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Video transcript:
Social media is one giant video game. And chances are, if you're watching this, you're not winning as much as you could be. Because the truth is, there are cheat codes and strategies that the top 1% of creators are using to stay ahead. That's why they keep winning. They're playing a smarter game than you.
So in this video, I'm going to break down exactly how to win this social media game. The strategy, the tactics, the adjustments, and the mindset.
If you're an agency owner, this is the blueprint for how to turn attention into dollars. Now, it turns out social media is the best video game ever invented. Billions of players spending hours per day fighting tooth and nail for likes and followers. Everyone is trying to get a leg up.
But the truth is if you actually know what you're doing, social media is way better than a video game. Because on social media, the points are dollars. And if you master this one game, you're going to be set forever.
Here's how to play. If you're trying to build an agency using content, you only have one job. To become the best time allocator in the world.
This is the game within the game. When you have no skills, no audience, no traction, and no team, all you have is time and energy. So think of your time in one hour blocks. Let’s say you have 40 time blocks to spend. And each week you get 40 more.
Now social media is made up of platforms, formats, audiences, and messages. Platforms are places like Linkedin, YouTube, or X. These are the places you can post. The where. Formats are things like short form videos, email newsletters, or video podcasts.
These are the types of content you can make. The how. Audiences are things like entrepreneurs and businesses. These are the people you want to reach. The who.
And messages are things like expertise, frameworks, or playbooks. These are the things you can say. The what.
Now every time you make a piece of content, you're putting out a message to some audience on some platform in some format.
And each of those combinations has a different cost in time. A video podcast on YouTube posted one time per week might cost 10 time units to make. A short post sharing learning tips on X might only take one-tenth of a time block to make.
Now your ultimate goal to win the social media game is that every time you burn a time block of energy, dollars eventually come back. And to do this, you need your message to reach the right audience through the right format on the right platform to get them to take an action that gives you dollars in return. This could be them buying your offer, or signing up for your email list.
No matter if you're a day one creator or you run a billion dollar brand, the approach for winning the social media game is the exact same. How do you allocate time blocks in the most optimal way to get the most dollars back for the least time spent? That's the entire game.
Now in this video, I'm going to share on what I think are the tactical strategies for winning the game. What is the best way to spend those time blocks to have the dollars coming back?
So the social media metric that I'm most interested in figuring out isn't likes, isn't comments, isn't followers. It's dollars. You want to put ylour time in and get dollars out. That's what we really want at the end of the day.
So for the rest of the video, I'm going to walk through three things. The first is why are you losing the social media game? What are you doing wrong? And why is the time you're spending not bringing dollars back?
The second, what are the top creators doing that lets them win so much? What are they doing right? How are they making millions per month?
And then third and most important, how should you shift your strategy to go from losing to winning? How do you build this content engine that turns attention into dollars?
Okay, so first, why are you losing today? Well, when it comes to social media, what really is losing? Losing is spending a lot of time and not getting dollars back. You're working and working and you're seeing no reward. Now, there's two reasons why this is happening.
One is good and one is bad. The good one is when you're in the investment stage. When you burn time blocks without getting dollars directly back in return, this is considered an energy investment.
This means you're building momentum, building some skills, taking those early reps to improve and really learn the game. At first, all of your time blocks will be spent as investments as you try to kind of get that machine going.
This is a necessary step for everyone. So if you're on the right path and you're in the investment stage, you're just early, so you're all good. But the bad scenario, which you absolutely must avoid, is when you're strategically misaligned.
This is when you're on the wrong path. When you're spending time, but you're playing based on a bad strategy, that's a huge problem. That would be like investing your time in one location, but all the gold is over here in another location. It's just wasted effort.
The other way this happens is that you're not really sure why you're doing what you're doing. You're just doing something to be doing something. Again, this is also probably not good. This is a strategy issue.
And the reason this is the biggest problem is because no amount of rowing can make a boat go forward if it's pointed backwards. You can row faster, you can even hire the strongest, fastest rowers in the world, but if your boat is pointed the wrong way, you are not going to row forward.
You must have a sound strategy. You have to point the boat in the right direction or else all that rowing is going to be wasted effort.
Okay, so the second thing are the main reasons why the top 1% creators keep winning this social media game. These are the people making millions of dollars a month. How are they doing this? What are they doing differently than you? The answer is actually super simple. The first thing is they have a super sound strategy, they are rowing in the right direction.
Second, once they confirm that is the right strategy, they put all their focus and intensity on this. Pure focus around one thing with zero wasted effort. The third thing is any dollar they make, they roll it back into that strategy to apply leverage.
This means if they made 3K in revenue, they will pay 3K to hire an editor and buy 40 more editor blocks to spin the wheel faster. And then fourth, they don't get distracted. They don't get bored. They stay focused for five to 10 years.
Now, obviously this sounds super high level and not tactical. It is because the truth is once you have the right strategy, all you have to do to win the social media game is to do the basics consistently without losing focus.
It's just pick a strategy, validate the strategy, do it for a decade, and you're guaranteed to be successful. It really is that simple, because social media gives you unlimited distribution for free. There is nothing better in the world.
The big question is how do you pick the right strategy to win the social media game? And what this really means is how do you pick the optimal set of format, platform, audience, and message to earn you the most dollars with the least amount of time spent? First, you need to start at the end with the offer.
What are you selling? If you have a product or service that already has revenue, you have a pretty clear idea for who that buyer is. But whether or not you have a product or not, you need to understand your ideal viewer avatar. For agency owners, this is your buyer. In other words, who do we want viewing the content so they buy what we're selling? The first thing you need to do is figure out who this person is. Nothing else matters until you do this.
Now to figure out your ideal viewer avatar ask yourself these questions. What are they like? What messages will resonate with them? What are their pain points? How do they like being talked to? What are their needs? You need to learn who this person is so you can understand how to make the right content in the right format on the right platform with the right message.
The biggest mistake I see agency owners make is they start with the platform or the format first. So they say things like, we need to do YouTube or we need to make videos in this style. This is the wrong approach and a massive trap.
Don't start with the format or the platform or even the message. Start with the audience. Who do I need a crowd of to buy the thing that I sell? If you want to make money from content, this is the most important place to start. This is critical. This is the whole game.
All of the winners on social media that you look up to that make tons of money have engineered their entire content system to target one specific ideal viewer avatar persona.
You need to do this first. Now, if you have a product you're already selling and you know the buyer because it's working, then you already have who your audience profile should be. It's the buyer. So the who, the audience is already solved for you.
So next you need to figure out the platform. Where do these people hang out? Where do they spend the most time online? You need to start with one single hero platform. One platform, go all in, crush it and then move on.
Now, let’s go through the structure for how you would think about figuring which is your hero platform. So you need to think where does my ideal viewer avatar spend time? If it's a B2B audience, it's probably gonna be on LinkedIn or YouTube. If it's an agency service, it could be anywhere. It kind of depends on the agency and the audience buyer profile.
You just need to figure out the dominant place that these people spend time. Most audiences live on multiple platforms, but you just need to start with one. What is the number one place that they spend time?
A hack for this is just to ask your customers where they spend their time, or watch how their comments or engagement come in. What platform do they come from? Now, once you have the platform where they spend the most time, next you need to figure out the format.
So you have the who and you have the where, but what format should you make to reach them on that platform? And I'll save you the trouble. This is the answer. Video is best.
Video is king. Video allows you to build the most trust with the fewest amount of reps. Video is the answer. A picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth a thousand pictures. It's video.
So then you really have three options for video formats. You have short form video like Instagram Reels or TikTok. You have medium form video like this video on YouTube. And then you have a long form video podcast.
One of those three is gonna work on every single platform. And there's a reason why they all incorporated video because everyone loves it. So the secret is that you need to pick whichever of those three video formats is most native to the dominant platform because native will unlock the most algorithm push.
Let me explain what that means. When you make a piece of content, you get a manual push, which is your followers sharing with others. And then you get an algorithmic push, which is the algorithm pushing your stuff to non-followers.
The algorithm push is like the house giving you free attention coupons. So you wanna make whatever content format on that platform which will unlock the biggest algorithm push possible. And this is probably going to be the one that is native to that platform.
And by native, I just mean the one that is most dominantly used by users on that platform. So for Twitter, native is text. For LinkedIn, native is now text or video. For YouTube, native is video.
So for example, if your ideal viewer avatar is most prevalent on LinkedIn, that's where they spend the most time. LinkedIn has text posts, but they now have short form video posts looped in in the feed as well. They even have a tab in their app dedicated to video. And that's short form.
Now, medium form video like this and long form video like podcasts, those are not native to LinkedIn. You could post them on LinkedIn, post them on YouTube, and post them as a text post, but they're not native. And those aren't gonna do as well as native short form or text posts. And that is because anyone that clicks on the medium form YouTube link will go to YouTube and they will leave LinkedIn.
And when they leave LinkedIn, their user session ends and LinkedIn stops getting ad dollars. It's very simple. LinkedIn wants the native engagement format to be the thing that people love the most. So that's what they push. So in this case, if you're looking at LinkedIn, you have text posts or short form video. Video is better, so you make short form video.
So now we have the who, the where, and the how. The last thing we need is the what, which is the message. What message should you say through short form video on LinkedIn to the buyer in this example? And that message or set of messages is just going to target the deepest and most acute pain points that that viewer has. Because the deeper the pain, the more trust they will associate if you solve it, the more money they will spend to solve it. You want deep pain.
Now this matrix, the audience, the platform, the format, the message, this is the strategy construct for how you win the social media game. If you can figure out how to allocate your time units the best way possible across that matrix, you win. And the strategy is that you pick one combination of this, the absolute strongest one that can reach your target, ideal viewer avatar.
Go all in for six months on just solving one format, one platform, one set of messages for that avatar. Then when this is working for you, you have two choices.
The first is you could take the revenue, hire yourself out of that platform and just let it cook. Or second, you could take the revenue and fund a team for the second platform. Now you have two platforms, LinkedIn and YouTube.
And you keep going until you've built all of the different content formats up, feeding each other. That's how you win the social media game. So if you're selling a B2B product and your ideal viewer avatar is dominant on LinkedIn, but they're also a little bit on YouTube, you might decide to first crack LinkedIn.
You laser focus here first. You make short form video on LinkedIn. You print revenue because the viewers are engaging with the video and going down your funnel and buying your offer.
You take that revenue, you hire a YouTube team and then you add YouTube. Now you have LinkedIn and YouTube. But a common question is this, what if our ideal viewer avatar lives on multiple platforms with the same density? Let's say it's LinkedIn and YouTube equally.
Then how do we decide which one we start with first? Now there's three factors that matter when your ideal viewer avatar lives on multiple places with the same density. The first consideration is which platform builds deeper audience trust the fastest. And this goes to my framework on content minutes.
You need to accumulate a certain number of viewer minutes in order to build trust with that individual. The longer the video, the more content minutes per rep that you're able to unlock. The trade-off is that longer form videos don't get that many users watching them.
So the number of minutes per person is high, but the actual number of people that were exposed to it is low. Now, if your product is high ticket, you actually don't need that many people watching it. A few hundred converting could make your business.
So if your product is high ticket, you may want to start with a little bit of a longer video format. That will help build trust faster and get deeper with audiences past that content minute line sooner.
So the first thing is speed of trust. The second thing is which platform or format would cause you to quit sooner. The truth is the only way you lose this content game is by quitting. If you pick a longer format that grows slower and takes way more effort per rep, like a podcast, for example, you have a higher likelihood of quitting if you're dependent on seeing those results in a certain period of time. So if spending five years growing a podcast without traction is going to cause you to quit, don't pick a podcast because if you quit, you lose.
Roughly speaking, short form video will take about two to six months to start seeing results. YouTube six to 12 months. And a long form podcast could take two to three years or more to start seeing results. So if you can't wait 12 months before you start seeing results, don't pick something that will take longer than 12 months to start seeing them or else you're going to quit.
Now, the third factor when you're trying to break the tie is which platform do you have a unique ability in solving? Are you an amazing editor? Are you amazing at long form conversation? Are you uniquely good at teaching? If you have some unique advantage that's leaning you towards being better at a certain format and you're OK with the negative tradeoffs that come from those points I just mentioned, you should probably go with that one.
But the answer is simple. One of the video formats on one platform targeted at one user avatar with a few different messages mixed in. That's the answer.
Again, if you're clear on this strategy and how it applies to you and where to play, and now you just need help on the how, like, how do I go faster? I've got a bunch of free marketing stuff below in the first link in the description about systems and tools, ways to get faster.
OK, now the last thing I want to cover really quick is what happens if you don't have a product yet and you're just trying to pick what the product is or trying to pick what that audience might be.
Well, if you have a product already and you have a buyer, your ideal viewer avatar is the buyer. So you don't really have a choice. You just got to figure out where they are. But if you don't have a product yet and the world is your oyster, it's so fun to try to pick what that ideal viewer avatar could be. So let me walk you through my framework for you.
And this is a big area where people get tripped up. Do not pick an audience that doesn’t want to spend money. This is a massive trap. If you do this, you will struggle to monetize from your channel. This is where the starving artists come from. And I hate saying it, but it's the truth.
Your goal is to pick an audience that has a lot of money or more importantly, is willing to spend a lot of money to get a certain problem solved. And the reason they'd spend a lot of money is because their return on investment for solving that problem is much higher so they can spend a lot.
Your ideal viewer avatar, if you could pick anything, should come from a combo of these three factors. The first is, do you have any existing expertise or skills? Because if you already have locked knowledge that's in your head, that's a skill set that just needs to be extracted. Well, then you should start here.
That's your offer. That's how you craft your offer and you work backwards for who the ideal viewer avatar that would want that skill set is. Gaining the actually valuable knowledge, that's the whole game. So if you already have the knowledge or you have a unique skill set that is valuable, start there.
Now, if you don't have any knowledge or skills or the skills you have you feel like aren't super valuable, you then have to think about one of these two factors.
One is market opportunities and two is the buyer revenue potential. So market opportunities are just skills or knowledge that is in demand or going to be increasingly in demand as time moves on. So in this current era, it could be anything AI related. How to use AI tools, AI consultancy, helping people build AI workflows. It could be marketing. It could be growth. It could be blue collar work.
You go down the list of in-demand skill sets and you pick one and that's what you build. The other approach is buyer revenue potential. You pick the most lucrative potential buyer, figure out what they would pay the most to have solved and then learn that skill set.
Again, right now this is anything AI related, workflow related marketing. There's so many things that you could pick from. But essentially, if you don't have a product or offer, you need to build a skill set or knowledge that is interesting and compelling for someone to buy so that you can make an offer to figure out who would buy the offer. That's really what this game boils down to. Do you have expertise or knowledge that people will pay for and then using social media to help get them to know where to go to pay for it? That's basically what this game is. If you follow what I just said, you can monetize way easier with way less stress.
Either way, that is how you build the content empire. This is the winning strategy. It works every time for every business.
You just have to figure out which combination makes sense for your business, your offer and your ideal viewer avatar. And I know this sounds high level, but just the thinking of starting with the avatar and going backwards, just that is different from what everybody that I hear on social media talking about these genius frameworks. Start with the avatar and work backwards. That is all you have to do.
So that's all I've got for this video. If you liked it, make sure to leave a comment. Until then, and I'll see you on the next one.