How I Gained 7.8 Million Followers In 40 Months (6 Key Lessons)

let's rock so you guys want to hear something absolutely insane well in the last 40 months my YouTube grew from zero to 2.23 million subscribers my Instagram Grew From 7,000 to 2 and a half million sub subscribers followers you get the

idea my LinkedIn went from Zer to 324,000 followers My Tik Tok went from zero to $856,000 followers my Twitter SLX the artist formerly known as Twitter went from0 to 600

17,000 my Facebook which we just started went from 0 to 25,00 there we go going in big Facebook my podcast went from 3,000 downloads to 25 million downloads and my email subscribers went from 0 to 700,000 for a grand total of two billion

Impressions over that time period and 7.8 million new subscribers and for a grand total of a million copies sold of my book for those of you who are like well what does that mean and I'll get to that in a second so

in 40ish months all of that happened and I show all of this is proof to start this to show one thing is that this works and you can build a brand without

babes without stunts or kittens and I start this proof because lots of people talk about stuff that they haven't done and teach a lot of sucky fluff as a result you can see the man there he's saying the truth this fluff sucks and I refus to do

that and so before we got the two billion Impressions and the 7.8 million subscribers it wasn't like this because 40 months ago I started with zero subscribers and a big quote fancy plan and my fancy plan had Three Steps

step one make as much good stuff as I could step two post it everywhere I could and step three learn as much as I could and after 40ish months $4 million in team equipment

vendors Studios and software a thousand hours of me on camera recording and 35,000 pieces of content let me say that again 35,000 as in count to a th000 and then do that 35 times in a

row I learned a lot of What Not to do but I did learn six things that made money and grew my brand that you can use today now what I'd like to do is for the remainder of the presentation save you

the three and a half years and $4 million so you can just get the lessons without the scar so that little box is our box of six lessons cool all right let's rock so here are the six changes that we observed over

the last four 40ish months that worked number one going from edutainment to education number two for us to for you number three wide to narrow number four

views to revenue number five shorts to Longs number six assume more to assume nothing now most of those I promise you I will explain and if it looks like I think I know what that means believe me there's a lot more underneath of it so let's start with the first one

edutainment to education so I see content in three buckets on one extreme you've got entertainment which is the entire point of entertainment just to define the term is to get people to watch the only point

of the entertainment is to just get people to consume it that's it if it accomplishes that it has succeeded on the other side you have education where the point of education is to get someone to change what they do right if you try and teach someone

how to answer a phone and then in the same situation the phone rings and they don't do something and then after they watch you do something they then change what they do in the phone rings the second time they have learned so the point is to change their behavior if educ if the video or the content does that then you succeeded at educating

them and lastly you have edutainment which has the point of both trying to teach and entertaining at the same time and to be clear it's less that you make entertaining content or that you make educational content it's more that you

make content and people are either entertained or educated as a result and so you can make one thing that entertains some people and then that

same thing educates other people and so I just want to make this very clear that you don't control the audience you make something and then education or entertainment occurs but for our purposes I'll Define the content category is the most common outcome of your content and so if a lot

of people are entertained then you've made entertaining content for the purpose of this presentation even if one or two people learn something so for example some creators might learn stuff from Mr BEAST's videos wow I learned how to make videos but the vast majority of people are entertained they watch just a

watch on the other hand Walla who's one of the number one Educators on YouTube you can even see the different looking feels and don't worry I'm going to get into that he may entertain some enthusiasts around that subject but mostly he educates

students and until recently I've been trying to figure this out I've spent a lot of time really working through this and so I have videos in all three buckets I have entertainment videos where the point is to get people to watch I have edutainment videos where we try and teach and entertain at the

same time and then we have education videos where we just want to change people's behavior we just want to teach them something and so the first change number one that we see over lots of the data I'll support in a second is that I'm going all in on

education for three reasons number one is that when we looked at all of our data All Views are not created equal I'll dive into that in a second number two is I like educational videos and number three is I like people who like educational videos too Andor people who educate themselves people who want to

learn and so let me explain these so all views are not created equal so there's this Theory and this is going to this will be one that's going to Rattle some cages there's a theory that media works like a funnel in fact the vast majority of marketing infographics and things

like that almost all are funnels and the theory goes like this you make entertaining content and then the theory states that people who watch that content then we'll go to more educational content okay

sounds simple enough we've got something wide we got something narrow fantastic but in our experience in my experience and based on our book sales based on our email optins and based on the applications we receive at acquisition.

comom to become portfolio companies it works much more like this which is that entertainment people want more entertainment content and education people want more say it with me education

education content and so in other words these people do not become these people not in any appreciable rate that we would build a business around and they certainly don't read the books Jo join the email list or apply to become portfolio

businesses so if I want more of these people then they deserve the stuff that they value and so that's the first reason that I'm doubling down on education All Views are not created equal number two the next is that I simply like doing it

all right so I do believe that you should try and do stuff that you like doing and if it happens to also be in align with your goals awesome it's much tougher when the thing you like doing isn't align with your goals but in this instance when I got that first piece of data I was like thank God because this is the stuff I like making most all right and so when I talk to

Ideal customers in my mind they are business owners and business interested people because if me and anybody who's close to me would probably attested this is that like if you hang out with me for any amount of time we will probably talk about business because it's what I love

talking about I eat it I sleep it I drink it I work seven days on it and like I skip holidays for it because for me it is the holiday so this is what I like doing and this is what the people that I like serving also

like and so they like it better too and this is where got confusing for me leading up to this and why this is so important is that it got very confusing when you have so many people saying man I really like the entertaining content and this is where it gets difficult this

is where you have to read between the lines of the comments rather than just reading the comments themselves all right because the thing is for us or at least for me they weren't necessarily who I was trying to attract again there's nothing wrong with that hey if I could serve the whole world I

will but I know that I tend to do better serving people who want to educate themselves than people who just want to watch or consume just for the sake of it and so that's why I'm debling down on going from edutainment some enter edutainment some entertainment to

education so that's number one so let's talk about change number two that we saw going from for us to for you're like what does that mean let me explain so recently a mutual friend came to the headquarters and he said hey I've been consuming your stuff for years but recently I just haven't been watching as much and he said it offhandedly wasn't

like trying to smash my ego into bits and he failed at that but when he said it I really took it to heart right it was very gut-wrenching he said it just doesn't resonate as much I was like okay got it felt like a gut punch since he's the person I could help most this is a

business owner doing 10 million plus a year and I was like man well that sucks and that's when I realized that reading the comments led me a little bit astray and for you it might be leading you astray and I'll give you some data to support that and so some

people loved our different styles but not the people that I ultimately wanted to help or am best suited to serve and so we realized that we were serving the wrong who and that had some very significant Downstream impacts on what

we made and how we made it so what is making for them or for business owners content really mean let me break this down into tactics all right so tactically it meant five things number one different packaging number two different

introductions number three different meat number four different visuals and number five different what I'll call pre-work all right so let's start with number one so the difference between these two thumbnails is going from vague

to clear all right so if I looked at all the stuff that we did in the past if I said what is the video on the left about you'd probably be like I a rule of some sort that might have to do with money not sure if I said what's the what's the video on the right the yellow background

video if I were to describe it I'd probably say a map or a blueprint or schematics of some sort that go from zero to a million okay well guess what the one on the right it's exactly that the one on the left has

nothing to do with what that thumbnail looks like and what do when people click on something that they don't know what it's about they have a smaller percentage of getting something they want than if you say this is what this is about and then they get exactly what they think it's

about so we're going from vague to clear in both what it looks like the thumbnails and what we say about it the headlines so that's number one from a packaging perspective that we will be changing Andor going more all in on and

I want to take a pause here for a second about this there was also a pervasive narrative in the marketing world is like you got to have curiosity you got to like you don't want to tell them everything you want them to be able to get no like if they want that thing they will click on that thing and then you just give them that thing

and that has been a very hard lesson for me to learn and so I share it with you now so the second is different introductions you guys feeling this okay good okay different introductions now this one is really big so going from

confirming the thumbnail or confirming the headline to proof and this is super important I'll explain the difference so a lot of the things that I learned like many of you if you are trying to get into content creation of any sort or media is that you look at the people who are who are the biggest right and so

often times the biggest people in media are entertainers now why is that because everyone gets value from entertainment but there is no one thing from an education perspective that can provide value to everyone why because everyone

already knows different stuff so if I educate a wide slice of people there's still already people who know that thing and then do not get value so entertainment by definition will always be greater or larger the followings for those people than people who educate there is no bones about it like it is

that way and so a lot of the lessons that entertainment teaches everyone listens to because they have the biggest followings but I don't think the actual tactics they subscribe or espouse are correct at a tactical level at a

principal level yes and so let me just say a second about what that principle is that the person who's going to consume the content we want to increase their perceived likelihood that they will get what they clicked so just like the headline and just like the

thumbnails now when they said in entertainment you want to confirm it well that's because most of the Sensational entertainment is something crazy and so the likelihood that someone just got the click so that they could not do that crazy thing is pretty high and so if you want people to watch you