 I want to talk to you today about something very important for your business moving forward and that is your personal brand. This is what I believe. I'm sharing that with you for nothing. Just get out there and succeed. I don't know if you're building a personal brand, if you're thinking about building a personal brand, if you have a personal brand or what you think or what your opinions of a personal brand are, but today I want to dive into your personal brand. You need to evaluate where your personal brand stands right now. Let me tell you the basis of personal branding and that is consistent original content, period. Consistent original content, original meaning that you made it or it's just it's personal to you for whatever reason. You filmed it or you created it or you thought about it out of your own mind and made this content but it's consistent original content. That's what creates personal brand. If it's not consistent it's not going to work. If it's not original it's not going to work. If they've seen it before they're going to recognize that you're just using someone else's content to build your own brand and it's not going to hold as much weight. In a minute I want to get into the different layers of personal branding but for a second I want to talk about my weekly email that I've been doing every single Wednesday since 2007, 2007, that's 13 years now every single Wednesday regardless of what's going on in my life. This email has went out that I have created out of thin air. It's original content that consistently has went out to my database for 13 years and I didn't realize it at the time but that was me building my personal brand and that email thank God that I created that email started doing it when I did because now it's turned into the single most important reason why I sell 100 properties every single year as a real estate agent. Why? Because people have recognized over that 13 year span that I'm consistent, that I'm hard working, that I'm dependable, that I'm knowledgeable. It's interesting, it draws them in because they know it's original content. That's what draws them in every time and then it's there every single Wednesday like clockwork. They can depend on it so that's a reflection of who I am. They can depend on me. They know I'm going to be there when they need me and that's the whole purpose of personal branding is to create a scenario where through your content people are seeing that as a reflection of who you are. Your content is a reflection of who you are. Your content and the frequency of your content is a reflection of who you are. So the weekly email is just one layer of content. Now let's talk about other layers. You have all the social media channels, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the Snapchat, the TikToks, podcasting, LinkedIn, Twitter. There's all the different channels and platforms that you can use to do this. What you want to do is you want to be on as many different layers, different platforms as possible. How many can you do? That's how many that you should be doing. I personally, in my real estate coaching business, I'm on every platform I could possibly be on. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, podcast, everywhere I could possibly be. I'm doing email marketing and my real estate coaching business. I'm even incorporating text messages. And that's another thing. Text messaging is just another layer. A lot of you are thinking text messaging is too intimate. It's too intimate. We don't want to send business text to people because they're going to unsubscribe or they're going to feel like that's creepy or whatever the case may be. What happens is very interesting. You have your database, you're sending your weekly email to, okay, boom. Now if you add the layer of texting to that same database, here's what's very interesting in the magic behind adding as many layers as you can to your personal brand. As you send that first text out, a lot of people are going to unsubscribe. Maybe 5%, 2%, 10% are going to unsubscribe. That is a good thing because you're filtering down to the people who want the information on that channel. They want the information via text. The people that unsubscribe are still getting your weekly email. If they unsubscribe from your weekly email and they unsubscribe from your text, they don't want any information from you and that is okay too. Your job as a personal brander, as you're building your personal brand is to filter down, filter through the population and get down to the people who want to see your content, want to do business with you. I don't even look at unsubscribe rate. I don't even look at the people that unsubscribe from my emails or my text messages or block me on Facebook or I don't even look at any of that stuff. I have no idea what the numbers are there because I'm so focused on how can I get my content in front of more people. That's the name of the game. How do we get our content in front of more people to get to know who we are through our content, which is a reflection of who we are as a real person who will then in turn want to do business with us. I want to talk about content in just a second but I want to continue this conversation with adding as many layers because I think it's really important that you don't make the decision of what your clients want in terms of how they want their information. You might not want a business tax but you can't make that decision for someone else who might want the information via tax. So don't make that decision for them. Some people are going to want it. Some people aren't going to want it. Be on all platforms that way they can decide which platform, which avenue that they want your information from. I believe very strongly that you need to have a podcast. I think you should be posting a podcast at least once a week of whatever business that you're in. You need to have a podcast talking about it. If you're a real estate agent, which is most of the people watching this video, you should have a podcast talking about your local market and then send a link to that show out to your database. Texting and emailing that episode of that podcast is a really good idea because once they listen to that podcast, they're going to hear your voice. Okay, they're going to hear your voice and they're going to get to know who you are just a little bit deeper than just reading text. Just reading a screen with pictures and words. They're actually going to hear your voice and then they're going to hear you talking about your markets and then what's going to happen. They're going to feel connected to you and that level of trust is just going to grow just a little bit more. Okay, let's talk about content for just a second. Original content. Okay, as you're building your personal brand, what you need to think about in terms of content because a lot of you are struggling with what do I post? What kind of content do I share? What do I talk about? What do I write about? And the fact of the matter is that you should think of your content. For me, I think of it two ways here. I think I want to be a media company in terms of I want to bring news to people. Right, I want to be on the cutting edge of something new that's happening that's news to them where they can almost hear it from me first. Okay, if there's some incredible thing happening in the area or the industry or whatever's going on, you bring that to their attention. Okay, they're going to be drawn because they want to hear that story and then they're going to know, okay, this is Ricky who sent this to me and they're going to continue to feel that connection moving forward. So you're always on the cutting edge of what's going on. There's always new stories, new things happening, always. And so there's always an influx of content that you can, you know, grab onto and run with there. Another side of my content creation is formed around free information. I want to give people free information. I want to give them as much as I can for free. I coach real estate agents for free. I'm coaching you for free right now. Okay, I want to give you as much value as I possibly can without asking anything in return. That is going to create a connection and therefore want to do business with you because there is that connection. So you want to think about what can I do to bring value? Okay, for real estate, for example, I give all of the closed sales. I send a list of all closed sales, pending deals, active listings. I just give it all to them, all market stats. I'm not trying to hold anything back so that they call me. A light agent say, well, you shouldn't give them all that information because then they don't have a reason to call me. Yeah, they do. They'll call me when they get ready to buy or sell a property. They're going to call you when they need to figure out what is closed. I'm going to go ahead and give that to them now where when they call me, they're ready to buy or sell. They already have the information. They call me when they're ready to do something. And another layer of your content, there should be a level of entertainment. Okay, there should be something there. When you post a picture on Facebook, make sure that picture is of something that has an incredible view of the beach or something that you're doing and you're documenting the process, something that's very interesting. And don't worry if you think it's not going to be interesting to people. There again, don't make the decision for people. Put content out there. Don't be scared to put content out there. If you don't understand what content works and what kind of content doesn't work, then you aren't posting enough. Okay, if you're posting enough content like I do on every single channel, I have a lot of content to go by to see what works and what doesn't work. And then I can post more of what works. And this is what you should be doing. A lot of people who say, you know, I don't know what kind of content to post. I don't know what kind of content works. I go to their social medias and they're not posting any content at all. Okay, which is a huge problem. You have to post content to know what kind of content works. It's kind of a chicken and egg kind of deal. So I could go on and on and on and on about personal branding and the fact that you should be doing it. It is the wave of the future in any industry. Anything that you're doing, personal brand is going to be the way to go. And you have to be on every single channel, every layer of personal brand that you can possibly be. You need to be there. Don't worry about if people are going to get insulted or frustrated with you or, you know, not want the content here, not want it there. Give it to everybody everywhere and let them decide how they want to consume your content. Then you can build a huge business and dominate your space because now you're growing an audience in many different places. Whereas if you're just one dimensional, if you're just doing the email and Facebook but you're not doing anything else, you're only going to get the people who want content on Facebook and the email. You're missing out on all the people that are only on Instagram, that are on no platforms and would prefer a text. Okay, you're missing out on so much. So every platform that you cut yourself off of or that you're not posting on or that you're not taking advantage of, you're dwindling down the opportunity that you have to grow. And one more thing about building a personal brand, it doesn't happen overnight. It's going to take a long time to get there. And so when I say a long time, it could take a couple of months to kind of see some, you know, some kind of results. It could take six months. It could take a couple of years. You don't know exactly. But what I'm telling you is that if you continue to do it, you continue to tweak, you continue to adapt, you can continue to get better, just 1% better every day, then you're going to get to a place where things start happening all of a sudden. And you're going to be like, wow, this really works. So I hope this video inspires you to start your personal brand if you don't have one already. If you have one, but you've just kind of left it hanging out there, you know, left it for dead kind of deal, that you go and you revive that personal brand and you start posting original, consistent content. And it's going to take your business to the next level. Leave me a comment, shoot me a like, a subscribe, a follow, all that good stuff. Let me know what in the world I can do for you and I'll see you guys in the next video. Let's go. Let's go.