RORY (00:00) A creator’s favorite form of creative avoidance is creating. A creator’s favorite form of creative avoidance is creating. They love to create, create, create, create, and they never tell anyone they exist. And if you’re not willing to go chase and you’re not willing to talk about, if you don’t care so passionately about your calling that you’re not going to share it with anyone, like you’re going to struggle. What if all of the personal brands that you follow, the ones that seem to be building and growing effortlessly, the ones that are landing the big stages and the big speaking engagements, the big book deals, getting lots of followers, growing their online presence, what if there was a formula that they were following? Well, here’s the thing, they are. Almost all of them. are very similar patterns and we’re going to talk about them today. Whether those creators know that they’re doing it or not. There are several identifiable, duplicatable systems and formulas that any personal brand can apply. And that’s what we’re here to pull the curtain back on and expose and share with you today. Welcome to the Wealthy and Well-Known Podcast. I’m joined by my wife, business partner, best friend, ⁓ and the CEO of Brand Builders Group, AJ Vadant. AJ (01:14) All right, so here’s the first question of the day that we’re going to talk about. What makes a personal brand go viral? And is there a formula that you can actually follow? RORY (01:27) Yeah, so I would say that the formula for going viral is watching the formulas that go viral. So basically when you see a video go viral, what we’re seeing today is that right now creators are watching the hook structures, the formats and the patterns that when a video goes viral, it’s because of the structure of the video and the format of the video as much as the framework of the video, right? It’s not just what you’re saying. It’s not just what you’re teaching. It’s more about how you’re presenting that idea, how you reveal it, how you ⁓ unroll it, and even how you edit the video. So what’s happening is people are seeing a video go viral and then they’re just replicating those formulas. AJ (02:18) Let’s pause there. Let’s talk about what are some of those formulas. RORY (02:21) Yeah, so I mean, there’s there’s hundreds of these hook formulas, right? And people talk about them. But like one that’s really popular right now is, if I had to start over from scratch today, and I wanted to achieve blank, here’s exactly what I would do. Right? That’s a really, a really, a really classic one that’s like going viral right now. Another thing that is going viral right now is ⁓ when people are putting multiple videos on the screen. So it’s like, here’s an example of this, here’s an example of this, here’s an example of We had a video go massively viral, hundreds of thousands of views, ⁓ thousands and thousands of comments and stuff. And it’s exactly that. Here’s this, here’s this, here’s this, here’s this. And it’s not the quality of the content. It’s not the framework. It’s the format. I’m not sure how I feel about all of this, right? But a lot of, think, what is important to understand and what we do at brand builders group right is we’re dissecting and understanding a lot of these patterns not just for going viral on video going viral on videos like one of our our least valuable concerns because it’s not necessarily what drives revenue and trust long term but it is a great example of to go everything we do at brand builders group where you go how to become a best-selling author How do you sell high dollar offers? How do you fill out rooms? How do you speak on the biggest stages? It’s a formula. It’s always a formula. It’s all about pattern recognition. And so I think it’s one of the things you could say, what do you really do at Brand Builders Group is like we identify the patterns, we then reconstruct them in a pragmatic way that anyone can follow. And then we teach them in all these different areas of a business. AJ (03:59) So I think what would be really helpful for everyone listening, me included, I think one of the things that a lot of people talk about are the patterns. They talk about the algorithm. They don’t really tell the end user like, go try this, go do this. And I think a part of it is you have to try many things to see what’s gonna click with your audience. But if someone was listening today going, okay, great, give me the three formulas to go and try online, what would they be? So I think you listed two of them, right? if I had to start all over I would do this. Yeah. The second one would be multiple screens of going like give people the images of multiple things that you’re showing all at the same time. RORY (04:41) So the real answer to your question is the one thing that I would do is I would follow the top creators in your space. I would look at which of their videos are over indexing, meaning they have way more views than they had followers, right? So this is an important thing is to go, if a video has 100,000 views, is that an over indexing video? And the answer is, it depends on how many followers they have. If you have 5 million followers in your video, got 100,000 views, not so much. 5000 followers and you got 100,000 views. That is a rich, there’s a rich idea, there’s a rich format, there’s a rich opportunity there. So the the, the formula, it’s not the best thing is not for me to just give you a formula. It’s different in every space. The the granular overarching formula is follow the top creators, pay attention to what’s working for them, and then replicate your own version of that. And that is particularly in the space of viral online video, we’re talking carousel, well, not even video, but just carousel posts, reels, YouTube, you’re going to see if you watch closely all the top creators, that is what they are doing. And it’s a fascinating study because it tells you that the psychology is very consistent of the human brain and very repeatable. And so you can go I can watch what a fitness trainer did to go viral. And mostly what we’re copying is the hook structure the first three seconds. Now when we teach what is a hook, a hook is anything you do or say in the first three seconds to get people to keep watching. That’s how we define it because I’ve never seen anyone define it. Right. So that’s how we define it. And a great one example of a hook structure that we teach is the I want blank test is to say how would your viewer answer the question I want blank and then tell them in this video, I’m going to teach you and fill in whatever however they would answer the I want blank. That would be a generic hook structure that works really well that if you don’t want to do all this other stuff, you go, just use the I want blank test. But now people are even using AI to track all of these patterns and go, this woman hosts a cooking show and she said, you know, here’s five things I would have learned, I wish I knew when I first started cooking. And you take out the word cooking, but here’s five things I wish I learned when I first started speaking. And then that’s it. So the psychological structures, it’s about the pattern is noticing the pattern. AJ (07:15) So I think one of the things that would be helpful is to talk about what are some of the other formulas, right? So you’ve got a format formula, which is kind of what you’ve been talking about and the different types of format. Would you say that there’s any specific formulas to follow when it comes to duration or any way to end the video, captions or some other, are there some other formulas that we should talk about that would be helpful for anyone listening today? RORY (07:41) ⁓ There’s one other very advanced thing that I would share that I think is universal enough to everybody listening and that is that if you have four parts in a video, okay, so say you have four points, it’s a YouTube video and there’s four points. Point number one should be shorter than point number two. Point number two should be shorter than point number three. Point number three should be shorter than point number four, meaning When people feel like they’re making progress early, they’re more likely to stay. If they feel like it’s dragging on, they tend to leave. But if you go, okay, you hook them in the first three seconds, and then what you’re seeing in a lot of these other YouTube videos is hooks within the video. So the most important hook is the opening hook. But then you say, hey, you mentioned something like, there’s three ways to create You know, there’s three patterns that every creator needs to know to go viral. And the first one’s right now. And I’ll tell you the second one in a sec in just a minute. That is a hook inside of a hook. It’s going I’ll tell you the second one in a second. I’ve just told them about something else that is about to come. And that’s what kind of the definition of a hook is. So that is another sort of psychological pattern that we’re seeing pretty consistently is this idea that you’ve got shorter points earlier in the video. There’s something going on that when people feel like they’re making progress, like if you can get them through the first few chapters, then they’re likely to stay longer. And then they give you more permission to give you more of their time basically as time goes on. AJ (09:21) What about anything in your opinion with reels versus stories versus carousels versus all the other things when you think about different formulas patterns and formats? RORY (09:34) Yeah, I mean, another carousel thing that’s going viral, and by the way, I would not consider myself an expert on this. This is not where we spend a lot of our time, which is what I think we can get to is to go, a good question is to go, why don’t we spend more of our time studying this stuff? And because this, lot of this stuff to me points more to vanity metrics than it does to profitability. But inside of this area, which we do spend some time studying, another really common thing that’s performing really well right now is your backstory. Like your personal story. People are tuning in to where did you start and if it’s a carousel post, it’s like pictures, right? So I’m working on one of these right now where it’s like I’m taking pictures from all of these different areas of my life, where the picture is worth a thousand words. And it says, here’s where I started. Here’s what I wanted to do. Here’s where I struggled. This is what was low. This is what I did. This is what I learned. Here’s what happened. And now I can teach you comment blah, blah, blah below for the opt in those personal stories are performing super well right now. I think about that’s a great carousel post formula. And I think the other thing that is performing well, you know, lot of people will say you don’t sell on your feed, you sell in your stories. That’s where and really we say the dollars are in the DMS. That’s really where sales happens. But like even lead generation happens more in the stories. So you attract them with the content on your feed, you nurture them inside of your stories and you convert them in your DMS or on a free call. But inside stories is a lot of where customer testimonials are being shared. That’s another really common thing of going you need one thousand customer testimonials, and you post a couple every day inside the stories. Because when people find you from your feed content, they go, wow, this was valuable, who is this person? And then they follow you closely, they go in your stories, and then they’re seeing, whoa, you’ve helped this person get a result, and this person helped them get a result, and this person helped get a result. And now I’m interested in engaging in potentially buying. AJ (11:42) So for the person who’s listening going, that feels like a lot of work. I felt like a lot to do. Uh, how, what do I, what, do you want me to do here? I have a, I have a full-time gig. I have a full-time job. Like who’s supposed to film me? Who’s supposed to edit all this? Who’s supposed to know all these formulas? Who’s supposed to know all these formats? What would you say to that? RORY (12:02) I would say yeah, you’re right. It’s a lot of work. Like there’s no free lunch as grandma used to say, right? Like everything that looks effortless is not effortless. So there is a whole lot of people getting sold a bunch of garbage because on the surface it’s like, ⁓ you know, I’m a stay at home. I’m a mom of four and I run my own business and I do it all through Instagram and AI comment this below and sign up for my webinar. And then they’ll buy something that’s just like garbage because the reality is this is someone who is working 12 hours a day or they have a team or they’re spending a bunch of money on ads or like it’s like there there is their excellence is never an accident. It’s never an accident. AJ (12:46) I would say even that it’s not even excellence. It’s like even the effort and all of this is not to be taken lightly to come up with the content to learn the formulas to just even follow the other top creators in your space. All of that is an extraordinarily large commitment of time, energy, money and resources. If this is what you’re really trying to do. And I think that’s one of the things I just kind of wanted to highlight is And I love the idea of like, yes, follow the top people in your field and then realize as you’re following them, they have a team. Like they have someone following them. ⁓ They have video editors, they have graphic designers. Like that is, it’s not apples to apples. RORY (13:31) So I would love to talk about this question. How do I know if my personal brand is actually working? What metrics should I actually be tracking? So if we’re saying like, look, I can show you a list of people who’ve gone viral who struggle to pay their bills. And I can show you a list of people who you’ve never seen a video of theirs online and they fly in private jets. And it’s just ironic the world that we live in is there’s a whole lot of like, you know, drawn to the vanity stuff. And so I think this is topic that we should talk about is what are the metrics that I should be tracking? What are the actual measurable KPIs that are going to lead to dollars? AJ (14:13) Well, ironically, none of those, in my opinion, would be found on social media. In my books, the actual metrics would be number of calls being generated and run, which could come from social media, but those are a lot harder to come by. RORY (14:31) But we would rather have a video with a hundred views that drove five free calls than a video with 50,000 views that drove no free calls. AJ (14:39) all day long, every day. It would be the number of clients being converted. It would be number of clients that are retaining. It’d be the number of referrals being sent by clients because then it’s like proof that your work is actually working. would count client testimonials as a KPI because it’s proof of what’s working. Number of presentations that you’re giving and presentations could be keynotes on stages, workshops in your local community, podcast interviews, it’s whatever you’re doing to get your message out into the world. ⁓ Those would be the actual metrics that I would be looking at. It’s like how many calls are being generated, calls being run, clients being converted, clients being retained, referrals being sent. And then on top of that, it would be like, what are all the other things you’re doing to generate the calls, which are your presentations? RORY (15:12) going on. Yeah, it’s funny, I literally just got off of a live training with our members. And I was we were talking about the success tracker. So this tool that we created that tracks basically the eight core metrics that every personal brand needs to drive for behavior, and then the four results that they measure. it’s it’s like, how many emails have you added to your list? So that that’s to me is like, the most digital thing to care about is like, how many email subscribers, but even that is super misleading, because it’s like, AJ (15:55) emails. RORY (16:04) you can add free emails all day from all over the place that like have nothing to do with the people that are actually going to do business with you. But that is a first metric. Sure. As going emails, then you know how many phone numbers you collect, how many free calls requested, how many free calls ran. And then it is presentations given referrals given referrals earned. And it’s like if you do those things, and you focus on you know, how many media pitches have you sent? those things will lead to actual money. It’s you getting in front of humans in more of an offline way or more of a longer form content way. I will say that I am being drawn more to YouTube is going. I think, you know, YouTube is really a place where trust can transfer because it’s long form content, right? And, and, you know, there was a study, I believe it was from Google that came out that said seven hours, people need to spend seven hours online with you before they actually would be willing to like, making an investment. And you know, in the world of YouTube, that might be like 10 to 14 videos in the world of reels. It’s like, it’s pretty much impossible to get to seven hours. mean, AJ (17:14) I that is one demographic that we should definitely be talking about. To not talk about it would be not fair. But I would just tell you, in my personal opinion, it’s like if someone who I do not go to YouTube or to social media to find experts, it’s like if I’m really looking for someone to hire, if I’m really going after that one, I’m going to ask for referrals from my network. So it’s going to be word of mouth. Or I’m going to read their book. And time-wise, It’s similar. It’s like the average book is six to seven hours in length. So whether I read it or I listen to the audio, but it’s like, if I’m really going to invest. thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not going to do it just off of social media content or even off of YouTube content. It’s not going to be just off of a podcast interview. It’s because I heard about someone that I, that I trust. Like I trust someone. I heard about someone else. I went then and investigated, found that they had a book or found that they had a free course. I’m tested that. Then I’m going to request a call. Like there’s a series of multiple things that can happen online and offline. But the thing that’s going to expedite all of those is that someone I trust said, this is who I trust. And that could be… someone that I already really like, know and trust as a personal friend. It could be someone as a thought leader that I’m an avid follower of and I just align with their content. But that’s gonna be the thing that’s gonna expedite it more than anything else. And those things can happen online and offline. But the first thing I’m gonna do before I invest tens of thousands of dollars, I’m like, do they have a book and I’m gonna go read it? RORY (18:53) Yeah, and I think, you know, this is a good question. How do, ⁓ excuse me, what is the difference between personal brand awareness and personal brand authority? And I think that’s part of what you’re talking about, right? Awareness is like, okay, a lot of people see me, but authority means people actually trust you enough to buy from you. And when you look at what are the resources, what are the assets that you can create that create personal brand authority that actually make people want to buy from you. The number one thing on the list, and this is in our national research studies, is 61 % of Americans say that testimonials from other customers is the most influential marketing asset that you have. The others would be a book, the other is you’re paid to speak on your topic, the other is you’re featured in media for your expertise, right? But when you look at followers, views, likes, all that stuff. much, much, much lower because you just you can game it, you can fake it, you can buy it. And we all know that and everybody is doing that. And so it’s different where it’s like, that’s why I think people have to spend seven hours with us online before they trust us. They have to spend much longer. Whereas we know that AJ (19:54) And we all know that. longer. RORY (20:11) you can do, we often say that the fastest way to take a complete stranger and turn them into a lifelong fan is a world-class one-hour presentation. We know that in an offline environment, the trust happens much, much faster. And so getting in front of humans and even like a live webinar is gonna be ⁓ such a more trust-accelerating experience than just a bunch of kind of like loosely connected videos. AJ (20:36) I agree. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really important. Micro content may get you followers. It may get you likes. It might get you shares. I have often found it’s not going to produce revenue. It’s like it’s a part of a formula. It’s like you’ve got to get them to start engaging with you. Then they have to start following with you. But then at some point you have to move them off the platform and into your email list so that you can then invite them to some longer engagement, a free webinar, a free audio thing, a free, whatever it is. And that relationship has got to continue into longer forms of content. uh, where there can be a real trust transfer, but that’s not going to happen in 30 to 60 second reels. RORY (21:20) Mm Yeah. By the way, so if you’re listening, if you haven’t yet, you can download our audiobook at free brand audiobook.com slash podcast. So wealthy and well known at the New York Times bestseller list last year, we give up. This is why we give our audiobook away for free is it’s like, it’s the fastest way for someone to figure out is brand builders a fit for me? And can they really help me? And do we kind of align philosophically? And that’s why we give it out because we know that if we haven’t met someone face to face, they got to spend some time and they’ll and and so we give that resource. AJ (21:51) And ironically, it’s about seven hours. Seven ⁓ hours. RORY (21:54) That’s right. Okay, here’s another question and then we’ll go to the community question. How do thought leaders consistently get booked, featured, and referenced without chasing opportunities? So, if we’re saying, okay, getting booked to speak on stages, getting cited in the media, ⁓ if those are things that lead to true authority, true trust, building transaction accelerating authority. How do thought leaders go get booked on those things without chasing opportunities? AJ (22:29) I would not necessarily say that thought leaders aren’t chasing opportunities. RORY (22:34) I’m gonna say the same. The air is in. AJ (22:38) the question. The errors in the question. like, I’m going, ⁓ no, if you want to be out there, then you are out there selling and promoting yourself. You are marketing of why you should be a trusted resource. You are selling yourself. You are pitching yourself. You are putting yourself out there and making yourself available. This whole idea of they’re not chasing opportunities. And somehow magically people are just emailing them and calling them and DMing them of going, I don’t, know you’ve never reached out to us before, but you know, I randomly found you. like that’s not not happening. And that’s the best RORY (23:13) The best speakers in the world are not sitting at home manifesting speaking gigs. They are out hustling, talking to people, writing books, producing content, building relationships, giving referrals, crushing it on stage, staying late, asking who do you know, sending pitches. Like if you are above chasing opportunities, you’re just never going to find opportunities. And like you might find a few, like a few may find you, but that is not going to be that’s not going to be the key to building your career. You want this, you have to go chase it. You have to go knock it. AJ (23:45) down. But I do think it’s one of those things like, you know, it’s, we say this all the time, the more you speak, the more you speak. And that’s because the more that you’re putting yourself out there, the more that you’re chasing the opportunities and saying, yes, when it’s right, and it’s aligned and putting yourself in the right opportunities and the right positions to be seen, to be noticed, to be heard, ⁓ then naturally, there is a momentum that starts to build. But again, like anything, when you stop it, the momentum stops too. So I do think there’s this interesting thing where it’s like, I only have to do this for a little while and then it’s going to catch. And it’s like, well, it could catch for a minute. But I can’t think of anyone that we know who is uber successful in this space doing something that has lasted over the decades that isn’t continually putting effort out there into keeping that engine moving. RORY (24:38) Totally. Even I remember in grad school, there was this this case study about Coca-Cola and they were talking about however many hundreds of millions and billions they spend on advertising every year. I think it was like 80 million dollars a year on advertising. is 20 years ago. But and somebody asked the CEO like, you’re Coca-Cola. You don’t need to advertise. Like, why do you spend 80 million dollars a year in advertising? He’s like, if we didn’t spend 80 million dollars on advertising, it’s like a car. No matter how good a car is, it still needs fuel to run. Like that is the fuel. This I’m going to say something that’s going to make a lot of people upset, but you heard it here first. A creator’s favorite form of creative avoidance is creating. A creator’s favorite form of creative avoidance is creating. They love to create, create, create, create, and they never tell anyone they exist. And if you’re not willing to go chase and you’re not willing to talk about, if you don’t care so passionately about your calling that you’re not going to share it with anyone, like you’re going to struggle. You’re just going to struggle. AJ (25:38) But that kind of comes back to what we said in the very beginning. It’s like, yeah, it does take a lot of time, energy, resources, and money to even figure out this social media thing. It’s like you do have to chase it, right? It is an engine that requires fuel. It requires your content, your creativity, your constant adjusting and flexing with what the algorithm is doing, what the market is doing. So again, the idea of set it and forget it, that’s just not the world that we’re living in online or offline. All right, let’s move on to the community question. Yes, so is one of our favorite parts of the show because we get to take a question that has been voted on by our BBG community. All of the questions were input, the community voted on. This was the top one and that’s what we’re gonna answer today. So here it is. Here’s what’s been selected. It’s from Tiffany. I’ve been posting content consistently for eight months. I have a clear niche. Decent production quality and I genuinely believe in what I’m teaching. But my growth has flatlined at around 800 followers and I can’t figure out what’s missing. I feel like I’m doing everything the gurus say to do, but something isn’t clicking. What’s the one invisible thing I’m probably not seeing that’s keeping me stuck at this ceiling? RORY (27:10) two ways to grow on social media, Tiffany. One is organic, the other is paid. The thing that you’re not seeing is what it actually takes to grow with either of those strategies. To grow organically requires a team or a lot of time, understanding and monitoring viral patterns. You’ve got to study what the other it’s not just what you’re saying. It’s not what you’re saying. It’s how you’re saying it is probably the format. It’s the presentation of it. It’s the structure. It’s the hook. And as AI takes off, more creators are soaking up more of the attention because they’re spending their time and they’re developing their teams developing tools to ⁓ reproduce those hook structures and those hook patterns. So that’s one thing. AJ (27:52) before you move on to the next, because mine is connected to that, it’s the key words in this that stuck out to me is for eight months. And there’s just a part of that where I know we all want it to be done now and eight months might feel like a long time, but it’s not. And eight months is just the beginning. And if you have gone from zero to 800 months, our 800 followers in eight months, that’s a hundred new followers every month. And if you’re not putting ad spin behind it and you’re like, I’m just doing what I’m figuring out. It’s like, I’d be pretty proud of that. All right. Like that, that’s not what you probably want to hear, but I would just encourage it’s like, if you had said, I’ve been doing this consistently in this way for this long for five years and I’m stuck, I’d be like, okay, there’s a problem, but this is eight months and nothing is going to have monumental explosive success. in this world at this current state of things with eight months. RORY (28:48) Yeah, that’s a good word. That’s a good word. The other way to grow on social media is paid. And that’s what you’re not seeing. The people who are growing massively are paying for it. They’re not buying fake followers, but they are paying lots of money. I’m talking tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. to show their content to more people. So they’re hiring expensive crews, they have expensive equipment, they have expensive, they got teams that are doing research, and then they’re building, they’re building teams, and they’re pushing money in the front because they have a business model in the back that pays for it. That’s a part of what we teach people how to do a brand builders group is to go, okay, how do you put $100,000 in the machine is you can do that as long as you know there’s 250,000 coming out the back end. Now we teach our clients to grow without paid ads, right? That’s not a huge part of our strategy until later later down the road. But that’s the thing that you’re not seeing when people are growing and it looks effortless. One, it’s not effortless. And two, there’s probably a ton of money. And many of the biggest creators, okay, not to expose the secret. Many of the biggest creators are spending millions of dollars just promoting and boosting and pushing their content in front of more people. And that’s going to continue to happen. And so the future of marketing is not about who has the best content. It’s about who has the most sophisticated system. And if you are someone who wants to learn how to build a more sophisticated system, go to freebrandcall.com slash podcast, you can request a call with our team, we’ll do an intake to see where you’re at and we’ll create a a custom journey for you of what you need to do to take the next steps to grow your business and also to determine if we might be a fit as a partner to help you in that journey. But it is frustrating and it is discouraging and it’s hard and it’s hard. It’s hard for us. It’s hard for everybody. It’s a dogfight right now. AJ (30:46) It’s discouraging when you’re comparing your numbers to someone else’s. And when you’re focused on, I have impacted and I have grown from zero to 800 people who are now absorbing my content, getting value from my content. I am now serving 800 people that I wasn’t eight months ago. It’s not discouraging at all. It’s actually quite encouraging. The only part’s discouraging is when you’re comparing your step one to someone else’s step 1,000. And that’s the hard part about the online world. Is it so easy to look at everyone else’s doing and think that what you’re doing doesn’t matter? But those 800 people, they do matter. Those aren’t followers. Those are human beings. And I would be encouraged if I were you. RORY (31:29) love that. Well, ⁓ if those 800 people were in a room right now, you certainly would be that’s right be fired up and impacting them. So hey, send this episode to somebody that you know that you think might enjoy it. And if you’ve been listening for a while, we’d love for you to rate comment review this show wherever you listen to it. We’re so glad you’re here. Keep coming back. We’re going to encourage you and we’re going to hopefully inspire you and share with you the strategies that are working to help you get your mission out to more people. We’ll catch you next time. AJ (32:03) We don’t want you to be invisible. RORY (32:05) So hit subscribe.