The Influential Personal Brand Podcast

When you create YouTube content, you are only one viral video away from changing your whole life. Today we speak with best-selling author and video expert Sean Cannell about how you can grow your brand on YouTube. We open our conversation by exploring the YouTube landscape and how, unlike other platforms, it acts as a content library and not as a feed. Sean shares why now is the best time to start a YouTube channel before explaining how you can overcome your early challenges like slow growth and having little viewer feedback. Sean then opens up his playbook, diving into the best practices that lead to YouTube success. You’ll hear practical advice on creating punchier videos and insights into how best to approach your content. We also discuss the top ways to get high YouTube rankings, why you should focus on quality over quantity, and why you should never upload a video that your subscribers didn’t ask for. YouTube has become a dominant way for people to build their brands. Tune in for an inside scoop on winning at YouTube from a creator whose videos have earned over 100 million views. 

“I don’t want to limit my opportunity by serving a small audience.” This is a common sentiment felt by many personal brands. But as our interview with Dance Studio Owners Association CEO Clint Salter proves, you increase your opportunity by serving a smaller community in a deeper way. Today we share our top highlights from our conversation with Clint and pinpoint the lessons that will help you grow your brand. We reflect how personal brands have a different path of success than traditional brands that rely on mass appeal. We then dive into why niching down is a powerful method of making your fortune. After sharing tips on carving out your niche, we discuss the value of treating new projects as experiments. For our final takeaway, we unpack how knowing your audience puts you in the best position to serve them. Tune in for more insights into how you can find success by serving your community.

Too many personal brands fail to find success because they’re inconsistent with their message and the audience they target. Clint Salter, CEO of the Dance Studio Owners Association, is the perfect model of how you can build a huge revenue-generating company and own your niche — all by committing to your message and audience. We open our conversation with Clint by exploring his business and career highlights. As he unpacks his journey, Clint highlights the importance of experimentation and being willing to devote yourself to a project. After sharing specifics on his services, pricing, and subscription model, Clint talks us through what he did to build his audience. Apart from his process, Clint talks about how he creates value for his audience by understanding their challenges and why you should first master one distribution platform before moving onto another one. Near the end of the episode, Clint emphasizes the role of commitment, hyper-focus, and clarity in establishing yourself in your niche. Tune in for more of Clint’s top insights into getting rich in your niche. 

In today’s episode, we highlight our top takeaways from our previous conversation with, “the world’s most practical small business marketing speaker and expert” — John Jantsch, AKA The Duct-Tape Marketer. We open by exploring John’s thoughts on researching and testing your ideas long before they appear in your book. After talking about how you can use your audience to test your content, we discuss John’s strategy of finding your audience by partnering with brands that serve your community. Reflecting a theme that has consistently appeared in many of our recent episodes, we then focus on the importance of building your email list and how you can do this through your content. Considering that strong SEO is eternally relevant to your online presence, we unpack John’s insights into structured data and SEO best practices. We wrap up the episode by looking into how data can give you a competitive edge and why having a process to gather and interpret data is necessary to grow your brand. Tune in for more of our key moments from our incredible discussion with John Jantsch. 

The most elegant marketing plan will always be restricted by real-world limitations. But when it comes to getting results, it doesn’t have to look pretty. It just has to work. Today we speak with Duct Tape Marketing Founder and world-famous practical marketer John Jantsch about what you can do to get your product in the hands of customers. Early in our conversation, John shares his ever-relevant marketing approach before exploring how he created the Duct Tape Marketing brand. We then ask him for tactical advice on landing early customers. His answers highlight the value of involving potential customers in your product building process and starting your marketing as soon as possible. With so many platforms available, John discusses the best ways to find an audience. After emphasizing the importance of your email list, John unpacks everything that small businesses need to know about SEO. We wrap up by touching on the history of duct tape. Throughout our discussion, John shows how so-called complex marketing concepts are easy to understand and directly lead to a higher business profile. Tune in for more insights on getting your product found.

Dr. Josh Axe perfectly embodies our strategic approach to building a personal brand. For Josh, this approach has been incredibly lucrative — he’s converted his personal brand into a 9-figure business. Today we reflect on our previous episode with Josh, highlighting our top takeaways from the conversation. For our first takeaway, we discuss the importance of forming your brand around one core message that you’re passionate about. While chatting about how Josh’s business evolved from a newsletter, we talk about why you should start creating your brand as soon as you can. After sharing the power of consistently adding value and having a desire to serve, we touch on why reaching only one audience member can still significantly impact your success. Near the end of the episode, we dive into why you should build a strong website and why having a data dashboard allows you to better market your products. A master of following the formula, tune in to hear more takeaways from our fascinating and informative conversation with Dr. Josh Axe. 

There is no guarded ninja hack to propel your brand forward. Instead, success is achieved by working hard and following tried and tested marketing formulas. Just ask natural health expert Dr. Josh Axe — he followed these formulas to build his nine-figure personal brand, along with the number one natural health website in the world. Today we speak with Josh about creating businesses and the power of following the formula. Early in our conversation, Josh talks about his motivations behind forming his natural health company. We reflect on the value of aligning your passion and what you’re good at with your business service before touching on how you can structure your company based on what your competitors offer. We discuss how you can solve your problems by reaching into your network and then explore some of Josh’s earliest business mistakes. A key theme in this episode, Josh shares details about how being coachable and focusing on winning formulas has led to his success. Near the end of the episode, we dive into why both a steady and accurate data stream and earning trust is crucial to scaling your brand. An inspiring story that proves how dedication and education lead to success, tune in to hear more about building your brand and business from Dr. Josh Axe.

Being vulnerable and talking to the individual and not the crowd is a powerful way to write books that relate to your readers. This key insight comes from today’s conversation with New York Times best-selling author and immensely popular Christian voice Lysa TerKeurst. After chatting about how Lysa first met hosts Rory and AJ Vaden, she opens up about her journey of discovering her husband’s infidelity and ultimately forgiving him. This remarkable story forms the basis of her latest book, Forgiving What You Can't Forget. Following this, we discuss the value of being vulnerable and how it can help you get your message across to readers. While exploring the differences between privacy and secrecy, Lysa talks about not letting crisis define you. She then shares her top tips on building a message that can inspire hope without alienating readers. Reflecting on Lysa’s writing process, we touch on the huge place that forgiveness and confession have in scripture and how Lysa aims to live her life in a state of “pre-forgiveness.” Lysa wraps up our discussion by giving listeners some final advice on how you should position your book for readers before highlighting the need to provide solutions to your reader’s problems. Tune in for more wisdom from Lysa TerKeurst, an author whose sound strategies have led to her selling more than six million copies of her books.  

Personal brands are a lot like golfers — they lie about their score. Today we recap the key takeaways from our conversation with successful entrepreneur and business fixer Mike Michalowicz, who highlights that your high score, whether it’s your revenue or follower count, is nowhere near as important as your profit. As we open this episode, host Rory Vaden reflects on the fallacy of top-line thinking, emphasizing Mike’s point that your profit margin indicates how healthy your business is. On the topic of building healthy businesses, we explore the difference between income and equity value before diving into why companies with high equity aren’t dependent on their founders. Our final takeaway, we focus on the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs face and how you can develop systems to both identify and then solve your business problems. A profound episode for anyone interested in scaling their business, tune in for more of our top insights from our discussion with Mike Michalowicz. 

Many seemingly successful influencers brag about their huge follower numbers and the high fees they charge for speaking events. What they don’t tell you about is how little of this translates to profit. Today we speak with best-selling author, entrepreneur, and business fixer, Mike Michalowicz, about putting your profits first and creating a sustainable business. We open our conversation with Mike by exploring his writing process and what he does to write books that are relevant one hundred years from now. Linking to how you can develop your brand as a thought leader, Mike talks about why your book needs to provide extraordinary value. Anything less might damage your credibility. We then discuss tips on how you can protect the financial health of your business by focusing on generating profit. Mike explains why reducing a company’s dependency on its owners leads to long-term viability. We touch on how you can structure your business to resell pieces of it, how it’s become easier to measure brand value and the importance of transitioning your personal brand persona into your company’s icon. Tune in for more insights into what you can do to increase your profitability and develop business sustainability.