Breaking Down the Science of Virality with Brendan Kane

business owners can think about virality and be like, well, I just want to generate more leads. I want to generate more customers, more purchases for my brand.
And they can't correlate it because they think virality is like that pesky teenager down the street that's making dance videos on TikTok. But the reality is, if you think about almost all businesses today have some type of social media presence.
And let's just say that on average, you're generating, let's say 10,000 views of video. Now, people listening to this, I want you to take whatever that number is, 1,000, 10,000, maybe some people are generating 100,000, and then multiply that by 10.
Then multiply that by 100. Then multiply that by 100,000.
What would that do if that many people were paying attention to what you had to say? Now, the potential of social media is only capped at how big you can dream, how big your business is. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.
Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you.
First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview.
So I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299.
That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.
Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states.
Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.
All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today is a really exciting day.
I got Brendan Canaan here. He's got three amazing books, One Million Followers, Hookpoint, and The Guide to Going Viral.
A lot of us have thought about going viral. I hate the people that say they're influencers, but this guy is the epitome.
He's like the influencer. He's an expert in creative direction, interactive marketing, SEO.
He's from Chicago, lived in California, spent some time in Austin, and spends part of his time in Europe and London now. Managing partner at Hookpoint, author of 100 million followers, mentor, tech stars, growth consultant.
You know, there's a lot of stuff here, but you're overseeing 300 million in marketing spend and has worked with major corporates like MTV, Paramount Pictures, Ikea, generating over a billion in revenue. He's worked with Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Adriana Lima, of whom crafted successful digital strategies.
I am so excited you're here. Thank you for making the time.
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to connect with you and everybody that's tuning into this.
Yeah, man. I'm sure the story is amazing, but tell us about yourself.
I know this is how every podcast starts, but I want to hear the success, what your passions are, wherever you've been, where you're going, what gets you excited? So I didn't set out to be in marketing. I actually wanted to be a film producer.
So I went to film school to hopefully learn the business side of the industry. Showed up at film school, quickly realized they teach you nothing about business there.
So I figured the best way to learn about business is start your own. So this was like 2003, 2004.
So the most cost-efficient way at the time was to start internet companies. So I started a few internet companies just to learn and experiment.
And then when I moved to LA to pursue a career in film, like everybody else, I had to start at the bottom, making coffee and copies and deliveries. And when people would ask me, well, why did you move to LA? What do you want to do? I said, I want to be a film producer.
I would see everybody's eyes glaze over. So I knew I needed a different way to stand out and connect with the heads of the studios, producers, directors, and things of that nature.
And I noticed that we would spend tens of millions of dollars in a single piece of content. And then we would invest tens of millions of dollars more into marketing that single piece of content.
And it's not like any other product or business where you have years or decades. You literally have months to make people, hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this single content.
So at the time, social media was just coming on. This was 2005.
So it was like MySpace and Friendster were the predominant lit players and YouTube and Facebook were just launching. So I just thought, especially on YouTube, there's all these creators that are amassing millions of views and millions of subscribers, but nobody's talking to them.
Nobody's trying to harness that power. So I started building digital divisions for the movie studios.
And that allowed me to connect and rise to the top of that industry in a relatively short period of time. So that's how I kind of got the bug and got started in that space.
And just quickly realized that the film industry is just another corporation. So it wasn't really fun, exciting.
It wasn't really moving. Everybody would talk about innovating, but nobody would actually do anything.
So that's where I left and actually started building

technology platforms on top of these social networks.

So I've built the first ever influencer technology platform

on top of MySpace.

Ended up licensing it to Viacom and MTV

and other platforms that allowed me to work with people

like Taylor Swift and Rihanna and others.

But that's kind of how I got started in this space.

I love that.

I'm going to go off script here. We've got a lot of questions, but a lot of people want to be influencers.
And Jeremy Miner, for example, the guy that made the intro, eyeballs. Jeremy was in here, I don't know, probably a year ago.
And he said, would you rather have a billionaire in here or a person with a billion followers? He's like, it's a new currency. He's like eyeballs.
What are your thoughts on that? It's a great point. And I'll break down a distinction because people think about, and especially a lot of business owners, business owners can think about virality and be like, well, I just want to generate more leads.
I want to generate more customers, more purchases for my brand. And they

can't correlate it because they think virality is like that pesky teenager down the street that's

making dance videos on TikTok. But the reality is, if you think about almost all businesses today

have some type of social media presence. And let's just say that on average, you're generating,

let's say 10,000 views a video. Now, people listening to this, I want you to take whatever

that number is, 1,000, 10,000, maybe some people are generating 100,000, 10,000 views of video. Now, people listening to this, I want you

to take whatever that number is, 1,000, 10,000, maybe some people are generating 100,000,

and then multiply that by 10, then multiply that by 100, then multiply that by 100,000. What would that do if that many people were paying attention to what you had to say? Now, the potential of social media is only capped at how big you can dream, how big your business is.
And I'll give you an example. We have two beauty influencers, both same amount of subscribers on YouTube, several million, and one does brand deals.
And she does relatively well. She does six figures a year off of brand deals.
But then one turns it into a multi-billion dollar company called Ipsy. That one is Michelle Phan, a friend of mine.
So that is the same thing, the same type of audience, the same industry, the same amount of views and subscribers. One turns it into valuation of billions, while the other turns it into six figures.
So it's just a tool to do what you want with it. And some people use it to do well, six figures.
Some people do it to have millions of followers or subscribers that don't really do anything from a revenue standpoint, while others turns it into billions of dollars of value. Yeah.
Like the Kardashians do a pretty good job of monetizing it. Absolutely.
What's the one that's a billionaire? Kylie Jenner. Kylie.
I saw her stand in the airport for the little makeup. Yeah.
And people kind of undercut that and say like, oh, well, she's just an influencer. But how many other...
I think she was at the time the youngest self-made billionaire off of social media. This is like the most fascinating subject because at A1 here, we spend about 3 million bucks a month.
We do TV, radio, billboards. We do ValPak, the little blue mailers.
I personally do a lot of social media, but we haven't really cracked the code, but there are people. I've heard that it's hard to go viral organically.
Like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok have made it harder than it used to be, unless it's like a goofy reel without really any advertising in it, because they want you to pay. What's your thoughts on that? Is it hard? Yes.
But I bet everything that you've mastered in marketing was hard. It's like not every business can spend $3 million a month profitably.
That's hard. Same thing with organic content.
People will say, oh, my account is shadow banned, or they're suppressing my reach on purpose in order to get me to pay for it. That's just inherently false.
In order to understand it, you have to understand the algorithms. And the algorithms control reach and distribution of the content.
So what are the algorithms fundamentally designed to do? Keep people on the platform longer. Because the longer people are watching your videos, the more ads they can serve, the more profit they generate.
Now, this isn't like Netflix where they're investing billions of dollars in original content. So they rely on us.
They want to see us succeed. They want to serve our content to millions of people.
Now, the challenge and the difficult part is when I started in social media in 2005, there's a few million people on the platform. Today, there's close to 5 billion people on social media.
So that's the difficult part is if any one of us opened up our favorite social media app, whether it be Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, whatever we use, there's probably 150,000 pieces of content it can cede to us based on the people that we follow and the content we've engaged with. So in reality is you're competing for that attention to prove to the algorithms your content can hold attention longer than other content.
Even looking at your Instagram profile, your most viral videos are not like silly pet videos. They're not people jumping off our roofs.
It's really deeply emotional and educational content. Now it's shaped and contextualized in a different way.
But if it was all about getting you to pay for it, then nobody would ever go viral. You know, Mr.
Beast, who started in his bedroom when he was 13 years old, he wouldn't build this massive empire of 500 subscribers across all of his channels. So Mr.
Beast, I just hired that works for me full time. One of Mr.
Beast guys that was right underneath them. That was his creative guy.
And he said, what do you think we spent on a video? I have no idea. He goes, 1.3 million.
He goes, we spent $40,000 on the thumbnail. He goes, I've got ways to do it at a fraction of a fraction of that cost.
But one of the problems we had with Mr. Beast is as he got older, his audience is not really, we made a lot of money on swag and different things like that.
I'm just curious, when you meet somebody, for example, me, I'm the home service expert. You know, I'm just curious, like, how do you kind of reverse engineer? Because so many people are like, it's so funny because I send Blake, the guy that came from Mr.
Beast. I send him goofy videos.
I'm like, we can recreate this. It's funny.
But I get off like MADHD. So I'm obviously like, I look at a lot of things that hit my algorithm.
And I'm like, this will get a lot of views. But then again, it's off brand.
So like, what's the starting point when you work with somebody? I mean, what exactly do you do when you start working? Do you already need to work with somebody that's already gone viral? And they're like the Aktua girl or whatever. How do you work? Yeah.
So we work with people with no social media experience. Some of our biggest case studies are people coming in with no social media experience, no social presence, and then they blow up.
Because sometimes it's a little bit easier to work with somebody without social media experience because you don't have to untrain bad patterns or behaviors or things that they believe to be true. So the way that we work with people is first getting them to understand that there is a formula in science to success.
And that formula in science starts with understanding what we call a format. Other people may call it a series, but it's a storytelling structure that is repeatable.
So a lot of people and probably a lot of things that you see is trend-based. So trend versus format.
Trend is something that is very fleeting, meaning it only lasts for a few weeks or maybe a few months. If you think back to the ice bucket challenge,

the ice bucket challenge was a trend.

Does anybody do the ice bucket challenge today?

No, because it died off.

So then people are forced to keep repeating

and finding new trends versus a format

is a repeatable structure that you can repeat

over and over and over again.

So I'll give you an example of it.

One of our clients, very little social media experience, was starting with 2,000 followers. He's a leather craftsman, so very niche expertise, sold leather goods like wallets, purses, things of that nature.
So we helped them design a format called, Is It Worth It? So it was a series where he'd buy a $500 Chanel handbag, deconstruct it on screen, and tell you whether it was worth the money that you were paying for it. So that format, he took from 2,000 followers to 2.5 million followers across all his social media channels.
How many? 2.5 million. And in some instances, with his most expensive products, he can't even keep them off the shelf.
He's selling it out. So we're using this repeatable series or structure that's tied to his specific expertise, his specific domains, where he can monetize.
So everything that we do is, it's not about going viral for the sake of going viral, because like you said, it's like, if it doesn't translate to revenue, then what difference does it make? And what people often think is, my subject matter isn't sexy or interesting enough, but I can definitively tell you, like our team has done 10,000 hours of research of what causes content to go viral. Any subject matter can go viral.
Taxes go viral. Real estate goes viral.
Garage doors. Garage doors.
We worked with a grave digger. We helped a grave digger go viral.
Any subject matter can. That's kind of cool.
I mean, when you really deconstruct it, I think even when you start a podcast, people like, I don't know what I'm going to start. And the best guys I know say, who's your avatar and how do you make it more interesting? And how do you get people tuning in? How do you make it valuable information? I think there's some goofy stuff too, like the guy that shakes his stomach and he makes a couple million a year.
I heard you don't Dan Mart by chance yeah back your time i work with him i just got back from colonna and he said here's the secret you start with youtube and you nail it on youtube because youtube pays for everything once you get enough followers once you get enough viral videos and it goes he goes you want to deconstruct your YouTube and feed the algorithm on his meta and LinkedIn and X Twitter. And this is his philosophy.
And I don't know if it's what you think. And there's a different audience for every single different thing and a different algorithm.
But he said, you nail YouTube correctly. It pays for every, everything because you want to get, people don't understand.
They're like, why do you do this stuff? Well, the whole goal is to make enough money to pay for a bigger, more sophisticated team. It's not, I make, I do well in garage stores.
This is where my pride and joy is. This is what put me on the map.
I want, just so you understand, and I don't know what you would say to this. I'm actually going to use this as a consulting thing, but I want to make like a video where I'm connected with guys like Robert of Kiyaki, rich dad, poor dad.
And I could get into Richard Branson. I go to Necker Island, but why not make over? Why not get all the doors donated and talk to the best designers in the world about just the curb appeal.
And a lot of it could do with garage doors and then have five minutes. Like I had the guy come out that you probably know this kid.
He says, how much money do you make? He goes up to cars. Yeah.
And like just quick tidbit from all these great smart, best-selling authors and say, hey, listen, I'm going to do a little podcast, but it's going to be in your garage. We're going to make over your garage.
And I get it all donated from my sponsors, which are the garage manufacturers. And we talk about the product a little bit, how good it looks on the home.
I don't know, but I know I'm getting a car done for like 500 grand from Richard Rawlings that is going to cost him like 80, but he's got 26 million followers. And it gets my brand, A1, on 26 million people watch my car that's going to get all A1 garage door designed on it.
It's sprayed in. It's my dad's favorite car.
It's kind of sentimental. It's a write-off.
It's going to be at every home show. This guy's got 26 million people.
I'm paying kind of to learn from him. And he's going to build a badass car.
I'm just curious, how would you even start, like, if I wanted to blow up the garage door industry? What would be the thought process? How does the process work? Because there's anything and everything from spraying for bugs to gutters. And there's a lot of businesses that listen to this that aren't in home service.
And we can use this as a coaching session. I'm fine kind of doing that.
So the first step to take you through is we've got to define what is the format or series that we're going to go after. Like you mentioned the young kid that approaches people in their cars and ask, what do you do for a living? So that is a man on the street format.
It's a clear format where you approach a random stranger

on the street. Oftentimes it's casted.
So it's set up. Yeah.
So that is a format. Now, man on

the street, there's 10 different versions of this. I have a good friend that we've worked with

named Alex Stemp. He's a photographer that approaches random strangers on the street

and offers them a car. No, he approaches them and offers them a professional photo shoot and then reveals the results so he's built an audience of 20 million people doing it so that's a format so we've done analysis on over 220 of these formats and we have a team of researchers that are doing new analysis every week so it's not like you have to pick from three to five of them but there's different formats you gotta stick to your format until you Okay.
Because the reality is, so the example is I started in the film industry. And if you think about any movie that you've seen over the past 50 years, they all use the same format.
It's called the 3X structure. So if you think about like Steven Spielberg, every time he makes a movie, he's not reinventing that 3X structure.
He's using it over and over and over again. And that is what allows him to become one of the best storytellers in the world.
Now, the issue is most people in social media, what they're doing is they're reinventing the wheel every time they create a piece of content, and thus they're not mastering the art of storytelling on these platforms. So you have to really master the nuance of executing on a format.
And the reason is, is most people think success in social media is about the content, what you're saying. It's not.
It's about the context of how you're saying it. And that is the major difference here.
So if you keep changing up your format every time, or if you're jumping from trend to trend to trend, you're not mastering it. The same thing in your business expertise, you built a massive garage door company.
Now, when you were first starting out, if you were trying to start 10 other companies that were all in different industries or sectors at the same time, horrible idea. It's the same thing with social media.
How do you go viral, build a massive audience so that you don't have to rely on other people's eyeballs? You choose a format or a series and you master that. So you may ask, well, how do you master a format or series? What does that look like? So what we do is we take that specific format.
Let's just say it's the man on the street. There's many different examples of it.
There's another one called the school of hard knocks. I don't know if you've seen.
Yeah. So school of hard knocks.
That's the guy that came and interviewed me and Jeremy. Generated millions of followers and hundreds of millions of views off of that.
Okay. So what we would do is most people will look at that on the surface and just say, oh, I see what he's doing.
He's just approaching random strangers in the street and asking them about their success. But if you look at his hit rate, there's certain videos that generate tens of millions of views.
And there are certain videos that generate less than 100,000 views. So how we really understand what drives that format is we have a qualitative analysis process called gold, silver, bronze, where we'll open up a spreadsheet.
We'll take 10 to 20 of the highest performers in that format, which is 10 million views plus, 10 to 20 of the average performers, which is like 500,000 to a million, and then 10 to 20 of the underperformers, which is like under 100,000. And what we're looking at is not the content, but the context of what is happening.
What is the difference that's happening to those high performers that's showing up there that's not showing up those underperformers, so that we can get a deep understanding of why they are so successful? Because I guarantee 99% of people that try the man on the street format fail. We just don't see them because the algorithm doesn't serve up to us.
So the best place to start is to first understand that there is this concept of a format and series, and then understanding which one you want to do because it excites you, but which one also is best for your business or brand, and then diving in to the contextual elements. So again, tying back to where I started, I went to film school.
So what do you do in film school? You see this in movies. You sit down and watch classic movies.
You read screenplays. Yeah, I took all the cinema classes.
Exactly. The reality is though in social media, nobody does that.
Why? Because anybody can just pull out a phone, press record and publish something. So they expect it to be so easy.
And that's where all these frustrated people come in and say, oh, the algorithm is just suppressing my reach on purpose to get me to pay for it. Facebook and YouTube and these companies don't make money off the person paying 10 bucks to boost a post.
They make money off of businesses. Ads.
Yeah. The people that are spending millions or tens of millions of dollars a month.
That's where they make their real money. It's not off the average person paying 10 bucks to boost it.
But that's, in a nutshell, where to start is first understand that there are storytelling structures out there. There's a lot of them.
Identify the one that you want to go after and then dissect the nuances that allow you to successfully use it versus unsuccessful uses of it. I think the right answer is how do I become an influencer to help this revenue stream? Like the leather guy is a perfect example.
The fast and loud, the guy Richard Rawlings is fast and loud on the YouTube channel. It's beefing up cars, man.
It's like everyone wants to see what he's putting under the hood and it's really cool. But he had a live TV show.
And a lot of these people, I think they're doing it backwards. Everybody wants to do a national day.
You look at Bar Rescue or you look at The Prophet with Marcus Limones. It's probably easier.
I can tell you his show, Richard Rawlings show, is bigger on YouTube than it was. It's got more viewers on YouTube.
Which way would you start? If you had a really compelling type of format, or I guess you would call it a structure, would you try to pitch it? Do you want to do self-publishing or do you want to get published by... How do you look at that? Well, obviously, if you can get on TV, that's great.
But most people can't get on TV. And also, let me just say this, being on TV is great.
There was a journalist I work with, Katie Couric, and she came to me after going to Yahoo. And she was getting lost because she was going after 30 years of being on the Today Show.
And the first thing I told her is go back to TV. It's a lot easier because you get this habitual nature built up.
But TV is also challenging once you get on there. It doesn't mean that they're going to hold the show or you own the underlying IP.
Your destiny is not in your own hands. Social media, you're in control

of everything. But as we mentioned in the beginning, it's challenging.
It is not easy. The process is simple to follow, but it's very difficult to really break through because of all this noise.
Now, it can be done with the right approach, the right mindset, and the right strategy. From my perspective, social media presents a much greater opportunity, a bigger opportunity from television, just because the numbers are so much bigger than you get with traditional television these days.
So that's like, again, I'm never going to tell somebody not to go to TV if they can do it. But I think that the real question is, am I going to be successful on social media? It seems so daunting and challenging.
Do you think if you're successful at social media, because I've seen a lot of these people that the show does want to pick you up, that they're like, man, you bring this massive following already. Do you think that that gives you kind of...
100% it does. Look at Mr.
Beast just got paid $100 million from Amazon to do a TV show with them. So yeah, there's a lot of examples.
So if you... Right, Sir Hans got a Netflix show out of it too.
Freaking awesome, man. I love this stuff.
You don't even understand how much this made my day. Just you being on here.
If you're going to pick something to go after, and this might not be a one-size-fits-all, but if you had to say... Because LinkedIn's becoming...
If you look at... I met Gary Vay Vaynerchuk, we talked for a couple hours and he's all about paid ads.
He's like, it might take a hundred tries. It might take a thousand tries to AB test, but you'll strike gold eventually.
But he was just talking to me about virality and all these different things. But where was I going with this? He started out with the wine industry, but he would tell you LinkedIn is a good opportunity right now for the bank for your buck on paid.
But then one of my buddies just started going viral on X. I feel like TikTok is really cool.
And I feel like there's a way to monetize it. It just seems like to me, like you're selling products.
You got like an Amazon store that you're just kind of, everybody's saying I make $3,000 from home and I don't do a thing. I just kind of, I buy it here, sell it there, this arbitrage game.
But if you had to pick a social media and you wanted a business following, what would you look at? How do you pick what social media platforms you're going after? You just hit all of them. Definitely not hit all of them.
Typically, it depends on your B2B, B2C. Typically, the way that we look at it is understanding what are the business goals and objectives? What type of product are we selling? Is this high ticket? Is this low ticket? Things of that nature.
But what we look at is we always start with what is the format or series that we want to go after and that typically dictates the platform. Now, LinkedIn and X are very different than TikTok, YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Meta, Instagram.
As you know, LinkedIn, very business audience, definitely smaller in aggregate audience size than the others. X, more text based, they're going heavier into video.
But again, much smaller audience size than kind of the bigger ones. So if you're you're strictly a B2B play, and it also depends on do you want to create the content? Are you willing to create the content? Do you have a team to create the content? It dictates where you go.
I can definitively say that there's no wrong way. I would never say, no, don't do that.
If you're like, really, I want to master this platform and there's a solid kind of business reason or content reason behind it. If you master any one of these platforms, you're going to have more business and leads and revenue than you know what to do with because economies of scale at this juncture are so large.
Do you care about getting paid back from YouTube at all? Does that even factor into anything when you're thinking about anything? I think it depends on the business. I think it's a definite bonus.
I think what you said about Dan Martel saying that if you master it, it can pay for everything. I think that's a great bonus.
I focus on how you actually master it because it's one thing he's 100% correct. And if you master it, it can pay for anything because their revenue share program is far more mature than any of the others because it's longer form content.
They can do interstitials and it's very easy to do the revenue share where all the other platforms, it's short form content. You can't do interstitials.
So it's difficult to share the revenue with the specific creator. I'm more focused on what is the underlying business goal and objective that you're trying to achieve with the platform? Because if you master YouTube, for example, and let's just go back to Ryan Serhan, you said you knew him, luxury real estate agent, sells properties in Manhattan that are anywhere from $15 million to $250 million.
So he's playing a completely different ball game than most people. Specific niche audience with the top 1% in the entire world in terms of their net worth and what they're willing to spend on a property.
So what he does is he plays the game of what we call the generalist principle of, I'm going to reach millions and millions of people with my brand and my message on YouTube. And if less than 1% is my core ideal audience, I'm killing the competitor because he's generating millions and millions of views a month.
He's even said he has sold a $30 million property off a single YouTube video. So if you think about that, the commission off a $30 million property compared to what you're making on YouTube AdSense.
And I'm not saying, I'm not diluting the AdSense.

It's great.

But then like when I mentioned Michelle Phan

who built Ipsy into a multi-billion dollar corporation,

do you think at the end of the day,

she's kind of measuring how much AdSense

she's generating off of videos?

No, it's relative.

Yeah.

So Jeremy Miner says,

I only post videos about sales.

That's what I'm known for.

That's what makes the phone ring. You got a guy like Andy Elliott saying, if you don't have a six pack, I'm not hiring you.
His stuff goes viral. And Dan Martell is like, I like to tell the personal side.
I like to talk about my fiance that left me because I work too much. I talk about my kids and they measure every single piece of content they put out.
They measure, when you talk about this, it gets this many views. When we talk about this, it goes down.
When you talk about this, and he almost uses podcasts. He likes going to smaller podcasts because they ask weird questions.
The big podcast, where did you come from? What are you doing? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he uses that as content.
What would be, he loves the interview style for his videos. And the book, put them on the map, Buy Back Your Time.
It's right there. What do you think, because their strategies, a little bit, you get to learn about who I am.
You get to learn about me as a person. You get to meet my dogs.
You get to see what I do at home. And then we talk about business 30% of the time.
Or does your structures really just fall into one category for most of the time?

So everything that you said of what they're doing, there's nothing wrong with it. What I'm

focusing on is how you be at the top 1% of social media. So everything that I'm saying is from that

lens of how do we become the top 1% in terms of people following us, in terms of the views,

the engagement, and things of that nature. What I would suggest, at least in the beginning,

is focus solely on that format and structure and mastering every nuance of that. Because just that exercise in and of itself is going to allow you to master that art.
Same thing with your business. You spent years mastering all the other disciplines of marketing to allow you to spend $3 million a month.
You could take that knowledge into any other business because you spent the time harnessing that knowledge. The same thing here is focus on mastering a single format or series.
And through that, you're going to become an expert in content creation. And once you've become an expert in content creation, then you're going to understand how to layer in those different elements.
But if you're starting out that way, and I'm going to do 30% personal stories and 20% business and 30% podcasts, it's just kind of like percentages that you're kind of throwing down there without any real kind of understanding of when something works, why does it work? Or when something doesn't work, understanding why it doesn't work. Which is so interesting.
This notion of, can you just go a little bit deeper? Context, not context. Because some of the stuff, you've seen this, but I'll watch a guy mow a lot.
He'll go to the ugliest freaking landscaping and it's just kind of pleasing. Or a guy clean a carpet.
That's just visual. And then there's other things that I'm like, it's goofy and it's funny.
I'm just curious. Can you kind of go into that a little bit more context? Yeah.
So there's different... So when we look at content, we're looking at what we call performance drivers.
So these are contextual elements that either increase the virality or decrease the virality. So there's over 200 of these performance drivers.
So these are contextual elements that either increase the virality or decrease the virality. So there's over 200 of these performance drivers that we break down.
So these can be things like pacing, tonality, facial expressions, body cues, the environment, what's happening. So I'll give you some examples.
One of the big mistakes people make with their content is happening in the first three seconds. So if you think about short form content on TikTok, Instagram, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, when you're scrolling through content, one of the biggest mistakes people will make is they'll have like a little meme card, title card at the top, they'll have captions below, somebody talking and potentially moving.
What's happening there from a subconscious level is you don't know what to focus on. Am I

supposed to be focusing on the title card, the caption, or the person speaking? And the subconscious

feels like it's being left behind, so it all already moves on to the next piece of content

or scrolls to the next video. So in that instance, it's not the content of what the person's saying

or what's written on the top or written on the bottom. It's the context of how it's being

delivered. So having a clear visual hierarchy of how it's being delivered is critically important.
Now, I'll give you another example. There's an amazing content creator called Dr.
Julie Smith. She's a clinical psychologist, millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram.
And she uses a format called a visual metaphor, where she's breaking down complex topics like PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks, things that typically you wouldn't want to consume, but she has millions of people viewing that content. So the way that she's doing it from a contextual element is one of her most viewed videos, there's a waste paper basket on the desk and it's filled with paper.
It's overflowing. So with that visual metaphor, automatically with the first few seconds from a contextual element, it's showing that there's going to be an applied interaction with this waste paper basket and there's some issue with it.
So automatically in the first few seconds, subconsciously, it's getting people to stop. Now, the way that she explains anxiety through this is it's the waste paper basket overflowing the paper.
So how do you do that? You go through trauma therapy. You take each piece of paper out at a time, which is a painful memory or an experience.
You fold it up nicely. You put it on the side of the table here until all the papers are folded up.
And then you put it back into the waste paper basket and it's no longer overflowing. So what she's doing is taking a very heady, complex subject matter, tying it to a visual metaphor where there's plenty of clinical psychologists or therapists on the web that will talk about the exact same subject matter.
Again, it's not the content, but they're just spewing facts or data or information that would get 10,000 views instead of 11 million views. Love this stuff.
You ever hear of Dr. Pompa? No.
So this guy, he's one of Joe Polish's buddies. He came to one of the hundred.
Joe Polish has got this big group. He lives down the street.
He's a great guy. And what is that shot that you take to lose weight now that's really big? Ozempic.
Ozempic. So I knew a couple of people, they're not on it now, that were on Ozempic.
And I said, I sent this to them. I'm just going to play this for you and for the audience.
How do you tell if people are taking Ozempic? They have Ozempic butt. No, it's a real thing.
Most of the weight loss with Ozempic is actually muscle loss and you lose the big muscle groups. Unfortunately, your butt are one of the big muscles.
Men and ladies, the butt goes away, and it is called Ozempic butt. New study just showed when you lose weight on Ozempic, you're losing mostly lean muscle mass.
Matter of fact, two-thirds of the weight loss is lean mass instead of the one-third that is fat. Fact is, if you lose weight, it's the opposite.
This is Dr. Pompa.
Yeah, I've seen his content before. 1.2 million followers.
And he just goes in, he'll go into like Kroger, and he'll go, look at the nutrients on this. And it seems like the same format.
It's always him. He's dressed differently.
He's talking to somebody that's a specialist, or he's going through like health things. It's amazing.
I mean, I really think that he's probably got some writers. It's his two sons that are doing the research and he's got a team.
How important is it that you do deliver on content? You've got the research. You show the stats.
I know you probably don't overproduce, but what is important about that? In terms of frequency and volume? What is the right? That's a great other question, but I'm saying how much research needs to go into the content? Should you have writers kind of doing some research going on? What's like, I've heard like stay current. Like you could talk about Ukraine or Israel.
I don't know if that works for everybody, but what's the current? Obviously you don't want to do what's a trending only. Yeah.
The current affairs maybe. I don't know.
99% of businesses, you don't have to do current content in terms of what's happening in the world. And oftentimes that can work against you.
Obviously, if you're a news journalist or a podcast host where you cover current events. But I would say 99% of businesses, it's not needed.
You can do it if you want. If you want to look at another person that worked with Mr.
Beast, a guy named Dylan Page, who is basically beating out all the news outlets on TikTok and Instagram, because he's mastered the art of covering journalism through these principles that we're talking about today. But I would say 99% of businesses, I wouldn't go there because you want to have evergreen content that you can use.
And also, I feel like you're trying to force things a little bit too much in terms of current events. But in terms of your question of how much research and script writing and things go into it, a lot of the research comes in at the beginning.
And this is where we spend most of our time. We have a team of researchers that's dedicated to spend 10,000 hours just dissecting different series or formats.
But a bulk of the work is really coming up front of identifying the series or format and then doing that breakdown of understanding what is the difference between the successful uses of that format versus the unsuccessful uses of that format. So that it gives you a blueprint to benchmark yourself against.
So that once you start producing content,

if your content ever falls short,

all you have to do is to take your video on one side of the screen,

the reference of a high performer on the other side of the screen,

not paying attention to the content, the context,

play them side by side and see what the difference is.

And if you're honest with yourself, you'll see differences.

And these differences can be subtle.

They can be your pacing, your tonality, what happens in the first three seconds. Maybe it's the lighting that's off or your background is off.
Things of this nature, you can start picking it up against that element. Yeah.
You'll see literally success leaves clues. Yes.
Let's put it against if this is what's the clinical studies you're going to have your, Yeah, you're just testing against the, what is that called? Whatever.

Can't remember, but how often should somebody be posting? And there's all this research. Some people say you got to do three a day.
Some people say it, some people will pull one down and test it again, pull it down and test it again. Well, what's the right way to kind of go about how you post in the frequency? Again, the answer that I'm going to give is how do you be at the top 1%? And if you want to be at the top 1%, it has nothing to do with frequency.
It has to do with your ability to master your content. Quality.
Yeah. Quality over quantity.
Yes. And what you'll see is frequency can tend to potentially lead to more followers.
But if you look at somebody's followers versus the views that they're getting, if they haven't mastered their format, then they can be generating 10,000 views a video rather than generating 500,000 views a video. And you're just having more impact with it.
The other challenge with frequency is it often causes people to throw learning out the window, meaning they're so focused on how do I get three posts out today without trying to focus on what is my hypothesis with each post I'm doing and what am I learning from it, whether it works or doesn't work. Because you'll see a lot of people that can go viral, maybe it's one out of 50 or one out of 100 videos by doing that volume model.
But when they get that one to work, they have no idea why it worked compared to the other ones failing. And thus they go through that cycle again of producing another 50 or another 100.
So frequency can come into play once you've mastered your format. Like Mr.
Beast started doing like a video like every month or every six weeks. Now he's trying to do a video every week.
He's mastered every element of it and he has a team to support and things of that nature. But if you want to be at that top 1% of really driving massive growth and eyeballs in your content, I would highly advise of doing quality versus quantity.
When you look at Instagram, there's shares, there's likes, there's comments. I was with Joe the other day and he goes, this guy's got more followers than God, but he never gets one comment.
I think they're all fake. And there are people that pay for like, you can look at someone that could be in the year.
Yeah. What do you think sets up the algorithm to say, is it shit? What's the highest signal? Instagram specifically, and they've outright come out with this, is they're really prioritizing shares right now because they see that as a massive benefit versus other platforms.
They're always looking for that extra edge and the way that they like it is it sparks conversation. So you see a video, you share it with a friend or a spouse or a loved one and a communication starts in the DMs around it.
So for Instagram specifically, I would say shares is number one, but retention is a close second. So watching the whole thing? As much as possible, yes.
So retention means watching as much as possible. Yes.
Again, the share element plays into retention because you're sending it to a person and that's likely going to spark a conversation. Every decision any of these platforms make is all about how they can get people to spend more time on the platform versus going to another platform.
Because if they're spending more time on their platform, they can serve more ads and generate more profit. So I've noticed that YouTube and Instagram and Facebook, I think TikTok is spending a fortune, I guess, because there's always TikTok videos that come up on their platforms.
Like go to TikTok. And this came from TikTok.
Is that just they're spending, spending the money? Why would they even, I guess they don't want to gate that stuff. Why would they allow their competitor to say, go to TikTok on their platform? I guess you pay to play.
I think, so you're, you mean in terms of somebody- Sponsored ads all the time or like, I just feel like it feels like stuff's always pushing. So if they're running ads, it's hopefully because they have a self-liquidating model going on.
The same thing in your garage business, you spend X dollars to acquire a user and you know what your LTV is. The LTV is profitable.
Right. So you hope that's the case.
I can't definitively say that that is the element, but there's always this arbitrage going on where each platform has really mastered the nuances of behavioral psychology to keep people on that platform longer. So I would suspect that, let's just say TikTok's running ads on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube to get people to download TikTok and use it, they know if they're spending to get that person to download that app,

that their models are trained to get them addicted to that platform and thus increase the likelihood

that people will start going to TikTok rather than another platform.

My biggest pet peeve in the planet is these influencers who have never been in the real

world. And I made a joke the other day with a post.
I said, the 20-year-old life coach

Thank you. pet peeve in the planet is these influencers who have never been in the real world.
And I made a joke the other day with a post. I said, the 20-year-old life coach, the guy that's marriage coach who's on his fourth divorce, they rent a Beamer or a Ferrari.
They go to this place in LA. And I'm still in the game.
I don't coach a lot of people, but I have this podcast. And I talk about real life.
What's the economy? You know, we're growing very, very rapidly when there's less than 20 percent of the companies growing in home service. 80 percent are actually declining.
I know that because I know the CRM data because I know the largest CRM. And do you feel like there's a responsibility of moral obligation that if you're going to make someone go viral, it needs to be real information, if they're informational? I mean, if someone's putting out bad content, I don't know.
I don't even know if that makes sense. But it feels like to me it's like someone's going to be a coach and they're going to start selling products like real estate.
Their stuff used to work, but now it doesn't. So they had to switch to sell courses.
What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I agree 100%. And if you look at the dedications of all three of my books are the exact same.
And it's all about that I feel that there's people that have the ability to transform the world in a positive way, but their voices aren't being heard because they just don't have the knowledge and the expertise. But I think that there's definitely a lot of that issue.
And I think the issue expands beyond that of people looking at even just celebrities or people that are successful and looking at this kind of surface level view of their life and automatically deeming that those people are happy just because they're showing this lifestyle, they're showing these trips and things of that nature. In some ways, I think that's even a bigger problem because people are aspiring to look at the wealthiest people or the most successful people and just say, well, I'm not good enough because I don't have that Ferrari or I'm not flying in that private jet or I'm not dating that model or things of that nature.
When both you and I know a majority of those people are miserable. They're not happy.
They're on drugs. They want to commit suicide.
I know that money ruins people. 95, probably 99 percent.
I mean, I'm making up stats here. But the majority of people that make it and get that kind of money, they're not ready for it.
They can't trust their friends. They get the fame.
They can't go anywhere. They got the paparazzi following them.
And I know they're not happy. I've met't trust their friends they get the fame they can't go anywhere they got the paparazzi following them and i know they're not happy i've met these people they're literally depressed yeah so i think that there's a lot of problems with social media at the flip side i think that there's a lot of positives you know there's a lot of there's a but it's like any type of media outlet that's been even since the the printing press was invented there's very successful uses of it and unsuccessful uses of it.
The guy at School of Hard Knocks, he said, hey man, your video went very, very viral. He said, would you be willing to come on, I got about a hundred entrepreneurs to pay me a monthly fee to ask some of these people the questions.
I said, yeah, I'll do a session. And it was so quick.
I just answered questions. I love Q and A's and I've got a lot of the answers because I've been through it.
Not because I'm a special, but because I failed so many times. And he's like, I think his goal was get the views, get very big and then monetize.
And is there a way to monetize through the process or do you wait to get? There definitely is. I would say, and you'll get this, there's a very big distinction between organic content and paid content.
So paid content, you can go right for the pitch, right for the sale, right for the conversion. Organic content serves a completely different purpose.
Organic content is to get people to know, like, and trust you. So again, going back to the leather craftsman Tanner Leatherstein, is it worth a format deconstructing the $500 Chanel handbag? There's no calls to action in any of his content.
What he's doing is he's sharing his expertise and breaking down whether these expensive leather goods are actually worth the amount of money that they're paying for it. And what he's doing is the numbers are growing so big because he's just focused on how do I build a connection with that audience? How do I get to know who I am, trust me, like me, and they automatically want to take that next step.
So for him, he just has a link in his bio and the traffic numbers are so big. But at the same time, as you know, it's paid traffic, the larger your organic audience goes, the bigger your retargeting audience builds off of that so that you can remarket to those people with direct response content.
Now, in terms of calls to action and content, organic content, you can definitely do it. But my recommendation is master the organic without the call to action, because then you're removing a variable that can drive down performance, master the performance, get the performance up, and then layer in the call to action, because then you'll know how to test different calls to action to ensure that it's not driving down performance.
But if you integrate it into the beginning, you don't know if that's the reason that the content's not

succeeding or if it's another variable. So I love this stuff.
If you're a home service company,

you're ABC plumber, where do you get started? You want to drive business. There's a couple

of things I want with my garage door company. I don't want just clients.
I want great people to

apply. What I noticed is if my social media gets bigger, really good people, half the guys that

Thank you. Like you seem like a real dude.
Like we thought it was too good to be true. We thought it was a Ponzi, but it's real.
And so the question I have is, I guess you figure out what's your goal. I mean, where does someone get started? Well, I think like you said, it's really understanding what your goal is.
And I think depending on the size of the business, and I'd love to hear your perspective, but I would say a lot of business don't really understand the metrics that drive the business. What's your cost per acquisition? What's the lifetime value of your customer? Just kind of knowing...
Cost per lead, your booking rate, your conversion rate, and your average ticket. Yeah.
That is the first place to start. You need to know those numbers.
Right. And then you can start different levels of how you want to engage in that space.
Paid media, as you know, is the easiest place to start because you're basically buying reach to get in front of eyeballs. That doesn't mean that people are going to stop and pay attention, but at least you're not having to fight against an algorithm from an organic perspective.
Well, you can turn that up or down. That's what's nice as you can go.
Capacity's filled up. There's no minimum.
Yeah. You scale as quick as you want to, you can do it faster.
Organic is, I would say, organic is earned and it's more of an advanced play, but there's much larger upside to it in terms of beating out the competition. Because paid, you're basically just bidding against your competition to see who can acquire that user versus organic.
When we look at companies' competitors, nine times out of 10, they don't have a single competitor in their space that's doing well with organic because they just don't focus on a lot of the nuances and things that we talked about today so organic is major upside but it's a little bit more kind of nuanced versus time get in time it's time i tell people how to rank organically on google i'm like listen google's got to trust you you got to get links you got to actually get like i'm on forbes i'm on huffington post i'm Inc. I get EDU backlinks.
I get .gov. I get links all the time.
I've got great content. My metadata is right.
My schema data is right. My H1 tags are right.
I'm putting out great content with videos. I'm doing all of it.
And it's still, I'm a 63 domain authority. It's pretty good for a home service company.
I want to get to 70. I'll outrank all my competition.
And I know they can't outrank me fast. No one could come on and say, I'm going to outrank you tomorrow.
It's going to take years. And as long as I keep doing my stuff, right, I'm going to continue to climb the ladder.
So what you just wrote down for search is almost the exact same thing of looking at organic is that you have to build trust with the algorithms. You have to prove that you can put content in front of millions of people and hold their attention.
So if you watch Mr. Beast and you watch a video that he just publishes, in the first like two hours, he's got 10 million views already.
Why? Because the algorithm trusts him implicitly, so they're gonna seed it to that many people. Versus if you're just starting out or you're one of those people that has bought followers or has found another way to gain that audience without fully understanding how to communicate effectively, the algorithm, the way it works is it's going to seed it.
You're going to post something, it'll seed it to 100 people. It'll measure how effectively you are at stopping the scroll and holding attention.
If you're good at it, it'll seed it to another 100, another 100, another 100. However, if that first 100 people, people don't stop and watch it, it's going to kill it right away.
So in the same way that you've talked about mastering SEO and building that trust with the albums that way, you have to do that the same thing with social media. I love this stuff, man.
If someone wanted to reach out to you, I mean, how do you work? So basically, we have a team that develops the research. So we do all the research for our clients.
We develop the strategy and then we train them in our models. So we work with solopreneurs with no social media experience.
They're shooting content on their iPhone all the way up to multi-billion dollar corporations. Why would you work with everybody? Why not pick an avatar? Why not find...
I mean, you're just so good at it that you said we're going to be able to do it for the masses. Yeah.
Because again, it's not about the content. It's about the context.

So for us, it's content agnostic. And also because of how well the books sell,

we have people from all over the world working with us. But we typically work best with the people that are doing hands-on with the content because they need to understand that,

those foundational elements. Right.
And if you want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to do that? They can just go to hookpoint.com to learn more. Also, just for your audience, my new book, The Guide to Going Viral.
If they go to hookpoint.com forward slash your last name, Mello, M-E-L-O-O, they can download a free version, PDF version or Kindle version of the book. This is awesome, man.
I love this. If you had any book that really influenced you outside, so you wrote 100 million followers, how I built a massive social following in 30 days, growth hacks for your business, your message, and your brand from the world's greatest minds, hook point, how to stand out in a three second world, and the guide to going viral.
And this one's just basic the cover i love it so what other books inspired you you know like for me it's the emith revisited and the richest man of babylon and i've got like probably 20 books that i can name that maybe even people don't know like go for no but is there any books that really change the way you think about things? I think one of my favorite books is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, Dale Carnegie.
Yeah. My top book of all.
Yeah. I think it's so simplistic, but so deep in so many ways.
And I really love the writing style. We tried to adapt the writing style for my books.
The Five-Hour Workweek, more from a hook perspective, he just nailed it with the hook and the content. The four-hour? Yeah.
The four-hour week. Is it four-hour? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss. Yeah.
Influence. Yep.
Robert Chidini was just in here. Yeah.
Robert Chidini was in here three weeks ago. He's 79 years old.
I'm having dinner with him. We're buddies.
I've had dinner with him three times. His books are amazing.
Yeah. So persuasion, he's the go.
Yeah. So those I think are the top ones.
Breakthrough Advertising is another one. Yeah.
Have you, you know, Alex Ramosi, he did pretty good on a hundred million offers. Yeah.
I don't know him personally, but yeah, he's done really well with his books. So you said I got more business because of my book.
Yeah. Do you feel like a book is the right way to start to do like, just curious, what's your thought are did you get published or did you do self-published first book i did publish worst experience ever second book kind of hybrid i did through my literary agent third book i just self-published yeah because once you get the following it's easier to self-publish but it's also like it's also it's just like we're marketers like you like right we all we eat and breathe data.
That's all we do. We optimize.
We break things. We try things.
Publishers don't work that way. So it's like you're getting data every six months if you're lucky.
It just doesn't make sense. For the average person, publishing is good for somebody that's getting a seven-figure advance because then they're going to put their marketing PR engine behind it.
But for the average person, the only thing that they're doing is helping you with the editing process, the cover design, getting it on shelves, which for some people is a big benefit. For somebody that just lives and breathes marketing, we want to control every aspect of it.
We want the data in real time. And the publishers just made it more difficult.
They didn't add value to the process. I would do this 10 times over again.
There's so much I learned through this. Guys, I'll just tell you this.
What Brandon's putting out here, you got to get his books, the new one, the Guide to Going Viral. I highly recommend you download that.
There'll be a link under here in this podcast. Watch the podcast, listen to the podcast.
If you don't think social media is the craziest, most best opportunity out there. I love Google, but I love everything.
I love everything that drives leads. And I measure the affluence.
I've got my avatar. Like I take this down to a science and this is my next frontier.
I will figure this out. And I'm actually going to ask for Brendan's help.
If someone wants to get ahold of you, so you go to Hookpoint. What is it? Hookpoint.com? Yeah, hookpoint.com.
And usually what I do to close this out is we talked about a lot of stuff and I didn't ask any of the questions. Here's how you know I have a great podcast guest is none of the questions on our, we do a lot of research.
There's lots of great questions, but my questions are better, but we talked about a lot of things. I'm going to let you close us out.
And we've got a lot of business owners that listen to this show. Anything, there's no holds barred, anything you want to talk about however long you want, but any final thoughts? I would just say definitively going viral or building an audience on social media is not luck.
There is a science to it. And the best piece of advice I can give you to start seeing that science in action is when you're using social media, no matter what channel you're on, is just start looking for this concept of a format.
See a viral video, click on the link of the bio of the person and see if they've done that same thing at least five or 10 times. If they have, then you're starting to see a pattern of a format that can be used.
If not, move on to the next one and find the next creator until you've identified that format. And the other big thing that I will say is, when you're doing that research, don't look for an apples to apples comparison to your brand or your business because oftentimes your competition is not being successful with organic.
So don't be afraid to look at a thought leader or an influencer that is in a different industry or sector because it's not about the content that's driving that performance. It's about the context of the way they're talking about it.
So often people make the mistake of saying, oh, I'm looking at this finance expert, but I'm in garages. I can't learn anything from that finance expert.
You can learn a ton from it. And that's where you can beat 99% of the people out there in social media is just adopting this new mindset as you're consuming social media content.
I got one follow-up question about that. Do you feel like you got to go through several different structures or formats before you find the one that's right for you? Or do you guys kind of figure out this is the format we're going to make this work? So typically, there's two ways to answer that question.
There's, are you being successful with the format or are you not enjoying that format? If you're not enjoying the format, then you should get rid of it right away. But if you're enjoying that format and you just haven't mastered the performance, stick with it because you will master it.
As long as the research proves that there is an upside to it, it's just science of manipulating all the contextual elements for the formula to add up. I love that.
Well, listen, dude, you are a rock star. I'm sure I was late today.
Thank you for listening. All the amazing home services and business owners out there.
That's a wrap for the home service expert. Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today.
Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states.
The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service.
So if you want to learn the secrets

to help me transfer my team

from stealing the toilet paper

to a group of 700 plus employees

rowing in the same direction,

head over to elevateandwin.com

forward slash podcast

and grab a copy of the book.

Thanks again for listening