11:28Kobey Nguyen · Essay
How Shelby Sapp Makes $5M a Month
How a lifestyle-branded sales coach turned two Instagram accounts and one webinar into a $4.9M month.
August 17thThe argument in one line.
Follower count is a vanity number; what actually drives revenue on X is a deliberate follower-to-call ratio built from targeted content, a credibility-tested profile, and a DM funnel that turns strangers into booked calls.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder, consultant, or agency owner who wants X/Twitter to generate booked sales calls, not just views.
- Someone under 25,000 followers trying to decide whether to chase broad reach or a specific niche audience.
- A B2B operator who needs a repeatable content system instead of guessing what to post each day.
SKIP IF…
- You're chasing follower count or viral reach for its own sake with no product or service to sell.
- You already have a working content-to-DM funnel and just want new hook ideas, not the underlying system.
The full version, fast.
Follower count is a vanity metric; what matters is the follower-to-call ratio, how many new followers it takes to book one sales call. The creator built a multi-million-dollar agency from just 27,000 followers by treating X as a funnel: impressions become profile visits, profile visits become followers, and DMs turn followers into calls. He teaches a profile built to pass a three-second credibility test, a five-pillar content mix (personal, expertise, social proof, trending, opinion) that shifts as an account grows past 5,000 and 25,000 followers, and a DM system, auto-plug CTAs, hand-raiser posts, follower outbound, that converts that content into signed clients. When growth stalls, he runs a bottleneck analysis on the funnel to find which stage is leaking.
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00:00 – 00:38
01 · $2.8M with only 27,000 followers
Cold open: the creator states his follower count and agency revenue, and promises the levers that book meetings instead of just earning likes.
00:38 – 03:33
02 · My actual Twitter/X account
Walks through his own analytics (300-600 new followers/month, ~6M impressions/year) and introduces the follower-to-call ratio, using his own 50-to-1 average as the benchmark.
03:33 – 07:00
03 · Business owners with money exist on Twitter/X
Argues anonymous 'egg' profile pictures are often wealthy burner accounts, cites a stat that nearly one in three U.S. X users earns over $100k, and frames the 'viral vs. profitable' tradeoff.
07:00 – 10:47
04 · Building your profile
Introduces the three-second credibility test (who you are, what you do, what you can do for them) and walks through header, bio, follower ratio, and pinned-post social proof.
10:47 – 12:55
05 · Control audience demographics
Shows the X Audience tab's demographic breakdown as a troubleshooting tool to confirm content is reaching the intended country, age, and gender profile.
12:55 – 13:50
06 · Realistic results
Shares before/after case-study numbers for two client accounts (up to +717% total views) and describes the agency's onboarding process behind those results.
13:50 – 18:51
07 · How to create viral and profitable content
Tells the origin story of his first ghost-writing clients, then lays out a 3-posts-a-day cadence, the five PESTO content pillars with examples, and a pyramid framework for shifting content mix as follower count grows past 5k and 25k.
18:51 – 21:11
08 · How to turn Twitter/X content into signed clients
Covers the three ways to convert content into calls: direct CTAs, auto-plug DM CTAs delayed until a post is already performing, hand-raiser posts, and follower outbound DMs.
21:11 – 22:34
09 · Viral idea miner
Describes feeding sales-call transcripts (via Fathom) into an AI 'idea miner' to build a backlog of content ideas sourced directly from prospect conversations.
22:34 – 25:44
10 · How to pivot when things aren't working
Runs a live bottleneck analysis on the four-stage funnel (views, profile visits, followers, calls) to show which stage to fix depending on whether the account is B2B or B2C, then closes with the free X Playbook opt-in.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A creator with only 27,000 followers generated over $2.8 million in agency revenue in a single year, proof that follower count is not the metric that pays the bills.
- The follower-to-call ratio, new followers divided by booked calls, is the real KPI for a personal brand on X; a 50-to-1 ratio is a healthy B2B benchmark.
- Almost one in three U.S. users on X earns over $100,000 a year, making it one of the most underserved platforms for B2B content.
- Anonymous 'egg' profile pictures on X are frequently burner accounts for founders, investors, and even billionaires, not bots to be ignored.
- 10,000 followers that are 10% your ideal customer beats 500 followers that are 100% your ideal customer, because the larger audience keeps authority and reach intact.
- A profile has three seconds to prove who you are, what you do, and what you can do for the reader, before they decide whether to follow, click, or leave.
- Pinning a post to a profile also files it into the Highlights tab automatically, turning one pinned tweet into a permanent, browsable wall of social proof.
- Below 5,000 followers, at least half of all content should be broad, top-of-funnel material; niching down too early starves an account of its own audience.
- Content should split across five pillars, personal, expertise, social proof, trending, and opinion, then be weighted toward whichever pillar is already converting.
- Delaying a DM call-to-action until a post has already hit its top 10% engagement threshold protects the post's own virality instead of tanking it with an early pitch.
- A single 'hand raiser' tweet, stating exactly who you serve and that spots are open, can generate qualified inbound leads with zero paid distribution.
- Every sales call transcript run through an AI 'idea miner' becomes raw material for new content, turning the sales process itself into a content engine.
- A funnel with a 100-to-1 follower-to-call ratio for a B2B account signals a broken DM or targeting problem, not a content or reach problem.
- For B2C accounts stuck at a poor follower-to-call ratio, the fix is usually more views, not a better DM script, since five times the reach can mean five times the revenue.
The number that matters isn't followers, it's your follower-to-call ratio.
GROWTH SYSTEM
A personal brand on X converts through a funnel, content to profile visits to followers to DMs to calls, and tracking that funnel matters more than chasing raw reach.
02My actual Twitter/X account
- Calculate your own follower-to-call ratio: new followers gained in a month divided by sales calls booked that same month.
- A ratio near 50-to-1 is a solid benchmark for B2B; niches with a bigger total addressable market, like fitness, can tolerate 100 to 150-to-1.
03Business owners with money exist on Twitter/X
- Don't dismiss anonymous or 'egg' profile pictures as bots; many belong to founders, investors, and even billionaires posting from burner accounts.
- Nearly one in three U.S. X users earns over $100,000 a year, which makes B2B-focused content one of the platform's most underserved opportunities.
04Building your profile
- Design a profile to pass a three-second credibility test: make it instantly clear who you are, what you do, and what you can do for the visitor.
- Pin your strongest piece of social proof; X automatically files pinned posts into your Highlights tab, turning it into a running proof archive.
05Control audience demographics
- Check the Audience tab's demographic breakdown periodically to confirm your content is actually reaching your target country, age, and gender profile.
06Realistic results
- Track before-and-after numbers on the accounts you influence, views, follower growth, close rate, to know if a strategy is working, not just producing activity.
07How to create viral and profitable content
- Split content across five pillars, personal, expertise, social proof, trending, and opinion, then weight whichever pillar is already converting best.
- Below 5,000 followers, keep at least half your content broad and top-of-funnel; niching down too early starves an account of an audience to convert.
- Say only things you actually believe in opinion content; forcing a hot take you don't hold damages the credibility the rest of your content relies on.
08How to turn Twitter/X content into signed clients
- Delay a DM call-to-action until a post already has strong engagement, so the pitch doesn't cannibalize the post's own chance to go viral.
- A single hand-raiser post naming exactly who you serve and that you have open capacity can generate qualified inbound leads on its own.
09Viral idea miner
- Run your own sales call transcripts through an AI summarizer to mine recurring prospect questions and objections into a backlog of new content ideas.
10How to pivot when things aren't working
- When growth stalls, run a bottleneck analysis across views, profile visits, followers, and calls to find which single stage is actually leaking before changing anything else.
- If your B2B follower-to-call ratio is high, fix the DM or targeting; if you're B2C, it's usually easier to fix by growing raw views instead of the conversion rate.
Terms worth knowing.
- Follower-to-call ratio
- New followers gained in a period divided by booked sales calls in that same period; a lower number means content and targeting are converting more efficiently.
- PESTO pillars
- A five-category content framework: Personal, Expertise, Social proof, Trending, and Opinion, used to balance a personal brand's posting mix.
- Three-second credibility test
- The brief window a profile visitor spends deciding who an account owner is, what they do, and what they can do for the visitor, before following or leaving.
- ICP
- Ideal Customer Profile; the specific demographic or business type most likely to convert into a paying client.
- TAM
- Total Addressable Market; the entire pool of potential customers a niche or offer could theoretically reach.
- Auto-plug DM CTA
- An automation that adds a call-to-action to a post's replies only after it crosses an engagement threshold, so the pitch doesn't suppress the post's own reach.
- Hand raiser
- A standalone post that states who the poster serves and that they have open capacity, designed to prompt qualified prospects to self-identify in the comments or DMs.
- Idea miner
- A workflow that feeds sales call transcripts into an AI tool to extract recurring objections and questions, which are then turned into new content ideas.
- Bottleneck analysis
- Tracking each stage of a content funnel, views, profile visits, followers, calls, to identify which conversion rate is underperforming and needs attention.
Things they pointed at.
19:29toolHypeFury
21:13toolFathom
Lines you could clip.
00:02
“27,000 followers is nothing special... I'm living proof that having a ton of followers means nothing.”
06:20
“X is where the people with money are, you know, founders, investors, operators, business owners.”
06:50
“I'd rather have 10,000 followers that are 10% my ICP... than just having 500 followers that are a 100% my target market.”
20:04
“How to convert content to calls? Direct CTA, direct message, auto-plug.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
If you look at my x profile, I only have 27,000 followers. But in the last year alone, my agency, the birdhouse, has generated over $2,000,000 from x.
And look, 27,000 followers is nothing special. There's accounts out there with millions of followers, and they're not pulling in anything close to what I am. So I'm living proof that having a ton of followers means nothing.
What actually matters is the content that you're putting out, and that's exactly what I'm gonna go over in this video. By the end of it, you'll know how to build a million dollar personal brand on x, and what levers to pull when you want meetings booked rather than just likes. So let's start with the math of it all.
So I'm gonna start by pulling out my x account here. We're gonna run the math on my own account. So over here, you can see all of the different months over the past year for my analytics.
And again, they are nothing special. I average probably between three hundred and six hundred followers per month. About 200,000 up to about a million views in a month in terms of impressions.
In the last year, I've done about 6,000,000 impressions. Nothing crazy at all. One of the big important things you wanna do when you are calculating how many followers you need to gain in terms of how many meetings you wanna book is to do something I call follower to call ratio.
And what this means is you take the amount of followers you've gained and you divide it by how many calls you are booking, and that's gonna be your conversion rate, your follower to call ratio. And for me, again, I gain anywhere from about 300 to 600 followers. If you have maybe a less b to b target market like me, something a little bit more b two c, you might gain anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 followers in a month.
And then you can do your follower to call ratio there, and you might wanna book a higher volume. For me, I'm more low volume. I book anywhere from three to four new clients for our agency every single month.
And I do that on about 10 to 12 new booked calls. And it's not just calls directly from x. I get a bunch of calls directly from my Twitter account.
Don't get me wrong. But I also get calls from other platforms. But I get a lot of calls from referral.
Actually, about 44% of our lead flow right now is referral. But that's not just because of the people that we work with referring us people.
It's people that we don't even know who refer us. Like, I always say that when you have a big personal brand, your goal is to be associated with the product or service that you provide.
Like for me, I've built my entire personal brand around x and Twitter. So every time someone thinks of like, okay, who can do my x? Who can do my Twitter?
Who can be my ghost writer? I come up in the conversation. You wanna be known as the guy for something in your niche.
On any given month, I gained between three and six hundred followers. Let's just use 500 to keep it super clean. And I book anywhere from eight to 12 calls.
So again, we can use about 10 calls to keep it super clean. So for me, that 500 new followers divided by about 10 calls is a 50 follower to call ratio. What that means is for every 50 followers I gain, I can estimate that I'm going to book a call.
So if I gain around 500 followers in a month, I should have booked around 10 calls between the inbound and referral coming from my personal brand. And this conversion rate is gonna look a little bit different for everyone. Some of our clients, especially if we have really really good setters, are going as low as about 20 follower to call ratio.
And then in some niches that are a little bit more competitive, call it like fitness, we see anywhere from like a 100 to a 150 follower to call ratio. But it evens out because the fitness niche has a massive TAM. You know, your total addressable market is essentially the whole planet.
So you can book a call for every 200 new followers if you go and gain three, four, 5,000 followers. So it's different for every niche and you wanna get a feel for it, but generally, we like to aim for around 50 on average. For me, leads that are coming in from inbound and referral close between 4050% of the time, which means for about every two calls, I'm closing a client.
So I can be very low volume in the amount of calls that are coming in, but I know that they're going to close at a really high rate because I have the authority from my personal brand. I typically have the good word of having a referral. Great thing about x is that x is where people with money are, you know, founders, investors, operators, business owners.
I actually just made a tweet saying that you should be stacking people that have egg profile pictures because there's so many rich people, business owners, investors, and even billionaires that are on burner accounts on x. And so you shouldn't just be trying to gain followers that have other personal brands, but rather just they look like bots.
But you can actually see the location in their profile and see where they're from, see if they're in your target market. And a stat just came out that says almost one in three United States users here earns over a $100,000 a year, and barely anyone is making content for them.
I know a lot of our clients have been for the last few years, but it's still such an underserved market. So specifically, if you're doing b two b content on x, I think it's a massive, massive opportunity. It's even verified by Grok.
I think someone commented saying, can you confirm? And they even said, yes. Recent reports say that US users from a 100 k plus households at 25 to 33%.
So again, almost one in three users from The US are earning over a 100 k. The biggest thing that people don't understand when they're creating content on x and they're building a personal brand is that you actually have to create for these higher level demographics for these specific avatars. So it's fine to get reach, you know, you can do some top of funnel content, but you also need to have really dialed in messaging to your ICP.
And we're gonna talk about a little bit later the different content pillars that you can do to actually solve this problem. And the biggest thing I always like to teach when it comes to x and when it comes to content is you don't have to choose either or. You don't have to say, I only want a 100 true fans and only gain a 100 followers.
But you also don't need to go gain thousands of useless followers that aren't gonna be in your demographic. You wanna be both viral and profitable. Good analogy I always use is I'd rather have 10,000 followers that are 10% my ICP, which means I'm gonna have authority, I'm gonna have reach, and I'm still gonna have a thousand followers that are my ICP than just having 500 followers that are a 100% my target market.
Because you still only have 500 followers and 500 people in your ICP, but now you'd sacrificed all the authority, all the reach, and all that potential energy to go upwards. Again, that's why I like to have this middle ground. I like to have this follower to call ratio, and I'm big on building a consistent inbound funnel with my personal brand.
So now that you know the numbers, let's go into actually creating the content. And so I'm gonna draw it out here to drive the point home. But before that, I'm gonna tell you a quick story about how I landed my first client.
So just doing Fiverr articles, $25 on Upwork, just writing whatever. And then I transitioned to Twitter ghost writing in the summer of twenty twenty two. I started doing a couple of different clients.
I signed my first client for about $1,000 a month through a cold DM. But then I landed my first $4,000 a month client directly from a referral, and that was my big big break.
And we ended up blowing them up. I believe within three months, they did $97,000 in cash collected, a $140,000 in revenue in, like, January 2023 directly from Twitter.
This is before anyone was really Twitter ghost writing, and this is way before anybody knew how to drive actual revenue from the platform in organic. And this is, like, when threads were in their prime. Right?
We ended up upselling that client to about $8,000 a month to do some other stuff, and this was before I did any rev share. This is the client that taught me that I need to be doing rev share because I wanted to actually get a cut of that $100,000 and start, you know, raising my deal size to 5 figures a month.
The point is that the system that I built for that person is the same system I use today, and it's the same system we implement for our clients. So I'm gonna show you here. So we wanna start with content, and this is going to be a very basic cadence.
Like, I don't like to overcomplicate it. A lot of people ask me, should I be posting 10 times a day? Should I be posting one time a day?
I find the sweet spot is at least three times a day. Sometimes I'll go up to five or six, but a lot of that is just random posting throughout my day. The actual scheduled post that my team is gonna be writing for me is three posts per day that are heavily targeted across the five pillars that we'll go into a little bit later.
And the entire point of the content is for them to go to my profile. And the profile is where all of the magic happens. So the first thing you wanna do when you're building your profile is make sure that people can pass what I call the three second credibility test.
The three second credibility test is going to be who you are, what you do, and what you can do for them. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. This applies to all social media platforms, but every platform has its quirk.
So I'm gonna go through how specifically you can do this on x. A couple of examples here. So for me, I always like to opt towards a header with my company.
I find that it's very easy. You can also do something a little bit more candid that if you have a good aura picture like this, this is one of our clients Jeremy Haynes, like, obviously, this is a sick picture with a millimonth trophy. You know, you can get jiggy with it.
But general rule of thumb is if you don't know what to put, just put your company banner. Who I am, I'm the CEO at the birdhouse. What I can do and what I can do for them is we build viral profitable personal brands across the internet.
And I like having some sort of personal touch for me. I'm an arsenal fan. I think that's cool.
I know for Jeremy. He's big on, like, no income claims. Results not typical.
He's, like, repelling poor people. That's that's his thing. We have other clients, like, my client Nick, 0 to 1,000,000 in Amazon book royalties and what he does and a call to action.
So there's there's a lot of ways you can do this, and I like to have a lot of nuance when it comes to building it. That's why I really just wanna make sure we're passing that three second credibility test. You can leave your location.
You can also put a little CTA arrow to your website. Definitely have your website, your landing page, or opt in a lead magnet. Have some sort of website here that's going to convert that traffic organically.
Another thing is having a positive following to follower ratio. I find that it's good for authority, but there was also some hints that it is a big deal with the algorithm in terms of determining that you're not a bot. They're kind of a little bit outdated, but I still follow it for every single client.
And then the pinned post. Pinned post, I always like to have social proof. I'm always interchanging this with different pieces of social proof throughout my day.
And a cool secret for social proof is every time you pin it, it'll automatically go to your highlight section. So my highlight section is just infinite social proof. Like, if you scroll my highlight section, you will just see years and years and years of social proof.
So that's how you build a good profile to pass that three second credibility test on x. Because after they go to your profile, one of two things is gonna happen. Right?
They're gonna click follow, or they're gonna go to your website, or they're gonna DM you. That's where all the magic happens. It kinda sends them in the different direction.
For this video, we're gonna focus on DM. So obviously, there's gonna be people who just convert directly through your website link, and that's fine, and we'll take that. But the DMs is more controllable, actually prequalify clients, and you can have a little bit more control over how they convert.
So I have videos on how to actually do DMs on Twitter, hot DMs, inbound DMs, warm, outbound, all that good stuff. So you can check out that video for for more DM stuff. But after the DM, of course, we go to the sales call, and this is the whole funnel.
Right? It's like a setter closer model. You don't really need a setter.
I think you're a little bit more low volume like me, you can have yourself or VA or at this point you can do Grokbot and have it help you book calls. For more high volume b to c clients, we always put a sales rep in there to actually convert the volume just because there's hundreds and hundreds of leads. Sometimes even thousands of leads.
So we always have to have a sales rep in there. Again, for lower volume, maybe you're an agency owner, maybe you're an investor, maybe you're a founder of a big startup, you might not need a setter. You could probably just go with yourself or VA or a GockBot or something like that.
So this is super basic funnel. I don't wanna get too deep into it because I do have other videos on DMs. But the most important part here is you're gonna have a conversion rate here.
You're gonna have your impressions that come from content, and then you're gonna have profile visits. I'm gonna call it PVs. And they're gonna have a conversion rate on your impressions to your profile visits.
And then again, you'll have a conversion rate from profiles visits to followers. So right here, there's another percentage on how many people visit your profile to how many people convert to followers. If you wanna get super nerdy about it, you really don't have to.
But if you do wanna get super nerdy about it, we'll do this like a couple times a year for clients who are like having suspiciously low follower gain from going viral. We'll look at the profile visitor percentage and then look at the follower percentage and look at that conversion rate. And we'll be like, okay, it's time for a profile refresh.
We're not super religious about it. But again, if you wanna get nerdy on it, you can be super religious about the conversion rate from profile visits to followers. Another thing you can do if you're trying to troubleshoot the amount of people that are actually following you is making sure you're driving in the correct demographic.
Like, I'll just go to one of our clients demographics here. You can go to new followers under audience, and you can look just at the last seven, twenty eight, three months. And you can look at like, okay, am I targeting the right people?
And am I attracting the right people? So for like, am I attracting United States males? Yes.
Okay. That's correct. If this was like a bunch of females from Germany, then it would obviously not be the right demographic.
So you can look at that as well if you're troubleshooting, but I won't get too deep into that. But again, the main thing you wanna look at here is going to be this follower to call ratio, which is all the magic happening in the DMs. So how many followers you're gaining and how many calls you're booking based on that.
When you look at that conversion rate, it's really gonna tell you, am I creating the right amount of content? Am I creating the right kinds of content? And am I targeting the right people?
If you have anything higher than, like, a 100 in your b to b, that is 100% too high in my opinion. You wanna have it way lower than that, closer to that fifty sixty mark. If you're b to c and you're, like, 100 to 200, you can survive with that.
Realistically, you'd want it at least under a 100. But if you're upwards of like 500 follower call ratio, something's completely wrong with your DM systems, and you probably need to troubleshoot that. So it's crazy because when I first had that client go to a 140 in a month, it was basically out of nowhere.
Right? Like, I really had only been ghostwriting to get people followers. I was still a solo operation.
I had just hired a VA at the time. Yeah. When I saw them blow up, I was like, okay.
We have something here. And I really built out that system. I zoomed out, put it on paper, and I realized it's something that I can implement for other people.
And again, this is before any of this existed. So what I can confirm is that, you know, three, four years later, it's still the same system almost verbatim. I'd say the only thing that's evolved is the kinds of content you need to create, which again, we're gonna get into here in a second.
So I have an example here that's kind of in line what I was just saying. This is a client who is b to c. It's a b to c biz op offer.
So they are targeting kind of a bigger demographic, not b to b. So we can aim for that 100 to 200 follower to call ratio. And here you can see in August so far, they've done about 5,000,000 views, 1,300 new followers, and they booked about 11 calls from x.
It's actually kinda low, but we're at about a 120 follower to call ratio. So for 1,300 followers, we've booked 11 calls.
And again, that's because we're going through the DMs. We have a couple different ways to book calls. I believe they're also doing triages, so we've actually done, like, 40 or 50 triages, but 11 actual closer calls.
So that's just a great example of follower to call ratio in terms of they've gained about a thousand followers and they booked about 11 calls. Quick pause before the next section. This is a client that we just launched a few months ago.
And after only thirty days before they worked with us, they gained about a 169,000 views and only did about a 104 new followers. And within thirty days of working with us, they basically four x'd everything.
They did 898,000 impressions and 428 followers followers in the first month.
A 311% gain on followers, 431% gain on views.
And this is literally one of our most conservative case studies. So that's what my old team does. We build the content.
We run the system. We do an interview process. We have a full in-depth onboarding that builds an avatar breakdown, voice and tone guide, a creative brief.
We try to learn everything about you. And we combine that with 10,000,000,000 views worth of data and viral frameworks that we have internally to actually launch your brand at scale. The link to work with us is in the description.
Definitely apply if you are interested. Now let's get back into it. So real quick, I wanna go through the five different content pillars that you need to build to actually build a personal brand and not just another account.
I wanna go through the stuff that actually drives in leads, the stuff that's gonna be top of funnel, the stuff that actually converts people into followers and eventually booked calls for you. So this is what I call the pesto pillars, personal expertise, social proof, trending, and opinions.
And I'm gonna give you a few examples of each that I've done personally on my page. So just a couple examples of personal stuff. This is your stories.
This is the behind the scenes stuff. This is a tweet of me getting engaged. I got about 17,000 views on that.
A view of my backyard, super basic fun stuff. A bunch of health stuff that I invest in. I think like Sahil Bloom, Dan Go, a bunch of people replied to this, got 300,000 views.
This is, again, this is personal stuff. It's not about business. It's not about anything like that.
It's purely to make sure that you are human. People are gonna relate to you. People actually wanna follow you and work with you.
Next we have expertise. Expertise is going to be your how to's, your mental models, your frameworks. This is, you know, you know your stuff.
This is where you put your shit online. It's where you tell people I know what I'm talking about, and you actually give away some sauce. You don't have to give away everything, but even if you know what you're talking about, only 20% of the sauce should actually be enough to get people a result.
Result. So this is where you wanna share that. This is the tweet I just went over a few minutes ago.
X is where people with money are. This is the statistics. Got about 8,000 views.
This was a talking head video I did. It's the green screen feature on x. You can go and like click the retweet button and react to other people's tweets.
And I talked again about you should be treating every single burner account like a millionaire because there are a lot of rich successful people on burner accounts. And again, this just shows I know my stuff. It got about 50,000 views.
I tweet a ton of expertise driven content that you can see that are outliers on my page. Social proof. This is where you prove everything you said in expertise.
Expertise is like, okay. Here's the sauce. Social proof is alright.
I'm not full of shit. This is the actual results I drove with it. And social proof is gonna be what drives in a lot of clients.
The CTA I just did sixty seconds ago was a good piece of social proof. So again, this is going to be tweets like this. I signed a client four weeks ago.
We did 3,000,000 views and 2,000 new followers. That is pretty solid. Again, signed a client two weeks ago.
500,000 views on x, 215 new followers, a 100% organic, 10,000 views. So these posts, they're not meant to go viral.
They're meant to convert all the traffic that you got from your top of stuff. Trending, this is gonna be where you go the most viral. This is where you try to get a bunch of the views.
I did a thread on Mikel Arteta and the things he does to build a winning team. I'm a big arsenal fan, it was just fun. Tweets on Claude, like any trending keywords.
At the time when I tweeted this, Claude was blowing up. So I tweeted that Claude Cowork can already replace every LinkedIn outreach software. Here's another Claude Cowork tweet that talks about scheduled tasks.
This is purely to get you reach. You try to keep it within your niche as much as possible. So for me, you can see I talked about LinkedIn.
I'm talking about AI. A lot of my clients about AI. The arsenal thing is just purely personal.
Like, I'm combining personal with trending and trying to get a bunch of views. So the trending stuff is, again, to get top of funnel, to get that TAM, to actually get the views. And lastly, we have opinions.
These are gonna be your hot takes. This is gonna be where you draw a line in the sand, and what's gonna happen is they're either gonna agree with you, they're gonna follow you, and they're gonna become a fan, or they're gonna disagree with you, they're gonna let you know about it in the comments. The most important thing here is that you actually say shit you believe in.
Because if you say stuff that you don't believe in just to go viral and you're just trying to, you know, get attention, that's gonna be bad for your personal brand. You're gonna lose authority. Uh, you don't wanna do that.
It's also embarrassing. So here's a couple examples I did. Your first years as a man are 26 to 27.
Everything else is a prologue. That went pretty viral. 2,000 likes.
This was a joke. I said, who was paying for this hormozy six k book launch? And then I the joke was that I actually did.
This went viral again. This was kind of like a trending opinion. So there's a bunch of different examples of this.
And like, for me, we have clients that have extremely hot takes, and then we have clients that have like some lukewarm takes. So you might have to get creative with some of these pillars, but these are just the five different pillars that I want you to know about as we get into the next part. So the most important thing to understand is that when you're below 5,000 followers, you have to worry about your audience size.
So from zero to five k followers, I always recommend that at least 50% of your content should be top of funnel, high TAM hooks, broad appeal angles. Build that base reach. When you obviously get a little bit higher into that 5,000 follower range, that's kind of when you're out of the abyss, and .
This is where you can start to be more ICP specific. You can do more niche, more expertise, more social proof, and you're gonna start getting a lot more direct conversions from your CTAs. And then 25 k plus, it gets super variable depending on your niche.
You can do a lot of different things to basically go viral. If you have a really good 25 k followers, that's, like, highly targeted. Basically, everything you tweet is gonna get, like, 10,000 views.
So a lot of creative stuff. But the important thing, because I know most people watching are kind of either zero to five k or five to 25 k. These are really important to understand.
You need to be doing more top of funnel content to get out of the abyss of the zero to five k follower range. And the cool thing about this, but whether it is top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel content, or it's the pesto pillars, is you can start by doing all of these equally. Right?
You can go 20% personal, 20 expertise, etcetera, across the board, really balanced. And then if something pops off for me, like, social proof does really well for me. So I am posting social proof every day right now because I know social proof is super good.
So I always compare it to the NBA two k sliders. You can slide up and down the different pillars depending on what works for you. We have this client who does car deliveries, and every time we do a story about a car delivery, it does super well.
So obviously, we wanna double down on that pillar. You don't have to do these evenly forever. You start even and you double down on what works for you because again, every niche and every audience has its own quirks.
Every niche is different. So that covers the content, but how do you actually convert this into calls? So there's a couple of basic ways that you can actually convert calls from your content.
Obviously, if you're driving directly to a funnel, a landing page, anything like that, a webinar, you just go to direct to the link and you can do CTAs to that. There's a couple of different ways that I'm gonna show you to do CTAs to the DMs here. So one of the more important things is a DM CTA.
So I'll give you an example here of one of the clients I showed you earlier. So here's a viral viral thread we did. And what this is called is an auto plug DMCTA.
So what this means is that we have it set so that after a certain amount of likes, whether it is a 100 likes, 500 likes, whatever the top 10% performance is of his content, we then auto plug the actual DM CTA on an automation. You can use any scheduler. You can use Typefury, Typefuly, Tweet Hunter, whatever you want.
You could even do it manually. You could probably do it with an MCP server now with AI. But the main thing is that it delay CTAs, the keyword, after the thread is already going viral so that it doesn't take away from the actual virality of that thread or the likelihood that that thread takes off, and then it's CTA.
So this is a cool DM CTA that you can see that drives a ton of inbound leads. So you can see here that we have an in house automation and some in house software called Fly Chat. It's kinda like ManyChat for x.
But you can see all of the inbound leads coming in here, whether they're DMs from the different platforms, whether they're keyword. And again, this all comes from that auto plug CTA, and we're doing these almost every single day. Another great direct way to get conversions to book calls is what I call a hand raiser.
You can essentially just do what you do in the auto plug, but you could just do it as a standalone tweet. This is a hand raiser I literally did yesterday. I just said, hey, if you're a founder or business owner with a minimum 7 figure a year in revenue and you wanna build content engine, drive traffic, post 300 times a month, we have a couple spots open for August, which we do.
And I already got a couple of inbounds from it as you can see here in the comments. So a hand raiser tweet again is another great way to actually drive inbound leads on top of the auto plug. And of course, the three second credibility test and having your profile optimized is another great way.
So there's a couple different ways there that you're gonna actually convert those DMs into leads. And you can do this especially if you're in a b to c offers. You can do follower outbound.
So every time you get a new follower that's in your demographic, in your ICP, you can message them, say, hey, thanks for the follow. Why'd you follow? Do you like the content?
Etcetera. Right? Like a basic this or that automation to every single new follower.
So not only are you getting hundreds of inbound leads from your CTAs, your DM keywords, your hand raisers, your the people that are actually coming to your profile. But on top of that, every time someone follows, if you're gaining thousands of followers, thousands of new messages right there as well.
So there's a lot of ways to book calls through the DMs this way. And the biggest flywheel that you wanna build here is after you are actually already booking the calls, is you wanna take those call recordings, run them through Claude, and you can essentially do what's called . So we have an in house skill that we use called an idea miner.
It's super refined, but you don't need the skill. What you can do is you take all the transcripts, you can take a Fathom API key, and what you can essentially do is build a idea bank. So like for me, I have an idea bank, and it writes my newsletters for me.
But essentially, what it does is it takes an idea back log here, and you can see clients churn before they even check their own inbox. Why your hook is the only thing that matters. Why a $100 lead on one platform isn't the same as a $100 lead on another platform.
Why qualified calls matter more than call volume. These are all coming from my Fathom transcripts with clients, from my call transcripts with prospects, maybe one of you. If you are a coach, it can be from coaching calls.
You could do this from your YouTube channel. And what it essentially does is it builds a backlog of ideas that you can then reverse engineer back into content. So you're essentially creating content that drives leads.
You're taking those leads. You're DMing them. You're turning them into book calls.
Then you're taking the transcripts of those calls to make new content that's more targeted towards your ICP. You can even have it so it only takes the transcripts from the calls that close or the calls that were your ICP. You know what their fears are, their dreams, their wants, their desires.
Some of the questions that they're asking, you can turn that back into content. A lot of times, it's gonna be more middle of funnel content that will actually then generate more leads, you can start to build this flywheel. So, yeah, you could take this, like, idea backlog.
And that's all four boxes checked. The last thing is just working out which one is leaking when things aren't working and doing bottleneck analysis. So the last thing you wanna do is essentially a bottleneck analysis for these four different steps.
So for example, let's just say you're posting content, you got 100 k views, keep it conservative. You got one k follower visits, which got you, let's just say, 500 new followers. F p, 100 k views, 500 followers.
Let's just assume you're doing new follower outbound, and this got you five calls. So there's really a couple of different levers you can pull. Right?
You have a 100 k views, which got you one k profile visits, which is 1%, which converted to 500 followers, so that's 50%. And you got five calls. So you have a 100 follower to call ratio, 100 follower to call ratio right here.
You got about 50% here, and you got 1% here. I don't really try to troubleshoot this number ever. I'm always looking at this number.
This number is really only if I'm really struggling to convert followers, but generally, it's not something I'm worried about. The main two I wanna be focused on are this and this. So now you can essentially do two things to double your calls.
Since you have a 100 follower to call ratio, obviously, depending on your niche, that could be on KPI or under KPI. So for me, I'm b two b. I want a 50 follower to call ratio.
This to me is not KPI. So this is going to be my bottleneck. I'm gonna try to get this 100 down to 50, which would double my booked calls, which would obviously double my revenue.
If you're b two c, and you're like, okay. A 100 follower to call ratio, 500 followers. Should I be trying to lower this?
I think it's a fool's errand. I'd be more focused on this right here, which is the impressions. It'll be a lot easier in a b to c environment to turn this into 500 k views than it is to turn this to a 50 follower to call ratio.
So I would be focused on this number. And what this is gonna do is gonna five x. Right?
So if I get five x the views, I'm gonna get five x the revenue, which is gonna be those 25 calls. Thousand dollars per book call would be $25,000 in cash collect.
And so on and so forth. Like, our b to c clients are doing millions of views usually per month on the lower end, at least 500,000 closer to a million.
On the higher end, five, ten million. B to b, much lower. Right?
We're not trying to go super mega viral all the time. So this is the bottleneck analysis. It's just like any other bottleneck analysis in a sales funnel.
But when it comes to content, you kinda have these extra variables with profile visits and conversion to followers as well as viewers. But this is important to know. So you'd really just have to track these four things.
Track the conversion rate and know which one you need to optimize next. So if you have low reach, then that's a content problem. If you have low follower to call conversion, that's maybe a DM setter problem, a script problem, or a targeting problem, like who you're targeting.
So if this is really low, but you feel that your DM script is super good, you're following up, you're doing everything super super tight knit, you might just need to look at your follower demographics like we said earlier, and you might realize that you're just not attracting your ICP. So again, it's back to the content.
So I'm always trying to control what I can control. Big content person, I like to put a lot of blame on the content just because I know we can control the creative as much as possible. So this is the bottleneck analysis we're always doing to try and figure out what the problem is and how we take it to the next level.
So if you wanna work off this rather than rewinding every time you sit down to post, I put together a full a to z playbook. The written version of everything we talked about here. The content frameworks, the DM funnel, the numbers behind it.
It's in the second link in the description. Drop your email in and it lands straight away. There's also a LinkedIn one there too and a full content engine one that I might go over in another video.
If you wanna go into a little bit more detail on my strategy, again, I've put together a full video on how to go from zero to 10,000 followers here. I have other videos on DMs. So, again, I appreciate you guys for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A creator with 27,000 followers says his agency pulled in over two million dollars from X in a single year, and opens by insisting follower count is the wrong thing to be chasing at all.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:30concept
Follower-to-Call Ratio
New followers gained in a period divided by calls booked in that period. The creator averages 500 new followers to 10 calls, a 50-to-1 ratio; he flags anything over 100 in B2B as too high and anything over 500 in B2C as broken.
Steal forany content operation that wants one number to judge whether posting is actually producing pipeline
09:48model
The Content-to-Call Funnel
- Content (Impressions)
- Profile Visits
- DM
- Call
The core funnel: content drives impressions, impressions convert to profile visits, profile visits convert to followers, and DMs convert followers into booked calls.
Steal fordiagnosing exactly where a personal-brand funnel is losing people
07:00concept
Three-Second Credibility Test
A profile must communicate who you are, what you do, and what you can do for the visitor within about three seconds, via header, bio, and pinned post.
Steal forany bio/profile audit across social platforms
14:57acronym
The PESTO Content Pillars
- Personal
- Expertise
- Social proof
- Trending
- Opinion
A five-bucket system for balancing a personal brand's posts: personal stories build relatability, expertise shows competence, social proof shows results, trending content drives reach, and opinion content builds a following of people who agree.
Steal forany creator's weekly content calendar
17:31model
The Follower Growth Pyramid
- 0 to 5k: top-of-funnel, broad-appeal hooks
- 5k to 25k: shift toward niche, ICP-specific content
- 25k+: authority mode, outcome-driven content
Content strategy should change with account size: below 5,000 followers at least half the content should be broad reach; between 5k-25k the mix shifts toward niche/ICP content; past 25k the brand is an established quantity and can lean on authority.
Steal fordeciding when to niche down instead of always chasing reach
22:33model
Bottleneck Analysis
- Views -> Profile visits
- Profile visits -> Followers
- Followers -> Calls (via DM)
Track the conversion rate at each of the three funnel stages to find which one is underperforming, then fix only that stage: B2B accounts with a weak follower-to-call rate should fix DMs/targeting; B2C accounts are usually better off just growing raw views.
Steal fortroubleshooting a stalled funnel without guessing which stage to fix
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
25:17newsletter
“Link in the description... I put together a full a to z playbook... Drop your email in and it lands straight away.”
Delivered as a free lead-magnet opt-in (The X Playbook) after the value-heavy body of the video, plus an earlier softer agency pitch ('link to work with us is in the description... definitely apply if you are interested') around the 19-minute mark.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
