"Personal brand" is way overrated.

"Capturing leads", "driving traffic", or "following up with prospects" are all alien concepts to me.

There are no people in this formula, where people = traffic.

Millions of professionals seem to be obsessed with creating a personal brand. As soon as they start out, they are bombarded with offers to teach them to "drive traffic" to their brand new website.

"Personal brand" is way overrated. It's a show for the "audience" where the "audience" is divided into warm leads, cold traffic, and paying clients. People put a crazy amount of effort into driving traffic to their sales funnels, needing more and more "traffic" to survive... And they never get to understand PEOPLE who would pay for their services voluntarily (without having to go through the embarrassing "funnel" of "hey stupid, look here! I said - here! I'll repeat 5 more times for you, dumbass?- here is the "buy button")

Companies that deal with traffic (and not people) never get to understand their own value too. Pitching what you think you're selling is a good skill. However, understanding what it is that they are buying - is a game-changing skill that will turn around a business and massively improve sales.?

"Traffic" doesn't have a choice. It's not allowed to think or to make decisions. As soon as it does, it disrupts a carefully created funnel and immediately becomes not interesting. It's supposed to land on a webpage, click "buy" or come back later to click "buy".

What happens after it buys?

It's not interesting and it doesn't matter since the job now is to get "new" traffic.

Creating a personal brand today is like creating a show for anyone who will stop by to enjoy it for a while. People fuel the show with their attention. As soon as people get curious about a different show across the street, "personal brand" starts showing signs of decay.

Without people's attention, many of the online gurus are nobody, they belong nowhere, and they are lost in the illusion of their delusional self-esteem. They are powerless.?

"Personal brand" doesn't know how to communicate with people. It knows how to drive traffic. It knows how to impress and make an impression (assuming people can't understand what they are looking at). It knows how to sell to those who buy into the packaging.

It doesn't know how to deal with people who need what they have without being told so. It doesn't know how to build relationships with people who will buy again and again because they value completely different things (the ones you can't show when you're busy moving "traffic").

"Personal brand" is way overrated. It's effective as long as you create algorithms to deal with "traffic" and as long as you agree to be forever in need of new traffic to survive.

I can't think of a reason to use inefficient and expensive marketing tools if there is a better & simpler way to build relationships with people who truly need that service or that product (and they keep coming back for it). No AI can ever learn the skills that make us human.

But humans can teach other humans how to tell a "fact" from a "personal brand", how to connect with people and how to empower long-lasting relationships that always lead to more sales.