what's it like to start over, building a personal brand from zero

Summary

I’ve been inconsistent on the personal brand for a long time because I didn’t have a clear why. now I do. so I’m starting over from scratch. here’s the plan.

1. personal brands are like fire. some are matches, some are bonfires, some are massive fireballs visible from miles away. the size of the fire is the size of your influence. influence is leverage.

2. I’m not leaning on existing audiences. no social transfer, no cross-promotion stunts. I’m rebuilding from an email list. owned channel, no algorithm, no platform risk.

3. first goal, 1,000 subscribers to the try harder newsletter. small number, important number. that’s the size of an audience that can sustain a real business if the content’s good.

4. tools. ConvertKit for the list. Spark Loop for the referral program. hit a milestone and get a try harder sticker. small reward, real momentum.

5. why does this matter. if I’ve built businesses for 15 years and my personal brand is still tiny, there’s compounded leverage I’ve left on the table. fixing that.

if you’re thinking about starting a personal brand, start with the why. fix the consistency problem before you worry about the platform problem. then try harder.

Transcript

introduction, why this journey matters

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. What’s it like to start or what’s it like to start over? Today I want to talk about building a personal brand, what I’m doing and why you might want to consider it. This is the Better Human Business Podcast.

I’m Jerred Moon. And if you look at any of my social media profiles, you can find me on Twitter or X. You can find me on Instagram. I think you could find me on YouTube as a person, Jerred Moon. What you’ll see is a massive pile of inconsistency. That’s right, massive pile of inconsistency when it comes to trying or attempting to build a personal brand because I’ve never found a big enough reason why.

my past hesitation about building a personal brand

I just can’t. Every time I start to do it, I stop a couple months after because I just can’t. I’ve never found that like internal motivating factor because I can grow businesses and I have for years without really ever having to do that. So I’m like, why would I go do that? Why would I go build a personal brand when I know how to build a business without having to build the personal brand?

So anyway, without that gigantic why, without that motivator, I quit. I stop. I’m inconsistent. I don’t keep going. That’s true with anyone doing anything. If you don’t have that big giant why, you won’t stay consistent whether that’s fitness, business or anything in between. But I recently have found some motivation to do it and here’s why and maybe why you might want to consider building a personal brand and I do want to talk about what I’m doing on the podcast.

So I really view having a personal brand as having some sort of fire, okay? And don’t get lost in my metaphor here, but you have a fire and the marketplace is the wood. And if you have a tiny match, that’s the size of your personal brand or maybe you have a candle of a torch, maybe you have a massive fireball from outer space that would be like famous people, right?

what i see as the power of a personal brand

Who have these massive personal brands. A famous person can take that massive fireball and land it in a forest somewhere that they’ve never been and ignite this entire market up overnight. If someone famous decided that they wanted to start an energy drink tomorrow, even though they know nothing about energy drinks, they could do that because of their personal brand.

And same with any market, if you have a personal brand, even if you have a match and you’re trying to light some twigs, it takes the personal brand to get started and I’m starting to realize that it probably is worth it to have some sort of personal brand, maybe not the famous level fireball like that, that’s hard to achieve, but some level of consistency in having a personal brand because it helps you start new things if you want to.

And while I’m not trying to start anything new, I do see the value in having the personal brand. But I’m no expert. I obviously don’t really know what I’m doing in building a personal brand, so what I want to do on the podcast is update you all on exactly what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. It’s accountability for me, something I know I can update everyone here on the podcast every four to six weeks, something along those lines about what I’m doing to build so you can follow too because, again, I’m no expert in doing it, but I have a decade and a half of running digital businesses, so I have a lot of ideas about how I am going to grow a personal brand and it doesn’t necessarily mean, oh, he’s going to start doing Instagram more.

my plan to share the entire process

That’ll factor in, but not right away. So I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m doing and how I’m building it almost from scratch. I’ve collected over 100,000 email addresses in my online career as a digital entrepreneur and I’ve also done a little bit with social media, but nowhere close to what I’ve done with email newsletters and stuff like that, spent a lot of money on advertising.

So anyway, I want to take all of that knowledge, but none of the assets with me in the creation of a personal brand. So like I said, I’ve collected 100,000 email addresses, well over 100,000 email addresses in my career, but I’m not going to take those people and put them on my new newsletter for what I’m trying to do personally.

I really want to start from scratch and that’s exactly what I plan to do. So that way I can help more people and I can see if it’s actually useful. Now I’m not going to start a new Instagram account, but my Instagram account isn’t massive anywhere. Anyway, I think I have somewhere between 12,000 and 13,000 Instagram followers and not a lot on other platforms.

my “start from scratch” approach

So anyway, I’m just giving you the baselines here. That way if you want to follow along, you can follow along and get going. So starting over is a big deal. Like I’ll never forget the first person to like my Facebook page when I started online. His name was Kyle and I’ll never forget. I’m like, thank goodness one person liked it.

I’ll never forget the first person who subscribed to my fitness newsletter back in the day. These things are small to those who take actions, but they’re massive for the creators. And that’s what I want to do. So here’s how I’m going to start. This is step one for me. Like I said, I’m going to share this on the podcast so you can learn and do.

I want this podcast to be about documenting the journey, whether I fail or whether I succeed. So letting you know what’s working and what’s not working. That way you can mimic, you can do it. Now I do have some assets. I do have some capital, like I will put some money behind things, but I’ll let you know every single little thing that I’m doing.

how i’ll begin building my brand & what you can expect

Every strategy, every lever I pull to try and do this slowly over the next year or so. And here’s where it’s going to start. What I want you to do, if you want to be a part of this journey and get even more into the weeds, I want you to go to jerred.com. So just look at the podcast cover if you don’t know how to spell my name, it’s j-e-r-r-e-d.com.

So go to jerred.com. Make sure you spell my name right or you’ll end up at a jewelry store, a website. So go to jerred.com. There’s nothing you can do on this page except for enter in your email address. Go ahead and do that. Where I’m starting is where I’ve started every digital business and that’s by building a newsletter.

What you can expect from me if you join this newsletter, a couple of things. First is I’m going to be emailing out the Try Harder newsletter every single Thursday. And I’m going to have in this newsletter ways to build your business, ways to build yourself in personal development and also examples of people trying harder both in real life, real scenarios and in the context of history just to keep people motivated and keep you going.

why you’ll want to read the try harder newsletter

So huge value proposition for you. I’m going to spend a lot of time and effort making this the best possible newsletter I can. And since I’m not building a personal brand full time, that’s about all I can do for now. So goal number one in getting started for me is getting this newsletter up and running and getting 1,000 email subscribers.

Until I get those 1,000 email subscribers, I will not move on to phase two. And it’s probably going to be hard to get those 1,000. I don’t think I’m just going to announce this on the podcast and boom, I have 1,000. It’s very hard to get people to go from podcast to action outside of what they’re doing.

If you’re listening to this right now, yes, I want you to hit pause, open your browser, go to jerred.com, enter in your email address, but maybe you’re driving, whatever. And then when you stop driving, you’re going to forget. It’s very hard to get people to take that action. But this is where I’m going to start.

referral program explained & “try harder” stickers!

So the goal is to get to 1,000 email subscribers. And the reason I’m starting there is because I think email subscribers are more valuable and you can build a better relationship with than you can on social media. I will eventually move to social media and tell you my goals there and what I’m doing.

But first we are starting here. So the first thing, like I said, go enter it in. You can start getting the Try Harder newsletter every single Thursday and it will be beneficial. I will make it the best newsletter possible. The second thing that happens when you subscribe to the newsletter is I have a kind of built-in referral program.

And so what you get if you sign up for the newsletter, it’ll take about a day, but you’ll get another email from me that welcomes you to the referral program and you’ll get a custom referral link. So if you refer one person, just one, one person, as of recording this, I could change it if you listen to this much further down the line, but right now if you refer one person and my system confirms that you have referred that person, I’m going to send you in the mail this badass Try Harder sticker.

my strategy for step one

It’s the coolest sticker I’ve ever produced and I’m sticking them all over. I’m sticking them on my kids’ foreheads, all over my laptop, my phone, in my garage, on our treadmill, just everywhere. I’m sticking these things everywhere. I’ve handed out a hundred just to friends and family members and I want you to have that reminder too.

I want you to get your Try Harder sticker from me. You can’t buy them right now. You can only be given one from me. And so these are really awesome high quality stickers. So anyway, if you become part of the newsletter, you will auto enroll into the referral program. You share your link. One person joins my newsletter.

You will get sent the Try Harder newsletter. I already have this system set up. So again, back end, how am I doing this? How am I setting up these systems? I want you all to know the behind the scenes just in case you want to do something like this. So what am I doing? One, I’m trying to provide a ton of value to you or to anyone who joins the newsletter.

subscribe, refer, and let’s build together!

I want the Thursday newsletter to be awesome. So I’m leading with value. I also have a referral program in hopes to get some people to take action and to get them to refer to their friends. I also recommend that you only refer, if you want the sticker, that’s fine, but I would only refer after you’ve read an issue of the newsletter.

See if you like it. And if you do like it, then refer your friends. You don’t have to just refer for the sticker. Make sure you actually like it and it’s something that you would actually refer your friends to. So I’m using ConvertKit as the email service provider. So if you want to know just like in the weeds what I’m doing, so ConvertKit is what I’m using.

And if you sign up for their top tier, I think it is, or one of their top tiers, you get access to an additional service they have called Spark Loop. And Spark Loop can bake in this referral program into your email newsletter service. And so if you want to dive down, if you want to start exactly what I’m doing, like I said, I’m just going to document the journey, you can do that.

So those are the services I’m using right now. Goal one here is just a thousand email subscribers. We’ll see how long that takes with me putting in kind of minimal time and effort to start, but this is where it will all begin. So go to jerred.com, J-E-R-R-E-D.com, sign up for the newsletter, get access to my more in-depth Thursday emails.

It’s going to give you a lot of awesome stuff. Also refer a friend, get an amazing Try Harder sticker, and I would love to have you be along for this journey, for this ride. Let’s see what we can do. Maybe we fail, maybe we do awesome, but I can’t wait to check back on this podcast, refer back to it in a year and see where things are at, see what progress I’ve made, and also maybe help a few people along the way.

Now if you can’t go to jerred.com and enter in an email address, come on, you just need to Try Harder.