Business Breakdown

After watching this video there were 2 things that stuck out to me:

1. What is a brand

2. Content strategy

What is a Brand?

This is the most valuable point of the whole video. Brands are built on associations.

As you are building a brand it is foundational that you come up with what you want to be associated with. Here are some associations of top brands and mine:

Nike → Performance

Meditations → Action

Amazon → Reliable delivery

Luis Vuitton→ Luxury/expensive

There are 3 elements to a brand.

1. Influence

Brands change people’s behavior. Let’s say someone gave you the option to pick between 2 shirts. One just a plain white shirt and the other a white shirt with Luis Vuitton on it.

Which would you pick?

Probably the Luis Vuitton shirt, because of the power of their branding. People are not buying quality they are buying the status that comes with the product.

2. Direction

After you have influence and can change people’s behavior you want to make sure to move them towards your brand not away from it, so be careful what you associate yourself with.

Understanding your audience is so important because the more you know about your audience's values, desires, and pain points, the better you can guide them in a direction that aligns with your brand.

3. Reach  

Reach is how many people in general have this association.

Controversy can help you get reach. Alex sees controversy the same as trends and does not want to be associated with it. He would rather provide valuable content and grow because of that.

Content Strategy

Don’t follow hacks or base your whole content strategy on trends because it’s not a long-term strategy.

Instead, you should align your strategy with the algorithms, which is to keep people on the platform.

You just need to make people:

• Click on the video

• Watch all the way through

• Watch something else from you

This objective will never change and is the same for every social media platform. By making this your goal you will always stay relevant.

Alex addresses posting frequency. He states that bigger creators are less frequent.

Mr. beast, Dude Perfect, and many more do not post daily or weekly. They understand that quality is more important than quantity.

They realize that if you spend 10X more time on something you might get 100X more views. So why do small accounts not adopt this strategy?

At the start it’s best to focus on quantity because you don’t know what quality is. By focusing on quantity, you get lots of reps in, so you learn quality fast.

Another good strategy he mentions is the 3 Ps for content:

Promise → What you will help them do

Proof → Why they should listen to you

Path → how they can do it

The promise is what gets people to pay attention to you. In the first 2 minutes of your video or first couple sentences you need to make it clear what the viewer will get from reading.

Next is proof, to keep people readingshow them proof. Why should they listen to you?

Now you show them how to do it.

Weekly Learnings

This week I started a challenge 1k newsletter subscribers in 90 days. I am still far from this goal but I’m making progress.

It truly is hard to juggle posting content, writing the newsletter, and building paid products, but who said business was going to be easy? If it was easy everyone would do it.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, there’s a lot of stress that comes with it and TONS to do.

As I have moved away for college, am living on my own and as I have invested more time into my newsletter I have learned that if I want something to happen, I need to make it happen. 

This is obvious but it never really hit me until I moved away and now everything that I do has a consequence.

• If I want to make friends, I need to put myself out there.

• If I want to eat dinner I need to plan ahead, get food, and make it.

• If I want to grow my newsletter, I need to talk to people and incentivize people to join. I can’t just make one post and hope they come.

Last week’s strat:

Last week I focused on DMs and it definitely helped me grow. I got at least 1 sub a day. It felt uncomfortable to ask people to join but growth is uncomfortable, if it wasn’t we would not value it.

If it was easy to get in perfect shape people wouldn’t value it because everyone would be in shape.

This week’s strat:

I’ll continue to do DMs but I’m going to focus on finding groups where people are already at:

• Reddit

• Quora

• Facebook groups

• Linked In groups

• X groups

This will take some time to build good will because you can’t blatantly promote your product on these platforms, but it is a great way to find an audience.

The entrepreneur niche has 3.9M members! That’s just one place. So, I do believe this will be a great place to grow.

I hope you find value in me sharing these insights and that you can grow your business with some of the tactics I share.

Action Guide

Thought Questions:

• What do people associate you with?

• What do you want to be associated with?

• How can you Influence people to change their behavior?

• How can you incentivize people to move towards your brand?

• When people see you or your logo does it change their behavior?

• What can you do to make it change their behavior?

• How can you make people buy into a movement or status?

If you're a small account focus on quantity. Set a goal to post daily or every other day then analyze your top posts to see what a quality post looks like.

I’m still trying to master the action guide and make it as helpful and actionable as I can. If you would like an example along with the thought questions so you can see it played out reply to this email with YES.

I do want to keep this section short so you can read over it quickly and apply it quickly.