Why Personal Branding Should Come AFTER You Build a Real Business | Marian Esanu

Stop wasting time building a personal brand on a foundation of sand. It's time to engineer a digital persona that converts views into actual equity. Today, we're joined by the personal branding ninja, Marion Assanu, to deconstruct how to treat your reputation as a sellable asset instead of just a content feed. Get ready to hack your growth and amplify your authority. Here on right about now with Ryan Alford. What people don't realize is there are pros and cons of building a personal brand if you're not doing it at the right time. A personal brand should be built second after you've built a business because it's nothing wrong with being a content creator. But you should not necessarily be labeled as an expert if you've never built something we're talking about. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hey guys, what's up? We're talking branding today. Branding of a personal nature. We're talking to Marion Assanu. What's up, brother? What's going on, man? Thanks for having me. Hey, man. Good to have you. Personal branding ninja. You hit my feed. I gotta talk to this ninja. I gotta be honest. I've been doing personal brain for five years, marketing for 22. When each time the ninja kind of goes ninja, anything comes across. Let me see what we're dealing with here. Skeptical. Another guy. Now watch your content. Ticked out your page. Okay. Marion knows what he's talking about. He's not full of crap. He's not full of shit. The personal branding term. Some people just roll their eyes at. I'm usually really good with words. I'm a good writer. What else can we call this? Maybe just to give it some fresh legs. We can call it digital persona, digital brand, digitalization of a person, whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day, it's really what people are talking about you when you're not in the room. It's the simplest way to think about it. And yes, it's true in person, but it's also through online. If you are not there, does your content speak for itself in a way that doesn't feel weird or it doesn't feel fake? A lot of people are fake it until something doesn't even happen sometimes. Of course, there are problems, but they're also pros and cons to it. Because a lot of people don't even think about it this way of my business slash entrepreneurial journey. I've also bought and sold a few brick and mortar companies. What people don't realize is, yes, it's cool. It sounds great. Build your personal brand, hype it up, make it nice. But if your soul business is just your personal brand, it's dangerous. You're in a dangerous spot. One, you'll never be able to exit it. Two got forbidden. Something happens. You're not able to create content for a while. How about a brand as big as Tony Robbins, Brendan Bouchard, right? These huge names. If they are not on the stage, the people there are attending the events. Now, I'm not saying that they don't have a business behind that personal brand, but you get the point. The main topic of it, there are pros and cons of building a personal brand if you're not doing it at the right time. A personal brand should be built second after you've built a business because it's nothing wrong with being a content creator. You can necessarily be labeled as an expert if you've never built something worth talking about. You can be an enthusiast and it's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with putting up a YouTube channel and start doing tutorials about how to do X, Y and Z. But don't necessarily try to position yourself as an expert and try to build your brand around some topics that you're not an expert in. Being an enthusiast, I've heard this interview from Gary Vee when a guy was actually trying to ask that hidden question till how can he be positioned as an expert when he's not an expert. And that's pretty much the simplest way to look at it. Don't try to be an expert if you're not. You can become an expert during that time, but you can be an enthusiast doing this time that you're building the content hub. If it's Instagram Reels short form video, but in my opinion, the actual personal brand should be separated from the actual business for a couple of different reasons. One, let's assume you plan to exit the actual business. Nobody's going to want to buy a personal brand because it's your name attached to it. Nobody's going to want to buy a name. And my favorite case study is actually my wife. My wife runs a beauty salon getting Boston. When COVID hit, the salons were one of the first businesses that were shot down because they were deemed not essential. I said to her, you've built this successful six figure business from scratch. You have an expertise. You have a skill set. Let's look at what other people are doing. We looked online. We saw a lot of different people teaching what she was already doing at that point. She has this eyelash extension salon. We started doing research. We looked on Google. We saw what companies are running ads against what type of sales pages they had, what type of products they were selling. We saw a variety of in-person certification, online certifications. Then we looked on you to me. Then we did the research for organic content on YouTube. And then we understood, okay, people are selling online courses about how to do eyelash extensions. This is your thing. Even though she had experiences, she had the skillset built. The first thing that came to mind, why would someone buy from me? Well, the reason that someone buy from me, first things first is that I said to her, you're not selling advice or you're not creating content for yourself now. You're creating content for yourself four years ago when you were trying to learn these things. You spent almost 20k in just attending workshops, getting yourself certified, going for your license at school and stuff like that. You learned all the ins and outs and then what was the biggest problem? It was not a lot of business advice around how to build this type of brick and mortar shop. I said to her, you can even start by just sharing the things that you've learned in the past and I'll even interview you. And then we started posting videos and then in just less than a year, her YouTube channel went to 23,000 subs. The podcast blew up, her Instagram blew up because why? She already built a successful business prior to her building a personal brand. Yes, that imposter syndrome would have probably been forever if she would have not built that prior business and start talking and giving advice because when you give advice about something that you don't feel confident and authentic talking about it, it's going to feel weird. It's going to feel unauthentic, it's going to feel fake and guess what? People will feel it. If you don't believe in what you're selling, if you don't believe in the things that you talk about, why would someone else with? And that's the main reason why a lot of people lack context of imposter syndrome versus should I talk about this, should I not how to be positioned as the expert? Now, I'm not saying that she could have even during school time or even when she was trying to get certified, she could have still recorded videos showing this is what I attend, this how much I paid for these things. But without trying to position herself as, oh, look at me, I'm doing this, this and that, where actually you're just paying for advice at the same time. She could have been an enthusiast at that point, she just, she was running her previous company and going to school, so it can even have time to work with you. But I think it's so interesting, the point you're making, there's a lot of misinformation or bad assumptions about why you should or shouldn't build your personal brand. And it's reputation, we all have a reputation. We all have things that we're good at or that we're specialized in. And social media forwards this opportunity to amplify all of that reputation. And with that comes benefits. We all have clicks or things or people that are naturally drawn to us. In life, we move around, if you and I went to a party, we may be cut from the same call, who knows? We're going to track a certain group of people. If you don't know anyone, you're going to talk to people because we all have auras and things that go on. What social media does is it just turn that amp up on your guitar that you're playing. It turns that noise up that it just amplifies who you are to attract more of those people. And that brings the benefits of connection that you never know where it's going to lead. More business opportunities, more friends, more just things. I tell people, I have a personal brand, but I don't want to be famous. I have no desire to be super star famous, but the more known I am, the more free to my half. I say that instead of money, but they all run together for me, freedom's important. But I get freedom when I have more money. The more known I am, the more business we do. The more money you make, I try to attribute it to the benefit to not make it about lambos and flaunting money. I don't give a shit about that. It's just about amplifying reputation to attract more opportunity. In your case, and in a lot of different cases, well, you also look at the time that you invest. Now you're investing time into sitting here and doing this podcast where you could have probably closed some deals or some other stuff. So you value time and understand the whole aspect of right. I'm going to put this time invested into this personal brand, even though I might not get a positive ROI immediately because it's long term. And a lot of people don't even understand this. The amount of money that you get paid for consulting or coaching work or the amount of money of a deal that you can close on the phone right at this time in one hour can be 10, 20, 30 times more. And the time that you spend here just doing a podcast, but you play the long game. A lot of people forget, you have a lot of people forget that. The name change of personal branding, you can't get rid of the word brand because I tell people sales overnight brand over time. And brand is built. It's just brand is reputation. Your reputation is built over time. No one judges you from one day or one week. No one judges a brand for one day or one week. This is a really bad week, but it's over time and it's built over time. And the dividends of our relationship here doing this podcast and the content we both can create from it. I know pay bigger dividends than one deal or one other conversation that I could have. And people have a hard time because we're so driven. The irony of today is that we have these radar opportunities than ever to build brand when you're not a superstar or you're not really TV ads. But then the mindset of I got to have it now. I got to have it now. I got to have it now. A weird relationship with those things. We have more opportunity than ever to build long term brand, but we all got to have it now. But you play the long game and you win. What's kind of like in your go to playbook for building your personal brand? The most important thing that people do is they try to start a personal brand from scratch without researching. My thing is always don't try to reinvent the wheel. I guarantee everything is online already. You'll find information about the topics that you want to talk about on every platform. So at first, the most important thing in my opinion should be let's look at five direct competitors and five indirect competitors. Five direct competitors could like I'll take myself as an example when I started doing my research for myself. Look at five direct competitors, but direct competitors could also be people that are way bigger that you're trying to compare yourself with. If I think about personal branding space and think about Gary V. Lewis House, Brendan Bouchard, Grand Cardone, even though he's known as the sales and the real estate guy, he talks about this a lot. And a lot of other people, Frank Kern, even though he's more a direct response, but these five have such unique approach, even though they all cover marketing and personal branding to an extent, they have a unique approach to it. So that's the first thing they will have to understand. They have a unique approach, even though they all covered. If we look at the content that they create today, they didn't start creating it five, 10, 20 years ago when they started their brands. So that's what a lot of people don't realize is they try to mimic what these big brands are doing. But then when you actually look at the audience size that they have, these people can actually post a blank or a full blown black picture and they'll get likes and comments on it. But when you're just starting out, you don't have that luxury. And even to that extent, you look at people, let's say you look at Gary V. And you see that he has an audience of 10 million people and then you try to do some research on the rules that he posting and then you see rules that have 100 to 300,000 views. You think, oh, that's a crazy successful real. If you ask one of his team members, they'll say, that's a really poor performing because the audience is 10 million and the reals only have 100,000 views. In their scenario, that really is a poor performing piece of content. That's number one. Number two is you have to also pick five indirect competitors and five competitors that are really closer in size of the audience that you have. If I'm just starting out now, I just started this personal brand in Ninja account, right? Like I have like 200 followers now. So I look at accounts that are 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, much closer in audience size and see what content it's actually performing for them. When I say performing is the amount of views have to have at least two to three times the size of the audience. So if the guy has a thousand followers, I look at reals that are 3,000 plus views. And then you also look at the amount of comments because we all know engagement, especially likes and views can also be bought and things like that. So you have to be paying attention to those things as well. But content research is one of the most important thing. The platform that I like to do, the research is also TikTok. Even though we're talking about Instagram at first, the reason that I like TikTok is you can actually add the filter. So you type in, let's say in my case, personal branding hashtag. So I look at the filter, personal branding hashtag, I type that hashtag and then I select the filter. I want to see content using this hashtag that has been the most light within the last three to six months. So what that's going to show me is the content that actually people like, not what the creator like. And then I start to go into that rabbit hole and understand what people actually liked and what they engage with and why. And then what's also important about TikTok, they added this SEO feature and it can see the exact key phrases that people search for using that hashtag. So now you're going to see other key phrases that people search for long tail. Yeah, exactly. Like you see the exact things that people search for, not just the hashtags. And then you take that hashtag and then now you go to Instagram and you search for the hashtag and then you look at the most recent and the most engaged on the homepage using that hashtag. And you can even follow hashtags on Instagram. And then you start going inside of these accounts and you see what kind of questions people ask in the comments. Yes, this is a tedious process because you have to understand what people are actually engaging with, not what the creator because sometimes the content that I like to create is different than what my audience wants to see. But even to that extent, you should find the sweet spot in between because if something doesn't feel authentic, you should not try to force it because people will realize that. So you'll see a lot of different trends in this process. You'll see what people pointing on the screen to adding about two different texts. Some of them are cool. Some of them are pretty good for the brand that you're trying to create. Let's tell everybody, Maureen, where they can keep up with you. The easiest way is whatever the platform that people are consuming this episode, they can just type in momentum, podcast and my show will pop up or they can just type in my name. Marian, Sano, M-A-R-I-A-N-E-S-A-N-U. And then also my show will pop up also other topics and there are things that I went in depth about what I just shared on this episode. That's great. The personal branding ninja. And if they want to connect with me personally, yeah, on Instagram. Yes, easy to find. You were to find me and met Ryan Alfred on all the platforms. We'll see you over there. We'll see you next time.