Neil Patel has certainly made a name for himself. The New York Times bestselling author was honored at the White House as one of Empact’s Top 100 entrepreneurs under 30 and was named a Top 10 online marketing expert to follow by Forbes. His agency, NP Digital, operates in over 20 countries and generates tens of millions in revenue annually. Simply put, Patel’s personal brand is among the strongest in the digital marketing world.
But despite leveraging his personal brand to launch this global success, Patel now offers some unexpected advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: don’t follow his path. While this may seem contradictory to his own experience, it reflects hard-earned lessons from seven years of scaling his business.
The personal brand plateau
“I believe it’s better to not build a personal brand than it is to build one,” Patel says bluntly. “I’m not saying a personal brand is bad. What I’m saying is a corporate brand is better and, in an ideal world, you would have both a personal and a corporate brand, but most people don’t have time to do both.”
Patel says NP Digital (formerly Neil Patel Digital) generated around $5 million in revenue in its first year, largely stemming from Patel’s personal brand. By the second year, that figure jumped to $18 million, with approximately $10 million attributed to his personal brand. As the business grew beyond $30 million, his personal brand consistently plateaued at that $10 million contribution.
“It’s not bad,” Patel acknowledges. “Now my personal brand’s not as big as Kylie Jenner or LeBron James or anyone like that, and it drives decent revenue. It’s a great way to kick-start a business. But what I learned is if you want to make a ton of money, people prefer just paying corporate brands.”
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
Whatever type of brand you’re building, Patel emphasizes that patience isn’t just a virtue—it’s a necessity.
“The first three years of building my brand, I was speaking at conferences for free,” he recalls. “I was creating tons of goodwill and content online, blogging like crazy, and it wasn’t driving much revenue in the first year.”
Patel says revenue picked up in the second year and got better in the third year, but it still wasn’t significant. Rather than giving up when things weren’t growing as rapidly as he’d hoped, Patel recognized that his patience would eventually pay off.
“I learned that, over time, things have a compounding effect if you’re willing to put in the time and energy,” he says. “It doesn’t work for most people because they quit after the first three months or six months.”
Patel’s advice for maintaining patience? “Instead of analyzing how well and how much money it’s making or how many followers you have, you should just think about it as a normal routine that’s part of your life. You should work on your brand just like you brush your teeth or try to stay healthy. Just dedicate a certain amount of time each and every single day to it.”
Find your focus
One critical lesson Patel learned early on was the importance of specificity. “I thought about going more mainstream instead of focusing on a vertical,” he recalls. “When I did that, my revenue declined but my reach went up.”
This experiment taught him a valuable principle: “What I learned is it’s not great to be known for just anything. You want to be known for something specific. It’s too hard to monetize just being well-known.”
To illustrate his point, Patel uses the example of Nathan Apodaca’s viral TikTok video of him longboarding to work while drinking cranberry juice and listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”
“It was a really cool video,” he acknowledges. “But how well is he monetizing his personal brand today? Being known for longboarding doesn’t do much. That’s not going to help you build a personal brand. You need to post content on something. You may not get the most followers, but you need to post content about a specific vertical and that’s what’s going to help you the most.”
The 3 pillars of effective brand building
Patel offers three core recommendations for those just starting their brand-building journey:
1. Create unique, valuable content
“If you’re not adding value with something that’s new, fresh, unique, it’s not going to do well.”
2. Go omnichannel
“You have to be on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter or X or whatever you call it, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn.”
3. Balance short- and long-form content
“People resonate more with long-form video. Long-form video is a great way to build a deeper connection with your audience. Short-form videos tend to get more views. It’s a great way to get followers, but short-form videos are a terrible way to build relationships.”
Combining these three pillars creates a winning branding strategy. Create unique short-form content and publish it across multiple channels to attract followers. Then, follow it up with long-form content to build relationships that lead to conversions.
Bridging brand and revenue
For entrepreneurs struggling to monetize their personal brand, Patel’s advice is characteristically direct: “Focus on the pain points of your customers and create content around that. Build your brand around that. Don’t build your brand around something that’s cool. Build it around solving a problem for the masses.”
This problem-solving orientation forms the bridge between brand recognition and revenue growth—a bridge that becomes stronger when built on a corporate foundation rather than a personal one.
As counterintuitive as it might seem coming from one of digital marketing’s most recognizable personal brands, Patel’s experience offers a compelling case for rethinking our approach to brand building. Perhaps lasting impact lies not in becoming the next influencer but in creating something bigger than yourself.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of SUCCESS© magazine. Photo courtesy of Neil Patel.
