Change Your Life with a Personal Website - Here’s Why

my goal here is simple I want to convince you to launch your own personal website that is it starting my personal website was one of the best decisions I have ever made back in 2016 I bought a domain I set up a simple website and I had no idea just how much it would change my life that website directly landed me opportunities when I was a medical student and when I worked as a doctor the personal website even played a role in helping me meet the person who eventually became my wife because of that website I started this YouTube channel 8 years ago and thanks to this YouTube channel and to you guys for watching the content and engaging with the content I am now able to live my absolute dream life I genuinely believe that no matter where you are in life whether you are just starting out or you're aiming for a promotion in the corporate ladder or whatever or you're dreaming of starting your own business a personal website can completely change your career and your life hold up wait a minute wait a minute a website costs time and money to set up and maintain I can see how that might be useful if you've got a business but I am just a corporate employee working at an accounting firm why the hell should I have a personal website yes a personal website does cost a little bit of time and money a few dollars a month maybe a weekend or two to get it up and running but here's the thing over time I am convinced that having a personal website is one of the best investments you can make in yourself and in particular your career so Harry if I could convince you that the time it takes to set up your website and maintain it and the small amount of money you're paying each month for your website if I could show you that that's probably going to give you a massive return on your investment would you then consider starting your own personal website you know what I'm open to hearing your perspective on this I got to tell you I'm a pretty skeptical guy I don't think you're going to be able to convince me maybe the personal website thing worked for you but I'm just a lowly corporate employee and I don't think it's going to work for for me but I'm open to hearing your case fantastic Harry so the case I'm going to make for starting a personal website for you as a corporate employee or whoever else happens to be watching this video is that there are three levels to having a personal website so let's start with level one the online CV all right Harry so let's start with the question do you think it's important for you to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile yeah of course I work in incorporate everyone's got a LinkedIn profile it's how you get noticed by recruiters and potential employers it's kind of like your digital resume exactly but here's the thing a personal website is sort of like your LinkedIn profile on steroids you have complete control over how it looks what it says how you present yourself and it kind of becomes your own personal corner of the internet okay but I already have a LinkedIn profile why would I bother putting in the time and effort to build a personal website on top of my CV and my LinkedIn profile that is a wonderful question so the simple answer is that a personal website helps you stand out whether you are applying for jobs or you're being headhunted by recruiters sure your LinkedIn profile and your CV are important but let's be honest everyone has a decent LinkedIn profile and every single person has a polished CV especially with AI being able to write people's LinkedIn profiles and to be able to write people's CVS relatively few people though have a personal website H so I've been thinking about switching jobs anyway and to be honest the market is super competitive right now ai is taking over I could use something to help me stand out in the job market but firstly how the hell is a website supposed to do that and secondly what would it need to have on it if I assume that it's even possible that is a very good question Harry so let me flip it back to you for a second so you've hired Associates at work right like Juniors who work underneath you what do you usually look for when you're reviewing applications or interviewing people oh that's easy so by the time I see the application HR has already screened out the ones that don't meet the basic qualifications so when I'm looking at the applications I'm essentially looking for two things firstly would I enjoy working with the person and secondly are they competent enough to handle the job without me having to handhold them every single step of the way right and how do you figure that out from someone's CV or LinkedIn profile honestly it's it's pretty tough I try to get a sense of who they are what they're like as a person what they're interested in outside of work but most of the time a CV or LinkedIn profile doesn't really give me that exactly now imagine one of these candidates happen to have a personal we it it is not just a copy and paste of the LinkedIn profile but it's a nice website it's got an about me page that's got some photos of them maybe there's some pictures and little texts and stuff that shows what they get up to outside of work or maybe they've written a pretty detailed blog post about their experience transitioning from a big four accounting firm to Industry showing the lessons they learned along the way okay fine you're right if I saw something like that it would massively boost their chances of getting an interview plus I'd have way more to talk about them during the interview 100% man and and here's the thing so in my experience I hired over 30 people I have literally seen thousands of applications and the candidates with personal websites or any kind of online presence or personal brand even if it's totally basic those people are way more likely to get an interview compared to those people who are completely invisible online and according to Chad gbt the average person in the US applies for over 600 jobs in their lifetime so even a tiny increase in your chances of getting hired could potentially make a huge difference over time it's an investment that pays off and given that it only costs a few dollars a month and a couple of weekends to set up a website I think that's probably worth it all right that kind of makes sense but does does this only happen if I'm actively job hunting not at all so even if you are not applying for jobs right now having a personal website is like keeping a polished CV in your back pocket it's like keeping your LinkedIn profile up to date just in case life as you know Harry is somewhat unpredictable you never know when a recruiter might reach out to you on LinkedIn or via your personal website you never know when a former colleague that you used to work with hands your name to a hiring manager CU they want you to join their firm or just someone within your industry or within a different industry might stumble across your website and they might see the stuff on your website and think that you're a perfect fit for their team so having a maintained personal website is sort of like having a maintained LinkedIn profile and it keeps you ready for those sorts of moments okay so let's say I agree with you what sort of stuff would this level one website need to have okay well at level one your website doesn't actually need to be anything fancy it basically just needs three pages so an about page that has a short professional and maybe bit of personal bio it's useful to have a resume or portfolio page which is basically your glorified CV where you showcase your skills or your work but you're not limited by the word count of like a onepage CV or whatever the thing is you can actually just present it in the way that you want and it's useful to have a contact page where people can easily reach you so whether that's an email address or LinkedIn profile or Twitter or Instagram you know whatever the thing might be now obviously you can choose how much effort you want to put into curating this website and just like if someone had a really well curated really well thought out detailed LinkedIn profile that would help them Stand Out compared to a generic LinkedIn profile with not much information on it if you take the time and effort to curate your personal website add more stuff to it all of that just gives employers and recruiters way more information and a stronger sense of who you actually are okay so that was level one where a website is basically a glorified online TV what's level two Harry I'm so glad you asked level two is where your personal website becomes baby steps for building your personal brand so tell me Harry you work in the corporate world to what extent do you think it's important for you to have a personal brand personal brand that whole thing again mate the the partners at the accounting firm they keep on banging on about this like importance of building your personal brand and to be honest I kind of get the idea you know they're saying that your personal brand is kind of like your professional reputation especially in a world that's being completely disrupted by AI people with personal brands are obviously going to stand out more than people without personal Brands they talk about how putting yourself out there online writing stuff on LinkedIn and different social media platforms giving talks maybe even writing a book all of that stuff helps you build your personal brand and they talk about how a personal brand can help you land clients which is kind of the main thing that these accounting fun partners are focused on they're focused on Landing clients and so the people with strong personal Brands you know they're always writing on LinkedIn and writing articles and like going on TV and doing thought leadership content and even trying to do cringe YouTube videos they're all hoping that the personal brand thing will help them land clients yeah that sounds perfect I mean those are a lot of the benefits of building a personal brand have you considered building your own personal brand Harry oh yeah I have considered it but I I I just don't want to be one of those cringe people writing crap on LinkedIn I don't want to post Instagram stories or like Tik toks of me dancing like oh it's so cringe okay Harry firstly no one's talking about you posting Tik toks of you dancing you know people talking about building a personal brand are talking about sharing your knowledge sharing what you know online how does that sound yeah I know it's just just anytime I think about putting myself out there and writing something on LinkedIn I just feel this like massive internal resistance to doing the thing and I've been you know I've had on my to-do list for ages I keep on I keep on telling myself you know I should really build that personal brand I should really start posting on LinkedIn it just feel feels feels weird man feels weird okay that feeling of resistance that you are currently feeling to putting yourself out their own line let's just call it what it is it is fear you are afraid of putting yourself out there online and I'm not judging Harry I used to be like this until I started my personal website back in 2016 I used to be terrified of putting myself out there online I used to be terrified that if I posted something my Facebook friends back when Facebook was a thing my Facebook friends are going to see it and they're going to think I'm cringe and they're going to be like who the who's this guy like what does he think he's doing like oh like you know get back in the barrel where you belong you weirdo but Harry you know what I realized over time it was just the fear talking I was fundamentally afraid of what other people would think about me and therefore I didn't put myself out there I didn't want to stand out you know the tallest puppies the first to get cut down and all of that crap okay yeah I mean that's exactly how I feel you know it's called a spade to Spade yeah I'm afraid of putting myself out there because I'm worried about what people will think how the hell does a personal website help with that like surely a personal website like exacerbates those fears right it's kind of like public speaking most people do not enjoy putting themselves out there and it is a muscle you have to build and for most people building it one small step at a time is a lot easier when you have a personal website no one needs to know that personal website exists that personal website is your playground to be able to create your own about page to put some pictures on it to mess around with the layout to maybe write a few block posts over the course of however long it takes you to get comfortable and no one needs to know it exists that is the crucial thing when I started my personal website I did not tell anyone it existed when I started my YouTube channel I did not tell anyone it existed I did not post about it on Facebook I didn't share it on LinkedIn I didn't talk about it on Instagram I just did the thing myself privately for a while and then I realized huh this whole writing on the internet thing it's actually not that bad and then I took a blog post and I shared it with a few trusted friends like the people who I really had my back and they were like oh man this is quite interesting this is quite good I was like oh you know that's not too scary and then like the next one I shared it with a couple more friends and they were like oh you know it's reasonable like three or four people read these blog posts but it helped me get comfortable with the idea of online self-expression and if I hadn't built that personal website initially and gotten those baby steps out of the way a year and a half later when I saw the opportunity to start YouTube channel I never would have taken it because it would have been terrifying it would have been so scary to put myself out there but I had the experience of having a website first okay so it sounds like what you're saying is that if I want to build my personal brand I obviously have to start putting myself out there right but I'm currently afraid of putting myself out there because I'm super worried about what people will think which kind of sounds a bit weird to admit but like yeah it's that that is exactly what's happening and you're saying that if I start a personal website it's sort of like a a private training ground where no one has to see it it's almost like a private journal in a way like no one actually has to see see the thing until I feel comfortable to share it with a few people one small step at a time yes exactly it is not quite like a private Journal because you want to write as if people are going to see it and that gives you that little push and you also want to actually build a website that is public so that then when you do decide to share it there isn't this whole friction process associated with it but essentially that's it the website is training grounds for your personal brand it's baby steps to getting comfortable with the idea of personal self expression in fact this book show your work by Austin Clon is a book I've been sharing on my YouTube channel for absolutely years this is the book that I read back in 20 late 2015 and this helped me get comfortable with the idea of personal self-expression he describes it as a book about self-promotion for people who absolutely hate the idea of self-promotion and reading this book helped me realize I could write stuff on my personal website and it was okay sharing what I'd learned I was just a medical student at the time but I'd done a few things I was like trying to build this like University admissions company and so I just started writing a few blog posts sharing what I was learning along the way and that is what made me comfortable with personal self- expression and so I owe a massive debt of gratitude to Austin Cleon for writing this amazing book it's like super quick as well it's like you know not there's loads of ctoons and stuff so like it's not it's not that hard to read but that is another massive reason why having a personal website is useful even if you have no followers even if very few people see it it will help you get comfortable with putting yourself out there and putting yourself out there is exactly what you need to stand out in any kind of career that you're now doing especially in a world that's being dominated by robots and AI all right so he's saying level one is basically where my website is my online glorified personal CV and level two is where my website basically becomes a training ground for personal self- expression to help me get comfortable with putting myself out there what about level three fantastic Harry I'm so glad you asked level three is where the real magic happens and that is where your website becomes a luck magnet with a level three website the more you put yourself out there your ideas your insights and your experiences the more you increase your surface area for luck this is personal brand building 101 by creating and sharing valuable content that is useful for a small number of people you give people a chance to find you and a chance to connect with you and potentially open doors to opportunities that you didn't even know existed okay but how does that actually work like people don't randomly stumble across websites do they yeah you're right it's not totally random So in theory it might be possible for some people to find the stuff that you write let's say you write blog posts about your experiences in accounting or whatever it might theoretically be possible for them to find it on search engines but it's pretty unlikely because search engine optimization is a whole other game in reality there are two broad ways in which people find your stuff so number one is you share it yourself on some kind of social platform like LinkedIn maybe you write a blog post about your experiences transitioning from accounting firm a to accounting firm B and like what you learned along the way or whatever the thing might be and then you post on LinkedIn at the point where you feel comfortable you know sharing it to your Professional Network saying hey I switched from accounting firm a to accounting firm B here are a few things I've learned I've written them up in a blog post link down below or something like that you're sharing it yourself so people will stumble upon your website but then method number two of people discovering you is that other people will share your stuff if it's good if your stuff is good and it is useful to people then people will just have have an intrinsic need to share stuff because it gives them social status points and there' actually been plenty of cases where someone on my team has stumbled upon a random blog post written by a random person that we've never heard of because it was relevant to a challenge we were facing in our business in the moment and then they'll share it within the team in slack and then me or Angus or someone else on the team will read the blog post we'll look at the about page of the person who wrote it we'll see that oh this person does freelance work let's hire them for a freelance Consulting Arrangement actually a lot of the people we've worked with over the years we have found because they've had personal Brands and person websites with an easy way to contact them and hire them for a freelance engagement okay that kind of makes sense um but the thing that comes to mind is like you know what can I possibly create that would be useful like I I mean I'm just a junior mid-level employee at like a boring ass accounting firm like what kind of content would be even vaguely interesting for other people that other people might care about all right that is a good question so at level one and level two your website was mostly about you helping people get to know you better so that you could stand out for jobs and so you could get comfortable with self-expression but at level three you want to focus on how can I be useful to other people how can I show my work so for example Harry you could write some sort of educational thing sharing lessons you've learned on your accounting Journey you've been in the workplace for a few years now there's probably stuff that you know now that someone 3 years younger than you or 3 years Junior than you in the same industry would find interesting or useful but that's like really boring accounting stuff like why would people care Harry you are not trying to get millions of people to like your stuff you are not trying to go viral you are not trying to appeal to the masses you are trying to appeal to the small small number of people who are a few steps behind you on the journey that you've just taken so if you imagine what do you wish you'd known 3 years ago what do you wish you'd known 5 years ago back when you were at University what are the things you wish you'd known about the workplace those are going to be relevant to a small group of people but they're going to be very relevant to that small group of people I probably wouldn't do an article around like I don't know five generic productivity tips because that's kind of generic but if you did an article on five ways to stand out when applying for a job at a big four accounting firm having applied to plenty of those yourself Harry and having landed one of those jobs that would probably be quite useful and somewhat unique it doesn't need to be unique there are no unique messages but there are always unique Messengers and your way of explaining the stuff that you know you know something that Derek civer says is what's obvious to you and what's boring to you can be absolutely amazing to others that's the kind of thing we want to tap into when it comes to figuring out what kind of content to share online oh man okay so I can see why this would be useful to do it just seems kind of hard man like feels like a lot of just feels like a lot of effort do I really want to go through the effort all right Harry I'm going to get on my soap boook for a minute here everything in life is hard right let's say you build a personal brand by sharing blog posts once a month about your experience in accounting it's going to be hard you're going to have to spend like a weekend once a month or something just doing some writing and you'll find that writing is hard and you have and you have to put it out there online that is hard but you know what else is hard it's hard when you get fired because AI has taken over your job it's hard when you don't get promoted to partner at your Law Firm because actually everyone else has a personal brand and they're able to land clients which is where the value of a partner is at and all you can do because you're invisible on the internet all you can do is just do people's accounts AI obviously can do people's accounts there's tons and tons of Juniors there's loads of people like in different countries being okay with being paid $5 an hour to just do someone's bookkeeping or just do someone's accounts the value in you as a human is in the fact that you can land other clients and you can build personal relationships it's also hard to be in the position where you're not that like everything is hard you just have to choose your flavor of heart do you want to put in the work now to build your personal brand to Future proof yourself and your career in an industry that's absolutely going to be dominated by AI or do you want the hards to come a few years down the line when you have a family and a mortgage and kids and now you're laid off because AI is taken over your job and you haven't had a personal brand to try and protect you from that Revolution okay fine I get it calm down you know there's no need to keep on going on about this I get it everything is hard and I can go through the hard of building my own personal website and my personal brand now or I can wait for myself to get disrupted and cross my fingers and hope for the best you know I like to take things into my own hands I'd like to have a little bit more control than I actually do so like okay cool let's say I'm now sold on why I should have a website where do I get started I've never built a website before I don't know anything about this I don't consider myself particularly technical like what am I going to do wonderful let's talk about how to build a website before we actually go there there is just one little piece of of uh verbiage or like semantics I would like to just just comment on which is that Harry you said I don't consider myself particularly technical firstly you don't need to be technical to build a website but I'm curious what do you mean by I don't consider myself particularly technical well you know I just like you know I've never really learned to code and I don't know I just I don't know I just I'm I'm I'm not a very techsavvy sort of person Harry this is holding you back you telling yourself the story cuz it's just a story that you are not a technical person is 100% holding you back and is going to continue to hold you back especially in the AI Revolution where the people that are going to keep their jobs and and the people that are going to thrive are the people that know how to use AI to improve their workflow and often those people if they have a story that they're not particularly technical there's going to be all of these emotional barriers and internal barriers to actually taking the steps to learn how to use Ai and to learn how to use these technical tools I think it would be very valuable for you to consider changing the story that you are telling yourself which is that you're not a technical person and embrace the fact that you're not a technical person yet but you can learn you can learn how to build a website you can learn the basics of how to code you can learn the basics of how to make an AI agent how do you do it by watching YouTube videos people have made tutorials about all of this stuff you can do it you can figure it out you can become a technical person even if you don't feel you are that already yet okay fine I get it yeah that makes sense I that's cool I'm I'm sold I'm going to I'm going to make a website okay so how how do I actually go about this like I've seen there's all these different options out there there's like hosting over the Squarespace of wigs the web flow there framer There's Tom Dick Harry AI there's no people building websites are notion these days what like which one should I choose okay so this is where things can get complicated because you're right there are all these different choices on how to start a website and to be honest at the end of the day it doesn't really matter which specific tool or which specific platform you use but I can share my personal recommendation for you if that's okay how does that sound yeah sure I want to hear your personal recommendation I want to hear what you would do if you were in my shoes and to be honest if I don't if I want to look around I can just search on YouTube I can find some tutorials I people have made loads of tutorials on how to build a website using all of these different platforms fantastic so I'm going to give you my own personal recommendation and I have two the first one is if I were speaking to my completely broke teenage self and I wanted a website but I was not allowed to spend a penny on it it had to be 100% free this is actually the position I was in when I tried to build a website as a teenager in that case if that's the case that you're in which Harry I know you're not but in case there's people watching this video who are in that position where you literally physically cannot spend the money or cannot afford to spend the money then my my favorite free option is a website called card. co and there's loads of tutorials and stuff and also you can figure it out on how to build a website using card but Harry given that you are not a broke 13-year-old and you do have a job that's paying you money and you are sold on the fact that having a website is is an investment in your professional life I would 100% recommend hostinger who are incidentally sponsoring this video but I would recommend them anyway and they're very user friendly and they're also very affordable hostinger yeah I've heard that they sponsor a lot of YouTubers like I mean I know they're sponsoring this video but would you actually use hostinger if they wer sponsoring this video funny story I actually am using hostinger to host three of my websites al. com pt.

com for my YouTuber Academy and productivity. com and we could choose from any website host anywhere in the world and pretty much any website hosting company would be down to sponsor our videos as well but my team did an in-depth analysis of all of them and we landed on hostinger In fairness it was a cross between hostinger and WP engine and they both offered basically the same service but WP engine was more expensive and hosting was cheaper so we went with a cheaper option and we've been with them for 2 years and we love it and I even went out for lunch with some of their team back when I was in London and they were super nice super friendly they knew their stuff so what exactly is hostinger and how does it work that is a great question so hostinger actually offers two main options of building a website you can build a WordPress website and you can host it on hostinger or you can use hostinger website builder okay so what's the difference between these two options okay so these are two sort of different things so WordPress is an open source platform that powers around 43% of the internet and so hostinger is a WordPress host so on WordPress you know WordPress is what we use it's more customizable there's like hundreds of thousands of templates that people have made there's hundreds of thousands of plugins that you can add to your site for pretty much any functionality you want and you can literally modify anything about it even the code if you're comfortable with that level of control now the trade-off here is that there is a little bit of a learning curve yes it's very easy to install WordPress but then customizing WordPress you know you got to pick a theme install some plugins maybe tweak some settings you know keep it roughly up to date which hosting it does for you automatically anyway okay so if I'm a beginner then this website builder sounds like it's the better option like why would someone choose WordPress hosting instead so if your goal is to have a professional looking website with the least amount of Hassle and friction and effort that is humanly possible then the website builder is the way to go this is great if you don't care about how websites work you don't really want toar learn you just want something out of the box but the WordPress hosting option is better if you are willing to invest a little bit of time in learning how websites work and honestly I personally think that learning to use WordPress is an incredibly useful skill to have all right I mean but that does sound like a lot of effort it sounds like I think I think I maybe want to stick with the website builder instead yeah I mean honestly that's totally fair I can totally understand how as a complete beginner who's never touched a website before in your life you want to use the website builder to get your feet wet to get started also In fairness with WordPress back in the day it used to be kind of annoying setting up with WordPress installation but with hosting's business plan it comes with unlimited SSL certificates for security WordPress AI tools that help you create content up to five times better performance compared to basic plan and a free content delivery Network that makes your site load quickly worldwide the setup process for this is actually pretty straightforward you choose a domain name you install WordPress with one click and then you can use the AI Builder or choose from thousands of Wordpress themes the other thing is that they've got the AI content creator tool which helps you generate ideas and so if you're particularly struggling with figuring out what you actually write about you can use the tool to help give you a few ideas plus they got really good 24/7 customer support and tons of tutorials so even if WordPress is a little bit more tricky to deal with you're in good hands if you host it with hostinger which is exactly what me and my team do okay nice that sounds reasonable can you show me how this works absolutely I'm glad you asked so let's go into the screen now and I'm just going to give you a little quick walkth through of how you could build a website using the hosting Go website builder all right so I'm going to go over to hosting go and I am going to use the website builder and I'm going to pick the Business website builder cuz why not and you know what I'm going to sign up for 4 years because I'm committed to this this and then I'm just going to go through the sign up process a few moments later and I'm going to start by using the AI website builder so my brand name I'm going to say is my name which is Harry uh Trotter describe describe your project or brand in a few sentences create a website okay now what I what do I want I want pages of navigation I don't even really need a homepage but let's see welcome to Harry Trotter accounting okay so this is what the AI has come up with and if I wanted to I could add a Blog Page where I can now write stuff like blog posts and things and then I can get a domain and connect my domain so because I get a free domain as part of this hosting a plan I can get the domain name Harry Trotter oh Harry tr.