Building a Personal Brand: No Followers, No Problem

We unpack why you don’t need followers to build a personal brand, and why starting at zero can be the most strategic move you make. We share the content choices, boundaries, and mindset shifts that turn visibility into trust, leads, and real influence in an AI-first algorithm era.

If you’re an introvert, creative, strategist, or business owner who wants more opportunities from their social media, this one’s for you.

This episode was proudly sponsored by PocketSmith.
Get 50% off your first two months of PocketSmith’s Foundation plan here. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Why you can build a personal brand with no followers in 2026 
•  Why clear positioning matters more than follower count for personal brand growth 
•  How to use top of funnel content to grow
•  Why AI-first algorithms favour clear, repetitive content
•  How choosing 3 to 5 personal brand topics builds authority faster 
•  Why your first 100 posts are for positioning, not growth
•  How to create a personal brand that drives trust, visibility, and inbound leads
•  Why personal brand growth comes from clarity, consistency, and memorability, not vanity metrics

Hosted by Cherie Clonan [@cherie_thedigitalpicnic] and co-hosted and produced by Steph Clifford [@stephssocials] 

Follow us on Instagram @theclimbpod_

Check out our agency @thedigitalpicnic > we teach digital marketing, and we can manage yours, too. 

Transcript

PocketSmith Sponsor Message

Cherie 0:00

Every Sunday, my husband and I sit down for a money chat. I know that's not sexy, but it's been wildly useful.

Steph 0:05

No, I actually love that because I feel like I'm at the age where I'm like, okay, I need to stop guessing where my money's going.

Cherie 0:11

Yes, and that's exactly where Pocket Smith helps. You can track what you spend and earn, categorize and label spending, set up budgets, and view your finances in a calendar and actually forecast your cash flow up to 60 years into the future. And for neurodivergent brains, that flexibility matters. Sometimes you don't need more willpower. You need a system that makes the information easier to see.

Steph 0:33

So whatever your goals like saving, paying things down, or just trying not to spend your whole salary on takeaway, PocketSmith allows you to easily track and measure your money and get to enjoy the process of building toward your financial goals.

Acknowledgement Of Country

Followers Aren’t The Starting Line

Cherie 0:46

If you'd like to manage your money like a pro, PocketSmith has a special deal for the Climb listeners. Get 50% off your first two months of PocketSmith's foundation plan. To get your deal, go to PocketSmith.com/slash the Dash Climb Dash Podcast. See our show notes for more details. We're recording this episode on the beautiful, unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We want to express our gratitude for being able to create this podcast on this land, and we pay our respects to their enduring culture and connection to country. We recognize that sovereignty was never ceded, always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Welcome to the Climb, a podcast about the messy, brilliant, relentless journey of building something meaningful. As an introvert who believes in adding value, not noise, every 40-minute conversation is built to respect your time, but also actually teach you something useful.

Steph 1:42

Cherie, today we're talking all about personal brand and how you don't need followers to start a personal brand. You just need to actually start it, which is often the hardest part, but we'll get to that.

Cherie 1:53

We will.

Steph 1:53

So do you actually need a following to build a personal brand in 2026?

Cherie 1:58

No.

Steph 1:59

And we can podcast it. Thanks, everyone.

Privacy Boundaries After A Viral Find

Cherie 2:04

No, you genuinely don't. But I've even got a story that could probably back this up. And I believe you have something interesting in the space as well. But for me personally, um, let's take it back uh honestly a few years now. My son, he's starting high school, it's year seven, he's about two weeks in. And then one day he came home and he shared that some way, somehow, and kids are uh freaking amazing these days, honestly. But they'd traced down my personal brand, but they'd gone so so deep, like so deep, they managed to find a photo of me in Queensland when I lived there as a 17-year-old in a bikini.

Steph 2:45

Oh no.

Cherie 2:46

Yeah. Oh, like I was just on a Gold Coast beach, like so swimwear necessary. Yeah. And it was so humiliating because it got sent through the class chat uh through through the whole cohort, I believe, year seven. Uh, and Max was really embarrassed because he's such a private little dude. I really hated that for him. And when he came home, I'm gonna say I've always prided myself on non-reactivity, but sometimes I can get reactive where it's needed. I looked at his face, I know him so well, he is my own child, you know, and I also relate to him so much as an introvert as well. So I just really deeply knew how he was feeling. Um, he didn't want to have to sort of, I guess, almost defend. I say it's an inverted comments, but he's mum. And so he just said, I just feel so uncomfortable with this. And he only needed to say that one sentence, and then it was one of my favorite moments because I I think I built psychological safety with him in this moment. Like I try all the time, but this was just another moment where that was being built. But we just sat down together and I said, I hey Bub, I'm gonna delete this right now. Let's do it right now. I said, I don't need this account. I can, I'm a strategist, I'll just use the main account and I'm gonna just hit pause on a personal brand for a red hot minute there. Outside of, I did stay active on LinkedIn, but I'm pretty sure the year sevens weren't active on that platform, you know. So I deleted it. I looked at his face and I knew immediately that I'd made the right call for my at the time 11 slash 12-year-old boy, and that was it. Like, personal brand closed. Uh, it cost the business a lot of money, and I didn't care. Uh, so that was closed, and I just hit pause on personal brand on that platform uh for a few years, and then he grew up, he changed even schools, you know, got to a school that was just better for him anyway. And I just thought I can restart a personal brand now. Like I just knew it was right, and I knew now what new boundaries would look like, and there's gonna be no bikini photos of your gal on the Gold Coast in uh when she was 17, right? So yeah, I just I feel good about where I am, but I can wholeheartedly say within less than three months, I had far surpassed followers that I had on my original account because I am a different person now, and I just I think I've just become even more strategic and so much more aware of what my purpose is when it comes to personal brand. And so it only took like some really big pieces of content to far surpass the followers. And these days, honestly, all of that vanity talk uh aside, followers don't matter as much as other stuff does, which I'm gonna talk about on this episode. But that's my story, Steph. But you've got like an interesting pivot story with a personal brand for you. So do you want to share your story?

Resetting An Audience On Purpose

Steph 5:33

Please. I um I used to have my own business. It's called Steph Clifford Films, and that was my Instagram account. So it was definitely a business account, it wasn't a personal account. I think maybe I jumped on stories a couple of times, but yeah, it was very much more just like sharing work.

Cherie 5:50

Yep.

Steph 5:50

And when I started working at TDP and in the lead up to this podcast going live, I really in particular was like, okay, I think now is the time that I could start my own personal brand. Actually, I feel like I have something to say and something to add to the conversation because I'd felt like up until this point, I didn't know what that thing was for me. But I was like, yeah, no, this podcast, like now's the time. Like I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this. And so I had my Stack Clifford Films account there, and I was like, I'm gonna pivot this to be my personal brand. So if you go there now, you can swipe down, you can go and see those wedding video videos and stuff. But the thing that I didn't love about it was that the audience was going to be so different to hopefully, you know, that future audience that I'm creating. And um, a lot of people had followed me for yeah, my business side of it. And they're probably gonna get a bit of a whiplash when I start posting podcast clips, you know, X amount of years later. And so yeah, I went through everyone who followed me and I made them unfollow my account.

Cherie 6:57

Yeah.

Steph 6:58

Literally every single person I knew, it didn't matter how close you were to me.

Cherie 7:01

Like such a cleanse clicking those three dots and just saying remove follower. Yeah. I love doing that.

Steph 7:07

Yeah.

Cherie 7:07

Yep.

Steph 7:08

So every single person that I knew them, I removed them. And it was like not a personal thing at all. It was honestly just like I felt it freeing for me, and I, you know, maybe it's freeing for them too, of like, you don't need to follow my, you know, what's going on with my work and my personal brand. Like, we really don't need to. It's yes, a lot of the content isn't for those people, you know, it's a completely different audience. And then started posting new content, and it's like, hey, you can follow me now if you want to. You can opt back in. I just felt like, of course, you could keep those followers there as the vanity metric, but really they're not the audience that I'm going for. They they don't need to be a part of the journey. And if they want to be, then that's amazing. And I and I love that I've had a lot of them since like come back and follow and support. But starting fresh is actually a really positive thing. And you know, I feel like we've experienced this at TDP as well. It's like when you fall into the incorrect audiences, it can actually have a much bigger negative impact than positive. So yeah, don't be worried if you're starting at zero followers. Like that's awesome. I remember when you started your like our personal brancherie. I I said to you, I'm like, I'm so excited to start like watch an account from zero.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

Yep.

Steph 8:25

Because you rarely get to do that. Like even now with the podcast, it's like I'm excited to see what we get to and like how we grow. So be excited by zero followers. Like, that's a really fun time.

Cherie 8:36

I agree. There's so much power in starting again as well. And and honestly, that's the really incredible thing about personal brand is when you nail this and you lock in and lock down on it, you can have growth far beyond anything you probably experience with a business brand. So that's what we're gonna unpack on today's episode. And I'm really excited.

Steph 8:58

Amazing.

Cherie 8:58

Yeah.

Steph 8:59

So what do people get wrong about starting from zero?

Cherie 9:03

I think the biggest thing is I almost I twitch over this one, Steph. But it's like watching folks honestly just take and wait too long to actually start, just get started. Um, I know that's uh sounding so generic at this point, but I just watch too many, I would say in our industry, creative strategists. So therefore they fall into what I consider to be like the tortured artist demographic. Perfectionism just wins every time, and so they just don't actually get started. They also overpolish. And to begin with, that's not what works with content in this era at the moment. And I'm gonna say for the foreseeable future, ugly content is definitely where it's at. So that overpolish stuff, they it just takes so much more time and energy, and then it just actually falls flat online, which destroys, you know, your own personal feelings of like momentum and so on. The other thing that I notice folks getting wrong is they start posting like they already have an audience. And that's a one of the biggest mistakes that folks make is it's firstly the cadence, uh the posting frequency is just too much. You are posting at a level of frequency as if you have a really established audience. So I say in the early days, especially of personal brand, start with less but do more with it. And normally when I teach funnel-based content marketing strategies, people will hear me harp on and on about nailing top of funnel and middle of funnel and bottom. Why would you bother waste your time with bottom of funnel content when you've got nobody there? Um, so I say if you were just starting out, probably even scrap the middle of funnel and just go all in on top of funnel content, which is high attention, high awareness. And I would be blasting that and that only. And when I say blast, I mean like maybe even just once a week, you know, until you feel like you've got something more established, and then you can start to flesh out a proper strategy with top of funnel content being high attention and awareness, middle of funnel being consideration, and then bottom of funnel being conversion.

Steph 11:02

And in that top of funnel space, it's like what value can you add? And you might think, well, I don't have any followers, so I don't know what value I can add. It's like, yes, you have so much value you can add. Is it education? Is it um entertainment? Are you making people laugh? Like, what what is the thing that you are giving value and agreed? You'll you'll see there's an audience out there for whatever you're interested in talking about.

Cherie 11:24

And you've seen it, Steph. Like you said you were excited when I restarted my post-bikini era account, and you saw it go from literally zero. I actually don't know what the follow account is at the moment. I don't care. Like, I'm I'm really deliberate on that. You saw it go from absolutely nothing to just bang, everything. And that was through really effective top of funnel content that was just so true to who I am as a person, and it built the right audience from for me right from the beginning. So you can go from zero followers to an entirely different situation for yourself with really effective type of funnel content to begin with.

Purpose And Owning A Clear Lane

Steph 12:02

Absolutely. Can you take us back to a time where you were posting and you weren't getting a lot of traction?

Cherie 12:08

Yeah. Okay, so what that phase looked like for me was having to get really clear on what my purpose is and was at the time. And it'll always keep evolving, I guess. But I've always been clear on that because I think if you lock in on that, it should be the thing that you can't stop talking about no matter how hard you try. Um, so for me, I'm really clear on that. I know what my my stuff is, you know, um, and anyone who hangs around me for five seconds would be pretty clear on that as well. Also, I would say, to be really honest, over time I realized I can actually own a lane for myself. And I landed on something that I feel really proud about, which is that I hadn't realized and I think I took it for granted. Um, and it was only when someone said it back to me in a particular strategy meeting that I was in that I'd paid to be and I wanted to speak to someone else outside of my like job, like my my job here, but they're also a marketing strategist. I paid for their time and they said this thing that just changed it everything for me, which was unoffendability is actually your leadership flex. And I was like, Yes, it actually is. Like I joke about Killian Murphy, but I'm not joking. Like I am unoffendable, and even when I do take offense, I know what tools to implement to get to a place of like pretty good and rapid recovery. What that phase also looks like for me was there's you just have to own it, there's a zero audience phase. You just gotta sit in the discomfort of it all. It's in that early posting days era, you know, so there's really low or no engagement. There's also as a result, no validation. That's the hardest part for some people building personal brand because they don't get that immediate hit of, you know, validation. You've got to be good with that. And I am.

Steph 13:54

It's really easy in that place to forget why you're doing it.

Cherie 13:57

Yeah.

Steph 13:58

Because you're getting none of the payoff. And people might be listening to this going, well, I don't even want to start a personal brand. But it's like, okay, well, maybe you don't, maybe you don't want to do that as a primary goal, but like, do you want opportunities to come your way? Yeah. Do you want like maybe career opportunities or speaking or some sort of money or you know, like all these different things that come from having a personal brand? And I think uh often people maybe who don't have personal brands would assume that people create them because they have an ego or they love themselves or they want to like put their face and their voice out there, and often that's not the case at all. It's actually about the other goals that they're chasing, which are in line with their lifestyle or family or career that they're going for. And yeah, when you're posting and you're getting one like and it's from your mum, it's pretty harsh.

Cherie 14:45

Like so, so humbling. Like my dad has an Instagram account with his full name, but he's merged all the letters. So it's actually car Shanter.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yeah.

Cherie 14:56

And honestly, in the early days, it was nothing but car shanta. And I was just like humbling, but you know, um, I'm okay with this. Yeah. And yeah, I just I wasn't building for the audience, I was building for the future one, you know. So yeah, there's a sense like you've got it. That's your quiet confidence era, I would say. So I loved that quiet confidence got me through that zero audience phase pretty well.

Steph 15:20

And what point after that did you realize this is actually working? I'm building some traction here.

Measuring Reach Instead Of Followers

Cherie 15:25

Yeah, this is an easy one and a short one, but it's actually that I don't know my follow account because I don't care. I do know, however, my average reach per month on this particular account. I know my average reach on LinkedIn, not so much TikTok because I'm yeah gal is busy, but on those two platforms where I'm making a concentrated effort, I know that on Instagram I'm averaging between four to six million um impressions per month. And on LinkedIn, I'm averaging about one million. Yeah, about one mil um in terms of reach per month on that platform. When I'm doing consistent content on both of those platforms, that's all that matters. So follower counts are pretty redundant in this era, but the impact that you make uh with what you're doing is what matters now. So I think that's my I've made it moment that I can just say, you know, straight away what I what I know I'm reaching per month and the impact, you know, that I'm making. And I feel really proud of that because we recently had our comeback conference and there was someone who stood up there and said, like, it's not about being an influencer, it's about being a person of influence, you know. And I think I wear that badge with pride. Like I get DMs every week that articulate return on intimacy for me, where just people feel genuinely compelled to let me know when they've been diagnosed as neurodivergent. That is the proudest thing. That's the proudest message I think I'd probably receive. But I get about 10 of them per week, you know. I know.

Positioning Through Repetition That Works

Steph 16:54

I think as well, people will probably be able to recognize it in themselves when you're scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, how many times you might see a person's face and you're not following them. Like, yes, I have that constantly on TikTok where I'm seeing people and I'm like, oh yeah, I probably watch these this person, you know, a couple times a week. And then like three months down the line, I look and I'm like, I'm not even following them. I know. Like, I can't, I actually get mad at myself when I like can't believe I haven't like given the recognition. But it it's more about going to show that it's a different social landscape now. So different. And it's just about algorithms and like how you appear to people. And so, yeah, really do drop the worry about follow account because just visibility. Yeah, and even at the time of recording right now, I saw yesterday, I think it was Fate the Label. A girl had posted on TikTok, I believe, like a haul, and Britney Saunders must have commented on it and said, Oh, you should model. And she, you know, she kind of said, Oh, thanks so much. And she said, No, really. And now she's modeling for Fate the Label. No way. And she had, I can't remember the amount of followers, but it was like less than a thousand or two thousand. And she literally spoke to this topic on how it's like, just post the damn thing, like you never know what can happen. That is absolutely it. All right, so if we're saying that the followers don't matter, yep, what does matter?

Cherie 18:16

Okay. It's clear positioning. Got to get really clear on your position. You've got to get so comfortable with repetition, you know. So um, we're in an AI-first algorithm era that needs you to get repetitive so it can really clearly understand what your lane is, what your expertise, what your authority is, so that they can be more likely to recommend you to folks who aren't even following them, like that scenario that you just mentioned there. Got to say the same thing a lot, but better each time. That will only come with repetition. And believe it or not, you don't need more content, you just need clearer content. So I guess I would ask you now, what is one thing you think you could say once a week for 12 months without running out of examples? That's my little, I could talk about one thing until the cows come home. That's something you should probably land on for your personal brand. Your answer becomes a recurring personal brand lane. And so for that reason, pick three to five things that you want to be known for. Make those your content topics that you speak to really consistently. Get really clear on your values and how you can show that you embody those values, and then get clear on your beliefs as well. So you want to get clear on your brand stories, picking again three to five uh stories where you can start sharing to those one to two times per week. And then I would say final thing is diversifying the way that you share that. So it might be video format, carousel, LinkedIn, repurposed across two, and so on and so on. So you've really got to mix up the format. And so the final thing I sort of ask a lot of people is well, I would ask you the question: what would your audience know and feel about you if you stopped hiding behind the business brand? So just after you've listened to this podcast episode, I want you to just pen and paper if you want, or digital, however you roll, write on one left side no, and then on the right side feel, and just write all the things that people would know about you if you stop hiding behind brand. And then on the right side, write the same, but with what they would feel about you if you stopped hiding behind your personal brand. And I'm not saying all of this, and we're not even leaning into this episode, Steph, to tell everyone to launch the personal brand. This stuff can honestly trickle into a brand. Um, personal brand can exist within a brand. That's how it should start, to be honest. And if you think it's got legs, then and only then would I probably launch into full-scale, you know, personal brand. But yeah, that's as easy as um, you know, getting started with this know and feel, three to five topics, the thing that you could say every week for 12 months without running out of, you know, ideas. That's a really great place to start.

Early Content That Stops The Scroll

Steph 20:59

Okay, so what kind of content works best in the early days?

Cherie 21:03

Yeah, so I mentioned a little bit before, but um definitely top of funnel. It's probably the only thing I would start with if you are in the really early days of a fully fledged personal brand like build out, high awareness content, not attention seeking. Please, anyone who's listening to this, don't think, like you said before, doesn't mean you have to be the biggest or loudest personality, but I'm just talking about anything that seriously stops the scroll and sort of really hooks people in. From there, you might even want to think about a signature series for yourself. From there, I would sort of look at the top of funnel content that's performing really well for yourself. And I would log into LinkedIn, take the well performing piece of content and sharing that across via LinkedIn DMs, especially if you've got a premium um LinkedIn account to relevant journalists or folks within the media. And I just usually say, and I was taught to do this by Odette from Odette and Co., where I sort of say, Hey, this post has gone live. It's a story about. dot dot dot it's getting some real signals um and i thought maybe you want to run this story so it sort of you're presenting the uh opportunity to this journalist and it you I packaged it up as if like hey I'm I'm doing part of your role for you because they're always that's it just helping you out um you know they're always looking for stories so I want to help them find them with my top of funnel content and I've learned um as an introvert who usually wouldn't do anything like that until I got that permission that that was acceptable from Odette I've learned that that's where I clock the large major majority of my free media wins. Yeah.

A Simple Filter For Oversharing

Steph 22:36

All right can you answer a question that we get in the DMs quite a bit which is how do I avoid oversharing online? Oh my gosh Steph, we get this. What would you I think it's like no a lot. Yeah I think because people probably you know who are sending us that message are part of our community and probably have followed you for a while Sheree. Yep and I mean you tell me if I'm wrong here but they would probably think of you as potentially an oversharer.

Cherie 23:05

Oh but they wouldn't they do sorry I was being delicate there.

Steph 23:11

But actually like knowing you I know that there's more stories that you don't share than what you do.

Cherie 23:17

So much more that I don't share than I would yeah. So it's funny that um yeah they perceive it to be oversharing but yeah that's just your level of comfortability and of course other people's might be far less you know they might be a little bit more guarded than that and that's fine too but anyways back to the question no that's a really good I like that you've actually shared that I think a lot of people would think oh wow so she overshares online and like not really I actually share to connect um so that's a really big important differentiation piece for me. And as you would know there is so much more that I could share but just choose not to sometimes it would be because I'd feel like that was virtue signalling or other times it's like I'm in the messy middle of this there's no freaking way I'm gonna share this right now. And other times like I don't share my children online anymore. I don't name their names because I don't want them to be like searchable. There's just so much that I don't share my husband really would prefer never to be shared online unless he's honestly given verbal permission to be shared. So I'm really careful and respectful of that. I I love his desire for privacy. It's one of the most attractive things about him. He's the most offline dude I think I've ever met in my life and this is some of the questions that I ask myself before I go to share something that might be maybe more in that vulnerability camp. I ask myself am I still in the emotional center of this have I actually made sense of what happened can I name the lesson clearly does this help the audience or just relieve me that's the biggest one.

Steph 24:54

That's a good one.

Cherie 24:55

Yep. What is the boundary and what stays private and then if anything is not ticked off like tick of approval type stuff with that it's not ready to be shared online and I think if I were to share say especially the one around does this help the audience or is it just relieving me that's that in my mind I feel really selfish if I you know am just sharing to relieve myself that's shit. That's just emotionally dumping on a big audience that we have like I think we're in our little world where we feel big you know and so they're the questions that I ask to make sure that I feel good about the thing that I'm sharing online. So it runs through a filter.

Steph 25:37

I love that one as well does this help the audience or just relieve me because when we are talking about providing value to our audience like if is what I'm sharing right now is there a lesson in there? Is there something that they're gonna get out of it? And if the question is no then you shouldn't share it because if you're not giving your audience value then like I don't know post it on your like personal personal page like to your private you know your aunties and your uncles and stuff like that you know yeah personal brand is different.

Cherie 26:06

Yeah I just want to add value not noise and also we've taken an online community through some pretty hard years so I'm not gonna just show up and share content that relieves me it's like oh COVID is hard like just sharing my unfiltered hardly figured out thoughts with literally no lessons attached to it. What's the freaking point? Just yeah literally emotionally dumping on a a community that we care about. So yeah they're the they're the filters for me. And as you know now from being BTS at TDP because of that not everything or even a lot these days gets through. Yeah.

Signals Your Brand Is Working

Steph 26:41

All right so we're starting our personal brand and we're not getting a lot of traction. But even when we do have low visibility or traffic on our page there are still signals that things are going well.

Trust Velocity And Sales Results

Cherie 26:53

So what are those signals that we can look out for yeah well I mean to begin with because of the way the AI first algorithms work now even in the early zero follower kind of days you're still going to be seen by quite a lot of non-followers especially if you're smart enough to load up a trial reel or something like that and it's like a top of funnel really good you know Instagram reel is as an example maybe that'll perform really well for you and sort of start to bring a few folk across and so on. It's certainly what we do with our clients I look for saves um because you're gonna clock a lot especially from non-followers they're probably not going to hit follow until they start to see you mentioned it before you needed a few touch points before you thought wait I don't follow this person and I should and it's just that touch points thing. It's a really typical journey for a lot of people so you're gonna clock saves. They might not follow but they're gonna hit save. They'll DM your content to their friends. They might start leaving commentary even if they're not following you. You'll start to pick up inbound leads and we notice this when we run our comeback conference I lose the ability to start servicing my personal brand content in the lead up to the conference and post because of how much work goes into our comeback conference every year. And so we've noticed that wow the personal brand is really like a bit of a big deal for TDP because it drives a lot and we've noticed there's a direct link to less leads before and after conference. And so on that like you will notice more trust velocity. So people start to build real trust with you and what you share. Again coming back to that example you gave where you're like wait this is the third piece of content I've seen from this person that I'm really starting to enjoy. I'm building some real trust here and I'm a bit surprised that I'm not even following them. I might hit that you know follow um finally for example and then I think the bigger one before you see the big numbers is to be really honest TDP like I'm in an agency mastermind with about 29 other agency owners in Melbourne. We are all genuinely friends. Like it's no one believes me when I say this but I can't tell you how important that mastermind has been for me I've got so much value from it and I remember on one particular session they put me and someone else in the hot seat and they I think this is their exact words so I'm not pumping my own tires up here but in the mastermind they said nobody else in this mastermind has a personal brand as strong as Cherice and um they said Cherie do you want to get in the hot seat but before you do we want you to come prepped with like Hubspot info like your CRM details we need to see everything. We want to test you against someone else who doesn't have a strong sort of personal brand online and we want to sort of showcase how much that impacts um sales and so they put me in a seat next to someone else in the mastermind. We got the same amount of leads in one particular month actually we didn't close as many like there was a difference in how many we closed is what I mean to say and then when we went through the numbers I closed every single sales call that came through to our agency minus two they closed about five um so I was something like four times as many as they had closed. Of the two that we didn't close it was because they were actually awful I didn't want to work with them. I couldn't probably say that on social media um but yeah so it was only two that didn't get through and it's because we didn't want to work with them. That was the moment that I realized there's so much ROI in personal brands and it's not just investment like the example I've given there but it's intimacy as well because what I've noticed Def now that I've put myself in the sales seat and I'm bloody loving it actually when I get into those calls I have something other agency owners don't seem to be able to draw from in terms of strength and that's just this really profound trust velocity. I just feel like I'm explaining significantly less and they already feel like they're knowers, they trust us and they just kind of want to get to like into it what can you do? What do you recommend? This is our budget how do you think this is best utilized that doesn't happen in other sales calls across other agencies and I know this from being in the mastermind. So how do you build trust with people who have never met you before never heard of you before what you want to build is memorability for the right reasons and none of the wrong ones I will say as you build a personal brand please like strap in you're going to be remembered for the wrong reasons as well you're gonna make some blunders online absolutely it's just part of being human you know and also we're not meant to win everyone over at this point in time I think TTV has 66,000 followers right I am not ever under the impression that I'm gonna have 66000 people completely agreeing with us. Absolutely not so you want to really clock memorability for as many of the right reasons as you possibly can and none of the wrong ones and so I try to embed psychological safety online for a brand new community not just for me but our clients as well and you know so if someone's never heard of you before you want to plant some belonging cues within your content and make people feel you know psychologically safe and like their nervous system feels good just even you know consuming your content. I would say for our impatient listeners, I've got some good news for you. Trust is speed based now online. You can build it with one freaking post. I'm not exaggerating here. Yeah so one post that really lands will do so much more for you than 10 super safe fucking boring beige neutral pieces of content. So honestly people aren't just assessing what you're saying now they're actually clocking how it feels to receive that content which I think is fascinating. Me too what are the biggest mistakes people are making when they're starting their personal brands okay this is easy they're overthinking yeah yep damn it yep they really are little tortured artists you know then they're inconsistent um so they'll just come in hot and then just fade out they try to go viral what a freaking waste of time they also try to be something that they're not this even applies to me sometimes I look at other creators online or especially other agency owners and they're just so cool and I just wish I was cool but I'm just not so I'm not gonna pretend to be like my best mate at school was a librarian. I'm never gonna try and be something that I'm not if they wanted to sign up to a really cool kid agency owner sorry everyone you found the wrong account like it's just it ain't me. They're so cool that they also do face to camera video content really well and kind of cool. That ain't me. My face to camera style um sometimes even this you might not know this actually Steph but sometimes I send video to you and I feel a little embarrassed about how autistic I am like I'm yep I'm deadpan like and my tone doesn't have a huge range and I feel a little self-conscious about that because I'm an autistic woman who's received 2000 pieces of negative feedback by age eight according to the latest statistics and I just thought I tried before and you wouldn't know this either I tried so hard for you to make the tone do different things and then I couldn't figure out what the fuck I was saying. Yeah you know I lost what I was even saying so I thought no no no I'm gonna come back to me. Yep it's a little deadpan uh my tone is more flat than others online but guess what that's also calm and regulated and that's who I am as a person. So I keep hearing feedback when I get off a keynote speaker stage where people are like I felt really calm when you began to talk you know and I was like all right well thanks for putting a nice probably reframe on deadpan.

Steph 34:45

It's funny because when you edit people you actually get to know other things that they do a lot but I think I'm probably just so used to editing you now that I I wouldn't think I wouldn't notice that at all. Okay you've been killioned. Yeah yeah yeah I notice phrases um that we both say now that I'm editing the podcast but I might tell you after this because otherwise oh my god I want to hear last no I want to hear now that's so interesting wait wait yes okay so do you think people wait too long to start their personal brand?

Cherie 35:16

Yeah start yesterday yeah honestly perfection is perfectionism is holding most people back a fear of judgment is a big one as well I would say personal brand is a really long game um and I've felt that at so many different points in TDP's lifetime and we've heard about it especially in episode one and two the strength of this personal brand got us out of some really tough shitty spots and I'm so grateful for that. So it is such a long game.

Steph 35:43

You have to genuinely choose not to care. And I remember one of the first posts that I posted and this isn't even that long ago and it showed how many shares there were and I knew that a couple were like you shree putting it on your story or something like that. Like a few of them I could clock where those shares were and then a few of them I'm like hmm they're probably in the DMs to someone like I had that thought in my head. Yeah right where it's just like wait where's that going and like I'm so used to looking at insights of posts and I'm like why why is that being shared and I I don't know where it is I can't see it. Absolutely and that little like voice in your head's like oh my God that's gone to someone's DMs probably and it's like well I can choose to stress about that and worry about that and think you know the worst. I can just choose to think it's a really great thing.

Cherie 36:33

Maybe they're just saying God she inspires me.

Steph 36:36

Yeah well you know even gaslight yourself a little bit to think of that even if maybe you don't fully believe that that's true. But it's just like there's no point worrying about it. No. Like you can't control it.

Cherie 36:47

Yeah worst case scenario it's really just 25 minutes of your time to reset the mindset.

Steph 36:52

Yeah. Speaking of mindset, what's one mindset shift that people would have to adopt before they even post okay well I think this one really helps me.

Cherie 37:04

As you're listening now everyone think about if you're a TikTok consumer when you log into TikTok where do you start? Is it in the FYP being the for you page or are you one of those weirdos who clicks following right?

Steph 37:20

Yeah I'm in for you.

Cherie 37:21

I know when I've accidentally clicked on and I'm like hang on something feels shit. I'm like seeing far too much stuff that I kind of know or like I just want diversity in all of the people that I all of that homogenous right and so most people are starting in the FYP and so that's the biggest mindset shift is that we are in a non-followers era. So you've got to say goodbye to 2024-ish bit of 2025 I would say where you thought you were designing content for everyone who already was following you for the most part. And every now and again when you had a bigger piece of content go beyond your followers list you'd be like I made it. Now it's the opposite when you click on the insights on pieces of content shared to Instagram and especially TikTok it's more non-followers than followers that are consuming that content now because of those AI first algorithms. And so I frustratingly see so many people still posting content as if it's 2024 and they're making this big mistake of assuming that people know who the flip they are, you know, and it's just not how it is anymore. So just assume that everything you're sharing is going to non-followers and so you have to sort of picture that they're seeing this content from someone they don't even know, don't recognize and probably need a few more touch points before they decide to follow you or not. And so I think about like when I first restarted that Instagram page as an example I felt really proud to share a piece of content about my dad actually and you would know it popped off. But even when it popped off it popped off in a way that you would never have had to have known who Cherie clonen from the digital picnic was to feel like you knew that person. I always think and I ask myself if this post that I'm about to share reached 10,000 people who've never heard of me tomorrow, would it represent me well? Would it help them and would it make them want more so with that shane post I realized really sadly actually that when that hit close to four million views collectively right there are a lot of people who had some real father wounds that kind of felt healed by that piece of content and I was like oh my lord I just wish I could give you shane cloned multiplied I would wish him on every kid you know I say that all the time and so I answered that question more than 10,000 people actually discovered me because of that piece of content and I felt really good about that representing me well. I feel like it helped them and it definitely made them want more. In fact many people asked if my dad was single I was like ew not the purpose of the content guys.

Steph 40:11

Not at all okay so what is the real goal of a personal brand if it's not the followers?

The First 100 Posts Are Positioning

Cherie 40:17

Yes this is a great question. So I think that your first 100 posts they're not for growth they're for positioning. So treat the first 100 that you share whether that's injecting more personal brand into your overall brand at the moment or maybe you're feeling really courageous after taking in this episode and you want to launch an official, you know, personal brand but you need to figure out that those first 100 pieces of content that you share are honestly not really for growth. They're for positioning and in this AI first algorithm era they're also for some really big evergreen wins later down the track in with regards to generative engine optimization related search.

Steph 41:00

So chat based search uh which is the future of how social is going to impact our businesses positively but to kick it off just start posting hey yeah yeah just start posting start yesterday yeah I would also suggest for people who maybe are business owners and they have a a brand page often they will say to us like I don't get the difference between what do I post on my business page and what do I post on my personal not to be like too you know egotistical but please go and have a look at Cherie's um personal brand in comparison to the digital picnic on Instagram and you should be able to see a really clear definition of like what we would post to TDP and what Cherie would post.

Cherie 41:43

It's very different. It's so different. I'm so clear on what I'm meant to be doing. I've got my three to five categories locked down for my personal brand and they wouldn't make sense on TDP's account anymore. In fact it would be a bit of a it'd be a bit of a whiplash experience for our team that'd be like sorry I thought we were working at a digital marketing agency.

Send Us Your Personal Brand

Steph 41:59

Exactly right so if you're yeah if you're thinking oh I already post on the um you know on the brand page what would I be posting that it's it's a very different um style so definitely go have a look there. Otherwise thank you so much for listening we want to see your personal brands so please DM them to us at the climb pod underscore because we want to follow along on the journey as well I mean you can watch us as we try and grow our Instagram presence there as well. So we're all doing it together. And if you want to support our podcast you can follow along and subscribe otherwise we will see you next week.

PocketSmith Deal Reminder

Cherie 42:34

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Steph 42:50

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Cherie 42:56

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Steph 43:18

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Cherie 43:31

If you'd like to manage your money like a pro, PocketSmith has a special deal for the Climb listeners. Get 50% off your first two months of PocketSmith's foundation plan. To get your deal go to pocketsmith.comslash the dash climb dash podcast. See our show notes for more details.