How to Monetize a Personal Brand: 8 Strategies to Put Cash in Your Pocket
Do you want to monetize your personal brand? Of course you do. Who wants to work on something all day and not get anything out of it?
This is why I believe fully in having a monetization strategy for your personal brand. The mistake most of you make is that you start creating content for your personal brand but don't treat it like a business.
You say something like "I just want to have fun and be myself."
That sounds great if you're objective is to express yourself. But if your goal is to make money, it's a terrible use of your time.
It's a lot more fun when you are getting paid to share your thoughts, your ideas, and your content.
Money is freedom. If you can learn to monetize your personal brand, you will give yourself more creative freedom to do the work you really care about.
So what are your options? How exactly can you monetize your personal brand? Let's get started!
First, Get Specific
Most people look at huge personal brands like Gary Vee or Hormozi and see how they talk about so many different topics.
So they mimic that strategy. They share their day, take pictures of their food, post workout pics, and share inspirational quotes.
Understand, when you're first starting out you don't have any credibility. No one knows about you and more importantly, no one know what you have to offer them.
Until you get to the point where you have established yourself as an authority, you don't want to treat your personal brand like a journal. You want to treat it like a business.
Pick an industry that you want to become an authority in, and post content ONLY about that industry.
Do not be a generalist. Be a specialist. Once you have established an audience, you can slowly transition into being a generalist.
When I decided to go ALL IN on turning my personal brand into a marketing machine for Copyblogger Academy, that's when I started gaining followers AND that's when I started making money.
Before we even talk about HOW to monetize your personal brand, you first need to put your ego aside and accept the fact that your brand is transactional. No one cares about you and your ideas, they care about themselves and what you have to offer them.
So offer something of value to a specific group of people. Once you go all in on that decision, you can build upon your success.
Now that we've established the you're building authority within a particular domain, you can start applying different strategies to make money.
#1 - Sell Advertising
Advertising is the most straightforward monetization method for your business.
There are many ways to sell ads.
Google Adsense
This is Google's automated advertising platform. To get started, you simply take the code that Google gives you and paste it on your website where you want the ads to appear. You can run AdSense through your website or even through your YouTube channel.
This is a great option for anyone just getting started, but at the same time, it is almost guaranteed you won't make much money. Google has terrible rates and you will need to drive millions of hits of traffic in order to truly monetize your personal brand through Google ads.
Selling Sponsorships
This is the better of the two options because you can sell sponsorships on any platform. You could sell sponsorships for a newsletter, a podcast, a website, or even against your social media.
There are now a lot of options to help you sell sponsorships. For instance, I use The Converkit Sponsorship Network to sell ads on my newsletter. I've also heard of other networks such as ...
However, you don't have to rely on a platform. You can make sponsorship deals directly with other businesses. For instance, I have used Twitter to sell sponsorships on my podcast with Hypefury and Riverside.
In truth, there is no one size fits all with sponsorships. You will have to establish an engaged audience and prove to sponsors that paying you will provide value back to their business.
However, selling advertisement is still a perfectly legitimate way to monetize your brand.
#2 - Coaching
Coaching is a great business option for people who have a valuable skillset.
Although I personally don't enjoy coaching, I see it as a great option for people who thrive in relationships and can easily communicate their message and their ideas to people.
To be an effective coach, you must be an effective listener and teacher.
Also, a great coach must have great time management skills. Once you start to build a customer base, it case be difficult to manage all your coaching sessions and if you miss a coaching session, you can really upset your customers who pay you their hard earned money.
People are more open to working with coaches because the best way to learn valuable skills is to learn from someone who has already been through the process.
Not to mention, a successful coaching business can establish your entire career and provide you with enough money to be completely self employed. That's the dream right?
I have a friend who charges $1250 per 1 hour coaching sessions. He's completely booked out.
Coaching can be big money!
#3 - Sell Your Services
Selling services is such a straight forward and great way to build a business because it doesn't require a large cost of entry.
My own marketing company is a great example of this. When we decided we wanted to start a marketing company, our only up front costs was the cost to build our website, the cost of hosting our website and the labor it took for me to write blog articles.
Many times, this is a slow process, but it's a great option because if you manage your books, you never have to burn cash to build your business. You can always be running on a profit.
Stodzy's first client was a women only healthcare facility in Ft. Lauderdale. We charged them $2000 a month, which basically put us at break even. We used the small profits from that account to help us build more content around our website. Eventually we would get picked up in search traffic which lead to another inquiry and another client. Soon we had about $10,000 in revenue and were able to hire our first employee.
Rinse and repeat. Now, we have employees all over the world and work with a half dozen contractors. What started with $2000 a month turned into a million dollar agency. Currently, we generate more than $2,000,000 a year.
The downside to this strategy is that it takes time.
Building an audience is a commitment. But if you are willing to live with delayed gratification, this method could easily build you a multi million dollar company.
#4 - Sell a Membership Program
This is one of my favorite ways to monetize a personal brand.
I love the idea of building online communities because if you get enough people engaged, your members will turn into brand advocates and do much of the marketing for you.
Another reason I love this model so much is because membership communities are very scalable. For instance, The Copyblogger Academy is now generating more than $30,000 a month. But as the revenue goes up, the profit margins increase because there is no cost to replicating the product.
Let's compare this method to #3 up above, which is to sell services.
When building a service based business, you will always have trouble scaling because every time you bring in new clients, you will have to hire new employees to services those clients.
With a membership program, there are up front costs to develop the program, but you can leverage technology to host your community. You don't need to grow expenses at the same rate of growing your revenue. A membership program has the potential to scale revenue on an exponential rate.
The downside to a membership site is that they are very difficult to get started. No one wants to sign up for a membership program that doesn't have any members. Because of this, most membership sites are dead on arrival.
Nonetheless, if you can push through the upstart costs and difficulties, a membership program can bring in boat loads of relatively passive income to help monetize your personal brand.
#5 - Sell Products
Creating an e-commerce store is a great way to build a business.
I've written a lot about my experience building and selling a profitable tee shirt company and I truly believe that anyone can create a brand around clothing.
It doesn't have to stop at clothing.
You could sell...
jewelry
dropshipped items from amazon
watches
wedding products
wrapping paper
home made bird feeders
anything you can think of
One of the reasons why creating an online store has become such a valid option is because Shopify (and other e-commerce platforms) have made it so easy for regular folks like you and I to create an online store.
Years ago, I recorded an interview with my friend Ray Guilbault. We talked about his clothing store and why Shopify was so helpful.
Also, my hair lol.
Before these platforms existed, we needed to figure out how to build a website and then connect it to a merchant, and then connect that merchant to a gateway. We needed to learn how to manage inventory. We needed to learn how to create a system to ship our products and also track them.
There were so many moving parts. That isn't the case anymore. If you build your store on Shopify, you will have everything you need built into the platform.
You can also sell digital products.
A digital product is any product that requires a transaction that doesn't need to be shipped. For instance, selling courses and ebooks would be considered digital products.
Online courses are a great way to monetize a personal brand because there are unlimited niche markets that people will spend money on.
#6 - A Paid Newsletter
This is such an under utilized monetezation method.
If you are able to truly establish yourself as an expert in your niche, then people will gladly pay for access to premium content.
One of the easiest ways to do this is through a subscription based newsletter. Paid newsletters make it easy to monetize your personal brand and they provide an option for people who don't want to get bogged down by the hassle of selling courses, or selling services.
Paid newsletters are the best option for people who want to find a way to monetize their content, without the business hassle that comes with it.
Just last week, I recorded a video showing how Brian Clark is building a wildly successful paid newsletter and teach you how to use this formula to hit $10,000 a week.
#7 - Book Speaking Gigs
For many, a speaking career is the holy grail of monetizing a personal brand.
What could be better? You get to fly around the country (or even the world) and get on stage to share your thoughts and your message in front of crowds of people. Better yet, for many people, speaking engagements can be highly profitable.
Even a moderately sought after speaker can demand 5 figures for an engagement.
Let's be real about expectations here. Only a select few build their brands to the point where they can build a real business around speaking. You have to truly have a unique message that stands apart from the rest and resonates with people on an emotional level.
But is it impossible? Of course not.
The key to building a successful speaking career is to touch on a subject matter that doesn't have competition. For instance, when I book speaking gigs, I rarely attend online marketing conferences because that is an overly saturated market. Rather, I seek speaking gigs about addiction and recovery, or about entrepreneurship for troubled youth.
You have to choose a message that resonates yet doesn't have a lot of "experts." Your experience is your calling card, so choose wisely.
#8 - Leverage Your Brand For Equity
This is what I do.
My personal brand doesn't sell anything. I don't sell products or services. Rather, I use my personal brand as a relationship tool and a leverage tool that gives me the ability to negotiate myself into equity deals.
This is exactly how I became an equity partner in Cuppa. I was able to talk with the founder and we agreed that I would use my own personal brand to help promote the product. In exchange, I get would equity in the company.
I even created a sales sequence in my email automation to sell the product. It's a product I REALLY believe in, and so I get to be a part of the upside.
This is the most difficult way to monetize your personal brand. The reality is you will only be able to execute on this strategy once you have truly established yourself as an indsutry expert.
This is where your reach and your audience will truly become an asset within itself, because the amount of power you have can be a force multiplier within itself.
But for me, this is the best way because my main objective is to build my portfolio and grow my personal holdings company. I want to keep building ownership in assets, because this is how you get rich.
Get Started Now
A year from now, you will wish you started today.
In my view, a personal brand is the most valuable asset someone can own. Even if you don't monetize you personal brand directly, building an audience is a great tool to bring in opportunities in the future.
What are you waiting for? What are you afraid of?
This is your future. Go!