Personal Branding: How to Build Your Brand and Make Some Serious Money Fast

Updated Aug 7, 2023.

The last couple of years have seen a tremendous rise in the popularity of personal branding. It has been touted as the magic bullet to success in your career or business.

In the past, branding was the preserve of celebrities and huge companies. Today, however, when potential customers or employers can learn about you with just a few clicks, building a personal brand is important for anyone seeking to build a name for themselves and set themselves apart from the competition.

The problem, however, is that building a brand, whether a corporate or personal one, is not a straight-forward affair. How do you go about building a personal brand? Do you even need a personal brand in the first place?

In this highly detailed guide, we will go over the exact steps you need to take in order to build your personal brand quickly and start making serious money.

Before we get into how to build a personal brand, however, you first need to understand what we mean by personal branding.

What Is Personal Branding And Why It Matters

“Your personal brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder.

Your personal brand is basically the image of yourself that you present to the world. Your personal brand influences how you are perceived by other people.

This perception, in turn, is influenced by how you portray yourself, as well as the information about you that is publicly accessible on the internet.

Personal branding, on the other hand, is the process of actively and intentionally influencing how you want to be perceived by the public.

It involves taking action to position yourself as an authority within your niche, get people to trust you, and set yourself apart from the competition, with the aim of enlarging your sphere of influence, growing your impact, and advancing your career.

Personal branding involves determining what you want to be known for, and then taking action to get known for these things, in order to build a reputation that you can monetize.

In other words, it’s all about consistently sharing your skill set with the world until you become known as a top authority for that particular skill set.

One of the worst mistakes I see with a lot of professionals is not taking time to build their personal brand. However, here’s the funny thing about a personal brand. You have a personal brand whether you are actively cultivating one or not.

This means that even if you are not actively cultivating a personal brand, you will still have one.

However, it will probably be a chaotic brand that doesn’t present you as you’d like to be seen, and one that might be costing you clients and opportunities.

To avoid this, it is best to actively create a strong, positive personal brand that presents you as an expert and one that will allow you to advance your career or business.

Fortunately, building a positive personal brand is something anyone can do. All you need is access to the internet, and the commitment to painstakingly build an audience and consistently present yourself as an expert within your field.

But why is it so important to build a personal brand?

Why Personal Branding Matters

Here are some reasons why you need to cultivate a strong personal brand.

It Differentiates You From The Competition

This is one of the main reasons why you need to build your personal brand.

Today, we live in a hyper competitive world, and whether you are looking for a job, looking for freelance clients, or looking for customers for your business, there is already a lot of competition. Already, there are over 30 million small businesses in the US alone.

how many small business are there in the us
Source: Oberlo

This high level of competition means that it is very easy for your message to get drowned in all the noise.

After all, if you are just like 1,000 other freelancers or job seekers, why should someone hire you and not the others? What is it that makes you special?

Fortunately, you can set yourself apart from the competition and show your value by developing a strong personal brand.

Since a personal brand is based on your own skills and experiences, it gives you an opportunity to show prospective clients what makes you unique and why they should work with you.

The more you focus on building your personal brand, the more you elevate yourself above the competition. With time, a strong personal brand will even start attracting clients by itself, and you won’t have to worry about convincing clients to work with you.

A Strong Personal Brand Helps You Build Credibility And Trust

If you needed someone to help you with digital marketing for your business, and you had an option of working with either Neil Patel, or some unknown internet marketer who just inboxed you on Facebook, who would you pick? Neil Patel, obviously!

Neil Patel has already established a strong personal brand as an experienced digital marketer. He’s a known expert in his field, and therefore, even if you’ve never worked with him before, you’ve seen him deliver results for countless clients, and you trust him to deliver similar results for you.

This is exactly what a strong personal brand does. It gives you credibility and gets people to trust you, which is very important before people make the decision to work with you.

A strong personal brand positions you as an expert, getting people interested in working with you because they are confident that you know your stuff and will deliver. This is especially important when you consider that consumers trust personal brands over corporate brands.

Personal Branding Allows You To Build Your Network

As an entrepreneur or freelancer, building a big network is very important. Your network determines the amount of business you are going to get, as well as your access to other opportunities.

According to LinkedIn, 73% of B2B buyers prefer purchasing from someone who has been referred by someone they know, while 87% of B2B buyers say that they are more likely to have a favorable impression of someone if they were introduced to this person by someone in their network.

build relationship
Source: LinkedIn

The good thing is that building a strong personal brand also allows you to grow your professional network. A strong personal brand shows clearly what you are good at. This makes it easier for other professionals to reach out and connect with you, since they understand what value you have to offer.

A Strong Personal Brand Boosts Your Perceived Value

If you invited Jay Z and some local artist to perform in a concert in your city, would they charge the same for their performance? Nope.

The two would perform on the same stage and to the same crowd, yet Jay Z would get paid more. Because of the strong personal brand he has built.

A strong personal brand positions you as an expert in your field, which in turn gives the impression that you are on top of your game and increases your perceived value. This boosts your demand and allows you to charge premium prices for your products or services.

Personal Branding Gives You Access To Hidden Opportunities

Cultivating a strong personal brand can also open doors to multiple opportunities for you.

For instance, if a media house wants to interview an expert in your field, they will come to you. These interviews will in turn boost your personal brand even further, opening doors to even more opportunities.

Similarly, if someone is hosting a seminar in your field, they might invite you to speak as an expert, thus boosting your visibility and enhancing your personal brand.

Other kinds of opportunities you can get by cultivating a strong personal brand include:

  • Partnerships with other professionals
  • Jobs interviews and internships
  • Promotions
  • Referrals from past clients
  • Book deals

Let’s Define Your Personal Brand

Now that you understand what a personal brand is, and why you need to create a strong personal brand, it’s now time to start thinking about how to actually create your personal brand.

The first step to creating your personal brand is to figure out what you want to be known for. What do you want people to think of when they hear your name? What do you want people to find when they search for your name online?

Below, let’s take a look at four things you need to do to define the kind of personal brand you want to create.

Start By Finding Your Niche

It is impossible to build a strong personal brand if you are trying to be known for everything.

Think about some of the most famous people in the world. Most of them are only known for the one thing they do extremely well.

For instance, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is known for being a great actor. Serena Williams is known for her skills on the tennis court. Oprah is known for her skills as a talk show host. Sir Richard Branson is known for being an intelligent entrepreneur.

This does not mean that these things are the only ones these people do well. For instance, Dwayne Johnson has an amazing gift of gab and even hosted a TV show, and he’s a very great wrestler. However, he decided to focus on building a personal brand that presents him as one of the best actors in the world.

Similarly, on top of being a great talk show host, Oprah Winfrey is a talented actress, an author, and philanthropist. However, most people know her as a talk show host, because this is the personal brand she has cultivated.

Like these people, if you want to build a strong personal brand, you need to focus on a specific niche that you want to be known for.

Focusing on a specific niche is important for two reasons.

First, it makes it easier for you to stand out from the competition. For instance, if you want to build a personal brand as an all-round digital marketer, this means that you will be in competition with every other digital marketer. Standing out from all this competition is not easy.

Many executives and leader even hire a professional to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

When you focus on a specific niche, you narrow down on the competition you are up against, which in turn makes it easier for you to set yourself apart.

This is why some of the most successful people in the world today focus on a specific niche, instead of trying to be a Jack of every trade.

For instance, you will notice that Neil Patel only focuses on one aspect of digital marketing – helping people to increase their traffic.

neilpatel

Similarly, Jon Morrow of Smart Blogger has created a personal brand as the guy who helps writers earn a good income from their writing skills – all this from his wheelchair.

writers dont have to be poor

Of course, this is not to say that Neil Patel or Jon Morrow would not be successful if they focused on broader niches. However, they would have a harder time standing out from the competition.

Why make things harder for yourself when you can easily set yourself apart by focusing on a specific niche?

Second, focusing on a specific niche makes it easier for you to gain expert status, which is a core element of a strong personal brand.

For instance, if you are trying to build a personal brand as a general digital manager, you will need to learn and excel at all aspects of digital marketing – content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, PPC marketing, and so on. This means more work, since you have a lot to learn and master.

On the other hand, if you focus on one aspect of digital marketing, such as SEO or social media marketing, it is much easier to get to an expert level, because you will only be focused on learning one thing, and can therefore get into the deeper details.

We have already seen that being an expert in your chosen niche is a core element of building a strong personal brand. Therefore, when choosing a niche to focus on, it is highly recommended that you pick something that you are already good at, something you can do better than the majority of the population.

By focusing on something you can do better than others, it will be a lot easier for you to gain expert status and become the go-to authority in that niche.

You can determine what you are good at by asking yourself one of the following four questions:

Where Am I Naturally Gifted?

Are there things that you naturally excel at? Are there things that colleagues and friends ask for your help with?

What Are My Greatest Achievements?

Looking at your greatest achievements can also help you identify skills where you have the potential to get to expert status.

For instance, if you won the National Creative Writing Competition, then this already shows that you are good at creative writing.

What Academic Qualifications Do I Have?

You can also focus on a niche that is related to your academic qualifications. If you have academic qualifications in a particular field, this means that you are already better at that thing than most people who don’t have similar academic qualifications and can easily become an authority.

What Professional Experience Do I Have?

Falling back on your professional experience is also a great way of identifying a good niche to focus on when building your personal brand.

Having worked in that field, you already have the skills and insights that you need to position yourself as an expert in that field.

For instance, if you have worked as an investment banker, you already have more knowledge and expertise in investments than the average guy. You can easily leverage this knowledge to create your brand identity as an investment expert.

What Problems Do You Solve For Which Target Customer?

Simply finding a niche that you want to be known for is not enough. If your aim is to build a personal brand with the hope of monetizing it, you also need to be known for providing the most effective solution to a specific problem for a specific customer segment.

The first thing you need to do here is to figure out what problem you are going to solve. Depending on your niche, that might be several problems that need solving.

However, if you want to quickly build a strong personal brand, the best approach is to find the one problem that you can solve more effectively than everyone else.

So, how do you figure out which problems need solving in your chosen niche? Here are three ways you can identify problems that you can solve.

Look At Problems In Your Day To Day Life

Trying to identify the problems you (or people close to you) experience while going through your day to day life is one way to identify problems that you can solve for people.

For instance, Ramit Sethi is known as the personal finance guru who uses psychology to help people achieve their financial goals, as well as their other goals in life. Ramit didn’t start using psychology to help people achieve their goals by chance.

After teaching about personal finance for a while, Ramit noticed that most of his peers knew what they needed to do about their personal finances. However, none of them was doing it.

Ramit realized that the problem was not knowledge, but the willpower to do what needed to be done.

ramit sethi

Similarly, looking at yourself and the people around you can help you identify a problem that you can solve for people.

For instance, if you work in HR, and notice that most of your staff do not know how to negotiate for a salary raise, you can set out to become the career consultant who helps people get paid what they are worth.

Conduct Surveys

Another way to identify problems that need solving is to conduct surveys for people within your niche and ask them what their biggest problems are.

For instance, if your chosen niche is social media marketing, you can run a survey asking business owners about the biggest problems they face when marketing their businesses on social media.

Such a survey can provide you with useful insights on the kind of problems that need solving within your niche.

Analyze The Competition

Looking at the problems that your competition is already solving can also help you figure out what problems you want to solve for your customers.

When using this approach, you should focus on problems that the competition is not solving as effectively as they should, or problems that you feel you can provide a better solution than what the competition is already providing.

Find Your Target Customers

After identifying a problem that you are going to be solving, you will also need to pick a customer segment for which you are going to be solving the problem.

Even though there might be a large group of people experiencing this problem, they do not all experience the problem at the same scale and are not looking for similar solutions. For example,

  • For some, the problem might be an inconvenience that they can nevertheless live with.
  • For others, the problem might be a huge pain point that they have to resolve.
  • Some might be willing to solve the problem, but might not have the money to pay for a solution.
  • Some might have the money, and might be willing to pay for one solution but not another.

What this means is that you need to identify the specific customer segment that you are going to solve the problem for.

Focusing on a specific customer segment allows you to come up with the most effective solution for that group, and influences how you are going to market yourself to that group.

You can focus on a specific target market either by demographic, geographic, psychographic, or behavioral characteristics, or a combination of the four.

main bases of segmentation
Source: GetFeedback

What Are You Known For? Any Credentials? Any Testimonials?

If you have something that you are already known for, you have a foundation on which you can build your personal brand.

For instance, if you have achieved some credentials, you can use these as the foundation of your personal brand.

Remember, building your personal brand is all about expanding your sphere of influence, and according to Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, authority is one of the six principles of influence.

Credentials like diplomas, degrees, certifications and prestigious awards are a show of authority. These credentials already position you as an expert, which is crucial in cementing your personal brand.

science of persuasion
The six principles of influence. Source: i-SCOOP

Another principle of influence, according to Dr. Cialdini, is social proof. If you have some testimonials from previous clients, you can use them as social proof to form the foundation of your personal brand.

When people see that you have helped others achieve results, they are more likely to see you as an expert and an authority in your field.

Define Your Personal Brand In One Sentence

After identifying your niche, figuring out what problem you are solving for which target customer, and identifying something that you are already known for, the final step to defining your personal brand is to distill your personal brand identity into a one sentence personal brand statement.

A personal brand statement provides a summary of who you are, what you do, and the value you bring.

Here are three examples of personal brand statements from three professionals who have already built very strong personal brands.

I provide practical help for hungry writers. – Carol Tice

Helping you build your influence with online video. – Sean Cannell

I am a publicity and marketing strategist who helps experts, authors, and coaches go from “hidden gem” to admired industry leader… and even a household name. – Selena Soo

Using these examples as inspiration, come up with your own personal branding statement that captures who you are, what you do, and the value you bring.

Proven Ways To Build Your Personal Brand And Earn Some Serious Money

Now that you have defined your personal brand, the next step is to figure out how to build and grow this personal brand and start earning money with it.

To do this, you first need a way to promote your personal brand and build an audience. While there are many ways to promote your personal brand, the best way is to launch a high end blog.

Once you have established your personal brand and built an audience, the next thing is to find ways to monetize your brand.

Let’s take a more detailed look at how to promote and make money from your personal brand.

1. Launch A High End Blog

Launching a blog is the best way of building your personal brand. Here is a list of some well-known professionals who built their personal brands through their blogs:

The list of people who used a blog to build their personal brand is endless. Like these people, your best bet at building a strong personal brand is by launching a blog.

Here’s why starting a blog beats all other options when it comes to establishing a personal brand.

online services consumers trust
Source: Fit Small Business
  • Over 60% of adults in the US spend more time reading blog posts that they do reading their emails, while 77% of global internet users regularly consume blog content. The average person reads about 10 blog posts every day. This shows that blogs are a great way to get word out about what you do.

So, how do you go about launching a blog? Here are the five steps to follow to start your own high end blog:

Choose A Domain Name For Your Blog

The first thing you need to do before launching your blog is to choose a domain name for the blog.

A domain name is the unique address that people key into their browsers whenever they want to access your blog. For example, the domain name for this blog is www.founderjar.com

When choosing a domain name for your blog, you can go with your own name, like Neil Patel and Adam Enfroy have done, or you can pick another name that represents what you do, like Jon Morrow, Ramit Sethi, and Carol Tice have done.

Whatever option you opt for, here are some things to keep in mind when coming up with a domain name for your blog:

  • Keep your domain name short.
  • Ensure that your domain name is easy to spell, pronounce and remember.
  • Avoid domain names that contain numbers and special characters.
  • Opt for .com extensions over other extensions like .net
  • The domain name should be related to your chosen niche.

Find A Host For Your Blog

After choosing a domain name, the next thing you need to do is to find a web hosting provider to host your blog.

A web hosting provider allows you to host your blog on their servers, thus making the blog accessible over the internet. Without hosting, people cannot find your blog, even when they enter your domain name in their browsers.

This blog, and all our other blogs are hosted on BlueHost, and we recommend using BlueHost for your blog as well. We chose BlueHost because of the following factors:

  • They have very low prices, especially during your first term.
  • They have very solid uptime.
  • Most of their plans offer lots of storage space.
  • They provide unmetered bandwidth.
  • They offer free SSL certificates.
  • Their customer service is exceptional.

To set up your blog on BlueHost, click here (using this link will give you a 50% discount) to open the BlueHost website and click on “Get Started.

bluehost

Next, pick a hosting plan that works for you. While you can start with any plan, I find that the “Choice Plus” plan offers the best value for money.

bluehost pricing

Next, enter the domain name you settled on. BlueHost will check if the domain is available, and if it is, it will be registered for you free of charge for the first year.

bluehost domain

Finally, you will need to enter your billing information to complete the process and check out. Once you do this, your hosting account will be ready.

bluehost account info

Install A Content Management System

Before you can start creating and publishing content on your new blog, you need to install a content management system.

Here, we recommend using WordPress, the world’s best and most popular content management system. WordPress powers over 455 million websites.

Installing WordPress on your BlueHost account is also pretty simple.

  • Simply login to your BlueHost dashboard and on the menu on the left side of your screen, click on “Marketplace.”
  • Click on “Add Website.” You will be asked to provide some details about your website, such as your site name and site tagline.
  • Next, choose the domain where WordPress will be installed. If you have only one domain, it will be preselected by default.
  • Choose whether you want the suggested plugins to be installed or not.
  • Finally, click on “Next” to finish. The installation will happen automatically, and within a few minutes, you will get a notification that WordPress has been installed successfully.

After installing WordPress, pick a theme you like to change the appearance of your blog and make it look professional. Once you have done that, your blog is now up and running. It’s now time to start publishing content on the blog.

Create Evergreen Content For Your Blog

Ever wondered what separates great blogs that attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every month from mediocre blogs that no one reads? It is not how beautiful the blog looks, or the kind of plugins used on the blog. What separates these two kinds of blogs is the kind of content on the blog.

To build a high-end blog that will establish and cement your personal brand, you need to create high quality, engaging and evergreen content that provides real value for your readers.

Evergreen content refers to content that does not have an expiry date. This content remains useful and relevant years after it was published.

The great thing about evergreen content is that as time passes, this kind of content attracts more and more traffic to your blog, unlike other kinds of content whose traffic potential diminishes with passage of time.

To create evergreen content for your blog, the first thing you need to do is to conduct keyword research to identify keywords that consistently attract high traffic. If a keyword does not have high search traffic, there is no point in creating evergreen content around it.

The best tool for conducting keyword research for your evergreen content is SEMrush. With SEMrush, you can easily see the number of people searching for a particular keyword, as well as other related keywords that you can focus on.

For instance, if you are in the search optimization niche, and want to see how many people are searching for the term SEO, simply enter the term in SEMrush and click on search.

SEMrush will provide you with traffic volume information for the term, and other related terms and phrases.

SEMrush

Once you have found the keywords to focus on, the next step is to determine the kind of format you are going to use for your evergreen content. Evergreen content can take many different formats, such as:

  • Product reviews
  • Case studies
  • How-to guides
  • Listicles
  • Glossaries
  • And so on…
evergreen content types
Source: BloggingX

You can focus on one evergreen content format, or combine several different formats, depending on your niche and audience.

After deciding on the format you are going to use to produce your evergreen content, you can now go ahead and create the content and publish it on your blog to showcase your expertise and attract traffic. It is also advisable to update your evergreen content regularly to keep it relevant.

Start Building Your Email List

Once you have started publishing content on your blog, you should also start collecting visitors’ emails and building an email list.

With an email list, it becomes a lot easier to drive traffic to your blog every time you publish a new post. All you need to do is to simply send an email to your subscribers asking them to check out your new post, and you will be assured of some free traffic every time.

Aside from driving traffic to your posts, your email list will also come in handy once you start monetizing your personal brand.

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels and provides the highest ROI. For every $1 you put into email marketing, you can earn up to $40. No other marketing channel provides such ROI.

With an email list, you can promote your products and services to your subscribers and nurture leads until they are ready to buy, thus helping you make more sales.

To build an email list and promote yourself via email, you will need a good email marketing platform. We recommend ConvertKit, which we use for email marketing on our two blogs.

With ConvertKit, you can easily create conversion-optimized landing pages, manage your email lists, automate your email marketing, track the performance of your email marketing campaigns, and so on. You can learn more about email marketing in this article.

Once you have set up your blog, created lots of high quality, evergreen content to establish your personal brand, and built an email list, it’s now time to start monetizing the personal brand you have built.

Below, let’s check out the different available options for monetizing your personal brand.

2. Productize Your Knowledge And Sell Online Courses

The high costs associated with acquiring a college education, as well as the massive gap between what is taught in colleges and the skills required at the workplace have pushed more and more people towards online courses, which are more skill-oriented.

Over the last couple of years, the online courses market has experienced a compound annual growth rate of about 9.6%. It is estimated that by 2026, the global e-learning market will be worth close to $400 billion.

global elearning market
Source: Open PR

This growth in the popularity of online courses is a massive opportunity for people to make money. If the personal brand you have built is related to a skill that other people are interested in learning, you can make money by creating online courses to help them learn this skill.

Already, there are several online entrepreneurs making money through online courses. Jon Morrow, Melyssa Griffin, Jeff Rose, and Daren Rowse are a few examples of entrepreneurs making money from online courses.

My co-founder and I also make money from online courses on our other blog, Cleverism.com. Here’s an example of one of our online courses.

cleverism

So, how do you go about creating an online course?

My co-founder and I have developed a six step process that we use to create winning online courses. Here are the steps in our six-step process.

Step 1: Choose A Topic For Your Online Course

Before you can start putting together your online course, you need to have a good idea of what you are going to teach.

Of course, the topic of your online course should be related to the personal brand you have created for yourself. For instance, if you have built a personal brand as an SEO guru, your online course should be related to SEO.

In the course of building your personal brand through your online course, you will already have interacted with potential clients and gained insights into some of the things they struggle with. You can use these insights to help you figure out what to teach on your online course.

If you haven’t gained any valuable insights yet, you can conduct a survey on your blog readers and ask them what problems they struggle with, or what skills they would really want to learn.

Step 2: Research The Market

After identifying a problem that your online course will help your readers to solve, the next step is to research the market to find out whether people are actually willing to pay for your course.

This step will save you from spending time and resources creating a course that no one will buy.

Step 3: Come Up With An Outline

Having confirmed that there is a significant number of people willing to pay for your online course, you can now develop an outline for your course.

The reason behind creating an outline is to ensure that all the necessary lessons are covered within the course.

Here are the steps to follow when creating an outline for your course:

  • Identify the overall outcome of your course. What will students achieve once they complete your course?
  • Identify the main modules students need to cover in order to achieve the overall outcome.
  • Break down these main modules into key action steps.
  • Identify the knowledge that your students need for each of these key action steps.
  • Come up with a lesson sketch for each key action step.

Determine The Format You Will Use To Deliver The Course

The next step is to figure out the best format to deliver your online course. Are you going to rely entirely on video? Will you combine video tutorials with PDF guides? Are you going to include any worksheets in your course? Will you include a test at the end of the course?

In most cases, it is best to combine different formats. This helps keep your students engaged. For instance, after a video lesson, you can provide your students with a worksheet that they will use to implement what they have learnt in the video.

Create Your Course Content

This is the part where you create the actual course material that you will use to teach your students.

Here, you are going to record and edit your video lessons, create your PDF guides, come up with the worksheets, create the test questions and answers, and so on.

Pick An Online Course Platform

Once you feel that your online course is ready, the last step is to find a suitable online course platform to host your online course for you.

Here, we recommend that you host your online course on either Teachable or Thinkific, two of the best online course platforms on the market. You can check out other great online course platforms here.

While both of these platforms offer an impressive set of features for online course creators, Thinkific has features that are more focused on course design and customization, while Teachable focuses on features that are meant to make it easier to market and sell your online course.

Once you pick an online course platform, upload your course and make it live, you can now start promoting your course on your blog and through your email list and sit back while the money flows into your bank account.

3. Run Free Or Paid Webinars

Another way to monetize your personal brand is to run free or paid webinars related to the niche for which you are known.

A webinar is an online version of a workshop or seminar. Webinars are typically held in real-time, which means that you will be doing a live broadcast to your audience, rather than showing a pre-recorded workshop.

Your audience also usually has the ability to submit their questions and comments during a webinar like they would during an in-person workshop.

Since you have already built your personal brand and positioned yourself as an expert, there will be a lot of people willing to hear you talk about your area of expertise, and you can leverage this to make money.

Here are a few reasons why webinars are a great way to monetize your personal brand:

  • Since webinars rely on video, they are a good way to create a deep connection with your audience and boost your authority and personal brand.
  • According to ReadyTalk, 20 – 40% of those who show up to your webinar end up becoming qualified leads. 2 – 5% of those who attend your webinar will also buy from you within 24 hours of attending the webinar. With such stats, it is no wonder that 83% of marketers believe that webinars are very effective.
webinar marketing stats
Source: Landbot
  • Webinars are a great way of reducing your lead acquisition costs. The average cost per lead for webinars is $95, compared to $432 for online trade shows and $573 for in-person seminars.
webinar reduce cost per lead
Source: Done For You

From these statistics, you can see that webinars are a monetization strategy with lots of potential. However, you might be wondering, how do you actually make money from webinars?

There are several ways of making money from a webinar, such as…

Charging A Registration Fee To Attend The Webinar

As an expert who has already built a strong personal brand, you are an authority in your field, and people already respect your knowledge and opinion. A lot of people are willing to hear your insights about your industry.

You can take advantage of this by holding educational webinars and charging people a registration fee in order to attend the webinar.

However, you should only use this webinar monetization strategy for educational webinars.

If you intend to use the webinar purely for advertising purposes and product reviews, don’t charge people to attend the webinar, even if some of the content you are going to share might be useful.

Sell Your Products And Services

Another way to monetize a webinar is to hold the webinar for free, and then promote your products and services during or after the webinar.

Webinars are an effective conversion tool, and therefore, promoting your products and services during a webinar can greatly boost your sales.

There is no limit to the kind of products or services you can sell during a webinar. You can sell your online courses, physical products, digital products like eBooks, freelance services, consulting and coaching services, and so on.

Market Other People’s Products

If you don’t have your own products and services to sell during your webinar, you can also promote other people’s products and services and earn an affiliate commission for every sale made off your webinar.

If you decide to use this approach, however, you should only market products that are related to the topic of your webinar.

Sell Advertisements

As an alternative to promoting other people’s products as an affiliate marketer, you can also charge other marketers to advertise their products, services, and brands during your webinar.

A good example of how to do this is to have an advertiser’s brand shown somewhere in the background during the webinar. You can also partner with brands as your webinar sponsors.

Pay-Per-View Recordings

Most times, some of the people who signed up for your webinar might still miss it for various reasons.

Even if your webinar was free, you can charge people a fee to view a recording of the webinar once the live webinar is over. This works well for high value webinars which were well received by the audience.

Alternatively, you can bundle together several of your past webinars and charge a fee to give people a lifetime access to this bundle of high value webinars.

Best Platforms For Hosting Your Webinar

To host your webinar, you will need access to a good webinar platform. Webinar platforms are software services that allow you to broadcast your webinar to multiple people simultaneously and manage other things like attendee registrations, holding Q&A sessions, and so on.

There are dozens of webinar platforms available in the market. However, we recommend using either WebinarJam or Demio. Both of these platforms are very easy to use, even for complete beginners, and come with a ton of powerful features that make every aspect of hosting your webinar a breeze.

You can also check out some other great webinar platforms here.

4. Host An Online Conference

You can also leverage your strong personal brand to bring together a group of other experts within your industry and have them share their expertise and insights in an online conference.

An online conference is an interactive live event that is held over the internet with the help of video conferencing technologies. The online conference brings together different experts to speak about various things within a specific industry.

Like a regular, in-person conference, an online conference goes on for an extended period of time, say several hours, and sometimes even a day or two, and has keynote sessions, plenary sessions, breakout sessions, and so on.

So, how can hosting an online conference help you earn money?

There are several ways of making money from hosting online conferences. Here are some of the most popular:

Selling An All-Access Pass

This is the most common way of making money from online conferences.

With this approach, you make it free for people to attend the conference, but then make the conference available for a limited time, say for up to a day after the end of the conference.

With the conference running for several hours, or sometimes days, it is inevitable that many attendees will miss some of the speakers. An all access pass gives attendees life-time access to all the speeches and interviews.

By paying for the all-access pass, the conference attendees are assured that they won’t miss any of the interviews and speeches.

The best part is that they can view the speeches and interviews on their own schedule, since an all-access pass does not limit access to the conference material.

Here’s an example of an all-access pass to the Contact Center Virtual Summit.

contact center virtual summit

Selling Products And Services

One of the best things about online conferences is that they bring together a huge number of people who are all interested in a certain topic or industry.

If you have any products or services related to this industry, you can make a lot of sales by promoting the products to the conference attendees.

For instance, if you are hosting an online conference on the topic of search optimization, and you have a SaaS product that helps markets improve their websites’ SEO, you can promote this product to the attendees and make lots of sales.

You can sell all kinds of products and services during an online conference. Here are a few examples of what you can promote and sell on your online conference:

  • Physical products like t-shirts, branded diaries, paperback books, and so on.
  • Digital products like eBooks, software, templates, plugins, and so on.
  • Your freelancing services, online courses, coaching programs, consulting packages, etc.

Affiliate Commissions

If your online conference is going to include tutorials or product demos, you can get in touch with the companies behind these products and sign up as an affiliate partner.

You can then promote these products during the online conference and earn commission from attendees who purchase the product using your affiliate link.

Sponsorship

Like in-person conferences, online conferences bring together a large targeted audience, and many companies within your niche or industry could benefit from such an audience.

You can reach out to such companies and ask them to support your online conference financially in exchange for having them listed as sponsors and having their logos displayed prominently during the conference.

Best Platforms For Hosting Your Online Conference

To run an awesome online conference that will make money for you, you need the right tools and platforms to host your conference and make it interactive.

While there are several online conference platforms to pick from, we recommend using either WebinarJam or Demio.

WebinarJam comes with a set of powerful online conferencing features, such as the ability to host an online conference with up to 5,000 attendees, hold live Q&A sessions, allow attendees to make their own presentations, and so on.

Demio offers equally powerful online conference hosting and management tools. You can allow attendees to register for just one session or the entire event, stream live in HD quality, share your screen, allow attendees to take the stage, and so on.

5. Start Your Own Podcasting Show

If you have the gift of gab and can keep people engaged using nothing else but your voice, you can leverage your personal brand to start a podcast and make money from it.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider starting your own podcasting show:

  • It is estimated that by 2022, there will be over 132 million podcast listeners. And that’s in the United States alone.
number of podcast listeners
Source: Statista
  • Podcasts are a great way to connect with your audience and grow your personal brand even further.
  • It is estimated that by 2021, podcasts will generate over $1 billion in annual ad revenue, up from $105 million in 2015, according to eMarketer. Starting a podcast gives you a chance to get a share of this money.
podcast ad revenue
Source: eMarketer

Starting your own podcasting show is relatively simple. Here are the steps to follow to start your own podcast.

  • Decide what topic your podcast will cover. The topic should be related to the niche for which you are known.
  • Pick a name for your podcast. The best approach here is to use the same name on your blog in order to avoid diluting your personal brand.
  • Develop your podcast artwork and come up with theme music. You can hire freelancers to create your artwork and theme music on freelancing sites like Upwork and Fiverr.
  • Decide on your podcast format. Are you going to be interviewing guests, telling stories, hosting solo or with a co-host, reviewing industry news and events, or a combination of different formats?
  • Determine how long your podcast episodes are going to be.
  • Pick a hosting platform for your podcast. The best hosting provider to host your podcast with is BuzzSprout. BuzzSprout is fairly priced, easy to use, offers secure and reliable hosting, and provides a ton of features that will help you get the most out of your podcast. You can also check out these other great podcast hosting sites
  • Start recording, publishing, and promoting your podcast episodes.

So, how do you make money from your podcasting show?

There are several ways of monetizing your podcast, such as…

Selling Premium Content

Aside from your regular podcast content that you share free of charge, you can also create some premium content and charge your audience a fee to access this content.

Here are some types of premium podcast content that you can charge for:

  • Bonus episodes. For instance, when interviewing guests, you can provide part 1 of the interview for free to hook your audience and charge for the second part.
  • Behind the scenes content.
  • Episodes that don’t contain ads.
  • Episodes that allow the audience to interact with you and your guests.
  • Episodes containing valuable resources that the audience can download for free.

Selling Ads

Podcasts are very effective at getting people to take action. According to Spotify, 81% of podcast listeners have taken action, such as mentioning a brand to others, researching a brand or its products online, or following a brand on social media, after listening to an ad during a podcast.

audio ads during a podcast
Source: Spotify

In addition, 52% of podcast listeners report that they are likely to consider making a purchase after listening to an ad during a podcast.

brands discover
Source: Oberlo

This makes podcasts very valuable to marketers. If you have built a significant audience on your podcast, you can reach out to marketers and charge them a fee to advertise their products and services to your listeners.

Sponsorships

This is almost similar to selling advertisements. However, instead of advertising a brand’s products, you will include a clip mentioning that your podcast is sponsored by that particular brand. This puts the brand in front of your audience and boosts their brand awareness.

Depending on the size and nature of your audience, you can generate thousands of dollars every month from your podcast through sponsorships.

Selling Your Products And Services

If you have products and services that are related to the topic of your podcast, you can market these products and services to your audience and boost your sales.

For instance, if your podcast talks about various strategies for scaling a business, and you have an online course that teaches startup owners how to attract more clients to their new business, you can promote this online course to your podcast listeners and make some sales.

You can do this for all kinds of products and services, such as software products, templates, physical products, SaaS products, online courses, coaching and consulting services, freelance services, and so on.

Affiliate Marketing

Alternatively, you can promote other people’s products and services on your podcast and receive a commission every time someone you have referred makes a purchase through your affiliate tracking link.

When monetizing your podcast through affiliate marketing, you should only promote products that you have used and can vouch for. This allows you to be more authentic when promoting the products, and ensures that you do not recommend low-quality products to your listeners, since this could hurt your brand.

Repurposing Your Podcast Content Into eBooks And Audiobooks

You can also make money by repurposing your podcast content into an ebook or audiobook and selling it to your listeners.

For instance, if your podcast shows involve interviewing various experts within your field, you can take the insights gained from several interviews, combine them with some new information and package them into an eBook that you can sell.

Crowdfunding And Donations

You can also make money from your blog by asking your listeners to donate to the podcast. This might seem ineffective, but you will be surprised to learn how much money you can potentially earn through donations. For instance, this podcaster makes about $1,200 from donations for a single episode.

6. Hold Corporate Workshops

After you have built a strong personal brand, you can also leverage this personal brand to make money by holding corporate workshops for organizations within your niche.

Corporate workshops are short educational programs held by organizations with the aim of teaching their staff some ideas, practical skills, or techniques that they can apply in their day to day work.

According to Statista, the global workplace training market has been on a steady rise since the Great Recession of 2007 – 2009. In 2019, the global workplace training industry was valued at an estimated $370 billion.

statista 2020
Source: Statista

If you have skills that are applicable in the workplace, you can get a share of these billions by holding corporate workshops to transfer these skills to the staff of organizations within your industry.

Unlike other monetization strategies, such as online conferences, where you simply need to organize the conference and promote it to potential attendees, corporate workshops will usually require you to start by pitching your workshop to organizations.

This means that you will need to reach out to organizations and let them know that you can train their staff. Very often, you will need to work closely with the organization to identify skills that are deficient within their workforce before you can start organizing the workshop.

Once your pitch has been approved, you can then go ahead and prepare for the workshop. Here are the key steps to follow when preparing for a corporate workshop.

Define The Goals Of The Workshop

The first step is to identify the goals that the workshop is meant to achieve. What is the expected outcome once the staff are done with the workshop?

Are you trying to teach middle level managers how to be more effective leaders? Do you want to teach the sales personnel how to make more effective cold calls? Are you teaching the content marketing team how to create better content?

Without a clear goal, most corporate workshops end up being a waste of time, because the attendees will not leave the workshop with any additional value.

Actually, such corporate workshops will end up hurting the personal brand you have worked so hard to build. World could easily go round that your workshops do not deliver any results.

Consider The Audience

After identifying the workshop goals, the next step is to consider the people who are going to attend the workshop and understand them and their needs.

The audience will determine how you are going to structure the workshop, the kind of activities included in the workshop, the kind of background material you will need for the workshop, and so on. It is impossible to organize an effective workshop without good understanding of the audience.

Come Up With An Agenda

Now that you know the workshop goals and have a clear understanding of the audience, you can now start crafting an agenda for the workshop. The agenda should cover the following things:

  • The key points that the workshop will cover.
  • The activities and discussions that will be undertaken during the workshop.
  • The length of time that each activity will take.
  • The visual aids that are going to be used for each key point.

Hold The Actual Workshop

After crafting the agenda and sharing it with the attendees, it’s now time to hold the actual workshop. Here are some tips that will help ensure a successful workshop.

  • Keep the workshop relevant to the goals and the audience.
  • Encourage the attendees to participate.
  • Incorporate multiple learning methods.
  • Keep all the participants engaged.
  • If the workshop is long (several hours), incorporate breaks to ensure that the attendees do not zone out.

Create A Follow-Up Plan

Once the workshop is over, have a plan on how you will follow up with the attendees and the organization to determine how effective the workshop was. A good way to do this is to ask the participants to fill out a questionnaire at the end of the workshop and ask them to share their thoughts and opinions about the workshop.

How Much Can You Earn From Corporate Workshops

The amount of money you can make from holding corporate workshops will depend on a number of factors, such as:

  • Your experience. The more experienced and knowledgeable you are, the more you can charge.
  • The position of the attendees. For instance, you can charge higher for a workshop aimed at C-level executives than you can for entry level staff.
  • The number of attendees. Generally, the more the participants, the more you can charge.

There is no limit to the amount you can make from corporate workshops. You can charge anywhere from a few dollars per hour to several hundred dollars per hour.

Generally, the stronger your personal brand, the higher you can charge, so you should put a lot of focus on building a strong personal brand.

In addition, showing the value that you can deliver can also help you earn more. Therefore, every time you hold a successful corporate workshop, ask for testimonials from the organizations or conduct case studies showing the impact of the workshop. You can then use these to show your value when negotiating with future clients.

7. Become A Paid Speaker On Leading Conferences

For someone with a strong personal brand, getting paid to speak in conferences is a huge opportunity to monetize your brand.

If you have already positioned yourself as an expert who’s highly knowledgeable in your field, there are lots of conference organizers who will be willing to have you speak in their conferences, and a healthy number of them will be willing to pay you to speak.

According to MarketResearch.com, the professional speaking industry has been growing steadily. It is estimated that by 2025, this industry will be worth over $2.3 billion. Why not leverage your personal brand to get a share of these billions?

How Much Can You Make From Speaking In Conferences?

The amount of money you can potentially make from getting paid to speak will largely depend on the strength of your personal brand. According to a survey by SpeakerFlow, 55% of speakers earn less $7,500 for every speaking gig.

Generally, here is how much you can expect to earn from speaking gigs:

  • If you are a newbie who is still trying to establish their brand, you can get paid in the range of $500 – $2,500 for every speaking engagement.
  • If your brand has already started gaining some recognition, you can earn anywhere between $2,500 – $10,000.
  • If you are an established brand with lots of testimonials, a couple of published books, media interviews, and so on, you can earn about $10,000 – $20,000 per gig.
  • If you have positioned yourself as the go-to expert in your field, you can earn upwards of $20,000 for every speaking gig.

People with very strong personal brands, such as author Malcom Gladwell, charge upwards of $150,000 for a single speaking gig.

How To Find Paid Speaking Opportunities

There are several strategies you can use to find conferences that can pay you to speak, such as:

  • Getting referrals from past clients and other speakers within your industry.
  • Networking with conference organizers and event planners.
  • Googling for conferences related to your industry, and then reaching out to the organizers of these events and pitching your speaking services.

For instance, if you are in the marketing industry and you live in Chicago, you can search for “Upcoming Marketing Conferences In Chicago.” This will bring up relevant conferences that you might want to pitch your speaking services to.

marketing conferences research
  • Using events tools such as EventBrite and Agent to identify upcoming events where you could speak. These tools even allow you to view the organizer’s contact information, making it easier for you to reach out to them and pitch your speaking services.
find speaking gig
  • Attending other conferences within your industry to network with the organizers, the audience and other speakers. Connecting with the right people can lead to future speaking opportunities.

Sales Funnel Blueprint For Earning More Money With Your Personal Brand

If you want to make good money with your personal brand, you need to come up with a system to consistently attract new leads and convert them into paying clients.

You might be doing everything else right, such as aggressively promoting yourself and your services, but without such a system, your efforts will not translate into money.

For instance, let’s say that you have already launched a blog to build your personal brand, you have great content on the blog, and you have decided that you will monetize your brand by selling online courses.

Your blog content might attract visitors and make them aware of your brand and the online courses you are offering, but without a way to turn these visitors into leads and nurture them until they are ready to purchase, you won’t make any money.

Here’s the thing. The majority of those who visit your blog are not ready to buy. Even for those who become leads, close to three quarters (73%) are not ready to be sold to.

Therefore, it is your responsibility to build a relationship with these people and nurture them until they are ready to make the purchase decision. Marketers who do this make 50% more sales while at the same time keeping their costs low.

The best way to consistently attract, nurture, and convert leads into paying customers is to develop a sales funnel.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a step by step process that moves a prospect through the different stages of the buyer’s journey, from the first moment they interact with your brand to the moment when they are ready to make a purchase.

The buyer’s journey is composed of the following three stages:

  1. Awareness: This is the stage where a prospect realizes that they have a problem and starts researching to find out whether a solution to their problem exists. At this point, the prospect is not aware of your brand and what you offer.
  2. Consideration: Here, the prospect has learned that there is a solution to their problem, and is considering the various available options. They are also aware of your brand. At this point, the prospect is comparing the features between different products, the prices, and so on.
  3. Action: This is the final stage of the buyer’s journey where the prospect decides what solution is best for them and makes the purchase.

Since the purpose of the sales funnel is to take the prospect through the three stages of the buyer’s journey, it can also be broken down into three key steps:

  • Attract: This is where you attract prospects who are researching the problem, let them know a solution to their problems exists, and make them aware of your brand. This is also the point where you collect their email address and turn them into a lead.
  • Engage: Once you have collected their email, you then continue building a relationship with them and delighting them with valuable content. Since they are still weighing their options, you want them to start considering you as the most effective solution to their problem.
  • Convert: At this stage, they are ready to make the purchase, so what you need to do is to give them that final nudge to convince them to buy from you.

As your prospects move through the various stages of your sales funnel, some of them will drop off at each stage.

For instance, only a portion of your site visitors will give you their email address. Out of these, only a portion will engage with your emails, and out of these, only a portion of them will end up buying from you. This is why the sales funnel is big at the top and small at the bottom.

Below, let’s take a look at how to implement your own sales funnel that will provide you with a constant stream of clients and allow you to earn more money from your personal brand.

Step 1: Launch Your Landing Page

The first step of your sales funnel is to attract visitors to your website and then convince them to give you their email address. While you can collect emails using a simple sign-up form embedded on your website, the best way to do it is to use a landing page.

A landing page is a dedicated page on a website whose sole purpose is to collect the visitor’s contact information. All the information contained on a landing page works together to convince the visitor to enter their details in the form.

Since landing pages have only one purpose, they don’t contain anything that might distract a visitor from the main action you want them to take.

This means that your landing page should not have things like a navigation bar, sidebar, or anything else that doesn’t encourage the visitor to give you their contact information.

Here is a great example of a landing page from Shopify.

shopify

The easiest way to create a landing page is to set up a WordPress website using Bluehost, and then use a lead generation WordPress theme to create your landing page.

The two best WordPress themes for lead generation are LeadX and GetLeads.

Both of these themes come with a wide variety of beautiful designed landing page templates that you can easily customize to suit your personal brand, as well as a ton of features geared at optimizing conversions.

Another way to create a landing page is to use landing page solutions like LeadPages or ClickFunnels. With these landing page tools, you can build dedicated landing pages without having to build an actual website, which makes everything a lot easier.

They also come with other powerful features, such as built-in analytics, that make it easier to manage your lead generation campaigns.

Create A Lead Magnet

In order for your landing page to be effective at converting visitors into subscribers, you will also need a lead magnet.

A lead magnet, sometimes referred to as an optin bribe or an opt-in incentive, is a valuable, irresistible offer that you promise to your visitors in exchange for their contact information.

Here is an example of a lead magnet on Carol Tice’s blog, makealivingwriting.com

make a living writing

Here are the different kinds of free offers you can use as lead magnets.

  • eBooks
  • Email course
  • Swipe files
  • Downloadables
  • Free webinars
  • Newsletters
  • Reports
  • Case studies
  • Resource guides
  • And so on.

You should keep in mind that simply placing a lead magnet on your blog will not automatically increase conversions. Your lead magnet needs to be irresistible to your visitors. An irresistible lead magnet is one that does the following:

  • It solves your visitor’s problem.
  • It promises your visitor a quick win.
  • It can be consumed within a short time.
  • It addresses a very specific topic or problem.
  • It is instantly accessible.
  • It showcases your expertise and knowledge in that area.

Step 2: Build Your Email List With Guest Posting, SEO Optimized Blog Posts, And Paid Ads

Once your landing page and lead magnets are ready, it’s now time to start collecting visitors’ emails and building your email list.

For you to build your email list, you need a way of driving traffic to your landing page. Without traffic, your landing page serves no purpose. There will be no leads getting into your sales funnel, and you won’t make any money.

Fortunately, you have several options when it comes to driving traffic to your landing pages, such as…

Creating SEO Optimized Blog Posts

SEO optimized blog posts are posts that have been tweaked to rank for specific keywords (that your audience are searching for) and attract free search traffic.

For instance, if you search for the phrase “content marketing for photographers” on Google, all the articles that appear in the results have been optimized to rank for these keywords.

SEO optimized articles

By including well-placed CTAs in such SEO optimized blog posts, you can drive some of the traffic these posts are generating to your landing page, collect their emails and add them to your sales funnel.

Placing CTAs On Your Homepage

If your website is attracting a lot of traffic, you can capture these visitors and turn them into leads by placing a call to action (CTA) on your homepage and linking the CTA to your landing page.

Here is an example of a CTA on the SmartBlogger homepage.

call to action

Adding CTAs On Your High Performing Blog Posts

Another way to drive significant traffic to your landing page is to add a CTA to your best performing blog posts.

Your best performing blog posts attract lots of traffic because they provide great value. After delighting them with great value, these visitors have a high likelihood of clicking through on your CTA and sharing their email address.

Social Media

With over 3.8 billion users around the globe and annual growth rate of over 9.2%, social media can be a great source of traffic.

social media use
Source: We Are Social

You can drive some of this traffic to your landing page by creating highly optimized social media posts with a CTA that is linked to your landing page.

The beauty of social media is that it allows you to create posts with attractive visuals. Using visuals in your posts is a great way of capturing users’ attention and getting them to click through to your landing page.

For this approach to be effective, the content of your social media posts should be well aligned with the content of your landing page. Your landing page needs to deliver on the promise made on your social media posts.

When using social media to drive traffic to your landing page, you should focus on platforms where your target audience is most likely to be found, rather than trying to attract traffic from every social platform.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great way to leverage other bloggers’ audiences to drive traffic to your landing page.

This approach involves approaching other bloggers within your niche with a guest posting offer, posting high quality, high value articles on their blogs, and then adding a well-placed call to action in the article.

If your guest post provides great value, there’s a very high likelihood that some of the readers will click through to your landing page and share their contact information.

Guest blogging is a great way of growing your personal brand and tapping into a traffic source that you would not have reached otherwise.

Paid Ads

The fastest way of driving traffic to your landing page is to use paid ads. Using paid ads gives you a much wider reach than you would have achieved with other methods, and does this within a relatively short time.

In addition, paid ads give you the ability to reach a highly targeted audience, which allows you to attract the right kind of leads – those who have a high purchase intent.

You can use paid ads on multiple platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, and so on. However, when using paid ads, I recommend focusing on one platform that is most likely to drive the highest ROI.

You should also use paid ads only when you have tested your landing page and optimized it for conversions. Otherwise, you might waste your money by driving traffic to a landing page that doesn’t convert.

Best Email Marketing Platforms

As you build your email list, you will also need an email platform to manage your list, send out email campaigns to your list, track the performance of your campaigns, and so on.

The three best email marketing platforms on the market right now are ConvertKit, InfusionSoft, and ActiveCampaign.

With either of these platforms, you get the following features:

  • Visual drag and drop editors to allow you to create well designed emails.
  • Ability to run automated email marketing campaigns on autopilot.
  • Ability to organize your list into segments and manage these segments.
  • Built-in analytics to track the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
  • And so on…

Out of the three email marketing platforms, our top recommendation is ConvertKit, which is more focused on creators.

convertkit

Step 3: Convert Your Email Subscribers To Sales By Running A Free Webinar

After collecting emails from your prospects and delighting them with engaging content on email, the next step in your sales funnel is to convert your subscribers into paying customers.

The best way to convert your leads into paying customers is to invite them to a free webinar where you can then pitch your products or services.

Remember, at this stage, your prospects are ready to make the purchase decision. A webinar allows you to give them that final push to convince them to buy from you.

Why a webinar though? What makes a webinar the best option for converting subscribers into paying customers?

The effectiveness of webinars in driving conversions stems from the power of video. Close to three quarters (72%) of internet users prefer watching video over reading text. In addition, pitching your prospects on video allows you to create a deeper connection with them, thus increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

In addition, when you run a free webinar, 20 – 40% of the attendees will turn into qualified leads, and 5% of the attendees will end up making a purchase within 24 hours of the webinar.

webinar marketing stats
Source: ClickFunnels

When it comes to using webinars to convert your leads into paying customers, you have two options – running a live webinar or recording an evergreen webinar.

A live webinar works best when you are launching a new product. Since none of your subscribers have seen or bought the product before, they will all be at the same stage in the buyers’ journey.

Pre-recorded, evergreen webinars, on the other hand, work best for already existing products. Such webinars can be used to individually convert new leads as they join your sales funnel, without having to hold a new live webinar every time you gain new subscribers.

To ensure maximum conversions, your products and services should be the focus of your webinar.

Talk about what differentiates your products and services from rival brands, show the results your prospects can achieve using your products, and so on. Remember, at this point, they are ready to buy, and all you need to do is to convince them to buy from you.

To hold a successful and effective webinar, you will need access to a powerful webinar platform, especially if you are going to have a huge number of attendees in your webinar. I recommend using either WebinarJam or Demio to hold your webinar.

Both WebinarJam and Demio have an impressive set of features that simplify the process of holding a webinar, while at the same time allowing you to provide the best possible experience to your audience.

Step 4: Measure Your Sales Funnel Metrics To Maximize Your ROI

As leads move through your sales funnel, it is expected that some of them will drop off from your funnel at certain points. These drop-off points are referred to as leaks.

By measuring certain sales funnel metrics, you can identify these leaks and find ways to fix them.

By plugging these leaks, you can increase the number of leads who proceed to each stage of your funnel, boost your sales, and ultimately maximize the ROI of your sales funnel.

Below, let’s check out the important sales funnel metrics you should measure, as well as how to improve these metrics.

Landing Page Traffic

Ideally, the more traffic your landing page attracts, the higher the number of leads who enter into your sales funnel.

Measuring your landing page traffic tells you how effective you are at generating awareness for your brand. Measuring landing page traffic also makes it possible for you to measure other important sales funnel metrics, such as conversion rate.

If your landing page traffic is not where you want it to be, you can give it a boost by:

  • Optimizing your paid ads.
  • Creating more SEO optimized content to attract free search traffic.
  • Increasing your social media promotion efforts.
  • Increasing your guest posting efforts.

Email Opt-In Rate

This metric measures the percentage of your landing page traffic who end up signing up to your email list.

Measuring this metric allows you to determine the effectiveness of your landing page in getting people to sign up to your list.

The email opt-in rate also affects the overall effectiveness of your sales funnel. For instance, you might be attracting a lot of traffic to your landing page, but if your landing page is not converting this traffic into leads, you will still have trouble making sales.

A survey by SUMO places the average email opt-in rate at 1.95%. However, the top 10% of marketers achieve a much higher opt-in rate, with an average of 4. 77%.

sumo opt in rate
Source: SUMO

To improve your email opt-in rate, you can:

  • Optimize your landing page copy.
  • Improve the quality of your opt-in bribe.
  • Use email capture forms with a lower number of fields.
  • Optimize your CTA.
  • Ensure there are no distractions on your landing page.

Email Engagements

Once people have signed up to your email list, their likelihood of progressing along your sales funnel is dependent on whether they engage with your emails or not. If they don’t engage with your emails, you cannot expect them to buy from you.

When measuring email engagements, there are two important metrics to look at:

Email open rate: This measures the percentage of email recipients who open your emails. Generally, an email open rate of 21% or higher is okay.

get response
Source: GetResponse

Here are some tips on how to boost your email open rates:

  • Make sure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices.
  • Send your emails at the right time and day. Your emails are more likely to be opened if you send them during morning hours on weekdays. Tuesdays and Wednesdays work particularly well.
  • Include your own name in the “from” section.
  • Address the recipient by name in the subject line.
  • Segment your lists.

Click-Through Rate: This measures the percentage of people who click on the links inside your emails compared to the number of recipients who opened the email. Leads who click through on the links in your emails are more likely to buy from you.

According to GetResponse, the average click-through rate for all industries is 3.57%.

Overall Conversion Rate

The overall funnel conversion rate measures the percentage of leads who end up purchasing from you compared to the number of leads who entered your funnel.

For example, if 1,000 people entered your funnel (signing up to your email list), and only 200 of these ended up purchasing your products or services, this means that the overall conversion rate of your funnel is 20%.

Measuring the overall conversion rates helps you determine how effective your funnel is in nurturing leads and converting them into paying customers.

Length Of The Sales Funnel Process

This measures the length of time it takes between a lead entering your marketing funnel and making a purchase from you.

Measuring the length of your sales funnel process is another way of determining how effective your sales funnel is at nurturing your leads.

The longer your sales funnel process, the less effective it is, since some of your leads might lose interest somewhere along the way. Ideally, you should aim for a sales funnel process of about 1 – 3 weeks.

If your sales funnel process is too long, you can shorten it by:

  • Sending fewer but more impactful emails before asking for the sale.
  • Reducing the length of time between successive emails.
  • Using urgency in your emails, such as offering discounts with an expiry date.

Quick Ways To Build A Clean Personal Brand

Everyone has a personal brand, whether you are actively shaping it or not.

Before you started actively shaping your online brand, you might have engaged in some negative online activity that is not aligned with the personal brand you are trying to create. And here’s the problem with such online activity – the internet never forgets.

To avoid such negative online activity from coming back to haunt you and hurt the personal brand you have been creating painstakingly, you need to clean up your online image.

Below, let’s check out three quick ways to build a clean personal brand.

Clean Your Social Media Profiles

If you have social media profiles, there is a chance that you have at one time posted something that doesn’t represent you in the best light.

According to a survey by YouGov, over half (57%) of social media users in the US have shared something on social media that they later regretted.

Here’s the thing… People are always watching what you post online, and some of what you post on your social media profiles could be hurting your efforts to build a strong personal brand.

For instance, if you want to create a personal brand as a wildlife conservationist, but you shared a meme 10 years ago encouraging poaching, this post could come back to haunt you and make your personal brand seem inauthentic.

To avoid this, you need to comb through your social profiles and make sure everything on your profiles is aligned with the personal brand you are trying to create.

Here are a couple of things you can do to clean up your social media profiles:

Use An Appropriate Profile Photo

Whether you like it or not, people will actually judge you based on your social media profile photos, and therefore, you need to make sure that you have appropriate profile photos on all your social media accounts.

Imagine taking time to build a very professional personal brand, but then when someone searches for you on LinkedIn, this is what they find on your profile photo.

wrong profile photo
Source: AC Online

Do you think this person would take you seriously? Highly unlikely.

However, if they found a profile photo like this one shown below, they would see you as a serious and professional guy.

correct profile photo
Source: AC Online

While you can use profile photos that are less formal on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, try to keep all your profile photos clean and appropriate, especially if that particular profile is publicly accessible.

This means that you should avoid photos that show you taking part in inappropriate activities (drinking, partying, using drugs, etc.), photos that might contain offensive signs or gestures, photos that contain nudity or sexual content, and so on.

Delete Or Hide Inappropriate Posts

Go through your social media profiles, find any posts that are inappropriate to the personal brand you are trying to create and delete them. If you do not want to delete the posts, consider hiding or archiving the posts such that they cannot be viewed by the public.

This applies for all posts that appear on your profile, even if they were not posted by you. This includes tweets that you have retweeted or liked, posts that you have been tagged in, and so on.

Update Your Bio

The bio gives you a chance to explain who you are and what you are about. Use this as an opportunity to enhance your personal brand by updating your bio to match your brand.

For instance, if you want to be known as an SEO specialist who helps small businesses increase their traffic, highlight this in your bio, rather than posting irrelevant stuff that doesn’t do anything to enhance your brand.

Share Relevant Content

To enhance your personal brand, get in the habit of sharing content that is related to whatever you want to be known for.

For instance, if you want to be known as an investment expert, you should routinely share news, articles, quotes, videos, and infographics that are related to investing. This way, anyone who goes through your social profiles will automatically associate your personal brand with investing.

If you look at Neil Patel’s Facebook page, you will notice that all his Facebook posts are related to what he’s known for – digital marketing.

neil patel fb page

Delete Old Accounts

If you have some old accounts that you no longer use, the best thing to do is to delete or deactivate them. You don’t want a potential client to judge you based on a Facebook account you created back in high school and haven’t logged into for a decade.

How To Deal With Negative Google Search Results

As your brand starts growing, more and more people will start googling your name. Is what they are going to find in the search results aligned with the personal brand you are building?

A single negative search result on Google could undo all the work you have done to build your personal brand.

Therefore, it is very important to google your name and find out what comes up when other people search for your name. When googling yourself, don’t do it on your own computer.

Alternatively, clear your browser’s cache to ensure that the results you are getting are not personalized for you. You want to get the same results other people get when they search for your name.

So, what should you do if some unflattering search results come up when you google your name? Here are a few tips on how to deal with negative Google search results.

Delete The Unwanted Content

If the unflattering search results are from a channel that you have control over, these are the easiest to deal with. All you need to do is to log on to that channel and delete the unwanted content.

For example, if googling your name brings up a drunk photo from your Facebook profile, just login to your Facebook account and delete the photo. Similarly, if the unwanted result is from a not-so-good article you posted on medium, just login to your medium account and delete the article.

Request For Removal

Sometimes, the unwanted content in your search results might be from a channel you have no control over. For instance, a blogger might have posted an embarrassing article about you on their blog.

In this case, the best thing to do is to reach out to the blogger and request them to pull down the article.

You should note, however, that there is no guarantee that they will oblige your request. Therefore, it’s advisable to remain polite and professional when requesting them to pull down the unwanted content.

Create New And Better Content

If you don’t have a way to get the negative search results removed from Google, such as when someone doesn’t oblige your request to pull down the unwanted content, the best thing to do is to do something known as reverse SEO.

Reverse SEO involves creating new and better content that will be associated with your name, with the aim of having this new content push the unwanted content further down the search results.

This way, anyone searching for your name will see the good content, rather than the negative results.

Leverage Your Professional Network To Get A Headstart

If you have a strong professional network, you can also leverage this network to quickly grow your personal brand.

For instance, guest posting on the blogs of other experts in your network can help your reach and build trust with your audience.

Being allowed to guest post on the blog of someone who’s already recognized in your field can be seen as getting endorsed by them. This gets this person’s audience to trust you and helps cement your own personal brand.

Similarly, having other established experts share your blogs posts with their followers can help boost your credibility and quickly grow your personal brand.

When it comes to leveraging your professional network to grow your brand, don’t focus solely on what the people in your network can do for you. Instead, you should also look for ways to provide value to these people. Good networking requires two way traffic.

Personal Branding FAQ

How do you personally brand yourself?

To brand yourself, start by identifying a specific niche that you want to be known for. Ideally, you should pick a niche you are already good at. This will make it easier for you to position yourself as an expert.

After picking a specific niche, the next thing is to identify a specific problem within that niche that you are going to solve for a specific target customer segment.

Next, based on your niche and the problem you are solving for a specific customer segment, come up with a one sentence statement that will define your personal brand.

Having defined the personal brand you want to cultivate, the final thing to do is to launch a high end blog to promote this personal brand and build your authority.

How long does it take to build my personal brand?

The length of time it takes to establish your personal brand will depend on a variety of factors, such as the amount of effort you put into building your brand, the level of competition in your chosen niche, where you are starting, and so on.

Establishing a personal brand could take anywhere between a few weeks to several years. However, if you commit yourself to building your brand and consistently put in the work, you can shape how the market perceives you within about four to seven months.

It’s also good to note that personal branding does not have an end. You won’t get to a point where you can say that you are now done building your personal brand and can now focus on other things. It’s a lifelong process.

Fortunately, once you have already established a strong personal brand, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to maintain the brand.

How does personal branding impact my income?

Personal branding has a huge impact on your income. First, personal branding helps you to stand out from the competition, which can help you capture a greater share of the market and therefore boost your revenue.

A strong personal brand also helps you to build trust and credibility, which are crucial in getting people to buy from you. Therefore, with a strong personal brand, you can attract more sales and earn more income.

With a strong brand, you also have access to more opportunities, which can help you boost your income. For instance, a strong personal income can lead to better paying job offers, better clients, book deals, speaking gigs, and so on.

Finally, a strong personal brand boosts your perceived value, allowing you to charge premium prices for your products and services.

Ready To Become An Authority And Impact Millions Of People?

In the past, personal branding was previously the preserve of celebrities, media stars, and huge companies.

Today, however, the growing popularity of the internet has made it possible for just about anyone to build a personal brand from scratch and make serious money.

While the process of building a personal brand can be a bit complicated, this highly detailed guide has provided you with the exact steps you can take to build a personal brand in no time and monetize this brand to grow your income.

All that remains now is for you to take action.

Are you ready to become an authority, impact millions of people, and make millions of dollars while at it?

Go out there, implement everything you have learnt in this guide and start building your personal brand!

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Martin Luenendonk

Editor at FounderJar

Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.