From Zero to 1 Billion Views in 12 months with Hilary Billings

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like My First Million. Today, we'll be breaking down how to go from zero to one billion views in 12 months. To drop these value bombs, I brought Hilary Billings into EO Fire Studios. With over a billion views, Hilary is a leading expert on the psychology of attention and the co-founder and CEO of Attentioneers, an agency that helps entrepreneurs grow revenue through short form video strategy. And today, Foundation, we'll talk about short form video.

0:39We'll talk about what the strategy was from going from zero to one billion views in under a year. We'll talk about three things that all great videos must have and what separates professional content creators from amateurs, oh, that and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Sales Evangelist, hosted by my friend, Donald Kelly, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales right now.

1:13A recent episode you should definitely check out is the five ways to do daily outbound with LinkedIn. Listen to Sales Evangelist wherever you get your podcasts. Hillary, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? Hey, Fire Nation. Oh my gosh, I'm so happy to be here. I'd say staying on the content train, since that's what we're gonna be talking a lot about, I think a lot of personal brands, entrepreneurs and business owners are told to go and copy what they see other people in their industry doing on social media with the same styles of content, the same styles of videos, and they end up doing that.

1:57And when they do that, they become a carbon copy of everyone else. Now we have all of this similar style content that exists. And the worst part is that they don't even know if it's working for their competitors. So they're spending all this time trying to check the box to say they've done something. But in reality, what they're doing is just contributing to the noise and not making content that converts for them. Fire Nation, we're already starting with a bang. as we talk about going from zero to 1 billion views in 12 months. And Hilary, you believe that if we are serious about growing our platform, and by the way, Fire Nation is serious, our focus needs to be on short form video.

2:41Why is that? 100%. There's so many platforms that are asking you to create content and it can get so overwhelming for business owners and entrepreneurs is thinking about photo posts and carousels and lives and all of these different things that you need to do, especially when for most of them, social media is just a brand affinity play or a lead driver, but not the primary business model, right? So you're spending all this time on these platforms, doing all these things, and you're getting minimal results. It's incredibly disheartening. So we're a big fan of Pareto's Law, which means putting your efforts to where you're going to see the biggest return.

3:17And Adobe actually released a study earlier this year, we're in 2023 right now, saying that 80 % of the time that we are on our cell phones and we are not talking or texting with someone. So just think about the amount of time every day you're on your phone and how much of that time is spent texting and talking versus everything else. 80 % of that time, you are watching short form video. So as a business owner, we want to meet our customers and our consumers where they're at and in the way that they're consuming content. So why put all this effort and energy trying to capture them in the 20 % that they're doing something else online on their phones when you have this massive opportunity to meet them where they are in the way that they're wanting to consume content and all the research is showing, all the data is showing that the amount of time that they're spending doing that just continues to grow.

4:09So we firmly believe short form video is the way to go because of consumer behavior. Now, I will tell you that me personally, I managed to stay away from the Instagram doom scroll for many years. I did. I did. And I just, I was able to do it for various reasons, but then I'll tell you what got me. Three and a half years ago now, we got our first dog, a golden doodle. And this guy is the best. His name is Gus and he's the cutest and he's such a lover and all those things. Well, you know, I started doing a little bit of scrolling just as I normally do. Not a lot, not the doom scrolling. And then what happened?

4:47I was served an amazing video of a golden doodle doing something hysterical. And that is all I needed to become absolutely addicted to now all these golden doodle videos. and I see them every single day and they just, they never get old for me. I enjoy them. They're short form. They're quick. They're snappy. And I just keep going with them. And what's really interesting, we talked a little bit about the birth of my first child, Bo Arthur Dumas, recently, very recently, November 14th specifically. And now what am I also getting served? Little cute baby videos in the short form. So now it's kind of like every other one's a baby, every other one's a golden doodle and I love them all.

5:29So Fire Nation, if you're one of those people that, like me, held out for a little bit, just wait. It will get you as well. And you need to realize this is the world that we live in. And Hilary, you went from zero to one billion views in under a year and zero to 400 ,000 followers in 40 days. What strategy did you employ to see this amazing growth? I originally was a content creator in different mediums. And my co-founder of Attentioneers was a content creator in different mediums. He was a professional touring musician, a billboard charting artist. So he knew how to make great music that people love to consume.

6:07I was a journalist. I worked for USA Today. I was a red carpet host. I did award show interviews, celebrity interviews. I've interviewed Dolly Parton and Ringo Starr and Dance with Mark Cuban. And we just knew how to make great content in other verticals. And we were approached right around 2020, you know, all of our income streams were drying up by an acquaintance of mine who happened to run a network of Facebook watch channels to see if I'd be interested in making short form video. And so we thought, sure, this would be relatively easy. We already know how to make great content in these different ways.

6:42We're just going to move it over to sub three minutes, sub one minute videos. What could go wrong? This is going to be easy peasy. And it turns out it wasn't. It turns out it was incredibly difficult. And we spent nine months banging our heads against the wall, trying to get a single video to take off. And it was so frustrating. We kept trying to copy what we saw huge influencers doing that was successful for them. And it wouldn't work for us. And it really starts to get in your head and make you think that you're the problem. Maybe people don't want to watch you. Maybe you don't have a message worth sharing.

7:13Maybe you're the issue. And maybe we should just quit. So we got about nine months in and we had to have this come to Jesus of if we really want to make this work, we have to change our approach because something that we're doing is not working. Maybe the way that we perceive how these videos become successful is wrong. And we either need to figure this out or we have to leave because now we're losing money trying to be short form content creators. So we decided to take a different perspective. and we asked the question, what if everything that we thought was accidental or effortless in these videos, what if it was actually incredibly intentional?

7:52What if these videos were being engineered to be successful and we just didn't know what the formula was? So we spent a weekend, locked ourselves in a room and watched thousands of viral videos across genres, across platforms. I do not recommend that anyone does this for their mental health. It was incredibly intense. But we created a spreadsheet because what we didn't know is what factors actually went into the success of a video. Did it matter if it was on a specific platform? Did it matter if it was in a specific genre? And we started documenting everything we could think of that would go into these videos.

8:26What's happening at second one? What's happening at second three? What's happening at second five? What are they wearing? What colors are in the frame? What do the captions look like? What color are the captions? Is there a particular font? How is it being edited? What are the camera angles? What are the hand movements? How are they moving the action forward in the video? And it was wild. It was almost like we became John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. And these formulas just started to emerge from the content. It didn't matter across platform. It didn't matter across genre. But there were certain things that had to go into each video in order for it to be successful.

9:04So we took our learnings and we applied it to our next video. and that next video did 5 million views. The video after that did 10 million views. And it's not to say that everything that we touched turned to gold, but what we realized is we had created a formula that would help us engineer content to give it its best shot at success. And we definitely knew why something wouldn't work if we weren't engineering it appropriately. So one in every four of our videos would go on to have a million views. One in every 10 would go to have 10 million views. And in our time as content creators, we went from nine months of almost no views to over a billion organic views across platforms in the next 12 months.

9:47Fire Nation, I hope you're taking notes here because these are the type of strategies that you can implement to start seeing some traction, some momentum in what you're doing. And once you get that initial momentum, then it's just, okay, what's really working? How do I double down there? How do I keep doing this thing? And we're actually going to talk about three things that great videos must do to go viral when we get back from thanking our sponsors. The new year is upon us, and that means new goals, more growth, and upgrading your day-to-day workflow. While most sales folk are stuck in the mud of manual scheduling, digging into data, and tracking down leads, let me share with you a better way to win so you can crush your Q1.

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10:58Bottom line, Sales Hub is focused on helping you work smarter, not harder, so you can get after all those other New Year's goals. Close more deals and get on track for your best Q1 yet. Explore the new HubSpot Sales Hub and AI tools like ChatSpot at HubSpot.com slash sales. All right, Hillary, we're back. And I teased before the break that there are three things that great videos must do to go viral. And this is regardless of industry, topic, or platform. So break those down now. Yeah. Yeah. So what we learned in that weekend hold up is that great content and honestly, not just great videos, but content in general must have these three things in order to be successful.

11:37And if you've created a piece of content that you love that's not doing well, it's probably because it's missing one of these tenants. Or if you created something and you have no idea why it's suddenly taken off, it's probably because it includes these three things. So the first thing that every great video must do is that it must grab attention. And I know that sounds a little bit redundant, but it's a lot like focusing on a great title of a book, right? You have two seconds to get someone to stop the scroll, to find that cute video of a dog that looks like Gus that you're going to sit there and watch.

12:12And the reality is, is that nothing else matters if you can't get them to stop. Just like if you don't have a great book title that encourages the reader to go pull the book off the shelf to buy it, it doesn't matter anything else that you've included in the material. they're not going to read it. They're not going to watch the video. So we have to focus on grabbing attention right from jump in order to be successful. And we spent a lot of time as content creators focusing on what that opening image was. You want to get people to stop the scroll and ask what's going on here and then get them to ask what happens next.

12:45So it all starts with that opening shot. And if you don't do that well, all of the rest of your time and efforts are wasted. So that's the first thing we have to do. The second thing we have to do is spark an emotion. People often talk about how relatable short-form content is and how the goal of short-form content is to come across as relatable. And the truth is, is that relatability means that someone has felt or feels the way that you're feeling in the video, or they've done the thing that you do and they understand the motivations. You understand and can relate to why that golden retriever, why that dog is going after the turkey because Gus has done something similar in your household.

13:23And as humans, we love to share what we find relatable. And that all starts by moving somebody emotionally because when we feel something, we share it. So you need to get strategic about thinking what you want your viewer to feel because when people get emotional, they get promotional. And this is where you start to have videos and ideas propagate outside of your own network. So lastly, the last thing that we want to do and the last piece of the puzzle that is so often overlooked and it's imperative if you want to get somebody to watch the video till the end is you have to create a curiosity gap.

14:00So you need to set up the video in such a way where there's a visual, there's a question, there's a statement where you are clearly sharing what this video is about, but leaving out a piece so they have to watch to the end to find out. So for example, if a video starts off with someone getting on his knee with a ring in his hand, the curiosity gap that's created is, is his partner going to say yes? If it's a straight to camera style video where you're saying something like, here's how much money I made on my Airbnb properties in the month of November, the gap that you've created is, well, how much money did you make?

14:40I need to know and find out because I too want to make money on my Airbnb properties. And this is also going to help the viewer know whether or not this video applies to them, which is also going to help the algorithm to then serve the video to more people like the ones that are interested in that content. So again, the three things that every video must do is it must grab attention, it must spark an emotion, and then you must create a curiosity gap. And if you do that, your content will be successful. Fire Nation, I hope your takeaway from that is that Gus would never go after a turkey. And I mean, never.

15:15So just remember that. I didn't mean to slander his name, I'm so sorry. Poor Gus, poor Gusipu. So I wanna talk about professional content creators versus amateurs? What separates the professionals from the amateurs? Great question. I think it's easy for amateur creators, and again, we're talking about people where they know they need content as part of their strategy, but maybe it's not their primary business model. It's easy for them to get flustered and frustrated when they're not seeing a video do well, especially when they're putting so much time into them. They don't really know what they're doing.

15:50They know they need this to work to help convert and get clients or get exposure. But in reality, what's happening is the amateurs are putting something out and then they're hoping for the best. And when you're hoping for the best, you're not actually putting in the time to see what else can work. So amateurs hope for the best while a professional will post and test. Amateurs hope for the best, but professionals post and test. What makes a professional is that they don't hold the content too precious, right? They don't think about it as being a reflection of them or how it's received and whether or not they should take it personally.

16:24No, they put on their experiments or their mad scientist caps and say, oh, interesting, that video didn't do well. I wonder what it was. Did I not get the opening image correct? Should I change the title? What if I move this around and we started it off in a different way or we change the location or the setting or the title of the video? I wonder how that would impact the video. And by doing that, they open themselves up for creativity. They open themselves up to keep experimenting. They're looking at data. And when they're able to do that, they become more and more successful because they're not allowing those challenges or those roadblocks along the way to dishearten them from continuing to move forward with making content.

17:05So the best thing that you can do, even if making content isn't your full-time job, is to put on your mad scientist hat and play and think about engineering videos as play and then you'll become much more successful with your content. Fire Nation, I'm sure a lot of you have your wheels spinning right now about what you're going to do differently in your short-term videos or if you're not creating short-term videos, thinking about doing just that. So if somebody listening right now, Hillary, is interested in growing both their reach and revenue through this short-form video strategy, What steps do they take?

17:40Yeah, absolutely. You know, my team and I, we're deeply passionate about helping heart-led entrepreneurs get more attention and visibility for their businesses. And honestly, it just breaks our hearts to see entrepreneurs taking time away from their business to create content that doesn't work. So to help with that, we've created this incredible viral video blueprint that we're offering to listeners completely complimentary. It includes everything from a hook cheat sheet to help you grab attention and kick off your videos the right way for your audience to best in class chat GPT prompts to help guide you through every step of the content creation journey and make sure that it aligns with your brand and aligns with the messaging that you want to get out into the world while also being engineered for attention to a complete video creation workflow template.

18:30It's everything you need to start creating better videos immediately. So if you're interested in getting this complimentary blueprint, you can head over to attentioneers.com backslash EO fire. That's attention E-E-R-S dot com backslash EO fire to download it. You know, we've taken our years of work, our trials and tribulations and all this time and all these views and condensed it into the easiest to use tool possible for making videos that are primed to go viral. And we've helped not only ourselves to do this, but our clients to 20 to 250x their results with this blueprint. So again, attentioneers.com backslash EO Fire to get started today and to connect with us.

19:12Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with HB and JLD today. So keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit EOFire.com. Just type Hillary. That's Hillary with one L in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. Hillary, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Let's do it. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Hillary for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you ready to rock your very own podcast?

19:49Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free. Free Podcast Course.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side.

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