Jim Cathcart said, “Become the person who would attract the results you seek.” And Og Mandino said, “Always do your best — what you plant now, you will harvest later.”
My guest today is Rory Vaden, a good friend of mine who is also a New York Times bestselling author and Co-Founder of Brand Builders Group, which is one of the leading personal brand strategy firms that focuses on helping people become the type of person that everyone wants to do business with. This is our final episode in the series we’ve been putting out about how to build a side hustle.
Make sure to check out our three previous episodes, Episode One on “How to build a personal brand,” Episode Two on “How to multiply your time and income,” and Episode Three on “How to beat procrastination and rewire your brain for success.”
Today, we’re talking about how to monetize your side hustle and eventually go all-in on your dream. We discuss the biggest mistakes you’re making on social media when it comes to the process for monetizing your personal brand, how to generate leads and get over the fear of selling, what most people get wrong about sales and marketing, and so much more.
If you enjoy what Rory has to say and are looking to take your personal brand to the next level, make sure to go to lewishowes.com/brandcall for a free brand strategy call with his team.
Who Is Rory Vaden?
Rory Vaden is a Co-Founder of Brand Builders Group, the world’s leader in the study of Reputation Strategy. Their mission is to help every person identify their voice, tell their story, and share their unique message. Working with celebrities such as Kevin Harrington (Shark Tank) and yours truly all the way to brand new aspiring influencers and entrepreneurs, Brand Builders Group is one of the only true personal brand strategy firms in existence. Co-founded with Rory’s wife AJ Vaden, Brand Builders Group helps people become the type of person that everyone wants to do business with.
In addition, Rory is a New York Times bestselling author! Rory’s first book, Take the Stairs, is a #1 Wall Street Journal, #1 USA Today, #1 Amazon, and #2 New York Times bestseller that has been translated into 11 languages. Rory writes and speaks about how the key to building a rock-solid reputation is to do the right thing even when you don’t feel like doing it. His powerful and emotional message makes him the perfect choice to keynote your next meeting. His programs are regularly tailored for leadership, sales, customer service, productivity, and teams.
Not only is Rory a fantastic and powerful writer, but he’s also an influential and talented speaker. Every year, more than 25,000 contestants from 90 different countries compete for a chance to participate in the World Championship of Public Speaking competition. Rory made it there twice and became the World Champion First Runner-Up. Additionally, he has earned the highest ranking designation from the National Speakers Association as a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), and his TEDx talk on “How to Multiply Time” has been viewed over 3 million times. Rory is rare in that he can deliver inspiration, humor, and fresh insights that you and your audience can’t get anywhere else.
So let’s jump right in!
Serve First
We’re always at our best when we’re serving others, and one of the magical powers of service is that it releases our insecurity. As we’re trying to grow our business, it’s the chicken and the egg scenario — do I build an audience to get leads, or focus on leads to build an audience? Answer: you get the leads by being in service first. Rory eloquently explains why most people struggle with selling.
“The biggest problem people have in selling is that they’re self-centered. The reason we don’t sell more is we’re focused on ‘how do I make money? How do I convince people?’ We approach it wrong, and I would say that sales has been taught wrong, done wrong, promoted wrong. … You only feel fear when you’re thinking about yourself. We say ‘there is no fear when the mission to serve is clear [and] you’re focused on helping someone else.” – Rory Vaden
In today’s digital world, that means constantly focusing on providing value, value, value. Value in your content is either educational, encouraging, or entertaining and typically involves a mix of all three. Teach everything you know for free one bite at a time, but in all random order.
“We’ve said this before: ‘People don’t pay for information, they pay for organization and applications.’” – Rory Vaden
We’ve spoken about this in previous episodes — it’s important to understand what value you’re offering and then you start focusing on how to serve people without getting caught in the trap of thinking your value comes from the size of your audience.
Once you’ve started by building the correct foundation and pushing out value on social media, the next step is building your audience.
How To Build An Audience
The power that social media gives us is not just that we can reach millions of people but that it’s a fantastic mechanism to push a button and deliver value. We don’t suddenly have millions of followers without starting with providing value first.
“If nobody is watching you record and teach value, you deliver it [anyway,] and people will engage with that. We have a process about converting comments into customers, [and] it starts with the mind. If self-centeredness is the problem, service-centeredness is the solution.” – Rory Vaden
Once we get our mind right and focus on value, we start pumping out value using the content diamond spoken about in Episode One on “How to build a personal brand.” However, we can easily get discouraged by the fact we only have six views when someone like Jay Shetty has six billion!
“Then what we do [is say], ‘I don’t have time to deal with comments. Someone sends you a [direct message] and you’re saying, ‘I don’t have time to deal with these’ and you’re missing it. Comments and [direct messages] are where the sale happens on social media. When somebody leaves a comment, they’re saying, ‘Hey, I’m interested — I like you.’” – Rory Vaden
Think of comments and direct messages this way — instead of you going door-to-door trying to find a sale, they’re coming to your door and knocking, and if you don’t open it, you’re losing a sale.
Rory shares his belief about people’s real motives behind wanting to build an audience even when they say they want to impact lives.
“What [annoys] me is people [say], ‘I want to impact lives … so let’s put a video out there.’ [People say], ‘We don’t have any followers.’ Well, I don’t care, there’s no barrier and it’s easier than it’s ever been in history to impact lives. … The truth is, we want to have millions of followers, and we want to feel important — we want other people to respect us.” – Rory Vaden
Impacting lives starts by impacting just one. The focus tends to be on how many people we impact versus the quality of the impact we can make in another person’s life. This is why Rory consistently speaks about being service-centered instead of self-centered.
Now it’s time to learn the formula for when someone comments on a post and how to move the conversation from comments into direct messages.
