BY KIM HANNA
This week we’re talking about building a brand, not just a channel, with YouTube creator and educator Roberto Blake.
In addition to his work on YouTube, Roberto is also a creative entrepreneur, public speaker, and business coach. He's all about educating and motivating creative people with new videos every week on his YouTube channel which has 475,000 subscribers.
His Awesome Creator Academy helps creative entrepreneurs leverage YouTube to grow their audience, increase revenue and develop their businesses and brands.
Check out some of Roberto’s top recommendations on building a personal brand here:
Is it a good or bad idea to go hard on one particular channel as opposed to having a broader footprint?
Roberto has achieved great success on YouTube, but he agrees that it’s important to have a broader footprint.
It's all about having a purpose as to where you should be. For example, Roberto is mainly known as a YouTuber, but he has a very active and engaged Twitter presence as well.
Roberto’s philosophy is “why not?” He says, “If you're already spending three or four hours on your main thing, taking away or adding 15 minutes to your plate to do something else doesn't really impact that...there's not a downside.”
Many people believe that having multiple platforms dilutes your focus. Roberto suggests that there is no downside to posting a few Instagram stories, replying to people on Twitter or things like that. If anything, It can help increase your exposure as people find your brand on other platforms.
Becoming known as a YouTube creator
Roberto did not start building his brand solely through YouTube. In fact, he started as a blogger; in his YouTube videos, he would include his website in his video intros. Roberto made his channel partly to drive traffic to his site.
He’s also active on Twitter and Facebook. This brings us back to Roberto’s earlier point that using multiple platforms does no harm. He says, “I actually probably for years was just as hard on live, streaming every single day on multiple live streaming platforms in the early days of mobile live streaming more than I was even when I was doing daily YouTube content.”
Roberto’s live streams and blogs were largely about his career as a graphic designer and digital artist. His early focus was helping other freelancers and creative professionals. He interviewed other up-and-coming digital artists who would later be featured in various magazines and publications.
As Roberto consistently posted on his blog and did livestreams, he realized that his own brand was growing at quite a rapid rate. From February of 2015 through December of 2015 Roberto grew from 20,000 to about 75,000 subscribers on YouTube!
Differences between a creator, an influencer and a personal brand
You might have seen this question in our #ChatAboutBrand Twitter chat on Tuesday. We thought we’d ask Roberto how he feels about these three distinctions.
Roberto’s definition of a content creator is basically anyone that creates content. They could be an influencer, personal brand, or none of the above.
“A content creator doesn't have to be a content creator in the sense of being a public facing or forward figure,” Roberto explained. “If you produce beats but your voice isn't on the track, you're a content creator. And if you're making money as a musician doing that, you're a content creator. If you're not the face, and you are the editor of something - you're remixing content, but you're not personally in the content - you're still a content creator.”
You can also be an influencer without being a content creator.
“You could be an influencer by virtue of being a politician. You could be an influencer by virtue of being a public figure and a public speaker and having a story. That doesn't make you a content creator.”
A personal brand is a forward-facing figure with a public reputation. Personal brands can also be content creators and/or influencers.
Roberto says these three words are not interchangeable. “Some people can encapsulate multiple buckets. Some of them it's just one bucket, and you can't assume that you've got the others.”
What do you think? Are you a content creator, personal brand, or influencer?
Creating the Brand
When asked why he branded the way that he did, he said, “I built a brand with the understanding that I wanted to build a brand that I could live with. But some people are a caricature of themselves online.”
Roberto’s brand is very authentic. Being authentic is a great way for your followers to feel like they know you a little more. Plus, a part of being authentic is showing that you’re not perfect all the time. To be successful on social media, you do not have to be ‘perfect.’
“I think what people get wrong is they think that they have to be 100% all the time, but that's exhausting, and you're not your best all the time. And so giving people your best sometimes means, ‘OK, it's not going to be exactly how I feel in that moment. “
How to get inspiration
Roberto sheds some great insight into our next question: “What do you do when you're not in the mood to create content, but you have to? How do you find inspiration when you need to create content, and what tools you use that help you out with that?”
Roberto’s saying is, “‘When motivation fails, your discipline won't.” You might not always have an idea for everything, but Roberto always plans everything out. When inspiration comes, he’ll move on that. But he moves more on planning and designing, meaning he’s already mapped out what's going to happen rather than waiting for that inspiration.
Roberto also creates the opportunity to be motivated and inspired. He does that by building the perfect office that will help generate inspiration. He has inspirational quotes everywhere, and posters about patience, ambition, failure, happiness, persistence, and success. Building his office this way makes it a very motivating place to do work!
Find Roberto
Check out Roberto’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/robertoblake. He’s also @RobertoBlake on most social media (he’s most active on Twitter and posts to Instagram stories pretty much daily). And, of course, you can work with Roberto via AwesomeCreatorAcademy.com.
Thank you so much to Roberto Blake for his incredible insight on building a brand, not just a channel! To watch our Let’s Talk About Brand show, join us live on Facebook every Friday at 12 pm.