What is your personal philosophy when it comes to living a better life? Can you explain the way in which you'd like to optimize some aspect of the environment around you? If you can, that explanation is your personal brand that will lead you to tremendous success. The best way to learn about branding is through personal examples, so here's mine.
I have been an avid video gamer since I was 9-10, when I got my first C64. I fell in love with the internet in high school; Quake 2 was my favorite after-school pastime for a couple years. This love carried me forward through life to where I'll eventually discover Firefox and fall in love with its add-ons that allowed a huge degree of freedom.
Over time, I became disenchanted with video games, internet websites and Firefox. They all promised so much but delivered so little. For example, Firefox that used to be so open to customization gradually started clamping down the options until most of them were baked-in.
Internet websites started manipulating and abusing the visitors more and more, most notably through clickbait and advertisements; video games became disposable and laden with microtransactions. At one point, I decided to try out making my own stuff to see if I can make them better.
After deciding to make my own website, I settled with barebones technology: HTML and CSS. Anything else would require immense maintenance after a while, since software companies are increasingly turning towards rapid-fire patches to thwart hackers.
It's still not easy and just making a new page involves some 150-200 actions, even after I tried to streamline everything. However, I can push out a new article within 5 minutes of getting the idea, if I'm not distracted by something else.
My goal is to create such a portfolio of work that shows to the entire world how fast and streamlined technology can be. The first step is working on this website, where I can fiddle with color schemes and experiment with different media.
I eventually plan to move towards making my own browser and perhaps dabble in making video games as well, just to show how it's done. For now, let's focus on what it means to have a brand and how my website fits into that.
When you have something to say, you will gravitate towards a public platform, such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. The problem is that those three public platforms have their own Terms of Service, which change over the years to the benefit of the platform. Worse yet, your content gets diluted on those platforms.
What eventually happens with all public platforms is that a minute percentage of users does something untoward and then the platform introduces strict rules for everyone, cutting down their freedom of expression and monetization options.
You can get banned on any platform simply because an algorithm deemed you "a Russian bot" or you can get a demand from Facebook to send over a scan of your passport etc. Everything you say is scrutinized and you have no real control over your content, which is mixed in with a bunch of random noise from other users.
The visibility of your content on public platforms is out of your control, even if you stick to the Terms of Service. Everything you say is invisible by default unless propped up by a mountain of likes and shares, which suffocates fresh ideas and the freedom of thought. To experience free thinking, you need your own platform.
Public platforms distort your content by hosting it in their predetermined format, alongside other brands and ads or just mixed in with noise from random people interacting with each other through the screen. On a public platform, your brand is diluted and loses most of its potency. Therefore, you need your own platform.
Your own platform minimizes the number of intermediaries between you, your content and the audience. Since there are no middlemen, you can streamline content production and control all of it yourself. Because you control the format too, you can concentrate your philosophy, which is how you gradually build up your brand.
Your brand is a concentration of your finest content hosted on your platform so that can it be directly consumed by your audience. This implies that you should focus on mass-producing content, regardless of quality, to build up a platform and then slowly increase the quality, but only if it doesn't affect the mass production efforts.
You should also be able to articulate the way in which you'd like to optimize your environment. In my case, I'd like to surf websites that don't spy on me, load unknown code on my machine, show me ads or waste my bandwidth. Once I've gotten my idea written down, I can start making small steps towards fulfilling it.
At first, you won't be able to make any money off your brand. In fact, trying to monetize your brand can get you involved with some unsavory characters who skate the line between law and anarchy, to put it mildly. If you persist, you will crash and burn emotionally and financially.
Build something sustainable using the least amount of resources and energy and make it so maintenance is non-existent. In this way, your brand won't have a meteoric rise but also won't crash and burn; your brand will steadily rise to the stratosphere of success.
Try to avoid putting your name or face on the brand, since that will make it hard to sell the brand later on. You might not think you'd ever sell your brand, but if you build it diligently, you'll start turning heads and getting offers.
By not having your name or face, the brand retains all of the value even if the ownership structure changes. Besides, in brands that are centered on personal interactions, you won't even be able to get a vacation if the brand involves you; customers will expect your presence at all times, as seen with RSD Tyler's life coaching brand—the logo is his face and he often complains about not being able to take a vacation and he actually films coaching videos while on a vacation.
All successful personal brands somehow break new ground in a technological sense. Your goal isn't to just promise better, it's to actually do better in some way, even if it doesn't necessarily involve what you originally set out to do. In my case, it's to make the sharpest, tightest website that loads instantly. Other companies are unlikely to copy my brand—a typical website loads up tons of trackers, ads, cookies, 3rd-party content etc.
You should be ambitious and not just copy other brands. By overcoming technical limitations, you'll get a lot of confidence and nice bragging rights. Also, most of technical limitations are more due to habit and company politics, meaning that you can make an amazing product just by re-examining the core assumptions in any given industry.
Content under your personal brand has to target a niche audience. Take a look at all the successful movie franchises of 2019 and prior – they all sprang from ridiculously niche brands, such as comic books. Define your brand in terms of being appropriate for the niche audience.
The Long Tail paradigm states that there's just as much market in niche audiences, it's just that they're not out in the open and nobody markets to them. By marketing to niche audiences, you create fervent fans that will fund your brand with every cent they've got.
Discover what it is that gives your content its personal mark and steadily stamp it over everything. Relish the way you build things and find a streamlined way to do it for years and decades to come.