This content explains why social media content underperforms by identifying six key mistakes creators make, focusing on how to fix them to achieve better reach and faster growth.
Key Points
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Today we're talking about how to get
more views. If you feel like your
content isn't getting the traction it
deserves, I'm going to break down
exactly why that's happening and how to
fix it. Cuz the truth is there's only
six reasons why content performs poorly.
And if you solve for these six things,
you will get significantly more views
and grow much, much faster. Now, I know
this works because content and marketing
is all I do all day long. I have a
million followers. I've done billions of
views. And I've also worked with
hundreds of business owners behind the
scenes to audit and fix their content.
that's not working. So, in this video,
I'm going to walk through all six of the
major content mistakes you might be
making, and I'll break down the exact
step-by-step tactics for how to fix each
one. All right, content mistake number
one is called bad sampling. And this
really is the explanation for why your
content is being ignored. When you say
your content is being ignored, what you
really mean is that you post and then
you get low views. And the problem
really is, you have no idea why that's
happening. So, here's what's actually
happening behind the scenes with the
algorithm when you press post. And this
will explain exactly why you're getting
low views. First, the algorithm takes
your video and analyzes the transcript
and the caption or description. And this
is how it indexes what topics and
keywords your video is about. Then it
takes your video and it shows it to a
super small sample of 100 to 200 people.
Now, when you're brand new on social
media with a new account, these couple
hundred people are legit randos that
have no connection to you. And the
algorithm picks them specifically
because they've shown behavior to enjoy
videos about these topics and keywords
before. Now, when you do have some
initial following, the algorithm will
take that sample from your existing
followers. Typically, people that have
engaged pretty well with your content in
the past. Now, regardless of the path,
with this initial sample, the algorithm
is trying to rapidly determine how much
or how little this sample group likes
the video. If the sample data comes back
strong in that these 100 to 200 people
really like it more than average, the
algorithm will start pushing that video
a lot. But if this sample of people do
not watch or engage, the algorithm will
nuke the video and the growth will stop.
So in this case and all cases, if your
video got low views, it was because the
sample data came back weak and those
first couple hundred people did not
watch or engage at the average you
needed. Okay, so the big question is
why? Why did that sample group not
engage? Why was the sample data so weak?
And there's really only three reasons
why this could happen. The first reason
is fake followers. If you bought fake
followers because you thought you could
trick real people into trusting you
sooner because of your following,
congrats, you played yourself because
the algorithm is running that sample
process to bots that don't watch videos.
And I know this is super common because
I've worked with so many brands that
have 50,000 followers and are only
getting 800 views. And when I asked
them, it's because 48,000 of the 50 were
paid for fake followers. So, if this is
you, no judgment, but you're going to
have to start over from a fresh account
or it's never going to work. Now, the
second reason that initial sample data
comes back weak is because you have the
wrong followers. Let's say you have a
following with a few thousand friends
from high school. Well, now if you start
posting deep educational content on a
topic they don't care about when the
sample data goes to a bunch of those
people, the data is going to come back
weak because they don't care about those
topics. Or maybe you did grow an account
from scratch talking about fashion, but
now you want to switch from fashion to
science. When you post those science
videos, the sample data of the fashion
people is going to come back pretty weak
because those fashion people don't want
to watch science topics at the same rate
they watched fashion topics. And so if
this is you and you feel like you have
the wrong followers, you're either going
to have to start fresh from a new
account or slowly grow and add more
science followers slowly over time,
churn more fashion followers slowly over
time, and re-calibrate so that over time
the sample mix is better skewed to
science. You're going to have to pick
one of those paths. Now, the third and
final reason why that sample data came
back, and by far the most common, is
that you just made a bad video. And it's
tough to hear this, but it's the truth.
The algorithm is a math equation. It
does not have feelings. So, if your
videos have low views and are not
getting pushed, and you don't have fake
followers, and you don't have the wrong
followers, it's cuz you didn't make a
video that was good enough to beat the
others. When you're playing the content
game, you're playing in the big leagues
where you're competing for attention
with massive creators and brands that
have been doing this for a decade. So,
if your video isn't preferred by the
initial sample, it's just that it was a
bad video and didn't beat the baseline,
and I call this whole problem bad
sampling, and this is what you need to
fix if you want your content to stop
being ignored and get more views. Now,
here's the good news. I have a system
and playbook for how to approach content
to fix this problem. I know exactly what
to change to turn those bad videos into
good ones, so the sample data goes from
bad to good. So, for the rest of this
video, I'm going to break down the five
biggest problems or mistakes that your
videos are making that contribute them
to being bad videos. I'm also going to
walk through the tactical changes for
how to fix those so you can start making
good videos. Also, before we go through
this, if you're a business owner and you
want to get better at content, that's
why you're watching this channel, I
built a free community just for you.
It's called Wavy World. We have 31,000
entrepreneurs in it, 60 free trainings
just like this, and like I said, it's
completely free. Invite link below if
you want to join. All right. Now, the
first big reason why your videos are not
working is called no man's land. And
this has to do with your channel
positioning and idea strategy.
Specifically, how you pick which videos
to make. If your videos are not working,
it's probably because you're stuck in no
man's land. Let me explain what I mean.
Typically, content works that's either
extremely entertaining or extremely
educational. It's either really
interesting or really useful. Most
people try to play in the middle. Kind
of interesting, kind of useful. A lot of
people call this edutainment. This is a
big reason why you're failing. If this
is how you're approaching your content
strategy, what ends up happening when
you try to play the edutainment game is
that your content is neither extremely
interesting nor extremely useful. You
have less useful value, but you claim
that is entertaining and so you play in
the middle. It ends up not working and
you lose both games. If you're playing
the entertainment game, you are legit
competing with every entertainment
source on Earth. Mr. Beast, Kaisen,
Netflix, all of them. Every single
viewer on the internet has a pool of
non-working, non-sleeping time that they
funnel into entertainment use cases.
You're competing for a slice of that
time. Now, if you're playing the
education game, you're competing with
all the sources where people get
tactical answers to questions. ChatGBT,
Google, other entertainment creators,
all of that. Both games are hard, but
regardless, you need to pick one and
optimize everything for that. If you're
stuck in no man's land, kind of
entertaining, kind of useful, you're
going to lose both because the
entertainment value will get outkicked
by the best entertainment creators and
the usefulness value will get outkicked
by the best educational creators. If
you're in the middle, you will lose.
Now, let's get really tactical about how
to position for each of those games. If
you pick the entertainment game, your
entire goal is to come up with video
ideas that drive mass shock, mass
emotional transfer, and apply to a large
number of people. You could be pure genp
pop entertainment like Mr. beast, or you
could be category entertainment, like
tech stories, but it's still
entertainment focused. But either way,
on this side of the table, you're going
for mass shock, mass emotional transfer,
huge tam. Now, if you play the education
or value game, your goal is to come up
with topics and premises and angles that
help the viewer maximally understand the
tip you're giving so that they can use
that learning and apply it in their own
scenario. Again, you could be pure genp
pop education like mindset tips, or you
could be category education, like
specific tech tool workflows and demos.
But either way, here you're going for
tactically applicable learnings. Now,
don't get it twisted. If you're going
for educational content, you would
prefer that they're enjoyable to watch.
Nobody wants to watch some super stale,
boring Harvard professor type lecture.
But the educational value must be the
highest priority for educational
content. You don't want to say you're
doing both. You're making educational
value that's extremely tactical and
you're making it enjoyable to watch.
There is a big difference between
edutainment and enjoyable education. And
this is a massive mistake that I see
creators and brands make. They don't
commit to either game. They're lost in
the middle and their content never cuts
through. Okay, one more bonus tip on
this education versus entertainment
game. It's very popular. Once you pick
one game to play, it's very hard to
switch back and forth on the same
channel. Don't do that. Some creators
are able to switch, but only when their
personal brand is so big that people
will watch because of their face, not
because of the strategy. So for
beginners, whether you're a creator or a
brand, switching back and forth rarely
works. Pick one game per channel and
stick specifically to that. And you can
win with both games. So the way to pick
which game to play is to ask yourself,
what value am I giving to the viewer in
my videos? Is it something they can walk
away from the video and use right now or
not? If not, you're playing the
entertainment game. If yes, you're
playing the education game. It really is
as simple as that. Both games can win,
but you have to pick one per channel.
All right, content mistake number three
that is causing you low views is bad
ideas. It sucks to hear, but the reason
your content is being ignored almost
always is because your video ideas are
just not good enough. They're either not
interesting enough, not useful enough,
or not clear enough. Now, let's unpack
this because ideas really are the most
valuable piece of the content puzzle.
But the term ideas is kind of hard to
know exactly what it means. So, let's
unpack the full thing. If you're looking
at the end content workflow, you've got
ideas, scripting, recording, editing,
posting, and analyzing. Of that full
workflow, ideas by far are the most
important thing. And I can prove it to
you. There are millions of videos every
day that go viral that are unscripted
with no edits, shot in a bedroom, zero
cuts, takes 10 minutes to do, they get
10 million views. The reason those
videos work is because the idea was a
banger. That's all they needed to do.
Not saying every video is like that, but
ideas by far are the most important
piece. Now, let's really break this
down. When I say idea, I'm talking about
the topic plus the premise plus the
hook. Those three things come together
to create the video idea. The topic is a
oneline sentence explaining the concept.
The premise is the approach or angle or
lens that you put on the topic. And the
hook is the visual and spoken execution
that you use to explain the topic and
premise in the first 3 to 5 seconds.
That idea combo is the most important
part of content by a mile. Anyone who
says anything different has no idea what
they're talking about. Now, let me give
you a tactical example of what a winning
content idea actually looks like. We're
going to go through the whole thing and
I'm going to explain exactly why it's a
winner. This guy, Yanni, has a huge
following where on his channel he breaks
down his journey to restore a old
vintage bowling alley in Chicago. He
went from zero to a million followers in
the last 4 months or so. Absolute
nuclear growth. Now, let's analyze the
idea, the topic, premise, hook from this
video that got 1.5 million views.
>> Today is day 33 of rehabbing my
60-year-old bowling alley. You might be
wondering why I'm balling. It's because
Johnny from the Bowlers Journal pulled
up to write a story about this project.
So, of course, I had to show him my games.
games.
>> Okay, so the topic, the oneline
explanation is this guy is rehabbing a
vintage bowling alley. The angle or
premise for the series is that he takes
you on these daily vlog mini missions
around his process to restore the
bowling alley. The specific angler
premise for each video is a different
mission or task. Now, in this specific
video, the one we're looking at, the
angler premise is that he's got a guy
from a famous bowling magazine coming in
to interview him, and the entire video
is baked around that concept. Now, for
the hook format, his spoken hook, he
always starts every video the same way.
This is day X of rehabbing my
60-year-old bowling alley. But most
importantly, his visual hooks are almost
always something bowling related, and he
always has motion. either the pins are
spinning, the bowling balls are
spinning, he's throwing the bowling
balls. So, it's immediate
recognizability and there's motion in
it. This combination, the topic, premise
and hook in this specific case is a
winning idea. But let's break down why.
Why is this a winning idea and what
specifically are the attributes that
make up a winning idea? First, as a
creator or a brand, we have to decide,
are we playing the entertainment game or
the education game? Remember, we have to
stay out of no man's land. So, Yanni
could have either decided, I'm going to
make entertainment style content
documenting my journey to restore this
bowling alley, or I'm going to make
educational content where I give
tactical tips to bowling alley operators
or business owners that they can take
and apply to their business. He could
have chosen either. He picked to play
the entertainment game. If you watch his
videos, he's not giving you explicit
walk away learning that you can apply
today. Maybe he infuses a little bit of
learning, but really, he's basically
filming a vlog or a TV show about his
process. That's entertainment all day
long. And this is completely fine.
Entertainment or education works, but
it's very important that he picked and
doubled down on the one he chose. Okay.
So, let's break down the core factors
across topic, premise, and hook that
need to be true for entertainment style
content and what exactly he did in his
that made it work. When you're making
entertainment content, the topic and
premise have to do three things. First,
they have to be shock inducing. Ideally,
it's something the viewer has never seen
before. In this case, you're going for
max novelty. Now, in Yanni's case, I'd
never seen somebody live rehab the
behind the scenes of a bowling alley
before. That's max novelty to me. And
the behind-the-scenes process to get to
see that is super unique. Now, this is
really important. If Yanni were the 10th
account that I saw to rehab a bowling
alley using this behind-the-scenes vlog
style, it wouldn't have been as
shocking. It wouldn't have gotten so
much traction. But because he's the
first one to do it, it works. Now, the
second aspect of entertainment style
topics and premises is that they need to
be curiosityinducing.
Some question has to pop into my head
immediately as the viewer. For example,
as soon as I saw this video that we've
been watching from Yanni, these
questions popped into my head. How is he
doing this? How long has he been doing
this? How did this kid get into the
bowling alley? What's going to happen
next? All those questions are popping
immediately in the first 2 seconds after
watching this. And the third aspect of
entertainment style content for the
topic and premise is that there needs to
be large applicability with some common
point of interest. And what I mean by
this is a large number of people that
could find this interesting and some
point of interest in the topic that they
could relate to quickly. So in this
case, anyone that has ever bowled, been
to a bowling alley or maybe even seen a
bowling related show on TV, might find
this interesting. According to ChatBT,
there are approximately 500 million
people in the world, 6% of the global
population that have been in a bowling
alley at least once before. That is a
massive, massive TAM. And so that means
there's a lot of people that would
relate to this immediately. Again, TAM
matters a lot for entertainment content.
It matters a little bit less for
education, but right now we're focused
on this video, which is entertainment
focused. So, as a recap, the three
elements that must be true for the topic
and premise when you're doing
entertainment style content. It must be
shock inducing. It must be
curiosityinducing. And it must be
largely applicable with some point of
common interest. Okay, so that is half
the idea. Remember topic, premise, hook.
That was topic and premise. Now, let's
go to hook. What does the hook need to
be for entertainment style content? What
are those same factors on the hook side?
When you're making entertainment
content, obviously the hook has to stop
the scroll. This is critical. And to do
that, you need to have the following few
aspects. First, you want recognizable
visuals. Just like that point of common
interest, I want to see a visual and
immediately recognize something in that
visual. In this case, the bowling pin,
the bowling alley, the bowling ball.
These are things with common points of
relatability that I recognize visually
in the hook. That's really important.
Now, this recognizability could also be
a facial expression on the viewer's face
that I relate to. If it's just somebody
face on, but they're really sad, I
recognize sad eyes, sad face, I start to
relate to that. You need some common
point of relatability in the visual. And
this is important because you want to
reduce the time it takes for the viewer
to contextually start to understand
what's going on. Now, typically this
works best with visuals that have high
color, high motion, high contrast,
something that grabs my attention, but
then the thing in the visual, the
expression or the object allows me to
understand more quickly what's going on.
Now, Yanni's visuals in the hook worked
super well, both because they're moving,
so they grab my attention, but also
they're common objects that I related to
immediately. I've been to a bowling
alley. I've seen bowling pins, bowling
ball. I haven't seen it in a while on
social media, but it immediately drew
back to my head. That's what you want in
terms of instant recognizability in the
visuals. Now, the second piece is that
this helps align to the words he's
saying. He's saying, "Day 44 of me
rehabbing my 60-year-old bowling alley."
When he says, "Rehabing my 60-year-old
bowling alley," I'm looking at the old
looking bowling alley. Those visuals and
those words are aligned. You want hook
alignment. That's the second key piece.
And why that's important is after just 3
seconds, I have immediate clarity that
this is about a bowling alley in a
bowling alley. He's rehabbing a bowling
alley. And I start to get the pieces
quicker. It's really important that you
start to get clarity on what's going on
as fast as possible. The visual helps
reinforce this quickly. Now, as a bonus,
what he did is he added music to create
some certain vibe that you want to be a
part of. He used a Frank Ocean song. You
don't have to use music, but it is
helpful if you can pick the right song
to kind of boost the vibe and help match
everything even better. So, in summary,
on the hook side, you need visual
recognizability either with an object or
facial expression that immediately
allows a viewer to understand what is
going on and relate to the scenario.
Two, you need alignment between the
visuals and the words being said, as
well as the words on screen. And three,
if you want, optionally, you can add
music or sound to help vibe match the
topic that's coming. So, the moral of
the story is, if your videos are
flopping, I can almost guarantee that on
the idea front, something about the
topic, premise, or hook that you're
making is not dialed in. If it's the
topic, you either haven't chosen a topic
that's interesting enough or a painoint
that's relevant enough for your viewer.
If it's the premise, you haven't framed
the angle or lens of the story to be
interesting enough for the viewer. And
if it's the hooks, either the spoken
hook was not clear enough, the visuals
were not interesting enough, or the
visuals and spoken hook did not align
enough. And it's important to note what
I just went through was an entertainment
case study. Yanni's video was an
entertainment video. For educational
videos, it's still topic, premise, hook,
but the characteristics and attributes
that matter change slightly. And here
are the differences. For educational
content, for the topic and premise,
instead of max shock inducing, you're
going for max clarity inducing around
the pain point you're talking about. It
has to be immediately clear what value
the viewer is going to get out of that
video from the topic and premise. You
don't need pure novelty around the idea.
Don't need to reinvent the wheel. But if
you could have novelty on your delivery
or the tip you give, that's great. The
way to think of this is instead of raw
shock, you need targeted shock towards
the viewer based on the pain point
you're talking about. All right. All
right. Now, I was thinking about this.
The most valuable thing I could give you
is the tactical playbook for how to
solve the ideas problems we just went
through. This is the most important
piece of the process. Here's my tactical
playbook for how to solve it.
Specifically, this is going to answer
the question, how do I come up with
better ideas more often? You have two
ways. The manual way is to come up with
original ideas, original topics, and
premises on your own and then really
workshop the topic, premise, and hook to
try to get it aligned and max it out.
This takes a lot of time and the
playbook to do this is pretty
sophisticated depending on your niche.
The much easier way and what I do
personally is to look for proven winning
videos in your space, ones that already
have high views and are outliers and
then mine them for the topics, premises
and hooks that already worked. Take
those, extract the patterns and apply
them to your own videos. That is the
easiest way to do this. It's the smarter
verse harder approach. Now, the way to
do this tactically, you go to
sandcastles.ai. You create a watch list
of all the accounts in your space that
make good videos. You go to the videos
tab and you filter only by that watch
list and sort by outlier score. What
that does is give you the best
performing outlier videos in your space
all in one area. You can then open those
videos and play them right there. So, I
literally go one by one by one by one. I
watch all of them. And this is much
faster than scrolling on a 4U feed
because you're not getting any noise.
Every single video is on target and
every single video is an outlier. You
don't have to scroll through hundreds of
videos to find a couple winners. In a
100 videos, you find a hundred winners
using sand castles. So, what I do is I
take this, I open a new tab, Google Doc,
and I write down best topics and best
hooks. And then I go and I watch one by
one by one. If anything is interesting,
I watch the whole thing. I write down
the topic. I write down the hook. Now,
after a 100 videos in a session, I now
start to see the patterns for what are
the best performing topics, premises,
and hooks. I take those topics and I
start thinking, is there anything
interesting that I know that most others
don't about this topic that I could
retell the story with? Is there anything
different that I could do to the hook to
ratchet up the shock, curiosity, and Max
Tam? That's how you do this process. So,
here's a tactical example for how I
would analyze this bowling video from
Yanni that we've been watching. On the
topic front, if I were to extract out
the one-s sentence Mad Lib format, it's
watch me restore X thing. Now, X thing
could be home renovations. It could be
vintage objects like watches and cars.
It could be another old business like a
vintage ice cream parlor. There's all
different sorts of things you could swap
in for the watch me restore X. It
doesn't just have to be a bowling alley.
And that's what I call remixing a topic
lens. You take a good idea, restoring X,
twist it, and now you have all different
types of topic rabbit holes that you
could go down. Now, on the premise or
angle front, if I look at what Yanni
did, he took the restoration process,
broke it down into individual daily
missions, and then summarized those
using his videos. So, for example, how
would I apply that to one of these other
topic mad lips? If I was restoring a
house, maybe one video is how I rebuild
the kitchen. Maybe another video is
talking to the tile manufacturer, and so
on. If you're restoring an old watch,
maybe every video is a different day or
a different piece of the watch as you're
rebuilding it. Now, on the hooks front,
if I look at just this video from Yanni,
I've got three observations that I'm
extracting out. Number one, always have
something unique moving in the frame.
Number two, always have the frame shot
where the visual context is immediately
noticeable. He always has some aspect of
the bowling alley, the lane, the ball
retrieval, the pins, the balls. He
always has something related to the
bowling alley immediately visible. And
number three, always have the main
person, the main creator, in this case,
Yanni, in the frame doing something
interesting. Those are the three
principles that you can extract from the
hooks. Now, I'm not going to buy a
bowling alley and recreate his exact
series, but you can start to see if you
look at it from a topic, premise, and
hook perspective. You can extract the
patterns that are universally applicable
to other ideas. And I gleaned all that
off just one video. Imagine if I went
through a 100 videos across 30 creators,
how many different ideas I would come up
with. That really is the process for
finding winners, analyzing the patterns
from those winners, and then remixing.
That is what all the pros, all the media
companies, that's what they all do to
grow faster on social media. That will
solve your ideas problem. I do that
whole workflow in sand castles.ai. Now,
of course, the last point here, cuz I
can already hear people in the comments.
As a business owner, you always want to
gut check. Well, if I do take that as
inspiration and remix it, will that
content format actually drive leads for
my business? And let's analyze this for
this bowling series for Yanni. This for
sure is going to drive foot traffic
locally in Chicago. when he opens that
bowling alley, they're going to be sold
out every single night. He also will
likely get other opportunities on a
general fandom perspective now that he
has 900,000 followers on Instagram. But
the real revenue driver here would be if
he was selling agency services, helping
other local businesses make content or
if he had an agency service where he was
buying many other types of old
businesses and restoring them. That's
the real lead genen driver. He's not
tapping into that. That's completely
fine. So, will this work as a content
format for his bowling alley? Yes,
locally. But there's a lot more revenue
on the table that this could work for if
he had a different model. Now, if you
were to run this playbook, you extract
this out, but you're doing it for
flipping homes or restoring old homes
and you do have a real estate practice
or some agency where you do this, that's
a much better model to fit into the
content. So, as a business owner, you're
always trying to do this process raw
where you analyze the winning content,
extract out the patterns, but then you
back fit those winners into content
product model fit. It has to make sense
for your business. Not to go too far
down the rabbit hole in terms of the
business conversion later, but that's
how I would think about it. All right.
Now, you can probably tell if you nail
the idea, the topic, premise, hook, you
are in a great spot. That is the hardest
part of the process in my opinion, which
is why I spend so much time breaking it
down. The truth is most people don't
want to spend the time to optimize their
idea process cuz they don't think that's
the problem. But if you get somebody
hooked that wants to watch, everything
else is so much easier. Now, the next
major bucket of problems is poor
storytelling and weak visual execution.
And I'm going to try to make this really
simple. There are three major
storytelling mistakes and three major
visual execution mistakes you might be
making. Let's rip through them really
quickly. On the storytelling side, these
are the three mistakes. The first one is
adding too many unnecessary details
right after the hook. I call this over
stuffing. Typically, people get so
excited when they have a great hook and
they have a topic they know a lot about
that they just over stuff way too many
details into the story. And this will
feel like the viewer is getting
waterboarded with extra facts that make
it really hard for them to connect
between the hook and the main problem of
the story. What you want to do is find
the shortest path to interesting after
the primary curiosity question is popped
in the viewer's mind. You just give a
couple contextual facts and that's it.
Anything you have good visuals for,
prioritize using these over everything
else. And only use things that are
additive to the story. Give the viewer
enough context where they can walk down
the rope from the beginning to the end,
but nothing extra. Now, the second big
storytelling problem goes handin-hand
with that, and it's called broken
storytelling. Maybe you do cut out a lot
of the fluff details, but the ones you
choose to use lead the viewer down the
wrong path. You set something up with a
hook, but then you lead them to a
completely different story, and you try
to come back at the end. The zigzag is
just too hard to follow. You want to
make the story super clear to consume.
You want there to be a clear logic line
from beginning to end. Now, the third
big storytelling mistake is not
rehooking. And this is really what takes
stories from good to great. If you're
able to pick the right facts and you
don't over stuff them and you keep the
viewer kind of on one story arc, what
you want to do is introduce another
relevant conflict 20 to 25 seconds into
the video. This will rehook and
re-engage the viewer and make them watch
to the end. So, for example, in Yanni's
video that we watched, the first main 20
to 25 seconds was all about this guy
Johnny that was a writer for the Bowling
Journal came in for an interview with
Yanni. But then at the 25 second mark
approximately, Yanni had Johnny ask a
question. Everybody wants to know how
did a 25-year-old buy a bowling alley
and get from zero to a million followers
so quickly. That is the rehook. It's a
second curiosityinducing hook after the
first one started to get boring. So for
you when you're auditing your content,
if you get through the idea stage, and
that's a huge if cuz that's the most
important piece when it comes to
storytelling. You have to make sure
you're not over stuffing the details,
you have a clear logic line, and you're
rehooking every 20 to 25 seconds. Now,
on the visual execution side, there are
also three common mistakes that I see
all the time. The first one is weak
visuals. The visual aspect of content is
a critically underrated piece of this
whole puzzle. And that doesn't mean you
need the most cinematic visuals in the
world. If you want cinematic, you can
use Veo3 if you don't shoot them. What
it means that you need to give the
viewer something interesting to look at
while they're listening. Also, it's
absolutely essential that these visuals
align with the words you're saying. Just
like in the hook where you want
alignment, you need alignment with the
spoken words throughout the whole story.
As you're delivering a sentence, you
should ask yourself, what is the best
visual I could be showing here? And then
go get that visual. Now, the second big
visual execution mistake is that the
visual format just ends up getting stale
or uninteresting. Now, visual format is
really a combination of the visuals
used, the layout they're in, and like
the angles that those visuals were shot
at. It turns out there are 36 core
visual formats that all content falls
into. I've got a full database of this.
If you guys want me to make a video on
just visual formats, breaking all these
down and the pros and cons, make sure to
drop a comment and let me know. And the
third visual execution mistake that I
always see is called visual switching.
And this is the pacing that the visuals
and camera angles change as the video is
going on. If it's too slow, you're going
to lose people and they're going to
churn because of boredom. If it's too
fast, you're going to overstimulate
people and confuse them because they
can't take it all in. So, you need to
find that Goldilock zone of visual
switch pacing. The best way to do this
is to take videos that you like that
you're really locked in on. Download
those videos, put them onto a Premiere
Pro or Final Cut timeline, make chops
every time the visual switches, and then
study about how long each section is.
That'll be a good proxy for visual
switch pacing. All right. Now, the last
two mistakes are super straightforward,
but they also trip a lot of people up.
Before we go into those, let's just
review what we've covered so far. First,
we talked about why your content is
actually getting low views in the first
place, and it's because of the bad
sampling data that's going back to the
algorithm. Next, we covered three
massive buckets of mistakes that you
could be making. And I say they're
three, but it's really like nine. The
first one was on positioning, and it was
to not get stuck in no man's land.
Either commit fully to entertainment
content and try to be the max
interesting you can, or commit fully to
education and try to be the max useful.
If you're doing education, you want it
to be enjoyable. You do not want to fall
in the edutainment in the middle. This
is where you're not as interesting as
the interesting people and you're not as
useful as the useful people. That's not
where you want to be. Now, the second
biggest mistake that we covered was bad
ideas. And this really is the killer.
I'm telling you, this is the one you
need to overinvest time in solving. And
that comes to topic, premise, and hooks.
We walked through exactly how to analyze
each of those and how to use
sandcastles.ai to build a system for
basically finding winners quicker and
extracting the patterns. The third
biggest bucket of mistakes we walked
through was poor storytelling and weak
visual execution. And we actually broke
down six kind of sub mistakes in there.
The truth is, if you can get through
those four pieces, the sampling data and
then the other three, the last two that
I'm about to go through end up being
really easy. And if you really boil it
all down, all you have to do is get
through ideas. Cuz if you get a good
idea that hooks somebody, visual
storytelling and spoken flow is actually
really easy to learn, train, and build a
system for. It's really ideas that is
the white whale. I say that over and
over because most people think their
storytelling, their persuasion, their
editing is what matters. No, it's ideas.
It's topic premise hook. Okay, so let's
finish these last two. The fifth biggest
mistake is poor topic consistency. And
this relates back all the way to the
beginning when I was talking about bad
sampling. Once you solve for ideas and
execution, and you're actually doing
this well, the algorithm is going to
start honing in on who likes your videos
and who it should push them to. And this
will work. I promise you it will
eventually start feeling like a snowball
rolling downhill if you don't make this
big mistake here. All you have to do is
not deviate from the topics and keywords
that you've spent so long training the
algorithm to feed you for. When you
switch topics around, beauty, science,
vlogging, travel. When you switch topics
around, it resets that bad sampling
problem over and over. You've got a
vlogging audience around travel. You
start doing fitness content, they don't
want to see it. You start doing beauty
content, they don't want to see it. You
start doing science content, they don't
want to see it. You don't want to bounce
around with topics. This is called
having a bad audience match. So, please,
for the love of God, once you figure out
a topic that works and people start
resonating and you get the snowball
rolling, double down on that, do not
deviate. If you want to try something
else for a different audience, do it on
a different channel. But pretty quickly,
when you're running two channels, you
realize this is stupid and you'll go
back to the main channel. Don't deviate
the main channel. Now, the last big
mistake, number six, is low volume. If
you have the rest working, you're not in
no man's land, you got great ideas,
you've got the flow for the
storytelling, you have the visual
execution, you're not deviating the
topics. If you have all those, all you
need is volume. The game then becomes
volume. And volume matters not just
because you're making more videos for
more people. The more data the algorithm
can get about those good matches, the
more it will feed and push you into
those matches. So volume is really your
best friend once you figure everything
else out. All right, guys. That's all
I've got for this video. As a recap, the
goal of this video was to try to give
you a framework for how to solve if you
feel like your content's being ignored.
And if you want more views, use this
framework as a checklist and kind of
like audit format to make sure you're
not making these big mistakes. Now, this
is the summary of what's happening. If
you feel like your content is being
ignored, you're getting low views. If
you're getting low views, it's because
the sample data is coming back weak. If
the sample data is coming back weak,
it's because you have fake followers,
the wrong followers, or bad videos. If
you have bad videos, it's because you're
making one or all of these mistakes.
You're either stuck in no man's land
where your videos are not as interesting
as the entertainment and not as useful
as the education. You have bad topic,
premise, and hooks, which are not
validated. You're not using validated
winners and you're not coming up with
the right ideas. You have poor stories
that may also have weak visual
execution. You are not staying
consistent to the topics that are
working or you're not putting out enough
volume. It's one of those five problems
in that order. Typically, it's ideas
that is the issue. As always, guys, I'm
trying my absolute best, if you're a
business owner, to help you level up
with content. You could hear it in my
voice. My voice is absolutely shot. I'm
giving everything I have to this YouTube
channel. If you like this content,
please leave me a comment and let me
know that I should keep going. I had a
doubt this week that I was considering
never making videos again on this
channel just cuz I was so burnt out. And
I mean that sincerely. So, I'm trying my
best to give you guys as much value and
really cover the non-obvious things. If
you guys want me to keep making videos,
please leave a comment. And again, if
you haven't joined Wavy World and you're
a business owner, there's 60 free
trainings like this in there. 31,000
entrepreneurs. People are just giving
free game. I'm giving free game. There's
no reason to not be in Wavy World. Free
invite link in the description. All
right. As always, guys, we'll see you on
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
