How Chris Koerner Built a Massive 820k Social Media Following

Chris Koerner is a serial entrepreneur with a lot of incredible experiences under his belt. From selling Buc-ee’s products online to partnering with John McAfee to launch a crypto company, he describes himself as an “ideas man.” 

In fact, over the last 15 years, he’s started 75 different businesses.

But today he’s here to talk about one specific aspect: social media. 

Chris knows a lot about growing content and viral marketing, having expanded his social media following to an incredible 820k across multiple platforms.

In this interview, he shares his framework, talks about different kinds of content for different platforms, reveals his thought process behind crafting hooks, and teaches us how to get more followers.

Watch the Full Episode

Chris reveals that started off selling golf balls as a kid, and shares some of his most unique businesses. Currently, he spends his time working on three projects: content creation, RV parts sales, and starting businesses with other people.

He has a lot of experience growing his following, which he discusses, and he talks specifically about his framework. He talks about the power of short form videos, with his getting on average 600k views and hundreds of new newsletter subscribers.

When he dives deeper into the power of short-form video, he talks about going high-volume, accelerating the learning curve, coming up with ideas, and recording on the fly.

He talks about calls-to-action, the value of podcast downloads vs. newsletter subscribers, and long-form content.

Chris shares his thoughts on followers along with his email formula, and talks about his findings after sending out his newsletters over the course of several years. He talks about where he gets the bulk of his subscribers,   

Chris is an expert at getting new followers, amassing around 10k new ones a day, and his content gets between 50 and 130 million views per month. He shares his perspective on posting content to different platforms and how he customizes his CTAs.

When asked how he decides which platform to post to, he talks about how he approaches all different platforms as well as the “easiest” platform to manage.

Jared asks him how he gets so many views, and he offers some great tips, which include training your algorithm, emulating other creators you admire, learning hooks, and throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Chris admits that he didn’t think about hooks initially and he shares the hook that works for him.

Lastly, he talks about whether or not he uses scripts. 

Links & Resources

• Chris’s Instagram
• His LinkedIn
• His Twitter
• His website
• Co-founders
• Social Blade
• CapCut
• Descript
• Viral Video Club 

Topics Chris Koerner Talks About

• His experience as an entrepreneur
• His different projects
• An overview of his framework
• His thoughts on short-form video
• Ideation
• His approach to long-form content
• His email newsletters
• Getting subscribers
• His monthly followers
• Using different platforms
• How to pick a platform
• His team and what they do
• The trick to getting views
• How to craft a good hook
• Scripting

Transcript

Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. And today we're joined by Chris Kerner. Chris, welcome on board. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Great to have you. We're talking about growing a following today. Now we could talk about a lot of different things with you.

You've got your hands in a lot of different things, a lot going on. We narrowed in on this one topic because we thought this was maybe the best thing for our listeners to hear. But before we get into those details. Give us some backstory on who you are. You got your hands on a lot of things. You got a lot of successful businesses you're working with.

Tell us about who you are.

Chris: Yeah. High level. Uh, grew up in Utah and Florida. Um, I've been a serial entrepreneur my whole life. I used to sell golf balls as a kid, live across the street from a golf course and grew up kind of poor, lower middle class ish, and so I just kind of had to be scrappy to save up for a yearbook or a field trip.

Uh, and that never left me. So I, I served a mission for my church from 19 to 21 in Eastern Europe. And that gave me the motivation that I never really had before. I came back appreciative of America and ready to just, you know, take capitalism by the horns. And so I, I got married to my high school sweetheart.

Uh, we went to the university of Alabama together and I just started starting all kinds of businesses. And so. Over the last 15 years, I've started like about 75 businesses. Um, and. It's just an addiction at this point. I just love it.

Jared: That's I didn't know you started that many. That is a lot of businesses.

Um, maybe give us a few high levels of like your favorite ones or the ones that you're the most proud of, or, you know, the ones you're involved in the longest.

Chris: Yeah, I had the longest stint was, uh, a company that remanufactured broken iPhone screens. So we would go to iPhone repair shops. Buy back their broken screens, um, send them to China to get new glass on them.

And then we'd sell them wholesale. Uh, did that for seven years. That was a lot of fun. Um, and one of my businesses that I own today, which is kind of a cool story. We resell Bucky's products. Bucky's is a small chain of gas stations, very unique brand. And we kind of, we pulled a viral marketing stunt cause they weren't selling online.

We started selling online for them. Um, and now we, we have a Shopify store and we do tens of thousands of orders a year.

Jared: That's

Chris: phenomenal.

Jared: That's great. Um, what are you involved with today? Like what does your, you know, high level business look like at this point?

Chris: Yeah, I, I kind of split my time into three buckets.

I have, um, content. Uh, which takes about a third of my time. And then I invest in RV and mobile home parks with some partners. I don't have an operational role, but I help find them. And then I help raise money for them. And then the third thing I do is start businesses. I have a brand called co founders and we find operating partners and it's not an incubator.

It's not a pure holdco. It's not a VC. It's kind of our own thing. It's my way to get ideas out of my head. Uh, and. Launch them with, with partners and then hold them forever.

Jared: Awesome. Well, we're talking today about, um, about growing a following and, um, you know, you've done this, I'll say over and over, um, but maybe kick us off to this topic today, set the stage for what we're going to talk about.

We're going to get really detailed. You've got a really well outlined strategy for it, but give us the high level. Um, and frame out our conversation here.

Chris: Okay. So I've been like doing a lot of copywriting since I first started a business. Um, it was never anything intentional. I never took a copywriting course, but I just love writing.

My mom's a writer. Um, and I love sending marketing emails, whether it's a cold email or a mass email. Uh, and so I started writing on Facebook, like in, you know, late 2000s, early 2010s and on Quora. Just answering business questions there. Um, and then 2017, I started writing on Twitter, um, like long form business stuff, case study, stuff, crypto stuff.

Um, and then, uh, a couple of years ago, I started writing strategically on Twitter to really start to grow an audience and then, uh, 10 months ago, I started a podcast and then I went to like short form and long form video so I could promote the podcast and, and then everything just kind of blew up from there.

Jared: The, um, you have a specific framework for it as a strategy that you go about. Let's start with that. I'll let you kind of share it. Cause I think it's really interesting. It's clear just from what you've already shared that there's, there's quite a Whether it's by accident or by design, there's quite an approach you take that kind of systematically follows.

Um, the, the, the action before it, let's get into the strategy that you shared in the show notes. And then we'll, we'll go from there into some of the questions I have.

Chris: Yeah, so it all started is just like everything how everything starts for me and I'm just curious and I kind of have this this toxic trait where I get really curious about something and then really impatient about something and then 15 years later, I have all these businesses.

I just I can't sit on an idea. You know, I just, I, it's physically impossible for me. So the same is true with content to me. Content is like another business. Um, and so I, I'm always kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall, just trying new formats, let's try short form, let's try long form, let's try this type of segment, let's try faceless or with my face, or let's try a business idea, or let's profile an owner.

And I'm always just kind of watching the data and seeing where it goes and then leaning into what works. Um, And so the, the real turning point for me was when, as you said, I, I finally put a strategy to all this spaghetti that I'd thrown at the wall and in a very simple way, it's short form video leads to long form audio written or video leads to, to be determined.

Cause I don't really monetize yet. I'm not in a hurry to, but I just know that having an audience is good to have. So I'm trying to play the long game. Why short form video first? It seems very purposeful. It is now. Um, I'd love to say that was the plan from all along, but I've like, I'm an introvert truthfully, and I'd much rather just sit here in my office all day.

Never take calls. Just put my head down in my Mac book and just growth hack stuff. Right. And I'm not. I love just writing, putting my thoughts out to the, to the world. And I've always said like, I could never do short form. I will never do short form form like that's too cringe. I can't even imagine myself like holding my phone.

I just, I can't do it. Um, and then when I created the account, it was only to promote the podcast. It's like, all right, I'll use AI to auto generate clips from the podcast and I'll upload them and, and we'll grow it. Um, and I've since learned that doesn't work very well. It's really hard to grow a podcast with just auto generated clips.

And so I started taking original shorts about stuff that I write about. Like, look at this business idea. Check out this business idea. Check out this business. I started, here's what I learned. This is a business partnership that went bad. Here's what I learned from that. Um, and that really, really, um, started doing well.

And so why short form it's the highest leverage. I I'll spend five to 10 minutes, uh, taking like end to end ideating, thinking kind of roughly scripting, taking the video. Five to 10 minutes. I'm done. I upload it to my assistant. Takes her a half hour to edit and I'm done. And that video will get me, um, on average, my shorts get about 600, 000 views and they bring 50 to 500 newsletter subscribers from five minutes of work.

Jared: How do you ideate around the topics for short form video? And by the way, I want to, I want to call out because I think a lot of people listening are probably more accustomed to producing long form content, just like you said you were. And so the, the jump to short form, it maybe sounds easy. And then when you roll up your sleeves, you're like, Oh my goodness, this is totally different than creating long form content.

So how do you ideate around that? How have you figured out what works? What kind of formula do you find works well for this short form content approach?

Chris: Well, you don't know what works until you just, you got to go high volume. Um, that's a strength and a weakness of mine. I have no attention to detail.

Like just as an example, I was in church last Sunday and my friend performed a musical number and I wasn't on my phone. I was just watching. And then 10 minutes later, I went to my son and I'm like, Hey, why didn't, why didn't he go up? I see on the program, he was supposed to go up and he's like, daddy. He went like you were staring at him.

And like, I was just so in my head, I have no attention to detail and I'm the opposite of a perfectionist. Uh, and in short form video that benefits me because some people overthink it. It's like, Oh, I got to get the hook, right? Oh, the lighting isn't good. Oh. Oh. And like, I just don't care. I just hit publish, right?

When you do that, you accelerate the learning curve, right? I can put out five videos in a day, spend a half hour on them collectively. And I have so much data than the five I put out the next day might do four times as well. And then four times as well the next day after that, whereas a lot of people, they just, um, I'm going to research some more.

I got to script this out the hook. I'm going to do research on hooks. Then I'm going to research on retention. I'm going to learn about charts. I'm going to just like ship it. Just get it out there.

Jared: What are the, what, like when you, if you're doing five a day, what do you, what do you, how are you coming up with those ideas?

What? Is the underpinning of what you're going to make five videos about a day?

Chris: Two sources. So number one, um, my long form content, most of it centers around business ideas. And so I'll have recurring guests on, and we're both idea machines and we won't have any script. We won't have anything. We'll just start talking and it kind of starts out slow.

And then it gets, we get going, we get going, we get excited. We come up with all these ideas and that's like 10 shorts worth of content right there that I'm just, and once again, I'm not clipping these with AI. Then I will pull out my phone 10 times and make 10 shorts talking about what I already talked about that point back to that podcast.

Right? So that's one bucket. The second bucket is Coming from the same platforms where I'm posting these, I'll go on Instagram and I will train the algorithm to my liking. So you and I, any human, we have different tastes. I like ultra marathons. I like Theo Vaughn. I like cooking pizza in my outdoor oven.

And I like business when I'm logged in on this Instagram account. If Theo von pops up, I'm going to swipe away as fast as I can. Right. If a pizza oven video comes up, Nope, not liking it. Not watching it. I'm just telling the algorithm. Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope. Business idea comes up like comment, bookmark. Cool.

And I'm just telling the algorithm, this is what I want. This is what I want. This is what I want. And then if I want to relax, I go to a different Instagram account and watch the Alfon, right? So that trains the algorithm to show me stuff that I can hopefully add value to. I see something interesting at book market, book market, book market.

And then on Monday mornings, I set aside one to two hours. I go through my bookmarks. I'll watch a video and I'll say, okay. And like, that's like, That's a whole nother conversation, but that plays into the argument of focus versus not focus because of the fact that I don't focus I'm able to easily and quickly cross reference things.

So I'll see a shortens like oh, yeah, this this is it boom And then okay, got it. Pull out my phone hit record. No script. No teleprompter I just kind of pause as I could think of my Anna that I have my hook pause think pause think Upload to my editor. She takes out the pauses and edits it.

Jared: So many ways short form video for you is perfect because it isn't overly scripted.

It isn't overly, it is a medium, almost prefers an unscripted quick, uh, quick take approach, which almost mirrors your personality and the way you look at business. And, uh, the way he described content gathering, it's almost like your own, you're your own personal RSS feed, right? Like. Create instead of the olden days of RSS feeds, where we actually would just get that all fed into one repository.

You're almost going out and creating and almost tailoring each platform and each conversation with other business owners and other people to give you all these ideas to create content on.

Chris: Yeah, exactly.

Jared: How does the funneling work? You talked about how you're doing short form video to promote your podcast.

You also mentioned it generates a lot of email subscribers for you. I might be a really detailed question, but I think it's one that a lot of people listening might have. How do you guide people to an email list on short form video content when you're actually kind of underpinning your podcast at the same time?

Chris: Yeah, good question. So I've, I've bounced back and forth between the two. So over the fall I, I would put a call to action in my podcast at the end of every short, I will never, ever, ever publish a short without a call to action. And I don't, frankly, I don't understand why anyone does, you know, and I know the argument it's, well, I have a call to action.

Then the engagement or the reach won't be as high cause it's, it's a sales pitch. Even if the call to action is follow me, follow me. It's a sales pitch and the algorithm will suppress it. Uh, no, like you can do it right. Like it can't be a five second call to action, but a two second call to action at the end on a 50 second video, you know, if they watch the whole thing, even if they skip out in the last two seconds, you still have 95 percent retention, right?

So I will put a call to action at the end of every single video. Sometimes just to follow me almost every time. Either to listen to the podcast or to subscribe to my newsletter. So over the fall, it was always, you know, check out my podcast, um, at the very end and my podcast grew and it was awesome. Um, but I wasn't getting any newsletter subscribers and I value a subscriber more than a podcast listener or download.

And so in the last couple of months. I push everything to the same landing page and then they fall into my newsletter and there I talk about the podcast. Now, you know, a good click through rate is 5%. And so theoretically, even if I only push my podcast, then my podcast is going to grow significantly less because only 5 percent of those subscribers will ever click to my podcast.

But net of net. I'd much rather have a newsletter subscriber that opens even if they're not clicking, then a loyal, um, podcast

Jared: download. That makes sense. Okay. That, that, that, that clarifies it a bit. So does long form content come into play at all in your current strategy to grow

Chris: more followers? Yeah. In my opinion, if I can't get anyone from short form content to long form content, then it's a waste.

Like I'm, everyone loves dopamine. I'm no exception, but I'm not in the attention game. Right? Like there are people that have millions of followers and they just like the dopamine and maybe they'll do an affiliate deal and, but like, that's not me. I, I, I log on to Instagram for business and I want to push people down the funnel.

End of story. And so statistically speaking, over 90 percent of my short form viewers, maybe 99 percent will never go anywhere. They'll stay in that part of the funnel. Um, because if I get a, if I get a short that gets a million views, that will probably bring me. 200 subscribers, fraction of a percent. So tiny, but that's okay.

And then of those 200 subscribers. Maybe two of them buy something from me, but that's okay. If I can make a short in five minutes and I'm, I have a backlog, hundreds of videos deep, then I just, I keep pumping out shorts.

Jared: I think it's really good for people to hear because somebody who starts out on shorts and maybe gets, you know, Has their, has one of their videos, you know, do well for a starting account.

Maybe it gets 25, 000 views, 30, 000 views. And they look and they're like, I didn't get a single subscriber. And that was my best performing video of the week. This isn't going to work. I mean, you're sharing like, Hey, I'll do it. I'll get a million, a million views and get 200 subscribers. Right. And so there really is a volume game at play where you have to continue to produce this at volume and at scale in order to build a snowball effect to get the subscribers.

Chris: But I will say. The million view to 200 subscribers. I'm talking about email subscribers. Email. Yeah. Whereas a million views to Instagram followers, it's probably like 5, 000 or two to 5, 000, which is significant. Now there's two schools of thought. A lot of smart people say followers don't matter anymore.

Subscribers don't matter. It's all algorithmically driven. You know, the for you page is just going to push it, whether you have followers or not. That's true to an extent, right? But if, if you go look at any influencer business or otherwise that has, let's say a million followers, they could post a video of them farting or just doing something stupid, and it's going to get 50 to a hundred thousand views, right?

Which is five to 10 percent of their follower base. Uh, or they could post something really high value and it could get 30 million views. And so the more followers you have, the lower your floor gets, the lower your, the higher your baseline gets. Uh, so it's not totally true. And I've AB tested it. I have shadow accounts, two followers, uh, and I'll take old viral content.

That's the algorithm has proven has blessed that this is good and I'll post it there and it's crickets, right? So followers do matter. Like it's, it's more data points for the algorithm to work with. Does that make sense?

Jared: Yeah. No, it does. It does. And it's also proof there's more than one metric to evaluate success when it comes to stuff like this.

You know, you can, you can get followers and subscribers. You can also get more podcast downloads and it sounds like you have a lot of different ways to succeed with every single short form video you produce. What are your emails like? Uh, it sounds like you're funneling people to your email. Well, clearly it doesn't sound like that.

You clearly are. What are your, what are your emails like? Um, and again, just from a high level, like frequency, um, uh, short versus long. Um, you know, you never publish a video without a call to action. Perhaps your emails are similar. How, how is the structure made up? Talk to us about your email.

Chris: My emails are.

Typically 1000 to 3000 words once a week, every single time, once a week. Um, my call to action in my email is I'm the most conservative, like the most protective of my email list. Like when I sell to them one day, it's going to be very calculated. And it's not just going to be a one off affiliate link, or it's going to be after a lot of research, right?

I take their email address very seriously. So, but you know, there are multiple types of calls to action. I, I, I asked them to share it. I have a referral program. Um, I have polls and every single email. So at the end of the email, I know how well they liked it or not. And that tells me what to double down on.

Uh, or I will, I'll use chat GPT to generate say 50. Industries. I'll say, you know, give me 50 niche home service industries that are growing in popularity right now, pressure washing, gutter cleaning, yada, yada, yada. I'll put those in a type form and at the top of my newsletter, I'll say, Hey, what do you want to learn about?

Here's 50 options. You can vote on up to 10 of them. Um, and then hundreds of people will vote. And then sure enough, bounce houses right at the top. And you know, up until a month ago, it's like, Oh, I think concrete leveling is cool. Let's interview a concrete leveling guy. And no, like now I say to you, tell me what's cool because I genuinely love All of them.

Like I'm not sacrificing any intellectual integrity because I just love business. I love commerce. Right? So my call to action from them today is like, let's get some data from you. So I know what to put out there, but I'm not, I don't have any ads in it and I'm not selling anything overtly and I don't have a paid newsletter.

It's only free.

Jared: It's only free. What is the reason for the newsletter then from a high level? I mean, that would be a question that I'm sure you have an answer to, but what is the purpose of the email newsletter in your overall brand? That's a good

Chris: question. I, I'm honestly, um, I'm perfectly fine playing the long, long, long game.

Um, I don't have to monetize it anytime soon. Um, but I will, like, I'll probably have a paid version one day. Um, I'll probably have a community one day. I know I'm going to do ads one day. Um, I've done affiliate links, so I have monetized in kind of a sneaky way using things that I actually use and, and endorse.

Um, but that's not even meaningful revenue. Um, the, the point is to, is because of the fact that I'm vertically integrated. Right. I have an incubator. I start businesses. We're starting a marketing agency here soon, and I will be selling things, um, to the newsletter. I just, I'm on edition like 64 now. So it's been 64 weeks.

Um, and I've never really. Uh, sold anything to them yet.

Jared: What kind of, um, what kind of, uh, any tips to share that you've learned from sending sounds like 64 weekly emails? Like what are some strategies you've picked up along the way or some interesting findings you've had that maybe you didn't expect when you started off?

Chris: Yeah. So, you know, like the, the midwit meme where it has like the distribution curve, you've got the guy on one side and the guy on the other side, like I'm, as much as I hop around from thing to thing. Email has been a constant. I'm obsessed with email. I love email. And I feel like it's one of the things I'm, I'm good at.

Whereas a lot of things I'm okay at, you know, um, the middle of that midwit meme for email is like, what time of the day are you going to send? What's your subject line? Well, how many words, what's your hook? Yada, yada, yada. And like, The more I learn, the more you have a loyal audience, the less that stuff matters.

Um, my subject line breaks every rule in the book and I don't do it in my other businesses. Um, my subject line is newsletter number, like hashtag 0 0 0 6, Um, that's my subject line and then every week it, you know, increments of one and then my preview text will be less than three words, just something that talks about the email and I've had a bunch of people say, Hey, you're not optimizing your email like I have an agency.

I could sell you X, Y or Z your subject and I'm like, I've a B tested it. I really have. I did it the first week and my opening line was kind of a joke. It's like, I'm going to, I'm going to have this newsletter until the day I die. And this is edition number one. And I'm so optimistic I'm going to make it six digits.

Um, so it's just kind of a joke that I never stopped playing. And now like no one even knows why, but I've AB tested it and the newsletter hashtag always wins. And so that kind of breaks every rule. But then with my e commerce business, I would never do that. Um, my subject lines are optimized and I AB test it.

Um, but one thing I have noticed is shorter is like always better, shorter subject line, three words or less. I don't care what it is. If it in doubt, shorter is better. Um, And so in some ways, like I'm really maniacal about data. In some ways, I'm not send time. It's whenever I get around to writing it or sending it, I don't schedule anything.

Um, but I, I am very maniacal about segmentation. So I know if a subscriber came from Instagram, Tik TOK threads, YouTube community. My pinned YouTube comment, my YouTube description. I have all those segmented differently and I track the open click and unsubscribe rates between all of them. Um, and it just tells me which platforms have the most loyal subscribers, which platforms do I really need to lean into to get more newsletter subscribers?

And that's been really helpful.

Jared: Which platform does have the best subscribers?

Chris: So it is the one that everyone's moved on from, like, we're all done with Facebook, Facebook. That's what I was going to say. Facebook is like, Hey, I'm still here. We're doing great. Um, we're doing just fine. And they are the only platform where you can, well, outside of YouTube, they're out of Instagram, Facebook reels or, and YouTube shorts.

It's the only one where you can pin a comment that has a, like a blue clickable hyperlink in it. And that is incredibly valuable.

Jared: How interesting that the original platform that started suppressing organic growth and not wanting people to move off their platform is the one that you say creates the most loyal followers and allows people to move from Facebook to your email list.

Chris: And it's, it's perfect because I get the most subscribers from Facebook and they're the most loyal. Um, and I'm not really competing in their inbox for much. I've had several subscribers tell me, I don't even know what an email newsletter was, you know, like they subscribed to bed, bath and beyonds mailing list or, you know, whatever.

But they're like, if you're on Twitter, like newsletters are a bubble, like it's about to burst that they're oversaturated, but that's like 1 percent of the real world. Newsletters are not a thing like on Main Street, so to speak.

Jared: So what is this strategy? What maybe give us some numbers, if you could, around what this approach, this high level approach, you know, short form content, Podcast email newsletter.

Like what type of followers are you gaining on a monthly basis right now?

Chris: I, I have like two KPIs that I track one is a views per follower. And that helps me know how well my calls to action are doing. Um, and I track followers across platforms. Um, so I just add them all up cumulatively and track them on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.

So views per follower. And that's at about 300 give or take. Um, and that's average. Um, every 300 people that sees something that I do will hit follow or subscribe or whatever. Um, and then the other one is followers per day, FPD aggregated across platforms. And I've been averaging eight to 11, 000, um, followers per day.

So last month I added 270, 000, which was. It was a record bump.

Jared: That is a lot of followers. That is crazy. And then when you translate that into views, if you're getting over 10, 000 new followers a day and it takes 300 views to get a follower, then that means that there are so many views happening on a daily basis, I would imagine.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, I, I usually get between 50 and 130 million views a month. Most of those short form. I wish they were long

Jared: form, but most are short. So you're getting short form content up there. I heard you talk about Instagram. Are you publishing the same short form content across a number of platforms? And how does that work?

Because every platform is a little different in how You know, you tweak it, how you work it, how it responds to it, how people engage with it, et cetera.

Chris: Yeah. It's so interesting. Cause there's this girl named Jenny Hoyos. Have you heard of her? Yeah. Yeah. She's like the shorts King and she preaches that, um, everyone's totally different.

She has a very relatively small Instagram following and a massive YouTube following same videos. Um, and so I took that to heart, but one thing I've noticed is in a way, they're all the same because they all just want one thing. Like they all want a bunch of stuff, but at the end of the day, they want retention, right?

If your thing keeps them on, keeps users on their app longer, they will push it to more people and then more and then more and then more, and they'll keep testing it and testing it until people don't care about it anymore. Um, YouTube. In my experience is the hardest to go viral, but it will stay viral the longest.

It is the most evergreen, right? So what I used to do was I would have like a three to four second call to action outside of YouTube, and then a really quick call to action on YouTube. Because. TOK are the only platforms that will show you a retention chart of your shorts. Um, and I would just see it fall off a cliff on YouTube.

Um, whereas on Instagram, I don't know cause they don't show me. Right. But now I just have a lightning fast call to action across all platforms. And the only thing I change on the calls to action are what the onscreen text is. So Facebook, it's top link, you know, hit the pin comment on Instagram It's. And then on YouTube, it's the URL of my landing page, which is six letters, easy to spell, easy to read because they have to type it in and it's a lot of friction.

Um, so I do customize my calls to action per video, but just on the onscreen page. Text call to action, but every video otherwise is the exact same, same duration, same hook, same everything. And, um, I'm growing, I'm not growing equally fast on all platforms. I'm still growing really well on all platforms with that strategy.

Jared: I know this is a difficult question to answer, uh, which is always hard when you hear that. You're like, well, then why are you asking me? I'm trying to, I'm thinking about the listener right now who's trying to decide maybe which platform works best for the type of content they're, they're making. Um, I guess the first question of a two part is, do you recommend going to all platforms like you're doing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik TOK, YouTube, and have you found certain platforms work better for certain types of content?

If someone is trying to decide.

Chris: I have, but, um, Oh, I actually have my assistant looking into that right now, like to what it is. Cause like I've noticed anecdotally home service business ideas do really well on Facebook. Um, they don't do well on Tik TOK. And my assumption is because Tik TOK is very international and, you know, a concrete leveling business does not apply in Estonia.

You know, just for whatever reason. Um, but generally speaking of this, another strategy I use, I will post to tick tock first, uh, cause I care the least about tick tock, but it shows me a retention chart. So I'll post a tick tock and wait an hour and look at the retention chart. And if I have, um, at least half of percent of viewers following me.

I know it's a thumbs up. If I, if people are watching on average, 40 percent of my video, I know it's a thumbs up if I see those things. I'll post as is to the other platforms. If I don't, um, then I'll either, well, some, I used to not post stuff, but now I just post everything. I will generally cut something.

There's almost never something to add. There's almost always something to cut. So I'll look at the retention charts. Like, Oh yeah, they're dropping off at this sentence and that's probably distracting. And I'm just guessing. I don't really know. Right. Or that sentence doesn't really add any value to the point of the overall video.

So let me just cut that out altogether and then let's post everywhere. Um, generally speaking, if a video takes off in the first test on tick tock, it's going to take off everywhere generally, but sometimes it'll only YouTube and nowhere else, or only go viral on Instagram and nowhere else. But that's pretty rare.

Jared: Which one is the easiest for you and your team to manage in terms of The overall process of getting content live on it, managing maybe comments or any other types of interactions is one that you found at scale, easier to work with.

Chris: Oh, well, um, Instagram and Facebook are nice because you can use many chat automations to hand, to handle a lot of stuff, but honestly, there are, I don't upload myself anymore.

Um, they're all about the same. Okay. Um, they really are. It's. Logistically speaking, it's It's annoying that you have to leave like the app open on TOK when you're uploading a video. Uh, but other than that, it doesn't really make a difference. We, we have noticed, um, a big difference in cross posting. We don't cross post anything.

Like we don't use any automations. We don't use any, like also publish the threads also published to Facebook. I heard like anecdotally that. Your reach will be suppressed if you do that. Um, but I thought, you know what? There's no way because the platforms just want you to keep users on the platform. And why would it matter?

You know, if it's viral, why would they care? It matters. I'm here to tell you it matters. So I used to auto publish to Facebook reels, just with the toggle switch inside Instagram. Um, and I never, ever once had a Facebook reel outpace an Instagram reel, not even once. And then I stopped doing that. And we did it the harder way.

I say harder in quotations because you're just uploading a video. Um, and now I routinely have In fact, maybe even on average, my Facebook reels do better than my Instagram reels, even though I have half as many followers over there.

Jared: That's really good feedback. That's really good news. Um, yeah, we, we, we want the shortcut.

Chris: We want like the, the panacea or the silver bullet and like, Oh, this one cool tool is only nine 99 a month. And I upload everything and it just pushes it out or opus. ai. I can just upload my podcast and we'll spit out 30 clips. And then I can use this Zapier integration to upload the 30 clips everywhere.

And then. I'm going to have the law of large numbers, 10 percent will go viral. I'm sorry. Like, I'm just sorry. It's not easy. It doesn't work. Yeah. No. The harder way is usually the better way. And that's a good framework just for life.

Jared: Well, you mentioned you're not uploading yourself anymore, which is a good segue into a question I have on my agenda here.

I'll ask it now. What does your team look like? Um, it sounds like it's not just you now. So what is it? What does it look like? Who does what? How big is it? So I,

Chris: I, I would consider it a pretty small team based on people that I've talked to, but I have a virtual assistant, um, In the Philippines that she's like my right hand woman, so to speak, she's in my pinned.

I message. I made sure she has an iPhone and she probably works 60 hours a week and she edits all my videos. She posts all my videos. She takes my long form written content. And manually cross posts, posts everywhere. I have this master Google sheet where she tracks all of my numbers. Every Monday she updates them first of the month.

She updates them from the prior month. She's like my most key person. And then I have a thumbnail guy, um, that I split with my business partner because he puts out a lot of content too. He's really, really good. He's in Turkey. Um, and then I have, uh, an editor. Uh, name Mohamed, he's really good and he's in, um, I think India and then I have a, like a, an administrative assistant in Spain that just helps with random stuff.

Um, so my administrative assistant and my thumbnail guy and my editor. I really only use half of I share them with my partner and then my content manager, um, she works 60 hours a week, so

Jared: I would agree. Yeah, pretty small given the least to kind of follow ship following or follower numbers you're generating and the amount of content you're producing.

That's great. Um, uh, I guess probably the elephant in the room for a lot of people right now. So I'm just gonna ask the question. The amount of views. And thus followers you're driving. It just seems insane. Given the way you talk about how you create content, given the way you talk about how you create ideas and like, what other tips can you share?

Because these numbers just seem so unapproachable in so many ways. And. Your strategy, I don't want to say it's simple, but it's very effective. And I'm just, what other things can you buckle down and just dig into that will allow someone listening who has been struggling with gaining a followership who has been maybe dabbling in short form content or writing long emails or whatever it is they're choosing, but they are struggling to get more than two or three followers a day.

Chris: Great question. Um, so I would start by training your algorithm. Like I said, have a separate, I would just start on Instagram cause it's worked great for me. Um, I'm sure you could do the same on any other platform. I would start on Instagram and whatever niche you're in, let's say you're, you, you sell a pet toys on e commerce.

I would start. On Instagram training, the algorithm to show you, uh, competitors or homeowners that have dogs, uh, just anything that could give you inspiration, spark inspiration, um, bookmark, like comment, do whatever it takes to show the algorithm that you like that content and be very strict on that. So you start there.

Then you're going to come across creators that You're that you're admiring and you, okay. I really liked that. I want to do some of that and just start taking note of styles, right? Um, maybe it's like a skit. Maybe it's like a still image with text. Maybe it's a three second, um, video on loop with texts, something.

And then you just want a bunch of buckets of content. Okay. So you've got that in a Google doc, and then you're going to find the actual creators that you're going to follow. And these are people that you're going to kind of emulate in a way. Um, and then go to social blade. I use social blade religiously.

I have a 10 a month account, and you're going to look up those creators and save them and track their follower growth. Because, you know, we talked about, you know, Followers are meaningless because the algorithm pushes it. No, they're not. But views are meaningless because if your views aren't converting to followers, then you're really getting nothing.

They really are. Right? Yeah. So go find the creators that are hacking many chat or that are hacking an interesting call to action. Are they, are they saying, you know, read the comment? Are they saying link in bio or they're saying comment the word X, Y, or Z. So many chat is triggered, see what they're doing and then follow their follower growth.

So you, so you could weed out the ones that just have vanity metrics and hone in on the ones that are actually growing their follower base, right? How are they using stories? Are they posting multiple stories a day? One a day, one a week, and just start copying them. And then once you have a base built and everything I just explained, you could do a start in an afternoon and then you just have to stop caring.

About, uh, whatever you publish and like, I'm like, everyone cares what people think about them. I don't care what you say. Everyone does. There's just, it's a spectrum. Right. Um, I started a brand new account. I didn't want to use my personal account and that was just out of pride and ego. I didn't want people judging me that I went to high school with, you know, but honestly I had 400 followers there.

The difference between 400 and zero is meaningless. So I started a brand new account and I just treated it as every single person that sees these dumb videos. They don't know about me. They don't care about me. So I don't care about them. I'm just gonna, this is my playground, my sandbox. And then I just take everything I learned from the people on the exact same platform and just start throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Um, CapCut. I would get CapCut Pro, 10 a month. Uh, it has a feature where it will automatically remove pauses. Uh, Descript, the Mac app. It's really good. It's even better for removing pauses. Not as good as CapCut for editing. Um, I put auto captions on everything and learn hooks, right? If you see a video that goes viral, write down what the hook was.

And how can you copy that exact same hook? And you don't want any dead space in your video, no dead space, no white space. And, um, all else equal, the algorithm will prefer longer videos. Um, it all comes down not to, uh, like average view percentage. Average seconds watched, right? So I'd rather have, um, um, a 90 second video on Instagram that people watch 50 percent of, so 45 seconds, then, um, a 30 second video that people watch a hundred percent of, and the algorithm will prefer that.

Even though they're only watching half of it, you're keeping them on the platform for 50 percent longer. So, um, but that's hard, right? It's easier to put out something that's 10 seconds and catchy. So start there. But then as you, as you feel more confident in your styles and in your content, then try to make them longer because the longer it is, If it's high quality, the higher chance it will have of going viral.

Jared: You've mentioned hooks a couple of times. What is a hook from a high level and what makes a good hook?

Chris: Okay. So it took me probably, it took me probably 40 videos to even think about hooks. So if you're listening to this, you'll be way ahead of the game than I was. Um, and then it took me about 150 videos to find my hook, which I use in almost every video now.

Um, So every single sentence you say needs to be engineered to get them to the next sentence. So my hook that works the best today for me is look at this freaking guy right here. Okay. Lately, almost every video I post starts with that hook. Look at this freaking thing right here. Look at this freaking girl right here.

Look at this freaking guy right here. And it's engineered to get them to the next sentence. Okay. What, what am I looking at? What am I looking for? And then I, and I break my own rule all the time. Cause like I said, it takes five minutes. If I were to actually take an hour to script out my videos, I'd probably have a higher hit rate.

Um, and so there has to be something visually appealing going on. Preferably that doesn't, doesn't have to be the case, but it's just like good copywriting. You just can't lose them, you know? So you got it. It's just like, you've got a hook and then a re hook, hook, re hook, hook, keep them hanging as long as you can.

And. You just got to experiment with a bunch of stuff. Um, there's one guy on Instagram that posted videos about really good hooks. Uh, it's called something viral. I gotta find it, but, uh, viral video club, viral video. club on Instagram. He has some really good videos where he lists out good hooks and I just start trying those, like another good one is, um, You guys have to see what I found.

Jared: Yeah, I've seen that one. That's great. That's great. Um, Uh, one more question on that. It sounds like you are scripting most or all of what you're recording. Is that true? Is that important? Have you tried not scripting? And why have you landed where you've landed?

Chris: No, I, I don't script hardly anything.

Jared: So you, these hooks all are just kind of coming out of practice and out of nature and out of an understanding of what your content does and how it relates to your hook.

Chris: Yeah. So at this point, the hooks are intentional, right? So you could call that part a script cause it is deliberate, but it took me a long time to get there. Um, but everything else, it, I'm just like, I don't know. I, the only analogy I would make, um, is like, so Taylor Swift, right? She, she's written hundreds of songs and she's published a fraction of them.

And I'm not very musically inclined and I've never understood that. Right. I just never, I can't wrap my head around it. Cause it's not just the words, it's got the music, you got to tie it in. You have the bridge, you've got multiple choruses versus, and I just never understood that. Um, but that's how she sees the world, right?

She's on a tour bus and she looks outside and sees a pig and she's like, Oh, that's interesting. And she makes all these connections and she'll, she'll write a song in five minutes. And I see the world like an entrepreneur. Like I've been. So curious and so I'm I'm able to see things really fast, right? And so that's an important part of it and it comes back to like the passion verse Profit argument, right?

Follow your passion, follow the profit. It's neither one. Um, in my opinion, profit is not scalable. Passion is, uh, so you have to start making money. And then once you have, uh, then you can really follow your passion and that can be infinitely scalable. So my passion is not this business or that business.

It's just business. And so. That helps me see things really fast. So whoever's listening, whatever your passion is, if you're about to make an Instagram account or grow your Instagram account on something that you don't really feel, you know, a lot of, or something that you're not really passionate about, you're gonna, you're going to have writer's block all the time.

And I, that just can't work, right? It, so it's gotta be something that you can really get energy from learning about. So you can just crank out, uh, a lot of content.

Jared: Chris, this has been a really, uh, good tactically, uh, inspiring podcast interview. Thank you for coming on and sharing. Thank you. Still blows my mind just how you're able to put together so much so quickly that, uh, is, is, is just so incredibly well received by people.

It's really, um, it's downright inspiring. So thank you for sharing so many details and so many tips. Uh, I think my biggest takeaway was when you shared that Facebook creates the most loyal audience out of everybody. That's, that's fascinating. Anyways, Chris, thanks for coming out. Where can people, I mean, follow along with what you're doing?

Where can people kind of go and learn more about what you're doing?

Chris: Yeah, I'm a, I'm the Kerner office on all social channels spelled like my last name, K O E R N E R. And it all lives at TKO pod. com as in the Kerner office podcast. So

Jared: that's great. Chris, thanks so much for joining us, uh, much continued success.

And we'll talk to you again soon. All right. Thank you.

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