💠The Future of My Personal Brand
The Sunday Night Review #164
Hey everyone,
I’m in Turkey this week with the team. It’s currently 1:20pm and I’m sitting at a cafe with my bro Saf.
If I’m being honest, I’ve been debating what I want this newsletter to be in future. I’ve been sending it for over 3 years and sent 163 issues, and it’s generally fallen under the category of ‘lesson I learned that week’ often relating to my career.
I’ve always tried to make it somewhat valuable for the reader, so there’s some takeaway or learning, but recently I’ve been thinking about how what stands out in an ever-crowded world is personality and storytelling. I’ve also read a few of these back and the ones that are nicest for me are the ones that tell me more about my life at the time.
One of the reasons they’ve also felt harder to write recently is because I’ve been working on a project that I haven’t wanted to talk about. Normally, I share as much as I can about the behind the scenes of what I’m doing, but I don’t want the public accountability for this one quite yet. The uphill struggle of actually doing the thing has felt harder, and I don’t want to add to the pressure with ‘announcing’ it.
But here’s a general summary on how I’m thinking about my side hustles at the moment.
I’m currently building an audience of YouTubers who want help growing their channel and their business. I’m doing that through twitter and my weekly newsletter How to YouTube.
I have ~3,500 subscribers there, and I want to share as much value as I can, whilst capturing some of that value for myself (i.e. make some money). There are various ways you can monetise a newsletter:
Sponsors
Affiliates
Sell your own product or service
Paid subscription
I’m currently exploring/explored all of these. I’ve accidentally made a small amount from affiliates, which I’ll continue to learn about, but ultimately if you’re serious about building a sustainable business that you control long term, you want to sell your own product or service. Affiliate income can be taken away from you at any time.
So that’s what I hope to do over the coming months, but more on that later when I’ve figured out what the hell I’m doing.
I love personal ‘build in public’ brands and newsletters, so I’ll continue to share what I learn on the way here. With the influx of AI tools and LLMs, information and content is becoming more commoditised.
The long term bet I’m making is that real people with stories and insights from human experience will stand out from the crowd. The more you can connect with your audience, whilst giving them what they want, the more defensible your brand.
Anyway, I hope that was somewhat interesting, and I’ve love to connect with any of you reading this either in the comments below or by replying to this email. I read all of them and even I’m slow to reply I will eventually.
Have an epic week!
Tintin :)
📚 Popular Issues of The Sunday Night Review
Thanks for reading The Sunday Night Review!