Transcription
Alex Hermosi taught me 10 powerful strategies that helped me get over 1 billion views on social media, grow my personal brand to over 100,000 followers, and make over $1 million with my personal brand at the age of 22. So in this video, I'm going to share with you all the 10 strategies that can help you to grow and monetize your personal brand too. So let's start watching the clips from Alex Ramosi and start with lesson number one, which is: views aren't cash.
Let me just share this experience with you. So we did a workshop here, and I asked the room, I said, "Hey, of the content that I make, which you guys are consuming—like case study stuff where we like build out a sales team and like we're like how we do onboarding and like all that stuff—and who here's consuming like lessons to my younger self?" The whole room was this side. And so, even though these got one-third the views of these ones, sometimes this can introduce people—like the right people. Will then just think about it as top of funnel—like this gets more people in, they'll see other stuff you have, and then they'll go down the longer, more niche videos that's specific to them. Yes, if one video gets more views than the other, it doesn't mean that it's going to make you more money.
Let's have a look at these two videos in my channel, for example. The first one got only 1,000 views, and the second one got 32,000 views. Now let me ask you, which one do you think got us more clients? No, it's not the video that got 32,000 views, and I think you might have guessed it—it's the video that got actually less views, and in this case, 32 times less views. And the reason is that not every viewer is made equal. So in my opinion, if you want to build a really strong personal brand and monetize it, you shouldn't only optimize for videos that get a lot of views, but instead making videos that attract a higher quality buyer audience instead of people that are just watching your content but would likely never buy anything from you.
All right, the lesson number two is: don't focus on the algorithm. Let's watch the quick clip and then discuss why. Algorithm—big picture here—don't worry about it. Always just align your objective with the platform. Like, hacks are stupid, cuz if you grow off of a hack, as soon as they close the loop—because all platforms do—you'll just go down to zero. The long-term strategy of every platform is to keep people on the platform, and so they want you to make content that lots of people click on and that lots of people watch all the way through, and ideally watch something else from you. Everything that they do in the algorithm is just to always optimize for those three things, and that's not going to change. That is true. There's a lot of people that recommend to pay attention to tags or hashtags or what time to post—strategies that might be effective in the short term, but they might not be effective in the long term. And the reason is because things change, and the algorithm changes too. But if you optimize for what the algorithm wants—which is keeping people on the platform—then you would most likely do very well in the long term.
Jeff Bezos had a quote about this too. He said that most people, when he started Amazon and his competitors were focused on things that might have changed, so he asked himself the question: what are the few things that would never change, or it's very unlikely that they would change, so I can only focus on those things and my company will be successful? And he found out that those three things, in his company's case, were the fast delivery, cheap prices, and the widest selection of products. And that's pretty much the only three things that you need to make an online store successful, and it is very obvious when we look back, but probably in the '90s when he was building Amazon, he had hundreds of options to look at and things to optimize for, but he picked things that he knew wouldn't change with time. Because if you focus on the principles and on the goals that the platforms have that won't change, then no matter what changes will happen in the future, you will still be successful.
The tip number three is to have a content ideas flywheel. And let's watch the clip to see what that actually is. I think you have to have a couple ways that you want to capture—like, you everyone captures content differently, but for me, if I get an idea, I can tweet it in 2 seconds. By doing that, I capture moments throughout the day, and then when we do record with the team, they'll pull up my tweets and be like, "What was this about?" And then I have content on that. And then when they're like, "What do we caption this Instagram?" They take my tweet, and then the tweets themselves become reals, and I can also say the tweet out loud and make it a video. And so all of these things all stem from one place. I think you need to have a repository for where your ideas are going to go as they come up throughout the week.
Do you ever struggle with content ideas, or do you think, "Oh damn, I don't know what to say in this exact video to make sure that my audience finds it valuable?" If yes, then this idea is to have a content library where you store your ideas, your insights, your lessons, your mistakes, and stories that you can later use for your YouTube video ideas or as content within the videos. Because if you have tried to make content before, then you would know that sometimes you struggle to make something valuable in the moment and to force your brain to come up with something. But instead, if during the week when you have a realization, when you make a mistake, when you give advice to a client and it works, if you document it and keep it somewhere saved, then later when you look back at that, you can always pull content ideas, frameworks, stories that you can use in your content to make it relatable, relevant, and valuable for your audience. This way you will always have something to talk about, something to share, examples to bring into your content, because you have everything saved somewhere, and it makes you stand out because you can make points that are specific that tells your audience that you actually know what you are talking about in practice and not only in theory.
The tip number four is that long-form content is king, but not for the reason that you might think. Let's watch the clip, and then we will break it down. Our goal as creators is to gain actual influence, so that we can influence the behavior of a large group of people, and the way to do that most powerfully is to give them something—some sort of directive that they follow, and their life gets better, and then they're more likely to adhere to a, you know, a follow-on request that makes sense. So if that's the case, it's very difficult for you to do that well with very short content. And so to put this in context, let's say that somebody has consumed 20 YouTube videos of mine, and let's say that those videos on average were 30 minutes. All right, so that's 10 hours of of content that they've consumed for me, okay. Right, let's do the math here. If the average short that I put out is let's say 20 seconds, so if we have 20 seconds for a short, that means it's three shorts per minute, so 10 hours times 60, we have 600 minutes is what my longs were, and we'd have to triple that, so they would have to consume 1,800 shorts of mine.
Let's break down what Alex is saying here. The goal of your content and brand is to positively influence the behavior of your audience, why? So they have a positive outcome, and they associate this value with us. For example, one of the clients that we had, his name is Fabian, he watched a video from me where I broke down how you can make call to actions in your YouTube videos to get way more leads for your business. He implemented that change, and he made more money in a day than he used to make in a month before. And then he associated this value, this positive change in his life—in this case, in his business—with me. So he consumed content from me, he changed his behavior, and he had a positive outcome. So what does long-form content have to do anything with this? Well, it is very hard to influence someone's behavior with 10-second clips, and even if it's possible, it is going to take you tens or even hundreds of clips to give the person the whole picture of the thing that you're explaining for them to be able to actually, number one, understand it, and number two, implement it in a proper way so they can get results. And it's so much easier to do that with long-form content because you can explain the points way more detailed, therefore it is easier to follow the instructions, therefore it's easier to get results. So if you want to have an actual positive impact on your audience or on your clients and you want them to associate these positive outcomes with you, so they can buy more things from you, they can tell their friends, and your content can become more sharable as well, then consider making long-form content because it will give you the opportunity to make content that will be able to influence your audience's behavior and therefore have a positive impact on their life.
Number five is that the packaging of your videos can 10x your views. Let's watch the clip together. And so I think that you could probably take the same content you're currently making and just simply structure it better, and you'd probably get 10 times the views. Yes, the packaging of your content has an exponential effect, especially nowadays where there are millions and millions of new pieces of content being uploaded on social media every single day. So how you present and package your ideas to the audience matters a lot. Let's have a look at these two different examples. The video on the left is the same video as the video on the right, but just because it's packaged differently, the two videos got drastically different results. One of them got only few thousand views when the second one, which is literally the same video, got tens of millions of views. So spending a little bit time and packaging your videos better is actually one of the highest leverage activities that you can do to grow your brand.
Now the tip number six is extremely important as well, because just packaging your video ideas better won't help you unless you do this thing. Let's watch this clip, and then we will break it down. The difference between these two thumbnails is going from vague to clear. If I said, "What is the video on the left about?" You'd probably be like, "A rule of some sort that might have to do with money." Not sure. If I said, "What's the video on the right, the yellow background video?" If I were to describe it, I'd probably say a map or a blueprint or schematics of some sort that go from 0 to a million. Well, guess what, the one on the right is is exactly that. The one on the left actually has nothing to do with what that thumbnail looks like. When people click on something that they don't know what it's about, they have a smaller percentage of getting something they actually want than if you say this is what this is about, and then they get exactly what they think it's about. So we're going from vague to clear in both what it looks like—the thumbnails—and what we say about it—the headlines. Yes, better packaging doesn't mean lying to your audience or being clickbaity, because even if you make people click on your thumbnail or in the title because it's packaged well, but the video doesn't deliver exactly what expectation was set with the packaging, then your content won't do well on any social media platform because social media companies want to keep people on their platforms, on their apps, so they also care that the people that clicked also keep watching. And there's a story about this when Alex Ramosi asked MrBeast, "Hey, you shouldn't clickbait in your videos, right?" And what MrBeast says was actually surprising. He said, "No, you should absolutely clickbait with your titles and thumbnails, but you must deliver with your video." So the lesson there is: don't lie with your packaging, and even if you are making it very crazy or very valuable or very outgoing, then make sure that your video actually delivers and you keep your promises, and the thumbnail and the title are clearly articulating what you're going to get from the video, and when people click, that's exactly what they get, because this way you maintain your reputation and you keep your promises, which is arguably one of the most important things when it comes to building your brand.
All right, the strategy number seven is the balance between quality and quantity, and what you should focus on to grow your brand and to monetize it. So let's watch the clip and then break it down together. As you'll notice, the bigger the creator, usually the less frequent they actually make videos, and it's because they realize just power laws exist, which is that if you spend 10 times more time on one video, it doesn't get 10 times the views—sometimes will get 100 times the views. Especially platforms nowadays are so heavily reliant on quality. You create the quantity to figure out the quality, and so in the beginning, more people make lots of content, and then you start figuring out the stuff that works, figuring out the stuff that works, and then you'll notice that they're like, "Oh man, well we did spend more time on that video. Okay, well if we're going to keep making videos like that, I don't think we can make this money." But it's okay, cuz you make it up on the fact that the total quality of that one—it gets shared more, people watch it longer.
So let's break this down because it can actually be a little bit confusing. So in my opinion, what Alex is saying is that quality is what matters the most, and I agree, because again, as we talked in one of the previous points, there's so much content out there nowadays that for you to stand out, your content actually needs to be better because there's a lot of alternatives. But to make your content better, if you're getting started, it is better to start with quantity so you have enough reps to learn, so then you can eventually make quality videos. Even if we look at someone like MrBeast, he started by making hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos, and he got a little bit better each time, and only after that he was able to have the knowledge and the experience to focus on one video for a long time to make it actually good. Because if you don't start with quantity first, you have the risk of spending a lot of time on a single video and trying to make it perfect, but just because you don't know how to do that, then you can just waste a lot of the time, and the video isn't good anyway. So you would rather make 10 bad videos than one because you will learn 10 times faster. But after you post it consistently for a few weeks, few months, and maybe even more, and you feel that now you're at a stage that you can make each video a little bit better, then it does make sense to focus on it so you can actually stand out and you can have way higher chance of your video doing better. And Hermosi is correct that whenever you spend 20% more effort onto a video, it actually can do 10% better, because it's all about the winner takes all principle. If we look at Olympic games, right, there's Usain Bolt, and he probably was just couple of seconds or milliseconds faster than the guy at number two, but no one even knows his name, but Usain Bolt is the person that won the gold medal. So even if the difference between two things are very small, the number one place can still take the whole prize pool. So the same for YouTube—your video, your CTR, your average view duration—all these things we talk about today, even if you make them slightly better, you still have the chance for your video or for your content to do way better than your competitors. And most of the time, people actually underestimate how much effort it takes to make a really good video.
There was a podcast I watched where the interviewer was asking a question to a big YouTuber whose name is MrWhoIsTheBoss, and he was saying, "Hey man, how do you have all these millions of subscribers? What's your secret?" And he answered, "Hey, I just put put in the hard work, and I spent a lot of time in my videos. There's a lot of things." And I said, like, "Can you give me an example? For example, how long it takes you for you to script your video?" And he answered, "It takes me entire week—7 days of everyday work—to make a single script for a YouTube video." Now there is a lot of people, including me, that the whole video doesn't even take 7 days—like to come up with the idea, to script the title, the thumbnail, and to record it may take few days. And in his case, he's spending way more time and effort to own a single script of the video, and of course, just because he has also the experience to make the video good, then this effort is also going to pay off. So if you're getting started, focus on quantity first, but over time, once you have experience, focus on the quality and go as in-depth as possible, because that's going to separate you apart from your competition and help you to take all of the price of the marketplace, because the person that will make the best content is going to benefit the most by far.
You need to obsess about your first 30 seconds, but like this last uh weekend, I watched my top 35 YouTube videos. I watched the first 3 minutes of all of them, and I wanted to figure out like what was it that I did in these videos that I didn't do in other videos that had similar average view duration but I didn't carry as many people through. I'll just share this with you—the three Ps that I found, at least for us, which is: promise, proof, path. When I looked at my top ones, it was just like, "Hey, I sold my company for $46.2 million. Big part of that was that we had a guarantee that beat all of our competitors, and so we did four things that we used that made our guarantee stronger." Done. And if it if that's what I said the video was about, they're like, "Okay, there's a promise of what he's going to help me do, there's a path, and I have proof of why I should listen to this guy." There was a huge obsession of like match the exact words of the headline with the first however many seconds of the video, confirm the thumbnail in the in the background, and that's really because if you say, "Hey, we're going to crush a Lamborghini," and you they go and it's a talking head, there's no Lamborghini, they're like, "Screw this," and they're out. Yes, actually hooks, and this framework—proof, promise, plan—is one of the biggest secrets to actually do very well on social media and grow your brand and monetize it, because every single piece of content, no matter if it's an Instagram reel, a YouTube content, a LinkedIn post, you lose most people in the first few seconds of your content, so hooks are everything. Your entire piece of content can be completely ruined if you get the first few seconds wrong. And to give you an example, our client Tanya went and cut some boring moments from the beginnings of her videos, and her old video still went from just few hundred views to over 10,000 views almost overnight, and this is how powerful this principle is. Now of course, you don't have to go back and cut the moments for your old videos; it's much easier to make new videos with this new strategy, but still, the proof from plan framework and focusing on your hooks is extremely important if you want your content to have the highest chances of performing well.
If we go ahead, if we look at the hook of this video, for example, you can see that I followed the proof, promise, plan formula exactly. I said that Alex Ramosi taught me 10 powerful strategies that helped me get over 1 billion views and get over 100K followers and $1 million, which is proof, and then I told you that I'm going to share with you these 10 frameworks with you so you can actually grow and monetize your personal brand as well, which was the promise, and the plan on how I'm going to deliver this value to you. So make sure to pay a lot of attention to your hooks, to your intros, to the very first seconds of your content, because it has a huge impact and effect on how well your content is going to do.
Now let's talk about the strategy number nine, which is how you can benefit from content even if it doesn't bring you new traffic. Yes, you heard it right. Now we're going to watch a clip where Alexi will tell—for example, when you're running ads or when you are doing outreach or when your videos aren't getting much traffic—how you can still benefit. So let's watch it, and then let's break it down together. Right now, if you have paid ads starting organic will immediately make the paid ads more profitable, because what will happen is people will look at the ads, then they will look at your organic, and then they will take the next step. Even if they took the next step and booked a call, they will actually show, and if they show, they'll have a higher percentage of closing. Like, don't worry about the views and all of that stuff that happens in the early days, just keep making it, and just think about it in the beginning as lead nurture—as you get bigger and bigger, it'll become acquisition. So the principle here is that even if your content isn't bringing you new attention, new eyeballs, the attention that maybe you are already getting from outreach, from Instagram, from LinkedIn, from other platforms can still be converted, because people will be manually checking out your social media, and they're going to watch some content to see what you are about—do they trust you and should they work with you or not? And that's a huge factor for people when they make a buying decision. For example, we had a client named Noah who is big on LinkedIn, but he had a YouTube video that only had very little views—you can see it on your screen—but he still got a client that paid him thousands of dollars because they went from LinkedIn to his YouTube video, they checked one of the videos a little bit to just see what Noah is about and to kind of get a feel of him, and after that he went ahead and bought something from Noah because now he trusted him more. So even if your brand or your content doesn't get you a lot of attention in the beginning or even later, right, it's still great because it can still start benefiting you immediately in so many other ways that you probably won't even know when you're getting started.
And the tip number 10 is probably the most important if you want to build the million or 10 million or 100 million personal brand like Alex or Mosi did. So please, let's watch it and then let's break it down. I started making podcasts 6 years ago. I committed to that process when I signed on with a a YouTube vendor a few years ago. On the first call, I said, "I'd like to have this channel be something in five to 10 years; we'll look at it then and see if it was worth continuing to do." I was like, "But I'm in for a decade." And he stopped me afterwards; he was like, "I've literally never had a client say that to me." You probably heard this advice everywhere, but it's true—the most successful people think in the longest time horizons. If you want to win, then being persistent is one of the biggest competitive advantages. You might have heard this statistic, but I guess 99% of the podcasters quit after 20 episodes or something like this, or most YouTubers never reach even 1,000 subscribers because they just simply quit before that point. And even for me, I'm 22, but I've been trying to make money online and post content and build an audience since I was 13 years old, so it's almost a decade—it's almost half of my life—and I tried so many different things; I posted on so many different platforms, and not everything worked, but just because I was persistent.
And I kept going, and I kept learning a little bit every single time. That's what helped me to generate over 1 billion views on social media in just the past few years alone. But it wasn't easy, and even to this day, I learn; I'm far from perfect, and I keep trying and experimenting with new things every single time. And that's what helps me become successful because things take time.
And especially if you want to build a good brand that's sustainable, that's long-term, that can also help you make money and have a real impact on the world, then thinking long-term and not quitting is actually the most important thing in my opinion.
And remember, entrepreneurship and personal branding is not a game of intellect; it's a game of will and persistence. If this video was helpful, please consider subscribing. And if you want to watch how Alex Ramosi shows me how to scale my business to $300,000 a month, then click on the video on your screen right now. And I will see you there.