So if someone came to you right now and they said, okay, I'm starting a business.
I want to get my brand going.
What's the first advice you'd give them?
So I would immediately look at what you want to do in your goals.
And the reason I say that you need to start with your goals, and this isn't
some cliche motivational pull rod type of thing is you need to understand
how big you want to play it.
Do you want to play it to where you're trying to become, you know, a celebrity
or maybe have a million followers or 10 million followers, or take
your business to nine figures?
Or do you want to simply become well-known on a local level?
And that will also determine your actual strategy moving forward with social
media and going out in public to network.
So myself personally, I want to take it as big as I can get.
I want to, I want to live up to my potential.
I really want to take this to the highest degree possible.
And so I know that my strategies aren't going to be limited to my city,
to my local neighbors, to my neighborhood, to my business on a local level.
Like my business is remote.
It's international, not national and not local.
And so always start with your goals and understand where you want to go with it.
And then understand what you want to be known as.
Now your personal brand is who you are, not just for what you do.
A lot of people only build out their personal brands for what they specialize in.
But if they ever want to pivot in the future, what ends up happening is the
people who are following them for the value in a specific field, and you do a
pivot, they're going to unfollow you because you're no longer providing value
to them and serving their best interest.
But if you were to build out your personal brand for who you are, connect on
the fact that you drink your coffee black without sugar, connect on the fact that
you're a huge Lord of the Ring span, or connect on the fact that you love to
travel and here are some of the places you've been and somebody else is like,
I've been there too.
I've been in that, but you know, I've been at that diner, that coffee shop,
or I too drink my coffee black.
That connects somebody and makes them become an acquaintance.
Even though you've never met them, they become your acquaintance.
And then they become your friend.
And then because of your social media content, they eventually become your
best friend and you might not even know they exist, but because of your
content that rapport is built.
And so that is going to be what established his longevity in the long term.
So always start with your goals and then start putting yourself out there.
Those are some of the initial tips that I'll give, but again, like I could go
into a million directions with that as well, because there's so many important
things and steps that come into personal branding and being successful at it.
So at what point after someone starts their business, should they consider
starting a podcast?
I would say immediately, that should be one of the first things you do.
If anything, it's going to take time to build out momentum for your podcast.
It took me a year and a half of my podcast and then me getting consistent
and starting to get people to listen and promote it every single time I went out,
every person I talked to, they did, you know, I have a podcast.
No, it didn't.
Well, here's the link, right?
Something like that.
And so I would say getting started early on is going to give you an advantage
considering 4 billion people are going to be on social media by 2025.
That's a massive amount of noise that you're going to have to cut through.
So why not take the advantage today and get started because otherwise
what will happen, Ashley, you know, this is you're going to say,
I'll start the podcast when I'll start it.
When my business is at X point or when I'm at this point, and then you'll get
there and you'll be like, yeah, I got all these other things going because
you're naturally going to get more things on your plates and then
you're not going to do it.
And so I would say start now, cut through the excuses and you know,
just put it's going to suck initially.
Like, and that's hot, right?
Like it's, it's going to suck.
And that's the beautiful thing because that allows for growth.
That allows you to understand the, you know, areas of improvement.
And then from there, you know, you can eventually get bigger guests, more
numbers, more listeners, more dollars.
Well, and the best part about starting the podcast is that you will create a
bunch of content that you can then repurpose for blog posts and
YouTube videos and everything.
Yes.