00:00
In my opinion, a personal brand should be built second after you've built a business because it's nothing wrong with being a content creator, but you should not necessarily be labeled as an expert if you've never built something worth talking about. The most important thing that people should not, I mean this is one of the biggest mistakes that people do is they try to...

00:26
start a personal brand from scratch without researching. If you're only getting views, but you're not able to convert them into sales, what's the purpose of that time being spent on just creating content every day without doing anything with it?

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listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford.

00:54
Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the rad cast. We're talking branding today, branding of a personal nature. We're talking to Marion Asano. What's up, brother? What's going on, man? Thanks for having me. Hey man. Good to have you. Personal branding ninja. You know, like you hit my feet. I'm like, all right, I got to talk to this ninja. I got to be honest when, you know, I've been doing personal brain for five years, uh, marketing for 22.

01:23
When any time the ninja kind of goes, ninja anything comes across, I'm like, all right, let me see what we're dealing with here. Skeptical. There's another guy. Another guy. But I was like, all right, I watched your content, checked out your page. I went, okay. Marion knows what he's talking about. He's not full of crap. He's not full of shit. So yeah, man. And it's a topic near and dear to my heart. And I think it's, I think a lot of people are curious about it. A lot of people are doing it.

01:52
A lot of people are faking it. A lot of people are annoyed by it. But I think the term has started to, I think the personal branding term. I think some people just roll their eyes at, you know? And I've been working for like six months and I'm usually really good with words. Like I'm a good writer. What's a new way, what else can we call this? Maybe just to give it some fresh legs. I get what I mean, we can call it.

02:21
in a lot of, we can call it a lot of different ways. I mean, you can call it digital persona, digital brand, the digitalization of a person, whatever you want to call it, right? Like doesn't, at the end of the day, it's really what people are talking about you when you're not in the room. It's the simplest way to kind of think about it. And yes, it's true in person, but it's also through online. Like if you are not there, does your content,

02:50
speak for itself in a way that doesn't feel weird or it doesn't feel like fake. What it does, like you just said, a lot of people are faking it until something doesn't even happen sometimes. So they don't make it. Exactly. But and then it's also, of course there are problems, but there are also pros and cons to it. Because a lot of people don't even think about it this way. Like in

03:19
In the last six years of my kind of business slash entrepreneurial journey, I've also bought and sold a few brick and mortar companies. So what people don't realize is, yes, it's cool. It sounds great in theory. Yes, like build your personal brand, hype it up, make it nice. But if your sole business is just your personal brand, it's dangerous. You're in a dangerous spot. One, you'll never be able to exit it.

03:47
Two, God forbid something happens, you're not able to create content for a while. How, like, you know, think about a brand as big as Tony Robbins, Brendan Bouchard, right? Like these huge names. If they are not on the stage, the people that are attending the events, now I'm not saying that they don't have a business behind that personal brand, but you get the point. Yeah. The main topic of it, there are pros and cons of.

04:15
building a personal brand if you're not doing it at the right time. In my opinion, a personal brand should be built second after you've built a business because you get, it's nothing wrong with being a content creator, but you should not necessarily be labeled as an expert if you've never built something worth talking about, you can be an enthusiast and it's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with putting up a YouTube channel and start doing

04:44
tutorials about how to do X, Y, and Z, but don't necessarily try to position yourself as an expert and try to build your brand around some topics that you're not an expert in. Be an enthusiast. And this, you know, I've heard this interview from Gary Vee when a guy was actually trying to ask this hidden question to like how can he be positioned as an expert when he's not an expert.

05:12
And that's pretty much the simplest way to look at it. Don't, like don't try to be an expert if you're not. You can become an expert during that time, but you can be an enthusiast during this time that you're building the content hub.

05:32
podcasting, if it's Instagram Reels, short form video. But in my opinion, the actual personal brand should be separated from the actual business for a couple different reasons. One, let's assume you plan to exit the actual business. Nobody's going to want to buy a personal brand because it's your name attached to it. Nobody's going to want to buy your name. And my favorite case study is actually my wife. My wife runs a beauty salon here

06:03
And when COVID hit, of course, the salons were one of the first businesses that were shut down because they were deemed not, what was it? Not necessarily. Not essential. Yeah. So I said to her, all right, you've built this successful six figure business from scratch. You have an expertise, you have a skillset. Let's look at what other people are doing. So we looked online. We saw.

06:31
a lot of different people teaching what she was already doing at that point. She has this eyelash extension salon. So we started doing research. We looked on Google. We saw what companies are running ads against, what type of sales pages they had, what type of products they were selling. We saw a variety of certifications, in-person certification, online certifications. Then we looked on Udemy. Then we, of course, did the research for organic content on YouTube. And then we understood, okay.

07:01
people are selling online courses about how to do eyelash extensions. I'm like, that's, this is your thing. And of course, even though she had experience and she had the skillset built, the first thing that came to mind, she was like, but why would someone buy from me? And I'm like, well, the reason that someone buy from me, like first things first is that I said to her, you're not selling advice or you're not creating content for

07:28
yourself now. You creating content for yourself four years ago when you were trying to learn these things. Then you spend, you know, you spent almost 20k in just attending workshops, getting yourself certified, going for your license at school and stuff like that. You learn all the ins and outs and then what was the biggest problem? It was not a lot of business advice around how to build this type of brick and mortar shop. So I said to her, all right,

07:57
You can even start by just sharing the things that you've learned in the past. And I'll even interview you because that was the main, like at first it was the whole content creation kind of imposter syndrome, like, I don't know if I'm good enough to talk about this. And then we started posting videos. And then in just like less than a year, her YouTube channel went to like 23,000 subs, the podcast blew up, her Instagram blew up and then people, because why? She already built.

08:26
successful business prior to her building a personal brand. Yes, that imposter syndrome would have probably been forever if she would have not built that prior business and start talking and giving advice because when you give advice advice about something that you don't feel confident and authentic talking about it, it's going to feel weird. It's going to feel unauthentic. It's going to feel fake. And guess what? People will feel it.

08:55
If you don't believe in what you're selling, if you don't believe in the things that you talk about, why would someone else win? And that's the main reason why a lot of people kind of lack the context of, all right, imposter syndrome versus should I talk about this? Should I not? How to be positioned as the expert? Now, I'm not saying that she could have, even during school time or even when she was trying to get certified, she could have still recorded videos showing this is what I attend, this is how much I paid for these things.

09:24
But without trying to position herself as, oh, look at me, I'm doing this, this and that, where actually you're just paying for advice at the same time. Right. So she could have been an enthusiast at that point. It's just, she was running her previous company and going to school. So didn't even have time to record videos. I think it's so interesting, you know, the point you're making about, you know, personal, I think there's a lot of misinformation or

09:54
bad assumptions about why you should or shouldn't build your personal brand. And it's, you know, it's reputation. We all have a reputation. But, and we all have things that we're good at or that we're specialized in. And social media affords this opportunity to amplify all of that reputation. And with that comes benefits.

10:24
You know, because you know, you're going to, like, we all like have clicks or things or people that are naturally drawn to us in life. We move around. If we go, if you and I went to a party, we may be cut from the same cloth. Who knows? We're going to attract a certain group of people. Like if you don't know anyone, you're going to talk to people because we all have auras and things that, that, that go on. And so what social media does is.

10:54
It just turns the like turning that amp up on your guitar that you're playing. It turns that noise up that it just amplifies who you are to attract more of those people. And that brings the benefits of connection that you never know where it's going to lead more business opportunities, more friends, more, more just things. And like, and you know, I tell people, you know, I'm not

11:24
I have a personal brand, but I don't want to be famous. You know, like I have no desire to be, you know, like superstar famous, but the more known I am, the more freedom I have. And I say that instead of money, but they all run together for me, freedom's important, but I get freedom when I have more money. And when I, you know, the more known I am, the more, you know,

11:50
business, the more money you make, the more money you make. And I, but I try to attribute it to the benefit, you know, to not make it about, you know, lambos and, you know, like flaunting money. It's not, I don't give a shit about that. It's just about amplifying reputation to attract more opportunity. I don't know what to say, but you also look right, like in your case, and again, in a lot of different cases as well, you also look at the time that you invest, like,

12:19
Now you're investing time into sitting here and doing this podcast where you could have probably closed some deals or some other stuff. So you, you know, you value the time and understand the whole aspect of, right, I'm going to put this time invested into this personal brand, even though I might not get a positive ROI immediately because it's long-term, right? So it's those, I mean, people and a lot of people don't even understand this. Yes.

12:47
The amount of money that you get paid for consulting or coaching or, uh, or the amount of money of a deal that he can close on the phone right at this time in one hour can be 10, 20, 30 times more, right. And the time that you spend here just doing a podcast, but a lot of people forget, yeah, but a lot of people forget that because brand and that's where, when I've thought about, you know, and I'm sure you have like the name change of personal branding.

13:16
You can't get rid of the word brand because I tell people, you know, sales overnight brand over time. And it's look, brand is built. It's just like brand is reputation. Like your reputation is built over time. No one judges you from one day or one week, and no one judges a brand for one day or one week, unless it's just a really bad, unless it's a really bad week. Uh, but it's over time and it's built over time.

13:43
And the dividends of our relationship here doing this podcast and the content we both can create from it, I know pay bigger dividends than one deal or one other conversation that I could have. And people have a hard time because we're so driven and today's it's so the irony of today is that we have these opportunities, greater opportunities than ever to build brand when you're not a superstar or you're not running TV ads. But.

14:10
but then the mindset of, I gotta have it now, I gotta have it now, I gotta have it now. There's a weird relationship with those things. We have more opportunity than ever to build long-term brand, but we all gotta have it now. But you play the long game and you win. 100%. So talk to me about when this light bulb, let's back up a little bit more. How long you been in the US?

14:41
We talked about a little bit of this pre-episode. Let's give everybody a little bit of that background. Yeah, I moved here in 2013. Okay, 2013. Yeah, 2013. Where'd you grow up? A little bit of a journey at first, moved here with my wife, both from Romania. So I came here first two years, kind of just did a lot of like labor jobs, seven days a week, 12, 13 hour days. Did nothing but work my ass off and just trying to save up some money.

15:10
Um, didn't necessarily have, like I knew I wanted to do something on my own. I didn't know. I know I knew from the first, first week that I came that I want to spend. My life here. Like I knew I wanted to build a life. I wasn't just trying to make some money and go back to just open something up there. Now don't ask me necessarily why I just felt it. So, um, I kind of had to sell the, well.

15:40
Let me back it up. In 20, like right before, a year prior to me coming with my wife here, I was in a program here for three months. It's called Work and Travel. So coming here for three months, you kind of travel to US to work. That's kind of the, that way you don't have time to travel. I was gonna wonder in how you became a, are you a citizen now? I'm actually, I just got my fingerprints last week. So going for citizenship in a.

16:04
about two months from what the notice said. So about five years of, five and a half years of residency and then getting my citizenship. Nice. Okay. Great. Yeah. So with that in mind, so the first, first two years, so I was here three months and then I have to, I had to sell this dream to my wife because she had her entire family at home. She didn't speak a single word of English. And I'm like, guess what, babe, you're gonna have to move with me across the world. Just have to live there, leave everybody behind.

16:34
in a world that you know nothing about and you don't speak the language. I've tried to sell my wife on some things, but never anything that hard. All right. So, uh, long story short, we both come, um, and I have to give this credit to her because she did have a really tough, uh, time at first. I didn't speak English either, but I studied in high school. Um, and I knew that like I knew grammar, like I could.

17:03
I could spell words, it's just I couldn't really have a conversation with someone. It only took me about a month and a half to start to really understand the whole concept of having a conversation. And then for the first two years, both of us, we just worked our asses off, again, seven days a week. And then the reason that I decided that I want to become an entrepreneur is we got married right before we came.

17:31
And then we had a honeymoon for, I think, five days to the Dominican Republic. But the problem was during that time, I was always thinking, I'm not working. I'm not getting paid these five days. And I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with me? Like I have to, I have to change this mindset. I just, it's wrong. Like I should be here spending time with my wife and enjoying it. Instead I'm thinking of being away from work and not making money. Like it's crazy, right?

17:58
And that was the first thing. So then I read one or two entrepreneurial books. And I said, all right, I have to kind of look a little bit from a different perspective. So at that point, it was two years in, I saved up to about 20 something thousand dollars, worked most of those two years doing labor jobs, like everything from moving to some light construction, light repair stuff, and then also driving some trucks.

18:29
So the first thing that I did was, all right, I know how to drive a truck, I know how to carry things, let me just buy a truck. So a buddy of mine joined, literally out of the 22K, spent about 20K to buy a truck, and then start going for contracts. Meaning I started knocking at doors, asking some big stores if they need help with transporting different equipment. So that's.

18:53
Kind of how I got started into my entrepreneurial work. So that business slowly grew to six and then seven figures slow. Now a year later when the business was pretty successful actually, both me and my wife got a letter in the mail saying, you have to leave the country because our immigration status required every six months an extension. For some weird reason, the third extension came declined. Literally we had to leave the country in like 48 hours in order to not become illegal.

19:23
And I'm like, what do you want? Like, you know, like I have three, three years of life. Like I have a business now. I, you know, a lot of things. So, no, we had to leave. So what happened was I was out of the country, both of us, uh, we were out of the country for about eight months. So during that time, the company. Grew significantly, like it almost doubled. How I was living on us time, taking sales calls on the phone. And my buddy that was here was able to manage operations.

19:51
What happened was because I was outside of the country, I was able to see the big picture. So that's when I really bought every course of marketing, lead gen, ads, sales that I could to understand what happens outside of the business instead of me being physically there. So yeah, it was a bad situation, but I had to find a way to turn it into something good because otherwise I would have pretty much lost everything. That's fascinating. So, you know, how that came together.

20:20
It could have been a total, you know, I don't know, a total disaster, like in some ways, but you know, somehow you worked it to your favor. Did y'all go back to Romania? We go every year. Did you, for that eight month period, did you go back to Romania? Yeah, I was in Romania, living on US time pretty much. I was waking up at, you know, 2, 3 a.m. in the morning, then working until, you know, 7, 8 p.m. here.

20:49
Where it was no, so I was going to bed at 3 AM and then waking up on US time. Now has have and I'm sure you're probably going to get to this, but like. Are you like, do you believe in the American dream? Like is it has it? Sure. Are the opportunities that you've had that you've created, you know, I don't think they just got given to you. You've created them, but are the opportunities here just that much greater than they are there? I mean, just what I was able.

21:19
Now again, like you just said, nothing necessarily was given because I landed with four or 500 bucks in my pocket. We had to borrow money to pay like the show. But the opportunity, that kind of opportunity that I had, one, none of us spoke English, at least not to the level to have a conversation. And to be able to, you know, get a job, yes, it was a hard couple of years of hard work. But

21:48
It was possible in ways that I feel even in my home country, maybe with twice the amount of time, I would have not been able to do that. I didn't have necessarily a skillset. Like again, I worked labor jobs to save up the, yeah, 20K. It might not sound in theory now when I talk about like marketing selling campaigns and things like that. Like you might think, or people might think, oh, 20K is not that much. Trust me when.

22:15
When you land with three four hundred bucks in a pocket twenty kates a lot of money to put into something to start something Like you don't even know a Do you even have the option to to get it back if something fails? No but The American dream in my opinion. It's it's a hundred percent Here and it's possible regardless of your background regardless What you look like?

22:42
and regardless of your skill set. Now, yes, you have to work hard on improving that skill set because I could have worked hard, trust me, when we talk about hard work, like working seven days a week, 13, 14 hour days, 13, 14 hour hours every single day, doesn't matter if I would have worked 23 hours, I could have probably made a few extra hundred bucks. So hard work is not everything. You have to really work on improving.

23:11
doing the skill set and the value that it can bring on the marketplace to be able to advance in the you know, in the next on the next level of what you want to achieve. But to everyone that says, Yes, you know, US has gone through some some tough times lately. However, I still believe to this day, you can achieve and regardless where you're coming from, you can achieve whatever you want to achieve as long as you're putting put your mind into it and you're willing to work for it.

23:41
So we transitioned all of those skills you talked yourself into the marketing machine that eventually became the personal branding ninja. Yeah, you're talking about my Instagram account. Oh yeah. It's funny how that name came up. One, I searched, so one I searched for the personal branding username. Obviously that was not available. I tried to buy it, the guy didn't wanna sell it. Anyway, and then the ninja came with

24:11
the fact that I'm practicing jujitsu and one guy saw a couple of stories of mine. Um, and we were, we were actually at the gym and then he saw the stories of me doing marketing and he was like, what? So now you're a marketing ninja. And I'm like, Oh crap. I didn't even realize about cause marketing, cause of the gear that I, that I was wearing. And it was a black gear at the gym. So I'm like, damn, maybe I'm not a marketing ninja, but

24:38
personal branding ninja doesn't sound too bad. And he was like, Oh, what's personal branding? And then I started to talk about this and then that's how that username actually came up. Uh, and I even bought the domain personal branding ninja.com. Hey, there you go. How much did you have to pay for the personal branding ninja.com? Can you just vault that? Was it expensive? I think five bucks. Oh, okay. I thought you meant like someone owned it already.

25:04
No, no, no, no. But what's funny is the reason that I said, all right, the reason that I broke my account, my main account, my personal name, Marian Villasano into this was, you know, I also invest in real estate, Airbnb stuff, like we buy, we renovate, and then we put it on Airbnb, keep it for two, three years, and then we sell it. And then also some self storage stuff.

25:33
There are some things in there that I cannot talk blended with, I shouldn't say cannot. It's not a good idea to try to go so broad because people that are trying to build their business by using marketing techniques, they're not necessarily yet at the level of wanting to learn about real estate investing or things like that. So my content strategy would have gone too crazy. So I said, all right, I'm going to break it down. I hired an Instagram coach and then kind of we went to, all right, we have two options.

26:03
other stuff that I want to talk about, like business acquisition, real estate, things like that, and then keep that for marketing or the other way around. And I said, all right, let me just do this because personal branding is more, it's really more of my passion and it's a kind of sub niche of it. But hear me out. I'm going to prove that I can build a personal brand account without having necessarily my name. Yes, it's my face attached to it.

26:32
I know. I kind of want to see this. I was wondering, I wanted to get to this. I'm glad you went there. I'm like, are you going to build? How's he going to do this? Cause I couldn't find your name. You know, like when we first hooked up, I got to find your name and then we, we DMed and, you know, it kind of worked itself out, but I'm like, this is interesting. So that account it's yes, all the content it's about personal branding and how people can, you know, the pros and cons of personal brand and things like that. But it's going to be its own asset.

27:01
And I've got to prove that I can build a personal brand account as a sellable asset. So by the time that the strategy is complete, I'm going to be able to sell personal branding Ninja as a full blown brand, having courses attached to it, having consulting attached to it, having everything and other people will be able to run it now is just the beginning of it. I'm going to refer back to this podcast episode. This is the first time that I actually shared that. Ah, I like it.

27:30
We'll cut it off and we'll do an episode 12 months from now and do a follow up to see where we're at with the Ninja account. So let's give, you know, we've had some good background. We've, let's give, what's in the playbook? What's in the personal branding playbook for you? You know, maybe for listeners that are.

27:56
heard me talk about it, heard, I've had a few other people on that promote it, but what's kind of like in your go-to playbook for building your personal brand? For my own or for what I do? Just in general, for how you talk to people, like give me some of the, to use, I'll use an American football terminology, the blocking and the tackling, like the, you gotta have it, you know? Yeah, 100%. So the first thing that I,

28:25
Always, and I talk about this almost every day in my IG content and YouTube and stuff. The most important thing that people should not, I mean, this is one of the biggest mistakes that people do is they try to start a personal brand from scratch without researching. My thing is always don't try to reinvent the wheel. Now I'm not saying to copy anyone, but I'm talking don't try like, doesn't matter the topics that you're trying to talk about.

28:55
I guarantee, we are in 2022, everything is online already. You'll find information about the topics that you wanna talk about on every platform. So at first, the most important thing in my opinion should be let's look at five direct competitors and five indirect competitors. Now five direct competitors could, like I'll take myself as an example, right? When I started kind of doing my research for myself. Look at five direct competitors, but direct competitors could also be people that are

29:24
way bigger that you're trying to compare yourself with. So, you know, if I think about personal branding space, I can think about Gary Veeb, Louis House, Brendan Bouchard, Grant Cardone, even though he's known as the sales and the real estate guy, he talks about this a lot. And a lot of other people, Frank Kern, even though he's more like the direct response, but these five have such a

29:53
unique approach, even though they all cover marketing and personal branding to an extent, they have a unique approach to it. So that's the first thing they will have to understand. They have a unique approach even though they all cover it. They all have their own kind of little thing that they started with. And if we look at the content that they create today, they didn't start creating it five, 10, 20 years ago when they started their brands. So that's what a lot of people don't realize is they try to

30:23
mimic what these big brands are doing. But then when you actually look at the audience size that they have, these people can actually post a blank or a full blown black picture and they'll get likes and comments on it. When you're just starting out, you don't have that luxury. And even to that extent, you look at people, like let's say you look at Gary Vee and you see that he has an audience of 10 million people and then you try to do some research on the reels that he's posting and then you see reels that have

30:53
100 to 300,000 views, you think, oh, that's a crazy successful reel. If you ask one of his team members, they'll say, that's a really poor performing because the audience is 10 million and the reels only have 100,000 views. I mean, in their scenario, that reel is a poor performing piece of content. So that's number one. Number two.

31:19
is you have to also pick five indirect competitors and five competitors that are really closer in size of the audience that you have. So if I'm just starting out, like now I just started this personal branding Ninja account, right, like I have like 200 followers now. So I look at accounts that are a thousand, five thousand, 10,000, like much closer to an audience size and see what content it's actually performing for them. When I say performing is the amount of views

31:49
have to have at least two to three times the size of the audience. So if the guy has a thousand followers, I look at reels that are three thousand plus views. And then you also look at the amount of comments, because we all know, like, engagement can be, especially likes and views can also be bought and things like that. So you have to be paying attention to those things as well. But content research is one of the most important things. Now, the platform that I like to do the research is also...

32:18
TikTok, even though we're talking about Instagram at first, the reason that I like TikTok is you can actually add the filter. So you type in, let's say, in my case, personal branding hashtag. So I look at the filter, personal branding hashtag, I type that hashtag, and then I select the filter. I wanna see content using this hashtag that has been the most liked within the last three to six months. So what that's gonna show me is,

32:46
the content that actually people like, not what the creator like. And then I start to go in down that rabbit hole and understand what people actually liked and what they engage with and why. And then what's also important about TikTok, they added this SEO feature in the last couple of months, and you can see the exact key phrases that people search for using that hashtag. So now you're gonna see, you know, other key phrases that people search for, personal brand new tips.

33:16
Yeah, exactly. The long like you see the exact things that people search for, not just the hashtags, right? And then you take that hashtag and then now you go to Instagram and you search for the hashtag and then you look at the most recent and the most engaged, um, on the homepage using that hashtag. And you can even follow hashtags on Instagram. And then you start going inside of these accounts and you see what kind of questions people ask in the comments. Now, yes, this is a tedious, um,

33:44
process because you have to understand what people are actually engaging with, not what the creator, because sometimes the content that I like to create is different than what my audience wants to see. But even to that extent, you should find the sweet spot in between because if something doesn't feel authentic, you should not try to force it because people will realize that. For example, I'm not necessarily a guy that...

34:10
jokes come easily. Like I'll never try to fake a joke in my content because it's just not my way of doing it. Like if me and you have a beer and we talk about stuff, like you realize I don't bring up a lot of funny jokes because it's just not natural to me. So I try to relate that in my content and some people will like it and some people will be like, oh but I wish more jokes would be in the content. That's cool. I wish too.

34:36
but I'm not the type of person to do it. So I'm not trying to fake it. I'm not trying to force it. You'll bring a comedian on to do it for you. Yeah, exactly. So maybe I'll interview somebody that's funnier than me. Maybe I'll do a collaboration with someone that's funnier than me, but I'm not trying to fake something that I'm not. Then next, so this is the organic side of things. So you'll see a lot of different trends in this process. You'll see what people kind of pointing on the screen to adding a bunch of different texts.

35:06
Some of them are cool, some of them are pretty good for the brand that you're trying to create. Like for example, recently, like two days ago, one of my wife videos got like three million views. Wow. But it was a remix of a video and it was more of a like a gross type of topic and like somebody's eye was like really like looking bad and then it was an infection, things like that. Oh, not a crazy eye. It was like a crazy eye looking the wrong way or something.

35:35
She was trying to put the eyelashes on and he had a crazy eye looking at her. So the video brought a lot of followers but virality of these videos, you know, that's not necessarily a topic that you can or your audience would benefit if you create every day. Yeah. Yes, one of those videos, it's cool from, you know, from time to time to kind of

36:03
add a little bit of the negativity and positivity at the same time. Negativity, not from a negative way, almost from a bad situation type of thing into your content. But if it goes viral and you get a bunch of followers that really aren't interested in your core topic, then it hadn't done you any good. Exactly. So in her case was good because people, so the topic was

36:30
an infection of an eye. So he was on a beauty account. But imagine having a video like that going viral on my account or your account because you're trying to relate it back to your industry. It would be weird. Yeah. Like, damn, I'm just trying to get some personal brand people. But yeah, but some of the trends, some of the trends you might feel how you can actually relate them back to your industry.

36:56
So, an example that I can give was I saw a video of a chick that was running. So the caption in the headline said something like, when one of my friends says to me, let's meet up for a drink, and she was running with a bottle of wine, pouring wine. So the video got like 60 million views. So what I did is I recreated that trend and I said something when my clients are saying

37:23
I can only create a real if we can have a drink before. And then I was doing the wine being poured in the glass. So you know that's one example that you can if it's something that you feel hey this type of joke it's not to the level that you would not create like I could I could see myself saying something like that you can try to mimic it back to your industry if it feels right for you. So that's the whole thing like you have to make sure that you do it right.

37:52
So this is the organic part, right? And a lot of people stop there. My strategy is I look at it from a business standpoint and I'm like, all right, now let's go to facebook.com forward slash ads forward slash library and let's look at those competitors and see what they sell. And that's the part where a lot of people don't even bother going because they think, oh, I'm building my personal brand. I don't want to spend money on ads. Well, you look at it the wrong way.

38:22
Because if you are able to figure out a way to actually be profitable at the same time, you're going to want to invest as much as possible. That's why a lot of people, they only think of themselves as content creator without thinking, oh, I can monetize this even from the get-go. Because if you use paid ads, regardless if you have zero followers, you can actually push your content in front of...

38:51
such a bigger audience. And as long as you create an authentic product and the product can be literally, you know, this can be one-on-one access to you, this can be group coaching, this can be all kinds of like online courses or even products like physical products, you can actually expedite that process of getting a really targeted audience because again,

39:18
going viral, it's cool, you cannot control who sees that. If your audience in US, but your video goes viral in India and Mongolia and other countries that maybe your audience is not necessarily the people that would buy the product. Now, it's nothing wrong with a lot of eyeballs on the video, but if the audience is not targeted, moving forward, if you're only getting views, but you're not able to convert them into sales.

39:45
What's the purpose of that time being spent on just, you know, creating content every day without doing anything with it. Yeah. So, I mean, you're, you're in this game for like way longer than I was. Um, but you've, you've learned a lot by young Jedi. But, uh, that didn't even train you, trained yourself. You're the, you're the, the ninja that trained himself, you know? But the reason that I love paid traffic so much is you can.

40:14
tell the platform exactly who you want to attract and who you want your content to be seen. So in my opinion, that's really where people should not stop. That's where people should actually start going even deeper, even if it's just from a research standpoint. So everybody can go to facebook.com forward slash ads forward slash library and type in the actual direct competitor or indirect competitor, and then look at what ads they're creating.

40:44
look at especially for how long they've been running those ads because if they've been pumping money for the last three months on the same piece of content, that means that money. Exactly. Like a big brand or not necessarily a big brand but a personal brand, one of your direct competitors or indirect competitors, if they're spending money on an ad for the last three months, it means it brings them a positive ROI.

41:13
It means that whatever they sell, and you can literally click on that learn more button or swipe up or whatever it is and look at what's the message on the sales page. Look at what's the message in the funnel. Now again, I want to make sure people understand I'm not talking about copying anything. You shouldn't actually, and you shouldn't really copy what they say. You should get inspired and you should look at the products that they're selling. And if that person is selling a product that you know you can make it better.

41:41
Well, that's your niche. That's the product right there. So I feel like a lot of people kind of either stop when it comes to paid traffic, especially when it comes to their personal brand, or they just don't think of it to the long-term aspect of being a business and not just being the content creator of things. I think it goes back to that keyword of brand and brand being, in this instance, what I'm talking about is like the

42:10
business. When you think about yourself, even if, you know, again, you're not building the business around you, but you're trying to promote yourself. Organic reach is just so minimal now. Like the, the social media networks, I mean, tick tock. Yeah, you can still get some, but it's at the right audience. But like you have to pay to get amplified, to get more people, to see who you are and to see these messages. And you, you can,

42:38
You could be the most interesting person on earth. You could be the prettiest person on earth and just growing organically with the audience that you want to build a business around is truly the slow boat to China from South Carolina. No. Yeah. And it's so true. And also another thing that people don't realize is they can use these two organic and paid together.

43:08
If you have a couple of videos that have performed and you know that there are the videos that are the right videos to be shown to a much bigger audience, it's just for forever. Is that the algorithm didn't recognize that? Yep. Um, those are the videos that you can start pushing. Like you just put, put a couple of hundred bucks behind one piece of content. If you already, if it's proven that it already worked with an organic audience, just show it to more people, uh, and have a simple call to action, like a DM me.

43:37
And that's even going to bring you up a much better reach because now Instagram, for example, they see the fact that, Hey, this person, it's paying to get people to stay more on the platform because now you start a conversation with them on in DM. Once you start engaging with them in the DM, you're going to see their content. They're going to see yours. So it starts a whole different snowball effect of more interactions.

44:05
And as long as your content relates to the audience, of course they're gonna engage more. So it's such a great way of kind of combining these two, these two worlds, because I feel like there are two separate worlds, like the organic and then the paid. Yeah, so most people you work with, they come to you and are they trying to sell a book? Are they trying to sell courses like?

44:30
You helped them kind of build out a full funnel around their personal brand as long, as well as like coaching them on how to build it. Exactly. Um, we don't do that done for you. Um, for the last probably a year, we stopped offering the whole, uh, program of, we're not doing it for people anymore because we realized a lot of people that we were doing it for once we stopped, um, helping them with for whatever reasons, you know, they say, oh, I would get now. Then they.

45:01
started to like kind of really struggle with. So now we kind of work either with their team, if they're a two, three person shop, or we train them. And then we have different ways to kind of work together for a longer period of time if it's recurring for a while. But we don't necessarily do it for them. Like, yes, we hand them a lot of like templates that they can just modify themselves, but we need them to really understand everything that happens behind the scenes. So we

45:34
easier for them to just hire a virtual assistant that can do the implementation of the technical stuff like, you know, installing the pixel and copying, copying and pasting that code on a page and things like that. That's all in a, in a gated area, in a course. And that stuff is just, all right, you can technically, if you type in on YouTube, how to generate your YouTube pixel or your Google pixel or your Facebook pixel or TikTok, whatever, you'll find that out. It's the strategy that really people are lacking. And that's what we really put our...

46:04
or working and then of course we hold their hand and we even give them access to some of our team members if they need you know but not not necessarily the full done for you we don't we stopped doing that about a year ago. You have your own podcast as well too right? Yep momentum. Momentum. Now is that is that a lead feeder or a relationship builder? I mean how to use it both?

46:31
It's both, yes, because it is pretty much the audience are people that are kind of going after the same type of questions and the same type of topics. So it is a lot of, now I interviewed people in various industries and topics, but it kind of all relates back to the main purpose, the whole personal branding aspect of things. And we try...

47:00
every time at the end of an episode to kind of, and you'll be on the show, what I think next week if I'm not wrong. Yes, look forward to it. We'll get some secrets out of you as well. But we're doing it in a way that at the end of an episode, we try to give people a short-term goal, something that they can do at the end of the episode and then a long-term goal for the next three months to kind of implement something. So it all relates back to at some point in time, people would need

47:29
some type of help from us, going from, you know, consuming that content into. I love it. You need help. Man. I feel like we could talk for hours on this. We both obviously live and breathe it and believe in it is, uh, let's tell everybody, uh, Morian where they can keep up with you. I think we've said it enough. They should, they're taking any kind of notes. They should know where that is.

47:56
Hard to present, man. So the easiest way is whatever the platform that people are consuming this episode, they can just type in Momentum Podcast and my show will pop up or they can just type in my name, Marion, Esano, M-A-R-I-A-N-E-S-A-N-U and then also my show will pop up and they can consume part two of, well not part two of this episode, but the interview with you, which is

48:26
other topics and you know other things that I went in depth about what I just shared on this episode. That's great. The personal branding ninja. And if they want to connect with me personally on Instagram especially about this topic I'm at personal branding ninja. Yes easy to find. I enjoyed it more and look forward to talking with you on your show.

48:54
100% man, me too. Hey guys, you know where to find us, theradcast.com. Search for personal reigning ninja. You'll find all the content from today. Highlights from Morian's and we'll even link to some of the show, we'll do a momentum. You know where to find me, I'm at Ryan Alford on all the platforms. I'm blowing up on TikTok, just like my buddy Morian. We'll see you over there. We'll see you next time on the Radcast.