If I only had 90 days to build a personal brand, I’d do this

0:00Building a personal brand might be the single greatest cheat code in business today. Everywhere you look, the business owners that are leaning heaviest into content are absolutely exploding. But the problem is most categories are now becoming extremely competitive. So if you're not approaching your personal brand with the right framing and strategy, you don't stand a chance at breaking out in this current era. Now, the good news is there is a playbook for building personal brands that seems to

0:25be working in literally every category. This is the blueprint that all the top personal brands are running and it's what I've personally been using to grow extremely fast on my own channels. So, in this video, I'm going to walk through that entire playbook and break down exactly how to build a winning personal brand in this era. This will be a four-step tactical blueprint that you can run over the next 90 days that will completely change how you think about content and personal branding. By the way, if you don't know me, my name is

0:51Callaway. I have 2 million followers. I've done billions of views. and I've personally worked with hundreds of business owners one-on-one to scale their personal brands over the past few years. All right, before we dive in, I just have to caveat based on the title. Obviously, building a personal brand is not something that can be done or finished in just 90 days. That would be silly and kind of defeat the point. But the reason I'm making this video is that if you run the exact workflow I walk through over the next 90 days, it will set you up for extremely fast growth that will keep compounding as you scale

1:21your personal brand. Now, the first three steps in the workflow are all about personal brand positioning and strategy. And I don't care what anyone says. This really is the sauce layer. For the first few days in this 90-day window, I would focus exclusively on solving this. Now, your personal brand positioning and strategy can be answered

1:38through the following three questions. The first one is the objective. What is my core objective with this personal brand? And which of the personal brand games am I trying to play? There are two main tracks or games when it comes to personal brand objectives. Number one is mass awareness and reach and number two is targeted awareness and efficient conversion. Now obviously everyone will hear that and be like I want both. But to frame it differently, think of it this way. Do you want to be mainstream culturally famous or do you want to be category famous? And there are pros and cons of each game. Mass awareness and

2:11reach would be people like Greg Lav, Horoszi or Cody Sanchez. These people are essentially trying to amass insane reach horizontally across culture. And there are obviously bigger cultural plays like Mr. Beast or Logan Paul, but relatively speaking in the business world, these guys are going for mass adoption and awareness. Now, in this game, you'll make way more money in total, but you will also experience the negative trade-offs that come with more mainstream fame. In the other game, more targeted awareness and efficient conversion. You're playing the personal brand game completely different. You're still trying to become cult famous, but only in your category and no broader than that. Examples of people that are

2:48doing this well would be like Peter McKinnon in the camera space, Jeremy Haynes upcoming in the business space, [music] or Maria Went in the social media growth space. I would also put my channels Callaway Marketing in the bucket of this game. This is the game I'm trying to play. Now, it is much faster to go from scratch and win here, and you'll probably make more money per follower, but you'll have a smaller footprint and you don't get the benefits that come with mainstream fame. Now, like anything, both of the games can work extremely well, and you can grow huge businesses in both, but they do require very different content

3:20strategies, and we'll circle back to the content strategy piece a bit later in this video. Now, the last thing worth calling out, it's very easy to start narrow with the category fandom and expand into mainstream. That's what you typically see with a lot of these big guys, but it's very difficult to start mainstream and go back down into category fandom. That's why I call this out. So for you, as I describe the two games, you probably already have in your head which one you'd like to play. Just keep that in mind as we go through the rest of this framework. Now, positioning question number two is who is my target

3:49audience? It is very critical to align on this. Who is the ideal viewer that I want to attract? And this will most likely map back to the game you just chose in question one. For example, someone like Greg Lav, and I haven't talked [music] to him, but I would imagine his secondary objective is to use his personal brand to grow sales of Bloom. His primary objective, as he stated, is to help educate the next generation of entrepreneurs. And knowing this is very helpful because it means he can frame his content both visually andformationally to attract exactly that type of ideal viewer. For me, as another example, I make videos specifically for

4:23business owners trying to help them scale their business with better content. And if that's you and you're watching this, then my targeting is working. But the real reason this is so important is that based on my clarity around this, I can build an avatar filter. Essentially, every time I make content, I can ask myself the question, will this provide value for my desired ideal viewer? If the answer is yes, I'll consider making the video. But if not, it's an immediate no. Now, spending a little time to identify your ideal viewer may seem like a silly exercise because you would assume if you just make the content, well, the algorithm

4:55should find who'd be interested in it. So, why do this? But the real value in doing this exercise is helping you to filter which content ideas you actually make. See, most people that don't thoroughly define their target viewer end up going broader and broader and broader with their content. I call this viewer drift. [music] When we don't have clear guard rails on exactly who we're trying to attract, we end up biasing our content towards vanity metrics. In this case, more views. And this ends up resulting over time in generic messaging that doesn't land our ideal buyer. So slowly, if you don't do this, you have less and less conversion potency in your

5:28audience as it grows. Now, to create this avatar filtering, it's actually very simple. I have people create their target authority statement, and it's basically filling in I help X person with Y thing in Zway. So for Greg Lab, it might be something like, I help young male entrepreneurs improve in business by passing down proven principles I learned. For me, it's I help business owners scale their businesses faster with social media or YouTube. Again, this is a very simple and quick

5:55exercise, but it's very important to do. Now, question three in the positioning playbook is really where the majority of the work comes into play. The first two could take like 5 minutes, but this one is much more substantive. This is what I call your personal brand pillars. For most people trying to scale a personal

6:09brand, they have two big concerns. Number one is how am I actually going to make this content tactically? [music] And number two, how am I going to cut through and stand out in my niche? Now, we'll address the making the content part in a minute, but this is a very helpful framework for learning how to stand out in your niche. Personal brand pillars. There are four pillars that make up the foundation of every personal brand. Every single person that you look up to that has a personal brand you want to emulate has a definitive point of view on each of these pillars. And I'm telling you, it is extremely helpful to

6:39map these out before you start making content so they can act as guard rails for you. And you're probably starting to sense a theme here. Winning in personal branding is not about adding stuff. It's about subtracting. When you're starting out making content or trying to build a personal brand, you can talk about anything to anyone in any way on any platform. Literally, the whole world is your ocean. Simply put, the art of personal branding is just putting guard rails around you to help define what you talk about, to whom, in what way, on what platforms. Now, the counterintuitive thing is the tighter and more discipline these guardrails

7:13are, the easier it is for other humans to opt in or out of your brand world and to help algorithms know exactly who to surface your stuff in front of. So, these are the four personal brand pillars that you really want to define. The first one is called niche targeting. And this really answers the question, how broad or narrow do you limit your focus within your category? For example, if you were to do this with my personal brand, and you were going to map this out on a bullseye, which is the easiest shape for this, the very center bullseye in the middle would be social media

7:41growth for business owners. One ring out from there would be social media growth for anyone. One ring out from there would be content growth for anyone on any platform. One ring out from there would be marketing of any kind on any platform. And then the final ring out from there would be business. Now, when you think about niche targeting, the narrower you go, the more inside close to the bullseye you are, the easier and faster it is to own a lane because you're narrowing the surface area of your focus. Now, this will inevitably shrink the total audience population or TAM, but that's actually okay. Most TAMs

8:14are much bigger than you think, and you actually don't need that many people to build a huge business. The goal once you map this bullseye is that as your authority and proof grows, you slowly expand and start targeting broader and broader slices. And again, running this exercise is very helpful because of filtering. The easiest way to scale a personal brand rapidly is to have very clear content, audience, offer proof alignment. And let's continue taking my personal brand as the example. I am intentionally serving this middle of the bullseye, narrowing my focus to only

8:44give value to these types of people. Now, by playing at this narrow specific level, I can do the following. Number one, I can pick topics that are extremely valuable to my avatar every single time. Number two, the examples and pain points that I use map back to scenarios that those people have 100% of the time. Number three, the words and literal framing that I have match things that they think about in their head. And number four, most importantly, I have the proof to match my claims for those people. So, they see themselves in the examples of my proof. Now, if I started making content at even the third highest

9:18level, the content on any platform in any bucket, I wouldn't have the proof or the authority because I haven't grown on Twitter or LinkedIn or any of these other platforms. I also wouldn't be able to serve the topic precision for business owners growing on social media. Every other video or every third video would be about something they don't care about. Now, for this exact example, if you were to place other personal brands on these rings in this bullseye, it would look something like this. In the middle, it would be me serving business owners on social media. One ring out from that, anyone on social media might

9:48be someone like Jesse Jean or Brock Johnson, people like this. One ring out from there, content growth on any platform might be someone like Dan Co or maybe Gary Vee. One ring out from there, marketing on any platform would be someone like Neil Patel or maybe Gary Vee in this place as well. And then one ring out from there would be business, which is best owned by Horoszi. Now, as you can see, if you're a business owner, focused on growing your personal brand on social media, you can tell that focusing on my content will give you more value more often because that's all I talk about. The broader you go out,

10:17you might get something from those people, but also a lot of their content won't serve you because they're covering lots of topics that don't matter. Typically, as a viewer, the more narrow you go in a particular niche, the faster you get your problem solved. And so, for you, as someone who's trying to build out their personal brand, it's no shade to anyone else. It's just super helpful for you to niche down using this niche builder because you want to serve 100% coverage on the exact target buyer that you're going for. Again, this exercise is very helpful for you to filter your topic selection, your messaging, the

10:49painoint targeting and signaling overall on the internet. Now, the second personal brand pillar that's very important to map is your contrarian beliefs. And if you've been watching my content for a while, you'll know I've been hammering this idea of contrarian beliefs for several years now. And the reason is that the easiest way to cut through a crowded category is to say things that are uncommon or different from what the conventional wisdom typically is. If your opinions are the same as everyone else, you are just a derivative that is smaller than the main person. You'll always lose. This is why you need novel frames, novel insights, new mechanisms, or new ways of doing

11:23things that the market typically hasn't seen. Now, I will say it is a bit difficult to one-time brain dump all of the contrarian takes you've ever had in a single session. But that's why you want to build out this contrarian take vault. And this is simply just a document or a note that captures any perspective you have that's contrarian when it comes up in your mind. And to

11:42make this, it's actually very easy. Whenever you're watching a piece of content from someone else in your space and you find yourself violently disagreeing with whatever they say, you're like, "Ah, this person doesn't know what they're saying at all." That's when you want to write down whatever your alternative belief is. That is a contrarian take. And the beauty of doing this is that the more you observe your thoughts and document your contrarian takes, the more you'll start thinking in contrarian ways. When I study the top personal brands, I find that most people have a couple macro contrarian themes and then several little contrarian takes

12:12underneath that support those themes. So, for example, for me, my biggest contrarian frame going back to a year ago is that I believe the best way to grow faster on social media is mostly through data. And that there's a way that using more data while still being creative is the Goldilock scenario for optimal growth. Now, when I came up with that a year ago, that frame was extremely contrarian. There weren't that

12:34many people that were talking about it. Obviously now many people have copied it and it's sanitized the potency of the message. But that's a good example of my contrarian frame that I became known for with all these other little frames that roll up to it. Most personal brands have three to five of these macro contrarian frames and those become the core messaging angles that they hit over and over. Now like I said, you don't need to come up with all of these right now, but you want to start thinking what are the core themes for what I believe that is different when the whole industry is

13:01zigging Isag. The reason these contrarian frames work so well is because viewers and buyers are constantly looking for new ways to solve old problems they still have. And I can't stress this enough. If you have zero contrarian frames or alternative perspectives, you will not cut through in your niche. All right. Now, the third personal brand pillar is association and common objects. And this is the one that you don't need to have finalized in the first couple days, but it's very helpful to understand that this matters and to get yourself thinking about it. As I've said in previous videos, personal

13:29branding is just association at scale. It's just you associated with certain messages, certain people, certain environments, certain principles said consistently such that it's reflexive in someone's mind. Now, a helpful exercise for you to build out your personal brand association frame is to think through what words or themes do I want to be associated with in people's heads. For example, for me, Callaway, I've tried to build my core associations with business owners, storytelling, social media growth, datadriven workflows. And so to do that, I try to talk about these things as much as possible. Because the more I mention them and deliver tactical, high differentiated value to you, the deeper the grooves go in your

14:11brain at reflexively remembering me tied to them. Now, on the object side, the same psychology applies. I wear this hat and these black hoodies or shirts in literally every single video. I'm always in this set in literally every video. I wear the Ray-B band round sunglasses in every single Instagram story and most of

14:30the podcast appearances that I go on. And I'm doing this on purpose because I'm trying to sear a visual into your brain that when you think of me, the objects come up so it's easier to remember me and tie to the associations I want. When I think of Horoszi, for example, I think of the beard. I think of the acquisition.com hat. I think of the tank. I think of the muscles. When I think of Casey Neistad, I think of the

14:51sunglasses with the tape in the middle. I think of his office with all those containers. I think of the electric skateboard that he would ride. People have a weird way of remembering objects instead of faces and names. And so using objects in your personal brand can be very helpful for association. Now again, the objects thing is not something you have to figure out right now. You don't have to be like, "Ah, what are the objects I'm going to use?" But just understanding this association concept that the more you say and show something to yourself, the deeper it gets tied in someone's memory. And that's where

15:21personal brand recall really is built. One good exercise on the association point is just to ask yourself, if I could buy one or two or three words or terms in someone's memory, what terms would I buy and how much would I pay to buy them? It's almost like the Google Adwords of someone's memory. Those are the things you want to be associated with. And so to buy the slot in their head, you just need to say it more often. Now, the fourth and last personal brand pillar is points of uniqueness or points of differentiation. And this is the one where you actually want to spend time to competitively map the existing

15:52players in your space. When you enter an open category where there aren't that many people playing, you can pretty much win with any strategy. For example, when I started this YouTube channel in the social media growth niche on YouTube like 2 years ago, there was nobody making content here. It was very easy to win. All I had to do was show up consistently [music] and I would win the category. Now, obviously, the better my content was and like the more I cared, the faster I would win. But in an open

16:14category, all you have to do is show up. The problem is most categories in 2026 and 2027 on YouTube and social media are fairly crowded now. And so, because of this, you now need to identify points of unique differentiation if you want to carve a new lane and still have success. Fundamentally, these are the five things that matter if you want to carve a new lane. You can do it on topic, on substance, on avatar, on format, or on visuals. Previously, I've covered this and I've talked about seven points of uniqueness. I think it just bubbles up into these five. So very simply, you either have to talk about things no one

16:47is talking about, talk about them at a depth or substance level that no one has covered, talk to an avatar that is currently being underserved, talk about it in a way or format that is unique to your space, or use visuals that differentiate you on the execution, production, and visual side. Now, I find the most useful exercise in personal branding is to literally map out the top competitors in your space across those five dimensions to figure out who's doing it in what way and where is their

17:15white space that isn't being covered. Then you want to plant a stake in the ground for the ways you're trying to execute and work [music] against it. The reason this is important is because the more white space you can find before you start posting, the easier it is to maneuver your content strategy to take advantage of it from day one. Now, if you do this across the five to 10 core competitors, I'm telling you, you will have a very clear understanding of what you need to do in the content in order to cut through faster. This whole exercise that I just went through, those three questions, and specifically the

17:43four brand pillars in question three, I call this the personal brand positioning canvas. Either you or someone that's in charge of content on your team should go through this exercise and literally document all of your answers for those questions. Now, if you want this to be even easier for you, I built out a full workflow in Claude specifically for this brand new. It has like 10 different skills. You drop it into Claude. You answer a few questions and it will go through the whole exercise. It will map out your competitive space. It'll identify the pillars. It'll figure out what content formulas are working for all your competitors. It'll suggest

18:16whites space and it will visualize it on this really nice templated canvas. If you have the Sandcastle's MCP also set up, it can then download and deep analyze top videos from each person and make the insights so much more robust. The link's below for that if you want to check it out. Now, next I want to go into phase two of the video, which is how do we actually start making the content from a content strategy and systems perspective now that we have laid the foundation for our positioning and strategy. And by the way, if you want to work with me one-on-one directly to help you scale your personal brand, I

18:47have links below for that. You can either just book a strategy call directly with me if you want to talk about it first or you can jump directly into short form academy where I have the system built out. Everything is there around the strategy and content piece. So depending on how aggressively you take action, you could do that first part in as little as like 2 to 3 hours or it may take you 2 to 3 days, but I really recommend you spend the next couple days before you jump into your next trunch of content to really define those things and put guard rails on your

19:14decisions. Now from there, let's assume you have 87 days of the 90 left. So we haven't used up much. How do we actually attack scaling our personal brand from here? The next step in the process, like I said, is to work through the content strategy and system for actually producing content against that positioning. And to do that in the first 90 days, I would break it into two phases. Phase one is testing and experimentation. And phase two is strategy, alignment, and scale. And this is exactly how I look at it with the personal brands that I work with directly. We run this exact same playbook. The first main sprint period

19:46usually is like 6 months. So this 90 days is like the first half of the first sprint to really get you ramping up. Phase one, like I said, is testing and experimentation. In the simplest terms, what we're really after when we're trying to make content for a personal brand is to figure out what content formulas work consistently for us. Now, when I say content formula, I'm talking about something very specific. I mean the following. A content formula equals a topic plus a format plus a visual layout. So, for example, if I was working with someone trying to build a personal brand in the barbecue space, like they're a barbecue chef, one of

20:21their content formulas might be something like this. The topic is barbecue techniques, the format is a live demo or tutorial, and the visual layout is shot in world standing at the grill. Now, they might have another content formula that's something like this. The topic is barbecue equipment and tools. The format is a listical. The visual format would be in the kitchen holding up the products, cutting back and forth between full screen, A-roll, and B-roll. These would be two different examples of content formulas used for the same personal brand. Now, for most personal brands, they want to end up getting to three to four core topics, one to three core formats, and one to

20:58three core visual layouts. And this creates several different combinations or content formulas. Most people end up having like five to 10 of these combinations. Now again, the reason why it's helpful to figure out what these content formulas are is that it creates set guard rails for you to create within. And creative guardrails is the thing that allows systems to be possible when it comes to content. Now, in phase one of your content testing, the goal is to test widely and wildly across different topics, different formats, and different visual layouts. Because what you're trying to do is find the winning

21:30formulas across these four questions. Number one, which formulas actually perform well across the metric we care about, whether that's views or followers gained or conversion? Number two, which formulas actually attract the ideal viewer that we want? And that could be judged qualitatively via the comment responses, the DM responses, or just clicking into the people that are

21:50following to gauge what their bio says. Number three, do we actually enjoy making this content formula so we don't get burned out? Because if you get burned out, the personal brand dies. And number four, are these content formulas actually showing up visually in a way that we're proud of? We don't think they're corny or lame. We think they're cool and represent us well. Now remember, it's topic, format, visual layout. The fastest way to figure out which topics are going to work is to use sand castles.ai. All you have to do is create a list of your competitors in the channels tab. Go to the videos tab. Look

22:17at the top 50 to 100 videos. Deep analyze them all with the lightning button. Export the data. Give it to Claude and let Claude just tell you which topics are working best. This is the fastest way to not guess on the topics. You could also guess, but it'll just take you longer to figure it out. Now, on the formats and visual layout side, you're going to want to experiment pretty freely in this first phase. Some

22:36formats are easier to make than others. Some layouts are easier than others, but also some are more premium and show up better than others. It all depends on your vision for how you want your personal brand to be represented. People often call this a signature visual style. They make content, but it looks junky and generic. That's because the visual layout execution is not premium enough. Now, I actually built out this Figma file that maps all the core formats based on level of effort, but also how much white space there is and how premium they are relative to each other. And if you want to see that, I'll

23:07link it below. In sand castles, we also have the collections tab, which has a bunch of curated examples across every format and every visual layout. So, if you're working for someone or you're trying to figure this out on your own, you can go into collections and see a bunch of these examples to understand which ones you might want to try. So what this means is that for the first two months, the first 60 days in this 90, I would post videos, three the first week, five the second week, and then

23:30seven per week for the next six weeks. That's about 50 videos. And I would test wildly across topics, formats, and layouts. Not really caring about performance, only with the goal of figuring out which content formulas are working for us that we like making. The only filtering criteria in phase one is this. Is the video going to provide value for the IVA, the ideal viewer that we identified in that first exercise? If no, then we skip it. But if yes, we have full license to try it in the first 60 days. Now, obviously, this talks about the strategy for approaching making the videos. The actual tactical process, how

24:05do I write good hooks? How do I make good scripts? How do I actually edit? What analytics do I look at? That's obviously a chore in itself, but that's a skill that you can close the gap on easily. If you want to become a master at the blocking and tackling of actually making the videos, whether it's you or you want to upskill someone on your team, that's exactly why I built Short Form Academy. It's basically social media mastery in a box. So, if you want to learn the tactical stuff, the link's below and you can put somebody through it on your team if you want as well. So,

24:30this phase one is kind of a combination of like what is the strategy from a content formula perspective? How do we test and figure out what's working? And it's also, [music] can we up our skills on the first 60 videos so that we actually make stuff good enough that's worthy of the market watching it? You're kind of doing both those things at the same time. So that's phase one. That would take up a good chunk of the first two months. Now phase two is strategy alignment and system scaling. Once you've tested those first 50 to 60 videos, you should have a good idea of what content formulas are going to work

24:59across those four questions. Which ones are getting the best performance? Which ones are bringing in the most of our ideal viewer? Which ones do we actually like making? and which one help us show up visually in a way that we're proud of. Your goal then in phase two is to double down on the formulas that are working and cut the ones that aren't working. And you just continue to run this process of doubling down and cutting, doubling down and cutting, refining and cutting. And you keep doing that until after 6 months you have a pretty set roster of content formulas that continue to crush. Now, I will say

25:29over time certain formulas and certain topics and certain formats will get burned out. You do it. You find an ARB, you rip it, people copy you, they kind of dilute the ability for it to bubble up. You have to go back to the experimentation phase, find new stuff, and that oscillation is the art of content over time. And again, you're not going to have insane results just in the first 90 days. That would be silly. But if you run this workflow for your next 90 days, it'll be very clear which formulas emerge, and then you can triple down from there. The reason I'm so confident that this is the exact optimal

25:59playbook, other than the fact that I ran this on my own channels to a lot of success, is that every business owner and personal brand I work with, we do the exact same thing. And the phases work the same way. The hard parts are obviously figuring out which content formulas work in the first place. And it's that triangle of is it working? Do I like doing it? And is it representing me well? Sometimes you get it working and you don't like doing it or it's not representing you well. And so you have to switch up. It's that plus the tactical block and tackling of actually making content at a high level within

26:28those formulas. Those are the two biggest constraints that make this tough. If you want to work with me directly on either of those, the strategy or the blocking and tackling, like I said, I've got links below. And I've tried to build the best programs in the world for both of those. But this video should have given you a blueprint for exactly how to tackle the next 90 days. All right, guys. That is all I've got for this video. As always, I'm trying to push the boundaries for what is given for free. If you're a business owner and you're trying to grow your business with content, hopefully you can

26:53tell this will be the best channel that you could possibly watch. Make sure to like this video if you liked it. Make sure to subscribe if you're a business owner trying to grow. And if you leave a comment on what you want me to cover next, where there's still a gap in your content workflow, I will help you as much as I can on a future video. Got a

27:08lot of free stuff in the description. We'll see you guys on the next video. Peace.