How To Build A Magnetic Personal Brand

[applause] >> Thank you guys. Thank you for being here today. James, thank you so much for the invite. Do you have a clicker for me? Thank you. I'm going to start with a question. What do you do when you want to marry a woman? What else? Nobody knows? >> I can tell you one. >> Go on. >> Uh, you go on a date with her. >> Okay. Okay. We'll get there. >> Oh. >> What's next? >> Um you probably ask her to be your girlfriend after the dates, I guess. >> So, the the theoretical answer is you go on a date, you move in together, you propose, and you plan the wedding, and then ultimately what you do is you marry, right? Now, the beautiful thing around everything that we're doing here today and that we're doing in general is that it works the exact same way with the relationship you have with your audience. Who here has an audience? Nice. Do you guys have a bigger brand or is it a smaller brand? Medium? Nice. All right. But, what most of you get wrong is you're either chasing the wrong women right now, or what's happening is you're ignoring the good ones who already want you in the first place. And that's a mistake, because I'll tell you why. Before we start, I want to compare something with you. And I'm going to talk about two different things today. One of them is a conscious filter. Now, I invented this when I made the presentation yesterday, but it's actually a very interesting concept, so I'd love to talk about it. The most important thing, and I think a couple of guys already talked about it today, we're very aware about the steps that we take on a daily basis whenever we want to convert an audience. So, the interesting thing around this is that you click, you watch, you book, and you make a decision to pay, or maybe not if you don't like the product. Now, the interesting thing around building a brand is there is actually another filter that you most of you aren't aware about. But, when you make a purchase, you got to James' event today here, you made a purchase, and you got here today, and there was an unconscious filter to this that I want to uncover with you guys together. Because this is the thing over the past like 3 years I've been trying to build my brand, and whether it's been a success or not, that's not for myself to decide. But, what's very interesting is that I got to a level where I got to know more about myself, and I got to know more about people, and I got to know more about psychology. And that's what I want to go into today. Um and the most important thing that I think is like people try to systematize everything, and they try to actually engage with so many different and they constantly try to find like the theoretical answer to every question that they have. And in all honesty, sometimes there is no theoretical answer. So, the most important thing when people get to your profile, which is something that happens every single day. When you go to your Instagram, you get the profile dashboard, right? You have lots of people there, most likely millions, or some people have hundreds of thousands. When people get to your profile, the first step that happens is there's initial understanding. So, people don't know what you do. They aren't curious yet, but they make a decision if they would love to engage more or if they like to follow somebody else. Now, the most important thing is when they have initial understanding, after this, we have curiosity. I think something that James said in the beginning of this whole conversation, what is the most important thing of us entrepreneurs? That separates the one that will grow constantly to the ones that stay the same. It's curious. You want to be very curious in the way you engage with people, in the questions that you ask, in the way you learn. You guys are all curious, otherwise you wouldn't be here today. You want to learn something new. Now, when you're curious, what happens is you get to you get to see more [ __ ] of people. You get to see their YouTube videos, their Instagram. Who's seen my Instagram Reels? Almost everyone. Okay. Who's seen my YouTube videos? Good amount of people. Okay, nice. Now, after you're curious, you get to watch more stuff of people. So, you're going to dig into their stuff, right? You're going to watch their longer form assets. You want to be have the ability to speak with their team members. Maybe you go to an in-person event or anything related to that. And I think one of the most important things for this is that people start to trust you. This is where the trust layer is built, right? Before anybody makes a purchase, you need to have the ability to trust someone. Because if you don't trust someone, you'll never actually take that action step. When you have full understanding, this is very interesting. You as a founder, you create influence. So, you have a level of influence. You have the decision and you can start to put things into place where you lead people through a certain cycle. And this varies for every single business. The most important thing is everybody already has a brand. You just haven't made content around it yet. But your personality, who you are and how you present yourself, and the impression that people get from you, that is your brand. Now, after influence, people make a decision to decide to work with you or not. And you can influence this decision. So, something that is very interesting, most people try to sell within the first three levels of this conversion cycle, of this filter. And And the problem with that is that there is no trust built. So, people would have a lot of skepticism. People might have a lot of questions, which is a very big problem if people want to make a very high-ticket purchase. Now, after this, you have influence and decision. The person is ultimately what matters. People buy into a person. And what's very interesting around all of this is that there are barely people with a personal brand that buy into the product, don't like the person. But there are people that like the person that don't even know anything about the product, but would still make a purchase. >> [snorts] >> Because it's a personal brand, right? It's a difference between a brand and a personal brand. A personal brand, people look into the people, and they want to know who's behind the person of what that person is actually doing. Now, the interesting thing is that there is a power that so many people don't see. You are trying to get as many customers as quickly as possible with the content that you're creating and you're constantly trying to do it better in so many different ways. And I can tell you right now they're like a thousands on thousands answers to this. And none of them is correct. There is no right answer. Because the power of the first three levels when people watch your videos, when people click on your profile, when people want to know more about the stuff that you're doing, is in their hands. You don't own the power. So, you have to imagine, right? Imagine you tell them to do anything, they wouldn't listen to you because you they have the power. They can decide if they want to continue watching or not. They can decide if they want to follow your brand. And if they do like it, they would, and otherwise they wouldn't. Very simple. Now, when we go to level four, the interesting part is that you get the power. So, now you have a playing field. You have an open playing field of how you want to engage with the customer. You can tell them to do certain things and they'll listen. Same with your clients. The power is yours because you have a level of authority and they would love to listen to you, which is the reason why they invested in the first place. Let's pause for a second. When I'm talking about building this audience and building this brand, I'm not talking about building a native audience or borrowed audience or going to somebody else, taking a piece of their audience and integrating it to your into your own. Neither am I really talking about building trust or building a loyal audience. Because there's something that I like to call a magnetic audience. And there's a difference between a normal audience, a native audience, a trust built in audience, but also magnetic audience. Within an audience, there's such a such an insane amount of of of I wouldn't call them difficulties. I would call them challenges. Because there are so many levels to a brand that you need to understand to build something powerful where people trust you and trust your name. I want to do a super quick test. If you listen to your own name and you have an own brand right now, what do people think? Think about that question for a second. Think about it. Most likely, nothing comes up. When you think about Nick Setting, what do you think about? Right? You might have something that pops up into your head where you think about something that relates to me as a person. So, the most important thing about building a brand is people associate you with something. And it could be could be a car, could be a color, could be anything. Doesn't matter what it is. They associate you with something. And the only way they can actually associate you with something is if you represent that thing. It's the most important thing. If you don't do anything, they don't have anything to be associated with. Now, why is this so important to build a magnetic audience? A magnetic audience can only be built in trust factor four and five. So, after people have been through all your stuff, after people have seen your profile, after they have been through everything that you do, and they really like what you're doing, and they built the trust, that's the only point when you can genuinely build a magnetic audience. And I think one great example of this is who here creates Instagram Reels and YouTube videos? Put a hand up. Some people. Okay, very nice. Now, sometimes when you watch a creator, you see a certain amount of views that they have. The difference between a normal audience and a magnetic magnetic audience is one very important thing. It's the baseline of the foundation that you've built for the people that constantly want to come back. That means that if you create a YouTube video, you always have a baseline of, let's say, 30 views in your YouTube video. Or it might be 5K. For me now, it's around 8 to 10K. So, every video that we'll post gets 8 to 10 K views and when it does well, it increases that view count. So, more people want to watch my stuff, right? Which are new people that I get into my magnetic audience. And the only way you can genuinely build a magnetic audience where people trust you and want to come back for what you're doing is if you are referring to the same things over and over again. You have to repeatedly bring things back into your content that people can be associated with, especially you as a person. People try to always do new stuff. They always try to pivot. They always try to bring a different message to the market. But the only thing you have to do to build something magnetic is repeat the same [ __ ] over and over again so you will be associated with it. Now, before I show you how to actually build it, let's do a small test to see which category you fit in. The most important thing that people don't have is a is is positioning and I think something that's very interesting to speak about is positioning because it's such a vague concept. Like, what does it actually look like? I I I like football, so I'm going to watch the Netherlands tonight. Who's going to watch football tonight? Some people in Netherlands are going to win, obviously, right? Um they're doing really good, at least, hopefully. Oversight. One thing I want to talk about positioning. So, imagine you're playing, right? You're playing a football match. You can decide if you sit on the bench on the on the on the side or if you're a midfielder. Like, I'm a midfielder. I played a lot of soccer. I really like soccer. I really like football. The interesting thing is, what does a midfielder need? Six, right? Oversight. An attacker scores a goal. A defender defends the ball. Easy. But, if you want to position yourself well in a field, just like you as an entrepreneur want to position yourself well in a field of all these entrepreneurs, right? We're all competing with each other. So, how can you be separate to somebody else? How can you be here on stage instead of sitting there? You have to think about that question. Like, how can you be different? The interesting thing is, there's one thing that I learned is very, very important. It's oversight. What does that define as? The most important thing is you want to you want to be able to see things from a drone perspective. So, if you see things from your own tunnel vision, you can only recreate your own reality. But when you listen to other people, you listen to their voice, you listen to their stories, you can bring insights into your playing field. So, you have more information around the things that you would love to share to people. And I really think that if you want to position yourself well, you need to have an understanding of what other people are doing, how our market is moving, how people are making decisions. Because when you know that, you you know where to place yourself on that stage to understand how to grow from there, how to make people listen to you. The second one is association. I already talked about this topic. Third one, I was sitting with James in when we had a little break, and he asked me what is one of the most important things that you learned um for me to have the ability to be here today in general, success-wise. And I answered, I said, "Intention." Intention is truly important. If you do things with intention, you are doing things with 10 times more power than the average person. And I believe that with what we recreate today with AI and so many other things, people lose intention. Which is great because that means you have an advantage over other people. That means that you can do so many things better than other people that recreated without intention. If people see my content, every piece of content goes with intention. I don't believe that people understand the pre-production of every piece of content that we create. There goes so much time into that. I have Max here today. I have Luis, my strategist, here today. They're doing so much work, including me, to get every piece to be performing as best as possible. And this is the interesting thing. What is as best as possible? You never know. But if you do things with intention, you realize how to do things better than other people. And the only reason why is because you genuinely tried your best. Most people aren't trying their best. You lost passion for what you want to do. And you can do that for a very long time if you're just doing it and treating it like a system. The third one is gravity. Gravity is very important because it's the foundation you build. I talked about this before. The foundation of your audience is what decides makes it decides if it's a native audience or a magnetic audience. People that actually trust you. People that want to be with you. People that want to be around you. And people that recurrently come back because of a specific reason. If you can't relate with one of these four points, you have a broken native brand compared to a magnetic brand. Something that people love and love to follow. Now, how do we build a magnetic brand? There is something I've been hiding for you. And I've been doing this for a very strict reason. To protect you from a paradox of information. Because today there is so much information out there. Like it's ridiculous. So many people can observe so much different information from so many different people that the e- that it's super easy to get lost. And because it's easy to get lost, you're going to spin in your own head thinking about what the best decision is. Because if you have unclarity and you don't really know what the next step is. Most likely you're always looking for the best path. If you have unclarity, you're looking for a path. You're looking for the best one. But what if there is no best path? The right thing is to constantly take action in a decision that you make. And that is all that matters around building a brand because the thing you don't know what you don't know. Secondly, you can't really see what you can't see. There is no substance to it. Like you don't know it. So, you need to get that information somewhere, but you need to be very specific with where you get that information from. Now, let me show you how to apply this all to content. >> Who has said before very interesting, I can promise you everybody I had the same thing. Who said to themselves before I don't have enough traffic? So many different people. Everyone almost. The reason why you're doing that is because you like to put the problem on on other things. So something that is very interesting to give you perspective is we have a scope. It's like a very big ball. And that is our visible traffic. Our visible traffic is the views that we get or the engagement, the likes, the the DMs, the the the conversations that we start, even the sales calls, right? That is our visible traffic. But what you don't understand is that there is an insane amount of invisible traffic. People that see you, people that know you, but they don't engage, they don't do anything, they don't interact with you. But it's what you don't see. And this is very interesting. A lot of people that make a purchase, right, buyer intent, are most likely people that never like anything anyways. They don't engage with anyone. So you think your scope of traffic is super small because you only see what's visible. But the interesting part around all of this is that there's such a big scope of invisible traffic that engages with you and you as a person that loves to follow you. They just don't engage the same way as that other part of the traffic does. But what you're doing is you're still listening to that part of the traffic. Because that's the only feedback that you're getting from people. Like people always ask me, Nick, how can I improve my content? Just ask yourself the question first, what for feedback am I getting? Like are you listening to that one YouTube comment that you got about this video is [ __ ] because of the hook and then you're chasing your hook? It's like you're you're not gathering any information from valuable people. The only people that you should listen to are the people that took the action. And the people that took the action are the people that made a purchase. So, the easiest way and go ask feedback is from clients. Because they deliver something that they've taken a promise to. They've done something intentional. Now, I would love to talk about this concept because how can you actually capture more invisible traffic? Because you don't have a traffic problem. You have a problem of not understanding how to be very clear in your message. I I'd love to talk about this one thing. It's something I recently discovered around 4 months ago. And I've just been overcomplicating everything for years. This has worked out and made me money. Everything was great. But, the easiest way to get somebody to trust you is to be as clear and concise as possible. So, if you're here now and you're starting your brand and you're thinking, "How should I get more customers? How do I want to make more money? How do I want genuinely people to trust me?" Be clear with one specific thing and say that thing over and over again. That's the only thing you should do to build trust as fast as possible. You don't need the craziest mechanisms. You don't need the craziest cycles of conversion. You don't need all that the crazy words. You just need to be clear and direct. That's the easiest way for people to trust you, to build longevity, to build a magnetic audience, and to make people pay you. Because if you're giving multiple options, right? It lowers the chance of them actually trusting all of them. If I give you a thousand options, yeah, most likely you don't like two of them. But, if I give you two options, how high is the chance you actually don't like one of them? It's very low. Now, after you're very [clears throat] clear in your message, you need to redirect people to the next stage. Like, you need to build a funnel for them. I like I don't like to call it a funnel. I like to call it a filter. Right? You're filtering people throughout the process and you can decide the shape of that filter. You can decide everything. Now, one thing that is very interesting that we've seen that have worked really, really well to get people interested in our stuff and get people to know what we're doing and how they like us or not, you know, like whether they like us or not. The interesting thing is pin posts, reels, and stories are very important to create and I think we all know this in the first place. But, I want to tell you why. When you create a pin post, what you're doing is you're representing your story of who you are. This is what I would recommend to put into your profile. Second thing, reels, I don't want to go into that today. The reason why it's because it's too broad. There's so many elements to reels. You can recreate it in so many different ways. People can ask me questions about that if you have to. Stories, I think people underestimate stories, but I think for the people that follow me already know that I really like stories. The reason why stories are great is because you show personality and you share a story. Why is that so interesting? You you you captivate people's attention. That's the only moment they genuinely want to listen to something or follow something, right? Like girls might want to watch other girls' vlogs when they go on vacation or anything like that. Guys want to follow business guys, follow their story, their private story based on how they're improving every single day. And it's kind of like a a behind of the scenes that you're behind the scenes that you're representing every single day. And that's something that is very powerful. Because in a world with so much attention, in a world with so much engagement, you want to see what's happening behind the scenes. I don't have I don't [ __ ] understand how many people ask me to make a vlog about my life and just share that and represent that to people constantly. It's where you nurture people. You don't convert people when you create stories, you nurture people. You get them more throughout down the line. You get them from a cold to warm. It's that whole from 10% to 90% process that you're getting them through where people really trust you. Now, after that, you start the relationship with them, right? They actually get converted by longer from YouTube videos. They want to engage with what you're creating. If you're not creating YouTube videos and you're doing only Instagram Reels, you've a massive problem because how do you want to get people to convert and pay you if you don't have any solution to solve? Reels aren't there to solve problems for people. They are there to make them aware about their own problems. Before you can solve a problem, you need to make people aware about that they have a problem. And the interesting thing is an insane amount of people are already very aware about the fact that they have a problem or not. Now, there's a set of principles that I personally live by. And this is what I do to constantly build a very magnetic brand that reflects the pace of success it takes you to genuinely build this. When you get these principles in your head, it will eliminate the wrong thoughts that might enter your brain. And I say these things over and over and over again to myself when I'm building a brand. So, when I'm making a decision, every time I make a decision, I go through these five principles. If it meets these five principles or at least three of them. The first one is your best content already happened, you just didn't film it yet. I don't know if people saw my latest Reel, but I said this in my latest Reel. Everybody has a life and everybody has a story. Whether you like your own life or your own story is not important. Everybody has something interesting to say and you want to share that. The only thing that you're doing in your brain constantly is you're trying to picture a life, right? In your brain, you're trying to picture specific content in your brain that people want to see, but you don't understand that what you're currently doing is already applicable to so many people. Because you'll always be striving for more. What you're currently doing, you want something better, but when you're there, you want to go to the next thing. So, you have to capture what you're doing today. If you don't want to put that online, that's fine. Just put it on YouTube unlisted, but at least capture it. Like capturing your life is so important because because it gives you feedback. It gives you data. And if you decide to publish it later on, you can. That's very important. An audience isn't people who watch you. It's people notice you'd never stop. This is my favorite one out of all of them for the past 3 years I've been committing to this principle. So, most likely 90% of people in this room don't understand what I'm trying to say here, but I'm going to repeat it again. An audience isn't people who watch you. It's people notice you'd never stop. So, people watch you, which is true. But, the reason why people follow you and why you build an audience is because people can picture your success, your future success in their head. If they feel like that your audience, that you as a person is going to stop in 6 months, they will never be in your magnetic audience. So, the thing that you need to understand is that your audience isn't people who watch your content, neither instantly people who buy. It's genuinely the situation where you can share passion, you can share product, you can share everything that you're doing to become the biggest success on Earth because people want to become part of something that grows. That's the only only genuine thing that matter of building a very very powerful audience. Now, who's bought courses before? Who bought who's who's bought courses before? People, right? Now, the interesting thing is you're buying other people's stuff, but you're not rewatching your own stuff. So, you're paying $1,000 to pay other people for for repurpose information, most likely, right? Without you actually watching your own stuff, and that's [ __ ] [ __ ] It's very stupid to not rewatch your old stuff. You want to watch your old stuff based on what you're doing, how you're engaging with people. That's why I said you want to capture everything because when you're doing that, you're learning from yourself, from your own experience. The only reason why is you've a dopamine factor of willing to learn something new because what you what you currently have isn't good enough. And that's the problem because the only moment you can build a genuine brand is if you're authentic. And if you're authentic, you can genuinely get to understand what to do to do the right thing because there is no right answer. The right answer is being you and representing who you are. And when you do that, you genuinely build a very powerful brand. And it took me 2 and 1/2 3 years to to to to learn this stuff. Content gets simple when you stop trying to be impressive and start trying to be useful. Now, the interesting thing is what is the definition of being useful? Right? Everybody has their own answer to being useful. But the most interesting thing is I think I cannot give an answer on this because it's different for everyone. I think you know when you are trying to be impressive and when you're trying to be useful. Trying to be useful is not more. You don't have to do more. You don't have to provide more value. Right? And I think that is something that a lot of people can learn in this industry. They try to do as much as possible in a very short time frame. So, you try to provide as much as much because you think that provides you more value. But the most important thing is genuine presence and connection with people because that's truly what people care about and that's why not like 90% of the information goes right back out of their left ear, right? That's why 100% of the information stays in their brain. And that's very very important to understand. The last one is people don't buy when they understand you. They buy when they recognize themselves. Relatability. Okay? So, what you're trying to do in your content is you're constantly trying trying trying to to get people to understand you. Meaning you might over complicate things. Maybe you even simplify things which is a lot better, but that's not the whole [ __ ] point. The whole [ __ ] point is you being relatable. Right? You have all these relatable touch points. Meaning you can decide to focus on them like let's say you're younger. You could try to focus on selling to 60 year olds. But it's not relatable. Does that mean Nick it doesn't work? No, of course it does. But it's way easier to sell to an audience of people that relate with what you do. You're going to make it so much easier for yourself. Because then you don't constantly have to try to figure out new things to act to try to recreate who you want to attract if you naturally already attract a specific person. Thank you guys. >> [applause]