The Counterintuitive Process to Gaining Influence that Almost No One Uses
How to build a personal brand the right way
The worst way to build a personal brand is to try and build a personal brand, yet it’s exactly what most content creators do.
It’s the ethos of trying that causes them to fail.
Think about it this way…
What’s the hallmark of someone who people consider to be cool?
They’re cool because they’re not trying to be cool. People gravitate toward them because they don’t need people to be in their life.
Contrast this with someone who people consider to be a “try hard.” They try a little bit too hard to get attention. They try a little bit too hard to display how cool they are.
Ultimately, it backfires.
This is what I see in the content creation game today.
Too many creators are trying. They lack that joie de vivre.
They spend so much time trying to figure out how to be successful that they forget the main ingredient of being a successful content creator.
The best content creators have, you know, a personality.
Too many creators only pay attention to half of the phrase when it comes to building a personal brand.
Let’s talk about some ways you can fix that.
Master the Art of Detachment
A mentor of mine used to say:
“The price of needing it to work is that it doesn’t work.”
Some of your best pieces of content will come from ideas you’re not fully sure of, yet released into the world anyway.
You’ll never achieve those outcomes if you gear all of your content for maximum engagement by taking the safe plays.
Safe plays include things like:
Sharing Twitter threads with “10 websites that should be illegal”
Speaking only in platitudes and sound bites
Constantly sounding too positive, too inspirational, too on brand, too on the nose.
The last one is the biggest marker of someone who’s playing it too safe. All of their content is on the nose.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from someone in their niche — zero rough edges, zero risk-taking, and zero chance of potentially harsh criticism.
Most content creators avoid experimentation because they’re too attached to the results.
They need that post to pop. They need the numbers to grow. They need to be seen as the next [insert influencer here] instead of just being themselves.
You shouldn’t abandon the commercial mindset of content creation altogether, but if you do it to the extreme, you’ll just end up looking and sounding like everyone else.
Try this approach instead.
Play the Branding Game, But Find Your Personal Edge
Have 80 percent of your content come from foundational content creation principles and use the other 20 percent to add your personal flair.
For example, I will swipe a common writing technique, but I’ll add my little twist to it.
I will use the framework like a listicle, but the content inside of the post will be a little different than most other list posts.
You use the common content creation approach to set their expectations, then you use your personal flair to break their expectations.
I can’t tell you how many times a reader has said:
“I thought this was going to be another one of those bland list-posts, but I was pleasantly surprised.”
Here are some of the things I personally do in my content that add personal flair and help me stand out:
I have a naturally politically incorrect disposition, so I don’t try to be politically correct in my content. It’s polarizing, but the ones who love it really love it
I will kill any sacred cow in my niche if it’s something I genuinely disagree with
From my perspective, at least, I tell the truth without any sugarcoating
When I am explaining concepts, I use my personal story to show how I practiced what I preach
I do a little trolling and shitposting from time to time
Where do you find your edge?
You have to go to the extremes of your own personality. Take however you naturally are and multiply it times ten in your content.
If you’re an analytical nerd, write deep analytically nerdy content about your topic.
If you’re an emotive empath vulnerable over-sharer type, spill your guts onto the page.
If you’re a joke cracker in real life, crack jokes and inject humor into your writing.
Ultimately, your edge only comes from what I’m about to tell you next.
Imitate, Emulate, Separate
The newer you are to the content creation game, the more likely you are to imitate successful content creators.
It’s natural.
We’ve been learning via imitation since we were babies.
In the beginning, you’re just plagiarizing people’s style — the imitation phase.
Next, comes the emulation phase.
Instead of trying to blatantly sound like others, you start to think about the underlying frame underneath their ideas.
You’re not copying their content, you’re modeling it. You don’t just try to create what they create, you try to think what they think.
There’s a classic copywriting technique where you hand-copy sales pages, not to copy them for yourself, but to put yourself in the shoes of the person who wrote it and siphon their energy for your own persuasive and creative purposes.
Last, the point most creators never reach, comes the separation phase. You’re so confident in your own creative abilities you no longer even pay attention to other creators.
You have your own special blend of herbs and spices that others are trying to copy and model.
In the beginning, your work is mechanical and rigid because you have no creative muscle memory.
After time, the creative techniques you pick up will become part of your subconscious, so you can just make stuff without thinking.
Eventually, you reach the point where the content just flows out of you. Well, it’s not coming from you, exactly. It comes from “the source.”
Some people call it a daemon, others call it the collective intelligence of the universe, and others call it God.
Every interpretation has this in common.
You’re no longer trying. You’re letting the creativity flow from the source.
You get there by trying, by copying, and by modeling, but it’s not a place you want to stay in forever.
Do the long and hard work, through constant creation and iteration, of finding out what makes you…you.
Links to other cool stuff you might enjoy
Watch this webinar replay I co-hosted with Self-Publishing School to learn how to write a best-selling book
Take my free 5-day course that teaches you how to make a living writing on Medium
Buy my best-selling book - Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement
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The Counterintuitive Process to Gaining Influence that Almost No One Uses
💯So many creators miss the ‘personal’ part of building a personal brand.
Nice post. It's a lot to unpack, but good stuff.