Why Personal Branding Should Come AFTER You Build a Real Business | Marian Esanu

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2:14That's ponchooutdoors.com slash Ryan. P-O-N-C-H-O outdoors.com slash Ryan. R-Y-A-N. And when they ask you how you heard about them, let them know. Right about now, sent you. Taking time building a personal brand on a foundation of sand, it's time to engineer a digital persona that converts views into actual equity. Today, we're joined by the personal branding ninja, Marian Asanu, to deconstruct how to treat your reputation as a sellable asset instead of just a content feed. Get ready to hack your growth and amplify your authority. Here on Right About Now with Ryan Alford. What people don't realize is there are pros and cons of building a personal brand if you're not doing it at the right time.

3:00A 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. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hey guys, what's up? We're talking branding today.

3:39Branding of a personal nature. We're talking to Marian Asano. What's up, brother? What's going on, man? Thanks for having me. Hey, man. Good to have you. Personal branding ninja. You hit my feed. I got to talk to this ninja. I got to be honest. I've been doing personal branding for five years, marketing for 22. Anytime the ninja kind of goes, ninja anything comes across. Let me see what we're dealing with here. Skeptical. Here's another guy. Another guy. I watched your content, checked out your page. Okay. Mario knows what he's talking about. He's not full of crap. He's not full of shit. The personal branding term.

4:10Some people just roll their eyes at. I'm usually really good with words. I'm a good writer. What else can we call this? Maybe just to give it some fresh legs. We can call it digital persona, digital brand, the digitalization of a person, whatever you want to call it. 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 think about it. And yes, it's true in person, but it's also true online. If you are not there, does your content speak for itself in a way that doesn't feel weird or it doesn't feel fake? A lot of people are faking it until something doesn't even happen sometimes.

4:44Of 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 of my business slash entrepreneurial journey. I've also bought and sold a few brick and mortar companies. What people don't realize is, yes, it's cool. It sounds great. 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. Two, God forbid something happens. You're not able to create content for a while. Think about a brand as big as Tony Robbins, Brendan Bouchard, right?

5:16Like 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. The main topic of it, there are pros and cons of building a personal brand if you're not doing it at the right time. 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. You can be an enthusiast and there's nothing wrong with that.

5:46There's nothing wrong with putting up a YouTube channel and start doing 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. I've heard this interview from Gary V when a guy was actually trying to ask the hidden question to how can he be positioned as an expert when he's not an expert? And that's pretty much the simplest way to look at it. 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, if it's Instagram Reels, short form video.

6:20But in my opinion, the actual personal brand should be separated from the actual business for a couple of 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 in Boston. When COVID hit, the salons were one of the first businesses that were shut down because they were deemed not essential. I said to her, you've built this successful six-figure business from scratch. You have an expertise, you have a skillset.

6:50Let's look at what other people are doing. We looked online. We saw a lot of different people teaching what she was already doing at that point. She has this eyelash extension salon. 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 in-person certification, online certifications. Then we looked on Udemy. Then we did the research for organic content on YouTube. And then we understood, okay, people are selling online courses about how to do eyelash extensions.

7:20This is your thing. Even though she had experience and she had the skillset built, the first thing that came to mind, why would someone buy from me? Well, the reason that someone buy from me, first things first is that I said to her, you're not selling advice or you're not creating content for yourself now. You're creating content for yourself four years ago when you were trying to learn these things. 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?

7:49It was not a lot of business advice around how to build this type of brick and mortar shop. So I said to her, you can even start by just sharing the things that you've learned in the past and I'll even interview you. And then we started posting videos and then in just less than a year, her YouTube channel went to 23 ,000 subs. The podcast blew up, her Instagram blew up. Because why? She already built a 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.

8:20Because when you give 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. If you don't believe in what you sell, 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 lack the context of 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.

8:52This is how much I paid for these things. 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. So she could have been an enthusiast at that point. It's just she was running her previous company and going to school. So I didn't even have time to. But I think it's so interesting, the point you're making. there's a lot of misinformation or bad assumptions about why you should or shouldn't build your personal brand. And it's reputation. We all have a reputation. We all have things that we're good at or that we're specialized in.

9:25And social media affords this opportunity to amplify all of that reputation. And with that comes benefits. We all have cliques or things or people that are naturally drawn to us. In life, we move around. 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. If you don't know anyone, you're going to talk to people because we all have auras and things that go on. What social media does is it just 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.

10:01And that brings the benefits of connection that you never know where it's going to lead. more business opportunities, more friends, more just things. I tell people I have a personal brand, but I don't want to be famous. I have no desire to be superstar famous, but the more known I am, the more freedom I have. 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. The more known I am, the more business we do, the more money you make. I try to attribute it to the benefit to not make it about playing bows and flaunting money.

10:33I don't give a shit about that. It's just about amplifying reputation to attract more opportunity. In your case, and in a lot of different cases as well, you also look at the time that you invest. 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 value time and understand the whole aspect of, all 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. And a lot of people don't even understand this. The amount of money that you get paid for consulting or coaching or the amount of money of a deal that you can close on the phone right at this time in one hour can be 10, 20, 30 times more than the time that you spend here just doing a podcast.

11:15But you play the long game. A lot of people forget. Yeah, but a lot of people forget that. The name change of personal branding. You can't get rid of the word brand because I tell people sales overnight, brand over time. And brand is built. It's just brand is reputation. 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 a really bad week, but it's over time and it's built over time. 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.

11:50And people have a hard time because we're so driven. The irony of today is that we have these greater opportunities than ever to build brand when you're not a superstar or you're not running TV ads, but then the mindset of I got to have it now, I got to have it now, I got to 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 got to have it now. But you play the long game and you win. What's kind of like in your go-to playbook for building your personal brand? The most important thing that people do is they try to start a personal brand from scratch without researching.

12:23My thing is always don't try to reinvent the wheel. I I guarantee everything is online already. You'll find information about the topics that you want to 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. Five direct competitors could, like, I'll take myself as an example. When I started doing my research for myself, look at five direct competitors, but direct competitors could also be people that are way bigger than you're trying to compare yourself with. But if I think about personal branding space, I can think about Gary Vee, Lewis House, Brendan Bouchard, Grant Cardone, even though he's known as the sales and the real estate guy, he talks about this a lot.

13:03And a lot of other people, Frank Kern, even though he's more of a direct response. But these five have such 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 that we'll have to understand. They have a unique approach, even though they all covered. If we look at the content that they create today, they didn't start creating it 5, 10, 20 years ago when they started their brands. So that's what a lot of people don't realize is they try to 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.

13:41When you're just starting out, you don't have that luxury. And even to that extent, you look at people, 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 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 then the reels only have 100 ,000 views. In their scenario, that reel is a poor performing piece of content. That's number one.

14:10Number two is you have to also pick five indirect competitors and five competitors that are really closer in size of the audience that you have. If I'm just starting up now, I just started this personal branding ninja account, right? Like I have like 200 followers now. I look at accounts that are a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, much closer in audience size and see what content it's actually performing for them. When I say performing is the amount of views 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 views that are 3000 plus views.

14:43And then you also look at the amount of comments because we all know engagement, 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 thing. The platform that I like to do the research is also 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.

15:09I want to see content using this hashtag that has been the most liked within the last three to six months. So what that's going to show me is 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 and you can see the exact key phrases that people search for using that hashtag. So now you're going to see other key phrases that people search for. Long tail. Tips. Yeah, exactly. The long, like you see the exact things that people search for, not just the hashtags.

15:44And 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 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. Yes, this is a tedious 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.

16:20So you'll see a lot of different trends in this process. You'll see what people pointing on the screen to adding a bunch of different texts. Some of them are cool. Some of them are pretty good for the brand that you're trying to create. Let's tell everybody, Morian, where they can keep up with you. 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, Marian Asano, M-A-R-I-A-N-E-S-A-N-U. And then also my show will pop up. Also other topics and their things that I went in depth about what I just shared on this episode.

16:56That's great. The personal branding ninja. And if they want to connect with me personally on Instagram. Yes. Easy to find. You can find me. I'm at Ryan Alford on all the platforms. We'll see you over there. We'll see you next time. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanIsRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.

17:26We'll see you next time.