Building an audience is exponentially simpler if you use your personal brand.

But there’s a natural resistance to putting yourself out there. I totally get that - I too felt that resistance!

Overcoming this resistance and committing to connecting yourself to your audience growth will be the biggest lever you can pull.

The rest of this Playbook is entirely doable without attaching yourself to the project but will be much slower and (likely) expensive.

This Part will convince you of the necessity of leaning into your personal brand.

Let’s get started:

Personal brand is the concept of attaching yourself, as an individual, to a company.

Instead of relying on the business’ brand you utilise yourself - your words, your image, your personality, your story, your journey. All to build an audience.

The core reason personal brand works is simple: people connect with people.

Ultimately we love to follow, interact with and (eventually) buy from actual people.

Wonder why podcast advertising is so popular? It’s because we listen to our favourite podcast hosts for hundreds or thousands of hours. Maybe we hear their voice more than our loved ones! So when that host does an ad read we’re pre-sold. We know, like and trust them and by extension their recommendations- even when we know it’s an ad!

Even huge corporations know this - hence the use of spokespersons, mascots and brand partners (like Michael Jordan). They attach individuals to their massive corporate structures to provide “a face”.

As normal (!) I’ve written a whole Playbook on just this subject. It’s available here: https://promptentrepreneur.beehiiv.com/p/personal-branding-in-the-age-of-ai-part-1

Comparative advantage

As someone growing a business your personal brand becomes a comparative advantage.

You (likely) can’t outspend competitors with advertising. Not yet. So you need to lean into every advantage you have. And, as a solopreneur or small team, you can do this by being an actual human being.

And that resistance you are feeling? Your competitors are feeling that too.

It’s much easier to remain anonymous online. It’s also less effective.

Even in the busy AI space (where I operate) very few content creators are open with their personal brand. Or they take a half measure of being open in text and not video. Video is far more open and accessible which scares people.

This has allowed me personally to rapidly expand my audience on a platform like Tiktok (65,000 followers in 3 months) because I can count my direct competition on one hand.

That same resistance stopping you right now means that, if you break through it, you could be looking at a nice empty playing field.

What would I even talk about?

A natural next question is wondering what you’d even talk about. And whether anyone would want to listen!

This is lack of confidence speaking.

I always recommend working in a niche that you know well - one that you have expertise in (or at least know more than your customer). Your expertise becomes your content, all wrapped up in your personal brand.

In the next Parts we’ll talk specifics of content marketing - what are you content pillars and how to deliver value.

What’s important now though is realising you do not need to be a world class expert to build an audience based on your brand.

You just need to be able to provide value to potential customers.

In fact, going too deep into your expertise may kill your business as it naturally limits your audience. There are always more people interested in or beginners in your topic than their are up at your current level.

In my world of AI entrepreneurship the wide content I put out (ie. to millions of viewers) is also the most basic. Anything complex and immediately I lose my audience. This is the case across niches.

You just need to know enough to be able to provide value to people below your knowledge level. And that comes not from having a PhD in the subject but instead in being able to empathise with your audience members and pitch your content at the right level.

Honestly, if anything, having a PhD would make that much harder for you!

We’ll discuss different levels of content later but for now just know that you need to know a little more than your customers to be able to provide value.

Authenticity

Personal branding works because it’s (ugh) authentic. This is a bit of marketing buzz word but there’s truth to it.

Audiences (and customers) don’t fall for glitzy sales tactics. They are too smart now.

Instead we buy from people we like and trust. Because of who they are.

That mean that our content doesn’t need to be highly scripted, professionally shot and perfectly edited. In fact that style content is doing worse and worse. Audiences don’t trust it.

For you, just getting started with building an audience, the stars are aligned. What works now for marketing content is:

• raw, authentic content from a real person

• education over entertainment

• substance over style

• lo-fi production values

• longer running rather than hyper edited videos

All great news for you, as a business owner, getting started as it means focusing on value value value - which we should already be doing.

You lose all of these advantages if you don’t want to put your personal brand on your content. It’s doable but is going to require a lot more polish, production and promotion.

Going raw also means that anyone with a phone can make and publish content. There aren’t any excuses.

Well, apart from psychological blocks!

Everyone has their own and it’s tricky to cover them all (that’ll take a week). However, I am running a 30 Day cohort soon that’ll blitz through your blocks to producing content, especially short video content. There’s a waitlist here if you aren’t already on it: https://aibusinessbreakthrough.com/waitlist

Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that personal brand is a powerful tool. If that’s all I convince you off in the Playbook I’m happy!

The rest of the Playbook will assume you are on board with this and are following using a personal rather than corporate brand. But it will still be doable if using a faceless corporate brand, just…more difficult!