 When I was first starting to build a brand, trying to establish myself to make more sales in my business, I did just about everything that you could possibly do wrong. And I recently moved and I was cleaning out my house and I threw away about three different stacks of business card decks this big. Because in the past, when I didn't use to make any money, I thought that building a brand meant business cards, websites, logos, colors, things like this. It turns out, that's not what building a brand is at all. That can be part of a brand identity, but it's not the fundamentals of what's actually going to make you more sales. So if you want to learn how to build a brand that makes you sales and avoid all the dumb mistakes that I've made, that's what we're going to cover in today's video. Let's get it. It's taken me a long time to understand that a brand is not websites and logos and business cards and everything else that you want to do when you're starting a business back in the day in 2013 and 14 and even before that, when I worked in real estate, these are the kinds of things that I would focus on. They kept to me busy. They gave me the dopamine hit of getting things done. But what they didn't do was actually bring in more sales to my company. Now, I am just obsessed with learning about business. So around that time, when those things continually did not work, I said to myself, you know what, Christian, I think that you're missing something about branding and I started to read and learn what a brand actually is. So if you're here to learn how to grow your sales and your business, but you have an agency, an online course, a brick and mortar business, financial services, whatever it is, this is what you need to know to establish your brand in the marketplace and have sales come to you and the greater your brand becomes, the more you're not going to have to chase people and the more they're just going to come, say, can I give you money? So I have three parts to this video today. Part one is make promises and keep them. Part two is be memorable. And we're going to talk about what that actually means. And then part three is results in advance. So first things first, something that I learned reading about crossing the chasm, which is about how to bridge the gap between early adopters and the mainstream market. The mainstream market is basically like the general public, the bulk of your market, the part of the market you have to break into. If you want to become a multi-multi-million dollar brand. A couple of years ago, I was maybe about 30K a month and I didn't know how to get to the next level. And I started realizing like, yeah, I have the people that are already excited about this opportunity. They're ready to go. They're willing to jump in and see if this works for them because they'll do anything to get ahead. Those are the people I was selling to. And if you're new in business and you're selling to some people, but having a hard time really reaching the broad market, chances are you're selling to the early adopters too. Now, if you want to understand this concept, it's really simple. This is pretty common in the technology sector, but they have a group, a segment of customers called early adopters. And these are the people that are willing to take, take chances. They'll take risks. They're aggressive and they just want to beat their competition. And it's really easy to launch a new product to these people and have them buy it because they'll, they'll try everything in the market. So to break this down, think about your hometown. Let's say that you have a new restaurant that comes out. You have a couple of friends who are probably going to go try that restaurant no matter what, because they'll do anything to find the best restaurant in town, including trying something that is completely unproven. Now you probably also have friends or relatives or parents who will not try that restaurant until at least 10 people have told them that it's good, that it's worth the money, that it's worth checking out. Those are what we call the laggards. These are people that just, they have no interest in taking any risk. The worst thing that could possibly happen is they would go to that restaurant and it would be bad and they've wasted their time and their money. That would be devastating to them. And so we have a whole spectrum of customers in between these two and the more we can bridge that gap, the more sales that we're going to make. And this is where branding really comes into play because you can go out there, you can make sales to the early adopters in a new industry in a new business today with no brand whatsoever. In order to get the people in the middle that are more skeptical. They're not willing to take any risks. And all of the risk has to go on to you as the brand for them to can't over any money whatsoever. In order to get them, we have to play a different game. So I finally learned that a brand is not your brand identity. It's not what you look like. It's not what you see when you go to the website. It's not the colors. It's not the logo. Those things all play into it. But what a brand really is, the process of building a brand is the act of continually making promises to the market and then keeping those promises. This is a slow, long battle. You promise the market something, you deliver on that promise, you promise the market something, you deliver on that promise and you do it over and over again. And that's what a brand really is because I learned that people care about brands, not because they think that a brand is the best, but because a strong brand has a much smaller chance of being a mistake. So if you think about it, if you travel to another country, another town, and you want to get a cup of coffee, you could go try out the local coffee shop. But for a lot of people in the United States and around the world, they're going to go to Starbucks. And why do they do that? Is it because Starbucks is the best coffee in the world? I actually really like Starbucks coffee, but I know a lot of people who don't think it's very good. No, they do it because they know what they're getting and they don't have to worry about walking in a local coffee shop, paying for the coffee, getting coffee and saying, this coffee sucks. They don't have to worry about that. So that's the value of the brand. It's not that there is green in Starbucks logo. It's not that you have the most beautiful logo ever or that their product is the greatest product ever created. It is that they are consistent and when they promise something, they deliver consistently over time and you're not going to make a mistake by going there because you know what you're getting, even if it's not your favorite cup of coffee, you know exactly what you're in for. So that is the brand. It's making a promise and it's keeping it and it's proving to the market that you keep that promise, whether by just delivering for your customers and they will spread the word of your brand around or by getting proof, you can build case studies, you can build testimonials, written testimonials, social proof, all that kind of stuff is going to prove to the market that you have a brand that does what they say they'll do. So that I put is number one because that is hands down the most important part of your brand. You can change your name. You can change your colors. You can change your logo. You can change your business cards. All that things is not going to affect your brand as much as just being in the habit of promising things and then delivering them. If you go look at my brand right now, I am accountable to my customer base. You can look at reviews for digital nomad.com on Google, on Facebook, on the BBB, on my website. You see reviews from my customers everywhere, telling you whether I delivered on my promise or not. And that's why I have a brand. So just to get into this a little deeper, I recently wanted to open my pool for the season and I moved into a new house. So it's my first time owning a pool and Fourth of July was coming up. So I wanted to get it done quick. Now, turns out that during the pandemic, pool companies are in extreme demand. So it was almost impossible to get anyone to come out here. So I looked up the usual pool companies. I Google them and went to their websites. Nobody could make it out in time. So what did I do? Made the fatal mistake of turning to Craig's list. Now I'm not saying you can't get good work done on Craig's list, but here's the deal. These companies that are, they have a website, they have Yelp reviews. They have Google reviews. What's happening? They're publicly accountable for the work that they do. And this is something to take into mind with your business is like, you should be as accountable as possible. And that's the way you're going to build your brand. If you avoid being accountable by having no public presence where people can actually rate and review you, you're not building that trust in people and you're not letting people know, hey, you're not going to make a mistake by going with me. But that's exactly what we get with Yelp with Google, with Facebook reviews, all that kind of stuff. That's why it works so well. But Craig's list is like the no man's land. There are no reviews on Craig's list. You're just taking your chances. So I call up this guy from Craig's list. You haven't come over and he kind of tells me his credentials in his background and seems legit, but he walks in and it's as if I have the most complicated pool system he's ever seen in his entire life. Now, because I know nothing about pools, I think, okay, maybe this system is really old and it actually is complicated. And this actually is really hard to figure out. So I pay him for a day of work. He gets almost nothing done. I have nothing to point at and show there's the result you promised me you would get even though he promised he would get it. Yet he convinces me that it is because my system is so complicated. So we sign a contract for further work and I just get red flag after red flag. Notice that he had no brand here. There's nothing for me to point out and there's no way for me to hold him accountable because I cannot go to Yelp, I cannot go to Google and review him because he has no public persona. He has no brand. So after about halfway through the contract, he tells me that he's done and any more work I'll need to pay him additional money. Now I have a contract for twice as much work for the amount that we agreed upon. Needless to say, he starts to argue and I find myself talking to my attorney to make sure that my contract is enforceable and then I'm not going crazy. It turns out I'm not. I'm sure this has happened tons in the past with this guy. So I get rid of this guy and I call up a pool company who's finally able to come out for the July is over. They're a little bit slower. It's the end of the summer. He comes out. It looks at my system. He goes, oh yeah, no problem. I said, this isn't complicated to you or this isn't hard to figure out. He goes, no, this is standard. I know exactly what to do here. He's in and out in five minutes, something that the other guy would sit and explain to me for three hours. He's done in five minutes and I should have known this ahead of time. Because if I had gone with the brand to minimize my downside to make sure that I was not wrong in picking a company, I would have been just fine. But what did I do? I didn't go with the brand and what happened? I was wrong. So that's the purpose of brand is to help us avoid being wrong, not necessarily to get the best choice or the best company ever. If you think about McDonald's, they don't have the best food in the world. But people that like McDonald's, they go there in different cities because they know what they're getting. They're not going to be wrong. They're going to get the quality that they're after. So it's a long winded way of saying the brand exists to prove to the market that they will not be wrong when they go with you. People are very risk averse and the brand is just helping them to avoid that risk. Part two of having a brand is be memorable. And a lot of people think you have to be something extreme and crazy to be memorable. All memorable means is easy to remember. So I was recently reading 50 cents newest book and he talks about how some of the rappers in G unit didn't make it like he thought they would. And he breaks down what he thinks the performers need to make it in the rap world. And he says you need a strong stage presence, which seems obvious. You need a unique appearance, which I thought that was very interesting. And he talks about how Tupac would have the backwards bandana, how some more modern day rappers have tattoos on their face. These things that you can clearly identify as being uniquely them having that unique appearance in 50 cents mine, who's very, very, very good at business and branding is a necessity. And then number three is that you actually have a good product. So you know that having a good product is one out of three there. So in 50s mind, you have to have a memorable experience. Now, if we're talking online, we're mostly talking about language. We can bring experience into this, but there's tons of people who don't have a unique experience, but they have unique language. So we can take Tim Ferriss as an example. Tim looks like a pretty normal balding guy. You could probably seven tons of white dudes that look just like him. But his brand is one of the most known brands in this community, the four hour work week. And then he has the four hour body for our chef. So we turn it into a four hour brand. Now, when Tim was writing the four hour work week, this is a book, mind you, that is about outsourcing. Essentially, it's about 80, 20 and outsourcing. And he was going to name it after this book, this old school book, but he was going to name his book Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit. That's what the four hour work week would have been about. Now, would people pick that up? Would they be interested? Would they be curious? And would they be able to tell their friends about it? Some people would, but not as much as have picked up the four hour work week. Now, people will go out there and they'll mock Tim relentlessly because they think that the four hour work week is about only working four hours a week. That's not what it's about at all. It's about getting the most out of work so that you can do what you're truly meant to do in life. That could be more work. He never says to only work four hours a week. Yet the brand is so memorable. That's all people can take away and they'll actually ascribe that to him that he claims that that's his philosophy to only work four hours a week. Now, why is that? Four hour work week. That's four words. So if you can't explain like your pitch and your concept in less than a sentence, you don't have a good brand. You don't have a strong brand. And when I realized this, again, I was it was a couple of years ago. It was about 30 K a month at that point in revenue. And somebody said to me, you know, a brand is is just the couple of words that people describe you by. And I thought, what if people describe me by and it looked at all the customers they had. I looked at my current messaging and it was work from anywhere. Simple, three words, easy to remember. And it became the work from anywhere guy and the work from anywhere accelerator was born. It used to be called funnel cloning or something like that. And I almost immediately went from 30 K a month to 80 K a month just by making that change. Now, why is that? Because if if people are going to go to lunch with their friend after they watch my webinar and it's called funnel cloning, they're going to have to have this long drawn out explanation to their friend. They're not going to be able to explain it. It's going to be way too complicated. And the benefits not really in that name. Now, if they remember work from anywhere, that's extremely easy to remember and explain. It's this business where you can work from anywhere. And it's a guy who's traveled all around the world doing Facebook advertising for companies and he gets to work from anywhere. Do you see how simple that is? So your brand messaging should be less than a sentence. It should be like ideally three to five words. That's what people are going to hang on to. So I could have been the Facebook ads guy that would have been super generic, but I thought what's the end result people are after it's to work from anywhere. Let's do that. Just like Tim said, what is the end result people are after? Well, they like four hour work week. And he actually found that out by the way by split testing on Google. He just threw a couple dollars behind there and tested which people clicked through on more. And so the lesson in that is when you're trying to find your messaging, you're not going to just make it up in your head in your bedroom and get it right the first time. You have to actually push things to the market and see what people respond to. So it's a continuous act of getting messages out to the market, seeing which one stick and then just double triple quadruple down on that messaging that actually works. So that applies to any business, but you want to think about what is the end result that my customers specifically are really after and go specific here and then just make that your brand name. There is a saying that's probably the most important saying in scaling a business and in marketing from the marketing side of a business is find something good to say, say it well, say it often. When you find that thing that hits, say it over and over again, that's how you're going to scale. Part three of having a great brand that makes sales is what's called results in advance. So people want to work with brands that can help them, right? They want to minimize risk. They want to work with somebody they remember and they want to work with people that can actually help them. Doesn't matter if there's no risks and they remember you if you're not doing what they want to get from you. So we use those called results in advance. For example, on my work from anywhere webinar, we teach people how to go out there and get clients on the actual webinar. And then when they go and they get the client, they say, what's next? And we say, we're happy to help you. We'll take you through the whole process. It's going to take us about eight weeks, but we will help you every step of the way and we'll actually support you after that up to a year and even longer. So we actually give them result for free, right? We show them, we prove to them, hey, we're here to help and let us prove it to you that we can actually help you before we ask you for money. So that's results in advance. You can do that with your brand through free content. You can show people how to get the first part of result and then you help them the second part. You can give away free samples. You know, the simplest form of this is at a bakery or you go to Costco, you get free samples. You say, oh, that's actually pretty good. I'll buy that. So again, that's mostly just taking the risk off of the consumer. You have to understand that in life, most people's biggest fear is loss. People are so incredibly loss of verse. It's it's unbelievable. And this is why most people stay stuck because they won't take any risk at all. So a quick side note, if you want to be a high performer in life, you have to get comfortable with the risk and you're not going to win every time. Take risks. And when you lose, don't say that was a mistake because they lost. That's just one piece of risk in your risk portfolio that will balance out with your big wins. But most people in life will do anything to avoid losses. It's just unbelievable. And so every step of the way with our brand, we're just proving to them, hey, we're going to take the risk and we're going to take the loss off the table. But we don't want you to lose ever. We're going to prove it to you by making promises and then keeping them repeatedly and showing you that we're going to prove to you by being memorable and being accountable in the marketplace so that people can remember us, talk about us and judge us. And if we're doing a bad job, we are going to be publicly accountable for that. And if we're doing a great job, we also get the public accountability for that, which is going to make us way more sales. And then lastly, results in advance, go out there, get your customer results in advance. You can do it with a free strategy session, right? Just talk them through the problems and help them. You can do it by running a trial for them. You can do it by offering a free sample. You can do it by just showing them something they didn't know before or shifting their perspective or offering good, awesome, free content. So if you're trying to build a brand that will make you sales, stop wasting time on websites, stop wasting time on business cards. I've thrown out thousands and thousands of them. Don't worry about your colors or your logo or any of this. I have to constantly talk my students out of this. This is not what's going to make you sales. Learning to make promises to the market and then keep them will make you more sales than you could need. Once you get bigger and bigger, then you can start to work on the website, the branding, the colors, the brand identity, what most people typically think of when we talk about brands. But really what a brand is is your reputation in the marketplace. And what people what comes into people's minds when they think of you, do you lie to the market? Do you let people down? Do you put the risk on them? Are they going to lose if they work with you? Or can they be sure if you know what, I don't know if this is the best possible solution in the entire market. But I know that I'm certain about the results that I'm going to get because they have kept their promises over and over again, right? You don't have to be the best product in the world. So Rix doesn't have the best coffee in the world. But if nothing else they are consistent and people love them for it. So that's all put in the comments. Does this help? How are you going to change your approach to branding after listening to this video? And did I break any misconceptions you have about branding or are you still kind of set on that brand identity piece that we mostly look at when we talk about branding? Also let me know if you want to see anything specific in the future. That's all for today. I'm Christian, the work from anywhere, digital marketing guy. I'll see you on the next one.