In 37 Minutes, I’ll Rewire How You Think About Brand

Let's start with this. I believe a lot of you are obsessing over your marketing because you failed at brand. You're pouring hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into paid ads.

You're tweaking funnels and email campaigns and chasing virality. But something I've observed over 17 years of building brands is that your marketing efforts get easier and become more cost-effective if you have a strong brand. Now, all of you are on one of two paths right now.

Path number one is the forgettable brand. You're posting content [music] just to check a box. You're not intentional with the pairings you're making.

And so, your audience is creating these associations for your brand that you have no control over. Path number two, however, is the intentional brand. This is where every piece of content that you make is actually moving you closer to your desired outcome.

This is where you're being intentional with the pairings you make and controlling the associations that your audience makes for your brand. Over this talk, it is my goal to walk you from path number one, the forgettable brand, over to path number two, which is the intentional brand. Now, in order to actually grow our personal brand, we have to understand what brand is.

And there's a lot of definitions out there. A lot of you have heard various versions of it. I'm going to share with you my definition of branding and brand because I think it's going to be very useful and actionable for you.

I believe that all branding is is just a pairing of things. Now if you want to do good branding I think you do an intentional pairing of relevant things done consistently and then you get the byproduct which is brand. Brand is when your audience inherently associates you and something else together.

Okay? And so you want to be deliberate and intentional with the pairings you're making because those form the associations that your audience is going to create for your brand. Now what are these associations?

Why why do these matter? Well, the associations that your audience has with your brand, this is also the lens, the sunglasses, the filter that your audience views your brand through. So, it's not just, you know, some like amorphous thing that, you know, all these branding experts try and make you uh, you know, prioritize and spend money on.

It's actually literally the exact filter in which your audience is going to interpret everything that you say and do through this lens. Now, a really good example of this that I've shared many times, and I'm honestly probably going to go to the grave still sharing this, is Nike and Michael Jordan. I think Nike and Michael Jordan is a beautiful example of this pairing.

MJ, greatness personified within basketball was a partnership that Nike decided to make when they were entering the basketball market. They were known as a running shoe company. Now, for a lot of people watching this, they have no idea, right?

Like, we think of basketball, I mean, that's definitely what I think of when it comes to Nike, right? maybe a little bit of tennis, but that's the majority. At the time, they were known as a running company and they wanted to enter a new market.

And so, what they decided to do is pair themselves with Michael Jordan in order to create the brand association of Nike equals greatness. Okay. Now, here's another example, but this is an example of it being done incorrectly.

An incorrect pairing. Take yourself. If you're watching this content, you're probably here because you're trying to build a personal brand that optimizes around trust, right?

You probably have heard or know of me as somebody who talks a lot about establishing and building trust. Okay? And if that's the case, then if you were to go on a podcast with a less than trustworthy, maybe scammy individual who is known and has a reputation for taking advantage of people online, do you think that would be a good pairing?

No, because if you do that consistently enough, your audience is going to interpret your brand, the brand that you desire to be known as a trustworthy brand. They're going to interpret it through the characters that you are spending your time with, that you're pairing yourself with, and that is an association that they will start to make when thinking of your brand. So, the next logical question is, how do I know what associations are good and what associations are bad?

And I believe that this is a really important question, but I think there's a couple other questions we have to answer before we can really go to that point. And I want to start it by telling you kind of a a sad tale that I hear a lot of times, which is I'll meet with an entrepreneur who's been making content, trying to build their personal brand for, you know, one, two, maybe even three years. And I'll ask them just the very basic simple question of how's it going?

What's working? What's not working? You know, are you enjoying it?

And it's almost always the same core sentence, which is, you know, Caleb, we put a lot of effort, we post every day, but honestly, I don't know if it's working. And I say a sad entrepreneur because that is a tragic story if you ask me. Like, how awful to invest so much time, money, energy, effort, all of these things into building this thing that you've not even figured out why you want to build it.

You don't know if it's working or not. And so what I always suggest people do is they start with a framework that I use called the brand journey framework. And the reason why is because I want people to understand what is the goal.

What is what is the desired outcome that we have? Why the [ __ ] are we putting all this effort in? What is that desired outcome that then we can use to measure against to see if we are actually being successful in our efforts if things are working or not.

Actually sit down and do this exercise. The first question you're going to ask yourself is what is my desired outcome? What's the goal?

What do I want to have happen? Right? What makes this a big W by putting all of this time, effort, and money into building my personal brand?

So, question number one, what is my desired outcome? Question number two, what would I have to be known for in order for that desired outcome to occur? What reputation, what would I have to be known as being?

What type of person do I have to be in order for this outcome, this goal to be realized? The next question comes to question number three which is what would I have to do in order to be known for the thing to get the outcome I desire. We build our reputation.

We get known for things not just by talking about them but by actually doing real [ __ ] [ __ ] So what are the real [ __ ] shits that we got to do in order to be known for the thing? The last question that I ask brings us to today. Right?

We're reverse engineering our way from the goal to right now. And the last question is, what would I have to learn in order to do the things to get known for the thing to get my desired outcome? And so, an example that I like to walk people through is if you're a woman who wants to inspire other women to build their business and you want to speak on stages in order to create that inspiration for these women.

Well, in order to speak on those stages, you probably need to be known as a woman who has built a successful business and arguably has probably helped other women build successful businesses. Well, that's question number two. Question number three, what would you need to do?

You would need to be a woman who has built a successful business and helped other women do the same thing. What would you need to learn? Well, within business, there's all these different departments.

And within each department, like marketing, sales, you know, finance, all these different departments, there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of different skills that you need to learn. And so this gives you the road map to go from right now to achieving your desired outcome. But the reason why I share it in this talk is because I want to make sure that you guys figure out what is what does success look like?

What is success with building my personal brand? That's the first question. Once you answer that, then everything that you do moving forward should be graded and measured against that outcome.

Does this move me closer to achieving that outcome or is it actually moving me further away? Because back to the question that I prompted you on earlier, what associations, how do I know what associations are good, what associations are bad? Now, we can answer that.

Okay. So, when it comes to a concept, if you're thinking what concepts, ideas, values do I want to associate myself with? Or what do I want my audience, excuse me, to associate me with aka what am I going to pair myself with?

The question then just becomes very simply does pairing myself with this concept, this value, this belief, does it move me closer to that desired outcome or further? If the answer is further, well then I think it's pretty obvious what you're going to do. You're not going to do it.

You're not going to pair yourself with that value, that concept, that ideal. If on the contrary, it moves you closer to achieving that desired outcome, well then what do you think you're going to do? Ding, ding, ding.

You're going to do it. And it gives you an incredibly simple decision-making framework that allows you to know what concepts, ideals, and values you should and shouldn't pair yourself with for your audience to create the association. And so knowing your desired outcome allows you to ask the very simple question for every single choice you make.

Does this move me closer to my desired outcome or further? If it's further, then I probably shouldn't do it. If closer, then probably worth doing.

This seems radically radically easy. It's not. It's simple, but it's not easy because it actually takes real effort to figure out what is it that you're trying to accomplish.

And then it takes massive discipline to be able to make the decisions that continue moving you closer to that outcome rather than further away. And what I will tell you is this year I've been presented I'm in my first year of business, first year of making content, and I've been presented with many opportunities that are big deals that would move me further away from my goal. They would give me a shortterm, you know, boost, right?

We would get a lot of audience. There's a couple podcasts that I've been asked to be on that we would get thousands of new followers off of because they have millions of eyeballs on their show. But that would be a short-term play and a long-term hit because me pairing myself with that individual would create an association that is antithetical to what my goals are.

What do I mean by antithetical for all those people that heard me say that and they're like Caleb never uses fancy words? It's the opposite. If I pair myself with somebody who is untrustworthy, that is the exact opposite of what I'm trying to build with my brand.

And so that takes me to how do you evaluate what kind of people you should or shouldn't associate with? And I've actually not really talked about this much publicly ever before. This is really the first time that I'm giving you kind of a framework on how you can make this decision.

News flash, it's going to be wildly simple. Nothing complex or complicated for complexity's sake. Simplicity is what we can actually stick with.

So the simple frame that you need to figure out is what are their values? What are their ideals? What do they preach?

That is the brand that they have. The next question you ask is, does that brand represent what my brand represents or the opposite of? Here's an example.

I'm trying to build a trustworthy brand. An individual who is known as being untrustworthy online has a podcast and invites me to come on. Do you think it makes sense for me to pair myself with that individual?

No. Because what does it end up doing? Well, if I do it enough times, my audience is going to start to assume that I am like this person.

It's kind of like the lunchroom and lunch tables in high school. Or at least when I was in high school. I have no idea what high school's like nowadays.

Every time that I even think about that, I feel like a really, really old man. But when I back in my day, when I was in high school, the table that you sat at indicated what your brand was to the rest of the students. If you sat at the jock table with the football players, then you were viewed as a jock or specifically a football jock.

There was also track and field jocks. There was also basketball. There was goths.

There was the artsy musician kids. Where you sat, who you surrounded yourself with communicated to everyone around you, what you stood for, and what your preferences and interests were. Now, obviously, that's boiling very complex humans down to something very basic, but that's how humans work.

That's how we interpret each other. Right now, I'm wearing all black. But if all of a sudden you saw on here a metal band or a Harley-Davidson logo or a Hello Kitty logo, those all three would give you different interpretations of how you're going to view me and how I might behave because you're going to be able to predict based on previous experiences with those logos, aka branding.

Okay, I'm going to end up going down a crazy rabbit hole there, so I'm going to stop myself. But if you are trying to figure out whether or not you should pair yourself with a certain individual, just ask the question, do their values align with my values or are they the opposite? A quick caveat here, if they're not the same values as yours, but they're also not antithetical, meaning the exact opposite of what you believe, that's fine.

You're going to see me go on podcast with people that I disagree with or don't believe the exact same things with. That's fine, right? Like, I'm fine doing a podcast, you know?

I I preach optimizing your personal brand around trust, not virality. I'm fine doing a podcast with somebody whose whole brand is around going viral. That's not going to be the issue.

The issue for me is on my values. I'm trying to build a trustworthy brand and so I can't associate or pair myself with individuals who are not known as being a trustworthy person. So, I hope that gives you a very clear yet simple framework for how to determine whether or not you should pair yourself with different people.

Now, to hit the ideas and concepts one really hard, one thing that I want to share with you guys is we've talked about how to avoid things, right? How to know what not to associate or pair yourself with and associations that you don't want. Also, just as important is to figure out what do you want to be for?

What do you want people to know that you are pro, right? And so the the thing that I'm going to encourage you guys to do is figure out what is the the thing that you can consistently pair yourself with that sets you apart from other people in your industry. What mine is is I keep saying in almost every single video I try to communicate that I believe that entrepreneurs trying to grow their business through their personal brand should optimize for trust, not virality.

This is a an ideal, a concept, a a belief that I consistently pair myself with. And I believe it's the reason why we've gone from zero to 35,000 people on our email list. We've gone from 1,000 to 64,000 subscribers on YouTube in only eight videos.

8 months, eight videos. And I think the reason why we've had the success we've had is because we are intentionally and consistently pairing ourselves with this idea. This is an association that we do want the audience to create when thinking of my brand.

And so we are being very intentional with how consistent we are in pairing ourselves with that concept. So, in order for you to have similar results, here's two things that you can really quickly do that I think will radically simplify how you think about this. Number one, figure out what is your contrarian take.

Right? What is it that you believe about your industry, about the world that is fundamentally different than what your competitors preach, say, or do? Now, that's on the belief angle.

Your contrarian take can either be a contrarian belief or contrarian actions. So maybe it's that you believe similarly, but the way that you act based on those beliefs is different. Here's a great example.

Third wave coffee shops. Uh I love a fancy coffee shop, but I'm not the most literate when it comes to like coffee culture and I'm not like super in the weeds and all the knowhow and all that [ __ ] right? So I walk in and I get immediately embarrassed when I have to ask them a question.

The majority of these thirdwave coffee shops, I think a lot of us could probably agree, we we don't feel like it's a warm, friendly environment where they're not going to make us feel stupid. We feel stupid. So maybe your belief in starting your own coffee brand, as an example, is similar.

You know, you should source your beans from all these places that these other shops do. But maybe your contrarian take is that you do things differently. You create an environment where customers feel totally safe and not embarrassed to ask questions.

There's no bad question. In fact, all questions are great questions and you're celebrated for asking such a thing rather than pretending you know what Guatemalan Antigua, you know, origin coffee is. I don't even know if that's a real thing, but that was the example that I was going to use.

And so, the next thing that you want to do is you want to consistently pair yourself with that concept, that belief, that action. The example that I gave earlier on in this video of Michael Jordan Nike, the thing that I left out was the consistency part. The reason why it worked is because MJ didn't just wear Nikes or Air Jordans in the championship game and the All-Star games.

He wore them in every single game. Night in, night out, game in, game out. And so I believe it's that consistency that is key here.

And so that's why I would encourage you to figure out a very granular way of communicating this contrarian belief or this contrarian action that you take so that you can say it concisely but also consistently in your content. I believe that's why we're getting some semblance of traction that we're getting in our content right now. Now that we have an understanding of our personal brands, it's time to amplify it with content.

This is where a lot of you are going to fall into the trap of listening to your favorite local virality guru on Instagram and they're going to encourage you to constantly chase viral hooks and always aiming for going for a million views. And let me just play out what this looks like. Okay, they'll preach something like get a ton of views and then you convert all of those people into customers, right?

And it's this big idealistic concept, right? I cast a wide net. I get all these fish.

Some of these fish will be the fish that I want to eat for dinner tonight. But here's how this actually plays out. If you do it really really well, so this is the best version that I have seen consistently.

Now, real quick qualifier. There are there are cases where this isn't the scenario, but for the most part, this is what I've observed, which is you start making viral content and you start getting way more views and reach. Okay, way more humans are seeing your content.

And the reason why is because you've probably made content that is appealing to a wider audience and not necessarily solving problems for your ideal customer. And so what happens is you start getting more and more eyeballs, more and more followers. The platform is signaling to you everything's working.

Do more of this. And so what do you do? You double down.

You end up making more content on that. And you're making content that is being signaled or you think it's signal. It's actually noise, but the platform is telling you this is working.

Do more of it. And then eventually one day you realize, oh my goodness, our conversion rate is abysmal. This new audience that we've acquired is not going to purchase our offers, not going to transact on our offers.

Especially if you're in uh any sort of high ticket scenario, then it's really unlikely that they're going to. But here's the more important part that nobody talks about. What I just said, that's been said a million times.

But the really interesting part is the audience that you did build when you were making more in-depth content that actually served your ideal customer and solved real problems for them. Well, they don't have any interest in this new wide content. And so what ends up happening is you create this massive delta and this gap between what you're creating and who you need to actually serve.

So, not only are you no longer attracting new people that are interested in your offer, the people who were there originally that were interested no longer give a [ __ ] about the content you're making because it's content that they're not interested in. A very clear example of a scenario that I've been involved in is there was somebody that I was working for who they made this mistake. They had built a very strong brand in the educational space on YouTube.

They were doing an amazing job putting out wildly valuable and useful content for their audience and their audience trusted them for this. They came to their YouTube channel to learn things that they were literally applying in real time into their business. And then this individual got excited about views and subscribers.

Who wouldn't, right? If you start seeing traction, you start hanging out with all these entertainers, you're going to recalibrate what your view of good is. But the mistake they made is they started optimizing for views and subscribers and not solving real problems for their ideal customer.

And so what happened is they started getting way more views, way more subscribers, but the people that were coming in were coming in for content that was completely unrelated to the offer they had. So they were no longer acquiring new qualified leads. And the qualified leads they had already earned, they started burning because they didn't give a [ __ ] about this new content.

And what happens is they start to no longer consume it and you start to fade out. You're no longer relevant to them. And so when you do need to transact and make people aware of your offer, when you go to try and get that portion of your audience, they've moved on either to somebody else or some other solution other than you.

And so if you're not careful, optimizing for virality over trust will cause you to acquire a bunch of new audience. But it's most likely going to be people who aren't interested in your high ticket offer. But more importantly, in doing this, you start to alienate the current individuals who are interested in your offer that are in your audience already.

And so what I would encourage you to do is instead of optimizing for virality, consider optimizing for trust. But how do you optimize for trust? And that is a can of worms.

I could make hours worth of content just about that. But I want to boil it down to the core most important elements here, which is if you're making educational content, your whole entire goal just should be, in my opinion, to make it easier for your audience to consume your content, take action on what you say, and get the outcome they desire. And if you do that, it is my belief that your audience will start to trust you more.

Meaning if you tell them to do something, they do it and they get the outcome they want, their level of trust in you increases. And if you consistently do it, your trust with the audience will be consistently going up. The analogy I like to use is I have a Ram 1500 that I love.

Every morning I go out, I push the brake down with my foot, I press the start button, and it starts, right? I was told if I press the brake and I push the start button, my truck will start. I was told that and it happens.

Every day that it happens, my trust in my truck's ability to start goes up. But if it suddenly stops working and no longer starts on day three, let's say, do you think on day four I'm going to have the same level of trust? No.

It's going to be like when I was driving my first beater car, my geot tracker, and I was always wondering if it was going to start, right? Very little trust. Well, how was that trust established?

purely by being told to do something, doing it, and getting the outcome that I was told I would get. Okay? Aka, they can predict.

What you're trying to do is make it easier for your audience to predict that they're going to get good from you every time that you open your mouth. And if you do this consistently enough, the beauty is is you start to make your audience aware of the fact that every time in in my example, and I'm going to sound like an audacious [ __ ] here, but walk with me here. Every time that Caleb says to do this, I invest my time to do it and then I get the outcome I want.

So when Caleb says to do something and I do it, it works. So then when I make you aware of an offer that I have, you have a higher likelihood of actually converting on that offer and transacting because I believe that trust is the currency that precedes the transaction. And so by building this trust up with you guys, the audience, over time, I am building that mechanism so that then you believe you get more for what you put in every time with Caleb.

And so that's what you want to do. That is how you optimize your personal brand around trust. Another thing that's like obvious, but I'm just going to say it is when you say you're going to do something, [ __ ] do it.

Okay? The more that you do that, the more of a trustworthy brand that you are building. The less you do that, the more hits you take to the trust that you're building with your audience.

This is how you optimize for trust. Make it easier for them to take action on what you say. Make sure that what you say is actually good so they get the desired outcome they have.

And then once they get it, boom, trust increases. And you just want to consistently do this over and over again. This solves so many random questions that you all have as a side note, like what should we do for motion graphics in our editing?

How often should we cut? All of these different questions no longer should be answered by the how do we keep people retained on the YouTube [clears throat] retention graph. The real question now becomes how do we make it easier for them to take action.

And the more you do that I believe you're going to see your retention as a side note go up in your content because the greatest retention hack in educational content is not some cool motion graphic. It's learning. So, I'm just going to make the bold, audacious assumption here that you've decided to optimize for trust over virality.

Amazing. I love that. Step number one is you need to figure out what your medium is.

Now, some of you have already done this, but a lot of you haven't really figured out what your actual medium is. Now, what is a medium? I believe that there are four different ways that you can make content.

Video, audio, written, graphic. Okay, four different ways. And um it's very obvious that video is definitely the best as far as you get the most out of it.

You put a little bit of effort into video and you get a lot in return. Same with audio, but less uh written, less graphic, far less. There's diminishing returns to all of these.

What I will say is yes, we can agree that video is the most optimized, highest leverage of all of these. But it's not high leverage if you don't stick with it. Meaning, if I tell you, hey, let's let's go film a YouTube video, and you get like a pit in your stomach, your heart rate starts increasing, your hands are sweaty, you know, whatever Eminem says in that song, then maybe video isn't what we want to start with.

Maybe you need to pick audio and you do podcast only and you get comfortable with communicating your thoughts and ideas to individuals and over time, you increase your comfort level to maybe then be able to do video. But you need to pick one of those four. Okay, so that's step number one.

Step number two is we need to pick a platform that we're going to prioritize. For those of you out there who are solo, as in you are the only human working on your content, nobody else touches it. Raise your hand on the other end.

Cool. Yeah, you're the only one raising your hand cuz you're solo. Uh you I don't have as big of expectations on because you're you.

You're doing the thing that you're doing plus you're building your personal brand. That's a fuckload to go off of. So, what I want you to do is pick a primary platform and a secondary platform.

I'm going to give you an example here. If you picked video as your medium, your primary platform is probably going to be YouTube. YouTube is going to be the platform that you optimize and create all of your content for.

This is where you're going to make your pillar piece or your long form chunk piece of content. More on that in a second. Then, you're going to pick a secondary platform.

Let's just say Instagram. So we got YouTube as our primary, Instagram as our secondary. That is where you're going to redistribute and reproduce content that you take from your primary and pillar content.

Okay? So here's how I'm going to explain it real quick here. If we are a solo creator and we have YouTube and Instagram, let's say you make a podcast.

You're going to make your podcast for YouTube. And then what you're going to do is you're going to find and extract all the moments that live on their own, self-contained moments that are the golden nuggets from the podcast. And you're going to mine those moments.

This is called the waterfall distribution method. Okay? You're going to pick those moments.

And here's where we get a little bit different. 99% of people would just immediately clip that moment into a real into a short and post on Instagram. What I want you to do is be a little bit more thoughtful with it.

I want you to think about what is the best version, what's the best wrapping paper for this piece of content to go out on Instagram. For example, sometimes you're not going to cut it as a short or a real. You're going to turn that same dialogue, that moment into a carousel or into an infographic.

There's many different versions that you can take. Sometimes you're going to take something that occurred in a podcast and instead of clipping that very moment, you might rewrite it, sit down in front of the camera and film a direct to camera short, right? It's going to be taking these moments, mining them, and figuring out what's the best wrapping paper, the best way to wrap this for my audience to consume it on the platform I'm distributing it to.

Okay, that's for the solo creator. Now, those of you out there with teams, raise your hand. Cool.

You, I expect a lot more of you. What I want you to do is pick three primary platforms and then you can pick some secondary platforms as well, but we're going to focus on the primaries. What you're going to do is exactly what we did.

We picked uh and you should pick your own. Just to be clear, these are the ones that we picked in order of priority. YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn.

These are our top three platforms that we are prioritizing this year. Tik Tok is our secondary platform. The way that we're thinking about it is we use what I affectionately call, cuz I'm a Lord of the Rings nerd, the Eye of Sauron approach.

We have three primary platforms, but right now we're a team of one and a half. Trevor, my content director, and then I'm the other half. Uh the majority of my time goes to actually running the business, not the content that we make.

And so we don't have the ability to go full boore on all three platforms. So we apply the Sauron approach, which is we're going to prioritize one of these three as our innovation platform. YouTube is what we have decided for our first year we're going to use as our innovation or where the I is focused on.

This is where we're putting the majority of our efforts to try and do new things, come up with new concepts to deploy our time, money, effort, all of that towards YouTube. We are also posting on Instagram and LinkedIn and we're doing that consistently, but I put those on what I call maintenance mode. This is where you're posting but you're not trying to create any sort of innovation.

Okay? And so again, if you're a solo creator, you have your primary and secondary. Now, for those of you with a team, you need to pick three primary platforms that you then rotate the eye of Sauron between those three platforms.

You can also have secondary platforms as well. Like I said, Tik Tok is one of our secondary ones. Now, third, I I mentioned, you know, the whole waterfall distribution method of having your pillar piece and then extracting mining the moments and then packaging them correctly, either a carousel, real, infographic, whatever.

The next natural question that a lot of you ask is how do I come up with ideas, right? Like how do I know what to talk about? If I'm going to make a YouTube video, how do I come up with this?

And there's a lot that we could talk about, but again, for the sake of time, I'm going to give you a very simple framework. It's very painful problem plus unique solution equals video. Meaning, if we are trying to build a brand that optimizes around trust, not virality, well, the best way to build trust with strangers is to solve real problems for them or to help them solve their own problems.

Back to our point earlier of making it easier for them to take action. We want them to take action on things that solve their problems. So, what you need to do and the exercise I want you to do right now is write out 10, 15, 20 very painful narrow problems that your ideal customer faces.

And what you're going to do is you're going to identify all of these problems and then what your unique solution is to those problems. Now, I'm not saying make up some [ __ ] solution. I I'm saying if you have a business, especially like a service business, you probably have a unique way of solving these problems.

It might not be like the most revolutionary thing in the world, but you have your own spin on it, right? This is what makes you different. What I want you to do is pick out your problem, the very painful problem that your customer is facing and your unique solution to it.

Okay? This is what I like to call your gift. This is the gift that you are going to give your audience.

But what makes a really good gift? Good wrapping paper. But before we actually wrap the gift, we got to go pick the wrapping paper at the store to keep using this analogy and keep it rolling.

So, we picked our medium, right? We picked our platform. Then, we've identified what our problems are, the ideas of how we're going to make these long form YouTube videos.

The next thing is you need to find your wrapping paper. What I find a lot of people struggle with here is they live paycheck to paycheck. They try to figure out what good packaging looks like for the video that they're releasing this week.

I'm not speaking to any inherent rules here, but from observation, I have found that to be very ineffective. When you need a good title and thumbnail for a video, that's when you are least likely to actually find it. When you are just scrolling through YouTube or one of 10 and just taking note of whatever tickles your fancy or catches your interest, I find that to be far more effective.

And so what I recommend you do is every week, two weeks, month, whatever cadence you want, set aside time where you actually just not intentionally searching for a specific topic, you just scroll through YouTube and oneof10. com to look for outlier packaging that catches your attention. The more absurd, the better.

Also, the more outside your niche, the better. You want to look for [ __ ] that isn't in your world, but is from creators that are in completely different world. And literally what we do is we'll be scrolling through and anything that catches our attention, we screenshot and we put into a notion board.

Put it into a Google doc, put it into a sauna board, clickup, whatever the [ __ ] you use to organize your thoughts and ideas. This is what you want to do. You want to put them all in this massive library.

You can almost think of it like a closet full of wrapping paper. All different kinds of designs, thickness, really expensive nice wrapping paper, cheap Walmart wrapping paper that tears the moment that you put any tape on it. All of these different wrapping papers.

Okay, so that's that step. The last step is we want to take this gift, the very painful problem that our customer faces and our unique solution to it. That's our gift.

And we want to wrap it. So now what we need to do is we need to go into that room full of all the wrapping paper options and we need to figure out which of these wrapping papers best wraps this gift. And again, what I have found is if you have your gift and then you go out searching in the world for the right wrapping paper, it's really hard to find the right thing.

But if you've been searching every week, every two weeks, every month, whatever cadence, and you have a backlog of ideas, the amount of those ideas that will fit with your topic, with your problem and solution video is enormous. I mean, the amount of times that people call to talk about their YouTube video or whatever, and they're like, I'm having a tough time coming up with this idea, and Trevor and I will immediately rattle off three ideas, and they're like, man, you guys, you really know your packaging. I laugh.

I actually think that like we're not even close to the world's best in packaging. Not even close. I have a lot of friends that I would consider that, but not us.

But what we are is we are constantly in it and we are constantly grabbing things that catch our attention. And so then we know how we can pair it. And so the last step here is you take your problem and solution and figure out which wrapping paper best encapsulates this entire thing.

I was just having a conversation yesterday with somebody who they were um tasked with having to make a workshop last minute. They also needed to make a YouTube video. So, they decided I'm going to make a YouTube video documenting how I make a last minute workshop.

And they had done the whole video and then they realized, wait, we didn't come up with the packaging before we filmed it. Which is typically what a lot of people do in YouTube world is you go packaging uh and then you go into the idea, concept, outline, film. They went concept, outline, film.

Oh [ __ ] we need the packaging. And so we were on the phone yesterday and I rattled off three different ideas that made sense. One of them was literally I sent a screenshot from our our bank or our room of wrapping paper and the title and thumbnail were this guy looking stressed staring at the camera and it was, "So you deleted social media.

Now what? " And I suggested to this guy, and again, I heard this idea 3 minutes prior, but I just went to our list of wrapping paper and picked this one. And I immediately was like, "Oh, so you saved your workshop till last minute.

Now what? " It's not like the best thing in the world, but it's amazing because we're so in it and constantly looking at these different things. We're able to come up with ideas very, very quick.

Okay? And so, I really encourage you, set aside the time to do this. It will come in handy like you can't even imagine.

It's kind of like marketing, right? If you only turn on marketing when you really need it, it's too late. And and I just think that if you try to figure out the best packaging right when it's down to the wire and you need it, you're just not in the right headsp space to be able to see what actually is going to catch real attention.

And so, make sure that you are constantly going and scraping through one of 10. I'm not sponsored by them. I just encourage you to use it because it's a great resource that is wildly effective in helping you find outlier packaging.

Now, the truth is is there's only so much that I'm able to cover in a 30-minute virtual conference talk.