RV (00:04): So I’m gonna share something awesome with you today. I’m gonna share with you four techniques to make your content go more viral. And the reason I’m sharing this is because I’ve spent a lot of time learning about this in the last several months. And if you’re new to this podcast or if you’re new to following me, you won’t know any different. But if you’ve been here for a while, you know that especially if you’re one of our brand builders group members, you’ll know that we don’t put a lot of stock into things like social media or a lot of time upfront into social media. And the reason why is because we know that building a real business is much more profitable. Focusing on systems, developing people, creating use, useful content, having automation and you know, follow up and, and these kinds of things that aren’t as sexy that you don’t hear about as much in the world today. RV (01:00): But you know, generating referrals speaking on stages, those are the things that actually are gonna generate meaningful or significant income in your pocket quickly. But there is this vanity of going viral that everybody is chasing. And you know, then they’re surprised when they don’t actually make much money from it. And so we just don’t focus on social media as much, right? Early on. But if you’ve, if you’re one of our members, you know that in our brand builder journey, we, we talk about doing the, there’s a, there’s a, people sometimes do the right things, but in the wrong order, right? They do the right thing at the wrong time. And the sequence matters a lot, particularly if you wanna scale a really significant multi seven or eight figure business. Now, that all said, we hit eight figures last year as a company, and we have spent five years perfecting our craft and creating our curriculum and building our systems and training our people, and doing all of those things. RV (02:03): And so what we have done is we are now set up to scale. We are set up to really rapidly grow. And so now all we have to do is go out and grow our audience. And so we are now turning our focus and our attention to learning some of these things that are more about scaling your audience. Because we’ve scaled our people, we’ve scaled our offerings, we’ve scaled our systems, we’ve scaled our team, we’ve scaled our technology, and so now we’re really ready to go out and scale our audience. And so that’s what I’m gonna share with you a little bit about what I’ve been learning in that front. And, and also to kind of say like, if you’ve been following me for a while watch out. Here we come, right? Watch how, watch how fast we’re gonna start to grow on social media and things. RV (02:49): And that’s because we can afford to do things now. We can afford to hire the team. We can afford to, to, to buy traffic if we need to, to, we can afford to produce high quality content. We can afford to invest in education to grow our audience because we have a backend business that can pay for it, right? If you know anything about how we teach paid traffic, which we don’t really talk much about here on the podcast, that’s really for members only. But we talk about how the, the person who wins the click is whoever can afford the most to pay for the click. And so the key is to not actually spend so much time just trying to build the audience or dropping a bunch of money into ads, is to build something on the backend that is very profitable so that you can afford to go buy traffic so that you can afford to go buy awareness. RV (03:37): And that’s basically what we spent five years doing. That said, I know that many of you’ll be excited to be learning about, you know, some of the strategies and techniques that we are learning to go viral. And I’m gonna share with you four of them today that are really important. That will make a huge difference for any of you, regardless of, of whether or not you have that backend system, and you have that, that clear personal brand, and you have that uniqueness and, and you really are building things the right way. Or if, you know, you’re just trying to get more views on your videos, and that’s what you, you, you know, or your, or your podcast or whatever your YouTube. And so either way this is, this is gonna be great. All right? So let me walk you through these. So the first one is content selection secrets. RV (04:22): Content selection secrets. A huge part of going viral is knowing what type of content is going to go viral. What kind of topics are going viral? What are, in other words, what are people already interested in that they are naturally sharing, that they are likely to share? And you might say, well, okay, but how do I know what the whole world is interested in? How do I know what people are likely to share? And that is the great question. And the answer is actually much simpler than you might realize. It is to watch what other content is going viral and to recreate your version of that same content. When we teach media strategy we referenced, you know, a term that David Meerman Scott created years ago called Newsjacking. And he said, if you wanna get featured in the news, what you do is you watch what is breaking news, and then you produce content on that same story, but with your slant, your expertise, your angle on that topic, because it will get picked up by the media that’s breaking news. RV (05:32): Well, this sort of viral drafting as I sometimes I think of it as like drafting is you’re, you are figuring out which topics are already going viral, and then you’re gonna draft off of those. So you’re not gonna copy them. You’re not going to, like, you’re not gonna just take a, a viral video and post it on your feed. That’s actually against many of the, the terms of many of these social media outlets, although people do it all the time. What, what I’m gonna say is watch for, for topics that are going viral in your niche and then create your version of it. So how do you do that? Well, there’s some simple ways. One is look at what’s showing up in your explore page. Look what is showing up in, in the trending section in YouTube, you can simply go look at a video and look at how many views a video has compared to how many subscribers the channel has. RV (06:30): If it has way more views than there are subscribers in the channel, you know, that piece of content is performing very well. There’s also lots of other third party tools that you can use to do this research for you. We talk about those in our membership program. But, but, but you can watch on what’s recommended for you. Like all of these platforms recommend content and push content. You know, in YouTube there’s like a whole panel down the side that will say, you know, you know, recommended next or, or watch this next. Those are all videos that are being recommended because they’re holding people’s attention, and that’s what the, the platform wants. And so those videos are performing well, and so they’re recommending those to more people, which, so you have to just pay attention. You have to like open your eyes. You know, when we say the next level of thinking or the next level of results requires the next level of thinking, it’s like your eyes have to be opened to a, a new way of viewing the world. RV (07:23): And, and this is happening all around you, and you’re probably just not paying attention to it. You’re not seeing it. So you need to look for that. And then you look for the topics that lend themselves to your expertise, to your niche, to your industry, or that you have something to say and you kind of recreate it in your own style, in your own voice. That is how you create viral content is, is basically recreating your own version of content that has already been proven to go viral by other people, right? So that’s content selection. And then that’s the first technique. Now, each of the next three techniques are all gonna be about hooks, okay? We’re gonna talk about visual hooks, text hooks, and audio hooks. In order to teach you each of those, you need to understand what a hook is. And this has been one of the most frustrating parts of my journey as it relates to kind of organic marketing and social media marketing is so many people say, you gotta have a hook. RV (08:28): You gotta start with a hook. You need a great hook. That’s a great hook. But nobody can define what in the freaking heck an actual hook is. Like, what does that mean? What is a hook? Like, I know the concept is that it hooks people attention, it hooks people’s attention, but how, like, what’s the formula for creating a hook? And I now, after studying this, you know, for a couple years, I think I found the answer. And I think it is insanely simple. And I think even the people who teach it, they can’t articulate what it is. They know what it is, and they’re able to replicate it, and that’s why they grow. But they actually can’t articulate it in a way that they could teach it to somebody else. And that’s what’s been so frustrating is, is, is figuring out how, what is, what is a hook? RV (09:20): What does that mean? What is a hook? And when I was in Toastmasters, when I started my professional speaking career, Toastmasters used to have this formula for a speech, okay? Not for videos, but for speech. And they said, and its formula’s been around for, you know, probably centuries, but at least decades. And they said, the formula for a great speech is tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell them, and then tell ’em what you told ’em. Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you told them. And that’s, that’s what the formula was for a great speech. What I’m realizing now is that what a hook is, is that first part. Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell them. So many people will start a video by just saying like, you know, here’s something I was thinking about the other day. RV (10:08): Well, that’s a random thought. Instead, what you wanna do is make the first words out of your mouth on the video telling the people exactly what you’re about to teach them, right? So you don’t wanna pontificate and flounder and mess around. You wanna say, here’s four ways to make your content go viral. And then it’s like, okay, one, I’m gonna teach you 1, 2, 3, 4. But the opening line should be, here’s four techniques that will help you go viral, right? I’m telling you what I’m about to tell you, or I’m telling you what I’m about to teach you. That’s the hook, right? I had my first con, my first social media content. I mean, my Ted Talk has gone viral and I studied TED Talks, right? So that, that’s gone viral. But in terms of like just creating organic content, I finally had a, a, a a, a social media piece go viral. RV (11:03): And it was when you, you know, I told the, the story of how someone stole $40,000 from me and for me and aj, and that was the opening line. I, I said, someone just stole $40,000 from me, and I want to tell you what they did. So it doesn’t happen to you, right? I’m telling them what I’m about to tell them, or I’m telling them what I’m about to teach them. I promise you, if you, if you focus on making the opening three to five seconds of your content and be very clear of just telling them what you’re about to teach them, your content is gonna perform exponentially better, exponentially better. So that’s the big idea. Now, let me teach you, you know, I promise you four techniques to make you go viral. So all three of these next techniques are related to hooks, but there’s three different type of hooks I want you to focus on. RV (11:55): Visual hooks, text hooks, and audio hooks. So a visual hook is when you hold something or you show something visual like you could be holding a prop or you could be, you could be doing anything that is different than just a talking head. It could be where you are. The, the where you’re behind. It could be something you’re wearing. It could be something you’re holding, but it is, it is something like visual that the eye can see to go, oh, this piece of content is going to explain this thing. Why am I standing here? Or why am I holding this? Or why am I doing x? That’s a visual hook. The visual hook is a signal that I’m about to tell you something related to that visual element, and that serves as a hook. So that’s visual hooks. Then you wanna use text hooks. RV (12:53): Text hooks are actually the easiest is to make sure the onscreen texts, like the, the, the, not what you say, but, but what you, what they see, that text that they see visually says what you’re about to teach them. So if this were a video, it would say four techniques to make you go, make your content go viral. And it would be titled that, and the text would be on the screen. It would also be the first line of your caption. And then the third type of hook is an audio hook. An audio hook is what you actually say, assuming it’s a video or a podcast where there is a spoken word element as you say. You know what I’m gonna share with you four ideas to make your content go more viral. So they’re seeing a visual element, they’re reading a text, a description, and they’re hearing an auditory description, all of which are three different types of hooks, A visual hook, a text hook, and an audio hook, right? RV (13:55): Lemme say that again. You’re giving them, they’re, they’re, they’re seeing a visual element, they’re reading a text description, and they’re hearing an auditory explanation. So they’re seeing a visual hook, they’re reading a text hook, and they’re hearing an auditory hook. I promise you, if you start your content with those three elements, and especially if you’ve, you’ve made a content selection, a strategic content selection, your content will go more viral. So there you have it, four techniques that will make your content go viral. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please make sure you leave a review for me on iTunes or wherever you listen to the show, and share this episode with someone who you think will benefit from it. That’s how you can pay us back and really help us. We, it’s what keeps this podcast going. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.