The Game with Alex Hormozi - Let’s Talk Content Creation - Keynote Pt.1 | Ep 401

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Why should I listen to you? Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he shares one of his favorite Keynote speeches about how he was able to grow over a million followers in his audience within six months through tactical advice and practices in creating content. This is part 1 of the talk.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(3:30) - Alex introduces himself and Module 1: "Why I started this"(9:22) - Alex's YouTube and content creation journey begins(15:15) - Module 2: Content creation model - Test, Record, Inject, Contextualize, Distribute(23:08) - Observations after implementing the content creation modelFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

What's going on, Mosey Nation? I'm super pumped for the podcast you guys are about to listen to. This is one of my favorite talks, if not my favorite talk that I was able to give this year. I was fortunate out to give at Grow With Video Live. This was my keynote. I made a very custom presentation for this, and it centers around content and brand, which is something that I really love a lot. And if you guys are enjoying the stuff that you've seen across all the platforms, it actually breaks down every tactic that we have done to grow over a million person active audience within six months. And so it's everything we do from like how we structure tweets to how we make videos. And really the heart of the message you'll hear the second half,

which is what I really think is the heart and soul of how you build the brand. And I think this is the big and the biggest mistakes that I think most people, especially the aspiring entrepreneurs, the people who are starting their businesses, the people who are just getting going, who are making content and not getting it to hit what they are missing. And I just, I can't wait for you guys to listen to it. This is part one of the two part series. Buckle up and enjoy. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer,

and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. So I was telling Sean backstage, I said, my promise to you is that this will be the worst presentation you have ever heard, the best presentation you've ever heard, or somewhere in between. So that is my promise for you guys today. So let's kick some butt. Cool. So Brett and Sean asked me to talk about a topic that is not my expertise.

I'm being super real. I'm mostly known not for this stuff. So we're going to be in for a ride together. So I'll just kind of share with you some of the things that I've learned over the last six months. So how I built a million plus organic following in the last six months. Good news is if you can do it like this, anybody can do it. All right. So just transparency on this.

I built all my companies off paid ads, affiliates, cold outbound teams or referrals. And that is usually what I'm asked to speak about. I have never built an organic brand. This is my first time. So I just like to get those disclaimers out ahead of time. And so what I have to share may not work for everyone or, in fact, be true at all, but it worked for me this time. So that's what I'm going to share.

Okay? So just take everything with a gigantic grain of salt that I say, all right? Because a lot of you guys are probably better at this stuff than I am. So that's probably you guys here. There's me on the side, watching you guys be much better than me at video. And so without further ado, one million fans, six months in 60 minutes or less. So this morning, I don't know if you guys do this, but like morning of, I redo. It's so cold.

I redo everything again because I'm like, oh, this is shit. I have to redo it all. And so I broke it into three sections to make more sense. So section one is, why did I do this to begin with? And why you might think it's a good idea too. Two, what and how and how much? like what do we do to actually create that? And then third is observations

because I had no other better heading for it than that. So that's what it is. Okay, so let's rock and roll. So quick backstory, I'm going to go through this as fast as possible. This is me when I started my business career, sleeping on the floor. I signed my first lease. Slept on that floor for the first nine months.

I was able to get it to that picture on the left in a year. Then I opened a new location every six months after that. And then over the next 18 months, I met Layla and we did gym turnaround. So we basically fly from place to place to place and fill gyms up. But it was a hands-on sales model. I had, at our peak, eight sales guy, turning around eight gyms every month. That became tenuous logistically.

And we're like, I wonder if there's a better way. And so from there, we packaged our IP for a better gym model into a licensing business. And so we were able to grow gym launch, which is a B2B business to $2 to $2 to $1.5 million a month, prestige to $1.7 a month, which was B2C. That was an affiliate-based business. And it was weight loss and supplements. So e-commerce. Then we scaled Allen to $1.6 million a month, which was B to B to C.

And we just recently sold that for 46.2. And we just sold that one last year as well, which I'm not allowed to say the number, but there you go. And then we started Acquisition.com, which right now does about $13 million a month, which is cool. And, oh, I appreciate it. That sounded weird. So right now we grow $3 million plus internet businesses into $30 million plus sellable businesses. That's kind of what we do now. And so hopefully you're probably asking this question,

which is like, what does this have to do with growing video or growing with video? Jack shit. But I started making video content with three goals. So number one was to attract internet business owners doing $3 million or more who align with our values. Number two is to help all businesses below our minimum deal size to just grow to the deal size. That was kind of the idea. Like how do I just get everybody who's at a million to $3 million or $100K to $3 million, whatever, just get everybody up above that level so we can hopefully work with them.

And then three, to create a place where I could document it to your best practices of building world-class companies from my experience. And like, we're not the Elon Musk's and the Basos and all that, but I wish that those guys had documented what they had done. Like, how cool would it have been to see, like, the vlog of Amazon in 1996, right? How sick would that have been? And, like, every day is like, yep, almost lost the company today. like six months later almost lost the company again i thought that would have been awesome so i thought

you know i didn't i did a really poor job of documenting everything up to this point and so i was really committed to like all right for this next phase um i really want to do a better job of it so that's the idea all right oops and uh ironically uh when we started doing that lo and behold business is doing three million dollars or more um started reaching out to us which was awesome right success so i guess this might have something to do with video. But believe me when I say that no one is surprised as me about this kind of organic stuff in general because I've never done it before. So we're on this ride together. All right. So here's the goal for the presentation. Give you a few lessons that I've learned to take you from wherever you are to a little closer to wherever you want to go

with this presentation. I'm so good at content. There's the little man. Okay. Great. So disclaimer, again, never done this. I also didn't want to be famous or known for a very long time. there's me saying, I want to be rich, not famous. But several experiences changed my mind. So I'll walk you through this really quickly. So when Kylie, do you remember this when Kylie was announced that she was a billionaire? Well, that's what I felt like that day. I was like, what am I doing wrong?

And then the rock, you know, killing it. And then boom, he's got a $2 billion plus tequila brand that he was able to launch off his organic audience. Connor McGregor, 600 million with proper 12, it's probably grown by since now. Huda, now is a billion-dollar brand. And so I can be a little slow sometimes, but I could kind of read the writing on the wall. So there's the writing on the wall. But I didn't want to build an e-commerce

physical products brands. And I was like, eh, it's not my vibe. I already did that once. It's not my favorite of the businesses that we've done. So I still kind of like dragged my feet a little bit. And that's when I heard this guy, nomad capitalist who like teaches people to not be U.S. citizens. That's not the point.

but um so you can not pay taxes but anyways um that's when i heard a podcast with this guy and he was like oh yeah i get about 3 000 applications month i was like holy canoli i was like well if i had 3 000 applications month i would make at least one dollar if that were my life and so i realized it could work for b2b not just e-commerce stuff i was like that's neat and then i heard neil patel was doing 100 million bucks a year doing a B-to-B agency services all off inbound. I was like, okay, this might make sense. And so again, I still was like, all right, so it does work for B2B, organic stuff works, but I still didn't really want to be famous. That was not my vibe. And so I met up with dear friends of ours, Lisa and Dean Graciosi, and we had a conversation

that was kind of the last straw here. So I was like, dude, being famous sounds terrible. He was just telling us about how somebody like shut up his house and threatened his kids. And I was like, that sounds fucking awful. Like, why? No, no, thank you. I'm good. I will just pass. I will just pass on grass. And so he's like, if getting harassed and attacked is the price I have to pay for the it was supposed to say impact. That was perfect. For the impact that I want to have, then I'd pay that price every time, which totally takes away from the impact of that message. But I was like, shit, he's right. You know what I mean? Like he said, if if that's the price I have to pay to make the impact I want to have, and I pay that price every time. I was like, fuck. All right. I need to stop being

a bitch. All right. So 18 months ago, I started a YouTube channel. Some of you guys may have anybody seen this, the YouTube channel? Nozzi Nation. And so I built two expensive studios to launch this thing. I started making three videos a week. Side note, important lesson that I learned on a vacation. That really shitty one did better than my really fancy one, which then taught me that What's inside the content matters more than the rapper. So for anybody who's worried about getting started, about making it look right, I don't think it matters. I mean, I think it matters a little bit, but it's 80-20.

So focused on the 80. All right. And so I continue my very steady growth for that period of time, which is great. Recommend. But in the first 12 months, we went from 600 to 70,000 to travel, which was cool. And so things were going smoothly until one day,

I had a chat with Grant Cardone about branding. And it reminded me that all the lessons that I learned in business applied to all this organic stuff. And so I was on this call with him, and I have the full video on my YouTube channel if you want to check it out. Yeah. He was like, bro, I'm not even gonna try.

He was like, bro, pull up your Instagram. I was like, okay, he's like, pull up my Instagram. He's like, I got 10 times the content is you, 10 times. He's like, bro, it's volume, bro. Volume. And I was like, that's deep. And so I was like, you know, I should probably do more, which is a lesson that I have learned over and over and over again in business.

And I'll tell you a couple more story about later. But like, so many times we're doing the right stuff, we're just doing way, way too little of it. Like, I'll tell you a quick story, which is not on this presentation. But when I started my first gym, I was told that I should put flyers out. And so I went, you know, like really, you know, full of pissing vinegar.

I'm going to go do it. So the business owner told me was more successful than me, et cetera. And so I went, I put the flyers out, and then like nothing really happened. So I met back up with him a few weeks later. And he was like, hey, how the flyers work? And I was like, uh, you know, I got one guy who called me and said, I fucked up his car. That was it. He's like, well, what was your test size?

I was like, hmm? I was like, well, I mean, I put 300 out. He was like, dude, our test size is 5,000. He's like, that's what we test with. He's like, and then we do 5,000 a day. I was like, oh, noted. And so it was just a really good lesson. And that happens with phone calls.

Like, yeah, I'm doing, I'm going to start doing cold calls. You make 10 calls every three days when you're feeling motivated rather than doing 200 aisles every day like its clockwork before lunch. You know what I mean? The level of effort difference is not like 2x or 4x. it's like 50x. It's a lot bigger. And most people dramatically underestimate

the amount of volume and effort that is required to get to where you want to go. Like dramatically. And so there was so many lessons that this repeated, and I was taught yet again, in a different sphere that I'm not familiar with that this was true. I'm also wearing the same shirt.

So I decided to take his advice and dramatically increase the amount of content that we created in how many places we displayed it, right? And so before I tell you, who wants to guess how many pieces of content we started putting out weekly after that call. 25, 10,000, less than that. I would be so much more famous if I put 10,000 out. What was that? 100? Good, good guess. Real quick, guys, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only

ask that I can ever have of you guys is that you help me spread the words so we can out more entrepreneurs, make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast. So the single thing that I ask to do is you can just leave a review, but take you 10 seconds or one type of the thumb, it would mean the absolute world to me. And more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. So we went from seven pieces of content a week. I did three on YouTube and I just repurposed the same three on a podcast to 80, 80 content pieces a week. And for scale, if you remember the first line that I showed you way before,

the top of that is that purple line from the first graph I showed you. And so this is what happened in those six months. We added 300,000 subscribers on YouTube, 7,000 followers on Instagram. Still haven't really cracked that one. 350,000 on TikTok, 150,000 buyers on Amazon for the book. 350,000 followers on Instagram, 100,000 on Twitter, and 400,000 downloads a month on the podcast. Cool.

right so basically a million person audience within that six months and because i am more of a business guy than i am a quote influencer creator uh this is what i cared about so the net traffic result for us is web traffic went from basically non-existent to about 100 000 unique clicks a month to the site just organically pretty cool number two is the subscribers so i told you before and then this is one that's really cool for who here runs paid ads and i get a okay some of you cool so this this will resonate with you So in the businesses that I had, at a $25 CPM, we were getting $2 million a month in exposure for free. Not only not free, we're getting paid to do it. Shit's crazy.

Like, I'm beside myself still because I think it's insane. So the fact that this opportunity exists right now is literal insanity to me. Like, we're getting paid now to market. Like, what a world, right? And so the business result from that is that we get about 400 companies a month that apply for acquisition.com so we can help them scale. And in that time period, we grew from $7 million a month to $13 million a month. And disclaimer on that is that part of that was just the companies themselves grew.

It wasn't like new companies, but still a lot in six months. And so if you're anything like me, you're probably thinking, well, that's really great for you, Alex. But what about me? Which is how and how much? All right? So here's where you come in. All right. So let's start with how much.

So just a reminder here in terms of time, I'm not like a creator full time. So it's like 93-7 is probably the. amount of time that I allocate towards this. And so money-wise, this costs me $20,000 a month to do. All right, you can scale this down however you want. I also don't have a tremendous amount of time that I allocate towards it, so I have to compensate with that with money. You could probably do this on your own. I just, this is how I do it. So we have a Twitter editor, a YouTube editor, a LinkedIn editor, a podcast editor, and an IG and TikTok editor. All right. And there's two of us, so times two. So it's actually $40,000 a month for the both of us. Okay. The amount of time that

it takes me is two days per month and four hours per week. And that is, that is what I dedicate towards this. And so, quick recap, I have a daily mind dump, which I'll show you how I do it in a second, because we're going to show you, I'm going to show you the whole model. I do a weekly Twitter review. It takes me like four hours because Twitter is actually really important to how I do all this stuff, which I'll explain later. And if you guys are on Twitter, actually, it's my favorite platform. But we do one day a month of recording and then for shorts and then one day a month, it's usually like a half day i'll do like 48 youtube videos the ones that are direct to camera and that's it that's the that's the jam so that's the how much that's what that's my investment that's my

cost to do this and so here's the how and so this is the content creation model all right that's the big visual and those are the bold bullets fantastic let's start with the first one so test record inject contextualize distribute so the old way that i used to do content was i would just have this ongoing email thread to myself i don't you guys have like notes or like a chain to yourself because you probably get ideas you're in a conversation oh i should make a piece of content on that right and then you email it's yourself and that's how i did it for a long time and the new way is the twitter way which is uh being blocked by the thing because it's a formatted word but i post all of those ideas as tweets on twitter rather than just sending them to myself

and so all of a sudden what used to be my inbox is actually just my like tweet thread all right and so i tweet about five times a day ish uh and the nice thing is that twitter is a very forgiving platform. So it's just like stream of consciousness and it takes notes. You don't have to pick videos or captions or I like it because it's just thoughts. I love Twitter so much for that reason. And so I'll post this stuff and I'll be like, okay, those are the ones that people thought were interesting. And then the threads become long format and the tweets become short format. Pretty simple. Step one. Second step is recording, right? Why am I doing both? I realized it because you're like, why you do short stuff? I was kind of against.

shorts and then I realized that I've never actually consumed anything from GaryVee that's long but I like GaryVee a lot and I was like oh well I guess that work so that's why I do both right and so I think it's a width and depth thing I think the shorts give you a lot of breath I think the longs give you a lot of depth right so this is everything that I know about about how to make content that quote goes viral I watched a long like interview with Mr. Beast my big practice of trying to learn stuff is go to the person who's the best at it and listen to them because they've already reorganized the information for you. Hack. And so he's like, listen, all these guys make this all compliment with their tags and the hashtags. And if you guys sell that, this is not me offending you. I have no idea what I'm talking

about. Remember, big grain of salt. But he said, it's just CTR times watch time. That's it. You got to get people to click and you got to get people to watch. I was like, okay, that makes sense. He's like, and that's what YouTube wants. They want people to be interested in the content to get the click and then make sure that the content fulfills the promise of the thumbnail. Cool. I was like, I can do that. And so this is the general format that I've used for the longs, which is like a hooker, a question that I'm answering, usually a story that's relevant to answer the question,

a framework that I've applied to repeat that process, and then an explanation of why I think it works. That's it. And if I want to make longer stuff, it's just that process with multiple stories repeating that over and over again. The shorts is a hooker, a question, a hammer, which for me is my tweet. I put the tweet as the next thing I say,

because I already know it converts. And then I have an example and an explanation. And so this is an example. So it was like 28 ways to guarantee poverty or 28 ways to stay poor. Right? So I made this thread. Got a lot of shares. Cool.

28 rules. Reprogram mine to be rich in 22 minutes. So I have to change the, you know, the headline and stuff. But the content was identical. I just did it in a video. Right. And then the short ones that do well, it's like, all right, overheard from a Navy seal, blah, blah, blah.

Authenticity is just a fancy word. Boom. I just make a short version of the same thing, just saying the tweet. next one is inject so uh we grew the the podcast actually recently from like 20 000 a month to 400 thousand a month and a big part of that was just having call to actions um sounds really dumb but i wasn't doing it so do it and so the way that we did it was we recorded two versions of each of the call to action so like call to actions to other channels lead maddics share a tag if you have a lower ticket product i don't but like or you know for me i guess have a book that's not you know leave a review

if you want to ask for clients or, you know, send a question. So I would just record two different CTAs for that. And then I just inject them into the content. So this is what it might look like. So it's like you have your CTA one content, mid-roll, content, end off. So that makes sense? So we started doing that with the podcast and it started to grow a lot. And now we're actually doing it in the rest of the forms of content.

So you'll see that for me because this has been working. So this is me doing this, walking the talk. All right. The point directions. etc. Okay, contextualize. So anyone's seen this one before? Everyone see this like me and that went viral. So it's like everybody kind of appears somewhat differently, even though it's the same person, depending on the setting that you're in. Right? On Facebook, you look a certain way. LinkedIn, you look a certain way. Tinder, you look a certain way. I had a sales guy who was on Tinder

and he would close every one of his dates on buying our supplements so that he could get, he was like, it always covered dinner. Savage. Anyways. So you have to make this stuff contextual. And so this is what we do. So this is the same video, right? Is that same Navy SEAL video I made earlier. Right? So that's a real. That's a TikTok. And then that's the YouTube short. So it's the same thing. You just make it match the platform. Same way you would make your Facebook look different than your Instagram look different than your LinkedIn, et cetera. As long as you just make it contextual, I think it does a lot better. Because have you guys seen people just like take literally the exact same thing and post it on the wrong platform? I just think it just

hurts it. And it's just not that much effort to make it contextual. All right. Last one, distribute. Then we distribute them. All right. So we went from seven times a week to 80 times a week in distribution. That was the result over that six month period, which was a lot of growth. Awesome. And so we 10x the inputs and we got 10x the outputs. Surprising. So quick recap. All right. Content creation model. Test. First thing you do, make your brain dump into something that's actually generating content. So this is net zero time for me. I was doing it and I just started doing it publicly. Number two is that once I have the stuff that's winning, I record it. I record the threads as longs. I record the tweets of shorts. From there, the team injects the call to action

so that I can direct the traffic whatever way I want to direct it. Right. Four, and big one on this last injection thing, like, if you don't do this, because I wasn't, you get all of these impressions and like eyeballs and stuff and you'll get followers, but like you don't drive a result. which again sounds silly that I wasn't doing this but I told you at the beginning you guys are better than I am at this number four was contextualize it I just think it works a lot better and then finally you cut it and increase the volume cool that makes sense so far great fantastic so was that helpful okay cool so that concludes section two how much and how fantastic observations I was going to call it musings but then I thought no one

would know what that meant. So I just gave you the like traditional lip service on a content generation model. It's kind of boring and I don't think it's that interesting, which is why I tried to get through it quickly because a lot of people will describe that as the reason that we grew a lot. And I don't think that's why. But I'm presenting it because I would end up getting a zillion questions about it. And so that's why it's there. I think the real reason that we were able to grow. So I'm going to put like my real head on for a minute. there's an unspoken question in every person's mind that has to first be answered, which is, why should I listen to you?

And I think it's one of the most profound questions. And I think it influences how people share, how people take your content, everything. It's the frame that the content is consumed in. So I'll give you a real word example. Imagine you're talking to a guy. You don't know anything. He's just like talking about business. And you're like, oh, that's cool.

And then like two seconds later, it's like, do that guy's a billionaire. All of a sudden, you're like, right? The frame matters a lot. Elon Musk makes a tweet that's like, I'm on the toilet. And it gets like 500 million shares, right? This guy's hilarious, right? It's because it's Elon, right? And he has a brand that he's established

and there's context there. And so I think that we should have this question answered for ourselves and our prospects before creating content. All right. And so imagine for a moment that I had done this whole presentation up to this point. and I had a 1,000-person total audience between all of those platforms. Same presentation. How different would that feel?

Right? Just imagine, do you on stage? You don't know me. And I have a thousand people on Instagram and that's it. Same presentation. You would receive it differently, right? Right. I would because I would think it was stupid, pointless, preachy, better than now, full of shit.

And if you're so good, why don't you do it? And so we have to answer the question, why should I listen to you? And I think a lot of you are making content from a weak frame. And that's just what I see. That's just me witnessing it. Like, you know, it's like the 18-year-old relationship coaches. You know what I mean? They're real.

You know, like, they're out there. Some of you are here. You can, like, being real, right? You know, or it's like the business coaches that are doing $5,000 a month. So besides all the stuff, that we shared earlier, the real reason that I think our audience is growing is that we're talking about stuff that we have evidence of support. Like, that's the real, right? So all the shit I said earlier, sure, you can do that. That worked for me. You might not like Twitter. I like Twitter because it's easy

for me. If it's not easy for you, don't do it, right? Which is why this worked for me this time. Right? That's the context. But I think this stuff is the more kind of eternal stuff. And that's why I was kind of like excited to get to part three. And so I think it's about having the evidence for your others and most importantly for yourself, right? We built these other companies first before ever talking about how to build companies. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed part one of the keynote. It's very special to me. I hope you guys got some tactics that you can immediately use in your business in terms of how to operationalize content in a way that is sustainable for you to build your business and start generating inbound leads to sell the stuff that you have. All right,

next up is part two of this. And this one is really from the soul. So I kind of actually transitioned the talk at this point going into part two. From what I heard part two was the thing that everyone, I mean it was the thing that everyone kept quoting at me and you can see my tone shift because you'll see that everything that I just talked about in terms of the operations, that's the day to day, that's the execution, that's the implementation. But if you have the wrong heart behind it, if you have the wrong fuel that's making it, no one will listen.

And so stay tuned for part two that's coming out ASAP for you guys and I can't wait for you to listen to it.