The School of Greatness - 81 Branden Hampton: How to Create a Million Dollar Social Media Empire

Episode Date: August 7, 2014

"The modern day celebrity is the social media influencer." - Branden Hampton This is Branden and he has millions of twitter followers. He holds some of the worlds most valuable pieces of social media real estate and he's here to teach The School of Greatness how to excel in social media. Come join the conversation and get your hands on the resources: www.lewishowes.com/81

This is episode number 81 with social media guru Brandon Hampton. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. What is up, greats?

Thanks so much for tuning in today on the School of Greatness podcast. I've got a new buddy of mine on today. His name is Brandon Hampton, and we got connected recently. And I was immediately intrigued by this guy because he has one of the largest independently owned social media followings out there. Now there might be some companies that have some bigger followings. But he's the only guy I know who's got 31 million followers over

all of his different accounts. He's got some huge accounts, which we'll talk about here in just a second. And it's amazing on how he's grown these accounts over Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest so quickly and how he leveraged some interesting things to grow such a massive audience and then monetize that audience. So in today's episode, we're talking about really how to grow this audience on such an epic level. Again, I've been on social media for a number of years and I've built some big followings, but nothing to the scale that Brandon has.

So it's a whole new level of social media growth and following engagement that he's going to be talking about and sharing some of his secrets here. We're also going to be talking about the new age of social media real estate. Now, this is some interesting stuff, but buying not domain names, but social media names and how powerful you can leverage these names with different brands, with selling products, services, affiliate marketing, things like that. So kind of some interesting topics we're covering today. I was very excited to interview Brandon and had him in the studio.

So I'm going to bring him on in just a second. And with that, guys, let's dive into today's episode and interview with Brandon Hampton. What is up, everyone? Thanks again for joining me back on the School of Greatness podcast. I've got a new guest on. His name is Brandon Hampton. What's up, Brandon? Not much, man. How are you? Doing well. I'm excited. Brandon, we connected, when did we connect? Like a month ago or a few weeks ago? Yeah, it's about three weeks. Yeah. Three weeks ago, we started reaching out to each other on Facebook, I think, or Twitter and then everywhere else. And I'd never heard of Brandon, but after we started talking, I realized we had a lot in common and knew some mutual friends. And I'd never heard about him before, but he has one of the largest, if not the largest independent social media following out there in the world right now with

over 31 million followers, real targeted followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other places online. And I was just like, oh, wow, that's pretty interesting. How did you do that? So we've been connecting over the last few weeks, and now he's here in my Santa Monica rental for the summer studio, and we're kicking it near the beach. So thanks for coming out, man. Yeah, hey, I'm digging the spot. I can smell the ocean from here. It's not bad.

Definitely don't mind it. I just moved in like a week ago, so it's like a few blocks from the ocean, and I've been telling myself every morning I'm going to wake up early and jump in the ocean, but I have yet to do it yet so hopefully soon enough i will but um i'm excited about this and you just wrote an article about you've kind of been like behind the scenes for a while with your social media following and you've only been working with bigger brands and no one's really known about you being the owner of all these accounts you've got some big accounts can we just talk about some of the names that you have on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook? Maybe?

Sure. Um, you're like at fitness on Instagram, right? Which is correct. Yeah. I have at fitness, um, which is one of the most searched, uh, terms topics, um, for Instagram. Probably one of the most hashtags too. One of the most hashtags. Yes. Um, you know, it's, uh, there's, there's a few different niche categories that are better in a visual sense, and fashion and fitness definitely fall into that category. So for Instagram and Pinterest, those are the topics that get a higher engagement on those platforms. I have at Notebook, which is 5.1 million followers on Twitter. Wow. Crazy.

uh, you know, 5.1 million followers on Twitter. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's really insane. And, uh, you know, I, I got in really early, which definitely helped, um, to be sort of one of the pioneers in this space. Um, what's early, uh, I've been doing it for a little over three years now. Yeah. So some of the other spaces that we cover, um, again fitness, we do fashion, I have skincare page, really, what we did is initially, I sat down in the early stages. And I said, I've kind of got the model down of what builds engagement on a social media account. And now it's time to map out what categories I need to be in. And of course, naturally, since the way that you monetize a social media platform is through advertising, I made a list. And I said, naturally, since the way that you monetize a social media platform is through advertising, I made a list and I said, what are the highest monetizing categories in

the world? And naturally I flocked to those. And somehow I just ended up managing all these women-based categories. Yeah. And if you don't know who Brandon is, he's got this huge beard on. He's like a bearded man right now. So Paul Bunyan or something. You just need the shirt. Very cool. So you realize how to capitalize it on one account in one niche. And you're like, hey, let me just repeat the same formula over a number of different industries. Right.

Yeah. It's really about just the process. And once the process was perfected, you can recreate that over and over. And once the process was perfected, you can recreate that over and over. Some categories are more broad where you can reach a bigger audience like Notebook, for example, having 5 million followers. Really, it's just positive messages. It's talking about love and relationships, which concerns everybody. But then if you go down to, you know, like a smaller targeted category, like maybe outdoors and camping, maybe you're just reaching a specific subset of people and it's not mass appeal, but then you get a higher level of engagement and

loyalty from that particular audience. So that's why we're trying to get our hands in as much as we can. Right. Interesting. And it probably helps if you build one following up, then you can kind of leverage it to build other followings up and kind of cross promote some of them. one following up, then you can kind of leverage it to build other followings up and, you know, kind of cross promote some of them. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, we're really using the larger broad audiences to build up those smaller ones. So it's, you know, if we have 5 million people, you know, collectively, we don't necessarily know who they are, um, you know, demographic wise, but we can go to them and say, Hey, if you are interested in fitness or if you're interested in shoes, um, you know, follow this particular page.

And then those people will sort of reorganize themselves and trickle over. And now they are a fan of love and positivity, but they're also a fan of shoes. Right. Very interesting. Yeah. On LinkedIn, I used to do this on LinkedIn years ago with the group section. I would create the sports industry group. It's the largest sports group on LinkedIn. And then I would create subgroups. So people from all over the world

were on the sports industry group, but then I wanted to create a group for sports marketing and sports PR and sports in New York city and Los Angeles. So I could create these smaller groups and be able to message out to them as well. So it looks like you've just been doing that. Yeah, we literally did the same exact model and you know for for almost any industry for any category it works whether you're building an email list or a social media following or you're building up groups you put people into the biggest category that you can and then you you know uh get them to join the smaller targeted stuff so you know where they live um you know what are, potentially what income. And again,

this goes back to the basics of building the correct audience. Right. Now, what's your favorite platform to build an audience on and which one does the best for you in terms of driving exposure to something, whether it be an advertiser or your own products or services or a website? Sure. Different platforms have, you know, there's two different things that you can focus on. Number one is for a particular category, each platform is going to serve a different purpose. You know, for example, Twitter and Facebook are more about driving traffic and being able to post links and embed content. Pinterest and Instagram give you the visual slash brand awareness section. So if somebody just wants to post an image for a company, that brand gets its exposure

because you consume that content immediately. You don't have to watch a video. You don't have to read an article. You don't have to click away from the website. As soon as you see that picture, you've consumed that information. And that's why I think in this society where people are getting trained to get lazier and lazier, it went from people reading five or six page articles to reading a short blog post to reading a Facebook status. Then it went to 140 characters and now it's just look at this image. That's it. What's next? Yeah. I mean, I, how much shorter can we get? I think that's about it. And that's why Instagram is really thriving right now.

It's like the peak of laziness and you get, yeah, it's the peak of laziness and you're also getting the most information at once. You know, who, who wants to sit there and read an article when you can just look at a photo and consume the exact same information. It's crazy. And it's got an interaction too, which I think works because you can double tap. So that's the, or you can comment, but it's like easy to interact with the image, right? I mean, the, the engagement for brands especially is significantly higher

on Instagram than it is on any other platform. And that's why a lot of the brands are, you know, starting to flock to that because they can, you old tradition of content marketing, which is you put a simple message in front of somebody and just remind them that you exist. And next time they go to buy a product in your particular category, then they think of you first. Yeah, they're reminded of you. So I want to talk about the future of real estate when it comes to online social media accounts in a second. But before that, I want to dive into kind of your story about how you got into this. And you wrote an article on your LinkedIn page recently about kind of your story working at a, I think it was

AT&T store back when you're like 2021 in the mall and killing it in that arena, doing really well and kind of like, you know, being successful there. And then you got out and went into real estate, right? Correct. So why did you get into that originally before real estate? And what were the lessons you learned selling people services and phones? Sure. Originally I was, you know, I had the normal aspirations. I got really good grades in school. I did really good, you know good on all my formal testing. I wanted to go into some sort of computer study, like computer engineering, because I had always been interested in technology. And so I got a summer job between high school and when college was supposed to start. And I realized how much money I could make very quickly. I've always been interested in the dynamics of how people work and being able to influence decisions in a positive manner.

As far as being able to get someone from point A to point B. Point B being the conversion of a sale without actually having to deceive people, without having to lie to people, without having to manipulate. And I found out some really good tactics to do that. And I mean, I just kind of put the numbers in front of myself and said, you know, if I go to school for X amount of years and spend X amount of money, I'm going to be working, you know, 12 hours a day as an engineer for somebody else, or I can sort of dive into sales. I can learn the trade. And I know that if I'm well at it, I can sort of dive into sales. I can learn the trade. And I know that if I'm well at it, I can go apply those same mechanisms to anything and not just necessarily cell phones,

but I can go sell things or services using those same concepts. And that's how I ended up. I made a few thousand dollars within my first month and I sort of got addicted to the ability to, you know, learn the sales process. And I, I, I mastered it very quickly and against, you know, my family's wishes, of course, everybody, you know, wants their, uh, you know, kid or grandson or whatever to attend college. Like you're, you know, like you're supposed to buy the to by the book and uh so i did the cell phone thing for a while i you know after two years in the company

i was managing seven stores in the la area and i was you know i think i couldn't even buy beer at the time i was like 20 um and uh after a long stretch there with the at&t stores i went over into real estate and said, okay, it's, you know, this is currently where the money's at and I can do what I did for cell phones for, um, mortgages, bigger properties for mortgages. Sure. Sure. So now it's not, you know, activating a phone for somebody it's, um, helping them execute the loan on their house or helping them refinance their house. And, uh, I happen to do very well very well with the mortgages as well. And in both companies, I really excelled and was shattering the different company records and stuff like that.

So I said, okay, I get it. I'm good at this. And I always wondered, what is the bigger picture? Where am I going to take this information? I'm not going to continue working for these companies, which is ultimately why I ended up leaving them because I understood the concept of these sales companies that you work for is that no matter how good you do the beginning of the following month, you're back at zero and they don't care what you did last month. They don't care about the record because the record does not, you know, help them hit their quota and answer to their bosses for that particular month. So they always want to know what are you going to do today and what are you going to do this month? And you impress them yet again, and then you're back to zero

for the 50th time in a row. If they were smart, they would really make you feel like you had more ownership in it or if they wanted to keep you around, they would give you days off or something. Sure, yeah. And with the real estate company, I was, 60 days off of my biggest month ever. Um, you know, in, in my, uh, short, you know, 23 or 24 years of life. Um, uh, I had my, my best month ever two months ago and, and, uh, I had requested some time off. Um, it was actually a holiday weekend. requested some time off. It was actually a holiday weekend. I booked my trip, you know,

they gave me the green light and the office and the region were not hitting their sales goals. And I had already hit mine for the month and halfway through the month, I had already hit mine and they said, you know, you can't go, we're behind, we're behind. And I said, that's, you know, that's not really my problem. And they told me that if I left that I wouldn't, you know, be able to come back. So I actually went in and dropped off a letter of resignation and went on my trip. Wow, that must have been a stupid mistake on their end. Yeah, I mean, you could just go restart your own mortgage company, probably if you wanted to. Yeah, I actually, I started working for a good friend of mine and uh you know i was able to not only do what i wanted with my time and have the flexibility um but i also was able to make you know a significant higher cut

on right you know the the business that i was doing sure and of course the freedom was was what was important to me at that time right okay So you're doing the real estate mortgage stuff for a while. And then did you end it to get into the social media stuff? Or did you start stumbling upon this for fun on the side? And then you're like, oh, I can actually make money with this. Sure. Well, first what happened is I didn't actually decide to leave real estate. It was actually kind of flourishing.

Everyone did. In 05, 06. Everyone had to. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like somebody picked up the market in a bowl and dumped it upside down. Um, by that time I, I had, you know, several rental properties and I had just bought my, um, you know, my primary residence that I was super comfortable in. And, uh, you know, if you, if you look at like a historical chart of where real estate peaked, like that's, you know, the six month period where I bought all these properties. Wow. And I just got extremely unlucky with the timing.

After the real estate thing, I went into, you know, a bit of a depression, probably, you know, almost two years. Because the value on your properties went down right away. I mean, it was cut in half. Wow. It was cut in half. It was cut in half, like over, over the course of 12 months. And I had, you know, um, at that age to have, you know, immaculate credit to have, um, uh, a decent chunk of money saved up. And then I put, you know, a bunch of money into these properties. I sort of had my life kind of riding on this between all my investments, all my assets, and then, um, my

income, everything was revolved around real estate. So when it crashed, there was my investments, all my assets, and then my income, everything was revolved around real estate. So when it crashed, there was my savings, there was my income, there was everything. So I crashed. It was really back to zero. And how old were you? It was in 2006. So yeah, it was mid-20s. Gotcha., that was pretty, pretty devastating. Um, and after that, I started a marketing company when I finally rebounded and was able to bring myself out of bed. Um, I started a marketing company and what we did was we did leads for, you know, debt settlement. Um, we did leads for, uh, loan modification for mortgage refinances we were just sort of supplying the information of people who went on google or they called into a phone number on tv and said like i'm

interested in refinancing my house and we would connect them with people in the mortgage industry who are able to perform that service for them sure um so we were on the side where we didn't necessarily have to perform in closed loans or we didn't have to, you know, acquire the customer. We just provided the information. Whatever happened with it at that point was really up to the salesperson. So it was a little bit less taxing to not have that, you know, stress on you. And that's what I needed at the time was something that wasn't so stressful and that wasn't going to make me feel like, hey, it's do or die every single day. I wanted something where I can sort of relax.

So how are you getting those leads? We did two types of things. Number one was we ran TV commercials. So we partnered with a company who bought media. We would run commercials and they'd say, you know, call the 800 number. And when that person would call, we would route them to a buyer who prepaid for a certain number of phone calls from the commercial.

The other way was Google AdWords. We would run targeted search, paid search results for different terms. And when they would search for something like how to get out of debt, we would connect them with the debt consultant and we would get paid for brokering that lead. Gotcha. Now, how did you come up with this idea?

I actually ran into a friend in the space, told me it was pretty lucrative. He said, if you're coming out of the mortgage industry, although you didn't survive that, if you know the terms and you understand how the process works, I can teach you the methods, and you'll do really well, just like you did with the mortgages. So naturally, I fell into it and it worked out really well. I had one particular client who pretty much bought up all that I can produce.

So it was a cash cow for a good few months. And I happened to get really trusting. I put that very large client on credit and he stiffed me for probably a little more than I even made from him over those few months. So that kind of put me back into the depression for a while and it was like man how many you know how many times can i go back to zero and it wasn't it wasn't you know losing a little bit it wasn't you know just a small pitfall it was literally back to zero because you're spending probably you know a lot of money every day or every week and month to generate these leads to buy the ads the media buys right it's expensive yeah you know's expensive. Facebook ads alone are expensive for me.

So I understand if you don't profit off those buys, that's like a huge chunk of change that's gone. We would pre-sell it. We would pre-sell, let's say if a customer wanted to purchase, let's say $20,000 in leads, we would buy the media and we would have to front that. And if our margin was 10 or 15%, we can go in and we can buy $17,000 or $18,000 worth of media to produce the $20,000 in leads

that we're going to do. We hedge our money for a $2,000 or $3,000 profit. But if that profit never comes, then the entire $17,000 or $18,000 is a loss. And that's what ended up happening for probably about eight weeks where we ran our media and generated all the leads and uh never got paid wow that sucks whatever happened uh that's it you never ended up getting paid no that's you said sorry that's all she wrote screw you yeah wow did you ever take action on that or would you have an agreement or is this kind of like your mistake his response when I told him that I was going to take legal action was get in line. Wow. So I just didn't catch it early enough. I didn't catch any of the signs. I was too blinded by the fact that, Hey, this client's a fantastic client. He's paying me all the time. And you know,

he, he paid me every week when it was, you know, um, a couple thousand dollars. And then when it went up to tens of thousands, he came up with an excuse. And of course, me not wanting to jeopardize the client, I was like, sure, yeah, you know, I'll run it for you again. I'll run it for you again. And he got, you know, he tapped me out over the course of about eight weeks. And then, yeah, that's it. Well, I look at it as lessons, not failures. No, yeah. It's, I mean, it's all, it's all very valuable experience. And again, it happened at such an early stage in my life. I lost houses. I didn't lose a home. I just only had myself to worry about. I didn't have a family at the time. And so that was the valuable lessons and really, really good

life experience that I got early on. So now I know better. Sure. I think I do at least I hope I do. So you ended up going to school, right? So this was like a college tuition, you know? Yeah. Exactly. Like the whole reason I avoided college was for that reason, but I ended up paying it. And then I got taught by the streets. There you go. It's I think it's more valuable. Very cool. So then when you're doing the lead lead stuff were you on the side doing the social media kind of like building up different accounts and just kind of no i i hadn't actually um really jumped into it yet um i think somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2000 and you know i mean i got i got like a twitter account in 2009 yeah um and i had it for personal reasons and i would tweet

and i didn't nothing happened and i didn't really get it and I thought it was stupid uh like most people did at the time sure and uh you know uh I think around the time that everybody else got interested in Twitter I kind of circled back which was when uh Aston Kutcher had the whole race to a million followers with CNN yeah and as the media started to drive more attention I said okay well this thing, this thing's for real now. And what first started out was I started posting just jokes, funny stuff that I thought was funny that maybe other people were kind of scared to post. And I just, you know, sort of off the wall type humor. And I noticed, hey, people like this and people are following along with me. And I got about 5,000 followers. And, you following along with me. And I got about 5,000 followers

and a lot of people didn't have 5,000 followers at the time. Even people who you actually knew who they were, better yet, somebody who you had no idea who they were didn't have that amount of followers. Then the first actual brand type category page that I created was the notebook. And a lot of people don't really know the story behind it, which was that some girl ended up following it when it had, I believe,

around 15,000 followers, which was what I built, the initial push. It had 15,000 followers. A girl followed the page and she only had you know 10 followers and she tagged one of her friends in the post um you know it was a love quote that she happened to like and her friend happened to be kendall jenner okay and um so i said hey you know i got excited i said hey you should tell your friend kendall to follow me so at this time you know nobody really knew about twitter and the value and how much an advertisement was worth or how much exposure was worth. And so she told Kendall, this page wants you to follow it. She got excited and she followed me.

And I said, hey, you should. She had about 400,000 followers at the time. This is before. When was this? This was four years ago. Wow. This is when, you know, everybody's starting to really pick up on the Kardashians, but the Jenners were still kind of, you know, under the radar. Now they're almost bigger. Those two younger girls are bigger, it seems like.

Absolutely. And it seems like they have that purity behind them. Yeah. Who knows. So she started following you. So she started following me, and i just went for it i just you know i've always been you know the type who is not scared to ask for something if i want it so i said hey um you should retweet some of my tweets if you like them and she's like sure

so she has 400 000 followers which again at the time you know that was a lot of followers yeah she's got you know 8 million or 10 million or something crazy now um she so she's got, you know, 8 million or 10 million or something crazy now. Um, she, so she's like, okay, sure. So she retweets like 10 or 12 of my positive messages in a row, which triggered Chloe and Kim to start following it. No way. Yeah. And, uh, that was, that was sort of the Holy grail. That was when my page really took off because Chloe and Kim both retweeted the same tweet sometime later in the week. And I think I went from 17,000 to 100,000 followers relatively quickly. Wow, amazing. And almost to a T,

I know I started the page in February. I'm not sure which February it's been. But religiously, the page started growing about a million to 1.1 million per 12 months around February mark. Yeah, it's got a 5.2 million now. Right, right. Which is pretty sweet. So, yeah, that's sort of the basic story behind when the page started and how it got its initial momentum.

And now the who's who of Twitter follows it. Everybody from Bieber to J-Lo of you know twitter follows it everybody from you know bieber to j-lo to you know kim kardashian still follows it and uh rihanna you know all these people have retweeted it at one point or another during their you know i would i always see when tmz breaks something like rihanna's having relationship issues i'm like yes she's gonna start retweeting my love quotes again that's funny yeah so it's mostly love quotes and positive messages love quotes positive messages um you know tr it's mostly love quotes and positive messages love quotes positive messages um you know truisms just stuff like that sure sure i mean it's

categorically you know people are saying like it's i mean it is a lot more women followers than it is you know men of course but we try to hit both categories and put just general positive messages along with you know the love stuff interesting and so you've you've built up a number of these different so that was kind of one of your first big wins is with twitter you know four four years ago building this up and now it's grown and then you started to basically just capitalize on other accounts you're like okay let me leverage this into this account and this name and things like that um so what are the things what are some of the things or when did you realize like hey maybe i could you know monetize this did people start reaching out to you and say, hey, could you post this about our brand and we'll pay you?

Yeah, yeah. What was the? People, I had my email in my bio, and people just started emailing and saying, hey, if you post this about our clothing brand or link to our website or post this YouTube video, we'll pay you. Right. clothing brand or a link to our website or post this YouTube video. We'll pay you. Right. Cause that one, that's when it kind of first hit me like, okay, there's, there's going to be, you know, some money in this. Um, I'm going to make a few extra bucks while I, you know, work, whatever I'm, you know, doing for a real income. And, uh, and this is going to supplement it, or this is going to be my, you know, my beer money or whatever it is. And, uh, so that, that's, that's pretty much

how it started. And I started's pretty much how it started. And I started to notice that it got more serious. One of the first campaigns that I ran for Instagram back in the day, this is when Notebook just had, I think Notebook has almost 600,000 followers now on Instagram. This is when it had 90 or 100,000 followers. I got approached by Sundrop Soda. followers um i got approached by sundrop soda and they said um we want you to post a picture of a can of sundrop soda and we'll pay you a thousand bucks with a hundred thousand followers that was with a hundred thousand followers and i said okay um that's it okay yeah sure i can do

that and they're like okay yeah you know so find an image you know go go buy a can of soda and take a photo or find one you know on the internet somewhere and use a caption and we just want you to use um hashtag sundrop in there somewhere and that's it wow and so i said okay and it was you know it was like uh may or june um of a few years ago and i said um June of a few years ago. And I said, summer's almost here and I'm hashtag or I'm ready to sun drop it like it's hot. And they loved it. And they're like, best money we ever spent on marketing. So cool. You know, we love the social media aspect, you know, thank you for that. And I realized then, okay, if the big brands are coming after me, there's a lot of small ones in between their startup companies with budgets. So I started to figure out where are people spending money? You know, one of the highest monetizing categories in the world, health and fitness, weight loss, diet.

Everybody wants to, you know, everybody wants to look good. Everybody wants to have a certain, you know, health aspect in their life. And that was where the majority of the money was being spent. So I started a fitness page. The fitness page now has, you know, 2.1 million followers health uh aspect in their life and that was where the majority of the money was being spent so i started a fitness page right the fitness page now has you know 2.1 million followers it has over 500 000 on instagram and you know that that proved to be true that there's a big desire um for advertisers to approach me and um we did one with skincare. We have a skincare page with 800,000 followers on Twitter. And I do various different topics. I probably have 12 to 15 different categories across all the social media sites. And we have hundreds of thousands of followers

in each of the categories. Right. So when you did the fitness, did you start at fitness or was it a, did you buy at fitness and how does that work? Well, at fitness on Instagram, um, it was an inactive handle and I had a different fitness name and I just approached Instagram. Um, and, uh, because I had 2 million followers on Twitter, they said, okay, well we'll give it to you. Um, I just had a certain level of legitimacy and trust that when they went to and they saw a verified twitter page with two million followers they said oh this must be a real company was that the notebook twitter page no it was it was the fitness one the fitness one has two million at fitness on twitter it's it's actually not fitness it's uh fitness is taken a personal trainer owns it and she said she's going to die with that username oh my gosh so

yeah so i have actually it's uh sort of like a Unicode like dork trick that I used and it's F and then it's, um, L T N E S S. And when everything's capitalized except for a lowercase L, it looks like fitness. Really? Yeah. Oh my gosh. So I was able to actually use a word that doesn't make any sense that looks like fitness to build up over 2 million followers.

Interesting. Which means that, you know, the branding and the names actually have nothing to do with it if you know how to manage the content and the engagement. And for the longest time, it's funny, I forgot to bring this up, but Notebook didn't used to be at Notebook either. It used to be the Notebook and book had three O's in it. Wow. Really? So how'd you change it? Just because notebook became available?

I contacted Twitter at one point when I hit about 2.5 or 3 million followers and they gave me at notebook because it was inactive and they verified my account, yeah. Wow, that's nice. Yeah. Very cool. Interesting.

So you could build a following even if you don't have the name and then ultimately get the name. Correct. If you want to do that. You can ultimately get the name or you can build it up even if you don't have the name and then ultimately get the name. Correct. If you want to do that. You can ultimately get the name or you can build it up as whatever brand that you want. You don't need to have the name to get it big. You don't.

You can even have different letters to make it look like the word. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can do that. Or it's the same thing. I try to build up a lot of my audiences under generic names, not necessarily brands or anything. So instead of creating a company, for example, like Nike wants to be Nike, I don't want to have my own brand

because I want to be able to advertise those companies. So I go with the most generic form in that particular field and I just say, I'm fitness. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. I like it.

So you took this concept of making $1,000 from one image and said, hey, there might be a way to make a lot of money with this. And since then, you've built a business selling ads to brands. Yeah, we have a bunch of different purposes per se. My core business, my legacy business is to essentially acquire either usernames or pages

and engage large audiences and, and, and sort of build up those followings. And then from that point, now we're able to do, uh, what we want with the eyeballs in, in, in many different ways. So if we know that we have a fitness following, we can provide them great content, you know, just as I always say, it's like a digital version, a digital free version of a magazine subscription. It's like if you want to subscribe to Women's Health or Men's Health, you have to pay for it. They send it to you in the mail. It's got lots of good content in there, articles, photos, how to. And then you have your ads in there.

So it's the same model. It's, you know, it's just like everything else where you get a good balance of content and advertisements. Sure. But, but in social media, we have a lot better idea of who our audience is and we can target those. So,

you know, instant feedback to an instant magazine doesn't get that feedback. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and for the advertisers, it's a lot higher quality as well as because,

you know, you can spend, um, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to get the billboard on sunset in hollywood and everybody's just looking down at their phones while they're in traffic anyway nobody's looking at the billboard and for a fraction of the price you can reach a more targeted audience and then you get complete analytics on who you reached

um how long i mean we post a video for somebody that's five minutes long. We can tell an average, you know, visitors watching it for two minutes and 40 seconds. And how often, you can't get that on a commercial. You can't, you know, see how many people fast forwarded because they DVR'd the show. There's so many different, not just the fact that it's a lot cheaper, but there's so many different advantages to social media advertising and digital space. Sure, interesting. So you're kind of in the game of, you're trying to buy pages now and names and acquire that, right? For the most part, we've built up organically, but there is sort of, you know, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, they don't really condone buying and selling of pages.

Sure. People do it though. I have people on Facebook that buy, you know, fan pages with a million followers or whatever. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, the, the, it's just sort of finding a happy medium, you know, like I've bought different pages before where they'll have it tied to like a domain name. So you can buy the domain name and get the social media properties as the intellectual property of the domain and stuff like that. So there's, you know, there's legitimate ways that you have to do business in this space. You don't want to jeopardize your audience. Sure, yeah.

I mean, we're in this whole new game now because people are buying, they've been buying domains for a long time, but now it's like social media accounts. You can get a lot for your social media account if you've branded it the right way, if you've built the right engagements. Sure. I mean, for someone who's got a million followers

on an Instagram account or a Facebook page, you could, you know, if you built it the right way, you could sell it for a lot of money. Sure. And that's what the game a lot of people are playing. They're buying accounts for new social media platforms that come up. Because who would have thought three years ago Instagram was going to be this big? Facebook did. Or Vine was going to blow up or, you know, whatever.

There's going to be... Just when I feel like it's too oversaturated, like there's too many things. Another platform comes out. Like Pinterest as well. It's like I never would have thought that was going to get big. But who would have thought these would have been big? There's another one that comes out that's easier

or more effective or simpler to use that people get hooked on. And I think that some of the older, and when I say older, I just mean a few years, older social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, they're sort of taking their true form because for a while they're almost in a stage of identity crisis. It's like, what is Twitter

and what is it going to be ultimately used for? And I think that right now it's just a communication tool. And I don't think it's a social media anymore. I think it's a medium to get information. And a lot of people are using it for their communication because they like open conversation. If I send you a text message, it's just you and I. But if I send you a message on Twitter that says, hey, let's grab lunch tomorrow, And, you know, Bob happens to be listening in, he can chime in and say, hey, I'm going to join you guys. People like the open dialogue.

And people are finding their news, you know, you can if somebody, you know, passes away, or if there's some sort of accident or catastrophe, you can find out seconds within that happening, as opposed to having to read it in the paper tomorrow morning. And it's, it's, it's essentially replaced all forms of, you know, traditional media. Right. And that's, that's what people are using for communication. I don't watch, I mean, I rarely watch TV and even sports center, which I love, I don't watch that much anymore. It's like for four years, I didn't have a TV when I was building my business and trying to learn from scratch everything just because I wanted to focus.

And now it's just like, I hear about everything like LeBron James, I mean his announcement the other day and it was all over SportsCenter the whole day, right? But I saw it within the first two minutes of it on Instagram. Yep. Because he posted it himself.

Exactly. And I was like, yes, Ohio has something to like cheer for. I'm from Ohio. And he said he was going back to Cleveland. I was like, I had ESPN then on all day just to hear about what they were talking about. Sure.

But that's when I turned it on, after I saw the news. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can get the headline and you can get the image almost instantaneously. And then after that, it's all about the details. You can watch the news for details or if it's something that you're passionate about or interested in. You know, like when it was football season, my Broncos were up until the Super Bowl.

You know, they're kicking butts. So I just turn SportsCenter on and listen to them hype my team up for an hour. But I wasn't learning anything that I didn't find out already on social media. But I just wanted to hear them, you know, boast about how good my team was. Exactly. media. Um, but I just wanted to hear them, you know, boast about how good my team was. Um, so, and then, uh, now, and then Facebook has sort of taken a backseat, um, as an information and content tool. And it's just, it's the social, social network, the true social network that people are referring to as like your close knit circle. It's like your high school friends and

your, your immediate friends, your immediate family, you're sharing, you know, pictures of your baby and you're, you're sharing your life news with stuff that you may or may not want to share on Twitter. Instagram is, you're opening up to a world audience and you're saying like, this is my life in a more exciting instant format of photos and short video clips. And you're building your own brand

essentially like we went back to brand awareness for companies um individuals are now able to do this too and there's uh you know like for example i went to a fit expo in san jose this past weekend and there a girl had her own booth there she had a million followers on instagram and that was that's her that's her interesting there nothing before that she had a million followers on instagram and so she got her own booth she's probably selling like sponsors she does sponsors she has you know all these different you know supplement companies that she's working with but her entire brand was built up um around the instagram following right and her fitness stuff probably and her fitness stuff yeah absolutely so did you see battle the bars there was this the same did you see all these guys doing bar like uh-huh flips and stuff like that

yeah pretty crazy stuff i had a buddy of mine who was actually on the show travis brewer who was there as like the mc or something so okay yeah i saw part of it on a youtube clip so i was just curious if that was the same one it was the same one yeah yeah that's interesting so someone was there who was like an instagram celebrity correct selling herself yep that's interesting. So someone was there who was like an Instagram celebrity selling herself. That's hilarious. Yeah, and that has become the modern day celebrity is the social media influencer. And again, I got into this space real early. So I understand that particular role from all different aspects.

aspects. Um, part of the, the, the, uh, new business model, um, and, and part of one of the projects that I'm creating is a centralized platform for social media influencers to be able to monetize their following. So somebody who, um, you know, two years ago you had no idea who they were and now a million people know who she is because she has a large following on Instagram. Instead of her being at fitness, which is a generic brand, she has her own identity behind this. It's like Michael Jordan doing the Hanes commercial, but instead you have a, a girl who's very popular in the fitness industry who's fit, who may now represent your brand and can take $10,000 to put your athletic gear on.

Yeah, it's crazy. And I've talked to, I mentioned this to you, but I've talked to, with Jen Seltzer a few times about her. I think she's almost got 4 million Instagram and it's like what she's done to build that up and make money with it. It's pretty impressive. And there's a huge opportunity for people to build their following

and create a name for themselves and become basically famous. Sure, sure. I mean, she was on, you know, in the New York Post. A few times. A few times. On. Sure. I mean, she was on, uh, you know, the, in the New York post a few times on the view and she was on a vanity fair, had like a full couple of page spread of her, but yeah,

you can get mainstream press and get a lot of sponsors interested if you build the right following. Now I have a pretty social media savvy audience. People are listening. They've been, a lot of people have been following me for five, six years now since I was doing LinkedIn stuff and other social media training. And they're pretty savvy entrepreneurs for the most part, everyone listening is. So some of the stuff they may be thinking, oh, yeah, I already understand that or I get it or I've heard how to do that.

But what's like for those who are really pretty savvy entrepreneurs already, what are some ways that they can tap into their own current following and ramp it up? Like what are some things maybe they haven't even thought of or that they've just haven't paid attention to because they didn't think it was going to work? What are some things that you do that work?

And you don't have to share all your secrets, obviously, but just what are some things that like anyone could do a little differently to see a big change? Sure. I think that I'll give one example and I give this example a lot because it's the most simplest form. A lot of people, you know,

have to realize that, you know, myself included, you know, I'm not that interesting to a stranger and it's nothing personal and it's never anything personal on social media, but somebody, somebody doesn't want to know that I just got my Starbucks drink. Right. Right. And you post that on a social media, but somebody, somebody doesn't want to know that I just got my Starbucks drink.

Right. Right. And you post that on a social media or on a, on Instagram, you post some stuff like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can, and, and it can get, you know, it can get some engagement and it's going to be from your close friends. Maybe you have an inside joke about it or whatever it is, but no new people are going to follow you. Correct. Correct. The, the, the secret is, and again, you said, what's a trick that maybe some people are overlooking, even if they understand social media, is you have to create relatable content that applies to the masses. So if I were to post right now on my personal account, I have almost 50,000 followers. So I could say, like, I just got Starbucks.

That won't get any retweets. It won't get any favorites. Maybe a couple people will respond and say, who cares? Or like, you know, shut up, you know, something funny. But if I were to post, I hate waiting in line, that would get a significant amount of engagement because how many people can relate to the fact that they hate waiting in line? So maybe I got my Starbucks shrink and that's important to me because I wanted Starbucks, but what if I had to wait in line to get it? Now I can relate to a bunch of people

because nobody likes waiting in line. So if I were to post that, the difference in engagement would be fairly significant. So for personal pages, that's what people always have to keep in mind is you have to figure out who, who am I as a brand, as an individual and what is my goal? Who am I, who am I trying to acquire as an audience? And you create content around that. So, um, you know, it's, uh, it's literally like trying to set maybe like a mousetrap and you put,

um, you know, whatever is going to attract the mouse into the trap. Right. That's what you want to do. And, and, and essentially if you want to look at it as capturing leads, capturing followers, um, that that's the same way that you have to operate. You have to create the great content that people who you want to follow you will like. Sure. Um, from a business perspective business perspective, this is one thing that I've always said, and I would like to think that a lot of people are listening. And if I go in to consult for a big brand, the most important thing that I can tell them, and this applies to, you know, it can apply to individuals as well, but brands make this huge mistake. And this is a very piece

of valuable information that I'm about to give out you are not your brand on social media you are your industry so if you sell wedding rings your goal is not to talk about wedding rings all day your goal is to post wedding videos your goal is to make suggestions on building and writing and managing a wedding checklist your goal is to um make suggestions on building and writing and managing a wedding checklist your goal is to talk about everything weddings except for rings so now you become a trusted source of information regarding the topic and the industry in the field of weddings so when it's time to buy a ring they come to you they come to you yeah so and that's and that's the mistake that a lot of brands make.

You can go on Nike's feed and they're talking about the new Kobe shoes and they're talking about this and the Nike Fuel Band that's out and they're talking about that. If they just posted sports, athletic content just that was content with no message, you have to look at it like a TV show, for example. You know, I like Law & Order. If I want to watch Law & Order, I can watch, you know, let's say 42 minutes of Law & Order and I can take 18 minutes of commercials with it. But what if it was all commercials? What if it was, you know, the other way around?

What if it was 75% commercials and it was 15 minutes of show? I wouldn't watch it. I don't want 25% show. I want 75% plus show. And that's what you have to do on social media is if you want to build that loyal audience, you have to give them what they want and then they're okay listening to your, let let's say pepper peppered in you know messages and stuff so it's like that's what we do on our fitness page we talk about how to get flat abs in an article and then we talk about what foods to eat we talk about what exercises to do and then we say oh by the way you know this is the nike fuel band and it's going to help you track your workout

metrics a b c x y z exactly and now we are the trusted source because we're providing them with great content and great information all the time so when we throw in an advertisement sometimes it doesn't look like an advertisement it looks like a testimonial or a legitimate recommendation sure sure so you've got all these different accounts uh you know i'm assuming i'm assuming hundreds of accounts over all of them i'm assuming um maybe maybe less maybe more there's probably in the neighborhood of about 60 to 70 across the social networks, yeah. Cool. So call it 50.

You're just one human being. And if you were running 50 accounts all day long, pumping out content, it would be a little overwhelming and you wouldn't be able to do it. Sure. So how do you manage all 50 plus accounts by one, curating content, creating content and finding it the right stuff, because you know, you're telling people to make sure to create the right content and post the right content. But a lot of the times what I've seen is you don't actually create the content, you'll find it, and then you'll post it specifically on Instagram, you're not out there

taking images all day long with these different industries. Right. Yeah. How do you have, do you have a team that does this or do you, you know, do yourself, do you give them guidelines? How does it all work? Sure. Yeah. What we do is, um, I have about seven content creators that work for me. Um, and they manage, you know, some of the, the Twitter pages, the Facebook pages, which can be automated, um, in advance. And then the Instagram pages, somebody is actually manning those sort of 24-7. And they have a responsibility of a certain amount of posts when they get assigned. Because there's no automated on Instagram yet.

No, no. Their API doesn't allow for it. Too bad. It'd be sweet when it happens. Sure. I mean, it will, but it won't. Right. From my perspective, a lot of the social media publishers, cause there's other people that do what I do out there. And a lot of people haven't

got into the Instagram space because frankly, they're just too lazy. Um, and it's just them. So, you know, imagine just, you know, like let's say a three or four times multiplier, um, you know, you're running four pages and you have to post on each page five times a day. Do you really want to log in and out, you know, of Instagram 20 times to do posts on top of everything else that you're already doing? In most cases and circumstances, the answer is no. So what I've done is I've found a few people who are willing to do that at a smaller level, and maybe they run three accounts each and they get compensated for, you know, doing an appropriate amount of posts. Um, so so each each page is given its own voice and it's given its own um set of reason and saying if it falls within this category it's okay to be posted um

and we try to stick to a very similar voice sometimes we'll even switch content creators from one page to another to keep the content fresh to keep everybody so i have you know i have my brother um who is you know 21 and he's sort of like you know, I have my brother, um, who is, you know, 21 and he's sort of like, you know, he's into like dirt bikes and he's like redneck ish, but he runs one of my women's fashions account. It's hilarious. And he's very good at it. He's killing it. Right. And he's killing it. Yeah. So, you know, some, some things, um, obviously are less sensitive to find an outfit and to caption it is not a big deal. But when we're dealing with stuff like people's health, um, for example, like we have people who understand and are in the fitness or nutrition space,

who actually will write content for us. And then we can, you know, edit it appropriately, because there's, there's, you know, the wording and, you know, headline caption space, there's a lot of copywriting tricks that you want to use for content to resonate. But we have the information coming from somebody who's reliable. Right. Interesting. Well, this stuff's pretty fascinating to me. And I want to know what's next for you. Like what's the big picture?

I know you're kind of like restructuring your business. You've got a new site out called Doug.com, which is a great domain name that you're curating content on. Therefore, you've got a few other products you're working on. You talked about this social media influencer site, but what's kind of the big thing that's up next for you that you're working on that you're really excited about? Yeah, I think the big picture for me is just sort of picking up as much digital real estate as I can. And I first used that term a couple years ago and I've kind of stuck with it and because I really feel that it does describe what I do and I'm trying to pick up all these valuable pieces of intellectual

property and there's different ways to monetize you know there's hundreds of ways to monetize each of these different pages that we own so to have access to that audience on a constant basis, we have an e-commerce site. So all of our fashion pages point to an e-commerce site where you can buy women's clothes. And we also have the publishing platform where we can now use our pages to monetize our content by dealing directly with brands.

So I think that at the end of the day, I don't own, you know, Doug.com is not, you know, the market that I'm in. I'm not in the e-commerce business. I'm just in the eyeball business. I want to influence a large group of people under a bunch of different types of categories. And I want to give them great content. And I want to find advertisers advertisers not only for the benefit of monetizing and growing my business, but also the fact that as technology gets a lot better and we can target people correctly, people are getting advertisements

that are relative to them and that can actually benefit them. Right, right. I love it, man. Well, I'm gonna lead it to one more final question in a second, but I want to make sure everyone can connect with you and learn more about you, which is over at brandonhampton.com.

You can go check him out over there. It's kind of just a landing page right now, but make sure to follow Brandon on LinkedIn. He's writing a lot of great content right now about how he does some of this in the business and his life experience. Brandon Hampton over there on Instagram, also Twitter at notebook, but also his personal is at CEO. Is that correct? At CEO on Twitter. And then it's at money on Instagram.

It's a great name. Two great names. Two great names. So make sure to check them out there. And if you have any questions, you'll have this, everything linked up in the show notes as well over at lewishouse.com. So we can go there and check it out. I'll have all his links. But to wrap it up, and with the final question, which is what I ask everyone, which is what is your definition of greatness? I think greatness is defined as being able to effectively and efficiently do what you love to do while not only benefiting you and your family, but everyone else that you come into contact with. Yeah. Because it's not about just

you and your family. It's about the greater good in the world. It's about the greater good in the world. You know, you have to be able to find the balance. And a lot of people are, you know, I think there's even some people that put too much effort into others and not enough into themselves and the people that are closest to them, you know, the people pleasers. And then there's the people who are very greedy

and self-centered and they put too much effort into themselves. So I think it's finding that harmony between the two and being able to, again, effectively and efficiently master what you love to do. I think that's a very important part. I love it, man.

Well, thanks so much for coming on and everyone will make sure to send everyone back to the show notes to check out everything you're working on and I appreciate what you're up to. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. Make sure you hit the beach. I will. All righty, guys. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to go back to the show notes over at lewishouse.com slash 81. That's 81 for episode

number 81. Got all the show notes back there, links to Brandon's pages and things like that. So you can check him out. Make sure to follow him. Post a picture on Instagram where you are listening to this episode. He is at money on Instagram. So tag at money and at Lewis house. Let us know where you are listening. And feel free to share this out on social media with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Again, if you've got other friends who are entrepreneurs and business owners, they're probably interested in building their following on social media. And if they haven't figured it out yet, then this is a powerful episode for them to listen to. So please share

it on Facebook and Twitter and spread the word about the School of Greatness podcast. Trying to blow this thing up and get this out there to even more people. So I appreciate you guys so much for being on here each and every week. As you notice, we're doing two episodes a week lately. I'm trying to ramp this up to possibly three, but I'm going to make sure that the quality stays super high and gets even better. So I'm going to continue to bring on great guests for you guys. And if I can get three a week, then I will. I'm going to make sure that it's high quality for you first and foremost with great information, inspiration, motivation to get you to the next level and have you stepping up into your own greatness. So again, guys, you know what time it is. It's time to the next level and have you stepping up into your own greatness.

So again, guys, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. I'm not in the e-commerce business. I'm just in the eyeball business.