34 Minutes of Top Creator Advice For 2026 | 109

[00:00:00] Nathan: To kick off 2026, I wanted to share some of the best advice from last year’s episodes. This will be a value packed episode where we’ve handpicked some of the best moments, either ones that resonated the most, or advice from the top creators that’s really worth paying attention to. I want you to take what’s useful to you and apply it to your business this year.

[00:00:19] So without much further ado, get your notes ready and let’s dive in.

[00:00:26] Dan Martell: The buyback loop is the process of figuring out w. How do we get more done? So my idea is capacity. Okay. We only have the same amount of hours in a day. Yep. We need to increase our capacity because if we want to go to a new level to attack a new devil, then we have to have the space to go do the development, to learn how to play that next level.

[00:00:48] So the first thing is, is it’s three step loop. The first part is to audit. An audit is to look at what we’re currently doing. So when I’ve done this process, which is you take the last two weeks of your life, okay? And if it’s in your calendar, that’s easier. If not, you have to audit it. You gotta like log it, because then what you have is you have a log of all the things that you’ve done.

[00:01:08] And then what I do is I highlight in green things that give me energy that I love to do, and then red things that suck my energy because especially for creators. The thing that stops them from creating the best art is the dealing with the stuff that sucks their energy. Right? The next thing is to write down what do you think it would cost you to pay somebody else to do that work?

[00:01:31] Right. The value of that work. So I always think of like $1 sign is very low cost to $4 signs is very high cost. Yeah. The cool part is, is once I do the time and energy audit. The only thing I gotta do next is hire somebody that I can grab all the red stuff that has $1 or $2 signs.

[00:01:52] Nicole Burke: Hmm.

[00:01:53] Dan Martell: And this is the rhythm of scaling that I’ve used in all my companies.

[00:01:58] The second part of this is the transfer. So once we’ve got this list, these are the things that are bad, okay? That cost very little money, not, not expensive. Okay. Now the crazy part is that might be even scheduling my posts on social media and editing videos and replying to comments. So that’s a bucket.

[00:02:19] So once I’ve got that bucket of stuff, and some people make the mistake, they’re like, okay, I gotta hire a contractor for this and a contractor for that. No, I hire somebody that can do all of them. Okay. So what I do is this framework called the camcorder method. I record everything. So at my desk on my computer, I have screen recording software, which today I just use Zoom by myself and share my screen.

[00:02:43] Uh, I have cameras recording me in meetings. And I capture the process of what I’m doing, knowing that someday I’m gonna have to get it off my plate. Talk out loud. So like what happens is the nuance gets missed. So as you’re writing an email for a late receivable and you write it, yes, copy, paste it as a potential template, but also talk about the philosophy.

[00:03:05] So I’m, I’m, I am using this information from here and I’m writing the email like this, and you’re talking out loud. Now what that does is it creates these videos for all these different areas that you’re gonna give to somebody else. And when I hire the person, this smiley face, happy, great culture fit person, and I give them their first day, they pretty much spend the first 3, 4, 5 days just watching videos.

[00:03:27] Mm. And the first time I hire somebody to do this, they’re the ones that create the SOPs, standard operating procedures. See, most people won’t hire the person until they have the time to document the thing. Don’t do that. Record yourself doing the work, which is net time. No extra time I get to do the work.

[00:03:43] Record it while I’m doing the work and create the onboarding for the next person I hire. So it doesn’t take me any time to sit down and do this, this like, if you just do this in your life, you will be like so happy. Now we go to fill and that’s the third step to the buyback loop. And the whole point of fill is to fill your time back up with things that light you up, that make you the most money.

[00:04:07] See, as a creator, your job is to get better at trading your time, becoming a better time trader. So why would I buy back my time to go do low value things, right, that don’t increase the ability. So for me, the fill is all about focusing. I call it like a ladder. There’s kind of three things that we focus on.

[00:04:27] First off, there are. Um, the habit side of things. Okay. Okay. So most people don’t realize that you can’t grow yourself outta bad habits. Okay? Like, okay, talk about that more. Well, you know, this, it’s like, they’re like, I want to be a top content creator. It’s like, okay, well step one, you have to be consistent.

[00:04:47] Mm-hmm. Some people are not consistent. Then it’s like you have to have discipline. They’re like, ugh. You know, like, so I always say like, the ladder of success is filling your counter back up with acquiring, you know, these new mm-hmm. The kind of skills. Right. So the, the second one is actually skills. So each level.

[00:05:07] Yeah. Second is skills. So one is to get the habits dialed in so that you are become the person who can climb that ladder. Okay. That’s the fill part. The next one is skills. What’s the next level skill you need to acquire to go be. World class, the thing you wanna accomplish. And the key is with this one at a time, skills, and drills like, you know the golfer?

[00:05:28] Yeah. You don’t go up to a golfer and say, okay, there’s 17 things wrong with what you’re doing. You say, Hey, the way you’re holding your club, you need to do this. Right. That grip, we’re just gonna, okay, that’s all we’re gonna go’s 18 holes, that’s all we care about. Go hit with the new grip and like adjust.

[00:05:42] Right. And they also don’t practice while they play. Right. That’s amateur hour. Oh, okay. Oh, amateurs practice. While they play a professional practices outside of the play. The third one is mindset. We already touched upon it. I can’t help you create great content if you don’t believe you’re great. That’s a hook.

[00:06:03] See, I did that. No, I’m just kidding. The idea of beliefs shape our worldviews. To even give us the chance to, to improve it. Mm-hmm. Right. You’ve talked to people where like, if you truly believe you’re only like, your goal is a million dollars and you’re at 700,000, like you’re not gonna show up every day to really do this work.

[00:06:27] Because you feel like you’re close to your potential, but that mindset of not realizing that you’ll never get a penny more than you think you’re worth, and if you don’t fight for it, you’ll never audit your time to believe that you’re worth hiring a great person to take this stuff out. Most people can’t do this.

[00:06:43] Not ’cause they don’t know they don’t have the money, or they don’t know what to give. They don’t believe they deserve it. So to me the mindset is like one of the biggest ones that kind of wrapped the whole thing. So the ladder, the rungs are the skills and then the habits are on the left side and the mindset’s on the right side because if your worldview is small, you’ll never play a big game.

[00:07:02] This is, but I gotta finish this thing about the loop. Okay. So visually it goes like this. And in life, and I’ve never taught this before, we get an exclusive. It’s always this and most people that don’t fail. They never get the forward momentum. Most people do this and they have a bunch of people and they go chill out in Thailand or Bali, and they, they’re on the beach, right?

[00:07:27] And they never focus on their habits or skills and mindset for more, for what’s gonna be next. New levels, new devils, you know, they’re comfortable playing level five. They don’t realize their potential is 22 levels. Yeah. Oh man. I know a lot of people who, and it’s literally this last step of fill, right?

[00:07:44] So audit, figure out what we need to come off my plate transfer, get great people, give it to em even part-time, but ideally full-time. And then fill your calendar back up with the things that make you money. That light you up. Yeah. That keep that upward spiral. Right.

[00:07:57] Nathan: What’s the business model today of how you go from the attention on LinkedIn, uh, all the way through to, you know, someone paying you for your, uh, for your program.

[00:08:07] Chris Donnelly: So I effectively create high quality, really well researched, very. Strategic content on how to grow. Mm-hmm. And that might be how to grow as a person. It might be how to grow in your resilience. It might be how to launch a startup, might be how to find an idea, how to validate. So it’s very entrepreneurial content.

[00:08:27] And it’s, there’s a, a, there’s a certain strand to it that’s about personal brand and that’s what I really, and so much of it. It’s just high quality, free educational content. Mm-hmm. And so I have built this big audience, so I got a billion views last year across my content, which I now effectively have one strategy, which is I use the content to garner views and attention and build audience.

[00:08:52] I then say, if you wanna go deeper on this, subscribe to my newsletter. Okay. And my newsletter, it’s once a week sent on Sunday. Very entrepreneurial. Very tactical, like how to build, how to grow. And from there I do a Thursday evening webinar, no matter where I am in the world. I did it this morning ’cause it’s normally my evening.

[00:09:10] So I did it this morning. From the hotel, wherever I am, I’ll do a webinar and two to 3000 people turn up to the webinars. Mm-hmm. And I will do some form of topic that is either interesting to me at the time or specific to personal brand or business. And at the end I basically say to anyone who’s ever been on one, I say, look.

[00:09:29] If you’re gonna do one of my cohorts, they are incredibly hard work. They take up a huge amount of your time, but if you put in the work, you will transform in 10 weeks and then that’s the only plug and that’s it. And I have no sales team. There’s no follow up, there’s no anything. It’s just you sign up or you don’t.

[00:09:46] Nathan: And so people sign up, they’re on the webinar.

[00:09:48] Chris Donnelly: Webinar. Yeah.

[00:09:50] Nathan: And then is, are the cohorts like open and close? Uh, yeah. So

[00:09:54] Chris Donnelly: the model is, and I think it’s really. It’s really important to understand this in that people don’t buy something. People don’t buy things unless there’s like a real reason to buy it.

[00:10:07] And so I always ask entrepreneurs like, why would I buy your product today and not tomorrow? Right? And they’re like, what do you mean? I’m like, well, that’s often the challenge that you have is like, how do you get something to buy now? And so the thing with the cohort model is that we do. Four, 10 weeks a year and that’s it.

[00:10:22] Mm-hmm. So if you miss it, you miss it, and then you have to start again in like four months time. And so people are, people will self-select whether that time of the year works for them. And then sometimes I’ll take a break and so it might be a six month wait for the next cohort. Yeah. And so that, that urgency pushes people to, to sign up.

[00:10:40] Mm-hmm.

[00:10:41] Nathan: Yeah. That makes sense. We had that in the early days of growing kit where, you know, I just did a lot of direct sales to recruit people onto the platform. But it was exactly what you’re saying. It’s like, oh, you can. I, I could sign up tomorrow or I don’t know, next month, next year. Like there’s not really, and you’re like, well, I’ll give you, you’re trying to like add scarcity in some way and they’re like.

[00:10:59] I dunno. Next one sounds fine. You know, and then webinars was the thing for us that we, it gave us an event to market and drive everyone too. And then through a bonus or you know, something we could get it where it’s like, no, it is genuinely way better for you if you sign up today. You know, or part, you know, part of this, this mini launch basically, instead of just leaving it open-ended.

[00:11:21] Chris Donnelly: Yeah. ’cause if it’s open-ended, especially with, uh, you know, a software product, I’ll just sign up next month. Yeah. Or the month after,

[00:11:26] Nathan: which rounds to never

[00:11:27] Chris Donnelly: Yeah. Which rounds never they could discover a new product. Yeah. Whatever it is. And so a lot of the time. Historically, I’ve been advising authors.

[00:11:35] Mm-hmm. And so you have that perfect thing with an author, but it’s like, I want ’em to buy my book right now. And the person’s like, oh, I’ll buy it. It’s some undefined point in the future.

[00:11:43] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:11:44] Chris Donnelly: And so authors then release, you know, accompanying value ads with the book, but then they leave them open forever.

[00:11:50] Mm-hmm. And so it’s like, again, I could just get the value add in a year’s time. And so you have to really. To your audience, they have to understand that when you say something, you mean it.

[00:11:59] Nicole Burke: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:00] Chris Donnelly: Whereas like with the author, they say, you can only get this thing now and then next month they’re giving it away again.

[00:12:04] You’ve gotta be very, very careful that people will trust what you say. Right. And Will will, you know, will

[00:12:10] Nathan: act on it. Yeah. I think Alex Ram Moey, he did a huge webinar for one of his book launches and he had, I, he hadn’t done something like it before and I, I think he had pushing like a hundred thousand people watching live.

[00:12:22] It was insane. But the thing that he really wanted people to leave with, obviously he wanted them to buy his book. Right. That’s what it was for. And he put in all this extra value. People thought that he was gonna sell something for like hundreds or thousands of dollars. And ultimately it was like, buy the book in like these little packages and get all this for free.

[00:12:41] But he was like, you cannot get this, you know this, these additional values, unless you do it right here, live on the webinar. Mm-hmm. And, and he just said like. I am here to train you that I mean what I say. Mm-hmm. And you should show if I do something live, you should show up for it and like you’re gonna, you know, there’s gonna be tens of thousands of people that email me afterwards saying, oh, I school drop off whatever else.

[00:13:03] I missed the thing and I wasn’t there live. And he is gonna be like, cool. Well, I hope. You know, when I do another book, maybe in a year or two, like, I hope you make that one.

[00:13:09] Chris Donnelly: Yeah. You know, and it’s, you know, he, he’s a master of the the game. And I think that it’s important. It’s important to be so honest and so transparent and, and then keep your word to your audience.

[00:13:19] Mm-hmm. Because when you tell them you have a business or you have a a product, or you’re gonna do something they don’t believe you, then the likelihood of building more trust is, is right. Is,

[00:13:29] Nathan: and you have to follow it up because there’s so much fake scarcity. What about the size of a community? Like is there a point where.

[00:13:35] You know, if it starts small and it’s like 10, 20 people, you’re not actually going to be able to get. Critical mass or you, you know, how do you, how do you maintain engagement at that small size as you’re building towards something bigger?

[00:13:46] Jay Clouse: I think small communities actually have certain advantages that are a good thing.

[00:13:51] I do think there’s a minimum size. I tell people if you’re launching a community, try to get 10 people in. Okay. And I have like this two phase approach, uh, that I call private opening, public launch, because you have this chicken and egg problem when you launch a, a, a membership or a community and try to get people in.

[00:14:07] Why would people join if they’re joining for people and there’s no people in there, right? Anybody who has an audience will have some number of people who are like up for taking the journey with very little context, very little information. And so what I encourage people to do is basically say if you’re gonna launch a membership a couple months beforehand.

[00:14:25] Just talk about it in your emails. Use link triggers, build a wait list. Mm-hmm. And ultimately offer some incentive for the people who are paying the closest attention to jump in early. Yeah. You want your biggest fans in there first. And so when we launched this, it was basically like, Hey, I’m launching a membership for creators.

[00:14:41] And if that’s interesting to you and you’re, you trust me and you’re willing to join site unseen, you’ll have half off this price forever. Mm-hmm. And then the price raised several times. So we have members in the community who have been there for four years who are paying 25% of the, like, of the current price.

[00:14:55] Current price. Um, because they were just paying close attention. They’re like, I trust you and I wanna jump in. Mm-hmm. But I think that’s also really good to give your biggest fans the best. Pricing and incentive and, and basically you build this understanding that the best time to purchase something new from Jay is immediately.

[00:15:15] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:15:16] Jay Clouse: And a lot of people get in the opposite cycle where it’s like they launch something, everybody buys a. They stop se like they’re not selling it very well. So they start discounting it and that actually trains people to say, let me actually wait until they start discounting this. Um, so anyway, you only need five to 10 people in the beginning.

[00:15:33] And if you have a small group, I would really over index on the number of live sessions that you do.

[00:15:38] Nicole Burke: Okay?

[00:15:38] Jay Clouse: Because you want to create one-to-one relationships between your members and the smaller the community is, the more you can manually send like very personal introductions between these people, right?

[00:15:49] If your community is the connective tissue and my relationship to this person, I’m glad I met. That’s a huge value to the community. And now those people become the cultural fabric of your community. Mm-hmm. And instead of, uh, theoretically saying, I’m going to have a membership someday, you now have a real life thing that you can document.

[00:16:08] This exists. We’re already meeting people are already having a great time, and if you wanna join us, you can now do that too.

[00:16:14] Nathan: What are the communities that you see? Absolutely nailed this. The creators who run communities and you’re like, all right, that I, I love something that I’m seeing here.

[00:16:22] Jay Clouse: My favorite example, an inspiration is, uh, Dan Andrews and, oh, the tropical NBA Tropical NBA.

[00:16:28] Yeah. They have the dynamite circle. They’ve been doing this for probably like close to 20 years now. You know, like they were doing location independent entrepreneurship for a very long time, and that group of people did not have. Connection to other people doing that. Mm-hmm. Like in 2007, it was very uncommon for somebody to say, I’m going to leave America, to move to Thailand.

[00:16:49] To basically have geographic arbitrage of money. Yeah. To afford, to build, uh, an Amazon fulfillment business, you know, so they created this online community and they very quickly like added. In person experiences of this. Yeah. They’ve been doing, I’ve spoken

[00:17:04] Nathan: to their events in Bangkok and Austin,

[00:17:06] Jay Clouse: and they do, like, they do, I think Dan told me they do six major events per year and they have hundreds of meetups mm-hmm.

[00:17:12] That are organized by the community at the same time. To me, that’s like the gold standard. Yeah. And outside of that, I, I look at things like YPO and eo, these, these, uh, organizations that have historically been very chapter like local chapter based. I basically want to take like the inverse approach. I think a lot of those organizations are trying to say, how do we do more online now?

[00:17:35] And I’m saying, we’ve been doing this all online. I wanna do more in-person stuff now because I think, especially in a world of ai, this is really, really important. You built

[00:17:44] Nathan: to a million uh, subscribers on YouTube with the main channel. How long did that take?

[00:17:48] Pat Flynn: We got to a million in seven months. That’s wild.

[00:17:53] Went in the shorts channel. It’s completely separate. I didn’t link to it from anything. I, why didn’t you link to it? Was that, is that Pat the experimenter? Yes. Just being like, I want a clean test here. Well, two reasons. Two reasons. This is the most common question. So I have, I have my long form channel, deep Pocket monster.

[00:18:07] Mm-hmm. And then I have my short form. Channel, and it could have been very easy to just be like, Hey, it’s Pokemon cards. Like everybody go check on my new channel. Audience overlap is substantial. Yes, but no.

[00:18:18] Nathan: Okay.

[00:18:18] Pat Flynn: Because the reason it, I felt it’s different, like the general rule is same audience, same channel, different audience, different channel.

[00:18:25] Even for podcasters, do I put my podcast on my YouTube channels? You know, whatever. People who watch my long form videos and sit on the couch with their families over dinner. Yep. For an hour and a half. It’s not the same person necessarily as the person who is in their bed doom scrolling at night. Right.

[00:18:42] And just wants a quick fix. Half my audience is on the toilet. I’ve called them out on it, like in the videos. It’s really funny. They’re like, how’d you know? You’re like, I know. And so my theory was just like, it’s just a different audience. Like it’s a different behavioral audience. Yes, it’s the same topic.

[00:18:59] There is some overlap there. However, there’s still a lot of people who don’t know the other channel exists. Hmm. I wanted to prove that I could do this without getting any help from the outside. So there is no team. It’s just me. I’m editing these videos and the way that I approach this is in a very lean learning way.

[00:19:16] I said, I wanna learn how to do this, so I’m gonna give myself 60 days. I’m gonna publish daily, which means I’m gonna get the reps in. Yep. I’m gonna base my wins off of uploads, not views. Whatever the thing that you can control. The thing that I can control, ’cause I can’t control views. I can of course consciously try to get better and get more views, but if I get to day 60 and I’ve gone daily, I’ve won.

[00:19:38] Mm-hmm. And I’ll probably learn something at least along the way, whether this thing works or not. Day 30. Going daily with opening packs, the videos are getting maybe 300 to 500 views per day. Not much in the grand scheme of things, and the old pat would’ve been like, okay, I tried it. It’s not like this is, I’m bad at this.

[00:19:55] But again, the goal wasn’t the views, the goal, the uploads. However, something interesting I’ve noticed did happen at day 30. My editing time personally for these videos went from 45 minutes to about 12 minutes. So I was, I actually, you got good at it. I was getting much better. Yeah. And learning the shortcuts and all this stuff, just simply because I was repeating myself, but I also had 30 pieces of data that could teach me some stuff.

[00:20:18] And one thing I learned, a small pattern that I discovered. Again, I think a big theme of this is look at your analytics today.

[00:20:23] Nicole Burke: Yeah.

[00:20:24] Pat Flynn: Uh, was that the videos where there was a sticker, a price tag on the pack, had higher views, something visual in the first second that people could see this different? And when I was in person interacting okay, at a card shop, I held people till the end.

[00:20:42] There was just something about it. I didn’t need to know what. Mm-hmm. But I just saw that that was the case. Day 35, I published a video that incorporates those two things, and I guess I hit the right wave and maybe there’s a little luck involved. Sure. But that video hit 750,000 views. In 24 hours, what did it go on to do?

[00:21:06] Uh, I think 15 million days. Uh, over time it still gets views. Yeah. Um, but then all the videos, everything elevated from there, everything elevated from there, and it was just like. People started to use it in their video, the same song, and like all, it just, it just took off.

[00:21:23] Nathan: Well, so I mean, again, you’re, you’re finding you’re putting in enough or putting out enough pieces of content, enough reps so that you can actually learn from it, right?

[00:21:32] Because if someone’s doing this once a month. Right. Or that sort of thing. You just, you get 12 reps per year and you can’t find a pattern in that.

[00:21:40] Pat Flynn: No.

[00:21:41] Nathan: There are the, or the chances of finding, you would have to be very lucky to find a pattern in that

[00:21:44] Pat Flynn: quantity is key. I know people say quality is key, but in the beginning, quantity is key.

[00:21:51] And I know that’s a little controversial, but I’m not saying sacrifice value. Yeah. Sacrifice a little quality to get quantity so you get more, more data and more and more reps in

[00:22:01] Nicole Burke: back in like 20 18, 20 19, I realized that I didn’t need to sell it on Instagram at all. Okay. Explicitly, like there was no need to, to ever say, I have something to sell.

[00:22:14] And I started to realize that Instagram is kind of like all of us have a little storefront. And so it’s like, I have this store. You have this store. We all have a little, a little building inside the Instagram world, right? And that the majority of people, if you, if you think of it this way, think of Instagram like a city, okay?

[00:22:33] Yeah. So it’s like I have my little storefront and you have your little storefront and then there’s a city and it’s like highways and streets and stop signs and all these other buildings and that the majority of the people we wanna reach, especially if we have a small account, which is where I was at that point, and maybe a lot of people are, no, I mean, we all start somewhere.

[00:22:51] And so you’re thinking like, I need all these people to buy from me. I need to like get them into my store. And so the most common mistake I would see people make is they would say like. Hey, this is what I do. DM me if you want a book, you know, or DM me and I’ll, I’ll sign you up. And they’re selling right, right at the start.

[00:23:10] And they’re not seeing that. Like these people don’t even know who they are. These people are literally across town, right? You know, they’ve never even seen their storefront. And their first post is saying, come on inside and let’s get up to the cash register. And so I started to see Instagram in that way and realize, okay, the way to reach the people that are so far away who have no idea who I am is to entertain them.

[00:23:33] Okay? So I started to make the biggest part of my content be entertaining content. And, um, I think you’re gonna draw this out so we’ll, we can take it maybe, maybe we’ll say like, this is like you. Okay. Maybe you can put like a little either a house. Yeah, there you go. Okay. That’s you, that’s you on the internet.

[00:23:51] That’s all you on Instagram. And so this is our little storefront, and we’re first going to focus on the people that are all the way over there. That’s where we’re putting the majority of our focus is the people who are so far

[00:24:05] Nathan: highball store.

[00:24:06] Nicole Burke: I love it, Nathan, the artist. Oh yeah, I love it. Okay, so when we’re talking to that person who is so far away, we’re gonna entertain them, okay?

[00:24:17] And by entertaining, you wanna think when you post entertaining content, what I mean by that is it is content that makes someone have an emotion. So this could make them mad, it can make them laugh. It could irritate them. It could overwhelm them. It could surprise them. And the sign that you have created entertaining content is they share it.

[00:24:41] They hit the share button, and adversary says this over and over again, the most valuable button to them on Instagram in the algorithm is the share button. Because what the person is saying is like, I not only identify with this, I not only like it, I want everyone in my community to see it too. Okay.

[00:24:58] Because you think about it, like if you’re thinking about algorithm games, right? Like my husband’s not on Instagram. I send him tons of reels. Right, right. So every time I do that, Myster is like, yeah, I just got this non Instagram user, this Twitter guy.

[00:25:12] Nathan: Yes.

[00:25:12] Nicole Burke: To actually open the Instagram app.

[00:25:15] Nathan: So that’s such an important point because everyone looks at these platforms with algorithms and they say.

[00:25:21] I wish I could possibly, I wish there was some way to know what the algorithm Gods cared about. Yep. And all you really have to do is say, well, what does the business behind the business that controls those algorithms? Yeah. What do they care about? YouTube users. YouTube cares about watch time.

[00:25:36] Nicole Burke: Exactly.

[00:25:36] Nathan: And so, oh, if you make videos, they get people to say, right.

[00:25:39] Instagram is users, particularly active users. And so Yes. And engagement, if people like, uh, well, both of our spouses are like not really on Instagram. Right. Yeah, if you send them stuff and you’re like constantly reeling them in. Yeah. And one of those times they’re going to be like, yeah, I’ll keep scrolling.

[00:25:56] Nicole Burke: Exactly. You brought them onto, I mean, you gave them business essentially, right? You gave them another user. Mm-hmm. So that share button is the most valuable to Instagram, which means it’s the most valuable to us as business owners. Okay? This is what gives us the reach, right? This is what lets us reach the most people.

[00:26:12] So a huge mistake I see almost every business owner make when they start. As they go straight to the, they go straight to the store. Right. And what you wanna do first is just entertain them. Okay? You just wanna make them laugh, surprise them, have them go, oh my gosh, that is me. And like when, when they have that moment, that me too moment.

[00:26:32] Mm-hmm. That’s, that’s when you hit it. Okay. When they go, how did, how did she get in my head? How did she get in my phone? How did she see my life? That entertainment content is where we wanna put 65% of our Instagram posts,

[00:26:46] Nathan: these reels that you’re putting together. Mm-hmm. Take me through the process of coming up with the idea all the way through to posting it on Instagram.

[00:26:55] Jefferson Fisher: Yeah. So this is how it, it happens. Let’s, and then let’s put it maybe a few months ago before all the book stuff. Yeah. When I’m in the office at the law firm. I’m working a full day until about 3 45, and then in those 15 minutes from 3 45 to four, I’m thinking of a topic that I can use from my day, or maybe I got a email or a question from someone, and then that’s what I go, okay, what could I share?

[00:27:26] What could I teach someone with that? I don’t think of everybody. I just think one person. Mm-hmm. What could I teach one person with that, and then I kind of just go, okay. I, I got one, and then I go to the car and my stuff’s all packed up ’cause I’m gonna be going home and I get my phone out and I just riff on those three points.

[00:27:47] And so my formula is super simple that anybody can apply. It’s, I tell them exactly what the video’s about. So it’s how to handle a difficult person, how to have a difficult mm-hmm. Difficult conversation. How to handle someone who interrupts you. Then the next words out of my mouth are going to be number one.

[00:28:04] And I’m telling it to you right then. So I typically, before I do it, I have an idea of what those three points will be, and it takes me about 30 to 40 minutes total for the whole entire. Video and truly the, the longest part of it is the captions. Instagram’s captions, um, have come a long way because they were rough.

[00:28:26] They were really rough and I didn’t really know how to download another app and use some other, I didn’t wanna mess with that.

[00:28:32] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:28:33] Jefferson Fisher: So I use, I always use just Instagram’s own captions. Um, so I’d get done with making the video and it’s never scripted. It’s never written out, and. I’ve never batched any content, so it’s always when I post it that day, I made it that day.

[00:28:51] Oh, wow. Yeah. And which is probably not the smartest use of time, but that’s what I’ve, that’s what’s worked for me, and then I, and then I’m typically posting it. I have like a method where I’ll find a parking lot. It might be in my office or somewhere else. That’s where I record the video. Then I go home, get into the driveway, I might review it one more time and I press post, and then I’m like, put it down.

[00:29:18] And then I pull into the garage, garage door opens, and then I’m dad. That’s kind of how that, that rolls and the phone goes away and the phone goes away. Yeah. Now I might, um, respond a little bit to. Comments at the very early to show interaction or get rid of all the, the spam comments. Yeah. That are insane.

[00:29:36] Um, but that’s really it. And I, I might, when I’m recording and doing, um, my three steps, I might, my, my whole goal is to, how can I eliminate words instead of this, I, I know about how many seconds each point needs to have for it to be less than 50 seconds, 45 seconds or whatever. And then I would test.

[00:29:58] Should I have a longer first point or a short, shorter first point compared to the second one? Or, and I would test how long I would make them. And so, and,

[00:30:07] Nathan: and when you’re testing them Yeah. That’s just comparing.

[00:30:09] Jefferson Fisher: Mm-hmm. Real to real. Exactly.

[00:30:11] Nathan: Not, you’re not running a split

[00:30:11] Jefferson Fisher: test. Nope. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not doing a split test and so, which probably would’ve been smart, but Nathan, I don’t know this stuff, so I, I, um, yeah.

[00:30:20] So I would, I would just. Once I made a point, I might think, oh, I think I like how I just said that, and I would tweak it to use that. So it takes a few takes and also if I’m not feeling it, I don’t do it. Hmm. If it’s not coming together, I don’t do it. I mean, that’s just kind of my mentality. If I’m having a hard time teaching someone I to do that, then, then it’s not true to that moment and life goes on.

[00:30:44] Nathan: So then are you doing it like the final video? Is that in one take or are you editing together the. You know, four or five takes. Oh, I edit together.

[00:30:52] Jefferson Fisher: Okay. A few times I’ve done, I would test a no points and I’m just going to say something for 30 seconds and be done and, um, just riff off it from there. But I’m doing the swipe.

[00:31:07] I’m just, I’m using my phone. I’m using my phone. This one right here? Yeah. Where I just do it in front of my face and I swipe it down. I might lean over to my side, swipe it up, swipe it down, and I mean, that’s all I’m, that’s all I’m doing. So my, my transitions aren’t anything crazy. It’s just my phone swiping up, swiping down.

[00:31:25] Right.

[00:31:25] Nathan: So then you were telling me that you can watch like a friend’s Instagram reel or something like that. Mm-hmm. And you’re, you know, they haven’t posted it yet and you immediately know, oh, this is gonna work, or, mm. Yeah. That one’s not going anywhere.

[00:31:40] Jefferson Fisher: Yeah. What are the things that you notice? The beginning.

[00:31:44] In the first three seconds, what I see a lot with creators is they say something like this, I get this question all the time. What should you do? And you go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, here’s what I, here’s what you should do. Like they just wasted seven seconds, okay. Of time. Because they began with, I get this question all the time.

[00:32:03] I don’t care. Number one. No you don’t. Number one is, no, you don’t. You’re saying that probably nobody’s ever asked you that. You’re only saying that because you are afraid that you’re gonna start saying something and people aren’t gonna find you have any credibility. So they. They have this desire of, I need to say that everybody asked me this, so it looks like I have more expertise or I have more credibility.

[00:32:26] You don’t need to do that. And social media, you just need to start talking. They will decide if you have the credibility or not. I mean, they, they will decide that, uh, for you. So you just need to start talking about it. So instead of this, let’s, let’s say if it was one of my videos, if I said, um, you know, how to talk in a podcast.

[00:32:47] And I swipe down and first swipe is, you know, I do a lot of podcasts and every time I get a podcast, I get these kind of questions. And here’s what I’ve come up with. Number one, you’ve just burn. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve lost them. You’ve lost them. So a lot of the times I am shortening and shortening and shortening the clips of saying, you know, need to talk about that.

[00:33:06] It’s like with, um, juries as an attorney, you might think that there’s this piece of evidence that’s really crucial and you think like, oh, this is a really good point. I’m, they, they need to hear this. And then you talk to the jury at the end, you’re like, how did this piece of evidence do? And they’re like, it didn’t do anything.

[00:33:21] I, no, that’s not how we came the decision. We, we totally disregarded that we liked this piece of information. And you’re like, Hmm, what are you talking about? So it just goes to show we’re terrible at judging our own like subjective content.

[00:33:37] Nathan: If this was helpful, be sure to hit subscribe. We’ve got some incredible guests lined up for this year that you won’t wanna miss.

[00:33:43] And if you’re looking for another value packed episode, check out my episode with Dan Martel. We went through amazing content advice, some really helpful systems, and his method of buying back your time. You can watch it by clicking here, and I will see you over there.