Building a brand, but it’s on easy mode instead

If you want to use organic marketing to get more leads for your business or you're starting from scratch, whether it's a new department or brand new for your business. I talked to a roomful of business owners for 8 hours, and this is one of the best moments that we pulled out of just talking about organic strategy to help them make more money. There are these two worlds where there's like the world that makes money and just needs traffic and the world that has so much traffic and has no money. And so when you learn how to marry those two, you just make absolutely obscene amounts of money. I mean, look like Logan Paul merging with Prime. Like he had the audience and the traffic and then he had a way to make money. MrBeast with the chocolate, like he had, he had distribution. He just needed a product. Alex Moseley needed a product for the distribution base. School, right? Tons of traffic. Where do we send it right now? If you have paid ads, starting organic will immediately make the paid ads more profitable because what will happen is people will look at the ads, then they will look at your organic., and then they will take the next step. Even if they took the next step and booked a call, they will actually show. And if they show, they'll have a higher percentage of closing. Like, don't worry about the views and all of that stuff that happens in the early days. Just keep making it and just think about it in the beginning as lead nurture. In the early days, it'll be nurture. As you get bigger and bigger, it'll become acquisition. But just from a value perspective, if you can just make that shift, it'll make your life a lot easier. From a scaling organic perspective, I, I tend to always start with an agency. For every new medium or platform that I wanna go on. Now, if you don't wanna do that, that's fine. I just prefer to buy lessons and trick my timelines. And so I started with a guy that I think I was paying like $5,000 a month. In no way was he special, basically did nothing, but it kept me accountable to making 3 videos a week. And so I would do that and he would post them. I still don't really know how to post a video on YouTube. And so I say that because if you just focus on making the content exceptional, like it will grow, like it absolutely will grow. And just my recommendation is do not promote in the content to the greatest ever. So think about it like this, is that you wanna have this big valuable thing, all this content that you're teaching. The CTAs, in my opinion, in content are not very effective. Like they kill reach, it feels weird, No one likes it, whatever. People will naturally just take the next step if you put it in the descriptions, you put it in your link in bio. Like you do those two things, you will get traffic to your stuff by just saying this is what I do rather than hey, by the way, like I just, I don't think that's the right way to do it. The beautiful merger of these, who here knows how to run ads? Can I just like get a show of hands? Okay, so like half of you guys, okay. Where the magic happens is where you build all the goodwill for free and then you use ads to do the CTAs. And so, has anyone here read The Leads Book? Okay, so there's a whole content section about the give-ask ratio. Unfortunately, based on the book and the limitations of the book, I can't get into more advanced stuff. Where it gets really juicy is that all of your content is only give, and then the ads are the ask. So then you don't have to balance a give-to-ask ratio. You just only give in content. And then the ads serve to be the CTA. And for whatever reason, it protects the brand. It's a totally different vibe. If I was like right-hooking every video, being like, hey, go to here, go to here, go to here, people would be like, whoop, and then that would be it. Like, no one would watch my stuff anymore. But if I keep providing value, they get value, I deposit goodwill, and then later we can hit them with an advertisement to go do something. And they exist completely separately. And so we just want to think about the mind space of like the 3:1 ratio still exists if you think about someone's newsfeed. So they have like content 1 from you, content 2 from you, content 3 from you, and then they have an ad from you. And so here's the money one and all this other stuff is free. And so think about it from a larger perspective. And that's— this is where like, this is where the obscene money is. What do you guys have questions about here? All right. So I'm gonna just rant at you for a second and try and cross as many of these out as I can. So from a like topics, volume, like these kind of all go together. So, so Evelyn, for you, if you were looking at, I make this really niche content, I need to go wide. In my experience, like keep making the content that's gonna serve your avatar. If you want to have, I would say like if you wanna sprinkle in, I just consider it further top of funnel. And so like we have made some of these, like I made one video on some meal stuff I did. And I would say that for us, we kind of swing a little bit like a pendulum where I only like making business content. The team will urge me to not make business-specific content so that we can appeal to a wider audience from time to time. And usually like the more I do this, I'm like, ah, and then I swing back over here and I'm willing to know that the volume drops. And I'll just tell you, let me just share this experience with you. So we did, we did a workshop here. That's why it's set up like this. And I asked the room, I said, hey, of the content that I make, which you guys are consuming? Like the case study stuff where we like build out a sales team and like, really like how we do onboarding and like all that stuff. And who here is consuming like Lessons to My Younger Self? The whole room was this side. And so even though these got 1/3 the views of these ones, sometimes this can introduce people like the right people will then just think about as top of funnel like this gets more people in, they'll see other stuff you have. And then they'll go down the longer niche, more niche videos that's specific to them. Now the other people who just come for that, well, they'll wait till you have your next one of that and then YouTube or whatever will display it to them. So that's from a topic perspective. I would say if you do like 4 to, like 3 to 1, 4 to 1 in terms of your longs, like one I go a little bit wider and the rest I still stay on topic, you'll probably get the best of both worlds. What I would tell you though is that I think your stuff's really good, and I think you just need to get— you need to learn more presentation skills. And that's OK. That's not like— this is me trying to help. And so I think that you could probably take the same content you're currently making and just simply structure it better, and you'd probably get 10 times the views. A side note for you guys is you'll notice the bigger the creator, usually the less frequent they actually make videos. And it's because they realize just power laws exist, which is that If you spend 10 times more time on one video, it doesn't get 10 times the views, sometimes it'll get 100 times the views. And so, like, especially platforms nowadays are so heavily reliant on quality. You create the quantity to figure out the quality. And so in the beginning, more people make lots of content, and then you start figuring out the stuff that works, figuring out the stuff that works, and then you'll notice that they're like, oh man, Well, we did spend more time on that video. Okay, well, if we're gonna keep making videos like that, I don't think we can make this money, but it's okay 'cause you make it up on the fact that the total quality of that one, it gets shared more, people watch it longer. And I think MrBeast said this, but it was like, if you make 10 videos or you spend 10 times and you make that one video 20% better in terms of AVD or click-through rate, you don't get 10 times the views, you get 100 times the views. So you get a disproportionate return for quality. And so I think it's fine from a, from the niche content perspective, but I would go really deep on the topic and try and keep it, keep it as congruent with the packaging of the video, which is where a lot of people lose off. And you need to obsess about your first 30 seconds. But like this last weekend, I watched my top 35 YouTube videos. I watched the first 3 minutes of all of them, and I wanted to figure out like, what was it that I did in these videos that I didn't do in other videos that had similar average view duration, but I didn't, like, I didn't carry as many people through. And I'll just share this with you, the 3 Ps that I found, at least for us, which is promise, proof, path. And so you want to cover that, and this is where, this is for you in terms of the big difference between educators and entertainers. They don't think that way. And maybe I'll find out in 2 years I'm wrong here, but this is what I think right now. Which is that there was a huge obsession of like match the exact words of the headline with the first however many seconds of the video, confirm the thumbnail in the background. And that's really because if you say, hey, we're gonna crush a Lamborghini and they go and it's a talking head, there's no Lamborghini, they're like, screw this, and they're out, right? But if you're educating, then I think the Lamborghini in our situation is proof. Is the big Vegas lights of why should I listen to you? Sure, I want to learn more about guarantees, okay, but why should I listen to you? And if you can answer that as quickly as possible, like the videos that, like, when I looked at my top ones, it was just like, hey, I sold my company for $46.2 million. A big part of that was that we had a guarantee that beat all of our competitors, and so we did 4 things that we used that made our guarantee stronger. Done. And if that's what I said the video was about, they're like, okay, there's a promise of what he's gonna help me do, there's a path, and I have proof of why I should listen to this guy. And so you want to have that, like, what's in it for me and why should I believe you? And then the path, in my opinion, is just to show that there is structure and you can set expectations and meet the expectations. I think that's more about watch time. The first two are about why should I stay, and then that's what's gonna happen. I will probably write a book on branding at some point. I think I have significantly increased my understanding of what a brand is. And so I think first starting with the term of defining it, which is it's an association between two things. That's what a brand is. It's between things that people know and people that they don't know. And so branding is also a word for teaching. Like if I say, if I wear a hat in every video, then people start to associate the hat with me. And if I provide value, eventually you can take the hat off and people still associate the value with the hat. Fundamentally, that's what branding is. And so if you're trying to make content about a certain topic, they will associate you with that topic. And so if you want to be known for a certain thing like that, like the background, everything that goes into it, people make associations. That's how we learn, right? And so there are 3 elements to brand. The first is the strength of the influence. When people see me or see a logo or see something, does it change their behavior? And so if we were to go to the etymology of the word, or basically where it first began, branding was like if I branded a cow, right? You brand a cow, it's got a mark on it. The reason for that was because it would change people's behavior. If I saw a cow that didn't have a brand, a cow that did have a brand, I would maybe catch this cow, I would leave it alone, I'd do whatever. But the one that has Rick's logo on it, I might give it back to Rick or I'd kill Rick or kill the cow if I hate Rick or I'd steal the cow if I hate— either way, the brand, I would treat this cow differently than the cow that had no brand. And so brands change behavior at scale. That's why they're so valuable. And so the question is, from an influence, is what percentage of people does it change their behavior? If it changes a lot of people's behavior, Donald Trump changes a lot of people's behavior. Now the next question is, is that behavior going towards or is it going away?. For some people it's very strongly towards and other people it's very strongly away, but he changes people's behavior, so he has strong brand from an influence perspective. The directionality is going to depend on the person. And then the next piece, the third piece, is just the reach, which is how many people in general have this association with you. And so if you're thinking I want to build a brand, then you think about the hypothetical max of what a brand would be, which is you'd want as many people as humanly possible moving towards you and all changing their behavior at once when they see your thing. That would be the hypothetical max of a brand, right? Like Taylor Swift has a brand that's very close to this. Everyone knows who she is. She has a very strong brand in terms of changing people's behavior, and they tend to move in the direction that she wants them to go. So I also kind of relatively reject the concept of all publicity is good publicity. I would just say all publicity is publicity. It will increase the reach of your brand. It won't increase necessarily these two, but it will increase the reach. More people will know about you. And so it's just being specific about what a brand actually is. And so if you understand that a brand is built through associations, then you're also very careful about who you choose to appear next to, right? And so there's a reason that I don't speak on stages anymore that I don't own. Mostly because the audience will associate me with the other speakers, and I often don't want to be associated with the other speakers. Podcasts, even to a certain degree, have the same thing. They spend an hour with me and this other person, and I've become more and more strict about this to the point where I really don't appear— like, I'm not really trying to appear with anyone anymore. You are always going to be the purest version of your brand. Like, you are your brand. And so You leaning into more of you is the stuff that's gonna accomplish these things. And if some people are turned away from you, that's fine. But what we can do to change that is we try and reach as many people as we can and we try and provide value to those people so that they change their behavior and ideally go towards us. I just wanted to draw that out for you guys 'cause I thought hopefully that was helpful. Niche versus wide algorithm, big picture here, don't worry about it. Like always just align your objective with the platform. Like hacks are stupid because if you grow off of a hack, like hashtags work or whatever, as soon as they close the loop, because all platforms do, you'll just go down to zero. It's not a long-term strategy. So just why do it in the short term if it's not going to work long term? The long-term strategy of every platform is to keep people on the platform. And so they want you to make content that lots of people click on and that lots of people watch all the way through and ideally watch something else from you. So everything that they do in the algorithm is just to always optimize for those 3 things, and that's not going to change. Now, the math that they do to code it might change, but the objective will always be the same. And so if you align your objective with the algorithm's objective, you will never have an issue. And that goes for Shorts, it goes for Longs. That's why the hook is so important, because they will see that a lot more people are making it past the first 3 seconds, so we will show it to more people. And if a lot of people are watching all the way through, they'll show it to even more people. And that's all it is because we're aligning our objective with theirs. That's it. Okay. Shorts versus longs. In the beginning, think about a long as just many shorts put together. Just from like if we have that path that I was talking about, like think about your path as the 7 shorts that you're going to string together. You just don't have necessarily 60 seconds that you have to get it. You can get to 90 seconds, whatever, but you still structure them the same way. And that will be beneficial for you. But in terms of longs, there's only 3 formats. You've got lists, steps, and stories. And you can intermix all 3 of them. So you can have a list of things and have steps within the list and then tell stories about each step. But all 3 can be intermixed because that's fundamentally what content is. It's lists, steps, and stories. Volume. Max. So from a volume perspective, we put out, if you want to like blow your mind, we put out 350 pieces a week. So put 50 pieces out a day across all platforms. I would start with something that you can commit to. And then basically you just keep ramping up. And the big flex on this is understanding where you get double, triple, quintuple dips on content. And so a lot of people don't know this, but the highest leverage thing that I do with my time is I make tweets. Those tweets are actually the life source of everything. So my tweets, which I think you have to have a couple ways that you want to capture— everyone captures content differently, but for me, if I get an idea, I can tweet it in 2 seconds. It's not hard for me to do that. And so by doing that, I capture moments throughout the day. And then when we do record with the team, they'll pull up my tweets and be like, what was this about? And then I have content on that. And then when they're like, what do we caption this Instagram? They take my tweet. And so I get— and then the tweets themselves become Reels. And I can also say the tweet out loud and make it a video. And so all of these things all stem from one place. And when I had Gym Launch before I was public, this actually was an old habit of mine because I actually had this big email thread to myself, which was like lessons and failures throughout the year. And every year I kept one email thread that whenever I'd learn something, I would just send it to that that thread, so I'd keep it. And I just replaced that with Twitter, and I just now word them slightly better. But I think you need to have a repository for where your ideas are going to go as they come up throughout the week. If you don't know topics that you can go on, look at your calendar, look at every single meeting you had that week and what you spent your time on, and that will give you more than enough content to talk. Oh yeah, I had this meeting and had this One of my clients had this issue with her order bump and it wasn't working, and so this is what we did, right? Great content, but unless you look retroactively, you might not think about it when you're on the spot. And so one is that I document in real time through tweets or emails, do whatever you want. You can have notes on your phone. Two is I look at my calendar of like, what did I do this last week that was interesting or that I learned or something that came up from a meeting perspective? The third category is far past. So like, what are the big lessons that have changed or shifted my beliefs that are valuable to somebody else? And so you've got far past, you've got recent past, which is your calendar, you've got real time, which you do your tweet dumps on, and then the kind of like fourth category you can look at is what I call manufactured, which is like I lived on $100 for a month, which is much closer to entertainment. I don't really do much of that, but it is another bucket of like topics of content. School community from scratch, and this is what I did. Like, that would be manufactured, right? And so that's how I think about it from a topical perspective that keeps it both interesting and endless. That, like, we never have a lack of content. Like, we always have stuff.

How do you get those frameworks out of yourself? Because I think that's one thing that sets you really apart is that you framework everything.

Do you have a method for that? Yeah, I actually have an answer to this now. I've gotten that question a zillion times, but I do have an answer now. So the framework for making frameworks is that even if— I'll just use the micro story I had about promise, path, plan, right? If I have to do something repeatedly and I have to do it over and over again, I want to create some sort of templates. I don't have to remake the same decisions or have to resolve the same problems. And so I tend to then drink in a ton of data. So I watched 35 of my YouTube videos, the intros. And then I was like, OK, what are all the things that happen in each one of them? So I wrote them all down. And then I was like, OK. Well, this one had 5 things, this one had 7 things, this one had 2 things. Okay, well, what did they all have in common? Well, they all had these 3 things. And so then you narrow it down to what are the few factors, basically delete everything, and if we only had these 3 things that they all had. And so this was the same thing when we had gym launch. I didn't know how to retain customers. I was really good at selling them, but the gym members, like, I had industry average churn. And what we did to solve that problem was that I I got my customer base, I said, who here has less than 3% monthly churn for 6 straight months? And so there are 20 gyms that had that out of however many thousand. And so I got them on a call and I said, okay, tell me every single thing you do to retain customers. And each one of them had 20+ things that they were doing. But when I interviewed all of them, all 20 of them were only doing 5 things in common. And those became the Five Horsemen of Retention, which just became the framework for how we retain customers in a gym. And so you drink in a ton of data, you get everything, and then you circle where are the commonalities. And then if I want to make it sexy, I try and have them be the same letter. Promise, path, plan, easy to remember. Or make it an acronym, something like that. But that's fun. That's the real process, and then the naming thing is super easy. So that's how I make frameworks. Go ahead. What's your take on controversy for content and branding? So I'll say this, and this will hopefully put a lot of you guys at ease. I actually don't think you can be canceled. I just don't think it's true. You can only be canceled if a platform— if all means of communication that you can communicate with an audience are removed from you, like you are unable to communicate, and you stop making content. R. Kelly has been canceled because he also stopped making content. Now, he did— I'm trying to think of like the most hypothetical extreme of terrible scenario, right? I would bet, I mean, you look at Kanye, right? He can say anti-Semitic stuff, whatever. He continues to make content and people still continue to follow him. Like you become uncancelable as long as you don't accept that you can be canceled. And I think fundamentally that's it. Now from a controversy perspective on that, the sheet that I had earlier about reach, controversy helps you get reach. The other two, maybe, maybe not. And so thinking about what— it's basically the same as getting on a trending topic. To me, controversy and trends are more or less the same thing. More people on average will be interested or at least click. It drives CTR. But what do I want them to— I would not want to associate with a lot of different controversies, so I don't talk about them. I personally don't talk about that stuff. It's just, I don't, I don't care enough. But yeah, some people do. I don't. If you have a good feel on organic in terms of making content, where the topics come from, algorithm stuff, shorts versus longs, find one person to hire 10 people who's really smart, overpay them. Volume comes from commit to what you can and then slowly ramp up. The volume is really so that you learn the quality more than anything else. And then product market fit, the customers that you have are gonna come from the niche content even if it doesn't get as many views.

Sorry, one question.

Sure.

Agency or start that hires people?

I did both. So I mean, I first started with the agency and then I was like, okay, now we're really serious. Basically when I sold Gym Launch, I was like, okay, now I can really do this. When I had Gym Launch and I was just starting some of the YouTube videos and podcast, I had a podcast agency that just posted it and I had a YouTube agency that posted it. And then when we were like, okay, we're really doing this, I brought Caleb in, he then started managing the agencies, and then he hired people in-house to replace them. And basically, I literally outlined the step in the book on agencies, but there's going to be a period where they work and your team works, so you pay twice. And until your team beats their team— and I tell them, I'm like, I'm going to beat you, that's all I'm trying to do here— and as soon as our team beats their team, they go away. How do you actually find, like, a good agency or a good Okay, the creed that they're acting like. Talk to 10, listen to all of them. You'll quickly see who has their shit together and who doesn't. You can also bid them against each other if you really want to, but I rarely do that. I usually just quickly see who's good and who isn't, and I try to go off of referrals of people. Because good, like I'll say this, the best agencies don't need to run ads. Like they have more customers than they can handle. Food? Nom nom.