Part 2 - How I Gained 7.8 Million Followers In 40 Months | Ep 770

0:00Let's go number four in terms of the things we're doubling down on. so before this we used to track views this is another big one man all six of these are big man i'm glad i made a presentation about so before this we used to track views as our primary metric so i'll take a second here who uses be honest be honest everybody's like likes don't you can't trade likes for for paying rent you can't pay payroll with view sure okay got it who makes views the most important metric you track all right right a lot of you that's okay me too but I'm going to give you a good metric that you can track. And this was after pouring through, believe me, I'm a big data guy, a metric that you might not expect.

0:41So the main reason is that I had a six to 12 month deal cycle. So I started by using views because I really had no other metric because for those of you who don't know what I do, well, I'll explain in a second, but we had no idea what it would do besides driving awareness. And I didn't really have any other objective, right? But in that time period of doing a deal in every six to 12 months, because we buy companies, that's more or less what we do. we begin seeing a much closer correlation with faster feedback metrics. And ideally in any business, you want as little latency between the metrics you track and the behavior you want to change.

1:10And so if you want to get people to change something and you want to look at something that takes a year to get feedback, really tough to change behavior. But if you can have a metric that you can see daily changes or hourly changes, then those are things that are going to much more quickly change behavior so that you can have a hundred feedback loops in terms of changing and getting better than one every year. And so besides book sales, opt-ins and applications, there was a metric that stood out as fastest and most measurable. It was ad revenue. And this is really surprising to me. So, and this is the point I want to make real quick is that to be clear, for those of you who don't know who I am, ad revenue is not how I make my money.

1:49All right, just very clearly. For those who don't know, my wife and I exit our first big company for$46.2 million in December of 2021. You can Google it. American Pacific Group was the private equity firm. Jim Lange and Prestige Labs were two of those companies. And since then, we invested and bought a number of companies that have grown a lot and do over$200 million a year. So I do media to feed a lot of different things, but I don't directly monetize the media. And like ad revenue is, I'll explain why in a second, is an important metric that we can use for everything else. Okay. So these are companies that we own.

2:20Great. So for me, I pretty much always ignored ad revenue and just saw it as something that could offset some of the cost of the immediate team. There was really nothing else. But I was wrong. It's actually so much more. So let's dive into a little bit for a second. How does ad revenue come to be? So it comes from two things. It's number of views times revenue per views. Now, the actual term is RPM, which is revenue per meal, which is French for 1 ,000. But it's number of views times the revenue that you get. Okay, per view. Fantastic. So it takes into account, and this is why this is important, because we thought views, and that was the only metric we had, But we had to have something to counter it because otherwise then you get views for view's sake.

2:55But we needed a quality metric with a quantity metric, which, by the way, paired metrics, if you're ever tracking something for a department, having like number of tickets resolved with rating against the resolution of how well those customer service reps resolve. Paired metrics allow you to get to the best or most effective throughput for any department. And I just didn't know enough about media to find out what our paired metric was. And this happens to be a single metric that pairs both. And so it takes account the quality of the audience, which for me was business owners who have amongst the highest spending power.

3:28And so RPMs are the highest. So for me, the RPMs go up. It means I'm getting more of the quality people that I want. And so this gave me and my team something that we could shoot for that bounced making videos for the right people who wanted to watch. So I mean, ideally, we absolutely want to crank views with the right people. And that's what that was able to track for us. and looking backwards the month with the highest rpms and ad revenue also created the most book sales the most opt-ins and the most business applications and this had nothing to do with how many views we got in fact we did kind of an experiment lately where we did 90 days of almost no business stuff we just did more uh more edutainment and entertainment style uh content and our views went through the roof like way up two three x what we're accustomed to.

4:16But even with the increase in views, our ad revenue dropped by half. So we're actually getting the wrong people. And I share this with you so you don't have to. And so the nice thing about this from a team perspective, for those of you who do have larger teams and want to translate this over, is that my team now has real-time access to this. So they can see every single piece of content in the ad revenue that it generates. And they can quickly generate baselines in their mind of what's good and what's bad on an objective metric that really is good and bad rather than just like, hey, this video cranked.

4:47Yeah, but it didn't bring any of the right people. We got this thing that had 10 million views. Okay, but it drove nothing. Versus we had this video that had 100 ,000 views and it made more ad revenue than one that had 10 million. And we saw the corresponding increase in the metrics that mattered to us. And so that's why we switched from views being the metric that we're optimizing for to ad revenue because it's a leading performance indicator. It happens almost in real time rather than something that happens in a big, in a rears, to give a fancy word, later. So that's number four in terms of the things that we're doubling down on.

5:23So let's talk about the fifth one, shorts to longs. All right, this is yet an end, another big one that's going to ruffle some feathers. So for a long time, the prevailing idea in content marketing was, again, a funnel. It's like everything's a funnel, all right? And it was believed that shorts viewers got more people to then watch longs and then those long viewers would then translate into becoming customers, right? So people watch shorts and then they watch longs and they give you money, right? That was kind of the prevailing thought. But again, when we looked at the data, it looked more like this.

5:57Shorts viewers watch more shorts and long viewers watch more longs and customers buy more. And so the point is that these are different audiences. And I will make a note here that this can change my platform. So I might be a long viewer on one platform and a shorts viewer on another. And where I do think the magic happens is where you can have shorts in one thing. And so someone finds you on TikTok, but then they are a longs viewer on YouTube, and then they watch your longs there. So I do think there's an element there, but not the way the narrative goes. And so for us, longs drive a lot more conversions than shorts.

6:41Conversions being book sales, opt-ins, applications, all right? And business-related content, unsurprisingly, brings more business owners than not business-related content. And so we are going to double down on more longs about that stuff and change our short strategy to keep the volume the same but focus more on business overall. And again, people watch differently on different platforms. So making shorts in order for people to, on a different platform, watch longs still carries as far as we know. So despite the mega obsession with shorts that has kind of prevailed for the last few years because it was a new format of content, we're putting now more emphasis on longs overall, for now, as far as we have dated.

7:24So that's number five. now let's talk about the sixth one that i'm going all in on assume more to assume nothing all right so what does this mean so let's start with assume more and what that what that really means broken down so assume more means i made content assuming people already knew me okay so here's an example the alex tramosi guide to haters i might be like if i don't know who alex Ramosi is, or have never seen that face before, why do I care? If I see the day in the life of Alex Ramosi yet again, I assume everyone knows me in this. I'm, I'm sharing these mistakes with you. As far as I'm concerned for getting new people into my world.

8:06It wasn't made. I assumed like everybody's going to know me. The Alex Ramosi diet. Everyone knows me. No, they're like, who is this guy? Right? And here's why this matters. If you want your content to bring people who don't know you, which is why many of you guys make content, then you can't assume they do. And so this is what this looks like tactically. From a headlines perspective, if I were to remake these today, I might try a first crack at business influencer crushes haters and shows how you can too. Okay. So now if I'm clicking, I would understand at least that this guy is a business influencer of some sort and he crushes haters.

8:38Okay, well, I might want to see haters get crushed. Day in the life of$200 million per year CEO. Okay. Now the jet tells me that this Alex Ramosi from the first one before, Alex Ramosi is maybe rich or maybe he can afford a private jet, but now I know he's a CEO because I could be a rapper. I could be more realistically when I walk around the place that I live, all the people that in my community assume that I'm a football player. It's the number one thing. So you play football? Are you on the hockey team? And I say no. I can. Nope. Nothing wrong with that. But no, that's not what I do. And then the third one there, Alex from Ozi Diet, 16-hour workday six-pack diet for business owners, whatever.

9:12The point is that we actually make it welcoming to everyone. And so here's how we do this tactically within the content itself. so we go from they know me to introducing yourself every time so earlier i was like i'm alex ramosi this is what i do this is the the subscribers i've gotten whatever we introduce ourselves two they know why they should listen to me tell people why they should listen to you every time three the inside jokes you know how i get no i don't know how you get please fully explain the reference because that references another piece of content that i haven't seen because this is the first video I've seen from you.

9:49And if you tell an inside joke and someone doesn't understand the inside joke, guess where they are on the outside and guess where people don't want to be on the outside and guess where people spend money on the inside. And number four, going from acting like you're already friends to pretending everything goes to people who have no idea who you are. And when you make content, so people who don't know you can enjoy it more do. And for those of you who are worried, because I can already hear the thoughts that are coming up. So let me just address those right now. I see you. I'm going to lose retention if I introduce myself.

10:28Okay, well, let's play the equal opposite. Would you rather fewer people know who you are or more people who have no clue? Because on one hand, we have some people who know you. And on the other hand, we have lots of people who also don't know you. So you're in the exact same position you were before. Two, well, aren't people going to get sick of this? you're going to keep saying your name every time or keep introducing yourself. Well, from what I can tell, warm people like the reminders and cold people need the introduction. And as a total side note, this is a fun little experiment for everyone here.

11:02You can run this when you leave here. Who here actually has posted content in the last year? Okay, good. Okay, good. For a second, I was like, this would have been really bad if no one had raised their hand. Fantastic. Okay. I want you to look at last year and I want you to look at your number one piece of content and this is what I want you to do. Just post it again and then let me know how it does and I will bet you that it does just as well or better than the stuff that you're posting right now and let me tell you one reason why I believe that to be true because if you have been posting consistently guess what's also happened?

11:40More people have entered your audience and guess what they haven't seen. That amazing piece of content that everyone from last year said was the number one best thing you ever made. And you know what you said? New people, you don't get that. That was only from my old folks. My OGs, they only get that. No, you got to reintroduce some of the stuff, your greatest hits. You got to bring that stuff in so that the new people also know what your greatest hits are. So that the lore continues to compound and grow. So number three, and this one, or a sub point, and this is one for me personally I follow a bunch of quote accounts I like comedy and philosophy and like fighting there's like kind of categories that I follow and gym equipment and so I get quotes a lot on my news feed but you know what happens when I see a quote from Sophocles or Epictetus yet again that reminds me that I should just toughen up and keep going I like the reminder I'm not like Epictetus God you lived 4 ,000 years ago like get over yourself No, he's not making new content.

12:39But guess what? People still post it and people still read it because we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. At least I do. To give a little tactical one on this from mainstream, because this might resonate for some of the older people in the crowd, there was this thing called television. A while back used to be big. Anyways, instead of having it on your phone, it was like this big screen on a wall. It was a whole thing. Anyways, I don't get into it. It's like floppy disk. Regardless, floppy disk was, okay, anyways. So there used to be this thing where at the beginning of every show, there was a theme song, right?

13:10So they'd be like, cheers, where everybody knows your name. And there's always a little introduction. It says produce by and all that stuff. And if those shows that spend gazillions of dollars on testing chose to think that despite selling more advertising space, it was worth having the same exact theme song and introduction for the show, don't you think it might be worth that for us too? And here's an interesting thing. The last thing positive associations and six if you actually get sing-songy about how you introduce yourself or the things that you relate to you It starts to become something that people expect and then they start associating it with all the positive other experiences They had with you So if I always introduce something a certain way and then I deliver value afterwards they associate the introduction with the value and guess who else?

13:54They associate that with you

13:59And so for those of you who are concerned, you can add variety to this. And I want to show you a cool little real world example of this. So the Simpsons has the longest standing show to my knowledge that has existed on television. And the introduction is the same. Now, Bart would be like 70 by now or whatever his actual age would be if it was actually humans, but it isn't right. And every introduction has Bart at some point in detention, writing something on the board. For those of you don't know The Simpsons, every one of the introductions actually changes.

14:36Every one of them. And so they still have the introduction that has all the positive associations with the funny times and the humor and the laugh that you've had with the show, but they introduce a tiny bit of variety into them to keep it interesting. And then what happens is people look forward to these introductions because they want to find the Easter egg. The real fans now get catered to, and the new fans don't know about it yet, but they will. And so now you actually serve both sides of the audience, the people who know you and the people who are just coming cold. And so that's it. Small variation, same introduction.

15:14You let the new people in, and you give something to the people who already know you. So title it like they don't know you. Introduce yourself. Say why they should listen. Prioritize the content that makes sense for strangers. Deprioritizing the vlogs, the hot takes, the opinions. Because if you can serve both audiences, serve both. Let the new people in. Rather than have a wall they have to jump over. Let them in on the joke. Fully explain the references that you make. Make all jokes, inside jokes for everyone. And then finally, mentally act as though you're always talking to a stranger. Because if the content does well, you are.

15:55at least that's what I'm going to be doing. And so that's the six big change that we're doubling down on. And so now that we cover those changes in my strategy, I just want to get real for a second. Everything has a cost. And it's not that other types of media or other topics or other formats don't work. Obviously, we had a smorgasbord. We had a huge variety, a cornucopia, myriad content types that we did over the last 40-ish months. And obviously, we had 7.8 million subscribers and 2 billion views during that time. period in a niche audience of business owners, which is pretty good. And so it's not to say that other things don't work.

16:32I'd even say that my mess ups also work to a small degree. It's just that they didn't work as well as something else might have. And so the game, at least as I see it in entrepreneurship, is figuring out what's my biggest bang for buck, right? What's the content that gets me the most of everything? Because you only have limited resources. You have time, money, energy, you put it into your team, and that goes onto social media or the media that you market on. and then that has output. And so if you can become more efficient with the inputs you get, you get more output on the other side. And so the question becomes, with the resources I have, how can I maximize the number of the right people who find out about my stuff?

17:09And so this is something that I live by. Anything works better than nothing. So raise your hand right now if you haven't made a piece of content in 90 days. Okay, just do something. Because if you do something, you will do better than what you're currently doing.

17:26Two, some things work better than others. And three, nothing works forever. And so the requirement of the entrepreneur is to start doing something, see what works better, and then do as much of that as they possibly can for as long as they can until it slows down and then figure out what the next thing to do is. And then do as much as they can of that.