Social Media Is A Video Game (Here Are The Cheat Codes)

social media is one giant video game and chances are if you're watching this you're not winning as much as you could be because the truth is there are cheat codes and strategies that the top 1% of creators are using to stay ahead that's why they keep winning they're playing a smarter game than you now I've spent the last 2 years obsessing over the social media game because I was like you I didn't understand how these people were having so much success well now I have a million followers I've done billions of views I made $120,000

last month in Profit just from posting content on social media I've learned the cheat codes and I'm just going to give them to you because I want to see more people win so in this video I'm going to break down exactly how to win the social media game the strategy the tactics the adjustments and the mindset if you're an entrepreneur this is the blueprint for how to turn attention into Dollars now it turns out social media is the best video game ever invented billions of players spending hours per day fighting tooth and nail for likes

and followers everyone is trying to get a leg up people are fighting for clout it's pretty crazy when you really think about it but the truth is if you actually know what you're doing social media is way better than a video game because on social media the points are dollars and if you master this one game you're going to be set forever here's how to play If you're trying to build businesses using content you only have one job to become the best time allocator in the world this is the game within the game when you

have no skills no audience no traction and no Team all you have is time and energy so think of your time in 1 hour blocks you have 40 time blocks per week to place on the social media board and each week you get 40 more now the board is made up of platforms formats audiences and messages platforms are places like Instagram YouTube or X these are the places you can post the where formats are things like short form videos email newsletters or video podcasts these are the types of content you can make the how audiences

are things like entrepreneurs grandmothers or students these are the people you can reach The Who and messages are things like expertise Frameworks or playbooks these are the things you can say the what now every time you make a piece of content you're saying some message to some audience on some platform in some format and each of those combinations has a different cost in time blocks to make a video podcast for dentists on YouTube posted one time per week might cost 10 time units to make a short post to students sharing learning tips on X might

only take one/ tenth of a Time block to make now your ultimate goal to win the social media game is that every time you burn a Time block of energy dollars eventually come back and to do this you need your message to reach the Right audience through the right format on the right platform to get them to take an action that gives you dollars in return this could be them buying your product signing up for your email list or the platform giving you a share of the advertising revenue from them watching no matter if you're

a day one Creator or you run a billion dollar brand the approach for winning the social media game is the exact same how do you allocate time time blocks in the most optimal way to get the most dollars back for the least time spent that's the entire game and when I started thinking about it using that framework my mindset and approach completely changed now in this video I'm going to share my thoughts on what I think are the Tactical strategies for winning the game what is the best way to spend those time blocks to hack

the dollars coming back and let me be clear life is not all about money I know this there is so much Beauty in Creative expression and artistic exploration if you love making content for the art of it and you're not really concerned with monetization you've already won this video is probably not for you just keep doing what you're doing you're crushing but for me and for most of you that are entrepreneurs I want to use content to build businesses to earn money to unlock time freedom in my life so the social media metric that I'm

most interested in figuring out isn't likes isn't comments isn't followers it's dollars I want to put my time in and get dollars out that's what entrepreneurs really want at the end of the day so for the rest of the video I'm going to walk through three things the first is why are you losing the social media game today what are you doing wrong and why is the time you're spending not bringing dollars back the second what are the top creators doing that lets them win so much what are they doing right how are they making

millions per month and then third and most important how should you shift your strategy to go from losing to winning how do you build this content engine that turns attention into Dollars by the end of this if you watch this entire video I guarantee you will be able to reset the strategy for how you think about winning the game okay so first why are you losing today well when it comes comes to social media what really is losing losing is spending a lot of time and not getting dollars back you're working and working and working

and you're seeing no reward now there's two reasons why this is happening one is good and one is bad the good one is when you're in the investment stage when you burn time blocks without getting dollars directly back in return this is considered an investment an energy investment and this means you're building momentum building some skills taking those early reps to improve and really learn the game at first all of your time blocks will be spent as Investments as you to kind of get that machine going and this is not only encouraged this is required

this is a necessary step for everyone so if you're on the right path and you're in the investment stage you're just early so you're all good but the bad scenario which you absolutely must avoid is when you're strategically misaligned this is when you're on the wrong path when you're spending time but you're playing based on a bad strategy that's a huge problem that would be like investing to build a castle on this map but all the gold is over here on this map it's just wasted effort the other way this happens which is super common

is that you're not really sure why you're doing what you're doing you're just doing something to be doing something again this is also probably not good what I found after helping hundreds of entrepreneurs try to crack the social media game for their business is that most of the time their effort was being placed in the wrong area it's not bad effort it's just misdirected so they were losing this is a strategy issue and the reason this is the biggest problem is because no amount of rowing can make a boat go forward if it's pointed backwards

you can row faster you can buy state-of-the-art ORS you can even hire the strongest fastest rowers in the world but if your boat is pointed the wrong way you are not going to row forward my biggest mistake with content for the first 5 years when I was failing over and over and over is that I didn't have a smart strategy because I didn't know how to think about social media strategy I didn't understand the game you must have a sound strategy you have to point the boat in the right direction or else all that rowing

is going to be wasted effort now I used to be a strategy consultant this is what I do this is what I spend all my time doing so again we will solve the strategy issue for how to win the social media game by the end of this video okay so the second thing I said I'd cover and I'll do it quickly are the main reasons why the top 1% creators keep winning this social media game these are the people making millions of dollars a month no joke it's insane real money they are crushing how are

they doing this what are they doing differently than you and you're going to hate this but the answer is actually super simple the first thing is they have a super sound strategy which again we're going to cover in a second they are rowing in the right direction second once they confirm that was the right strategy they put all their focus and intensity on this pure Focus around one thing with zero wasted effort the third thing is any dollar they made they rolled it back into that strategy to apply leverage this means if they made 3K

in Revenue they will pay 3K to hire an editor and buy 40 more editor blocks to spin the wheel faster and then fourth they didn't get distracted they didn't get bored they kept staying focused for 5 to 10 years now obviously this sounds super high level and not tactical it is because the truth is once you have the right strategy all you have to do to to win the social media game is the basics a bunch consistently without losing focus it's just pick a strategy validate the straty do it for a decade and you're guaranteed

to be rich and it really is that simple because social media gives you unlimited distribution for free there is nothing better in the world so this will work every single time okay so let's get into the strategy that's what you're here for right I didn't mean to bury it at the end I just think it's super helpful to think about how the players are playing and understand why social media is a game before we get into it so now let's get into the main thing the big question is how do you pick the right strategy

to win the social media game and what this really means is how do you pick the optimal set of format platform audience and message to earn you the most dollars with the least amount of time spent first you need to start at the end with the offer what are you selling if you're an entrepreneur you either have a product or you are the product if you have a product or service that already has Revenue you have a pretty clear idea for who that buyer is if you don't have a product or service you are the

product this just means you're a media company so Brands will pay you to rent your audience for a post but whether or not you have a product or not you need to understand your ideal viewer avatar for business owners this is your buyer for media companies this is your viewer they're the same thing your ideal viewer Avatar in other words who do we want viewing the content so they buy what we're selling or who do we want viewing the content so that Brands will pay us so that they can buy what they're selling the first

thing you need to do is figure out who this person is nothing else Else Matters until you do this now to figure it out I like to run the chair test if you could generate your ideal viewer Avatar in a lab and sit them in a chair in front of you what would they say what would they be like what messages would resonate with them what are their pain points how do they like being talked to what are their needs you need to learn who this person is so you can understand how to make the

right content in the right format on the right platform with the right message the biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is they start with the platform or the format first so they say things like we need to do YouTube or we need to make videos in this style this is the wrong approach and a massive trap don't start with the format or the platform or even the message start with the audience who do I need a crowd of to buy the thing that I sell and if you're a media company who do I need a

crowd of so that Brands pay me to buy the things that they sell if you want to make money from content this is the most important place to start this is critical this is the whole game all of the winners on social media that you look up to that make tons of money have engineered their entire content system to Target one specific ideal viewer Avatar Persona you need to do this first now if you have a product you're already selling and you know the buyer because it's working then you already have who your audience profile

should be it's the buyer so the who the audience is already solved for you so next you need to figure out the platform where do these people hang out where do they spend the most Time online you need to start with one single hero Platform One platform go all in crush it and then move on now there are hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs that are going to watch this video across thousands of different different businesses and business models so I can't give the exact answer for exactly which platform combination you for your business should focus

on it's just impossible everyone has a different answer this is why I work with entrepreneurs one-on-one and in my Academy so I can't answer that exact answer for you today in this video but what I want to do is go through the structure for how you would think about figuring this out for yourself so you need to think where does my ideal viewer Avatar spend time if it's a B2B audience it's probably going to be on LinkedIn or YouTube if it's a consumer product it's probably going to be on Instagram or Tik Tok or maybe

YouTube if it's an agency service it could be anywhere kind of depends on the agency and the audience buyer profile you just need to figure out the dominant place that these people spend time most audiences live on multiple platforms I'll talk about that in a second but you just need to start with one what is the number one place that they spend time and a hack for this is just to ask your customers where they are or watch how their comments or engagement come in what platform do they come from now once you have the

platform where they spend the most time next you need to figure out the format so you have The Who and you have the wear but what format should we make to reach them on that platform and I'll save you the trouble this is the answer video is best video is King video allows you to build the most trust with the fewest amount of reps make video video is the answer a picture is worth a th000 words a video is worth a th000 pictures it's video stop there so then you really have three options for video

formats you have short form video like Instagram reals or Tik Tok you have medium form video like this video on YouTube and then you have a long form video podcast one of those three is going to work on every every single platform and there's a reason why they all Incorporated video cuz everyone loves it so the secret is that you need to pick whichever of those three video formats is most native to the dominant platform because native will unlock the most algorithm push let me explain what that means when you make a piece of content

you get a manual push which is your followers sharing with others and then you get an algorithmic push which is the algorithm pushing your stuff to non-followers the algorithm push is like the house giving you free attention coupons so you want to make whatever content format on that platform will unlock the biggest algorithm push possible and this is probably going to be the one that is native to that platform and by native I just mean the one that is most dominantly used by users on that platform so for Twitter native is text for LinkedIn native

is now text or video for YouTube Native is video so for example if your ideal viewer Avatar is most prevalent on LinkedIn that's where they spend the most time LinkedIn has text posts but they now have short form video post looped in in the feed as well they even have a tab in their app dedicated to video and that short form now medium form video like this and long form video like podcast those are not native to LinkedIn you could post them on LinkedIn post them on YouTube and post them as a text post but

they're not native and those aren't going to do as well as native short form or text post why is that it's because anyone that clicks on the medium form YouTube link will go to YouTube and they will leave LinkedIn and when they leave LinkedIn their user session ends and Linkedin stops getting ad dollars it's very simple LinkedIn wants the native engagement format to be the thing that people love the most so that's what they push so in this case if you're looking at LinkedIn you have text post or short form video video is better so

you make short form video so now we have the who the where and the how the last thing we need is the what which is the message what message should you say through short form video on LinkedIn to the buyer in this example and that message or set of messages is just going to Target the deepest and most acute pain points that that viewer has because the deeper the pain the more trust they will associate if you solve it the more money they will spend to solve it you want deep pain now this Matrix the

audience the platform the format the message this is the strategy construct for how you win the social media game if you can figure out how to allocate your time units the best way possible across that Matrix you win and the strategy is that you pick one combination of this the absolute strongest one that can reach your target ideal viewer Avatar go all in for 6 months on just solving one format one platform one set of messages for that Avatar all in 6 months then when this is working for you you have two choices the first

is you could take the Revenue hire yourself out of that platform and just let it cook or second you could take the revenue and fund a team for the second platform now you have two platforms LinkedIn and YouTube and you keep going until you've built all of the different content formats up feeding each other that's how you win the social media game so if you're selling a B2B product and your ideal viewer Avatar is dominant on LinkedIn but they're also a little bit on YouTube you might decide to First crack LinkedIn you laser focus here

first you make short form video on LinkedIn you print Revenue because the viewers are engaging with with the video and going down your funnel and buying your product you take that Revenue you hire a YouTube team and then you add YouTube now you have LinkedIn and YouTube but a common question is this what if our ideal viewer Avatar lives on multiple platforms with the same density let's say it's LinkedIn and YouTube equally then how do we decide which one we start with first now there's three factors that matter when your ideal viewer Avatar lives on

multiple places with the same density the first consideration is which platform builds deeper audience trust the fastest and this gets to my framework on content minutes which I've talked about before you need to accumulate a certain number of viewer minutes in order to build trust with that individual the longer the video the more content minutes per rep that you're able to unlock the trade-off is that longer form videos don't get that many users watching them so the number of minutes per person is high but the actual number of people that were exposed to it is

low now if your product is high ticket you actually don't need that many people watching it a few hundred honestly converting could make your business and so if your product is high ticket you may want to start with a little bit of a longer video format that will help build trust faster and get deeper with audiences past that content minute line sooner but if your product is lower ticket you need a lot of people to end up buying it for it to move the needle for your business and if that's true you may not want

to wait as long as it takes to get longer formats to grow so the first thing is Speed Of Trust the second thing is which platform or format would cause you to quit sooner the truth is the only way you lose this content game is by quitting if you pick a longer format that grows slower and takes way more effort per rep like a podcast for example you have a higher likelihood of quitting if you're dependent on seeing those results in a certain period of time so if spending 5 years growing a podcast without traction

is going to cause you to quit don't pick a podcast cuz if you quit you lose roughly speaking short form video will take about 2 to 6 months to start seeing results YouTube 6 to 12 months and a long form podcast could take 2 to 3 years or more to start seeing results so if you can't wait 12 months before you start seeing results don't pick something that will take longer than 12 months to start seeing them or else you're going to quit now the third Factor when you're trying to break the tie is which

platform do you have unique ability in solving are you an amazing editor are you amazing at long form conversation are you uniquely good at teaching if you have some unique advantage that's slanting you towards being better at a certain format and you're okay with the negative trade-offs that come from those points I just mentioned you should probably go with that one so again I work with entrepreneurs trying to figure this out one-on-one and in my Academy because there's so much nuance and important in picking where you play but the answer is simple one of the

video formats on one platform targeted at one user Avatar with a few different mess is mixed in that's the answer again if you're clear on this strategy and how it applies to you and where to play and now you just need help on the how like how do I go faster I've got a bunch of free stuff Below in the description about systems and tools ways to get faster if you're on the right track but just out of time wavy world is a free community with like 10,000 other creators I'm even about to launch an

amazing software sandcastles a that will actually write the scripts for your videos for you it'll go research the video and write the full script in like 60 seconds that's the kind of tool you need to improve the time that it takes to do something okay now the last thing I want to cover really quick is what happens if you don't have a product yet and you're just trying to pick what the product is or trying to pick what that audience might be well you're in luck cuz I'm going to save you a lot of Heartache

if you catch this before you started too far because if you have a product already and you have a buyer your ideal viewer Avatar is the buyer so you don't really have a choice you got to figure out where they are but if you don't have a product yet and the world is your oyster oh it's so fun to try to pick what that ideal viewer Avatar could be so let me walk you through my framework for you and this is a big area where people get tripped up do not pick an audience that brands

do not want to spend money to acquire this is a massive trap if you do this you will struggle to monetize from your channel This Is Where The Starving Artists come from and I hate saying it but it's the truth and I'd want this warning if I were starting out if you're targeting a buyer group that does not have money and you Cann sell things to them then you are essentially just free TV for them competing with Mr Beast and the only way you're going to monetize is for your split of the advertising Revenue which

you don't want to rely on the max this is going to be is 10 to 20K on YouTube that's the most and it's going to take you 5 years to get there don't pick a buyer group that doesn't have money cuz the thing is it doesn't have to be this way you don't have to be limited to AdSense on YouTube your goal is to pick an audience that has a lot of money or more importantly is willing to spend a lot of money to get a certain problem solved and the reason they'd spend a lot

of money is because their return on investment for solving that problem is much higher so they can spend a lot so let me just tell you how I think about this from a strategy perspective your ideal view Avatar if you could pick anything should come come from a combo of these three factors the first is do you have any existing expertise or skills because if you already have locked knowledge that's in your head that's a skill set that just needs to be extracted well then you should start here that's your offer that's how you craft

your offer and you work backwards for who the ideal viewer Avatar that would want that skill set is gaining the actually valuable knowledge that's the whole game here so if you already have the knowledge or you have a unique skill set that is valuable start there you're good now if you don't have any knowledge or skills or the skills you have you feel like aren't super valuable you then have to think about one of these two factors and this is okay everybody starts here but this is what you think about one is Market opportunities and

two is the buyer Revenue potential so Market opportunities are just skills or knowledge that is in demand or going to be increasingly in demand as time moves on so in this current ERA it could be anything AI related how to use AI tools AI consultancy helping people build AI workflows it could be marketing it could be growth it could be blue colar work you go down the list of in demand skill sets and you pick one and that's what you build the other approach is buyer Revenue potential you pick the most lucrative potential buyer figure

out what they would pay the most to have solved and then learn that skill set again right now this is anything AI related workflow related marketing there's so many things that you could pick from if you guys want another video where I break down kind of what I see the trending in demand skill sets to learn I can do that as well but essentially if you don't have a product or offer you need to build a skill set or knowledge that is interesting and compelling for someone to buy so that you can make an offer

to figure out who would buy the offer that's really what this game boils down to do you have expertise or knowledge that people will pay for and then using social media to help get them to know where to go to pay for it that's basically what this game is and again there's plenty of entertainment focused channels that you guys follow they're playing a different game they are essentially just TV playing the ad dollars game that's a really hard game to win and it doesn't have to be like that if you follow what I just said

you can monetize way easier with way less stress so to summarize this is the strategy for winning the social media game I'm going to give it to you right here first Define your offer or if you're the brand you're the product then your audience if you're media second get super clear on who that ideal viewer Avatar is based on that offer who are they where do they spend time where do they live three is to pick the number one combination of platform format and message to reach your ideal audience where is the highest density that

they spend time Focus exclusively there four is to pick one of the video content formats ideally the native one to that platform so for Instagram it's short form reals for YouTube it's this medium form YouTube video five is to focus extremely intensely on cracking that one format on that one platform with a small set of messages for that one audience Focus exclusively on cracking just that six that will build max trust the fastest leading to revenue which you can then extract out and build on a second combination of platforms formats and messages seven roll that

Revenue into either hiring a team to leave behind on Platform One while while you go build platform two or hire the team and place them on platform two so that you keep going on one and they build two either way that is how you build the content Empire now this is the winning strategy it works every time for every business you just have to figure out which combination makes sense for your business your offer and your ideal viewer Avatar and I know this sounds high level but just the thinking of starting with the Avatar and

going backwards just that is different from what everybody that I hear on social media talking about these genius Frameworks start with the Avatar and work backwards that is all you have to do now the how of how you actually execute this across your combination that's what takes a ton of reps a ton of time better workflows that's what I work with entrepreneurs on is figuring out once you have the strategy how to compress the time to deliver the how I've spent all of my time last year building these systems that allow that compression so if

you're clear on the strategy and you need help with the how I'm telling you in the description Wavey World content Department sand castles these are things designed specifically to make it easier to execute against these strategies now I have some exciting announcements coming up soon about the house so stay tuned about that but that's all I've got for this video if you liked it make sure to leave a comment let me know what I should make in the next video and until then we'll see you guys on the next one peace