My first YouTube video starred a blender. April 2014. I wasn’t even in it, just the blender doing its thing while I stayed safely behind the camera.
I only worked that out when Daniel Priestley posted about publishing video content for over ten years. It made me wonder when I’d started. The answer, it turns out, was a kitchen appliance.
No face. No confidence. Just an upload.
Daniel wrote Become a Key Person of Influence. I’ve been lucky enough to hang out with him on multiple occasions and get to know him quite well. He’s a really humble guy. He also has this uncanny knack of taking powerful ideas and making them incredibly simple, and this book is the best example of it.
I’ve watched him do it in a room full of business owners more than once. He’s been a guest at the ActionCOACH UK Podcast’s live recordings at Sky HQ, and he said himself he keeps coming back. I was lucky enough to host the first ever Velocity Live, and Daniel spoke there too. His message: the little stuff is big stuff online.
The names that come up first
Think about your own industry for a second. When someone asks for a recommendation, a handful of names always come up. Those people get the calls, the invitations to speak and the best opportunities. They aren’t always the most qualified person in the room. Often they work no harder than you do. People simply know them, like them and remember them.
Daniel calls them key people of influence. His big point is that you can become one on purpose, and he breaks it into five steps: Pitch, Publish, Product, Profile and Partnership.
Your pitch is being able to say, clearly and quickly, who you help and how. Publishing is getting your ideas out of your head and into the world, in writing or on video, so people can find them. Product means having something people can buy from you that goes beyond your time by the hour. Profile is being visible, so your name and face turn up when someone goes looking. And partnership is teaming up with people who already have the audience you want to reach.
None of that is complicated. That’s the point. The line from the book I come back to is this one:
“When you know where you stand and what you stand for you become a magnet for opportunity.”
The brand I built by accident
I accidentally built a personal brand when I became Natural Juice Junkie. Over a million views on a blog in 18 months. I was doing lots of the things Daniel talks about. I was publishing. People knew who I was and what I stood for. I just didn’t have a framework for any of it.
His book gives you exactly that. It’s the instructions for something you might already be half building without realising it.
And when it comes to building a brand right now, remember this: people buy people. A logo has never been invited to speak at an event. Nobody recommends a website over coffee. They recommend a person they trust.
Think of Richard Branson, the face on the front page. Plenty of people couldn’t name half the companies he’s started. They know him, though, and that’s what opens the doors.
Which brings me back to the blender, and Daniel’s point about the little stuff. I hid behind it because I didn’t feel like a video person. A lot of us do some version of that. We let the logo do the talking, or the website, or the product, and then wonder why nobody thinks of us first.
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t need to be famous. You need the right people to know you for the right thing. A small group who’d happily recommend you beats a huge crowd who scrolled past once.
If you’re good at what you do and still feel like the best-kept secret in your industry, this is the book I’d hand you. It’s the best framework I know for learning this stuff, and it’s easy to come back to.
It’s one of the books in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, along with a few others about standing out and being remembered.
So if someone in your world was asked for a name tomorrow, would it be yours?
