I Made $12M by Ignoring Popular Personal Brand Advice (What Actually Works)

If you're an entrepreneur that's looking to build a personal brand that not only gets you paid, but gets you that lifestyle and freedom you're after, this framework is going to change the way that you approach personal branding. I've spent years testing the most popular personal brand advice out there, and honestly, most of it is garbage. But along the way, I figured out a formula, and I've used this to grow two businesses to over $12 million in sales over the last five years. Plus, I built a engaged following on Instagram of over 190,000 followers. I also teach this strategy to entrepreneurs every year at events throughout North America. Now, if I'm being real with you, I spent way too much time following all the pop advice, posting three times a day, chasing all these vanity metrics, and doing all the things that the gurus said would work. I was getting followers, but I wasn't getting paid. I was building an audience, but I wasn't building a business. But then I figured out my 3C system that doesn't just get you followers, it gets you clients. All right, we are going to jump straight into the exact system that I've used to completely transform my business and life. I've used this to reach millions of people each month on Instagram, but not only that, transform this into a community of people that engage with my content, that want to work with me, and. And actually, I've used this to launch two businesses to multiple seven figures. So it actually works. I'm doing this. Several other creators are doing this as well, but nobody really talks about the real blueprint. I feel like people just give you this kind of generic advice that's supposed to apply to everybody, but nobody truly breaks down what it is that they're actually doing behind the scenes to reach more people. That's what I want to dive into today. This is going to work no matter what level you're at, whether you're a beginner or you're intermediate, trying to get to more views and more money. Now, before we get into my system, I want to share with you some of this garbage advice that I think is leading people in the wrong way. The first thing that people will tell you is, you got to be consistent. You should be posting three times a day. This doesn't really work anymore because people who are just posting for the sake of posting, checking the box, the posts don't perform, and it actually leads to you being burnt out and maybe even your audience just writing you off. So you want to be consistent, but you want to be intentionally Consistent. I would much rather have you post three times a week, but we really thought through those posts than three times a day and you were just checking a box. So we want to be intentionally consistent with the right type of content, which I'm about to get into. The next thing of garbage advice that's out there is people tell you to always be closing abc. Well, the problem if you're always selling your content as people think every time they see your face, you're selling them something, you're closing on something. And that's okay in a short window, but for long term brand growth, you want to be giving value first and then selling in select key opportunities. Right? You don't want to be selling every single thing that you post the next thing. I see a lot of creators just get obsessed over and this is especially true within the creator niche where people make super dialed in content is quality. They want their setup, the lighting, everything to be dialed in. Now don't get me wrong, like right now we're shooting this on a nice camera. I've got a good light, but it's super basic. I just plugged this mic directly in here. We haven't really done a ton of setup work. I don't have a really fancy background. We just have one little background here. And this is for YouTube, but for my Instagram stuff for short form where I'm building my community, getting a lot of the conversions and DMs. I'm not really thinking about it that much. I do want to think on a scale of one to ten, I want to be at like a six and a half, seven. But I don't want to try and go for perfect because that's going to make me just get obsessed with the, the, the actual look. And I've seen people obsess over the way their content looks and they barely even post. So this dialed setup, but they're not really doing anything with it. So think about how you could be more consistently posting content that's on a relatable authentic level. And that would be like I said, about a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. Now the last thing I will tell you here is for garbage advice is people will tell you all these little hacks, like growth hacks and you have to be careful with this. They'll be like use this hashtag. Or if you post at this time of day, you get more reach and all these things. And here's what I found. It's all garbage. You just need to make a video that people want to watch. You could post it. I post at 6pm, I post it at 6am and both have gone viral. It's just depending on what you're actually saying in the video and how it's going to reach people. I've posted with hashtags, posted with no hashtags. Both have gone viral, right? So a lot of these little tiny things don't matter and people get obsessed with them because it allows you to be distracted from the real work, which is making a good video, picking a good topic, delivering it the right way. And that's gonna be the most important thing out of everything else. Let's get straight into it like it is a 3C system today, guys, it's three Cs. The first C is obviously content. And I'm gonna break this down. What's working in 2025 as we head into 2026 to get more views on Instagram? It's all about how we can keep people on the platform longer. The number one metric is gonna be watch time. Now, TikTok, the number one metric they're looking at is did the user complete the video. So it's very similar to watch time. But how do we get people to watch our videos longer? Well, there's a few things that I'm doing right now that are questioning. Let me get straight into this. So the first thing I want to share with you guys is, you know, in a 90 day window, I might reach, you know, 5, 6 million people on Instagram. And I've noticed that the majority of these people are my ideal demographic, which is the elder millennial demographic. But your demographic might be different. But the two types of content that I'm posting are top of funnel content, which is meant to reach new people, bring people into my audience. But then bottom of the funnel content is meant to convert those people into an offer that I have, get them onto my email list, get them into a lead magnet, maybe get them to start working with us, right. On any one of my businesses. So those are the two types of content I've noticed a big mistake creators make is they will post something that is meant to be a bottom of the funnel video and they'll judge it based on top of the funnel views. Well, it's not the same metric. Like if you post a video that gets you clients, gets you a lot of opt ins, that's considered viral. Like if it did really well for your business, doesn't matter if it did a fraction of the views that you would consider viral, it is viral for you. I call this viral for me, vfm. And I don't judge every video solely based on views. You have to think about what is the goal of this video and then act accordingly. So for videos that are meant to get me more followers, then I want to do things that would have a broader appeal and I want to keep people on the video as long as possible. So let me show you how I'm doing that. And by the way, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that like followers don't matter and views don't matter. They do matter. But I'm just saying is on some videos, that's not the only thing I'm concerned with. Especially if there's a specific call to action to a group of people. I think of it like this. If everybody's walking along a field and think about everybody has a tent and your tent is your following on social media and you got tents on there. Like if you walk by a tent and there's two guys in there and nobody's really in there, there's. It just seems weird. You probably just keep walking and then you walk by the next tent and maybe it's my tent. There's some music on, there's some people in there, they look like they're having fun. You might go in there, you might watch a video or two, you might stick around, right? And so there's value to just having people watch your content. There's value to just having some followers because nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. And so just having people there helps. Just like on a video when it pops up, if there's comments on the video, more people are likely to comment. Why? Because they're not the very first one. It doesn't feel weird to them. So you want that social proof. This is why I focus on two types of content. I do want content that would bring more people. And I actually did a podcast with Alex Ramosi and he told me all views are not created equal. He referenced a person that has a thousand person audience that's making millions of dollars a year from their audience. Right. It's actually possible. You just have to have the right type of people see your content. And so the first thing I want to let everybody know is you don't just want to be another content creator. There's so many people putting out informational content tips, listicles, these kinds of things, these can go viral. But I've noticed that nobody cares about you, the personal brand. So you want to build your brand in a way where people value not just the information, they value you, they go from a place of like, yo, that was a great video. I loved what you post too, man. I need to work with that person. It's a very small shift you need to make in the content, but you can do this. And I'm going to walk you through this. So the way you do this is you need to think about how you could show your expertise in your video. The number one way that I'm getting business from my content for my top of the funnel content is showing competence. So I want to show people I know what I'm doing, but at the same time I don't want to come off as a lecturing them. So one of the ways that we're doing this, which is absolutely crushing right now on social, is to break down the news. You could do a green screen video or you could just simply take the headline article, screenshot and put it in the beginning of your video. What you want to do is just make an observation about the news, like did you guys see this? Or breaking news or something like this. You're basically taking the news. And by the way, there's no shortage of headlines regardless of what industry. And there's always some kind of news coming out that you can break down for people in your industry. So you'd find a topic that affects anybody in your audience and then you would post that, breaking it down for them, but then also inserting a few things along the way, which I'll show you right now. So I've been doing this. It's crushing. People in our group have been doing this. I'll give you guys some examples of how I'm getting these headlines. The way I'm doing it is I go to Apple News and I scroll for the topics that my audience would be interested in and then I screenshot the trending articles. So think about this. These publications have already done the heavy lifting for you. They tested probably 20 different headlines to see the one headline that probably gets the most clicks, the most views and then they go with that headline. So you get to take all that work and put it in the beginning of your video. There's also something going on here where when you do this, you making an observation about something that happened. People don't want to be the outside, they want to be in the know. As my wife likes to say. They want the T, right? They want to know what's going on, what's going what, like how it affects them, all those kinds of things. So just think about, you could be the person to Bring it to them. Now, after you do this, you're going to insert your unique point of view, right? So you're going to tell them what happened, but then you're also going to put in how does it affect them and what do you think about this topic? Right? I'm going to tell them, here's my thoughts on it, here's what I believe. And if you don't do this, you're just simply breaking the news down and you're just like every other creator. So I will say, you know, there's a lot of people who try this and they don't get the result. It's because they didn't put in their unique point of view. This is very important. Like if you're just saying everything in the same way that everybody else is saying it, it's just noise. So you definitely want to insert that in there. This can be done on multiple topics. You could do this every week. Honestly, like, any time that I am feeling like, hey, I need to get more reach, I need to restart my account, this is the go to strategy I'm using. So break down the news. The next thing you can do is these green screen videos. I will give you one tip on green screen. Make sure that people can see the headline of the thing you're talking about, right? You don't want to cover the headline with your face and then people can't see it. So that's number one. Now the next thing I'm doing with my content to reach more people is not being generic. I have this theme right now. It's called anti generic. I don't want to be saying everything in the exact same way. I know a lot of us copy other creators, which is great, but you definitely need to put your own spin on it to stand out. And the crazy thing is you don't need to do much to stand out today. It could be just one or two things that you're doing a little bit different. Now. One way to stand out is with your unique point of view. That's what I like to use. Another way people stand out is with the way their videos look and sound, the way they shoot them, maybe sometimes the way that they appear on camera with their messaging. Like you can do different things to differentiate yourself from the competition. And some creators who are really different actually do all the things different. They have a different point of view, different messaging, different way of shooting their videos. If you can hit that trifecta, that's great. But honestly, all you need to do is just one. And my Thing right now is just inserting my unique point of view. So this makes the videos anti generic. I want to give you a quick exercise that you can do to come up with these ideas on how to stand out from the competition. So this is called a two column brand exercise and it's going to be gold for. If you just take a few minutes to do this, it's going to be gold for you. So what you want to do is set up two columns on a sheet or paper and on one side you're gonna write down the things that people are saying in your industry that you disagree with, maybe you think are just completely wrong or they just need more nuance, like they're just explaining it the wrong way. And then also write down the things that people in your industry are saying that like, make you think, man, I would never do it that way. Like, I just, it just rubs me the wrong way. Okay, so you'd make that calm. And then on the opposite side, on the right side, you would talk about your position on this. Okay. How you would do it differently. So let me give you an example. Like if I was talking real estate, example. So let me give you an example. Like for real estate, I would say the left column is like, okay, people in my industry say renting is dumb, you're throwing your money away, you should have bought years ago. Or they actually talk down to consumers. I don't like this. So that would be what I'm putting on the left. On the right side, I would talk about how meeting people where they're at, I would address those concerns, provide empathetic guidance like meet them and not make them feel bad for not owning and actually help them along the way. Even telling people like, it's okay to rent. So it'd be the contrarian take on the standard thing that I think is wrong or the standard thing that I think needs nuance. Okay, this would work. Honestly, regardless of what industry you're in, it doesn't matter if you're like, I've seen people do this with coaching consulting, client service business. It doesn't matter. You would just list the things that you don't agree with and then your position on the opposite side, those are going to be the topics that you can talk about. And this is going to allow you to stand out from the competition. The other thing you can do is just make sure you're starting your videos with a better hook. Like, I noticed a lot of people use these generic hooks. You know, three ways to do XYZ or here are Two tips to do this. Like, that was great years ago, but it's dead today. What you want to do is make it very personal and put a unique spin on it. So for example, if I knew people in my audience were overwhelmed or struggling with something, I would call that out. I'd say, look, if you're overwhelmed with X or if you're struggling with X, you know what, I was right there too until I found this, until I found these tools, right? And then now I'm going to share the information, but it's going to be through personal experience. Again, the most important part on these videos is how you start. And this is called the hook. I actually put together a list of 50 of our best performing hooks. If you want to grab it, you can click on here or there's actually a link in the description as well and you can just fill in your info and then we'll go ahead and send you these 50 hooks right away. Now the next strategy I'm using to reach way more people is not just telling people things on social, but actually showing them. The way I do it is I stand in front of a whiteboard or screen and actually break down some data for them. I show them things, I circle words. It's actually a great way to teach because people are visual learners and when they connect things visually it makes it easier for them to learn. So you have to think about about people scrolling social media. They're not in like peak intelligence mode. They're probably like decompressing, maybe just doom scrolling at the worst case. And you don't want to make things hard for them to learn. So to make it easier, you can show a chart, you could show something on a screen and people really start to connect with it. Actually it makes their job easier. The biggest tip I can give you on these videos is to show the thing within the first three seconds or at least let them know that you're about to show them something. That way they don't think of this video as just another talking head video. Guys, whenever I do this, I literally get 5 to 10x the views almost every single time I do this. So if I get get average of 20k views, I might get 200k views if I simply show something instead of telling them. The other cool thing about this strategy is it builds that expertise that I was telling you about earlier where people start to connect with you as the expert because you're different than everybody else who's simply talking to the camera. So let me give you an example. This was for the real estate mortgage niche. And I was talking about how mortgage rates have gone down. I wanted to illustrate how much they've moved, because just talking about the numbers is what everybody else was doing. But I wanted to visually show people. So I put it up on a screen and I use a VI board, but you could use any screen for this matter, or you can even use a whiteboard. And I started circling numbers, showing them the effects of what this really meant visually, how much money they would be saving, how much more buying power this would give them. And the video had a ton of reach, a ton of engagement compared to if I would have just said it. So this is just an example. It's like a semi viral video, but it's resulting in a ton of communication. And in the comments of this video, there's plenty of people asking for more help. They're commenting on a keyword. And so they're taking this to the next level. Now, there's another video I had where I didn't want to shoot it in front of a whiteboard. I just shot it in front of my computer screen and actually shot it with the iPhone. Okay. I talked to the back of the iPhone and then I flipped around and showed my screen on that video. I've got a ridiculous amount of reach because I'm showing again visually these deal strategy, where to look, how to what the things I want to click on. Just something simple like this goes a long way with, again, people connecting the dots in their head. And then in the comments of this video, there are hundreds of leads, literally hundreds of people commenting asking for the resource. This turned into direct business. We had six figures in business for two businesses. One for the people who wanted to get the information to buy property. But then also the second one was for people in my industry who wanted to learn about the strategy. We actually put those people into a workshop offer. So this particular post served two purposes for me. Now, before I move on to the next season, this formula, I just want to touch on quality real quick. I'm shooting most of these videos with the iPhone, but we do have like all this expensive camera gear as well. I have found that there's not really a difference whether we shoot one with an iPhone or we shoot one with a $5,000 camera setup. I believe the key component is that people can clearly see you and hear you. I have found that people treat you better when your content looks better. So I do want to make sure that even if I'm shooting with my phone, I'm wiping the lens. I'm using a mic. If I'm more than arm's length away, there's good light on my face. So it's just simple things that can get the video to a place of like, seven on a scale of one to ten. I'm not trying to make it a nine or ten and be perfect. In fact, sometimes going for perfect makes it look too produced or like an ad. But I do want to be in that place where people don't have to work to watch my video. Like, if they can't hear me, they're not going to try and turn up the volum. They're just going to scroll to the next video. So all you have to do is just make sure when your video pops up that people are pleased to see it. Like, they don't have to work to watch it. And it's going to be an enjoyable experience. All right, so the second C in the 3C formula is probably the most important, but it's the most overlooked, and that is connection. You want to connect with the audience. I've seen people that have a million followers and they could show up in a city and post that they're going to be there and no one would show up. It's because they don't have any connection with their followers. It's just random numbers, random views. You do not want that, especially if you're trying to grow your business. So what I would rather do is have a certain segment of my followers that really connect with me. They connect with what I'm talking about, not just on a business level, but on a personal level. And the way you can do this is to share some more of your personal life. You can do as much or as little of this as you feel comfortable with. But if it's all business, you're just not going to get the connection piece. So the formula I like to use for content is like 80, 20, 80% business, 20% personal. I know some people go like 70, 30, but you can do whatever you feel comfortable with. And then as far as what to share from your personal life, I think about the five Fs. Food, faith, family, fitness, fashion. I don't really have much for the fashion part. You see, I wear the same thing every day. But I will say that if you're into that, you should talk about it. If you share a lot of these things in your content, you just start inserting them. People really connect with them. I'll give you an example. I recently share some stuff about my family. Well, now people ask about this when they see Me, right? If I share something about a hobby I'm into or something my son is doing, like, we're doing this together. Those are the things that people come up to me and talk about. So, yes, they're watching the informational content, but the thing that they remember is these stories I tell about what I'm doing personally. So I'll give you a few prompts that you can use and you can write these down. I want you to tell people, like, who are you in real life? Like, what do you stand for? What are your values? What are your isms? Like, I have certain things that are Neil isms. The things that I always talk about or I want my audience to know. I start putting those into my content intentionally. Next, you should let people know why you do what you do. So for a lot of people in my industry, they're in real estate. Why do you do this job? Like what, get what gets you up out of bed in the morning? What do you get excited about? It doesn't mean you have to love everything about what you do. But there are certain things that keep you doing what it is you do. And you should talk about them. Talk about the fulfillment you get from helping people. Talk about why you got how you got into the business and why you stuck around. Just think about all those little things are going to really connect people to you. And you would think nobody's interested. But I have this saying. I write it down. It's actually on my desk. It says, don't say no for the audience. You might have a video that does store that's in your Instagram story or in your feed. Maybe it doesn't do the best, doesn't get the most amount of views, it's not viral content, but it's going to connect you with a segment of your audience. And watch what happens when we go to the connection piece and watch what happens when we get to the conversion piece. A lot of those people who you have that personal connection with are gonna be the people that transact with you. They're gonna buy whatever it is that you're offering. Now, before we move on to the final C, I'll give you one idea for a connection piece of content that would crush like this works for almost everybody who does it correctly. And that is to talk about a mistake you've made. People really love it. If you're real on social media, like, authenticity is number one right now. And nothing is a greater signal of real than just letting people know a mistake. Like, hey, when I first got into this Industry, here's a mistake I made, or here's a mistake I made last week, or here's where I mess. It's vulnerable. It signals to the audience that, hey, this guy isn't just posting his wins, he's also sharing some of the things he struggled with. And I think a lot of people don't want to share this because they're worried about being embarrassed or what are people going to think of them. But I actually had this conversation with Jesse Itzler. He's a billionaire who spoke at our events a few years ago. And he told me, neil, the greatest gift you can give yourself is to get over the fear of being embarrassed. Like, you think that there's this big spotlight on you and everyone's watching every single move you make. The truth is, there is no spotlight. It's a very noisy world. People are onto the next piece of content quicker than ever before. So it's just a flash in their day. And so the only way you can stand out is to really be authentic and to tell a story. So I would tell a story, do it in a concise way, but there's this stat that says 65% of people remember information when it's related in the form of a story, because stories connect to the brain better than if you just told facts. Only 5% of people remember when you talk about just facts. So it's a huge benefit if you can tell a story about something that you messed up. Just talk about that and you'll watch your views and your connections go way up. Now, the way I'm posting this content is not just in my Instagram story. I'm actually sharing some of these videos in the Instagram feed. So whatever platform you're using, for me, it's Instagram and Facebook. You need to put them as actual posts in your feed, not just hidden in your stories. Because the problem with stories, it's really cool behind the scenes stuff for your audience, but it only reaches a fraction of your most engaged followers. When you put it in the feed, you'll reach not only those people, but you'll reach more of your followers. And you now have the chance to reach strangers because when you post in the feed, it shows it to random people and the video can take off from there. All right, and now the last C of this 3C formula. Formula is conversion. Now, I'm going to go through a sequence that I've used to make millions of dollars in both of my businesses. And it's honestly the sequence that completely changed the way I Think about marketing. What I learned is that the best marketers on social media are not looking for sales. Okay? You would think, oh, these guys are out here selling a bunch of stuff. They're looking for sales. No, no, no. They're looking for signal. They just want people to raise their hand. So they get people to raise their hand, and then they sell afterwards. Most people, most amateurs are making the mistake by posting content, going straight for the sale. Yes, you can ca. You can get lucky, but you're missing the biggest piece of the market. In industries that I serve, 80% of the people are not certain. They're not ready to buy yet. And these people are just completely ignored. So you have 10% of people maybe that are ready to buy. Everybody chases those people. You got 10% of people that will never buy. But 80% in the middle are just a few questions away from working with you, but you never prompt them. You never ask the question. So here's how we do this. I have found that there are people in your audience that will reach out to you. They'll ping you. They'll say, hey, love your videos, would love to work with you, or hey, I have a client for you. And it's great when that happens. But I found when you're growing, it doesn't happen often enough. The biggest piece of your audience is going to be people who silently watch your content. They don't even hit the heart button. They don't leave a comment. This is just the silent viewers. Okay, we need to activate these people because they're not going to come out of the woodwork and just prompt you because they're not going to come out of the woodwork and just ask to work with you. You have to ask them now. You have to do this in the right way. Now, the way I do this is with a call to action or a CTA you want to prompt. The way I think about this is the customer's on one end, the closed deal is on the other end. Whatever it is that you sell. Most people online are expecting the customer to make the whole journey on their own. What you want to do is back out the truck. Two steps. Like one or two steps. Think about what's a step that you can add in the middle. So for many people, this is going to be offering a lead magnet. The other thing you could do is drive people to a longer video or a webinar or some sort of conversion event. Those are the things I'm inserting in the middle before the end goal. So let's just Say I'm in real estate. My end goal is to get a customer to buy a house. Well, what happens before that? That they probably need to book an appointment with me. Well, what would happen before that? They probably need some information to guide them on the market because they're uncertain that's the piece I'm going to sell. So I stopped selling the other things, and I just sell that one step only. The problem is people put their end goal in that same step, and it messes everything up. You want to sell it as if the customer is going to be doing it on their own. So you'll notice on social media, the plumber who gets the most views is the one who teaches you to do your own plumbing. The mechanic who gets the most views, he teaches you DIY techniques. The fitness. Fitness. Right, right. Think about fitness. Fitness is the number one trending topic right now. They're teaching you the workouts to do on your own. But then they still end up with all this business. Why? Because they're giving away the blueprint. So what you want to do is don't sell your service. Give away the blueprint to do whatever it is that you do. If you give it away, you'll get the clients. And it's true, a lot of people will take this blueprint and just go off on their own. But that's okay, because just enough people will work with you. So let's just say, for example, you make a video, and it includes a checklist, cheat sheet, or guide. Guide. It's super valuable. It tells them what to do on their own. So they don't even need you. They couldn't. They could just take the information, not even hire you. You'd be like, man, I'm giving it away. I'm screwing myself. Well, not necessarily, because if you have 200 people get that thing in, that actual guide in, there is going to be a way for them to take the next step with you. You know, there's people who want diy, but I always say, like, it's like going to ikea. Everybody wants DIY when you go to ikea, when you get home at the box, you're like, man, I wish somebody would come do this for me. Right? So people think they want that, that. But then when they actually get down to it, they want to hire someone. They want to work with someone who's the expert. And now the person they trust is you because you gave them the blueprint. So think about, what could you offer? What is that thing that you could offer? It needs to Be a really valuable resource. A lot of people just offer something generic, needs to be something specific. So think about guide checklist, cheat sheet or a longer video where you break down a topic for them and then, like I said, give them all the information that they would need. But then in there, you can insert a call to action for them to take the next step with you. They can book an appointment, they can take a quiz, you can reach out to them. Because now you've got the signal. You've got all these people who raise their hand. Like the people who raise their hand to get the free thing are interested in doing the thing. So now you know who to contact if you want to go cold outreach. It's actually lukewarm outreach now. So I do this all the time and it crushes, like, I crush the competition because I'm giving away things that they would hide behind a paywall, that they would hide behind an appointment. And I have found that most people on social media are selling the number one thing that the customer doesn't want to, which is a booked call. Like, it works. But if you're trying to generate a bunch of leads and get a bunch of people into your funnel, there's not that many people want to book a call yet. Just think about it this way. Like when you order food, you like to push buttons and the food just arrives at your house. If you have to call the restaurant, you're pissed because you're like, man, I don't want to talk to people. I just want to push buttons and things arrive. That's that way. This is the way people are with information. So it's the same concept, but now you're introducing it into your content. You should not sell work. Work. Do not make it hard for people to start. You want to make it easy for them to start the process. I know it could be complex later, but make it easy to start and then you want to give them information on demand. It's weird when I look at a lot of our funnels, people opting in to these things at all weird hours of the night, like 11pm, 1am so people are in the pajamas and they see something that they want and they want to download it. Well, they can't talk to me at that time, right? So you've got to get them into the funnel and let it happen on their terms, not your terms. I have so many examples of videos that I've posted where I gave a valuable resource away that could be to my own detriment in business, business, but hundreds and Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people are asking for the resource. You've probably seen the most popular creators do this. They use a tool called ManyChat to automatically respond to every single person and deliver the goods so you don't have to respond to everybody on your own. I know that could get frustrating. If you're trying to do this manually, you want to use a tool. The one I recommend is manychat. There's actually a link in the description here for a free trial, I believe, with manychat and actually includes templates that we're using right now. So if you want to grab manychat, you can do that. And I actually have several people in my group who have gotten tens of thousands of leads from a single video that randomly went viral. Now, just to take this a bit further, like, how do you actually get people to download what it is you're offering and then turn that into a conversation and turn that conversation into business? Let me walk you through just a quick framework here. So for the thing that you're offering, this is most important. You really, again, want to make this valuable for the audience. Like it needs to solve a real problem for them. It used to be generic. Lead magnets work, but people don't even download them anymore, right? They don't even opt in. So it has to be something that, like, you almost feel a little bit weird giving away. So I just want you to really think about how you can make this valuable. It should be something that maybe you could charge for for maybe make, you know, that could be the bar for you. Just like I could honestly charge 100 bucks for this. It's that good. It's either going to save people time, it's going to save them money. It's really important. So that would make it actually something that people want to download. I'll give you example in. In real estate, maybe we'll give people a guide. Well, I want to go a step further. I want to put together a list of things that they can do in their contract that would save them money. I want to put together a list of how they could do some of the things that we do internally in the real estate industry for themselves, right? So I think about making the super value valuable. I also think for people in content and other coaching, consulting businesses, like a lot of the stuff is the same old recycled stuff. I think people even share Lee magnets and it turns into this garbage that people are, you know, just giving away to get the opt in. But the people realize when they download it, hey, this isn't even that good and their opinion of the creator goes down. When I give the thing to somebody, I want their opinion of me to go up like, oh my gosh, this is actually a good resource, so make it valuable. And then the next step is to follow up. We do this through many tools. We actually send it to them, get the information optim in. I have found that with ManyChat the opt in rate is insanely higher than if you were to opt them in on a landing page or email. So what I'm saying here technically is we used to have people click away, go to a landing page, fill their information out, get the thing, follow through that way. Well, you lose people at all these different friction points. So what I do now, and I try to do this on everything, it doesn't always work because sometimes you have to send them to a page. But what I try to do most of the time is just capture the email directly in the dm. So I'd be like, yo, thanks for reaching out about this thing. Or I'm really excited to give this to you. What's the best email that I can send it to? Right? Or do me, I just need to ask you a couple quick questions, I'll send it to you and then you could ask them one or two questions. And the opt in rate for that is actually significantly higher because they're not having to leave the platform, they can do it right in the DMs. So we're seeing anywhere from 60 to 80% click through rate when we do this in DMS versus like half, like 50% click through rate if you send them to another page. So try and do that if you can. In manychat, we can make a whole separate video on that. If you actually want more tips on this and you want us to make a tactical video on that, let me know in the comments. But then the next step is going to be follow up. You know, the fortune is in the follow up. What do you do after somebody's opted in? Well, you got to sell them, you got to tell them about stuff. So what we do is send them on a drip sequence of emails. So you want to write like six or seven emails and you could use AI to help you do this and then just send those out to the people on a sequence. So once they've got the tool for me, you send them another email, give them more value, reiterate, tell them a lesson, give them a testimonial. Like you can do a sequence of emails and each one of those emails will have the call to action for the next step with you. So if the next step with you is to book a call or buy this program or buy this offer, like that would be in all of the emails, just pushing people towards that thing. Many times people need to see 7 hours of content, multiple emails, multiple touch points before they actually pull the trigger on working with you. During that time they're developing an opinion of you, building trust with you, and then at some point they're going to pull the trigger. We recently had an event where we wanted to sell tickets to it and we had to follow up an average of seven times. So it took a lot of follow up to actually get someone to move forward. Yeah, there's people that do it on the first or second time. That's awesome. I love that. But you're leaving so much money on the table. If you just quit following up afterwards, the majority of the market is going to be in that undecided category. And it's your job to continue to give them value, to get them to the finish line. And then I'll give you one bonus tip that has crushed for me. This is an advanced strategy that we could probably do a whole nother video on. And if you want me to do that, let me know in the comments. Again, but one of the best things I love doing is getting people in with a lead magnet and then getting them onto a webinar. Like webinars have been huge. I've done millions of dollars of sales over the last several years on webinars and live events. So what I would do is I would give the thing, I would talk about it and then I'd say, by the way, I'm actually hosting this thing on Thursday or next Thursday where I'm going to walk you through this and this, you will leave with this. And it's going to be super valuable. It's exclusive. And so if you want to get in on that, go here. Now the cool part is, is people are already getting warmed up, they got a little appetizer, you're going to give them the entree later. But they're getting warmed up to getting more information. They're getting excited. You've just given them just a taste. And now on the webinar you can go deeper. And during that time is when you could actually sell them on booking, appointment, getting the next step or buying whatever it is that you're offering. Like that could be the point where you really go for the sale. But you've done it in two steps. Steps. And so by Doing that. It's something that most people, most entrepreneurs and creators are not willing to do that. They're not, they're just going to go straight for the sale. You're going to do it in a very methodical way. You're going to give them value in the video, you're going to give them value in the lead magnet. Now you're going to give them even more value on a webinar. And so that's my strategy that has done the most business for me. And then there's a whole strategy on the actual webinar for how you get people to take action, what you want to teach on that. But I'd like to do something short. I like to keep it like below 30 minutes. I stick around for another 30 minutes for questions. But in the beginning especially, you want it to be short and sweet because you don't want it to feel like too much of a commitment, too much work for them. So the crazy part about this is if you do this last piece of content, this conversion piece, and you've done the content and connection pieces, you now have a massive chance for success here. I've seen so many people just jump straight to the conversion piece and it works sometimes, but it's not gonna work as well if you haven't done the first two steps. So think about all these three Cs working together, content connection, conversion, and you're going to see your results take off. Now, before I wrap up this video, please drop a comment and let me know what are the things you want me to dive deeper on. Is it some of the conversion pieces? Is it more of the connection content? I want to create the content that's going to help you guys grow the most. So let me know so I can create future videos on this. And I'll just wrap with this. I've seen so many people in our groups that are afraid to post content. They don't tell me this, but they just don't post it for whatever reason. Now, you might be worried about what other people are going to say or you might be just second guessing the piece of content. I've had so many pieces of content that I was like, man, I don't know if I should post this or it's not going to work and, and you're saying no for the audience. Remember, don't say no for the audience. And just remember that the creator you want to become is on the other side of the content you're afraid to post. This is the best advice I've ever received in content marketing and it has totally changed my business and life. So if you're serious about this, make sure that you post content that differs from the competition and you will see your results take off. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you on the next video.