6 lessons from lowkey building my personal brand for 9 months

Summary

nine months ago I started building this personal brand in parallel with everything else I was running. low-key, no big launch, just consistent reps. here’s where it stands and what I’ve learned.

the numbers: Instagram went from about 9,000 to 26,000. email subscribers up by more than 2,000. roughly $30,000 invested into growth. monetization has not been the priority yet. this is a long-game asset, not a quick payback.

six lessons I’d hand to anyone starting from zero today:

1. content quality beats production value. substance is what gets shared and saved, not the lighting.
2. email is still the highest-leverage owned channel. build the list early, treat it like the asset it is.
3. have a clear ROI path even if you’re not pulling the trigger yet. you should know exactly how this becomes a business.
4. don’t confuse personal brand with business brand. integrate your real interests, that’s the whole point.
5. expect the curve to be flat before it bends. nine months isn’t long. mine is just getting started.
6. authenticity is the moat. it’s the one thing AI can’t replicate at scale.

Transcript

why I started building a personal brand

I’ve been low-key building a personal brand for the last nine months. Today, I’m going to go over kind of what I learned. So if you’re looking to do the same thing, I can help you as well. So here’s the deal. First, I want to start with why I’m even trying to build a personal brand. For me, it’s just a place that you can evolve.

I have been creating content online since 2011. And the fact that I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve just wanted a place I could finally just be myself, evolve, change openly, if you will. Because everything I’ve done in the past, like for instance, I have the Garage Gym Athlete podcast. If you didn’t know, you can go listen to that podcast.

It’s a very popular podcast. I really enjoy doing it because I love geeking out on fitness, nutrition, scientific studies. But here’s the deal. Because I kind of niched down there with Garage Gym Athlete, I can’t really talk about anything else. I mean, to a certain point, I could. But it probably wouldn’t grow or have the same growing power that it has had for years because we’ve stayed niched down to helping Garage Gym Athletes.

And for my personal brand, I just want a place where I could talk about business, self-development. And as I evolve as a human being, if I find something interesting in real estate investing or business growth or just any way I could help people and still be able to communicate these things, I wanted a place to do that.

And sure, I could do this under a new brand. But why not just your name? You know, why not just use your name? That’s why I have Jerred.com. You can go check that out. J-E-R-R-E-D.com. You can see all the stuff that we have going on there. But ultimately, I just wanted a place that, you know, I’ve been doing since 2011.

I finally, like, think, well, this is probably what you’re always going to be doing to some degree. So you better have a place that you can just kind of hunker down and always be producing content. And that’s what I want here. I don’t really ever want to stop. I want to make it super sustainable and grow it and monetize it over time.

And so let’s talk about some of the numbers that have happened over these last nine months since I’ve kind of gotten more serious about posting on social. So real quick, the journey. I started June 2024. And specifically in just Instagram, like I was just trying to do short form content because I wanted to see if I could grow that channel incredibly hard.

Still don’t think I really understand it. And I’ll kind of get into some of my lessons. But I have grown that channel. So I started around 9,000 subscribers or 9,000 followers on Instagram. And I’m now at, I think, 26,000 ish. So about a 17,000 follower growth there over on Instagram. And it’s been good.

Engagement has been low. Haven’t loved it. But what I have seen a lot from Instagram was ultimately my main goal is a lot of email subscribers have come through there. So we’ve gained over 2,000 new email subscribers, which is a big part of my strategy. I’ll talk about that in a minute. Just started on YouTube a few short weeks ago, not trying to do anything fancy or sexy on YouTube, really just taking this podcast, putting it on YouTube.

the numbers nine months in

So there’s a video version. And then in overall podcast downloads, it’s tracked in a lot of different ways. But what I have seen is about a 459% increase in podcast followers or subscribers. And honestly, that could be more because some of the metrics are hard to pull in certain areas. And so it’s working.

I’m moving in the right direction. It’s like, how much money have you made? And the answer is not much. I honestly haven’t tried to monetize my audience. I will be moving into the next quarter, launching a new email marketing course. Some of you are already subscribed to the kind of the VIP pre-release announcement coming out very soon.

And then there are some other ways I plan to monetize it in the very near future over this next quarter. But here’s the deal. That hasn’t been a main focus of mine. I added up a rough amount of what I’ve spent on video editing, some advertising we’ve done for the email newsletter, all these kind of things.

And it’s probably honestly about $30,000 in the last nine months is what I’ve spent on growing this following. So making money on spending $30,000 would make sense. Right now, I’m definitely in the hole. There’s not a huge ROI here. And I’m okay with that because I’m in this for the long term. And I think this is going to snowball.

I already kind of see it happening with some of the inbound requests that I get through Instagram DMs and everything else. So let’s talk about kind of my six lessons here that I’ve learned over doing this for the last nine months. By far, no expert when it comes to growing a personal brand. But I do want to keep everybody up to date on what I’m doing, strategies I’m implementing, success, failures, all those kind of things.

The first thing I learned is quality always. I’ve talked about this like a good amount on the podcast, but really focus on the content. And when I say quality, I don’t mean the production value. Like if you look at some of my short form content, you can tell it’s been very well produced. A pretty good video editing team, shoot with a decent camera, those kind of things.

That’s not the quality I’m necessarily talking about. I think that’s important these days. But it’s not the most important thing. Really focusing on the content itself and making that the best you possibly can. And it’s funny because I go through these cycles where I feel like it doesn’t really matter.

And I’ll focus, I’ll just like publish whatever the hell I want. This podcast is probably more in the category of whatever the hell I want, in all honesty. I’m just kind of riffing here. I wrote down some things. I wanted to share it with people. It’s not as polished, not as produced as or scripted or whatever you want to call it.

content quality beats production value

Like it’s not as much. But I do think that this content matters. This type of content. But the quality of the content, when I get in these cycles of like just really preparing a lot for a content, I see everything go up. Like more views, more podcasts, downloads, more subscribers. If I get in a good cycle of doing that.

And so I just try to always maintain doing that. But the big thing for me, and if you’re like me, I’m a business operator trying to grow a personal brand low key on the side. I’m not focusing on content 100% of the time. And if I was focused on content 100% of the time, and that’s all I was doing, things would be growing a lot faster because I have a very clear path to how I’m going to ROI.

I have a very clear path of how I’m going to grow this thing. And I’m going to share that more and more on this channel. But ultimately, quality matters. Focus on your content. Make it good. Don’t make it bullshit content that no one wants to hear. What are you learning? What lessons do you have? Like pull from your past, pull from your experiences.

That’s what I try to do a lot of because I’ve talked about this before as well. I feel like that’s my biggest competitive advantage over a lot of people creating content these days is I’ve just been doing it for so much longer than most people. And I’ve seen a lot more success than most people in the same space.

So that’s the first thing, quality always. The second thing is email still works. Like it just works. That’s why I have an email marketing course coming out. I don’t know how else I would monetize this if I didn’t have the email list. To be honest, I send out a weekly newsletter every Thursday. And I’m going to be making some offers via email, i.e.

that email marketing course that’s coming out. And there are a lot of people signed up right now to be a part of that who are very interested in that. Like there’s a lot of excitement I’ve generated from email replies and everything. And I’ll let you guys know how the launch goes and how many people sign up and all these things.

But it’s not going to be overly expensive. I’m not trying to make a ton of money on that. I’m just trying to create a resource that’s going to help people. And I’m going to do that through this email marketing course. I’m really excited to launch it. But to be honest, if I was just sitting around trying to DM people on Instagram and whatever on YouTube, I don’t know what else I’d be doing to try and monetize it.

I really understand email marketing a lot more than I understand a lot of these other social platforms. And that probably makes sense because that’s how I’ve grown all of my businesses over all of the years. So email marketing still works. I don’t see it going anywhere anytime soon, like famous last words, right?

email is still the highest leverage channel

Maybe something eats it up. But right now, I feel like that’s still a great place to monetize. And that’s ultimately my strategy. Still working. I get a lot of replies, a lot of engagement, high open rates, high click-through rates. The email stuff is really awesome right now. The third thing I learned is if your content is too polished, it’s not relatable.

And that’s where it goes back to not the quality of your content, but talking about the actual production value. Everything I produce has a certain level of production value. And I like that to a certain degree. But what I found is when I post the lower production quality stuff or more personal based stuff, like this is what my dog does, or here’s my workout, those kind of things, a lot more engagement than the super polished, scripted, 30-second video, 60-second video, whatever the case may be.

And so I feel like you’re going to have to mix. And that’s what I’m experimenting with is mixing both. Sometimes I just want to go straight polished, professional. I want to have a certain look, certain branding, all those kind of things. But it’s not as relatable because not everyone’s doing that, right?

And so it’s just not as relatable. You can’t be too polished all the time. And so just keep that in mind. That’s a big thing I’ve learned. And to be honest, I haven’t changed a whole lot there. I just have noticed when I publish the more personal things, the less polished things, there’s a lot more engagement.

That’s probably a good thing. I’m going to be trying more of that going into next quarter. The fourth thing, screw the metrics. I focus a lot on the metrics. I like metrics. I like tracking metrics. It’s all good. But if you’re like me and you just want to have a place to do this for maybe another 10, 20, 30 years, I don’t know.

I don’t know if I care about the metrics anymore. Like I was really diving into a lot of these things, like trying to make everything better. And I always try to make database decisions on like, did people like this YouTube video? Did people download this podcast? Which one was most popular? Like I’ll keep those things in my mind when I’m producing more content.

But ultimately, I don’t really care. I don’t care that much about the metrics to where I’m going to become a slave to the algorithm or build a bunch of videos that I hate. Like I did this like competitor analysis of, I wouldn’t even call them competitor analysis. It’s more like the top dogs on YouTube, the content that they’re producing.

And what I realized after I looked at several of the big accounts, over a million subscribers, similar niche to me, they’re just all copying each other. Like they found like, oh, he did something awesome. I’m going to copy him. They put their own spin on it. And I’m sure that they’re actually probably getting really tired of that content.

knowing your ROI path early

Once I had never realized that, but I also hadn’t followed a lot of these people on YouTube. And they’re just all copying each other. They’re slightly changing the titles. Content’s pretty similar. They do put their own spin on it and bring in some of their own experience. But then they’ll just repeat a video like, oh, this one did well three months ago.

Let’s do an updated version of that one and just change it a little bit. That’s just straight playing the game. And hey, I don’t mind it, but that’ll get boring for me eventually. There’s probably some level of playing the game that I will do, not going to lie. I’ll try to do things that work. I’m not an idiot.

But at the same time, I don’t care enough to not have a podcast like this where I’m just trying to talk to anyone who’s following me and my stuff. It’s like, if you want to hear a little bit more about personal brand, growing it, this is kind of behind the scenes. So anyway, screw the metrics. Don’t focus on them too much.

I really think personal brand is just a long term investment strategy, in all honesty. And so I’m not as interested in the metrics. Don’t care that much. The fifth thing, have a clear path and a clear ROI path, because what I don’t want you to hear from me, having just listened to what you’ve listened to so far, it’s like, oh, damn, he spent $30,000.

He’s grown decently. Nothing like crazy, but he’s grown decently and he’s made not a lot of money from it. And that’s because I’m very patient and I can spend $30,000 on building a personal brand without needing an immediate ROI because of all of my other successful businesses that I’m running. Like I’m again, this is low key building a personal brand while I’m still running multiple different companies.

And so and I’m not the CEO of all these companies. Everybody should know that I’m not really the CEO of any company more, but I am still in the weeds in all of the companies that I do own to some degree. I’m more of a business owner, not necessarily like the chief executive officer. I help a lot more with operations and behind the scenes marketing acquisition, those kind of those kind of things.

But I don’t think you should do the same thing if you need an ROI. I think you should launch something right away. I just haven’t done that. I’ve been very slow. I’ve been testing the waters. I want to find out what content I like to make, what content people like to hear from me. Do I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting and also been very slow, but I have a very clear path of what’s going to happen over the next three months, six months, nine months, 12 months.

I know exactly what I’m going to do. I know exactly how I’m going to monetize this. And if it doesn’t work, I’ll pivot fast and do something else. But have a very clear ROI path. And I think that’s something I have not talked about as much is if you’re going to be doing personal brand and dumping all this money time effort, it shouldn’t just be because someone told you should be doing content like point people back to whatever it is that you want.

personal brand vs. business brand

That’s why I’ve done the newsletter, because I feel like the newsletter is a great place to communicate with people and build those relationships. But I don’t have to pitch them anything right away. Let’s just date for a while. You know, let’s just go back and forth and you can email me and I’ll email you and I’ll send you some helpful content once a week.

And then if you reply, I’ll reply back and we’ll build a relationship. That’s kind of in my holding area. If I was, again, doing this without email marketing, I really didn’t really know what I’m doing. I would actually be a little bit scared of like, how do you launch something on Instagram and it still do well?

I wouldn’t know how to do any of those things and then putting ads behind it. Again, I have a very clear ROI path and I’m gonna be talking about that a lot more into the next quarter and the final quarter of 2025, because I think it’ll be really helpful for all of you. But I want to share actual results of when I do it.

How did it work? How did I make money? That way, you know what you’re doing if you want to do any of this stuff as well. And then the last and final piece is integrate everything. And this has to do with you as a person. And I’ve been really bad about this, but I’ve been getting better about it lately.

So when I say integrate everything, you’re building a personal brand, you’re not building a brand. And I’m building a personal brand. I’m not building a brand. You have to know what you’re doing. If you’re building a brand, like, for instance, going back to Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, where I talk about predominantly fitness related things.

That’s very niche down. And so I don’t talk about my dog or my son’s football games or soccer games or whatever. I don’t really discuss those things as much. It wouldn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense for our Instagram account to be about those things. But my Instagram account, I try to share all those things periodically.

I’ve been bad about it, but I’m trying to get better about it, trying to integrate all these things, because what interests me as a person, like if you just sum it up family, I love my family, love hanging out with them, love watching my kids play sports. You know, I’m just super in love with hanging out with my kids and having a great time being the best dad that I possibly can be.

I love building businesses. I love geeking out on numbers, operations, entrepreneurship. I love coaching other business owners and those who are really interested in building themselves. I love personal development, self-development, getting better, reading books, pushing yourself. I love fitness. I love my dog.

what i’d hand someone starting today

I have a German short haired pointer. She’s awesome. She makes me walk a lot, gets me a lot of steps. I’ve talked about these things. So anyway, there are all these things that make me who I am. Right. I’m a husband. I’m a father. I’m a veteran. Like, I just I have all these things that I haven’t really been talking about as much because I just didn’t think it would make as much sense.

But sprinkling those things in more builds a personal brand as opposed to a brand. If I was just trying to build a brand, like just a better human business brand, let’s just focus on that. I wouldn’t be talking about all these things, but I’m trying to build a personal brand, something so I can pivot because right now I’m talking about a lot about business, you know, and not as much about self-development.

I want to kind of go back to talking a little bit more about self-development. I’m also into real estate investing. We’ve made some really good moves lately. I want to talk about those. So I’m gonna be talking about those kind of things. Again, a personal brand is a spot where I can talk about whatever I want, but luckily I don’t have a lot of things to talk about because I’m not interested in a whole lot.

I’m only interested in a couple of things, but those things that I’m interested in, I’m really into. And those are things I want to talk about. So integrating all of that I think is really important to building a personal brand, which is a little bit different than just building a brand. So those are the things I’ve learned.

So to recap, I spent $30,000, made not a lot of money, 17,000 new Instagram followers, over 2,000 new email subscribers, only about 400 people on YouTube. If you’re watching this on YouTube, go subscribe. I’m really struggling on YouTube. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually, hire a coach or something.

We’ll get better. And then a huge increase in overall podcast downloads because, in all honesty, I’m better at podcasting than most anything else and email, growing the email list. But Q3, coming up, I plan to pour gasoline on a lot of this stuff. I have all the chips in place now to really have that clear ROI path and what all the next steps are.

And I’m going to be keeping you updated. So if you’re interested, make sure you’re subscribed to this, whether that’s on YouTube or in your podcast player, wherever it is, because you will miss the next update if you are not subscribed. So go subscribe. And if you’re trying to build your personal brand or your brand in general, try harder, live bigger.

And I’ll see you in the next one.