How I Gained 7.8 Million Followers In 40 Months (6 Key Lessons)
Summary
- I grew my YouTube from zero to 2.23 million subscribers, Instagram from 7,000 to 2.5 million, LinkedIn from zero to 324,000, TikTok from zero to 856,000, Twitter from zero to 617,000, Facebook from zero to 25,000, and podcast from 3,000 downloads to 25 million, while gaining 700,000 email subscribers in approximately 40 months.
- You can build a brand without needing to rely on stunts, kittens, or similar tactics.
- My initial plan: create good content, post it everywhere, and learn as much as possible. Over time, the plan led to spending $4 million on team, equipment, and software, while producing 35,000 pieces of content.
- I learned six things that worked for growing my brand and making money: focusing on education over edutainment, catering content from my perspective to the audience's, narrowing the topic range, prioritizing revenue generation over just chasing views, shifting from short to long-form content, and assuming the audience knows nothing to ensure clarity and inclusivity.
- All views are not created equal; my educational videos connected better with my desired audience of business owners.
- I found a higher correlation between ad revenue and business-related metrics like book sales and portfolio applications than just counting views.
- I realized that short-form viewers generally watch more shorts and long-form viewers watch more longs; therefore, focusing on long-form content is more conducive to conversion for me.
- It's crucial not to assume the audience knows you. Introduce yourself each time, avoid inside jokes, and create content for both fans and newcomers.
- Through this experience, I came to believe that action is key. Doing something is better than doing nothing, and continually adapting is part of the entrepreneurial journey.
- I provide resources like the games inside the school for beginners and training courses at acis.com for more established business owners to help implement these strategies.
*Remember that these insights are based on my businesses, and execution will vary based on individual situations and industries.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by focusing on education over entertainment. Creating content that teaches your audience something valuable is key. You want to help people change their behavior and make a difference with your content.
A good way of doing this is by catering the content from your perspective to your audience's needs. Think about what problems you can solve for them or what insights you can share that they might not have considered before.
It's also important to narrow your topic range. Choose a niche that you are passionate about and that aligns with your expertise. Do not try to cover everything. Specialize in an area that you know well, that serves your target audience.
Prioritize revenue-generating activities over chasing views for the sake of it. Remember, not all views are equal. Your educational videos will connect better with your target audience, which in my case, are business owners. You can focus on building a real connection with your audience that can lead to revenue, like book sales or services offered.
When making content, you should not assume the audience knows you. It's crucial to introduce yourself each time. Keep it clear and welcoming for both fans and newcomers. Make sure every piece of content can stand on its own and makes sense for someone who is coming to your brand for the first time.
Always keep in mind that action is key. Start by doing something. It’s better than doing nothing. Continually adapt and tweak your strategy based on what you learn from each piece of content you create.
If you're just starting out or need help growing your business, use available resources like training courses on acis.com. These can give you practical steps to implement these strategies.
Finally, remember that different things work for different people. Don't get stuck doing one thing. Keep experimenting and find what works for your business or personal brand.
Quotes by Alex Hormozi
"All views are not created equal"
– Alex Hormozi
"An ounce of pre-work is worth a pound of post"
– Alex Hormozi
"If you want your content to bring people who don't know you then you can't assume they do"
– Alex Hormozi
"Make all jokes inside jokes for everyone"
– Alex Hormozi
"Anything works better than nothing"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
let's rock so you guys want to hear something absolutely insane well in the last 40 months my YouTube grew from zero to 2.23 million subscribers my Instagram Grew From 7,000 to 2 and a half million sub subscribers followers you get the idea my LinkedIn went from Zer to 324,000 followers My Tik Tok went from zero to $856,000 followers my Twitter SLX the artist formerly known as Twitter uh went from0 to 600 17,000 my Facebook which we just started went from 0 to 25,00 there we go going in big Facebook um my podcast went from 3,000 downloads to 25 million downloads and my email subscribers went from 0 to 700,000 for a grand total of two billion Impressions over that time period and 7.8 million new subscribers and for a grand total of a million copies sold of my book for those of you who are like well what does that mean and I'll get to that in a second so in 40ish months all of that happened and I show all of this is proof to start this to show one thing is that this actually works and you can build a brand without babes without stunts or kittens and I start this proof because lots of people talk about stuff that they haven't done and teach a lot of sucky fluff as a result you can see the man there he's saying the truth this this fluff sucks and I refus to do that and so before we got the two billion Impressions and the 7.8 million subscribers it wasn't like this because 40 months ago I started with zero subscribers and a big quote fancy plan and my fancy plan had Three Steps step one make as much good stuff as I could step two post it everywhere I could and step three learn as much as I could and after 40ish months $4 million in team equipment vendors Studios and software a thousand hours of me on camera recording and 35,000 pieces of content let me say that again 35,000 as in count to a th000 and then do that 35 times in a row I learned a lot of What Not to do but I did learn six things that made money and grew my brand that you can use today now what I'd like to do is for the remainder of the presentation save you the three and a half years and $4 million so you can just get the lessons without the scar so that little box is our box of six lessons cool all right let's rock so here are the six changes that we observed over the last four 40ish months that actually worked number one going from edutainment to education number two for us to for you number three wide to narrow number four views to revenue number five shorts to Longs number six assume more to assume nothing now most of those I promise you I will explain and if it looks like uh I think I know what that means believe me there's a lot more underneath of it so let's start with the first one edutainment to education so I see content in three buckets on one extreme you've got entertainment which is the entire point of entertainment just to define the term is to get people to watch the only point of the entertainment is to just get people to consume it that's it if it accomplishes that it has succeeded on the other side you have education where the point of education is to get someone to change what they do right right if you try and teach someone how to answer a phone and then in the same situation the phone rings and they don't do something and then after they watch you do something they then change what they do in the phone rings the second time they have learned so the point is to change their behavior if educ if the video or the content does that then you succeeded at educating them and lastly you have edutainment which has the point of both trying to teach and entertaining at the same time and to be clear it's less that you make entertaining content or that you make educational content it's more that you make content and people are either entertained or educated as a result and so you can make one thing that entertains some people and then that same thing educates other people and so I just want to make this very clear that you don't control the audience you make something and then education or entertainment occurs but for our purposes I'll Define the content category is the most common outcome of your content and so if a lot of people are entertained then you've made entertaining content for the purpose of this presentation even if one or two people learn something so for example some creators might learn stuff from Mr BEAST's videos wow I learned how to make videos but the vast majority of people are entertained they watch just a watch on the other hand Walla who's one of the number one Educators on YouTube you can even see the different looking feels and don't worry I'm going to get into that he may entertain some enthusiasts around that subject but mostly he educates students and until recently I've been trying to figure this out I've spent a lot of time really working through this and so I actually have videos in all three buckets I have entertainment videos where the point is to get people to watch I have edutainment videos where we try and teach and entertain at the same time and then we have education videos where we just want to change people's behavior we just want to teach them something and so the first change number one that we see over lots of the data I'll support in a second is that I'm going all in on education for three reasons number one is that when we looked at all of our data All Views are not created equal I'll dive into that in a second number two is I like educational videos and number three is I like people who like educational videos too Andor people who educate themselves people who want to learn and so let me explain these so all views are not created equal so there's this Theory and this is going to this will be one that's going to Rattle some cages there's a theory that media works like a funnel in fact the vast majority of marketing infographics and things like that almost all are funnels and the theory goes like this you make entertaining content and then the theory states that people who watch that content then we'll go to more educational content okay sounds simple enough we've got something wide we got something narrow fantastic but in our experience in my experience and based on our book sales based on our email optins and based on the applications we receive at acquisition. comom to become portfolio companies it works much more like this which is that entertainment people want more entertainment content and education people want more say it with me education content and so in other words these people do not become these people not in any appreciable rate that we would build a business around and they certainly don't read the books Jo join the email list or apply to become portfolio businesses so if I want more of these people then they deserve the stuff that they value and so that's the first reason that I'm doubling down on education All Views are not created equal number two the next is that I simply like doing it all right so you know I do believe that you should try and do stuff that you like doing and if it happens to also be in align with your goals awesome it's much tougher when the thing you like doing isn't align with your goals but in this instance when I got that first piece of data I was like thank God because this is the stuff I like making most all right and so when I talk to Ideal customers in my mind they are business owners and business interested people because if you know me and anybody who who's close to me would probably attested this is that like if you hang out with me for any amount of time we will probably talk about business because it's what I love talking about I I eat it I sleep it I drink it I work seven days on it and like I skip holidays for it because for me it is the holiday so this is what I like doing and this is what the people that I like serving also like and so they like it better too and this is where got confusing for me leading up to this and why this is so important is that it got very confusing when you have so many people saying man I really like the entertaining content and this is where it gets difficult this is where you have to read between the lines of the comments rather than just reading the comments themselves all right because the thing is is for us or at least for me they weren't necessarily who I was trying to attract again there's nothing wrong with that I mean hey if I could serve the whole world I will but I know that I tend to do better serving people who want to educate themselves than people who just want to watch or consume just for the sake of it and so that's why I'm debling down on going from edutainment some enter edutainment some entertainment to education so that's number one so let's talk about change number two that we saw going from for us to for you you're like what does that mean let me explain so recently a mutual friend came to the headquarters and he said hey I've been consuming your stuff for years but recently I just haven't been watching as much and he said it offhandedly wasn't like trying to smash my ego into bits um and he failed at that uh but when he said it I really took it to heart right it was very gut-wrenching he said it just doesn't resonate as much I was like okay got it it felt like a gut punch since he's literally the person I could help most this is a business owner doing 10 million plus a year and I was like man well that sucks and that's when I realized that reading the comments actually led me a little bit astray and for you it might be leading you astray and I'll give you some data to support that and so some people loved our different styles but not the people that I ultimately wanted to help or am best suited to serve and so we realized that we were serving the wrong who and that had some very significant Downstream impacts on what we made and how we made it so what is making for them or for business owners content really mean let me break this down into tactics all right so tactically it meant five things number one different packaging number two different introductions number three different meat number four different visuals and number five different what I'll call pre-work all right so let's start with number one so the difference between these two thumbnails is going from vague to clear all right so if I looked at all the stuff that we did in the past if I said what is the video on the left about you'd probably be like I a rule of some sort that might have to do with money not sure if I said what's the 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 zero to a million okay well guess what the one on the right it's exactly that the one on the left actually has nothing to do with what that thumbnail looks like and what do you know 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 so that's number one from a packaging perspective that we will be changing Andor going more all in on and I want to take a pause here for a second about this there was also kind of a pervasive narrative in in the kind of marketing world is like you got to have curiosity you got to like you don't want to tell them everything you want them to to be able to get no like if they want that thing they will click on that thing and then you just give them that thing and that has been a very hard lesson for me to learn and so I share it with you now so the second is different introductions you guys feeling this okay good okay different introductions now this one is really big so going from confirming the thumbnail or confirming the headline to proof and this is super important I'll explain the difference so a lot of the things that I learned like many of you if you are trying to get into content creation of any sort or media is that you look at the people who are who are the biggest right and so often times the biggest people in media are entertainers now why is that because everyone gets value from entertainment but there is no one thing from an education perspective that can provide value to everyone why because everyone already knows different stuff so if I educate a wide slice of people there's still already people who know that thing and then do not get value so entertainment by definition will always be greater or larger the followings for those people than people who educate there is no no bones about it like it is that way and so a lot of the lessons that entertainment teaches everyone listens to because they have the biggest followings but I don't think the actual tactics they subscribe or espouse are correct at a tactical level at a principal level yes and so so let me just say a second about what that principle is is that the person who's going to consume the content we want to increase their perceived likelihood that they will get what they clicked so just like the headline and just like the thumbnails now when they said in entertainment you want to confirm it well that's because most of the Sensational entertainment is something crazy and so the likelihood that someone just got the click so that they could not do that crazy thing is pretty high and so if you want people to watch you smash a Lamborghini then you better have the Lamborghini next to you or people aren't going to believe that you're actually going to smash it now let's flip to entertainment for a second sorry let's SL let's switch to education for a second if I say I'm going to teach you a physics thing I'm going to teach you about the law of I don't even know what the first law of physics is but if you push it it will move something like that anyways if I want to have proof or increase the perceived likelihood that they're going to be well taught then what I actually have to do is edify the person why should I listen to you if I'm the viewer there's a zillion people that could write something on a board but if you're a PhD physicist then the likelihood that I will listen to you and that I will get what I want is much higher and so in both of these examples we are actually doing the same thing but we do it differently if you want to educate and for me when I looked at my videos and I'll explain the data in a second it became really clear and so in entertainment it's say the title again and then literally show them what was on the thumbnail in education it's show them that you can do what you promised them in the thumbnail and that's the difference and to figure out what made intros for our videos work I actually rewatched my top 35 educational videos this actually took some time and so let me just save you like a lot of hours and just give you the Nugget and so I actually developed a new moniker around how to think about introd for ourselves that I'm spreading throughout my whole team and you can just steal it proof promise plan so I'll break down all three of these so all of the introductions of the best education videos that we had had these three characteristics and I want to make one point about the order of these is that you can have these three mixed in any order you want I would emphasize the one that is the most important for that particular piece of content so if you have something that you're making that you think the proof is going to be really important then lead with that if you have a promise that's incredibly important for the audience then lead with that if you have a plan that for some reason is going to be more emphasized than lean with that but I would say that for our content for the most because I'm a business educator about making money in general most people have this big glaring sign above their head before they can even turn on the volume of their brain which is why should I listen to you and so I tend to lead with proof and so proof is that you prove that you know what you're you're talking about you give people a reason to believe you the promise is to tell them what they're going to get or learn from the video and the plan sets the expectations of what will happen next so let me give you a real world example of this I started this presentation with data that shows that I've done what I'm talking about if I went up here and just skipped this part you might be like okay all of this up to this point why should I listen to you and you'd be right in thinking that because you have no idea who I am I could just be some random dude that looks like a birken stock slightly Lumberjack eish weirdly Dressed Man like why would you listen and you'd be reasonable to believe that right but if you start with that then you're like okay well he know something the promise was what I said you would get at the beginning I said I learned six things that made money and grew my brain that you can use today and I'm going to save you $4 million in three and a half years and you'll just get all the lessons that I learned that was the promise making sense okay and then finally we had the plan I said how are we going to get there how am I to complete that promise I said well there's six changes and I'm going to walk through them that's the plan and so leading with those things we found got business owners or the people that I'm interested in to actually better frame and perceive and get educated on the content that we're talking about and so that's what we're changing out of our introductions third now let's talk about how this strategy changes the meat of the content what we're actually like the the real bones the potatoes all right is that going from be real SL Vlog stuff because we have made that to list steps and stories when we looked at the educational content that did the best they had more of the right and less of the left from Razzle I would I would love to say to Dazzle but it really is it's just Razzle on the left and so I actually wanted to show a different type of content so I don't want to make this seem like this is all YouTube I just have like long form video there has all of the elements and some platforms don't have all of them so you YouTube's a very easy platform to base this off of but this is from Instagram and Tik Tok would function the same way Etc so if you look at the squares here I just pulled the last 30 days of content that we made and I looked at our bottom performing over the last 30 days that we posted that were reals and then I looked at the top now interestingly it was a almost a perfect reversal so the bottom 12 videos that we made eight out of 12 I would say had more Razzle emphasized it was more about effects a little bit higher production and on the flip side and this is what was crazy and this is why I'm sharing stuff with you because like I would I would literally never have guessed it and that's why we look N9 out of 12 75% of the best videos we had emphasize language emphasize the actual message more than the production and so it was about emphasizing the language rather than the Razzle I find this very fascinating now to be really clear you can have really bad language you're like poor vague unclear language and it won't do well and you might have Razzle that just absolutely crushes I just look at the trends of of 75% on this side were this style or this type and 75% that weren't as good were this style well then let's do more of this and less of that and so those are the main meat Changers that we're doing in the videos we're emphasizing language this also was true with Longs as well so if I go and show you this real quick language that's on the screen and that's one of our best videos ever and that takes up 70 80% of the video is actually just words interesting for me at least I mean I was a little offended cuz thought I had a you know good face but apparently no one cares so that's what we're changing about the meat so let's talk about visuals this one's a big one all right so going from over production and I want to be clear not over production over production for the objective so it's not like we did like my team did anything wrong or anything like that it's just that if we want to educate sometimes production distracts from the objective of Education if the point for entertainment is to get someone to watch then adding lots of things can be a good thing but if you're trying to learn physics and there's whizbangs and popups and changing backgrounds it's really hard to learn and if that's the throughput or that's the point of the video that it actually detracts rather than ads and so the difference that I put in this example here is we have a background that changes colors while I'm teaching something it does not help someone understand the subject matter better fundamentally changing background color will not help anyone learn more on the flip side clar ver ifying what words on a screen are because maybe my handwriting is not that good would help people understand that's the difference so over production to effective production from distracting to enhancing from visual effects to visualizing data so instead of having Flames behind me it's what does this look like on a chart so we can give relative scale so we have scope so we can show changes over time and so that's how the visuals that did the best looked like and then number five let's talk about pre-work for a second so going from postproduction to pre-search so instead of saying hey let's just record something and then fix it in post anybody who's in the media side knows what I'm talking about four weeks of editing after you know almost no prep to get a video out well what if we did four weeks of research and then we have almost no editing because we thought of everything ahead of time well guess what the videos where we spent I mean we're like the the the hour to hour ratio is stupid and I'll get to that in a second but if we spend a quarter of the time that we used to spend on Post in Pre we eliminate 90% 90 maybe 95% of our post edit work and man-hours and for the business owners in the room that's real cost that's real savings and for the also business owners in the room that also means increased production so if I can take the quarter of the time and I can get almost zero time on the back end that's four times the videos but not only is it four times the output it's also higher quality for your goal and your audience so this is a big thing that we noticed the videos that we spoke the most time on the front end we spent less time on the back and they did better and so we want to spend more time before than after and so this is my little quote if you want to write something down uh an ounce of pre-work is worth a pound of post so that was my little my little take on this and so by focusing more on what educates and what it means we do great and everything else distract from that goal and so those are the five things that we're changing tactically and that we're doubling down on to cater to business owners this at least for my audience is what they cared about and I happen to be in that audience and I feel that way too so I'm happy about it so that's how we went from for us as media people to a degree because I've got into this now uh to for you or for your audience and for me that means for business owners so now let's talk about why daero all right and this will also ruffle some feathers and rattle some cages so instead of talking about relationships and college and food and lifestyle I'm going to be narrowing down or doubling down on if you will business business models business leverage and selling in a business notice business being in all of these videos and all these topics and so that's how I'm going narrower very simple now that I'm going to go back a slide because I want I want to head on this for a second just like I said earlier that people who like Entertainment also just want more entertainment what we also found is that people who I'll go back quick people who watch relationship stuff want more relationship stuff and as they should that's what they clicked on that's what they want that makes sense and people who want to learn about college are people trying to make a decision about college guess what those people probably aren't business owners and people who want to learn about food they watch other food videos and people want about lifestyle probably watch other lifestyle videos but for me those were not necessarily the people that vibed the most with my stuff and that makes sense because to be fair this is a little bit more foreign to me when I talk about business I feel very comfortable when I talk about these things I just give what I would consider hot takes this is my perspective so that is what we're doubling down on in terms of the topics that were choosing for the content we make so that's number three let's go number four in terms of the the things we're doubling down on so before this we used to track views this is another big one man all six of these are big man I'm glad I made a presentation about so before this we used to track views as our primary metric so I'll take a second here who uses be honest be honest everybody's like likes don't you can't trade likes for for paying rent you can't pay pay roll with view sure okay got it who here actually tracks something besides views me say it again who makes views the most important metric you track all right right a lot of you that's okay me too but I'm going to give you a good metric that you can track and this is after pouring through believe me I'm I'm a big data guy um a metric that you might not expect so the main reason is that I had a 6 to 12 month deal cycle so I started by using views because I really had no other metric because for those you who don't know what I do well I'll explain in a second but we had no idea what what it would do besides driving awareness and I didn't really have any other objective right but in that time period of doing a deal in every six to 12 months because we buy companies that's more or less what we do um we begin seeing a much closer correlation with faster feedback metrics and ideally in any business you want as little latency between the metrics you track and the behavior you want to change and so if you want to get people to change something and you want to look at something that takes a year to get feedback really tough to change Behavior but if you can have a a metric that you can see daily changes or hourly changes then those are things that are going to much more quickly change Behavior so that you can have a 100 feedback loops in terms of changing and getting better than one every year and so besides Book Sales optins and applications there was a metric that stood out as fastest and most measurable it was ad revenue and this is really surprising to me so and I this is the point I want to make real quick is that to be clear for those you who don't know who I am ad revenue is not how I make my money all right just very clearly um for those you don't know my wife and I exit our first big company uh for $ 46.2 million in December of 2021 you can Google it American Pacific group was the private Equity Firm gym launch and Prestige labs are two of those companies um and since then we invested and bought a number of companies that have grown a lot and do over $200 million a year so I do media to feed a lot of different things but I don't directly monetize the media and like ad revenue is I'll explain why in a second is an important metric that we can use for everything else okay so these are companies that we own great so for me I pretty much always ignored ad revenue and just saw it as something that could offset some of the cost of the immedia team there was really nothing else but I was wrong it's actually so much more so let's let's dive into a little bit for a second like how does AD Revenue come to be so it comes from two things this number of views times Revenue per views now the actual term is RPMs which is revenue per meal which is French for thousand but it's number of views times the revenue that you get okay per view fantastic so it takes into account and this is why this is important because we thought views and that was the only metric we had but we had to have something to counter it because otherwise then you get views for view sake but we needed a quality metric with a quantity metric which by the way paired metrics if you're ever tracking something for a department having like number of tickets resolved with rating against the the the resolution of how well those customer service reps resolved paired metrics allow you to get to to the best or most effective throughput for any department and I just didn't know enough about media to find out what our paired metric was and this happens to be a single metric that pairs both and so it takes account the quality of the audience which for me was business owners who have amongst the highest spending power and so RPMs are the highest now for so for me the RPMs go up it means I'm getting more of the quality people that I want and so this gave me and my team something that we could shoot for that bounc making videos for the right people who wanted to watch so I mean ideally we absolutely want to crank views with the right people and that's what that was able to track for us and looking backwards the month with the highest RPMs and AD Revenue also created the most Book Sales the most optins and the most business applications and this had nothing to do with how many views we got in fact we did kind of an experiment lately where we did 90 days of almost no business stuff we just did more uh more edutainment and entertainment style uh content and our views went through the roof like Way up 2 3x what we're accustomed to but even with the increase in views our ad Revenue dropped by half so we're actually getting the wrong people and I share this with you so you don't have to and so the nice thing about this from a team perspective for those who do have larger teams and want to translate this over is that my team now has real-time access to this so they can see every single piece of content in the ad Revenue that it generates and they can quickly generate baselines in their mind of what's good and what's bad on an objective metric that really is good and bad rather than just like hey this video cranked yeah but it didn't it didn't bring any of the right people we got this thing that had 10 million views okay but it drove nothing versus we had this video that had what 100,000 views and it made more ad Revenue than one that had 10 million and we saw the corresponding increase in the metrics that matter to us and so that's why we switch from views being the metric that we're optimizing for to add Revenue because it's a leading performance indicator it happens almost in real time rather than something that happens in a big in a rears to give a fancy word later so that's number four in terms of the things that we're doubling down on so let's talk about the fifth one shorts to Longs all right this is yet and end another big one that's going to ruffle some feathers so for a long time the prevailing idea in content marketing was again a funnel it's like everything's a funnel all right and it was believed that shorts viewers got more people to then watch Longs and then those long viewers would then translate into becoming customers right so people watch shorts and then they watch Longs and they give you money right that was kind of the prevailing thought but again when we looked at the data it looked more like this shorts viewers watch more shorts and long viewers watch more Longs and customers buy more and so the point is that that these are different audiences and I will make a note here that this can change my platform so I might be a long viewer on one platform and a short view or another and where I do think the magic happens is where you can have shorts in one thing and so someone finds you on Tik Tock but then they are a Longs viewer on YouTube and then they watch your Longs there so I do think there's an element there but not the way the narrative goes and so for us Longs drive a lot more conversions than shorts conversions being Book Sales opt-ins applications all right and business related content unsurprisingly brings more business owners than not business related content and so we are going to double down on more Longs about that stuff and change our short strategy to keep the volume the same but focus more on business overall and again people watch differently on different platforms so making shorts in order for people to on a different platform watch long still carries as far as We Know so despite the mega obsession with shorts that has kind of prevailed for the last few years because it was a new you know format of content we're putting now more emphasis on Longs overall for now as far as we have data so that's number five now let's talk about the sixth one that I'm going all in on assume more to assume nothing all right so what does this mean so let's start with assume more and what that what that really means broken down suum more means I made content assuming people already knew me okay so here's an example the Alex rosi guide to haters I might be like if I don't know who Alex rosi is or I've never seen that face before why do I care if I see the day in the life of Alex rosi yet again I assume everyone knows me in this I'm I'm sharing these mistakes with you as far as I'm concerned for getting new people into my world it wasn't made I assumed like everybody's going to know me the Alex rosi everyone knows me no they're like who is this guy right and here's why this matters if you want your content to bring people who don't know you which is why many of you guys make content then you can't assume they do and so this is what this looks like tactically from a headlines perspective if I were to remake these today I might try a first crack at business influencer crushes haters and shows how you can too okay so now if I'm clicking I would understand at least that this guy is a business influencer of some sort and he crushes haters okay I might want to see haters get crushed uh day in the life of $200 million per year CEO okay now the jet tells this me that this Alex Heros from the the first one before Alex Heros may be rich or maybe he can afford a private jet but now I know he's a CEO because I could be a rapper I could be more realistically when I walk around the place that I live all the people that in my community assume that I'm a football player it's the number one thing I like so you uh play football you on the hockey team and uh I I say no I can nope nothing wrong with that but no that's not what I do um and then the third one there Alex rosi Di 16 hour workday sixpack diet for business owners whatever the point is is that we actually make it welcoming to everyone and so here's how we do this tactically within the content itself so we go from they know me to introducing yourself every time so earlier I was like I'm Alex rosi this is what I do this is the the the subscribers I've gotten whatever we introduce ourselves two they know why they should listen to me tell people why they should listen to you every time three the inside jokes you know how I get no I don't know how you get please fully explain the reference because that references another piece of content that I haven't seen because it's the first video I've seen from you and if you tell an inside joke and someone doesn't understand the inside joke guess where they are on the outside and guess where people don't want to be on the outside and guess where people spend money on the inside and number four going from acting like you're already friends to pretending everything goes to people who have no idea who you are and when you make content so people who don't know you can enjoy it more do and for those of you who are worried because I can already hear the thoughts that are coming up so let me just address those right now I see you I'm going to lose retention if I introduce myself okay well let's play the equal opposite would you rather fewer people know who you are or more people who have no clue because on one hand we have some people who know you and on the other hand we have lots of people who also don't know you so you're in the exact same position you were before two well aren't people going to get sick of this you're going to keep saying your name every time or keep introducing yourself well from what I can tell warm people like the reminders and cold people need the introduction and as a total side note this is a fun little experiment for everyone here you can run this when you leave here if who here actually who here actually has posted content in the last year okay good okay good for a second I was like this would have been really bad if no one had raised their hand fantastic okay I want you to look at last year and I want you to look at your number one piece of content and this is what I want you to do just post it again and then let me know how it does and I will bet you that it does just as well or better than the stuff that you're posting right now and let me tell you one reason why I believe that to be true because if you have been posting consistently guess what's also happened more people have entered your audience and guess what they haven't seen that amazing piece of content that everyone from last year said was the number one best thing you ever made and you know what you said new people you don't get that that was only for my old folks my ogs they only get that no you got to reintroduce some of the stuff your greatest hits you got to bring that stuff in so that the new people also know what your greatest hits are so that the lore continues to compound and grow so number three and this one or subo and this is one for me personally I follow a bunch of quote accounts I you know I I like comedy and philosophy and like fighting those like kind of categories that I follow and gym equipment and so I get quotes a lot on my Newsfeed but you know what happens when I see a quote from Sophocles or epicus yet again that reminds me that I should just toughen up and keep going I like the reminder I'm not like epicus God you live 4,000 years ago like Get over yourself no he's not making new content but guess what people still post it and people still read it because we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught at least I do to give a little tactical one on this for mainstream because this might resonate for some of the older people in the crowd there was this thing called television a while back used to be big anyways instead of having it on your phone it was like this big screen on a wall you a is a whole thing anyways I W get into it it's like floppy disc regardless floppy disc okay anyway so so there used to be this thing where at the beginning of every show there was a theme s song right so they'd be like cheers where everybody knows your name and there's always a little introduction it says produce by and all that stuff and if those shows that spend gazillions of dollars on testing chose to think that despite selling more advertising space it was worth having the same exact theme song and introduction for the show don't you think it might be worth that for us too and here's an interesting thing the last thing positive associations and sticks if you actually get sing song about how you introduce yourself or the things that you relate to you it starts to become something that people expect and then they start associating it with all the positive other experiences they had with you so if I always introduce something a certain way and then I deliver value afterwards they associate the introduction with the value and guess who else do they associate that with you and so for those of you who are concerned you can add variety to this and I want to show you a cool little real world example of this so the Simpsons has the longest standing Show to my knowledge that has existed on television and the introduction is the same now Bart would be like 70 by now or whatever his actual age would be if it was actual humans but it isn't right and every introduction has barred at some point in detention writing something on the board for those of you who don't know the Simpsons every one of the introductions actually changes every one of them and so they still have the introduction that has all the positive associations with the funny times and the humor and the laughs that you've had with the show but they introduce a tiny bit of variety into them to keep it interesting and then what happens is people look forward to these introductions because they want to find the Easter egg the real fans now get catered to and the new fans don't know about it yet but they will and so now you actually serve both sides of the audience the people who know you and the people who first who are just coming cold and so that's it small variation same introduction you let the new people in and you give something to the the people who already know you so title it like they don't know you introduce yourself say why they should listen prioritize the content that makes sense for strangers deprioritizing the Vlogs the hot takes the opinions because if you can serve both audiences serve both let the new people in rather than have a wall they have to jump over let them in on the joke fully explain the references that you make make all jokes inside jokes for everyone and then finally mentally act as though you're always talking to a stranger because if the content does well you are at least that's what I'm going to be doing and so that's the six big change that we're doubling down on and so now that we covered those changes in my strategy I just want to get real for a second everything has a cost and it's not that other types of media or other topics or other formats don't work obviously we had a smorgus board we had a huge variety of cornucopia Myriad content types that we did over the last 40ish months and obviously we had 7.8 million subscribers and two billion views during that time period in a niche audience of business owners it's pretty good and so it's not to say that other things don't work I'd even say that my mess ups also work to a sort a small degree it's just that they didn't work as well as something else might have and so the game at least as I see an entrepreneur entrepreneurship is figuring out what's my biggest bang for a buck right what's the content that gets me the most of everything because you only have limited resources you have time money energy you put it into your team and that goes onto social media or the media that you that you Market on and then that has output and so if you can become more efficient with the inputs you get you get more output on the other side and so the question becomes with the resources I have how can I maximize the number of the right people who find out about my stuff and so this is something that I live by anything works better than nothing so raise your hand right now if you haven't made a piece of content in 90 days okay just do something because if you do something you will do better than what you're currently doing two some things work better than others and three nothing works forever and so the requirement of the entrepreneur is to start doing something see what works better and then do as much of that as they possibly can for as long as they can until it slows down and then figure out what the next thing to do is and then do as much as they can with that so is that helpful in terms of understanding content in media yes awesome do you feel like you got at least one lesson without the scar saves at least a tiny percentage of the $4 million that I spent learning what didn't work so I can show you these six things that do okay good would you like more stuff like this okay well then I've got a bunch of free stuff that I can give you to help you grow your brand and make some money that be all right okay so if you're just starting a business right now raise your hand okay this is for you I'm the co-founder of the school games inside you'll find courses full day trainings the easiest business model they know of to use this med this Media stuff because it's one thing to just say like oh great I just watched this whole thing on media now do I do well this gives you somewhere to actually practice it like a Sandbox you can learn it and you learn by doing this is one of the lowest Stakes way to make money get your first dollar across the finish line and so fun fact something I'm very proud of is that right now 30 3.44% of people who finish their first month make their first dollar online by starting online community I think that's pretty cool and so you can start that for free by going to school.com games all right tell them I sent you so that's for everybody raise your hand if you're business uh uh you're starting a business right now okay that's for you now if you're a little further along in your business Journey I've got free stuff for you too all right trying to feel like Santa Claus today I wrote These two books right now which have 25,000 F store reviews they sold a million plus copies and I make courses for each of those books that are free on my site you go to acis.com trining so if you like this stuff you want to learn about offers you about advertising more about getting leads paid ads content all of that stuff so you can start making money within your business or scale it from wherever you are to wherever you want to go I've made this stuff for you these are real courses it's not barred anywhere you can click there watch them all all right see I put that for myself because this is how I roll get in the get in the zone so otherwise you guys are all amazing you can go there for stuff that will help you practice his stuff actually do it in the real world because if you just walk away from here today and you do not execute anything you learned nothing and so for the love of God just do one of the things so you can get a tiny percent of that $4 million and the 35,000 pieces of content and the Thousand hours that I spent recording just do one of them so you can take that lesson for you thank you guys [Applause]