25:34Kallaway · Listicle
The Best & Worst Advice for Growing on Social Media
A social media strategist tier-ranks thirteen pieces of common content advice from S to F, live on an animated tier list.
September 3rdThe argument in one line.
Every idea already exists somewhere higher up a traceable source hierarchy, other creators, platforms, books, research papers, and 'scriptures', so consistent content comes from mining that hierarchy rather than inventing anything new.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're a short-form creator who feels like you're running out of things to post and want a repeatable system for sourcing ideas.
- You already post consistently but want your content to feel more original instead of recycled from other creators in your niche.
- You want a framework for turning long-form sources like books, research papers, or podcasts into short-form video ideas.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for hook-writing or editing tactics specifically. This is about where ideas come from, not how to cut a video.
- You want data-backed growth tactics with case studies or numbers. The framework here is conceptual, not tested with results.
The full version, fast.
Content is ideation, and ideation follows a source hierarchy: other creators sit at the bottom, feeding from platforms like blogs, podcasts, and YouTube, which feed from books, which feed from research papers, with life experience and 'scriptures' (a niche's foundational, agreed-upon texts) at the very top. The method: pick a source higher up the chain than what's already saturating your platform, interpret it in your own words, then execute using one of three storytelling types, visual, verbal, or written, ideally combined so no format is wasted. The video closes with a pitch for a paid seven-day storytelling challenge that walks through applying all three formats.
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00:00 – 00:29
01 · Cold open: the consistency promise
Alfie promises to break down what content actually is and a posting strategy that avoids burnout.
00:29 – 01:47
02 · What is content, really?
Content is ideation. A good idea is relevant and engaging; storytelling has two components, the idea and the execution.
01:48 – 03:07
03 · The idea hierarchy begins: model creators and platforms
Other creators sit at the bottom of the hierarchy, fed by platform content: blogs, podcasts, YouTube, analytics, courses, webinars, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, TikTok.
03:07 – 03:50
04 · Climbing the hierarchy: books and research papers
Books sit above single-session platform content because they take months to produce; research papers sit above books as tested, empirical ideas.
03:50 – 05:10
05 · The top of the hierarchy: life experience and scriptures
Life experience and niche 'scriptures' sit at the very top. Case study: Ben Patrick's knees-over-toes content is built on Charles Poliquin's training philosophy.
05:10 – 06:56
06 · Reverse-engineering an idea back to its source
Trace any idea you see upward to its origin and go straight there. True creativity is reinterpreting existing ideas, not inventing new ones.
06:56 – 08:00
07 · Three types of storytelling execution
Once you have the idea, execution splits into visual, verbal, and written storytelling, illustrated with a personal example clip.
08:00 – 10:58
08 · Visual, verbal, and written storytelling, explained
Each format's use case and strengths, plus the case for maximizing all three (caption, visual, verbal) instead of relying on one.
10:58 – 13:05
09 · The 7-day storytelling challenge pitch
Recap of the framework, then a day-by-day breakdown of Alfie's paid challenge applying visual, verbal, and written storytelling.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A good idea only needs two qualities: it has to be relevant to the audience and engaging enough to hold attention.
- Storytelling breaks into exactly two components: the idea itself, and the execution that delivers it.
- Ideas flow down a hierarchy: other creators copy platforms (blogs, podcasts, YouTube, courses, social posts), platforms draw from books, books draw from research papers, and everything traces back to life experience or a niche's foundational scriptures.
- When creators in a niche seem to be copying each other in a closed loop, the original idea almost always started somewhere off that platform.
- Books sit above single-format content like YouTube videos or podcasts because they take months to produce, which usually means more refined ideas.
- Every niche has scriptures, the overarching, agreed-upon foundational texts everyone in that space eventually draws from, whether or not they realize it.
- Ben Patrick's knees-over-toes content is built on Charles Poliquin's training philosophy, a textbook case of adopting ideas from a scripture-level source and repackaging them as engaging short-form.
- True creativity is combining, reinterpreting, and reimagining existing ideas, not inventing new ones from scratch.
- The practical method: when you see an idea on your platform, trace it upward, source, book, research paper, scripture, then go straight to that highest source instead of copying whoever diluted it first.
- As a content creator you're functionally a teacher, and the best teachers take complex source material and translate it into plain, easy-to-understand terms.
- Visual storytelling, hook-and-montage, split-screen before/after, works best for simple ideas that can be shown rather than explained.
- Verbal storytelling, piece-to-camera, A-roll/B-roll, voiceover, carries complex ideas more coherently than visuals alone.
- Written storytelling is the most overlooked format, and it matters because a large share of the audience comes from text-first platforms like X, LinkedIn, and Facebook and reads rather than watches.
- You never know which part of a video is doing the work, so the fix is maximizing all three storytelling layers, caption, visual, and verbal, at once rather than betting on just one.
Ideas don't run out. You're just mining the wrong layer.
WHAT TO LEARN
Every idea sits somewhere on a traceable hierarchy from creators up through platforms, books, research, and scriptures, and the fix for running dry is going one layer higher than everyone else in your niche.
02What is content, really?
- A good idea has exactly two requirements: it's relevant to the audience and engaging enough to hold their attention.
- Storytelling has two components, the idea and the execution, and most creators only ever work on one of them.
03The idea hierarchy begins: model creators and platforms
- The most obvious idea source, other creators in your niche, is the bottom of the hierarchy, not the origin: it's fed by platform content like blogs, podcasts, YouTube, analytics, courses, and other social platforms.
- When creators in a niche seem to be copying each other in a closed loop, the original idea almost always started somewhere off that platform.
04Climbing the hierarchy: books and research papers
- Books sit above single-session content like a YouTube video or podcast because they take months to produce, which usually means more refined ideas.
- Research papers sit above books: peer-reviewed, tested ideas that filter down into books, then videos, then short-form content.
05The top of the hierarchy: life experience and scriptures
- At the very top of the hierarchy sit two sources: firsthand life experience and 'scriptures,' a niche's foundational, agreed-upon core texts.
- Ben Patrick's knees-over-toes content is built directly on Charles Poliquin's training philosophy, a scripture-level source repackaged as engaging short-form.
06Reverse-engineering an idea back to its source
- The practical drill: when you see an idea on your platform, trace it upward, book, research paper, scripture, then go straight to that original source instead of the creator who diluted it.
- True creativity is combining, reinterpreting, and reimagining existing ideas, not inventing new ones from scratch.
07Three types of storytelling execution
- Once you have the idea, execution splits into three storytelling types, visual, verbal, and written, and most creators lean on only one.
08Visual, verbal, and written storytelling, explained
- Visual storytelling (hook-and-montage, split-screen before/after) suits simple ideas that can be shown rather than explained.
- Verbal storytelling (piece-to-camera, voiceover, A-roll/B-roll) carries complex or educational ideas more coherently than visuals alone.
- Written storytelling is the most overlooked format, and it matters because much of the audience comes from text-first platforms and reads rather than watches, so maximizing caption, visual, and verbal together beats betting on just one.
Terms worth knowing.
- Scriptures
- The foundational, widely agreed-upon texts or teachings within a specific niche, not necessarily religious, that most ideas in that space eventually trace back to.
- Idea hierarchy
- A layered map of where content ideas originate, running from other creators at the bottom up through platforms, books, and research papers to life experience and scriptures at the top.
- Internal ideation
- Sourcing content ideas from within the same platform you're posting on, typically by adapting ideas other creators are already using.
- External ideation
- Sourcing content ideas from outside your posting platform, such as books, podcasts, research papers, or personal experience.
- Visual storytelling
- A content format that communicates an idea primarily through footage and editing, such as a hook-and-montage or before/after split screen, with minimal spoken or written explanation.
- Verbal storytelling
- A content format built around spoken delivery, such as piece-to-camera, voiceover, or A-roll/B-roll narration, used for more complex or explanatory ideas.
- Written storytelling
- A content format that tells its story primarily through on-screen text or captions, aimed at silent viewers, accessibility, or dense structured information.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
05:47
“We do not need to teach new ideas. We need to remind people of the old winning and relevant ideas.”
06:12
“True creativity involves combining, reinterpreting and reimagining existing ideas and elements in unique ways, rather than solely inventing them from scratch.”
09:40
“There's a famous quote which says, 50% of my marketing budget is useless. I just don't know which 50% it is. Creating content is very similar.”
04:06
“Ben Patrick is an incredibly successful short form and long form creator who adopted a lot of the practices that Charles Poliquin took in his godfather-like scriptures on knees over toes training.”
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story
Hello and welcome to another YouTube video. In today's video, I'm going to take you through what is content, how to really understand that and how to make it work for you. A lot of you may be starting your account for the first time, looking at content creation and being intimidated by the idea of having to post every single day.
Let me tell you, the algorithm rewards consistency and showing up and driving valuable content for your audience. Today, we're going to break down how to do both of those things with a consistent strategy avoids burnout but also gives you an opportunity to create relevant and engaging content for your audience.
As we begin the first thing we're going to ask ourselves is what is content? Now content is really just ideas. It is about ideation and it's about bringing great ideas to market.
So when I think about this, what is content creation? Really, content creation is the storytelling of these ideas. It is the way that we market and bring these ideas to an audience.
Now, storytelling really has two components, the idea and the execution. So firstly, what makes a good idea? Now, a good idea is relevant.
and engaging to the target audience and relevant can be defined as closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered now engaging can be defined as charming and attractive we nail both of these we have a good idea so where do we get ideas from now firstly we can get ideas from internal ideation and we'll be touching on that today the second place we can get ideas is from external ideation.
And we'll also be touching on that today as well. What I'm going to take you through is my idea hierarchy. Now, this is incredibly important to understand.
And we're going to start right here at the bottom, which is ideas for your content. Now, the most obvious place where you could source ideas from your content is from other model creators, right? We could pull from existing people on the platform and we could look at what ideas they're bringing to market, take those ideas and then put them in our own words.
and create ideas for our own content. But the question begs where do your model creators get ideas from? Now, maybe, just maybe they get it from other model creators.
And we have this closed loop where model creators are just copying model creators. But at some point, the ideas must have existed off the Instagram platform. And that's where we go up the layer of ideation.
We could have blogs, Reddit posts, Quora, any of the written platforms. We could have podcasts. We could have long form videos like YouTube videos.
We could see some analytics and data that's being presented to us. We could see courses. webinars or workshops, may they be in line or in person.
Next, we could have LinkedIn posts, X or Twitter. We could have Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, all the other short form platforms. Ideas are circulating on these platforms and they could be adopted and taken into Instagram.
Now, above that, we have books. And the reason I put books above the other levels of the ideation is because books take longer to produce. They aren't like a YouTube video or a podcast that can just be created in an hour or a day or a week.
Books take normally months. A longer form of ideation and more refined ideas come from there. Above that, some books are supported by research papers.
So that can be another great source of ideas as we get studied empirical truth. Those ideas are brought to market as they're tested in science as hypothesis that become true or false. And those ideas can filter down into our books, into our YouTube videos, all the way down to our model creators.
Now at the very top, we have two sources of ideas. We have life experience and we have scriptures. Now, when I say scriptures, I don't just mean in the biblical sense.
Scriptures are the overarching Godfather papers within our given niche. If I take an example of a scripture that you may not probably see as a scripture, it would be... ben patrick and charles poliquin so ben patrick is a incredibly successful short form and long form creator who really created this philosophy or not created the philosophy which is the key part of how it links to charles poliquin but he adopted a lot of the practices that charles poliquin took in his godfather -like scriptures on knees over toes training and general athleticism and he put those into engaging short form content so he took the core ideas from charles poliquin from an agreed upon scripture that he read and adopted and built engaging short form with it.
So he used the relevant. ideas that were coming from Charles Poliquin into an engaging short form video. Various religious scripts where the core beliefs and idea structures are still applicable in today's society.
Those are what I refer to as scriptures. And nearly every niche has its own scriptures. If I think of yoga and some of the ancient yoga teaching in there, it has its own scriptures as well.
And I think being able to understand those and interpret those in your own words and then educate people at scale, aka create content through them, is going to make you even more valuable as a story. because you're going to the source of where those stories have come from you're not taking an adopted idea from a model creator or from a youtube video or from a book you're going to the very top source.
So what I recommend doing is when you see an idea, for example, on the platform by a model creator, question, ask where it came from. See if you can link it to maybe a YouTube video, a podcast, maybe some analytics or data, a course, a webinar, and then ask where that came from. See if you can link it to a book, a research paper, and at the very highest level, a scripture.
Ultimately, all of the ideas today already exist out there. We do not need to teach new ideas.
We need to remind people of the old winning and relevant ideas. And that's incredibly important as a content creator, because as a content creator, you are an educator on this platform. This is where I talk about true creativity, which true creativity involves combining reinterpreting and reimagining existing ideas and elements in unique ways, rather than solely inventing them from scratch.
So my suggestion to you is find your scriptures a knowledge of source for good ideas Ideally in a format that doesn't already exist on short form. You need to push yourself to interpret these from a written format into a visual one.
These could be from books, podcasts, journals, YouTube videos, scriptures. Just find a source of ideas that isn't yet on the platform. This is going to enable you to have effortless ideation because you're pulling from a bank of knowledge that is either agreed upon or you can easily access and interpret onto the platform.
Again, your job is a teacher. The best teachers out there take complex ideas and put them in layman terms, aka they put them in terminology that is easy to understand. Now the second half is going to be execution.
So how do we execute on short form? Now I'm going to show you three types of short form storytelling.
Hi, I'm Alfie Robertson and 12 months ago, I decided to start documenting my journey. 75 days to lock in, remove alcohol, the catalyst for most of my mistakes, lack of productivity and underachievement. Training twice per day, eating only real food, prioritizing my sleep and arguably the most important, posting every single day.
no matter what. 12 months later and I couldn't have scripted it better myself. I'm now making it my mission to show people that living your dream life is possible and social media can be a force to good when it's put in the right hands.
DM me creator to get started today.
As you can see there are three main types of storytelling. Now, the best storytelling out there combines visual, verbal, and written, and I'll go into how you sandwich those together later on.
But visual storytelling in itself allow you to combine a visual, a verbal, and a written in a very appealing and engaging way. We have examples of a hook and a montage. That's where the first three seconds draws the reader in.
And then there is a montage of scenes after. hook and split screen, montage and contrast. These are great for day in the life, day of eats, visual change, before and afters, good and bad.
Anything that is quite a simple idea that can be shown visually can be used and utilized through these storytelling methods. Next, you have verbal storytelling. These could be piece to camera, could be A -roll.
B -roll, quotes, or a voiceover. Now, these are better for more complex ideas, day in the life, day of eats, educational content, complex explanations, reaction videos, comment responses, and just general storytelling about who you are and what you do. Reason being is if we compare verbal to visual storytelling, you're going to be able to get across more complex ideas in a more coherent way.
Lastly, we have written storytelling. This one's often overlooked on the platform, but can be incredibly powerful. And I'm sure you've all been scrolling when you've seen...
read the captions style videos. Now, why written storytelling performs so well is a lot of people are coming from X, LinkedIn, Facebook, which are written platforms. And we often forget that, that a lot of people learn through reading rather than just the visual elements of the platform.
So this tells a story, whether that's on screen or in the caption or a combination of both. And I would adhere everyone here to make. use of your caption.
There's a famous quote which says, 50 % of my marketing budget is useless. I just don't know which 50 % it is. Creating content is very similar.
There's probably some element of your reel that is completely wasted and useless. We just don't know what part it is. So therefore I encourage you to maximize all areas of your reel, both your caption, the visual formats that you use and the verbal formats that you use.
Combined together is what creates really powerful storytelling. Written storytelling structures are perfect for silent viewers, accessibility, or just structured info that you want to put in front of them. I find it very useful to do an education overload in a way, putting a lot of information down and then having a simple call to action to my lead mag where they can access the PDF or document that I've shown them in a very fast manner.
It allows you to provide a lot of information upfront and pushes them to inquire more about where that information is sourced and what information and value they could derive from you now to be a great content creator you need to have effortless ideation pulling from a great source of ideas and you need to have simple and effective storytelling you need to know how to execute visual verbal and riff and storytelling at the touch of your fingertips the only bottleneck should be what new idea are you pulling and once you have effortless ideation that should be overcome as well Too many people get stuck in the execution phase and struggle to know how to execute the ideas that they have.
This is exactly why I created my seven day challenge. Inside this seven day storytelling challenge, you're going to be challenged to make visual, verbal, and written storytelling style content. I'm going to equip you with everything you need from templates, scripts, and custom GPTs to ensure that you can create this content with ease.
You'll end the seven days being equipped with how to execute effortlessly. content. The idea here is that you'll be inside my community.
You'll have access to my content coaches, including myself, who will give you direct feedback over the seven days. If you would like to sign up, I'm going to leave a link below in the bio. In here, we're going to take you through from understanding your USP, aka what makes you unique, understand your ICP, your ideal customer profile, working through how to really understand ideation, most of what I went through today, and then how to execute on those ideas across seven days of storytelling.
Day one, we're gonna start with a piece to camera. This is probably the most scary piece of content that you will create, but it allows you to tell your story, introduce yourself to the viewer and break down that first initial fear of what it's like posting online. Next, I'm going to show you visual storytelling.
You'll be provided with a template and create a daily vlog. After that, we have written storytelling. You're going to be doing a value drop, which I'll provide the guidelines for.
Then we move back to verbal, visual and verbal. And then finally on the seventh day, it will be your choice. Each step of the way, we will be reviewing and auditing your content and you'll be inside my small challenge community.
In here, you'll get direct access to me and my content coaches, and it will give you an opportunity to at least dip your toes into content creation. My purpose is to lower the barrier to content creation and let more people experience what it's like to create on the platform. I truly believe Instagram is a net positive if you're creating.
It allows you to connect with like -minded people and put yourself out there in a creative way, but it's net negative if you're just consuming on the platform. If you'd like to start creating and join me for the seven -day challenge, click the link below and you can access it today. And I can't wait to see you on the inside.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Alfie Robertson opens with the fear every creator eventually hits, running out of ideas, then spends thirteen minutes arguing that fear is solvable: ideas already exist in a traceable hierarchy above your platform, and the only real skill is knowing where to look and how to tell the story once you find one.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:48model
The Idea Hierarchy
- Other model creators
- Platforms (blogs, podcasts, YouTube, courses, socials)
- Books
- Research papers
- Life experience & scriptures
A layered map of where content ideas actually originate, used to trace any idea back to its highest, least-diluted source.
Steal fora repeatable weekly content-research process instead of scrolling competitors for ideas
00:50concept
Two Components of Storytelling
- The idea
- The execution
Storytelling is the combination of a relevant, engaging idea and how well it's executed.
Steal fordiagnosing whether an underperforming post has an idea problem or an execution problem
06:56list
Three Types of Storytelling Execution
- Visual storytelling
- Verbal storytelling
- Written storytelling
Every piece of content executes through some combination of visual, verbal, and written storytelling.
Steal forauditing whether a piece of content is using all three layers or leaving one on the table
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
10:59product
“If you'd like to sign up, I'm going to leave a link below in the bio.”
Soft, value-first pitch: teaches the full framework for over 11 minutes before naming the paid 7-day challenge, then walks through the day-by-day curriculum and community/coaching access rather than a hard sell.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
