Want to be a better creator in 2025? THIS is the episode for you | Aldar Experts event

0:00This is the GaryVee Audio Experience.

0:31getting into the Q &A and really answering a lot of the questions in this audience, but I will frame up my conversation in the macro and the micro of what I see is the opportunity for most people in this room. And when I say macro, micro, what I'm referring to is you've had the luxury to hear Ryan speak and I didn't get the luxury of catching the talk, but watching him build his brand over the last half decade and interacting with him quite a bit in New York, if he was talking about building personal brand, that's obviously incredibly important, but clearly he had a very different path than the majority of this room because 99.9 % of this room is not gonna end up on a hit television show at the height of cable consumption for a decade to get that level of awareness.

1:30The majority of you would have to go down the path that I've gone through over the last 15 years, which is creating your own creative and content and using the free distribution of social media to build that brand. And I'm gonna go into that a little bit because the most interesting part for me being in social media creative for the last 17 years is how much it's changed in the last 24 months and what that means for everyone here. To give you the cliff notes and the preview, for 2006 to 2009, there was an incredible land grab of attention with early Facebook and Twitter that I and others took advantage of.

2:15That got harder as the world started to figure it out. Over the last 24 months, over the last 36 months, the TikTok-ification of every social media platform has changed everything. There are literally people in this room who've never produced content for social media that can next week make a single video and start a completely different path of growth in their career. And that's pretty remarkable. That hasn't been the case for the last 10 plus years. And that's something every single person in this room needs to take very seriously. But we'll go to that in a minute. that to me is the micro. The micro is how do you make content?

2:58Like what kind of content? Which platforms should you be producing for? What content works on which platform? That's the micro. The macro that I want to talk to everybody about in this room is none of you have a chance of succeeding in the biggest opportunity you have which is building your own brand and leveraging that against your ambitions. if you don't have the macro pieces in place. The macro pieces in place are strictly mindset and perspective, strictly. The reality of how life works, everyone's ambition here business-wise is completely dictated by what's going on inside of them emotionally.

3:42There's no chance you're gonna work hard enough, produce good enough content, or anything else that's required to achieve what you want unless you're in a good place. It's as simple as that. I've done this for a very, very long time and the reality is it's not sustainable unless you've got solid foundation. It's no different than building a home. The things you all sell, it doesn't matter how well you decorate the living room or how nice the color of the paint is in the master bedroom, right? If you do not have steel and concrete that holds up the building. The steel and concrete for every single human here is their emotional stability and what they actually feel.

4:29And so the thing that I've been fascinated by was I didn't realize why all my businesses were working in my 20s and 30s until I went a little further on my journey. I am the byproduct of incredible mothering. I am lucky that I had a world class mother who built accountability and self esteem in me which made me completely capable of doing everything that I've wanted to do in my business career not everybody is as lucky as I am with the luck of the draw of who their mother or father or circumstances were I was lucky that I was born in the Soviet Union and came to America and we had nothing and had to grow up grinding it out because I never was able to form entitlement because nothing ever came easy to me.

5:24These are just the circumstances of all of our lives one way or another. But before we get into how you're gonna sell more stuff or build your business, you've gotta actually be in a place of asking yourself, are you emotionally capable, the macro? Are you emotionally capable to deal with it? because the biggest issue, the single biggest issue is the single biggest opportunity all at the same time for the reality of this room. The biggest opportunity on earth for every broker that exists is making content on social media at scale. Period. Right now, in 2023, as we sit here in this room, there is no second option compared to the truth that is, if you sit in here and are capable of producing 15 to 25 pieces of content a day across four to five platforms a day, that the business ambitions you have will come true.

6:36The problem is, the reason most people don't produce 15 to 25 pieces of content a day is not because you have no time. If you understood that it was the single biggest reason that you would make more money, you would find time. If you understood that you would four, five, 10, 15, 100x your revenue or your sales or your commissions, the dollars in your bank account, you would find two hours a day to do it instead of having a two-hour meeting. You would find it. The reason most people do it, or don't do it, excuse me, is because they can't deal with the emotional feedback that comes with putting yourself out there.

7:18The single reason that this room, I find it very hard to believe that this room in Q1 of 2023 does not understand that social media output is a driver of business. I don't believe there's a single person that has come to this conference that does not understand that to be true. if that's true, and if you came to this conference, I think about this all the time, why are you even here right now? We're in the middle of the week, in the middle of the afternoon, why would you even be here? The answer to that always for me is because you're ambitious, because you want something to happen, that you're putting in the work to make your thing be better.

8:08If that's true, that means that everybody in here is in play to execute the model that creates the growth. This is what brings me to the biggest thing that I want to talk about in this room, which is insecurity. The biggest reason 98 % of this room will listen to everything I'm about to say, will do the Q &A, it has complete historical affirmation to be true, and you will leave this conference and still not do it, in the face of the truth of it working, is 100 % predicated on insecurity. To me, this is the biggest pandemic in the world that many of you will not double your business this year because you are not capable of people leaving negative comments on your social media account.

9:05To me, the craziest thing when it comes to business is that people in this room will not go and figure out how to make content, not because you don't know who to hire, not because you don't know where to post, not because you don't know what to post. All of the things that are disguised when we get into the Q &A, when you're like, ah, Gary, what platformer? Who should I hire? What kind of camera should I use? The camera that is on your phone right now is a better camera than Hollywood was using 20 years ago. The camera's not your problem. The finding the employee to post for you is not your problem.

9:51The problem is the macro. I promise you this. The problem is the macro. You're scared to post because you're worried about what other people think. You're worried what your buddy thinks about you doing it. You're worried about somebody saying you don't look good. you're worried about that your makeup's not right, that your muscles aren't good, that your face isn't right, that you are scared. Fear is the biggest way to not make money. Fear is the biggest way to not achieve what you want. I find this very ironic and I'll tell you why. The whole world is scared to post because of insecurity in comments, but I find that funny every time I talk to real estate brokers because brokers do something that most people are scared of which is sell.

10:49Most people are scared to sell. Most people are scared to ask for the listing. Most people are scared to sell. Most people are scared to sell. This group in this incredible arena has already crossed the chasm into an area that most people are scared to do. As a matter of fact, many of you try to encourage or you razz your friends for being scared to sell because you're not scared to sell. What's most interesting to me though is selling is very important. But sales never beats branding. Branding always beats sales. Sales is just bad branding. Most of you, when I look at this crowd, this is a very well-dressed, attractive, put-together crew.

11:43The amount of brands that are being worn right now by people in front of me that I can just see in the lights is very high from handbag to tie to suit to dress. Nobody sold you those products. You went and bought them because they built brand. the biggest way for everyone here to and what's double important in this conversation is the following I've spoken to brokers pretty much my whole career I've done events of this nature around the world but I think everybody sitting here the stakes are double high comparison to what I've done in the past because you're in a market post pandemic that is one of the few flourishing markets in the entire world.

12:37You can literally be living almost everywhere else on earth and it is less exciting than being a broker in the UAE. We need to clap that up for a second.

12:57By show of clapping loudness, how many people agree with what I just said? Please go. Should we listen?

13:08If that's true, if it is true that by the luck of God you have found yourself in the prime of your career in a market that has ridiculous upside for looking around probably the majority of the rest of the people's careers here, why would you not execute to maximize the opportunity? And the simple answer is, you fear what people are gonna say. This is like, as you can tell by the way I'm setting this up, this is like incredibly emotional to me. I am sitting here looking at thousands of people when I know 98 % of you will not do what I'm about to say. Every single person here needs to make a dramatically bigger commitment to producing videos, pictures, and written words on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and YouTube tomorrow.

14:21Let me tell you why. I don't know if you've heard, it's free. I want to say this one more time. I love when people are like, Gary, Facebook shadow banned me. My Instagram, I'm not getting as many views. I'm shadow banned. I'm like, you're not shadow banned. You just suck. These platforms are free. People get upset and I'm not getting as many views. This is why the world has become so entitled. The biggest issue in the world is entitlement. People literally think about this. I'm 47. I used to pay for full page ads in newspapers. I used to pay for radio spots. I used to pay for local TV ads. These platforms are free.

15:13Free. We have become so accustomed to it. We now blame these platforms and the algorithm because your Instagram post doesn't get as many likes as it did two years ago. And instead of blaming yourself because you're posting the same crap over and over, you blame the free platform. Every time I have these kind of talks or conversations one-on-one or with a smaller group, the amount of people that are capable of having accountability of what they're doing about it is almost non-existent. on a free platform. By the way, as many of you know, the platforms are starting to change a little bit. We're starting to see that they might not be free.

16:00We're starting to see that Twitter wants to charge this much a month, or Facebook wants to charge that much a month. We are living, my friends, through the greatest era of free exposure of all time in the history of the world. In the history of the world, individual small businesses or human beings have the ability to get free exposure, attention. You know, the single most important asset on earth, attention. Free. In this group, free attention in the single most flourishing market on earth. you can imagine the energy that I had in my body flying out here from Manhattan for this talk I'm going to talk to thousands of people who are in the best market in what they do facing the next decade during the most scaled free attention platform in the history of marketing all at the same time and yet 98 % of the people in this room won't actually do anything about it.

17:17All based on the fact that they are insecure of not getting enough likes or getting a negative comment from somebody. This is what's called a conundrum. Hey everybody, actually, if you're a really hardcore listener and you know I never do this, I'm sorry to be jumping in the middle of the podcast, but the truth is I'm like shitting the bed on this. everybody else is getting people to review on Spotify and Apple and like the Vayner Nation does none of that because I've never asked. So if this podcast has ever meant anything to you please go to Spotify or Apple right now and leave a review. By the way even if you give me a one star review because you think it's shit I respect it but just leave a review, an actual review.

17:57Four or five stars and the actual details of why yeah that would mean something for me so thanks. Now back to the podcast. My friends let me help all of you that struggle with people that leave negative comments. I'm gonna make this very simple. You are upset when you post and someone says, you're ugly, you're not smart, this is stupid, you should get off of this. Your friend texts you and say, you look silly, you're not good on video, whatever it is. I just want you to think about this for a second. Somebody on the receiving end of your content in their feed decided to take their own time and leave a comment to tell you that you're not good.

18:39think about this you should not be upset for yourself you should be upset for them could you imagine how miserable of a life it is that you are so hurting inside that you need to go find somebody else's content and leave a comment to hurt them to drag them down to your pain this is something you have to wrap your head around It will change the paradigm of how you view this. We must leave this conference understanding this final truth that the biggest growth in this industry around the world are from the individuals who are outproducing their competitors in social media content. Whatever your feelings are about these platforms, you don't like your kids are on it, you don't like TikTok you don't like this you think it's silly the market does not care what your opinion is of these platforms the market is just acting like the market and we must we must take advantage of this do we understand?

19:53cool

19:57so then I'm going to double click into this let me talk to you about a couple things that I would like to see a lot more people do. How many people here by show of hands, I'm gonna want you to raise your hand. Now remember, please don't lie, because if I see somebody raising their hand that I'm not sure about, I might jump out and we might check you. And we're gonna record it, and if you're lying, I'm gonna put it on my social media and shame you to the whole world. So by show of hands, by show of hands, how many people here make YouTube shorts every day? raise your hand.

20:38One, two, three, four. Four people in this room make YouTube shorts every day. Let me explain to you why this is a major opportunity. YouTube shorts, unlike Instagram reels, unlike TikTok, YouTube shorts has a very unique thing that I think is gonna matter to this room. YouTube, as some of you may know, not most, because people don't think of it that way, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, behind Google. Now, Bing with ChatGPT may start growing and we'll watch it, but YouTube. People go to YouTube to search because some people like myself learn more from audio and video than they do from written words.

21:29Cool? YouTube shorts if you are smart and you're making a piece of video like Instagram and TikTok but when you name the video you think about naming it for people that are searching not just for a clever naming for the video unlike Instagram and TikTok that YouTube short can live for a very long time I would argue if I'm selling homes if I'm selling commercial real estate, if I'm selling, YouTube Shorts needs to become a major part of the place you go. How many people here are making TikToks or Instagram every day? Raise your hands. Raise it high. Okay, so in general, we have a major problem in this room.

22:18But for the people that just raised their hands, just taking the video that you're doing on Instagram and TikTok and then bringing it over to YouTube Shorts and just naming it smartly from a search perspective will disproportionately grow the opportunity of your awareness and branding. What's more concerning to me is I don't know if this room is shy or like people didn't raise their hands, but again, going back to the opening rant, we need to outproduce a lot more than what the room just did. I will forever struggle with this conversation and I genuinely implore everyone to get a heck a lot more serious about this.

23:04What's happening is my biggest fear is that a lot of people here in the next three to five years will regret not taking advantage of this era because the world will move. As a matter of fact, this is a fairly young audience but how many people here do Google AdWords listings and run ads on Google for their listings. Please raise your hands. Again, pretty small. Jesus, I'm moving here and I'm going to sell homes. The opportunity is very clear. Google AdWords was a very big tactic that in the mid-2000s, early 2000s, that I would speak to in events like this that people were not taking advantage of.

23:49It has become much more of a standard practice around the world and a lot of people took advantage of it, but it costs a lot more to do the same thing. The thing that I'm really hyper-focused on in this room is letting and forcing and motivating people to get serious about social media content while it's so underpriced. On an everyday basis, on an everyday basis, more and more people are coming in and producing and it throws off the supply and demand, which makes it harder to go. Four years ago, five years ago, when I was yelling and screaming about TikTok, very few people were doing it, but everyone who did do it would get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views because there was less people producing, but there was a lot of attention.

24:37We continue to sit in rooms like this and say, well, I can't sell my luxury homes on TikTok, and I continue to get emails every day from people who are selling their luxury homes on TikTok. The amount of people that decide about certain things like this without ever trying it is fascinating to me. To me, this is a very unique time in the history of selling stuff because of the distribution. When I go back, for the many in here that don't know my story, my dad, I was born in the USSR, I come to the US, my dad was a stock boy in a liquor store and then he eventually owned his own small liquor store.

25:21I was very motivated by being the oldest son and wanting to build my dad's business. When I came into my dad's business full time in 1998, the business was doing$3.7 million in revenue. Five years later, the business was doing almost$70 million in revenue. We took no investment, no credit line, no cash infusion. This hyper growth was based on one thing, which is what I've been talking to you about for the last 25 minutes, which is the following. The number one way to grow anything when it comes to business is being the best at understanding where the underpriced attention of the world is. I'm gonna say it again because I want everybody to understand this.

26:01The number one way to grow a major business, top line revenue, sales, is to understand where the underpriced attention is. In 1998 for my dad's store, that was email. When I did email marketing in 1998, 1999, 95 % of the people on our newsletter opened the email. Today, if you get 30%, you're a genius. In 2000, Google AdWords came out and I bought every wine term on Google AdWords for 5 and 10 cents a click. In 2006, when YouTube came out, I started making videos about wine when nobody was doing it. My career for the last 25 years has been buying or getting free underpriced attention on every single platform that's come out.

26:51No question, the only way outside of business development deals behind the scenes that anyone here can 2, 3, 7, 12, 15x their business is by executing an underpriced attention. The second this audience really grasps the concept of underpriced attention is the second that they will grow. The problem is underpriced attention always sits in the stuff of today. And most people, when they want to build a business, look at yesterday. And as a matter of fact, they look at tomorrow. I've had more people ask me about, Gary, should I list homes on the metaverse than I've had people figuring out how to make perfect content on YouTube shorts.

27:39We are obsessed with tomorrow. We are romantic about yesterday and most everyone does not execute in today. My obsession of this keynote and this Q &A is to get the majority of this room very focused on today. Today, the people that are being affected by information to make a decision to consider a purchase is predominantly happening on social media. We continue to underestimate it. We continue to politicize it. We continue to have opinions about it. But the reality is it is the currency of attention. I'll give you another one that's very fascinating in this industry. How many people here by show of hands, this one will surprise me, are producing content every day on LinkedIn?

28:32Very nice. Solid. For me, LinkedIn, for a lot of you, is a humongously untapped social network. LinkedIn in the last seven to eight years has evolved to look a lot more like Facebook than look like a place where you go and find people to hire. What's super interesting about LinkedIn is the following. the mentality of when somebody is going through their feed on LinkedIn is very different than when they're going through their link on Instagram. The psychology of who that person is, all of us are a different version of our own selves depending on what stream we're going through. When you're going through Facebook, you're in a friends and family mindset.

29:23When you're on TikTok, you're in an entertainment mindset. When you are on LinkedIn, you are in a business mindset. I find that this audience making a commitment to videos, listings, pictures, audio in LinkedIn would be very surprised where they find themselves. Look, I come here, I talk in this setting, I'm looking at the crowd right now and trying to process what are people thinking and the only thing that happens in my mind is what sentence can I say to get people to start making? The reason I start now with the macro is I've learned in the last decade it has to do with insecurity. It has to do with judgment on oneself.

30:13I get it and it's very challenging. I don't think it's easy to just, I come in and say stop being insecure and tomorrow you're like I'm not insecure. but I think it starts with understanding that's why you're not posting. Number two, I focus on the tactics. Here's a very important part for everyone if they're gonna be successful at this game. A lot of people here do not want to make video. They don't feel comfortable, which is fine. My preference is you do. Video outperforms every other medium. It's the way the world works. however if you are not comfortable on video please be self-aware and find your own medium for many of you writing which is more this than this is very acceptable a photo and writing on a post is very acceptable audio is something very few people are doing literally taking your phone hitting record on the record and talking what you would do on video, but you don't have to be visual.

31:22For a lot of people, it means you don't have to get your lighting right, your makeup right, your outfit right. You could just literally do it as you're thinking it through in the car, the office, or in bed. But recording your thoughts on why this is a great listing and all the things you would say to a human being in an open house and putting it on recording and then just uploading the recording with a still picture is remarkably, remarkably right. Before I go into Q &A, I want to talk to you about a framework for the people here that are ready to make the jump into what I'm talking about, which is the concept of pack, platforms and culture.