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I'm going to show you exactly how to build your personal brand to over 10 million followers for whenever I need to start over.
Sam Gaudet shares a simple system for building a 10M+ follower personal brand: positioning (promise, proof, perspective, personality), ideation, production, distribution and analytics.
Key Takeaways
- Commit to one clear promise rather than many topics to stand out.
- Continuously share and stack proof of your accomplishments to build credibility.
- Develop unique perspectives drawn from your own experiences and share your personality.
- Use a structured ideation process (topic, angle, format) and validate ideas before scripting.
- Increase volume and track analytics to reduce reliance on luck and improve over time.
What the video covers
- Sam Gaudet, who grew Dan Martell's personal brand to over 12 million followers, presents a simple system for building a personal brand to 10 million followers.
- Success comes from a repeatable system rather than talent, luck, or expensive gear.
- Positioning is built on four P's: promise, proof, perspective, and personality.
- The promise should be a single clear thing you help people with; sharing many promises weakens positioning.
- Proof should be shared visibly and continuously through 'proof stacking', showing accomplishments that build credibility.
- Perspective must be novel, non-obvious, and unique, drawn from personal experience, stories, and analogies rather than repeating others.
- Personality, which AI cannot replace, helps people connect with the creator as a person, so showing behind-the-scenes life matters.
- Ideation is a process problem, not a creativity problem; each idea breaks into topic, angle, and format, validated through internal and external data.
- Production and distribution emphasize clear outlines, repetition of core beliefs, strong editing and design teams, and platform-specific content over simple repurposing.
- Volume and analytics matter: high output reduces the role of luck, and tracking views, followers, leads, and revenue guides improvement.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and the 10 Million Follower Goal
- 00:54Positioning: Promise and Proof
- 04:48Proof Stacking and Building Credibility
- 05:41Perspective: Developing Unique Viewpoints
- 07:35Personality and Ideation Framework
- 10:50Topic, Angle, and Format Validation
- 13:00Production, Distribution, and Omnipresence
- 21:10Analytics and Volume
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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If you don't know me, I'm Sam Gdet.
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I've grown Dan Martell's personal brand from under 100K followers over 12 million across all platforms.
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And what I learned about getting to 10 million followers is it's not about talent, luck, or having fancy gear.
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It's about having a simple system.
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And so, in this video, I'm going to break down the exact system that I would use to build my personal brand to 10 million followers.
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Starting with your positioning system.
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So, the word positioning gets thrown around on social media, but at the end of the day, it's what you want to be known for, and it breaks down into these simple P's.
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The first one is your promise.
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Your number one goal on social media is to share a compelling promise with your audience so that people understand what they're getting from you.
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A mistake that I see a lot of content creators make is they share 10 promises, not one, on their social media.
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And if you want to stand out in a sea of other people, you need to share a clear promise of what you're going to help people with.
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And so in my case on my social media, I help people with personal brand and content creation, and that's it.
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And for Dan, he helps people with business and AI.
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That's it.
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Yes, you can chase every shiny object and talk about everything that you're interested in on social media, but you're never going to build strong positioning if you don't have a clear promise that you deliver on in your content.
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Which brings us to proof.
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Yes, you should share a promise of what you're going to tell people.
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But you should also have a reason why they should listen to you.
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And that's why you want to share your proof in as many different ways as possible on social media, whether it's your bio on your Instagram or it's the hooks in your YouTube videos or even the hooks in your short form videos.
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But you guys saw me do this in real time in this exact video because I strongly believe that your unique advantage on social media is what you've done, the things that you can stack on.
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And if you want to have strong positioning on social media, then you can't be scared to share your proof.
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And I know a bunch of people watching this right now have tons of proof, but you're scared to share it on social media because you don't want to be bragging to other people.
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But the truth is, people listen to people who they want to be like, and people listen to people who have done what they want to do.
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So if you want to get more views and followers and build your personal brand to over 10 million followers, then you need to share your proof.
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And this is what most people won't tell you about creating content is that you also need to do this thing called proof stacking.
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You need to be constantly stacking your proof on top of the stuff that you've already done.
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You know, I've grown Dan Martell's personal brand to over 12 million followers, but I didn't stop there.
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I want to keep proof stacking.
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And so, I'm on this mission to go from zero to 100K followers with just my iPhone to prove you don't need any fancy equipment to get views on social media.
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And so, I'm doing it.
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I'm on Instagram.
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I'm at 75,000 followers so far.
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And I'm proof stacking in real time.
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So, that way I'll have two pieces of proof that I can talk about and then I'll move on to the third one.
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But your goal on social media isn't just to create content, but is to constantly stack proofs that people listen to you and not somebody else.
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Which brings us to perspective.
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It doesn't matter if you want to call it contrarian takes, counterpositioning, or even the purple cow theory, but at the end of the day, you need to have a perspective on social media that is unique to you.
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You can't just regurgitate what other people are saying on the platform.
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And your perspective is usually what makes people gravitate towards you if you want to have a strong personal brand, one that stands the test of time, one that gets to 10 million followers very, very fast.
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And you need to have strong perspectives on the world so that people gravitate towards you and not someone else.
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And the big thing here is your perspectives need to be novel, non-obvious, net new.
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You can't just look at what other people are saying on social media, like I said, and say the same thing.
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You need to look at your life experience, your stories, your analogies, and then take inspiration from those stories and analogies and bring them into your perspectives.
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Everything that I'm sharing on social media right now, everything that I'm doing has come from 10 years of being in the content creation space and taking that experience, packaging it into simple ways that people can understand, and we'll talk about that later, and then delivering that perspective in a unique way.
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If you want to grow really, really fast on social media, you can't skip having unique perspectives.
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Which brings us to the last P, which is personality.
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At the end of the day, yes, AI can replace a bunch of things.
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But what it can't replace is your personality, who you are.
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And what most people don't realize is that people don't just follow you for what you say.
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They follow you for who you are and the things that make you you.
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And so this means share a little bit of yourself, your personality on social media.
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Don't just hide behind the veil of what you're sharing with people and not show some of your life.
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And that could be a monthly carousel where you just share, you know, what you've done in the month and give people a little bit of a behind-the-scenes.
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But we do this with Dan as well, right?
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We try to show as much as possible his love for supercars, his love for extreme sports, his love for his family, his dog, his wife.
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And the more you can show on social media what makes you unique, your personality, your quirks and features, the more people are going to gravitate towards you and who you are, not just what you say.
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Which brings us to the second part of building your 10 million follower personal brand system, which is ideation.
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You don't have a creativity problem, you have a process problem.
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And a lot of people think that they should sit there and come up with ideas without a process.
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And that's why their personal brand feels stalled.
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Because if you break down the word ideation, all it means is coming up with ideas.
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And so what you need to do is to build a system so you can come up with ideas.
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Which leads us to asking ourselves, what is an idea in the first place?
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And I like to break down an idea into three simple parts.
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Topic, angle, and format.
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Those three things are usually what I focus on whenever I'm coming up with ideas so I don't have to go write an entire script before I validate it.
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And so this is my exact system on how to come up with topics, angles, and formats for my content that you can use for your content.
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So the first part, let's go into topic.
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It's way easier to enter an existing conversation than to try to create a completely new one.
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And if you want to perform on social media, then you need to share topics that people are interested in.
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And there's two different ways you could do this.
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You could do this using internal validation, which is, you know, looking at your sales calls, coaching calls, team calls, maybe the stuff that you've already posted on social media and look at what people are reacting to, right?
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What's performing?
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Or you could do external validation, which is looking at what other people are posting on social media or on Reddit or on Quora or, you know, on Google search trends and seeing what are the conversations that are already happening on social media or on the internet that you can tap into very easily.
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But the biggest key here is whenever I'm doing ideation, I'm not just going to optimize for the thing that has the most demand, because if not, you're going to split test yourself into fitness content.
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And you're going to be a bu
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because let's say the other ones are blurred out and people are wondering what are the next steps in that video.
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And so if you want your content to perform better, then you need to show people a road map of what they're going to get from the video to create curiosity in their mind. So they watch till the end. Which brings us to the
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fourth part of your system to build a personal brand to over 10 million followers, which is your delivery system. Once you've written out your outlines, once you have a guide of where to go, the whole idea here is you want
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to treat your outlines like a trail, not a rail. You don't want to read your outlines word for word. That's why you sound like a robot in your content. But what you want to do is use your outlines
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like a guide, right? If you think about it, a train, right, goes on a rail and stays on the rail. Someone who's walking on a trail, who's hiking, can bounce around between the edges of the trail, but you always come back to the middle.
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And that's the whole point of a script or an outline is to keep you on track, not something that you need to read word for word. And because I want to make this the most valuable video that you've
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ever watched on personal brand, I'm going to give you my off the-d dome method. This is what I use to shoot videos off the top of the dome without needing to read a script or having a teleprompter. And I just use these four
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steps. Number one is I write my outline out ideally that same week so it stays fresh in my mind. Number two is I remember, right? I read my outline before I go shoot the content. And I remember most of the things in my
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outline, right? If you think about the best actors in the world, they read their lines, right? They remember their lines. They don't have their script next to them when they're shooting their movies. remember their lines and so they're able to deliver them more
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authentically. The third part is riff and this is where I think you should allow yourself to bounce around the trail of thought. Not have one stream of consciousness but have multiple streams of consciousness and allow yourself in some cases to go on little tangents
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because that's where you'll unlock authentic delivery. And the last part is to repeat. I believe that if you suck at delivering your content, it's not because you suck at public speaking.
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It's not because you suck at creating videos. It's because you haven't said that thing enough times. And the best content creators in the world, like the Dan Martell of the world, have said the things that they're saying in their
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content hundreds and hundreds of times to their team, to rooms that they public speak, or even to themselves, and that's the beauty of content creation is your authenticity compounds. The more you say things, the more you repeat your unique
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perspectives, right? The more you repeat the stuff that you truly believe, the easier time you're going to have delivering that content over time. And so you want to make sure that you repeat your content as often as possible
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because you might see someone say something super fluently and you're like they're such a natural at content creation. The truth is no one's a natural. They've probably said that thing hundreds and hundreds of times so they're able to time the positive to
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riff on certain stuff to lower their tone when they need to. And that's the whole point of creating content on social media is that you become better and better over time. Not because you're a natural on camera, but it's because
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you repeat that content time and time again. Which brings us to the fifth part of your content creation system that's going to get you to over 10 million followers. The production system, the only job of your production is to help
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the audience understand better. It's not to add fancy graphics, animations, text on screen. It's to help the audience understand better. And if you give any amount of production that doesn't help the viewer understand more is wasted in my opinion because it could be spent
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somewhere else where it matters most. And so I believe the best graphic design, the best video editing often goes unnoticed because it's not distracting the viewer from the content, but it's augmenting their understanding of the content. And so make sure that
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your production system is all aligned around helping the viewer understand better. And also what you need to understand is that your editors don't suck. Your graphic designers don't suck.
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You just don't know how to lead them. Your systems suck. And a lot of people blame their creative talent. They blame their team for their inaccuracies on the production side. They say, you know, if only I had the best video editor in the
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world, I would be able to get million view videos. That's not the case. Your job as a creative, as the entrepreneur, as the person that's leading the creative team is to take the system and implement it with the editors. I could
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take a B-level editor and turn them into a double A player by just giving them the right systems and training. And so, it's not their job to organize themselves. It's your job to organize them and hold the standard for what's
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great. Which brings us to being maniacal about the details in your production process. You have to understand that the difference between Olympic gold and silver is milliseconds. And the same thing is true in content creation. The difference between the best video in
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your niche and the second place one is a small detail in the production process.
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And oftent times production is the final step before publishing. And what I like to do here is I like to be extremely scrutinous on my talent, on my editors, on my graphic designers. I give them a lot of notes whether it's positive or
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negative because what I'm helping people understand at that stage isn't my preferences because honestly I don't care about my preferences. It's my principles because that's what I believe most creatives should implement in their businesses. It's leading with principles
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over preferences and share what you believe about content creation. What are the principles that are true? And so they interpret those principles and implement them beyond just your notes on frame or Dropbox. And the reason why you do this is if you teach them
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preferences, you teach them to come to you with problems. But if you teach them principles, then at this point they can think for themselves. And that's what you want to create is an environment of individual contributors that are able to
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drive outcomes because they can think for themselves. Which brings us to part six in your personal brand system that's going to get you to over 10 million followers. And it's your distribution system. You need to be able to
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distribute content properly across all platforms if you want to win on social media. And the first thing you need to understand here is you need to stop repurposing content. There's this common method on social media right now that's
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called the waterfall method where you take one pillar piece of content and then you take that piece of content and repurpose it across all platforms. The problem with that is you're optimizing for one platform and oftent times that
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platform is not the one that's rewarding you the most. An example of that someone will make a YouTube video that gets 100 views and then clip up that video and maybe get a,000 views on their Instagram. Yes, there's no extra work
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required outside of your video editors. But why don't you just make platform dedicated content? And so what I like to do instead is instead of the waterfall method, I do the lake method. And this is where I make content dedicated per
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platform so that Facebook gets what it needs, Instagram gets what it needs, YouTube gets what it needs, and then we put all of those platforms content into the lake where people can go fish for what content they need. And so that way
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we're able to cross-pollinate across platforms so that if something performs on Instagram really well, then yeah, we're going to move it over to LinkedIn, but we're not going to just post everything from Instagram to LinkedIn because then you're just optimizing for
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one platform, not all platforms. And if you want to build a personal brand to over 10 million followers, then you need to leverage all of the platforms growth, not just a few. And so stop repurposing content and start building a system
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where you're making platform dedicated content. Which brings us to engineering omniresence. And you could say this is another unique mechanism, but the whole idea here is that you need to be omnipresent across all platforms. Yes, but you can't just expect people to find
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you. And so what I like to do is to cross-pollinate across platforms and send people from Instagram to YouTube or YouTube to Instagram. You saw me do this in this video where I offered you a free scripting template and all you needed to
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do is go find me on Instagram. Now, chances are if you go find me on Instagram, you message me the word YouTube, you might give me a follow. You might like my content on short form and you might follow me there. And I do the
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same thing the other way around, right? Where I'm on Instagram and I tell people, hey, I just posted another video on YouTube. Go find it with my link in bio. The whole point here is you don't want to just expect omniresence by
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posting on all platforms. But you want to engineer it by telling people where to go and giving them an incentive to go find you on those platforms. Which brings us to the third part in your distribution system, which is volume
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negates luck. Right? At the end of the day, if you post one video a day or three videos a day or five videos a day or six videos a day, you have a different chance of going viral because
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you have more at bats. And if you're looking at me right now and you're saying, "Sam, I can't possibly produce five or six videos a day." Neither can I. But what I like to do is use strategies on certain platforms that I
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can double my output with no extra effort required. And what that looks like is specifically on Instagram, there's this thing called trial reels where you can post videos that get published to your nonf followers. And if you want my full strategy on this, I
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just posted a video last week on YouTube, but the cliff notes are if you want to get extreme distribution on Instagram, then you need to increase your volume with what I like to do is do this thing called the double post where
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I'll take one piece of media and I'll post it on the trial reel first and then instead of making it public right then and there, I'll just take the same MP4 file and post it on the main feed. So
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that way I have two videos getting views at the same time. And there's tons of hacks, whether it's every 60 days reposting your best content on the main feed or if it's taking content that you've, you know, posted on YouTube six
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months ago and then just re-shoot it with a new angle. There is ways that you can increase volume without increasing effort. And if you want to build a system to get you to over 10 million followers for your personal brand, then
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you need to be able to find these hacks to increase your volume because volume negates luck. Which brings us to the seventh part in this video to build your personal brand over 10 million followers, which is your analytic
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system. You need to measure what matters. And a lot of people over obsess over the vanity metrics and don't focus on the stuff that's downstream. And so what I like to do is focus on four metrics for my social media. Number one
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is views because I do think it's a great leading indicator. But then we go into followers because I think if you're getting tons of views but no followers, it means people are seeing your face and not liking what you're saying, which is
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really bad. Then we get into leads, which is how many emails or SMS numbers did you capture? And that's a big idea because you want to move people from earn traffic, right, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube to own traffic, right?
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This is where you capture people's emails, SMS numbers, or even physical addresses. And that is how you get leads. And the fourth number I like to track is revenue generated because at the end of the day, if your views and
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followers aren't turning into money, it means that you're not positioned correctly. And so, you want to restart this video and start with the four Ps.
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And I like to track these every single day. I like to have a Slack message that's automated. Now, with AI, it's super easy. That tells you how many views, how many followers, how many leads, and how much revenue did you
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generate yesterday, so you can constantly adjust your content. Which brings us to part eight in your personal brand system to get to over 10 million followers, which is your mission system.
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Look, if you're making content for selfish reasons, I can't stop you. But what I know is that if you focus on serving people, if you focus on helping the audience, if you focus on just sharing the most valuable advice that
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you can for free, you will attract more goodwill in the market than anybody else. You should be more focused on your mission than your media. And if you can focus on your mission of helping people get through the thing that you've gone
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through, do the thing that you've done, then you will be rewarded for it. And every single time that you're staring at a blank page or feel insecure in your content, just focus on helping people.
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Because in focusing not on yourself, but on other people and helping them achieve their goals, then you're going to be able to achieve your goals. And as a reminder, if you want my YouTube scripting template that's going to help
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you script viral videos just like this, go find me on Instagram, message me the word YouTube, and I'll send it over to you. and watch this video next if you want to learn how to be so good at
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content creation that it kind of feels disgusting.
Topics:personal brandingcontent creationsocial media growthpositioningproof stackingideationYouTube strategyaudience growthcontent systemsSam Gaudet
