How to Blow Up on Social Media (even if you don’t have time)

social media is the biggest cheat code to business there's just nothing like it but when I talk to entrepreneurs there's one common problem that keeps coming up over and over and over how can I grow on social media if I don't have time to make content this is the biggest issue if you run a business you just don't have time for a second job so how do you build an audience without spending another 40 hours per week in this video I'm going to give you the answer now I've grown from zero to 1 million followers

in the last two years billions of views six figure months I figured out how the social media game really works and then I built an operating system to make it easier for me to grow so I'm going to walk through that full framework this is the blueprint for how to build a social media content machine that runs on easy mode okay first let's clarify when I say social media I'm talking about Instagram Tik Tok LinkedIn Snapchat every platform except for YouTube the YouTube strategy is similar but it has a few key differences so I'll cover

the YouTube workflow in a future video now when it comes to social media the way to win is short form video this is where all the platforms are going this is where all the attention is going if you can learn how to make short form video consistently you're set and it's not to say you can't win with text or images or audio or any other format it's just way way harder it will take you longer to grow it's harder to cut through and it's just way more competitive the social media platforms are all pushing short

form video super heavy right now and it's because the data is showing that's what the people want that's why LinkedIn added a short form video tab X added a short form tab Snapchat added a short form tab Instagram reals Tik Tok even YouTube shorts I'm telling you the fastest way to grow on social media is short form video and I'll tell you this you're not too late we are still early in this wave you can still win huge and if you just commit to this for even 6 to 12 months your life and your business

will completely change okay so back to the key question if you want to grow on social media how do you create a short form video operation that doesn't take up all of your time first I'm going to break down the whole workflow for how you actually go end to end on a short form video then I'm going to add layer on top of that workflow first the base layer and this is hard mode this is you doing everything yourself I'm just going to walk through this as a Baseline and tell you exactly what you should

do for each step and how long approximately it should take you second is the tool layer what are all the tools that you could use today to speed up the process of making short form video and spoiler alert these tools are going to save you about 50% of the time on their own and then third is the team layer what are the critical roles that you could hire for to most efficiently run this machine who do you hire where do you find them how much should they cost and how do you glue them together by

the way for every single step I'm going to have a link in the description super organized so either a free guide that I put together to help you with tools for that step or a link to a specific tool directly everything you need will be linked ordered below okay let's start with the full short form video workflow there are six core steps needed to go end to end on a video idea mining idea research script writing recording editing and posting okay so we're going to start with the base layer again this is what I said

is hard mode it's you doing everything yourself this is how you have to start out but I want to walk through exactly what to expect and the time that it should take you okay let's start with idea mining now idea mining is the process of consistently finding or generating the best possible ideas for your Niche and this usually involves studying what is working for others finding customer pain points through interviews or remixing some successful thing in another space back for yours idea mining is the most slept on part of the short form video process most

people look at content creation like pyramid they think they should be spending the least amount of time on the ideas and the most amount of time on the editing but I think this is the wrong way to look at it ideas and storytelling are just as if not more important than editing especially because they happen earlier in the process you can save yourself the most rework if you just spend more time upfront coming up with better ideas now the idea mining process is typically the hardest thing to figure out on your own because most business

owners really aren't trained to think in a Content first lens you essentially have to be answering the question what is a great video idea for my avatar over and over and over all day long for idea mining if you know what you're doing this process will typically take you around 5 hours per week but it could be significantly longer if you don't or if your Niche is super hard to research again as a reminder I'm going to come all the way back through this six-step workflow again in 1 minute and I'm going to layer on

top the tools and the team that you can use for every step to make this go way faster I'm just starting with the Baseline okay next we go to idea research once you have a validated idea how do you actually go about developing that idea to pull out the most compelling parts that you can storytelling those super interesting nuggets is also a super critical piece of the idea process and doing this well requires you to have advanced knowledge about what actually makes for a winning idea again on hard mode if you're doing this all manually

this part of the process is going to take 30 to 45 minutes per video coming up with the initial idea is one thing but then developing it to find out what's interesting that's a whole another piece okay the next piece is script writing and things get more straightforward from here so I'll speed through the rest of this base workflow script writing is the storytelling process to take that researched and developed idea and then write a great story with a compelling hook and a body that people want to listen to this is seen more as the

art part of the video making process on hard mode script writing is going to take you another 30 to 60 minutes per video so far we haven't even recorded and work 2 to three hours in on finding the idea developing it and then writing the compelling script this is why taking social media seriously when you're starting out is super super hard it just takes a long time to do these pieces when you're learning okay next is recording and thankfully this is the easiest part of the process once you have a workflow setup and equipment that

you're used to recording should only take 10 to 20 minutes per video if you're moving from location to location or you're outside it's possible this takes longer but most recording formats can be pretty quick all right the last big step in the process is editing and editing is the hardest piece because it's a language that few business owners have ever tried to learn everyone can write so if you're going from a bad script writer to a good one at least you're building on a base skill set that you have some previous knowledge of but most

people have never touched an editing program before so when you open up for the first time it's a complete foreign language and when you're on the hard mode step with editing like I was each video takes anywhere from 1 to 4 hours to edit you'll get better over time and a little bit faster but this is where most people start as an anecdote I personally edited my first 200 videos and my average towards the end was about 3 hours per video okay now the last step just to round out of course is posting and engaging

and this includes writing the captions for each platform posting and then responding to comments which is super important and this will typically take around 15 to 20 minutes per video but could be a little bit longer if you're posting and engaging on every single platform but okay that's the base layer that's the hardest it will ever be now let's get into the good stuff cuz if you're like me and you tried this at the beginning and you saw how long it took per video immediately you're like I'm never going to be able to do this

I have to find a faster way and I completely agree this is the biggest blocker for entrepreneurs it's hard because you know you should be doing it literally earning compounding free attention for your business but you just don't know how to close that time Gap the way I look at it is like this you're either going to pay for that flat part of the curve with short form video with time or money if you have no money you should start by just investing time in the base layer workflow that I just walk through but if

you have even a little bit of money or a business that is generating some cash flow there are ways to buy your time back and speed this process way up and this is exactly what I have done personally I have a set of short form channels that drive about 20 million views per month generate anywhere from 50 to $100,000 per month of direct revenue and would also Drive thousands of Premium qualified leads if I had the right product at the bottom of the funnel now my secret is that I have systematized a lot of this

process so I'm going to show you exactly how I do it let's go back through each step of the workflow and I'm going to show you the tools and team members that I use to speed this process up and at the end I'll give you my thoughts on prioritization if you can't afford to upgrade every piece at once like most people can't where should you start and how do you stack those tools and teams accordingly okay so back to idea mining now the dream for idea mining will be to have a tool that automatically tells

you exactly what video ideas to make so you don't even have to think about finding ideas and the problem is there is no great tool that does this today now the good news is I am building this right now and depending on when this video comes out it may already be available but if it isn't out yet and you want to be on the VIP weight list to solve this short form idea problem you're going to want to fill out the form that's in the description anybody on that form is going to get first access

to this when we launch it now until that's live the only tools available for speeding up this idea mining process are going to be to glue together a bunch of different disparate data sources the good news is these all have free options here are a few of the best ones first Tik Tok Creator search insights is actually a super underrated and valuable tool it not only tells you what's trending on Tik Tok for your category but it basically gives you a blueprint to what they're going to boost so to access it literally just type Creator

search insights in the search bar and you'll see it come up you can look by category for what's trending you should also be subscribing to relevant newsletters blogs Twitter Youtube any profile that talks about the stuff in your space you can find newsletters on substack or beehives directory explore page pages and if you want to find accounts on social media just find one person that you trust and then go to who they're following once you find a bunch of newsletters and blogs you can use a tool like feedle to aggregate them all together and it

will give you a daily briefing your goal with idea mining is to become a magnet for what's most interesting in your Niche so you become in the know and constantly are aware of all the latest trending information now the most helpful thing you could do for idea mining today is to build a Creator list build a list of other short form accounts whether they're creators or brands or aggregator that are in your Niche so you have easy access to those accounts because the easiest way to make winners is to remix off of proven winners so

you want to track these creators and figure out what they're talking about that is working if you struggle to build this list just find one like I said earlier and then go to who they're following this a great way to kind of curate this will be the easiest way to build it you could also probably use Chad GPT operator as an AI agent to put this together for you now I know that even if you glue all these tools together the hard part is actually having the filtering criteria and system for knowing which ones to

actually make again I'll make a video breaking down exactly how I do this in the future but for now there is not a great tool to do this if you want it to be 100 times easier with our tool make sure you're on that weight list in the description okay this brings us to the idea research and script writing pieces of the process and the question is once you have a compelling video idea is there a way to do research find the most compelling pieces and then storytelling faster than the 60 to 90 minutes it

takes to do it by hand and the answer is yes there is a tool and it's called sandcastles and I know this tool is the best in the world doing this for short form video because I built it and I took everything I know about short form video all the Frameworks the formulas all the playbooks I talk about in this Channel all the learnings from billions and billions of views and I infused it directly into the DNA of this product there is nothing even close to this for short form video here's exactly how it works

you put in a video topic you can add as much context or as little as you want and then we will automatically begin researching and finding all the relevant sources about that topic to create a 360 view of understanding on it and this happens automatically for you you can add manual sources if you want to add other things that we may not have seen but we'll do the research automatically if you want and we include YouTube Twitter blog newsletter PDF anything with a link we get it now after one click we start mining for what's

interesting and we take all those sources everything you gave us and we're going to bucket those topics into super easy to understand chunks that you can pick how you want to direct the story now we recommend what we think is best based on everything I know about winning on short form But ultimately the controls are in your hands you can tweak them and change them if you want and these are essentially the building blocks of the story that you're assembling now that process to get all the relevant sources to create a 360 understanding to extract

out what's interesting summarize them back to you so you can pick we do that in 20 seconds so this is the whole idea research phase from 30 to 45 minutes per video down to 20 seconds but of course that is only the first half of what sand castles does because then we take those core building blocks of the story that you chose and that we may be recommended and we write the full script for you and we've taken everything that I know about storytelling and script writing and persuasion and hooks all the videos you guys

have been watching on this channel and we Infuse that plus so much more into this DNA of the storytelling agent we also give you a super powerful storytelling assistant that sits right next to the script so if you want to iterate the whole thing with Specific Instructions you can do it if you want to highlight the hook and iterate based on a specific tone style or change you can do it it's basically like having a version of me sitting right next to you as a storytelling assistant that you could use when you're iterating your scripts

now out of the box that script engine is super good already but a lot of people want customization to be able to personalize the tone of their script so you can do that with the chat or directly editing now to be fair to the market it is definitely possible for you to find the great idea research and develop that idea figure out what's interesting mine that into buckets and write the script all using chat gbt or perplexity or Claud it's very possible for you to do that you could definitely try like I have for the

last several months but if you're like me you already know that trying to use those to get a highquality turnkey output just never works because it's way too generalized sand castles wins because it was built for one single purpose short form video the entire thing was built specifically to optimized for short form storytelling psychology and virality now combined the idea research plus script writing phase takes about 1 to 2 hours if you're doing it the hard way and sand castles does that full process in less than 60 seconds again hand up I'm definitely biased cuz

I live and breed this stuff all day long but I would not have released this product if I didn't think it was 10 times better than chat GPT at doing this task if you want to give it a try because you supported my YouTube I have a free trial link in the description for sand castles okay let's move on to recording so far we've already cut the time to make a short form video from like 2 and 1/2 hours pre-recording down to 30 minutes but let's keep going the easiest way to systematize the recording process

is to have an audio video and lighting setup that you like already dialed so all you have to do is sit down and press record now this takes a little bit of time up front to get it set up but once you have it you are golden actually put a free guide together with four different gear lists audio video lighting everything you need the first one is the most affordable and then the fourth all the way up to the Lamborghini kind of like the studio that I have the exact equipment that I use you don't

need this it's Overkill but one two and three other Studio options with all the gear you'd want Linked In the guide below the other way to systematize your recording process will be to use something like a haen AI Avatar this will be using AI to pre-record yourself and then it will literally make a digital clone of you so you just put the script in and then it is you rendered reading the script so if you use this you wouldn't actually have to ever get in front of the camera which is pretty crazy there are actually

people on social media already that are fully AI avatars that most people do not know Veron Maya is one of the most popular ones my friend Rowan also does this and I am actually an AI Avatar right now I'm just kidding that' be pretty crazy if I did this whole thing as an AI so the truth is I've actually tried playing around with this myself for shorts where I tried to create my own avatar and haen the problem is the mouth movements and the looping kind of repetitive motions are just not humanlike enough and so

people using this have to kind of cut around it I don't like that for my style or maybe only one to two iterations away from it being extremely believable and so pay attention to this this would be the ultimate way to record Now using haen you wouldn't actually save that much time because you still have to write the script in program it wait for the video to render and if you're doing it manually it's only taking 10 minutes however it enables a ton of flexibility because you don't actually have to be in front of a

camera or your studio to record you can have someone else on your team a Content researcher programming the videos and printing them out without you ever touching it so it enables way more flexibility once it works I'll put the link to haen below if you want to try it as well but for most people right now I'd recommend looking at the gear list picking one of the four getting those items getting it set up and they're just dialing in that process so you can press record super quick okay next is editing now when it comes

to editing there is no automatic Style Match tool where you can kind of pick somebody else's video put it in and say edit my video exactly like this if that existed it'd be a billion- dollar company I bet Adobe will do it we haven't seen anything like that yet now there are a few buckets of editing tools that can save you 30 minutes here 30 minutes there there are so many of them I'm not going to list them here cuzz I don't want to make the video too long again I put together a completely free

Guide listing all of those tools what they're good for summer free summer paid you can download that Doc and then that will help speed up some of the editing workflow now when it comes to the actual editing itself you're probably going to use one of the following platforms Adobe Premiere Pro Final Cut Pro Da Vinci resolve descript cap cut or you're going to edit directly in the social media apps themselves Tik Tok has a good app editor Instagram is about to launch their own dedicated mobile app editor and for these different soft softwares the best

way to get up to speed is just to watch free tutorials on YouTube to try to learn the basics if you want to learn Premiere Pro specifically which is what I use I actually built a bunch of free tutorials in wavy World which is my free community for creators entrepreneurs there's like 13,000 people in there and it's super helpful to get up to speed from zero on Premiere Pro again I'll put an invite link to that below if you want okay so just to close the loop for the tools layer let's cover posting as well

now there are ton of posting scheduler tools hoot Suite buffer assembly and these tools are meant to up upload once and post everywhere schedule it automatically I would actually recommend not using these thirdparty schedulers because I've heard that the algorithms on these social platforms will demote your content if it's coming in from a prescheduled post you're better off actually uploading it through the platform itself saving it as a draft if you want and then posting it when you're ready okay so to summarize the time savings that you're going to get with just the tools that

I mentioned idea mining there's no great tool so there's really no Time Savings idea research and script writing it's sandcastles all day long again I'm biased you're going to save between 30 and 45 minutes for each piece that's 60 to 90 minutes combined that you will save on every video for recording it's already pretty quick 10 to 20 minutes but I recommend getting a gear list getting it set up and that will at least save you maybe 10 minutes per video of rumaging around with a different equipment for editing there are free and paid tools

in the guide below these will probably save you 30 to 60 Minutes of the 1 to 4 hours and then for posting again no recommended tool zero Time Savings so for less than a 100 bucks a month plus any equipment upgrades you're going to be able to save 2 to 3 hours per video in the process just by by using those tools and now to improve on this even further this is where we start to add team members in the stack and this is how you really extract yourself out of this whole process in the

future State at the optimal setup all you're doing in this process is recording or you're using haen to kind of program it for you and you don't even have to touch it now there's three different roles that you could look to hire for an editor a Content researcher and an in-house Creator I'm going to break down each one here okay let's start with an editor now the highest leverage thing you can do if you want to upscale your content operation is to hire an editor if you edit manually it's going to take a minimum of

1 to 4 hours per video and I promise you if you do not like editing other priorities will get in the way and this will slowly decrease your volume output to zero because if you don't like editing you will do everything you can to avoid it this is how I was I brute forced my first 200 videos by editing myself but I hated it every step of the way I did not want to edit I was desperate to find a way to hire an editor now I tried to onboard a few editors on the way

up but the taste Gap was so big between what I wanted and had and what I was getting it just wasn't worth it but I finally found an editor that was super high quality and he was able to crank out one short form video per day so up to 20 per month now the key though is that I didn't skimp on the quality and taste of the editor that is super critical here I found that paying a little bit more for the right editor that had the taste embedded made all the difference now a great

editor that's working on this kind of volume one video per day 15 to 20 videos per month should cost around 3K per month and if you want to hire one exactly like the one I have that's it's honestly been responsible for hundreds of millions of views I have a link in the description you can fill that out okay the next role is the content researcher and this is someone that's specifically trained on the idea Mining and research process so they're going to run the full idea mining playbook for you in the background and then they're

going to sync with you either daily or weekly and go over those ideas to kind of co-b brainstorm this will shortcut the 5 to 10 hours per week and the mental bandwidth of thinking about ideas all the time down to zero now typically when you have somebody dedicated to just this for you you're right away going to become one of the best in the space because they're focused all day long on finding and filtering out the best ideas and when you have that content researcher also paired up with sand castles they can get the idea

develop the idea and write the script for you so they're coming to you with done scripts ready for you to record that have been validated twice by them and by sand castles I kind of think of this like a Ghostwriter but for short form content the content researcher can also handle posting captions and comment replies as well so it's kind of everything in the front you record you hand off for the edit and then everything in the back and be honest I used to be scrambling day after day trying to find ideas I have so

much to do it would always get pushed down and then I'd end up making videos where I knew the idea wasn't good I just didn't have time to filter through as soon as I got a Content researcher all of a sudden I've got five fresh validated ideas coming to me every single day my list for great ideas has grown so long that I always know I have something good to make now I will say part of the reason why my content researcher is so valuable is because I trained him on my idea mining process and

I had so much interest from my friends on this that I actually worked to create kind of like a training program to upskill a bunch of other content researchers for people to work with now this role is going to cost anywhere from 3 to 4K per month as well but it's super worth it if you don't have time to think about ideas all day if you want to hire one of these content researchers that is trained on my method kind of pre-installed with my operating system for ideas fill out the link below as well okay

and then lastly if you wanted to solve this whole thing with one single role you could hire an inhouse Creator an in-house creator with the right skill mix could handle ideas script writing recording editing posting the whole thing for you and depending on the niche and the experience level a turnkey Creator like this will probably charge between 6 and 8K per month to make anywhere from 10 to 15 videos the upside of this is that it's fully TurnKey so you only have to work with one person and this is the quickest way to kind of

flip the switch from nothing to something working right away the downside is that some of the brand Authority is going to acre to the Creator's face especially if they're recording for you most creators don't want to do the ghost work to find the ideas write the scripts then have you do them so it's probably going to be all or nothing with this Creator solve now hiring an in-house Creator is usually the best option for a brand that wants to turn on short form video without requiring the founder to do anything but this may not be

the best option if you're selling products services or expertise that requires that authority to acrew on your face and your personal brand so may be the best for you it may not just depends on what type of company you're running if you want to process to find vet and hire the top creators in this way prev vetted the best way to find them there's a link below as well I have a great service for doing this now I want to say this a lot of you who have made progress on this are probably using a

full service agency that sells the turnkey full service for anywhere from 6 to 10K per month but I don't think this is the right solve for you and if your content hasn't started working I'll tell you exactly why for one thing the sum of the total is more than the sum of the parts the agency because of their markup is charging you more than what it would be to glue together the two or three rolls that you need per month and two the best way to get the best talent is to hire specialists at each

thing and Stitch them together if you hire an agency you're really hiring a generalist and chances of them having a Savage at every single piece is very very low you're paying a steep markup for this and your content is probably coming out average if it were me I don't want a Swiss army knife I want a razor blade and then a screwdriver and I'll put them together this is a big mistake that entrepreneurs make when they're trying to automate their content workflow they try to Sprint to save time by hiring a full service agency but

the agency is just not good because a they're not in the trenches and B they're not specialized at each particular thing so my recommendation and what I did is hire each individual piece of Specialists that are trained for their piece and then build systems and use AI to automate the glue between them this is what I do for my own stuff okay now before we wrap up let's really quickly talk about prioritization if you can't afford everything and everyone at once you kind of have to prioritize and build up the stack so when it comes

to prioritization here is the order of operations that I would follow the first thing I would do is integrate sand castles immediately again I'm biased but this is $40 a month and you're going to save 10 to 20 hours right away if you're serious about content this is a layup immediately after that I would go through the free guides that I linked below the one on recording the one on editing tools as well as my notes on a Creator list I would start putting those in place as well to kind of get the low hanging

fruit on the margins and speed that part up as well so right away right there you're less than $100 a month and you saved half the time the next thing I would do immediately is hire an editor this is the best Roi you're going to have this is probably the thing inhibiting you you're going to save 2 hours per video so 20 to 40 hours per month for 3K per month any entrepreneur is taking that trade all day long so that's the first roll out would hire and then the next role I would hire if

I'm not doing something inous is to bring on a Content researcher and that allows you to completely detach from the ideas piece which is the highest leverage piece in the process so all in if you integrate those correctly you've basically built a short form pod for about 6K per month and you could be pumping out 20 videos a month spending 2 to 3 hours recording and that's it now I totally understand that trying to take all of this in and action against it is a lot to bite off these are obviously all the steps you

have to take but actually figuring out how to do them is really ult if you never tried it before if you want to take a stab at doing this on your own this video should be a blueprint for you and a bunch of the other stuff on my channel should help you go one to two levels deeper on every single piece that's why I put it together but if you want to compress the speed and make sure this starts working sooner I built a full program for that and I did it because I keep getting

reach outs from all my entrepreneur friends asking me to teach them how to do it so I just put it all in a program it's designed to take the entrepreneur from zero to crushing with short form video in a couple months so if you're an entrepreneur and you want to speedrun this short form process still going to take work you still have to put in the Reps but you want to avoid the landmines and let me just tell you exactly how to do it as fast as possible I have a wait list below for that

as well all right guys that's all I've got for this video hopefully it was helpful for you to see the end to end short form flow in this way let me know in the comments what you guys want to see next I'm happy to put together anything I just want to see more entrepreneurs win until then we'll see you guys on the next one peace