Transcription
If you want to make content that performs better, I'm going to explain exactly how to do it. Because the truth is, if you're struggling to get traction, it's probably because you're playing the content game with a suboptimal strategy.
Now, I've been making content for a long time. I have a million followers. I've done billions of views. But most importantly, I have obsessed for thousands of hours trying to build a system that makes it easier to create winning content. Now, the good news is I finally cracked it. I built that system and it's working. It's the exact thing I've been using to speedrun Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube over the last 6 months. It's also worked for dozens of other business owners across wildly different niches. So, in this video, I'm going to break the whole thing down. This is the eight-step system, really a playbook that virtually guarantees you win with content.
All right. Now, before we dive into the eight steps, let's just quickly align on what winning with content actually means. Here's how I look at it. Winning with content doesn't mean I'm going to sit on the couch, make zero videos, and then the views and dollars are just going to pour in. That's obviously not how it works. You're going to have to put some work in. But here's the thing. If I'm going to do all that work, I want to be sure that the content I make is actually going to perform well. And that's what winning with content really looks like to me.
Every time you sit down to make a video, you want to essentially guarantee that when you post it, these three things are going to happen. One, that your video will find its way to the right viewers. Two, that your video will resonate with those viewers when they watch it. And three, that some portion of those viewers will watch it and then take some desired action. Sign up for an email list, buy your products, watch more videos. Winning with content is guaranteeing that all three of those things happen every time you sit down to make a video. And I call this d-risking the rep. I'm risking and investing my time to make the content. So, I want to make sure that time investment actually pays off. So, this eight-step playbook that I'm about to walk through is specifically designed to derisk your effort so that you get the highest possible win rate when you do make videos.
All right, step one is extremely important, and you got to do this before you take any other action. A lot of people overlook this, and that is getting clear on who your target viewer actually is. I call this person your ideal viewer avatar. If you could pick anyone to watch your videos based on the business you're building and the audience you're growing, who would they be? Before you do anything else, you have to fully understand the makeup and archetype of this person. Demographics, psychographics, platforms they spend time on, messages they resonate with, and most importantly, the pain points they are struggling with. I actually recommend you open a Google doc and make a bulleted list of all the attributes of this person so that you can remind yourself every time you sit down to make a video. And understanding who this IBA is, it's really important for a lot of different reasons, but the most important one is that it forces content audience fit consistency time after time after time. And that consistency will trigger the algorithm to help you find more of those people over time. Now, in this video, I'm not going to do a full breakdown of exactly how you come up with the right IVA because I've made several other videos on the channel, which I'll link below, that cover that. But just know before you get to everything else, this is a non-negotiable, critical step one. You have to know who your IVA is.
All right, step two is to find other winning creators on your content medium that are already making winning content for that same IVA. And this is so you can start with a blueprint of what actually works versus doing everything yourself from scratch. When you're starting out with anything, the reason people fail is because there's too many unknowns that you're trying to tackle at the same time. And this paralyzes people because when your content doesn't work, you don't know which of the unknowns was the problem. Was it the idea, the pacing, the story, the scripting, the editing, the bio, the posting time? What is it? It becomes a black hole of confusion. And so, the easiest way to get to success faster with anything, but especially content, is to minimize the set of unknowns. And this is why I believe all beginners with content should start out by modeling creators that are already making winning ideas for that same IVA. If you're in fifth grade and you're trying to learn how to play basketball, it's much easier to watch the pros shoot and model their behavior than go out on a court by yourself and try to figure it out. It's the same logic here.
Now, there will be lots of people in the comments that are saying, "Dude, that's not modeling. That's straight copying and stealing." And that's just not true. Copying is copying. Remixing is taking the seed of something that worked, adding something different to it, and making something new. Virgil Abau, one of the most celebrated designers and creatives of all time, has the 3% rule. He says, "If you take something and change it 3%, all of a sudden you have a new thing. Artists are allowed to do that. Musicians are allowed to do that. That's how the world works." And I spent time saying that because beginners get into their head that they're not allowed to remix and build off of stuff that already works. That couldn't be further from the truth.
All right. So, if you buy, that's the strategy. How do we go about actually finding those proven winners that are targeting your IVA? First, you want to go to the platform that you're actually posting on. Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever it is. Go to that platform. You want to create a fresh account so that the algorithm is not biased on what you've consumed before. So make a new email, new username, fresh account from scratch. Begin by searching in the search bar for terms that your IVA would search for either at the topic level or specific questions or pain points they might search for. So for example, if you're trying to make content for small businesses that need accounting services, maybe you're searching accounting services, maybe you're searching a specific tax question for small businesses. Now, once you search that, start by watching a few videos that you get served. For any that are not related, swipe through. For any that are related, like, save, and watch the whole thing. In this process, for 10 to 15 minutes, the algorithm will get pretty good at tailoring the content to you. You want to find one anchor creator that comes up on the feed that looks like they make quality content that you were engaged by for your IVA, and they have at least 100,000 followers. Grab that person's profile URL and add it to a bulleted list that you have on the side.
Now, you want to find 10 to 20 more people like that person. And there are two ways to do it. The easiest way is to just keep doing what you just did. Scroll the for you page, find new people, add them to the list. But if you can't find new people in the for you page or it's just taking too long, pick that anchor creator, go to who they're following, and then look at their following list. It'll probably be 3 to 500 people. Chances are, if that person is winning in that space and is dedicated, they're also finding other winners for you. So, this is just a shortcut to get more curated inspiration. Now, on YouTube, obviously, there are no following and followers, but the for you feed on YouTube is the best out of all of them. So, it's pretty good at serving you videos in your category after 15 20 minutes of scrolling. When you're picking people to add to this list, you want to look for a mix of small and large followings. Don't just pick people with over a million subscribers or followers. Look for people with 20 to 50,000 all the way up to several hundred thousand. Oftentimes, the best seeds for ideas come from smaller accounts that created a banger on accident and they just stumbled on it and don't know why they did. These types of videos have the smallest amount of traction bias because nobody knows who they were and they still liked and watched it. So, there's a good chance there's something in there that really resonated. Again, the reason we're going through this exercise is because finding winning creators is the fastest way to find winning ideas. When I started making content, I made the mistake of thinking everything had to be purely original that no one had ever made. And not only is this impossible, it's just the hard way to play. If you're trying to derisk your effort, I recommend easy mode.
All right, once you have 10 to 20 people on that creator list, let's move on to step three. By the way, before I keep going, you can probably tell I don't approach content like all the other social media gurus. I am a scientist and study the data for how to reverse engineer winning success on social media and YouTube. If you're a business owner and an entrepreneur and you're trying to learn these tactics to really build a content engine and system that works regardless of the emotion or flavor of the month, you should join Wavy World. It's a free community I built and there's 22,000 other people in there that are all helping each other level up their content and learning from trainings and tutorials that I put together. I've got a free invite link in the description for you below if you want to join.
All right, back to step three. So far, we have defined our IVA and we have found 10 to 20 other winning creators that are already making content that's working, serving that same IVA. Next, we're going to scan those winning creators accounts for outlier performing content. Okay, so why does this process work and how exactly do we do it? In order to derisk your effort making content, you want to start with ideas that have already resonated before. And the truth is, the best judge of resonance, stories, hooks, ideas is the mass market. Unless somebody bought the views with paid ads, which you can tell right away, you can't fake this data. And here's a common concern that I'll dismiss for you. You might be worried that if you take some idea from a creator and remix it, well, the audience has already heard all of that messaging before and so your video is not going to do well. And possibly this is true, but only if it's a direct copy, which of course I do not advise. The truth is, most messages take several times, even if said by the same person, to stick in someone's head. And you might be the fourth person to say the same thing, but you said it in a different way, and that was the reason it broke through for them. So, don't worry about this. Also, the original creator probably only tapped into one or less than 1% of the total addressable audience that would care about that message. So, there's a huge additional market that never saw that base video. If you take their idea, remix on top of it, and then post, there's a chance that idea goes to only people that never saw their original video.
Okay, let's keep going. So, how do we actually determine what the outlier videos are? What you want to do is open the creator's profile and scan the videos on their feed, looking at the total view count. And there are advanced ways to do this, but the most basic one would be manually scrolling and looking for 10x view outliers. So what that means is which videos have a view count that is at least 10 times bigger than the average on that channel. So for example, if you roughly scroll the last 50 videos, then you kind of get a sense that the average is around 5,000 views, a 10x outlier would be 50,000 views on that video. So for any video you see with at least 50,000 views and the topic looks interesting to you, that's a key point. Grab that video link and add it to another list. This is called your idea short list. And I will note, the better you get at identifying what a good idea actually looks like, the lower you can drop that outlier multiple. So sometimes I'll find a video that's just a 1x or 2x. It doesn't look like a breakout, but I know there was something in there that the creator just missed when they executed. When you're starting out, I recommend having that outlier number as high as possible, 10x or more.
Now, the manual way to do this task is to go through the feed, find the videos, rightclick, new tab, copy that link, and go manually one by one. But the speedrun way to do this is to use a tool like sort feed to automatically resort the videos in a viewer's profile to rank them by views over a certain date range. And I talked about exactly how you do this on my last video about AI tools. But I will let you in on a little secret, and this is the first time I've ever said this. Everything we're talking about right now, finding winning creators, taking their profiles and finding the outlier ideas, figuring out how to remix those ideas to improve them, we're building our own AI tool that will do all of that for you automatically. There is nothing even close to it on the market today, and it's insane. It will save you hours and hours per week. Now, if you want to be one of the first people to get access to that tool, you can join the weight list here at this link or in the description.
All right, at this point you have a list of winning ideas from your list of winning creators that have talked to your IVA. Awesome. And this is where the hard part really begins. You now need to look at that list and try to figure out two things. Why those videos worked and more specifically what areas of opportunity or improvement there are in those videos that you could tweak so that you could make it work as well. Now again, there's a chance that if you just straight copy everything, the words, the edit, the recording, the voice, the tone, the hook, if you copy all of it, there's a chance it works. But I advise really strongly against doing this. A, this is straight up stealing. B, the platforms won't like it. And C, audiences look poorly upon this. Usually, niches are small, and so if you make the exact same video, people may see it and might remember, and if they do, they'll write you off forever. So instead, what you want to do is try to understand the base components of the video and figure out where there are areas for improvement. And this is the hardest part to learn. But if you master this, you cannot lose with content.
Okay, let me break down how I approach doing this every single day. Every video really has four components. There's the idea or the premise, which is what the video is about broadly. There's the hook structure, which is what is being said and shown during the hook or intro. There's the story structure, which is how does the story flow? But what are the main body points of the story? What is the video actually about? And then there's the visual structure, which are the visuals and execution of everything but the spoken words. And here's my metaphor for this. I want you to think of each of those four buckets as a giant tub of different Lego pieces. Each of those Lego pieces in those buckets represents all the different ways that a video could be made in that structure. So, there are a lot of different types of video ideas. There are a lot of different types of video hooks. There are a lot of different story structure formats. There's a lot of different visual structure formats. Essentially, every video is just one combination, one stack with a piece from all four of those buckets. And I call this stack your video format. So, in this stage in the process, you've got a winning video format from another creator in your hands. And you're trying to do two things. A is figure out what is that Lego brick combination stack that that video is made out of. What was the idea? What is the hook? How is the story flowing? What are the visuals? And then B, what other LEGO pieces do you have in your bucket that you could swap in to make the video perform better? Essentially, can you break this content down into components, find the weak spot, and then rebuild it stronger?
Now, the most helpful thing you could learn by far in content is understanding what all those different LEGO pieces are in each bucket and the best ways to stack them together to make winning formats. This is like a marketing superpower. And I'll admit, if you're starting out, this is the biggest gap in the largest set of unknowns. You might not have even known there are those four buckets. Now you know, but you may not know what all the different Lego pieces are inside of them. And what this really equates to is that you can look at a video and see that it performs well, but you don't know why. And I'll tell you the reason why is because of the Lego combination that was used. Now, I don't have time in this video to go through all the different Lego brick options in every single bucket. That would take hours. But what I will say is this. All the winning creators that you study, they are experts at the stacking, breaking apart, and restacking of videos. That is what they're doing. They just don't know how or why they're doing it. My secret weapon and the reason I've been able to help so many different businesses across different disciplines is that I built a system and approach to break these formats down into pieces and understand how to build them back up so that it works best for your niche. Now, if you want to learn that full system for short form videos, I have the whole program at short form.academy. I'm also building the best-in-class version of this system and approach for long form videos like this one on YouTube. So, if you want to join that weight list and be the first one to have access at a discounted price, I've got a link below.
So, again, understanding the Lego bricks, being able to look at a video, break it into parts, figure out what to throw away, add, and then rebuild. That's where all the gold is in content. So, to summarize, in step four, all we're trying to do is figure out which idea on the list to pick to make that day. Which one has the highest chance of winning? And to me, the highest chance of winning is the one that has the biggest opportunity gap, the biggest improvement area for you to improve from those components.
All right. So far, we have done a lot of work to identify who the IBA is, find winning creators, find winning outlier ideas, and then ultimately scan that idea list and pick one to work on. So, at this point, we now have one to work on, and we're going to move forward to actually make it. And by the way, the reason we spend so much time on the idea is because the idea is the most underrated part that nobody focuses on. If you overinvest in the idea, your videos will start performing better automatically. But the work is not done. So now we need to take that idea and develop it further from here. So step five is idea development. And what development really means is finding that white space, finding those improvement opportunities and actually going out doing the research to figure out what else we could say or include. So while step four was analyzing and picking the idea, step five is actually taking that idea and finding where those improvement areas actually are.
Now, typically a winning video has one or more of those four buckets that actually worked pretty well. That's why it's a winning video. So, you don't need to force changes in every area if you don't see opportunities. Here's what I look for across each category that signals there's an opportunity to be had with the idea or premise. The opportunity area is really finding a different angle to communicate the story in. For example, let's say you make content about tech and AI tools and you see a winning video that's breaking down the tool, but it's mostly talking about features. You might decide the angle that's more interesting is to create an example with that tool or show a case study. That's an example of taking the same overall seed about the AI tool, but shifting the angle or direction. The idea is kind of like the overall concept of the video. So that's where you would look for improvement opportunities. Often times the outliers I find are pretty solid on the idea front. So I usually tweak it at most.
Now, with the hook structure, the typical improvement areas are to use way more clarity in the words or improve the visuals to match the alignment with the words. So, the base hook is usually suffering from either a lack of comprehension or a lack of alignment. And again, typically an outlier video is going to have to have at least a marginally good hook. So, the improvement areas might be small here. Now, when I watched the outlier video, I asked myself after just 5 seconds, was I hooked on the hook or not? If so, then the hook tapped into something positive that I can build on top of. If not, that signals there's a huge opportunity to improve the hook.
Now, when it comes to story structure, the actual meat and potatoes of the video, this is the bucket where I typically see the biggest area for improvement. Improvement here could either target the content talked about in the story, or just generally the way it flows. If the story is boring, but you fully understood it, it means the content, the meat and potatoes, just wasn't interesting enough. If the story is compelling but it's just confusing to follow, that means the flow wasn't clear enough. And then the last bucket is visual structure. And again, you can find a ton of improvement opportunities in this one as well. Visual structure applies to the visuals that were used, the pacing or motion on screen, and then the editing and packaging and layout of the visuals themselves. Again, you're looking for a lack of clarity and comprehension, areas where you got confused that you feel like you could improve in your version.
Now, the tactics for exactly how to improve in each of these four areas is very nuanced and changes depending on what your niche is and the style of content you make. So, again, if you want to learn those specific tactics, I have it all included in the links below. But, let me just give you one tactical example of how this idea analysis and development process might look like in real life, which will help make it more real for you. I'm going to use my short form video channels where I talk about tech and AI for this example. So, I was scanning for AI video ideas one day and I came across my friend Rowan's channel and I saw this video that was about Toyota building a secret tech city in the foothills of Mount Fuji. And his video didn't have crazy views. It was only like a 2x outlier at the time, but for whatever reason, I clicked on it. And so, I watched that video and this was my base assessment across these four buckets.
First, the idea and premise. The idea and premise of this was extremely strong. Essentially, Toyota's building a super smart city to test all the latest AI and robotics. So, there will be people living in the city and they'll have the latest and greatest AI, automation, smart homes, and they're really using it as like a future city test bed buried secretly at the foothills of Mount Fuji. That's a banger idea. And as I searched it more on YouTube to research it, I found tons of great visuals from Toyota illustrating what the city could look like. So, immediately I knew this idea would be interesting to my IVA, which are tech enthusiasts. So, on the idea front with the premise, I didn't really have to change anything. The premise would be to explain that this city exists and why it's so interesting. But in this case, the reason I identified this video was a opportunity for me is that it was a great idea executed poorly. That's what you're looking for.
All right. Next, we move on to the hook structure. So, when I watched Rowan's hook delivery in this video, I saw a bunch of things that could be immediately improved. For one, the hook was delivered with super slow pace and low energy. The edit led with full screen B-roll that had a big logo of Toyota, which I felt like didn't grab me, and it felt more like a commercial than it did an interesting video. One of the sentences he used right away was a arguably non-important fact that 100 people in the city were going to move in soon. He pulled that fact too high up and wasted valuable real estate to get somebody hooked. He also didn't create enough contrast as to why this city was more interesting than another city. But I saw that the raw visuals he used in the hook had a ton of potential. So, for all these reasons, I knew right away the hook could be improved. Tighter, clearer, more contrast, better pacing.
Now, the third thing is story structure. And this video was built around what's called a newscaster structure, which begins with a hook, but then lists a bunch of facts over and over and over. And newscaster is pretty good, but I knew if I swapped this to what's called a breakdown structure, I'd have a lot more success. Breakdown structures use facts, but they rehook intentionally throughout, which is why you can hold the viewer for a bit longer. Essentially, his version got boring too fast because of a lack of embedded contrast. Now, I love Rowan. He's one of my homies, and I think he'll be okay with me saying this. Stylistically, Rowan's video just had low emotion. And that's because he uses an AI avatar with an AI voice. It's not actually him delivering. So, the intonation is just flat. It's just a little bit less interesting than what it could be if you had better intonation. So, again, I knew I could improve the story flow significantly by increasing the pacing, embedding contrast, and just making it more interesting to listen to. The actual meat and potatoes, the facts he used, those weren't terrible. Obviously, there's only a small set of facts you could use for this story. So, he used most of the ones that I would use as well, but he missed one of the most interesting and most important pieces in my opinion, which was an underground AI robotics layer that delivered goods from house to house. There was an amazing visual about this and he missed this completely. So, for all those reasons, I knew I had a huge opportunity to improve the story structure.
And lastly, we go into visual structure. After I decided there was something here, I went deep down the rabbit hole to see if there were other visuals that I could use that he might have missed. And I found several sources that he didn't incorporate in his video. There was a really cool part of the video where he broke down the three different road types that grabbed me immediately in his version. So, I knew I wanted to include that in mine as well. And this was my assessment that I kind of came to in like 30 seconds. Essentially, this was a diamond in the rough idea that was just executed worse than it could have been. Rowan's version of this video got 40,000 views. My version of this video got 2.2 2 million views. That's 55 times better. And of course, this isn't a shot at Rowan. Like I said, he's my homie. It's more an illustration of exactly how deep you want to be when you analyze winning videos to find the areas of improvement so that you can make them better. And again, if you want to learn what I just did right there for yourself, I've got the whole thing built linked below.
All right, let's move to step six, and that is script writing. So, at this stage, you've gone out, you've got your IVA, you found winning creators, you found winning outlier ideas, you've got a list, you picked one, you developed that one, and now you're ready to take that development, that research, and start building the script, and then edit the video. All that is the basis, the framework for a video that should perform well. From here, it's just about execution on the script and the edit. Now, I've made tons of script writing videos on this channel, both for short form and long form. It's probably what I'm known for best on this platform. And so if you want to tactically learn and get better, I'm not going to cover the script writing here. Just go binge my content both on shorts and longs, whichever content you make. But what I do want to say here tactically, that really is the most important part for the script writing phase is this. You have to optimize for comprehension over everything else. If you've done all that work to cherrypick the best idea, and you have all the script writing formulas that I've gone over in my videos and we've put into sandcastles.ai, all you have to do is make sure the viewer actually understands the words you're saying. And this sounds obvious, but it's rare to find people doing this consistently. When I write scripts, I run through the exact same refinement process. For every single sentence, I make sure there is only one way a viewer could comprehend those words. In this phase, you're checking for crystal clear clarity. And then once you screen for the words themselves, is the pacing and delivery such that people won't misunderstand? For example, look at these two phrases. Phrase one, Google just invented AI for dolphins. Phrase two, Google just invented AI that lets humans talk with dolphins. Phrase one is more concise, but it's less clear because it could mean there's an AI that could talk to dolphins, that this AI lets dolphins talk to each other in a new way, or that it lets humans talk to dolphins. There's three possible outcomes, and the point is it could be confusing for the viewer. This leaves the meaning up for interpretation. When you have this, it creates a fractional pause in the viewer's brain, and comprehension goes down. Versus the other sentence, which is slightly wordier, but it's impossible to misunderstand. If people can fully comprehend the word you're saying, you've solved more than half the battle with the script.
Now, obviously, you have to still write a compelling script. The meat and potatoes have to be there. You want to use all the advanced storytelling techniques I've already gone over, but we've built all of that into Sandcastles.ai so that it will just write it for you. What I do is I personally take all that research and development from the idea stage. I paste it into Sandcastles. I run the original flow with research turned on and then the script I get is already 85% of the way there for anything that Sand Castles doesn't handle or is still unclear when I review it. I then punch it up and I'm good to go. I honestly spend more time in the idea stage than I do in the script writing stage because ideas are more important and I have great AI tools that can help me with the script writing. If you struggle with the script writing, I'm telling you, watch all the videos on my channel and use Sandcastle.ai. It's just way easier.
All right, step seven is the edit. At this point, you've found the IVA. You found the winning idea. You developed it. You wrote a great script. And I'm going to assume you recorded a raw take of it. Now, it's time to edit a visual package that best communicates the story. And again, when it comes to how to edit, there are tons of tactical tips that I've included in other videos on my channel. But again, the most important one that I'm going to double down on here is visual comprehension. If I could get the word comprehension tattooed to my forehead, I would. And this is what you're looking for. Are you showing the best possible visual on screen that increases the viewer's ability to understand what's going on when paired with your spoken words? Again, these last two points sound stupidly obvious. Use clear language and use visuals that match the words. But this is the lowhanging fruit that people overlook. They don't know why certain creators win and lose. This is the lowhanging fruit that makes your videos perform well. If you don't do these things, I guarantee your video will not perform well. But if you do them and you have a validated idea and you're using the storytelling techniques, you have a good chance of it performing well.
Here's a framework that should help you with your edits. A viewer can only focus on one spot on the screen at a time. So, as you're saying something, are their eyes going to the visual that complements what you're saying the best? We can talk about the razledazzle and all the bells and whistles of editing, but if they're not actually looking at what you want them to see, and that thing is the best possible visual, the edit's not going to work. Now, to solve for this, what you want to do is find the best key visuals that explain what you're saying. And this varies a little bit depending on the type of videos you're making, but the best places to find these is YouTube, company websites, and other social media profiles. Now, if you can't find B-roll, you either need to make your own shooting videos of you not talking A-roll to the camera or use AI tools to generate the B-roll for you. My favorite AI tool stack to make B-roll is MidJourney for images and then Craya.ai or Google Veo3 with Flow. Either of those work to animate those images. And I talked about that a lot, the workflow for that on my last video. Again, every niche is so different, so it's hard to give a always right rule for exactly how to approach edits because again, in the visual structure bucket, there's all these different Lego bricks and techniques that you can use to improve your edits. I'll cover these more in a future video, but the best way to go from 0 to one, look at what the outlier did. Look at what the pattern is from those creators and emulate that. If you have an editor on your team that is helping you make the edits, share the links to the outlier videos and walk through what pieces of the edit grabbed your eye when you watched it. The truth is this. If you have an interesting idea and you've succinctly written a script with those facts and you edit to where the visuals match what you're saying best, you really can't lose.
All right, the last step in the playbook, step eight, is of course posting. And we'll keep this one super simple. If you take all the steps I just mentioned and you end up posting the video, you should consider that a quality rep. Your goal is now to do this daily or weekly for 6 to 12 months. Daily for short form video, weekly for YouTube videos. If you're able to maintain this level of consistency and you have the discipline and rigor to look at the videos, identify what's working, extract those things, swap in the pieces, execute, learn on the next one. If you have that rigor, you'll get whatever you want after 12 months. The tip for posting is to not overthink it. Make the video. Post the video. Gut check what didn't work. Make the next one. Again, everybody wants a shortcut. I just gave you like 10 of them in this video. Here's one more. Just post more videos. You'll get whatever you want.
All right, that is all I've got for this video. As a recap, that was my eight-step playbook. Really, a system for always winning with content. If you follow that format and that playbook, and you post consistently for 6 to 12 months, you will unlock anything you could possibly imagine with your audience.
Now, as a quick recap, here were the eight steps. Step one, before anything else, get extremely clear on your ideal viewer avatar. It's hard to curate videos without knowing exactly who the people are that you want them to resonate with. If you want to learn how to do this, study the video I linked below. Step two is to find winning creators on the platform you're making for that are already making great videos for that IVA. Step three is to find out performing videos from those creators. By definition, this works because it significantly minimizes the idea risk and helps you start with a validated seed. Step four is to analyze those ideas on your list and try to figure out which one has improvement opportunities so you can decide which one to make. In the beginning, make any of them that speak to you. But as you get better and refine your skills, consider using the tool I'm about to come out with. It'll be at sandcastle.ai to do this process faster. Step five is to further develop your selected idea. And this stage is all about finding a new angle, a new story structure, a new hook structure, or new visuals to help you upgrade the outlier that you found. Remember, for the video to be an outlier, at least one or more of those had to be pretty good already. So, remix the parts that worked and rebuild the parts that didn't. Step six is then to take that idea research and development and write the script for your video. And again, in this one, I didn't go super in-depth on the script writing cuz I have all those other videos on my channel that break it down. But the highle tactic is this. Maximize comprehension. Simplify your words and really question if every sentence is written in its most atomic form. Is it easy to understand or not? Most of the work is actually done on the idea side. Most people don't talk about this, but if you want to just speedrun the script writing, use Sandcastle.ai and you'll be fine. Step seven is to edit the video. The key with editing is to only add visuals, B-roll, text, and motion if it increases the ability to understand what's being said. If the visuals confusing from the words being said, it's actually hurting and not helping you. And lastly, step eight, take that finished video and post. So many people are afraid to press post. In order to move the needle, you're going to have to post at least 200 short form videos or 50 long form YouTube videos before things start really working. So, while the framework that I just took you through will help avoid all of those beginner pitfalls, really the best way to learn this process is through iterative reps. If you post daily or weekly for 6 to 12 months, you will get everything you've ever wanted.
Now, in this video, I mentioned a lot of links and tools. Remember, everything is down below organized for you. So, if you're curious, feel free to click. Most of it's free. You should be good. If you want my full organized system, everything laid out, all the examples, full walkthrough for short form video, Instagram, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, I've got that below at short form.academy. If you want the full system for long form on YouTube, I'm working on that. I have a wait list below. You're going to want to be on that weight list if you're interested in that program. As always, please drop questions in the comments and let me know. I'll try to answer as many as possible, and it really does help me inform which videos I should make next. Until that next one, we will see you guys then. Peace.