The Viral Content Playbook
The Hyperfocused Entrepreneur
September 11, 2023
Read time: 10 minutes
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Three months ago I started creating a different type of content for LinkedIn and Twitter.
Since then we’ve nearly 5x’ed our following on those channels and gained 40,000+ new subscribers.
In this article I’m going to break down my 5-part framework for creating viral content, but here’s the thing about audience building:
A lot of creators and entrepreneurs are chasing meaningless vanity metrics.
They judge the quality of their audience based on its size, and the quality of their content based on how many likes it gets.
These metrics might make us feel good, but if it’s not driving towards some business-outcome, it’s all just wasted energy.
That is, of course, assuming your goal is to make money from your content. If it’s not, then you do you.
But for those of you creating content to grow your business or personal brand, it’s important to understand this:
It doesn’t matter how BIG your audience is…
It matters how ENGAGED your audience is.
In this article, I’m going to show you my step-by-step process for creating engaging content, but this is only one piece of the puzzle.
The other pieces of the puzzle revolve around how we take that engaged audience and transform it into ecstatic paying customers.
And truthfully, this is the part I see most creators and entrepreneurs struggling with.
They put out great content (and might even have a raving audience), but they have no clue how to monetize those eyeballs to create a thriving and self-sustaining business.
I’ve been there…
We struggled to crack this nut while building Escape Climbing.
But once we did, our business exploded and we went from doing $300k/year of revenue to $3,000,000.
I’ve used the same process over the past 4 years to build a high 6-figure personal brand and to acquire $80M of assets with Invictus Capital.
These systems are easily one of the most valuable things I have to teach…
But something I’ve come to realize in business, content creation, and life is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
I can show you the playbook that worked for me, but applying it to your unique situation requires context and nuance.
With that in mind, I’ve decided it’s not enough to just package up the system and give it to you guys to figure out for yourself.
So, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before:
It’s tentatively named, “The Creator Collective”, and we’ll be launching later this month.
The Collective is a monthly subscription that’ll include not only my blueprint for creating 6 and 7-figure online businesses, but also:
- Access to all my Premium Paid Courses
- Bi-Weekly Live Office Hour Calls
- Monthly Live Workshops and Trainings
- Private Community
- Personalized Real Time Help
The part I’m most geeked about is that the first 100 students will get a 30 minute 1-on-1 strategy call with me (something I usually charge thousands of dollars for).
Click here to join the Creator Collective waitlist.
Alright, enough of that…
Let’s dive into what you came here for:
The 5 Step Framework to Creating Viral Content
1. The Hook
This is THE most important part of creating viral content.
Bad Hooks don’t get clicked…
Which means your content is going to die a sad, pathetic death in total obscurity.
After analyzing my most viral content, here are two concepts that consistently produce viral Hooks:
The Time Anchor
The human brain loves creating narratives that follow a linear timeline.
To control this, we must anchor the starting point of our story.
For instance, here are some of my top performing hooks:
- “Ten years ago I was…”
- “Spent last weekend at a…”
- “You’ve got one month to…”
- “Over the last 10 years I’ve…”
- “We did “X” last year using…”
The Open Cognitive Loop
Your Hook has one job…
That’s it.
It’s called the Slippery Slope.
And when executed correctly, it gets the reader to slide from one line to the next without even realizing it.
Now, I’ve experimented with hundreds of techniques for achieving this…
But ONE technique stands above all the rest…
(it’s actually the technique I’ve used over the past 6 sentences)
I call it:
Open Cognitive Loops
Here’s how it works:
Start by planting a seed of intrigue.
This could be with a question or an implication that opens a Cognitive Loop in the reader’s mind.
Now, Cognitive Loops are pesky little things…
They cycle through our minds over and over again until they find resolution…
Like getting a song stuck in your head, the only way to get rid of it is to play through the song in its entirety.
Our goal in creating viral content is to open that loop and keep it open until the very last line.
In this section, I created a Micro-Open Cognitive Loop by saying:
“Your Hook has one job…”
And then I alluded to the “Slippery Slope”.
Both of which create intrigue and compel the reader forward.
Interestingly, you’ll notice this Micro-Open Cognitive Loop occurs within the Macro-Open Cognitive Loop that I created at the very beginning of this post, which is:
“There are 5 things we do that create viral content.”
So, now our reader is compelled to complete both “this” section and the “entire” post.
Mastering this one concept alone will put you in the top 1% of creators.
2. The Image
Your audience is getting bombarded with thousands of “distractions” every second.
If you want to grab their attention, you’ve got to do it fast.
Typically, words alone won’t cut it.
Which is where a picture comes in…
Because they are, afterall, worth 1,000 words.
The trick is to find an image that both stands on its own AND compliments the theme of your post.
This concept is especially important on YouTube where a thumbnail plus title (aka: The Hook) must create instant intrigue in a viewer.
If you’re interested in learning more about creating Thumbnails and Titles that get clicked, check out this article where I laid out The YouTube Playbook we used to scale from 220 – 135,000 subscribers in under 9 months.
The YouTube Playbook: How we grew from 220 to 100k subscribers in exactly 6 months. (Part One)
3. The Story
Stories have the power to change the world.
In fact, the most powerful people are rarely the fittest or the smartest…
They’re the best Storytellers.
Think of Martin Luther King Jr, JFK, Ghandi, Jesus, or Abraham Lincoln…
These people used their words and the power of story to change the world.
And so can you.
But the problem for most people is two-fold.
They don’t know:
- How to tell a good story
- Which stories to tell
I’m not going to deep-dive how to tell a good story here…
(If you’re interested in mastering what I call Seven-Figure Storytelling, then you’ll definitely want to join the Creator Collective when it launches. Click here to join the waitlist.)
But I will share one of my favorite tools for deciding which stories to tell.
I call it the Story Bible.
Simply put, this is a journal or a spreadsheet where you brain dump in a single sentence every story you can think of from your life.
Of course there are the big obvious stories about the day your dad forgot you at the K-Mart and you had to sleep in the toy aisle overnight.
But you have thousands of small stories that I bet you’ve completely forgotten about…
Like that time your grandma took you for ice cream on a hot summer day… or that time your best friend broke your favorite G.I. Joe and you hated them for a week.
These stories might seem inconsequential, but that’s not the point.
The goal of a Story Bible is to get you thinking about your life as a succession of tiny little stories AND to give you the raw material you’ll need in the future for crafting compelling content with the potential of going viral.
To prove the point, here are 3 of the stories I’ve used recently that have gone super-viral:
- My cat, Sparta, nearly died.
- I read an article about boredom that was kind of interesting.
- They put me on Ritalin when I was 6 years old.
None of these stories are inherently dramatic or interesting, and if I was just sitting down to write a piece of content, none of them might pop to the front of my mind…
But because I have a Story Bible filled with thousands of stories from my life, I can flip through the pages and find inspiration in any number of places.
If you want to learn more about creating your own Story Bible, check out this recent episode of the Amplified Impact podcast:
4. The Lesson
Have you ever told a story that started strong, but midway through you lost the thread?
You couldn’t really figure out how to wrap it up so you just kept droning on and on hoping somehow you’d just stumble into a climactic finale that leaves everybody in awe…
But after a couple excruciating minutes, it never really comes, so you just kinda trail off before ending with a:
“Yeah… so I guess you just had to be there.”
Oof… I feel ya.
We’ve all been there.
The problem?
You committed the most deadly of Storytelling Sins:
You told a Story without giving it MEANING.
When most people tell a story, they’re simply reciting events in some sort of chronological order and leaving it up to the audience to imbue it with their own meaning.
Great storytellers, on the other hand, don’t leave it to chance. They tell you exactly what they want you to take away from the story.
Here’s an example from a story I told the other day about my cat’s near-death experience:
“The next morning we were scheduled to put him down.
I remember feeling so impotent and shallow because I’d put a dollar value on the life of a loved one.
Now, I get it…
Sparta is just a cat.
But that’s not the point.
Because it’s about the larger truth:
I wasn’t in a position to help if my dad, or my partner, or my siblings, were ever to fall sick.
I resolved at that moment, money would never again be the reason I couldn’t help a loved one in need.”
Because I tell the reader WHY this story is so important and WHAT I want them to take away from it, the chances are high the reader will walk away impacted by the story in the way I intended.
So, before you create any piece of content or launch into a story at the next happy hour… pause and ask yourself, what is the meaning behind this story?
Here’s the beautiful thing about answering this question:
You now know exactly how to end the story.
But that’s a topic for another day.
5. The Format
In my experience:
82% of good writing is simply great formatting.
13% is sentence structure.
4% is how you say it.
And only 1% is what you actually say.
Okay, so obviously I’m throwing arbitrary numbers at the wall, but…
These might not be all that far off if a controversial study conducted by Albert Mehrabian is to be trusted.
In it, he concluded that 7% of what we communicate is spoken, 38% through tone, and the remaining 55% through body language.
In the world of writing, I like to think formatting is the equivalent of body language.
But what exactly is good formatting?
To me, good formatting makes your writing POP off the page and just begs the reader to dive in.
It’s friendly and inviting.
The sentences flow seamlessly, almost rhythmically, so that the eye is drawn quickly down the page.
The key to good formatting, then, is in how you use the white space.
Look at this page for example…
Notice how a paragraph is rarely (if ever) more than a single sentence?
Sometimes, it’s only a few words…
Before jumping to the next line.
Now, this style of writing would almost definitely make your high school English teacher gasp in dismay.
But guess what…
In a world of infinitely scrolling screens (like a phone), this is easier to read/skim AND more engaging.
So stop worrying about whether or not something is technically correct and instead, ask yourself:
How does this look?
Usually, if it looks good, it’ll read good.
Yes, I know that’s a grammatically incorrect sentence.
No, I’m not going to fix it.
Until next week,
Stay Hyperfocused,
AV
From YouTube This Week:
OUTWORK Everybody By Being Bored
Want to go even deeper?
1.The Hyperfocused Masterclass: the exact system I used to overcome ADHD, write a bunch of books, build some successful businesses, and acquire a whole lot of real estate.
2. If you’re in relentless pursuit of doing less, but better, than check out my podcast, Amplified Impact, for a quick-hitting daily dose of motivation and inspiration.
