The only personal branding principle that matters

There's only one principle that matters for building a lucrative personal brand.

The more someone trusts you, the more they’re willing to buy.

That’s it. Trust accumulation is the long pole in the tent.

So the gazillion dollar question is…how can you accumulate trust faster, at scale?

It boils down to two things.

Number 1: How many minutes are people consuming your content? 

Very simply, you need someone to consume a certain number of “content minutes” to ascend up the trust ladder.

• A follow = 3-5 minutes

• A comment = 7-10 minutes

• A low-ticket purchase = 15-20 minutes

• A high-ticket purchase = 100+ minutes

Trust scales as a function of minutes consumed (as long as those minutes are sticky, per point #2).

These are the best ways to accrue content minutes faster:

• Prioritize longer formats (each of my YouTube videos, when watched in full, contain 20-30 content minutes)

• Prioritize multi-format (if I make content across multiple formats (short-form, long-form, email, etc.), I can stack more content minutes from the same person in a given day because their view share in split across platforms)

• Prioritize high volume (someone can only consume the amount of content minutes you put in front of them. It you make 3 short-forms per week only, that’s a max of 3 content minutes in that week. This is why Hormozi is posting 1,000x per month)

• Prioritize bingeability (try to turn a single view into five or ten by creating a series or building connective tissue between videos (without sacrificing the standalone value of the individual video))

Number 2: Is trust actually accruing to you during each of those minutes? (i.e., are they sticky?)

This is where the quantity vs quality debate takes hold.

Just producing midslop volume will not actually get trust to accrue. These are minutes, but not sticky minutes.

So how do you get trust to actually accrue and stick to you?

You need to share things in your content that are:

1. Nonobvious – If you tell them something they've already heard, that's obvious, and trust doesn't accrue. 

2. Tactically useful – If you tell them something they can't use, they might be interested or entertained, but trust doesn't accrue. 

If you watch a lot of my content, you will have heard me say these 2 words dozens of times.

Trust is sticky when you share nonobvious and tactically useful things.

If I tell you something obvious, you don’t trust me more than you did before.

If I tell you something nonobvious, but you can’t actually use it to improve your situation, you might trust me a little, but it’s not super helpful.

But if I tell you something nonobvious, and say it in a way that you can take it and actually use it to improve your situation, you will trust me and come back for more.

The game is as simple as this folks.

Here's a great exercise for coming up with more nonobvious (or contrarian) things…

Take your topic and ask yourself three questions:

• What do I believe to be true about this that 99% of people haven't heard?

• What would most people in my space disagree with?

• What's the thing I learned from actually doing this that nobody talks about?

The reason this content game is so hard — and keeps getting harder — is because there's less and less new stuff, fewer and fewer fresh nonobvious, tactically useful takes that exist to be shared.

And once you do come up with something, usually, it’s not actually that nonobvious.

The good news is, personal branding is no more complicated than this.

There's no one-size-fits-all content formula when it comes to personal branding.

Every niche can use different formats, different strategies, different editing, top of funnel, bottom of funnel…it doesn't matter. 

All that matters is that the person watches a lot of your content and trust accrues from it.

If you've watched/read my content for a while, the reason you trust me is because I say a lot of unique things you haven't heard before. And the only way I've been able to do that consistently is by spending every waking hour for years actually in the trenches doing this.

This is all I do, all day long.

So if some fake personal branding guru is selling you on a magic formula…don't buy it.

Save your money. It's more minutes and more trust. That's it.

Keep going 🫡

PS - If you want my help coming up with more nonobvious and tactically useful content ideas for your niche, so that you can improve your trust accumulation and scale your personal brand, you can work with me 1:1 here