the bossbabe podcast - 454: Funnels vs. Personal Branding: Which One Actually Makes You More Money?

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Funnels or personal branding — which one should you focus on to make more money in your online business? If you've ever felt stuck trying to grow, you’re not alone. Many entrepreneurs chase visibility without turning it into sales or build a funnel that no one actually sees. In today’s episode, we’re breaking down the difference between funnels and personal branding, how each impacts your revenue, and which one will move the needle faster for your business. What You’ll Learn: Why some businesses explode with growth while others stay stuck spinning their wheels. The key difference between funnels and personal branding—and how to know which one you need right now. The exact steps to create a business that brings in revenue and builds long-term trust. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Funnels vs. personal branding — which one actually makes more money? 01:06 What a funnel really is (and why most people overcomplicate it). 02:28 What personal branding actually means (hint: it’s not just showing up on social media). 03:57 How a strong personal brand can triple your funnel conversions. 07:10 Why personal branding and funnels should work together — not separately. 08:36 The 2025 digital shift: Why AI, ad costs, and organic reach are changing the game. 09:59 The rise of micro-influencers and why small audiences can drive massive results. 11:15 The real answer: Which one makes more money, and where should you start? 14:42 How to scale without burnout and build a business that runs like clockwork. 17:04 Two resources to help you implement this today RESOURCES + LINKS ⭐Join Natalie for a FREE Training: How To Build A Profitable, Predictable + Repeatable Business – ONLY HAPPENING IN MARCH THIS YEAR! Choose From 3 Live Dates Here. 🚀Doors Are Now Open to Join Freedom Fast Track. Get The Funnel Roadmap Mentioned In The Episode Here. Get The FREE Instagram Growth Handbook To Build Your Personal Brand Mentioned In The Episode Here. Join The Société: Our Exclusive Membership To Help You Build A Freedom-Based Business. Sign Up For Our Free Weekly Newsletter & Get Insights From Natalie Every Single Week On All Things Strategy, Motherhood, Business Growth + More. Drop Us A Review On The Podcast + Send Us A Screenshot & We’ll Send You Natalie’s 7-Figure Operating System Completely FREE (value $1,997).

Funnels or personal branding, but if you had to choose just one to focus on, which would actually make you more money? That is exactly what we're going to break down today. The reason that this conversation matters is that most entrepreneurs waste months, sometimes years chasing visibility without ever turning it into actual sales or they obsess over perfecting a funnel only to realize no one's actually seeing it or going through it. It's like having a store with the best products inside, but the lights are off and the door is locked.

So what really moves the needle? Becoming the face of your brand or building the system behind it. Let's start with funnels. A funnel is simply a system that takes someone from, I just discovered you to here's my credit card. It's not just a landing page. It really is the entire journey. You've heard me talk about it. The idle client qualifier, the conversion event, the emails,

the sales pages, the checkout, and then even the post purchase followups. Think about it like this. If personal branding is how you get someone to walk past your store, the funnel is what gets them to walk inside, browse and end up buying. The beauty of a good funnel is that it works while you sleep. And listen, we all love things working while we sleep. You should see the state of me when I wake up in the morning. What is it that they say?

The morning shed. That's the way I think about a good funnel. Imagine waking up to sales notifications, not because you are actively selling, but because your system did it for you. And here's the best part. Funnels give you predictability. If you know that for every a hundred people who enter your funnel, five of them buy, you can reverse engineer your revenue goals, but a funnel without traffic is like a billboard in like the desert.

No one is seeing it. And that's where personal branding can become a game changer. So that's really why I think this conversation is important to talk about. So let's talk about personal branding. Personal branding is often misunderstood. It is not just posting on Instagram or showing your face on TikTok, YouTube. It's the trust factor. It's how people will decide if they actually like you, trust you and believe you can actually help them. Think about all the

entrepreneurs that you follow online. So why do you follow them? I'm going to guess it's not what they sell. It's them. It's their values, their stories, the way that they communicate, the interest in seeing the behind the scenes of their life. A strong personal brand can do three critical things for your business. The first is it can turn cold traffic into warm leads. Your personal brand can be the reason someone pauses while they're scrolling. It can be why they click your profile, binge your content, and sign up for your freebie. That is huge. Being able to turn that cold traffic into someone that actually

wants to learn from you is huge. It really shortens the sales cycle. So when someone trusts you, they don't need 20 touch points to buy. They need two or three. That is a huge, huge difference. It also really increases your conversions because a well-known trusted personal brand could literally triple the conversion rate at least of any funnel. Can I just really like tell you the power of that?

Tripling the conversion rate of a funnel, you guys, that is game changing. So if you're running a webinar funnel and someone already follows you, they trust you and they see you as an expert, they are far more likely to buy at the end. Right? I've seen funnels convert at 2% for cold audiences, but jump to 10% or more when the traffic actually comes from a well established personal brand. And if you put that into the context of numbers, that is a huge amount of revenue. Like that is game-changing when it comes to actually scaling your business.

So I really want that to land like the power of having a personal brand behind a funnel could just take everything to the next level. So I know a lot of you are probably hearing this and being like what does a personal brand actually look like? Like is it having an Instagram account? It's more than just showing up. It is showing up with purpose because just posting on social media. Listen, if running your business feels like a never ending to-do list with no end in sight, you are not alone. I used to think that just working harder was the answer. But the truth is freedom in business comes from systems, not hustle. And that is exactly what we will teach you how to do inside a freedom fast track.

So over eight weeks, I will personally walk you through how to simplify your offers, how to build a sales engine that actually sells for you, how to finally attract the right leads with a proven traffic strategy. So instead of constantly feeling chained to your business, you'll finally have the time, income and clarity that you were looking for when you started this business in the first place. Let's actually work together and build the business that I know you wanted when you started. So if you're interested, go to bossbabe.com slash freedom. It is finally time to make your business work for you and not the other way around. That's bossbabe.com slash freedom. It is finally time to make your business work for you

and not the other way around. That's bossbabe.com slash freedom. Can I tell you the one thing that separates businesses that thrive from the ones that constantly struggle? It is not the perfect Instagram strategy, it's not the way they're running ads, and it is definitely not working way more hours. It is having a system that turns strangers into buyers and keeps sales flowing on repeat. That's exactly what I'm breaking down for you

in my completely free training how to build a profitable, predictable and a repeatable business. So inside the training what I'm gonna teach you is how to build an offer so irresistible buyers literally cannot say no. We are gonna go into how to actually grow an audience of buyers, not just followers. And we're gonna talk about the exact sales engine that I personally use to create consistent revenue for the last decade without launching 24 seven.

I'm also gonna be diving into how to leverage AI to really automate the busy work and focus only on what moves the needle. If you are finally ready to break free from the chaos and build a business that really works for you, not the other way around, go to bossbabe.com slash live to register for the free training now and I'll see you there. Yeah, it does not mean that you have a brand. So I'm going to break it down in a few different ways for you. The first is positioning. So what do you want to be known for? A good question to ask is,

if someone mentioned your name, what would they associate you with? Are you the go-to for scaling digital products? Are you the expert in gut health for busy moms? Are you the mindset coach who helps women hit six figures? Do you help women to get pregnant through low toxic lifestyles? Like whatever your niche is, there is a personal brand there. So I really want you to think about nailing your positioning first because everything else is going to build from there. I also really want you to really double down on the power of storytelling because this is the heartbeat of your personal brand.

People don't buy because of features. They buy because they resonate with your story. This is really profound and important, and it can take a lot of time to pull your story together. Like you're really raking back into your life to figure out sharing the moments that shaped you, that shaped your business. Why did you start?

What mistakes did you make? What transformation or experiences have you gone through that you could help others with? And the more that people can see themselves in your story, the more trust that you're going to build. And that's really important. And the more people relate to you, the more that they're going to want to follow your story. You're also going to want to think about content strategy because this is where a lot of people get stuck. Your content should do three things.

It should educate. So teaching your audience something really valuable. It should connect. It should be showing your personality and your values. And it should convert. It should have people follow you or move towards your offer, right? And it's not about posting every single day to be quote unquote consistent. It's about posting really strategically.

So visibility is showing up consistently, but the thing is consistency doesn't have to mean daily. It means being dependable. Whether it's three times a week or twice a day, your audience kind of should know when and where to find you and that dependability builds trust without you even having to ask for it. You know, if someone says they release a podcast episode every Tuesday, and then they just don't and one week's a Wednesday or one week, it's a Thursday. You might not realize it, but that's breaking trust with your audience.

They don't know that they can depend on you. And another part that people miss is that your personal brand isn't separate from your funnel. So when people are deciding between the two, the way that I like to frame it is your personal brand is probably the top of your funnel. So if you think about it like this, right, your content is awareness. So every time you post, every time you podcast or you go live, you're attracting new eyes, then your ideal client qualifier is interest.

So once people trust you, they are way more likely to opt into your freebie. Then your nurture sequence is consideration. The more they see your face, they hear your voice, they read your words, the more that they're going to trust you. And then your offer is the conversion. So when you finally present your offer, the hope is that they're kind of already sold. Without personal branding, what you're doing is asking

strangers to buy. And with personal branding, it's like inviting friends into your funnel. Now, neither of those is right or wrong. It's okay to sell to strangers, but if you can supercharge what you're doing with personal branding, I actually think that you're positioning yourself in a really, really strong position in the longterm and listen, we're all in business for the longterm. We're not just in it for the next few months. And I really, really think personal branding is here to stay and it's

something you really need to invest in, in 2025. Well, let's talk about that. Why do you need both in 2025? Cause I really think this year is where the game is changing. We say it a lot, but the digital landscape is shifting so fast. I mean, you guys with AI driven content, paid ads are getting more expensive, organic reach becoming harder to maintain. Trust is the new currency.

AI is literally flooding the market. AI is making it easier than ever to create content. Blogs, videos, social posts, you name it, can literally be generated in mass, in minutes. But AI cannot replicate you, your personality, your values, your unique perspective, and most importantly, your story. Your story is so important. Personal branding, I believe this year is more important than ever. It's how you're gonna stand out in a sea of AI generated noise because listen you're seeing it, I'm seeing it, we're all seeing it. Another

thing to call out and this is the truth is ad costs are rising. With increased competition ad costs are climbing and so if you're relying solely on paid traffic without a personal brand you are gonna start to pay more to acquire customers. But when your personal brand can drive organic traffic for you, your funnel probably becomes more cost effective because warm leads are converting faster and probably at a higher conversion rate.

Audiences, I really think, are craving authenticity. You know, we're tired of polished corporate style marketing. We wanna buy from people that we know, that we tired of polished corporate style marketing. We want to buy from people that we know that we like and that we trust. And so I do think in 2025, if you're not showing up as a personal brand, as the face of your brand, you're invisible to a huge chunk of your audience. And so that's a huge opportunity for you. Another thing to call out this year is privacy changes are making tracking a lot harder.

So iOS updates, third party cookie bans, stricter privacy laws, tracking user behavior is getting harder and I'm not getting into whether this is a good or a bad thing, but ultimately it does mean it is getting more and more difficult to retarget cold traffic. But when you are building a personal brand, you're not relying on algorithms. You're building relationships. And that is really powerful. That is something an algorithm cannot take away from you or a data change cannot take away from you. We're also seeing the rise of micro-influencers and we've been seeing this for a while, but big influences are not the only ones winning.

So like a micro-influencers, probably people with like 2000 to 20,000 followers, they're driving really, really massive results because their audiences trust them. And most of the time they're in a very defined niche and a defined space. And that's the power of personal branding. And so if in 2025, you don't have both a funnel and a personal brand, you are going to struggle to stand out. You might struggle when it comes to converting leads and then scaling in a profitable way.

So let's dive into which of these actually make more money. The honest truth is that neither one works in isolation. But if you are coming to this episode, choosing where to start, then my advice is I would start by building a simple funnel and then simultaneously build your personal brand to feed that funnel. Here's the thing. Funnels generate revenue.

If your business is not generating revenue, it's a hobby. And listen, I don't know about you, but we can't, I don't have time to be funding hobbies. We really want businesses that generate revenue and then personal branding increases volume and conversions. And together, that is just a really incredible mix that can set you apart from the rest. And I really, really think is a great place to be spending your time. So if I was starting from scratch tomorrow, here's exactly what I would be doing step by step. The first thing I would clarify my personal brand. So I'd be defining my niche, my core message and brand pillars,

positioning myself as a go-to expert. So that would mean getting crystal clear on how I want to be perceived and what transformation I'm promising. And I would really ensure that my messaging is concise, is powerful, and speaks directly to my ideal audience's pain points and desires. Then I would be building authority content. So I'd probably focus on quality over quantity. Every single piece of content would be serving a purpose, either to educate,

to connect, or to convert. And I'd probably start with three to five core content topics or content pillars and consistently create posts, reels, videos, all around those themes. And the hope would be this establishes authority while keeping me the top of people's minds. Then I would launch a simple funnel. And I really mean simple, you guys, this does not need to be complicated.

I would start lean. So I'd have one clear, idle client qualifier connected to an email sequence that nurtures, trusts, and leads straight to my core offer. No complicated tech, just a very clear path from discovery to purchase. And I would really prioritize clarity over complexity. Then I'd be thinking about driving traffic. I personally use organic content and I would be doing collaborations with other people that have a similar audience to me. use organic content and I would be doing collaborations with other people that

have a similar audience to me. I'd also put a small budget through ads to get my lead magnet in front of the right people and then I would leverage platforms where my audience already hangs out so I'd find out all the on Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn and then I'd go all in there and something else that would really really help starting from scratch will be leveraging social proof so even if I didn't have clients yet I'd share wins from free workshops beta programs or personal results because that kind of testimonial is going to build trust really fast and I would try to weave it into every single touch point I have so sales pages emails social posts you name it I would be putting results in there and then I'd be optimizing consistently for conversion.

So I'd be tracking key metrics like click-through rates, email open rates, sales page conversions. Where are people dropping off? I'd be refining copy, adjusting offers, and then A, B test until my funnel consistently converts. Then I would be building an evergreen content ecosystem. I'd call this my million dollar ecosystem. I would create three to five pillar pieces of content, like a signature

webinar, podcast episode, or a blog that constantly drives traffic. These would act as magnets pulling new leads into my funnel without that constant effort. And once this funnel is converting, I'm thinking about scaling without burnout. So I'd be increasing my ad spend. I'd be repurposing top performing content and automate everything possible. Think about scheduling platforms, email automation, pre-made templates, chat GBT, you name it. I'd be really trying to keep things efficient there.

And then I really think community is so incredibly important. And I would nurture my audience through some kind of separate area to social media, whether that's a private group, a Slack, an email list, some kind of space for conversation and high value can build that loyalty and loyal audiences convert way faster. They also give you better feedback. And then speaking of that, you know, as I'm gathering feedback,

I'd probably strengthen my core offer. I would add value-driven bonuses, simplify delivery, tighten messaging, and the goal would be to make it an absolute no-brainer for my audience. And then overall, you know, the goal from that would be build a system that runs like clockwork while I focus on

growth, content and actually serving clients and I don't think that this is just a nice to have right I really think that this is how you build a business that doesn't burn you out and I think it's how you build a business that you don't you know two years from now decide that you want to fully burn down because you are so exhausted and you cannot picture yourself running it for another year. I think that is really really important. Let's build businesses that we don't want to burn down. So kind of coming back to the funnel or brand conversation, which one actually makes you more money? Funnels make you more money predictably and personal branding makes you more money consistently. So if you want that shorter term cash flow,

build a funnel and if you want the longer term authority, I'm gonna recommend building your personal brand alongside it. But if you're like Natalie, right now I just have a capacity to choose one, then my recommendation would be start with the funnel because revenue is the fuel that allows you to keep showing up and actually scaling your brand. And that's what's really important. Like I said, if you do not have revenue in your business, it's a hobby, and it is very hard to give so much time and attention to a hobby.

So let's focus on that. So if this episode really resonated with you, I've got two resources that I think will really, really support you and just help you to take all of this to the absolute next level. So the first is a funnel template that you can literally copy and paste into your business. It's actually one of my most successful funnels ever. I compiled every single detail of it. You can grab that in the link below.

It's a game changer. And then the second is a completely free 130 page guide to growing and monetizing your personal brand on Instagram. It is so comprehensive. I cannot even put it into words. It took us, I think about five months to create this. It's filled with every single detail you need to really grow your business. And the link for that is also below so you can grab those resources.

I think they will make a massive difference for you when it comes to growing your funnel and your personal brand. And then I also would love to hear, does this episode resonate with you? Do you like this format? Is there something I could do another topic on? Is there a way I could present this that would resonate more with you? Please let me know. I am all ears and I want to make sure that I keep delivering as much value as I can in these episodes. So thank you so,

so much for tuning in and I will see you next time.