The New Era of 'Expert Branding' Has Just Begun

0:00Personal brands are dead, at least for anyone who sells their knowledge or expertise. [music] We're now entering the era of the expert brand, and the two are not the same thing. A personal brand is basically an influencer's tool that somehow got sold to coaches and consultants, and it's not getting them the results they thought it would. [music] And the people who fall for it keep ending up with a really polished brand that nobody finds, and the same referral-only pipeline they started with. I've spent the past 8 years building the other thing, an expert brand, and it's taken my business from $60,000 a year to over a million off one

0:36channel. And since then, I've helped thousands of experts stuck in exactly that spot build their way out of it. So, to really understand why the personal brand is probably failing you right now, [music] we really need to understand that it's just a better fit for influencers than it is for you. And to see why that is, we have to actually take a look at where this idea came from in the first place, cuz it didn't start on social media. It wasn't born on Instagram or TikTok or any place like that. It actually started as simple career advice literally decades [music] ago. So, there was this business writer named Tom Peters,

1:12and he wrote a piece for Fast Company way back in 1997. It was called The Brand Called You, and the whole thing was just about standing out at work, like in a physical corporate office. Think about 1997, right? This was 6 years before LinkedIn ever even existed, way before anyone had ever uttered the word influencer. It was just about getting yourself noticed in a building full of cubicles. But over the decades since, that idea has changed a bit, right? It got pulled out of the office, and social media just took it over from there. So, when marketing gurus tell you to build a personal brand today, they're

1:48basically telling you to focus on three things. [music] First is your presence on social media, you know, making sure you're doing all the latest trends on TikTok or Instagram. You know, whether that's using trending audio or just just being all over the place there. Second is your overall look and aesthetics. So, things like your website design, your colors, your logo, having the perfect

2:10headshots, your beard and nose strips. [music] You got to have the look just right. And third is the voice of your messaging, but it's mostly about how you sound, like how relatable you are rather than what you actually know. And all three of these things live 100% on the surface. And all this surface level strategy, well, it works incredibly well for influencers because [music] influencers are in the attention business. The way they make money is through ads and brand deals and selling cheap stuff in huge volume. And the math in the attention business is pretty brutal. I mean, the going rate for attention on the internet right now is

2:47about two bucks for every thousand views. And because that payout is so depressingly low, an influencer needs millions and millions of eyes just to make a living. So, they have to appeal to as many [music] people as possible. They have to make content about stuff that everybody cares about, like fitness, food, general lifestyle, daily routines, you know, relationships, because those are the only topics big

3:13enough to interest millions of people. But you as an expert, you're playing a completely different game. You're not in the attention business. You're in the trust business. You know, your money doesn't come from a million casual strollers throwing a few pennies your way. Your income comes from a really small number of the exact right people trusting you enough to pay you thousands of dollars to solve a pretty hard painful problem, which means your value as an expert comes from being pretty narrow and specific, not broad and general. And I want to show you exactly how bad this can get. You've heard of Alex Hormozi, I'm sure. He is probably

3:51the biggest personal brand in business right now. Over a period of about 40 months, Hormozi became an absolute machine. I mean, he put out 35,000 pieces of content in that time. Just an insane amount of volume. Now, he didn't do it alone, right? He spent roughly 4 million bucks on his media team and his studios and his gear, and he built a

4:12following of almost 8 million people. And a really big chunk of that content was lifestyle stuff, right? He was showing his daily workouts, his diet, his morning routine, his relationship with his wife. And it worked really well for getting some attention. I mean, he did rack up hundreds of millions of views, right? But the reality behind the scenes was not what you'd expect. His actual business numbers were completely flat. The money he was making per thousand views was basically zero because he'd built notion of attention,

4:43but it was filled with the wrong people. A bunch of 22-year-olds watching a workout video couldn't afford what he actually sells. So, he saw what wasn't working, and he made a really big pivot. He cut all the lifestyle content out, and from then on, he only talked about business, scaling, sales, pricing models, all that stuff. And no surprise, his views tanked. They dropped from millions down to just, you know, one or two thousand views per video. But right when his views dropped, his book sales shot up. He realized right then that he had to stop tracking views because views are an [music] influencer's number, right? Instead, he started tracking how

5:23much money he made per thousand views, so he'd know the people watching could actually afford him. And when he cut out all that relatable lifestyle stuff, what was left wasn't a personal brand anymore. It was an expert brand. And while we're here, if you're already wondering what your own expert brand could look like, grab my free expert brand launch kit. It's going to walk you through building yours step by step with

5:46absolutely everything you need to do it. So, the link is below in the description. But, let me ask you a question to really drive this home. So, let's say your personal brand is done so well that people online think of you as their, you know, funny, super relatable friend. They love your, you know, behind-the-scenes content. They know your dog's name, and they just feel

6:05really connected to you as a person. [music] But, what happens when that follower suddenly has something really serious on the line? Like, what if they're facing a big legal threat, or their business is bleeding money, or they have a serious health scare? Do they give that huge problem to their friend to help them solve it? Or, do they skip right past you and go find the specialist who's known for fixing that exact thing? Obviously, they're going [music] to go to the specialist, right? You know, being liked gets you friends, but being trusted to solve a specific problem, that gets you a business. And you don't even have to

6:43give up being liked to get there. When you help somebody with the exact problem they have, and you're generous with the wisdom you've built up, they're going to like you for that. So, people will still like you. You just earn that with your wisdom instead of, you know, oversharing your personal life. And I don't want you to misunderstand me here. It's not like you have to strip out your personality out of an expert brand. You don't have to turn into a cold, soulless, corporate version of yourself, and you actually shouldn't. You should absolutely bring your real personality to the table. All I'm saying is your personality and who

7:19you are is no longer the product. The product should be what you know, and what you fix for people. Take a leadership coach, for example. Now, the personal brand version of that coach is going to spend weeks getting new headshots and stressing over a color palette, and writing a generic tagline about, you know, unlocking potential. It's always about unlocking potential. And they post a generic mindset quote on Monday, then [music] a quote from their beach vacation on Wednesday talking about, you know, the freedom of entrepreneurship, and maybe a quick surface level tip on Friday. [music] And that coach is going to end up with a following of dabblers. You know, people

8:00they they'll tap like for the good vibes, but they're never going to pay them to fix a real problem on their team. Now, contrast that with the expert brand version of that exact same coach. This coach doesn't post vacation photos. Instead, they just put out one 10-minute video on a really specific issue, like how do I deal with a team member who constantly misses deadlines? And in that video, the coach explains exactly how they handle that situation. They walk through a real client case. They explain what's going on in the head of the employee who keeps missing deadlines, and they lay out the exact conversation they told their client to have. That one

8:43video is going to bring in some pretty desperate business owners who are ready to hire them right then and there. But this actually brings up an even bigger problem with the personal brand, and that is the visibility problem. A personal brand's basically just a first impression. It only controls what people think of you once they're already looking at you. It does absolutely nothing to get them to look at you in the first place. I remember a couple years ago, I had to hire a copywriter for some sales pages I was making, and I ended up going with someone who had a really flawless looking personal brand. Her

9:15photos were great. Uh there's lots of personality on the whole website. The copy was really good and witty, and her whole look just screamed premium [music] and a little edgy, too, which I personally resonated with. And she charged a lot, and she completely delivered on that price. But here's the thing. [music] The only reason I was looking at her beautiful website at all was just because my business coach gave me her name. And even with all that great branding and those premium prices, from what I could tell, she was barely getting any bites for new work. And it's because she was living entirely off of word of mouth. Her branding was only

9:53working on people who had already been given her name. And without that referral, she was practically invisible. An expert brand skip this trap completely because they come with their own built-in way of getting found. They work with how people actually look for stuff. You know, when someone has a painful, specific problem, they don't scroll social media hoping that the answer somehow finds them. That'd be crazy inefficient, right? Just like you or me, they go and they type their problem into a search bar somewhere. And when you build your content around solving that one specific problem, you have a really good shot at coming up as the answer. Okay, so here's a test. I

10:34want you to take a look at the last five pieces of content you put out in the world and ask yourself honestly whether somebody who has the problem you solve would ever type this into a search bar. If the answer's no, then your buyers literally cannot find your content. You're putting out stuff that is invisible to the exact people when they've got their credit cards out. And that leads me right into the next big flaw of the personal brand. When buyers finally find you, a personal brand really only shows them the cheap part of what you do. While the buyers, [music]

11:07they only pay for the expensive part. The cheap part is all that relatable stuff, right? The family photos, the origin stories, the generic inspiration. And I I call it cheap because it just doesn't take any real expertise to share that. I mean, I personally never did much of the relatable family content. I just I kept my personal life mostly to the side. And the couple times that I did try it early on, it just felt a little fake. Like I was a putting my life on display just [music] to get clients to like me. But the blunt truth is, uh most people don't care about your

11:42life. They only care if you can help them. So the expensive part, the thing that buyers actually pay real money for, is how you think, right? They're paying for your judgment. They want to watch you work your way through the messy parts of their problem. And a surface-level personal brand hides all of your judgment away behind a wall of, you know, polish and aesthetics. And if we look at the world today, like all that surface stuff has gotten even

12:09cheaper because of AI. Think about it. You can generate really professional-looking realistic AI headshots in literally 5 minutes now. You can use AI to instantly make a really gorgeous website that you would have had to pay, you know, over 10 grand for just a year ago. So what I'm saying is the polish of a personal brand is now pretty much free, which means anyone can look premium now. But what AI can't generate is the actual wisdom that you've earned by doing what you do in the field. It can't fake the years that you spent using your judgment on messy real-world problems. And because a personal brand runs on that cheap

12:50surface, it usually only lets you sell the cheap stuff, like a $15 template or a $47 mini course, stuff that people just kind of buy on a feeling. The expensive stuff only sells when people can see your judgment, and surface-level content just can't show [music] that. Dean is a realtor, and he's one of my students in my YouTube the Clients Academy. Now, Dean didn't build a personal brand around the realtor lifestyle. He built an expert brand entirely focused on all the ins and outs of buying property in Whistler, British Columbia. He's only got about 1,000 subscribers, and his videos usually get just 100 to 200 views. But, those low

13:30numbers are really misleading because from those low view videos, Dean pulls in one to two new clients every single week. And they show up already sold on hiring him. In fact, this year one of those low view videos got Dean a $10 million client. Because nobody trusts a $10 million deal to a realtor just cuz they have some nice relatable photos of their dog on Instagram. Dean's expert brand runs a lot deeper than that. So, his revenue per thousand views metric, it's off the charts. So, if you sell what you know, I need you to really hear this. Small numbers are not a sign of failure here. The narrower and more

14:07specific the problem you solve, the smaller your audience is naturally going to be. But, that small audience is almost all going to be real buyers who are actually looking to spend real money with you. But, this brings up a big practical problem now. So, if the entire goal of an expert brand is to let buyers see how you think,

14:29where do you actually put that content? Because it can't survive where personal brands live. And this is the final reason that the old model fails, right? An expert brand can only get built somewhere that people can actually see you go deeper, which means it has to live on a platform that's built for minutes or even hours, not for seconds. And Google did some really interesting research on this. They found that it takes on average about 7 hours of content before someone trusts you enough to make [music] a big purchase. So, think of that as 7 hours of getting comfortable with you. Now, [music]

15:04do the math on that. If all you post is 30-second clips, it's going to take a viewer over 800 posts to hit 7 hours of watch time. And nobody's watching 800 short-form videos from a single person. The math just doesn't work for building real trust like that. But, if you're making 10-minute videos where you're explaining how you do things, you can actually get there a lot faster. And this is exactly why I say that YouTube is the best platform there is for building an expert brand. It's the only big platform out there that gives you both things you need. First, it's built for long videos. So, you've

15:41got the leeway you need to properly show your judgment in action. And second, it's still a search engine. It's a pretty big one, actually. So, people go there specifically to type in the problem they want to have solved. It's the one place on the internet where getting found by new buyers and building trust with them happens at the same time. And I watched this play out perfectly with this music teacher named Charles Cornell. Uh he originally blew up on short-form video. He had the viral numbers that everyone's told they need to have a real business, right? Millions of views, hundreds of thousands of followers, um just a massive [music]

16:18personal brand. But, his actual business, you know, getting students to sign up for his paid teaching was sitting at basically zero because a few seconds of attention never turned into enough trust to buy his online piano course. So, he rebuilt his whole damn strategy. He walked away from short-form, and he started taking one song apart at the piano for 15 minutes at a time. And that's what finally built his business up because a video like that is really a free lesson. People sit down to watch it. They actually learn something from him, and now they think of him as someone they could actually

16:55pay to learn from. [music] He just gave people enough room and space to see that he could teach. Now, if you're ready to stop polishing a personal brand and start building an expert one, that's exactly what my free expert brand launch gets for. So, click right here or down in the description, and by the time you've worked through it, you've launched yours with your first 15 videos already planned. So, click right here to get that and I'm

17:19going to send it to you right now.