In this article, I will tell you:

1. What did my past experience with a personal brand based business teach me?

2. What do funders usually fear and why is it so hard to delegate a personal blog?

3. Our agency's case study on working with the Book Club founder's personal brand: idea generation, content and promotion.

4. How we built the process of work, the results of 3 months and the results in figures.

I'm Olya and 2 years ago I closed my instagram-based online school because I couldn't cope with blog and school at the same time. This period became one of the most difficult in my life because you had to shoot a lot of viral content for social media. Often this content didn't require much mental effort, which made it even more tedious to produce.

All this time, I was afraid that I would definitely lose everything if I just stopped making videos with fun music and posting storizas. At one point I realized that I couldn't live in a state of constant stress anymore and closed the business. This is how the story of my much-loved project for "beginners" in IT, based on a personal brand, ended.

What have my past experiences taught me?

Being a blogger is another job. You can grow as a manager in your project, delegate tasks effectively, but it's blogging that is often very hard to hand over due to psychological reasons and fear of losing the trust of subscribers.

But delegate some of the tasks of blogging ≠ give up participating in content creation and give up blogging. A properly organized creative team will help you develop your personal brand faster, build funnels, plan content output, balance your personal life and blog sales.

What do funders usually fear and why is it so hard to delegate?

What fears I personally faced when I realized that there was not enough time to blog:

• Distrust of agency work. As the saying goes: you want to do well, do it yourself, right? Often cool agencies don't take on small projects, and freelancers give insufficient quality.

• The style of writing texts will not hit the CA, the difference between what you write yourself and what other people write for you and your blog will be visible.

• Fear of letting go of your business and trusting it to other people.

• Face. How do you work on your personal brand with your team but still be the face of the brand?

Do you recognize yourself? Let's dispel all fears.

The way you love your business, your unique style and your personal brand is something that cannot be replicated. And no one will ever love your blog more than yourself, but as they say - if you love it let go :) Is there no worse feeling than when you're torn between operation-content and you can't do both well?

Personally, I had a sense of guilt towards the project and the team for not being able to do quality everything, it tormented me and eventually killed the project.

It's sad to think now that I could have entrusted the project to professionals who would have been reverent and gentle with my ideas and offered new and bright solutions to grow together.

I did one last blog post, said goodbye to part of my team, closed school, smoked bamboo for two months and opened an agency. Now my team does design, SMM and event stories for businesses. Usually they are big companies: Atom, Unistream, Qiwi and other big clients we can't name. Most often we take clients along the lines of those we have already worked with. But recently we decided to try to work with a small business and took a friendly project based on a personal brand. I had Vietnamese flashbacks because of my own blogging past but, then I suddenly realized that it was my past experience that could help this project, help it not to shut down because of founder burnout, but to grow as a result of strengthening the product with a team of professionals.

A case study of our agency's work with a funder's personal brand

Let me introduce you to Anna. Anna has created a profitable business based on a small personal blog. Her project is a Book Club for those who love business literature and books on psychology and philosophy. The project has already celebrated its second anniversary and at the moment there are 9-12 active groups of 10 people in the club. Leaders in the club are experts in sociology, psychology and business.

Anna oversees a large team in online and offline formats, launches new businesses, personally leads several groups and, according to the classics of the genre, has to shoot 3 videos a day, post 70 storizas and 2-3 carousel posts a week about her life, business, testimonials and, of course, integrate sales into the content at the same time. Every single day. No weekends. Anna also buys her own advertising and that's about how we met. Anna used to buy ads on my blog and I wrote a very good script for the integration that Anna still uses in ad pitches when buying traffic.

Anna faced a tough choice for several years between the necessary and the important, blogging and business growth, tedious posting and the joy of scaling, Anna was very tired. And chose to delegate the necessary to do the important.

Now OKAD Agency is doing content marketing for Anna. Here are the results of 3 months of work

• New directions. The Book Club has a new direction - fiction, now there are 2 directions: business + psychology and fiction.

• More quality informational posts. There are 1-2 carousel posts per week, for 3 months we have made 23 such posts.

• The product became clearer for subscribers. With the help of communication design we wrapped complex information in understandable texts and presented them in a new and simple format. Engaging blog information about the books in the club became more transparent to subscribers.

• In January, groups started to be recruited twice as fast, and already in the middle of the month, an entry was only available for the beginning of March

We'll come back to the 3 month results a little later, but for now we'll give you some details about targeting. We ran a targeting contest with paper books, spent 15€ on it, got a reach of over 22,000 accounts, and got over 200 link clicks from it, with an average link click price of 0.14€, which is a good result in this niche. New subscribers from the contest warmed up to the purchase and eventually joined the Book Club, we'll reveal the numbers below.

We don't just put out useful posts and funny Reels. We have a customized content funnel laid out. Its main steps are shown in the diagram.

Results from content mapping in numbers

Using this funnel, in 3 months we increased our reach by 1,134%, in absolute terms it's more than 155K accounts; provided an influx of new audience to the profile with a conversion rate of 8% to subscriptions. In total, in 2 months of organics and 1 month of targeting + organics we got 7,684 account visits, with 594 people converting to subscribers. What about sales? The bookstore started launching monthly. We get 20+ new high-touch customers per month to subscribe at a price of 7-10 thousand ₽/month.

That is, in 1 year, a customer brings in an average of 144,000 ₽ and we are now bringing in a cohort every month that will yield an annual LTV of 2,888,000 ₽ if fully profitable. Assuming steady monthly sales, we will achieve an annualized LTV of 34,560,000 ₽.

Thus, by keeping the personal blog and the uniqueness of the product, we minimized Anna's involvement in content preparation, took over the operational work of social media and are on track to maximize the monetary result.

Another non-obvious plus - we can now safely answer the question of how much extra money we need to invest in the team and advertising to earn more, and what potential profit these investments will bring.