57:54Daniel Iles · Tutorial
The Complete 2026 Meta Ads Blueprint
A 58-minute course on why the creative is the targeting — and every other Meta ads variable is secondary.
June 10thThe argument in one line.
You win on social media by studying human psychology instead of algorithms, then dialing in content quality first and only scaling quantity once quality is proven, because reach is now only as good as your most recent post.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A business owner who already has a real offer and revenue but whose social media output is producing almost no return on the hours spent.
- An expert in a credibility-heavy field (lawyer, accountant, doctor, coach) who needs to convert intangible expertise into content a cold stranger will trust.
- A founder posting consistently who suspects they are stuck at one end of the funnel: lots of views and no sales, or constant asks and no audience.
- Anyone deciding which content format to start with and tired of generic hook templates and trend-chasing advice that does not survive an algorithm change.
SKIP IF…
- You want a guaranteed viral hack, a hashtag trick, or millions of views in a couple of months with little effort, because the training opens by telling you to leave if that is your expectation.
- You have no offer and no audience and are looking for a hobby channel rather than content that drives business revenue.
- You are already running a 500,000-a-month-plus operation with a mature paid and organic engine, since most of the tactical floor here is calibrated below that.
The full version, fast.
Daniel Iles releases his agency's full paid onboarding training for free. The core equation is quality times quantity equals results: nail quality on a few scripted videos first, then scale quantity, because since 2020 your reach is only as good as your most recent post. He maps an 'effortless content continuum' from tweets to long-form so any strength feeds every format, then sorts content into top, middle, and bottom of funnel and tells you the ratio to run. The psychology core is the locus of control, meeting an audience where they place blame and peeling them toward self-ownership, paired with a credibility continuum of observation, experience, expertise. Practical chapters cover scripting in your speaking voice, hooks as the most interesting part rather than bait, reposting and recycling proven content, hour-long competitor research, productizing a service so cold traffic can buy it, raising prices, and a ManyChat lead system.
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00:00 – 02:17
01 · Set the rules
Promises not to waste your time, tells anyone wanting an effortless viral hack to leave, frames this as essential context for working with his team.
02:17 – 10:05
02 · Quality times quantity
The core equation: nail quality first, then scale quantity. Reach is now only as good as your most recent post. The 13-to-200 followers-per-post client story.
10:05 – 15:31
03 · Daniel from the future
A comedic interruption flagging that the paid community has PDFs, tools, custom software and bonus modules beyond the free YouTube cut.
15:31 – 29:17
04 · The effortless content continuum
Map of formats from written short-form to long-form presentations; enter at your strength and reformat ideas up and down. Hormozi, Gary Vee, Naval as examples.
29:17 – 48:24
05 · Funnel ratios
Top, middle, bottom of funnel explained with give-to-ask ratio, brand equity, and worked ratio examples for service, product, and starting-from-scratch businesses.
48:24 – 57:13
06 · Locus of control
The four blame layers (concepts, things, people, themselves) and how to match messaging to where the audience places control, peeling them toward ownership.
57:13 – 1:10:32
07 · Credibility continuum and brand equity
Observation, experience, expertise matched to cold, warm, loyal audiences; the Jeff Bezos test; brand equity as a double-edged sword built by giving.
1:10:32 – 1:28:48
08 · Video formats and reposting
Scripted talking head, bullet-point improv, response videos, mock interviews, podcast clipping (Dave Ramsey case), plus reposting and recycling proven content.
1:28:48 – 1:42:30
09 · Hooks and the value-to-time principle
Hooks as a shortcut to the best part, not bait; specificity (the restaurant analogy); promise plus proof; reading level at sixth grade or lower.
1:42:30 – 1:58:43
10 · Competitor research
The Instagram follow strategy, the one-hour scroll, sorting tools, and why you must interpret the research yourself as the expert.
1:58:43 – 2:17:39
11 · Offer design and pricing
Product vs service continuum, productizing services for cold traffic, desirable beats best, modeling richer competitors, and raising prices.
2:17:39 – 2:25:41
12 · Tooling: Drive, Frame.io, paid plus organic
Screen-share demos of the Google Drive folder system and Frame.io review workflow, then why paid ads and organic content multiply each other.
2:25:41 – 2:34:13
13 · ManyChat, profiles, fresh accounts, Rick AI
ManyChat lead automation and DM follow-up script, profile setup rules, when to start a new account, and a demo of the Rick AI scripting agent.
2:34:13 – 2:39:36
14 · Outro
Comedic multi-person sign-off rewarding viewers who finished and pushing them into the paid school community.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Quality times quantity equals results: you gain followers with good content and lose them with bad, and quantity just accelerates whichever direction you are already heading.
- Since 2020 your reach is only as good as your most recent post, so a million-subscriber account that posts a bad video still gets buried.
- One client went from 13 followers per post to over 200 by making a third as many videos and spending three times longer scripting each one.
- Don't study the algorithm, study human psychology, because psychology doesn't change week to week and algorithms do.
- The narrower your audience, the more specific and tactical your message must be, the way a real billboard says 'best injury attorney in the city' not 'call your mom.'
- Audiences place blame in four layers: concepts, things, people, themselves, and your content has to meet them at their layer before it can move them.
- Lead with observation for cold audiences, experience for warm, and expertise only for loyal ones, because a cold audience hears a self-proclaimed expert as just another guru.
- Every post either moves a prospect toward a sale or away from it, and giving value without asking compounds brand equity while every hard ask spends it.
- A hook is not bait you say to convince people to watch, it is a shortcut straight into the most interesting part of your content.
- Specific hooks beat generic ones: 'real estate investors in Florida' stops more of the right people than 'entrepreneurs, listen up.'
- Reposting the same video isolates timing as a variable, and clients have seen the same clip get 3,000 views once and 100,000 the next two times.
- Don't be creative, be smart: model proven concepts because your sense of boring arrives long before your whole audience has even seen the content.
- Write scripts in your speaking voice, not your writing voice, and read every sentence out loud as you write it or it will sound like AI on camera.
- 54 percent of the US reads below a sixth-grade level, so writing above it silently excludes more than half your potential buyers, including rich ones.
- It is rarely the best product that makes the most money, it is the most desirable one, because customers can't compare quality until after they buy.
- Productize a service and a cold audience can finally value it, which is why the same offer is pitched as coaching to warm traffic and as deliverables to cold.
- A 20 percent price increase with flat delivery costs can lift profit 67 percent, so always test higher prices first.
- Good organic content makes paid ads cheaper and more effective, because you test creative for free before putting budget behind what already works.
Win on psychology, quality first, then scale.
WHAT TO LEARN
Stop hunting algorithm hacks and start engineering content around how your specific audience thinks, perfecting quality on a few videos before you ever scale quantity.
02Quality times quantity
- Treat results as quality times quantity, and never crank quantity until quality is proven, because bad content at scale loses followers faster than good content gains them.
- Remember that reach is now only as good as your most recent post, so tenure and follower count no longer protect a weak video from getting buried.
04The effortless content continuum
- Pick your strongest format and reformat the same ideas across the content continuum instead of inventing new ones, so one tweet, email, or podcast becomes a month of posts.
- Start most business owners in short-form talking head because it has the highest return on effort and lets you pivot fast when a video flops.
05Funnel ratios
- Sort every post into top, middle, or bottom of funnel and run a ratio that matches how much trust your offer actually requires before someone buys.
- Build brand equity by giving far more than you ask, because heavy asks spend trust while consistent free value compounds into an audience that buys with almost no direct selling.
06Locus of control
- Diagnose where your audience places blame (concepts, things, people, themselves) and match your message to that layer before trying to move them toward ownership.
- Stay highly tactical for audiences blaming outside forces and save motivational content for loyal audiences who already trust you.
07Credibility continuum and brand equity
- Match your claim style to trust: report verifiable observations to cold audiences, share your own experience with warm ones, and only speak as the expert to people who already trust you.
- Apply the Jeff Bezos test and never lead as the top authority on a topic unless your audience already sees you that way.
08Video formats and reposting
- Write scripts in your speaking voice and read every line out loud as you draft it so delivery doesn't sound like AI on camera.
- Repost and recycle proven winners to isolate timing and squeeze full reach from content you already know works, rather than reinventing every video from scratch.
09Hooks and the value-to-time principle
- Make the hook a direct shortcut into the most interesting part of your content, pair a specific promise with proof, and name your exact audience so the right people feel addressed.
- Keep the reading level at sixth grade or lower so you don't quietly exclude more than half of your potential buyers.
10Competitor research
- Spend a focused hour studying competitors before filming so you calibrate to what already works in your niche and skip months of avoidable trial and error.
- Interpret the research yourself as the domain expert, since no one else can judge which viral videos in your space contain bad information.
11Offer design and pricing
- Productize an intangible service so a cold audience can value and buy it, and sell the same offer as deliverables to cold traffic but as expertise to warm traffic.
- Make the offer desirable before you make it the best, model what richer competitors price, and test higher prices first because a small increase on flat costs can swing profit sharply.
Terms worth knowing.
- Effortless content continuum
- A spectrum of content formats from written short-form tweets up through long-form presentations, where you enter at your strongest format and reformat the same ideas up or down the spectrum instead of inventing new ones.
- Locus of control
- A psychology principle describing where a person assigns blame for their problems, ranging from external concepts to themselves. In marketing it tells you how tactical or motivational your message must be to match where the audience currently is.
- Credibility continuum
- Matching your claim style to audience trust: observation for cold audiences (reporting verifiable facts like a news anchor), experience for warm audiences (what worked for you), and expertise for loyal audiences (opinionated authority).
- Brand equity
- The accumulated trust an audience has in you. Giving value without asking builds it; hard sales asks spend it. Higher equity lets you eventually sell with almost no direct asks.
- Give-to-ask ratio
- How often your content provides free value versus requests an action like a lead opt-in or sales call. Skewing heavily toward giving builds long-term equity at the cost of short-term revenue.
- Top, middle, bottom of funnel
- A three-stage model of content: top of funnel gets broad views with low trust, middle of funnel builds trust through value, and bottom of funnel converts warm followers into leads and sales.
- Famous person effect
- The tendency of large audiences to engage with a creator simply because they are famous, which lets huge accounts post vague, profound content that would fail for a smaller creator who still needs to be specific and tactical.
- Productized service
- Packaging an intangible service so its deliverables, price, and outcome are clear enough for a cold stranger to compare and buy without first building deep trust, the way software-as-a-service sits between product and service.
- ManyChat automation
- A tool that auto-replies to comments and direct messages, turning a keyword comment into a DM conversation that captures a lead and delivers a resource, bridging cold viewers to warm leads.
Things they pointed at.
22:00channelAlex Hormozi (turning tweets into long-form video)
23:00channelGary Vaynerchuk (podcast-to-shorts model)
25:00channelNaval Ravikant — How to Get Rich
27:00channelVivian Tu (Your Rich BFF)
28:20channelAustin Hankwitz — Rich Habits Podcast
48:24channelTim Ferriss billboard question
1:36:40channelMark Rober (explaining complexity simply)
2:20:00toolGoogle Drive (raw and edited content folder system)
2:21:40toolFrame.io (editor feedback and review)
2:25:41toolManyChat (comment and DM lead automation)
2:30:00channelBrock Johnson (fresh-account framework source)
2:31:40productRick (Viral Coach's proprietary AI scripting agent)
Lines you could clip.
09:00
“Luck has never built a business worth owning.”
02:48
“I'm not here to sell you. I don't care. I'm here to make you good.”
1:30:48
“The hook is responsible for 100% of your video success.”
1:24:00
“If you want to make money, don't be creative, be smart.”
2:00:50
“It's not always the best products that make the most money, it is the most desirable products that make the most money.”
2:16:40
“Raise your prices. Thank me later.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
00:00Hey. I promise not to waste your time. If you have done business programs in the past or worked with marketing agencies, that is not what this is.
00:06This isn't marketing one zero one talking about colors and logos, and it is definitely not vibe or whatever that means. This is about making money for your business. And these videos are essential content that we have found to be useful to hundreds of clients and has been refined by our team that has gotten our clients billions of views.
00:24It's also how we scaled Viral Coach, like this exact strategy, to several million dollars per month in revenue and the same marketing strategies that we are actively using today. It is designed for high performing business owners, so I promise I will respect your time. But at the same time, this is also essential training material to work with us one on one.
00:39So this is the context that you need to actually get the most working directly with my team. So please be respectful of their time and watch these videos so that you and my team are all on the same page. Here's what you can expect from us.
00:51First, if you've looked through these videos, you might have noticed kinda looks a little sparse. You might have been expecting to be waterboarded by hundreds and thousands of hours of training material because when you have a really big goal, especially for your business, you expect to need a lot of stuff to get to that big goal.
01:06But I think what you're really needing is results, not a bunch of content to consume. So with that in mind, these videos are made specifically to be as short as possible so that you can actually go through them and then go do the more important stuff, which is the actual work.
01:20And don't get me wrong. I don't wanna exclude the details and nuance because I think that's super important to social media. But because social media strategy varies so much niche to niche and the type of content you're gonna be doing, the what we've seen to work best is just asking your account manager about your specific scenario and then having them give you a really specific answer that solves your specific problem instead of watching hundreds of general videos trying to find some bit of guidance.
01:48So these videos are meant to give you a really good understanding of social media as a base so that you can ask the right questions. Because, honestly, there's no cookie cutter program or solution or video that's gonna work for everyone to get millions of views. If there were, we'd all have millions of views already and be super rich and famous.
02:04Right? Like, there's no secret trick. There's no hashtags.
02:06There's no viral trend that is gonna solve all of your problems. You might get lucky doing some of those trendy things, but luck has never built a business worth owning. So instead, let's set some expectations of what we're actually doing here.
02:17We are gonna be learning how to make the best content possible so that you can win regardless of what platform you post on or regardless of what the algorithm is favoring this month. We're not studying the algorithm looking for some kind of hack or secret trick. We are studying human psychology, which unlike algorithms does not change week to week.
02:35So once you learn these skills of communication on video, you're gonna be able to succeed on every single social media platform. But at the same time, learning everything there is to know about human psychology and how to leverage it on video is not a super simple thing to do.
02:47Like, there's a lot of trial and error involved. There are a lot of individual skills that need to come together to create a complete and successful outcome. And if your desired outcome is millions of views, something that very few people in the history of mankind have ever accomplished, by the way, you are gonna need a lot of skills.
03:01It might take a couple of months to get those kinds of results. And I only mention this because I've seen it before, where people come in, they'll pay for consulting, or they'll pay for marketing, or hire an employee, or they'll they'll run into a single problem with whatever strategy they've tried to pursue. They can't solve it right away, and so they just give up on the strategy altogether.
03:17And this goes against the entire concept of owning a business and building something worth owning. And so if you're like, wait. You're not gonna make me super rich and famous in a couple months with no effort or risk to me at all?
03:28If that's you, leave right now. Like, get out. Email support for a refund.
03:32Tell them, I don't want to be good. They'll know what that means. Leave.
03:35And I know no other business owner is gonna tell their customers that what they're about to do is hard because they care about making the sale and keeping the client. That is not me. I'm not here to sell you.
03:44I don't care. I'm here to make you good. I'm here to get you results.
03:48And if that's what you are after, I'm glad we're on the same page. If not, leave because it is actually gonna be difficult. If we're trying to grow a business, we're trying to influence millions of people.
03:56That's hard. That takes time. That takes a lot of effort.
03:59And while I'm being brutally honest, you can get all this information for free on YouTube. I'll be honest. That's how I started.
04:04It took me about five years of gathering free information on YouTube before I got my first million views, but it was completely free. It was just on YouTube. So if you want the free thing, you can go watch the free video that'll tell you hashtags are good, and then you can watch the free video that tells you hashtags are bad, and then you can spend years testing like I did to find the truth and understand the nuance of why both of these videos can be true, or you could just pay for a shortcut like a real business owner would and get the outcome years earlier like I wish I did.
04:32The only thing I'm here for is to save you years of effort searching through all the fluff, trying to figure out how to do this, and just actually tell you what works with your specific context, shortcut those years of experience for you. Because personally, I've grown my company with social media.
04:46We have had clients that post their first video with us, have that video get 5,000,000 views, The next day, they get hit up for a bunch of interviews. They're in the news. They make tens of thousands of dollars forty eight hours after their very first strategy call with my team.
04:58That actually happened just recently. But at the same time, that person, that example that I just told you, had six years of experience on social media, literally thousands of failed videos before we stepped in.
05:10So it's not that they skipped the learning process. It's not that they took this massive shortcut and that they were successful immediately. It's that they spent six years learning and practicing, and then when they finally made the last few tweaks with my team, everything just worked.
05:23But we didn't skip that learning process altogether. They just did it by themselves. And most of the time, there is some trial and effort involved.
05:30There's no cookie cutter program that is gonna tell you exactly what to do and get you the exact results that you want. There's gonna be a lot of trial and error, and that's okay because we are here to help you discover the gaps and create that plan for where you wanna be and how to get there. But I'll be honest, the more you know at the start, the faster you're gonna see results.
05:48For example, if you're really good at presenting on stage, you're probably gonna sound great on camera. If you're really good at photography or videography, you're probably gonna get the studio set up in minutes.
05:58If you're good at writing, you're probably gonna crush the scripting part that we do. If you're really good at what you do professionally, if you've just been in your industry for decades, podcast style content is gonna be amazing for you. We have solutions for each one of these skill sets.
06:09If you're good at business, you probably could make thousands of dollars from just a couple 100 views on your videos. You don't even need to go super viral. But if you're not good at any of those things, like, that's fine too.
06:18We have plenty of time to get through it. A lot of business owners come to us with no experience on social media whatsoever. That's what we've built our business around.
06:25But as long as you put in more effort, because, yes, you will have to put in more effort than the people that are already good because you are not yet good, depending on how many steps you've taken before getting to this, you might have more or less work to do than the average person, but each step builds on each other.
06:39So just like you don't go and learn calculus and then suddenly hate your first grade math teacher because what they taught you, you know, basic arithmetic was baby stuff compared to this cool new calculus thing, you know that you need the basics before you go do the complex thing. Like, this is either gonna be the first step in the right direction for you or the very last piece of the puzzle that you need to have the whole picture make sense.
06:59And either way, it's gonna be what you make of it. I promise no matter where you're starting from, my team can help a lot, but your ability to execute on this is either gonna make you millions of dollars, or it's gonna make you feel like this whole social media thing doesn't work for anyone at all ever. And that is the biggest difference between our clients.
07:14We have worked with billionaire clients that come in. They single handedly complete two months of our program in a matter of forty eight hours. They post a single video that drives hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
07:24It's truly impressive. And people like that are really successful at everything they do, because that's what successful people execute like. But if you're not there yet, that is totally okay.
07:31Let's go change that. So the entire strategy of Viral Coach can be boiled down to nailing quality and then maximizing quantity.
07:39And we can actually look at it as an equation where the quality times the quantity equals the result. So it's not just one of these. It's a very careful combination of the two.
07:48So you gain followers with high quality content, and you lose followers with low quality content. And you accelerate the process of either gaining or losing them with quantity. So if you post a bunch of good stuff, you get a bunch of good followers and engagement and hopefully business revenue.
08:05But if you post a bunch of mediocre stuff, you actually lose followers, you'll get bad engagement, and you'll end up making less money simply wasting your time for even posting in the first place. For example, one of our clients came to us, only generating 13 followers per post on social media. Now that might seem like a lot to some of you, where you just post a free video and you get 13 new people following you.
08:26But his team was spending a hundred and thirty two hours per month dedicated to this effort. And it's been months trying to make this work, and it made absolutely no sense at that rate of growth. Posting twice per day would have him reaching his goal in literally one hundred years.
08:40That's what the math backs out to all while paying a team thousands of dollars every single month to be able to get there. And the strategy that we moved him to actually has him averaging over a 100,000 views per video on Instagram alone now and over 200 followers per video. And the core of the strategy was actually by making a third as many videos.
09:00So he started just decreasing the total output. He decreased the quantity, but he increased the quality. Yeah.
09:08Every single video is way better. They were literally working 20 times better, and we spent literally three times longer scripting every single one of these videos out.
09:17But then once we had that dialed in, once we were able to really understand what worked on the quality side, we were then able to crank up the quantity and get him back to posting two, three times per day, and that is when his business really started to scale. Just a few months later, he has over a 100,000 followers, he's growing faster than ever before, and he's one of our best success stories.
09:38So rather than pushing tons of mediocre content through the pipeline, which we've had clients ask us to do, which will leave you feeling like you did so much work and you actually got nothing out of it, our goal instead is to spend a lot more time on every single piece of content at the start. We're gonna dial in the quality first, get the systems to where they need to be, and then once we have that figured out, we can really crank the quantity as much as you want because that's when the business has started to scale.
10:05But we take this approach because this is how social media works right now. Years ago, if you had millions of subscribers, it was almost guaranteed that every single video you'd put out would be getting hundreds of thousands of views. But since about 2020, your reach on social media has changed to now become only about as good as your most recent post.
10:25So if someone with a million subscribers posts a bad video, it's not gonna get pushed to any of his million subscribers because it's bad. On the other hand, if someone posts their very first video with no followers, but it's an amazing video and they 100% nail the delivery, they have a chance to get tons of views despite not having a massive audience prior.
10:43And this change in how social media works has really made a lot of content creators salty, a lot of big business owners that have established brands.
10:52They're mad about it because they spent years building up their following. And all of that time building up their following has been wasted because now they still have to make a good video if they wanna get views, just like the new guy. And while I do think that's true, I see it absolutely as a good thing because it levels the playing field and it puts quality and quantity over everything else.
11:12It doesn't matter how much tenure you have, it doesn't matter how many people know you in the space. If you can't show up well today, it's irrelevant. And with billions of views of experience behind us doing exactly this for our clients, we are very excited to compete on that.
11:27Now the tricky part here is that quality is subjective, and it's not your opinion that matters. It's the audience's opinion that determines whether more audiences see it. You can't just improve video quality by using a better camera and expect to be super famous.
11:41You can't just pay a whole bunch of money to someone and have them make you super famous. And depending on the piece of content, having higher production quality or a big team around you makes it look higher produced, almost like a TV commercial, and that actually could result in even less viewership and worse engagement because audiences on social media are generally a lot more cautious over material that looks far too promotional.
12:03And we'll go into the details about what quality actually means on each platform and what your audience thinks is high or low quality later, but first, we need to talk about what the content that you're gonna be making is actually gonna be about. Hey. Listen.
12:17This is Daniel from the future. Here's the mic sync. You're not gonna hear from me again.
12:21This is the only message that you're gonna get on this uninterrupted course. But the message is important because I'm from the future. I know more than you, um, or at least more than myself that's filming this video.
12:34Here's what I wanted to say. This entire course might be great, might be fine, but there's even better stuff that accompanies the course. I'm talking I'm what am I talking?
12:44We got a whole bunch of stuff. I'm talking PDFs. I'm talking assets.
12:47I'm talking a bunch of additional tutorials, stuff that you can just throw your team, and they'll get it done. All tools. Someone said tools, software, custom software, by the way.
12:57Whole bunch of stuff that you can get in addition to the actual Vidual modules. And then actually a whole bunch of other course pieces depending on when you're watching this. We're launching whole bunch of stuff, basically, on how I built my business from scratch to the multiple million dollars per month that we make on social media.
13:13I intended this to be a multipart series, and you can find almost all, if not all those parts already on Viral Coach, the the school site that we got, the school community that we got.
13:25I don't know why I said it's the site. They're making fun of me. You're gonna go back to watching the rest of the video, but just know you're missing out if you're only watching here on YouTube and you don't actually get in the community and get access to all the other stuff that we did specifically for this launch.
13:37That's all I'm doing. Get the head. Turn it off.
13:40Wait. You gotta do the outro. That's the outro.
13:42That's the outro? What's the intro then? The intro was that there's no outro.
13:46That's all they're gonna Should you plan the content of your videos out before filming it, or should you just get on camera and talk off the top of your head about whatever comes to mind? Both of these are actually decent strategies, and just like any other marketing strategy, you need to have a strategy for which one to choose.
14:04My goal is to share what we have learned from my team's combined decades of experience on social media, now thousands of clients that we've helped and been able to learn from ourselves. And just to be clear, these strategies aren't just pulled from my experience getting millions of views across platforms, but all of my team's experience working with all of those clients, over a 100,000,000 followers across platforms.
14:25And that's why I have an extreme amount of confidence telling you this, that they will work if applied correctly. So just like you plan word for word, everything that you put on your website, for example, or what you would say on a billboard, or plan to talk about on a stage before you give your presentation, you should also probably be planning your content, maybe even scripting your content out word for word on social media.
14:46Otherwise, potential customers are gonna look you up on social media, see a low effort video that you posted with no thought, and they are gonna attribute your lack of effort and how you present yourself on social media to be congruent with how you do everything else in your business. And that's why clients who are a little bit more established on social media already, what we usually do on day one is look at their existing content and just delete stuff.
15:06We just clean up their social media of anything that isn't congruent to their brand. If it doesn't feel professional, we get rid of it. If it potentially represents them in a bad or less than ideal way, we nuke it.
15:16And really, that's just putting your best foot forward to potentially millions of people, and there needs to be some planning consideration around that. And one of the most important things you could do to getting the outcome of a good first impression with your audience is understanding what good first impression means to you and your business.
15:31One of the easiest ways to do that is just by looking at what other people are doing and seeing how they have positioned themselves on social media. So either your competitors or people in related industries that are successful on social media, you should pay attention to what they are doing and model their best practices.
15:47Model what their profile picture looks like. Model what their profile setup looks like. What kind of videos do they make?
15:53Do they pay attention to really detailed scripts, or do they just go off the top of their head on everything and make it feel more grounded, more connected to their audience? And if you don't have competitors, potentially pay attention to what other type of content your audience is already watching on social media. Because if your audience breathes air, there is a 70% chance they're on social media.
16:12Meaning, they already consume some kind of content. It is your job if you're trying to succeed in marketing to deeply understand what that is and meet them where they are at. A really successful example of this is actually one of our clients, Amanda Custer, who runs Forex for Women.
16:25Her group is for women, so a lot of moms. And her most successful content leans on her being a mom and creating content that that ideal audience would want to watch, whether or not she mentions her financial services business.
16:38But once she has that ideal audience's attention, moms, she does mention what her company does and how they serve that exact demographic. It creates a massive opportunity to take all of those eyeballs that she's able to reach very efficiently and then push them to her business. But if you have no idea what your goal is with content, or who you should be targeting, or what kind of content they like to consume, or what type of content you want to make, it's gonna be really hard to get this hypothetical goal outcome of good looking content or good first impression.
17:06Hard to get that by accident. But understanding what type of content moves the needle is dramatically gonna influence the results that you get from that audience and the amount of success you see with your content.
17:16And having seen results of hundreds of clients is informed why we have so much material focused, especially in these videos focused around planning your content out. Because before we actually do the work, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to actually plan, to research, to strategize, to understand what you're gonna be doing for the next several months.
17:35Abraham Lincoln once said, give me six hours to chop down a tree. I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe. And if you don't believe me or Abe Lincoln, totally fine.
17:44You'll believe me once you are either very successful or find out when you are struggling to make it work. While we're planning out our content, it is helpful to understand how the most successful people on social media plan their content. I call it the effortless content continuum.
17:59And you can enter at any point in this continuum here with any type of content, and you will just start with whatever your strengths are, and then pull content through the entire rest of the continuum up or down. So if you're really good at long form talking head videos, start there, and then use that to inform what your written short form is gonna look like.
18:18Or if you're really good at written short form content, use that to inform what your long form content is gonna look like. And this is what some of the biggest creators' core strategy is on social media. For example, Alex Hermosy.
18:28He posts tweets on the x platform, very short form written content, and then turns 100 of those tweets into a single hour long YouTube video. So instead of having to create new ideas, he just takes a lot of the ideas he has in one type of content and reformats them for the other.
18:44So maybe you do really well with podcasts or having long in-depth conversations. That's great. We can cut those up into shorts for posting on short form video platforms.
18:53That is Gary Vee's entire strategy. Or one of my friends, Vivian, your rich BFF, who crushes on short form video. She takes most of those sixty second talking points that are very successful, like she'll get millions of views on them on short form platforms about how to save on travel.
19:07Then she'll package all of those up into a single long form video that is thirty minutes long on how to save money traveling. And I'll show examples on how to do this at every single step later, but you can think of each stage as progressing someone deeper and deeper into knowing you and your business and building a relationship with them.
19:24And as they spend more and more time with you watching longer and longer form pieces of content, they're gonna build more trust. The more time you can spend with your audience, the more trust you're gonna be able to build with them, either through them reading years worth of your short tweets or a couple 100 of your short videos or watching a dozen long form videos or listening to a couple hours worth of podcasts.
19:46All of these build trust just on different levels, and there are advantages to each of them. So one of my favorite styles of content right now is actually short form video. This is where I recommend most business owners start for several reasons.
19:56One, you can turn around 20 to 30 shorts if you sit down for a single hour long interview. So it's a very low time commitment relative to the total output, which is about a month's worth of content. And you also have massive organic distribution potential there.
20:10But if you can also do this at a high level of quality and you can present yourself professionally on camera, put a good foot forward, you can look and sound good on camera, communicate more professionally than you otherwise could in a written piece of content like a tweet or an email because you also get to have some tone and inflection there.
20:27It's an easy way to communicate really complex things to your audience. It's also relatively an untapped market. Like in most industries, there are only a few really famous and established people.
20:36For example, lawyers, accountants, financial advisers, we work with a lot of those. And despite being established industries, literally being around for thousands of years, all of the most famous people are still super new on social media.
20:49There's only a handful of them with over a million followers. And compared to formats like long form written content, because most people in these industries do send emails and they do write blog posts, those are usually way more competitive and generally less interesting to prospective clients because there's so much material around there than organic social media content because it's new and untapped.
21:08Another example is business coaches. There are literally millions of business coaches out there with Twitter accounts just using ChatGPT to write single sentence posts at a clip of, like, 20 to a 100 posts per day spamming their feed. And they are trying to compete with millions of other posts per day from other people in their exact space saying the exact same stuff.
21:28It is impossible to win on quantity. But on social media, there's only a few business coaches that command 99% of the entire market, leaving an awesome opportunity for another new competitor to come in, do it really well, and gain a lot of market share with a new perspective.
21:42I also don't recommend long form videos for beginners that are just starting out because the level of competition that exists on YouTube is much higher than on short form platforms, and it's not even close. Because YouTube as a platform has a decade head start on short form video platforms like TikTok. And the really big players, like super rich influencers and billion dollar companies, they've already entered the market for long form video and become really well established on YouTube.
22:11And when you're competing for views against some of the most famous people and most well funded people in the world, you are almost always going to lose. But on short form, that isn't very much the case because it's a newer platform, the bigger companies are just now starting to figure things out, and you still have an opportunity to gain market share for attention for the next few years.
22:30But in the end, in five or ten years down the line, expect the exact same thing to happen in short form that did to long form. The players with deep pockets are gonna enter the space, they're gonna figure out how profitable it is, they're gonna establish a foothold for themselves, and they're gonna make it incredibly difficult to compete.
22:46I also prefer short form for beginners right now because it is so much easier to pivot to something when it doesn't work out right away. So if you have a short video that gets no views, or maybe it got like a 100 views, you are only out the thirty to, you know, sixty seconds it took to make. That's no big deal.
23:02You have another one going live tomorrow. You could post a second one today. But with long form, you could spend hours scripting, an hour filming, a week or two editing, thousands of dollars to get help with all this with staff, and the video could still bomb.
23:14It could get, like, 50 views, and then you're gonna be out another week's worth of time, if not more, thousands more dollars to test the next video hoping it does better. And the feedback loop is just so much longer and not really congruent to learning on long form social media platforms.
23:30Not to say that long form doesn't work. Of course, it does. My team is making a massive effort right now specifically on long form.
23:35But we, just transparently, are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month only to put out one video or a couple videos a week. It is a massive commitment that if I didn't have the experience on short form first, I even couldn't afford the long form stuff.
23:49So until you're in a similar position where you can very comfortably burn several $100,000 a year, I don't think it's worth the effort, and there's a much easier ROI specifically on short form.
23:59But if the video style content doesn't come naturally to you whatsoever, you can start anywhere on this continuum and transform what you are comfortable in saying from writing into short form content that is very easy to make with very little additional effort. So with written short form, this is anything that's like a tweet style post, anything that you see on x, or threads, which is the Instagram version, or even short answers to community questions, or comments you respond to.
24:23Maybe you get emails from prospective clients. If someone asks you a quick question, you know, give a response via text or maybe even product FAQs that you answer. Each one of these could be short form written pieces of content that you make, and you can just post them.
24:35But then what you would also do is take the thing that you typed up and do a fifteen second response with a short form video. It doesn't have to be super professional.
24:43It doesn't have to be a complete thought. It can be very concise, especially if you have the context of answering someone else's question written in the caption. Now that's how you'd adapt written short form moving down the list.
24:54Written long form is something like an email or a blog post. If you have any of this material already made, it can easily be rewritten into your speaking voice and then delivered on camera as a short. You could also repurpose it as a carousel post on Instagram, keep it to a couple 100 words or so, but also add images and graphics to communicate the information more visually.
25:12And because you've got more total words to work with, you have the opportunity to use storytelling and give more value there. Now getting into the actual videos here, short looping reels is just like written content.
25:23So a short or a long form written post, but then you add a visual, something like a a short looping video of your work environment or what you're actually doing, and then potentially also an audio element like a trending song or a voice over. But the content here is either very short primary text and a long caption or long primary text and a short caption.
25:44So a little bit of words in the video and a long caption to go with the video or the inverse. And you're still leaning on the writing more than the video part with this type of piece of content, but now you're at least posting a video, which will get you the distribution of a video, which could actually just be like a recreated version of the top performing email you've ever sent.
26:04Just summarized with a couple of bullet points, text on screen, and then keep the entire email copy as caption of the video. These are really great for testing and building new audiences because they can have great organic distribution on social media, but it doesn't actually require any of your time to, like, create dedicated new content.
26:20You're just taking what already works in your emails or your blogs and putting it up in a video format. Unfortunately, though, don't recommend it as an exclusive strategy. It's not gonna really do very much to be able to build trust because it's hard to trust a wall of text just like it's hard to trust an email.
26:35And there's a reason why short form video, especially founder led videos, are so much more successful. But if you can add your personality or some credibility to the video, like you see some of the biggest entrepreneurs doing with photos of them speaking on stage or videos of them working with their team in their business, and then just add the text on top of it.
26:53It could help you stand out a little bit more. What we're very confident doesn't work is just a very boring wall of text in front of very boring stock footage. Trust me, our clients have tried that.
27:04It feels way too corporate, and there's no results from it. Moving down the list, short form talking head videos. This is actually the bread and butter of what we teach and the whole reason why I just explained it makes it better and easier and have a higher ROI than all of the other options right now on social media for this list.
27:19Next, long form talking head is often a YouTube video anywhere between ten and thirty minutes long, and you can have short form pieces of content that actually inspire those long form videos, like stitch them all together. For example, one of Alex Hermosy's biggest videos, just a bunch of tweets that he reads out loud and provides a little bit of context to each one.
27:37Another one that's had a lot of success with this strategy is actually Naval Ravikant's biggest videos, which is his most popular body of work on the entire Internet, and it's just a three hour long audio only podcast. Whereas that type of content usually wouldn't get very good organic distribution, the video has millions of views because it's actually based on his most popular series of tweets called How to Get Rich, and they are very well known by a very large Twitter community.
28:03So the tweets did really well, but this three hour long video, which was based on the tweets, builds way more trust because they get his narration and additional thoughts in addition to the original content that is proven to be very successful as tweets by themselves. So it's just really taking one successful type of medium.
28:20If you truly believe that it was successful, for example, if you know your emails rock, adapting it to another type of medium and just experiencing that same success all over again. But long form videos, I will admit, are harder because the YouTube algorithm is more competitive like we talked about. It requires a lot longer.
28:34The time investment in short form videos and the organic distribution for long form content is a lot more competitive than short form. Whereas you could post a short and have it get a thousand views. If you spent a 100 times the effort and made a long form video on a similar topic, you could be left with one one hundredth of the results.
28:48And even a 100 views, like, honestly on YouTube on a brand new account is very good for a result. But in addition to that, if you're making a video for YouTube and it's only published on YouTube, you're limited to one platform. Whereas with Shorts, you can post across multiple different platforms.
29:01YouTube, but also TikTok, but also Instagram, but also Facebook, but also LinkedIn, but also whatever next comes up. And for most people, unless you already have a large YouTube audience or an audience on whatever other platform that you could push to YouTube, you probably won't see an ROI on long form YouTube for a very long time.
29:17Next on the list is podcasts. Similar to YouTube and that they often have a video accompanying them, but the focus is on what is being said and not as much as what is being shown on the video. These often take an hour or more to film.
29:28They're posted as an audio episode on on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. They have almost no organic distribution on those platforms, so there's no, like, scrolling for you page for new podcast.
29:38They don't get pushed to viewers as soon as you post them. So unless you have a really large audience somewhere else that you are directing to the podcast to get the views, or you already have a podcast with thousands of very active listeners, your podcast, if you're posting the first episode, won't get any views. And if you can get a network deal or drive a large audience to the podcast, it can be great for building long lasting relationships with listeners who listen to hours and hours of your content all the time.
30:01Getting recognition from very large brands because those audiences that you build on podcast are very sticky. But getting to that point is really difficult. I'll be honest.
30:09One of my good friends, Austin Hankowitz, runs a podcast called the Rich Habits Podcast. They were number one on Spotify's business charts multiple times in a row, and every month, they're one of the biggest shows on Spotify. And so Spotify, because they're a big show, often pushes their show to new users on their homepage.
30:23But before that podcast, he had millions of followers across platforms, tens of thousands of paying newsletter subscribers. He partnered with another amazing entrepreneur, Robert Croak, also millions of followers even before they created the show.
30:35And so they do really well with the podcast now, so it absolutely can work. But to get into podcasting with no experience and expect the results that they had with none of their previous audience, absolutely not gonna happen. And then lastly, down here on the list, we have long form presentations.
30:49This will be the most time consuming and also the most valuable media that you could possibly create. Training videos like this, webinars, speaking on stage, anywhere where you have the audience's undivided attention for potentially hours on end, there's often very little organic distribution for this type of content, but it is high value for the audience that does see it.
31:05And we have moved content from all across this continuum. We've taken some of our best performing emails, turned them into trainings. We've taken some of our best trainings, turned them into high performing, short form, and long form videos.
31:15Now a complete social media strategy, of course, has all of these in place, but it's not just one or the other. And you can't just do the easiest piece of content here and expect to be really successful everywhere else. But specializing in just the hardest ones is also gonna be really difficult because it's gonna take you years to see traction and justify the time and effort, and it's not very realistic for most business owners to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars over years just to see some kind of return, hopefully.
31:40Like, that's not my expectation for you. And so generally, recommend starting wherever you already have some content made, either emails or tweets or presentations, and using that to inspire content through the middle. But I recommend being in the middle because, again, it has the highest ROI potential potential right now.
31:54And I understand this can be intimidating if you're starting with nothing because there's tons of options. There's like a million things you can do. But once you start just somewhere, it could be easy to keep the momentum going because any content that you do have can be repurposed into two or three different styles, and then that content can be pulled into two or three other styles, or just new topics that are tangentially related.
32:14And as you learn what your audience likes, this entire process of running through this continuum is gonna get easier and faster until you eventually just never run out of ideas, and have a long list of videos that you want to get around to making and are actually inspired to do so. So now that you understand the different types of content you can make, we're gonna look at the effortless content continuum as different stages of the funnel.
32:34So the short form stuff is generally gonna be more top of funnel, really good at getting views, but it doesn't build much trust. And the long form stuff is generally gonna be more bottom of funnel, good at building trust, but the opposite is that it's difficult to get views on. And we need to consider what type of content you should make and what the ratio should be for top and middle and bottom of funnel content.
32:52And it really depends on what the goal for your content is. Like, can give some rough guidelines so you know what kind of percentages to shoot for, but this is gonna require adjustments as you go. And it's not gonna be a strategy that you put in place once and then forget about it and never revisit.
33:03You should always revisit the strategy for how much top versus middle versus bottom of funnel content you should be doing, and it's based on how your content performs. So if you wanna prioritize ROI from the start, it's really important to know the level of trust that your audience needs to purchase and how many customers you need to get to enough of an ROI, and really build your strategy around getting the audience to that level of awareness and trust first.
33:26So for product based offers, like golf clubs or tiny homes or handmade soaps, we've had all of those clients, really don't need to build much trust at all with your audience to buy. In most cases, you just need to demonstrate your product. You need to show them, like, here's how it works, and the product is gonna sell itself.
33:40In this case, you will just wanna get in front of as many people as possible, so you're gonna be focused on top of funnel goals for your content first. On the other hand, for professional services, like accountants, lawyers, doctors, you are gonna need to build a lot of trust.
33:53So you are gonna need to make more middle and bottom of funnel content first. So I wanted to provide some examples here and and talk through some strategies for each so you can get a very tactical example. If you're a big business with a consulting or a service based offer and a lot of followers already, a goal of increasing your revenue and you're already posting about 60 times per month, the ideal ratio for you is probably gonna be around the eighty twenty principle.
34:14About 20% of your content is gonna be top of funnel to keep some continued effort in getting in front of new audiences. But because you already have a large following and because the primary goal is revenue and you need to build trust with your audiences before you can sell them because you have a service based business, I really don't think gaining another 500,000 followers that are like vanity followers is gonna be the easiest way to make more money.
34:35Like, that sounds difficult, actually. Like, what I think is gonna be much easier is winning over the existing audience that is already interested in your content and has already raised their hand saying, want to see more. So the other 80% of the content, most of the stuff that you're gonna be doing is middle and bottom of funnel.
34:49Most of it is building trust with your content because this is a service based and consulting offer that requires a lot of trust, and some content with a call to action to actually take the next step and let people know how they can get, you know, a free lead magnet or your book or asking potentially more direct bottom of funnel things like getting on a sales call or even more direct, which is just asking for them to check out on your website, all of which eventually results in more revenue.
35:13Now have we ever, in a client engagement, counted every single post to make sure we're following the math perfectly down to the percentage point? No. It's more admin work than it's worth.
35:23But it is worth considering when planning out your content. Like, if we're gonna go into a filming session, we'll know we roughly need about 12 top of funnel posts for the entire month, maybe a dozen or so pushes to a lead magnet, and then everything else is gonna be middle of funnel. Most of the content is gonna be middle of funnel.
35:40Now for product based offers, you probably don't need to build as much trust. Like, you're an e com, you're not gonna build a whole bunch of middle of funnel content, and the split is gonna be completely different. Like, maybe it looks like 80% top of funnel just getting some kind of attention on social media, and then, like, 20% for middle and bottom to to actually convert it, but it should be really easy to convert.
35:58If you're advertising a physical product, you might not need any authority at all to make the sale, just demonstrating the product. A really good example of this, one of our clients, Bunky Life, they sell bunkies, which are basically just like tiny homes. So you could educate people with middle of funnel content on the, you know, square footage of tiny homes on average, the the heating ratio of tiny homes.
36:17But what's probably gonna be a better use of your time is rather than just talking about the product, which everyone can read spec sheet on, you just have an amazing advantage in being able to show off your product. You can show how it's built. You can show how it looks.
36:29You can show how it's used, which is very difficult to do if you're in a service based business like accounting, for example. You can't show how the numbers are calculated. They just are, and you know it.
36:38So product based businesses are gonna have a much easier time reaching their audiences when the audiences can, like, see themselves using it. Another example is software tools. So I've worked with many large software brands in the past, including QuickBooks, Venmo, PayPal.
36:51And while I could talk about the benefits of their encrypted payment system or how their credit card has 1% better cash back on purchases up to $6,000 in a calendar year, I used to do this. All of those are middle of funnel ideas, but they're generally for more sophisticated users, people that were, like, already on the fence of buying.
37:07And all of that assumes that you do trust me and my math and my opinions on payment security and what a good deal is. But something that would be more simply understood and has gotten way more views is just the top of funnel video showing the product. And when I used to make content for Venmo, for example, it's just me typing in my friend's phone number and then suddenly being able to send them $20 for lunch because I forgot my wallet.
37:28For this type of top of funnel video, you don't need to trust me. You can just see that the product is working. And just showing how the product works for product based businesses or SaaS in a video has far outperformed all the math and logic and trust that you could spend years trying to build with videos and logically talking through how the product could work.
37:47Now the third example I wanted to show you for funnel ratios is what to do if you are starting from scratch with no social media presence whatsoever. A large part of our clients come to us in that situation. So if you don't have an audience yet, if you're just starting from scratch, you should start by giving as much as possible to your audience.
38:03No asking for checkouts. No bottom of funnel content. Don't be trying to monetize that audience.
38:09You should also be prioritizing top of funnel content to get in front of as many new and relevant people as possible. And depending on your industry, this might be a couple months of only posting top of funnel content. Maybe you post 20% middle of funnel in those first few months where you get, you know, winning top funnel videos and that you go into more detail on for middle of funnel, but the rest of your content, the 80% would be top of funnel.
38:31Another example I'll give from one of our clients who prefers to stay anonymous, but they run a really successful coaching business doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Not many people on social media knew them as a professional in industry. So for the first two months that we had, they were spent entirely on getting as many new relevant people to watch their videos as possible.
38:49We didn't include any middle of funnel posts until about two months in. And then after posting for four months, one to two videos per day, we had so many videos posted that were all top of funnel. At that point, he had built up a decent audience of people that were at least aware of him, and he already had a successful business and an offer that he knew worked.
39:07So when we did make an ask post, combining those two, audience that he had and the business that was already converting successful, we did a single short form looping video. It was very caption heavy. It had a ManyChat CTA.
39:19It got him tens of thousands of views, And because he was positioned towards the bottom of funnel event, which is converting into leads, he brought in literally thousands of leads with a single video and a very substantial amount of revenue. Now it wouldn't have been possible to ask their audience for money until they had an audience that knew, liked, and trusted him.
39:39So a lot of those first videos were around getting that audience and then building trust. But once the audience was there, once they were warmed up a little, we can make tons of money from a single video just by typing some words on a screen and clicking post and not even being on camera that entire month because his schedule didn't allow for it because he was traveling a bunch.
39:55But at the end of the day, it is the quality of the content, not what percentage of each type of content that you post that is gonna get you the result. So don't worry about getting the ratio just right.
40:04Just understand what it even means and focus on just making good content. If you have specific questions about your specific scenario, just ask our team. They'll be able to give you guidance on whether you should be top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel.
40:16One big mistake that we work through with a lot of our clients that will absolutely limit your reach on social media is called the famous person effect, and I wanted to explain it with an anecdote. The author Tim Ferriss asks all of his interviewees, including some of the most well known people in the world, the exact same question on every single interview.
40:33What would you put on a billboard that everyone in the world would see? And, if the entire world is looking, it's better to be profound. And so the answers he gets are often very profound, like, you have purpose or call your mom, talk less, listen more.
40:48It's all this ethereal stuff, which is probably actually useful for the entire world to see. But when you think about it, what is on actual billboards really like when you drive by on the interstate?
40:58It's always like best injury attorney in the city, phone number. Live show tonight, MGM Grand, 6PM, 8PM, 10PM. Real estate professionals, 35 lots available next exit.
41:08And the difference between the message that you would put on a billboard for everyone in the world to see is very different from what most people put on a billboard that they know will only be seen by a narrow demographic, which is maybe only the people on the freeway that month. And the point that I'm trying to make is the narrower your audience is, the more specific and actionable you need to make your message.
41:25So when you look at the biggest content creators in the space, the ones with tens of millions of followers, the ones with millions of views on every single post, you need to recognize which one of those two billboards they have, the bigger one. Right? And because they are expecting to reach millions of people with every single post, the message they make has to be tailored to that audience.
41:44And most of the times, just being real, their audience listens to them just because they are famous. It's like when you're walking down the street and everyone starts crowding around someone, and there's like a big crowd forming and people have their phones out asking to get a picture or signature. Like, whether you know who that famous person in the center of the crowd is, you're probably gonna look over there and just see what's going on.
42:02It's called the famous person effect, and if you don't have that kind of reach yet yourself, your message is gonna need to be different than the famous person's because your audience is smaller, and it's narrower, and it's more specific. But at the same time, you have the advantage with that smaller audience to be far more tactical.
42:18Just like best attorney in the city can just, like, throw up his office phone number and get a whole bunch of leads, like, that's not something that you can do when you're in front of the entire world. You have an advantage, and that with your narrower audience, you can get way more specific. But there is also a way that we can learn from these really big guys.
42:33One of the ways that you can get inspiration from some of the biggest people in your space without worrying about, like, copying them directly or whether or not it's gonna work because you don't have millions of followers is by looking at the type of content they were posting before they got famous. And so while we do want this level of success they have right now, posting what they're posting right now is not gonna give you that success.
42:51But fifteen years ago, if we look at some of the biggest people like Gary Vee, he was talking about tips for posting on YouTube for small businesses. It's before he had millions of followers. That was the type of narrow niche content he made.
43:02Grant Cardone was making sales training tutorials, very niche for his small audience back then. Five years ago, Alex Hermosy made very tactical business tutorials largely talking about scaling gyms, And now all these guys have massive audiences. Their biggest videos are all very profound ideas of them talking on stage and talking about the meaning of life or business or how to make money broadly.
43:25But if they started by making those types of videos that were very broad, they probably would have never gotten to the level of success they're at now. So unless you have millions of followers already, I recommend not making videos that are successful because of the famous person effect, being able to identify videos that potentially do fall into that category, and instead going after a few concepts or ideas that are successful for people that are just a couple levels of above you.
43:49Maybe people with two to five times your follower count or having great success with those types of videos, instead of referencing the most successful videos from the most successful people in the world and expecting those exact things to also work for you. One factor to consider when making targeted content for your very niche audience is understanding that audience, and specifically how to talk to them through a psychological principle called the locus of control.
44:12Control. And this is how you make a video work before you even make the video. Figure out what your audience thinks the problem is and make your messaging match it.
44:20So where they place the blame, where they place the control, speak to that power, and your content will be more powerful. And I'll explain in a second, but most marketers, they skip this step. But when you get it right, I've seen this drop ad costs by half, sometimes even to a third with our clients with basically the exact same type of ad creatives.
44:38It's just addressing a slightly different problem or talking about it in a slightly different way. It's a very small shift, and that's why it's difficult for some people to understand, but it is so powerful, which is why I wanna make a whole video addressing this. So people often find problems that you can solve for them with your business in one of four things.
44:54It's your job to figure out which kind of thing it is and base your entire marketing strategy around that. And if you've ever sold to a client, you've probably gotten some of these objections. Like, lot of this sounds like sales psychology, but in content, you have the same exact goal, which is you have to know where people are at, have you to meet them there, and you have to communicate more effectively and create content specifically for them if you want that sale.
45:13It was very similar to sales. And the first place that people place blame and find problems are concepts.
45:19So they place their blame on an entire concept, like the economy or the government or society or, like, time itself. That's the problem. I'll start when the marketing improves.
45:30I'll start when the election's over. I'll start when things are fair in my business environment. They blame things that they can't touch and they can't change and conveniently things that they can't be held accountable for.
45:42That is the very first layer of the locus of control, it is very far out from where they're at. They can never actually touch that thing. And the second layer, they blame things.
45:51So they blame things like money. They blame things like their old computer. They blame things like the state they live in.
45:56Like, actual things that they can point to and actually explain other than, you know, the other one just concepts like government. Like, do you point to government? Right?
46:02So they'll see things like, I'll invest in marketing once I have more money. They blame the money, which is funny how that works because you need money to invest in a marketing, and you need marketing to make more money. But whatever.
46:13They blame things that are real. They blame things that are tangible, but things that still feel outside of their control. In the next layer, they take a little bit more accountability.
46:20So they blame actual people. They cannot just point to things, but they can point to individuals. So they blame their parents.
46:26They blame their partners. They blame their employees for not being able to figure this out, or for not being able to get started, or whatever's preventing the sale, whatever's preventing them from agreeing with your marketing. So they'll say things like, I would succeed if my team weren't so incompetent.
46:40So we're getting a little closer to the truth here. At least it's someone responsible and not something that no one can influence or something that you can't even point to.
46:48And then at the fourth level, the deepest level, when you know your marketing truly hits, this is the final level, is when they blame themselves. When they say my business isn't growing because I lack the skills, so I'm gonna fix that. When they blame themselves, they reclaim all of the control and they reclaim all of the power in fixing their position.
47:08So your job is to meet them where they're at and eventually peel back each one of these layers to get to the core of the problem, which in most cases is always them. Not everyone starts at level four. Most people are still stuck at level two or level three, and that's fine.
47:20You can still sell to them. You just gotta peel back the layers one at a time before you get to, this is my responsibility. This is my problem.
47:26I can take control, and I can fix this. I can use your product or service because I know I have the power to be able to influence my position. And with content, we can get someone from, like, a four to a two.
47:37Because when someone says, oh, you know, all this sounds great. I can see how it worked, but I need to check with my partner. That's progress.
47:43Like, least they're no longer blaming the economy, something that you are never gonna be able to influence or themselves really be able to influence, an objection that you're never gonna be able to overcome. They're at least admitting now that they could influence the decision if they talk to the right person first. And in sales, just like in content, your goal is to build enough trust to guide people through each one of these four layers, peeling back the layers until they take full ownership so that you have the most amount of change in their state and they have the most amount of control over their situation.
48:09But you can't rush this. Like, you can't just go out and say in a video, hey. You're the problem.
48:14You're an idiot. Fix it. Just like in therapy, earn the right to tell someone the truth.
48:18And at the end, just have them be accountable for the decisions and taking action by being responsible for themselves. So starting from the furthest locus of control, people blame situations or they blame concepts.
48:30We call that telling stories. They say things like, oh, well, it wouldn't have worked out because of this thing here. So now I can feel good because I've got something to blame, and it couldn't have been me.
48:40Right? And as long as you blame something else, you're not responsible, you're not response able, you are not in control.
48:46And so when the locus of control is intangible, when it's a concept like it is for most people, they blame things outside of their control. And it's really hard to fix anything when people think that whatever is broken isn't something they can influence. So instead of blaming them and saying, you're an idiot.
48:59It's not the economy. It's you. And losing their trust, you could blame their fitness routine, the thing that they don't have any control over, for not having them do this special exercise that burns calories 10 times faster, like fasting cardio.
49:12Not that I believe in that, but, like, maybe that's your solution. Or you can share a sales technique for why they haven't been closing prospects in this tough economy. Like, this is the tough economy close.
49:21Oh, you didn't know about the tough economy close? You're right. It is the economy that's preventing all your clients from closing, but here's the tough economy close.
49:27Here's how to get over that. I don't even think that's a real thing either. But either way, you need to give them some sense of agency over this problem that they previously have never even been able to touch before.
49:36They've just been missing this hack or this trick that they should have tried, and that would solve their problem. And for this audience, really, you have to provide very practical takeaways in your content. Anything that's generalized or not specific, like, you should just try harder, you should work more, simply is not gonna be well received because you haven't earned their trust to be preachy.
49:56You haven't earned their trust to say the locus of control is actually you. You control your situation. They are still thinking it is something ambiguous, something intangible, and you have to mirror that or they're not going to believe you.
50:07Now if this is your audience, your content needs to be extremely tactical. It needs to be made for them to get immediate value from something that they've been missing. Now for warm audiences, like one layer down, we can get a little bit more open.
50:18So instead of assigning the blame to ambiguous things like time or the economy that they may not be in anyone's control. They will point the blame to specific things like it is their broken sales funnel and they think that's the only thing they need help fixing. Or it is some kind of piece of technical equipment, a camera, a light, whatever that is preventing them from having all of their wildest desires and that is the only thing that is broken.
50:39So you need to just show them the secret strategy with that specific thing that they have a problem with that they haven't yet tried. Tell them about the communication strategy or the closing framework that'll help their sales team double their close rate. It's still very tactical, but as you dig deeper, the focus changes from just like tricks and tools to actual strategies, actual education.
50:58They are receptive to improving their entire website tech. It's not about the economy anymore. We can talk about fixing just their website or fixing just their sales process.
51:08And then as we continue to move down deeper, it is actual coaching for their team. So maybe they'll blame their sales rep or maybe they'll blame their person in tech saying, oh, they're incompetent. You know, we need to create content that actually supports those people.
51:20So maybe you create a video that is a tutorial for sales that that business owner who is blaming their sales team would take and send to their sales reps to to be able to improve. And either way, you're at least on the right track of giving them real coaching, which is probably what they really need. And then eventually, at the deepest level, you have content that makes them look inward.
51:38This is when you have a really large warm audience. This is when you've built a lot of trust with your audience. You don't have to be tactical all the time.
51:45You don't have to have a concrete takeaway with every single post. You have loyal fans. You have people that are just gonna listen to you because they like you and they trust you.
51:51You can make purely motivational content, and it's gonna be very successful. And this is where the biggest life coaches and the biggest business coaches and health coaches eventually end up once they have millions and millions of followers.
52:02They have enough trust with their audience that the message becomes work harder or try more, or like just be patient. And that's like the whole video, and people eat it up. But people see Tony Robbins give that motivational speech where he just says that, and they try to copy it, and they get no results, and they wonder why.
52:19And it's not Tony's message is wrong. Obviously, he has millions of followers and tons of people praise him for his work. It's just that what he says word for word won't work for anyone else because they don't have the context of trust and authority that Tony Robbins has built over decades with millions of people.
52:35And the entire goal of marketing is to get as many people here as possible, people that will trust you no matter what you say, so that you can essentially start selling without even trying. You just say words, and suddenly they're like gold to people.
52:48But you have to get here one layer at a time, and it's another reason why you should really focus on building up your brand equity. Start with tactics that build trust as your audience warms up. Eventually shift the ratio to also making content that gives them agency over their own problems, less tactics, more strategy, and then start helping actual people with development themselves.
53:05Develop their sales reps, develop their tech people, develop whoever it is that are decision makers in their lives that they point blame to. And then at the very bottom, the brand equity is the result of this process where you slowly start to win the trust of your audience, and then you get to tell them what to do, and they trust you for it.
53:19You can't just skip to motivational content and expect this to land right away. You have to start with where your audience is, highly tactical, high value content that proves you understand their worldview as they see it. You have to build their trust, the right to go deeper from tactics into strategy, from tips into coaching, from like here's what you do to here's who you need to become, and you need to master this framework of progression.
53:40You're never gonna understand what content to make next. But if you know exactly where your audience is in trusting you, you'll also understand what they need to hear and when they're ready for more. When creating content, you also need to match your level of credibility to your audience's level of trust.
53:57I call this the credibility continuum. And so for cold audiences, oftentimes with top of funnel content targeting people that don't know you, they're cold audiences, you want to lead with observations, such as a statement like, this real estate strategy went viral.
54:10People with very little experience are buying millions in property. And this works because you are reporting on facts that anyone can verify just like delivering the news. People rarely question the integrity of the person reading the news.
54:22There's nothing to argue with. There's nothing requiring you to trust them. And yet, just like the news anchor, you are a narrator.
54:28You are not a self proclaimed expert. And for warmer audiences, further down middle of funnel, you could think of that, you can actually share your experience. Instead of just talking about an observation, share your experience.
54:38A statement like that might sound like this real estate strategy made me $2,000,000 last year. So this is just what works for you.
54:45You're not promising that it works for anyone else. You're just saying this is what worked for me. But by this point, they also probably know you enough.
54:52They're in your middle of funnel. They know you enough to believe your story. And personal results like, here's what happened to me, are harder to dismiss than abstract claims.
55:01This is because you are building proof through transparency by sharing what worked for you. And for loyal audiences, which is kind of bottom of funnel, people that already know who you are and they trust you, you can actually speak as the expert. You can have a statement like, this is the best strategy for making money in real estate, period.
55:19They already trust you. They want your authoritative perspective.
55:23They're not questioning your credentials at this point. They're just asking for your perspective so you can give them something that is potentially opinionated. And here's what most creators get wrong.
55:30They try to establish this expertise. They try to come off as the expert in their content before earning the right to do so from their audience.
55:38Because when you're unknown, when you're trying to reach top of funnel audiences and you lead with, here's the best way to do this specific thing, you actually sound like every other self proclaimed guru on the Internet. There's thousands of them. And audiences just know that.
55:52They immediately tune those things out, and you never even get a chance to finish your video. But if you flip the script, instead of saying top ways to make money online, you say Kanye West did this thing to make $200,000,000 from a single piece of online content, here's what happened.
56:08You're taking an expert position and instead presenting it as an observation. You are telling the news no longer your opinionated expert perspective. You are making an observation that anyone can independently verify.
56:20And even if you've made millions of dollars yourself, even if you are the best in your industry, cold audiences don't know that yet. So you can't start with your expertise. You can't lead with authority and expect everyone to just believe you, unfortunately, because there are so many other people doing the same exact thing on the You need to start what is undeniable.
56:38The observation that you are making. The observation that anyone else can verify. And then you use that as a bridge to then share your experience, and then eventually, once you win their trust, their expertise.
56:47And there's a quick test I like to call the Jeff Bezos test. If you are not the most credible person on the topic, don't lead as if you are. So Jeff Bezos can say top ways to make money online, but that is the only person that to a completely cold audience can say top ways to make money online because his credibility is preestablished.
57:03He has made the most money online over anyone else in the history of mankind. And if you have not, you can't lead with that same statement and expect to get the same kind of results as Jeff Bezos. And if you're thinking about it in hierarchy, observations open doors, experience builds trust with that audience, and expertise closes deals.
57:22So you gotta use them in that order, top, middle, and then eventually bottom of funnel, and you'll never sound like another guru that is just screaming into the void. The content you publish is gonna be a double edged sword. No matter what, every single piece of content that you post is either gonna bring you closer to a sale or push prospects further away from the sale.
57:40And the amount of money you make on social media is directly proportionate to how far in either direction you have pushed people with your content. I call this brand equity. High quality content builds up.
57:51Brand equity increases your brand's value, and low quality content decreases your brand's equity. And the question you should always consider is how much equity you have, whether it's positive or negative that you've built with your audience.
58:02And one of the things that impacts this brand equity the most is the give to ask ratio in your content. How often do you give value in your content, and how often do you ask your audience to do something like become a lead in your funnel or give up their personal information to book a sales call with you? And in the short term, if you have a lot of asks, you're gonna make more money because you're asking people to go do something that generates you revenue.
58:24But you're also gonna decrease your equity with every single ask. And the more you give, so the more value you provide without asking for anything, the less money you're gonna make in the short term, but it sets you up to build massive personal brands in the long term. And that's what you see with brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who didn't sell anything for years to his audience and still really doesn't beyond the large b to b marketing services that he does.
58:45Now he makes hundreds of millions of dollars per year from that exact type of demographic watching his content. And these give and ask posts aren't binary. You can have an ask that has a very soft call to action that doesn't deplete your brand equity almost at all, like the CTA I recommend everyone to have in their bio, which is a ManyChat automation to get free access to something that is valuable to you.
59:06You know, that doesn't require a lot of taking from your audience. And while it is an ask, and that you ask for their information, they become a lead for you. It's also not asking for very much, and they get a lot from it.
59:16Ideally, the value that you provide with your lead packet. Alternatively, you could have a really hard call to action where you ask them to sign up for an hour long sales call so that they can get pitched to buy your 5 figure program. That's a lot harder of an ask and usually depletes your brand equity a lot if you always post that hard call to action.
59:32Now if you ask your entire audience to do that every single day, you probably aren't gonna have an audience by the end of the week. Right? And, ideally, you should always instead be building up more and more brand equity.
59:42You should not be a net neutral. You should always be building in the positive and doing the bare minimum of asking and the maximum amount of giving because the effects are gonna be compounding from giving more. The more brand equity that you build, the easier it is to continue building brand equity to the point where you have a massive following that results in millions of dollars of revenue gen Without even having to have any direct asks whatsoever.
1:00:03And knowing some of these guys on a first name basis, that is exactly what the most successful entrepreneurs on social media done. And when they do eventually launch a product, when they have their first ask ever, when they go to the marketplace and for the first time ask their audience to buy something, they make so much money that I'm, like, actually not allowed to tell you how much on camera.
1:00:19But trust me, it is life changing work for just the couple of years that they spent building trust with their audience. So if I can give you any advice on how quickly should you try to get an ROI from social media, I would always say delay it as long as possible because the rewards are always gonna be greater. So we can look at your social media strategy as a funnel in three stages, the top of funnel, the middle of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel.
1:00:41And you need to have content for each type of person and the different levels of understanding that they're coming in with. Let's use a super niche example of someone that has a b to b business helping plumbing business owners make more money in their plumbing business. Super niche client of ours that started from scratch and now is the biggest plumber on social media.
1:00:56He's made 6 figures a month from organic content alone. He's doing really well. Starting with the very bottom of the funnel, this is for conversions.
1:01:02This is really where you can turn your followers into clients by helping them as much as you can. They're problem aware. They trust you.
1:01:09They're ready to buy. And this type of bottom of funnel ask post asks your audience to do something. For example, we would offer potential customers a custom solution for one on one coaching.
1:01:19These posts reflect your business goals and the problem you're trying to solve. So if you need revenue, this content generates that. If you need leads, this content generates that.
1:01:26If you want to attract attention to a new book that you're doing, this content generates that. And if you think of this as an ad, and whether you're doing it with organic content that is free to post or an actual ad that you put paid traffic behind, the goal here is the same with bottom of funnel content is to actually make money.
1:01:41Now moving up the funnel, we have middle of funnel where you're showing off your expertise and you're turning viewers that loosely know about you into a warm audience by providing them value. So before you make a sale, you actually need those people to trust you. This middle of funnel content is how you do that.
1:01:56So in our plumbing coach example, we would make content about plumbing and business strategies and tactics and provide free value to their audience. It also serves as a testing ground to find out where your bottom of funnel needs to be. So the top middle performing content will tell you what the best bottom performing content will probably be before you go wasting your brand equity or actual dollars in ads testing this bottom of funnel angle that's probably never even gonna work.
1:02:20You can look at your middle of funnel stuff, understand what's doing well, and then model that from bottom of funnel and be basically guaranteed a result. For example, if we found and tested that plumbers don't respond well to make money online claims in the middle of funnel because they're highly skeptical of online coaching programs.
1:02:36And instead, we found better that they respond to make it home in time for dinner with your family and stop taking phone calls at all hours of the night as marketing messaging. We could save thousands of dollars in failed ad spend on the coaching angle of the product we're trying to sell and skip right to the good stuff that we know our audience already responds to.
1:02:53And then with top of funnel, the biggest part of the funnel, this is where you get views with the right audience. Really just helps you get in front of more of the right people and helps distribution of your middle and bottom of funnel content eventually when you do make it.
1:03:05And as an example of how this top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel works, I'm sure you've experienced this before on social media where you see like one video from a person and you watch it because it's a good video. You like that video. And then for like the rest of the next month straight, you start seeing all of their content everywhere.
1:03:21You start seeing their middle of funnel, you start seeing their bottom of funnel, they're just everywhere on your social media after just watching one video. And this is what most people get wrong about social media. They track top of funnel views as the only type of progress that matters.
1:03:34But for a business, building brand, building conversions, which are middle and bottom of funnel content, are even more important. They're just not as easily tracked with view count.
1:03:43But if you can get those top of funnel views first, you can drive those audiences to middle and bottom of funnel content, which will actually end up building you the trust and making you the money for your business. For example, there's a lot of people on social media that have millions of people watching them every single month in top of funnel.
1:03:58But because they don't have any middle or bottom of funnel built out, they have zero real influence. Like, no one actually listens to them for their advice. They watch their videos, but they can't change their audience's opinions or drive revenue.
1:04:08They're like a dancing monkey at a zoo. They're not a speaker on stage with trust. Like, both get views.
1:04:13The monkey maybe even gets more views, but only one of those two has influence. And just to illustrate the differences, one of our former members on the team, Lisa, she built up the team at Dave Ramsey, the social media team over there. She was presenting on stage about this exact topic, top versus middle versus bottom of funnel.
1:04:26And she played two videos, and she asked the crowd to guess which one of these two videos performed better, and she had the audience vote. Some audience voted on one of their videos, some of the audience voted on the other, and then she showed the view count for both videos. And the crowd just erupted like, oh my gosh.
1:04:39This video did so much better. I was right. Of course, the other video would have never gone viral.
1:04:43And then Lisa said, well, the views were just one part of the equation in the video doing better, and no one knew or no one even asked what the actual goal of either of the posts were. So both of those videos were made with a bottom of funnel goal to drive sales. And the video with the big view count that everyone thought did better actually only did a fraction of the sales.
1:05:04While it was good at getting new audiences, it wasn't good at converting audiences and actually driving revenue. And if you can understand where in the funnel each piece of your content belongs, it'll give you all the control that you need over the levers that you could be pulling on social media and what analytics to pay attention to, whether it's followers or comments or total views, whether it's getting more views with the audience or getting new audiences that haven't seen you before to actually follow and engage, or converting the audience that you do have and have been nurturing into actual paying customers for your business.
1:05:35This is how you go from just throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping it sticks to actually strategically making content and posting to get results for your business. And a common mistake that our account managers work through with clients all the time is people will either be stuck at one extreme or the other.
1:05:50So they might rock at top of funnel. They know how to get views. They know how to say, you know, controversial stuff to get tons of people to engage, but they never actually convert people into their business.
1:05:59Or the opposite is true. They're such experts at what they do that they can never step back and teach from the perspective of a beginner for top of funnel and reach more people. They only know how to ask for money in their content.
1:06:10Another example of this for a personal trainer, I personally like fitness, and I'm interested in what other people are doing. And if I come across a good top of funnel post from a personal trainer, I'll follow that person just because I hope to see more content from them even though I don't actively want a personal trainer myself.
1:06:25I know about fitness. I don't want the coaching. I prefer to work out by myself.
1:06:28But then I might be served up a couple more videos that explain in detail some things about exercise or diet that are really niche for people that are a bit more experienced, and I'll be intrigued by it. Right?
1:06:40The top of funnel content was very broad, and I don't want personal training, but the bottom of funnel stuff he's saying, the middle of funnel stuff is really building up my trust in this person. And it's this middle of funnel content that makes me trust the personal trainer even more because they're providing me value. And then I might get hit with a bottom of funnel post promoting their new app or their new program.
1:06:57And even though I wasn't actively shopping for fitness advice because I don't ever want it, I end up buying with that person because I trust them, and they've earned my business. And I just wanna hear more from their perspective. I never would have been shopping for a program in the first place.
1:07:09I never would have responded to direct ads for that. But because it's coming from someone I know and someone I like and someone I trust, they have forced me to buy because I'm interested. But without ever seeing that top of funnel post, without ever seeing that piece of content that, you know, they might have thought is irrelevant to someone like me, they never would have sold me because I wasn't a customer of their product because I wasn't a follower of their brand.
1:07:31And this is something that no direct response marketing can touch. This is a massive new set of audiences of people that don't even think of themselves as customers for your brand.
1:07:41But with social media, you can absolutely convert them into sales. And so with every script you write, with every video you post, you really need to determine who you're making it for and what your goal is, top, middle, and bottom of funnel, so that you can have full control over that process.
1:07:54Whether it's getting a new audience, or nurturing an existing one, or converting your followers that you do have, and focus on doing just that for every single video. So there are tons of different types of videos that you can make, and there are multiple ways to make those different types of videos. Your job isn't to master every single way to make any type of video on social media.
1:08:12It's to find a format that matches your current skill level and gets you the best results the fastest. Here's how to decide where to actually start. And I'll kind of break it up by different types of formats.
1:08:22So the first format is fully scripted talking head videos. This is where I recommend most people to start. It's a video like this that is fully scripted where your thoughts are concisely presented on video, and it can be a short form video or a long form video.
1:08:35This is best for 95% of people when they first start making content. This is where most people should begin because it gives you the highest chance for success.
1:08:42Because when you script out every single word before filming, you control all of the variables. You control your hook. You control your story.
1:08:49The payoff that you have at the end. You don't have to ramble. You're not gonna forget your point halfway through the video.
1:08:55You don't waste a whole bunch of time doing bad takes that don't sound good. It's extremely efficient and very effective for when you are in front of the camera. That being said, it does take more time in prep before filming to make sure that you have all that information organized.
1:09:10And with hundreds of clients, we've seen scripted content far outperform unscripted rambling content, but only if you can deliver that content in a way that sounds natural and authentic to you.
1:09:21And the catch kind of here with this scripted content is that it only works if you don't sound like you're reading. If you can actually make it sound natural, that's the only way it ever works. You can think of it kind of like a speech.
1:09:33Like, the more preparation you have before giving that speech, the better you become. But reading off word for word off a teleprompter kills the message.
1:09:44Like, you need to internalize the script. It needs to feel very natural to you. You need to be the one that writes it, and then you need to be the one that nails the performance.
1:09:51Otherwise, you're gonna sound like some nervous kid, like, at his very first school play. It's gonna be awkward. It's gonna feel bad.
1:09:57And the biggest mistake that most people make in scripting content is scripting it in your writing voice and not scripting it in your reading voice. So they'll write the script in the way that they would write an email or write a LinkedIn post or, like, this super formal letter. It's very structured.
1:10:14It's very overly polished. They use a lot of big words, and it sounds like Shakespeare. It doesn't sound like how they would actually talk.
1:10:19And so when they try to go and deliver it, it doesn't sound like them at all. It's like, ah, you know, you stumble over your own words that you just wrote. And I'll give an example here.
1:10:27So, like, here's this is all scripted, but I'll read something that is in a writing voice. One must consider the implications of market timing when evaluating investment opportunities.
1:10:37No one talks like that. That is crazy. That sounds too smart.
1:10:40Like, only Batman's butler actually talks like that. I forgot what his name is, but you know who I'm talking about. Alfred.
1:10:46Alright. Now in your spoken voice, here's the same exact thing said differently. Here's the thing about timing the market.
1:10:53Most people get it completely wrong. So how you take one written sentence and transform it into a spoken sentence is you actually speak the sentence out loud as you write it.
1:11:05You will naturally choose better words and more simple language when writing it out if you read out every single sentence after writing it. What you don't wanna do is write everything out, get to start filming, and then read it for the very first time because you are gonna be shocked at how bad it sounds. And if it doesn't sound like something that you would say to a friend when saying it out loud, you should probably rewrite it and have it be formatted for more of a natural voice.
1:11:28And if you don't read your scripts out loud until you start recording, like, I will know, my team will know, everyone watching on social media will know, this sounds really awkward. It doesn't sound like you. It sounds like your content was written by AI is what people will tell you in your comment section.
1:11:42And this is one habit that will make the biggest difference between your content quality and how it actually sounds. You could have the perfect script, but if you can't deliver it naturally because it's not in your reading voice, it's not gonna matter.
1:11:56We'll talk through a few more examples later, but the second format is bullet points and a little bit of light improv. So this is really better for natural speakers who ramble less when they have just a little bit of structure, but prefer flexibility in their speaking. So if you are constantly tripping over your words or losing your train of thought when filming from a script because you can't focus delivering it word for word, you can try this instead.
1:12:19Write out three to five bullet points, a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion, for example, and just speak around them. Maybe include a single anecdote that you were hoping to mention in one of those points. And people will know immediately when trying this out if this feels easier or harder than scripting.
1:12:36Like, just try it twice and you'll know right away. If you can stay concise, and if you can stay on message with just the bullet points, this might be your format. If you ramble too much, or if you notice your videos are going on for two to three minutes when you're intending for just a single minute, go back to scripting.
1:12:51Really, the test I recommend everyone to try is to film three videos. And if you're doing like five takes per video on each one of those three videos, and you spend like half an hour recording those three videos, you probably need to go back to full scripts. And for most people, bullet points only work if they're naturally concise.
1:13:07But if you are that way and if you deliver comfortably with just a couple of bullet points, it can save you a lot of time in the scripting process and feel less forced when you're actually having to deliver the content. Another format you could use are response videos. So these are really good for people who are better at reacting to content than creating content from scratch.
1:13:25Maybe they're not super creative on what to talk about, but they can respond professionally to something that someone else has made or someone who wants to build in a little bit more proof of concept in their initial first few videos. And response videos are exactly what they sound like. You're just responding to someone else.
1:13:40So you could be responding to a comment that you got from your audience, a question that you got in your direct messages. Another creator's video is also very common. You can take the first few seconds of someone else's video, use their hook, and then the rest of the entire video will be your video.
1:13:54Or you could just create a response video to trending news, a topic that's in your industry and really popular right now. And this works because it solves the hardest part of content creation, which is staring at a blank canvas, not knowing what I should talk about. Will anyone care?
1:14:08These response videos give you a pre validated topic, so someone has already asked the question or made the video, so you know that there's some interest in it. A pre built in hook, so the hook of the video, what gets people's interest, is that someone else was interested or said something about the topic.
1:14:22And if you want a verbal hook on top of that, you can start with, someone asked me this question, or I saw this video claiming that dot dot dot, or I wanted to address the news blank blank blank. Immediately, you create context for your entire video, and you have a topic to talk about. It also creates some natural structure, like you're answering something specific, which keeps you very focused and concise in giving that answer.
1:14:44And lastly, it also gives a little bit of social proof. So responding to real questions or popular content on the Internet shows that you're really engaged with your industry and that you know what you're talking about.
1:14:54It also allows you to add your opinion in there, and you're just naturally stepping into a conversation that already exists. It allows you to take a little bit more of an expert frame as opposed to preaching at the world about something that no one cares about.
1:15:08You are instead giving your opinion on discourse that is already happening. These kind of videos are also ideal for monetization and building your middle and bottom of funnel. So we cover this in-depth later when we get to bottom of funnel content, but just as a really quick preview, response videos naturally lead to call to actions.
1:15:24It's very easy to get someone to do something after they watch a response video, because you're already solving a problem for them, especially if it's a question that you're answering. And within response videos, there's kind of like three different types. So the first is reacting to other content.
1:15:38So if you see a video in your niche, or a niche adjacent to yours, you can respond with your own take. Either agreeing with it or disagreeing with someone else's opinion or just adding nuance to a subject that really wasn't very well explained.
1:15:50So some example hooks here. I just saw a video saying that you should do something that's actually bad advice. Here's why that's wrong.
1:15:57Or this creator posted the best explanation of subject that you're interested in that I've ever seen. Let me just add one thing that they missed.
1:16:06Or everyone's talking about this new news thing, but they're missing the most important part, which is this. Or just have the first few seconds of someone else's video play as the hook of the video, because you know the hook was good enough for them to get views if you're responding to a video that has thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of views.
1:16:22Use their hook. Use the proven concept, and then start your argument just a few seconds into the video. Use a few seconds of their video, and then the rest of the video is original thoughts that you're adding.
1:16:33And this works because you're riding the wave something that's already getting attention. Any kind of disagreement that you might have with the original piece of content creates some kind of curiosity like, oh, I saw that video where that was a popular video. Why was what they were saying wrong?
1:16:46And why was what you're saying more informed or correct or different? And you can also then position yourself as an authority who can evaluate other people's ideas critically.
1:16:55And you're not just saying, here's a viral video. I agree with it. Here's a viral video.
1:16:59I disagree with it. Ideally, you'd be adding context. You'd add thirty, forty five seconds of a missing perspective or some kind of application to what that video was saying or like, you know, your experience based on what that video is about.
1:17:12And if you're talking about response videos to other popular videos, you could respond to just about Another type of content would be audience questions. So this is the best one. And once you start getting some content that starts to snowball, you'll get some people commenting on your videos or DMing you or emailing you questions.
1:17:28And you could just film response videos to those questions, and then have even more people ask you questions. It's like infinite content because they see proof of concept, someone asking a question and you giving an answer, it prompts other people in your audience to jump in and ask even more questions. Now once you get here, a couple of example hooks that you could use is, someone just asked me the best way to dot dot dot.
1:17:48Or I get this DM like three times a week, so let me clear this up for you. Dot dot dot. Or this question keeps coming up in my calls, so here's the truth.
1:17:56Dot dot dot. And it works because your audience literally tells you what they want to know. There's zero guesswork.
1:18:02They are asking you the questions so you can respond to it. And when you answer publicly, everyone else with the same questions get value too.
1:18:08Another format is mock interviews. So potentially, with your account manager, you can get on a call, and they'll ask you questions in your industry.
1:18:16This is really good for clients who speak better when they're prompted than when they are presenting at something. So for example, if you're a doctor and you answer your patient questions all day long, you're probably very comfortable with that style, that format of presenting your expertise.
1:18:31We can model that in a mock interview or a mock podcast just as well. And this is an option that we use with a lot of clients that spend a lot of time working directly with their own clients answering questions. Think lawyers, accountants, doctors.
1:18:43They spend years answering client questions, and so they're very good at that specific style of delivery. And if that's the case, we're just gonna bring talking points, audience FAQs, industry specific questions that we will interview on camera, and that you're just gonna be able to naturally answer because you do that all day anyways.
1:19:00And then we do the heavy lifting on the back end, like cutting up those questions into clips, rearranging some segments as needed, and creating your answer as an entire piece of content in post production. But I will be honest, there are some downsides to this as well. So it does require significant back end post production to make the final product successful.
1:19:18Like, even if you are a great speaker, turning raw interview footage into viral short form content is an art.
1:19:26We have a massive team of editors and a lot of experience picking the best responses, but it's still really difficult. And it's almost less about how you respond and more so how we can take your response and optimize it for social media. It's not right for everyone, but if you do think it's a good fit for you, ask your account manager and we'll set it up.
1:19:43Another format is similar, but instead of mock podcast clips, it's taking clips from an actual podcast. And for most people, this probably isn't a good idea.
1:19:52So you might see a lot of successful creators, people with millions of followers just getting on a podcast, and then they take that podcast and they cut up clips into short form. It looks easy, but it's not.
1:20:02And it's actually very different from the mock podcast style, where the entire interview is designed to get Shorts out of it. Unless you have literal decades of experience in sales, or public speaking, or some kind of media, unscripted long form content probably will not translate into successful short form clips.
1:20:21You need years of practice to naturally create a hook mid conversation. You need to know when to add emphasis or pause in that delivery to have it be very concise. And delivering complete thoughts with all of the necessary context you need to have a thirty to sixty second short form chunk of video is extremely difficult.
1:20:40You also have to be very cautious at not rambling or losing the thread like most podcasts aren't very well structured for converting into shorts. I'll give an actual case study here because it's not at all about the expertise or the type of person doing this. It's simply the style of podcast, which is often not congruent.
1:20:56So our case study for this was Dave Ramsey. He's a billionaire, and he was a billionaire long before he was social media famous because he had a radio show. He had decades on radio, on stage, writing books.
1:21:07He was one of the best educators on the planet, but even he struggled to make podcast clips work at first. So one of our executives, Lisa, she worked directly to build Dave's social media team. And at the very start, working with Dave, the issue obviously wasn't a speaking ability.
1:21:19He had decades of that. He just wasn't optimizing for the final clip of what he was saying to be cut up and posted on short form content.
1:21:27So he would start these stories with no concise ending and then get around to it ten minutes later. But that doesn't translate well to a one minute video. Or he would bury the hook like three minutes into an answer, but you want the hook at the start of the video.
1:21:40That's the point. Or he didn't pause naturally at different parts of the video that we would need to edit around.
1:21:46So the content wouldn't naturally convert into short form videos very well. But after working with him for several months and reviewing the short form content that came from his long form consulting calls, Lisa was able to show him the results, and he got better at adapting his speaking style. He literally changed how he spoke after decades of speaking experience to optimize for short form content.
1:22:07It was absolutely a skill, and he worked on it. But once he understood how to speak for short form, again, not just speak well in general, he was already one of the best communicators on the planet, everything changed once he spoke for short form. He learned when to add emphasis, when to stop talking, when to add a little bit of color for storytelling.
1:22:23But that level of awareness only comes from being a top 1% communicator in the entire world and understanding the medium, short form video with months of experience. So the bottom line is just because you're good at podcasts or just because you're good at speaking on stage or teaching, it doesn't mean your long form content is gonna translate well into short form clips.
1:22:40And if you've tried cutting up podcast before, it probably didn't work, and this is exactly why. It's actually really hard, and I don't recommend starting there. A much easier entry point is those mock podcasts where the answer is gonna be very short, and the environment is extremely controlled.
1:22:55You're not trying to do live q and a for multiple hours on it. Now, you've already had some success on social media, one of the easiest tactics that I like to use when thinking about what new content to post, what we often actually recommend you post first is old content. For people that have had successful videos before, this is gonna be the lowest hanging fruit because you already have successful videos.
1:23:16By just posting them again, you can get a really quick boost in views, a little bit of engagement, and hopefully some revenue, and you also get information on what kind of content your audience wants to see the most now. So if you've been making content for years already, a video that got you a 100,000 views last year may not be successful today.
1:23:33But it would be good to know that before you start planning an entire month's worth of content around whatever strategy. Because if that video is successful today, like it was last year, you should probably make more content like it today.
1:23:44And just for future proofing your content strategy, even if you are starting from scratch, everyone on social media needs to have a plan to be able to repost successful content once they have it. And this is usually what we do day one with some of our big guys that come in through our one on one program. We set up a plan to strategically repost their most successful content, and then monitor with the results to be able to inform what future content we actually start making.
1:24:05And we've seen people get millions of views, tens of thousands of new subscribers or followers with no real effort, like, on day one because they're just reposting their old proven successful videos a second or a third time over. And what this test controls for is the actual video. What you said, how you said it, all the details on the video.
1:24:24The one thing it doesn't control for, which is what we actually wanna test, is the timing of when you actually posted it. So the more times we can repost the same exact video, the better we can isolate the timing variable and control for it. And this is actually really important as you grow on social media because there are many instances where you could post a good video, but it can perform poorly, and it'll give you a false negative.
1:24:42Like, a video would only get a 100,000 views even though it is technically good enough to deserve a million. And it seems like your audience doesn't want that type of content because it got low views, when in reality, it could have been the best video you've ever made. And unless you repost it, you just won't know.
1:24:56Part of this variability is because not everyone is on social media every single day. Like, maybe your audience that would have responded really well to the video isn't on social media as much this particular weekend. And so they missed your most valuable video ever.
1:25:08Like, if you repost it, they have a second chance to be able to see it. Plus, not every single person sees every single post you make. Like, even if they are chronically online, you post multiple times a week, not every single one of those posts is gonna be absolutely recommended to them.
1:25:21It's not guaranteed. The algorithm might also miss it, like one of those times. For example, you could repost a video three times, and it can get 3,000 views the first time, a 100,000 views a second time, and a 100,000 views the third time.
1:25:31We've had this happen before for clients. And obviously, the algorithm missed it on the first post where it only got 3,000 views, and the other post, it got a 100,000. But if you only post a video once, and you don't have the hindsight of the second two posts each getting a 100,000 views, you'd have no clue if a video was actually bad, or if it was just overlooked by the algorithm that day.
1:25:50If you don't repost, there's no way to find out. It's also possible that maybe someone who needed to see the video wasn't following you a year ago when you first made that post. The new people who have only been following you for the last few months, they have no clue you've been posting good content for years.
1:26:03Because to them, you're only as good as the last couple of months of content because that's all they've seen. So having your repost scheduled on a cycle lets those new audiences see your best stuff too.
1:26:12Another reason to repost is some people just might need to hear that message a second time. Like, most people need to be reminded more than they need to be taught something, so serve that. And then if you're talking about technical things, like very specific procedures or specific case law, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel content, your audience's viewing interests might have changed over the last year.
1:26:33For example, if you're a criminal defense attorney, your ideal audience may not have needed detailed information about what they should and shouldn't say to the police three months ago. But now, because they're being accused, it'd be really useful if you repost that video for them. And if you have hundreds of pieces of content that all sound or look kinda similar, it's also possible that they mistook one video for another.
1:26:52So if you have a lot of videos talking about a specific niche, this is actually inevitable. You'll open a video talking about sales three times, and the audience mistakes all three of those times for the same exact thing they've heard before, and so they just quickly skip over the video. Like, oh, I've heard this guy talk about sales.
1:27:04Let me go on to the next video. And so if you just post it again a couple months later, once the audience has forgotten that they just watched that other sales video from you yesterday, they'll be able to get value from it today. The most important reason to repost your content is if you actually made a good piece of content.
1:27:19If you made a good video, if it's not just, you know, video of the day, if it's not like video 100 of this month, it's not just like he just sat down and filmed something just to post something today, if it is a properly good video, if it is a type of video that you wanna show your friends, if it is a video that people are commenting on, like, this is amazing, like, that's the type of content we should be making anyways.
1:27:37Like, when you make a video like that and the same person watches it a second time, it's still a good video the second time they watch it. And if you don't already have tens of thousands of followers, it's very likely that you will need to repost those videos a few times before they get the traction they deserve. You're not gonna be able to post one video once, and then have it reach everyone in the world that it possibly could.
1:27:59There's gonna be a period of time where you have to go back through your entire catalog and repost that video. And while it's possible for your very first video ever on social media to get millions of views, it's much more common that there's gonna be a gradual ramp in views as you get started. So the videos you create in month one or month two should be reposted in month three, four, five, six, so that they can get the reach that they actually deserve once you've built up your audience.
1:28:22And then once you have a large enough library of content, you may very well go a month without making or even posting truly new content, and just have reposts keeping the content engine going. And from personal experience, when I was just a guy talking about investing in money on social media, I went eighteen whole months on social media without ever being on camera.
1:28:39I got between 10 and a 100,000,000 views per month during that eighteen month period, and of course, hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for my business. And because I owned such a large library of content, I was able to act almost as a TV network by myself, essentially just showing reruns of myself to the same audience, and they loved it.
1:28:58Now there are some downsides to this, like exceptions and rules to reposting. It definitely can backfire, but those are very much on a case by case basis. I'm not gonna go through all them here.
1:29:07But if you are seriously considering doing multiple months worth of content reposting, talk to my team. They can walk you through all the specific strategies that you need to be able to avoid any kind of platform restrictions or special scenarios that could backfire. Now the next best strategy that we recommend is to recycle content that is already successful.
1:29:24This is a little different than just copy and pasting the same exact piece of content when you repost. When you're recycling the original material, you wanna make something completely new out of it. But using what's already been proven to work for either you or your competitors will give you that massive advantage, so you're not starting from scratch on your content.
1:29:41One of the best and easiest ways to get inspiration for your successful content is to just study what the best creators in your space are already doing and what their audiences like to watch because their audiences are ideally your audiences too. So take the most successful video concepts that other people are doing in your niche, recycle them to fit your brand, and then fit your story and your perspective.
1:30:01Now whatever you do, I I feel like I have to say this. Plagiarizing is gonna ruin your brand. Make it original to you.
1:30:06If you need me to explicitly tell you don't plagiarize, this is me saying don't plagiarize. But just like when you make a website, you don't invent the whole website from scratch. You use reference material.
1:30:16You look at a template or some other websites, and you get inspired. Right? It's still gonna be original to you.
1:30:20It's still your website. But if you don't reference something at the start that's already built, that's already successful, if you are starting from scratch every single time, it's gonna take you ages to figure this out.
1:30:30No one builds websites like that just like no one should do content like that. So this is gonna be one of the biggest shortcuts rather than just leaning into creativity and reinventing the wheel every single time you need to make a video.
1:30:40We're just gonna lean into what's already working by modeling success from other people on social media. And there's a saying I like for this, most people repeat the same mistakes over and over. Smart people make a mistake once and adjust, but the smartest people in the world, they study what already works for smart people and for everyone else, and they just avoid those mistakes entirely.
1:30:59So be one of those smart est people. Pick topics and structures that already work for other people on social media so that they have the highest likelihood of working for you. And I've gotten arguments to this strategy before.
1:31:08Daniel, how do I convince and capture the attention of people with lizard brains scrolling on social media and convince them to give me their money if I'm doing the same thing as everyone else? That's boring. And I will just straight up tell you your perception of boring is not the same as your audience's.
1:31:24I promise you, you will get bored of your own content before your whole target audience even sees it. You may even make five videos about the same exact topic and get a different audience every single time, and it will seem super boring to you. Marketing is interesting.
1:31:38When you do it right, it is boring. But to the person who only sees post number five and not the first four talking about the same thing, it is game changing, and you have to keep posting for them. Not every single video is gonna be super exciting and fun and creative and new and whatever, but at the end of the day, you are making content for your audience and your business, not for yourself.
1:31:56If you wanna do a separate thing for yourself that's new and exciting every single time, that's very fun, that's on you. But we are here running a business, and businesses don't stop marketing just because they are bored of a campaign, especially not if it makes money.
1:32:07So act like a business owner, act like a marketer, pay close attention to what the leaders in your niche and other niches on social media are doing, and more importantly, not doing because this is market research. So act like a business owner, act like a marketer, pay very close attention to what the leaders in your niche are doing and other niches on social media are doing, and more importantly, what they're not doing, because the market research that you can do on your competitors for your audience is extremely important.
1:32:31And another little hack here is you can even go into the comments section of videos from your competitors and see what their community thinks. I love doing this because if the biggest videos that my competitor has stir up a lot of controversy, I look at those comments, and then I make videos addressing those comments. And if you're new to social media, you can get a year's worth of content ideas just by reading through a competitor's comment section in all of their top videos, taking notes on the common questions or points, and just arguing those in your own content.
1:32:56You can just make your own videos with the same exact type of audience who will then be cheering you on in your comment section because they were fighting that famous content creator in theirs. This way we can take inspiration from those leaders in the space, learn from their mistakes, and make even better content. Because most oftentimes, if you can find even a single competitor, their viral videos have hundreds, if not thousands of comments worth of feedback from people who watched that video and thought something else.
1:33:21I'll say it one more time for people in the back. If you want to make money, don't be creative, be smart.
1:33:26And I've got hundreds of examples of this working for myself and for clients, but I'll give you just one to illustrate my point. This was my first viral video ever. It was about the American Express black card.
1:33:36It was my first video to get over a 100,000 views. It was my first video to get over a million views, and it ended up getting 4,000,000 views total. And the next month, I published 10 more videos in a very similar style about the American Express Platinum and Gold cards, and then a whole bunch of other very similar luxury cards.
1:33:54So this one successful style of video and topic recycled dozens of times into other videos that I made, got me 400,000 followers in just thirty days.
1:34:03And then three months later, I reposted all those same videos and got a 100,000 more new followers. And if you're looking to apply this for yourself, let's take it through another example with fitness content. Let's say your best performing video to date is about the best exercise to build glutes.
1:34:17This could be reframed into five completely different videos for five completely different audiences while still talking about building glutes. For example, you could use the five best exercises to build glutes for muscle size. So that's a video focused around fitness for women.
1:34:31Or the five best exercises to build glutes for endurance, video for long distance runners. Or for stability, potentially, you're talking to recovering hip replacement patients. Or for mobility, so yoga students.
1:34:40Or for strength, you're talking to power lifters. So those are a bunch of different videos all on the top five best exercises for glutes, but now you can do five of the worst exercises for glutes that if you're training for endurance or muscle size or whatever, that actually won't work. And then you can do that same exact proven concept for every other type of muscle group.
1:34:59One successful video, five best exercises for glutes, can create you an entire year's worth of content if you can recycle it correctly. And the cool thing is it doesn't even have to be your video. Like, if you do market research on your competitors, you can find dozens of other proven viral videos that you can recreate in your style that are proven to work because they have millions of views demonstrating they do.
1:35:18Next, I wanna talk about the hook of the video, which is the very first five seconds of your video that determine everything. If you can't get people to stop scrolling past other videos and start watching your video, nothing else in the video is gonna matter. No world changing insight, no perfect call to action at the end to convert viewers, no production quality is gonna save a video that people never started watching in the first place.
1:35:39The hook is responsible for 100% of your video success. And the longer people watch, the more likely they are to like, and then comment, and then follow, and then train the algorithm to show your content to more people just like them.
1:35:51So the hook is the most important part of any video. But here's what most creators get wrong. They think a hook is something that you say to convince people to watch, and it's absolutely not.
1:36:00In most cases, the best hook for a video is just getting directly into the most interesting part of your content. It is a shortcut for the viewer to get to the best part of your video right away. And generic hook templates as a whole don't work.
1:36:12You've probably seen those lists online if you've ever researched social media marketing. It's like 200 ways to start your video. Use this template.
1:36:19Copy and paste this hook. Say this thing in the first three seconds of your video and be guaranteed people watch. We don't teach that here for two reasons.
1:36:26One, generic hooks aren't specific enough to work well. The more specific your hook is to your exact audience, the stronger their response is. Could think about it like this.
1:36:34If you're in a busy restaurant and a server drops a plate, everyone looks around. Everyone's looking for that server. Where's that plate?
1:36:39Is the guy okay? What happened? Right?
1:36:41Just general curiosity, but no one does anything. Everyone sits in their seat, and like two seconds later, they go back to eating their food. Now in that same restaurant, when a child yells, mom, only the moms stand up and look.
1:36:51It's not everyone looking around anymore, it's just moms. And sometimes they even stand up to see where that sound came from. Who is that baby?
1:36:56But if in that same restaurant someone shouts your name, you look, and you probably stand up, and you scan the room, and you respond with like, yeah, who's that? Right? The more specific you get calling out an audience, the stronger your response from that audience, and this applies directly to your hook.
1:37:10So if you say, entrepreneurs, listen up. You're gonna get mild interest from that broad audience of entrepreneurs. Everyone thinks they're an entrepreneur.
1:37:16Right? If you say real estate investors in Florida, you're gonna get a much stronger response from a much more specific group of entrepreneurs. And if you say, if your lead cost is over $50, immediately, you're gonna get attention from people with that exact problem.
1:37:29If you say, b to b SaaS founders struggling with the new meta Andromeda update, people like me are gonna stop and watch that video. Because no matter how broad your audience is, your audience isn't everyone. Like, it's impossible for your audience to be anyone.
1:37:43And because your audience is specific, you should try your best whenever possible to name them. Reference their specific situation. The narrower you can get in your hook, the more likely they feel that you are talking directly to them, and the more effective your hook is gonna be.
1:37:55And the second reason we don't use generic hook lists is the best hooks don't actually sound like hooks. Like, if people can tell you were trying to hook them in in a video, it's already not working.
1:38:05Your audience has seen thousands of videos at this This is in 2010 when Internet videos are a new thing. They know when someone is begging for attention on social media. And I'll be honest, it used to work a few years ago.
1:38:14Back when I was first starting, 2020 on social media was easy. But now, the audience is sick and tired of it. If you make it too obvious that you're trying to force them to watch a video to hold their attention, they're gonna ignore it, and they're gonna think less of you for it.
1:38:26And at the end of the day, the best evidence that you can deliver value in a hook isn't saying that I will deliver value. I promise. Watch the video.
1:38:34It's actually delivering value immediately, getting right to the good part of the content. My real biggest issue with hooks is that most people are just begging with those hooks.
1:38:42Most bad hooks are just begging for attention. They delay the value. They make it less convenient for the viewer to get what they're coming for, which is whatever they're interested in.
1:38:49They ask people to trust you before you've earned any trust. Now when trying to create a strong hook for your content, you should think about two elements. One, which is the promise.
1:38:57What value do you promise you'll give your viewer for watching the content? And two, what proof can you show that they should believe you that you can actually deliver on that promise? So if you do just a promise alone saying, here's how to get leads.
1:39:10Right? It's very generic. It's uncompelling.
1:39:12Unless they already know who you are, there's no reason to believe that some random stranger on the Internet can get you leads. But if you do a proof and a promise, for example, here's how we generated 500 qualified leads for real estate agents in just thirty days, that is one, a very specific outcome, but two, demonstrating evidence you've done it by showing historically your results.
1:39:31So if you notice the pattern, the proof isn't just that you're saying, trust me, I'm an expert, or hoping that people trust you without even calling to it, but it's a specific result or a number or some kind of outcome that makes that promise instantly credible. Now, what we've talked about so far is discussing what you say, but people also respond very strongly to what they see in the first frame of the video.
1:39:50So how you're set up, what you have on video is actually very important. And some visual hooks that you could use potentially are professional lighting and framing.
1:39:58Like, it immediately signals high quality. If you're using a nice camera, if you look professional, it sets you apart from everyone else on social media who might just be filming on their phone in it with an unprofessional background. Second is having a clean and uncluttered background.
1:40:10If you're filming out of your basement, it's gonna put the focus on your basement and less focus on you, the professional who's trying to communicate with your audience. Next is having direct eye contact with the camera. It creates confidence.
1:40:19Just like you're talking to someone that you'd be lecturing or consulting, you wanna be able to look at the camera directly instead of being very distracted. Next, the text on screen that you could have could reinforce your verbal hook. Roughly 70 to 80% of people watching content on social media watch it without audio.
1:40:35So if you have captions going throughout your entire video, as well as text on screen with a hook to let people know what the actual video is about, you'll be able to get their attention even if they can't hear what you're saying. Now, one more piece of advice that I'll give you about the hook is if you're struggling a lot with the hook.
1:40:49If you just can't figure out what the most interesting part of your video is, the problem might not even be what the hook is. It It might be that you're not making videos that your audience cares about or what you care about or that you're not even framing an interesting enough topic to connect to real problems. So before you write your hook, I always recommend people to ask, like, is this a genuinely valuable video to my specific audience?
1:41:08Does it actually solve a problem that people care about? Is there something surprising or counterintuitive or high stakes about this specific thing that I'm talking about?
1:41:15If so, use that as the hook. Would I stop scrolling if I saw this exact video from my competitor? Would I be interested in what they have to If the answer is no, try reframing the topic or what the video is actually about or just picking something different.
1:41:27The bottom line is the best hooks on social media, the best way to get people's attention doesn't feel like a way to get their attention. It feels like someone getting straight to the point with something actually interesting that they wanna talk about. So stop begging for people's attention and start actually earning it in those first few seconds.
1:41:42The most common issue we see with first time clients is that they read their script like a blog post. They're written in a very formal writing voice. They're packed with big words and transition between sentences that work when you're reading stuff, but like it sounds very awkward in conversation.
1:41:55And then when they go to film that blog post, it feels really unnatural. They speak like they're reading something written by ChatGPT. They stumble over their words.
1:42:04The the pacing's off. Right? The audience feels like something ain't right.
1:42:07And oftentimes, the core problem with that written kind of content that's not written for their speaking voice is that there's just too much unnecessary content. Like, are way too many words. Almost every first revision we do with clients cuts entire sentences and paragraphs out of their scripts.
1:42:20Because the information might not be wrong, but you just don't need it. You're wasting your audience's time by over explaining. And on short form, where they expect things to be really quick, they will just scroll past your video.
1:42:30And the way I like to think about this is the value to time principle. The value your audience gets must justify every second of time they spend watching. Now there's no specific, like, limit to how long or how short your videos should be because some topics need thirty seconds of explanation, some need ninety.
1:42:45But a really quick and easy way to tell is if your entire argument can fit into one single sentence, you probably don't have enough substance to justify a video. You can either pick a different topic that requires more nuance or just write it out as a tweet, like a single sentence on x or Twitter or whatever you wanna call it.
1:43:02An example of this is you should diversify your investments. Like, that's not a video.
1:43:07That's a fortune cookie. There's no depth. There's no proof.
1:43:09There's nothing about the video can leave the person saying I learned something. But at the same time, if your video is too long, if you're explaining things your audience already knows, spelling out obvious things that don't add value, for example, like now. Before we get into the specific strategy, I wanna give you some context about why this matters.
1:43:25You see, in business, it's really important to understand your metrics. And a lot of people don't pay attention to their numbers, and that is actually a big mistake. So let's talk about one very specific metric that changed everything for me.
1:43:36Like, that's way too much preamble. No one wants to listen to that. You didn't even tell them what the number was.
1:43:40This could ideally be much shorter of an introduction and probably the rest of the script as well. This one metric changed my business, customer acquisition cost. You see how in the second one, we even mentioned what it was in the first one after, like, a whole three sentences we didn't?
1:43:53Another way to think about this is if someone can watch your video one time and be completely done with it forever and never have to go back to it because they understood everything, you can probably do better. You'd ideally want to make your content reference worthy. So the best short form content is so packed full of value that people want to rewatch it.
1:44:10They feel like they have to go around a second time because there's just so much stuff in there, and it was very impressive. They'll save it for later. Not because you hid information or talk too fast, like those are cheap tricks, but because you delivered so much actionable insight that they need to watch it a second time just to fully absorb it all from that one video.
1:44:26What would you say your audience's reading level is at? Because here's a number that might surprise you. 54% of the entire US population reads below a sixth grade reading level.
1:44:36Meaning, if you write content above a sixth grade reading level, you are automatically excluding more than half of the potential people in America. And, yes, this includes some of those really successful business owners or executives, qualified buyers who could buy what you're selling, who just don't have an interest in consuming very highly intellectual content.
1:44:54This isn't even about intelligence. It's about making your content more accessible. It's about making it easier to understand and retain.
1:45:00Because really complex language doesn't make you sound smarter, not always, but it does always make you harder to understand. And so on short form, if people have to work and struggle to understand what you're saying and piece the content together with context, they probably won't want to watch. For our client videos, we aim for a reading level of sixth grade or lower regardless of niche, regardless of how sophisticated your audience is, we have to keep it accessible.
1:45:23And my biggest videos, the ones that generated hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views, and converted those views into massive business revenue for Fortune 500 companies, those average a third grade reading level. Not because the ideas are simple, like I'm talking about financial modeling and investing, but because the language I choose to use is really clear.
1:45:41And if you say, my content is too complex to explain that simply, I argue no it's not. Mark Rober, he's a famous NASA JPL engineer. He makes videos on YouTube about physics and engineering and how the world works, and his audience is mostly children.
1:45:57He's one of the biggest YouTubers in the world. And if he can explain rocket science to kids, you can find a way to explain your business concept to a sixth grade reading level. And keeping your reading level at sixth grade or lower solves a few different problems all at once.
1:46:10First, makes it more accessible. So you're not excluding half of your potential audience just because they have to work too hard to understand you, especially while scrolling through social media and being distracted. Second, you get better comprehension.
1:46:19So even sophisticated audiences process simple language faster, like they get through it easier. They will understand your point immediately instead of having to think about it for a second.
1:46:29And third, you're gonna improve retention. So the less cognitive effort that you require to understand your videos, the longer people are gonna watch. Simple sentences let them focus on what you're actually saying, and they stick around a lot longer, which promotes your content even more with the algorithms.
1:46:42My recommendation for people struggling with their reading level is to write your scripts and then run them through Hemingway Editor. It's hemingwayapp.com. It's a free tool that analyzes your writing and it gives you a grade level that you're writing at, and it even highlights the specific words or sentences or structures that you need to change to make it more simple.
1:47:00And essentially, it converts something that is heavily scripted into more natural conversation. Because when you're talking naturally, you automatically use shorter sentences. You use really common words and very direct language.
1:47:11Like, you don't use the word utilize in conversation. You say the word use.
1:47:14You don't say facilitate the implementation, whatever that even means. You say help them do it. Right?
1:47:20And if you're writing in your natural speaking voice, your reading level will naturally drop below sixth grade. That's how most people in the human world talk. And that is the point.
1:47:28It's just to make it seem more natural. Because in most cases, clear communication is the best sign of mastery.
1:47:35If Einstein could explain relativity to just about anyone and Mark Rober can explain rocket science to children, you can find a way to explain your business concept at a sixth grade reading level. Now before you create a single piece of content, you need to understand what already works in your space, not so you can just copy it, but so you don't waste months testing stuff that your competitors have already proven don't work.
1:47:56There's a very strategic value to competitor research, and one is that you learn what good looks like in your niche. Like, industry has different standards for pacing and hooks and topics and, like, what the content actually looks like. What works for fitness creators won't work for b to b SaaS.
1:48:10You need to calibrate for what is already successful in your space and what your audience expects. Second, you also create very clear direction before you actually start filming your content. Because without a vision of where you're going, we can't help you get there.
1:48:22You can't even help yourself. Market research gives you that vision of what the goal should be so that when you work with our team or with your social media manager or on social media, you are executing on a plan that you understand and can clearly point to and agree with. And lastly, you save months of trial and error.
1:48:38Like, one hour of research upfront saves you dozens of hours of hypothesizing or creating content that never would have worked in the first place.
1:48:47Again, very successful clients do not skip this step. You have to understand what your goal is before you start trying to pursue something. And if you want some tactical ways to do this, I've got two.
1:48:56The first one is an Instagram follow strategy. So this is just passive consumption. You start a brand new Instagram account on a phone where you don't have a whole bunch of account history.
1:49:06No feed history of scrolling. You wanna start fresh. This gives you a very clean slate.
1:49:09Instagram is gonna serve you content based on only who you follow and not all of your years of past behavior on social media. Second, you find one single person that your target audience is already watching. Just one.
1:49:20It could be someone in your niche. It could be slightly adjacent. It could be a competitor.
1:49:24It could be just some interesting thing that your audience watches that is not related to your business at all. Regardless, you want to know who is creating content for the people that you want to reach, your audience. Step three, you follow that person and look at that little drop down menu that Instagram gives you.
1:49:38Instagram's gonna serve you about 32 suggested accounts, which are competitors with similar audiences and similar industries, saying if you follow this person, you're probably gonna follow other people like this, just like your audience. And the people who watch that person watch these accounts. They are competing for the same eyeballs just like you.
1:49:54Then you're gonna follow all of those accounts and then repeat. And if you follow every suggested account and then did the same for their accounts, you would end up with a thousand total competitors just on Instagram alone that you're following. So when people say, oh, I have no competitors on social media.
1:50:08Like, they're just not even looking. They are there. They're very easy to find.
1:50:11Just to rephrase this, if you have potential customers, people that wanna buy your stuff, those people are probably already on social media buying other stuff from other people. All you have to do is find who they're buying from already and match their style of content. The next step is just to scroll for one hour.
1:50:25This is the most important part. Set a timer and just scroll through your feed for a whole hour watching videos in your niche and liking the ones that you actually like that you'd wanna create. What you're learning during this hour is content formats that work.
1:50:37Whether you should do talking head, whether you should do b roll, whether you should do text overlays, you know, some short form written content, some long form written content. You learn hooks that stop the scroll, topics that get traction and engagement, what people are saying in the comments section, visual presentation standards, so like do you have to have this fancy lighting and framing, some fancy editing, or can you pull it back a little bit, make it more simple.
1:50:57How people structure their videos, so do they have a hook value and payoff, or do they have something that is a little bit more organic feeling, the tone and energy that resonates? It's like, do you wanna come across as the lawyer who is super cut and dried, very professional, always wears a suit because you're representing business owners?
1:51:12Or do you wanna come across as the lawyer that's approachable and funny and he's relaxed and he wears jeans because you have a lot of personal injury cases and you need to relate better to your audience. So just like look at a bunch of content, rot your brain for a whole hour. But my most successful clients, they never skip this step.
1:51:27They come to the first strategy call with my team with a very clear understanding of what good content in their space looks like, and a vision for what their content should be because they understand their competition. That single hour of scrolling upfront saves them several hours over the next few months, and really your entire marketing journey is better because of it.
1:51:45Like, my team will, of course, help with this market research, but you have to be active in understanding the nuance of your specific industry. And just to be really clear, it's it's not enough to have us do this for you, do the market research for you. Like, for example, if you're a doctor with a specialty in gut biome optimization, my team might be able to help put together the most viral videos in your niche.
1:52:03Sure. We can do that market research, but it is up to you to understand which videos with millions of views have inaccurate information in them, which content creators currently in your space that you are competing with are bad actors.
1:52:14If one of your competitors is just spreading tons of bad information, your deep understanding of your specialty will change how that information informs your strategy. Do you make similar videos, or do you make response videos to counter them? You have to participate in this step or you're not gonna be successful.
1:52:29Like, I'm just gonna be honest for you. No one is gonna do the market research and interpret it for you because you are the expert in what you do, and you are the one that is at the end of the day gonna be on camera. You have to know what you're talking about.
1:52:39Now, I'll mention not all competitors are worth studying. Like, generally, 80% of your inspiration and 80% of the goals that you set are gonna come from just 20% of the accounts that you find.
1:52:49But during your hour of scrolling, you wanna pay attention to which one of these other accounts resonate with your style and it feels like something that you could replicate. Which one of those topics that they're talking about align with what you talk about? Who's pacing and energy matches your natural communication style because you're gonna model them at the start?
1:53:05And you're not gonna know who those 20% are until you find them. But once you do find those people, you wanna spend more time watching their specific videos. Watch their top videos.
1:53:13Notice their patterns. Watch their worst videos. Understand what's different.
1:53:16Model what they're doing at the start of their success. And just like you didn't start your business with only original thoughts only, like you probably modeled your business after another successful business. Right?
1:53:26You're gonna do the same exact for your marketing strategy, for your content. And you're not copying them. You're just learning the language of your niche so that you know how to speak it.
1:53:34And then this research is a flywheel itself. Like, you scroll for that hour, Instagram serves you more and more relevant content. So you're gonna discover more new competitors and get even better inspiration, get a cleaner picture of what works specifically in your space.
1:53:46You can't just do this for ten minutes and call it done. You have to go through an hour to get to the very best last ten minutes. There is another way that you can do this, and it's with some sorting tools.
1:53:55If So you can very quickly identify your competitors, you can study what works for them specifically, and the best performing content they've ever posted, not just what they're posting today or last week. You can look at historically what have been the most successful videos. And there's a lot of Internet browser extensions that let you do this.
1:54:09You can get an extension scrapes all of Instagram data and sorts the top videos by performance. Or you can go on TikTok and sort the videos by the most popular there. And the tools that you're gonna use for this, they often get taken down.
1:54:21I'm not even gonna make a recommendation for them because Instagram very frequently changes how they display the information. So any specific tool that you use this week could not be working next week, but there's always a dozen of these tools, and the principle is the same. You install the extension.
1:54:34You go look at the competitor's Instagram profile on your browser. You click the extension and, like, sort their most viewed reels by most viewed or most comments if you want the controversial ones, and you're gonna see all of their content organized by performance. You can instantly tell what their million view video was versus their 10,000 view video, and what the difference is.
1:54:52What topics very consistently get the most traction? What formats perform best? Is it short looping videos, or is it talking head things, or is it text based?
1:54:59What drives the most engagement, like comments instead of just views? This tells you what's working for your competitors and gives you the best ideas to test for your own content. The time you spend on research will give you a better starting point, and the time you spend testing will give you the results.
1:55:13So this video in particular is critical because you can have massive success on social media and make absolutely no money from it if you don't understand how to match your content strategy to your business and offer type. So does this apply to you? Here's some diagnostics really quick.
1:55:27Pay special attention in this module if any of these apply to you. If one, you're an expert struggling to create an offer and understand what to sell or how to sell it. Like, maybe you have the knowledge of how to do something, but you don't have the knowledge of how to package it and sell it over and over again in a reproducible form.
1:55:42Or maybe you have multiple different things that you sell, but you aren't making a 100,000 a month yet from your business. You haven't reached the size of business where it's very quickly repeatable. Oftentimes, in that case, something is broken in your positioning.
1:55:53Like from one offer, if it's truly good enough, if you have a wide enough TAM, you should be able to get to a 100,000 a month with the business and have multiple employees supporting that. If not, adding more offers, a fourth offer, a fifth offer, a tenth offer, might just add more complexity that your business without that staff supporting you can't handle.
1:56:11A third option is maybe your offer doesn't work on paid ads. So if you have an offer that you sell to people, but if you're trying to sell it to a cold audience, people that don't know you or trust you, you struggle to get those people as clients. What you really need is to meet the person in person, shake their hand, sit down for a coffee.
1:56:26If that's the only way you can sell to your clients, you probably need to have a little bit more structure around your offer. Or maybe you have scalability issues. If doubling your fulfillment overnight would break your business right now or make it unprofitable, the delivery method of the offer probably also needs to improve.
1:56:40So if any of those sound like you, what you're about to learn will hopefully help improve the problem. So there's really two types of offers for most people, products and services. It's not binary.
1:56:50Like, you can have a continuum. For example, software is usually right in the middle. They call it software as a service.
1:56:55You're purchasing a product, which is the software, but there is service attached to it to make sure that you get usability out of it. But understanding where you fall in this product versus service continuum tells you exactly how you should be selling on social media. So diagnosing which one you have.
1:57:09When someone asks you, what do I get if I work with you or if I buy your thing? If you can explain it in three words or less, if it's tangible, you probably have a product based offer. Think of sheet of plywood or think of two by four.
1:57:22You can see it. You can touch both of those. You can describe it in detail regardless of whether you're getting this two by four.
1:57:28Like, it's wood. You can compare it to competitors from Lowe's or Home Depot before buying it. All of the specs are available upfront, the size, the weight, the composition, the price.
1:57:36The the deliverable is clear, and it is standardized. Those are product based offers. Everything that you see about that product is easy to understand before making the transaction.
1:57:45It is crystal clear what people are paying for, which makes it very easy to sell. And so the opposite is true where if you sell a service, packaging it more like a product will actually help make it more defined, help make it easier to sell. Because with service based offers, if you've ever been on a sales call and someone asks, so what exactly do I get?
1:58:02It's probably because you have a very service based offer that is not presented at all like a product. For example, maybe you sell coaching or training or some kind of consulting or agency work. Those are all services.
1:58:12The results that clients get are sometimes complex and difficult to quantify in just a couple of words. Like, you can describe what happens, but it's nearly impossible to compare your coaching against a competitor's coaching without buying both of them first and knowing the difference.
1:58:27And that's why service offers are harder to sell. Like, if your customer understood everything about what your coaching teaches or what your expertise buys them, they wouldn't need the coaching.
1:58:36Like, that's why they need coaching is because they don't know. So many coaching products are locked behind this no refund policy because once customers learn it, the value has been delivered. Another way to think about it is how does your book compare to your competitor's book?
1:58:48Like, you don't really know until you read both. Maybe yours has more pages or maybe it's like $5 cheaper, but what really matters is how much better your book is, which is what they would actually pay for, the value that's inside of it that they can extract. And service offers are often results based, like what is the outcome of someone going through that service, not deliverables based, like plywood or how many pages in a book they get.
1:59:09Right? Now once you understand what type of offer you have, you can understand what type of content you need to make. For example, if you have a product based offer, you can sell to cold audiences with just top of funnel content.
1:59:19The tangible thing that they can get and can be very easily understood can be valued by a stranger who's never heard of you before. So if they see a top of funnel video, if they see something that doesn't build trust and doesn't communicate a lot of value, they can still understand, oh, that's a two by four. I know how to get value out of that.
1:59:33You can lead with what they get, like the deliverables, the specs, the features. You can show it in action. You can have demos or, like, use cases or do before and afters.
1:59:40Those are also really great. Or you can have specific comparisons on price or on quality or on speed compared to your competitors, and you can focus on differentiating yourself, why yours is better than your competitors.
1:59:51And you can also probably ask for the sale earlier because they don't need to trust you deeply to be able to buy your plywood, for example. You're not building deep trust. You're just demonstrating The value.
2:00:00You're giving them a couple of quick ideas. Now if you have a service based offer, building trust first is gonna be really important. You're gonna have to focus a lot more on middle and bottom of funnel, and this is a lot harder.
2:00:09Because if you're selling an outcome, something that is mostly intangible, like knowledge or information, you're gonna have a hard time selling that to the audience. You're gonna need to spend more time with that audience explaining what you actually do, what success looks like, why they should trust that you can even deliver.
2:00:23And so your content strategy is gonna prioritize building trust way more before asking for the sale. You wanna make them product aware first. They need to understand what they're getting.
2:00:30Then you need to demonstrate your expertise with free value that you give out to them. So some tactical content, some frameworks, case studies, whatever you can show that demonstrates you know what you're talking about. And only then ask for the sale once they are ready and already trust you.
2:00:43Because before someone buys your expertise, they have to first trust that you even have expertise, and that's very difficult to demonstrate visually. Most of your content should be focused on building that expertise if you're trying to sell it instead of actually selling it. So a really quick example, this is how Tony Robbins sells it.
2:00:59Most mindset and performance coaches often say that their biggest competitor is Tony Robbins, arguably one of the biggest mindset and performance coaches in the world. But when they come to me and say, Tony Robbins is my competitor. I need to make content just like him.
2:01:11It is false. Tony Robbins isn't their actual competitor. Tony Robbins is so big that he doesn't have a cold audience.
2:01:17He isn't unknown to almost anyone in the world. He can sell an intangible service like coaching to relative strangers because it is productized. It's Tony Robbins coaching, like his trademark.
2:01:28His service is a product because his brand equity is so massive. Everyone is warm traffic to him, and if someone doesn't recognize him, the testimonials and decades of case studies, him talking to former presidents instantly builds trust. And so the mistake that coaches make when they try to do the same thing, they look at his offer.
2:01:42You know, it's intangible coaching at a certain price point with a certain delivery method, they say, I tried the same offer, and it didn't work for me. What they're missing isn't a difference in the product or the offer or the price point. It's the brand and the warm audience that Tony has built over decades.
2:01:54It is all of the top and middle of funnel content, decades worth of videos that has made his coaching essentially commoditized. Another example is actually we sold the same service in two different ways depending on the audience, whether it was cold or warm. So for warm audiences, if they already know, like, and trust me, we pitch them the service.
2:02:10Like, you can work with Daniel and his team or even specific members of his team that have worked with other big brands like Dave Ramsey or NerdWallet or whatever. They trust me, so they want the intangible thing, which is coaching, the expertise, the partnership, the mentorship. That's what they value most.
2:02:23But for cold audiences, which is also a very large part of our demographic, they've never heard of me, which is fine. We pitch the product.
2:02:29It's social media marketing. It's x amount of views. Like, we can easily quantify what they're getting.
2:02:34It's x amount of views. We post videos on social media about your brand. They can price shop against competitors and see who has more reviews and testimonials.
2:02:40It is tangible. It is comparable. And we package it specifically that way for a cold audience because we know they won't trust the coaching or the expertise.
2:02:48And at the end of the day, both audiences get the same exact thing. They get both. They get the complete system, the coaching, the team, the frameworks, all the stuff that's actually required to get a good results, but the pitch changes based on the level of trust.
2:02:59Because we know those service pitches work well on warm traffic because they already know and trust who they're working with. And the product pitches work on cold traffic because they can quantify what they're getting. And so if you position your offer as a product, if you can productize your services, it's gonna be way easier to explain.
2:03:14You're gonna be able to sell it better to cold traffic. And then that gives you a massive advantage, which is you can just go out and buy customers with ads, people that have never seen you before, or you can go out and make top of funnel videos, videos that get millions of views that also drive you traffic. But if you sell your expertise, if you're a doctor, lawyer, accountant, that's fine.
2:03:32You're just gonna have a longer sales cycle. You're gonna have to sell to warm audiences, which means you have to get cold traffic, and then you have to warm them up before you can make a sale. And that's what most people on social media have to do.
2:03:43But if you can productize your service, you're just short circuiting the entire trust building process for cold audiences. And oftentimes, this is easier to figure out than to get millions of people to first know you, and then to trust you, and then to buy from you on social media. And while we as a marketing company would love to build out this top, middle, and bottom of funnel thing to get you tons of views and convert them into warm traffic and then help you make that sale, it's gonna be way easier if we can shortcut all that and just sell a productized service.
2:04:07So please, audit your offer, look at what you're selling, and try to make content that both matches it and makes it easier to sell. There are two keys to making a great offer specifically for service based businesses marketing themselves on social media. The first is desirable.
2:04:20Will people actually pay for it in excess of the cost? And the second is profitable. Meaning, is it profitable right now?
2:04:27And can you keep profit high as you scale and grow to deliver more of it? And if you don't have a 500,000 a month business right now with really good profit margins, this is actually probably gonna be the most important video in this entire thing.
2:04:39And here's why. Most people focus on building the best product, but the best product rarely makes the most money. It's the most desirable product that does.
2:04:49And we'll cover both of these, but we're gonna spend most of the time on desirability. Because if you're under 500,000 a month, that's definitely the biggest issue with your business. The first thing is you wanna make it more desirable.
2:04:58And I'll be honest, no one comes to me saying, my offer isn't desirable. Like, wouldn't say that. Right?
2:05:02Instead, they say, my leads suck. My audience is dumb. My audience is broke.
2:05:07No one understands the value. But almost always, the issue there is something they can control, which is how desirable that offer that they're making actually is.
2:05:15And you might actually know people who need what you do and how to deliver the best results for them, but it's often very different from what that customer wants and what they would actually pay for. So here's the problem. If your customers know exactly what they need, if they knew how to get the best results for themselves with a service, they wouldn't need your service helping them understand that.
2:05:32They would already have the solution themselves. Like, you hire an accountant because they understand accounting. If you understood accounting, you could just go do it yourself.
2:05:39That is exactly what you're selling them, the information that they don't yet have. If you're a lawyer, you're selling the information of how to represent them in court. You can't tell them this is exactly what you say, and you have to say it like this, and this is what you need, because they don't even know exactly what they need.
2:05:53They don't even understand what the processes are to go through a court case. Like, that's why they need you. And coincidentally, that's also what I'm doing this video.
2:06:01Like, a lot of businesses come to us just wanting help with their marketing. And here I am talking about improving our offer. Like, I know that's not what you asked for, but at the end of the day, a marketing company is only good as the company we are marketing.
2:06:11So if you can't convert these views that we get you, none of this is gonna work anyways. So let me give you a very quick example from my own business. Version zero of our company, before we even went to market and selling this, was exactly what people needed to grow a business on social media in the shortest time possible.
2:06:25Cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single month to work with me, and the two people that took me up on this offer got hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of followers, made hundreds of thousands of dollars, their business completely blew up. It changed their lives, and almost all of their business now happens from social media.
2:06:41We were able to get those results for our clients in less than ninety days. It was a killer offer. It was absolutely the best thing in my experience that's ever been on the market, and it's not even close, but it required a lot of time from the business owner.
2:06:53And despite how incredible those results were, people that we talked to on sales calls, they thought they were so incredible that they didn't even believe them. They didn't think they could even get those results for themselves because they were so amazing, and so they weren't willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars a month.
2:07:04And it sold terribly, and it still does. And we still offer it as a special program, like talk to your account manager about it if you wanna be considered. It's by recommendation only.
2:07:12We screen those applicants very heavily, but you work with me, and it's it's a very expensive, very well worth it program in my opinion, but it doesn't matter about my opinion. It's never going to matter what my opinion is because it's never gonna work as a front end offer because I'm not selling to myself.
2:07:25I am selling people that are gonna be my clients, and those people are hard to convince sometimes because they are solution unaware. And so on the front end, we don't sell that. We sell a much cheaper way to work with us so that people can at least get started with something.
2:07:39So instead of losing the lead altogether because it's too expensive and it's inaccessible, we are at least able to get a client and help them somehow. And if that very expensive offer was the only thing I ever sold, my business would not be around today. I had to find something different to sell, something more accessible, something easier.
2:07:54Because no matter how good I think that expensive thing is, no matter how confident I am that it's the best thing in the market, unless the people who are able to pay me for it think so too, it doesn't actually matter because it's not gonna sell. And the core problem is with selling service based things is you know more than your customer does.
2:08:10You know what will work. You know what won't work. You know what they actually need, probably from real earned experience that your customer doesn't yet have, which is why they'd pay you in the first place.
2:08:18But if your customer doesn't know it too, if they don't agree with you, if they don't have that same experience of decades that you do, if they don't know your product is as great as you think it is, it doesn't matter. Because they have no way of finding out, because unless you can nail the offer and sell them first, and then potentially on the back end introduce them to some other stuff that's gonna fix their actual problems, they're never gonna get to experience it.
2:08:37And the inverse is also true. Like, I'm sure you've seen competitors of yours with terrible products. You know that those products don't work, but they're nowhere near as good as yours, but they seem to be doing well.
2:08:47Maybe they seem to be better than you. And it doesn't matter that your product or service or whatever is better because people are buying the other thing that's potentially worse. And unless people buy both products to compare, they're never gonna know the difference.
2:08:58And one more time for people in the back, it's not always the best products that make the most money, it is the most desirable products that make the most money. So at the start, I probably wouldn't even focus on creating the best product, at least not at first. Like, you don't want your product to be bad, but you simply don't have millions of dollars of market testing required to know what you could even do to make a better product.
2:09:18So instead of chasing perfection at the very start, launch as soon as possible, then use those first few customers to make the product better for everyone in the future. And then for the people in the future, you can charge more for that better product. Now it's not to say you should start from scratch.
2:09:29There's a couple of ways to model other successful products. One option is to just copy a competitor that has an offer in your exact niche. So find someone in your industry who is already winning.
2:09:38Look at their offer structure. Look at their price point. Look at their positioning, and do it better.
2:09:43And just to be super clear, doing it better is not doing it better on the delivery side. That's not enough of an advantage because again to your customers, until they buy both products, they don't know what your delivery looks like. They don't know what the other person's delivery looks like.
2:09:55However, being known for doing delivery better is a big advantage. One of the ways you can do that is by having a big brand on social media. So if you have more or better testimonials or more better followers or if you have some other kind of implied trust, that's how some of the biggest brands in the world build themselves up and differentiate themselves from people that have been around for decades.
2:10:13Mister Beast with Feastables, for example. Mister Beast, a content creator, is taking on Hershey's. Hershey's was a direct to consumer brand with ads and tons of brand equity over decades.
2:10:25But Mister Beast used organic content and launched a Hershey's competitor. It crushed. They didn't do anything different with the product positioning.
2:10:30It's candy. It's for kids. But because he had a lot of implied trust, he was able to better differentiate themselves on the front end to where the customers perceived his product as better, even though it's functionally basically the same.
2:10:41Or Logan Paul with Prime, another really big content creator. Logan Paul took on Gatorade, a very established company that spent very heavily on ads and had been in the industry for decades. Logan Paul used organic social media to sell basically the same thing, and he made billions competing with them.
2:10:56It's one of the coolest things about social media is you can actually run this play very successfully. And if you're selling with social media, you have the advantage of lower relative marketing costs. Because you're not spending as much on ads, because you're posting content that's free, you can structure your offer to have better lifetime gross profit than your competitors because you're not paying out a large portion to ads, which gives you far more enterprise value and ability to scale than all of your competitors who are traditional marketing spending on ads.
2:11:22And the second option instead of modeling a competitor is to adapt a proven offer to a new demographic. There are several multiple million dollar businesses that all they did was model a male dominant product that was already really selling successfully and just sold it to a non male demographic. Like an example, one of our clients runs a very successful stock trading group, and stocks are generally dominated by male demographic.
2:11:44That's who's mostly interested in stock trading. And our client just teaches that same exact thing, same exact material to women. Multiple millions of dollars per year doing the exact same thing that works for men, now for women.
2:11:55How revolutionary. And the second example is actually remote sales training and staffing. So sales is mostly dominated by men.
2:12:01There are a lot of men selling it to younger men. But there's a certain lady on social media who recently, over the last couple years, got extremely popular. Millions of followers, tens of millions of dollars of enterprise value, and she does the exact same thing, but sells it to young women, the sales training and the staffing.
2:12:17And there's actually multiple people competing with her now doing this at a multiple 7 figure per month revenue level, selling the sales training that's been really successful for the last decade now to women. You can be very successful just modeling what works for a slightly different demographic. Now the second part to making a successful offer is making it profitable.
2:12:35And sometimes people set a goal of, like, wanna make a million dollars a month. But what they really mean is they want the profits that come with a million dollar a month business. But in most cases, a $100,000 per month business top line with 50,000 a month profit is way more manageable and stable and overall better than a million dollar per month business top line with the same 50,000 profit.
2:12:55And that's because you have less operational complexity at a lower revenue level. But, also, with the $100,000 example, profit is a larger percentage of top line revenue. And if you can increase top line revenue by 5%, it probably won't result in a massive increase in cost, which means you can put more to your bottom line with every new dollar in revenue you bring in, which brings me back to the whole point.
2:13:15If you are under 100,000 a month in revenue or if you're under even 500,000 a month in revenue, the biggest recommendation I make to most clients is just to keep it super simple. Making your business too complex, having way too many decision makers or key players or per parts of your offer or different types of service delivery really limits how far you can take it or if you're even able to step out of the business without everything breaking around you.
2:13:39And while both desirability and profitability are important, there's a specific order that I recommend most people do this in. And because the best product doesn't always win, the most desirable product usually does, you wanna first make it desirable, and then make it profitable. So find out what people want, what they will pay for, not what they need, but what they're actually willing to exchange money for, and then you wanna model what's already working.
2:13:58So how are people getting that product or service delivery right now, either in your exact niche or a slightly different niche or maybe in your exact niche with a slightly different demographic. Then you wanna add your advantage in, and then you wanna be able to launch and actually sell your product, get market data, and only then refine for profitability and growth.
2:14:17So once you have customers, once you have feedback, that's when you make it profitable, and that's when you scale. And once you have your offer and deliverables figuring out, changing the pricing is the easiest way to make it very profitable because a small change in price can dramatically change profit margins. Like, a 10% price increase doesn't just add 10% to your top line revenue, it often can double or even triple your profit because of how the costs can potentially stay the same.
2:14:40So here's an example of exactly how. So at $5,000, let's say you sell one unit, you have revenue of 5,000, the costs to deliver are 3,500, leaving you with 1,500 profit, which is a 30% profit margin.
2:14:53But at $6,000, which is a 20% price increase, you have revenue of $6,000, the cost stays the same at 3,500, and profit is now 2,500.
2:15:04So your profit margins have gone from 30% to 42%, which is a 67% increase in profit from just a 20% increase in price.
2:15:15Now let's look at the inverse of that. So at $4,000, which is a 20% price decrease, you have revenue of 4,000, cost of 3,500, profit of 500.
2:15:25The margins are 12.5%. So you cut your profit by 70% just to give a 20% discount to your customers because 20% discount is all they feel, you lost most of your profit.
2:15:36Or if you go even lower, 3,500, which is a 30% price decrease, you know, you're basically doing this for zero profit. There's no profit margin. You're working for free.
2:15:43So these small changes in price can have massive impacts on profitability as long as your delivery cost stays the same. And this is why you should always test higher price points first.
2:15:53Because if you can sell the same exact offer for 100% more and only lose half of your customers, you are significantly more profitable. You're essentially leaving the same amount of top line revenue with only half of the delivery costs. So you shouldn't be stuck on a specific offer or a specific price.
2:16:09You should always test higher and higher price points because the easiest thing that you can do in business is increase cost so that you can become more profitable. And most people, by default, they underprice out of fear. They think, oh, if I charge more, no one's gonna buy.
2:16:22But oftentimes, the opposite can be true where higher prices signal higher value. And so the customers that do buy at higher price points are often better people to work with. They're more committed.
2:16:31They're easier to work with. They're likely to get easier results for because they've gotten results more for themselves because they've accumulated money to be able to afford your thing. They're richer.
2:16:40In most b to b cases, this also means they're smarter because they've been able to figure out how to acquire more resources. And so talking about people that are richer than you, look at the people in your industry that are richer than yourself and model their pricing. I usually don't agree with copying just what other businesses are doing because most businesses suck, and they're stupid.
2:16:57But if you know someone is doing better than you, skip some of that testing and just learn from them. They've already done the testing. They've probably millions of dollars of more testing than you do.
2:17:06Just use their experience as your baseline and then test higher and potentially test lower. Don't be afraid to charge more. Assume that most people underprice and act like it.
2:17:14Worst case scenario, worst case, if you overcharge, your pricing isn't set in stone. It's one of the easiest things to change in your business. Decrease your price.
2:17:22Everyone's gonna love that because the person you're selling to tomorrow has no idea what you charged today. One more time for the people in the back, raise your prices.
2:17:31Thank me later. Now this is a quick tutorial of our Google Drive setup for our raw files and edited content. This makes it easy to upload files for your editor and have them organize everything.
2:17:39So generally, have two folders. One for raw files. This is really the only folder that you need to worry about.
2:17:45You upload content into it. And then we have another folder for all of the edited content. This is where your team is gonna be taking all that content and storing it before and after posting.
2:17:54So we've got a couple of different subfolders here as well. It's really nice to have as you grow on social media, but your team is gonna be managing all this for you so you don't have to worry about it. For example, here I have some of those assets organized by upload date, so while they're being used and then archived into another folder after they're done posting.
2:18:11My editor organizes a bunch of those images that we use internally for content. There's a bunch of old raw files that are no longer active and a couple more here that we're actively editing on and then we'll drag those and drop those into the old folder once they're done. Further in b roll, we have a bunch of organized content by different niches and categories of content that we film.
2:18:29And then in the edited content, we have stuff that's ready to post. So we also have a couple of subfolders underneath there. So one for ads, ready to post, one for long form content that's ready to post, one for short form content that's ready to post, one for scripts for that content, organized by medium, and then within that, years and months that the content was made.
2:18:47So this is the visual hierarchy of everything that we do for content at the very highest level. But as a business owner, the only thing that you need to worry about is just throwing assets into the raw files folder and knowing that with this system, everything else is gonna get organized for you as needed.
2:19:02Frame.io here is the software that lets you give feedback to your editors. It works better than any other solution because it allows a lot of precision in the feedback you give, and I can show you what that looks like here. So click on the folder that you've got for yourself, and then click on potentially a single video here.
2:19:17You can mute the video, and down here you can play the video, and you can scrub through it this little scrubber here. But let's say for example, I don't like the color of the font right here. So at this exact time stamp, I can leave a note, font color, and that will appear only on this specific part of the video, so the editor knows exactly what I'm talking about.
2:19:38I can also change it to apply to multiple sections of the video by clicking on the timestamp here and dragging it through a certain part of the b roll. Say, I don't like this clip.
2:19:48And so my editor will know exactly what clip I'm talking about because it's for the duration of that clip. So this entire section here can be removed. And if you're a production manager, social media manager, whoever's reviewing the content before it actually goes out, like, highly recommend changing the watch speed of the content you're reviewing here down to 50%, watching it slow down.
2:20:09That way you can really look at every single word that comes onto the screen. It makes it easier to check for spelling mistakes, which will inevitably happen as you get to posting hundreds of videos. But once you're done reviewing something, you can change the status of the video by going back up here to the folder that it's in and changing the status to approved or needs revision or whatever else you want to use.
2:20:30We usually like to change it to one of three options or naming convention is needs review. That's usually when an editor first uploads it and, like, raises their hand saying, hey. This video needs review for the person that's in the actual content to watch and give feedback.
2:20:42In progress is the next stage, so it lets the editor know that I left notes for you. You need to go re edit some parts of the video, like that part needed different font color or whatever. And then approved is the very last one that we change it to, which some of these are marked as already.
2:20:56That just mean it's completely done and ready to be moved to a different folder, and then eventually posted on social media. So all of these items here are in the for review, and then we'll they'll be eventually moved into approved once they are marked approved.
2:21:09Another cool thing that frame.io lets you do as an editor is to move files on top of one another and add a version two. So it's gonna replace the previous version, and then you, as the person reviewing the content, can pull up both versions at the same time.
2:21:24You can click this little compare versions thing, and it'll show them side by side demonstrating what changes were made to the edit. So this is the after, and this is the before version one and version two.
2:21:34And it's a really quick and easy way to see how changes were made and actually implemented by your editor. Now once you're satisfied with an edit and it's ready to be posted on social media, like, can say, maybe this one is the final version. It's ready.
2:21:45You can go down here and to download, and then download the original file. You could choose some of these other options here. They're proxy files.
2:21:52They're smaller file sizes, but it's gonna be a compressed version, so there's gonna be quality lost. So I'd always recommend downloading the original instead. Overall, this is by far the most efficient tool for giving feedback to editors.
2:22:03There's a lot to play around with, but those are the basics, and there's nothing else in the market that even comes close. Now if you're running paid ads and ignoring organic social media content, or if you're doing organic social media and ignoring paid ads, you're leaving a lot of money on the table either way. After spending a million dollars a month consecutively on ads for my company alone, not to mention the multiple millions per month for our clients, the most common difference between people who have success with ads and those who don't are the ones that are good at organic content also do well with paid ads.
2:22:32Because most advertisers can't create content that actually works. And so their only solution is to get more people to watch the bad content by paying for those views via ads.
2:22:43So they are burning a budget on creative that doesn't even work because they don't test it organically first. They force those views through paid ads. Or for that matter, they don't even have experience making content that even works in the first place, and so they put a bunch of money behind ads and those don't convert at all.
2:22:58And likewise, if you're only doing organic content, avoiding paid content, you are really limiting your growth potential. And that's because organic content makes your paid ads cheaper because people recognize you when they've seen your ad if they've also been following you on social media. Your creative is definitely gonna be better because you could have potentially tested what works organically and then literally repeat the same video ideas once they're proven with paid ads.
2:23:22You have proof of concept so you know which message resonates better before wasting money testing on paid ads. And paid ads amplify your organic reach because you can put paid ad budget behind your best performing organic content for top of funnel. You can target people who might have never otherwise seen you organically because maybe the messaging is just a little bit off.
2:23:40You can control who sees your message by targeting bottom of funnel specific content, and this absolutely is a situation where two plus two equals 10. And organic and paid content work together so much better than they work independently.
2:23:56And small businesses can choose to start with either paid or organic. It doesn't matter to me. But if you want a big business, at some point, you will need to do both.
2:24:02And doing both sooner rather than later will simply just help you scale faster. So if you want a massive business, you should be doing both. Depending on the scale of content that you're producing, you might consider implementing a software called ManyChat into your business.
2:24:14Now if you're just getting started making your first post, your second post on social media, the effort to set up ManyChat probably isn't worth it. And likewise, if you've already spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on ads or organic content, you probably should find a more comprehensive solution for gathering leads.
2:24:29But for the businesses where it does make sense, the businesses right in the middle, they've been posting content for a little while, they don't yet spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on ads, here's a breakdown of how we recommend implementing ManyChat. So we run two types of automations, comment automations and direct message automations.
2:24:44Comment automations are put onto the videos that you post. So you tell someone either in the video or in the caption of the video to comment a specific word. And when they do so, the automation fires and sends them a direct message.
2:24:55Now the direct message automations happen in the next step. Because once someone comments on a video, we send them a direct message that usually forces some kind of small interaction like clicking a button or replying with a keyword in the direct message. Because the once the prospect participates in the direct message, we not only get their info, but now also unlock full DM privileges back and forth and automation capabilities.
2:25:16And after that, we can send them a free resource that they might have asked for, a prerecorded voice memo. We do that for myself. It builds trust, shows that it's not a salesperson working the leads.
2:25:25And then usually also a note that, like, hey, this whole thing, the lead magnet, the prerecorded voice memo, that was automated, but I will personally check-in later. And then we set up automations to direct them to the website, nurture the leads, and hopefully eventually convert them into customers as further stages process.
2:25:39And this many chat strategy does two things. One, it boosts engagement on your videos because people have to comment to get the free thing, and more comments improves your engagement, which boosts your priority in the algorithm, which creates this flywheel that pushes even more people to comment organically. And two, it bridges the gap between a cold and a warm audience.
2:25:58It turns people who are just watching your content into people who are engaging with your content, people who are direct messaging you and getting direct messages from you. And then it turns those people into actual leads that you can collect information from or at least follow-up with somehow later in your direct messages.
2:26:13And now, if you're working with my team to have ManyChat built out, it'll probably be really robust. But if you want just a quick and dirty version of this, you can reduce it to just one voice note that you can record in sixty seconds. My personal follow-up framework is thanks for reaching out.
2:26:25Acknowledge somehow that they opted in that you desperately aren't gonna be annoying them. Next, ask a qualifying question. So I ask about their business or content goals and encourage participation in that conversation.
2:26:36Then I say, regardless, I am down to chat. What's your week look like?
2:26:39I can also drop a calendar link if that's easier. You wanna make it human, but still make it very easy. Drop the calendar link right after so they can just book in.
2:26:46And then lastly, a message saying, let me know when you got it booked. Notifications get weird sometimes. That way, not responding to that last message or not looking in a call should feel a little awkward, and the lead will have some kind of pull to be able to do what they said they would do, which is book a call.
2:27:01That's it. That's literally all we do. We've closed hundreds of thousands of dollars in deals with that exact system.
2:27:06Now this video actually comes with a massive doc linked down below. If my team recommended launching a ManyChat funnel for you, don't even worry. Don't open this doc.
2:27:14They will just handle everything. But for those of you that are curious or wanna look into ManyChat, this doc is very thorough and will give you a lot of the best practices and setup of how we do it. Alright.
2:27:23Here's what we look for when setting up a social media profile across different types of social media accounts. First, your profile name. It should either be your name or your brand or your product.
2:27:33And across profiles, it needs to be identical. For example, if I'm Daniel Iles on Instagram and Dan I on TikTok, nobody calls me Dan, it's gonna be really confusing for audiences to find me across both platforms. So And when deciding on your name or your brand or your product, I always encourage you to use your name versus the actual product or brand.
2:27:51Because generally, the platforms prioritize personalities over brands, and you will get a boost in viewership, a boost in engagement simply by being a real human, a person, rather than a brand. And anecdotally, there's also tons of examples of individuals having larger accounts than the massive companies that they've built.
2:28:09Look at Elon Musk or Bill Gates. Both of them are multiple times larger in following than the companies that they represent, even at a smaller scale. Alex Tremozi, hundreds of times more popular than his brand on social media, acquisition.com on Instagram.
2:28:23And the few examples you can find of founders that are smaller than the brands that they represent on social media usually result from those founders that are really small never having made an honest effort to post themselves anyways. So I recommend you show up as yourself.
2:28:37And choosing how you show up as yourself, the profile picture is probably the most important part, and you wanna lean to the different parts that make you a unique type of personality. For example, with a fitness professional, I would use a picture of them at their gym or facility. For a chef, I might use something like them in the kitchen holding a spatula or whatever.
2:28:54A lawyer should have case law books or a bookshelf of some kind behind them. If you don't have a professional recent picture, I highly recommend getting a new one with your new studio.
2:29:04Like, my team is gonna help you set up the studio, especially if you've got the nicer camera and lights. You can get a really nice looking picture. It only takes a single second to snap that picture before filming to take, and then you can use it as your profile picture.
2:29:14And then for some platforms like Instagram, they'll leave room for text to describe yourself a little bit more underneath your profile picture. You get up to a 150 characters, for example, on Instagram, and you wanna use them very carefully.
2:29:25You're gonna explain what you do, who you do it for, and what the actual benefit people get from following you on social media. For example, if you're a fitness coach, you might have a headline like, I help busy parents get fit without losing time with their kids. So what you do is you help them get fit.
2:29:39Who you do it for is the busy parents. And then what's the benefit for them is that they don't have to sacrifice time with their kids. On Instagram and TikTok, you'll also have an option for a link, which should be the call to action, which you want your ideal clients to do.
2:29:51Either schedule a call with you or see your lead magnets or get information on services that you're providing. It's more than just a link to your home page on your website. In most cases, people finding this link will have already seen a few videos from you.
2:30:03They're interested in learning more about what you do. They're a higher intent audience, don't send them to your homepage. Give them a little bit more than just a generic home site.
2:30:10For example, on my profile, I send people directly to the page where they can apply to work with my team, and they get a short video explaining exactly how my company can help them with their business. And then also below this video, I have a whole bunch of really good examples of good looking profiles that you can look at.
2:30:24Should you start your social media account from scratch? Maybe. So there's a couple different decisions that you wanna pay attention to when deciding whether you should start from scratch or post on your existing account and try to make it work.
2:30:34All of them relate to the number of engaged followers you have as a percentage of the total followers you have. And, basically, it's just a measure of engagement rate. Like, there's no hard and fast rule here.
2:30:43There's no single number that I can pull out as a percentage and say Instagram endorsed this number, but there are a few things that you can pay attention to here. So all relate to the number of engaged followers you have as a percentage of your total followers. So two of the following six things generally must be true before you even consider starting a brand new account.
2:31:00And I know it sounds like an easy out. It sounds very simple to just start fresh and post on a brand new account. But I promise talking from experience, it is an incredible amount of effort to go from zero to a 100 on a brand new account and even just getting that little bit of momentum at the start.
2:31:15Usually, that's the biggest sticking point, and being able to not have that issue makes it way easier. So if you don't have to have that experience again, it's much better to just use an existing account. One of the things that you should consider changing your account for is if you've changed your niche.
2:31:28So again, changing your niche will change the amount of engaged followers you have as a percentage of your total followers. For example, if you started out as a plumbing person, teaching plumbers how to do plumbing, and then you pivot to real estate coaching, a very small percentage of your existing followers are gonna be engaged with this change in content, now talking about real estate because they're not interested in real estate.
2:31:46They followed you for plumbing. Here's a couple more examples. If you're a real estate agent that transitions to mortgage lending, you're actually probably fine because the majority of the topics you were talking about, real estate and buying your first home, and a lot of the similar accounts that you're engaging with, people who are interested in buying their first home, they have a lot of overlap.
2:32:01However, if you go from real estate agent to marketing company, it is worth considering restarting your account Because previously, you might have been selling to individual home buyers, and now you're selling b to b to other companies looking for marketing. Another example, if you transition from a personal account with pictures of your kids and, like, what you do for fun into a professional company account as a marketing company, there's really no reason to keep your personal content on that account, and none of the content, none of the followers you had from high school are relevant for the new account that you're gonna be trying to build for your business.
2:32:31Also, you've posted viral content that is not within your niche, and you accidentally got famous doing something you didn't want to be known for, or like don't actively do in your business now, you could have accumulated tons of followers from that one viral piece of content that are never gonna be engaged in this new type of content that you're posting, and the kind of content you want to be known for with your business.
2:32:49I had a friend that posted a single viral video, got a 100,000,000 views. 100,000 followers from that one video, and it was a dancing video. Completely unrelated to the marketing company she had, and unfortunately for years ever since, successful video.
2:33:02She hasn't been able to get good visibility on her marketing content because her followers, a 100,000 of them she got from that one video are only interested in dancing videos. They're kids. That's not even relevant.
2:33:12And it completely ruined her opportunity for that account to do what she set out to do on that account. She had to start completely from scratch. Another consideration is if your engagement rate is below 1% consistently on multiple videos.
2:33:25Like, you get a 100,000 views in a video, but less than a thousand likes and comments total, your engagement rate is below 1%, and this could be a reason to start from scratch. Or if you have a video with 10,000 views but less than a 100 likes and comments combined, it's also showing that the audience watching your content isn't really engaged with it.
2:33:43The engagement rate is below 1%, which is categorically low, and it's worth potentially considering starting a new account and pivoting to a new audience. Additionally, if your account is more than four years old, like, this isn't enough by itself, but it could lead to very low engaged followers. For example, my account, think, is, like, ten years old.
2:33:58And I don't have any reason to restart it because my current followers are fresh, but if I hadn't done very much in those last ten years and slowly accumulated followers over those ten years, it's reasonable to assume that a lot of those followers are either inactive accounts or they're not even real anymore. They've never logged in Instagram, so they don't actually count as followers.
2:34:14And Instagram sees it as you have followers that are not engaging with you, which affects your engaged followers as a percentage of your total followers. Also, if you have multiple community guideline violations, whether you were able to get it appealed or not, it is permanently on your record by the platform.
2:34:28It might just be worth moving to something brand new and trying on a new account that is completely unrelated with a different email address, potentially even different IP address. Another reason to start a new account is if you've had any inorganic growth strategies.
2:34:41So if you've paid for fake followers, if you've done paid view giveaways, if you've had engagement groups that you've been a part of, if you've paid for any kind of engagement or followers in the past through websites or whatever, this is a reason to definitely give up and start from scratch and one of the most conclusive reasons to do so.
2:34:57But again, generally, you'd wanna have at least two of the following be true before you give up because of the incredible amount of work that it actually takes to start from zero followers and try to scale to thousands or tens of thousands. Now, I got this rough outline loosely inspired from Brock Johnson. I think it was on an interview that he had with the head of Instagram that really opened my eyes to some of these platform specific restrictions and gave me a lot of clarity as to whether someone should start from scratch or not.
2:35:20But it's something that we very rarely recommend to clients. Because again, starting from scratch, going from zero to a 100 followers even is so so difficult that before you go through that massive effort, I would try literally anything else. And the bit of guidance that we give clients before they start a new account is that they have to have at least one hundred days of consistent, high quality posting before they do so.
2:35:40And the wording here is very particular. This doesn't mean you've been posting for a hundred days. This doesn't mean you've posted high quality content before.
2:35:46This doesn't mean you've posted for a hundred days straight. This means for at least a hundred days straight, you have posted consistently every single day, and every single one of those days was high quality content.
2:35:57If you only post a high quality content for a couple of weeks and then you take a month break, the counter restarts. And if you're starting from zero, wait until you get a hundred days of high quality consistent content before considering restarting your account again. Just because it's gonna be so much easier to build up an account that already has some kind of instant distribution to a follower base of hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of followers when you post a video as opposed to posting with absolutely no one on the other side.
2:36:23Hey. So this is Rick, a proprietary AI agent that we created to write your content for you. So Rick is gonna do the content scripts, the captions, even help you a little bit with the strategy based on the content that we have in this course, as well as thousands of data points that we've trained Rick on from top performing content on the Internet, as well as millions of views that we've gotten for our clients.
2:36:41And Rick is actually named after an amazing social media manager that we staff for one of our clients. Shout out Rick if you're watching this. It actually worked so well that the client wanted a second Rick.
2:36:51So he was asking for a second person to staff just like Rick. And we thought through just how much raw talent Rick had, like, just from day one on copywriting. And instead of trying to train up a second person and or a whole bunch of other people to staff for other clients as good as Rick.
2:37:05We just decided to train a language model. So this ChatGPT model is named after Rick, and it has worked incredibly well. It's not perfect, but within the limitations of AI and ChatGPT today, this is the best that I've seen on the market for social media.
2:37:17And again, this is way better than just going to regular ChatGPT for your scripts because Rick is trained on our school materials, so all the videos you've seen here, as well as thousands of data points for our clients, and his context window is incredibly large specifically for short form vertical videos that you're gonna be making.
2:37:34So you can interact with it just by pressing the main button there. Can you give me 10 script ideas? And seeing what Rick comes back to you with, he's gonna ask you a couple of questions.
2:37:42You're gonna fill out the information such as what your niche is, some information about your audience, and then Rick is gonna go back and give you 10 script ideas. And then he's asking just let me know which one works for you. And then let's say you wanted number three, and then he's gonna break out that entire video for you line by line with a hook, a body, and a conclusion, and then he's even got a caption there for you.
2:38:03This whole thing is highly customized depending on what your niche is, and as long as you give Rick enough context around your business and the type of content you wanna make, it's gonna use those thousands of data points that we have, hundreds of millions of views across other videos to potentially and hopefully automate some of the script writing process for you.
2:38:19Hey. This is who is this?
2:38:24Congratulations for making it through. This time Congratulations on clicking on this video.
2:38:30Hope for watching the full thing. Yeah. You made No.
2:38:32There's no way they watched the whole thing. There's no way they watched the whole thing. Gotoschool.com.
2:38:37Say something that tell them to comment whatever word you wanna say right now. Say that in the comments, and you'll know if they watched the whole video because they're here at the end right now.
2:38:47No one would know that. So there are four or five people commenting.
2:38:50Yeah. Comment comment the word airplane accident. Bro, you know No.
2:38:57That. I'm
2:39:00not knowing. Caramel coffee.
2:39:02Yeah. Give me give me caramel coffee in the comment section if you made it to the end of this video. Also, what are you doing making it to the end of this video?
2:39:10You should have been going through this in the school course like I told you to in the intro. Congrats on making it through the entire video.
2:39:18Comment caramel coffee if you did. And if you want even more, make sure to gotoschool.com. You heard the man.
2:39:23Do that. They didn't hear. They no.
2:39:25They definitely heard him. You crank the audio. Nope.
2:39:28I'm not cranking anything.
2:39:31Alright, folks. Bye bye.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The title does the heavy lifting: a thirty-six-thousand-dollar one-on-one training, handed over for free. Daniel Iles opens not by selling but by daring the wrong viewer to leave and email support for a refund, then spends two and a half hours proving the price was real.
Named ideas worth stealing.
06:00model
Quality x Quantity = Result
Good content gains followers, bad content loses them, and quantity accelerates whichever direction you are already going. Win quality on a few videos first, then scale quantity.
Steal forany content calendar decision about whether to post more or post better
18:57model
The Effortless Content Continuum
- Written short-form
- Written long-form
- Short looping reels
- Short-form talking head
- Long-form talking head
- Podcasts
- Long-form presentations
A spectrum of formats ordered by effort, trust, and competition. Enter at your strongest format and pull ideas up or down it instead of inventing new ones each time.
Steal forturning one strong asset (a tweet, an email, a podcast) into a month of multi-format content
29:17model
Top / Middle / Bottom of Funnel
- Top: get views, low trust
- Middle: build trust with value
- Bottom: convert to leads and sales
Sort every piece of content by funnel stage and run a ratio tuned to your offer type and how much trust the sale requires.
Steal forplanning a month of posts with intent instead of chasing view count alone
48:24list
Locus of Control
- 1. Concepts
- 2. Things
- 3. People
- 4. Themselves
Where an audience places blame. Match your message to their layer (tactical for outer layers, motivational only for the inner ones) and peel them toward self-ownership before asking for the sale.
Steal forwriting ad and content messaging that lowers acquisition cost by addressing the right problem
57:13model
Credibility Continuum
- Observation (cold)
- Experience (warm)
- Expertise (loyal)
Match claim style to trust level. Observations open doors, experience builds trust, expertise closes deals, and the Jeff Bezos test says don't lead as the authority unless you already are one to that audience.
Steal forwriting hooks and headlines that don't sound like every other self-proclaimed guru
1:30:48concept
Promise + Proof hook
A strong hook pairs a specific promised outcome with proof you can deliver it, e.g. 500 qualified leads for real estate agents in 30 days, rather than a generic promise alone.
Steal forrewriting any weak hook or subject line into a credible one
2:02:43model
Product vs Service Continuum
Tangible products sell to cold traffic on top-of-funnel alone; intangible services need trust built first. Productizing a service (clear deliverables, price, outcome) short-circuits the trust-building cold audiences require.
Steal forrepackaging a coaching or agency offer so cold traffic can buy it
2:15:00concept
Price-to-profit leverage
- $5,000 price, $3,500 cost = $1,500 profit (30%)
- $6,000 price (+20%), same cost = $2,500 profit (+67%)
- $4,000 price (-20%), same cost = $500 profit (-70%)
When delivery cost is fixed, small price moves swing profit dramatically, so test higher prices first because raising price is the easiest profitability lever.
Steal forrepricing any service offer for better margins
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
2:34:13product
“Comment caramel coffee if you made it to the end, and go to skool.com for the full community with all the bonus material.”
Played as a comedic multi-person bit that rewards the rare viewer who finished 2h40m, then pushes them into the paid Skool community where the PDFs, tools, and bonus modules live.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
