Living The Red Life - From Zero to Millions on Social Media: The Untold Secrets of Hofit Golan

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

In this episode, we meet Hofit Golan, a social media star with a whopping 3.6 million followers on Instagram. Hofit shares her secrets to making it big in the online world, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and passion. She discusses how even the simplest and most unexpected content can go viral, urging listeners to just be themselves and have fun creating.Throughout the conversation, Hofit provides practical advice on how to navigate the world of social media, from understanding algorithms to collaborating with brands. She encourages aspiring influencers to embrace their unique skills and interests, reminding them that everyone has something valuable to share with the world. With her wealth of experience and down-to-earth approach, Hofit inspires listeners to pursue their dreams and make their mark on social media.The first 1000 to click here and send the promo code from the podcast can claim one of my courses for FREE! - https://m.me/rudymawerlifeCHAPTERS00:00 - Preview1:10 - Introduction2:33 - Going Viral for the Wrong Reasons4:33 - Transitioning from Traditional Media to Social Media6:54 - You Don't Need Money To Get Started8:09 - It's All About Branding11:48 - Your Indepence is the Most Powerful Tool You Can Have12:15 - Master Mask Seller During Covid13:22 - The Key Change in Media14:24 - Creating Viral Content20:03 - How Brands Should Collab with Influencers24:18 - How to Find Hofit's Content25:11 - Tip on Creating ContentConnect with Rudy Mawer:- LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/rudymawer/- Instagram - www.instagram.com/rudymawerlife- Facebook - www.facebook.com/rudymawerlife- Twitter - www.twitter.com/rudymawerConnect with Hofit Gulan:- Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hofitgolanofficial

What are some tips for actually getting good reach and impressions and standing out from all the other content? Sometimes the things that are most authentic that you expect to do the worst go the most viral. I'll give you an example. I was in Tulu. It was COVID. I was sitting on the beach by the pool,

and I jumped off the chair and I walked into the pool. My friend filming behind me, 2.7 million views. Sometimes things go viral for you have no idea why. And sometimes it's really understanding the algorithms and the trends. I just made a post now that's over 600K in two days. So simple. It's a video. The drone is of our villa. The drone doesn't even

move. One side, someone's running down the stairs. The other side, someone's sliding down a slide. The most basic thing. And we ask, do you rather take the stairs or the slide? We engage the audience. Like 400 something comments, over 2,000

saves, over multiple thousand shares and that's just in the first few hours my name is rudy moore host of living the red life podcast and i'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week if you're ready to start living the red life ditch the blue pill take the red pill join me in wonderland and change your life guys what an episode we have planned. 3.6 million followers, three times Forbes Influencer of the Year, over 200 stores when she had her own product line. We're going to talk about building products, building brands,

collabing with brands, influence, attention. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I wore pink to color block you. That's good. Pink's a shade of red. There you go. So look, I know we've become friends since I moved to Miami. me i wore pink to color block you that's good it's good pinks pink's a shade of red so i mean kind of blend so so look i know we've become friends since i moved to miami you've been

doing the whole social media world for a very long time before social media exists but you know most impressively you you really mastered influence right you won forbes free time influencer of the year and uh you've done a lot of cool stuff and i know we look at each other's socials you were showing me all the virgin stuff and oh you you crack me up you never mind me let's just switch it back to you for a second because you guys are watching it because of him but his instagram is so entertaining it's a community reality show yeah yeah i love it because you don't give too much of like you still manage to keep who you are private to your close friends, but you give so much good quality content. And the thing today about social media, there's a lot of people that go viral or they have a lot of followers.

I look at their content, I'm like, what are you giving to the world? You're going viral for all their own reasons. It could be a prank or yeah nothing that i find inspirational or beneficial or things i could take back into my life and better my life your content makes me happy yes thank you and and it gives back in the sense that you're teaching people how to elevate their life and go on business and i always think that's really important i try to do the same with my messaging it's like look at the life we build if you're at all inspired by it i want to give you the tools to go and be able to build yeah a version of it for yourself yeah that's that's the general yeah concept right it's like i think there's a lot

of social media where it's just like brag brag brag yeah but for me you know I actually post way less like cars jets money there's very rare you'll see me post that sort of stuff but it's more yeah like hey this is what you can achieve coming from a small town in England and I would love to help you do the same and I find that's like the content that we need more of because there's a lot of content. Today, your hairdresser is a content creator. Your Uber driver is a content creator. I mean, it's everyone that's got a phone is an influencer today.

And they are in a way, because it could be micro, nano, mega. Everyone has a form of influence. But what are you using your platform for? What's your messaging? Are you just trying to show a life you have or are you using your platform for what's your religion are you just trying to show a life you have or so you're pretending to have any worse um those are the ones i hate the most you know the influencers are like faking arguments or staging everything like oh you know it's just it was cool for like a minute and now now I'm just like, I want to use the time that I spent on social media to take something back.

Either a feeling or a tool that can better my life. Yeah, totally. And what about, let's talk about your life. How did you get here, right? Give us the one minute summary. I think I started my Instagram journey 20 years ago before Instagram was even a thing. I was already blogging without knowing that doing it because I was doing the away TV show. I was the face of fashion TV. I had a film crew with

me. We were traveling 300 days a year filming content, but we were doing short form content before YouTube existed, before any of this, we're doing it for for tv fashion tv was one of the three channels in the world that had no commercials so it ran content 24 7 and so the content sometimes was three minutes long yeah yeah seven minutes long 10 minutes long up to 45 minutes right yeah so we were doing these short videos of like it could be attending an event or a trip summary, hotspots was one of my shows. And we went around the world discovering all the hotspots. Today, you blog, right? You go to a dinner and you show your meal. You go to a hotel and you give a room tour. I did that 15 years ago. I did it for TV. But the funny part is that our show,

even though we were in 191 countries with half a billion household reach, the boss of the net was really cheap. He gave me no budgets for camera crews. And so as the cameras became smaller, I started having a 4K camera in my hand. And I would go to Fashion Week, beat Fat Ro, i'd have my my actual cameraman at the end of the runway filming you know the models walking down but i wouldn't whip

up my camera you know this is like 2010 2011 nobody was doing that they would yeah i don't even pick up um cameras on your show um back, I was whipping up my camera, filming myself reacting to the fashion, and then filming the models, filming the people in the front row, filming the front row across the city, and then having my editor whip that and getting it on TV the same day. Wow. So we were doing that, and then the whole social media world came in and we just transitioned that into social media because I realized that that became your own TV network and your own empire media. Yeah, I always teach. It's like there's no excuse now to not get more attention on your brand, more traffic. And, you know, I came from an ads background, a little different where I paid every dollar to get traffic, right? And then I slowly grew organic over time.

And I'm like, I still think ads are great because you can scale and control it. But if you don't have a lot of money, then, you know, you can focus on creating content. And you don't need, like, you can do everything on an iPhone nowadays to get started, right? In fact, my friends, my model friends, my my celebrity friend my influencer friends they don't want to shoot with professional photographers they only want to shoot an iphone because professional photographers are still shooting like you know the camera is done i i i always tell photographers i'm i'm not a youtuber yeah flip your phone flip your camera yeah i can't use this landscape picture where is that gonna go i can't post that i I need real size, you know, portrait style.

So it's like teaching the VHS how to be a demo. Like, just forget it. Put up the iPhone. It auto-corrects the colors for you. It's the app so you can see yourself. It's crazy, yeah. So you have so much power in the palm of your hand. And whether you have an Android or an iPhone, it doesn't matter.

You have power. And it all comes down to branding. I mean, look at you. You mastered the branding. Sure. I worked with brands for the past 20 years. Since I was a kid, my first campaign was with math when I was 16. And we did a shoot with Madonna.

Okay. Imagine that. And, you know, I've been working with brands and I took the brands from the TV platform to my social media. And now I also done the package that's unique because I'm like, I can get you into social media and on the red carpet and on TV and into print magazine. Yep. Whether they're print or digital.

But all the brands, what they're looking for is reaching an audience sure and so branding is one of the most important things because as you design your brand you can align yourself in brands that are similar in your eth yeah totally and what about i would love to hear people listening you know maybe they're small personal brands or they have small brands they're trying to build on social what are some of the biggest tips you'd give to people starting out to to get going everyone is good at something okay everyone has got a skill and every skill has an audience in the market yeah whether you're good at cooking or good at decorating

or good at styling yourself, you, or you're good at building something, whatever your passions are, things you actually enjoy to do and you're good at doing or you're curious at doing or even things that you're learning to do.

As you learn and you're teaching back, people are interested in that. So don't seal by going to my page or anybody else's page and going like i can't like this is too much for me i can't reach this look at yourself look at your closet look at your house look at your in the mirror yeah what do you enjoy are you cool with doing hairstyles are Are you cool with anything? And most of that links to their brand they have because most people build brands out of passions, right? So a lot of personal trainers are just fitness fanatics that become personal trainers.

A lot of people that launch a skincare line is because they've been obsessed with fixing their skin for years and trying, right? So generally you have that in you and it's just a continuation. It's identifying it and then being clever how to build. And when you're building a social media, you talked about attention retention and attention currency. And it's also like there's two ways to get there. There is the art of building your audience and also collaborating with other people and tapping into other people's stages.

Yeah. So tapping into other people's audiences is the easiest way to start or escalate, no matter where you are, into diversified. Everyone has a skill. Yeah. And you need to develop it. And then you have to think about what you want to do with your social media. Sure. For me, the key is working with Berlin.

And eventually I have my own brand and I'm going to be launching my own brand again. So when I built my social media, I focused on myself as the brand. And showing my passions and the things I'm into became part of this cue. Sometimes people are like, want to put you in a box. Or like, okay, you might be good at one thing so then you have no authority to speak on anything else. Yeah. The most important thing

for me is to show that actually I could speak on anything and everything because my passions are in health and wellness, in travel, in lifestyle, in crypto,

in biohacking, in red carpet, in luxury lifestyle, anything to do with luxury, in building and elevating and mastering your power and your independence. Your independence in business is the most powerful tool one can have. And if you understand that the true bank, you own a bank, everybody owns a bank. It may be two banks. The first bank is here between your ear. The second bank is the one you hold in your hand. It's your phone.

And if you learn how to optimize these, you have independence and power for the rest of your life. Even if you have to change your direction and change your genre. This is a side note. Don't you remember during COVID, we all became like masters of selling masks? Yeah, I dodged that one. But I got many invites of like, Rudy, we can make $20 million together. Help me out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I will say with that, like I actually started in fitness. I built a fitness company, passed a million followers. By 26 years old, we did over $5 million in revenue, 100,000 members, sold out events. And I'd done that for about eight, nine years. And then I switched to business. And now I'm pretty much back at that same place. I've done way more in revenue, but I have about a million followers. So I do think you can, you're not stuck forever into one thing. But what you have to understand is the psychology of influence, the psychology of content creation and marketing, that won't change much even when

platforms change. So you talked earlier, 20 years ago, the way people want to consume content, the psychology behind it, how they want to be entertained, they want to be inspired, they want to laugh, right? That stuff doesn't change in our psyche. So if you know that, you can do pretty much anything. What changed? The key change is that the middleman got removed yes so you don't need an agent or a manager or a record label or a movie studio like they got removed she held all the power because before you had to impress an editor and they had to choose to print you into that magazine or impress the casting director who had to choose you to be in whatever form of entertainment you were casting for or a brand to choose you to be their brand ambassador but today you can go and post something tag

all the brands you're aspiring to work with and they're catching your attention if they like what you do you don't need an agent or an agency to put you forth you just being able to put yourself forth it's a massive change and it's a massive shift of power that gives the consumer the average person so much power to to go in whatever direction they wish it's not having that middle of person dictate. I love that. And what about, let's talk more around content creation types, like creating viral content, right? You've got many videos of hundreds of thousands of views and lots of reach and done this for many years.

What are some tips if someone's like, hey, I'm trying to create content, but what are some tips for like actually getting good reach and impressions and standing out from all the other content so I think that sometimes the things that are most authentic that you expect to do the worst go the most viral like I jumped into I don't know I was in I'll give you an example I was in Tulu it was COVID I was sitting on the beach by the pool, and I jumped off the chair, and I walked into the pool, just walked into a pool. My friend filming behind me, 2.7 million views. So to answer to that, sometimes things go viral for you have no idea why. And sometimes it's really understanding the algorithms and the trends. So when you're starting out, there's tricks you can do.

There is the right hashtags. Music is a big part of it. Music, people sometimes just watch content because they love a song. They search content based on the song. Especially when the song syncs with what's playing, right? TikTok is very driven by viral sounds and also viral trends. So there can be all sorts of challenges, whether it's a dance or whatever it is. If you emulate things that are popular, that can go viral.

So it depends what genre you're trying to enter into but also looking at what's viral and copy goes viral because people like to see the different versions of that content once they're into that kind of content the algorithm realizes that they like it and keeps feeding them more of that same content so once you understand how the system works and i think of course is to teach people this as well um you can then design your content based on that yeah and also knowing the pages that you are targeting for repost because repost is really important in virality. Looking at what's trending with them.

For example, I just did a post now that's over 600K in two days. So simple. It's a video of the drone is over a villa. The drone doesn't even move. One side, someone's running down the stairs. The other side, someone's sliding down a slide. The most basic thing. And we ask, do you rather take the stairs or the slide?

We engage the audience, like 400-something comments, over 2,000 saves, over multiple thousand shares, and that's just in the first few hours. So sometimes it's something so simple, but people are engaging it because they're thinking like oh would i rather yeah yeah and they're watching it over and over again because the slide the last few seconds of the slide the person's like banging your hand it's kind of funny so not funny but funny um so it's just like that yeah you're lucky and sometimes you have to be really clever and

understand it's a challenge and understand. It's a challenge. And I think it's a numbers game too. Like I always teach, like, you know, I find, like you said, often, which makes me sad, I love high production, cool looking stuff. So I'll spend hours on something, it won't work. And then this random outtake from a podcast or random iPhone clip will go off. I'm like, oh, god damn it. So people like you and I that come from production.

Yeah, yeah, we like that. I like it to be. So I'll give you another example. I was at the Oscars. I wore a very powerful dress. My girlfriend who has like 3,000 followers and it was her first event in her life. Okay. And she's in her like early 50s.

So it's like a youngster, like first event in her life, first red carpet, first time getting glam. She's behind the scenes, you know, holding an iPhone, making a video of me arriving to the red carpet. And she's talking about my dress. And she posts it on her Instagram at the same moment because she doesn't care. She's not looking at the perfect angle, the perfect way to production. She just uploads it. That video had over 3 million views and got shared thousands. I don't even know how many times because I got tagged in the posts over a thousand times in 24 hours.

I don't know how many got just shared from her. And when I posted it a few days later, all beautifully produced. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. But she's got 10,000 followers. I have 3.6 million. Yeah, yeah. But it was like, and she put a little emoji.

Like she, it was almost like a story that she reads. She put lighting on it. And I would never dare do it to like main feed real yeah i like that it went viral it her post cut reshut in the media all the other bloggers and i was like yeah about me i weren't yeah i was going in the high risk dress what about like yeah i I mean, that's a great example of that, yeah. No followers, no knowledge. I've done like 10,000 red carpets, I've done thousands of clips,

and she stole my thunder. So all I'm saying is, sometimes when you overthink it, you stunt the content. Yeah, totally. Last question for you. So we talked a lot about content creation, virality, brands, psychology but I want to flip it because you work with so many brands and a lot of my audience are they have their own brands. What makes a great collab

between an influencer or a celebrity and the brand and how do you make it authentic? How do you make an ROI from it so it actually works and a great synergy i have a unique position because i understand the brand's position because i was an owner of brands before i was content crepe i had 200 stores at my fashion line and i was producing fashion i became a media personality by accident because when i had my clothing line and celebrities would wear my clothing and there was no social media, there was no way for me to get the word out that it's my brand.

I would go with the celebrities to the red carpet, whether it was Victoria Beckham or Kylie or Paris Hilton or Naomi Campbell, all these people. I would shine them and do the red carpet with them. That was the deal if they wanted to wear my brand. And we became super viral. We would get so much print magazines in the UK.

We even shut down the Square one. And then studios started coming to us. We did a partnership with Marvel. I understood as someone that was putting all the effort in designing these dresses and the money that I needed the end result. I needed the name recognition, the product placement. someone that was putting all the effort in designing these dresses and the money that like I needed the end result I needed the name recognition the product placement was one thing but the knee recognition was the most important so when I work with brands they really come from

a position of understanding the passion that went behind yeah what they're trying to build and because I built campaigns for my brand over 10 years, I sit with them and I look and I say to them, okay, what's been working for you? Let's emulate that and elevate that. What's missing from what you're trying to achieve, what you're bringing me to do? How can I fill that gap? And then I look at their socials and I say, you know something, you're missing this whole other opportunity that you don't realize let's create this for you so take it really like from their perspective and then i look at the perspective of the influencer and what works and i try to bridge bridge the gap because sometimes the brands are still coming for

you goal mentality and you have to re-educate them but the most important is still like understanding their end goal and and really delivering that to them. And I really go after over delivering to the brands because I like having long term relationships with them. And so, you know, the mistake a lot of influencers make is that they're like so worried about the money and negotiating. So one story, two stories, give more and you get more yeah and i think on the brand side it's like finding an influencer that gets it right is the first thing i'm hearing the second thing is making sure there's a content strategy it's not just hey i'm gonna pay an influencer three thousand dollars for a story i don't know what i'm gonna get but let's see right so it's like having a strategy

behind it because not all influencers are like you that take the time effort and energy to figure that out right a lot of them they just create it send it back and say here you go and also like they also make really terrible content they're like here is me with my perfume no one holds perfume like that don't walk around with your perfume hugging it you know or or holding a bottle to the candle like this is horrific people know the art of branding is that it doesn't look like you're branding i think the people realize that you're being paid they switch off you switch off i think a tip like i give my audience and my business owners that i coach is when they're working with influencers and celebs try and make it like user-generated content, right?

The more authentic, generally the better is a good rule to follow. If my audience are into and believe that what I'm doing is elevating me or making me healthier or younger or whatever it is or more beautiful, and they just show that it's part of my natural routine, they don't even know which products are paid, which products are not. That has the most impact. For sure. That's all organic.

It means authentic. And that's the art of true content creation. Make it seem real. And they never know who's your sponsor and who's just there as part of it. Oh, yeah. So, actual last question now. Where do people find you if they want to see this content? Because I actually think everyone, you know want to see this content because i actually think

everyone you know look at the content because you learn by watching you're right this is the theory but when you start watching it you'll go okay i get it now that's cool they made that you know you made that fun you made that engaging how can they see the content so my instagram is official i think i'll put it up yeah yeah, I don't know. Yay. Why? So it actually means in Hebrew, Chofit means the beach. Golan is the mountains. Golan Heights. Some officially beach in Mexico.

That's why you love travel too. There you go. And, you know, my content, like mostly I love being really engaging on my stories. So I really try to engage with my audience and I read their comments. And I try to give back to them what they want. And then, you know, you'll see the rest.

My Instagram is my main. Great. My main. And final tip, someone watching to go and create more content and get out there. What would you say to them? Content is king. Don't think about it. Whip your phone out. The things that have gone the most viral for me and yielded me the most

results are things that I thought were going to be deleted as I upload this and delete it tomorrow. So you never know what people are going to resonate with. As long as you're true and authentic and you're having a good time doing what you're doing, it's going to resonate with people. Totally. Love it. All right. Well well thank you for coming on the show congratulations on your new office and on your success thank you guys if you want to level up thank you appreciate that guys i hope you enjoyed today's episode another living the red life i'll see you guys soon take care