transcript
MonsterDFace:
Let’s talk about how to plan your brand growth. Growing your brand is just as important as picking up the number of followers you have, the daily viewers that you get, and just promoting yourself in general. Growing your brand comes with time. It comes with community. It comes with trust. Most importantly, it comes with bonding. When people start to attract themselves to you and what you’re building and your bigger picture of what you’re doing on whatever platform it is you’re growing on, they’re going to find themselves tuning in more often, communicating with each other. That’s when you create like this family, this whole brand, this whole big powerhouse of people that support you and back you.
Planning your brand, you have to start from day one, whether you want to call your followers something special, like let’s just say, Welcome to the Nerd Society, this is you planting your feet on the ground, getting people to think they are part of something and having people attach to something that relates to you. Here you can see my brand is already established. I have a logo set up. I have a color scheme set up. It’s pretty much like a one big theme that we run with here on our channel.
Another part of my brand is the golden D. I took something that was from my name, MonsterDFace. We turned it into our brand, right? We turned it into our logo. It became a part of the stream. It’s the little things like this that you influence your audience. You make them feel like they’re family. You obviously get pretty tight with them through time. This is just how things translate. Your channel takes up to the next step. You want to do it from the start, from the beginning of your growth, of your journey, you want to establish yourself. Picking your name. Whatever username it is you decide to start with. If you can incorporate it into your brand, that’s always awesome. If you had a name with, let’s just use my username.
I could have taken my brand two different ways. I could have used MonsterDFace and went with more of a monster styled channel right? It could have been clawing and ripping and of course, if I ever decide to 360 our brand, our growth later, and push away from the big golden D and that as our centerpiece, we have so many other options, just the username alone provides, for us to create other style themes, other directions we could take our brand, just so we look powerful, so we look great, so everything kind of blends in, it meshes in. Yeah. That’s probably the biggest tips I can give you guys in starting your brand, just make sure you do carry it over to your social medias. You want it everywhere. You want to make sure you’re able to reflect back and just have everything fit in, everything themed out. Your overlays on your streams, you want those to stand outs.
I can go into my vods. You’ll see that people know me as MDF. They take my name. They’ve abbreviated. People also know me as D just for the big golden D. It’s just a lot of things like this. A lot of it will occur organically through your streams. You’ll find that little quirky jokes will then turn into things that you decide to stay with and kind of run with, you think sound cool. A lot of it you have to come up with. You have to be very creative. You have to look at your name, look at your username, look at what you call your community, your little society of people. Take it in a certain direction. People are going to love it. They’re going to love to be a part of something greater. For us, or the MDF Family, we call it MDF Inc, actually, so they think they’re part of a big corporate business we’ve got going on here. It’s just a joke that we all play. Again, it’s just something that happened organically over time. It just naturally evolved. People love it. We have fun here on the channel. This is our brand.
Let’s talk about planning out your brand growth. How do you want to grow your channel, grow your brand, grow yourself, your community, everything that you’re working on? I’ll tell you this much, social media is the key. Not only do you want to of course have established gaming content channels, vlog channels, whatever it is that you’re basing your content off of, you want to make sure that you also support other people. It’s not just yourself, you have to scratch the back of other guys. Think of it as an investment. You invest some of your community and someone else’s community and they in turn give you a piece back, right? That helps you grow.
Just as a content creator, planning your growth is going to help you out tremendously. Don’t be selfish. Don’t stay in a little box, get out there. You’re already a face. You’re something. You have influence. You have to not only push influence out to your people and make sure they reach out. You have to reach out to others as well. Attending events, I find, is extremely, extremely helpful. After I started attending my first PAX events, my first Twitch events, TwitchCon, I found that that was opening so much more opportunities for me. People were starting to see who I was, know me as a human, not just as a personality. It was these little things that helped my channel just evolve from something small into something a lot larger.
If you’re looking to plan the growth of our channel, you’ve got to start early. Look at what events are coming up. Look at what’s in your local area. Look at who you can stream with, who’s around you, who you can support and how to reach out to others to create bigger and better things.
Jumping into our second tip. Look at what events are going on in your area. For me, things really started to change when I got my first sponsorship. I was invited to a PAX event. I went to the event really not knowing what to expect. I was like, “Whoa, I’ve never been to convention center. Not a huge one. Not for gaming stuff. I can’t even believe I’m being invited out. This is kind of crazy.” Being there, I learned so much. The doors that were opened for me were incredible. I met so many people, so many new opportunities were just falling at my footsteps. I’m like, “Oh, what do you do?” “Hey, I play games.”
These guys were just actively seeking content creators, gamers, people that were passionate about their games. You got to just see a world of people that have so many of the same interests as you. It was kind of freaky in nature. It was really crazy. With all of that, I was blown away. I wanted to attend every event. I wanted to meet more and more people. Just producing content for my home, that’s one thing. There’s no one here I can share it with. You can talk to your girlfriend, your mom, your dad, you cousins, but none of them really relate, right? They’re not in our shoes. They don’t do what we do. Going to these events, you get to see all of this. You get to meet so many people. That right there, are friendships that just cannot be broken. That’s how you push your brand to the next level, because now you start to meet other content creators that are going to believe in you, support you, understand what you’re doing and now you guys just go full steam ahead together. It’s great.
Last but not least, think about creating a team. After you already have established social media channels, you can possibly attend events, meet other people, meet other streamers, start looking to band together, grow together. If any of your viewers are interested in possibly streaming, help them start a stream up. They’re going to constantly refer you to and give you praise and support you on what you do endlessly and then they’ll get a taste of what is you do as well, right? This is how you start to grow your brand. You have other people that are suddenly talking about you. If they talk about you, that’s good for you, more publicity. You’re there when you’re not there. Think about not only helping other people, because that will definitely benefit you, karma of course wise, and just in general publicity. Later down the line, your stuff can all come back to you. It’s about investing your time, investing in people you believe in, people that you think you can help also become successful and in turn, you guys will grow together.
If your friend, your best friend, suddenly just started blowing up, he’s going to help you out, especially if you were there for him. You would hope that he’d do the same for you. It’s just growing as a team. Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone needs a little help. Planning your growth from the ground up, you want to take other people with you. Don’t go in there alone. Try and help out your viewers as often as you can as well.