I Made 367 Videos and Here's What I Discovered

anybody can win on social media but if you want to grow fast you have to know where to focus your time all I've done the last 2 years is make videos Almost a million followers a billion views but I could have grown so much faster all I needed was somebody to just sit me down and tell me the truth about how this stuff actually works well here you go these are the eight brutal truths about winning on social media that I would have paid thousands to learn from the beginning number one virality can be engineered

it is solvable there is a formula for making videos that consistently work at will and that formula is based around audience matching videos can be shared in two ways human to human or algo to human human to human is me sharing a video with you manually in DM or text algo to human is Instagram showing my video to you without me having to do anything the cheat code to content is figuring out how to make the platforms YouTube Tik Tok Instagram push your video algorithmically and the way to do this is by making videos for

the same type of person over and over and over I call this person your ideal viewer Avatar the tighter you narrow in on that ideal viewer Avatar and the more consistently you make videos for just them the tighter your audience match will be and audience match equals algorithm push it's like a bullseye Target lock think about it this way if every video you made hits the center of the bullseye the algorithm is going to slowly expand the bullseye over time it will mechanistically let you reach more people the more precise you are so that's the

theory of how you need to think about content you need to start with the ideal viewer Avatar now the tactics of how you make good videos for that Avatar that's covered in my virality formula video it's the first one on my channel I'll pin it here that's the tactics of how to actually make great videos but the audience Avatar concept is key because the big mistake beginners make is they ignore the Avatar before you make any videos you need to spend a ton of time thinking about who that Avatar is what their pain points are

what their likes and dislikes are imagine a person in front of you you need to clearly Define who you're making videos for before you make videos too many people start out on content without giving this any thought and a lack of clarity on this just leads you to make a bunch of different videos for a bunch of different audiences and that may sound like the right experimentation plan at the beginning but it isn't because by doing that you're just eliminating any free boosting that the algorithm would give you to help get your channel off the

ground every time you switch audience it's like restarting from scratch so you're never getting good enough signal if you're on the right track instead of making a bunch of videos for a bunch of different people you should pick one group of people first and make a bunch of videos for them after a certain amount of time if that doesn't work move on to a different audience Avatar this is a huge mistake that most people make all right number two is very simple very critical but it's a hard pill to swallow and it's that people aren't

watching videos for you they're watching videos for them and this is going to sound harsh but the truth is deep down people don't care about your life they don't care about your struggle they don't care about your story they don't care about the characters around you they don't care about that stuff what they care about is accomplishing their goals maybe eventually If someone becomes a cult fan they will care about you and your story and your world and your ecosystem but that will only happen once you have helped them enough with their goals that cult

fandom a curse people care about accomplishing their goals and if you're a helpful hand in doing that they will reward you knowing this and believing it is critical because it will help shift your mind from making content about I to making content about you you can start focusing on you as the Avatar and the paino and not wrapping all the content in your individual stories that people really don't care about so when you're making a video and you're thinking about your ideal viewer Avatar you can use this Frame and ask yourself is this really helping

the person I want to help is this really solving the pain point that I think my viewer Avatar has if so that can be a Guiding Light in terms of picking your topics all right number three is that ideas matter way more than you think I used to think ideas were a dime a dozen everybody says ideas are nothing execution is everything right that's a common phrase but it turns out great ideas can be a 100 times more sharable than an average idea that's the difference between 10,000 views and 10 million views I always used

to listen to Mr Beast talk about this he would always say how important ideas are and how he was investing in his ideas team and I'd always roll my eyes but I couldn't have been more wrong about this and the reason great ideas matter so much is because the content world has gotten so noisy an average idea is just noise a good idea is just average a great idea is what it takes to cut through now the easiest way to come up with great content ideas is to go find validated outliers from other creators that

are speaking to your same ideal viewer Avatar and if you think this is copying let me just address it for one the internet is one giant remix everybody Builds on top and remixes ideas all the time two you can extract a core idea but change the content the angle the story The Packaging the way it's delivered you can take 5% of an idea add 95% new and still draft off a validated out liar idea but the truth is you don't even need to do that Virgil Abo's 3% rule if you change something 3% it's your

own so you don't even have to make that big of a change but you can this framework is the way anything in life is recommended if someone's winning at a thing you look at their strategy you reverse engineer it and then you apply it in your own way this is the guidance for everything in life now the tactics for actually how you go and find who makes validated outliers what's considered a validated outlier how do you know where to find them all those tactics that's a huge thing we cover in short form Academy because it's

so critical to be being able to make great content and here's a quick Pro tip the reason videos are great is not about the facts it's about the angle the point of view the lens the thing you add on top of the facts the process to research an idea but then mine for those angles that's where I found the most outsized returns in coming up with great ideas and one of the tools that I use to come up with great ideas on YouTube specifically is called spotter studio now the beauty of spotter is that it

does a lot of this outlier identification for you automatically you can just put in your video idea a couple words a title and it will automatically generate other titles and thumbnails for you and those titles and thumbnails are based on existing outliers on YouTube now the title feature is this cool UI where you have a title it explodes into six options and if you like one you keep pressing the plus and it just explodes forever it's really one of the easiest mindmapping brainstorming title tools I've ever seen and then the thumbnail generator is also super

helpful basically they have three different animation Styles and it will create thumbnail renders and mockups based on the you chose so I'll take these and give them to my thumbnail designer and it gives him a faster start these are all validated based on what already worked for your Niche on YouTube now what's crazy is this is the tool that Colin and Samir duded perfect this is what they use to come up with titles do their research come up with thumbnail mocks I'm actually really surprised at how many massive YouTubers are already using this now they're

running a holiday promo right now it's pretty cool they're giving $25,000 away to creators for free and all you have to do is sign up for a free trial you don't have to convert to paid if you cancel the tri before you get charged they'll still keep you in the drawing for the 25k so it's basically risk-free I have a link in the description if you want to try it it's really a no-brainer if you're trying to grow with YouTube all right the fourth brutal truth is about storytelling and I wish I knew this earlier

but storytelling is such a cheat Cod and I actually think the Art of Storytelling and scriptwriting is kind of lost in this new age of Max retention and super fast scrolling people may come for the hook but they'll stay for the story when it comes to content I spend most of my time thinking about storytelling and trying to crack these new formats that work over and over a couple of tips I haven't shared anywhere else else the first one is you kind of want your scripts and stories to feel like a wave it's kind of

like building tension releasing tension building tension releasing tension kind of like a wave crashing on the shore you want to do this because it keeps giving added things for the viewer to watch they get tension and then they release those things it's a satisfying Loop if you just build up constantly to one thing and then release there's only one satisfying build and drop from my view the way you want to story tell online is this kind of constant looping tension now another tip is to give people something to root for as soon as possible the

shorter you can compress the time to Value to give someone something to root for the longer they'll stay because they're rooting for it now on the storytelling and the streping front I have two things for you for one I made a video it's my biggest one on YouTube almost 500,000 views already I'll link it here it goes through kind of six tactical tips around storytelling things to improve and the second thing is I'm actually building an AI tool that will help automatically do the storytelling and script writing for you it's called sand castles we're building

it right now all you have to do is put in a Content idea it will do the research it will mine for the Angles and it will write a script based on the storytelling Frameworks that I already have that I know are validated it will take 60 Minutes worth of script writing work and compress it down to 60 seconds right now we've had insane demand for it it's weight list only so if you're on the weight list you're going to get special pricing when we go live sandcastles if you're interested in improving your storytelling make

sure to sign up for it all right brutal truth number five is that editing matters way less than people think so ideas matter way more editing matters way less now editing is the thing visually that makes the video seem professional but it actually matters way less than you think if you have a lowquality edited video but it doesn't perform well the chances are the quality of the information is probably the reason it's not the edit and this is the sad but honest truth now Charlie and I include a lot of Graphics in our videos because

a we just like the way it looks and B we're talking about Frameworks and visualizing them with Motion Graphics is just an easier way to communicate the point but you really don't have to do this if you at the pain point of struggling with social media and you believe that I a person with proof I could record these as Loom videos with zero graphics and you would still watch them and that shows that the edit doesn't really matter the quality of the information is what matters more editing is really helpful to help contain the pacing

to prevent people from getting bored and I think it is good for visualizing things like Frameworks and complex process maps and things like that but you really don't need editing people overvalue the edit all right here's a few more rapid tactical ones we'll go through these quicker so number six is to spend 80% of your time on the visual hook I wish I knew this from the beginning I spent so much time not caring about this the visual hook regardless of short form or long form is so critical It's a combination of the text shown

on screen the visuals you're showing the words you're saying over the first five to 30 seconds of the video the thing is people will decide if the video is for them after just a couple seconds so dozens of hours of your work will be wasted if people don't stay from the visual hook now the thing is most creators I talk to spend equal time on all sections so if you have a video that's 10 minutes long they're only spending 5% of their time on the first 30 seconds that should be 30 to 50% % of

your time if that's what it takes because everything after once someone drops off might as well be a black screen so the visual Hook is where all the risk is to retain now the way to make your visual hook a banger tactically is to open up a curiosity Loop in the viewer's mind take your ideal viewer Avatar imagine what their pain point is and then open a curiosity loop around that pain point so that they have to listen for the next line that is kind of the Tactical key I talk about this a lot of

my script writing videos and a lot of my virality formula everything is based around the Curiosity Loop for the the visual text make sure there are three to five words on screen that says what the video is about it sounds simple but people read more than they listen just include the visual text on the screen now the deeper the Curiosity Loop the stickier the hook it's as simple as that next week on this YouTube channel I'm going to make a video breaking down how to write a bunch of different Hooks and give my take on

what the visual hook would look like so make sure to subscribe and come back next week to see that video also before I go on I just want to say if you're trying to improve your content game if you're watch this far you care about this and you really want to grow I've included so many free things below so much free help I know this stuff is hard and I genuinely just want to help people win so I've got a bunch of stuff I have a full 5-day course on virality I have a Content newsletter

where I talk about Trends I have a full school that's free with all these tutorials everything is free so it's all down below if you're struggling with this stuff Check It Out Below make sure to subscribe for some of that stuff so you can get access to my best information all right the brutal truth number seven is about metrics I think people spend way too much time looking at metrics initially but I'm going to break down exactly what metrics mean what the only ones that matter for for growing on social media are share rate how

many shares divided by views and average view duration how long did a person spend on the video and the reason those matter is because content platforms are ad businesses and every additional user second adds to the watch time which adds to a monetizable event shares bring new users in average watchtime keep existing users there those are the two metrics that they care about now to optimize for both those metrics you have to make videos that are interesting it sounds silly it sounds stupidly obvious but when you read back your script or you think about the

video is it actually interesting it has to hit you in the face that that is an interesting video if it doesn't it's not going to work the truth is most videos just aren't that interesting which Maps back to the importance of ideas that point I said earlier now here's a quick trick on what each metric means if your video is getting high shares it means that it was remarkable and unique and your take induced some kind of an emotion emotions Drive shares if the video has a high amount of saves that means the information was

dense and valuable it was a neutral take but it was really worth saving if your video has high likes that means you gave a fairly consensus take and it was something that people agreed with if the video has high comments it's usually a contrarian take and something that people are coming into to argue about now the order of importance of those metrics in my mind goes shares comments saves likes views that's how you should prioritize now if you know what drives each one and you know the prioritization you should try to gut check if your

content is driving the proper metric all right so this last one I save the best for last I'm just going to give you the framework for how you should approach content this is the full formula the framework it's very pretty simple and the first step right we're going backwards is to have a hook that presses on that pain point that drives an emotion so if you're doing it linearly from beginning to end it's a hook that opens some Loop that presses on a paino it's a story that talks about the paino and how you might

solve it it's the pain point that you're talking about it's the ideal Avatar that is going to have that pain point and it's the product and service that you want the ideal Avatar to buy every time you sit down for a piece of content you should think intentionally who is going to buy what for what reason and then tell a story that presses on that paino inducing an emotion to drive that action it really is that simple if you have that framework written down you have the product or service or if you just want to

build an audience you have the ideal Avatar you can work backwards from there and stay laser focused with that audience match on hitting just that Avatar over and over and over and over you need to become satisfied with the boredom of winning when you find a winning formula you're going to get bored you're going to keep winning over the same thing over and over the same Stories the same messages you need to learn to be happy with the bom of winning and if you are and you follow this format you will win all right that's

all I got for this video these were the eight things if I would have understood this deeply from day one I would have grown so much faster luckily now I understand it hopefully now you guys do as well of course this is just the tip of the iceberg in these videos I just don't have enough time to give you everything I try to talk about the strategy the psychology at the top level and then the tactics at the bottom I try to cover both but there's just not enough minutes there's so much with content and

social media so if you want more make sure to check the free links below I'm constantly talking about this stuff I'm really obsess uccess that you can tell other than that hope you guys enjoyed it leave a comment make sure to subscribe and we'll see you guys on the next one peace