Transcription
Gaining followers and subscribers will change your life forever, as long as you do it right. I have nearly 5 million followers across all social media accounts. Growing all the accounts transformed my life. I haven't had to go to work, so to speak, since 2017, and I can work remotely from anywhere in the world. Laying down on planes is something I think we should all aspire to do.
The truth is that getting 10,000 followers is probably the hardest part. Once you have 10,000, it's not actually that hard to take it to a million. Most people quit Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a white belt. Why? Because it's the hardest, and you suck the most. They say a black belt is just a white belt that didn't give up.
I'm going to explain to you what I've learned in all my time growing social media accounts. But before we get into it, I think it's important you realize that it took me four years of posting almost every single day to reach 10,000 followers. And within four years of that, I was at 1 million. This is the compounding effect of social media. And I suppose, to quickly understand the compounding effect, let's quickly look at the impact of doubling a penny. If I said you could have a million dollars today, or you could double a penny every day for 30 days, what would you pick? Well, if you were patient enough to compound the penny over 30 days, you'd have 5,368,791.2. So even if you grew your account by 5% a month every month, that amount of people is going to become larger every time. That's the first lesson: the onset will be the slowest, the hardest, and you'll suck the most.
My first thing I'd say is you need to really aim just to produce 100 videos as soon as you can in the onset. I have so many people who try and overcomplicate the process of growing an account. I can teach you everything there is to know about audio, videos, setup, hooks, and pacing. But so many of the lessons that you need are in the videos that do better than expected, and then the ones that bomb when you expected them to do well. It's the little improvements that you make across time.
One of my favorite exercises for you is to go find any of your favorite YouTubers, head to their videos, then click oldest. If I go back 5, 10, or even 15 years, it's incredible how awful the level of content they used to produce is. When we look at the realms of fitness, we can work all year round for a pretty insignificant gain in strength, but we do it because we love the process. However, what you bench won't really impact your life as much as running a proper business.
When I look back at my favorite outcomes from growing social media accounts, it would be the times that I upgraded my friends to business class, where I brought my parents a Porsche, and the fact that I'm aiming in the next few years to try and take over all my family's mortgage repayments. My favorite thing to do was to lie to my friends. I'd ask what airline they're flying with, and then I'd lie and say, "Oh, I'm actually having a casual thing with an air hostess that works for that airline. Why don't you send me a booking reference? I'll see what I can get, maybe an upgrade." And then, usually about $5,000 later, I'd get an angry message along the lines of, "You shouldn't have done that." But as soon as they're in business class with a glass of champagne, they forgive you pretty soon.
But we need to appreciate that reaching 10,000 followers actually does [ __ ] nothing for you, but it's a milestone we need to work tirelessly towards because the lessons and experience of working towards that milestone applies to email marketing and all the other areas of your business right now. Chances are you're not good enough to do well on social media, but in time you can, if you do the work. For thousands of years before us, never have we had the opportunity to quite literally retire our parents using our smartphones and some Wi-Fi, and you can. Social media has also never been easier to grow on; it just takes one post to boot off, and your circumstances can change massively. So let's delve into some of the principles essential to growing on social media.
One: problem-solving. You should have an avatar, a person that you want to help. This is actually where a lot of people that I work with make massive mistakes. They think they want to help nurses get fit, let's say, and then tell them that less than 1% of the world are nurses, that most of them are underpaid, [ __ ] exhausted, and looking to survive the week and not get shredded for a holiday to Cancun. I told that person instead to focus on helping exhausted women regain control of their fitness regimes because, let's be honest, a mother of three children has many of the same problems as a nurse: sleep routine, putting other people first. It's important that we don't niche down too far. Instead of wanting to coach, I don't know, CEOs to get fit, maybe aim for high-functioning men and women. Because there may be a bricklayer who wants to lose 15 kg before Christmas, who's put a bet on with a Tyler that he works with on-site, and to him that could be worth whatever it is that you charge. So essentially, you don't niche down too far, because you're just making your life so much harder. So make sure each post resonates with that audience because if you deliver 10 to 20 "aha" moments to someone, they're going to start seeing you as someone who understands their problems. Now, not everyone is going to want to hire you, but maybe 5 to 10% of these people are going to consider it. So think about who it is you want to work with. Now write out their problems. Now, next to those, provide solutions via content. Don't bunch these up either. I hate it at the moment when people say, "Here's five ways to have a better squat." Like, shut up! You're not. Just pick one and then blow my world away with it between 45 and 90 seconds. Then you can do one piece of content each for one of those five principles, and boom, that's nearly a week of content sorted.
As far as frequency, I think one a day is a really good benchmark. Number two: with every rep you will get better. Every Olympian gold medalist once couldn't do the thing they do; they just got better at it to the point that they're now world-class. Even now, you may think I'm some kind of well-spoken, handsome geezer who pronunciates and strategically plans his delivery of these topics, but the reality is I've just been doing this a lot longer than you. I've done more reps. Same goes for Jiu-Jitsu; most people I get beaten by have just done it for longer than me. So don't look for excuses; it's not the market, it's not the economy; it's the fact you need to do more of this to get better at this. You want to be able to do more chin-ups? Do more chin-ups. You want to be better at cooking? Cook more. Want to get better at writing emails? Write more emails. You see the pattern.
Let's look at number three: what I call my 20% rule. I think you should be aiming for 20% of the people who follow you to be on your email list. I have about 450,000 on mine at the moment, and that's just for one of my businesses. Collectively, I have about 600,000 emails, and I know that's technically just like over 10% of my following, but for smaller accounts, 20% is the benchmark. And if you said, "James, you can lose your social media accounts or your email list," I'd keep the email list; it's way more sacred. And this is something I'll teach you across time on this channel. There are loads of ways to grow your email list. One of the ways, you know, I like to cleverly link a link in the description offering something like, I don't know, 30 mind-blowing nuggets of wisdom to help your brand and business for free, which are cleverly delivered at the same time every day. So check that out at the end of this video and do it; just literally copy me because by the end of that automation you'll resonate with the emotional journey necessary to compel people to want to consider to do business with you, or don't.
Let's look at number four: be wary of a subprime audience. I've been guilty many a time of trying to go viral because if you use skits and trends to try and grow your audience, you may just grow a list of people that just want to be entertained. You don't want to bring in loads of vegans if you own a butcher's. Having a large audience and not having many people within it on your email list or in a position to buy your services or offerings is like being a priest with a 14-inch [ __ ]; it looks good, but what's the point? You're better off growing an audience with 10,000 savages ready to go to war than you are to have 1 million that followed you because you cameoed two episodes of Love Island.
Number five: your first 1 to 3 seconds at everything. Let's imagine you're making a topic on short form, maybe even the topic of this video. You could start with, "Hey guys, so when it comes to, uh, wanting to grow your social media account to 10,000 followers and more, that [ __ ]. Let's think, maybe script, maybe plan a little bit more." If I had to grow my account to 10,000 followers again, I'd focus on doing X. If you're someone with under 10,000 followers, it's essential that you start. Why? Growing your social media account to 10,000 followers in 2024 is hard, but if you do it right, it's easy. It's imperative that you those first few seconds have to really allow people to realize what it is you are talking about and how it can help them. Which brings me on to number five: your content is not about you; it's about them. It's not about you; it's about them. Even this channel, it's not about me; it's about you. Most coaches take pictures of their lunch and their workout and they wonder why they have no clients and no business. If you look through the video titles on this channel, you'll notice that they're all problems that people face. I am subservient to your problems; it's kind of what I do for a living. I solve problems. Fitness people aren't accountable to their training. This business people don't know what they're doing on social media. Necking four pills with a can of white monster isn't nice. So whatever piece of content you post, it's not about you; it's about them. So when you plan a piece of content, think about how it could genuinely change their life forever. For instance, there were two videos that I can think of right now off the top of my head that changed my life forever. I remember a post that said, "A Romanian deadlift doesn't have to touch the floor," and never got lower back pain again because in my mind I thought I was doing it right, and that person knew where I was at and what I could be doing wrong because he probably worked with a lot of people. Then I remember another, Ed, my Sensei on YouTube. Remember when he said, "Make sure that you plan your titles and thumbnails before you hit record on YouTube"? Now, looking back, those two creators are in very different niches, but they knew exactly who they were talking to, and they communicated something to me that quite literally made me a different person after I watched that video. So when you next plan out a piece of content, ask yourself if it is really life-changing. Because a video of today's workout you complete, it doesn't do [ __ ] for me. That's the reason that so many of your channels don't grow; it's self-centered, it's not well thought out, it's not problem-solving. And the biggest thing I see with creators trying to work their way to 10,000 followers is this: you massively overestimate what can be done in weeks, but you at the same time massively underestimate what can be done in months and years.
Now, the sixth bit of advice for growing a channel isn't actually something you should do; it's something you absolutely shouldn't do. There is one thing that is absolutely destroying creators' retention: it's filling their audience with a subprime type of follower. And if they could only stop doing this thing, they'd have so much of an easier time growing their channel. And if you want to know what you need to stop doing, well, you need to watch this video here; it's only 8 minutes long, and well, it will change the way you see social media forever.