Just started your content creation journey and don’t know what you’re doing? This is for you.
You made content. Little to no engagement. You think it’s the topic you chose or that you’re not smart/funny/entertaining enough. You try a bunch of different things, but the more you create for your audience, the more you find yourself moving away from the stuff you love most.
Here’s how I can help.
I will teach you a framework for how to stay true to yourself while making content that resonates with your audience, and we do that by understanding what brand really means.
If your weakness is structure, I’m here to provide that for you in these newsletters. There are many frameworks for building your brand, but this is the way I’m doing it.
What you need is…
A compass.
You might be wandering about trying to stumble upon the right ideas or content or don’t even know what to create in the first place. That’s because you don’t have direction. Here is the compass for a content creator — a brand strategy. By using this effectively you will become one step closer to becoming the content creator you want to be while providing immense value for your audience.
Buckle in. It may be a bit long, but I promise it’s worth the read.
The Personal Brand Components
The 6 definitions to know for creating your personal brand:
Brand: “A person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company” - Marty Neumeier
Purpose: why you exist beyond just money
Vision: what are the future goals
Mission: how you get there
Values: your core beliefs that guide your decision-making
Passions & Interests: what inspires you and makes you wake up with excitement everyday?
I always provide examples because they are effective teaching tools.
Here’s one brand that everyone knows — Apple.
Apple’s brand components:
Purpose: Changing the world for the better and improving people’s lives
Vision: To make the best products on Earth
Mission: By bringing the best user experience to its customers through its innovative hardware, software, and services.
Values: Accessibility, Education, Environment, Inclusion and Diversity, Privacy, Racial Equity and Justice, Supplier Responsibility
Notice I left #6 out. This is specifically for your personal brand, so it doesn’t apply to Apple — you are the product, the service, and the company. Your passions and interests will be the most important thing to address because it’s the fuel for your engine.
Let’s talk about that before we hop back into the other brand components.
"Passion is the most important thing in life. If you don't have passion, you don't have energy, you don't have drive, you don't have the will to succeed." - Tony Robbins
There are going to be two types of people reading this: those who know their passions and interests and those who don’t.
The litmus test for finding your passion is this big question:
What are you willing to sacrifice your time and energy for every single day and gets you excited to wake up for in the morning?
I wrote this first letter because…
This was inspired by a web 3 friend who is trying to make his content work for web 3. Typically I sleep in on my Saturdays, but this morning I was inspired to write this newsletter after weeks of deliberating what topic. He had a problem and I wanted to solve it, and I did it through using my passions and interests. I have a deep passion for learning and more recently entrepreneurship and content creation. Being a learner also means that I love to teach and share knowledge to help others, so I’m doing it through writing (an interest) as the primary medium.
Your interests will be what you enjoy but not necessarily the things that you’re always willing to go the extra mile for. I love gaming. I love martial arts. I love playing the piano, but I don’t necessarily love doing this every single day. These are just as important though because with your interests come different perspectives and they tie together with your unique personality.
Use this big guiding question and these descriptions to identify your passions and interests. If you can’t do this, then you need to try everything out and experiment until you find something that does excite you.
The Brand Strategy Framework
Identify your brand components
Define your target audience
Find your differentiator
There are more complex frameworks, but for a personal brand this 3-step framework is what I recommend using.
For the brand components, all you need to do is answer those questions that I outlined for you. Here’s the thing though — you’re 99% likely to change them again and again. The point of my letter is to bring awareness to this concept. On your journey as a content creator, you will continually question why, how, and what you do and that’s completely normal. As you push out content, you will recognize what you’re naturally good at or what you gravitate towards.
Before I start explaining steps 2 and 3, let’s dive a little deeper into the brand components in case it still doesn’t make sense to you.
Purpose
I didn’t know my purpose for a while, but I realized this after being miserable for 2 years out in the middle of Twentynine Palms as a US Navy dentist.
God, I hated this place.
I was stuck. I didn’t have the freedom to do what I wanted or be with the people that I love. I felt like I had no purpose and as a result I had this big realization — I just needed a fulfilling life.
“Fulfillment” to me just means “for life to be enough.” I want to do the things I love doing and to be around the people that I love. Now I want to help others do the same and that is my purpose. Your purpose will typically be general and potentially relate to the eternal markets: health, wealth, and happiness. It may stem from your deepest insecurities and your darkest place. It might also be from your best place, so think about it.
Vision and Mission
How do you see the future and what will you do to achieve that? That’s the vision and mission. They often go together. Read Apple’s vision and mission back-to-back.
Mr. Beast’s vision was “to be the most successful YouTuber by creating the best videos on the planet.” My vision (currently) is to create a successful business while being part-time and replace my 9-5 job by productizing my specific knowledge for the next 2 years.
Values
Your values are one-word descriptors or phrases that ultimately drive your decision making.
Mine are: life-long learning, creativity, wisdom, accountability, and grit.
Defining Your Target Audience
This is the most important part of the entire brand strategy. You need to create an avatar of your target audience, but it’s actually not too hard to do because your audience is actually — you.
Doing customer research can be a very difficult and extensive process if you are creating a brand for a product/service/company, but in this case you’re not. You’re creating a personal brand and you know yourself better than anyone. That’s who you’re going to target, people just like you. They share the same problems and needs.
Get your notebook out and answer these questions:
What are your core needs?
What are your frustrations?
What are your motivations?
What challenges do you have?
How can I help these people just like me?
Again I’ll use myself as an example. I’m a young professional who needs to find fulfillment in what I do every single day. My main frustration is being employed and just being a cog in the system that I want to break out of. My motivation is to inspire others to do the same, so that they, too, can have freedom and build wealth. My challenge involves having to learn new skills from scratch with no roadmap and a lack of experience outside the health industry in order to achieve my entrepreneurial goals. The best way for me to help others in my situation is to figure out how to do it, document it, and then teach them how to do it too. Hence, this newsletter.
Boom. Guess what?
It took me a whole year to get to these answers. I’ll likely change them again as I accumulate new beliefs, traits, and skills.
The Differentiator
The differentiator is what makes you unique in the marketplace. In a saturated market, you can’t just make generic content or be boring.
So how do you be unique?
By skill stacking. I stumbled upon this in Naval Ravikant’s “How To Get Rich” where he references Scott Adam’s “skill stacking” concept. Here’s a good resource that explains this further in detail.
The basic idea is that it’s very difficult to be in the top 1% of an industry. However, it’s relatively easy to be in the top 25% of something.
Scott is a comic artist and his skill stack is drawing + writing + business + work ethic + risk tolerance + a sense of humor.
This weird combo not only makes it very difficult for others to compete with you, but now you use it as leverage for your personal brand. Replicate this concept for yourself.
How I’m doing it.
As a jack-of-all-trades, I always struggled figure out how to provide value with my seemingly useless skills. The key is to find how they can all connect. As you think more about it you will also find skills or attributes that weren’t so obvious to you before. For example, as a healthcare professional, I learned how to diagnose patients, which is basically a mix between knowing how to ask good questions and critical thinking. Little did I know, I found that in my web 3 client discovery calls that I was great at building trust and giving my clients the confidence that I could solve their problems, something that I practice everyday in my career without realizing it before.
In this newsletter, I combine my ability to write with teaching and specific knowledge on branding and content creation — all of which that I’ve studied extensively, had experience helping others with, and applying it to my own personal brand.
Special thanks to The Futur, Marty Neumeier, Devin Nash, Alex Hormozi, and Naval Ravikant.
Conclusion
Finally. The very end. Congratulations for getting through my first letter and for reading a very, very comprehensive guide. By now, you should understand what the brand components are, how to define your target audience, and how to differentiate yourself.
I never got to answer the main question, but I will now:
You stay true to yourself by making content that you love and are passionate about while keeping in mind who your audience is and what their needs, challenges, frustrations, etc. are so that you can provide value to them.
One last thing before I say goodbye.
I would love some feedback. Is this something that was helpful for you? Was it too long? Was it too boring? Was it even relevant? Please let me know! Regardless, thank you all for reading and until next time. Any specific questions will help me create useful newsletters to help you solve your problem.
- Will N
Really enjoyed this read. Usually I don’t tend to read all the way through the mountain of NL’s I get through but this was genuinely valuable. I like the way you write, it’s understandable and you move from topic to topic really nicely.
I liked your advice on maintaining and building a brand - something very relevant for me atm - and a lot I will take away. And your comments on how your audience is, in fact, yourself, and it’s good to use this as a point of reference.
Amazing job on your first NL! Dropping a subscribe and looking forward to the next!