Neil Patel & James Dooley - The Truth About Personal Branding

James Dooley: Yes it would have made me way more money. Who is Neil Patel? Massive clients don't care for Neil Patel. Massive clients care for who's going to be on my account and going to be producing the results. So not chasing the vanity metrics but more chasing exactly who your target demographic is. Look hi, so today I'm joined with Neil Patel and today's video is about personal branding. So Neil, we'll get straight into it. Do you need a personal brand in today's world in your opinion? Neil Patel: No, corporate brands make way more money. Personal branding does help you get raises and promotions and jobs or make money as an influencer or getting speaking gigs. I'm not saying there's no value in personal branding. I think it's great, but personal branding doesn't mean or guarantee success. You know, if you ask most people who Satya was, the CEO of Microsoft before he was a CEO of Microsoft, most people had no clue who he was, or same with the Google CEO. You know, now they have a personal brand because they're on TV all day long and they're in press outlets and events, but you just need to be really good at what you're doing. I think that's more important than personal branding with regards to yourself. James Dooley: Obviously in the SEO community and the digital marketing community as well, you've got an amazing personal brand. Probably the biggest personal brand there is in the world. Would you do... do you ever regret that and wish that you'd spent more time on a corporate, like you're saying, that they... no, it's not the most important building a corporate man. Do you wish you'd spent more time on building actual business brands than your own personal brand? Neil Patel: Yes, it would have made me way more money. You look at any person, how valuable is a Tony Robbins or you know LeBron James or Christian Ronaldo? They're valuable, they make a killing. They probably all have private jets and nice homes, but you know what's more valuable than that? Owning Cisco or Microsoft or Nvidia or any of these large corporations. James Dooley: Yeah, he's not. Is that you think because people then start in... if you go and get yourself a massive client, do they want Neil Patel to be on the call? Do they want Neil Patel to be at the meeting? Is it like... Neil Patel: No, that's not an issue, but if you also think about massive clients, massive clients don't care for Neil Patel. Massive clients care for who's going to be on my account and going to be producing the results. You know, it's very black and white. It has nothing to do with me. They really don't care. They only care about ROI and numbers, and Neil Patel's not on your account every day and giving you, talking to you, you know, and sitting in your office for eight hours a day. They care about the people who are actually in their offices or you know, working on their accounts virtually and getting stuff done. James Dooley: So with regards to the benefits then of a personal brand, how has that impacted your business ventures do you think? It's opened up doors with regards to investments, staff coming wanting to work for you. Like what do you think are the benefits then of the personal branding business? Neil Patel: The biggest is it drives quite a bit of revenue. Not the most in the world, but it drives a decent amount of revenue over time. That is the biggest benefit. Um, two, it opens up a lot of doors, uh, and it helps you get started. So look at personal branding as something that can help start, help you kickstart your company, help you open up doors, maybe help you raise money, but it doesn't help you really grow into a big business. You need the fundamentals, systems, processes. You need good operations team, good sales teams, good marketing team, good product team, right? It just helps kickstart. Think of it as putting fuel to the fire, and that's what it's great at, but it's not great at helping you build that multi-billion dollar company. And you can say, you know, look at Rihanna or Kim Kardashian. They got multi-billion dollar companies, yeah, but there's way more to it than their personal brand, right? There's so many celebrities that have tried to do companies and most of them are not multi-billion dollar companies, and because there's more to building a big business than a personal brand. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then a bit of an SEO question with regards to branded search volume, right? So I've seen quite a few times on Instagram and on Facebook and I've seen people holding banners up, good-looking girls, that says "who is Neil Patel". Is that it? It's some of your team that's done that to try and build for so people start to search for "who is Neil Patel"? So do you think that like the benefits of that with Google and the algorithms and seeing that branded search, help you within the SEO, the old kind of arm of personal branding as well? Neil Patel: It did. And that experiment, I don't know how old it was, but maybe seven or eight years ago if I had to guess, the one that went the most viral was there was this dude and he was like buff, like really jacked, like veins coming out everywhere, and on his pecs, like his chest, he put my name, Neil Patel, and he could make one pec go up and down at a different time and then my name would bounce. And like that went, I want to say viral, but it did extremely well. And that caused a ton of people to search for my name. I forgot what his name was, but like really, like buff dude, like he probably could lift like 300 pounds in a bench press or something crazy. But what was the reasoning for that? Is it just to build up the personal brand search volume? James Dooley: It was, but here's the thing that I learned from it. At the end of the day, that's not going to give you big enterprise contracts. You got to know your audience. If I was trying to sell to SMBs or the average person walking down the street, I think it's a great tactic. If you're trying to sell to large corporations, it doesn't help one bit. Neil Patel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what do you... is there any other techniques or tactics that you do? Any, like, recently with regards to paid ads to trigger branded searches or anything like that? James Dooley: What we focus really on when it comes to branded search and building a brand, we just believe in putting out a ton of good information that's targeted towards our ideal customer. You're not going to go viral on it, but you're building your brand with your right audience, which means eventually it should help with revenue. Neil Patel: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, we ran quite a lot of experiments on brand, um, because it just seemed to be all the time. Obviously, correlation doesn't always mean causation, but the bigger brands always seem to keep winning within Google. So every time we run on some of our bigger brands, every time we run Facebook ads or Instagram ads and we run Twitter ads, our search volume would go up. And our search volume went up, our rankings would go up, as a direct, like an indirect ranking factor as well. And um, obviously the engagement and stuff like that. So it is something that we've never done it where we've put a board up saying "who is James Dooley" or "who is whatever our brand is", but we have seen an indirect kind of ranking factor from more branded search, more engagement on, holistically on social media, as play a massive part. James Dooley: Yeah. What about a book? There's quite a lot of people that talk about publishing a book. Um, what's your thoughts on getting a book written? Do you think it's good for people that are wanting to build out a personal brand and get a knowledge panel and stuff like that? Neil Patel: Yeah, so I co-authored a book years ago. We hit the New York Times list, I think two or three weeks in a row, and it didn't do much for me. And it was a few lessons I learned. One, if you're going to write a book, write a book on your own. Don't have co-authors, um, because it helps more with branding when you write it on your own. Two, my book was too generic. It wasn't around marketing. So it can help grow your brand, but not with the right audience. So write a book around your vertical or your expertise, even if that means you're not going to sell as many copies. And three, writing a book is great if your goal is like speaking circuit. It's not that great to necessarily drum up tons of business. You know, like if you look at Eric Ries, you know, great entrepreneur, wrote the book Startup, um, and does a ton with Lean Startup stuff. He does a great job. He knows it better than almost anyone else, but you look at like the big guys like Accenture and Deloitte, they probably generate more revenue from, you know, Lean Startup consulting than he does. And I don't mean that in a bad way. You look at me. I talk about marketing and create all this content. WPP, Denu, Omnicom, Publicis, they all generate way more revenue than me, right? So it's a like, yeah, you can do this stuff. It's not bad. It can get you a start, but it doesn't guarantee success. I think it's great for speaking if you're looking to make a career out of that. James Dooley: Yeah. If you was forced into writing a book now, so you had to write a book, you was forced into doing it, what would it be about? And would you... when you, if you said digital marketing, would you narrow down in one element of digital marketing or what would the book be about? Neil Patel: Uh, if I would write one right now it would be on digital marketing for sure or personal branding, um, it would be on one of those two, and it's just giving people tidbits of knowledge on what works. Um, the reason I don't really write too many books or continue wanting to do so around marketing is it changes too fast. So it works today won't work tomorrow, and then you got to keep updating, and it's it's a pain. James Dooley: Yeah. And then what about any mistakes? Have you done any mistakes over the years with regards to your personal brand that you wish you hadn't done? Neil Patel: Not really. There's learnings of course, but if I had to pick one big mistake, it was optimizing for more people to know me versus my ideal customer to know me. James Dooley: Yeah, so not chasing the vanity metrics, but more chasing exactly who your target demographic is? Neil Patel: Correct. James Dooley: Look, I've built a personal brand. My brand is really small compared to someone like Gary Vee. Gary V's done an amazing job. I think he's one of the best people at personal branding. And although he's really good at that, I actually think he's better at spotting trends in business than even personal branding. I think people underestimate uh his skill level, right? Maybe some people don't, but he's not really a personal brand or motivational speaker. There's way more to him underneath the surface. His personal brand, I don't think, drives much revenue for Vayner Media. The business side of him and the operations and the networking, you know, he's figured out how to drive revenue and grow that business. But a personal brand only gets you so far. You look at Kylie Cosmetics. Kylie generally grew the business so far, right? It's no L'Oreal. It's no Estée Lauder. Am I saying she did a bad job? No, you know, overall she got a good exit. Good for her. Amazing job. But it's hard to build one of those big companies and personal brands, you know? Personal branding isn't enough to build something gigantic. Neil Patel: Yeah. James Dooley: And then if someone wanted to be the next Neil Patel in digital marketing, right, but that you're only allowed to use two platforms, so LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, could it... could be a website. What two platforms would you choose? Neil Patel: LinkedIn and YouTube. James Dooley: LinkedIn and YouTube. You want to have a website, you do, just do it via LinkedIn and YouTube? Neil Patel: I would have a website of course, but I assumed you meant two platforms, like social platforms. So yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, so... James Dooley: What about... alright, I'll allow you to name three, not a website included then. What would be the third? Neil Patel: By far the highest... I'll just give you two. LinkedIn and other than a website, LinkedIn and YouTube. LinkedIn and YouTube. I'm telling you, it has the biggest impact for anyone in digital marketing. You may not get the most views, but you'll get more customers. James Dooley: Yeah. So everyone, I hope you like the video with Neil Patel on personal branding. There's plenty more to come. Thank you very much, Neil. Neil Patel: Thank you.