Alex Hormozi’s 6 Content Lessons From Gaining 7.8M Followers in 40 Months
If you don’t know Alex Hormozi, he’s an entrepreneur, investor, and author, focused on providing free business education.
He and his team published 35,000 pieces of content in the last 40 months and spent $4M along the way. In this video, he summarized the 6 key lessons and changes they’re now making to their content strategy based on what they’ve learned.
(He refers mostly to YouTube, but these lessons are also valid for other channels.)
If you want to save the 45 minutes it would take you to watch the video, check out my notes below.
1. From edutainment to education
All content falls within one of three buckets:
Entertainment: The goal is to get people to consume the content (that’s it!)
Education: The goal is to help someone change what they do.
Edutainment: This content aims to entertain and teach at the same time. But usually only one or the other occurs.
The common belief is that people need to get hooked by entertaining content, before they then watch some educational content and from there become customer. What Alex found is that people who watch entertainment usually want only more entertainment. And people who prefer educational content typically want more of that.
Alex is going all-in on education for three reasons:
All views are NOT created equal: Think about who your best customers are and what type of content they prefer. Alex’s target audience is business owners who like to educate themselves, not entertainment seekers.
Do stuff you like doing: Alex enjoys educational content himself so it’s much easier for him to create this type of content.
Target to people who you like to hang out with: Again, it’s much easier to address the types of people in your content who you prefer working with anyway.
2. From “for us” to “for you”
From the first lesson above follows a logical next step to re-focus on Alex’s core audience of business owners. These are the five changes they’re making to their YouTube videos specifically to cater to that audience.
Packaging: They’re moving from vague to clear thumbnails that communicate the value of the video.
Intro: Instead of saying what you're going to say, prove that you can deliver on the promise. Answer the question “Why should I listen to you?” immediately. This is Alex’s formula for effective intros:
Proof: Give people a reason to believe you
Promise: Tell them what they're going to get
Plan: Set expectations of what will happen next
Meat: Alex is moving from B-roll-heavy, vlog-style videos to concrete lists/steps/stories. Shift the emphasize on the language and lessons instead of fancy production.
Visuals: Remove anything that distracts from the core messages. If it doesn’t support getting the message across, then it doesn’t belong in the video.
Pre-work: Rather do 4 weeks of research (and minimal editing later) than 4 weeks of post-production because you filmed with too little prep. "An ounce of pre-work is worth a pound of post."
3. From wide to narrow
It’s tempting to broaden the topics you cover with the intent of casting a wider net. At some point, Alex started making more videos about vague topics such as relationships and college.
But people who watch videos about relationships most likely just want more of that. And Alex’s business ultimately isn’t providing relationship advice.
They’re now re-focusing and doubling-down on narrow, business-centric topics (e.g. business models, strategy, selling a business), again, to cater to their core audience of business owners.
4. From views to revenue
Alex used to track views as the primary metric for success. Now, he’s switching to ad revenue/RPM as the leading indicator.
Ad revenue = # of views * revenue per view
RPM (Revenue Per Mille) = how much money you've earned per 1,000 video views
The reason is that ad revenue and RPM take into account the quality of your audience (business owners have generally a high spending potential and are considered a very valuable audience).
Alex found that the months with their highest RPM and ad revenue created the most book sales, opt-ins, etc.
5. From shorts to longs
Shorts have been all the rage. And the general belief is that shorts viewers will translate into viewers of longer videos and will become customers.
But Alex found that shorts viewers just watch more shorts, and long video viewers generally want more long videos
People watch differently on different platform, though. Someone could enjoy their shorts on TikTok, while preferring long videos on YouTube.
Ultimately, he found that long videos drive more conversions so this is where their emphasis will lie.
6. From “assume more” to “assume nothing”
Alex confessed that he used to make content assuming people already knew who he was. However, that doesn't help bring new people into his world.
He suggests making all content welcoming to new audience members:
Introduce yourself every time
Tell them why they should listen to you every time
Fully explain all references (no inside jokes)
Pretend you’re talking to a stranger
Repost successful content so new members of the audience see it, too (even if they’ve seen it before, they’ll enjoy the reminder)
The game is figuring out the biggest "bang for buck"
Alex concludes with a question, every business owner should ask themselves: "With the resources I have, how can I maximize the number of the RIGHT people to find out about my stuff?"
He reminds us that anything works better than nothing, some things work better than others and nothing works for everyone.
His recommendation: Start doing something-> see what works better -> do as much of that as you can, for as long as you can, until it slows -> figure out the next thing.
