Everyone Needs a Personal Brand (Here's Why) | Caleb Ralston

Caleb, what's your take on followers? I feel like social media has changed so much in such a short period of time, right? The algorithms work differently.

Every platform has its own algorithm.

If you have, say, no followers or like 300, like you just said, and your videos are stuck in that 200 view likes jail that everybody calls it, is that a bad thing or how do you get out of that?

Well, there's a couple of things to it.

So one, anyone who says followers don't matter are just saying it as a piffy hook to catch attention.

That is not true.

It's not the metric that we want to optimize for anymore.

So it is no longer as important, and it is no longer something that I factor into how I develop a strategy.

However, I do believe that your follower count is an indicator of people fucking with your shit enough that they want more of it in the future.

And so I do believe it's more of an indicator of success rather than a metric that we optimize for.

So that's out of the way.

The beautiful thing, you just articulated it perfectly.

we are in interest media not social media and so if you got something to say you stand a chance whereas when i started my first videos on youtube were back when i was in high school i was filming with like the top bodybuilders and powerlifters in the world and at that time i started my channel at zero and it took a fuckload of effort and a lot of big names that people were searching out to get any traction on my channel now that is no longer the case I guarantee both of you have opened up your YouTube homepage in the last two weeks and seen a video on your homepage that has less than 150 views being suggested to you.

Yeah, for sure.

That was not a thing.

I've been doing this for 17 years.

For like the first 14 or 15 of them, that was not a thing.

You didn't stand a chance.

Now you do.

And so it now comes down to how do you interpret this data? Because to your point, if we're stuck in the 200-view jail...

That's kind of tough to know what's working, right? Because it kind of feels like nothing's working.

But in the beginning, you do have to look at anomalies and it might not be that big.

You might average 200 views and one video gets 313.

So what I want you to do is try to identify, and this is where you need to turn into a scientist here.

You have to make a hypothesis of what you believe is the biggest variable from that winning post that caused it to do better than average.