Blog Post Written By: Melrose Michaels
Having a strong personal brand is crucial for creators. Warren Buffet's quote, "Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room," emphasizes the significance of how your brand represents you as a creator. Your brand is the story, and you are the main character.
To start, let's define what a personal brand means. It is the unique set of qualities, values, and traits that define an individual and set them apart from others. Your personal brand is how you present yourself to the world, both online and offline, through your actions, words, and overall image.
In simpler terms, your personal brand is how others perceive you and your distinctive attributes, expertise, and skills. It is a combination of your reputation, online presence, personal style, communication skills, and overall image. Your personal brand is shaped intentionally or unintentionally by your interactions with others, social media activity, personal and professional achievements, and the way you present yourself to the world.
Most creators are building personal brands unintentionally with the way they market, carry themselves, interact with fans - all without even being aware of it, and oftentimes not liking the perception it actually is speaking of them.
Building a strong personal brand can be a powerful tool to establish yourself as an expert in your field, increase your credibility and earn the trust of others. One great example of this is the personal brand I have created with Sex Work CEO. Our brand has become a trusted resource for adult content creators, providing valuable information for free, actively helping others and making ourselves accessible by responding to every tweet, comment, and direct message. We are proud to be viewed by our community as a reliable and trustworthy brand that genuinely cares about the interests of our audience. By establishing a strong personal brand, you can create new opportunities to achieve both your personal and professional goals.
As an adult content creator, navigating the online space can be challenging. While it may be tempting to build an entirely adult brand, it's important to consider the limitations this approach may bring. Although I personally identify as an adult creator, I recognize that social media platforms and legal restrictions can make it difficult to establish a solely adult-focused brand. In fact, creating an entirely adult brand can result in unnecessary obstacles and make it harder to run your business effectively. Therefore, it's crucial to approach adult content creation with a nuanced and strategic mindset.
In the world of OnlyFans, mainstream influencers often earn more than adult creators due to their established brand recognition and fanbase. By leveraging their existing popularity and willingness to share more intimate content, these influencers are able to earn a significant income. As adult creators, we can learn from their success by building a strong mainstream brand that supports our adult content. By expanding our reach beyond adult-only platforms, such as gaming, cosplay, art, and music, we can overcome the challenges of being shadow banned or deleted from social media. Building a mainstream brand not only provides additional income streams but also increases the visibility and longevity of our adult content.
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
Before creating a personal brand as a creator, it is important to have a clear understanding of who your target audience is. This will help you tailor your content to meet their needs and preferences, and establish a connection with them. This is often a part that creators don’t give any time or attention to - even though it’s so fundamentally important.
When it comes to connecting with your target audience, it's important to understand a few key factors that can influence how they interact with your brand. Here are four areas to focus on:
Demographics: This includes factors such as age, gender, income, occupation, and geographic location. Depending on what you're offering, certain demographics may be more relevant than others. For example, if your target audience is high-earning men aged 18-55 who live in expensive areas like New York, California, and Chicago, you'll want to focus your efforts on doctors, lawyers, and other high-earning professions.
Psychographics: This refers to the psychological characteristics of your audience, such as their values, beliefs, interests, and lifestyle. Understanding the psychographics of your target audience can help you better tailor your message and offerings to their needs. For example, if you're looking to connect with a liberal, non-religious, fun-loving, and humorous audience that values a good time, you may want to focus on creating content that appeals to people who follow meme pages and are sexually open.
Behaviors: This includes purchasing habits, social media usage, and media consumption. Analyzing the behaviors of your target audience can help you determine the best ways to reach and engage with them. If your audience is likely to be into gaming, guns, cosplay, redheads, and following pages on social media around those topics, you can use this information to create content and outreach strategies that appeal to their interests.
Pain points and motivations: What problems or challenges does your target audience face, and what motivates them to take action? Understanding these factors can help you better communicate the value of your offering to your target audience. For example, if your audience wants to game with pretty girls, have someone to talk to like a companion, and laugh and have light conversations to distract from their real lives, you can use these insights to create messaging and offers that appeal to these needs.
Understanding your target audience is a crucial step in marketing, as it allows you to customize your messaging, product offerings, and marketing efforts to better suit their needs and preferences. This not only applies to personal branding but also to mainstream brands that support your adult one. Ultimately, both audiences are there for you - the main character. It's essential to recognize that despite the branding story that draws them in, the primary focus is always you. Additionally, this understanding of your audience can open up new possibilities for business growth and expansion.
Step 2: Choose Your Niche
Choosing a niche that aligns with your skills, interests, and expertise is crucial in creating high-quality and relevant content that resonates with your audience. To identify your niche, start by exploring the topics that you are naturally passionate about and have a deep understanding of, and then narrow down your focus to a specific area. When discussing this with other creators, I often ask them, "What are the things that you naturally gravitate towards? The things that you would do in your life even if you never got paid for it?" This is an important question to ask because building a brand and business takes a lot of time and effort.
Personally, I have been building my brand for over a decade, and I believe that if you can't commit to doing it forever, then it's not worth doing at all. The key takeaway is that building a successful personal brand requires a significant amount of time and dedication, so it's important to choose a niche that you can leverage and build on for the rest of your life, not just for a short period. To illustrate this point, think of successful personalities like Lena the Plug, Lana Rhoades, and Riley Reid.
Once you have identified the things you're passionate about and could do forever, that's when you’ve found your niche. Some ideas of niches are:
Gaming and esports
Beauty and makeup (although I’d aim this toward costume makeup if you are targeting a male audience)
Celebrity gossip and pop culture commentary
Comedy and humor
Magic and illusions
Music and dance
Film and TV reviews and analysis
Tarot card reading and astrology (I’d again somehow relate this to a male audience, maybe with tarot readings about the future of your sex life, etc)
Board games and puzzles
Cosplay and costume design
Food blogging and restaurant reviews
Fantasy sports and betting
Travel vlogging and adventure tourism
Beer and wine tasting and reviews
Karaoke, music, rapping, singing
Retro gaming and collecting
Car and motorcycle customization and racing
Action sports and extreme activities (e.g. surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding)
Stand-up comedy and improv
Podcasting and radio hosting
Toy and action figure collecting
Home brewing and distilling
Voice acting and narration
Craft beer or winemaking
Pet, exotic animals, etc
Ultimately your niche should reflect who you are naturally and resonate with you deeply. Remember, once you pick a lane or niche, you can always go into Chat GPT and ask for clever brand names in slogans, that incorporate your creator stage name and the niche you’re building around.
Step 3: Develop Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
In the world of content creation, having a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or offer is crucial to standing out from the competition. Simply selling Onlyfans or clips won't cut it - with 5 million other creators out there, you need to find a way to differentiate yourself. Your USP is what sets you apart and makes you unique in your niche. To discover yours, think about what value you can offer your audience and what problems you can solve for them. For example, posting new videos daily and including them all in the subscription feed is a USP that no one else is doing. By identifying and emphasizing your unique strengths, you can make yourself stand out from the crowd and attract more followers.
Step 4: Create a Consistent Brand Voice and Visual Identity
Creating a strong brand identity is crucial for building a successful social media presence. To achieve this, it's important to maintain consistency in your brand voice and visual identity across all your social media platforms, whether your audience is adult or mainstream. By blending these elements together cohesively, you can establish a powerful online presence that's easily recognizable to your audience.
When creating your brand's visual identity, it's important to choose a color palette, typography, and design elements that align with your brand personality and values. This will help you to create a visual language that's unique to your brand and immediately recognizable to your audience. Your brand's voice is equally important. Identify the tone that best represents your brand personality, whether it's sassy, witty, kind, shy, playful, seductive, or something else. Make sure to use this tone in all your captions, tweets, and other content across all your social media platforms.
By maintaining consistency in your brand voice and visual identity, your audience will be able to easily recognize your content, even if they don't see your username. This can help you build a strong and memorable online presence, making it easier for your brand to stand out in a crowded social media landscape.
Step 5: Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Optimizing your social media profiles is crucial to make them easily discoverable, visually appealing, and informative. Utilize relevant keywords in your bio that mention your niche, name, hobbies, and provide insight into what your followers can expect. It's also essential to incorporate your brand into your captions by using a consistent tone and voice. Additionally, ensure that you include links to your website and other social media profiles, and create engaging photos, videos, reels, and stories that showcase your brand. Since social media bios are SEO-optimized, it's crucial to make the most of the available space. While funny bios can be cute and entertaining, they may not assist potential fans searching for keywords such as "redhead," "gamer," or "cosplay" to locate your profiles.
Step 6: Create High-Quality Content
Producing top-notch content for your social media channels is like offering candy to potential fans, enticing them to visit your profiles and hit the follow button. The content or 'candy' should consistently reflect your brand image. However, the candy doesn't need to be thirst traps, as we've all been conditioned to believe. Keep in mind that your content doesn't need to be a thirst trap, as such content belongs to adult brands. For mainstream brands, it's important to create content that addresses your audience's pain points and is tailored to your target audience.
For instance, if your brand is about gaming, it wouldn't make sense to post content about how to use Artificial Intelligence as an adult creator. Your fans aren't interested in that kind of content, and it doesn't align with your brand. Therefore, make sure your reels, pics, TikToks, clips, and text are all targeting your intended audience and addressing their needs.
It's crucial to understand what your audience values, whether it's sweetness, kindness, seduction, teasing, playfulness, or wit. Use your voice to create captions and content that align with your brand's personality, whether it's gaming or teasing, or even high fashion modeling, car or gaming pics. You don't have to post nearly naked photos to attract followers. In fact, such content could hurt your social page more than help it.
It's also essential to consider relevant keywords to make your content more discoverable. Tweets and TikTok captions are now SEO optimized, meaning the words you use in your content matter more than ever. Use them wisely to increase your content's discoverability and attract potential fans.
Finally, consider that the low engagement on your pages and the fact that they're not searchable could be due to shadowbanning or the audience's preferences. Men in relationships may be hesitant to like or comment on suggestive content, and some may not follow such pages at all. Therefore, it's essential to create content that is appropriate for your audience and is discoverable through relevant keywords.
Step 7: Engage with Your Audience
To interact with your audience effectively, make sure to respond to their comments, direct messages, tweets, and emails. Sometimes, creators may feel frustrated with fans who make requests through DMs, but it's important to remember that these individuals could become valuable leads and supporters. Speaking negatively about them publicly can hurt your brand by conveying the message that you don't appreciate your followers or that you're giving off entitled vibes. Even if someone has been a "freeloader" for years, they still have potential value as a future spender, and engaging with them can help build a community and foster loyalty. Companies like Apple and Nike have successfully built cult followings through such engagement, and nurturing your audience can lead to business growth. By building relationships with your followers and seeking feedback on their content preferences, you can establish trust and learn more about what they enjoy. Kylie Jenner is a prime example of how cultivating and engaging with a large audience can lead to success, as evidenced by her billion-dollar makeup brand. So, prioritize engagement with your audience to build a loyal following and grow your business.
Step 8: Track Your Performance and Make Adjustments
To determine what's effective and what's not, keep tabs on your social media metrics. Use analytical tools to keep an eye on your engagement rates, growth in followers, and website traffic. Tracking these metrics will help you determine where your limited time is best spent - especially when you're just starting out. If you're new to social media, choose one primary platform and focus on building your presence there first. Sex Work CEO, for example, started with Twitter and only recently began to expand to Instagram. There is an order to these things, so don't feel like you need to do everything all at once. Once you've established your presence on one platform, you can then expand to others, and your brand will grow as you do so.
To summarize, building a successful mainstream brand requires defining your audience, niche, and unique selling proposition, creating a brand voice and visual identity, optimizing social profiles, producing high-quality and relevant content, engaging with your audience, and tracking performance analytics. It's important to constantly remind yourself that you're building a mainstream brand, separate from any adult industry experience, and to focus on creating a timeless brand that can lead to future opportunities beyond the adult industry. Use this information to make adjustments to your content strategy and improve your personal branding.
If you enjoyed this blog, you'll really love the Twitter space we did focusing on this topic! You can listen to the recording of that Twitter space here. I think you'd really enjoy it!