Transcription
I've been in content for 5 years. I've generated 10 million followers and 10 billion views as a creative director. And in this video, I'm sharing the 13 brutal content truths that I wish I knew when I first got started.
You're not growing as fast as you want because you're not trying to save the world. Most creators that I have talked to, they are in the business of making content because they either saw someone successful at it, so their mentor, and their mentor told them, "Oh, you got to get on camera." Or they're doing it because they got into a mentorship program. And in the program, they taught content as a client acquisition channel. And I'm all for that. I think anyone can create content, and I think it's a great acquisition channel, but I think that you need to like zoom out for a second and and realize that content is media, which has the ability to impact people. And it's it's way more way bigger than just client acquisition, way more than just getting customers for your business.
Like, if you look at the biggest brands in the world outside of social media, like you have Nike, and their motto, their mission is to just do it. They want to empower people to just do the thing. If you look at Apple, their mission is innovation. They want to challenge the status quo. If you look at Amazon, their mission is convenience. They want to make shopping convenience so you don't have to even leave your house to get next day shipping. These companies, these brands mission is in some form to save the world. Like if you look at all of Elon's companies, for example, their mission is to save the world, which is why the brand is so sticky.
If I look at my mission, for example, for for a long period of time, I just had the skill of content. Like I started in content 5 years ago. I was pretty good at helping people grow on social media. And so when I looked at my vision like what do I want to do with this company? It was always about like making money like I want to make this much money in this company or I want to help people make content. But for me there was nothing intrinsically emotional about that. And not emotional like I'm going to cry about it, but there was nothing that woke me up every day and made me want to continue building this business.
And so what I did is I developed a mission based off of how content has impacted my life. Like I'll share an example of of the most raw example of how content has changed my life. When I was 17 18 years old, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and I felt very lost and I felt like no one could lead me to the destination that I wanted to go to. And so I found this guy on social media. His name was Alex Heroszi and through watching his content I was able to build a business which gave me purpose and that all happened because he made content. I ended up meeting him and I told him I was like, "Hey, I sent you a DM when I was 18 and I was completely lost." And now because of you, because of the content you you created, you have changed my life. How [ __ ] cool is that?
And so my mission is to learn the principles of influence so that I can teach other people in my content how to influence people for good. That is my mission because that has impacted my life immensely. So for you, what is your mission that is going to serve humanity? What is your mission outside of just growing this business to make money? What I want you to do is look at your business. What do you do and what do you help people do? And then ask yourself, how has this vehicle impacted my life? Because your brand will spread so much faster and it will grow so much bigger if it is of service to humanity. It's not about not making money. It's about trying to help people. Help humans. That is a brand that will spread.
Real truth number two, learn how to play other people's songs before you try to write your own music. When I was a kid, I learned how to play viola and piano. And I didn't start by trying to write my own songs, my own classical music. I found music that was famous in in that world and I learned how to play it before I ever tried to make my own songs. I think that applies to content because a lot of people are trying to create good content and they don't even know what good looks like. I think if you're trying to grow, the first thing that you should do is model winners. Go find people that are winning in social media and model what they're doing. That doesn't mean steal their content. That doesn't mean take their scripts and do them verbatim because a lot of people do that. It's about looking at a video that performed on an account and looking how do they set up their camera, how do they speak, how do they communicate, what's going on with the lighting, what is the message, what are the topics, and you want to model that.
Go on to Instagram and search up the industry leaders in your niche. You can do this by just searching up key terms. So, if you're in business and you help people grow their business, just search up business, sales, marketing, and then look at the top content and the top accounts that pop up and look at what they are doing. What does the shot look like? What formats are they doing? What are the topics? and then try to replicate those. But then supplement your own experiences so that it's authentic to you. But until you are starting to create content that is modeled after good content, you will continue to create slop.
Brutal truth number three. You're not building a personal brand because you don't even know what the term personal brand means. There's a lot of people that do what I do. They're like content coaches, content experts, or whatever, and they use the term personal branding, but they don't actually understand what that means. And it shows because when they create content, they're not talking about what it means. They're not they're not replicating it. They're not demonstrating it in their content. Just like all squares or rectangles, but not all rectangles or squares. Is that correct? >> All squares are >> all rectangles are squares. All personal brands online were built through content, but not all content will build your personal brand.
Branding is pairings and associations. And so now, if you bring that concept of pairing into branding, it's who are you pairing yourself with? Like what names are you collaborating with? What are you talking about? And what experiences are you giving people in your content? If you always make content yelling at the camera with sunglasses on outside of a supercar, you can bet that the experience that you're giving people is not necessarily a good one. You are diminishing people and making yourself seem better than them. And so that is going to be your brand. You are pairing yourself with that. And so now when people see you outside of that context, they are going to think I don't like this guy because he diminishes people. The goal of a personal brand is to influence people. And so you want to make sure that the things that you pair yourself with make it likely that you will influence your target demographic.
There is advertising and there is branding. And you can create good advertising that is bad branding. I was at an event and I was talking about branding and content. And one of the guys asked a question. He was like, "Hey bro, I serve women who want to lose weight and I made a Valentine's Day post and I said that if you aren't fit for Valentine's Day, you don't deserve a date." And I see that as an example of very good advertising because that probably gets a lot of attention. It probably pisses a lot of women off. But it's bad branding because it takes the target demographic and it insults them, which is going to repel them from being influenced in the direction he wants to influence them, which is to buy his product or service. Something he should have done instead is say, "If you're not fit for Valentine's Day, but a guy doesn't like that, then he doesn't deserve to take you out on a date." That affirms the target demographic and it shows that you are in their corner and you're on their side.
So, when you create content, I want you to think about the pairings that you're making with yourself. Are you pairing yourself with good people that your target demographic like? Are you pairing yourself with a good experience so that the target demographic likes you? Or are you doing the opposite? Because if the pairings that you're making with yourself are not influencing people to buy your [ __ ] then good branding isn't actually happening and you're not building a personal brand. You're just creating content that gets views.
Real truth number four, people don't watch your videos because they don't understand the words you're using. I was working with a fitness coach and they were talking about the concept of progressive overload. And they were like, "If you're not progressive overloading, then you're not going to grow muscle." But how many people that aren't fitness coaches actually know what that term progressive overload means? Instead, what we did is we defined what that term meant as people would observe it. And then we labeled that definition with a term and then called it progressive overload. So we educated the viewer. So the example we did of defining terms in a video was if you can do bicep curls for 12 reps with 10 lbs, then you're ready for bicep curls with 15 lbs for eight reps. And then once you can do bicep curls with 15 lbs for 12 reps, then you're ready for bicep curls with 20 lb for eight reps. And then we went on and on and we explained what it meant. And then we said this is progressive overload and if you're not doing this process then you're not going to build muscle.
Whenever you use a term that people don't understand they don't understand the rest of what you say. And so defining and redefining terms is one of the most important and powerful things you can do in your content. Most people use fancy complicated terms to sound smart to sound like they know what they're talking about. But you might be sounding smart but you're actually repelling people away from you. You need to make simple dummy proof content. This increases the amount of people that are able to consume your content. This is what separates niche accounts from big big personal brands.
Brutal truth number five. Your views don't convert into followers because you don't understand the path that viewers take before they hit follow. If I were to do a live demo right now, I open up Instagram. I go to my for you page and I just start scrolling. Okay, so I don't know who any of these people are that are on my for you page. So, how's a video going to stop me from scrolling, get me to pay attention, and then go to their account and hit follow?
First of all, your video needs to be Ewok, which means effective without context. See, I just defined the term. means that your video needs to give enough context so that the viewer could understand what that video means without knowing who you are. My buddy Sam calls this being able to pass the stranger test. Could a stranger watch your video, get value from it, and then go to your account and hit follow? And then the second thing is your content needs to be exclusive. People don't follow accounts that are commoditized because they know they could just find that information anywhere else. And so you want to make exclusive content that is unique to you. People have to follow you otherwise they will miss out on the opportunity of seeing you again. That's kind of the point. I saw a CTA on a video one time and it said, "Hit follow because there's a chance you'll never see me again." And that was brilliant because that's really what gets people to follow in the first place. They're like, "Oh, I saw this video. It was so good. I never want to lose this person again, so I'm going to hit follow."
Your content needs to then pass the library test. The library test is I know when I walk into a library, I'm going to get tons and tons of books with information on a variety of topics. If your video was a one-off and it's the only video like that in your library of videos, then people aren't going to watch because they're going to be like, "Well, this isn't a consistent type of upload, so I'm not really missing out on anything." But if they saw a video on their for you page, it was so good. Stop them in their tracks. They go to your account and they see that every other video is exactly like that video on adjacent topics, that's an account that they don't ever want to lose.
Brutal truth number six, your audience hasn't grown in the past year because you haven't learned anything in the past year. Most creators had like an arc of learning. They had a period of time where they were just sponges to all information and they were rapidly learning. And then that's usually when they start to create content. And the thing about creating content is it puts you in the the teacher's chair. It puts you in the chair of the person who knows everything. I know this because when I started to create content, I stopped avidly learning because I was like, well, I'm the guy now. I guess I know everything. I'm just going to like teach people what I learned. But that's going to shoot you in the foot because the goal of building a personal brand is to share what you've learned and continue learning so you can continue sharing those lessons.
My question to you is what active learning are you doing? What real life learning are you doing? Not just like reading books or consuming content. What lessons are you learning from the things that you're doing on a day-to-day basis? There's this concept of delegation where everyone's like obsessed with delegating everything and so they build a team and they just hand off everything off of their plate to their team. But then with that delegation, you're no longer learning about the thing that you claim to be an expert at. And that's going to kill your ability to educate people further. It's likely that you'll create a bunch of content and then you'll hit a point where you're like, "Well, I'm continuing to say the same things over and over again. I don't really know what else I'm going to talk about." And that shows me that you're not actively learning as you build a personal brand.
What I'm doing to make sure that I don't stop learning as I create content like this is one, I'm learning with my own content. So the cool thing about what I do is I learn about content from creating my own content. for you, maybe it's not the same because maybe let's say you're a sales expert. You don't really learn more about sales from creating content. So, you need another avenue where you're still able to learn about sales. Another thing that I'm doing is I'm still holding a small handful of clients that I'm helping so that I'm still learning how to create content for them and then I can take those lessons and teach them in my content. So, if I've only ever grown fitness accounts on social media, then I really only understand the tactics and the behaviors that work for fitness coaches to grow on social media. But if I also work with some salespeople, copywriters, business experts, content experts, marketing gurus, then I will understand the content principles that work for any industry. So don't delegate everything to your team. Keep a handful of clients or a handful of work on your plate so you can avidly learn about your niche so that you can take those lessons and teach them in your content.
Plus, when you are doing just to get an outcome without content in mind, you're basically subconsciously doing building unconscious competence. It's like, "Oh, I know how to get an outcome, but I don't really know how to teach that outcome." But when you're creating content and you're working with people, you are building conscious competence because you're like, "Well, why do I do this?" Oh, cool. Well, it's because of this. Write that down. That's a piece of content. And now you're conscious about why you're good at what you're good at. And personal brands that grow to massive audience sizes are brands where the creator has conscious competence.
Brutal truth number seven, stop outsourcing your content to ChatBT. Don't ask AI to do things that you don't know how to do. I see this all the time. People go to Claude or CHBT or Mattis and they're like, "Write my content scripts." But the issue is that that creator doesn't even know what a good script looks like and they don't even know how to write a good script. And so when they go to chatbt or any AI and they say, "Hey, write this script." That AI is going to give them a script. They won't know if it's good or not and they're going to take it, say it, and post it and then wonder why their content doesn't perform. AI can do any task overconfidently, but it will only do good work and good tasks if it actually knows what good looks like. If it has a model to replicate.
AI is a tool and it's an awesome tool. And AI can actually do pretty much anything. like it's at the point where it's writing some pretty banger scripts for us. But the only reason it's able to do that is because I know what a good script looks like. And so when it writes a script for me, I can say no, it's bad for this reason, this reason, and this reason. And then it can fix that. And then I give it the final approval and put my human fingerprint on it. But if you don't know what good looks like, you might as well just forget about using it. Use AI to outsource your hands, not your mind. The thing that I'm using AI the most for right now are the things that are just like repeated tasks that don't really require my creativity, so that I can take that extra time and put it into things that do require my creativity.
If you want to be able to teach AI what good looks like, then you need to create good yourself. You need to define what good means for you. I'm assuming it means videos that get views, followers, and customers. And so, forget about AI. Create content with volume and apply the feedback loops from that volume. And then study the outliers, what it is about these videos that performed, and then take those traits and then plug those into AI and teach it how to do that. That is how you get AI to create good work. For example, one of the things that I've learned about creating good content after posting 10,000 clips a month for years is that a video with an observable hook does better. I only learned that because I created so much volume of content. So, when I go to AI, I say, "Give me observable statements. Give me observable problems that people experienced." That's just one example. But I wouldn't have known that observable mattered if I hadn't posted so much content and then studied what worked.
Brutal truth number eight. Nobody watches your videos because you don't know what a good hook is. One of the things that pisses me off the most on social media right now is people that do those videos where they're like 10 hooks that always work. A hook will never perform independent of a topic that people actually care about. So, let's forget about hooks for a second and then focus on what actually matters, which is your topics and whether or not people care about them. There is an ingredient in every video that has ever performed since the dawn of human time on social media. And that ingredient is demand. Is there need for information on this problem, on this topic? Are you joining a conversation that people are already having because it's a pain point that they're having. So instead of worrying about your hooks, worry about your topic selection. You want to make sure that the topics that you're creating videos about have a broad total addressable market, have a broad tab. Once you know that this topic has millions or billions of people that are interested in it, then you can worry about packaging that video with a hook.
So I'll share an analogy. If a video is a room, then your hook is the door into that room. It needs to accurately depict what is inside of that room. The best hooks are ones that leverage what people already experience or symptoms they already have. If I was trying to package a video about caffeine, I could open up the video by saying, "Caffeine doesn't actually give you energy. It just makes you not tired. No one really cares about that." Or I could open up with, "Have you ever felt tired? You felt that way because of this tiny little chemical in your brain called adenosine." So instead of opening up with caffeine, which is something I don't really know if people care about, I open up with something that I know people have experienced, which is feeling tired. So every hook should open with an observable experience that people have, a symptom that they have, or a question that you know that people have asked.
And then getting a little bit complex, there's two types of hooks. And I think the best hooks are ones that do them together. You have stun hooks and curiosity hooks. A stun hook is something that just stops you in your tracks. You don't really know why you're watching. You're not really curious about what's going to happen, but it just keeps you. Like Mr. Beast does this all the time. This is 100 one-year-olds versus 100 year olds. He just stops you in your tracks. You don't really know why you care, but you care because it just stunned you. It shocked you. A curiosity hook is a hook where the viewer has to watch to the end because they need to know what happens and they are aware that they're curious. The best hooks are ones that stun the viewer. They shock them and then the creator opened a loop so the viewer was curious to see what happened at the end. An example of a video we did with a creator is we had six plates lined up and then each plate was covered with a bowl. He opened up the bowl and he stunned you by saying, "This is 20 grams of protein." But then because you saw all of the other bowls that weren't uncovered, you were curious to see what the ingredients under the other bowls were. We stunned you and we opened a loop. So you were curious.
Brutal truth number nine. Your viral videos don't turn into a viral brand because you're too afraid to repeat yourself. Alex Herozi, Dan Martell, Gary Vee, Dave Ramsey, these people have been saying the same three to five things for the past decade. Why? Because branding is consistent pairings. A lot of people are building a personal brand, but the personal brand is scattered and random. They're talking about too many things and the audience doesn't know how to categorize them in their brain because it's not consistent across time. This is like personal branding and content kindergarten. But you want to pick a problem that you're solving? And you want to define three to five content pillars that you will continually talk about. So figure out what problem do you solve for your audience. What are your content pillars? And then continually talk about those over and over and over again.
It's something I've seen so many times where creators will post a video, pops off, and then they don't want to post it again or talk about it again cuz they're like, "Everyone's already seen this video." But we grew a creator 300,000 followers in 7 or 8 months. And the majority of those followers came from 30 videos. And they were all on the exact same thing. We got one video pop. And so we were like, "Okay, how can we turn this into a series? How can we build their brand on this?" And then the next video, a million, 3 million, 5 million, 10 million. They got so many million view videos from just doing the same video over and over again.
I want you to imagine that the playing field of social media is a field. And you, as the content creator, are a minor with a pickaxe. And your job is to dig in this field searching for ore underneath the soil. The ore is demand. It is it is need for information on a topic. Sometimes when you dig, you'll hit nothing. You won't get any views. And sometimes when you dig, you'll get millions of views. But when you get those millions of views, that's proof that there's ore, there's demand under the soil. And so when you hit that viral video, you don't move along. You don't move ever. Like most people, they get that viral video and they're like, "Next spot." And they keep digging and then flop, flop, flop. Instead, when you get that viral video, build your brand on that demand. Do as many videos as you can over and over again. Dozens, hundreds of videos on that same topic, on that same concept, with that same format until it just stops working. People are way too quick to retire their videos. Don't do that. Kill them. Do them until they stop working.
Whenever you get a video that performed five times or more than your average video, you're going to apply this framework called the 4R framework. The first R stands for re-shoot. You take the video and you reshoot it verbatim, exact same video. The second R stands for remix. You take the video and you iterate on it, changing something small about it, but doing it again in a different way. The third R stands for re-sequence. You take the video that performed and you re-edit it so that it's shorter and you reorder things about that video. For example, we did a video that got 3 million views for a creator. We resequenced it, posted it again, it got 12 million views. It did better the second time we've resequenced it. Wild. And we've seen this dozens of times. And the fourth R stands for repost. Typically, we wait about 2 to 4 to 6 weeks. It just depends on the creator and what their preferences are, but we repost it as many times as we can to get as much juice out of the squeeze. So, every time you get a video that performs better than your average video, apply this 4-our framework because it works. This is what separates creators that get a viral video from creators that get a viral video and then build a viral brand.
Brutal truth number 10. You're a commodity on social media because you don't create exclusive content. Be uncopyable. If someone could take your videos and say them verbatim, then there's nothing unique about you. If I make videos talking about my exclusive opinions from all of my experiences of helping people grow personal brands, no one else can steal that because they haven't done what I've done. I don't think all of your content needs to be uncopyable because there's definitely content that is more like dopamineergic. It's like candy. It just spreads on the algorithm. Like you see a lot of this happening where people are like, "This is good for fat loss. This is okay for fat loss. This is bad for fat loss." Like if you build your entire brand on doing stuff like that, which every other fitness coach is doing, then you're a commodity on social media because people can consume that content from any other creator. And I'm not saying don't do them, but if that's your only effort to build a brand, you are a commodity. And commodities are cheap. But if you want to build a brand that is able to charge a lot of money for your product or service, you need to not be commoditized. You need to be unique. You need to be differentiated.
What are the things that only you have the ability to talk about? What are the things that only you can teach because of your experiences? I think people are addicted to getting views and so they chase views by any means necessary. So they end up abandoning themselves just chasing trends, chasing these viral formats. So to make sure that that isn't you, steal this framework called the bite framework that embeds your differentiation into your videos. Whenever you're going to shoot a video, use the template bait, illustrate, tail, end. Bait is your hook. It is your statement. It is your question. It is how you open up your video. Illustrate is your elaboration on that statement or question. Tail is a story that only you have experienced. And then end is your takeaway or the conclusion you want the viewer to arrive at. So, if I was going to do this live, I would be like, don't steal other people's content. That's my bait. Illustration. When you steal content, you are cheap and a commodity on social media. My tale would be I've posted 10,000 clips a month for years and I've seen so many creators that aren't able to charge any money for their product or service because they're no different than all of the other creators that create the similar type of content. So now I differentiated myself by sharing a story and then my end would be so don't be like everyone else. When everyone zigs you zag look at the things about yourself that are unique and only exclusive to you and then share those stories and share those things. That's an example of me using that framework live.
Brutal truth number 11. Most people don't build a personal brand because they're advertising for their service, not actually branding. Most people pit themselves into picking one lane, like business. For me, that would be content and only talking about that thing. But building a personal brand is about scaling your reputation and controlling the things that people associate with you. You likely have interests outside of what you do in your business. If your only goal for posting on social media is to advertise for your business, then that's fine. But if you say, "I'm trying to build a personal brand," and you want the benefits that come with building a personal brand, which is impact, like being approached on the street for saying you've changed people's lives. Pricing power, so being able to charge more for your product or service, talent acquisition, not just getting customers from your brand, but talent to work for your business, and partnerships, so being able to speak on stages, get invited to podcasts, building relationships with people in your industry, being able to get the respect of the people you respect. I think not a lot of people talk about that. That's one of the coolest things about building a brand is the people you used to look up to now look at you as someone that they can interact with. You're not just a fan. These are all benefits of having a personal brand, not just pitting yourself into advertising for your service.
And if your goal is strictly to advertise for your business, then I'm going to challenge you with the idea that there will never be a world where people don't do business with people that they like. And so when you share the way you are, you share your likeness, these are my beliefs, this is what I think about the world, this what I think about my business, this is what I spend my time doing. then people like you will connect with you and like you as a byproduct of that. The goal of personal branding is to scale your reputation. So actually scale it and don't just talk about one thing.
Brutal truth number 12. Stop creating content for your peers and create content for your potential customers. I'll use fitness coaches as an example. Most fitness coaches are creating content to impress other fitness coaches. They are trying to be seen as an expert by their peers. They're not actually trying to help people lose weight or build muscle or whatever they're trying to help people do. And they do that by using complex terms and over complicating their content and not dumbing it down and making it simple for everyone to understand. There's a quote that I love which says when you create simple content you help experts understand it better than you help beginners understand it for the first time. And that is the goal. You are creating content to build a personal brand to help people help people get an outcome. You're not creating content to get flowers from your peers.
If you're a business coach and you're trying to create content to get flowers from other business coaches, you're leaving all of the people you could help on the table helpless. If you're a fitness coach and you're creating content for other fitness coaches trying to look smart, you're not helping all of the people that need your help on how to get fit. This applies to any industry. What I want you to do is to name all of the people that watch your stories, that DM you, that you know watch you, write them out on a piece of paper and then say, "I'm not making content for them." If you have anxiety about saying certain things in your content because you're like, "Uh-uh, like I don't look like an expert talking about this." Throw that out the window. Write these people's names down because as soon as you pinpoint them, ask yourself the question, "Am I going to let this person stop me from creating content that would help beginners?" If the answer is still yes, then I know what your priorities are.
Brutal truth number 13. The person you are on camera should be the exact same person that your spouse gets. There was a guy that I followed on social media and he was a certain type of way. He was very energetic. He was intense. He was dramatic. and I went to one of his events and I met him and the guy that I met was nothing like the guy that I knew on social media. And when I started to help him create content because we ended up collaborating, one of the first things that I told him was, "Dude, this is you on social media and this is you in front of me. There are two completely different people." And when we started creating, my goal with him, the only goal I had was to get the version of him that I met in person filmed on camera and posted onto the internet. As a byproduct, the guy grew 2 million followers.
Most people have a social media persona. this is the way I want to be perceived. When it's lights, camera, action, they turn into a completely different person. Don't do that. The way to tactically stop being a different person on camera than you are in real life is to start shooting with a buddy, someone who knows you personally. Like, for example, right now I have my buddy Sam shooting with me, and he's like the pulse check on whether I'm being someone else on camera than I really am in real life. If the people that know you personally like you, then that's the version of you that belongs on social media. Like at the end of the day, if you're not being authentic in your content, people can feel that [ __ ] They can sniff it out. And so, be the same person that the people closest to you know and love. Watch this video next to understand how to build a cult-like personal