Transcription
Today we're talking about how to get more views. If you feel like your content isn't getting the traction it deserves, I'm going to break down exactly why that's happening and how to fix it. Cuz the truth is there's only six reasons why content performs poorly. And if you solve for these six things, you will get significantly more views and grow much, much faster.
Now, I know this works because content and marketing is all I do all day long. I have a million followers. I've done billions of views. And I've also worked with hundreds of business owners behind the scenes to audit and fix their content that's not working. So, in this video, I'm going to walk through all six of the major content mistakes you might be making, and I'll break down the exact step-by-step tactics for how to fix each one.
All right, content mistake number one is called bad sampling. And this really is the explanation for why your content is being ignored. When you say your content is being ignored, what you really mean is that you post and then you get low views. And the problem really is, you have no idea why that's happening. So, here's what's actually happening behind the scenes with the algorithm when you press post. And this will explain exactly why you're getting low views.
First, the algorithm takes your video and analyzes the transcript and the caption or description. And this is how it indexes what topics and keywords your video is about. Then it takes your video and it shows it to a super small sample of 100 to 200 people. Now, when you're brand new on social media with a new account, these couple hundred people are legit randos that have no connection to you. And the algorithm picks them specifically because they've shown behavior to enjoy videos about these topics and keywords before.
Now, when you do have some initial following, the algorithm will take that sample from your existing followers. Typically, people that have engaged pretty well with your content in the past. Now, regardless of the path, with this initial sample, the algorithm is trying to rapidly determine how much or how little this sample group likes the video. If the sample data comes back strong in that these 100 to 200 people really like it more than average, the algorithm will start pushing that video a lot. But if this sample of people do not watch or engage, the algorithm will nuke the video and the growth will stop. So in this case and all cases, if your video got low views, it was because the sample data came back weak and those first couple hundred people did not watch or engage at the average you needed.
Okay, so the big question is why? Why did that sample group not engage? Why was the sample data so weak? And there's really only three reasons why this could happen.
The first reason is fake followers. If you bought fake followers because you thought you could trick real people into trusting you sooner because of your following, congrats, you played yourself because the algorithm is running that sample process to bots that don't watch videos. And I know this is super common because I've worked with so many brands that have 50,000 followers and are only getting 800 views. And when I asked them, it's because 48,000 of the 50 were paid for fake followers. So, if this is you, no judgment, but you're going to have to start over from a fresh account or it's never going to work.
Now, the second reason that initial sample data comes back weak is because you have the wrong followers. Let's say you have a following with a few thousand friends from high school. Well, now if you start posting deep educational content on a topic they don't care about when the sample data goes to a bunch of those people, the data is going to come back weak because they don't care about those topics. Or maybe you did grow an account from scratch talking about fashion, but now you want to switch from fashion to science. When you post those science videos, the sample data of the fashion people is going to come back pretty weak because those fashion people don't want to watch science topics at the same rate they watched fashion topics. And so if this is you and you feel like you have the wrong followers, you're either going to have to start fresh from a new account or slowly grow and add more science followers slowly over time, churn more fashion followers slowly over time, and re-calibrate so that over time the sample mix is better skewed to science. You're going to have to pick one of those paths.
Now, the third and final reason why that sample data came back, and by far the most common, is that you just made a bad video. And it's tough to hear this, but it's the truth. The algorithm is a math equation. It does not have feelings. So, if your videos have low views and are not getting pushed, and you don't have fake followers, and you don't have the wrong followers, it's cuz you didn't make a video that was good enough to beat the others. When you're playing the content game, you're playing in the big leagues where you're competing for attention with massive creators and brands that have been doing this for a decade. So, if your video isn't preferred by the initial sample, it's just that it was a bad video and didn't beat the baseline, and I call this whole problem bad sampling, and this is what you need to fix if you want your content to stop being ignored and get more views.
Now, here's the good news. I have a system and playbook for how to approach content to fix this problem. I know exactly what to change to turn those bad videos into good ones, so the sample data goes from bad to good. So, for the rest of this video, I'm going to break down the five biggest problems or mistakes that your videos are making that contribute them to being bad videos. I'm also going to walk through the tactical changes for how to fix those so you can start making good videos.
Also, before we go through this, if you're a business owner and you want to get better at content, that's why you're watching this channel, I built a free community just for you. It's called Wavy World. We have 31,000 entrepreneurs in it, 60 free trainings just like this, and like I said, it's completely free. Invite link below if you want to join.
All right. Now, the first big reason why your videos are not working is called no man's land. And this has to do with your channel positioning and idea strategy. Specifically, how you pick which videos to make. If your videos are not working, it's probably because you're stuck in no man's land. Let me explain what I mean. Typically, content works that's either extremely entertaining or extremely educational. It's either really interesting or really useful. Most people try to play in the middle. Kind of interesting, kind of useful. A lot of people call this edutainment. This is a big reason why you're failing. If this is how you're approaching your content strategy, what ends up happening when you try to play the edutainment game is that your content is neither extremely interesting nor extremely useful. You have less useful value, but you claim that is entertaining and so you play in the middle. It ends up not working and you lose both games.
If you're playing the entertainment game, you are legit competing with every entertainment source on Earth. Mr. Beast, Kaisen, Netflix, all of them. Every single viewer on the internet has a pool of non-working, non-sleeping time that they funnel into entertainment use cases. You're competing for a slice of that time. Now, if you're playing the education game, you're competing with all the sources where people get tactical answers to questions. ChatGBT, Google, other entertainment creators, all of that. Both games are hard, but regardless, you need to pick one and optimize everything for that. If you're stuck in no man's land, kind of entertaining, kind of useful, you're going to lose both because the entertainment value will get outkicked by the best entertainment creators and the usefulness value will get outkicked by the best educational creators. If you're in the middle, you will lose.
Now, let's get really tactical about how to position for each of those games. If you pick the entertainment game, your entire goal is to come up with video ideas that drive mass shock, mass emotional transfer, and apply to a large number of people. You could be pure genp pop entertainment like Mr. beast, or you could be category entertainment, like tech stories, but it's still entertainment focused. But either way, on this side of the table, you're going for mass shock, mass emotional transfer, huge tam.
Now, if you play the education or value game, your goal is to come up with topics and premises and angles that help the viewer maximally understand the tip you're giving so that they can use that learning and apply it in their own scenario. Again, you could be pure genp pop education like mindset tips, or you could be category education, like specific tech tool workflows and demos. But either way, here you're going for tactically applicable learnings. Now, don't get it twisted. If you're going for educational content, you would prefer that they're enjoyable to watch. Nobody wants to watch some super stale, boring Harvard professor type lecture. But the educational value must be the highest priority for educational content. You don't want to say you're doing both. You're making educational value that's extremely tactical and you're making it enjoyable to watch. There is a big difference between edutainment and enjoyable education. And this is a massive mistake that I see creators and brands make. They don't commit to either game. They're lost in the middle and their content never cuts through.
Okay, one more bonus tip on this education versus entertainment game. It's very popular. Once you pick one game to play, it's very hard to switch back and forth on the same channel. Don't do that. Some creators are able to switch, but only when their personal brand is so big that people will watch because of their face, not because of the strategy. So for beginners, whether you're a creator or a brand, switching back and forth rarely works. Pick one game per channel and stick specifically to that. And you can win with both games. So the way to pick which game to play is to ask yourself, what value am I giving to the viewer in my videos? Is it something they can walk away from the video and use right now or not? If not, you're playing the entertainment game. If yes, you're playing the education game. It really is as simple as that. Both games can win, but you have to pick one per channel.
All right, content mistake number three that is causing you low views is bad ideas. It sucks to hear, but the reason your content is being ignored almost always is because your video ideas are just not good enough. They're either not interesting enough, not useful enough, or not clear enough. Now, let's unpack this because ideas really are the most valuable piece of the content puzzle. But the term ideas is kind of hard to know exactly what it means. So, let's unpack the full thing.
If you're looking at the end content workflow, you've got ideas, scripting, recording, editing, posting, and analyzing. Of that full workflow, ideas by far are the most important thing. And I can prove it to you. There are millions of videos every day that go viral that are unscripted with no edits, shot in a bedroom, zero cuts, takes 10 minutes to do, they get 10 million views. The reason those videos work is because the idea was a banger. That's all they needed to do. Not saying every video is like that, but ideas by far are the most important piece.
Now, let's really break this down. When I say idea, I'm talking about the topic plus the premise plus the hook. Those three things come together to create the video idea. The topic is a oneline sentence explaining the concept. The premise is the approach or angle or lens that you put on the topic. And the hook is the visual and spoken execution that you use to explain the topic and premise in the first 3 to 5 seconds. That idea combo is the most important part of content by a mile. Anyone who says anything different has no idea what they're talking about.
Now, let me give you a tactical example of what a winning content idea actually looks like. We're going to go through the whole thing and I'm going to explain exactly why it's a winner. This guy, Yanni, has a huge following where on his channel he breaks down his journey to restore a old vintage bowling alley in Chicago. He went from zero to a million followers in the last 4 months or so. Absolute nuclear growth. Now, let's analyze the idea, the topic, premise, hook from this video that got 1.5 million views.
>> Today is day 33 of rehabbing my 60-year-old bowling alley. You might be wondering why I'm balling. It's because Johnny from the Bowlers Journal pulled up to write a story about this project. So, of course, I had to show him my games. >>
Okay, so the topic, the oneline explanation is this guy is rehabbing a vintage bowling alley. The angle or premise for the series is that he takes you on these daily vlog mini missions around his process to restore the bowling alley. The specific angler premise for each video is a different mission or task. Now, in this specific video, the one we're looking at, the angler premise is that he's got a guy from a famous bowling magazine coming in to interview him, and the entire video is baked around that concept.
Now, for the hook format, his spoken hook, he always starts every video the same way. This is day X of rehabbing my 60-year-old bowling alley. But most importantly, his visual hooks are almost always something bowling related, and he always has motion. either the pins are spinning, the bowling balls are spinning, he's throwing the bowling balls. So, it's immediate recognizability and there's motion in it. This combination, the topic, premise and hook in this specific case is a winning idea. But let's break down why. Why is this a winning idea and what specifically are the attributes that make up a winning idea?
First, as a creator or a brand, we have to decide, are we playing the entertainment game or the education game? Remember, we have to stay out of no man's land. So, Yanni could have either decided, I'm going to make entertainment style content documenting my journey to restore this bowling alley, or I'm going to make educational content where I give tactical tips to bowling alley operators or business owners that they can take and apply to their business. He could have chosen either. He picked to play the entertainment game. If you watch his videos, he's not giving you explicit walk away learning that you can apply today. Maybe he infuses a little bit of learning, but really, he's basically filming a vlog or a TV show about his process. That's entertainment all day long. And this is completely fine. Entertainment or education works, but it's very important that he picked and doubled down on the one he chose.
Okay. So, let's break down the core factors across topic, premise, and hook that need to be true for entertainment style content and what exactly he did in his that made it work. When you're making entertainment content, the topic and premise have to do three things. First, they have to be shock inducing. Ideally, it's something the viewer has never seen before. In this case, you're going for max novelty. Now, in Yanni's case, I'd never seen somebody live rehab the behind the scenes of a bowling alley before. That's max novelty to me. And the behind-the-scenes process to get to see that is super unique. Now, this is really important. If Yanni were the 10th account that I saw to rehab a bowling alley using this behind-the-scenes vlog style, it wouldn't have been as shocking. It wouldn't have gotten so much traction. But because he's the first one to do it, it works.
Now, the second aspect of entertainment style topics and premises is that they need to be curiosity inducing. Some question has to pop into my head immediately as the viewer. For example, as soon as I saw this video that we've been watching from Yanni, these questions popped into my head. How is he doing this? How long has he been doing this? How did this kid get into the bowling alley? What's going to happen next? All those questions are popping immediately in the first 2 seconds after watching this.
And the third aspect of entertainment style content for the topic and premise is that there needs to be large applicability with some common point of interest. And what I mean by this is a large number of people that could find this interesting and some point of interest in the topic that they could relate to quickly. So in this case, anyone that has ever bowled, been to a bowling alley or maybe even seen a bowling related show on TV, might find this interesting. According to ChatBT, there are approximately 500 million people in the world, 6% of the global population that have been in a bowling alley at least once before. That is a massive, massive TAM. And so that means there's a lot of people that would relate to this immediately. Again, TAM matters a lot for entertainment content. It matters a little bit less for education, but right now we're focused on this video, which is entertainment focused. So, as a recap, the three elements that must be true for the topic and premise when you're doing entertainment style content. It must be shock inducing. It must be curiosity inducing. And it must be largely applicable with some point of common interest.
Okay, so that is half the idea. Remember topic, premise, hook. That was topic and premise. Now, let's go to hook. What does the hook need to be for entertainment style content? What are those same factors on the hook side? When you're making entertainment content, obviously the hook has to stop the scroll. This is critical. And to do that, you need to have the following few aspects.
First, you want recognizable visuals. Just like that point of common interest, I want to see a visual and immediately recognize something in that visual. In this case, the bowling pin, the bowling alley, the bowling ball. These are things with common points of relatability that I recognize visually in the hook. That's really important. Now, this recognizability could also be a facial expression on the viewer's face that I relate to. If it's just somebody face on, but they're really sad, I recognize sad eyes, sad face, I start to relate to that. You need some common point of relatability in the visual. And this is important because you want to reduce the time it takes for the viewer to contextually start to understand what's going on. Now, typically this works best with visuals that have high color, high motion, high contrast, something that grabs my attention, but then the thing in the visual, the expression or the object allows me to understand more quickly what's going on. Now, Yanni's visuals in the hook worked super well, both because they're moving, so they grab my attention, but also they're common objects that I related to immediately. I've been to a bowling alley. I've seen bowling pins, bowling ball. I haven't seen it in a while on social media, but it immediately drew back to my head. That's what you want in terms of instant recognizability in the visuals.
Now, the second piece is that this helps align to the words he's saying. He's saying, "Day 44 of me rehabbing my 60-year-old bowling alley." When he says, "Rehabing my 60-year-old bowling alley," I'm looking at the old looking bowling alley. Those visuals and those words are aligned. You want hook alignment. That's the second key piece. And why that's important is after just 3 seconds, I have immediate clarity that this is about a bowling alley in a bowling alley. He's rehabbing a bowling alley. And I start to get the pieces quicker. It's really important that you start to get clarity on what's going on as fast as possible. The visual helps reinforce this quickly.
Now, as a bonus, what he did is he added music to create some certain vibe that you want to be a part of. He used a Frank Ocean song. You don't have to use music, but it is helpful if you can pick the right song to kind of boost the vibe and help match everything even better. So, in summary, on the hook side, you need visual recognizability either with an object or facial expression that immediately allows a viewer to understand what is going on and relate to the scenario. Two, you need alignment between the visuals and the words being said, as well as the words on screen. And three, if you want, optionally, you can add music or sound to help vibe match the topic that's coming.
So, the moral of the story is, if your videos are flopping, I can almost guarantee that on the idea front, something about the topic, premise, or hook that you're making is not dialed in. If it's the topic, you either haven't chosen a topic that's interesting enough or a pain point that's relevant enough for your viewer. If it's the premise, you haven't framed the angle or lens of the story to be interesting enough for the viewer. And if it's the hooks, either the spoken hook was not clear enough, the visuals were not interesting enough, or the visuals and spoken hook did not align enough. And it's important to note what I just went through was an entertainment case study. Yanni's video was an entertainment video. For educational videos, it's still topic, premise, hook, but the characteristics and attributes that matter change slightly. And here are the differences. For educational content, for the topic and premise, instead of max shock inducing, you're going for max clarity inducing around the pain point you're talking about. It has to be immediately clear what value the viewer is going to get out of that video from the topic and premise. You don't need pure novelty around the idea. Don't need to reinvent the wheel. But if you could have novelty on your delivery or the tip you give, that's great. The way to think of this is instead of raw shock, you need targeted shock towards the viewer based on the pain point you're talking about.
All right. All right. Now, I was thinking about this. The most valuable thing I could give you is the tactical playbook for how to solve the ideas problems we just went through. This is the most important piece of the process. Here's my tactical playbook for how to solve it. Specifically, this is going to answer the question, how do I come up with better ideas more often? You have two ways. The manual way is to come up with original ideas, original topics, and premises on your own and then really workshop the topic, premise, and hook to try to get it aligned and max it out. This takes a lot of time and the playbook to do this is pretty sophisticated depending on your niche. The much easier way and what I do personally is to look for proven winning videos in your space, ones that already have high views and are outliers and then mine them for the topics, premises and hooks that already worked. Take those, extract the patterns and apply them to your own videos. That is the easiest way to do this. It's the smarter verse harder approach.
Now, the way to do this tactically, you go to sandcastles.ai. You create a watch list of all the accounts in your space that make good videos. You go to the videos tab and you filter only by that watch list and sort by outlier score. What that does is give you the best performing outlier videos in your space all in one area. You can then open those videos and play them right there. So, I literally go one by one by one by one. I watch all of them. And this is much faster than scrolling on a 4U feed because you're not getting any noise. Every single video is on target and every single video is an outlier. You don't have to scroll through hundreds of videos to find a couple winners. In a 100 videos, you find a hundred winners using sand castles. So, what I do is I take this, I open a new tab, Google Doc, and I write down best topics and best hooks. And then I go and I watch one by one by one. If anything is interesting, I watch the whole thing. I write down the topic. I write down the hook. Now, after a 100 videos in a session, I now start to see the patterns for what are the best performing topics, premises, and hooks. I take those topics and I start thinking, is there anything interesting that I know that most others don't about this topic that I could retell the story with? Is there anything different that I could do to the hook to ratchet up the shock, curiosity, and Max Tam? That's how you do this process.
So, here's a tactical example for how I would analyze this bowling video from Yanni that we've been watching. On the topic front, if I were to extract out the one-s sentence Mad Lib format, it's watch me restore X thing. Now, X thing could be home renovations. It could be vintage objects like watches and cars. It could be another old business like a vintage ice cream parlor. There's all different sorts of things you could swap in for the watch me restore X. It doesn't just have to be a bowling alley. And that's what I call remixing a topic lens. You take a good idea, restoring X, twist it, and now you have all different types of topic rabbit holes that you could go down.
Now, on the premise or angle front, if I look at what Yanni did, he took the restoration process, broke it down into individual daily missions, and then summarized those using his videos. So, for example, how would I apply that to one of these other topic mad lips? If I was restoring a house, maybe one video is how I rebuild the kitchen. Maybe another video is talking to the tile manufacturer, and so on. If you're restoring an old watch, maybe every video is a different day or a different piece of the watch as you're rebuilding it.
Now, on the hooks front, if I look at just this video from Yanni, I've got three observations that I'm extracting out. Number one, always have something unique moving in the frame. Number two, always have the frame shot where the visual context is immediately noticeable. He always has some aspect of the bowling alley, the lane, the ball retrieval, the pins, the balls. He always has something related to the bowling alley immediately visible. And number three, always have the main person, the main creator, in this case, Yanni, in the frame doing something interesting. Those are the three principles that you can extract from the hooks.
Now, I'm not going to buy a bowling alley and recreate his exact series, but you can start to see if you look at it from a topic, premise, and hook perspective. You can extract the patterns that are universally applicable to other ideas. And I gleaned all that off just one video. Imagine if I went through a 100 videos across 30 creators, how many different ideas I would come up with. That really is the process for finding winners, analyzing the patterns from those winners, and then remixing. That is what all the pros, all the media companies, that's what they all do to grow faster on social media. That will solve your ideas problem. I do that whole workflow in sand castles.ai.
Now, of course, the last point here, cuz I can already hear people in the comments. As a business owner, you always want to gut check. Well, if I do take that as inspiration and remix it, will that content format actually drive leads for my business? And let's analyze this for this bowling series for Yanni. This for sure is going to drive foot traffic locally in Chicago. when he opens that bowling alley, they're going to be sold out every single night. He also will likely get other opportunities on a general fandom perspective now that he has 900,000 followers on Instagram. But the real revenue driver here would be if he was selling agency services, helping other local businesses make content or if he had an agency service where he was buying many other types of old businesses and restoring them. That's the real lead genen driver. He's not tapping into that. That's completely fine. So, will this work as a content format for his bowling alley? Yes, locally. But there's a lot more revenue on the table that this could work for if he had a different model. Now, if you were to run this playbook, you extract this out, but you're doing it for flipping homes or restoring old homes and you do have a real estate practice or some agency where you do this, that's a much better model to fit into the content. So, as a business owner, you're always trying to do this process raw where you analyze the winning content, extract out the patterns, but then you back fit those winners into content product model fit. It has to make sense for your business. Not to go too far down the rabbit hole in terms of the business conversion later, but that's how I would think about it.
All right. Now, you can probably tell if you nail the idea, the topic, premise, hook, you are in a great spot. That is the hardest part of the process in my opinion, which is why I spend so much time breaking it down. The truth is most people don't want to spend the time to optimize their idea process cuz they don't think that's the problem. But if you get somebody hooked that wants to watch, everything else is so much easier.
Now, the next major bucket of problems is poor storytelling and weak visual execution. And I'm going to try to make this really simple. There are three major storytelling mistakes and three major visual execution mistakes you might be making. Let's rip through them really quickly.
On the storytelling side, these are the three mistakes. The first one is adding too many unnecessary details right after the hook. I call this over stuffing. Typically, people get so excited when they have a great hook and they have a topic they know a lot about that they just over stuff way too many details into the story. And this will feel like the viewer is getting waterboarded with extra facts that make it really hard for them to connect between the hook and the main problem of the story. What you want to do is find the shortest path to interesting after the primary curiosity question is popped in the viewer's mind. You just give a couple contextual facts and that's it. Anything you have good visuals for, prioritize using these over everything else. And only use things that are additive to the story. Give the viewer enough context where they can walk down the rope from the beginning to the end, but nothing extra.
Now, the second big storytelling problem goes hand in hand with that, and it's called broken storytelling. Maybe you do cut out a lot of the fluff details, but the ones you choose to use lead the viewer down the wrong path. You set something up with a hook, but then you lead them to a completely different story, and you try to come back at the end. The zigzag is just too hard to follow. You want to make the story super clear to consume. You want there to be a clear logic line from beginning to end.
Now, the third big storytelling mistake is not rehooking. And this is really what takes stories from good to great. If you're able to pick the right facts and you don't over stuff them and you keep the viewer kind of on one story arc, what you want to do is introduce another relevant conflict 20 to 25 seconds into the video. This will rehook and re-engage the viewer and make them watch to the end. So, for example, in Yanni's video that we watched, the first main 20 to 25 seconds was all about this guy Johnny that was a writer for the Bowling Journal came in for an interview with Yanni. But then at the 25 second mark approximately, Yanni had Johnny ask a question. Everybody wants to know how did a 25-year-old buy a bowling alley and get from zero to a million followers so quickly. That is the rehook. It's a second curiosity inducing hook after the first one started to get boring. So for you when you're auditing your content, if you get through the idea stage, and that's a huge if cuz that's the most important piece when it comes to storytelling. You have to make sure you're not over stuffing the details, you have a clear logic line, and you're rehooking every 20 to 25 seconds.
Now, on the visual execution side, there are also three common mistakes that I see all the time. The first one is weak visuals. The visual aspect of content is a critically underrated piece of this whole puzzle. And that doesn't mean you need the most cinematic visuals in the world. If you want cinematic, you can use Veo3 if you don't shoot them. What it means that you need to give the viewer something interesting to look at while they're listening. Also, it's absolutely essential that these visuals align with the words you're saying. Just like in the hook where you want alignment, you need alignment with the spoken words throughout the whole story. As you're delivering a sentence, you should ask yourself, what is the best visual I could be showing here? And then go get that visual.
Now, the second big visual execution mistake is that the visual format just ends up getting stale or uninteresting. Now, visual format is really a combination of the visuals used, the layout they're in, and like the angles that those visuals were shot at. It turns out there are 36 core visual formats that all content falls into. I've got a full database of this. If you guys want me to make a video on just visual formats, breaking all these down and the pros and cons, make sure to drop a comment and let me know.
And the third visual execution mistake that I always see is called visual switching. And this is the pacing that the visuals and camera angles change as the video is going on. If it's too slow, you're going to lose people and they're going to churn because of boredom. If it's too fast, you're going to overstimulate people and confuse them because they can't take it all in. So, you need to find that Goldilock zone of visual switch pacing. The best way to do this is to take videos that you like that you're really locked in on. Download those videos, put them onto a Premiere Pro or Final Cut timeline, make chops every time the visual switches, and then study about how long each section is. That'll be a good proxy for visual switch pacing.
All right. Now, the last two mistakes are super straightforward, but they also trip a lot of people up. Before we go into those, let's just review what we've covered so far. First, we talked about why your content is actually getting low views in the first place, and it's because of the bad sampling data that's going back to the algorithm. Next, we covered three massive buckets of mistakes that you could be making. And I say they're three, but it's really like nine. The first one was on positioning, and it was to not get stuck in no man's land. Either commit fully to entertainment content and try to be the max interesting you can, or commit fully to education and try to be the max useful. If you're doing education, you want it to be enjoyable. You do not want to fall in the edutainment in the middle. This is where you're not as interesting as the interesting people and you're not as useful as the useful people. That's not where you want to be.
Now, the second biggest mistake that we covered was bad ideas. And this really is the killer. I'm telling you, this is the one you need to overinvest time in solving. And that comes to topic, premise, and hooks. We walked through exactly how to analyze each of those and how to use sandcastles.ai to build a system for basically finding winners quicker and extracting the patterns. The third biggest bucket of mistakes we walked through was poor storytelling and weak visual execution. And we actually broke down six kind of sub mistakes in there. The truth is, if you can get through those four pieces, the sampling data and then the other three, the last two that I'm about to go through end up being really easy. And if you really boil it all down, all you have to do is get through ideas. Cuz if you get a good idea that hooks somebody, visual storytelling and spoken flow is actually really easy to learn, train, and build a system for. It's really ideas that is the white whale. I say that over and over because most people think their storytelling, their persuasion, their editing is what matters. No, it's ideas. It's topic premise hook.
Okay, so let's finish these last two. The fifth biggest mistake is poor topic consistency. And this relates back all the way to the beginning when I was talking about bad sampling. Once you solve for ideas and execution, and you're actually doing this well, the algorithm is going to start honing in on who likes your videos and who it should push them to. And this will work. I promise you it will eventually start feeling like a snowball rolling downhill if you don't make this big mistake here. All you have to do is not deviate from the topics and keywords that you've spent so long training the algorithm to feed you for. When you switch topics around, beauty, science, vlogging, travel. When you switch topics around, it resets that bad sampling problem over and over. You've got a vlogging audience around travel. You start doing fitness content, they don't want to see it. You start doing beauty content, they don't want to see it. You start doing science content, they don't want to see it. You don't want to bounce around with topics. This is called having a bad audience match. So, please, for the love of God, once you figure out a topic that works and people start resonating and you get the snowball rolling, double down on that, do not deviate. If you want to try something else for a different audience, do it on a different channel. But pretty quickly, when you're running two channels, you realize this is stupid and you'll go back to the main channel. Don't deviate the main channel.
Now, the last big mistake, number six, is low volume. If you have the rest working, you're not in no man's land, you got great ideas, you've got the flow for the storytelling, you have the visual execution, you're not deviating the topics. If you have all those, all you need is volume. The game then becomes volume. And volume matters not just because you're making more videos for more people. The more data the algorithm can get about those good matches, the more it will feed and push you into those matches. So volume is really your best friend once you figure everything else out.
All right, guys. That's all I've got for this video. As a recap, the goal of this video was to try to give you a framework for how to solve if you feel like your content's being ignored. And if you want more views, use this framework as a checklist and kind of like audit format to make sure you're not making these big mistakes. Now, this is the summary of what's happening. If you feel like your content is being ignored, you're getting low views. If you're getting low views, it's because the sample data is coming back weak. If the sample data is coming back weak, it's because you have fake followers, the wrong followers, or bad videos. If you have bad videos, it's because you're making one or all of these mistakes. You're either stuck in no man's land where your videos are not as interesting as the entertainment and not as useful as the education. You have bad topic, premise, and hooks, which are not validated. You're not using validated winners and you're not coming up with the right ideas. You have poor stories that may also have weak visual execution. You are not staying consistent to the topics that are working or you're not putting out enough volume. It's one of those five problems in that order. Typically, it's ideas that is the issue.
As always, guys, I'm trying my absolute best, if you're a business owner, to help you level up with content. You could hear it in my voice. My voice is absolutely shot. I'm giving everything I have to this YouTube channel. If you like this content, please leave me a comment and let me know that I should keep going. I had a doubt this week that I was considering never making videos again on this channel just cuz I was so burnt out. And I mean that sincerely. So, I'm trying my best to give you guys as much value and really cover the non-obvious things. If you guys want me to keep making videos, please leave a comment. And again, if you haven't joined Wavy World and you're a business owner, there's 60 free trainings like this in there. 31,000 entrepreneurs. People are just giving free game. I'm giving free game. There's no reason to not be in Wavy World. Free invite link in the description.
All right. As always, guys, we'll see you on the next one. Peace.