# Personal Branding Made Simple for Creatives

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Philip VanDusen
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg
- **Дата:** 17.01.2026
- **Длительность:** 1:35:29
- **Просмотры:** 1,119

## Описание

Personal branding for creatives can be a complex thing to master. This workshop unlocks the secrets of personal branding, demonstrating its unparalleled power in forging a successful career and establishing yourself as an independent authority.

Let's dive into the world of personal branding with an engaging overview, and an introduction to the "Personal Brand Wheel," a proprietary strategy tool that creates a tactical framework to conceive, build, maintain and grow your brand. This hands-on workshop will guide you through interactive exercises to start crafting the core strategic elements of your personal brand, ensuring you leave with actionable insights to elevate your career and personal visibility.

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WEBSITE
https://www.philipvandusen.com

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LINKEDIN
https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipvandusen/

THREADS
https://www.threads.net/@philipvandusen 

FACEBOOK
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Philip VanDusen is a branding consultant based in New York. A highly accomplished creative executive and expert in brand strategy, graphic design, marketing and creative management, Philip provides design, branding, marketing, career and business advice to creative professionals, entrepreneurs and companies on building successful brands for themselves and the clients and customers they serve.

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Heat. feel. You Hey, down. hey, hey. There's creative entrepreneur, it can feel isolating to go it alone. Imagine being surrounded by other accomplished creative colleagues eager to accelerate the growth of their business and personal brands. I'm Philip Van Dusen and I'm launching a membership community called Bonfire for creative pros like you because I believe in the power of building a meaningful network. Bonfire is a hybrid coaching, training, networking, and accountability community. A place for us to share, grow, and ignite our potential together. Need more confidence about your next move? With our fire milestone success map, you'll know what your next step should be and exactly how to get there. You get bi-weekly video sessions, private online community, a deep resource library, and exclusive access to yours truly, and other amazing benefits. So, come join Bonfire, a community of like-minded individuals who are as passionate as you. Visit phipandusen. com/bonfire to learn more about the launch. Let's fuel your creative future. Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. It's exciting to have you here today. And I tell you, I have been I'm a little rusty. So, I'm just going to let you know that right out of the gate. And uh if you're on LinkedIn, welcome. And if you're on YouTube, welcome. The thing to know about being uh watching this on LinkedIn is that um I'm not able to see your com comments or respond to your comments here um on LinkedIn. I have to have a different streaming uh service for that. So, if you want to engage in the comments, jump on over to YouTube and uh and check us out there. Sorry, my nose is itching. I have getting over a bit of a cold, so I apologize about that. Anyway, um I'm stoked to talk to you today. We're going to be talking about personal branding, and it's a very important uh subject to me. that's been absolutely transformative um in my

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

career when I underwent a big pivot about a decade ago and um I'm going to share a little bit about my own story um but I'm also going to share uh a bit about a tool that I've developed called the personal brand wheel which is an amazing tool to help you plan and track and evaluate the development of your own personal brand and so if you're watching I'd love to know where you guys are from if you want to pop it in the comments. Let me know where you're joining from. Um, also it might be helpful to me if I know how long you've actually been in the industry. And if you know anybody who is interested in personal branding or is trying to build a personal brand of their own, um, please uh, shoot them a text or a DM and let them know that this live stream is going on. I'll be on for about an hour and so um, it'll be really great. I'll also be doing a little Q& A at the end. So, uh, if you want to stick around to the end, you can definitely kind of engage from me directly and get all your questions answered. All right. Um, so with that, I think we should Well, first of all, if you haven't connected with me, of course, you're connected with me on LinkedIn if you're watching it there, or YouTube if you're watching on YouTube. But um if you're not on my email list, please go to phipvandusen. com/musem s and uh subscribe to my newsletter and then you can get alerted whenever I go live or post a new video. And I also share a lot of curated content, stuff I think is valuable that you should know about. And I'm also getting more um active on Threads. I've jumped off of Twitter. I think it's a bit of a dumpster fire. So um Threads is the place to be. And it's a really um amazing platform and there's a lot of creative people there and a lot of uh great positive energy which is not what I can say for Twitter at this time. So um cool. So happy new year to you Honk now and Miles. So good to see you Miles I know is joining from LA. Um Robert good to see you from Canada. Um, let me know if my audio is coming in okay, if everything sounds good. I did as much testing as I could to make sure everything was kosher as much as possible. Um, and uh, Harris Ali from Pakistan. Cool. Excellent. Um, Sheila from North Carolina. Uh, Pro remedy from Italy. Wow, we got representation for all over the globe. That's really awesome. Um, and so yeah, also pop in there and let me know how many years you've been in the industry. Um, are you just starting off? Are you a vet? That'll help me kind of um evaluate how I can position some of what I'm going to talk about today. All right. So, also one of the things I wanted to um make sure is that you if you have here hitting the wrong button, not coming up. Okay. If uh if you don't listen to my podcast, you should definitely check that out. It's called Brand Design Masters. It's in the top 5% of marketing and design podcasts in the world. And I, uh, I've been posting a lot of solo shows, short solo shows there, um, which are very easy to listen to. They're like 8 to 10 minutes long, and it's easy to binge on them. And so if you haven't been listening to the Brand Design Masters podcast, I encourage you to head over and check that out at some point. And it would be super helpful and wonderful if you could give me a star rating or a review. That would just be incredible. All right, so you guys just want to jump right into it. I think this would be a good time to do that. All right, so I'm going to be sharing some slides today and uh maybe popping back and forth between those two things. And uh this is how we're going to do it. Good. My tech is working. That's encouraging. So today we're going to be talking about personal branding and we're this is going to be a workshop. So if you have if you're at a desk or if you're someplace where you can actually take a few notes that could be helpful because I'm going to be asking you some questions that it might be good to see if you just jot down the answer to. I'm also going to be sharing a tool that you can download called the personal brand wheel that has a lot of these question prompts within it. So, it's um it's a working tool that can really help you uh evaluate, build, and conceptualize your personal brand as you go about doing that. All right. So, Pro has uh graphic designer more than 10 years now. Four as a freelancer. That's cool. Congratulations on being independent and um just starting on social media. So Harris Ali um and uh let's see Parascar sorry uh 14 years Robert 30 plus all

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

right 25 years 31 years good we got some vets here that's really awesome okay cool all right so I am going to see if I can get my slides to go all right so what we're going to do today is I'm going to talk just a little bit about my story I don't know how much um everyone here knows about me some of you have heard this story before I know. Um, but I never know who's in the audience. So, I want to give you just a little bit of background because this does frame out the context of what I'm going to be talking to you about today. And it also kind of establishes the fact that I've been down this road and I've traveled this road and um, know a bit about how to kind of come out successfully on the other end. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the idea of going from being brandless to being branded and owning your own personal brand, owning your own identity independent of any kind of employer. And so, you can build a little bit of autonomy and a little bit of career insurance for how you're going about your professional journey. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about also about the ROI, the return on investment of developing a personal brand. One of the things I want to mention is, and I'll see if I can pop this up right here. I'm not sure if I can do it right now. Yeah. Um, if you have a question, please type question in all caps before your question and then I can scroll back through the feed and answer your question when I get to the end. I won't be answering questions during the presentation. Just kind of throws me off. So, if you have a question, type question in all caps before your question. And then I'm going to share with you the personal brand wheel which is a framework. It's tool that I developed. It's a propri proprietary tool that I use with my clients and my mastermind community in order to kind of conceptualize, build, uh create an outline for and track and evaluate the development of your personal brand. I'm going to walk you through exactly how to use that tool. And I'm going to make that tool available to you for free today. So you have something that you can walk away from this presentation with that you can actually start to put into action. And then full disclosure, I've got a little bit of a special offer for you at the end. I'm going to share with you a community that I run called Bonfire and tell you a little bit about what that is and also how the Bonfire community can really add rocket fuel to the development of your personal brand. And also if you're an independent, a consultant, a freelancer, have a small agency, how Bonfire can really um really energize that and also build your meaningful network. And I just don't mean network like LinkedIn connections of you know people I'm connected, boom, done, another number, right? No, I'm talking about meaningful connections. connections with people that you actually interact with, you develop relationships with, you possibly go into strategic partnerships with, people that you can bring into projects that you're working on. So, a meaningful network, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that at the end. So, let's talk about going from branded, brandless to branded. Okay, my experience is that I've got 20 years in big corporate. So, I've been a VP of design at Old Navy and PepsiCo. I've led super large creative teams. Um I've been running my own brand consultancy and uh agency for the last 10 years. And during that time I've been building my own kind of content empire buyer and my own personal brand which I'm going to share a little bit with you in just a minute. And then I've got um over five years actually in uh global branding agencies, strategic design agencies. And so in 2016, as I said, I'd been a VP of design at PepsiCo, Old Navy. I'd been an ECD executive creative director at the global branding firm Landoor Associates, also another firm owned by Shock Inc., which is no longer existence called Anthem Worldwide. Um, I've worked with a host of Fortune 500 clients, managed large design teams, small design teams, and I've been on the board of adviserss of the AIGA and also the San Francisco College of Art. These are just a few of the clients that I've worked with in my career um in my global agency days. Done projects for every single one of these enterprise level clients and then happens, right? Stuff can happen in your career that you're not expecting. Number one, agism is incredibly prevalent in the creative industries. If you're 45 and a creative director or a senior designer, you have a target on your back actually and you may not really realize it. So, building a level of career insurance is really important as you're getting to mid to late career as a creative professional. And financial downturns can happen, corporate acquisitions and reorganizations can happen. Unexpected life events can happen. In fact, when I left my last big corporate job, my

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

father was passing away from dementia. Um, I'd been working a 60 80 hour week at this global position and I massively burned out. I'll just like tell it like it is. I massively burned out and there was a lot of emotion attached to that because I was losing a parent and I walked away from this big gig and I really didn't know what I was going to do after that and I was so kind of disill disillusioned by the creative industry at that point that I wasn't really sure that I even liked branding anymore. So, it was like this big kind of pivotal um moment in my life. Also, in my career, I've been laid off once by a financial downturn. from an agency that lost a major um pivotal client for them. I've been laid off once because of a restructuring. And a couple of those layoffs, I was out of work for a year in between those gigs. And so, it's tough to be at the the whim of a large corporate entity or an agency. And what I want to do with you today is help you understand how you can develop a little bit of agency, autonomy and own your career. And so you have to understand that this is my mission. My mission is to give you some career insurance and to make sure that you are not caught blindsided and unprepared for what will eventually go down one way or the other. And so when I left that corporate gig, I was invisible. Like I had a you know I had a big business card, had a big title, had a big salary, right? And I, you know, I ran big teams. I a lot of cache, right? And suddenly overnight, literally overnight, that all went poof. And so when it came down to it, I knew that I was going to have to start my own thing. I was going consultancy. And I had to figure out how to get clients. None of the clients that I'd been working with in these global, you know, corporations were going to be my clients. I wanted to work with small to medium-sized businesses. And so, I'd never created content. I didn't have an email list, no podcast, no video. I didn't know anything. Literally, I didn't know anything about what personal branding was. And to be honest, a decade ago, you know, personal branding was still kind of, I'm not going to say it's in its infancy, but it was certainly just starting to be known. and uh the independent, you know, kind of um consulting economy was just really starting to gain steam. I knew nothing about personal branding. This was my website. I had a five-page Wix website. I want to say actually four pages because I had a bio, I had some portfolio pieces, little slider, I had my resume, and then I had, you know, some press clippings and the blog page was totally empty. So, that was it. That was the digital presence that I had when I started off a decade ago. I had 25 years of experience in the industry and I had no idea this was me. what I was doing. And so now I have a pretty successful branding consultancy uh YouTube channel. You guys are here. You found me on YouTube. Um I have a newsletter, a podcast. I run a uh subscription community called Bonfire. It's a mastermind community for mid to late career creative pros and entrepreneurs. Uh I sell a brand strategy course. I've published tons hundreds of articles and been a guest on hundreds of podcasts and done digital conferences etc. I also accept brand sponsorships um to endorse other companies in my content. And so it's been a big change for me over the years. These are just some of the small to mediumsiz businesses that I work with now. I really wanted to work with companies that I could influence and uh help advance much more quickly than these corporate behemoths that I've been working with most of my career. As I said, when I first started off, the first thing that I did was I actually started a newsletter. I started publishing a newsletter and building an email list because ultimately there's two things that you own in terms of digital real estate. And I want you to write this down. Everything else in the world is rented land. YouTube is rented land. LinkedIn is rented land. But when it comes down to it, you own two things. You own your website and you own your email list. And if you don't have an email list going, I would highly suggest that you start working on one because that's the only place where you can really communicate with people directly. Um, and so I've been publishing my newsletter for about nine years. My YouTube channel's been going since 2016. This is actually my 10y year anniversary. Um, I've built that to over 300,000 subscribers, 150 uh plus videos. And here's the important part. Within a year of starting my YouTube channel, 80% of my clients, my new agency, independent clients, were coming to me directly from YouTube. And that's still true today.

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

And so developing content, podcast, newsletter, video is one of the best things you can do to elevate your ability to be found, to be visible in the industry. And we're going to talk more about that, too. Again, my podcast, Instagram, I'm not that really that um active on these days. And then my brand strategy course. If you're interested in this course, if you go to philipvandusen. com/bs101, um you can learn more about that. and then my Bonfire mastermind community that I'm going to share with you a little bit more about this um today uh a little bit later and if you go to philipes. com/bonfire you can read more about that as well. So LinkedIn is one of the places that I really focus on. One of the things I want to share with you today, which I'm going to do a completely separate video on and also possibly a separate live stream on, is how to get f found um through LLMs, throw the chat GPTs, the Geminis, the perplexities, the ask engines, right? So, the generative engine optimization or ask engine optimization. How do you get found? surfaced? How do you get cited when people ask questions of these AI models? And one of the things that has just come to light through a survey from Semrush is that LinkedIn is now second only to Reddit in how many times it's being cited by Chad GBT, Gemini, Perplexity, these LLM models, LinkedIn content because they're verifiable profiles. It's professionally based. The people who post content there are usually very authoritative and knowledgeable. Publishing on LinkedIn is the most important place these days to publish. The number of times that LinkedIn is cited by LLMs has gone up five times in the last half year, maybe a year. And so it goes Reddit, LinkedIn, and then, you know, I'll do a separate video on this, but LinkedIn is number two. So publishing on LinkedIn is super, super important. And I know what you may be saying to yourself if you actually are working for other people. And that is that you say, I have a job, right? I don't need a personal brand. I have a salary. I have a title. They pay me. I get vacation. It's all good. The thing is that that's not true. And that eventually there will be a financial downturn, a corporate restructuring. Your agency will get bought by another agency. Your department will be made redundant. You will reach an age where you become too expensive or your title is too much or they can hire two people with what they pay you and you will be made redundant. And it may be very well no fault of your own. That's the thing that a lot of people kind of hold on to is they're like, I'm doing a great job. You know, I get great reviews every year and I've been moving up. And the thing is that stuff like this can happen without any fault of your own. And so you kind of h you really have to kind of think ahead and be prepared for it. This is a great quote and Mark Ekko is the founder of Echo Clothing. He said this like I don't know probably 15 years ago and he said you two are a brand whether you know it or not or whether you like it or not. And a lot of people don't like the fact that they are they have to address this or deal with it but you do. And the cool thing is that today as I show you the personal brand rule, it's going to create and it's going to kind of simplify the complexity of building a personal brand in your own head. It's going to be really helpful, I think, because ultimately you own you. Your employer doesn't own you. You have to take full responsibility for the full trajectory, the full arc of your career. And I want you to make sure that you're kind of recognizing that and owning it, right? because you don't want to offload that responsibility to your employer because when it comes down to it employers don't care about you as much as you care about you right so here are what I call the four pillars of personal branding and that is credibility visibility value and authority and they really go in that order and they really build let's talk about each of those just a little bit credibility is your story. It's your experience and it's also what you know, what your expertise is, how and um why people can believe that you know what you're talking about, right? Really, when it comes down to it, visibility is how people find you, where can you be seen, heard, how do people discover you? Also, how do people recognize it's you when they come across you in their feed as they're thumb strolling by at a million miles a minute, right?

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

The next pillar is value. And that's how are you providing a solution through what method? Is it a digital product? Is it are you speaking? Are you doing digital conferences? Are you delivering graphic design or creative deliverables? What is it and how is it that you're delivering value to your clients, to your target audience? And finally building over time all of these things combined help you build authority helps you build community. It helps you build visibility and also that authority is created by your ability to deliver transformations to your clients and your customers. It comes down to personal branding really. attraction over promotion. So what you're doing is you're putting yourself out there exhibiting your story, your value, the transformations that you uh that you achieve for people or the audience or your clients and how that builds in that visibility to attract new opportunities to you. So let's talk um about the ROI, the return on investment of personal branding. There are so many different areas where personal branding can offer you value. one, it builds your competitive advantage as a professional. And this is this matters whether you're employed or whether you're independent, right? If you're building a level of authority and visibility as an individual um professional, it adds value to your employer and your employer actually will pay and value your you more if you have this level of credibility and authority. So it used to be the people were like I don't you know companies actually didn't want people to build personal brands or to kind of show up outside of the you know the umbrella of their company. But right now that is really shifted. Companies are really starting to embrace the influencer lever level culture and the positive halo effect that they can get from having employees who work for them who are authorities in their space. They're still very nervous. Corporations are very nervous because if anyone misspeaks or posts some, you know, unfortunate post or something like that, it can reflect badly on the employer, right? But on the whole, companies are much more accepting of this. Now, you also, if you build a personal brand, you get greater value. You have more professional opportunities. Recruiters are going to search you out more. Your ability to earn a higher salary or be promotable is greater. And you're also your visibility as a professional gets you know kind of projected outside of your social profiles into a level of greater visibility in terms of people in your industry and also in your professional network. It builds for you a level of professional autonomy completely independent of your employer and it increases your value and your influence within your industry. The other thing it does for you and this is also kind of going to link in link up to what I talk about at the end with bonfire is that it increases your networking leverage. So if you build a personal brand, your ability to network with higher level people, get invited on podcasts, get invited to speak on in conferences or in digital conferences or summits, that goes up. So building your personal brand, that visibility, that authority adds to your networking leverage as well. Now, here's the thing, and this is why I built this tool. Hold on a second. Are you guys good? Domelo, awesome. Good to see you, man. After punk, Anna Valerie, yay, Valerie's here. Thanks, Valerie, for showing up. That's really awesome. Um, building a personal brand can be complex. And I built this tool, the personal brand will, because of this. It's a framework. And if you go to Phil, I'll show the URL in a second, but if you go to phipvanddusen. compbw, you can download a PDF of the personal brand wheel. And it comes with the tool itself, an example of what the tool looks like when you fill it out, and also a large range of question prompts that help you address and look at and use the tool. So if you go to pbw philipenderson. com/pbw you can download that tool right now and you can follow along with me or write down the URL and grab it after the live stream but you definitely want to grab this tool and we're going to be talking about this tool in detail today. So essentially what the tool is, you guys following? You tracking with me? All right. What this tool is it's a visual road

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

map. It's broken into four quadrants and 12 different sections. And it addresses very specific parts of building a personal brand. And like I said, building a personal brand can be kind of complex and there's a lot of moving and interconnected and interdependent parts of personal branding. And so what this does is it kind of simplifies it and puts it into a very I'm a design guy, right? So it puts it into a very visual context that helps you kind of get an overview, get a 30,000 foot level view of what you've started to work on, what you're being successful with, maybe what you haven't even thought about or what you haven't addressed yet. And it helps you plan your actions, get that 30,000 foot view, evaluate your progress over time. And this is one of those things that you can use this tool over time to evaluate and indicate your progress in your um your success or your challenges in certain areas of building your brand. You want to capture what working is working. needs work or what you possibly haven't even addressed yet. And we're going to talk about this tool in detail right now. And essentially you are rating yourself one through five different levels from good to lacking on each of these 12 um kind of slices of the pie. And the question prompts in the PDF will help you uh do that. And we're going to be going through them today as well. So the first quadrant is called foundation. And the foundation area is really what it comes down to. What's your story? What are your credentials? What's your mission? What's your personal um brand positioning? Uh the creatives and the strategists in the audience will know what I mean when it comes to talking about a brand positioning. You want to develop we write positioning statements for our clients all the time. But you have to write one for yourself. You have to really write a brand positioning statement for yourself because that's going to help you kind of conceptualize and really codify and capture and think about your value proposition as a professional. And this is one of those things that a lot of people don't do and it drives me crazy. And one of the reasons why we don't do it is because it's hard and because it's like the cobbler's children have no shoes, right? I know so many graphic designers who hate their websites and they never update their websites and their websites look like crap. Why? Because we're spending all the time working on our clients with our clients. And working on your own website, your own brand, your own logo, your own color palette, all that stuff for designers is really hard to do because we're so critical of ourselves. And so developing a brand positioning, your mission, your point of view, your brand tone of voice, your value proposition. These are all strategic aspects of things that you have to address for yourself. Omniresence. Omnipresence is your brand design. It's also your home base. So is that your website? Is it a primary social channel that you're using? And also what other kind of platforms you're on. Are you on physical stages in real life? Are you doing digital conferences? What's your social um media platform uh ecosystem? Where are you showing up? Engagement this uh quarter is all about your audience. So what is it that you're actually delivering? What's the content or the product or service that you're delivering? What's your distribution? And also is it digital? Is it in real life? Do you have a retail store? Right? There might be entrepreneurs here who have retail stores. Who's your target customer? Who are your subscribers? Who are your followers? And also, how do you engage with those subscribers? This is one of those areas that when I have people do this wheel for themselves, they get to this, you know, they get to this slice of the pie, the engagement and they're like, uh, really? Uh, I'm like seriously lacking because we spend a lot of time publishing and maybe commenting on other people's things, but we're not really engaging with the people who are engaging with our content. It's an very important point that I'm going to come back to. And then there's transformation. Transformation is another area which sometimes is not considered or paid attention to as much as it should and that is the results. So you are delivering some sort of product, some sort of service, some sort of value to your clients or your audience, right? And so you need to understand and be able to articulate what those results and what those transformations are. And then also you have to gather testimonials. social proof of your ability to actually do those things because that's what's going to increase your credibility when you can display your uh your the transformations that you're creating for people. And it also is like what's your extended network?

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

How is your network growing? What is your meaningful network look like? And this is something I'll talk about a little bit later in greater depth, which is that we spend a lot of time like trying to get subscribers, trying to get followers on LinkedIn, trying to get people to click on our post. But the thing comes down to it is like those are just vanity metrics. Those just make us feel good. Oh, 200 people liked my post, right? And but the thing that's more important is what is your meaningful network? the people that you really know, the people who really trust you, can refer work to you, who can bring you in on a project, someone who you could bring in on a project to help you with an area of a project that you don't isn't in your core competency. That's a meaningful network. Someone that you could turn to bounce an idea off of or a decision you're trying to make off of to get true feedback that you could truly trust is valuable to you. and then also the growth of your business. Now, we're going to jump into the each different section of this pie. You guys tracking with me? Am I going too fast? I know the coffee is kicked in. And I'm also super passionate about this, so I have a tendency to kind of go really quickly, but like I said, you can download the tool phipfandusen. com/pbw and follow right along with me. All right, so the first uh piece of the pie is story. What is your personal development story? And I shared a little bit of my personal development story with you here today. And that helped ground you in my credibility, right? And also my passion for what I do and the story of the trajectory of my career and how that influenced what I do now, my success, the transformations I, you know, create for people and also why I've done what I've done in terms of building my own kind of content. um empire, right? So, what's your personal story? What are the things the events that brought you to now? Where did that motivation come from to do what you do? This matters. People kind of they don't uh a lot of creatives and entrepreneurs don't take a lot of stock in the fact that it's important for us to tell our story because that's how people make a personal connection with us. That's how people know, like, and trust you. And people do business with people that they know, like, and trust. And so, if you're just kind of a brand, what I like to call a brand bot, right? Like if you're kind of spouting very generic messages and um you know, you're getting chat GPT to write all your emails and you're showing up in a very generic way. People can't connect with that. And so you really want to get in and let people know the man or woman behind the curtain a little bit because that's how people make that personal connection. What are the catalysts? What are the triumphs that you've had in your career? You know, what is it that got you to where you are now? because those sorts of challenges and triumphs like earlier in this presentation when I was sharing with you that I've been you know laid off and out of work for a year twice in my career. Those kind of challenges are things that folks can identify with if you tell those stories. Um and where are you going to tell that story? on your website? Are you going to tell it through your content over time? Are you going to share it on different platforms? Um, you want to showcase that humanity and that personality of your story. The next area is purpose. So, what do you offer, right? Who do you offer it to? Why are you better? This is basic brand positioning um kind of questions. What do you offer? Why are you different? Why do you do what you do? And what is your mission? What is your purpose? What's your reasoning behind what it is that you do? You want to really think about and capture and start to articulate these things because they are going to inform everything that you say, everything that you publish, every bit of content that you put out, every story you tell, and every network relationship that you build. Your purpose is going to inform that. So putting some thought and some energy around capturing this is one of those things that when you're building a personal brand is kind of a foundational because it's sitting in the foundational quadrant is a foundational element of doing that. Your value is what you're bringing to the table. What's your credibility? What it what is it that you do that you're great at? Where is your expertise? What is your value proposition with the information and expertise that you bring to the table? How are you adding value? How are you making those trans transformations for people? What does it do? What do you do that

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00)

actually creates that transformation in other people's businesses or lives? Again, codifying, capturing, writing down, refining what the messaging is behind your value is one of the things that will be injected into absolutely everything that you do. I generally tell my little story to my bio story to a small extent in almost every presentation I do because I never know who's going to be in the audience, who doesn't know the first thing about me, right? So I have to kind of frame out who I am a little bit and what it is that I do in the transformations that I create for people. So establishing this foundation as you're going about building your personal brand and learning how to articulate that value is an important part of it. Brand design for the creative professionals in the room. This one's an easy one, right? So what is your brand design? Do you have a logo? Have you developed um a color palette? Have you chosen specific fonts that you use over and over consistently across your branding? Do you have uh textures or a photography style or um a pattern or a sound or smell that you use in your branding? And this is the important part for creatives but also for anybody else who is building a personal brand. Are you deploy deploying those things consistently over time across every single touch point where you're showing up? I like to talk about the three Rs which are being recognized, remembered, and revered. Being recognized and remembered, those things come from visual uh cues. We live in a mobile device thumbcrolling world where people are just flipping through content, right? and it goes by really quickly. And if they pass by one of your posts and then they do again a couple days later and then a week after that, if those posts look differently from each other, they're not making that psychological that visual connection that this is a post from you. They're not recognizing that it's you who they're coming across. So visual branding and developing and deciding that and um and uh rolling that out through all of your content is one of the most important parts of uh personal branding. Also when it comes to business branding too, what's your home base? So where's your real estate? What is your digital real estate? What's your physical real estate? If you have a retail store, if you speak on stages, where what's your home base? Like I said at the beginning, you own two things. You own your website and you own your email list. All the social media in the world is borrowed land. And it could go poof. Ask people who built million-dollar brands on Vine. How they go poof, right? There are people who built multi-million dollar brands on Twitter, and Twitter is a dumpster fire. That's my personal opinion, but people have been leaving Twitter in droves. And there are people who have spent decades building, well, not decades, but years building huge influential brands on Twitter. And that platform is dying. And so any kind of platform where you build your brand that you don't own, not your email list, not your own website is borrowed land. So you have to be really careful and thoughtful about where your home base is. Is it your website? Is it an e-commerce platform? Is it as I said in real life physical retail retail? How effective is it? This tool also is as you go through this and ask yourself these questions, you're evaluating yourself on effective to ineffective from, you know, light green to dark blue. Have you addressed this? Have you articulated these things? How effective are these things? So, if you've built a website, that may put you in the green category, but if your creative professional hasn't updated your website in six years, maybe you're going to bring yourself down a notch. So, you want to start tracking all of these things and answering these questions for yourself. Have you even addressed it? And if you have addressed it, what's the effectiveness of it? Or does it need to be improved or evaluated? The next area is platforms. So what's your exposure across social media? Where do you show up? Is your reach too broad? narrow? Or is it just right? Are you getting involved in email, social? Are you doing articles, blogs, media, audio, video, etc.? Are you being interviewed for podcasts? Are you on attending conferences? Are you getting on stages to speak? Are you utilizing these things? A, what are you doing? B, are you utilizing them to your full potential? Or if you're

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doing a certain number of them, but you're realizing that adding on a couple might be beneficial to your brand. This is what you evaluate in this kind of piece of the pie of the personal brand wheel. What are the platforms? Are you using them effectively? are the ones that you need to kind of add on to. The next section is in the engagement section which is distribution. Now the distribution is your product and service, right? It's what form does your value take? What are you delivering? Is it content? Is it intellectual property? Is it a product? Is it service etc. And then what vehicles do you use to distribute that? Are you giving people downloadable PDFs like the personal brand wheel? Are you delivering digital courses? Are you delivering design services? What is it? And how is it that you're distributing what it is that you do? Is that effective? Is there a way that you could expand on that or do it a little differently more uh efficiently? How do you deliver that value and is it adequate? And are you leveraging also this is just another kind of add-on which is like are you trying to distribute yourself in a visible way as a personal brand? Are you seeking out appearances, podcast appearances, interview appearances, doing partnerships or collaborations, elevating your visibility in how you deliver what you do. So you could say I deliver you know um uh coaching services to entrepreneurs. You might be delivering coaching services directly to those entrepreneurs but then you could also be doing getting interviewed on podcasts or video channels and speaking about how you deliver coach to those entrepreneurs. Right? So how do you increase that level of distribution and visibility in your distribution? um your community. Who's your avatar? This is classic, you know, kind of brand strategy, too. Who is it that you're trying to target? Who is your community going to be? Who are your people? Who is your tribe? Are you trying to build a community or are you just trying to build an audience? And that's okay if it's not actual community and that it's an audience and people who are consuming what you're doing. But do those uh people that you're trying to reach actually engage in what you're doing? Do they engage with each other? So as you build community, you want the people in your community to be engaging with each other as well, not maybe only with you. Are you providing real value to that group as a group? Are you trying to build community? Are you trying to build an audience? And if you are, evaluate your success there. Is there an ability to kind of improve or expand on that audience? There's also the flip side of that, right? Are you trying to talk to too many people in too many places and therefore your message is getting diluted and you're not being as effective or going as deep as you can? This is one of those things that I do a lot of coaching with my coaching clients on is that a lot of people when they're building a personal brand, they feel like they have to be everywhere and do everything for everybody all the time. And that's not true. I always recommend that people choose one platform and they go deep in it for six to nine months before they ever even consider doing anything anywhere else because it's so much better and more effective to go choose an appropriate platform and go deep in it than it is to try to be everywhere. Because it's hard to evaluate your analytics and evaluate your effectiveness and your community and your impact if you're trying to look at that across too many places all the time. And the other thing about it is that it's really difficult to adjust or understand your audience or adjust your content or what it is that you're doing there in order to be more effective and deliver more transformations for people. Um, okay. Now, we're talking about conversation. Conversation is one of those areas that when I started talking about this tool in the very beginning is important. And that is that people forget this. They forget that engagement is a two-way street. Engagement isn't just I post something, it's a value to people. They like it, click. They share it, click. Fabulous, right? They comment on it. Click. They they, you know, I get that little, you know, kind of endorphin boost for the fact that someone liked my post and they said some really nice congratulatory comment about it, right? Feels lovely. The thing about it is that it's not a conversation. It's not a two-way street. Are you truly engaging with the people who are consuming your content or consuming your products or your services

### [50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=3000s) Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00)

or your courses or your podcast or whatever it is that you do? Are you engaging with your followers, your subscribers, your audience in a two-way street? Are you communicating back with them? Are you starting to actually build a level of conversation? What does that two-way street look like? And if you're not, think about how it is that you could do that or where that. And this is one of those reasons why I suggest that people only go deep on a single platform because it's so much easier to kind of stay engaged and, you know, and and show up consistently and often and build an audience on a single platform and develop a community and a true conversation with people. But if you're trying to be on four or five different platforms and going across all these different, you know, DM and Slack and Facebook Messenger channels and all this sort of stuff and WhatsApp, it's hard to kind of keep your attention up and not feel scattered. And so building that back and forth conversation is deeper level of engagement. And a lot of people forget about how important this is. Social proof is another place. This whole actual transformation section is one of those areas that people have a tendency not to pay as much attention to as they should. And I'm going to be honest with you, myself included, right? I'm sometimes so busy in engaging in my coaching and delivering things to people that I don't take the time to ask for testimonials or to uh to collect social proof of the transformations that I'm um creating for people and that my coaching is helping people create for themselves, right? And so is your community experiencing transformations? Number one, are you actually having effect with people? Are you collecting testimonials and stories of those transformations and in the voice in the testimonials, the quotes, the you know the video, whatever it is of uh you know how people are being affected by their interaction with you and your content, your products and your services. Are you actively building case studies about what it is that you do and the results of do? A lot of creative professionals like do case studies on their websites and they show oh I developed you know this brand identity and this was a strategy and this was logo and the fonts and the colors and blah blah but what they don't have is like was there a sales lift right was there an increase in marketing activity was there any kind of bump in analytics from this social campaign that you did paying attention to what the results are from what it is that you're doing and going back to your clients or customers your community and asking for testimonials. Every time I finish a coaching engagement, I always send an email out to that person to say, "Hey, you know, it was really great working with you. And if you're comfortable, it would be really awesome if you could just shoot me maybe two or three sentences about the results that you got from our coaching and so that I could use on my website. " And 95% of the time they do. But if I didn't ask for that, I wouldn't have the testimonials that are on my website. And when people go and consider coaching with me, they wouldn't see that I've I make results happen for people, right? And so collecting that social proof and paying attention to that is important. Then your network, right? This is one of those things I'm going to get into a little bit deeper and that is that your network, your meaningful network is super important. Do you regularly connect with existing peers and colleagues? Do you pursue new connections? Do you build deep relationships that can actually mean something to your business? Relationships that are with people or peers that you could they could refer business to you that you them that they could invite you in a strategic partnership to work a project that they're working on or vice versa. Do you participate in forums or groups? Do you attend physical conferences? still a thing, still super important. Um, are you a member of a mastermind group? Mastermind groups for me in the launch of my solo independent career were the most transformative thing that I ever did and I am so passionate about them and I have seen them transform so many people's lives and businesses that I started my own series of you know oneoff mastermind groups and then an ongoing uh community called Bonfire which I'm going to share a little bit about uh with you but those the mastermind framework methodology is one of the most effective things that I have ever seen or personally experienced in my business and I know there's actually a couple

### [55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=3300s) Segment 12 (55:00 - 60:00)

people are in the chat here right now Valerie Morris who's I'm in a peer mastermind with that mastermind is incredibly effective and it's like a rising what is it a what is it rising tide lifts all ships right that's what masterminds are about more on that in just a growth. Is your business growing? Yes or no? Right? Is your authority growing? Is your perceived authority, your credibility in the industry? Is your visibility and the kind of level of authority that you're achieving growing? Is your following growing? Are you leveraging additional team members? Is your team growing? Doing some analytics and tracking your own business growth is an aspect of personal branding, which is another place that some people have a tendency not to pay attention to. What's my website traffic? What's my social traffic? Yeah, we pay attention to vanity metrics like followers and subscribers, right? Email subscribers, but it's a little more difficult to really get down into the minutia of tracking the analytics around your business. So that's the personal brand wheel. That's how it works. If you go to phipvandusen. com/pbw and download the personal brand will wheel PDF, you will see how effective this tool can be. And almost all the questions that I asked you in this presentation and put on these slides are um in that PDF. So you can use it to actually um uh use the tool for yourself. And uh you can also you know just shoot me an email. My email is available on LinkedIn or a DM on LinkedIn. And if you have any questions about it, just hit me up and ask me, okay? Be happy to answer them for you. So, I was ranting for a second ago about your network. Your network is your net worth. Your network is where if you get laid off, you're going to get your next job. The online job application system in this global economy is completely broken. Your network is where you get your work, your referrals, your next job. And so if you want to have a truly meaningful network, you want to be able to feel confident in the fact that you're making the right decisions about the work you do for clients, on your own business, your website copy, whatever it is that you struggle with. If you want to achieve your goals faster, a mastermind group is a place that you're going to do it where you're going to build a meaningful network. There's this amazing quote by Echart Tole who wrote the power of now which is one of the most successful book books in history. I think it's like in 50 countries and 50 million copies. It's crazy. And a transformative book for me in terms of how I uh think and process my thoughts. The quote was, "When a log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that's burning fiercely and after a while they are separated again, the first log will continue burning with a much greater att intensity. After all, it's the same fire. " Basically meaning if you're surrounded by people who are on fire and passionate about their business and building their personal brand and doing the things you can't help but catch fire too and learn things that you never even knew existed or methods know that you could employ. So I started this and because of that quote I love that quote by the way I started a community. It's a mastermind community called Bonfire and it's a community for mid to late career creative professionals. If you're just a few years out of school, it's probably not the best place for you. But I have had kind of more junior people in it. You also don't have to be a creative. I've had people who are building, you know, online e-commerce businesses or any kind of other personal brand, uh speaking um speaking careers, uh building a podcast, a YouTube channel for another kind of business. And so it's an amazing community to join. And let me tell you a little bit about it. So we meet on Zoom four times a month. There's two mastermind sessions a month and two office hours sessions a month. One of which is sometimes a visiting expert session. And it's a fairly small group. It's generally under anywhere from, you know, 10 to 20 people. Fluctuates. I try to keep it small. Um if it grows, it grows. We might split the group out. But Historically, it's been very intimate. And this is one of the reasons why some people feel hesitant about getting into a community like this is because they feel like they just might be a number. But the thing is that in this community, you can truly build real meaningful relationships that are going to have an impact on your business and your career. You get expert coaching, group coaching from me. Depending on the level that you subscribe to, you can get one-on-one coaching with me. Um, you get a powerful

### [1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=3600s) Segment 13 (60:00 - 65:00)

network literally overnight. like when you subscribe and you show up at Bonfire, you immediately have a meaningful network and that will continue to grow and flourish. Um, we set goals, we hold each other accountable to those goals, we give each other feedback, we bring our problems, our concerns, our challenges, and we help each other with them. You build confidence in your decision- making. You grow faster and then you also have access to over a hundred resources and I'll talk about those in a second. So, you get live group coaching. You get four times a month of Zoom calls. There's a private online community. It's not on Facebook. It's in its own gated area that's much like Facebook, but it's completely firewalled. Um, you get accountability partners. You also have kind of what I call the Firestone um milestones, which is a series of uh tools, resources, playlists that help you build a pathway to greater level of success in what you're doing. You get visitor expert visiting expert trainings. You get expert um uh resources and a library of those resources. And you also get steeply discounted access to brand strategy 101, my course, and then also very personalized support and training to support you in that course. So you get group coaching with me, weekly Zoom calls, meeting recording, so all of the meetings are recorded and posted in the community. So if you miss a meeting or you want to go back and relisten to a hot seat that you had or something like that, it's all available to you. And there's a private online community and you get peer feedback and accountability. You also, as I said, get the fire milestones, the success map, you get a deep resource library office hours with me. So, there's a session a month where if you just want to show up on Zoom and ask me questions, get some personalized attention, I'm there and available for you, brand strategy 101, um, support as well, and visiting experts. And this is just like a visual of a smattering of some of the tools and playlists that I have, templates, worksheets. If you think the brand um personal brand wheel is a helpful tool, just like 75x that because I've got so many templates and tools online that you can immediately put into use in your business and the community kind of looks like this. It's on the Circle platform. It's an excellent stable platform. It's easy to access. Um there's tons of different, you know, kind of communities and forums within the Bonfire community. And um there's also a mobile app, so you can get Bonfire on your phone, which is really cool. Um and uh yeah, and so anyway, if you're thinking about joining, the membership fee is $97 a month. That's if you join quarterly. You can join monthly and just go month by month. That's 127 a month. But if you join quarterly, which I encourage people to do because it really makes sense to make an investment into this community for a period of time because that's where you're going to see the benefit from it. You're not going to see it overnight, right? You're going to build relationships. They're going to become meaningful relationships and you're also going to get exposed to a tremendous amount of knowledge that you didn't even know existed. And then there's the guild level, which is um you get everything in the regular bonfire membership, right? not membership. Membership, you get it, right? Branding. Um, and so there's the guild level where you get everything that's in the base membership, but you also get an hour of one-on-one coaching with me every month. So, personalized coaching one-on-one And my hourly coaching is $400 an hour. So, you get everything in Bonfire. That's outside of Bonfire. So, you get everything that's in the basic membership plus you get an hour of coaching with me. So, steeply discounted um one-on-one coaching. And then if you want direct ongoing personalized mentorship with me, um there's a mentorship level as well. And so, if you're interested in Bonfire, go to phipvandeson. com/bonfire and check it out. There's some videos on there. There's some testimonials on there. Testimonials. I've been collecting a few anyway. I could be better at it. But um there's a few videos on that page with me describing what Bonfire is and the benefits that you can get out of it. And uh I highly encourage you to come check it out. It's a really cool and vibrant community and I think that you'd get a lot out of it. If you're not connected with me on the rest of my socials, this is where you find me. It's generally under my name. It's not hard to figure out. And with that, I'm going to take questions. So, uh, let me back out of this slide thing. And there I am. Oops. I'm going to turn off my lower thirds. So, that's it. So, I hope you guys, you know, enjoyed this presentation. I can't believe I hit it like almost on the

### [1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=3900s) Segment 14 (65:00 - 70:00)

hour. Usually, one of my old VAS used to say, "Philip, you couldn't do a live stream in less than an hour if your life depended on it. " And I always think that I'm gonna talk for like 40 minutes and I'm such a blower mouth or I get so caffeinated that I just kind of keep going. So, if anybody has any questions about personal branding, about the personal brand wheel, about Bonfire, um, or about building their own, you know, personal brand and any challenges or ideas or thoughts that you have that you'd like to hit me up with right now, I'll stay for a little while and answer some questions. If not, that's cool. Um, one of the things I wanted to say is that I'm gonna be going live. um probably weekly for the next six to eight weeks. So I want you if you're not on my email list, jump on to phobusen. com/muse mus and uh get on my email list because whenever I do a live stream or I post a new video, I always make sure I shoot it out to my email list because teaching moment that's one of the only two places of real estate that I actually own. And so, um, if you're interested in some more cool, really informative live streams that I'm going be doing over the next couple months, definitely get on my email list. And one of the ones I'm going to be doing is I'm going to talk about um how to show up on ChatGpt and Perplexity and Gemini and the other LLMs that are increasingly becoming more important to show up on than Google search. And I don't say that lightly. So, I'm going to be doing a live stream about that soon, too. All right. So, let me scroll back like way back and see if there's any other capital question here. Let me take this off. I'm going to take the muse thing off and I'm going to put that um scrolling, scrolling. Okay, Robert asked a question. I've been debating on threads and wasn't sure if it I will benefit from it. Oh, you've been debating whether to get onto threads. Well, here's what I would say. The lifestyle of certain kinds of content are different depending on the platform that you're on. For instance, the life cycle of a tweet is on average about 10 minutes, which means that if you tweet something, it's going to end up so far down in the tweet feed within 10 minutes that it's almost gone poof. And so there are platforms that are built for very immediate gratification and engagement. And then there are platforms like YouTube. I have videos that are literally 9 years old that are getting hundreds of views a week. There are platforms that have incredibly long life cycles. And so I use platforms in different ways. If I want to make a quick comment about something or talk about, you know, start a conversation about something that I'm seeing that I think is really current and relevant of the moment and I'm not looking to get into like a super deep, you know, kind of back and forth conversation, then a platform like Threads makes a lot of sense. Um, and so I think you need to kind of, Robert, of ask yourself the question, is my time and effort in posting on threads, is that the sort of platform for the sort of content that I want to do there? It's not a platform that's got an incredibly long shelf life. I think though, threads is better than Twitter in the fact that a the user base of threads is much smaller. the um there's it's much easier to navigate. It's easier to follow topics or to uh join community forum groups. It's easier to discover people. Um and so building a uh a community or engaging in a community on a particular topic, design, strategy, you know, personal branding, whatever that is, is easier to do there than it ever was on Twitter. I also find that the just general social tenor, the mood and the kind of like the vibe of threads is so much healthier and less toxic than Twitter was. So, if you ever were on Twitter and enjoyed it, it was working for you, but then you backed off on it because it's gotten weird or you weren't getting any results from it, yeah, jump on threads. It's worth it. I've met a lot of really cool people on there and it's also small enough that um people are just coming out and joining and building communities now. So it's not like it's long in the tooth and it's a it's a young platform so you can get in on the ground floor. That's

### [1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=4200s) Segment 15 (70:00 - 75:00)

what I'm trying to say. Okay. Um question above the hardest part. Miles says, "The hardest part for me has been finding the bandwidth to get this done. How can I offload this to an assistant or vendor? " Miles, it's a very good question. And the way I'll answer that is the same way that I would coach someone in using Chat GPT or Gemini or an LLM to create content for themselves. You have to establish a a brand strategy, a brand personality, a tone of voice and um and a content theme and focus. And in Chat GBT, you basically upload all of that stuff and train it in your tone of voice, what it is you talk about, who your audience is, the transformations and products and services that you deliver, etc. You have to educate the model to be able to create content for you that is accurate for you and for your brand. This is where a lot of companies and personal brands fall down is that they don't train the model to actually deliver a differentiated and very personalitydriven result for them using it. And I would say the exact same thing comes from working with a VA. When I was about two or three years into my developing my content, um, I was recording, editing, posting all of my own YouTube videos for years and then I started a podcast and I had my newsletter and my consultancy was going crazy and I was starting a, you know, brand strategy course. I just overloaded myself with like way too many things to do. So, I had to offload my YouTube and my editing to someone else. And it was very, very difficult to do because I had to bring on someone who knew nothing about me essentially. And I had to educate them in uh who I was, who I served, my brand personality, my tone of voice, you know, my vibe, how I approach content, all that sort of stuff. So, they could develop, they could edit my videos. Number one, they could write descriptions. They could promote it across social for me in a way that I was comfortable with and I thought and in a way that I felt did um the content justice, right? And I'm not going to say that I flipped a switch and it worked overnight because it didn't. There was definitely a um a period of time where I had to watch very closely and edit and comment and give feedback around what they were doing for me. And you know, there were missteps, there were mistakes that were made, but when it came down to it, over time, over like 3 to four months, I was able to kind of really bring them up to speed. And it was the best thing I ever did. You can see me just swooning because getting rid of some of those kind of like weighty albatrosses that I had on my back in terms of the content commitments that I had and that I knew that I needed to keep going for my business. Um, it's worth it, but you have to understand that you have to do some homework in, like I said, that first foundations quarter of the personal brand wheel, establishing your story, your tone of voice, your brand positioning, your customer avatar, all that sort of stuff. You have to establish that and then you have to train whoever it is that you're going to do your social for you in that. And then at the beginning, you have to watch over their shoulder pretty closely. But once that's done, if the relationship works out, it can be transformative. So, I know it's dicey and it's, you know, it takes some time, but in the long run, offloading it will be super bene beneficial to your business. Um, okay. Okay, I'm looking at some questions that whatever that Okay, this doesn't type question before your question, guys. Um, what if our brand's audience knows more about WhatsApp and less about Gmail? Um, then should we focus more on that or email list because for that brand, their customers use WhatsApp more than email? Okay, good question, Harris. This is what I'm going to say to that. And I said it at the beginning, you own your website, you own your email list. WhatsApp is fine. And if you can get people's direct contact information and their email addresses from them in WhatsApp, so you can add it to your email list and you tell them you're adding it to your email list, then by all means. But I would say if you're working with a client and they

### [1:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=4500s) Segment 16 (75:00 - 80:00)

are primarily on WhatsApp, I would highly try to influence them to capture their contacts, their audience, their community in email through one way, shape or form. They can off do that through offering lead magnets, mini courses, webinars, get people to sign up for something so they have to cough up their email address. Because when it comes down to it, and here's a perfect example, YouTube, right? YouTube is a platform where I can see your screen names, right? But I don't know who you are. I don't know how to talk to you directly. There's no way coming out of this live stream if I loved what you were talking to me about and I thought you were great and I'd like to develop a relationship with you, you know, or I thought that, you know, you'd be a great, great person to um watch a particular video of mine or there's some content or a book I want to suggest to you, I would have no way of contacting you, right? directly messaging you. And so that is a major failing of YouTube and any kind of platform that doesn't give you direct access to the people in your community. And so I had to for a period of years make a concerted effort to drive people off of YouTube to my newsletter, to my email list, to my free Facebook group where I collected their email, to my lead magnets email. Everything that I did was to drive people off of YouTube so I could get access to them directly and because I don't own YouTube. Yes, YouTube's like biggest platform in the world. It's not going to be going away, right? And so, but that's what people said about how great Twitter was or how great Vine was, right? Stuff happens. But when it comes down to it, you own your email list. And you know, if you're working with clients and their community is completely on WhatsApp, I would highly recommend that you encourage them to find ways to drive people off of WhatsApp so they can capture their email address. Um, okay. Uh Arsh Ubman asks, "Is it worth spending time on personal portfolio website on web flow? Now AI can make websites in seconds. " Um it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you get the website up. It doesn't matter where you build it, right? my website because I started it a decade ago um is on Squarespace and Squarespace has been tremendously slow and cumbersome in making changes and they've you know made builder changes that have been very frustrating and they're also in terms of design in my point of view not up there in terms of staying up to date on the beautiful aspects of what web design can do. Now that said, Squarespace does everything for me that I really need it to do. Gives it I can put my blog up there, my portfolio up there, put my all my, you know, videos and lead magnets and everything. It does what I needed to do. So, the platform is not as important as actually getting your portfolio up there. The one thing I would say for you though is that there are a lot of people who just put their portfolio up on Behance or Adobe Portfolios or some other kind of portfolio hosting site. And I would say if you do that, I would definitely mirror your portfolio to something that you own to your website. Um whether that's built on Web Flow or, you know, Wix Studio. I they paid me as a sponsor for a couple videos, but Wix Studio and I had to kind of get into that platform to kind of explore what it was like. Wix Studio is doing like really amazing stuff. So, but it doesn't really matter what the platform is you're building your website on. What's important is that you build the website and that you get it up. Um, okay. Scrolling down. Okay. uh pro remedy asks how to build your audience if you're a foreigner and you don't speak the language on a high level like advanced how to make these links in this case if you have a different cultural background right um well the one thing I would say about that uh pro remedy is that there has never been a better time to be developing content or trying to build an audience if you don't speak the language. And a perfect example is that, you know, you can use any number of SAS products that can take

### [1:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=4800s) Segment 17 (80:00 - 85:00)

a talking head video like what I'm doing right now, feed it through it, and it can translate what I'm saying into Spanish, adjust the video using generative AI to make it look like I'm speaking Spanish almost flawlessly, and for me to publish that in a place that was more native to the Spanish-speaking culture. or Spanish speaking cultures because there's obviously dozens of them. Same thing with a podcast. Same thing with uh translating information to uh sending out emails. There are people who communicate with me on LinkedIn and will DM me in Russian or they'll DM me in Spanish and I'll have to, you know, take that and I'll paste it into Google Translate or paste it into something else and then I'll type my response and have that translated to Russian and I'll paste it back to them. It's like you can do it. It's a little more cumbersome. Takes a little more time. Um, but if the native language that you're trying to build a community in, um, is not your native language, uh, it can be done. It's just a little more cumbersome and there's some stage gates in between that. Um, but it can be done. Okay. Um, okay. How can you attract real clients? I have a niche. I have all the personal branding stuff in place, but I'm not getting exposure. Okay. So, my question to you, and I'm not sure whether you'll be able to do a follow-up, but um if you have your website, your personal branding, you've developed your foundation, you know your story, all that sort of stuff, what is it that you're delivering and how are you becoming visible? Um, that's the question. So, if you have the place for people to go or the content for people to access or get value from, the next question is how are you surfacing that? What is the platform that you're using to become visible on? And if you're saying you're I'm not I don't have the specifics about what you're saying you're not getting exposure, but one of the ways that you can do that is to post value in communities that are not just you. Meaning like say you're on threads and you have 10 followers and you're posting and you're not getting any exposure or visibility because you don't have a lot of followers. Go into a graphic, join a graphic design forum or community or go into a community that is a community that's based around the industry or the category of business who are generally your clients, right? The people that you want to come to you for business and start posting topics and, you know, curated content and value and thought pieces in that community for the benefit of that community. And don't be salesy. Don't kind of like put yourself out and say, "Hey, and by the way, you know, come to me for copywriting. " What you want to do is you want to post value with no expectation of return. And over time, and content marketing takes time, people will start engaging with you and you can build an audience. Best way to do that is offering lead magnets or free things of value that people will download and you can grab their email list. And that is the way to start building your uh community. But the way to do it at the very beginning if you don't have enough of an audience to get exposure generally um just from your profile join other communities and add value in that community to that audience in a way that is you know completely um selfless and you will build attention that way and that's the first step. Um, okay. Kimberly asks, "How do you do this while you still have a full-time job? " That is a challenge, Kimberly. And but I'm going to say that I had a full-time job doing my branding agency consulting and coaching. But in order to get clients for that full-time job, I had to start producing content. And I started with a newsletter, then went to YouTube and started producing content. And this is kind of going back to the previous question. On YouTube, I started producing content that was completely selfless. I wanted to share everything that I knew with no expectation of return. In fact, the first 25 videos that I posted, I forgot to have a call to action in it. Like, I didn't even say go join my email list. I didn't say anything. I just posted about, you know, building a customer avatar, brand positioning statement, all this sort of brand strategy and design

### [1:25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=5100s) Segment 18 (85:00 - 90:00)

stuff. I just gave away for free with the idea that people would see the value of it. They would understand I knew what I was talking about and they would come to me for me to do that work for them. And that's exactly how it ended up working. But I was doing this while I was also bringing in money doing working for clients and other things. So, I'm not going to say it's easy and but think of it as, you know, paying your rent, paying your uh paying your, you know, insurance policy premium, right? If you are employed and you really want to, you know, kind of develop some level of autonomy and comfort in the fact that if your employment went poof, you would have some sort of presence, credibility, visibility online and have developed a bit of a supportive, meaningful network. And I'm pointing at you because this is really important. Not just followers, not just subscribers, but a peer colleague network that you know, interact with, engage with, trust. That's where your a your next job is going to come from and also where your um uh where your career insurance policy is going to come from because that's where you're going to be learning the things that are going to help you survive and either get the next job or develop something independent. when the kind time comes that you'll have to develop something independent. And if you're a creative professional, I can guarantee you that by the time you're 55 or 60, you're going to be building something independent. I saw a study by Aquent, which is um a very it's a very deep study about salaries and the creative industry. And there was this chart. I actually did a video about this. There's this chart that shows the age of people working in the creative industry. And when you get to about 55 or 60, it like falls off a cliff. And my question is, people have to work till they're 65, 70 years old now, right? Because you do, you have to keep income coming in. And if all these creative professionals at 50, 55 left the industry, what are they doing? Like, did they just not get jobs and couldn't get back in the industry? Have they come become all independent? They're not full-time employed anymore, that's for sure. So, something's happening there. And I hate it when people aren't aware of that fact and don't prepare for it. So, it's going to be a bit of a stretch and side hustle. And the thing about side hustles is that you got to do it on top of your full-time job. And, you know, I wish I could say otherwise, but it's just the truth. Um, okay. Uh, Karine says, "I'm publishing books on Amazon with different pen names, different non-fiction niches. Better to build first build a brand for each pen name or to build a brand under one publishing house for pen names. " I can't say that I'm a super expert in this, uh, Karine. Um, the one thing I would say is, and this is something, um, I'm gonna equate it to a client I'm working with right now who is considering starting two different YouTube channels for two different areas of her business. She has a, um, a business development coaching area, and she also offers certification in something, an academy, and she was saying that she was going to create separate um, uh, YouTube channels for this these areas of her business. They were slightly different customer avatars but related. And I encouraged her heavily not to, right? To subsegment one channel, sub-segment it between people who are getting accredited in an academy and then people who are taking that information and that certification and building a business with it. Create different playlists, different content around them. But how is it under the same channel? And the reason why you do that is because you're building brand equity in one thing. You're building it in the name of your business or the channel and you're aggregating all of the people in that industry who are interested in that thing to one place. They know where to find you for every aspect of what they're doing in the arc of their career. Now, writing books and being an author is different and especially if you're publishing in different non-fiction niches, but the one thing I would say is that the more pen names that you operate under, the less um uh the less personal brand equity you can build in any one particular name. And I don't know enough about what you're publishing to know why you're actually doing different pen names. like are they going to negatively affect each other if they're all

### [1:30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=5400s) Segment 19 (90:00 - 95:00)

non-fiction? You know, there are non-fiction authors who publish things about politics and UFOs and then, you know, kind of uh international conflict and they're just non-fiction authors, right? So, it doesn't matter that they're different niches. They build their equity around their name. And so I would suggest that you build as much equity around a single name than spreading it too thin. That's my recommendation. It's less work for you also. And also you know it's easier to get podcast interviews and everything else around it if you're using a singular name rather than three or four. Um so Karine also asks, "Is Bonfire good with me? See my previous question above. " Uh yes. Yeah, it is. If you're developing content and trying to build an identity and a business around your content and figuring out how to market that and how to what kind of markets to go into, how to build your name, your recognition, improve your income there, you know, how to publish those books, how to promote those books. I have someone who's actually was in the chat a little bit ago who is in a peer mastermind that I'm in who is specializes in helping authors um promote and launch books. And so she's in one of my peer masterminds. She actually came and spoke at Bonfire about how to self-publish, promote, and launch books. And so that's the kind of thing that happens inside of Bonfire. And she's an amazing expert at it. She's got like four launches in the next two months. It's crazy. Anyway, so it would be an amazing place for you. I would definitely check it out. And if you're curious about it, here's the other thing I want to say. If you're curious about joining Bonfire and want to have a quick, you know, 15-minute get to know you Zoom with me and explore the idea of whether it'd be a good fit for you, DM me on LinkedIn and um or send me an email. You could go to my contact form on my website. Just go to, you know, contact and fill out the contact form and shoot me an email. come straight to me and we'll set up a time on Zoom to chat about it and we'll see if it's a good fit for you. And that goes for anybody who's here still watching or watching the replay. If you're interested or curious about Fon Bonfire about whether it would be a good mastermind community or fit for you, do one of those things. Go to the contact form on my website, shoot me an email, connect with me through LinkedIn, and shoot me a DM and we'll set up a Zoom and we'll hop on Zoom and talk about it for you because I want it to be a good experience for you. And bonfire is my passion and it's the one thing that I make sure that whoever is involved in it is getting as you know as deep benefit as they can possibly get. And if you have any respect for me, you know, I'm not going to say respect for me. If you respect my credibility and what I've built and my experience and what I have to offer, this is the place where I'm spending my time. In fact, I'm in the next two weeks closing my free Facebook group. I have a 9,000 member free Facebook group that I've built over eight years, but I'm h I'm really focusing my time on Bonfire. I'm trying to I'm not building volume or places or platforms anymore. I'm consolidating to the very few places where I'm going to be delivering value over the next few years. And that is Bonfire and one-on-one coaching. And if you want one-on-one coaching, there's a way of getting that through the Bonfire community with the added benefit of getting all of these amazing um peers and this incredible meaningful network that will benefit you in ways that you can't even imagine. Um and the people who are in there right now, most of them have been in there since the very beginning. Like there's a reason why it's been going on for two years. There's a reason why those people are in there and have been there that long because they continue to get incredible value out of it. Um, okay. So, that's about it. I'm gonna have to jump. It's been about 90 minutes. So, this has been awesome, you guys. I really, really appreciate it. I'm going to put this up really quickly. So, if you're interested in joining Bonfire, my mastermind community for creative pros and solopreneurs, go to Philip, go to philip vanusen. combonfire, and um, and check it out. Read all about it. Again, if you're interested, curious, want to talk to me about your participation in it, shoot me a DM, connect with me on LinkedIn and we'll talk about your if you are serious about it, okay? Um, we can talk about it and it's it'll be a transformative experience for you, especially if you're interested in the topic of what we talked about today, building your personal brand. So, with that, you guys, this has been awesome. I appreciate you're taking the time and spending the

### [1:35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWi2ybGWHIg&t=5700s) Segment 20 (95:00 - 95:00)

day and the morning with me and uh I wish you all the best in building your personal brand and um stay tuned. Get on my email list because I'm going to be going live a lot over the next few months. So, it's been awesome. It's good to see you and uh take care.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/17345*