The effectiveness of your brand, content, and offers are a combination of 3 things:
Your skills
Your expertise
Your curiosities
Your skill level determines the quality of the value you deliver, your curiosities give you a unique perspective on certain topics, and your expertise allows you to monetize the attention you are grabbing.
In 2-Hour Writer, we turn your skills and interests into content you can write about to build an audience. In Mental Monetization, we turn them into a product so you can monetize your creative work in the best way.
For now, I want to plant some seeds of awareness in your head.
As you go through this course, I would highly recommend starting to read up on the basics, principles, and fundamentals of certain skills.
You will not master these all in one go, but simply having the awareness of them will prime your brain for pattern recognition.
Building a personal brand on social media gives you a place to practice ALL of these skills.
This is crucial.
Rather than endlessly learning and not knowing how to apply your skills — you can start applying what you learn immediately through your content, free products, and brand.
Skills That Will Determine Your Success Fortunately — building a full-fledged personal brand or creator business requires you to learn all of the skills that are necessary for success online.
Don’t let this overwhelm you. You don’t need all of these at the start. You can learn and implement these whenever you see fit.
The beauty in this: you have a meaningful project to work on, refine, and iterate for as long as you do this.
Pursuing an intrinsic hierarchy of goals is a big key to happiness. It is how you reap the benefits of the good dopamine that comes from survival mechanisms in your brain.
Like working on a hobby project that you deeply care about as opposed to a client project that you grow tired of.
The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Here are the skills that will boost the impact and income from your online endeavors:
Copywriting (persuasive writing)
Email marketing (for trust-building and sales)
Sales (for closing deals and networking properly)
Web design (for landing pages and a personal website)
Social media growth (for sending traffic and audience building)
Graphic design (for visuals and brand assets)
Marketing & advertising (for getting people to act)
You learn these skills best by learning the principles, starting a real world project (a personal brand), and refining your skills with time and experience.
These can all be freelanced or consulted with once you get the hand of them (and if you want to go that route).
The more you practice these and get results for yourself — the more you understand the nuance of how these skills interact with a specific business.
That is how you develop your own unique system and increase your prices IF you want to freelance or consult with these down the road.
ALL of these skills rely on a set of meta-skills:
Grabbing and holding attention
Storytelling & persuasion
Psychology & human behavior
Self-awareness and observation
Philosophy and spirituality
In other words, you need to understand how humans make sense of and interpret what they see.
You need to understand different perspectives and viewpoints so you can navigate topics with expertise.
You need to structure your message (throughout your entire brand, content, and funnel) in a way that leads readers toward a beneficial desired outcome.
None of this will work if you create what you think will help others VS what is actually going to help others.
Specific Knowledge
You don’t have to do all of these things yourself. You can outsource them.
But, the process of “figuring it out” is how you acquire specific knowledge. That is how you make new discoveries and help others navigate the path effectively.
How Your Curiosities Play A Role One big problem I see all the time is that people don’t know how to talk about what they love (while still maintaining authority).
It’s pretty simple, you just have to zoom out.
Stop thinking of your content or brand as a static thing from day to day.
It grows and evolves over time. Your content doesn’t just disappear after you write it. You refine your ideas, post them again, and build a library that displays your authority, interests, and personality.
Some content will stick in people’s heads and do well — some content won’t. That’s how it goes.
You incorporate your curiosities by being observant and using them to bring a new perspective to a problem that people face.
Your curiosities intersect with your interests, skills, and expertise — if and only if you are trying to find a way to connect them.
Here is a general way to incorporate your curiosities into your brand:
Write out 2-3 of your interests (the things you LOVE talking about)
Write out 2-3 options for eventual monetization (skills or interests like health or performance coaching)
Think big and small — write out broader interests and skills, then write out niche interests and skill relating to the 2-3 points you wrote out already. This starts to create a web of content ideas and curiosities to pursue
Keep an eye out for books, content, podcasts, and life experiences that check one of those boxes
Make a note of it and create some form of content around it
This is a watered-down version of the system we will be implementing in the Bachelors tier to make this process seamless.
You Are Building A Personal Brand
Niche brands have their place, but this is for people that want to harness the internet to do what they love (and pursue their life’s work).
It is difficult to put YOU in a box — if not impossible. You are ALLOWED to try different things and pivot whenever you want. You are a human that evolves with time.
Why would that be any different in a digital reality?
With practice and busting through limiting beliefs, this will become a reality.
Solving Your Own Problems And Selling The Solution If you don’t yet have a solidified offer to sell — or a skill that you are hell-bent on monetizing — there is another route you can go.
This route is an all-in-one “one-person” business model approach.
You are leveraging your ability to solve your own problems, document the process via content, and create a product that you can sell to your former self.
This is:
Personal growth
Social media growth
Authority building
Market research
Marketing
Offer creation
All. In. One.
If you attract people with similar interests as you, educate them, and give them a process that shaves 2-3 years off of their learning time — they will pay you.
For example: I have been passionate about health for the entirety of my adult life.
I have 10 years of experience.
I’ve tried all of the diets, training programs, and everything else. I have a very unique perspective with results to show for it.
Even though I talk about business and self-improvement — I could sell 6 figures worth of a health product in a month or two.
(Of course, this is considering I have an audience and vast marketing knowledge).
My point is — my audience likes me for me. Everyone has burning biological problems in the eternal markets. I can create a product on anything I feel like IF I can position it correctly within those markets.
My personal brand is what sets me apart. People will buy my health product over someone else’s just because I’m the one that made them aware of their problem and educated them on how to overcome it through my content.
The Best Products
The best products solve a problem that impacts a specific person’s direct experience in a positive way.
By solving your own problems, you do this automatically (and in a unique way).
This makes it seamless to target a problem in the eternal markets and position it towards a beginner market. Nearly guaranteed sales if you understand the rest of The One Person Business on an experiential level.