🦅 3 Reasons Your Personal Brand Isn't Making Money

In this issue, you’ll find:

• 3 reasons your personal brand isn't making money (and how to fix it)

• News creators should know

• Join Hypefury’s Instagram growth challenge

3 Reasons Your Personal Brand Isn't Making Money (And How to Fix It)

Most creators have it backwards.

They chase followers, wait for a big enough audience, then think about monetizing. Meanwhile, creators with smaller but engaged audiences are building real businesses.

The difference? They understood three things most creators never figure out.

1) Depth Beats Reach

You don't need to be an internet celebrity to build a profitable personal brand.

Chasing the algorithm is a trap. When you create for virality, you end up making content your ideal customers don't care about. You optimize for strangers instead of buyers. And when it doesn't work (which is most of the time) you quit.

The creators making real money aren't focused on follower counts. They're focused on replies, DMs, and conversations. They know who their 50 most engaged followers are. They reply to every comment. They treat their audience like a community, not a number.

Those are the signals that matter. Not impressions. Not reach. Conversations.

What to do

1. Pick a primary platform where your audience lives, plus one secondary to protect yourself (check why it’s crucial to go multi-platform in 2026)

2. Track engagement quality (replies, DMs) over vanity metrics

3. Use Hypefury to manage both platforms consistently without burning out

2) Your Identity Is Your Moat

Most creators skip the foundation work. That's why their content feels random and doesn't convert.

The fix is simple: content pillars. Define 3-5 themes you want to be known for. Every piece of content should fit one of these buckets.

This isn't limiting. It's what makes your brand recognizable. It's what makes your content compound over time instead of getting lost in the noise.

When someone lands on your profile, they should instantly know what you're about. If they can't figure it out in 10 seconds, you've lost them. Random content about random topics might get likes, but it won't build trust. It won't make people think of you when they have a problem you can solve.

Content pillars also solve the "what should I post today" problem. You're not starting from scratch every time. You're picking which pillar to speak to today. That consistency is what separates brands that grow from creators who burn out.

What to do

1. Define your 3-5 content pillars

2. Before posting, ask: "Does this fit one of my pillars?"

3. Let your pillars guide what you say no to

3) Monetize Before You're Ready

9 out of 10 problems are offer problems, not audience problems.

Waiting to monetize is the biggest time-waster in the creator economy. You don't need a bigger audience. You need to test whether people will pay for what you're building.

Draft an offer in a Google Doc. Send it to 10 people you know. Learn from the response. This takes one afternoon, not six months of audience building.

Low interest doesn't mean you need more followers. It usually means the offer needs work. The positioning, the promise, or the format. Maybe the price is wrong. Maybe the problem you're solving isn't painful enough. Maybe people don't understand what they're getting.

The only way to find out is to put something in front of people and watch what happens.

What to do

1. Create a simple offer this week (coaching, course, template, service)

2. Test it with your current audience, however small

3. If interest is low, talk to people and find out what's missing before you pivot

Multi Modal AI Steps Into the Spotlight in 2026

Multimodal AI is presented as the key shift of 2026, moving from text-only chat to systems that see, hear, and act in real environments. Rapid improvements in speech and other modalities, combined with falling inference costs, are making continuous perception and interaction viable for mainstream products. As more devices and sensors stream machine readable data, AI agents can integrate deeply into workflows that simple text interfaces could never reach.

→ Find out more

From Design Vision to Live App with Cursor and Claude (Free Guide)

Turn high-level product ideas into working web experiences by describing them in everyday language and letting AI handle the code. Go from zero-setup to a live portfolio or growth tool by pairing Cursor’s editor with Claude’s coding agent, using clear prompts instead of syntax. Follow a simple sequence from planning and local previews to GitHub, Vercel, and custom domains so your projects stay versioned and online. Layer on databases, authentication, and AI chat by wiring services like Supabase and OpenAI through guided prompts that also help you debug.

→ Find out more

Paid Social Is Growing, But Free Access Still Rules

More platforms are leaning into paid tiers like Meta Verified, Snapchat Plus, LinkedIn Premium, YouTube Premium and X Premium, expanding perks and visibility boosts for subscribers while testing paywalls on select features. This shift is driven by the search for new revenue streams and, in some cases, by the promise of cleaner, more authentic user bases with fewer bots. At the same time, advertising remains far more lucrative than subscriptions, so fully paywalled social networks remain unlikely as long as reach is the core value for platforms and brands. Instead, users can expect a gradual creep of premium-only tools and AI-powered features that normalize paying for extra functionality while leaving a free tier open to the masses.

→ Find out more

Join Hypefury’s Instagram Growth Challenge

We’re hosting a 7-day growth challenge to help you grow on Instagram.

Here’s the plan:

• DAY 1: Revamp your profile

• DAY 2: Warm it up for posting

• DAY 3: Let's write

• DAY 4: Let's engage

• DAY 5: Let's analyze together

• DAY 6: Setting you up for success

• DAY 7: Your growth system

Last poll: What will be the most impactful trend in social media in 2026?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Short-form video dominance continues (35.71%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Creator-owned platforms & direct audience

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ AI-generated content going mainstream

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Rise of private/community-based platforms (Discord, Skool, private groups)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ AI-generated content going mainstream

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss some more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury