Transcription
Do you ever notice how the more marketing advice you consume, the more confused you get about what actually works? Well, there's a reason for that. See, I've spent the last decade helping small businesses with their marketing, and I've discovered something pretty unsettling: the most popular marketing advice out there isn't just ineffective, it's designed to keep you stuck.
That's why I had my team pick out some of the most popular marketing advice TikToks that they could find—some good, some bad, probably some terrible—so that I can weigh in and let you know what advice to actually follow and what will probably kill your business if you do. All right, let's start with our first one.
Top five digital marketing trends for 2025. Trend one: Companies will start doing SEO for all platforms, not just Google. Check out how many daily searches take place on all platforms: over 46 billion. So that's really good advice right there. What he's saying is basically we can't rely on Google anymore for SEO; too much has changed. They are not only trying to answer things with AI right within Google, but they're prioritizing so much extra content—from the maps to YouTube videos on the side to "people also asked" kind of boxes. So let's say you were to get that number one spot—well, congratulations, you're already pushed kind of way down to page two. So smart advice already, especially if he's talking about YouTube; that's definitely a good place to focus on SEO. Although Google is a leader with 8.5 billion searches daily, it only controls 18% of the market share. So the new SEO will be search everywhere optimization instead of search engine optimization.
Trend two: Micro-influencers will boom. Paying someone with millions of followers doesn't work well. The ROI for influencers of over 500,000 followers is -112.04%, while paying influencers under 100,000 followers creates roughly a 36.71% ROI.
Trend three: Marketers will shift their content creation focus. Most people focus on video and text-based content. That's an interesting stat; I've never heard that before. But uh, Neil knows this stuff when it comes to this—it's Neil Patel. That is a good piece of advice to concentrate not on like the Kardashians of the world. If you're going to be doing influencer marketing, you want to concentrate on the people who have niche audiences that overlap with yours the most. You'd think like people that are more famous would get more engagement, but no, it's the smaller people because people feel more of a connection to them; they feel like they almost know them in a way that you don't really feel like you know Kim Kardashian, right? But you might feel like you know an Neil Patel or someone like that. So smart. However, content types like webinars, case studies, live streams, email newsletters, and podcasts have a higher return on investment potential.
TR four: Companies will prioritize marketing AI platforms in 2020. We asked people how they find answers to their questions. I do want to push back on what he said about podcasting. So I love podcasting; I've I've actually done a few in my life. The problem with podcasting—I I don't know how you can measure that you get a better ROI for that. It's easier to do a podcast, generally speaking; it's just audio-only. You don't have to to focus on the visuals, although video podcasts are becoming more and more of a thing, too. The problem with podcasts is it is very hard to find an audience for them. Think about like YouTube; it finds you an audience. Like if you do everything right, there's people there, there's eyeballs, people searching; they know what you like; they push stuff to you on a homepage. There's nothing like that in the podcast arena. Like if you go to Apple Podcast, it's just going to show you like a grid of like the most popular podcasts; it doesn't really get to know you and your taste in that same way. So I do think podcasting—I'm not going to say it's a way out; I just think it's less of a sure thing unless you're going to do video podcasting and you're going to really concentrate on putting it on YouTube, and then you can put it everywhere else, too. Almost everyone said searching is like Google. We asked the same question in 2024; roughly 30% of people use AI platforms like ChatGPT to answer their questions. Companies have no choice but to optimize their content to show up on these AI platforms.
TR five: Companies will shift how they use content. Historically, companies use content to build an audience on the social web or drive SEO. So I love that; I've actually done a video about that. It's called generative engine optimization. So it's basically GEO is the new SEO, in a way. I don't know about you, but when I have a search now, I go to Perplexity or I go to ChatGPT, like the Deep research mode; it's going to give you so much better of an answer, and people are really quickly catching onto that. So we were going through a surrogacy journey right now, and we're we we're trying to pick between two different surrogacy agencies, and uh, we went to ChatGPT for it, the Deep research mode—cuz it's so much easier than just to look through a bunch of search engine results where there's nothing there to grab onto other than their own marketing language. So the more you can do to show up—be the business that AI recommends in their recommendations and their suggestions—that's going to be key going forward. And although likes and engagement are cool, they don't necessarily mean more revenue. Specific content types, such as long-form videos or case studies, are more likely to encourage people to purchase. In contrast, channels like podcasts and short-form videos are great for building awareness. I think podcasts are terrible for awareness, actually, um, because, like I said, people have a hard time finding them. But when someone listens to your podcast and they really start absorbing it, it's a good long-form content play that can uh result in a lot of sales. Short-form video, though, he's right about that; short-form is great for quick eyeballs, quick attention—not so good for sales.
Do I need a website to get clients? No, you do not need a website. You need two things: you need good work and you need a good network. Now, first and foremost, you need at least an example of what you can do. Uh, I have a lot to say about that right there. You don't need a website. Let's say that's true—it's not, but let's say it is. You need good work. Okay, in other words, he's saying your work will sell itself. I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet, but that's what it sounds like to me. He's saying if you have good work, people will just recommend you and you're good to go. There's a couple problems here: good work doesn't sell itself; you need to be able to talk about it in a way that makes people see the value in it; that's what a website is good for. Let me just see what he's going to say about the network thing first of all before I weigh in. That doesn't have to be on your own website; that could be on any of your social medias, or it can just be a file itself. And secondly, you need people who can vouch for you, people who can recommend you and let these clients know that they are in good hands. Your network is is just as important as the work that you do, and those are the two main things you need in order to start your journey. So I don't know if he's talking there about just people who are just going to recommend you. You know, it's the old-school way of doing business, and there's there's something to it. I don't I don't discount the idea of in-person recommendations from friends, neighbors, family—that that kind of thing—but you can't rely on it; you can't take that to the bank every month and know, okay, I'm going to get five referrals this month; you can't control that. If you create content online or if you even if you do paid ads, that is in your control. And I think what he does have right here is you need people who can vouch for you—that's testimonials, that's reviews online; that is definitely gold. And as long as those are up and online, they're doing work for you. Your neighbor down the street who used you one time—how many people is he going to recommend you to in a daily basis or a monthly basis or every year? So that is why you can't rely on word of mouth alone. You can build a website at any time throughout your career if you have the time, but I personally do not have a website, and I haven't had a website for the seven years of my career, and my work and my network speak for themselves. I never needed a website to get that next job. I don't know about how you think about it; if someone doesn't have a website, I do not think they're a real business. To me, it sounds like it is a either a hobby or um they couldn't get their stuff together enough to put together a website, which means again they're not a real business in my eyes. So having a website in 2015 was expected and the bare minimum; if you're a business, you cannot rely on your social media as an alternative to that.
Here are three touch points that I find most pivotal for a business doing digital marketing: prospecting tools. If you're driving online traffic through paid advertising, it's important you work on capturing that traffic in some way, depending on your brand, and you can try a value wheel, giveaways, a quiz, or even the promise of quality content. Welcome flows: it's the combination of educational content, product teasers, and limited-time offers. Social proof: If you have no reviews on your website, your potential customers will be skeptical. The difference between zero reviews and one review is big; you can't ignore this early on. A lot of people ask me that question a lot, like, Wes, what if I don't have any testimonials? Get a testimonial, even if it's just one—like he's right, one is better than zero, three is better than one, five is better than three, you know what I mean—just make it a priority to get them. In terms of what he was saying in the beginning here, I mean, it's basic stuff; it's you need to get people on your email list, and then you need to nurture that list.
Two pieces of advice I definitely agree with: If you want to get a lot of views and subscribers on YouTube, then you need to watch this video. YouTube is based on three main components: making people click, making people watch, and giving the market what they want. Start with a thumbnail that people actually want to click, then create it around a topic that people are actually interested in that's happening in the news, and then once one pops off, create 5 to 10. Okay, so I think this is a little bit more geared toward entertainment YouTube. He said make something that's like getting a lot of traction in the news. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Ideally speaking, if you're going to be using YouTube for marketing, you want evergreen topics. You want to make a video today that people can watch today, tomorrow, next year, two years from now, and it's still bringing you in eyeballs, still bringing you in clients. So I wouldn't think too hard about uh trending topics.
Here are five must-have website pages that we always include for our clients. Here is a website that the web team have just finished creating. So the first page should be your homepage. Homepage. You should also include information about your business. You should have a page showing your services or your products, a page answering common questions, and lastly a contact us page. I have no problem with any of that. She didn't really go into too much detail of what she to go on those pages. You definitely need a homepage; you definitely need an about us page where you get a chance to really talk a little bit about the why of your business because people do want to—they want to feel some kind of a connection; they want to feel like you get where they're coming from. So that's important for that reason. She mentioned FAQs; you also want a testimonials page, and you also want a pricing page—super important to have all of those. So just missed a couple, but what she had was good.
Want to stand out and build your brand on YouTube? You need to have a place where like-minded people can come together, and that's how you actually build a community. YouTube is very noisy; there's a ton of channels out there, and there's a lot of new YouTube channels that are getting started every single day. Now the goal is for a viewer to come to your channel and they see that this is all for them, and they're going to subscribe when they see that there are similar videos all based around the topic that they are interested in. The YouTube algorithm will actually reward you for doing this. So what he's basically saying—long story short—you want to make sure that if you're doing YouTube, you need to have a niche, right? You need to have kind of a topic cluster of of very similar topics; you can't be all over the place. You can get a little bit more outside as you go. For instance, on this channel, at this point, I talk about websites, I talk about AI-related stuff, I talk about YouTube as a marketing channel, but it's all under the umbrella of helping service businesses get more clients. It's different topics all around the same thing, but when I started, I really had to hone in on like website stuff because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have known what I was about. If I was talking about websites and just marketing and AI—I didn't really wasn't much of a thing then—and YouTube, it would have had a hard time categorizing me in knowing what audience is to put me in front of. So when you start, you really do want to start pretty niched down, and then as your audience grows, you can kind of start expanding a little bit, but don't go too crazy with it.
I truly believe cold calling is one of the most effective outreach strategies because it allows us to connect with people on a human level. Cold calling is coming full circle because I think people crave that human interaction. Yes, people crave getting uh sales calls from people they don't know that they haven't necessarily got in the last couple of years because everybody's been so absorbed with technology and new forms of contacting people. So I'm not going to say that cold outreach does not have its place in business. I'll be the first to admit I don't have the stomach for it. So if that's thing and you're really good at sales and you want to do that, I'm not going to say it's a bad idea. What I will say is in my experience, and this is just a human psychology thing, if you make something their idea, they're way more open to the prospect of it. So for instance, when you create content, you're basically creating what we call inbound leads; they're finding you; they're coming to you as opposed to what he's talking about, which is I'm going to get on the on the phone or I'm just going to blast people with emails saying, hey, here's why you should hire me. I get those all the time, mostly from like YouTube editors and stuff like that and like content writers, and it's just like it falls on deaf ears because I get them so often. And he's he's kind of making it sound like no one does it anymore, which is like not really the case because again I get it all the time. Doesn't mean it doesn't work; it just means I think you got to have the stomach for it; you got to be a good salesman, and you got to be willing to kind of piss people off, too, because I think you're going to do that a lot when you're cold calling. Really is no secret to cold calling success; it's repetition and the ability to be resilient and take no a thousand times over to get exactly a lot of nos to get to a yes. I would rather spend my time making content, attracting them to me, where once we get on the phone they're like already pre-sold; makes it a lot easier.
All right, here's the inside scoop: people don't read; they scan. It's all about the F-shape pattern; your eyes move from one point to another, forming an F-shape. That means your content needs to be scanned, not just readable. Whether you're designing packaging, creating ads, or developing a website, the key is to make it easy for people to scan and absorb the information. Yeah, so this is why you want to make really good use of headlines on your website; you want to use like bulleted lists whenever possible; your website copy and just all your marketing copy should be as short as possible, right? You don't want these long these big blocks of text; generally, that's why you want to use images—all that kind of stuff. The headline tells them that it's this kind of content, and they'll read further when they want to. So good advice.
I think that email response rates definitely have gone down, and you know I don't think that this is unique to our company; I think it's across the board, and I can relate to it as well because I get tons of like outbound emails coming to me every day, and I hardly ever look at them. If I have that need, if I remember an email, I might go and search for it and bring it up, but I think uh the effectiveness of emails has really gone down. So there's two things here. So a like the question of is email dead? That comes up all the time. I've done videos where I talk about how much I believe in email marketing because I do, and it's still very effective, and I get constant comments back from people saying like, no, I I refuse to look at a marketing email. Here's the thing, though: what she's describing and what those commenters are describing, it's a very different type of email marketing than what I recommend and what most people recommend who know what they're talking about with it. I'm not talking about promos; I'm not talking about those like designed emails that you get that look like a little mini website or that are just trying to sell you something today; that doesn't work very well, right? But what does work is you get people through your content—again, a lot of talk about content because I I do believe that is the way forward now more than ever—so you get people in with your content; you sign them up to your email list with some kind of a lead magnet, some kind of content that they um really need that's going to help them solve a problem. Then here's where I want you to pay attention: you're going to send helpful content that helps them go further; it's advice; it's tips; they're going to look forward to those emails. I'm on several email lists that I look forward to getting every week because it's actual interesting stuff that I can use. So if you do it that way, and then every four or five emails, then you hit them up with a little bit more of a direct offer, but even then you're sly about it, and it's more like, hey, we've been talking about this topic; I think you might want to go a little further, a little faster if you need my help; I'm here; let's schedule a call as opposed to now it's time to like sell, right? It's still I would just want to help you even more. So that's how that works.
Well, here are five things that every service-based business needs to include on their website: real-world examples of your work; that's to back up the importance of your services. Testimonials from your previous clients. A detailed application form for your services. That detailed application process looked pretty intense. Now if you have the kind of business where it's visual, like a designer, show your work, show your testimonials—all that good stuff. Then on the the contact form—she's cleverly called it like an application form, not just contact—it looked like she had about like 10 or so fields there, which can be overwhelming for people, and you're going to get a lot fewer leads that way. Will they be more qualified leads? Probably. The more questions you ask, it leads to people who are more serious, but you got to figure out that balance: do you want one lead a month who's serious or do you want maybe 10 leads who um can be very easily sold right on the phone? So that's just up to you and what you want to how you want to deal with that.
One of the best ways to find new design clients is just posting videos on YouTube. Now the best part about this is you don't have to have a big YouTube channel; you don't even have to have a single subscriber, but you can still put these videos out and get new clients. Now I started posting these videos a few years back, and basically what I would do is I would finish a project, and then I would record my screen and walk through the project page by page. I would show them what the website looks like and why I made the decisions that I made, and then I would just talk to them about what about that website is actually working. This would show them that I'm an expert, and it showcases some of my work, and it's just fun for them to watch this whole project come together. Yeah, no, and this is good stuff. So basically he's saying he's talking about doing kind of case study videos, which can work out great. I would always recommend adding other types of content to that as well because some people um have a hard time seeing their own stuff in one case study. You would also want to do videos just basically based on tips or should I do this or should I do that—FAQs, that kind of thing. There's plenty of those kind of videos that anyone can make, even you know especially a web designer. So let's check out the rest now.
At the end of this video, all you need to do is add a call to action, or in other words, just say, hey, go to my website or call me if you have interest in a website like this. Yes, okay. So this is where the rubber meets the road. You've got people finding you on YouTube; how do you get them as an actual client? What he's saying: you have to then usher people kind of back to your website where you control the ball; it's your home court advantage there where you can control the message. So he's right, having a call to action. What he's not saying and what I would highly recommend—the way you would handle it—is at the end of every video you have to have some kind of a call to action, right? Three out of four times that call to action should be now watch this video right here for another case study or now that we've learned this, it's not really worth much until you learn this, right? You get them into the next video, and the next video it creates a binge session, and that's where they feel like they get to know you. Then on every like fourth video or so, then you can say, all right, now there's a lot I can help you with one-on-one, so click right here and set up a consultation with me; I'd love to talk to you. So you're not always driving them back to your website; you can do that in your description; you can always have a link in your description; you can definitely have a link on your channel page that gets them there. So don't always send them away from YouTube because YouTube doesn't like that, right? They're going to stop recommending your content if they see that a lot more people than usual leave YouTube after watching your videos. And as long as you use the right keywords in the title, people will always find this video, and they'll contact you for a project. He's basically saying you want to go for search on YouTube at first, which is totally right. There's a lot of YouTube advice out there that talks about the real riches are in having discoverable videos, right, where YouTube just shows them on the homepage and you find brand new audiences who weren't even looking for you. Great in theory, but it takes a while to get there; you can't start there. Start with search-based videos so that YouTube understands who your audience is and what your content's all about. Then you can start broadening out, and then suddenly YouTube will show your stuff to people who weren't even looking for it because they just know like, okay, this is probably the right kind of audience for this video. So start with search and then broaden from there.
There are three components to a high-converting website, and they're only the hero section. The hero section is what you see before you start scrolling on the website. The first one is your value proposition; this is basically a headline that tells people what it is that you're doing on this website and why they should even care about this. Here in Shopify's website, it's bring your ideas to life for $1 a month. Now the second key component is the call to action; what it is that you want them to do. In this case, you want people to start their free trial and give you their email address. You must tell people directly what to do and put a clear button on the hero section. And the third part is a visual; remember, images communicate faster than words, words. So in this case, we have an image here that looks like a shop front with an you know add to cart button and a cursor. Okay, I'm going to stop it right there. So I like his advice; you do need all those things, but I'm going to go one step further. He said value proposition, right? So he showed the thing of like, you know, here's what we're going to do for you—basically, here's the result we're going to get you—very important, and I love that as a headline, but what's missing is the context, right? I see so many small business owners who follow this kind of advice, and then they make that big proclamation statement, but what do you do, right? Like that's where the subheadline has to come in; we need to know exactly what that is, and that's the thing that's missing on a lot of sites that I see these days.
2042. I'm going to stand right here and be like, you ID social media. I mean, day trading attention means that you do not put anything on a pedestal. I have no romance to social, to Google, to Facebook, to TikTok, to myself, or anything I've done prior to my career. I care about today, right now, and what is overpriced and underpriced behavior to make the thing that I want to happen happen as of this moment. Organic social media creative is number one most important thing in marketing today. They will continue to leave opportunity on the table, and I tell you there's not an organization in the Fortune 5000 selling stuff that has organic social media as number one on their list. Meanwhile, every business that's 5,001 down, it's the only thing they believe in; it's why they're growing, period. So I don't agree with everything GaryVee says, but I happen to really agree with that, but I will take it a step further. So he basically said said organic social media is what to do. Yes and no. Here's the thing: you can spin your hamster wheel like crazy if you're doing the wrong kind of social media, right? And I'm not going to say what's right and wrong specifically, but what I will say is if you're only concentrating on really short bursts of content, if all you're doing is like Instagram like short videos or you know TikToks or image carousels, that kind of thing, you're going to have a very hard time time really getting people to latch on to you as a business. That's why you really do want to focus first and foremost on longer-form content. So when we think of social media, you know, I'm going to be a broken record and say YouTube again. So while YouTube isn't actual social media, it's much more of a search engine; it's much more of an entertainment platform than social media. You want to focus on something like that first and foremost—long-form stuff. Then once you've got your feet under you there, you can start repurposing it, shortening it for social media—for you know Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, all those good things—but you don't want to get too burnt out on this hamster wheel of having to create you know three or four things a day because when you're on Instagram, that is what you have to do; you have to
Put out content, content, content, versus like, you know, YouTube, one a week. You can even do one every two weeks on YouTube, and you're fine, because it's searchable. There's a long tail to it; it's not here today, gone tomorrow, like it is with other social media platforms. So, yet another reason I like YouTube.
Rich people don't sleep 8 hours a day. That's a third of your life. It ain't for 24 hours in a day; you cannot be sleeping 8 hours a day. You can't live in L.A. and wake up at 8:00 in the morning; it's 11:00 on the East Coast; the stock market's been open two hours. Steve, Steve, Steve. This is the kind of thing I expected from Gary Vee. You cannot tell someone they deserve less sleep. Your rest and recuperation is just as important as the time you put in to working, right? If I didn't get my rest in my sleep, I would come in to work being like a shell of a person, and then I would get nothing done that day.
Hustle culture is something that I'm really trying to kind of, uh, get people to let go of a lot, because it's it's not helpful. You need to go at a pace that's sustainable, right? When you're a brand-new business, you can do a little bit of hustle, right, to get yourself going. If it's not sustainable, then what good is it?
Here's seven things to avoid in your email marketing strategy that people do way too often. Let's go. Number one: Don't send too many emails. A consistent schedule is nice, but don't be sending multiple emails every single day, or else it becomes annoying. Number two: Don't forget your preheader text, which, when you view it from a mobile phone, can be even more eye-catching than the subject line. Number three: Don't go overboard with the design and images; keep it simple. I agree with everything you said so far, especially that one, because I get the question a lot when I talk about email marketing. People are asking, "So, Wes, should I do the the kind of email that looks really pretty? Because, like, I got MailChimp, or I got, uh, ConvertKit, and it comes with all these really cool templates. Should I use those?" And I always say, "Do not use those, because they make your email look like an ad." That's not what you want; you want it to feel like it just came from someone who's there to kind of be a mentor figure and just teach you stuff. Number four: Don't be too pushy. Super aggressive marketing almost always can turn away prospects. What did we talk about? Three out of your four emails are content; then the fourth one can be a little bit more direct, but it should still be from the mindset of, "I can still help you more if we got on the phone together," or something like that. So you're still helping. Number five: Don't sound too robotic. Okay, you call me that. Try to make it sound natural. Number six: Don't forget to add your contact information to every email. Number seven: Don't ignore your analytics. Yep, that's great advice. Email marketing is not dead; don't let anybody tell you otherwise. An email newsletter is very, very low friction; it's pretty easy to just get started writing. If you know how to type something, you can probably send an email newsletter. Whereas, when it comes to an email newsletter, all you have to do is type a few things and hit send, and so it's one of the easiest kind of platforms that you can get started with as a creator.
I like Ali Abdaal's stuff, but that's a pretty unhelpful, uh, statement. It's basically saying, like, if you can just put some images on a screen, you can make a website. It's all about the content of the newsletter, right? It's about putting together something that people actually want and then marketing it correctly. So, newsletters are coming back, but they're being talked about in a different way. It's like, you know, "I'll help you become a better marketer in 15 minutes a week," or, "I'll help you get your dog trained in five minutes a week," that kind of thing. And it says every week, then you would just send them a new email with either, you know, a tip, right, in the email, or it would be a link to a, you know, your video or your podcast or whatever kind of content you created. So it needs to say something; don't forget that part.
Customers don't care about you; they don't care about your product, and they don't care about your brand. The only thing they care about is themselves. So, if you want to sell more, simply show how you are all about them and how your product transforms their life; help them solve problems, reach goals, or feel amazing. When you position your audience as the hero in their success story, your brand becomes their place to be. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree with this advice more. So, basically, so many websites get this backwards, and you go to their website, and they just talk all about, "This is why we're so great; we've been around since 1985; uh, we do this, this, and this." But really what your clients want to see is they want to see how you're going to help them. So, if you make your hero section, you know, at the top of your homepage all about your business, and you show a photo of yourself and, you know, maybe, you know, the outside of your building—a lot of companies like to do that—I don't see myself reflected in that journey whatsoever. So you make it about them; you make it about the results you get them, and you are just the helpful mentor that helps them get what they want; that's your role in the story. If your website's a story, you are the the Obi-Wan Kenobi, right, and they're the Luke Skywalker. And it's actually a much more powerful character to be the Obi-Wan, 'cause that's the person with all the experience, all the know-how, but he's not the hero; Luke's the hero.
Digital marketing is the biggest scam and waste of time, and here's why: 90% of the people telling you to start a business, how to start a business, building a business, growing on social media have never done any of those themselves; they've never built a business themselves. Well, that's true; there's a lot of people out there talking about stuff they don't know about. I know this 'cause a ton of them come to me for coaching, but also I've poured hours of research into this side hustle and a ton of other ones. And if you're a digital marketer watching this, I hate to tell you the truth, but it's better that you know it now so you can stop wasting your time and probably money and actually do something that will get you to where you want to go. I know for a fact that you want to make money; it's the whole reason why you're in it. And so, if you want to make money, do it the right way. Well, what's the right way, you may ask? In terms of social media, it's talking about things that you actually have experience and knowledge in. This could be fitness; it could be health; it could be relationships. He's talking about content marketing; I guess he's saying, "Don't BS your way through it." I like the fact he has a little microphone and a spatula. I don't take him super seriously, just with, like, you know, with with all that kind of stuff. But yeah, don't BS your way through it; don't talk about stuff you don't know about. But if you are an expert in something, or at least at least if you know a lot more than your clients know about something, you don't have to have been around for, you know, 20 years to have something to say about your industry, right? Create the content; research to fill in the gaps of your own knowledge, and you will learn very quickly just by creating that content. But yeah, don't bamboozle people; don't tell them you have experience when you don't; that's that's not cool.
Then what I want you to do is create content around that for a straight year, but the big thing is don't do it for the money, because if you do it for the money, not only you probably not going to do it, but you're not going to stay consistent with it. Your sole focus should just be helping people for free and spreading your message out for free. Yeah, I mean, there's something to be said for that as well; um, it's it's decent advice, because let's face it, we're all in business to make money; we're not just in business to send out good vibes. But I think the bigger picture what he's saying here is if you get on this content train, especially if it's like YouTube, don't expect to get a payday right away, 'cause you're not, in most cases. You can start to see some more client interest in the first maybe 3 to 6 months; it'll be slow, and then, you know, 6 months to a year, it picks up steam. So know that going in; you do have to kind of pay your dues, and you're you're doing a lot of free work. And he's right; you're basically you're helping people for free. Doesn't mean you're helping them one-on-one for free; I don't think what he's saying is go out and and do jobs for people and not get paid for it, but if you're helping them with content, with advice that is helping, and that's building up a lot of goodwill of people who will then become clients.
So, a video cannot go viral without passing the silence test. So, before you post your next video, I want you to turn off the sound and ask yourself, within the first two seconds, "Was it clear what this video is about, and is that interesting enough to tens of millions of people?" So what he's talking about is like viral short-form video. I don't even recommend that this be a strategy for you for a couple main reasons, the first one just being, um, short form is a terrible way to go deep with people. People will watch a short of yours on TikTok or whatever, and then, even if they really like it, they're very unlikely to be shown a video again; like, even if they are, they're not going to necessarily remember you. They've got to see you probably 10 times or more before they would ever start remembering who you are to begin with. And when we're talking about virality, there, what do you think is better: being seen by 10 million randos or by 100 of your perfect audience members who were searching for content like yours? So, when people ask me, like, "How how do I go viral?" I just tell them, "Don't even worry about going viral; you don't want to go viral; you want to be found by your exact clients at the exact right time." That is how you're going to make a lot of money through your videos. So, if you want to watch me react to even more advice on TikTok, this video has some of the worst marketing lies I've ever heard, and they're really easy to fall for if you don't know what you're looking for. So just click right here, and I'm going to show you what to avoid for the good of your business. Meet you right there.