Can you imagine having a brand that everyone in the world knows about? Brands like Nike, Pepsi, Disney come to mind when you think of brands. Learning how to build a brand that helps people is just a step by step process.
Scott Volker has done this many times and also taught others to do the same thing. Building a brand is something anyone can do in just 6 steps and Scott shares exactly how to do it.
3 Steps to Start Your Brand
Identify Your Target Market
Figure out what you are passionate about and start with that.
If your passions are for your pet cats, then find out how you can narrow down your focus to reach only people who love cats. It could be just a specific type of cat.
You will want to niche down to be very specific and targeted. Just make sure you have a potential audience you are going to serve and produce great content for them.
Validate Your Market Size Potential
Before you even start, you want to make sure that there are others who would benefit from what you are developing. If there is no one there to consume your content, you will be left with no one to buy your content.
You can validate your idea by doing some search engine optimization filtering. Use this site to help you know if there is a market: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest
By searching for your market, you will see how many others are searching for what you are going to teach.
How to Quit Your Job with Passive Income
Get the Best Selling Book FREE!
Make Sure You Can Make Money Consistently
You can build your brand while also making money.
Advertising, affiliate sales, courses, books, coaching etc. are all great ways to make money with your brand.
You are also looking for potential products you could Private Label down the line. At this point we are just validating that there are products selling to this market.
Explore websites that are in your market and see what they are offering and if they are running ads currently.
Pay attention on their website and see if they are collecting emails in exchange for
If there are others already in the market making money with these formats, then you have the ability to make your own, or just sell theirs and make a commission.
The key is to know if there is a way to make money from this concept and how you can become successfully unemployed.
6 Steps to Build a Successful Brand
Know the market you are trying to serve
Know what they are looking for and how you can fulfill their needs
Niche down to make your product specific to your customers
Help them know that you have the answer to their needs
Find out more about what they need
Offer your solutions to them
How to Build a Brand In 6 Steps
A lot of people see opportunities, a get-rich-quick scheme, and they get excited.
When Scott first got into the online space, he was selling wooden bridges on eBay. He knew the bridges would sell, because he was looking for them for his photography studio.
He bought them for $30 and resold them for $130, and was able to put his kids through private school. Scott understood that product could sell, but he wanted to share with other people what they were doing.
It is all about attention (traffic). It is going to be a lot easier to sell someone that is targeted properly with the right stuff.
Scott followed this model in his photography business. He built an email list and that is how he would book all their sessions.
It comes full circle. What happened to him five years ago, and what happened when he launched his podcast, the Amazing Seller, is he started to dabble in the physical products world with Amazon. He saw an opportunity, he started selling a product, and in 90 days he made over $40,000.
Scott decided to document it and share it with other people to see if he could get a following.
If you are only thinking about the money, it is going to be really hard to be successful at anything you do. The money doesn’t come instantly.
If you understand your market, if you know how to attract your market with the right thing/content, if you show up as a resource, that is where you can start making recommendations.
It is always about the market, the attention in the market, and then from there, what does the product buy.
Scott is always modeling what other people do successfully. He doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel. There is no one who is going to compete with you being you or me being me. You will attract the right people by being authentic.
When Scott and his wife were in the photography business, he taught himself photoshop by a book, and he started teaching people what he knew. Give people something of value and build relationships.
Scott shared his story on YouTube and taught them how they could do it too. Over time, he built up an audience. After six months, he had about 1,000 followers.
What is something right now that you are really good at or you want to be really good at — either one of them can work.
The first thing you need to do is identify if that market is out there. If it is, then validate that market is buying things.
Scott put out content and he didn’t have any way he was going to monetize. On that 1,000 person list, he let them know that he was possibly going to put something together to teach them an overview. A bunch of people said they were interested.
Scott put templates into a package, 10 CDs, and included a training of him teaching and he did the product launch Jeff Walker style.
Scott bought Jeff Walker’s course years ago for $2,000, on a credit card. He sold $12,000 in two days. He followed this same model when he launched a membership for his photography business.
Scott started his podcast and released 52 episodes and never made any money.
Watch the entire episode here:
Building a Brand Is All About Serving What Your Customers Want
Scott has a friend who has a blog on how to grow succulents. She was a photographer and then moved into online stuff. Fast forward, she has a six-figure business and tons of traffic.
Think about something you could publish, whether words, photos, or videos. What is it you can show others?
Scott’s friend, Jesse, documents how he is learning to distill alcohol. His goal was to get 500 subscribers on YouTube. Just show up 52 weeks a year and serve your market.
Jesse got 15,000 subscribers in a year, and now he is at 40,000. When Scott last checked, Jesse was making over $1,000 passively just from YouTube traffic, which has probably at least doubled by now.
Scott started by selling products on Amazon, but he pivoted, because he saw the market changing. Now, he recommends taking your brand or business, and if you want to sell a product, build it around your brand and use Amazon as your channel.
You need to have your own traffic source. Traffic equals money. With the attention and the right traffic, you can monetize through ad networks.
The easiest way to get started is to find a market, find out if there is traffic in that market and build an email list. Serve that market and show up at least once every week.
Create buckets of content: common questions you are going to answer on the blog, how-to articles, and product-based articles. There is a shift happening in the Amazon world. It is getting more and more competitive.
If you are making money based solely on somebody else’s platform, be careful. That rug could be pulled out from underneath you. Build a brand first.
How Scott Volker Makes Money Without A Job.
It has been a long journey and it is always evolving. Scott learned very early on that it was going to be hard to chain him down in a cubicle or a factory.
Coming out of high school, he was never brought up with the idea of looking at college. His father was raised in the farming world with nine brothers and sisters, and some only graduated from the eighth grade. The idea was that Scott was going to learn a trade and earn an honest living and support his family.
When he graduated high school, Scott thought he was going to work for a printing company. They are still in business today and they print some of the largest magazines.
How to Quit Your Job with Passive Income
Get the Best Selling Book FREE!
He had an in at the company and thought it would be a good place to start. If he worked his way up to the top pressman, he could make up to $70,000 (this was in 1992). That was good money, and he figured it would take about eight years to get there.
Scott was at the company for 24 hours, he realized he was in a factory, and he felt claustrophobic. He felt trapped, but he stuck it out for nine months and he learned very quickly that he did not want to be in a building all day long. He worked from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am and he was 18 years old.
His father was laid off from General Electric and he and a partner started a construction company.
They wanted to grow the company, so they offered Scott a position. Scott was making $6.40 an hour at the printing company, so his dad offered him $7.00 an hour. What got him the most excited is that his dad said that one day he could own the company.
Fast forward, Scott’s dad and his partner were like a bad marriage. Scott wrote a book about it, The Take Action Effect. It is why he is now jaded on partnerships.
He worked for his dad for about seven or eight years, but he realized he wasn’t going to own that company.
He knew he didn’t want to work for someone else, so he and his wife started a photography company. At the time, they had two young kids, a two and a half year old and a five year old.
They had an interest in photography, but YouTube wasn’t a thing, so they learned a lot from books. They started the business and 18 months later, Scott left his father’s company.
Scott and his wife supported themselves from the brick and mortar photography business for about six or seven years, and when his wife was pregnant with their third child, they decided to get into the online world.
Scott started to dabble in eBay and he made a few sales. That’s what woke him up and he realized there was something there. He did his first product launch, followed Jeff Walker’s plan, and did about $12,000 in about two days.
Dustin has done partnerships in the past and he doesn’t do them anymore. You get 50 percent of the profits and 100 percent of the liability.
How Scott Volker Went from $7 an Hour to 7 Figures a Year
It is a huge leap going out on your own. People need to realize that they have a safety net most of the time. If you have been in the working world, you probably have a skillset you could fall back on.
Scott knew that if he made this jump it would be scary, but he also knew he could always go out and do construction work on the side if he needed it.
They originally built the photography business for supplemental income, not to be their main income stream. They started to get busy and people were coming to them versus the top photography studios.
Around Christmas one year, Scott’s wife, Lisa, said she needed him to quit his job and work at the photography business.
Scott figured if he could make $10,000 in the next eight weeks and bank it, it would hold them until they could figure things out after the Christmas season.
Scott went into his father’s office and talked to him and his partner. His father was happy for him, because he was staying at the company and trying to make it work for Scott. His dad didn’t know Scott wanted to leave.
The business partner was shocked. Scott walked out and never looked back, but it was scary. It was November 1, 2011, and he has been successfully unemployed ever since.
The Brand Accelerated Live Conference
Brand Accelerated Live was created, because Scott was at an event and people asked him what Amazon event he would go to next. Scott wouldn’t go to another one, because he learned what he needed. Instead he would go to a digital marketing event.
Scott decided there needed to be a conference that taught more about that side of it, not just how to leverage Amazon. He didn’t want to run a conference, but one of his listeners worked in the hotel industry and worked with him on it. Connections are huge. Over 200 people attended the conference this year, from all over the world.
The event is all about brand building and brand acceleration.
Scott didn’t want to be coined as “The Amazon Guy” anymore, so he now has the Brand Creators Academy. It is all about simplifying his life and what he wants to be working on and helping people build brands. Part of that is the Amazon channel.
How can listeners find Scott Volker?
- Go to ITunes or Stitcher and search for The Amazing Seller
- Go to brandcreators.com, enter your name and email address, and Scott will send you The Brand Growth Validation Checklist, a five-page document and a video.
- https://theamazingseller.com/start
- Book: The Take Action Effect