Ok, if you listen to the WebPunx podcast, or read some of my “Thoughts on Leadership” blog, you know I like to poke fun at Tai Lopez (don’t click on his name, unless you want to be extremely targeted with online advertising). But, the truth is the guy is an innovator in personal branding. Being a digital marketer means that you constantly have to reverse engineer campaigns and activations so that you can understand what others are doing and what seems to be working. I regularly dive into other companies campaigns and look at what they are doing to see if they are trying new things or tactics that I haven’t discovered yet. Tai Lopez isn’t using any breakthrough tactical genius moves, but he has created a model of personal branding that I, on March 27th 2018, am officially calling “The Tai Lopez Model”. Reverse engineering how he got so big wasn’t difficult, but it’s an interesting model that a lot of others are now utilizing to gain popularity and bring their personal brands to the eyes and ears of millions of internet users. The likelihood of tons of people converting to sales is high, so it’s fairly certain this model is working well.
Here’s a breakdown of how the Tai Lopez Model worked for Tai and why you now see him everywhere you turn on the internet.
- Your “Claim to Fame”. For Tai Lopez it was a Ted Talk “Why I Read A Book A Day” which is currently sitting at about 9 million views. [Published January 2015]
- Create a website, which will be your central hub of retargeting data. You can see here that Tai aggressively started updating his website (www.tailopez.com) around the same time his Ted Talk was released.
source: The Wayback Machine - Create a “Mailing List” or some sort of soft lead generator. For Tai it was his “book a day” club where he would send out an email with a book recommendation. (Note that this was monetized by using Amazon affiliate links – every time someone clicked on the link to buy a book, Tai got paid).
- Create a youtube channel and start publishing content.
- Create social media pages (instagram, snapchat, facebook, etc..) and ensure that all of the retargeting pixels are successfully installed on your website.
- Put out as much quality content branding yourself as possible across every channel you have available.
- Pre-roll your youtube content (in Tai’s case it was videos of him with books and cars, and sometimes women) to anyone who had engaged with your social media content or visited your website.
- Start creating more lead generators and ways to capture people’s information by selling courses, or providing more free information.
- Start aggressively retargeting advertisements on every platform. If someone visted your Facebook page, make sure you served them ads until they click through on one of them and give you their information.
- If anyone visits your website use a retargeting model like Amazon’s where they continually see your advertisements across social media, programmatic display (banner ads) and any other mediums you can buy ads on digitally.
- Continue building your audience and monetizing them however you can. Tai started partnering with people from different sectors who specialized in different things and sold online courses, such as his “social media agency” course.
- Continue steps 6 – 11. Forever.
In all fairness, with all the jokes aimed at the guy, Tai Lopez is an innovator in personal branding. Many have created personal brands before him, but I don’t think any of them used as much intrusive advertising as Mr. Lopez and have had as much success.
Others are now using the same model to build their personal brands.
Chase Reiner, a popular youtuber who talked about Search Engine Optimization started aggressively retargeting and monetizing his audience.
Scott Olford, an entrepreneur sold a business (for a lot of money), talked about it in the media, and started creating youtube content + aggressively regargeting it + started monetizing his audience.
And I’m sure there are a ton more.
The fundamental of the “Tai Lopez Model” is to figure out a way to build up an audience and then monetize and grow that audience as much as possible using social media, youtube, and website re-targeting.
Some day this will be listed on Wikipedia.