My Evidence Based Guide to Making Money Online [TIER LIST]

I've grown my brand over 10 million subscribers across all platforms. And in this video I'm going to break down by tier which of these platforms has the highest potential for making money with my real up to date stats and where I'm investing for the next year. So let's start with TikTok. So if we're going to analyze platforms based on how much money making potential they have inside of them, then these are the stats that I care about. First is who. So who's on this platform? If there's a platform with tons of kids on it versus people who have gazillions of dollars, I, I'd rather be on the one with gazillions of dollars. How many of those people are on the platform is a function of how much market share that particular platform has captured of my ideal who next we have what's my ability to grow on the platform? Some platforms are really easy to grow. Some platforms are really hard to grow. The next one is the depth because I don't want people to just recognize my face, although that is good. But I would much rather have them have a good relationship with me where I can provide tons of value where, which then increases the likelihood of them converting. And then finally I'm going to give you the results that I have now. Underneath of depth, I'll also give you a little bit more intrinsic stats like average view duration, average percentage viewed, so you can look at your own stats and kind of have that as a benchmark. So let's start with who. I looked at Pew Research to see which percentage of platforms have $100,000 families or higher and how many of them are on that platform. Want to know what it is for TikTok? It's 27%. All right, so 27% of families. So almost three out of four are not on TikTok who make over $100,000 a year. That was surprising to me. But when you hear some of the rest of the stats, it will become less surprising. The next question is how many do we have here? And so this is a function of market share within the United states, which on TikTok is 33%. Now we're like, okay, so we've got a lowish amount of people who make money. There's 33% market share across the US at least. Now let's talk about growth. Now on TikTok, growth is one of the highest and best components of TikTok, as in it's one of the easiest ones to grow. But I will say that in recent History, it's become harder and harder to grow and because of the way that they've changed the algorithm, what we've noticed is that shorts on one platform don't necessarily work on TikTok anymore. And so now it's platform specific. Something that works on Facebook Girls, but might not work on Instagram reels, that might not work on YouTube shorts, which might not work on TikTok. And so it's actually becoming more and more fragmented. Still ranks high among the platforms in terms of discoverability and your ability to grow from zero, meaning it favors newer creators. Now, it still may be hard, but it still favors people equally versus other platforms where they still skew towards larger creators. So when it comes to depth, our next marker, it's about how much time are they going to actually spend per unit of content that we put out. So TikTok ranks really low here. So on the low side you get something like 5 seconds to 20 seconds at least. These are the statistics that we have on the low to high side in terms of duration per view. Now mind you, that's not a lot of time to provide a ton of value. Especially it's just someone's immediately scrolling, immediately scrolling. And if you absolutely murder it and you get 25 seconds from them, I think the main benefit you get is that they just recognize your face. I can almost tell whenever I get recognized in public when, when someone is a TikTok viewer because they're like, you're that guy. I don't know your name, but yeah, I see you right? Versus people on like YouTube are like, dude, you've changed my life. You've made me so much money. You're the best. I know your name. I bought your book. It's completely different avatar in terms of the experience. So then we have conversion. Now TikTok has two things that are kind of interesting that you might not know. So number one, Gen Z prefers Instagram DMs to TikTok DMs. And so in terms of your ability to convert people from TikTok, it actually tends to be significantly lower. Now for very low ticket things, things like TikTok shop are coming out, are having massive adoption, which is encouraging. But if you're selling any kind of services, which 78% of businesses are, this one's kind of tough. And so I'm going to put this as low. And to be clear, TikTok a couple of years ago was amazing for new creators because it was the first one that had short video videos, which is easier for someone to get into. It's much harder to make a 20 minute high production nice, valuable piece of content for YouTube versus a 15 second short that you can put on TikTok. But then the other platforms caught on and you got YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, the Facebook reels, and all the other platforms that have short LinkedIn has shorts now. Like they're all over the place. And so let's get to the results. And this is where it gets really crazy. And so I have almost 900,000 followers on TikTok at the point of this video. And the amount of traffic that I get from my TikTok, despite being about a tenth of my follower count, is only 2.5% of all of the traffic that goes to my page, which I've tracked on our CRM. And so it basically has 1/4 the effectiveness per unit compared to the other platforms, which means that some other platforms are disproportionately making up the volume. And the whole reason I wanted to collect all this data for me was because there was a business owner who was a winner of the school games, so school.com games. And when he came out he was like, yeah, it's really weird. I have 800,000 on TikTok and I have 200,000 on Instagram, but 90% of my revenue comes from Instagram. And I thought about that and I was like, wait a second. So think about this. The amount of time that he spends on TikTok, could he spend all of that time on Instagram and and get 10% more to make up for all of it? And the answer is probably yes. And so that totally changed my perspective in terms of thinking, wait a second, we want to grow everywhere, but there's definitely some platforms where we get higher returns for our avatar, which is business owners. And so for you and your avatar, looking at the stats should give you where you should put your time so you can make the most money. Especially if you're on a budget and you can't do do 10 platforms, right? You can maybe just do one or two. You should do the ones that make you the most. And by the way, if you want to check out one of our workshops, you can go to acquisition.com we'd love to talk to you. It's for business owners only, so if you don't have a business, go to school.com and we can help you start one. With all this taken into consideration, what am I doing with my TikTok strategy? I am rating it an F. And it's something that I'm not putting a ton of time and attention into because there are other platforms that, that are making me way more per unit of time, money and effort I'm putting in. And one more thing that my team just told me about TikTok real quick is that the average session length of someone going from TikTok to acquisition.com, my website is 8 seconds now. You'll see some of the ones later are way higher. So the next platform is the tubes, which if you're watching this on YouTube, then this is for you. So we're going to cover the same metrics as before and we're going to start with who percentage of families over 100k are here. Survey says 89%. So take that in consideration versus TikTok, which was much, much lower than that. All right? People who have Money are on YouTube. The next thing is what percentage of the United States is on here? 83%. All right, so you've got a huge percentage of the people who are making the most money on the platform. And so growth for this platform really comes down to how discoverable is your content on the platform. And to give you context, for me, at least 80% of my traffic comes from the suggested or browse features, meaning more than three quarters of the people that come and watch my stuff, maybe you right now actually weren't coming because you were a subscriber, but because the algorithm said you might like this video. And so for me, I rate this as high. Now the next question is, okay, so we've got the right people, we can grow on this platform. These are all pluses. So the next thing is, well, how much time are these people actually spending with you so you can really provide value. Well, for us, our average view duration per video across all channels is over eight and a half minutes. All right, so it's eight and a half minutes. Now compare that to the five to 20 seconds that we're getting on TikTok. I mean, we're talking 20 times. I need to do the math. But it's a lot, a lot more time is spent here versus others. And so this allows you to develop a more realistic, a deeper, realer relationship with your audience because you can actually give them value that they can do stuff with. If we want to do a quick apples to apples with TikTok, obviously YouTube has YouTube shorts. So let me tell you something interesting about this. The average YouTube short that we have has a 33 second average view duration. Remember, 5 to 20 on TikTok, we're more than twice that over here on YouTube. Now, how does this actually translate to what we care about, which is conversion? When we talk about the convertibility of YouTube, it's actually one of the lower ones. But there's a massive caveat here, which is that you can't. I can't DM you. If you're a subscriber, there's no real story that I can post and immediately see it. The closest thing is the Community tab that you can do, which, by the way, murders. So if you do have a YouTube channel, highly recommend doing CTAs on the community tab sporadically when it makes sense. And so for here, I would rate this low to medium. The Community tab kind of brings it up a little bit, but. But by and large, it's very hard for people to immediately convert. They basically have to click a link somewhere else. And if you put it in the video, it does kill your view duration. So it's like if you're going to say something, you just got to make it short, make sure that it's not too big of an ask from the audience. And then you could put links in the description, which, by the way, if you look at our description, you can just look. You want to put it above the fold. So you want to have to be the first thing that somebody sees before they even click. See more is where you want to drive them. You, you can also, pro tip, put the first comment that you have in the comment section. Just pin that comment. So that gives you two different places, and third, inside the video where you can drive traffic. This is just something that I've learned over time. But still, that's a lot of effort. And it's not like, hey, respond to my Instagram story foreshadowing. And we can take. We can start a conversation immediately on the platform. And to give context on this little community post thing, I was saying, my community posts over the last 30 days had two and a half million impressions. And to get put that in context, my short videos got about 18 million impressions. So it's not nothing. It is relatively significant, especially when you can load it with some sort of call to action in there. But no matter what, you pretty much have to take people off the platform in order to converse with them and potentially convert them. Now, let's talk about results, because all of this stuff is conjecture. Let's get to the brass tacks, which is, here's the crazy thing. Drum roll. 28.6% of our traffic comes from YouTube. All right, so a massive amount. But there's another caveat that I want to put on top of this, our YouTube traffic converts at three to four times every other platform. So when people, these clicks that go here are worth a ton. And so the actual percentage of the contacts that we create, people who are want to become portfolio companies, business owners that want to scale and go to acquisition.com almost 60% of those contacts actually come from YouTube originally. And remember that little 8 second average that TikTok gave us in terms of how long people even spend on the page? Want to guess what it is for YouTube? It's 91 seconds, it's a minute and a half. So we're talking 10x the amount of time that people are actually spending on page. Alright, so you're taking somebody who has high intention that you've delivered value to, they actually remember your name and you can actually start a meaningful conversation to help them in a more deep way via commerce, selling stuff, whatever. So one of the things that actually Got me on YouTube Originally, one of the last pieces of content that I consumed before I was like, you know what I'm going to start creating was I heard this guy who had a 20 something question application and he was on a podcast and he said I get about 3,000 applications a month. And I looked at his YouTube channel and he had like 300,000 subscribers. And I was like, holy cow. Because at this point all I had done was paid ads. And so I was like 3,000 inbound warm applications. I was like, my God, if I had that kind of volume I'd be able to do so much with that. And so when I saw the 300,000 and I saw that that translated to 3,000 applications a month, I was like, there's something here and I'm going to try and figure it out. And so if you are getting started, listen, I have a massive team. But it didn't start that way. So I had one guy who, who I stayed committed to posting three videos a week. And if you look at the very earliest videos on my channel, it's me with a webcam at my desk just talking about business stuff as it came up throughout the day. And so I would encourage you to just start and then all you have to do is every month or every week look back at the three videos you made the week before and just try and improve one thing. And if you just stick that, what happens is you create this checklist over time that becomes this mondo checklist of what ultimately creates an exceptional video that performs. I remember when I got so excited when we had my first thousand view video in 24 hours. And I was like, dude, can you believe, like, there's going to be a time we're going to get 10,000 views in a day? And now we do 100,000 views in our first day. And so the levels just keep going and going and going as you grow in skill. And if you're going to obsess about something, These are the two things I would obsess on. Number one is the thumbnail. One of my last two videos was no BS advice on how to get rich in 10 years. And we split test nine different thumbnails. And so thing one is the thumbnail matters a lot. Thing two is the first eight seconds of your video. You want to be done talking about what the video is going to be about and start. And this is something that when I see a beginner video, I watch and it's like two minutes before they actually start the video. You've already lost everyone and so you're going to lose most people in the first 30 seconds. And. And so you want to crush the intro so they know exact. It's exactly what you promised in the thumb and headline. And then you get to the meat as fast as possible. And this video right here, we did eight different takes of the intro where I slowly worked from 30 seconds down to eight, and then that's what became the intro that you saw before seeing this moment right now. With all that being said, the YouTube gets the highest praise in the Internet ecosystem. Jesus. And gets the S tier ranking because this is where I'm doubling down and continuing to pour more and more resource resources because this is where I'm getting the best returns. Next up, we have the artist formerly known as Twitter, currently known as the X factor. First up, we've got who's on this platform. So X has 29% of people over $100,000 in household income are on X. So about the same as TikTok. Actually a little bit higher. The next question is how many of these people, right? What percentage of the population the United States is on X? And so here, this is where it's a little bit lower. So TikTok's got them. They're at 33 versus 22 on X. Now let's talk about growth. Growth for X. It's one of the most viral platforms because the share button is the easiest button on X and Twitter. And this is fundamentally what allowed people to organically grow on Twitter to begin with. But it is a platform that you have to be really, really good at words and it takes a very long time to do that. But the advantage is that you can actually tweet a sentence or a word or an image or a meme. And so there's a lot of things that are native to the platform. And Elon continues to put more and more stuff on there to make it more and more viral and just continue to improve it overall. And after being stagnant for years, Twitter is actually back on a growth curve right now. But here's an interesting tidbit for X users. It's a little bit more of a silo, but the people who are on X tend to be really hardcore. And so the average x user spends 34 minutes per day on the platform, which is about half of some of the other platforms, but still not bad at all comparatively. The next one's real quick depth. We don't have stats because there's no real average view duration for Twitter. But the easiest thing that I look at for this is how you know how many comments, how engaged people are. I don't have particular stats on it, but. But with that being said, let's move on to conversion, which is what matters. Now, Twitter is interesting. There's lots of people that have 1,000 person followings, 8,000 person followings, and make multiple millions of dollars a year on Twitter because they're super niche down in terms of the types of topics they talk about. In fact, there was a business that came here the other day who is in a CRO marketing agency that specialized in e commerce companies doing over $10 million a year. So talk about like a niche of a niche of a niche of a niche. And he was doing $5 million a year from his 8,000 person Twitter following. And all he did was have in depth threads where he would just say, here's a split test that won. Here's another split test that won. And the entire thing of his bio was if you want to call, click my calendar link and book a call. And he told me that he was getting eight to 12 calls a day with unbelievably qualified prospects. And so one, you have to go off platform, but you have this link that's right there and immediately visible. The second thing on Twitter is you can dm and so many people DM on Twitter all the time. And so people who are on that platform are very accustomed to it. And the amount of access that you get on Twitter slash X is kind of unbelievable. Like you've got superstars on there who will reply to DMs. It's nuts. First thing you don't want to do if you're just Dming people on Twitter is just DM them with an ask the amount of people that have who's like, hey, can we hop on a call? No, no, we can't. Thanks for the ask, though. I think compliments are a great way to start. Like, hey, I love this thread. Don't just say, hey, I love your stuff. Point to a specific thread that you liked and then explain why. And if someone says thank you, then you can respond afterwards. If someone doesn't say thank you to a compliment, then they're probably not going to engage anyways. And so I would just start with some. Like, what is valuable to somebody is just telling them they did a good job. So I rate this a high on the convertibility of the audience. Now, what does that actually translate into us for results? So before I give you the stats on this, I want to give you a little bit of context. The reason I like X so much is that X is actually my hub for content. So what I mean is I consume X more than any other platform personally, and I on the fly create on x. So 100% of the tweets that are on X are me in the moment, just tweeting them out. I heard something on a meeting, someone said something, and. And I think of a pithy way to say it and then I shoot it out right now. The thing is, is that X generates a little bit of results and I'll explain what it is in a moment. But what it does do is it actually feeds all the other platforms because the captions on my Instagram are tweets from here. And the long form stuff that we put on LinkedIn are just multiple tweets put together and reformatted. And so if you ever see written word from Alex Hermosi on any platform, there are words that I wrote. I have no ghostwriters. I do have people who assemble the words that I have and then put them in a new order or group them together. But that's how I've been able to scale my voice without ever being like, oh, that's really cringe. So your ability to repurpose all the stuff you put on X is super high. Our percentage of traffic that we get to Our site is 6.12%. And if you look at how many people I have on Twitter, it's about 6% of my total subscribers. And so it's about 1 to 1 in terms of the ratio. Like it's pulling its weight in terms of Conversion. Even though this is a short form platform compared to TikTok, the average session duration on my site from someone from x is still four times higher than TikTok. So it's over 30 something seconds is what people do from X on my site. And for that reason I give X an A rating for me, because the main thing is is I'm not going to stop going on X. I we don't really have a lot of team dedicated to X. It's pretty much just me and my team takes what I put there and then sprays it everywhere else. And so this is for me, incredibly valuable. Y' all thought I was gonna put it on S, I know, but no, this isn't a tier for me. I mean, if I had to pick YouTube or X, I would do YouTube. But X is the wellspring of everything else that I make. Which leads us to the inn of links, the LinkedIn magic, the professional network where all people are serious but no one really is. And let's break down how much money this platform actually makes. And I think it will surprise you. And I have changed my view on LinkedIn. Who's on LinkedIn? Now this one may surprise you. 53% of households over $100,000 are on LinkedIn. So this is double TikTok, like we were talking about earlier. Now the next question is how many people in the United states are on LinkedIn? And this one was kind of surprising to me. It was 30%. So I actually thought it being way lower than that because I figured no one uses LinkedIn. But it turns out a lot of people use LinkedIn, just not as much as you think in terms of per day. And so the average amount of time spent on LinkedIn per day per LinkedIn users is about 7 minutes. So way lower than a lot of the other platforms. So let's talk about growth. So growth for me and growth for you should probably be incredibly important because if the point of advertising is to let people know about your stuff and you want platforms that let way more people than already know about you know about your stuff. And So I give LinkedIn a medium to high and I'll explain why. So LinkedIn is super shareable and very connection driven. And so the part that I would say is high about it is that there's a lot of people who share on LinkedIn. It's very common to share stuff. It's kind of like a sharing culture. And when you create high value stuff, people want the association with that value and then they share public because it Makes them look like they've got, you know, their thought leaders. Now the flip side is the reason that I still have this medium anchor is that because it's connection driven. So think about it like a hinge. So if you have 10 people, a lot of your posts will get shown to people who are friends with your connections, right? So it's like so and so is friends with so and so who made this post, right? And so in the beginning, it can be harder for you to get started because you might have a only a few connections. And so let me give you a tip on this right now. Wherever you went to high school, wherever you went to college, if you went to college, wherever you work, all of these places are very customary to have LinkedIn profiles. And by the way, I would strongly encourage you to at least put one up there that looks like you exist because from a professional setting, I'll tell you some of the big benefits that I get that are not on this list that have been worth it for me. But you can get your first 500 connections. And, and the nice thing with LinkedIn is they just say 500 plus. So it's not like you have to think like, oh my God, I need millions and millions of people like you max out your personal connections at 500. So it's very, you can do that with a high school class. Like, it's not hard to get going. So let's talk about depth real quick because there's no average view duration, we have no real stats on that. So let's get on to the drumroll of conversion now. LinkedIn. So think about, think about like, you know, TikTok is like a bomb or like a sprinkler, right? LinkedIn is like you've got a hose with a laser pointer on it and you can shoot whoever you want with it. All right? And so the conversion ability on LinkedIn is extremely high. All right? And I'm going to, I'm going to talk about this in a couple, couple, couple different vectors. So number one is it's very high because there's a ton of sophisticated tools. LinkedIn is built for outbound, meaning you can get incredibly targeted with your searchability criteria for prospects. And, and so if you want to find hedge fund managers who are in this state and above this age, you can do that. And so LinkedIn has something called Sales Navigator that you can use. 40% of B2B marketers say that this is their primary channel for getting customers. So, like, do not sleep on the ability now, mind you, LinkedIn ads shaky. Some people make them work. LinkedIn content overall will help you convert when you do DMs, but this is an outbound monster, all right. And relative to the following count that you have on LinkedIn, your ability to make money is probably the highest. So you can have the tiniest following and make the most money on LinkedIn because of how targeted you can be with your outreach and how easy it is to message someone who engages with your content. And before I move on to results, I want to give you a little hack here for the growth. One of the biggest growth methods right now on LinkedIn is getting large account.