RV (00:07): Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know the there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from Martin team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/podcast, brand builders, group.com/podcast. We hope to talk to you soon. AJV (00:53): Hello friends. This is AJ Vaden here with another recap episode of the influential personal brand co podcast. I am going to be doing the cliff notes version of my conversation with Natasha stone king who was an old friend of mine. We went to college together and she has just really blown up on a social media, but more importantly it’s been a, a steady climbed for her, which is what I love is to hear the truth behind things. There’s and the truth is, is there’s no secret to overnight success. It is consistent. It is often gradual and there is always a ton of work happening behind the scenes, but she has built an incredible life and style business with incredible monetization with brand deals and all these different things she has going on online. And so we’re gonna talk about three things that she shared today that I think are really helpful, and it doesn’t matter if you are trying to monetize your audience. AJV (01:59): If you really consider yourself a, a blogger or an online influencer, an not, I think these tips really do ring true, no matter what your business model is. But just good, good old fashioned reminders of what it takes to become successful in business. No matter if that business is online or not. So here we go here are the first three or the first of my three things. And I love, I love that. She said that she has been blogging since 2008 y’all it’s 22, right? So she’s been at this for 15 years. This is something that she said, I started doing it because I loved it. I keep doing it because I love it. And my audience, my engagement, my followership has continued to grow because I’ve been consistent. And so here are a couple of things. I think it’s really important for us all to remember success. AJV (02:55): Success does not happen overnight. It happened through consistency. And if we’re trying to build something in a month or even in just a year, it’s like, that’s really not fair. It’s not fair to you. And it’s not fair to your message. It’s not fair to the people around you. We live in this era of instant gratification and that’s just not how it always works, especially in business. But it’s about consistency goes, I have been consistent this entire time. My topics have changed. I have changed my life has changed, but I’ve been consistent through the whole process. And here I have a couple things that she’s super consistent on that I thought was really important. She does a coffee a morning coffee live on Instagram every morning and does not miss it. She goes, I am almost always in my PJs with my coffee. AJV (03:44): And I’m just sharing a little bit of inspiration and optimism for the day, every single morning. That’s a big deal. That’s a huge commitment. But a part of that is she goes, I’m building a relationship. I’m building a relationship with my audience. Isn’t just for engagement. This is something that I am passionate about doing, I enjoy doing, which is why it doesn’t feel like work. Right? And I think those are just really good reminders when we get bogged down with, oh, I just have to keep doing it. It’s like, no, you shouldn’t have to. It’s something that you should want to do. Because even when it’s online, this is still relationship building. It just happens differently. Like we wouldn’t expect that the person that we’re married to, right, or the person that we’re dating or whatever, it’s like, tho those relationships were not built through just texts or through posts. AJV (04:36): Right. There was human connection. There was a consistency effort. There, there was get to know me. And I wanna get to know you, it’s this virtual element of relationship building that ti it does take time and it does take consistency, but it’s gotta be done in authentic, in an authentic way where you, you genuinely care about making a difference in doing what you’re doing, which makes it feel less of a burden and more of something that you get to do, not something you have to do, but it’s finding those things of like, what am I gonna be truly consistent with, right. And maybe it’s one post a week. Maybe it’s not a a morning coffee session. But maybe it’s, it’s one post a week, but you’ve gotta train your audience what to expect from you. Right. And that was kind of like the number one thing I thought that was really good. AJV (05:20): The second thing is she goes, I, I love on my audience and specifically her email list, right? So this is kind of like 0.2 and three. So I’m gonna stick to the love part. And then we’ll talk about the email list part. But I love on them and I loved what she talked about and you should go listen to this. She goes, I’m doing giveaways all the time. She says, I, you know, I have helped co-design different line for tons of different brands. And anytime that I get my, you know, my pieces of what I’ve designed is I always set one aside to be able to share and give away to my audience hyper specifically in her email list. But again, it’s like, what are the things that you’re doing to actually create excitement and share the love with your audience? AJV (06:02): And that could be your social media audience could be your podcast, subscribers, blog, subscribers, email list whatever it may be, but what are some things that you’re doing to infuse a little fun into your engagement, right? It’s like, I’m not a exaggerating, I, I did this podcast interview with Natasha yesterday and this morning. I literally pulled up my email and I was sent this to our marketing team. And I was like, all right, y’all it is time to infuse a little fun with how we engage with our audience. So I wanna be doing BG summer swag giveaways. We did this thing last year called the 12 days of B E B G for Christmas, where we gave something away for the 12 days leading up to Christmas. But it’s like, what are we doing to just create a little fun, a little engagement, a little excitement, a little giveaway to just switch things up to also make people feel a little loved on, and it’s like, you don’t have to buy anything from us to get this. AJV (06:54): Like, this is something we wanna do because you give us to your time and attention, however frequently that is, it’s like, thank you. There’s a bunch of other things that can be getting your attention out there. Thanks for giving me a little bit of yours. I love that. And she says she does it all the time and I’m like, no, I’m gonna be like, I’m gonna be following her a heck of a lot more closely because there’s this element of fun. And so a prize that we all enjoy and it’s like, what are we doing to actually share the love back to our audience, back to the people that are engaging with us, that we’re trying to build these relationships with. And that was like one of the biggest takeaways for me. I literally spent like 20 minutes writing up this detailed outline of, okay, this is what we’re gonna do on a quarterly basis. AJV (07:37): And these my annual fun things. But I think that’s the key word. It’s like, what are you doing to create fun with your audience? Like, how are you creating this in excitement that we all wanna be a part of? So I loved that. I love that so much. And then my third thing, and I love what she said. She goes, I was just taught really young, really early in the business, that the most important thing, always your email list. And, you know, if you follow myself a brewer or brand builders group, you know, this is something that we are already true believers in. It’s like, if you are only building your platforms on social media then you are been building on rented real estate, my friend, and building your email list is probably now even more so than before ever increasingly that much more important owning that first party data is a huge part of today and into the future. AJV (08:25): So it’s like, what are you doing to compel someone to want to give you their email, right. But what kind of unique, original content are they gonna get in your email list that they’re not getting on social media? Are they not getting on your blog or they’re not getting on your podcast? And I think those are really, and I think different things that we hear is so often what we hear so much about is how do you multiply time by taking one piece of content and splicing it and using all these different places. And I will say there is a time and a place for that. There’s also a time and a place not to do that. And I believe this is a part of that, of what kind of original unique content are you creating for your email list that is only for your email list. AJV (09:05): Like that’s the only place you’re gonna get it, right? And perhaps part of those giveaways are just for your email list, but it’s creating original unique content that you’re not gonna get anywhere else. You’re only gonna get it. If you’re a part of my email list and it’s nurturing that list and treating that list is different and unique from the other platforms. So again, it’s creating intention, it’s building these online relationships. It’s infusing excitement into fun and y’all, these are just three things that we talk about, but we also talked about her brand deals and how to know if a brand is right for you, things that you can be doing. If you’re trying to get brand deals way before you go after them. The art of proactively reaching out called prospecting called sales and not waiting on other people to do it for you, how much you should be doing versus having an agent or a PR team. Now that we talked about so much in 45 minutes this is a interview talk full of real life. Like here’s what you do. Here’s how you do it from someone who’s doing it right now. So hope you enjoyed this. Please go check this out. Check out Natasha at hello, happiness, blog.com. And then always stay tune and come back and visit us again at the influential personal brand.