2:27:19Caleb Ralston · Tutorial
How to Rebrand Yourself Online (Full Course)
Two and a half hours on swapping the associations in your audience's mind without starving the business that depends on them.
August 7thThe argument in one line.
Personal brands grow fastest by deliberately narrowing content to serve one specific person as deeply as possible, because the trust built with that small core group transfers to every adjacent audience later.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A solo creator who has been posting for months with little traction and suspects their content is too broad to build real trust with anyone.
- Someone about to start a personal brand who wants a concrete framework for deciding their content ratio, their niche, and which platform to start on.
- A creator or business owner trying to write hooks and call-outs that create genuine curiosity instead of copying generic demographic openers.
- Anyone deciding between short-form and long-form who wants the decision tied to their own personality and bandwidth rather than a trend.
SKIP IF…
- You already have a large, engaged audience and are optimizing distribution mechanics, not positioning.
- You're chasing viral reach with no plan to convert attention into a business outcome.
The full version, fast.
Caleb Ralston and Trevor Odom argue personal brands grow fastest by starting narrow: pick one specific person to serve, go as deep as possible, and accept that most viewers won't be your audience. They recommend a 75/20/5 content ratio (niche, niche-wide, personal) that only widens in 5-10% increments after six months without traction, because trust built with a small core group transfers to adjacent audiences over time. The second half covers writing call-outs that trigger real curiosity through four ingredients (knowledge gap, belief, novelty, relevance) instead of generic demographic hooks, and choosing short-form versus long-form based on your own verbosity and bandwidth rather than copying what established creators do.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostCaleb Ralston
00:00cohostTrevor Odom
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:30
01 · A Podcast-Style Episode Between Two Co-Hosts
Caleb frames the episode as a departure from his usual format: a podcast-style conversation with Trevor working through wide-versus-niche content, call-outs, and short-form versus long-form.
01:30 – 06:00
02 · Wide Content vs. Niche Content vs. Niche-Wide
They define three content categories: wide content that serves the general masses, niche content built for one narrow avatar, and niche-wide content that serves the ideal customer while still reaching adjacent people.
06:00 – 14:39
03 · Determining Your Content Ratio Early On
For a solo creator just starting out, the ratio of niche to wide content should be driven entirely by the desired business outcome, not by a fear of getting boxed in.
14:39 – 24:10
04 · Choosing Your Pond: Expert vs. Student
Pick your competitive category (the 'pond') based on what you've actually accomplished. If you haven't accomplished it yet, position yourself honestly as the student in pursuit of it instead of faking expert authority.
24:10 – 38:00
05 · Trust: Why Extremely Narrow Content Went Viral
Their free 6.5-hour course, built for one specific person, hit 1.1 million views and got shared by strangers outside its intended audience, because trust built with a narrow core group transfers to adjacent groups over time.
38:00 – 41:30
06 · Expect Nothing for Three Years
A foundation-first metaphor for building a personal brand: go deep before you go wide, and plan for zero meaningful outcome for 36 months so any earlier win feels like a bonus instead of a letdown.
41:30 – 44:10
07 · The 75/20/5 Content Ratio
Their recommended starting ratio: 75% deep niche content, 20% niche-wide, 5% personal, woven throughout the rest of the content rather than posted as standalone pieces.
44:10 – 53:09
08 · Call-Outs and the Four Components of Curiosity
A call-out should speak to the consequence of someone's pain rather than the pain itself. Genuine curiosity requires four ingredients together: a knowledge gap, belief the gap will be filled, novelty, and relevance, illustrated against a real submitted clip that fails on all four.
53:09 – 59:21
09 · Live Hook Rewrite: Fixing a Submitted Clip
After a short pitch for their paid community Ralston Select, Trevor rewrites a Ralston Select member's weak demographic hook live, adding a knowledge gap, visual novelty, and a credibility statement.
59:21 – 1:05:42
10 · Short-Form vs. Long-Form: Where to Start
The choice comes down to two questions: what medium do you naturally perform best in, and what do you want to have happen. Short-form generally has a lower barrier to entry, but deep experts often find it harder to compress nuance into short clips than beginners do.
1:05:42 – 1:07:15
11 · Building a Second Platform Before You Need To
Single-platform dependence is a real risk, illustrated by the TikTok ban scare; creators are encouraged to expand into a second platform, including owned channels like email, within 6-12 months of gaining traction anywhere.
1:07:15 – 1:15:26
12 · Prioritizing by Personality, Bandwidth, and ROI
Long-form rewards people who want leverage and have more time to invest; short-form rewards people who want faster feedback loops and have less bandwidth, illustrated by a story about Gary Vaynerchuk's five-minutes-a-day content system.
1:15:26 – 1:19:56
13 · There's No One-Size-Fits-All Playbook
The closing advice: don't copy an established creator's strategy, because it's built around their specific constraints. Hold up a mirror to your own bandwidth and personality, then have a bias toward action over further debate.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- If you try to reach everyone, you reach no one; trust built with one narrow group transfers to the audiences adjacent to it.
- A recommended starting content ratio is 75% niche, 20% niche-wide, and 5% personal, woven through the other content rather than posted as standalone pieces.
- Wait roughly six months of consistently making genuinely deep content before widening your topic, and even then open up in 5-10% increments.
- Curiosity requires four things at once: an obvious knowledge gap, belief the gap will be closed, novelty versus what the viewer normally sees, and personal relevance.
- Demographic call-outs like 'are you 45 to 65 and trying to lose belly fat' fail because they state a fact instead of opening a knowledge gap.
- Their highest-performing video, a free 6.5-hour course built for one narrow avatar, hit 1.1 million views; their lowest performer was the one video made to appeal broadly.
- Pick the competitive category you compete in based on what you've actually accomplished, not the category the biggest creators in your space occupy.
- If you haven't achieved the outcome you're teaching yet, position yourself honestly as a student in pursuit of it rather than faking expert authority.
- Short-form generally has a lower barrier to entry for traction, but deep experts often find it harder to compress nuance into short clips than beginners do.
- Build a second, owned platform such as email or YouTube within 6-12 months of gaining traction anywhere, since single-platform dependence is a real risk.
- Plan for zero meaningful outcome for 36 months; hitting it in 8 or 18 months becomes a pleasant surprise instead of a broken expectation.
- There's no universal content playbook. Strategy has to be built around your own bandwidth, verbosity, and constraints, not the constraints of a creator you admire.
Depth beats reach for building a trustworthy personal brand.
WHAT TO LEARN
Narrowing your content to one specific person, tracking a 75/20/5 content ratio, and writing call-outs that hit four curiosity triggers builds more durable trust than chasing broad reach ever does.
02Wide Content vs. Niche Content vs. Niche-Wide
- Wide content serves the general masses; niche content serves one specific avatar; niche-wide content serves that avatar while still reaching people adjacent to them.
03Determining Your Content Ratio Early On
- Decide your content ratio based purely on your desired business outcome, not on fear of being permanently boxed into one topic.
04Choosing Your Pond: Expert vs. Student
- Choose your competitive category based on what you've actually accomplished; if you haven't accomplished it yet, position yourself honestly as a student rather than faking expert authority.
05Trust: Why Extremely Narrow Content Went Viral
- Trust built with a small, specific audience transfers to adjacent audiences over time, which is why a piece made for one narrow person can still go wide.
06Expect Nothing for Three Years
- Start with the deepest, most foundational content first, the same way a building's foundation goes down before anything goes up.
- Plan for 36 months of effort before expecting a meaningful outcome, so an earlier win feels like a bonus instead of a broken promise.
07The 75/20/5 Content Ratio
- A useful starting content ratio is 75% niche, 20% niche-wide, and 5% personal, with the personal element woven through other posts rather than made standalone.
08Call-Outs and the Four Components of Curiosity
- A call-out works best when it names the consequence of someone's pain, not the pain itself, since people often don't recognize the pain directly.
- Curiosity requires four things together: an obvious knowledge gap, belief that gap will be closed, novelty against what the viewer normally sees, and personal relevance.
- Generic demographic hooks fail because they state a fact the viewer can just answer, instead of opening a knowledge gap that pulls them forward.
10Short-Form vs. Long-Form: Where to Start
- Pick short-form or long-form based on how you naturally perform and what you want to happen, not on which format currently has a lower barrier to entry.
11Building a Second Platform Before You Need To
- Expand to a second platform, including an owned channel like email, within 6-12 months of gaining traction anywhere, so you're never dependent on one platform's survival.
13There's No One-Size-Fits-All Playbook
- There is no universal content playbook; build your strategy around your own bandwidth, verbosity, and constraints instead of copying a creator you admire.
Terms worth knowing.
- Wide content
- Content made to serve the general masses rather than a specific ideal customer, often unrelated to the creator's actual subject-matter expertise.
- Niche content
- Content designed specifically for one narrow avatar; it serves that person well but has little value for anyone outside that group.
- Niche-wide content
- Content written for your ideal customer that also happens to serve a broader, adjacent group of people without losing its core focus.
- Pond
- The specific competitive category or subject-matter lane a creator chooses to compete in, based on what they've actually accomplished or are actively pursuing.
- TAM (total addressable market)
- The total size of the audience a given niche or pond could theoretically reach; a smaller, more specific TAM is treated as a deliberate early-stage choice.
- Call-out
- A line, spoken or on-screen, that names the specific person a piece of content is for, usually by naming their pain or the consequence of that pain rather than the pain itself.
- Knowledge gap
- The distance between what a viewer currently knows and what they could know; one of the four ingredients required to trigger curiosity.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
24:30
“If you try to reach everyone, you reach no one.”
38:01
“When people are constructing a building, you build a foundation by going down, not wide.”
39:32
“Build this and put massive amounts of effort in and expect nothing good for 36 months.”
41:40
“We have a ratio that we typically recommend, which is 75-25. 75% is deep, 20% is niche-wide, and 5% is actually personal.”
47:05
“If you're 45 to 65 and obese, I don't know what to tell you, but you just don't need a complex plan to lose that first 30 pounds.”
49:12
“There are four things that need to be present in order to invoke curiosity in someone.”
31:40
“The one video that we did not optimize for views in any single way, the six and a half hour course, has 1.1 million views.”
58:40
“If you want to go from looking like this to looking like this with less than two hours of effort every week, I got you.”
1:17:53
“You need to hold up a mirror to yourself and be like, what is going to be useful for me?”
1:18:59
“Doing and pivoting is far faster and far better for your personal brand than spending that same amount of time just debating.”
Where the conversation goes.
01:30 – 14:39denseWide vs. niche vs. niche-wide content
14:39 – 38:00denseChoosing your pond and expert vs. student positioning
38:00 – 44:10steadySetting expectations and the content ratio numbers
44:10 – 59:21denseCall-outs and the curiosity framework
59:21 – 1:19:56denseShort-form vs. long-form and platform strategy
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.
metaphoranalogystory
Right now, you're building your personal brand by yourself. You don't have a team who is helping you do this whole thing. You're either starting or you're stuck at a point that you just can't seem to get past.
And between Trevor and I, we have a combined over 20 years of experience. building personal brands online. And today we are going to do a slightly different style of video.
It's going to be a podcast between Trevor and I where we talk through a couple of core things or core questions or problems that personal brands are facing. It's going to be why content versus niche content, how to properly call out your desired customer, and whether or not you should focus on short form. or long form content and so the first thing that we want to get into is wide versus niche and i figure what we can do is define some terms here and give context on what we mean by wide content and niche content Really, when we think about wide content, this is content that is made not to serve our ideal customer, but to serve the general masses, right?
What we've typically found, and I'm sure you see this all the time, is people who have a specialty or an expertise in an area, let's call it e -com business, right? And they do that. But this is where they're talking about maybe personal development or relationship advice, right?
This is wider content that is appealing to more people, but doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their subject matter expertise. Then we have niche content. This is where you are making the content specifically to serve this avatar.
And I know you have a lot of thoughts on this. This is where a lot of people get stuck in how they do their niche content. We'll talk about that here in a second.
But niche content is essentially... As it sounds, you are designing this content for a very specific avatar that you are trying to reach. And typically, this is very narrow.
And so, yes, it serves them. But anybody that is outside of that world is not going to be interested or really get any value or usefulness out of the content. Yeah, they won't care.
Yeah. The next one that we like to add in is actually niche -wide content, which we don't really see a lot of people talking about online. There's different frameworks out there.
I know Patti Galloway has the CCN fit, which I think is great. And it's kind of similar, but basically niche -wide is when we are making content written and designed for our ideal customer, but it also serves a broader group. I like to call them like ideal customer adjacent individuals, right?
And we actually did a video like this a while ago on our YouTube channel. It was the one that we were... rolling around all over Vegas filming the, if you struggle with making content, please watch this.
Right. And it's basically a video where I'm talking through the five biggest struggles or hurdles that I'm having to overcome in this whole crazy thing of like being public, putting content out there, building my personal brand. But what's cool is the way that you and I, cause we wrote that one together.
The way that we wrote that is it wasn't just designed for the, you know, entrepreneur, the CEO or executive who's overthinking. starting their personal brand. It serves them, but it also serves, as I like to always say, like the mom and dad who's overthinking sharing a carousel from their family road trip that they just got back from.
This is a way that we have found that you can increase the odds that more of your ideal customer actually sees your content. By doing this, because it's a wider or broader appeal, but it's not getting away from the core thing that you want to be talking about. Have you noticed that this is kind of a trend amongst people that they don't seem to understand this kind of nuance of niche wide content?
Yeah, it's a question that I get most often, which is like in short form content. is niche the way to go or is niche wide the way to go? And the way that I've kind of like defined it for people is that niche content is really just making content, solving problems for your ideal customer.
And then niche wide, I just defined it as making that applicable to everyone that could potentially be a customer like within that niche. That's a better definition than I just gave actually. That's really good.
I appreciate that. I think we're going to talk about call outs here in a bit, but a lot of people like, Are you a person struggling with blank or whatever in their YouTube videos, intros or whatever?
Are you a busy executive with a 45 -inch waist and blah, blah, blah? And we'll talk about why that's not even a good intro or necessarily a super good call -out in a little bit. But the problem with that is when you think about that, okay.
If you say that, that's very niche. But the niche -wide would be like, okay, what are the potential customers in the future? Potential customers, or maybe I'm not your potential, like your ideal customer, but I'm going to send this to somebody who is, right?
Like all those things. So when you do that and you put yourself in that hole, sometimes you actually, you kind of pigeonhole yourself into like one thing when you use call outs. I have a question on that.
I'm curious to hear from you. Would you say that... potentially too, by calling out a very specific avatar or a very niche avatar, you limit the potential reach because not every one of your avatars is necessarily going to self -identify in the way that you are labeling them.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a better way of putting what I was actually just talking about, which is like they won't, how do they, sometimes they don't know the problems that they're facing, right? Like they can be your ideal customer, but labeling them in that way, To your point, it's like, oh, wait, I don't actually know that I'm struggling with that.
And so if you don't tell me or you don't like, you know, you don't widen this thing up, sometimes you don't reach that person that could potentially be that customer. Let's put a little pin in that. We'll come back to that in a second.
But let's talk through how we determine our ratio in the beginning. Right. Because.
There are different stages to this, and we tend to have different beliefs in the ratio of niche, niche -wide and potentially wide content at different levels and stages of building your personal brand. So let's speak to the solo creator who is starting out or they're stuck early on. They haven't gotten a lot of traction with their personal brand.
How do you think about trying to determine what this ratio is? at least in the beginning when you're building that foundation? That's a good question.
I like, I mean, you and I like to start with depth. I think when we were... 18 months ago when we were starting your brand, we had, I distinctively remember conversations based around like, we don't want to be known by everyone.
We want to be known by the right people. Yes. And we also want to start with depth, which I feel like creates the most impactful personal brands.
And so taking a step back for just a second, because we were just talking about niche wide and niche or deep, deep in niche wide. We were kind of talking about it in a way that like. Maybe frames niche is not the move, but I want to be clear that's not the case.
We still, even 18 months in, are making very niche videos that like, we posted a video last week that you were like, I don't expect this to hit. And it didn't. But we made that video specific, like there was a specific entrepreneur, a big entrepreneur who commented in that comment section.
And you DM'd me and you were like. It did its job. Yeah, he literally reached out and was saying how right now he's really busy operating the business that he's working in.
Makes sense. But the moment that he wants to or has the capacity to start taking his personal brand more seriously, he wants to work with us. And it was right after I could literally see the timestamps.
He commented on the video and then within three minutes sent me that DM. And even though it was an eight out of 10. that fulfilled its purpose.
Now, what is the overarching theme of what we're talking about here? what we're talking about is determining what the outcome is that you desire. And so this is where you could insert the brand journey framework.
Anybody who's watching this has probably seen a lot of our content. So I'm not necessarily going to go through that. Maybe we end up flashing it up on screen with the four questions that you can ask yourself.
But it needs to be informed based on what you are trying to accomplish. Because also, if you come into this game, you're starting your personal brand solo, and your ambition isn't to grow a business or to reach a specific avatar like we are, but maybe your goal is just to help young women or young men navigate their careers and you don't have anything that you're selling, at least in the beginning, you're going to actually want to go wider and you're going to speak to a wider subject matter.
And so all of this, the way you determine your ratio is truly predicated purely and solely off of what are you wanting to have happen? And this is why we... are going to hammer this until the days that we die, right?
Because it's the most important decision that you need to make that it tips over all the other dominoes, right? We knew that we wanted to reach... I mean, what's really funny is actually we've broadened who we're reaching as we've made content.
Because when we started, our only goal was to work with CEOs of... nine figure plus businesses, right? And we didn't want to work with a bunch at a time.
We were looking to take on two or three a year. And that was what we were focused on. And as we made content for those individuals, more people that didn't fit that were watching it, getting value, but then asking like, hey, can you make content?
For the solo creator who's starting out or stuck. And guess what? That's what this is.
And we're doing this. And we actually ended up creating an offer within Ralston called Ralston Select. We ended up creating that because we ended up getting more demand from people outside of who we originally thought we were going to serve.
And so it's crazy that I would give a quick little like. caveat for a lot of people is a lot of people hear this and they get afraid that they're going to get stuck. And I'm only going to be able to serve this person, only talk about these subject matters.
And there's so much fear around this, like, I will be this forever. And one, I don't necessarily think there's anything inherently wrong with that. But if you get bored, you can always add in more or If you end up providing so much value because you are so targeted and focused on who you're trying to serve, you end up reaching people outside of that.
They demand for more. You can determine whether or not. your business, your operation wants to serve those individuals, which we did.
And so now what started as a very narrow TAM has become a little bit wider, right? We don't necessarily talk about personal brand for everybody. We still talk about personal brand in the context of having a business outcome usually, right?
And so there is still that narrowing of our topic, of our focus. We are a little bit more niche still, but I would argue we've gotten a little bit more niche wide. Not with all of our content, but with some pieces.
To your point, our most recent video was wildly narrow. It was basically talking about why successful entrepreneurs struggle with personal brand. Yeah, like the time constraints and stuff like that.
Like we were speaking to a very specific person that 99 % of our audience does not fall into that category. I sent you a Slack message. I had to like almost catch, it's funny when you do this, you'll catch yourself too of like, we had a specific purpose and a specific reason for that video being so narrow.
And then I like, I sent you that packaging. I did a few packaging swaps in the first 24 hours and I was like, it's just not, nothing's catching on. And I was like, it's, it's really just mapping to like the ABD is going to be lower because it's successful.
Why successful entrepreneurs? So we specifically like the TAM, there's just, if successful entrepreneurs, which people have to self -define if they are successful or not. And most people are more self -critical, meaning that like, Hey, successful people, I'm not a successful person, even if I.
run a multimillion dollar business. But the thing that we were just beating up, I feel like answers a lot of the question of where to start. I think we're about to go into this, but like, we always prefer to start narrow, niche, deep, like as deep as possible with a core audience.
Not only because it's easier to gain trust with those individuals, but also it's not like you don't just stay there. You can expand slowly. And so one thing that I want to make really clear to everyone, because this is where a lot of people hit me up and they're like.
I'm just not gaining traction. I have three views on my latest reel. And like it's very deep content, but it's just not working.
In the beginning, after a certain amount of time, you can then begin to niche wide. I never want to go wide necessarily unless it's like for personal content that like we posted a clip of you and me talking about Star Wars. Just for like a personal like, it's a funny moment.
I'm not saying that you... You don't need traction, especially these days on these platforms. You do, right?
It's going to be hard to scale a business with three views on average per reel, right? We've seen people be successful with a small amount of followers, less than 50 ,000 that we've seen multi -million dollar businesses being built. But you do need some amount of traction.
And so that's where I recommend people start as... deep, as niche as possible. If we're going to talk about ratios, like we recommend 75, 80 % of your content in the beginning niche.
And then if it's not working over time, or if you need more and more traction, slowly open up, slowly open up the dial, right? Slowly turn it up. It's interesting because basically we started super niche, but would you say that That is the right move for the person starting off.
They have zero subscribers on YouTube right now. They're going to make their first video. Do you think making a wildly deep video is the right move?
Or would you say we even did that? Would you say our first video was a wildly deep video or was it a little bit wider actually and our second video was deeper? Ooh, that's a good question.
Now we're going to like nerd out and I'm probably going to ask you some questions. Cause I think that like, maybe we can uncover a couple new things here. Um, I would say our first video was a little bit more applicable.
It was deep in like the lessons were like pretty, like you have to really care in order to like understand like you, cause our first video for, for those who are unfamiliar was just like a, my career video was like 16 years of building personal brands to X million followers. And so I would say. It was a little bit wider within the pond that we were playing in, but the pond was smaller.
As in we didn't just talk about brands, we talked about personal brands. We talked about educational personal brands. Like there actually might be a second layer here, which is you talk about like what pond you're playing in, which I would love to hear you kind of define for the audience right now.
But I would say within that pond, it was a little bit wider. I'm glad you went here. This is where everybody needs to start.
As soon as you figure out what you want to have happen, what the outcome is that you want, you then need to figure out what pond am I going to compete in? And so back to that e -comm example, if somebody had great success with an e -commerce business, they're probably a savage with e -commerce.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they are a savage with a brick and mortar business or a service -based business. And so what I mean by pond is a lot of people who have success in one type of business or one type of athletic endeavor or health pursuit. then make the assumption that they should compete at the highest level of that category.
It's the people that have success in e -comm and then say, I'm going to be a business creator and I'm going to compete with people who have experience building e -comm, service, brick and mortar, right? Like all of these different types of businesses. What chance do you think that you stand to compete in that, right?
Like for us, we were very intentional with the pawn that we chose. It's not like we chose to talk about brand. I'm not talking about brand as a whole.
I don't speak to these luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and shit like that. That's not my world. I don't have experience there like I do on personal brand.
Sure, I've done some stuff in that world. I've probably spent about, I would say, three or four years working on non -personal brands. But out of my career, that's a small chunk.
And as far as my big Ws, my wins, they've been within the world of personal branding. But even chunked down from that, it's personal branding for business owners. It's, well, it's, it's, it's chunked down a couple of times.
It's educational, personal brands, but then chunking down more, it's business, educational, personal brands. Yeah. Yeah.
And so we've been very intentional with the pond that we chose and people I think are kind of like surprised at the, well, what's funny is, you know, half the people are like shocked at the growth. The other people are like, I knew this was coming or whatever. And I'm always like, yeah, you did.
I did not. But, I think that part of the reason why we've had the growth that we've had so quickly is because we understood the pond that we were competing in.
And we decided we in that pond will serve those other fish more than any other fisher in the pond. I don't know. Fisherman.
Yeah. The analogy is falling apart here. But we decided we're going to solve the most amount of problems for that specific person.
than anybody else. Now, what's really cool as a side note, the benefit of doing this is you start to see other people in the pond start adding more value into the pond. And so by doing this, you not only serve yourself, you serve the greater ecosystem as a whole.
It's like a really cool thing. But everyone here needs to pick the right and appropriate pond. And how do you pick the right pond?
It's predicated on what you've done. Your expertise. Yeah.
And And real quick, because we know who we're speaking to here and we read the comments, it's not just the experts, though. There's also the students, right?
And especially at this stage, a lot of people that are watching this might feel like, I don't know if I fall into the expert or student category. So once you've chosen your pond, right, you know what you want to have happen. We know our desired outcome, and that's going to inform a lot of what we're going to do next.
Then we're going to pick the pond, which is predicated on what have you done? What have you accomplished, right? And that's if you're the expert.
So the expert picks the pond based on what they have done. And ideally, the pond you choose is full of people that want to accomplish the thing that you have done. That's going to be the best version of this, right?
That's the expert. Now, a lot of people in the comment section will be like, well, I haven't accomplished anything big yet. I haven't done the thing that my audience wants to do.
Yeah, I don't have these big W's, Caleb. I don't have these big W's, Trevor. And the answer is then, okay, what are you in pursuit of accomplishing?
You're the student, which means you're learning your way to some sort of outcome. And in the beginning, sometimes the outcomes are a little bit more vague. And as you go, that gets more specific.
But ideally, the most specific outcome or accomplishment that you're looking to achieve, if you can define that, that's going to be the pond that you choose. But instead of posturing yourself like you're the expert and you're teaching people what to do to get what you have, well, you don't have what they want. You are in pursuit of it.
And so you're the guinea pig. You're the test subject. You're making the time, money, relationship investments to pursue this thing.
And then you can bring everybody in your pond along with you as you do this so that they don't have to make the same level of investment to learn. That's interesting. because we've talked about like student versus expert and obviously the pond like a lot of time experts have to pond uh down but what's interesting is i think where students go wrong is they try and look at the person who is like owning one of the biggest pawns and try and be that yes and that is actually the reason for their not success yes yeah and like we need to just like say it once and for all there is not a world where you are going to gain more success pretending to be an expert when you are actually a student.
You will get better traction doing the student route. I mean, we've seen it time and time again on our TikTok and Instagram and all the other feeds where it's like day one of learning, blah, blah, blah. And people love that shit.
They love to come along the journey. And so you will find great traction. You won't be positioned in the same way.
And you probably need to make sure that your offer is reflective of that. I will tell you, you will gain extreme traction. The key is being honest with yourself and then being honest with your audience because there's nothing worse than when people find out that someone who is pretending to be an expert is actually a student.
And a quick qualifier I have to give, every fucking expert should remain a student at all times. We always want to be learning. We always want to be.
That's not the point here. That's not the statement that we're making. We're delineating.
How are you framing what you communicate to your audience? Are you framing it from the frame of the expert or the frame of the student? Yeah, that's interesting.
So I would say right off the bat, just like kind of loop back around, we did narrow our TAM a lot to like a deeper audience right off the bat. Before we even started making content, before we even like, do we go deep or niche wide for that content? We immediately eliminated all like a ton of TAMs.
So why did it end up going as well as it has? Like you would argue, yes, we... sandbagged ourselves by having a very narrow TAM, total addressable market.
Basically, we had a very small pool of people that we were making content for. And yet, it kind of, in our world, in our context, relative to the size of our channel, it blew up. Why do you think that was?
If we were making content for probably one out of every 20 ,000 people at most, like, why did it end up hitting? I mean, There's probably a couple reasons.
I mean, it always goes back to like, if you try to reach everyone, you reach no one. That's definitely true in this sense. But it's also a case of like, I think it's trust.
As in, once you establish trust with a core group of people, I think it's easier to then gain trust with an expanded group of people. Trust is just the measurement that someone believes you're going to meet or exceed expectations based on what you've done in the past. Right.
And that can be good or bad, right? They can trust in a negative way or they can trust in a positive way. Trust is not inherently positive or negative.
It just is and it can go in a positive or a negative direction. And so I think once you have positive, extreme positive trust with a core group of people, I think it then becomes easier. to then gain trust with a little bit more expanded group.
And that's why I recommended that people widen this up over time because boom, you gain trust with this people, then you gain trust with these people, and then you gain, right, it just ever expands. Do you think there's an element to the fact that like we, our second video was such a big give that even though a lot of it was maybe not applicable to some of the people who are getting a lot of value out of this podcast, they still consumed it?
and still wanted more content from us because of that? As in because it was so valuable? Like the thing was just such a...
Yeah, and in a world where so many people, especially before we started, you know, really pushing this whole course thing in our industry, there's plenty of other niches and industries where people were giving out free courses. And that was really big in a lot of other worlds on YouTube, just not ours. And so maybe they saw, even though we were making content that was three levels above them, Maybe they felt like there was a world where if they comment enough or something like that, we would end up making like I'm just curious what your perspective is on like how it ended up clicking with people that were pretty wide outside because you see the comments on that course.
Musicians are asking questions about it. We have people that are completely outside of our. avatar that we're trying to reach that are getting value but asking for different versions of it i know with like musicians and yeah like people want a full how to build your brand as a musician course and we have not done that to be fair because it's not who we speak to it's not our pond but yes that second video that second video for everyone being a six and a half hour free course on youtube we talk about it as a positioning statement of like here's our pond boom nobody else in our pond is doing this and we are now like we are going to immediately put this out And immediately all the fish are going to look to us, right?
When we do that, I think that yes, seeing that core value, but I would argue we made it though for that core group. We didn't make it for musicians. Musicians that just then started after seeing the trust that we build with that audience, they then start looking at that piece and go, wait, there are things that I can learn from this as well, but we made it.
with honestly, we made it with a deep content in mind. We made that with like, we're talking to people make these like avatars with like advanced Adam or, or simple Samuel or whatever it is. Right.
Like these like. uh avat these basic avatars in their head and they're like i'm just gonna make it for the advanced adam or whatever it is uh we like to speak to a specific person in mind where it's like i think it makes it more personable like this this six and a half hour course you were speaking to a character uh from your past one of your very good very close friends that was recently uh onboarded as a content director for a big entrepreneur.
And so you're speaking to the person who needs to build out an entrepreneur's personal brand. So that's the frame that we took with that entire six and a half hour course. And that, I believe, just makes it like that deep content for that person, but that trust that we established with that audience and everyone seeing the trust, how strong that trust is with that audience, then immediately goes like, oh, wait.
There's something that I can learn. There's something that I can take away. And then it starts expanding into its own kind of like it was deep originally.
And now it's more niche wide. You know what I think it might be? I think we're both kind of like verbal or processors.
And so what people are getting to see is kind of what are, you know, four hours zoom sessions when we're writing a video looks like. But I think a big part of it, actually, now that we're talking about it, I think a huge reason. is when you try to serve too many people at once, you are only able to go to a certain level of depth in solving a problem because you have to make an assumption that everybody is starting from the same knowledge point or the same starting point, right?
And when you have too big of a group, there's way too much variance. When you make a video very specifically for a very specific group, you can make a lot of assumptions and you can go a lot deeper on solving problems. If we look at our YouTube channel right now, the videos that I think have done the best, we have been the most specific about who the fuck this video is for.
Down to a name. Down to a name in real life. A real life person.
And when we have, and we're human, and so as much as we talk about Start your videos with what problem you're trying to solve for who? There's been a video or two that I've come to you and I'm like, I think this will go wide.
And guess what it doesn't do? It doesn't do shit. Those are our bottom performers.
You know, there's this amazing trend that a lot of people were taking advantage of, of like, give me 60 seconds and I'll do blank. And I wrote a video because I wasn't trying to serve anybody specifically. I wrote it because I thought it would do well.
Interesting. And it's one of, if not our lowest performing video versus. Our highest performing video, the one that we did not optimize for views in any single fucking way, the six and a half hour course, has 1 .1 million views.
And I believe it's because we actually really, truly go to the core of the problems that the person that we wrote it for is facing. And by doing that, I think we actually end up solving more people's problems indirectly. And the thing that we also saw is...
We had a lot of people, they were sharing our course on YouTube on our behalf for free. People start, and why? There's a couple of things.
One, branding is just the pairing of things. And so if I introduce you to something that brings value into your life, you associate that value with me, right? It's like when you introduce a friend to a new restaurant that they just become obsessed with.
At a very small level, that does something for your relationship. They trust your recommendations more. Every time they go, they're like, oh man, Trevor introduced me to this awesome spot.
I love this spot. Right. And on a bigger level, if something leads to a big outcome for your business, my God, that association is amazing.
And so what we started seeing is all these creators on Instagram promoting it, you know, comment blank and I'll send you Caleb's course. It was fucking insane. Yeah.
In the beginning, we encourage people to accept a narrow TAM. But the key is, is don't be dull, boring, and basic for that narrow TAM. That is the recipe.
That is the formula for like nothing to happen. Nobody's going to give a fuck. If you select a small group that you are wildly confident that you can serve, you will end up serving more than that group.
That's huge. That's actually ginormous. And I think people need to accept that in the beginning.
But then you have something that I hear you talk about a lot, which is if six months in to accepting that and truly trying to solve those problems, like actually not teasing or value edging the solution, giving the real solution. If after six months of doing that, you're not getting traction. That's when you typically I see you recommend to a lot of Ralston Slack members like this is where we need to start implementing more niche wide.
We still write it to serve, but we wrap it. for a wider group can you just speak to what that looks like like in the mechanics yeah and and to be fair i recommend this only after people have really honed in on their brand positioning and their content strategy which is what i believe honestly is the is the problem the majority of the time i think that like people are like deep is not working it's usually what like those two things before it is ever like sure we need to go much much wider I think even the deepest of niches online with interest, with like the rise of interest media, it's just false.
Like my thing that I talk about is too small. My TAM is too narrow. You know, like I speak to personal brands for business owners that do, I don't know, CPG products for like, you know, like you can get so, so narrow and specific.
And I still think that there is a lot of people. that you can reach. So that that's kind of the core thing there.
But to your point of like, when do I recommend this? It's typically after like three to six months of actually doing the thing of actually making deep content, because I want to be clear. Sometimes when I click on these people's profiles, or like YouTube videos, and I'm like, this is not deep content.
This is what everybody else in your space is saying, which I would argue again, to my point. Is it brand positioning? Is it a positioning problem?
And I'm like, fix that before you go wider. Like you're just saying whatever else is. Something interesting that popped up when you were saying that is I think there's a tension.
We've never, I've never said this before. There is a tension between people's desired outcome and the TAM. There is a tension between the desired outcome they have and the group they're serving.
So when we hear people say things like the... The niche I'm serving, the group of people I'm serving isn't enough. There's not enough people.
What that really is describing to me is you have a much bigger desired outcome than what your abilities or credibility are able to execute right now. Meaning maybe you have ambitions of building a $250 million business and that's your real desired outcome. That's a big outcome.
And I applaud you for that. And I'm all for it. I love the big ambitions.
So let's just go with that example. But you starting off are going to make content for people who own businesses, building their personal brand in the educational space like we're doing, right? I do not have ambitions of building a $250 million company, for example, or for context here, but we'll use me as an example here.
My TAM would not be able to support that outcome right now. And so I think what a lot of people need to realize is, sure, maybe you do have, I'm not saying anything is too niche, but some things are so niche that it is a smaller group, right? There are less business owners than there are women who wear makeup.
That is just a fact, right? There are less business owners than there are men who want to get a six pack by summer, right? There are different niches and TAMs that have wider or more people within it.
Just because your desired outcome maps towards having a really wide TAM does not mean that when you are starting off, you can compete in the wide TAM pond. And so you need to pick the pond that you have the credibility to compete in and then pond your way up to that eventual spot, right? Like Gary Vee was never going to buy the Jets just off of Wine Library, the business, the wine business that he started running with his father, right?
And then when he started talking more about marketing in the early days of VaynerMedia and speaking, that wasn't going to buy him the Jets. Then he started to, and the business grew and what he talked about grew and expanded over time. Now he talks about personal development, which has led to VFriends.
So many other things in that, obviously in that train and everything like that. But I think a lot of people need to be able to separate. You figure out what your desired outcome is.
And then are you at a point where you can direct line to that? Most people can't. Do you see what I'm saying here?
Like, I think there's an interesting little disconnect that a lot of people have that they're mislabeling something. Yeah, we're verbally processing right now. I think this might be actually cool for people to see of like, we're uncovering this thing.
Maybe we'll make a video about it. It goes back to, I think you just put words to what I was describing a little bit earlier, not to take credit or anything, but like you're... You're processing this better than I am, which is once you have trust with a core group, it's easier to establish trust with others.
Because I think everything, especially online, all these niches, all these ponds are connected in some way by some sort of, we're going to go with the analogy here. There's some sort of waterway connecting all these ponds. And so the reason I think to your point that musicians start consuming the personal brand course, the free course that we put out, is we made it for this core group, this TAM, this thing that we think we can own right now.
But people see the success in that pond. They're sharing this thing on their stories. They're sharing this thing everywhere they are.
And this business owner runs an offer for serving musicians. right? Them sharing that gets all of the musicians to this thing.
And then they start, you know, and so that's how the web starts expanding slowly over time. And so that's, I'm curious if you think, but that's probably the way that you pawn over time. So would you say that this is the strategy to fast track your personal brand growth?
is is what it is is starting narrow oh yeah and going really deep do you think like people can expect that they'll blow up in two months oh i understand what you're saying no no not at all because that happened so slowly over time for us i'm shocked it happened as quickly as it did I mean, it took a year, 18 months, and now the course is over like a million views.
And I would say we're just now starting to expand that niche to niche -wide a little bit more. But again, still 70 % of our content is deep. But no, it's not something that happens overnight.
It's not something that happens in two, three months. It happens very slowly over time. And I would argue that the people it happens to insanely quickly.
Because there are cases, right, where you make a very viral piece of content, especially in short form, not as much long form, I would argue, but short form, especially, you can make a piece that then just goes absolutely insane. And I would argue for the vast majority of those creators, it's a detriment to their long -term personal brand instead of a, like, it's nice at that time.
And six, 12 months, three years later. it's a detriment because they no longer have that sustained attention, that sustained audience because they didn't build that core audience. They just started reaching everyone.
And so this is where like we talk about like when you start with that depth, if I logged in and deleted your YouTube channel tomorrow, your Instagram would be like, where the hell is your YouTube channel? And everyone, you would have thousands of messages of people being like. What's happening?
Where are you? What happened? You only get that with starting with depth.
That might be a fun little marketing play. Yeah, let's delete your YouTube channel. Maybe not delete, but maybe...
I don't know. That might be kind of fun to... Unlist them all?
Yeah, like unlist them for like a month or something like that. Like go dark in December or something like that. We're going to test this.
We're going to unlist everything tomorrow. So what I always like to say, just to kind of sum up this section here, is you should start deep. I'm not a construction expert, but I know the basics, which is when people are constructing a building, you .
You don't build the foundation on width first. You go deep into the ground first. And so we always encourage people to do the same.
Start with the deep foundation, the stuff that most people won't see. Most people don't see the house foundation. Most people see the stuff on top, the bedrooms and the living room and all of that shit.
But start with the foundation and then everything on top will actually be strong and can withstand the, and as cheesy as this will sound, every personal brand goes through their own version of storms. There's different things. A clip that you post gets taken out of context or misunderstood or whatever.
These things happen. And so a strong foundation can help you weather those storms. Part of that is that strong foundation is the strong audience that you build a connection with.
And so if somebody misunderstands something in your comment section before you can even go in and correct it, you have people that are in your audience doing that on your behalf. But the key here. expectations are really important.
And I say something and I've been saying this probably since, uh, since I was working for Gary on team Gary and I would meet with people and give them advice that, you know, would come through wanting content strategy and stuff. I've been saying this forever and it used to be really well accepted. Now people hate when I say it because we are just not patient anymore.
But I always tell people build this and put massive amounts of effort and expect nothing good for 36 months. That's three years. But if you do that, I believe you have the right attitude to be able to actually provide value without needing to see an immediate return.
Because where people get this wrong is they pour so much effort into it, like we're saying, and they don't understand that it's not like your third, fourth, or fifth video is going to hit. That happens, but that is an exception. That is not the majority.
And so if you go in with the expectation that it's going to take me three years to get any sort of meaningful outcome and you get it within eight months or 18 months, then you're surprised in a positive direction, not surprised in like a, oh my God, I've put all this effort in and got nothing in return. And so I think another missing element here that people need to round this all out.
Everything that we've been saying you need to be doing this and then you need to start with the expectation That you can go for three years without this leading to any sort of meaningful outcomes I've seen it happen way sooner happen way sooner for us, but I didn't go into it with the expectation Like you saw I never could have imagined that we would ever hit a hundred thousand subscribers let alone in our first 18 months I think I was saying man if we could get to 10 000 in the first year, that'd be fucking crazy 10 ,000 people that want to watch another video about personal branding from me?
My God, right? But going in with those expectations allowed us to have more reinforcement rather than less. And that's where I think a lot of people end up giving up way too early or giving up before they actually see the point where they tip over the edge and start going downhill instead of just running uphill.
To wrap this up, my kind of question to loop back around to our promise that we kind of like we're talking about here in the beginning, which is, Determining their ratio. So somebody determined their ratio.
Is it a time thing? Is it in relation to the amount of time? You know what I'm saying here?
We have a ratio that we typically recommend, which is 75 -25. 75 % is deep, 20 % is niche -wide, and 5 % is actually... personal.
What's funny about the ratio is it gets misunderstood as like, if I have 10 posts, then seven and a half of them need to be deep. Two of them need to be niche wide, and then half of them needs to be a personal post. And what that actually looks like is more of a ratio of how your content as a whole plays out.
That 5 % personal doesn't need to be its own individual piece. I want people to sprinkle that 5 % throughout the other 95 % of their content. As in, you know, I'm constantly referencing my Harley Davidson's or going to a metal show and getting punched in the face.
Like I haven't been to one in, you know, like probably seven months now and I need to go. I'm always referencing these things, which is integrating, right? My personal elements into the deep content that we make.
Not just like individualized posts. Yeah. I would roughly have it be.
75 % of your content should be niche content that is serving only written, only written and packaged for your ideal customer. Now, I'm not saying that you should sandbag your packaging. You need to get really good at how you package for that ideal customer.
Because just because you make it plain and simple doesn't mean that it's going to all of a sudden magically reach them. That's a whole different conversation. But you need to do that.
And then 25 % of your content should be that niche wide. It's written to serve your ideal customer, but it also serves a greater group as a whole. An example of this, I'm not saying we're going to do this, but an example could be a video that is written for the business owner, but also directly applies to musicians.
That would be our version of a niche -wide video as another example here. In the beginning. Correct.
Yes, in the beginning. And if you're not finding traction after six months, I would say 50 -50. Yeah.
Oh, interesting. Would you agree with that? I would say the advice I usually give is opening it up slowly that in five to 10 % increments.
Yes. As in like, so six months in, if you're not getting any traction whatsoever, again, look at your content strategy. How are your hooks?
Like, do they suck? Are you just in your brand positioning? Are you ripping off everyone?
Okay. Like, and just. regurgitating advice.
But if it's truly like you're just struggling with traction there, I typically like, okay, for the next month, open it up 10%, go 35 % niche wide and 65, I believe that's math, 65 % deep. Now let's move to call outs. And by the way, call outs are not necessarily just hooks in short form.
They can be titles on YouTube videos, right? So let's start by, can you define what a call out is? First and foremost, it's a mechanism to drive curiosity in the specific person that you want to reach.
And typically what that looks like, the best version of a call -out is typically calling out where a person, where the specific person you want to reach is, has been, or wants to be. And you typically do that through... accessing their pain or the outcome of their pain.
And so I did a lot of layers there, but essentially a call out is it's, you want to speak to the pain of where they have been, where they are, where they want to be to kind of like wrap up in general. A call out could be a few other things, but I believe the most effective version is that pain or an outcome of the pain. You give this really great example of if you hear a hook that is like, are you tired of being bald all the time?
You're like, eh, First and foremost, again, to the point of like some people might not actually know that like that's their problem or a problem that they I don't actually know if I was tired of being bald. But if you speak to the outcome of that pain or the consequence of that pain, which is like, are you tired of wearing a hat all the time is the example you use?
That's an interesting one. Or another one like, are you tired of being embarrassed at the pool taking your shirt off? Yeah.
Like rather than are you trying to lose 20 pounds? It's like, no, that like maybe I'm not willing to say that. damn i know every time that i've been at the pool i'm a little insecure about taking my shirt off and that hits are you tired of people judging you yeah like like those the consequences of the pain and so Are you tired of saying that, man, these jeans are so tight because I just washed them, even though they've not been washed in weeks, right?
Yes, I agree. I believe it comes back to a copywriting principle. I would describe that as a call -out, right?
It's typically a mechanism to drive curiosity in the people that you want to reach, and typically it's accessing pain or consequences of pain. And so why are they effective? Why do they work so well, even to this day?
Because this has been a thing since, like, the dawn of advertising. To put it in very plain language, you immediately access, like you immediately access the person you are trying to reach by calling them out very specifically.
And if you do it in the right way, you actually reach them versus if you do it in the wrong way, you typically sound like an ad where it sounds like a, like a, an infomercial of like, are you bored and at home and want to go like whatever it is. Let's use a really wide example here for a second. let's use tide pens, like an ad on TV with a tide pen showing a kid running in from the front yard with a green stain on their white shirt.
Like, is that even a call out? Yeah. I think a call out could be visual.
Okay. It just has to be very obvious and very plain in the context of like organic YouTube content. A lot of times I would say it's verbal, especially in.
personal branding. But I think it could be visual. We know they're important.
We know what they are. How are people misusing them? Because I think you get a lot of examples.
You have a lot of examples of when it's done correctly. But I'd be curious to hear, how have you been seeing people do this incorrectly? Let's go through a specific example.
Do you want to use maybe busy executives wanting to get in shape? Yeah. Oh, we have a Rawson Slack member that submitted a clip recently.
And their call out specifically was... And to be very clear, Andrew's a gangster. We love Andrew.
He's got the coolest accent in the world. Scottish, right? Please tell me it's a Scottish accent.
Yes, I believe it is. Okay. Okay.
Yeah. I'm actually just going to pull the clip up right here. If you're 45 to 65 and obese, I don't know what to tell you, but you just don't need a complex plan to lose that first 30 pounds.
Yeah, it's typically just a question base. It's typically like, are you blank? Are you this specific?
What they're doing is they're wrapping in that demographic into their hook and just formulating it as a question, which is, are you blank? And it works, right? It works.
It's a call out. It does speak occasionally to some things. But I believe if you do that, It's just not an interesting way to drive curiosity actually is probably the most basic way that I can put it is I am not inherently interested in that if I hear that as a hook.
See, I think it's a lack of novelty because so many people have done it now. I think it worked at the very beginning of social media. People were like scrolling.
They're like, oh my God, I am between 35 and 45 and trying to lose stubborn belly fat. I think it's actually missing more than components of just novelty. Zooming out for a second here, I believe that there are four things that need to be present in order to invoke curiosity in someone.
But a lot of people tell you to create curiosity in content. And I love that advice. It's great.
It's also, in my opinion, a little bit bullshit. And the reason why I don't think that's good advice is because they're just blanket telling you to just create it. Like it's something out of thin air.
You can't do curiosity. You can't say curiosity. You can only control inputs and then curiosity potentially happens to the right person.
And so I believe there are four components that drive curiosity or that need to be present in order to invoke a curiosity response in somebody because it is an emotional response. The first one being a knowledge gap. A lot of people talk about this.
There's studies done on this. Curiosity, knowledge gaps create a gap between... what somebody currently knows and what they could know or something like that.
Right. And I would argue that those hooks are you 45 to 65 and trying to lose belly fat. I don't know.
It's not a very obvious knowledge gap is what it is. You might just answer it. Yes.
Yeah. No, there is no gap. Yeah.
Great point. It's not an obvious, and it might be implied and there might be like, maybe the next line has the knowledge gap, but you didn't capture it in the first, in the beginning. So I would believe that.
The next thing that I believe needs to be present in order for somebody to potentially be curious is... is a belief that that knowledge gap will be filled. And this is one that a lot of people miss.
This is in the credibility, which is like if somebody watches a clip, but they believe that they're going to be faked out or they don't believe that you can actually tell them what this is like, what is this millionaire going to like in shades going to tell me about my relationship, right? If there's not a belief that the knowledge gap will be filled by this thing, they're probably going to lose curiosity, right?
The next thing that I believe needs to be present. is novelty, like you were talking about, which is if are you 45 to 65, that is not novel. That is not different than baseline.
How I describe novelty is something that is different than baseline. If you walk down, if you go to work every day and you walk down the same hallway or you drive down the same road and it's always the same, it looks the same, you're in a small town, but one day there's a new shop to your right, that is different than baseline and you immediately, your attention is drawn to that.
And so that's what I believe novelty is fundamentally is like, it is just different than what you typically see are different than baseline. And, and I would argue that hook does not do that. So we're verbally processing our way to why these, these, these don't work.
And then the last one is relevance. I do believe that probably hits relevance. Relevance is the thing that determines whether, whether somebody.
A specific person is curious and another person is not. If I have a clip and I am laughing about this or I'm super curious about this clip and I show my girlfriend who is not interested in the nerdy things sometimes that I am of like Elder Scrolls and I show her a clip about Elder Scrolls, she's going to roll her eyes at me because she, how is she, she's not curious, but I am curious, which means that there is an element there that needs to be pulled.
that is not pulled for her. So you can only control inputs of that. I would argue the only thing that a hook like that actually covers or actually hits is relevance.
I wasn't actually planning on bringing curiosity into that, but that is the reason. That is the reason why those hooks don't work. It doesn't actually invoke a curiosity response in the person that you want it to.
And if you're at this point in the podcast, It's our hope that we've delivered a lot of value. We've been giving, giving, giving, giving.
And so if you're at this point, you're in deep. And so what we just described of how we're trying to arm you with the tools, the mechanisms, the principles, the tactics to help you develop your own playbook and game plan for building your personal brand, one that leads to the outcomes you want, not just gets random views from random people and brings random people into your life.
Well, we did a little bit of what we do in Ralston Select in this whole entire podcast. Our whole thing with Ralston Select is designed around arming you with those tools to be able to build your system. It's not a carbon copy system.
And so what I will say is it does require work. It's not like you're just literally carbon copy. You need to learn.
these principles, these tactics, and how you apply them to your personal brand. But that's what we do in Ralston Select. If you're at this point, I think maybe trust is on the higher end with us.
And so if you trust that we can help you go further than just what we can do in the free content, and I'm talking like literally Trevor doing what he did on that short form clip with your content, breaking it down and giving you direct feedback and generalizing to everybody else on the call. That's what we do in Ralston Select.
If you want more information, you can go to Caleb Ralston. dot com slash select. And you can join the wait list.
We only open enrollment, I think, like one week every quarter. And so there is your urgency there. You can join the wait list.
And when it opens, you can join the group and potentially get your content graded by Mr. Trevor Odom. There's also other fun things, you know, Caleb.
I also do a Q &A in there. It's honestly the best thing I think that we have built yet. And we've put out some really gangster shit that I think a lot of people have gotten value out of on YouTube, but there's nothing quite like what we have done in Ralston Select.
You can play this clip over and over. Let's come up with a better hook. How would you create curiosity with this specific clip?
The first thing that I want to do is make the knowledge gap more obvious. So breaking down the components, right? Knowledge gap, belief of the knowledge gap can be filled.
Novelty and relevance. We already hit relevance on this. And so how can we include the other three elements within this to make this a good hook?
The first thing that I want to attack is the knowledge gap itself, which is I want to make that a lot more obvious. And so I would probably for a clip like this, I would probably create an actual like verbal, like if you're here and want to be here, if you look like this. And I would probably even visually pop up an image of a middle -aged man so that, to your point, visually, I'm calling out a middle -aged person rather than a young person.
Does this need to be somebody that he's worked with? Would that maybe help with people's believability that he can close the gap? Like if he were to say, do you want to look like this?
Go from this to this. And then maybe he ended his hook by saying, I actually took this person from here to here. Yeah, yeah.
That's a way that you can add that. Okay. There's a lot of ways that you can incorporate these elements.
That's what I'm trying to reach here. It's like the way I would immediately attack it is like, I want to include a knowledge gap first and then like tackle the other components. Belief needs to be in there somewhere.
I think belief doesn't necessarily need to, uh, belief can also be inherent, which is like, if I hear that hook, if you're here, if you look like this and you want to look like this by, by summer 2026, you know, or by, you know, or have a, a Euro summer. body like this i don't know just a fun way to kind of kind of play with the language there there is a belief in that knowledge like that knowledge gap itself when i'm pointing those things out of like there's a belief that this is going somewhere and then you can hit that credibility statement second of like well this is one of my clients and here's exactly how i did it or uh i worked with dave here and this is exactly how he did it in three weeks so he was ready for his summer vacation you know like something like that that's probably not the exact language that i would do I would probably immediately take it from like, if you want to go from here to here, I do that visually so that there's an element of novelty in there of like, this is different than what you typically see.
I'm not just talking about this thing. I'm like, if you want to go from this to this, I'd include a time element in there because I just think that inherently makes something more interesting and typically appeals to, it appeals to a desire. When you're calling somebody out or calling a specific person out in your content, oftentimes the thing is not enough.
It's how they get the thing that needs to be the mechanism, right? Do you want to lose weight? Sure, I get it.
Like, yeah, I want to lose weight. Everybody wants to lose weight. Like everybody in their 30s or 40s are like, yeah, I could lose a few pounds.
but there's a reason they haven't done it. So can you appeal to the reason why they haven't done it? I would argue it's effort or it's time or it's like, you know what?
So you need to incorporate an element of that too. That makes it people, a lot of people call like these like super hooks, these like strategists talk about like super hooks that I would argue. would make it a mega hook, in my opinion.
It would be like, can you appeal to the desire underneath? The reason why they haven't done it for, especially for this type of niche. So I'd incorporate a time element or effortly, or like if it's February or March or April, and you're like, and you want to hit this body by summer, right?
So I'd include some sort of element in there to why they haven't done it. That visual element, I would, yes, I would have it as a client of theirs so that you can hit that second line. And it's just easier to like, if this is a middle -aged man, if 40, cause he calls out 45 to 65 in here, having that, that image oftentimes means that you might not need to say it.
You might not need to inherently call that out. That's probably, I believe that hits novelty. That hits a knowledge gap that hits belief of the knowledge gap.
And that hits relevance, all of them. And which I would say we improve that hook. Let's write it out.
And real quick while you're doing this, Andrew, you are an absolute champ. We appreciate you being down with us, utilizing your clip as an example. We also hope that you make this as a hook for one of your videos because we believe it will do well.
If you want to go from looking like this to looking like this with less than two hours of effort every week, I got you. That'd be a hook. Just like that.
That is how I would probably improve that hook. And I would argue that hits all four elements or four components of curiosity. We just talked about short form there.
That was a short form clip. Obviously, that applies to long form as well. But let's move to the debate between short form versus long form.
Because if I'm a solo creator and I'm starting out or I have. gotten to a sticking point and I feel like basically I'm kind of just starting over, starting from scratch. After watching this, I'm going to make a lot of different changes to my personal brand strategy.
Where should I start? Short form or long form? Let's first actually, before we answer that question, what is the value of short form and what is the value of long form in your eyes?
The value is honestly based on what you want to have happen more than anything. I think you can accomplish similar things with both.
I think that in general, the way people typically think about it is short form. You get facial recognition, right? You get more eyeballs faster potentially.
And then long form, you can go deeper. It's like you can, instead of chatting online, right? You can go, you can invite them into your house is kind of the analogy that I would put it with your long form.
And yes, I would, I would agree with that. But at the highest level, attacking the question of where do you want to start, I believe you need to answer two questions or a couple questions before that, which is, A, what medium do you perform best at, right? What are you good at?
Are you verbose? Are you very, like, are you long -winded in your answers and stuff like that? I would argue that you might want to stick with a podcast format or a long -form type of format there.
So, like, You need to reverse engineer you as the person. And then the second thing is just what do you want to have happen?
And I believe that then you could answer short form or long form and the answer becomes pretty obvious. Is there a bigger barrier to entry though for short form versus long form? Like if I'm just starting off, is there a little bit of the answer is based on like what is easiest?
I think as a rule of thumb, It has been easier in the past to establish traction, this thing traction that we've been talking about with short form content. I would generally agree with that for the mass majority of people is it's been easier to gain traction, eyeballs, attention with the people that you want to reach in general in short form content rather than long form content.
And it does gear you up to like to then make. make that long form but like we started with long form so there are also other cases it's not really a rule but more just like an observation you had yeah it's an observation that i've had and i would argue uh actually funny enough this is actually like just a a deep thing that we we've actually been recently talking about in the car i think when we were on shoot here is like I actually think in the past six to 12 months, YouTube has been like a wide, maybe two years, maybe one to two years.
Like YouTube has been a very wide open, like the people who have like very deep expertise and actually know what they're talking about. I actually argue in the last 18 months, there's been a bigger window on long form for the experts than in short form because of such a crowded marketplace in short form and so much noise there.
I would say that gap is closing. and has like has been closing for six to 12 months as in like a lot of people are jumping over it's there was this like metrical analysis that was like i believe youtube was the only platform that was up maybe facebook might have been too um but it was like the only platform that was up and overall impressions and i like so the only one instagram was down TikTok was down because it's become so crowded.
And so there's been this weird thing, but I believe that window is closing. But I would say yes, in general, as an observation, short form has a lower barrier to entry than long form content, but it's not a necessarily like inherent rule. Would you say that's why you see so many creators that have like, I mean, because we see it all the time.
people that have hundreds of thousands millions of followers on instagram or tick tock yet have and there's nothing i'm not like making a value claim on this but they have less than 10 000 on youtube oh they're not gaining much traction there i've seen millions yeah i've seen i saw an account the other day that had like three or four million followers um and had 26 000 subscribers on youtube um so it happens and it's definitely like that was the format that worked well for them that they are that they can execute very like super well they can reach their ideal customer and that's where like things are happening they're trying to expand over to long form and they're experiencing obviously it looks like they're experiencing like the gap between what is short form and long form content um but they're cracking it and it happens over time so my advice typically is whichever one uh Once you answer those questions and you determine whichever one that you start on, I always like to, we always talk about a secondary platform or a secondary, like when you are trying to cut in or trying to expand into, if you start with long form and go into short form, or if you start with short form and go into long form, the most basic advice that I have for people is just take your top performers that you've had and just expand on them deeply with your content.
Or like. chunk them down to like a summary. Yes, chunk them down if it's going from long term to short form.
And we've had success with that after filming like a, you know, seven hour course or whatever. A 12 hour film day, we filmed like a five minute to 10 minute. Like recap.
Yeah, recap. And they've actually done really well for us on Instagram, like as a little side note. That's for everyone like watching, that's the most basic way.
You've talked about this in the past and I would love for you to touch on this of like, if you are only on one platform, Even if you're like, you can be on multiple different shorts platforms. If you're on one short platform only, like you have a lot, you're sitting on a lot of risk.
Remember when TikTok was about to be banned and all these like UGC creators and everyone was like, oh shit, I'm about to lose all my income. uh that could have been prevented had we thought about that maybe you don't have necessarily like the bandwidth or anything but once you do starting to expand that over i think that there is a ton of value in being a multi -dimensional or multi uh multi -medium creator yeah um and i believe that should be your goal over time uh with regardless of whichever one that you start on it's funny very early on in my career i was friends with a a tick talker um who did it was like uh he cleaned crime scenes wild yeah it was like and he made really cool content and the first thing that we had a call and i was like i love what you're doing and like i know that you're just he's having fun like it's not even like a business thing yet but like he's just having fun and the first thing that i told him was like i would keep making on tick tock tomorrow i want you to make a like a youtube video
And I believe he got over like a million subscribers on YouTube and like completely blew up. And his account on TikTok, as a lot of TikTok accounts have done in the last five years, is pretty much dead. But he has that core audience on YouTube.
Or like for us, we've established a newsletter, an email audience of over like 70 ,000 people that we can completely control. I saw this thing the other day that was like, email is the only platform that you control. your audience on, which I don't know if that's true or not, but that's an interesting thing.
And so expanding that is that once you establish, have clear systems, have clear things that you have done on one medium, expanding that is a core thing that you need to be thinking of within six to 12 months. Love. I completely agree.
Let's talk through prioritizing it because there's a couple of things that I think we can speak to that is useful for the audience on figuring out, do I prioritize short form in the beginning or long form? And one thing that I'll speak to, which I did not have this lens before I started making my own content, which is I actually think that if you are a wildly deep expert who has been doing the thing that you do for a very long time, you are actually going to find short form more difficult.
And I agree that for the masses, short form has a lower barrier to entry. We know this to be true. You just whip your phone out, record a quick clip and post on Instagram.
I found for me, it was very difficult to get the nuance of the information I wanted to share across in a short form clip. And so I have found for myself and a lot of the clients that we work one -on -one with, They don't love sessions where they're filming shorts because they find it very difficult to communicate a valuable, a truly useful, valuable nugget in such a short amount of time.
Now, it's not that it's impossible. It's that. we have not trained ourselves or a lot of people have not trained themselves to be able to do that.
And so actually I found YouTube to be a lot easier to make content that I was proud of because I was able to cover all the little caveats and nuances that I add to the points that I share. If you're a really, really deep expert that's been doing the damn thing for like five, 10, 15 plus years, I think you may actually find it.
to be easier to start with long form content and learn how to structure that appropriately to get people to continue watching. In the beginning, you're just going to be like, you know, word vomiting and brain dumping and stuff. But over time, you can start to refine that structure.
And I find that is a lot easier. If you are more of a student, you're not the expert, then I think that short form is a much easier way for you to start because you get to take people on the journey and it can be like a series that you do. Day one of learning how to vibe code with Claude or whatever, right?
And that becomes a very interesting thing. And because you're a student and maybe don't have as much to speak about, it might be a little harder to actually maintain any sort of depth in a long form video. And so maybe that's a good frame right there.
There's a lot of nuance that we could go into, but I think that's one of the first layers that you look at is like. you know, do you got the gift of gab like I do? Maybe short form isn't the way to start, you know?
And maybe what you do is you accept the fact because to your point, I don't want people to be on just one platform. Even if you're a solo creator, you need a primary and a secondary. And so if you are that solo creator that has the primary as long form YouTube content, cool.
You accept the fact that your short form is not going to potentially do as well because all you're doing is just repurposing and mining from your long form. Yeah. To your point of like, I mean, it all comes back to like knowing what you are comfortable with and what you like.
Yes. That I think the other thing there is especially for our core audience of like entrepreneurs and, and, and people like that, um, they expect a certain amount of ROI for like a leverage, uh, getting a lot out for what you put in. And I would argue again, long form content for those types of people is going to be a way that you can put, um, you do.
This is where you like, you do have to put more effort into a long form piece, usually than a short form piece in general. Again, I've seen people spend days writing shorts and they blow up and that's a thing that they do. But you in general, as a rule, basic, you know, my basic observation is, yes, you've put more effort into this, but you get a lot more out because then you can repurpose that.
I know a lot of people are going to comment like repurposing is dead or it's not useful. Yes. But for somebody who is.
who is maximizing their time for somebody who what they want to have happen is leverage is getting a lot out for what they put in every solo creator yeah every solo creator every entrepreneur right um every business owner well they do want to it was actually a question from a select member who was like why is it that i see all these big entrepreneur -like characters doing repurposed low effort repurposed content versus They're filming with their iPhone and they're like setting it up and doing it all themselves.
And I was like, well, what do we think that we're they're maximizing for? Right. Their strategy is built around their time constraint.
Yes. And so those those constraints also have to be factored into the platform or the thing that you're choosing. Big point to all the content strategists that like to pick apart the big dogs and what they're doing, but they don't realize that their whole strategy is built around the fact that some of these characters have less than four hours like.
a week or really more like less than two hours a week that they can dedicate to content and so yes that is also an incredibly important point here is knowing your schedule and knowing what time you can actually consistently not for one week two weeks three weeks three months definitely but yes consistently uh and there can be ebbs and flows you can dial back you can increase but what can you consistently do because that's the most important part here now One interesting thing that I will throw out here that counters what I just said is also people who are deep experts on what they do.
They're the expert. They also typically have a bias towards data. And if you're doing long form content, not always, but if you do long form content, sometimes if you're like me and you only do one a month, you get less of a or it's a longer feedback loop versus if you do shorts.
Low effort shorts. Could you post five a week and get more data on what topics, what hooks, what pain points that you speak to are resonating with your audience faster? And so you start understanding what your audience is fucking with and you can double down on that quicker than let's say if you were doing a YouTube video every two weeks or once a month.
Yeah, because counter to the point that we were making with like a long form, yes, does have more leverage. The other thing that especially for solo creators, they have the advantage of, to your point, is a strategy that I recommend to a lot of people is cool. Start on Instagram if that's what you're hot on.
That's what fits you. That's what fits your media like that. That medium fits you.
get a lot of data very quickly, use that as a testing ground to then, like I was talking about when you're expanding to the other medium, which in this case is long form, then you can just take your top performers and go deeper on those top performers in that case. And so there is a point to be said where it really just comes down to your bandwidth.
who you are, how you roll, your bandwidth, your constraints, and forming a strategy around those things, right, are the biggest things that you need to think about when starting out. So, Trevor, are you basically saying that there is no one -size -fits -all playbook that everybody carbon copies? Unfortunately, no.
And so really what this is about is we're trying to arm you with the tools and information to be able to determine your own strategy. The majority of people in our space have one playbook that they recommend everybody runs. And I love the simplicity in that.
I love the intention behind it. The problem is that is not how humans work. It's like, you know, personal trainers at the highest level know that like there is no one diet or one workout program for everybody.
because we're all different humans and have different variables and so the best personal trainers the best nutritionists understand the context of the individual right like i remember this is again another gary example but you know i worked for a man who had a personal trainer travel with him 24 7. like we'd be like filming a meeting that he's having and all of a sudden mike or jordan walks in with a protein shake is like all right drink this g right and was that necessarily the program they designed The most optimized?
No, it was the most optimized for a man who literally would never have a break from the moment he started working to the moment he ended. The only breaks were to take a piss. Like that's it, right?
And so you have to come up with a completely different strategy. Using that example, if an entrepreneur is willing to dedicate, because there's some online right now that are crushing it and they're dedicating 25 to 40 hours a week to their content. And then you have other characters like Gary, who's still posting a thousand posts a day right now.
he's probably dedicating what? Less than 20 minutes a day. I don't know what it currently is, but I know that's what it was when I was on the team.
It was like less than five minutes a day was dedicated towards content. If I could get him to summarize a daily V at the end of the day in 60 seconds, that was like game changer, right? What I'm giving is kind of the wide end of the spectrum.
We've worked with people who dedicate, you know, almost like the majority of their week to making content. I've also worked with people or worked for people. that dedicate less than five minutes a week.
And so what we're giving is we understand there is a wider spectrum here. And what we're trying to arm people with is some of the tools and tactics and principles they can use to help develop their own strategy, their own playbook. Yeah, I think to tie this up in a neat little bow, knowing what not to do is a lot of times more useful, especially for beginners than knowing what to do.
It's why you see a lot of people going like, avoid this and don't do this, right? It works. The thing not to do here is look at creators that are established and both in the mediums that they're choosing and their overall content strategy and being like, how can I do that?
Or why are they picking that apart? Because to your point, why does Gary not do direct to camera YouTube videos?
There's a very specific reason for that. And it's in like how he rolls, right? And then the strategy is then built around that.
And then the medium that they chose in the beginning is built around those things. So the thing not to do is look at where somebody is a creator that you like to follow and then ask, how can you emulate that strategy? It's to...
You need to hold up a mirror to yourself and be like, what is going to be useful for me? And then knowing that you can expand over time, all these creators that you follow, a lot of them, like didn't Gary start on Twitter? Yeah.
Gary didn't start on YouTube. Twitter and YouTube. Yeah.
Back in the day, but on YouTube, it was a different video platform before YouTube, right? He did YouTube. And then he made that, that funny, uh, Vidler, uh, little escapade for a couple of years.
But like these creators that you follow, When they're established on a platform, a lot of times they started on a completely different one. And you wouldn't even know that because you hopped on the bandwagon later on.
But you can expand up similar to the pawns that we were talking about with your TAM, with your total addressable market, with the people that you're trying to reach. You can also chunk up. You can also platform up, medium up over time.
You just need to pick the thing that's right for you in the beginning. But the real, real here, we've talked a lot about different principles and tactics that people can use. The most important thing when starting out, especially as a solo creator, when you're in the beginning is to not overthink and to have a bias towards action.
It's not debating, it's doing, okay? You're going to get far more value and you're going to get a lot more learnings and traction off of doing versus debating. So if there's two routes that we gave you in this podcast that you are debating over right now, I want you to stop debating, make a decision.
go down that path, and then you can pivot. Doing and pivoting is far faster and far better for your personal brand than spending that same amount of time just debating and not having actual data to make your decisions off of. Now, if you've gotten to this point, you are probably very serious about building your personal brand.
And so what might be really cool is to actually watch an episode between Trevor and I where we go through what we focused on month by month in the first 12 months. of building my personal brand to over 250 ,000 followers by just posting once a month on YouTube. It was fucking crazy.
You can click here to watch that.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Caleb Ralston grew his channel to 250,000-plus followers posting once a month before scaling past 100,000 YouTube subscribers in just over a year. In this two-host conversation with his creative director Trevor Odom, he and Trevor lay out the exact content ratio, positioning framework, and hook-writing method behind that growth, aimed squarely at the solo creator building alone and stuck.
How they asked for the click.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
