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May 3, 2026
The Art of Expressing Yourself Honestly
The Art of Expressing Yourself Honestly
00:00
43:41
Transcript
0:00
How are you gonna go from a commodity to the king of your category? So category king is, is I would say, not to use Kenneth's IP, but it's the holy grail of owning a brand or an offer.
0:09
Whenever somebody thinks of a particular product or service, your name comes to mind. So if you think about inbound marketing, you think HubSpot. If you think about funnels, you think about Russell Brunson.
0:18
My name is Nabeel Aziz. I'm Sri Lankan living in Dubai. I'm actually also part Malaysian. Maybe like a quarter Malaysian, quarter Malay. Oh, that's good.
0:26
Because the-- We're Malay Muslims in our family in Sri Lanka 'cause the British, they brought over a lot of Malays as the police force to Sri Lanka. Mm-hmm. And so that's our background.
0:35
And I run a boutique email marketing agency called Dropkick Copy, and as I was telling Kenneth earlier, I'm in the middle of launching a trade school for the next generation of copywriters and marketers.
0:47
It's called Copy Skills, and basically I'm just blatantly copying Justin Brooks' [chuckles] name and business model.
0:52
So I've designed it to be like a low-ticket membership, but it's going to be-- the service is gonna be like almost like a high-ticket kind of mastermind.
0:59
And I also have a lifestyle brand for Muslim men that I just recently launched called muslimman.com. I bought that domain years ago for $5,000 and I finally figured out something to do with it.
1:08
And here you can see a few endorsements from people, and you might not even rec-recognize these names, but that's on purpose
1:16
because the people who recognize these names are my kind of people, and once they see these endorsements they're gonna know, "Hey, Nabeel is somebody that we wanna work with," right?
1:24
If it was Frank Kern, Russell Brunson, Dan Kennedy, that has some cachet in the marketing world, but it's generic. There's a lot of people out there with a Frank Kern endorsement or a Russell Brunson endorsement.
1:34
Or maybe not that many, but it's generic. And really the problem that we're trying to solve is the fact that we all sell commodities.
1:40
99.9% of us are selling commodities particularly in the internet marketing space, right?
1:45
And then the key here is how do we go from being a plain white Post-it like everybody here to be like a yellow Post-it or a red Post-it, okay?
1:52
Even though everybody's a Post-it, the one that's gonna stand out is the one that's red or yellow or green or whatever color that is because that's what your eyes, your brain is gonna go to.
2:01
There's a couple of people that I've applied these principles for, and we've been successful. This is a current client of mine. His name is Mike Mark. He's the founder of coachingsales.com. They're a sales consultancy.
2:12
After I started working with him and using these principles, we were able to double their revenue in 30 days and triple their OS in 30 days. And then after that, the business went on to 10X. I still work with him today.
2:20
They've scaled back a bit now, but this is the result that I'm most happy with. And here's Joel Erway. He's the person who invented the mini webinar and the power offer.
2:29
We only worked with him for nine months, but this was during the pandemic when the lockdowns were going on. And we were able to... Basically, he had his best year ever. He grew 50% year on year.
2:40
He's a solopreneur, right? He has his-- It's just him plus a bunch of contractors. He took home over half a million dollars in profit as a solopreneur, and we had four back-to-back record-breaking months.
2:49
And those are just the two case studies that I wanted to show you before we start the content of this presentation. Who's read this book? One in the chat if you've read this book.
2:58
22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout, Jack Trout. If you haven't, I highly recommend you read it because there's a number of principles in this book that apply.
3:08
Basically, once you understand this and internalize the principles in this book, y- your marketing becomes a lot easier because you understand exactly what you're trying to do.
3:15
And I won't go through the entire book, but there's four principles that are relevant to the presentation today. Uh, the first one is that law number one is that it's better to be first than it is to be better. Okay?
3:26
So if you're gonna launch first, it's better for you than if you launch second or third because first mover advantage is the thing, right? If you can't be first, okay...
3:33
Got these animations and they're a little bit finicky. So if you can't be first, the next best thing to do is make your own category.
3:39
Now, this is a lot harder to do than it sounds, one, because making a new category is just in and of itself extremely difficult because you have to educate the market, and two, if there's no category for what you're doing, it's probably an indication that nobody wants to buy it.
3:50
So the fact that there is competition in a particular market is actually a good thing because you know that there are buyers in the market and people are buying those products.
3:57
So if you can't be first in a category, make a new category. Now, we're gonna figure out a way to do a workaround for this, and I'll explain more during the presentation.
4:06
Law number three is that it's better to be first in the mind of your prospect than it is to be first in the marketplace. How many of you have heard of Leadpages?
4:14
Okay, so Leadpages builds-- It's a landing page builder, right? But how many of you actually have a Leadpages subscription? How many have a ClickFunnels subscription? Okay.
4:23
I would probably say that in the internet marketing space more people have a ClickFunnels subscription than they do Leadpages, right?
4:27
And that's because when you think about landing pages, funnels, things like that, your mind immediately goes to ClickFunnels.
4:32
So even though, if I'm not mistaken, Leadpages launched before ClickFunnels, ClickFunnels is first in the mind of the marketplace.
4:40
And then the final law that we wanna do is that marketing's really a battle of perceptions, not products.
4:45
If you can create a perception in the mind of your market that is more appealing than your competitor, then you're gonna take the market share.
4:53
And now we're basically gonna figure out how to do all of that with the rest of the presentation. And the key ultimately here is niching and branding. And for the longest time I was a generalist copywriter.
5:03
I was pretty much taking on all comers and doing all kinds of jobs, and I actually like it because it's more interesting and I developed a very broad skillset that I still use to this day when I'm working with clients.
5:14
The clients will hire me for one thing, and then I'll end, end up doing a whole bunch of other things for them that basically save them a lot of time and money because I have such a broad skillset.
5:20
But what I found after a while is that once I started focusing more on email marketing, which is what we sell at the agency, it became a lot easier for me to sell my services because there's a lot more focus.
5:31
And really niching and branding, there's a sort of like a history to it. If you remember back in the day, like every business was a village business.
5:40
And if you go to like more developed countries where industrialization and big corporations aren't a thing, every business is still a village business, right?
5:47
You think about going to like the town center or whatever to the baker to get your bread for the day.
5:52
I remember I used to ride my bike from the bottom of our lane up to the top to the junction to get our bread in the morning, and the baker knew my name. I knew the baker's name. She knew my order.
6:02
Once in a while the- she might throw a few thing, few loaves in extra as like a gift or whatever.So it's a very personal kind of thing where there's a direct human relationship between the business owner and the customer, right?
6:14
And then we came to the industrialized era where goods were produced in factories, right? And now you're no longer buying from a person, you're buying from a corporation, right?
6:25
And then we started to deal with brands and things like that. You didn't buy your shoes from the cobbler in town. You bought your shoes from Nike, okay? And maybe some of you still do.
6:35
Whenever I go back to Sri Lanka, I always make it a point to go to our cobbler and get some bespoke shoes done. Uh, and the leather work is they're, like, really good.
6:42
They're, like, masters of their craft, and you get it for, like, a fraction of the price of buying some name brand product. And now we're in this era where we're back to buying from people again, and I think it's...
6:53
We've been in this era for many years now, ever since the internet started, and I think there's still a long way to go, but more and more you're seeing the relevance of brands start to diminish, and the rise of personal brands being able to, through their audience, one, launch, launch their own brands of products, and then do basically a shitload of revenue.
7:14
If you look at Kylie Jenner, her Kylie Cosmetics is, like, a billion-dollar brand. If you look at MrBeast, right, who recently opened a burger restaurant, okay? Basically, it was a line out of the door.
7:24
They basically had to tell people to stop coming because so many people showed up. If you look at a lot of these gaming streamers, a lot of these Twitch streamers, the famous ones, they're able to...
7:33
There's another streamer called PewDiePie, right?
7:34
So if you look at them, they have this huge personal brand and a huge audience, and whenever they want to monetize that audience, they're able to create a brand of products or whatever they wanna sell, and they're able to immediately monetize that audience because they have this relationship with the audience, and people are gonna buy from other people, okay?
7:49
And really, when we talk about personal branding, this is the real- reality, is that what you do is a commodity, but who you are is inimitable, which means that nobody can copy it.
7:59
Me, as a copywriter, I believe the last time I checked on LinkedIn, there's 700,000 or close to a million people with writer in their bio or content writer or copywriter in their bio, but there's only one Nabeel Aziz.
8:10
All right? So that's really your competitive advantage, and it's the easiest competitive ad- advantage that you can leverage to grow your business or grow your brand and things like that.
8:20
Because it's very difficult to create a competitive advantage within the product because, like I said earlier, everything is a commodity.
8:26
And the more competitors you have in a market, you get to something called feature parity, where everybody's basically doing the same thing, right? So email marketing services, there's hundreds.
8:37
They all offer the exact same thing. The way they carve out their little section of the market is either by serving a particular audience or having some sort of narrative and particular brand story that they tell.
8:47
Who you are is the most important thing when trying to basically create a name for yourself in the market. So these are for basically coaching companies. They have a coaching program, probably most are consulting.com.
8:59
That's Sam Ovens' program. There's a few others that I'm familiar with, familiar with. There's Client Attraction University, Traffic & Funnels, and Mastery Mode, and they all pretty much do the same thing.
9:07
They take business owners and, through a gouge- group coaching program, help them grow their businesses, right? Now, what's the difference between these four, all right?
9:17
And it's consulting.com, all of the brands that I just mentioned, really, they don't have a brand of their own, but the founders are basically the brand.
9:25
So the people who are like Sam Ovens, so Sam Ovens is technically gonna attract nerdy engineer types that are, like, all about the numbers, that kind of thing.
9:33
Mike Russell is gonna attract a particular demographic of people. In this, in, in this particular case, it's gonna be, like, African American entrepreneurs.
9:40
Taylor Welch of Traffic & Funnels is basically gonna attract sort of the extroverted rural marketer type because he's very bombastic and exuberant.
9:48
And Nick P- Peterson of Mastery Mode, he's gonna attract more of the sort of introverted thinker type.
9:53
Just because of their nature and certain other attributes about themselves, they're gonna attract a particular type of client. Now, if you look at the audience here today,
10:02
just Kenneth being Kenneth and being, like, this Chinese Malaysian, he's gonna attract other sort of Asian type of people to his mastermind that may or may not have joined any of these other masterminds.
10:13
Even though Kenneth is actually an expert, like his skills are on par with any of these, when you have to make a decision on who you're gonna pick to join their mastermind, you're only gonna go with what's familiar to you.
10:24
Really, what you're gonna go with is the people who are like you will like you. Okay? So people who are like you will like you. If you look at, there's another entrepreneur, his name is Ramit Sethi.
10:33
Most of his audience is basically American Indians. Not the Native Americans, but the immigrant Desi kind of people who are born in the USA, that kind of people.
10:43
And I don't know the a- exact demographics of Kenneth's mastermind and Kenneth's people, but I would assume that the majority are Asian people. Is that accurate, Kenneth, or do you have a mix? It's a mix.
10:52
Mastermind, yes, more Asians. Not all are Asians, about probably 70% Asians, but the, my other tiers are more mixed.
10:59
So that means there's, that the white people are okay spending less money with me [laughs], but the Asians will spend more.
11:06
But so the Gold and Platinum tiers are a lot of Westerners, so actually mainly US now on the first two tiers. And actually, even this group isn't 100% representative.
11:15
There's about three or four that are all white that didn't show up today for some reason. But I think initially this was true. So initially in maybe my first one or two years, this was true.
11:24
It was mainly Singaporeans, Malaysians, and then over the last year it seems to be more Western. Right. I'm not sure what created that shift, or we just advertise more to US people.
11:36
I'm, maybe I'm more endorsed by Westerners maybe. I think I have the same sort of trajectories. You have a lot more penetration now with Westerners than you did before.
11:45
That's what it is, so people are recognizing your skills and things like that. I see you on podcasts with a lot of big names in, in the US in the m- internet marketing space and entrepreneurship space.
11:53
So I think it's the penetration. And I would say all of our clients are based in the US, and a lot of the customers for my courses are in the US.
12:02
The, the main thing that's gonna happen is really the people who are like you, and it doesn't have to be a demographic thing. Yeah. It can be a vibe thing. It can be a personality thing. Yeah.
12:09
The people who are like you will like you, all right?And so these are the three main ways where we'll share commonalities with our audience. There's race and gender, which we can't change. We're born with that, right?
12:20
But there's personality, and there's a point of view that when we express it properly, we will start to attract, quote-unquote, our kind of people to us, okay?
12:31
But the problem with that is most online entrepreneurs or online personal brands, they have the personality of white rice, unsalted white rice. They don't express themselves authentically.
12:42
They don't share enough of themselves to actually stand out from the crowd. Okay, that's problem number one. Now, problem number two, two is that they're all NPCs.
12:51
You can pretty much switch every single one of them out, and you will have the same opinions. If somebody's in, like, the woo kind of spiritual or niche, they will all have the same opinions. They'll talk the same.
13:01
They'll use the same jargon. They'll have the same kind of programs. All of their course prices will be some kind of weird number like $88.88 or have a 33 in it, like some kind of divine numer- numerology type thing.
13:13
So they all have the same opinions, and they act the same. That's why I say if you've written for one person in a niche, you can write for anybody in a niche.
13:19
If you've written for one kind of spiritual inner work mindset coach type of person, you can write for them all because they all pretty much sound the same and talk the same, and that's the problem when you're trying to stand out in a market, okay?
13:30
And here we have this video. It's one of my favorite interviews of Bruce Lee. It keeps getting taken down, the full interview by his daughter, because they controlled the intellectual property a lot.
13:39
But let's listen to this. To me, okay, to me, ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. Now, it is very difficult to do. Okay?
13:53
I mean, it i- it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool and all that. Or I can f- make all kinds of phony things, you see what I mean?
14:05
Blinded by it, or I can show you some f- really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly, now that, my friend, is [scoffs] very hard to do.
14:22
And you have to train. You have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it, it's there.
14:27
When you want to move, you're moving, and when you move, you are determined to move, not taking one inch, not anything less than that. If I want to punch, I'm gonna do it, man, and I'm gonna do it, you see?
14:39
So I mean-- So that is the type of thing you have to train yourself into it to become one with the punch. Now, I'm leaning forward a little bit- Yeah... hoping not to hurt any camera angle. Yeah.
14:49
I mean, you gotta put the whole hip into it and snap it and get all your energy in there and make this into a weapon.
14:57
What he's talking about is martial arts and going away from forms and things like that, but I feel like it applies a lot to building a personal brand.
15:04
He says, "To express myself honestly, not lying to myself," that's very hard to do.
15:10
And you actually have to train yourself to express yourself honestly and authentically when you're creating a personal brand for yourself.
15:16
How many times have you thought of posting something, and you bit your tongue and held back because you were worried about how people are gonna perceive it or how people are gonna think of you?
15:25
Do you have opinions that are contrarian in your particular industry or niche? Why are you afraid of expressing those? So that's really why I included this video here.
15:33
It's about, it's about expressing yourself honestly, and the more you can do that, the more you practice doing that, the easier it will be to you, and that's something that I actively work on myself.
15:41
Probably the reason why I have a very distinctive personal brand.
15:44
The next thing that you wanna think about is that whatever you're doing, so you're a copywriter, you're an offer owner, eCom brand, whatever that is, you're also a media company, and you need to think of yourself like a media company.
15:54
And that means producing content. It's quite popular now. It's like people are doing all these TikToks and reels and things like that. They have somebody editing their videos and things like that.
16:03
So it's becoming more mainstream to produce a lot of media, but two or three years ago, it wasn't as common to think of it this way. So you are a media company.
16:09
Whatever else you're doing, you need to produce a lot of content in order to promote yourself and promote your brand.
16:15
I mean, you don't have to be like a Gary Vee kind of thing, where you're everywhere posting 10 times a day.
16:19
My personal recommendation is to have one main channel, and the way things are going right now, it looks like YouTube is the best channel for that.
16:26
And then you have all of these other satellite channels where you repurpose your content to. You chop it up and repurpose, and then again, if you're on YouTube, that makes it a lot easier.
16:33
And the thing about content creators, right? If you look at authors and art- artists and musicians, whenever they're in some sort of controversy, album sales go up. Their book sales go up.
16:43
Their art starts selling more and becomes more popular, right? And this is the principle of antifragility, right? On the left side is the... What is this sword called? Dama- the sword of Damocles, okay? Yeah, please.
16:54
Yeah. That, that's basically-- What that signifies is that you become weaker whenever there is some sort of volatility or uncertainty or chaos in your system.
17:02
And so, so basically, there's more downside than upside from volatility, right? And so basically, what would happen is let's say you're in a particular niche that is affected by some sort of market condition.
17:11
Let's say your niche is severely affected by the energy prices in Europe, for example. You are living in a sort of D- Damocles type situation because of what's going on in Europe right now.
17:24
Then there's the middle part of it is resilience, is that no matter how chaotic and vo- volatile your market or your environment or your industry becomes, you're able to withstand that.
17:34
So whether or not the market goes down, you're able to come back. Even if you take a loss, you're able to come back.
17:40
If there's some sort of problem that prevents you from doing business, you're able to take that loss, come back, and you're pretty much at the same level.
17:46
The last version is antifragility, and that's signified by the Hydra in this image, is that when you cut one head of the Hydra off, two grow in its place.
17:53
And this is where the authors, content creators, artists, those kinds of people live. There's a maximum limit there, okay? They're not, like, invincible, but this is what happens.
18:04
The more controversy there is, the more attention you can get. Even if it's bad publicity, it's ultimately good for you. All right?
18:11
And when you wanna think about-Controversy or being contrarian or sharing your opinions that may or may not be popular in your niche or your market or wherever you're operating.
18:21
Wanna think about this principle called the Overton window. Now, it was created to apply to politics, but you can apply it in this situation as well.
18:28
So the Overton window basically is a principle that states that there is a range of discourse from right to left that is acceptable, okay? And that's called the Overton window.
18:39
And what you're really trying to do is outside the Overton window is basically stuff that you can't say. Basically, it's totally unacceptable. You might get canceled, things like that.
18:47
And really, you know, what politicians are trying to do when they use this Overton window is they're trying to find out what is the range of acceptable positions of discourse that you can, you can talk about and what's outside the range.
18:57
And then they're trying to cater their campaigns or their talking points to fit in that Overton window. But then you have some people that come in and basically obliterate the Overton window and blast wide open.
19:07
Like for example, Donald Trump, when he ran for office and won the presidency, he was talking about stuff that was outside the Overton window, but it was stuff that his demographic was thinking about and talking about.
19:17
So by Donald Trump running for presidency and talking about what he was talking about, he was able to shift the Overton window or widen it and make those talking points, ideas and stuff that he was talking about become part of the Overton window itself, and now it becomes acceptable to talk about it, right?
19:34
So when you're applying it to your personal brand and your business, you wanna think about, do I have any ideas or opinions that are not within the popular discourse, that are contrarian?
19:47
Do I think or believe something that other people think is wrong? It's that Peter Thiel book, right? Zero to One. What do you believe that everyone else thinks is incorrect?
19:56
And that's basically what you have to double down on, right? And now we come to The Troll Framework and, and this is a framework I created. It's not very scientific, but I created it observing--
20:07
I created it observing a lot of personal brands online. And it's an inverted pyramid.
20:12
It goes from bottom to top, and the wider the pyramid gets, the more reach you have and the more influence you have as a personal brand.
20:20
And the higher you get on the inverted pyramid, you go from anonymity to infamy, the more famous you become until you become infamous.
20:27
And the higher you get on the pyramid, it takes a lot more self-esteem to put yourself out there the way you have to do it. And then the bottom level of this pyramid is what I call a lurker.
20:40
There's a lot of people on social media, they just have accounts to follow their favorite celebrities and influencers and things like that. And they're not actually posting.
20:47
They may post once in a while, but really they're just there to observe and consume other people's content. Then one level up, you have people who are publicly active, but they're passive about their activity.
20:58
They aren't really trying to get some benefit from their time on social media, and they-- as a result, they don't really grow their brand.
21:05
There might be some people, they have like anonymous accounts where they're just posting hot takes and funny sayings or things that pop into their mind, things of that nature, but they're not really trying to achieve some sort of objective.
21:14
They don't have a goal with their social media presence.
21:17
And then on the third level, you have public and active, and that's most people who are trying to grow their personal brand or promote a business, is that they're trying to create a brand for themselves.
21:29
They're trying to put themselves out there, but they don't go far enough in expressing themselves honestly, as Bruce Lee said. And so they shy away from controversy. They're extremely risk-averse.
21:40
They don't say what they really think. And e-even though they play it safe, they're still gonna have haters because some people just don't like your face. And level four is the level where you wanna stay at.
21:50
You wanna stay within a range, and that's the thought leader, okay? Where you're, you're a well-known authority. You express yourself honestly. You're known for having opinions and being opinionated.
22:01
And because of that, you have fans, all right? Because people love what you have to say and love what you do.
22:07
And also you have haters because, again, you're expressing yourself honestly, and every time you put yourself out there and you say something that people might disagree with, you're gonna invite disagreement.
22:18
And then the last level of this pyramid is the pariah.
22:21
And that's where you become so popular that you have a huge diehard fan base, but your haters are institutional, as in Facebook hates you, or Instagram hates you, or the US government hates you, or the IMF hates you, or the European Union hates you.
22:35
So when you reach that level of haters, they have basically the power to do something about it and cancel you.
22:40
Now, these examples are a little bit outdated, but Alex Jones is a popular one, but the most popular one in our time right now is Andrew Tate. And
22:49
this is basically what happened to him is because he got so popular so fast and he got on the radar of the wrong people, and they ended up canceling him. And it wasn't like they just banned his Twitter or his Instagram.
23:02
They shut down his Stripe account. They disabled his Gmail. They canceled his Airbnb. He's not allowed on Airbnb anymore. They shut down all of his social media accounts.
23:12
A few of his websites where the hosting got taken down.
23:15
Because he couldn't modulate his growth and control his growth of his personal brand and stay within that band of public, active and thought leader, he grew into a pariah, and then what happens to a pariah is they need to be stamped down and taken out.
23:27
And so balancing-- There's no-- It's not a sort of a discrete pyramid where it's like level one, level two, level three, level four, level five. It's more like a continuum.
23:34
And as your business grows, you might naturally find yourself ascending this pyramid to public active to thought leader.
23:41
Most of you will never get to pariah status because really you're not affecting the matrix at that sort of level, right? But ultimately what you're trying to do is you're gonna try to stay in that thought leader band.
23:51
And you could be-- There's a spectrum. It's not like you're a thought leader. It's not a binary one and zero, right?
23:55
You could be a thought leader that's closer to the public active, or you can be a thought leader that's closer to pariah.
24:00
And really all that depends on is how much risk you're willing to take or how risk-averse you are, okay? And that could depend on a lot of things. That could depend on your personality. It could depend on your gender.
24:09
It could depend on your background. It could depend on your age. It could depend on whether or not you're married and have a family.
24:15
So it really depends on how much risk you wanna take and how aggressive you wanna be in promoting your brand. But ultimately what you wanna do is-Like Bruce Lee said, you wanna express yourself honestly. Okay?
24:24
And that, my friends, is very hard to do. So now we can do some Q&A if anybody has any questions. Thanks, Nabeel, for an excellent presentation. Thank you for over-delivering.
24:34
I think that's actually a lot of food for thought. I think creating a personal brand is both an art and a science, and learning where you stand and, are you trying to be authentic. Any, any questions from you guys?
24:44
Issue. Okay. Actually, but it's popular at the moment, but not too popular in the sense that taking a stand on something that is popular now, that might not be next year. So I would need to change my stand next year.
24:55
My question is, is taking a stand on something that has, uh, some reach is a good way to have a personal branding? That's a beautiful question, and thank you for asking that. So let's take an example.
25:06
Are you guys familiar with Black Lives Matter? Everybody familiar with Black Lives Matter, right?
25:10
People during Black Lives Matter in, like, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, changing their profile pictures to, like, a, the black flag to support Black Lives Matter.
25:18
But r- really that has nothing to do with us, and it's not relevant to us. All we're really doing is jumping on a bandwagon thinking that it's gonna get us clout, right?
25:29
And really, if you've been following the news of Black Lives Matter, now that a lot of the people who are involved in the organization of Black Lives Matter turned out to be thieves and scammers.
25:38
So now you ended up supporting Black Lives Matter, and now you have to backtrack on your position.
25:42
You're like, 'cause you're now, you tacitly supported a bunch of scammers who stole, like, $60 million or something like that of, of people's money who were trying to support racial equity, right?
25:50
So you have to be careful about supporting things that are popular just because they're popular. You can support it if you really believe it, if those are your real beliefs, okay?
25:59
So that's what is expressing yourself authentically and expressing yourself honestly.
26:03
If you really believe those things, you wouldn't have to change your, your stance from one year to the next when it was popular one year and not popular the next year. Okay?
26:11
So if you really believe those things, then those will be your stances. But if you're just j- jumping on a bandwagon, that's not really a good idea. My approach a bit different.
26:16
I actually express, if you actually notice my wall and all those things, I express a lot of values. I don't express a lot of opinions. So I don't actually tell you whether I like Trump or I like Biden. I don't care.
26:28
[laughs] I don't express those things, which is actually why I don't actually get many haters. I don't have many haters at all just because I express values.
26:35
I say, "I love my family, love my wife, love the Lord, love people, love business." So I express a lot more of value system more than opinions. Also, 'cause I really don't have very strong opinion of things.
26:47
Like, who cares whether Trump is or Biden [laughs] is on the White House, right? It's not affect me what. It doesn't affect me in Malaysia. Or am I vaccine pro, pro-vaccine, anti-vax?
26:56
Lots of very anti-vax sentiment when I was in the US and everything, and they say, "What's your stand on it?" And I was like, "I don't have a stand." It doesn't bother me that much 'cause I'm Asian.
27:05
Personal liberty is not really my thing anyway. So I think we have other things to worry about. And that's a good approach, Kenneth. Yeah.
27:11
Is to share your values because then your values are also an identifier for your personality and your point of view. So you're gonna attract people who identify with those values.
27:21
The thing is, even when you do that, if you don't express opinions, like, you'll get haters for not expressing opinions. Say, "Hey, Kenneth, I haven't seen you change your profile picture to a plain black color.
27:30
Are you against Black people? Are you for police bru- brutality?" That kind of thing is gonna happen. If you haven't expressed your opinion on the vaccine, it's, "Are you an anti-vaxxer?" That kind of thing.
27:37
Or if you express a value that you have of personal freedom, okay, and that's like a dog whistle for having certain kinds of beliefs, they'll call you a right-winger or a conspiracy theorist. Yeah.
27:46
If you have personal values that involve being fit and healthy and exercise and things like that, nowadays, like, they're saying that if you like going to the gym and you like bodybuilding or you like eating healthy and things like that, it's signs that you're, like, a right-wing Nazi.
27:59
There's articles coming out that say that. So even when you express your values, people are gonna take it the wrong way. So ultimately, like, y- you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
28:07
So really what you ought to do is just express yourself honestly, which you are doing, and then that's gonna attract the right sort of people to you. And I'll answer Sean's question.
28:15
He said, "What are your thoughts on how Ben Settle and Daniel Throssell are building their brands?" I haven't been on Ben Settle's email list for a while now. I used to read it a lot several years ago.
28:27
I have a bunch of his products, Ben Settle. But I don't know, I'm not up-to-date with what's going on with him right now, so I can't offer a proper opinion.
28:34
I'm on Daniel Throssell's list, but I don't actually read any of his emails. One, because his subject lines are not appealing. Ugh. So if you really like Daniel Throssell, you're gonna open his emails, right?
28:45
If you like Daniel Throssell's emails. So most of the thing about open rates is, like, whether you like the person who's emailing.
28:50
If you're a fan of Kenneth, right, you're gonna open Kenneth's emails no matter what, even if he sends it with no subject line.
28:56
A lot of this subject line optimization and things like that is when you're emailing a cold audience who doesn't know you. So Daniel Throssell, I'm on his list, he doesn't actually optimize his subject lines.
29:03
He just assumes people are going to open his emails, and that, I suppose, that's acceptable because you're emailing your house list, and they signed up to hear from you.
29:09
But in my mind, the inbox is so crowded that you need to give people a reason to open every single email, even if they're diehard fans. So I use something called a perfect subject line formula. Mm.
29:20
It's benefit plus specificity plus curiosity, and when you have those three elements, your subject lines are gonna be optimized.
29:25
So I try to send every email with a perfect subject line, and I don't try to do these cutesy, fancy kind of subject lines that are storytelling.
29:33
Generally, I find because I don't open emails like that, so I'm trying to write for people who are like me.
29:40
I know he's always in some sort of controversy, and he uses that controversy for email content, and he's always pissing people off and things like that.
29:46
But because I don't read his emails, I can't give you a definitive answer. The observation about subject lines is, is interesting because my subject lines, I think Zach can probably give more perspective.
29:55
I think my subject lines, the open rates don't change that much, right? It's usually 20 to 22% anyway. Yeah. What you throw in, right, Zach? Right. Yeah, and usually nowadays I just use, like, emojis.
30:06
Make sure it's short and formula is short plus emoji. Yeah. Yeah. So- Yeah, that's another mistake that a lot of these personal brands make is that their subject lines are way too long. Yeah.
30:15
People are reading their emails on a mobile phone, and a mobile phone is 35 characters max. Yeah. And so they have this long subject line where the benefit is at the end of the subject line where nobody's gonna read.
30:24
Yeah. Basically a lot of these gurus, they don't optimize their subject lines at all.Yeah They're just basically assuming the open, which is like the worst thing that you can do when you're emailing a list.
30:32
Never assume anything. Never assume people have even seen your email or are even gonna open your email. Like, you have to optimize that, like from the beginning as if you're emailing to a cold audience.
30:41
Sheann has a question, "What goes into a point of view? Values, opinions, or critical thinking?" All of that.
30:47
It's where you're from, how you grew up, your race, your gender, your education, your religion, your mindset, your mental model of the world, and then all of this informs your point of view.
30:59
It's a lot easier to have a point of view that's credible when you're older because you have a lot more life experience.
31:04
But there are some young people who have done a lot or been through a lot that they actually have a valid point of view. I know this entrepreneur, her name is Julia Tangen,
31:14
and she's been in business since she was like 17, and she's 24 now. So she has a point of view even though she's so young, but a seasoned point of view. It's not half-baked.
31:23
The problem that a lot of young people have is they'll have their 21st birthday and they'll put a tweet thread out where it's like, "Hey, it's my 21st birthday.
31:30
Here are 21 lessons of life from my 21 years on this earth." [laughs] And it's, bro, like your balls just dropped yesterday. What life experience do you have? You know what I mean?
31:38
But there are a few people who have legitimate life experience even though they're young, and they can have an informed point of view. Would you expect an equal amount of fans versus haters?
31:46
For every one hater you have, you will have 20 silent fans. Most people are not going to-- Your fans are really not gonna go out of their way to praise you or things like that, or comment or engage with you.
31:57
But a hater, he'll go out of his way to tell you all the things that you're doing wrong, because people love to correct other people. I find all the haters actually are from cold traffic for me.
32:06
So when I run ads, that's where all the haters are, but not so much on my social media, which I thought was interesting. You will see very angry comments on your Facebook ads.
32:15
[laughs] Their Facebook ads, they're accessible. So what I do for hater comments on Facebook ads is I'll use it to troll them back. Mm-hmm. Or if it's a valid objection, I'll do objection handling. Yeah.
32:25
Because it demonstrates authority, and you can use those comments as content for like your emails and other social media. Yeah.
32:30
So I'll do objection handling in the comments, and also I'll just use it to engage with the audience because the more engagements your ads have, like the stronger signal it sends to Facebook, right?
32:40
So the more comments, the more conversation happening, Facebook's gonna think, "Oh, this is an ad everybody wants to see." So that's what I do with the comments.
32:46
A lot of people will delete negative comments, but I prefer to demonstrate authority in those comments. It's only possible when you're at a small level where you can appreciably manage the comments that are coming in.
32:55
Sean has another question. He asks, "How do we amplify someone else's personal brand if we're writing for a client?" So my approach to doing this is I will usually do an interview.
33:07
It's more like a meeting, like a informal chat every two weeks with the client, and we'll just catch up, talk about what's going on in their life, talk about what's going on in the business.
33:15
We might exchange ideas for the type of content that we wanna create. But a- after a while, client's personal brand is really just me, so it really just depends on how well you understand the audience and the market.
33:26
And so the clients have this idea like, "Oh, I need somebody who's gonna get my voice, who's gonna be able to write in my voice, and who unders- understands my brand." Let me share the screen again.
33:35
These are the people who have that idea. "Oh, I need somebody to write in my voice, and I need somebody who understands my personal brand." Meanwhile, their personal brand and their voice is unsalted white rice, right?
33:44
I honestly, for the most part, I have never really ca- cared too much about getting my client's voice and getting my client's brand.
33:50
Because when you do the interviews, like I said, every two weeks, or you do a proper onboarding interview, you can get a sense of what kind of language they use and things like that.
33:57
It, uh, as long as it looks like their ideas and you're pulling ideas from the conversations that you have with them, they're going to think like you're writing in their voice because it's their idea that was expressed.
34:07
But really, the voice is my own. So our approach in WYODC is what I do now, we have a flywheel when it comes to content. So basically, these masterminds run once,
34:18
twice to th- two to three, sometimes even four times a month. And every time, there's always new content being shared by me or by speakers and everything.
34:27
And so what happens is Zach takes the notes, and he turns them into emails, and those emails then turn to blog posts and all those things. I think the next level is the Omnipresence engine.
34:36
That means the Alex Hormozi talk and all those things. I already lined up the people who will do that for me. But for now, it's with the resources we have, it's just channeling that.
34:44
I think that's a good way to bring your voice across, and that is you immerse the writer in you. So basically, now we have these sessions. It goes to Zach.
34:53
Zach basically takes down the notes, turns them into multi-series emails, and the content goes to the crowd. The crowd now knows who I am, knows the unique sorts of thinking, and then they ascend back into Empire.
35:07
They ascend back into the mastermind. So it's almost like the mastermind drops seed, and then it harvests back into the mastermind because people are like, "Wow." Now the aspiration is people want to join Empire.
35:16
It's like a natural graduation process from where they are. "I wanna join Empire," but it comes from doing this cycle. That's exactly it, and, you know, the content has a flywheel as it, it- itself. Yeah.
35:28
Zachary asks, "How did you build your personal brand as a marketer? What's your journey like?" Honestly, I didn't set out trying to build a personal brand deliberately.
35:36
I've just always been outspoken and opinionated, so I guess it just developed organically.
35:42
What I would say for the copywriters and marketers starting out is I spent way too much time creating content and sharing my opinions than I did actually trying to go out and get clients and do client work.
35:53
I should have probably spent more time sending cold DMs, sending cold emails, trying to get more clients, because I probably would've been a lot further along in my business than I am right now.
36:02
Especially because in the beginning, like you need life experience in your kind of niche as well.
36:06
Like, you need experience 'cause it's like knowledge plus experience is wisdom, and for you to be able to have a point of view, you need s- a little bit of wisdom.
36:12
So really, it's more appropriate to have your head down and doing the work than it is to be building a personal brand when you're starting out.
36:18
If you are gonna share content and build your personal brand, which everybody should, even if you are a beginner, I would a- adopt a frame more of an enthusiastic student as opposed to some sort of expert.
36:29
I see a lot of people posting authority content. Some of them are copywriters, when I know for a fact that-They have trouble getting clients.
36:36
They're barely making any money as a copywriter, and they're posting authority content.
36:39
There was this another guy who was writing e-commerce emails, and he told me that his emails barely get any clicks, and he's posting authority content.
36:45
When you're posting, when you're building your personal brand, you wanna make sure it's congruent. Otherwise, you're bullshitting. You're just a liar. You're faking a funk.
36:51
They say fake it till you make it, but really that's just lying at that point. You wanna be congruent at every step of the way. And sincerity goes a long way. People can smell it.
36:58
I get a lot of cold emails, and I ignore most of them from people trying to write for me. They offer, "Hey, Nabeel, I want you to mentor me. I'll write for you for free." I ignore all of them.
37:07
But I got this one email from this one girl. Her writing was decent, and she hasn't had client work before. She was trying to see if I had any work for her. But I could tell reading her email that she was sincere.
37:18
And because of that, even though I would've normally ignored her cold email, I replied to her cold email. And that's happened like time before. I ended up mentoring that person for a couple of calls.
37:26
But people can smell that, and sincerity goes a long way in building your personal brand because people can tell. And it, it shows in the way you create your content.
37:34
You can tell if somebody has really a surface level understanding of a topic that they're talking about versus a deep understanding, and that's very easy to see.
37:41
You have a lot of people posting value content in copywriter Facebook groups, and maybe they should because they need the practice, right? They need to get their reps in.
37:47
But you can tell that these people have a very surface level understanding of the topics that they're writing about, and so their content ends up being noise as opposed to signal. You wanna go for high signal, low noise.
37:56
You have to use your judgment here. Like obviously you don't wanna waste your time going back and forth with haters for like hours and hours.
38:02
What I would do is basically we'll do one kind of response clowning them back, and then if they escalate or they keep going, I'll just hide the remaining responses and only show my response.
38:12
Then they're not gonna know that I've censored them. A troll is really get- looking for a response, right? So you respond to him, he's gonna wanna respond back and continue the conversation.
38:19
Sometimes I'll let it keep, keep going a few rounds, but really it's a judgment call and how much time you wanna waste talking to these people.
38:25
You can just do one kind of response and then hide all the other replies that you get back from them. So you've done your authority building and objection handling there. Yeah.
38:32
Sean asked, "Could you elaborate more on high signal and low noise?" SEO content, right, or content marketing, and if you're looking at, take a niche that's very competitive like marketing, right?
38:40
There's probably hundreds of millions of the same if you look for a topic like, okay, how to write a good subject line. There's probably a million articles on the same topic.
38:47
They're following the same SEO optimized strategy with the keywords in the subheading and the keywords in the blah, blah, blah. They're, like basically every article looks exactly the same. That's high noise, low signal.
38:58
There's very little quality content on the topic. For example, how many of you heard about the perfect subject line formula before I mentioned it to you?
39:05
Okay, I could write an article about that, and that would actually be the signal in all of the noise, right?
39:10
In fact, I remember posting about this in this Instagram post by Copy Posse talking about how to write good subject lines, and it was an Instagram post, and basically the advice was bullshit.
39:21
The subject line examples in that post were subject lines that nobody would open because it's like, it's just noise. It gets drowned in the inbox.
39:27
So really what you're trying to do is be that, the signal here is the one that stands out, is the one that's, the one that you should be paying attention to, the one that is actually sharing something of meaning, something of value, as opposed to the fake value posting that you have.
39:40
Nabeel, just a quick question. Value, sometimes it's also in the eye of the beholder, right? What is value to you is maybe useless to someone else and vice versa. That's a good point.
39:49
And then I think also we're dealing with the curse of expertise, where it's too basic to us, but it might be like a mic drop/mind blowing moment to someone else. So I think there's also like a judgment call.
39:59
It really depends on your audience. Are you serving beginners or are you serving intermediates or are you serving advanced people? It really depends on your audience.
40:07
What I would say is that you have to be a little bit careful with this because it is important to have the super basic content for like top of funnel kind of things. Yeah.
40:14
And you'll find that kind of content is the one that gets the most engagement because it appeals to the broadest audience.
40:20
But for me, I feel like getting the co-sign or the engagement from the actual influencers in the space has a sort of like a trickle-down effect. Mm-hmm.
40:27
Where people can say, okay, Kenneth is posting something, all right, and okay, these big shots are engaging with it. Kenneth must be somebody.
40:34
So you don't actually have to appeal to the lowest common denominator to get the effect that you're looking for. But I do agree with you that value is in the eye of the beholder, so it really depends on your audience.
40:44
If you're talking to beginners, like the most basic stuff might be more important. Yeah. Since Copy Posse won Marketer of the Year, Alex won Marketer [chuckles] of the Year last week. Yeah, I saw that.
40:52
So I think, yeah, content sometimes it is-- My personal approach to content is just be my weird self and see who engages with it. And I'm- Sorry to interrupt you. Think about content for copywriters on YouTube, right?
41:03
Yeah. How many of you guys have heard of Kyle Milligan? No. How, how many of you guys have heard of Alex Catoni and Copy Posse? Yeah.
41:10
In my experience in watching both channels, Kyle Milligan's channel is way better than Alex Catoni's.
41:16
Kyle Milligan's channel is an example of high signal, low noise, whereas Alex Catoni's channel is optimized for YouTube. So it's a lot of fluff basically, to be honest.
41:24
They'll do a 20-minute video where they get to the topic, the meat of the topic is like only three minutes long, expanded out for 20 minutes, and you're just wasting your time trying to watch a 20-minute video.
41:33
And it's clear that they only, they're only doing this to boost their YouTube numbers, right?
41:37
If you're a copywriter trying to study copywriting, I would probably watch Kyle Milligan over Alex Catoni's YouTube channel because the quality of the information is a lot better.
41:44
Could you share some examples of enthusi- enthusiastic learner content? So book summaries could be one.
41:50
Not just book summaries, but okay, hey, I read this book, and I applied this principle from this book to my client work, and this is what happened, right? Show that you're learning and applying what you learned.
42:00
You could be sharing the results from one of your latest campaigns. We sent this email to my client's audience, and I tried this new thing, and this is what happened.
42:09
Instead of posting value in Facebook groups, how about you ask a thoughtful question, right?
42:13
And it's not like a thoughtful question is not something that you can Google the answer to, but it's like a question that has context.
42:18
Hey, I'm dealing with this particular problem, and I researched, these are the potential solutions. I tried this. I'm gonna try this, and this is what I plan to do about it.
42:27
Would you give me some feedback on whether you think this is a good idea or not? So there are actually good-- There are actually bad questions. People say that there are no bad questions.
42:33
No, there are very bad questions. Those are the questions that you can Google the answers to.
42:37
People, like the internet made education on any subject whatso- what you can think of, it made it free, and then you'll still get DMs in your inbox from people asking you, "Hey, man, I wanna start copywriting.
42:47
Where do I start?" You know what I mean? And those are the kinds of people that deserve to be ignored. I just tell them to pay me. This is my payment link. Pay me, I'll pay attention to you [chuckles]. It works.
42:57
And some do. Probably the best summary I can give you is go to YouTube and watch the Bruce Lee lost interview. Hmm. It's called Bruce Lee on The Show With Pierre Berton.
43:08
Pierre Berton Bruce Lee interview is one, or you can search for Bruce Lee lost interview. Mm-hmm.
43:13
That is basically a long form discussion of what we talked about today, and he-- The essence of what he's talking about is what you can apply to building your personal brand.
43:23
It c- And the interview keeps getting taken down, so you might have to find other links as well. I actually downloaded the interview.
43:28
I'm gonna include it in my membership community because his daughter, Shannon Lee, keeps taking down all the Bruce Lee IP, copyright striking.
43:33
If anybody's interested in getting more from me, I have a weekly newsletter that goes out. You can find it on nabeelaziz.com.
Nabeel Azeez, Syndicated
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