How To Leverage Your Expertise Into A Profitable Personal Brand
You don’t need a big audience
“Hasan, you should go in my place.”
I froze. Seriously? Me?
It was late 2017. Ash Ali, my friend, and investment partner was talking about a huge 3-day international startup summit in Dubai, where he was going to be flown in as a speaker and mentor to thousands of tech startup founders in attendance from all over the world.
I’d had my share of business success, but I never felt like I was there yet to go and ‘share my wisdom’ and be a mentor. I didn’t think I could compare to Ash who headed up the growth of Just Eat — a startup that IPO’d for billions.
Over the course of the year we’d been working together he’d seen something in me and wasn’t taking no for an answer. “They’ll love you. You’ll see. You know a ton more than you think”.
So there I was, with my ‘Mentor’ lanyard, feeling out of my depth on a manmade desert island on the outskirts of Dubai, where they’d built this huge summit. Here I was getting thrown into the deep end of public speaking, with an audience in the thousands. Despite my nerves, the way the startup founders’ faces lit up invigorated me to share more of the insights and stories I had of launching my own business.
This was only a few years ago. Today, guiding others is what I do full time.
Since that first speaking event, I’ve given a highly rated TEDx talk, and my debut book has been published to wide acclaim. I can now add ‘bestselling business author’, in addition to ‘award-winning’ to my name. Without any self-doubt, I am now recognized as an expert. I’m now coaching, teaching, and mentoring huge startups, entrepreneurs, and interestingly, other personal brand businesses.
These were a new generation of ‘knowledge influencers’ who were helping to teach and level up their audiences, whether they were building their brand on Medium, YouTube, or TikTok. I’m talking about people with millions of subscribers and followers like Ali Abdaal.
Along my journey to becoming a respected thought leader, I’ve learned we often underestimate how much we can teach others and the door-opening power of building your personal brand as an expert.
Deep down I’d always known I could help people, but I made excuses like not knowing where to start. There are many people who have expertise and experience, and illustrious careers who feel the same way I did. You might feel the same.
Even if you have moments where you doubt yourself, you can grow a profitable personal brand. Where people and companies seek you out, hire you, invite you to speak, to coach, to teach. There’s a lot of hard work involved but if you follow the steps I outline below, you’ll be well on your way to establishing yourself as someone people, media and companies gravitate toward for advice.
Here’s how:
Level up your peer group and get some accountability
Too many intelligent people suffer from the curse of knowledge. You’ve learned so much over your career, it’s easy to forget not everyone has the same insights as you. Something which might seem basic to you could transform someone else’s life!
You’re probably already doing this informally. Maybe you mentor a few people. Maybe you even learned a bit about coaching.
Great!
Now you need to scale that up. But don’t skip the step where you’re doing it on a small scale, as that’s where you’ll develop your true insights.
I’m a huge believer in lifelong learning and the power of the internet to level up. I’ve always considered myself an unnatural entrepreneur. When I graduated from university in London, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I paid $2000 for an online course to teach me how to build a passive income business. My friends and family thought I’d gone mad. Everyone told me it was a scam.
After a few years, I was making a full-time income passively, and traveling the world!
During this time, I met Ash. We clicked and became friends despite our different backgrounds. (I’m actually the one who pushed him to share his insights about startups, growth hacking, and success in business publicly).
We ended up writing our book together, The Unfair Advantage, which became The Business Book of The Year.
If you want to build a personal brand but you’re holding yourself back then seek out accountability. Find someone who will guide you along your path, whether it’s a friend or a coach. Few people build empires without any help.
Start with who, not what
I thought book deals were for academics and celebrities. We were neither. So I never thought we’d land a book deal. But we did. I signed the book deal while still in my 20s. Our book The Unfair Advantage got offers from four top publishers: MacMillan, Wiley, Bloomsbury, and Profile Books.
Why would these publishers care what we have to say? Why would they care about what you have to say?
It all begins with creator/audience fit. Rather than thinking about what you want to teach, focus on who exactly you want to help. You need to be extremely clear about this and decide what’s more important to you. Do you want to attempt to be an online celebrity or do you want to actually make an impact on people?
Once you’ve decided who you want to help then take a deep dive into their needs. You shouldn’t make guesses here. Talk to people. Survey people. Validate your assumptions about them and where they’re stuck, and what they want.
For our bestselling book, we first created our Minimum Viable Product, which we called The Lean Version of our book which we used to gather feedback. Even before this, we were testing our ideas on LinkedIn and at events. We used the questions people asked to make our idea clearer and further narrow down our niche. By the time we sent our book proposal to publishers, we had nailed down our creator/audience fit and had a lot of fun along the way.
You can start this process right now by identifying your target audience’s emotional drivers. Write down what their fears and frustrations are then write down their dreams and desires. Now how can you help them get there?
Flip the funnel
One of the greatest misconceptions about becoming a successful online brand is that you need millions of followers. You don’t. I don’t have anywhere near millions of followers myself!
I believe what I have is far more valuable — depth. My audience trusts me and believes I can help them achieve their dreams. I get emails everyday about how the book has changed their lives. This makes me happier than any number could.
You might be wondering how anyone can make a full-time income in this way though. The key is in flipping the funnel.
What people usually try to do is build a large audience first then try to sell them cheap products like a $5 e-book. Then they might have an upsell of a slightly more expensive product. They might convert a tiny number to high-ticket products if they gain enough confidence.
Why not start with the high-value items first? You’d need to sell two hundred $5 e-books to make the same amount as five hours of coaching at $200. If you have a small audience who resonate deeply with you, you’ll probably find it easier to find one coaching client than to mass sell digital products.
The truth is we live in a world of information overload and people crave support in improving themselves. The role you can play as a coach is to help to guide your clients but they will need to put in the work themselves. Always be ethical and never try to be a fake guru.
Coaching is a natural fit for people who have valuable insight to share but don’t want to wait until they’ve built a large social following to help people. It’s more personal and for me, it’s always been more fulfilling. It also lets you put into practice the mantra of ‘do things that don’t scale’ first. Then you can really resonate with your audience and grow your following really really fast.
