3 Hooks Guaranteed To Make Your Content Go Viral

So for the past couple of months, myself and my team have been grinding, putting together a educational community, putting together all of the micro courses around what I believe the modern entrepreneur need, that they want to be successful in business, because I think a lot of the skills, the systems, the mindsets, the beliefs that we were taught in school, they aren’t terribly useful. The. The things that I’ve learned from starting and running businesses are not the things that were covered in the modern educational system. So the way I’m thinking about this is, it’s almost like an MBA for the real world, where the systems, the skills that we’re sharing, they will actually serve you on your entrepreneurial journey. We’re calling this the apex collective, or beyond the apex. And we’ve been working on putting together all the micro courses and materials for this thing, because the way that we envision it is that it covers the four spheres of influence, which is your mindset, health, wealth, and your skills, designed to help the entrepreneur maximize their return on life. So this not just about building their business to seven figures, but building a seven figure mindset of seven figure body. Right.

Thinking about our entrepreneurial self holistically in a whole sense. And with that, then we’ve been putting together a ton of materials in each one of those four spheres of influence. We’ve been putting together goal setting and vision casting courses. For the mindset side, we’ve been putting together the ultimate guide to sleep. For the health side, we’ve been putting together a bunch of skills training, ranging from things like copywriting to public speaking to leadership, to hiring and firing to what I want to share with you today, which is one of the courses that we’re putting together in there, is the LinkedIn blueprint. Now, I was approached by a buddy, Hunter Thompson, who runs a very large community for capital raisers. These are individuals raising capital for their real estate deals. And he’s like, hey, can you put together a training for my people on how they can use LinkedIn more effectively? And as I started doing this, I went down the rabbit hole really deep, and I was like, if I’m going to make this, I might as well make it as good as I can.

So we’ve gone a little bit overboard. And this thing is a robust masterclass. It’s no longer a microclass, because I believe LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful platform for an entrepreneur, for a creator, or for a brand trying to bring customers into their business, understanding how the platform and the algorithm works and how you can maximize, how you can position yourself as an expert, I think is really low hanging fruit, because compared to a lot of the other platforms, there’s not as much competition on LinkedIn. And so I think it’s a great place for a lot of brands and creators and entrepreneurs in general to focus their efforts. And so we put together this crazy training. It’s going to be part of the beyond the Apex and the Apex collective. But I just wanted to share one aspect of it today, which is one of the modules, is all about overcoming obscurity, getting seen, getting known, because it doesn’t do you any good if you have the best product in the world, but nobody knows that exists. And in the beginning, all entrepreneurs need to solve for this.
They need to solve for how do I overcome obscurity? So one of the things that you have to learn how to do is how to hook people’s attention. Content is a great way of getting put in front of thousands, if not millions of people, but only if that content gets seen. And so part of this LinkedIn blueprint is understanding what works on that algorithm. What have we done over the last year to go from 8000 subscribers or followers up to about 80,000 as of today. So that’s a lot of growth in one year on one platform. We get tens of millions of impressions every single month. So we’ve kind of unlocked the platform. And I wanted to share with you just one tool here, one tool to help you go viral and how to get your content to stand out.
And this will work not just on LinkedIn, but across all the platforms. I’m calling this viral hooks unlocked. This is the Hooks ebook. And so what I did was I put together twelve of my favorite, most viral hooks that I use in my content consistently. These are proven ways of getting people to stop what they’re doing and pay attention and click, hey, I want to see more. And then they’re engaging with the rest of your content. So this is step one in getting people to actually do business with you is getting their attention. And so what I want to do in this podcast today is just share with you three of the hooks that are covered in the ebooks, or the hook ebook, which you can download by going to anthonyvacino.com hook.
You can get it totally for free, just you put your email in there, and then you can get the ebook, download it, and start using these in your own business right away. If you’re interested in learning more about the apex collective and the LinkedIn blueprint, when those things all go live, which should be here in the next couple of months? No, it should be sooner than that. I’ve been saying for months I need to actually just set a deadline and say this is when we’re launching it. I just keep adding things to it. I want to make it as awesome as possible, but there comes a point when I just need to launch and say this is what it is, and we’ll continue building and stacking on as we go. But we just got to launch at some point. So it’s coming soon, I promise. But without further ado, let’s talk about some viral hooks.
Now the secret to going viral on any social media platform is that you have to create content that gets attention and it keeps attention. The hook is all about getting the attention. This is what we refer to as CTR, or your click through rate. At what rate of impressions do people see your content and then decide, I want to see more of that? Now, the hook is your secret weapon for getting people’s attention. This is how do you get them to stop and click? A common example of this would be in the case of a book. You have your title, you have your cover, and you have your subtitle. That’s usually what you have to grab people’s attention. And this is really important because if you can’t get people’s attention, then doesn’t really matter how great the rest of the content is, they’re not going to see it.
The secret then to a great hook is it plants a seed of intrigue. It opens a cognitive loop in your audience’s mind that they feel compelled to close. It’s a question burning in the back of their mind that says, I wonder where this is going? And if you do this right, then they will feel compelled to go into the rest of your post. And if the rest of your content is great, they’re going to continue watching it. But that’s a different story for a different day. Let’s talk about these hooks that are so darn effective. The first one is what I call the time bound hook, and this is probably the oldest hook known to man. This is once upon a time.
Most of the time, when you’re telling stories, your audience lacks context. So our job as the content creator or as the storyteller is to build that context as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, you don’t have a lot of time and space to do this because a lot of our audience has the attention span of a goldfish and a lot of stimuli is competing for their attention. The time bound hook is effective because it immediately roots an audience in a particular moment in time, and it gives them something to mentally latch onto. For instance, one of my best performing posts of all time is ten years ago, I was broke, homeless, and recently dumped by my fiance. So that’s the first sentence. That is the hook. Ten years ago, I was broke.
And there’s other compelling parts of this hook besides the ten years ago. But those first three words are an instant anchor for the audience because they have a sense for what universe and what timeline is this story playing out. And a little can go a long way. That might not seem like it’s super useful, but I assure you it is. Another version of this is just simply when I was six years old, my parents decided. So I just rooted you in a particular age. Right? And because most of your audience has been six years old, at some point, this gives them an immediate frame of reference and the ability to put themselves into the story, which they will do unconsciously. But that’s a topic for another day.
Let’s talk about another hook. Let’s go with the obsession hook. A couple months ago, I found myself falling down a really strange YouTube rabbit hole. It was the world of speed. Rubik’s cube competitions. And the crazy thing is, I don’t even really care about Rubik’s cubes. Right? I used to solve Rubik’s cubes as a way of warming up my fingers for rock climbing at the beginning of a session. But I don’t find myself particularly drawn to Rubik’s cube competitions.
And yet, here I was. I was watching people who devoted hours every single day to solving this little cube in just mere seconds. It was truly hypnotic, and it sucked me in before I even realized what was happening. And so when I finally snapped out of it, I took a second. I was like, what happened here? Why did I get pulled into this so hard? And the answer is simple. Passion is contagious. When somebody is truly obsessed and in love with what they do. Even if that thing is of no interest to us personally, we’re drawn to it like moss to a flame.
We just can’t resist it. And that’s where the obsession hook comes in. To use this hook in your content, we want to draw attention to the weird and obscure things that we’re obsessed with. For instance, this is a post that performed very, very well for us on LinkedIn, very recently had over 150,000 impressions. It starts like this. Here’s a concept I’m obsessed with. Addition through subtraction. And so I start this by pointing out, I am obsessed with this.
I can’t get it out of my head. And then the concept that I share is vague enough and strange enough, where you’re like addition through subtraction that seems contradicting. How does that work? Tell me more. And so now you’re pulled in because that cognitive loop has been opened, and you’re wondering, where is this going? Here’s another version of this. I can’t stop thinking about this idea. It’s called the chaotic path of improvement. This is another post that I did recently, and it’s just anytime that we can share with others what is currently occupying our brains, they will immediately be drawn to it. And it can be very hooky.
We’ll say that. Yeah, hooky. That’s the word we’re going for. Let’s do another one. Let’s see. I’m going through the list of twelve here again. If you want this ebook, you just go to anthonyvacino.com hook. I’ll get all twelve of these, plus explanations and examples of how you can use them.
Let’s go with the curator hook. Humans love collecting information. Unfortunately, most of us are pretty generally lazy. Like, we don’t want to work any harder than necessary to get the information, so we want it served up to us in a nice, easily consumed fashion. And this is why we love it when others take the time to do the heavy mental lifting for us. And then they come down from the mountaintop and they share their most valuable lessons. What is this? Information summarization is a massive industry. Just think of things like Cliff notes and Blinkist, the app, and it’s big for a reason.
If you position yourself within this industry or within this particular type of topic, you can position your content to go mega viral. It can be very, very powerful. For instance, here’s one that did another 150,000 impressions on LinkedIn. For us, it goes like this. I’ve read 1000 books over the past decade. Here’s what I’ve learned. So the thing that makes a curator hook particularly effective is you want to make it very clear you have done an unreasonable amount of research in the area that you’re distilling. The more work you put into the research, the more value your audience will perceive in your summary.
Another version of this might be I interviewed 100 billionaires. Here are the five things they all said you need to do to build wealth. So the curator hook, very, very powerful. It’s a lot of fun, actually. You probably have a lot of things that you know really well. You’ve researched a ton over the years, and so it’s just a matter of taking that information, packaging it up, and then bring it to your audience. And that can be a very effective hook as well. So that is three very viral hooks that will serve you well.

Again, if you want the ebook of Hooks, you just go to anthonyvesina.com backslash hook and stay tuned because we’re going to be releasing more information about the apex collective and all the courses that are along with that, including the LinkedIn blueprint. I am really excited about that. I think the thing I’m most excited about, though, is that we’ll be doing monthly live master classes with students of the program. So if you’re part of the community, you get to come into live office hours. If you have questions and things that you need personal coaching on around your business or life in general, you’ll have access to me in that. And we’ll be presenting on a different topic each week or each month, going deep, dive into that. And then I’ll be bringing a bunch of into the community as well, a bunch of really big hitters who have massive businesses, massive successes to come and share and distill the things that they’ve learned over the course of their years. That’s going to be a lot of fun.

So stay tuned for all that. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends, and I’ll see you in the next episode.