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Hello there!

It’s been a long time since I last wrote one of these newsletters, but I am back with a banger.

Lately, I got distracted with a lot of other things and disintegrated my focus, but now I am back with immense clarity about what I want to do with my life, what my purpose is, and boy, it feels good.

I did a Founder house in Bali for 15 days with 4 other Creator/Founders, and even though I planned to do a lot of work, I couldn’t do even half of it, well, because we were exploring XD

So this Founder house (BOYS TRIP) turned out to be one of the most transforming trips of my life because of the amount of clarity it gave me.

I have always chased clarity in my life and preached the same, and that is exactly what this trip was all about for me. It gave me clarity in different forms - this time it was not me sitting down alone and writing my thoughts down.

This time, every small experience helped me get closer to clarity:

Whether it be getting roasted, roasting someone from the group, laughing for no fucking reason, meeting entrepreneurs doing 100X of what I am doing in every aspect of life, Meeting an indian wearing 2 Crore watch at a club in uluwatu, getting washed off by the waves while surfing, doing MMA, taking saunas and ice baths, going for a run.

Everything just added to my mental clarity and changed my perspective about what I am doing and how I want to do things in my life and business moving forward.

Okay, enough of ‘ME’ - what kind of a marketer am I, shit!

Amongst 100s of crazy experience I want to pick one experience today and talk about the beauty and leverage of personal branding so by the time you end up reading this newsletter you feel - Damn that was good.

let’s go…

On 6th April, we were just chilling around in our villa, and Saksham got a text from one of his followers sharing Daniel Dalen’s Instagram story - He announced a meetup the next day at 6 am at a spot 10 minutes from our villa

What are the chances?

He just posted a 15-second story on a 24-hour notice: I thought 15-20 people would show up, and I couldn’t be more wrong!

By the time I reached there, I could see around 200 entrepreneurs circling him.

It blew my mind for real - That is the power of building a legit personal brand!

The brand pull he had was insane to experience.

He doesn’t educate people, he doesn’t act like he knows everything. He just shows what he does and builds, and 200 people show up at 6 am - Fucking insane!

That got me thinking!

How to build a cult personal brand?

I have been building my brand on Instagram for a while now, and the truth is that recording and posting 50-second reels gets exhausting after a point in time.

So, how do you make it sustainable and scalable?

How do you build a brand that brings you tangible ROI over the vanity of a million views?

How to build a cult like following?

Let’s break it all down…

1. Build a narrative

What do you stand for?

What is your brand all about?

Define it!

Nike’s narrative is - Just do it

Represent’s narrative is - On a mission

Every good brand/ personal brand is supposed to have a narrative.

For my brand, the narrative that I want to push is - ‘Escape mediocrity’

This is important because it gives you clarity about how to think about your content.

Once you are clear about your narrative now your content can be all about amplifying that narrative and your community knows what you stand for.

Here are 2 questions you should ask yourself to get some clarity on your narrative:

Q.1 What do you stand for and represent in 3 or fewer words?

Q.2 How does someone feel after consuming your content?

2. Define your mission

A good mission is not about you. It is about the person you want to inspire, motivate, and educate.

Define a mission that your viewers can rally behind.

Nike’s mission - to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world

How can you define it for your Personal brand?

Think about it

For me, it is “to bring inspiration and insights on building online businesses and a life of freedom to ones who don’t accept average”

It won’t be as easy, but you need to deeply think about it - What is your mission, what are you trying to achieve, who are you gonna help, what are your values, what are you curious about?

A mission is just the compressed version of all of these things.

3. Establishing the enemy

A personal brand is like building an army of people who stand by you!

But an army is useless without an enemy!

• Understand who the enemy is

• Put the enemy in your content repeatedly

• Get your army to rally behind you

The more your enemy prevents your mission from becoming a reality, the more people will buy into your mission.

The enemy for me is my own undisciplined, unclear version. You might have seen me often say - ‘The war is internal’

That is how I have defined my brand’s enemy

How can you do it for your brand?

Figure it out!

4. Content Pillars & Purpose

Once you are clear about the foundation of the brand and what you stand for, it’s time to brainstorm on the content pillars and what the purpose of every content pillar you have.

A lot of people completely skip the first 3 parts and start talking about content pillars, and are always confused because they don’t have a greater why to create content.

Your content pillars should amplify your narrative and mission at all times.

Define your content pillars.

For example, my content pillars are:

1. mindset/self-improvement

2. Online business/ Entrepreneurship

3. Creator economy in general

My purpose with content is:

1. To build awareness

2. To grow

3. To showcase expertise and build affinity

Once you are sure about this, we can move to the final and most important part of building a cult personal brand that will allow you to bring this entire strategy together.

5. Create a social series

Your content doesn’t work right now because people don’t know what to expect from your content.

Treat your brand like a culmination of different TV shows in your life.

Making a social series for every purpose you have - It makes content easier and fun

One filter for deciding a theme for a social series is that it should be infinitely repeatable.

What is 1 social series you can start on your personal brand today and keep repeating it?

Once you know this answer, building a brand will become effortless, and you will build a cult like personal brand for yourself.

I have done this on my personal brand up to an extent, but now you will see me doing this a lot more on my Instagram and YouTube as well.

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Talk soon

-Akshat