Celia Smith, founder of Weekender Productions sat down and went in depth about how she started her personal brand and grew over the last 4 years. Celia is tremendously asked a lot of questions on how she started her business and grew her social media presence.
She gives us some insight on how to become successful and start your own brand:
One of the most common questions Celia gets asked by her followers is, how do you get paid to travel?
She is launching a course on this because it is not such a simple answer, but to begin, the first step she suggests is to find purpose: What you want from this life + What the world needs from you. “My passion is creating meaningful content, and everyone needs content, especially in the traveling and personal branding industries.”
She loved photography and digital creation, so she took that and found a way to create revenue from it. She says to think about what you really want to do and write down the steps you would need to take to make it happen. During the early stages of the company, Celia had multiple jobs that she had to juggle, however she explains, “you need to make time for what you really want to do. You’re going to have to make sacrifices and cut a lot of things out.”
The next question she addressed was, how to gain credibility and grow on social media?
Here, she explains the importance of networking and surrounding yourself with like-minded people who contribute to your vision. Celia says, “relationships are the most important element of life. The quality of your life is directly proportional to the quality of your relationships. You need to surround yourself with people who support and believe in you and challenge you to become greater.” This does not necessarily mean to be around people doing the exact same thing as you, but growth-orientated people. These are the people you can learn from. Collaborating with other people is another crucial key factor to growing your social media presence.
How to make money?
There’s so many ways to make money online, especially if you have a strong personal brand: you can set your own hours and pace. Then there are things like, e-commerce, affiliate links and Youtube Ads/Google Ads. You can handle content creation or even content management by running other people’s social media accounts. And finally other options closer to what Celia does, which is creating content and marketing campaigns for luxury brands and resorts. You can get paid to record your adventures and monetize your videos.
So how do you travel for free?
Celia says, “I had to create the content, collaborate with people, reach out to resorts and reach out to airlines and show them how I can provide an ROI to them and their company.”
She is also a personal brand consultant and teaches people how to create a proof of concept, media kit, pitch deck, and business model for this.
And in regards to networking, a simple resource for success if your voice.
Say hi. You never know who can help you or teach you something. So reach out to different groups of people from different demographics.
If you’re taking a leap into the entrepreneur / social media monetization era, Celia is a great person
to reach out to:
Weekender Productions (www.weekenderproductions.com)
In Association With: Artistic Initiative Agency