The Four-Level Short-Form Funnel: Get Views and Customers
Tom Noske's four-layer content framework for personal brands that want broad reach and real conversion from the same account.
Posted
yesterday
Duration
Format
Essay
educational
Views
586
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
A personal brand needs four kinds of content at once, broad audience, inspiration, education and product, and you have to accept that each level gets very different view counts on the same account.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A creator with a coaching offer or digital product who gets decent views but almost no customers and can't figure out why.
An educator who posts only teaching content, converts well on a small audience, and is stuck at low view counts.
Someone building a personal brand on short-form who feels pulled between wanting to go viral and wanting to run a real business.
SKIP IF…
You don't sell anything and just want entertainment or hobby content, since the whole framework is built around conversion.
You want a platform tactics video with hooks, edits and posting times, because this stays at strategy level.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Creators fall into two traps: the influencer trap overvalues views, the educator trap overvalues conversion. Tom Noske's fix is a four-level short-form funnel. Audience content makes the idea the hero and chases total audience size. Inspiration content makes you the hero through your origin story. Education content simply teaches, and product content only sells. Each level gets fewer views, roughly 500K to 1M, 100K to 500K, 10K to 100K, and 5K to 10K, and that's the point. He recommends a 40/25/25/10 split across the four levels.
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Views and sales come from different content, so a healthy account posts across four levels and judges each by its own job instead of by total views.
Chasing views alone and chasing conversion alone both fail, because most viewers never buy and buyers can't find you without awareness first.
Audience content makes the idea the hero. Opinions, day in the life, comedy and relatable takes can reach a broad crowd because they don't filter by who you are.
Judge an idea by its total audience size. Broad insight content and above counts as audience content, while niche value content is much narrower.
Inspiration content adds your story to the idea, and the test is whether a random follower could retell your origin story accurately.
Once layers one and two are working, education content can simply promise an outcome and deliver it, with no need to double as entertainment.
Product content only sells and will always get the lowest views, so measure it by customers, not reach.
Expect swings on one account, roughly 500K to 1M for audience content down to 5K to 10K for product content, and treat that as the strategy working.
Broad reach brings strangers, so a viral video can lower your click-through rate while the quiet product videos quietly close sales.
A starting mix is 40% audience, 25% inspiration, 25% education and 10% product content.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
TAS (total audience size)
The number of people worldwide who could plausibly be interested in the idea a piece of content represents. Audience content aims to maximize it.
Insight content
Content where the viewer only has to listen to an idea, as opposed to value content where they have to apply a system or framework.
Surrogate for the idea
Tom's phrase for the creator's role in audience content: you carry a good idea out to people who don't know you, without making yourself the subject.
“When someone says my name, what is the first thing that comes to mind?”
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The Script
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There are two camps of people watching this video right now. Camp number one has no trouble getting views. They get lots and lots of views, but very few of those views turn into customers and so their biggest problem is they cannot make money.
Then there is camp two, who has a very difficult time getting views. Whatever they do, they cannot get people to watch their content, but they have a great time converting a high percentage of their viewers into customers. And both camps of people would do a lot better if they got married and worked.
together. And so in today's video, I'm going to share with you my four -part framework for organic content. It allows me to get lots of views, but also get lots of customers and have the best of both worlds.
There is more than likely two very distinct parts of your brain. On one side, you've got the side of you that wants to be famous and you can pretend all you want that you don't have that part of your brain, but you're probably lying to yourself. If you make content on the internet and you want to build a business through your personal brand, there is probably a part of you that wants to be famous.
Then you have the other part of your brain, which is the side of you that's rational and realistic. And that's the side of you that wants to build a business. Now, the issue.
is that these two are in constant conflict. There is the side of you that wants to just make content, put it out there, get views, get likes, get followers. And then there's a part of you that just wants to build a business and just focus on your customers and just focus on the product.
But these two, if they work together, can help each other. See, the influencer trap on one side, where they're only wanting to get famous, they only want to make content, is overvaluing views and undervaluing conversion. These people chase views at the expense of everything else and the success of a piece of content is solely determined by total views.
And so if something gets a lot of views, but no customers, that is in their mind a success. Whereas a piece of content that gets no views, but makes lots of money in their mind is a complete failure. Whereas on the other side, you have the educator trap and these people overvalue conversion and undervalue viewership.
These people think you don't need more views. Now I've honestly said many times that you can get good conversions out of low views and I still believe that.
But the thing you have to understand is you do need awareness. If you have zero awareness and you're only focused on bottom of funnel content, it's going to be very difficult to have those people on your low view videos. end up converting.
And so you have to start with top of funnel awareness. And so they fixate on business results and that makes their content suck. These people are so fixated on converting the biggest possible group they can that their content just kind of ends up sucking.
What you need to understand is that 99 % of your audience will never buy. Whereas these people who are focused on building a business and only being an educator, they think in their mind that if they just make only educational content, only bottom of funnel content, that they'll convert a higher percentage of their audience.
What you can then do by understanding this is you can make content for both of these people. You can make content for 100 % of your audience. So it just creates awareness, gives value, provides something in exchange for the time they're giving you.
But then you will convert these people out of that because they watch that content and go, you know what? I wanna do business with this person. Understanding that the solution isn't either or, the solution is you need to do both in your content.
You will have a better personal brand and you will have a better business. And the short form funnel that I'm about to explain to you is the solution to this problem. The short form funnel.
has four key content levels. Level number one is audience content. The purpose of this is just to drive audience growth.
You're making this content purely on the idea that you're trying to drive total or top of funnel awareness. Then you have inspiration content. And the purpose of this content is to get people invested in you.
At this level, you just need people to watch this content and go, I like this person. I want to learn more. They're not willing to buy yet.
They understand enough about you that they're willing to follow. Then you have education content. This is where you're building authority, you're building trust, you're doing exactly what I'm doing right now.
This content that I make on YouTube is designed to build trust. It's designed to demonstrate my authority. It is designed to show you that I could potentially be the person who's gonna solve your problem in relation to building your offer and monetizing it with a personal brand.
And then down the bottom, you have product and CTA content. And these four pieces of content should be represented throughout your entire content strategy. At the top, you're going broad.
You're just trying to hit that total audience, 100 % of your audience. But as you... work your way down, you're trying to get narrower and narrower and narrower as you move down.
Now, the key thing you need to understand is when I make audience content, I usually hit between 500K and a million views per video. These are the videos that I make that are pseudo motivational, B -roll videos with cinematic voiceover. These are the videos that I make where I'm really not the subject of the video besides me being in the footage.
The subject of the video is the idea. It's the insight. It's the thing I'm talking about in the video, not me.
and that's how it's able to connect with a bigger audience. When I make inspiration content, I usually get between 100K and 500K views. These are videos where I'm just sharing an insight from my life.
I'm sharing something that has no relation to my business, no niche relation to whatever I do, but it has some kind of relation to my own lifestyle, my motivations, my mindset around money. For education content, I usually, and this is the bulk of my content, I usually get between 10 and 100 ,000 views on these videos. where I'm sharing a particular idea or demonstrating my authority.
And then down the bottom, I can reasonably predict that these videos are going to get between 5 ,000 and 10 ,000 views. Now, the crucially important thing you need to understand is that these views are on the same account. And so one day I could post a video that literally gets a million views and the very next day post a video that gets 5 ,000 views.
And I need to be okay with that because it all fits into the overall strategy for my brand. I'm okay with posting a video that gets a fraction of the views that I'm capable of because I know that it's serving a purpose. And that's the problem that most people have is they'll post a video one day that gets 150 ,000 views.
And then the very next day, they'll post a video that's literally designed to get them more customers. It's designed to convert more of their audience. And so by definition, a smaller percentage of their audience is gonna resonate with it.
And it gets fine. views and suddenly they're disappointed even though it's exactly what they were supposed to do and so you need to be comfortable with posting one day and getting massive views and the very next day getting no views and your willingness to be comfortable with that is directly proportional to how well you'll implement this strategy and how much money your brand will make and so level one is audience content.
At this level, the goal is just to maximize what I call TAS or total audience size. All you want to think about here is what is the total audience size of the thing that I'm talking about, of the idea I'm representing, of the framework I'm sharing, of the insight I'm sharing. What is the total audience size of this idea?
And so I want you to think about it like this. At the bottom here, we have 100 ,000 people globally who are interested in niche specific value content. This is niche.
And then you're giving value. And so not only do they need to be interested in the niche, they need to be interested in receiving value from you. So it's a very small group of people.
Then you have a million people. And this is niche specific insight content. Insight content is different to value content because insight content, all they really need to do is listen.
This is insight content. I'm sharing a piece of insight about organic content that you can take away and use or not use. Whereas I post videos regularly that are value content where I'm actually teaching.
you a system or a framework that you actually have to implement in the video and so as you go from insight to value you reduce the total audience size for that content then you have a hundred million people globally who are interested in broad insight content this is a broad topic with an insight. This might be motivation in general, and you're going to share an insight about motivation, or it might be lifestyle in general, and you're going to share an insight that you've learned about that particular topic.
It's a broad topic, but you're sharing an insight, so it's still slightly niched. Then you have a billion people, and this is broad English -speaking content. There are billions of people or a billion people on planet Earth who could watch a broad English -speaking piece of content and find it funny or entertaining.
or insightful. This is usually not talking about a specific thing. This is usually just sharing something that could be entertaining to an audience.
Then you have 8 billion people who could watch a piece of broad visual only content and find it funny, entertaining, or at least inspiring enough to watch for the few seconds that it's on screen. A really good example of this is imagine that I film a drone clip of the Dolomites. Every single human being on planet Earth can look at a drone clip of a drone flying through the Dolomites in Italy and go.
That's pretty cool. That is as broad as you can possibly go. No one's speaking English.
No one's on screen. So you're not filtering for the type of person. There's no opinions attached to the video.
There's no insights attached to the video. And so there's nothing for people to look at and go, this is for me or not for me. It's just a video of something that people could look at and go, that's pretty cool.
And so between niche specific value content and a drone clip of the Dolomites, you need to raise the floor of where you're going to set your audience content. you can just think about it like this. Anything above the floor of broad insight content can be considered audience content because you're not the hero of this story.
The idea is the hero. These people don't know you. And so you are just the vehicle representing the insight.
You are just the vehicle, the surrogate for this idea. Do not attach your story, your insights, or your personality to this piece of content yet. You just want to make the idea the hero.
You can be the hero in the next piece of content. Now, formats for audience content. is opinion videos.
Share a take that could split a room. Share an opinion that you have that you think 50 % of the room would go, nah, I don't like that. And 50 % of the room would go, yes, I like that.
Day in the life videos. These are amazing for this because it shows off what you do every day, but you're not the hero. You got to remember, people are not watching a day in the life video because they want to learn about you.
They're watching a day in the life video because they can compare their life and what they do every day to what a stranger on the internet does every day. And then they can make a judgment call on whether their life is better or worse than yours. They don't care about who it is living the life.
They only compare about the comparison, the contrast between their life and your life, this stranger's life on the internet. You've got comedy and skits, so make your audience laugh. If you can make people laugh, you'll have a broad audience.
You'll have an amazing time building that audience. Relatable, share a relatable or hot take on a subject. Share something where, again, you're not the hero yet.
You're just sharing something that a broad group of people could listen to and watch and go, oh, I've felt like that. You wanna make that the hero of this content. The key frame for audience content is again, you are not the reason people will watch yet.
You will be in the future, but these are a group of people who don't know you yet. You are not the hero of this content yet. The core idea of the video is why they will watch.
The opinion. the relatable story, the insight, the comedy, the thing is why they will watch. They don't yet care about you.
Your job at this level is to be a surrogate for prolific ideas. You wanna be the surrogate or the vehicle that brings a good idea, puts it out into the internet so other people can listen to that idea and go, wow, I like that idea. Maybe I'll listen to this person more in the future.
Level two. is inspiration content. This is where we add the eye to your brand.
We add you into your personal brand. And we do this by making you the hero of the idea. All we do differently between audience content and inspiration content is we attach your story to the idea.
So now we make you the hero of the insight. And so if you were sharing an insight about motivation, and you were talking about how motivation is finite and you shouldn't rely on it, you should tell a personal story in relation to how you discovered that in your own life.
If you wanna share an insight around wealth management and how people should really take their financial future seriously, you could tell a personal story in relation to you not taking that seriously and how that was at consequence to your life. We're not teaching yet. We're not actually giving any value yet.
We're just getting people interested in you. This is how you'll get them willing to listen, willing to engage. willing to learn from you in the future.
Let me paint you a picture of how this would work or what type of content you need to make. If there was a gunman and he was holding a gun to your head and the only way that you could save your life was for the next six months, you have to make so much content that six months from now, that gunman could choose a random follower from your audience and they had to retell your origin story with a 100 % accuracy and your life depended on how accurately they could tell your origin story, what content would you...
make. That is the content you need to make for inspiration content. You need to fill in the picture for your audience.
You need to tell the story of your upbringing. You need to tell the story of why you got into this. You need to tell the story of your business and how it started.
You need to tell the story of why you're so motivated by this and where you're trying to get to in the future. You need to tell all of these stories. So if a random follower was selected from your audience, they would be able to recount your origin story with 100 % accuracy.
That is inspiration content. Formats for inspiration content is lifestyle content that signals your core values. So it can't just be day in the life videos.
It needs to be lifestyle content that signals your opinions on certain things. And so I've made videos in the past where I talk about how I drive an expensive car and I wear expensive watches, but I do that because I want signals that represent my gratitude for the work that I've done. And so that way I'm sharing a lifestyle piece of content, my watches and my car and what I have, but I'm sharing it in a way that attaches it to my core values.
around gratitude and wealth building. For vulnerability content, you wanna share real stories. You wanna share relatable stories.
You wanna share your origin story. You wanna share timeline content so that shares the journey to today. So how did you start your business?
Why did you start your business? What failures have you been through on the way? What have you been through that has led to this moment today?
The goal of this layer is to control the storyline. You just need to control the story from your audience's perspective. You need to be in charge of how they...
receive your content. The best way to think about this is when someone says my name, Tom Nosky, what is the first thing that comes to mind? So replace Tom Nosky with your name.
When someone says James, what is the first thing that comes to mind? When someone says Grace, what is the first thing that comes to mind? When someone says Joy, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
You want to control that narrative. You want to give people an impression that they will remember. That is inspiration content.
Level three. is education content. This is the authority builder.
Now, this layer is where most of you spend 90 % of your time. If you're watching my content and you're an educator and you make good content, you've built an audience and you have a coaching business or you have a digital product or you sell a course, the problem is right now that you're spending 90 % of your time trying to teach people.
But the issue is... layer one and layer two are completely empty. So you're not filtering those people through to your education content.
And so the number of people that are listening to you and valuing you is lower than it could be. But here's the beautiful thing about doing layers one and two really well. If you do layer one audience content and layer two inspiration content really well, when you get to layer three, you can just teach.
You don't have to worry about. being really engaging. You don't have to worry about it being like edutainment.
You don't have to worry about having this amazing hook or this incredible structure. You can just give value. And it's a beautiful thing once you get there and realize that all you need to do if you want to demonstrate your authority is take the things that you're an expert in.
and give unconditionally. And when you do that, people will value that significantly more than you trying to do this Frankenstein video where you're trying to be entertaining and let people understand your origin story and give value at the same time. That is incredibly difficult.
It is so much easier when you finally understand that your goal when you're educating is simply to educate and nothing else. Now, I'm not going to teach you how to teach your own shit. You're good at that.
But the idea is you just wanna promise an outcome and then deliver on that outcome. And so I promised you an outcome at the start of this video and with the title and with the thumbnail, I am now delivering on that outcome. I'm not trying to do anything else.
My only purpose here is to deliver on the outcome that I promised at the start of this video. Level four, product and CTA content. This is the conversion layer.
This is the process of turning your viewers from every step into customers. And so this content is just for selling. When you get to this level, don't try to get views.
Don't try to hook people in. Don't try to do anything else. Your only purpose here is to sell.
And so student wins, program launches, what's inside, basically everything that was spoken about was sending content. Give people an open home for what it's like to be a client in your business. If you can show people what it is like to be a client, they will more than likely want to become a client in the future.
And so this is the content where I share student case studies, student wins, examples. of what it's like to be in my program, examples of tools that we share with members in the program. This is all the stuff that I share with you that makes you get to rehearse what it's like to be a client.
This content will always get the lowest views and that's okay. You gotta remember, if you make broad content and it gets a million views and now you're making a piece of content that is only designed for the people that are warmest in your audience who are ready to buy, it is by definition going to get significantly less views.
and that's okay. I am totally okay with these videos not selling 1 .1 million views, 2 .1 million views, 364 ,000 views, 820 ,000 views. These videos cumulatively probably have very few customers, but I'm okay with that because I'm also okay with these videos not getting many views.
15K views, 16K views, 15K views, 14K views, but all of these videos. probably contributed significantly to getting people to buy. And so you have to be okay with getting lots of views and no customers and then getting no views and lots of customers.
It is literally inverted. I had a video just recently go viral on YouTube. It got 110 ,000 views or 113 ,000 views.
And it literally went the opposite direction as soon as it took off. And so usually my videos get 5 % of viewers to click on the landing page for time to build. This video got less than 1%.
it got to 100 ,000 views the amount of people that were clicking on the link in bio significantly dropped because the moment that it popped off it reached a broad audience who don't know who I am. And so it is by definition not going to get customers because these people don't know me yet. And I'm okay with that because that was not the purpose of that piece of content.
Now, what's the split? Because I know inevitably you guys will ask. I think you should be making 40 % audience content, 25 % inspiration content, 25 % education content, and 10 % CTA or product content.
If you can stick to this split roughly, you'll do a pretty good job. You'll have a great personal brand. You'll have a great business.
And those two conflicting. sides of your brain that wanna be famous and wanna make lots of money will be perfectly in peace and in harmony. If you enjoyed this video and you found it valuable, I really think you should watch this one next.
It goes over my entire framework for building a 1 % personal brand. And so everything we spoke about today, it dives deep into the frameworks around what creates a 1 % personal brand. And so if you are now making these four pillars of content and you wanna do each of them really, really well, this is the video to watch next.
I'll see you over there.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The title promises a $42,989.35 week, but the video is really about why your views and your sales don't line up. Tom Noske splits creators into two camps and offers one funnel that serves both.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:24model
The Short-Form Funnel
Audience content
Inspiration content
Education content
Product and CTA content
Four content levels that run from broad awareness to narrow conversion, all posted on the same account.
Steal forany personal brand with an offer
06:33list
Total audience size ladder
100,000: niche value content
1 million: niche insight content
100 million: broad insight content
1 billion: broad English-speaking content
8 billion: broad visual-only content
A scale for judging how big the potential audience is for an idea. Anything above broad insight counts as audience content.
Steal fordeciding whether a topic is wide enough for top-of-funnel
18:59list
Content split
40% audience
25% inspiration
25% education
10% product
A rough posting ratio across the four levels.
Steal fora weekly content calendar
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
19:25next-video
“I really think you should watch this one next. It goes over my entire framework for building a 1% personal brand.”
Soft next-video pointer after delivering the promised outcome. Offer links sit in the description, not in the spoken script.
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Tom Noske says content makes no money because it has no awareness, no trust and no email conversion engine behind it, and backs it with his own funnel numbers.
A ten-year case for treating a personal brand as the one business asset that compounds forever, can't be taxed, and survives the sale of every company built on top of it.
Thirty-four minutes on an iPad whiteboard arguing that a memorable brand is built from associations, context and a delivery system, not better content.
Tom Noske breaks down the three-part sequence, holding versus sending, the open home vision, and the Rolex call moment, that took two of his coaching clients from posting weekly to record launches.
A 28-minute case study in why the origin story is the load-bearing structure of every personal brand — delivered by someone who just disclosed his parents were evicted by a sheriff last week.
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