[0:00]In the last six years, I've learned everything there is to know about social media. And I've become one of the top business influencers in the world. And today, I'm going to step you through everything I've learned in the last six years, going from zero followers to 17 million followers. And so much money I can afford to make this video for you free. And all you need to do is sit down with a notepad and make notes, and you can change your life. So let's get into it. So principally, there are eight things that you need to know about social media. The number one thing you need to understand, you're probably starting from zero, it's a good thing. The vital key to this is, it doesn't matter you've got no followers. I see a lot of people saying, well how can I make money from social media if I've only got a hundred followers? It's possible. If you can connect to 100 people and understand why they followed you, I promise you can make money from it. Follow account does matter. It has a role to play in your social media strategy. And we definitely want people to follow you. But I want you to start off with the mindset that this is an experiment, have some fun with it, and I want you to start from zero. When I first went live, and live is something you really have to get into, and you don't necessarily have to be on camera. There's quite a few people that are doing pretty well doing POV content, point of view content. Now, you on camera will actually help you build your personal brand. So if you're not minding being on camera, then absolutely do it. But if you are awkward on camera, then you can do this POV style and it can be just as powerful as you on camera. But you have to have the mentality that it doesn't matter how many views you have, it doesn't matter how many followers you have. You just got to have fun and do something that becomes natural to you every single day. If any of you go to the gym, for example, you know that once you go once and then you go twice and then the third time you go, it becomes a beginning of a habit. Social media needs to become part of your life. You literally need to go live having breakfast. It might only be you eating breakfast, but you're live. You're learning to be comfortable in front of the camera, you're getting used to that idea of the camera in front of you. Get used to it, because it's not going anywhere. And if you use it right now, I I predict within three years, they'll shut what I'm about to teach you down. They won't let you take advantage of what I'm about to teach you. So you have to right now get comfortable with the uncomfortable. The second thing I'm going to teach you about this starting from zero point is, you're going to have to think a little bit about what you enjoy doing. Make it something that you would do naturally. So, if you love running, go live when you're running. Experiment and ingrain it in what you love doing. If you love doing sales calls, then literally turn on your live doing those sales calls. Teach people not by telling them what to do, but by showing them what to do. And you'll be surprised how quickly that could generate you a customer, how that can generate you a follower, and eventually, I'm going to teach you how to do this in a minute, how it's going to generate you revenue. Get the right mindset and start from zero and get excited about having zero followers. I want to give you something I've never shared before. My team and I put together all of our internal documents, how we edit, how we create content and exactly how to start working with brands. School doesn't teach this, so I want you to have it for free from us. Just drop me your email below and tell me where to send it. Use it alongside this video and it could genuinely change the direction of your life.
[3:13]The second thing I want to teach you is something that when I first say it, is obvious, but I'm going to give you a framework to make it possible. You have to learn to just post. Don't overthink, don't overedit, you just make it good and you post it and then you get feedback and you repeat learn and post again. You've got to stop blaming lack of experience or lack of equipment on not making it happen. You might have zero followers and you may get one view, and that one view can be your mate who maybe laughing at you. But I promise you, this process of learning to accept failure and people laughing at you will lead to freedom. If you remember every time you post, and if you post every single day from the day you've watched this video to the one year from now, I 100% guarantee in one year's time, the people that were laughing at you won't be laughing anymore. Those people that were watching the content will become your customers and you'll have the life you want because you'll own your own time, you'll be able to post and make content when it suits you. Mentality wise understand. If you don't post, if you don't just do it, then you're going to get trapped in the life you've presently got. This is also a social experiment to see whether or not you can push yourself through the pre-programming that school has given you. The education system has taught you to sit down and shut up, to not get noticed, and you have to push back against all that subconscious training. Standing out is exactly what's going to guarantee success for you, being unique, being seen, being heard, every single business on this planet. is only succeeding because someone heard about them and bought their product or service. If you don't post, your life will not be what it could be. And you will not have financial freedom. You may be able to do it without social media, but I'm telling you, it's a lot harder. Now, earlier, I said we talked about monetization, so let's talk about tools, because here's the secret, most people won't tell you. What you use matters. This is where Stan comes in. Stan is one of the top softwares for monetizing social media. Most tools need you to have a huge following. With Stan, you can get started by selling direct in your bio, which is the easiest way to get started, plus they built all the tools a creator needs to monetize. If you want to make money from social media, use Stan to get paid. As mentioned earlier, you can get our internal document at the link below. My team will show you exactly how to prep, launch and grow your content for free. We'll show you how to set up your Stan store too, if that's something you're interested in. Thank you to Stan for sponsoring this video. We use the money we get from sponsorship to fund dreams and help you with content like this to get where you want to be for free. The next thing you need to learn is how to take feedback and structure. Let's start with structure. When I started this journey six years ago myself, I already had a YouTube channel that I hardly used. And I've been playing around with making videos from my previous businesses with frankly, very low views. But what I should have done in hindsight is be a bit more proactive and followed my own guideline in this video. The number one thing to do on structure is actually get yourself structured to make content every week. The best way to do that, I think is batch recording. So find a slot, half a day, ideally a whole day where you come up with ideas for content and then you shoot it. And initially, keep your structure light. A good iPhone will do it. Get a stand, a cheap one, and just talk into the camera. It doesn't have to be good audio, it doesn't have to be brilliant on the videoing, but just practice. Maybe that's too basic for you. I can explain why I am six years later, but I worry that you won't really fully believe it's possible for you to build the structure I now presently have. In the end, you are going to need someone that helps you come up with ideas. Because even I'm brilliant at coming out of content, I still need help to fine tune that content. It's like anything in this world, you need a muse, you need someone to go back and forth with. Now, right now you could build that structure by having a friend you trust, or the expertise, or the thing you're going to talk about, perhaps get other people in the room with you making that content. Or literally, you can just put the content out, and this is what I'm talking about feedback and see what people say. At the end of the videos, you're going to ask them, what else do you want to know? What are we not teaching you that you need to know? I know for a fact, for example, that this video I'm about to give you now will give you everything you need to make your social media life work. But there will be things, like, for example, how to create a perfect hook, how to create a perfect story. Some of these things are going to be very technically difficult for me to explain to you in this video. I'm going to try and give you the basics, but I'm going to give you all of this deep content. All you need to do is go subscribe to my main list, there'll be a link somewhere around here, and I'll send you in my next post out on my email list, a detailed video on exactly what you need to do to make a video work. I've been doing this so long now, I know what you're going to tell me you need at the end of this video. But equally, you need to understand, when people give you feedback, what to listen to and what not listen to. And here's the framework, read the comments of every single video that you put out. Send the video to people who you have targeted in the video. So I'm targeting people here that are starting a business. I'm targeting people that want to grow their business through social media. So I can literally send this video to those people and say, I know you have this problem with social media. Does this video give you what you need to be better at social media? And if it doesn't do that, and someone tells me that, then I don't make the same mistake twice. I make another video and I feel the gaps. You have to go after your target audience and ask them exactly whether or not what you've made gives them what they want. And that will I promise you ensure a successful social media strategy going forward. Now, just finishing up on the structure. When you first start out, do not overthink this. You can literally use the in app edit tools to edit any video. And it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be live. Do not try to make it perfect. As you develop your craft and you get better at, say, talking on camera or making content behind the camera, you can start to see where your gaps are. And someone will see your content and pop out an offer to help you with editing. But all you need to remember is that content is just like TV. You have to entertain people, you have to teach them something and you have to hook them in. I know people don't like hooks. When I first started doing content, my first big hook was, I'm a multi-millionaire and I can teach you business. I cringed, I didn't want to do it. But I did it, and that's why I have huge audience and huge amount of success on social media. Because I accepted that although a hook wasn't me, it was how the game is played. Once you're hooked in, I then try to bring value and differentiate myself within the value that I bring. Let's move on to staying motivated, because I know now at this point, I've given you what you actually need to start. But what's going to keep you going? This is the key that a lot of people don't teach within their business content. Because it's going to sound woo woo, but I promise you, if you move past the subconscious, thinking it's just woo woo and understand what I'm about to teach you, you will change your life. I first want to say that burnout is normal. After six months of doing content, when I started this whole process six years ago, it was within six months that my enthusiasm died. I felt I'd said everything I already knew, and it was a point where I thought, well, there's no point anymore in doing this. I told everybody everything I know, those videos are there forever. That's it. It's over. And I had a week off. And then I realized something, and I don't know whether this is just business instinct because I've been doing business so long, but this isn't how it works. You can't work hard for six months building a business and then stop and expect it to work. Those early videos that I made, I had to remake them because I'm a different person six months later. I had to redo that content and be sharper, make the hook better, make the story better and make the payoff better. I had to entertain people more, I had to teach people something deeper. And so I went and did the whole thing again. And I did it by realizing that I wasn't that great. And that I could be better. The best people, the people I invest in, I invest in a lot of companies. I invest in people that accept they're not the best and they're going to get better. And this is what you need to do. You need to realize that you can improve and you want to, because the more you improve, the more chances later of you never being poor again. I don't want you to win the lottery, because if you do, you won't be able to make the money again unless you're extremely lucky. The best way to ensure long-term financial success is know how to make money and build it step by step by improving yourself. You have to learn that burnout is normal, but you also have to understand how you come back from burnout. That's first of all, realizing what you've just done, you can do better, and you should for your own sake. And second, and probably just as important. Remember, when you've made a bit of content and people have seen it, you'll be shocked how many people haven't seen it. I have told people a million times that I bought a staircase in Twickham where you can go and pitch your doorbell of dreams, that I want a million dollars in Dubai. But I bet there's still someone here right now that's never heard any of those things before, and I make videos on those things a hundred times. You have to remember what you think people have heard, they haven't heard. You have to say it again and again and again. You need people around you that are going to support you. You have to get rid of people that are not encouraging you to follow your dreams. If you've got friends telling you to come out on a Friday night or come out at the weekend, when really you should have your head down building your dream and making content instead, then you kind of need to cut those people out of your life. Now, I'm not saying don't go out and have fun, please do, especially if it's your content strategy, but if it's going to stop you following your dreams by having the wrong people around you, you've got to get rid of them. You got to make sure you're motivated by the people around you. The next thing we're going to talk about is monetization. Yes, how to make money. And I'm going to try and give you two frameworks. Now, ironically, if you can make money, and I know this is going to help you stay motivated. So we want to get you to monetization as quickly as possible, but remember what I said just a moment ago. Motivation's got to come from the inner you, the purpose of which you're doing this for. Because what's going to happen, and I have it too, you go look at my videos. I've got a video that's got 141 million views. The next video has a thousand views. It's going to happen. Don't look at the views and let that determine whether or not you are successful. Don't let it demotivate you. What matters is consistency. And you're only way you're going to get that is by not looking at views, but impact. If you'd help one person, or you get one customer, or you get one new person joining your organization for whatever reason as a fan, that's the win. That's the win we want each week, okay? And that is what you need to focus on. Now, ironically, if you post consistently and you bring value, money's going to flow in, okay? And now let's talk about the structures of how money's going to flow in. We'll quickly have to break down each of the different platforms. So, let's just be clear. YouTube will give you the most amount of money per views. Probably second, depending on algorithms and the any given month is TikTok. Instagram doesn't really pay you for views, but Instagram will give you money from brand deals quicker than, say, YouTube or TikTok in the early days will. You can get money from brand deals quite quickly on Instagram. But the most important thing is, you post on all channels. Coming back to YouTube for a minute, when you're posting on YouTube, you've actually got three sections you need to learn to use properly. First is the shorts. So you need to put up short form content, and that can drive subscribers and build your channel up quite, quite nicely. Now, of course, long form videos, like this video, definitely you want to get into as well when you can. And then the final thing is the community tab, the area that a lot of people overlook. You want to post in the community tab as often as you can. This community tab is the what creates stickiness between you and the followers and the subscribers and the viewers. To build a business, all you actually need is 1000 true fans, 1000 people that love you that every month will be willing to tell 10 people about you. So focus on building the community, because community, by the way, is another way to monetize. If you right now were, for example, doing plumbing and you had 500 plumbers in a WhatsApp group, or in your community tab on Instagram or on YouTube. And you said to a plumbing company who's launching a new product, you can reach 500 plumbers with one post, they'll pay you a lot of money. Now, I mentioned WhatsApp there. Frankly, that's another social media channel that you can use. If you see on your YouTube channel and your Instagram channel and your TikTok channel you're getting 100 views, if you could get those 100 views into a WhatsApp group, now you're starting to build another level of independence from those platforms. So if TikTok shuts down or Instagram blocks you, you still got this WhatsApp group. So you do want to figure out for monetization, how to build email addresses, build community, and make sure, ultimately, that you've got a group of your community. Those are assets that none of these social media chat platforms will be able to take away from you later. So you want to try and always build out those things. That's why I mentioned earlier, for example, join my main list and I'll give you deep dive videos from my technical team on how to make these videos that we're talking about, right? It's also a way for me to build up my main list, because I don't know if YouTube one day is going to block me, and I want to make sure I don't lose connection with you, my audience, right? You need to do the same, because it's another way to monetize. So, in the end, you want to try and build one funnel that does lead to getting an email address. You can make money from affiliate links. So you can put links to products that you believe in, and when people click those links, you make money. You can put affiliate links in your bio. I work with Stan store. This is the partner I have for this. Because I don't need to build a website with all this stuff in it, I just use Stan store. And within Stan store, I can put all the things that people can buy from me, so branded product, for example, or affiliate links. So, basically, you can make money from affiliates, you can make money also from brand deals. Now, you might think, ah, Simon, I don't have any followers. How am I going to get brand deals? Why don't you think about it this way? When we launched my doorbell of dreams at the staircase in Twickham, we used Ring doorbell. Now, Ring is owned by Amazon, and we couldn't get hold of them. We thought it'd be nice if they were a sponsor. But we put the doorbell up anyway, and we got millions of views on this video just because we used their product, because we needed it, we like it, we believe in it. And guess what? We then meet them, we get a brand deal with them. So sometimes just leaning into what you really like, product-wise, you know, what you're wearing. And if you get the success that I hope you get, following the formula, I'm giving you here, you will get those brands reaching out to you. Now, you can also go and join affiliate programs. So you can go and be within things like TikTok. I'm launching a drinks brand soon. You could, you could sell my drinks brand. And if you sell that drinks brand, I make profit, which I can give to dreamers, and you get money for helping sell that product. So you don't even need to have a product to make lots of money in the future. The next thing I'm going to talk about is building a team. Now, when I say this, you'll instantly going to think cost, your fight or flight panic mode. Oh my God, I haven't got any money to build a team. You don't need money in the short term to build a team, and I'm going to give you a framework, how to build a team with no money, okay? So how do you build a team of the caliber that I've got? Again, a lot of this will interlink what I've talked to you about today. If you have a mission that matters, so my mission is to fix the education system, and frankly, I'm building an alternative to it. You can learn from this YouTube channel, you don't need to learn from a teacher that doesn't know. I have asked people in my team, the present people in my team initially to help me, and I wasn't even talking about money. I just said, I'm trying to do this, you have a skill on content or copywriting, can you help me? They said yes. So Callum, Jack, even Joe, who's with me today in the room, all kind of helped. They weren't thinking about money, they were thinking about the mission. Now, they're making money now, and they should. You need to pay your people long term. But at the beginning, people will help you if you have a mission. And one of the things I've done in my previous business that I think is really interesting is, um, I wanted to hire someone who was really, really good. So I was running an agency called Fluid out of Hong Kong. We were one of the biggest agencies in the region, really successful. But the person I wanted to hire, we couldn't afford them. So, how did I get them on board? I basically gave them ownership. I said, in time, you can own equity in the business if you come and join us. Now, if this person and they were, very senior, very good. They were working in a company that would never give them that. So I have an advantage that other companies don't. I'm willing to give up equity, which, by the way, is the most valuable thing you can ever give someone. And so I bought them on board. He actually bought the shares. So he invested and then worked in the business with under KPIs, measurements of success. And as he reached those milestones, he got equity and he is now a multi-millionaire today, a guy called Guy Parsonage. I think you should do that for everybody in your company, everybody. What I'm getting to here is that building a team isn't about spending lots of money. It's about applying the frameworks I've just given you to get the very best people in. And frankly, if you don't get the best people in, then you won't be able to be the best. Just before we move on to the next two things, which are really vital to make this all work. There are some key roles that you're going to need within a content strategy, right? social media in particular. I think it is crucial to have a good editing team or good editor in the long run. You can use in app editing initially, and by the way, the apps love it when you do that, but in the long run, you are going to need an editor. You're also going to need probably a camera person. Now, you can get camera people that are also editors. I found that often one's a really good editor, but not necessarily good on camera, or they're really good on camera, they're not very good at editing. Like Dudley is my cameraman, right? And Joe is my editor. Joe could hold a camera and Dudley, by the way, Dudley's got quite good at editing now, but when he's early days, he was really crap. I think scripting's quite important. Now, I don't script these videos because I know I know all of this stuff. So I don't need scripting, but what I do have is, you know, someone, Jack in my team, who writes out the basic points so I don't forget. You might need to get someone to help you with scripting. Now, Open AI, Chat GPT, these tools are all right. You can use them, but of course, they need to be in your own words and be authentic. I think thumbnail designers, like even now, at the scale we're at, we're one of the most popular business YouTube channels in the world. We don't have a full-time thumbnail designer. We literally have a couple of people part-time who are good and internally, we do have a couple of people that can do thumbnails. I think you need a designer to frame up your social posts. Again, Canva is pretty good, and with AI on things like Canva, they're not my sponsor, but I just like products like that, they're really useful. And then the final thing you should think about operations. Someone that's going to keep you a bit accountable. Now, you can do a remote EA. I have a full-time EA, someone that's permanently organizing my life. But I do think you need someone that's going to keep you accountable on Monday, you're going to meet them at 9:00, and you're going to talk through what you're going to get done that week. You need a bit of accountability. This might also help you stay motivated, by the way, having someone to help you with the operations. The next thing I need to teach you is probably the most important. And if you've got it this far in the video, I'm going to say well done. There's a high chance you're going to be successful, because you've managed to stay focused on learning something that can change your life. Please do me a favor, hit the subscribe button and don't forget. If you are finding any value from this content, you should join my main list, the link's in my bio. Short-term wins and long-term vision. It's important and I've touched on it slightly in the previous parts of this video, that you really set in stone why you were doing this. If you set a short-term goal, a long-term goal, and a reason to keep going forever, you will win. Collaboration in the short term is probably going to be your quickest route to success. I always say, one plus one equals 11. You basically need to think carefully about how you can work with others to build your profile up. You know, I was saying earlier about building your team. One other way to do it is build your community. Think about who in your space would be good to team up with. Now, don't think because they've got millions of followers that they won't necessarily club with you. There's been plenty of people that have had near zero followers that I have done a podcast with, because not everybody's in it for the money, despite what the media tells us. A lot of good people out there will collaborate with you. It's not who you know, it's who you ask. I think short term, to get your views up, first of all, be persistent, be frequent, and look for a collaboration. In the long term, you have to make sure that your business is something you love. You have to give yourself an ambitious target, both revenue and execution of mission. So in my case, I want to help 10 million people start a business. I think we're well into the million plus now already. Give yourself two frameworks. One is, to move a mountain, move one small rock at a time. That's your short-term plan. Move one small rock at a time. Your long-term plan is, what is the mountain and why does it need to be moved? This is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to give yourself time. It's taken me six years to become one of the most successful business influencers in the world. And every single step of the way I have fought about giving up. Every single step of the way, I've had doubts whether I've got the ability to do it. I push myself through all that. I'm a better person because of it. And even if I get no views on this video, at least I tried. At least I'm trying to be better, and that's what will give you the life you want because you try to be better. In this video, I've given you everything you need to make your social media journey both enjoyable, successful, and scalable. Maybe you need to go back and watch it again and take notes, save this video. I don't know what you need to do. Do not stop until it works. Your life can be better if you apply yourself using knowledge like this. You don't need a mentor. You just need to get the knowledge from the people that have it, and I have it, I'm giving you to you for free. Please share it with others. Let's make other people's lives better. Thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this video, subscribe. Don't forget to join the main list, and I'll see you soon.
