Million Dollar Copywriter Becomes a Personal Branding Expert - Triples Sales for his Clients

Eric Eden: 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is David Feldman. He is a copywriting and personal branding expert. Welcome to the show, david. Thanks, thanks, eric. Thanks for having me. Alright, so let's hear a little bit about your journey.

David Feldman: 1:16

I work for Goldman Sachs Micron Technology but, honestly, just the whole corporate world wasn't the right fit for me. I just never felt at home there. So I went off on my own, started doing a side household. We actually sold my wife and I and we had two kids at the time. We sold our house and decided we were going to go travel Europe for a year with our kids, so we did that. I was trying to look for ways to make money on the side. I decided that I would be a freelancer, actually copywriting, and I signed up for a platform that a lot of people probably know, which is Fiverrcom. Back in the day. Originally, Fiverr was like what would you do for $5? And it's expanded since then to become like a real legitimate freelance platform. But I discovered copywriting on there and I started providing that for customers on there and I ultimately grew to become probably one of the top I don't know exactly, but I would say one of the top copywriters on that platform. I've completed thousands and thousands of jobs on there. In fact, my was ranked on page one. It was so popular. I started having to hire other copywriters to basically work under me to keep up with the demand and then that spiraled into other things. It spiraled into I was helping people write website copy. I was helping people write copy for their funnel. So I started to learn about funnels, about website design, about SEO, about all these different things, and I started partnering with all these other. They were originally clients but we ended up partnering on a lot of things. One in particular I partnered with a gentleman and we started full service digital marketing agency and you know, end to end, we would write their ads, we would run their ads, we would write their website we would build their website. We would help them with it, write their articles and their content management and help them with their SEO. We would do all that stuff for and that's when Mud Branding, my current company, was founded I learned a lot with being in this whole full service digital marketing agency that I was in there for a little while and I picked up a lot in addition to Copywriting A lot of stuff, a lot of branding that we were doing for companies. We would create brand guides for companies, we would create websites for companies, we would go through and create content for companies, and I actually found another niche that I got into, which was these entrepreneurs people that were successful entrepreneurs that had never really taken the time to build their own personal brand. And so what I started doing is I started applying what we were doing for companies for people, because we have this. I have this real realization. I don't know if it's a realization or a motto, whatever you want to call it, but at Mud Branding I say people connect with people. They don't connect with companies. It's this fundamental subconscious thing where there's so much noise out there, there's so much content, there's so much garbage, there's so much marketing and advertising, and people are subconsciously tuning it out, but they are connecting with people and individuals that they relate with, that they think are smart, whatever the case may be. So you see, people like, I would say a classic example is Elon Musk. A lot of people buy Tesla's because they like Elon Musk. They think Elon Musk is cool and they want to support him or do whatever he's doing. He's stepped out from behind his companies and built a personal brand where people love him, hate him, whatever. They want to see what he's thinking and they want to see what's inside of his brain. I started working with successful entrepreneurs that had built six, seven, eight, nine, ten figure businesses, but they'd actually never really stepped out from behind their business and everybody I would say the local community probably knew who they were generally to a point and they realized, hey, this person's really smart, they've done a lot of good stuff, they're a business leader within our community, but I don't see them on LinkedIn. I don't see, I don't know where to find out more about this person. I don't. I don't see them on Twitter. They don't have a website. So what I started doing is building these personal brands out with these, I would say, successful entrepreneurs or executives and helping them really put their phone thoughts out there, put their own brand out there and utilize that as a channel to drive revenue to their business. And actually by doing this, a lot of people. There was one person that I spoke with that I worked with, where he said I was spending like millions in dollars on my company in marketing my company and as soon as I took that money actually way less money and started putting that effort into marketing my own personal brand, it actually like three X my company more than all that marketing money did. Because what happens is people like you and then they say, oh, I like this person or this guy, this lady, whoever it is and then they're like, oh, I want to buy their stuff. It's like I like Elon Musk, I'm gonna buy a Tesla. I like Steve Jobs, I'm gonna buy an iPhone. It's like that sort of thought process. So that's what I've been helping people do. We've been using a lot of social media platforms. That's my story. I have had a lot of successful copywriting as well. That's really like I said. That was the foundation of where I started and I still work with a lot of clients on copywriting. One of my clients we worked with. We thought through the whole sales funnel. He used Clip Funnels, he used the funnel software that we built out. Everything helped him build it out, write it out all the ad, copy all the ads and built his funnel up to $100 million. Got to go to Funnel Hacker Live. Get up on the stage and receive the $100 million award for running. $100 million should have funnels. So I've had the opportunity to do that. I had the opportunity to write copy for a lot of celebrities that people would probably know, even a former president of the United States. So it's been a fun career. A lot of highlights.

Eric Eden: 7:28

So that's pretty amazing that you became a top copywriter on one of the best freelance platforms, fiverr, and you started working with clients, created a whole agency around that, and then you worked with one client and helped them build a $100 million funnel and done writing for celebrities. That's an amazing string of accomplishments. It's a very interesting transformation from copywriting into the personal branding, because I agree that person to person is much more effective. In person to company or company to person is sometimes a bit awkward. A lot of people say human to human is much better, right, exactly.

David Feldman: 8:16

And I'll just throw this out there as I don't know, maybe it's a tip for people that are listening or just something that I've learned going on that idea of people connect with people and they connect with them on a personal level. Honestly, one of the strategies that we use with a lot of my clients on LinkedIn is really getting personal with how not overly personal, not TMI, but personal with how you're talking to people, how you're thinking and how you're putting yourself out there. It also goes behind this thought process of people who love to buy but they hate to be sold. It's a gentleman that I worked with. He runs a very successful real estate fund. They own billions in real estate, a homebilly company, couple's SaaS company. He's got multiple companies, multiple millions and millions of dollars. He could easily on his LinkedIn profile say I own this company, I do this, I manage all this, I do all this. He could easily say that, but we didn't take that approach. We took the approach of more personal, relatable, person to person approach, not like trying to sell his company, but trying to sell him as a person. We said things like. We mentioned things in his profile on his LinkedIn bio I'm a twin. My mom and my sister died in a plane crash when I was 17 years old. I've known my wife since I was in first grade. We knew each other since we were six years old. These are some unique things that we said about him. We didn't really talk about his companies, didn't even really talk about his businesses in his about section. I've had multiple meetings with his client and he'll come to me and he'll say, david, this is just crushing it. He said people come to me and they'll say, hey, I saw it in your bio the year of twin. I'm a twin too. Oh, hey, by the way, I've got a few million dollars I want to invest in your real estate fund. These are conversations that he's having because he's building this. It's not just a personal brand, but it's a personalized brand that is really helping him put himself out there, helping people connect with him. Then that in turn, just because people relate to him, they hand over their money, they keep helping him become bigger and richer than he already is. It's just crazy how it works, but that works for everybody. Anybody that. I've noticed that same strategy works for a lot of people when you connect with people on something that you're not even trying to sell, say, for example. I would say he's a public speaker, consultant and he does that sort of things, but he's also an ax throwing champion. He throws actions, he talks about ax throwing and different things like that. They're different. He also talks about struggles that he had growing up. But he goes into that a little bit and he literally has. He doesn't approach people and say, hire me to be a public speaker, hire me to be your consultant. He leads with these other personalized items. Then what happens is people say, oh, you're an ax throwing champion, that's so cool. You're an ax throwing champion. Oh, by the way, we need a speaker. At our executive conference I saw that you're a speaker, you should speak. It works at all levels and multiple platforms.

Eric Eden: 11:30

I agree that, at the end of the day, business is personal. People like to buy from other people, not necessarily some other entity, some corporate entity. I think that it makes sense that people can triple what they're doing by building the personal brand and making it more personal. Thank you for sharing these insights with us today, david. We appreciate it. I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn profile. In case people want to learn more about what you're doing and build their personal brand, they can reach out and have a chat with you about that. We appreciate you sharing these insights. I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends. People should hear this inspiring story. Thanks for being with us today, david. We appreciate it.

David Feldman: 12:21

Thanks, eric, thanks for having me.