04:27James Kemp · Talking Head
Stop Marketing, Start Yapping
A four-minute talking-head pitch for replacing calls to action with content that invites, plus two free-and-paid doors behind it.
June 26thThe argument in one line.
Most social results come from a few posts, and those posts share four types of content: philosophy, proof, problem and plan, built on insight, ideas and private selling.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach, consultant or service provider who posts regularly on social media but has no process for what to say or why.
- Someone whose content gets likes but never turns into conversations, leads or clients.
- A solo operator who wants a simple content framework instead of chasing hooks and trends.
SKIP IF…
- You want the full four-bucket breakdown. This video only covers the philosophy bucket in detail before it ends.
- You sell low-priced products directly in the feed and don't plan to move buyers into email or DMs.
The full version, fast.
Kemp says social media works when you deliver insight instead of information, sell ideas before products, and move people from public posts into private conversations. He adds that an interesting real life makes interesting content. Then he introduces his 90/10 formula: 90% of results come from under 10% of posts, and those posts fall into four buckets, philosophy, proof, problem and plan. He walks through philosophy with real posts: state what you believe, take contrarian positions you can back up, call out what others miss, and share vulnerability only when it is real.
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00:00 – 00:57
01 · The claim and the setup
Kemp promises four posts from his Social Code and says most people post blind without a process.
00:57 – 02:17
02 · Insight over information
Showing instead of telling produces insight, which moves people toward you.
02:17 – 03:43
03 · Sell ideas, not products
People buy into an idea before they buy a product, which cuts friction in the feed.
03:43 – 04:03
04 · Give in public, sell in private
Pitching in the feed causes fatigue, so move people into email and DMs to sell.
04:03 – 05:19
05 · Be, do, document
Social media amplifies your real life, so living an interesting one is the best content strategy.
05:19 – 06:06
06 · The 90/10 content formula
A few posts drive most results, and they fall into philosophy, proof, problem and plan.
06:06 – 10:33
07 · Philosophy posts
What you believe, contrarian takes you can back up, congruence, and real vulnerability, with example posts.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Information is everywhere and easy to copy. Insight is rare, and it comes from showing people why something happens instead of telling them what happens.
- Before someone buys a product, they have to buy an idea. Sell the idea on social and the product gets much less pushback.
- Give in public and sell in private. Feed posts build trust, and the pitch belongs in email or direct messages.
- Selling directly in the feed all the time creates fatigue because people see the pitch coming and switch off.
- Social media amplifies your real life. If your life is boring, your content will be too, so do interesting things and document them.
- About 90% of social results come from less than 10% of posts, so a handful of posts can outperform 200 mindless ones.
- Four content buckets cover most of what works: philosophy, proof, problem and plan. The best posts blend them.
- People buy who you are and what you believe more than what you do, which makes philosophy posts the base of a personal brand.
- Being a contrarian works only if you are right and can back it up with results.
- You attract people who share your beliefs better than people who fit a niche, because there is less unsaid and less confusion.
- Congruence builds trust: teach what you do, do what you teach, and say so plainly.
- Manufactured vulnerability and manufactured authenticity are still manufactured. Real stories resonate and made-up ones don't.
Sell ideas in public, products in private.
WHAT TO LEARN
Social content works when it shows insight, sells ideas instead of products, and pushes the actual pitch into private channels.
- Show people why something happens instead of telling them what happens. Insight is rare, while plain information is easy to copy.
- Sell the idea first. People who buy into an idea face much less friction when you finally make an offer.
- Keep pitches out of the feed. Give value in public, then move people to email or direct messages to sell.
- Your content is an amplification of your life, so doing interesting things gives you something real to talk about.
- Expect most results to come from a small share of posts, and learn which types of posts those are.
- Use four buckets for content ideas: philosophy, proof, problem and plan, and blend them in the best posts.
- Share what you believe and observe that others miss. Contrarian takes work only when your own results back them up.
- Be congruent. Do what you teach, and share vulnerability only when the story is real.
Terms worth knowing.
- 90/10 content formula
- The idea that 90% of results from social media come from less than 10% of the content you post, so the goal is to find and repeat the types of posts that do the work.
- Four buckets
- Philosophy, proof, problem and plan. These are the four content types Kemp says can be created regularly, and the best posts blend them.
- Congruence
- When what you say, teach and do all match. Kemp uses it to explain why a visible mismatch, like an unfit personal trainer, hurts trust.
- Give in public, sell in private
- A rule of posting useful content in the feed and moving the actual pitch into email or direct messages where a real conversation can happen.
Things they pointed at.
00:10productThe Social Code
06:16productThe Sovereign Consultant
Lines you could clip.
02:10
“Information is absolutely everywhere but insight is rare.”
02:40
“Before someone can buy something, they need to buy into something. And that something is an idea.”
03:10
“Give in public and sell in private.”
04:30
“If your life is boring then your social media content is probably going to be boring.”
Word for word.
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I've made millions of dollars on social media and I'm going to show you the four posts that enabled that. So this is a peek behind the scenes. This is something that I have for clients called the social code.
And I'm going to give you a peek behind the scenes to give you the four pieces of content that you need to generate leads, generate customers, ultimately generate clients. First thing I want to give some insight in terms of what works on social media. And when I mean social media, I mean all of the platforms.
mindset and the orientation that people have when they come onto those platforms and how you need to understand that mindset to actually generate results from them. Because a lot of people are posting blind on social media, they're putting stuff out there, they're hoping to get attention, but they don't have a process and they don't have an approach to it that actually works for them because they're thinking about social media in different terms.
So unlocking social media requires, you know, some some big factors and i call these the orientation the first one is delivering insight so information is absolutely everywhere but insight is rare so information allows us to observe just what is happening but if you can demonstrate why something is happening and give someone an insight it actually moves them forward because it allows them to look at something from a different perspective and that's what insight does so the content that i'm about to show you delivers insight rather than just information and another way to distinguish between those things is if you are telling people things then you're probably delivering information which is very common in everywhere because it can be replicated it could be copied if you're showing people things then you're likely to be generating insight so if you can make that shift from tell to show and start to generate insight you will notice that people move move
towards you from your content, reaching out, liking, sharing, commenting and saying this is valuable and ultimately becoming clients and going into your funnels or whatever it might be if you're delivering a lot of insight. The other piece is selling ideas. So before you sell anybody anything, they need to be bought into the ideas of what you can do together.
So I, on social media, sell ideas a lot. I sell people on the ideas without selling them on the product that enables those ideas. So before someone can buy something, they need to buy into something.
And that something is an idea. So if you sell people on ideas on social media, it's much easier to sell them on you and what you do by the time you actually make an offer or come to the ask. If you focus on selling the idea rather than selling the product, you'll find a lot less friction in your social content.
You'll find a lot less pushback and tension because people are buying into ideas much more than they're conceptually buying into you. The third principle is move from public to private. So this is a little mantra that me and some of my friends have, which is give in public and sell in private.
People don't wake up in the morning and go on Facebook or scroll Instagram and going, yeah, I'm going to buy some consulting today. Let's go on Facebook or, you know, I'm going to buy some coaching today. I'm going to scroll Instagram.
If we sell directly in the feed all the time, it creates a lot of tension and it creates a lot of fatigue in an audience. People just start to switch off because they anticipate the pitch and the ask coming soon. We do the pitch in private, which means that we get people from the public sphere, which is the feed or the main thing, into private, into email, into direct message, into a place where we can actually have a conversation with a human.
So if you give in public and sell in private, you will find, again, a lot less fatigue in your content and a lot more intimacy and a lot more connection when you actually talk to someone in private.
ultimate hack with social media is just to live a good life you know i do i call it be do document um if your life is boring then your social media content is probably going to be boring if you don't do anything then you have nothing to talk about um social media is an amplification of your own life and the characters in it right so the simplest way to have a enticing and engaging and interesting social media life is having an enticing and engaging real life and actually demonstrating on our social media you don't need all these unique angles and fancy hooks if you have interesting things happening in your life One thing that I've got really good at is actually living a relatively boring life.
In many cases, I'm pretty routine -based and those things, but finding ways to make that interesting when I talk about it. I can essentially tell a story and turn it into any idea, but I'm sharing what's happening on a day -to -day, a minute -to -minute basis sometimes and actually turning it into something. So that's the approach.
But what do you actually say in the content? So I'm going to take you here to this part of the training, which is... what I call the 90 -10 content formula.
So I can point at dozens of posts that have done more for my brand and audience and sales than another 200 times that I've just posted mindlessly. And I've been on social media for the majority of my adult life. I was early on Facebook and those environments.
So I've posted on social media a lot and all the platforms and I've tried everything.
Most of it was a waste of time because they didn't have this lens to look at. So there are four simple buckets of content that can be created regularly. They are philosophy, they are proof, they are problem, and ultimately a plan.
And the best content blends these ideas together. So philosophy is based on the fact that people buy you in the world that I'm in and the world that you're probably in much more than they buy what you do. So philosophy is what you personally believe to be true, right?
You know, I have built a brand around the sovereign consultant. The sovereign consultant is about, you know, freedom and choice and all the things around it. Freedom of time, freedom of income, freedom of location.
So my philosophy is, you know, kind of stamped on there, but I talk about it a lot. So what do I believe? What do you observe?
What do you think? How do you think differently about common ideas? Being a contrarian that's right is a wonderful position to be in the market.
that showing ways that you can do things that other people can't do is a wonderful way to get attention as long as you can back it up. People didn't think I could build a business that does $3 million a year working less than two days per week. So I did it and then I showed them how to do it and that obviously broke their belief that that was impossible or it was something that had a lot of sacrifice or I demonstrated that, yeah, there were some trade -offs with it.
But I demonstrated that it wasn't all bad and that it was actually possible in the first place. And the other philosophical piece is what do you observe that's hidden to others? So I've got this post here.
Fat personal trainers don't get many clients. They can get some, but eventually the lack of congruence catches up with them in the head of ceiling. So this is appealing to people who believe the same things that you believe.
A lot of people talk about niches and talking to different vertical markets and categories and all these ideas and niches from my American friends. But the reality is that we work best with people who believe similar things than we believe. There's less unsaid, there's less unspoken, and there's less confusion.
So the philosophical posts are really about talking to the people who are your people and sharing that worldview with them in the way that you see things. I'm a big believer in congruence. I teach what I do and I do what I teach.
So I make it simple for myself to say, I know this works because I do it. I believe this will work because I've done this. You know, I believe this will work for you because I've done this in the past and I got this result.
So I'm a big believer in congruence and this post, you know, specifically in terms of why fat personal trainers don't give any clients talks to that congruence. and talks to the things I believe and the people who come behind that and believe in that also are more likely to resonate with that message. Other posts here in terms of philosophy, I say you'd be shocked at how little profit some of your seven -figure heroes are making on their 100K a month business.
This talks to the fact that a lot of people in the coaching and consulting space have big bloated businesses with big bloated teams and they talk about six figures a month, but they're barely taking home five figures and in some cases losing money. This was calling out, you know, and obviously I have an advantage as I have a solo lean business with very high profit margins.
This was calling out the fact that there's a lot of nonsense and misrepresentation in the marketplace of people talking about huge revenue numbers but not having so much profit. And then the character who has altogether. This is a deeply vulnerable post.
And a deeply vulnerable post, vulnerability is an acquired taste. Just like authenticity. It's an acquired taste.
It has to be something that is real rather than doing it for the likes and the shares. This was me talking about the period of my life when my marriage ended and I had friends there to support me. And one of my friends said, you know, don't play the character who has it all together.
And I took that wise piece of counsel from my friend and I embedded it into my life. And then I shared that wisdom with other people because it was a deeply profound and useful message for me at the time. It made me stop and pause.
And I allowed myself to open up to some more people of stuff that I was bottling up. And I shared that. And vulnerability helps people, you know, resonate and engage with you.
Again, manufactured vulnerability and manufactured authenticity are still manufactured. So real stories with real resonance and real meaning will always resonate better than stuff that's just made up for the likes and the clicks. You can do that.
I'm just telling you it's not going to get the result you think it is.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
James Kemp opens with a money claim and a promise to show the four posts behind it. What follows is less a list of posts and more a mindset: insight, ideas and private selling, then the 90/10 formula.
Named ideas worth stealing.
05:19model
The 90/10 Content Formula
90% of results come from less than 10% of posts. Those posts fall into four buckets and the best ones blend them.
05:48list
Philosophy, Proof, Problem, Plan
- Philosophy
- Proof
- Problem
- Plan
Four content buckets that can be created on a regular basis. Only philosophy is covered in depth in this video.
04:03list
Be, Do, Document
- Be
- Do
- Document
Live an interesting life and show it, because social content is an amplification of your own life.
Visual structure at a glance.
