could use paid Omnipresence (the form of retargeting) to increase the impressions from 100 to 500, what would that do?

It would increase the brand velocity in terms of intimacy. While I use this in the businesses that I own an invest in, in the realm of a personal brand it has the potential to turn you into a celebrity in what feels like, overnight.

The bonus? It’s pretty inexpensive to do this.

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PR

While this person who I’m working with is a true expert and extremely successful. You are only as good as others say you are.

We’ve engaged a few PR experts that will help us obtain the social proof needed through both traditional publications and on top tier podcasts.

Generally speaking there’s really only two ways to get PR. You either earn it through knowing the right people or you pay for someone who already has a relationship with those people.

I prefer paying someone who has relationships and thus that’s what we’re doing.

Obviously in both cases you still need to be noteworthy, however, I attempt to use my money when I have more of it than time.

YouTube

While we won’t build a YouTube channel or show at the beginning. Once we have a starting level of audience (10K+ subscribers on email) we will go ahead and start a YouTube show.

As he’s fairly connected to others, is a super connector and has the time and resources, it’ll be easy for him to build both a show alongside of interviewing others. While this will help his brand, I would call a spade a spade and like myself he’s mostly going to enjoy connecting with other interesting people (while calling it “work”) :).

When we are at this stage I’ll enlist the help of a couple past YouTube growth hackers and will start adding YouTube ads to the mix.

Social Media

We’ve decided that for the time being we are going to focus purely on email and YouTube. While he will post on Instagram, majority of his focus won’t be on these other platforms until after his brand has matured.

What is success?

When it comes to a personal brand that isn’t focused on being the business itself it can be somewhat difficult to define success.

However, in this case I believe it comes down to the following:

#1. It feels good for the person I’m working with and they are motivated and feel good in doing what’s needed to build a personal brand.

#2. They are growing a month by month basis with both quality and quantity of audience.

#3. They are becoming the “go to” person in the industry and are being seen as the person to invite to summits, conferences, masterminds, etc.

#4. They are obtaining investment deal flow that is high quality.

Bringing this back to the roots

Why am I sharing this on my investment newsletter versus my 7+ figure scaling? Simply put… this is meant as a strategy to build a portfolio.

Yes, it will feel good for the client I’m working with and they’ll inspire millions of people. However, if there is a solid investment in ensuring you make great business investments.

This is the one. Go get it

-Scott

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