personal branding is changing: an old school 'new' method

Summary

most personal brand advice in 2025 is wrong. polished, AI-written, optimized-to-death content is exactly what people are tuning out. the brands growing right now are the ones that sound like a person, not a template.

what changed: a comment on one of my posts called me out for using AI in my captions. they were right. I stopped, and engagement went up. realness beats reach.

what’s working for me:

1. write your own copy. every word. if it’s not in your voice, it’s not your brand.
2. respond to everyone. every reply, every DM, every comment. that’s where trust gets built, one conversation at a time.
3. survey your audience. the content that hits isn’t the content you want to make, it’s the content they need. ask them what they’re stuck on.
4. raw over polished. a real story told plainly beats a perfectly produced piece every single time.

the long game: attention is not trust. you can get a million views and convert zero customers. trust is built in conversation, over years, with the same humans showing up again and again.

build content. but build a relationship with the people consuming it.

Transcript

why i started focusing on my personal brand

All right, let’s get into the nittygritty of building a personal brand. If you’re unfamiliar with me or you just need an update, I have built multiple brands over the last couple of years. Physical Therapy Biz, uh, one of the bigger businesses that I’m a part of with the Inc. 500 twice. Garage Gym Athlete, I’ve been doing for a long time, still doing it, actually just kicking things up there. uh and then also part of uh a marketing company called the patch system where we do marketing for clinicians and you know CRM management all those kind of things.

So have built multiple brands and then it was last year I was like you know what I’m going to start doing a little bit more personal brand content. I don’t necessarily have anywhere to point people, but I want to start building this asset. And I started with like super polished like everything like a lot a lot of the YouTube videos I wouldn’t say are scripted, but super planned out unlike this one. I just have the idea, a couple points I want to hit.

Um, and then same with the Instagram content, super polished, professional video, B-roll, everything in between.

the comment that called me out

And what I’ve noticed is that I hit growth numbers. You know, I like Instagram following has grown. YouTube is I mean, I’ll be honest, YouTube is hard. I have not quite put the time, effort, and energy in YouTube, but it’s still growing. It’s just not rapidly growing. Very challenging uh platforms uh for the most part. But one thing that really stuck out recently was uh I run a lot of ads on Instagram specifically, you know, Meta, Facebook, or whatever.

And I run these ads to get people to sign up for my newsletter. Um, if you haven’t been listening to this podcast or anything I’ve done on my channels, uh, I talk a lot about email marketing because that’s how I’ve grown most of uh, our companies. And so I’m always running ads to get people on the newsletter on top of people organically signing up through links in YouTube, you know, link links on Instagram. It’s the thing that I’m always after and most focused on.

But I had some guy click to uh, my profile and he kind of called me out. He’s like, “You have really low engagement on Instagram.” He’s like, “I think you bought all your followers.”

what actually increases engagement

And I was like, “Dude, I haven’t I haven’t bought a follower, you know, in my life.” And so, he pushed back on me, whatever. Like, I don’t pay attention to the trolls, but I did find it interesting because that’s something I’ve really struggled with on most of the social media platforms is just engage engagement in general. And I’ve been talking about this off and on for the last year, but I’ve actually really truly been putting into practice um over the last couple weeks of just trying to get more raw and authentic content out there like this one.

And off the cuff, hey, let me just talk to you about my struggles with building a personal brand, what’s going on. And it has been working a lot better. And I, you know, I’ve been talking about this trust recession in some of my recent episodes and stuff. And I think it’s so true. Um, but it’s funny that the answer, the solution to low engagement, the solution to no one commenting or whatever seems to be you just got to be you.

You got to be very authentically you. And people say that all the time, but how to do it is actually the hardest part. It’s like, how do you actually just be who you are? And the answer, I think, to that is a lot of practice and talking in front of a camera microphone.

why i stopped using ai for content

And I’ve had a lot of practice in that over the years, but it’s really just talking about whatever the hell you want to talk about. Uh like I just recently did uh you know an episode on this channel, this podcast for how to do more pull-ups cuz I’m like, you know what, I’m I’m just going to talk about whatever I want to talk about cuz I’m in no need of a personal brand, like needing to grow.

So, I’m just going to continue and keep at it and play the long game. But what I’ve noticed is getting more raw and authentic content is getting more engagement because I’ve had some things um specifically on Instagram do really well, get a ton of views, uh but it didn’t lead to anything. It didn’t lead to selling more. It didn’t lead to necessarily a ton more email subscribers, but then I’ll have some things that really hit home and you know those people sign up for the newsletter and then they reply to the newsletter and they you know it’s more it’s more easy it’s easier to build that relationship with them.

So, I want to go over specifically what I’ve been doing other than just talking about this idea of like raw content. The first thing is I ditched AI. And that might sound crazy. I did mention this recently on an episode, but I ditched AI especially or, you know, specifically for um two brands. Uh my personal brand, anything you see on Instagram right now over the last little while has been just me writing the captions. They’re typically pretty short and to the point.

And you know, even if it’s still polished content, polished video, the caption is just me. It’s raw. And then same with like posting on Instagram stories and things like that. Um I just ditched AI completely. Uh I had heard out there that um people were being penalized for using AI and I knew that the companies would do this one way or another. And I do see the reach um it the reach gets a little bit more.

Um I wouldn’t say views are astronomically better or anything like that with going more raw. And I still think that you can use AI in a lot of ways for like uh ideiation or you know coming up with concepts, fleshing out your frameworks, scripts, research. Um it can help with a ton of things, but when it comes down to this like AI crap, I called the AI slop that people are posting in their captions and descriptions and stuff.

building content around audience needs

It’s just it doesn’t help anyone who’s reading it. Like I think people are going to stop reading eventually because they’re just like, “Yeah, you AI generated this crap.” So keep I’m keeping them short and I’m actually writing them. That’s that’s the first thing. Now, the second thing is that I’m really diving into what people want. So, I sent out a survey to my newsletter um really asking what their struggles were and how I can help. And I started to I compiled this list and I’m just creating content around, you know, the a lot of the things that people have come up with, imposter syndrome, mindset, uh taking action, productivity.

And I’m just I’m starting to hack away at those as opposed to some research back what I think will go viral, what I think will be the best. I’ve been trying to create content around what people said they needed help with. And that obviously is going to interact or get more engagement um with your audience, which is ultimately the goal. And I probably should have started there, but I really feel like that’s what you want in building a personal brand is not more views, bigger, more.

It should be authentic relationships with those people who are willing to follow you, willing to pay attention. You know, if you if you have someone’s attention for even a minute, you know, you should be thankful for that. You know, I’m thankful for anybody watching listening to this right now. You know, I really do appreciate that. And so, getting people an answer to their question or helping them with their problem, I think is another thing uh that I’ve really been diving into recently. and it has built some better content and some better conversations amongst people.

Uh, and the third and final thing that I’ve been doing is just really making sure that we get good replies on the newsletter. And so this is all the kind of the behind the-scenes stuff. Uh, you know, where I’ve kind of lived, but the newsletter is super important and it always will be. It’s always going to be a big part of what I talk about. Having some way that you can communicate with people and just knowing that’s not AI generated either.

Like I’m writing it. If you reply, I reply back. all these kind of things and keeping up to date with all of that. And so these are just some of the things I’ve been doing is trying to get more raw with my content. I’m still I’ll be 100% honest with you, I’m not where I want to be.

the long game of real personal branding

I’m not fully like just being myself on social media. One, it’s not natural for me. Two, there’s some things I don’t want to share in my life. Uh but, you know, as I get more comfortable and decide where this kind of will land, I will update you all. But the long and short of it, what’s your takeaway? What can you do? Just start to get a little bit more raw with your content. Whether you’re building a personal brand or brand in general, um like I mentioned in a previous episode, the trust recession, it’s a real thing.

People don’t trust people uh as much as they used to. There’s a lot of uh division just in the country in general. Very hard for people to trust. And then there’s the AI problem, right? There’s like everyone and their brother can create content at a really high rapid level because everyone has access to AI can just whip this crap out. So, I don’t know where we’re going without AI in general, cuz I’m not abandoning it in in its entirety.

I think AI is still really beneficial, but there’s got to be some middle ground of like, hey, we still need to be humans and not just check the box and post on social media.

final thought: build trust… not just content

Like, how can we interact? How can we form a community? How can we have a conversation? So, that’s what I’m working on right now. Building the personal brand. If you ever have any questions about that, let me know. But until the next one, try harder.