I broke my own rule while building a personal brand

Summary

I broke a rule I tell every other founder. I started optimizing for the wrong number.

I was making the content sharper, working on Instagram followers, tracking views. all real work. all the wrong scoreboard. social followers are not an asset I own. the algorithm moves and the audience disappears.

the asset I actually own is the email list. when somebody hands me their email address, they’re saying I trust you enough to let you into my inbox. that’s a relationship a platform can’t take from me.

so I’m refocusing. content still matters, but the question I’m asking now is, did this grow the newsletter. if the answer is no, it wasn’t the right work, no matter how good the engagement looked. boring lesson. expensive to relearn. write it down somewhere you’ll see it again.

Transcript

introduction to the personal branding journey and current status

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, let’s talk about personal brand is going to be very off the cuff, just kind of update what I’m actually doing, where I’m at with my personal brand.

And if you’re new around here, this is the Better Human Business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And if you want to subscribe to any of my content, go to Jerred.com J-E-R-R-E-D dot com. We kind of revamped the website and are continuing to work on a lot of resources there. So go check it out if you haven’t already or if you’re not on the newsletter, which, by the way, now I’m going to talk about what the mistake I’ve made on building a personal brand.

overview of tools and strategies initially used for building a personal brand

So I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with personal brand. Primarily trying to get good at short form content on Instagram, and what this means is I’m just filming content, having a video editor edit it and trying to stick to a publishing schedule and what I’ve been doing with that. I’m also sending out a newsletter, which has changed in how it looks, but I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on that, trying to maintain a lot of authenticity there because that’s I mean, I’m actually doing all these things.

I do have a team who’s like helping with edits and those kind of things. But I write everything that’s published. I write the scripts that I use. I don’t really utilize A.I. So anything you see from me is coming from me. And I actually am the one who hits publish on Instagram. I don’t schedule it out. I don’t have somebody from a team do that. I’m doing all these things because for me, personal branding is more of an experiment and in trying to grow personal brand, trying to find out what’s working and what’s not working.

discussion on the shift of focus from core objectives to content perfection

And I’ve where I’m at right now in the content side of things is I don’t want to get a video editing. I don’t want to get good at lighting or camera stuff. Those things are getting too into the weeds for me. But it seems like a very important step. And a lot of people want to focus on that. So that’s why I kind of hire those things out. What I want to focus on is the content itself, the scripts that I write, the podcasts that I record, the newsletters that I write, the scripts I write for doing Instagram shorts, looking to get into YouTube soon and like on a personal channel with like a lot of these podcasts now going to YouTube.

That’s the plan in the near future. And things have gone pretty good, I would say. Like, I think when I started this journey, I think I was around eight thousand, nine thousand Instagram followers. I’m at about eighteen thousand. But I just like always in anything I’ve created, I’ve never known or figured out like how to go viral or to have one thing hit. But I’ve never really chased those things. And I’m still not where I try and be is just the consistency.

strategies employed to realign focus towards growing the newsletter

I just want to have my message and be consistent in it. And the people who want to pay attention will pay attention. And that served me very well throughout my entrepreneurial career. But I’ve gotten more into this, like trying to get good at the script writing. And what’s been good about that is it I have like just over and over trying to make my content better and better, even here in the podcast, trying to put more preparation into the content other than this one.

Like I said, that’s kind of off the cuff. But where I failed and the biggest mistake that I’ve made is I’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing and just out of pleat, just like I just completely took my side off of it is why are we doing this in the first place? And that’s because I’m going down this like rabbit hole of like creating content, getting better at script writing, trying to create better content. We’ve got videographers coming over, video editors doing stuff like all these different things.

advice for entrepreneurs on maintaining focus and aligning strategies with business goals

But then what I started to optimize for. Was this the content itself, like writing the scripts, right? And the big a big reason I’m doing this, too, is not just to build my own personal brand, I have multiple companies that I run and, you know, and also consult for and I’m trying to take all these lessons learned and ideas and distill them down to the people I work with and the people who work with me to be able to give them like shortcuts to all this stuff as I learn through spending my own money and time and doing these things.

That’s that’s a big reason I want to do it. But ultimately, I started to optimize for just, hey, I need to create better content, so I’m going to focus on creating better content. But what I really want to do and optimize for is growing the newsletter, growing the email list, because an Instagram follower is only worth so much, but an email subscriber is worth a lot more because they are more bought into your specific message. An Instagram follow is like, ah, this guy said something interesting, whatever.

conclusion and reminder to stay focused on what truly matters in brand building

Click follow that. It costs someone nothing. Like if we had to assign dollar values on these things, it’s like if I follow somebody that’s worth a quarter, you know, 25 cents to them, maybe. But if I’m going to give somebody my email address or you’re going to give me your email address, that’s a lot more of a commitment, right? It’s like now you’re in my inbox, you know, my email address, like that’s a different level. Maybe that’s worth five bucks, you know, to you, whatever it is.

And so and, you know, an email subscriber can be worth a lot of different things if we’re talking about what is an email subscriber worth in a lot of different businesses. But that’s not my point. My point is from the person submitting these things, giving the follow or giving the emails their email, their personal email out, it’s going to be of more value. Your email address is of more value than giving someone a follow, in my opinion.

And that’s what I set out to optimize for was growing the newsletter. And then I got so focused on the content and trying to make that better and writing different scripts and stuff. I started to take my attention off the newsletter. And so anyway, that I’ve broken my own biggest rule, which is like I don’t want to grow social media accounts for the sake of having a larger social media account. I really don’t think that does anything for you.

Like I know some friends who own multiple companies worth around a billion dollars. I mean, they own like dozens of companies or have a stake in dozens of companies. And the total worth is over a billion. And they have 5000 followers on Instagram. So again, it doesn’t matter much to build a personal brand when it comes to wealth building. There are a lot of ways to do this. I built all of my companies with having minimal, minimal following.

But I want to learn this for, like I said, not just myself, because I think it’s an interesting skill to learn in the current environment, but also good for the clients who work with me and also all of my business partners as we look to grow these areas, you know, where there’s not always this reliance on paid traffic. But you have to know what you’re optimizing for in a personal brand. What I’m optimizing for and had taken my complete attention off of is building the newsletter.

And so that’s what I’m getting back to now is making sure that I’m really emphasizing the newsletter, which, oh, by the way, if you’re not subscribed to the newsletter, please go to Jerred.com and sign up for the newsletter. You spell Jerred, J-E-R-R-E-D dot com. Go sign up for the newsletter. Would love to have you because when I was optimizing for that and all of my calls to action on these podcasts, which, you know, I kind of dropped off, we were getting more email subscribers and now we’re we’re getting fewer because I’m not optimizing for it, even though the podcast is growing.

It’s like, oh, well, podcast downloads are growing, but email subscribers are not growing. Why is that? You’re not trying. You’re not trying hard, Jerred. You’re not taking your own advice. So ultimately know what you’re optimizing for is my lesson learned for everyone who’s growing their own social media, following business, whatever you’re trying to do, make sure you know what you’re optimizing for. I’m optimizing for newsletter subscribers because I just think that’s a better way to communicate with people, because I know if I have 100 email subscribers, all 100 people are going to get my email today if I send it.

It doesn’t mean 100 people are going to open it. There’s 100 percent chance that all 100 people will not open it, but everyone will get it. The reason I don’t like social media is because Instagram can be like, we don’t really like this content. We’re only going to show five of your followers today. You know, it’s like, ah, OK, but I really needed this message to go out. And they’re like, yeah, we know, but it’s a promotional message and we don’t want to push those.

So you see what I’m saying? Like, it’s not I don’t want to optimize for that. But growing that net of social media can help get more what newsletter subscribers. And so think about this in your business as well. Make sure you know what you’re optimizing for. And as I got into the weeds, I started to optimize for the wrong thing and just kind of took my time and attention and effort off of growing what I really wanted to grow, which is the newsletter.

And so anyway, growing a personal brand is great. It’s very challenging. There’s a lot to learn in this process. I am having a ton of fun with it, though. I really enjoy writing content, trying to get better at it, writing hooks and scripts. And I’m working on a ton of resources for people who are on the newsletter. See, I’m just baiting this over and over again. You got to join the newsletter. But we are I think I have like half a dozen free courses almost done on the site Jerred dot com.

They’re not available right now for you to go there. You have to do what? Sign up for the newsletter. But anyway, you sign up for the newsletter and I’m working on this stuff. So all these lessons learned, you’re like, I want to dive deeper on this topic. Or sometimes when I say on the podcast, like I don’t have time to go over that because it’s a short form podcast. I want to start creating. Anytime I say that, I want to have like a resource for you to go to on the website and to be accessible primarily for newsletter subscribers.

But that’s what I am optimizing for in the podcast now. And so that’s my biggest lesson learned. I got to make sure I know what I’m paying attention to, what I’m optimizing for. And that is something for you to take into account as you’re building your business and your brand as well. Make sure you know what you are doing it for, because vanity metrics are stupid. I want ten thousand Instagram followers. Why you want one hundred thousand Instagram followers?

Why? Like, why do you really want those things for me? I want those things so I can grow my newsletter and actually be able to communicate with the people consistently with things I want to communicate about. So I’m telling myself, not you today, telling myself, Jerred, why don’t you just go try harder?