personal brand update, the side project version

Summary

quick update on the personal brand. it’s still a part time of a part time of a part time job for me. my real businesses come first. but here is what is actually moving the needle on this little side project.

1. a no fail publishing calendar. podcast goes out, every week, regardless of how I feel about the episode. consistency beats quality you never ship.

2. a backlog of SEO blog posts on jerred.com. I hired help to turn old podcast transcripts into search-optimized articles. Yoast scoring. real keyword targeting. cheap, slow, compounding.

3. a newsletter referral program. try harder stickers for hitting referral milestones. small, fun, works.

4. Instagram reels and a tiny amount of paid ads to nudge follower growth. nothing aggressive yet. that comes later when this stops being a side thing.

site traffic is at 2,500 unique visitors a month. not big yet, growing. the lesson: a personal brand done at 10% effort, but with no missed weeks, still moves. just slowly.

Transcript

introduction and context on the focus towards growing a personal brand

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, so how do we grow a newsletter? How do we grow a podcast? How do we grow an Instagram following? I’m going to be going over some of the things that I’m doing in today’s podcast. This is the Better Human Business Podcast.

I’m Jerred Moon. And a couple episodes ago, maybe a dozen, I don’t know, five, 10 episodes ago, I talked about how I was going to start slowly working on my personal brand because it’s always something I just can’t really maintain something I can’t stick with. Just because I’m running businesses right now that one, take up a good amount of my time and two, I’ve never really seen the value in it because I have successful businesses without a personal brand or a large Instagram following or any of these things.

the importance of consistency in content creation, specifically podcasting

So anyway, I’ve started slowly working on these things and I wanted to give everyone an update because it has been very slow. I have not done a whole lot. And to be honest, I probably won’t do massive amounts like big moves until end of Q2, beginning of Q3 of 2024, so this year, but I have been doing some things.

And so I wanted to let you know what I’ve been doing just in case anyone else out there is looking to do some of these things. If you’re looking to grow an Instagram following or you’re looking to grow a newsletter or grow a podcast, if you’re looking to do any of those things, let me go over what I’ve been doing recently.

So the first thing I’ve been doing that I’ve been, this is more behind the scenes work that’s going to matter in the long term, but not the short term. So the first thing is, if you remember Q4 of last year, 2023, I got inconsistent with the podcast. I wasn’t publishing that frequently and I just wasn’t as focused on it, mainly because we just had a lot going on and it wasn’t my focus, blah, blah, blah.

behind-the-scenes work on converting podcast episodes into seo-optimized blog posts

Anyway, what I’ve done is one, I’ve maintained consistency in the podcast. So consistency is a big thing. So I’ve been publishing two episodes per week, pretty much from the beginning of the year without fail. And I always tell anyone trying to grow anything, especially online business is consistency.

You have to have like a no fail publishing calendar. And so I created my no fail publishing calendar, the Better Human Business podcast publishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And that’s just what’s been going on. So I’ve been doing that. But where the behind the scenes work is going is I did start jerred.com.

As you’ve heard, that’s where I’m pushing people in the podcast to go sign up for the newsletter. But what I’ve done there is we were coming up on nearly 100 episodes of just the Better Human Business podcast. And what I’ve done is I hired somebody to help me backlog all of the episodes and put them into a blog, into this blog at jerred.com.

details on the outsourcing process and the benefits of cost-effective scaling

The blog is not fully available yet because this project has been ongoing. And what I’ve done is we’ve taken transcripts from all the podcasts, turned the transcripts into blog posts. And so turning those into blog posts and the reason being is for SEO. So as I’m much bigger on SEO than I am Instagram or anything else, I’m talking about SEO for search engines.

And so we’ve optimized all of these blog posts and it’s become a process in the business as like every new episode is published. Not all of them are published on the blog yet. So if you went to jerred.com, you wouldn’t see it. You could see some of the newer ones, you could go to jerred.com slash blog and you’ll see the format that I have going on.

And this is so that there’s a place for all of this content to go and for it to get optimized by search engines. So it’s really, the backlog has been a massive project. That’s what we’ve been working on. And like I said, making sure all of those blog posts are SEO optimized, I’m doing all of that on WordPress and we’re using the plugin Yoast SEO, which is really good for helping you optimize SEO blog posts.

tactics for growing the newsletter, including the introduction of a referral program

It has like a red light, yellow light, green light for publishing blog posts. And so if it’s SEO green, then that’s good. And so you can, you can publish it. So anyway, that’s a big, that’s been a big project, very much behind the scenes. And that’s where I’ve been focused on getting that process, getting someone hired and in place.

So I don’t have, I was doing, I didn’t do all the backlog. I hired someone for the backlog, but I was actually doing every single blog post when a new episode would publish. And I just recently hired that out. So I hired someone to be able to publish the blog posts. And now that I have a system and a process, and now they can take that over.

And that’s something that’s happening this month right now. So now I can just record these podcasts. They can go on the site and get SEO optimized. And I can start to build some of that search engine optimization for some of the keywords that we’re targeting. So that’s the first big thing. That’s like the, if this were an iceberg, that is the under the water portion of what I’m doing to build a personal brand.

early strategies for instagram engagement and follower growth

So that’s why you haven’t seen me as active on Instagram or anywhere else. Because this for me, building this personal brand is still, it’s a side hustle. It’s a part-time thing. Like I’m still focused a hundred percent on my other businesses. So it’s when I have time and creating the system and process to be able to hire these things out.

If you’re curious about, you know, how much something like that costs, hiring someone to backlog the podcast was not overly expensive. I think it was about a thousand dollars. And then a couple hundred bucks a month to get someone part-time to continually publish the episodes. So if you’re just trying to think like how much you don’t need, like a full-time employee for these things, you could find somebody who does this part-time already.

You could get a VA to do it, all sorts of different options for doing something like that. So that’s the first thing. The other two things, obviously I have not, I’ve done two things to grow the newsletter. The first thing is obviously mentioning it on the podcast because there were, there was really no call to action here on the podcast before.

reflections on the overall progress and plans for increasing website conversion rates

So now there is a call to action. I’ve been starting a lot of the podcasts with, Hey, go to jerred.com, sign up for the newsletter. You’ve heard that. And there was initially a good push, but now it’s kind of like dwindled. I’ll probably still mention it. I’ll keep mentioning it, but I’ll probably change out the calls to action at the beginning of the podcast for reviews and other downloads that we have coming out later in the quarter and all sorts of stuff.

But that was a big push. And just something to remember, if you’re doing a podcast, have some sort of call to action. Mine’s right there at the beginning. So if someone’s new, they’re not a part of the newsletter, they know to go sign up. So I’m mentioning on the podcast and then within the newsletter itself, I put in a referral program.

Okay. So the referral program, if you didn’t know, if you’re not a part of the newsletter, it’s at the bottom of every newsletter I send out on Thursdays. Basically if you refer one person with your link, you have to use your link. If you refer one person, you’ll get an email from me saying, Hey, where can I ship your try harder sticker?

final thoughts and future updates on growing a personal brand

So you get a try harder sticker and we’ve sent out quite a lot of those. So that’s been going well too. So let’s, let’s get, well, I won’t get it in numbers yet. And then, so that’s the main thing for the newsletter, just pushing it on the podcast and then the internal referral system. And I use convert kit for the newsletter and spark loop for the referral system.

I want to be very transparent with what I’m doing, how I’m doing it. Now the third thing is I have just recently started Instagram. That’s where I’m not going to pick things up probably until Q3. But what I have done is I already created some pretty good content on Instagram. If you go to my Instagram, I’m at EO3 underscore fit.

You can also search Jerred Moon and you’ll find me on Instagram. These videos, these reels I created were at the end of last year and it was for a greater business experiment that I was working on. And so I made some good, good reels. In my opinion, they’re good reels. They’re edited very well. The stories are pretty good and they get shared quite a bit.

The engagement was really high, all that kind of stuff. So I created those reels. And then what I’ve done when doing recently is I just started boosting those. And this has only been about a week or two. So boosting each one of these reels for a couple dollars a day. And it’s honestly, it’s been probably a week and I have already grown my Instagram account by I think an additional 250 people in a week.

And I’m spending very minimal dollars there, talking like $5 a day on some of these reels, which really is not a lot in the world of online advertising and what I might get to as things start to progress. I just need to be in a position where I have the time and energy to focus on it. So I’m going to, when things really start to scale, I’ll tell you what I’m doing there.

But that strategy has been working well. What I noticed there, yeah, I’ve got some more followers. I need to start posting more consistently. Right now I just plan to post probably once a week and more long form posts, try and keep up with my stories a little bit, but nothing overly produced or anything.

Like I said, till later this year when I have the correct team members in place, which there’s already a plan for all that kind of stuff. So that is where I am at on the personal brand update. So numbers, just from the podcast and the referral system, I’ve been able to grow the newsletter by about 650 new email subscribers.

To be honest, I thought it might be a little bit more, but I’m pretty happy with the growth there. So that’s pretty good. A pretty good addition from, to be honest, minimal effort. I haven’t even got into advertising or retargeting or anything. Again, all strategies I will share if you continue to listen to podcasts and this stuff is interesting to you.

I already mentioned Instagram, a couple of hundred followers there. That’s going to grow because that’s only been like a week. That’s going to grow exponentially, especially if I increase the budget there and I’ll get into budgets and keep giving you numbers. And then traffic on the website has gone up quite a bit.

I’m a little bit confused at like what’s getting, why the traffic is coming in. That’s something I haven’t like figured out yet. Like I am optimizing things for SEO, but it went from obviously a new website, zero visitors per month to about 2,500 unique visitors within about a month and a half of working on this project and publishing some things.

And they’re not like even all published, which is a good thing. We have a lot of visitors coming in, but the bad thing is I don’t have a lot of visitors taking action. So if you go to jerred.com, you’ll see, Hey, the main thing that you need to do is sign up for the newsletter. And I don’t have an overwhelming amount of those visitors coming in to take that action.

So what that tells me is I need more calls to action, probably in the blog posts themselves, but that’s what they’re finding. Cause they’re not clicking to the homepage or anything else. So that’s on the list for, for me to do. But ultimately things are moving in the right direction. I would put my, I do not put my efforts in the try harder category right now.

This is like a minimal effort stuff. I’m just utilizing some of the assets I have. I would say what I’m doing on the SEO side is the try harder category because it is a big project. It is taking a long time, but that’s everything I’m doing. We’re moving. The needles are moving, albeit slowly, but they are moving.

So again, if you’re trying to do this, you’re trying to build an online business. I feel like I’m basically starting from scratch here. The only thing that I’m going to be going over is once I start spending more money, you’ll realize what it might actually take to build a personal brand if you don’t have time, but you have money.

So that’s one thing as we continue to do this right now, I’m focusing minimal time on it, minimal money, and things are moving in the right direction. So a lot of tips and tricks for you there. If you’re looking to grow a newsletter or a podcast or an Instagram follower, Instagram following, those are all the things that you need to be doing, or at least the things that I’m working on.

And that seems to be working for me right now. And I’ll give you another update in a couple of episodes once I have more progress and more things to update you on until then, continue to try harder.