So here's what's in this week's issue:

• 🔥 What's Working vs What's Not Working in Marketing 🥶:
• The secret to consistent viral short form videos like Neel Home
• TikTok is playing chess while other platforms are playing checkers
• 📝 Inside the Marketing Playbook: Running Plays That Work:
• How leveraging negative news & this viral trend makes content creation easy
• Lessons from hundreds of YouTube thumbnails
• 🔗 Marketing Resources + News:
• Ryan Serhant's $2.5 billion biggest lessons & golden nuggets for recessionary environments
• Behind the scenes of marketing & advertising 1,000 listings
• 3 Marketing Resources this Week
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

🔥 [What's Working vs What's Not Working in Marketing]

The Secret to Consistent Viral Short Form Videos like @NeelHome 📱

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoByMLbJArzAXo-bTOAelzQ/videos

If you don't know who Neel Dhingra is, he's been taking the real estate industry by storm.

So I wanted to break down his Instagram Reels strategy that took his business from $300K to $4M in only a few years.

I analyzed over 60 of Neel's Tik Tok's and IG Reels so you didn't have to! And here's what I learned.

This is a comprehensive guide to Instagram Reels for Real Estate where I break down his short-form video structure, his 5 principles for growth, and his not-so-obvious hacks that help his videos perform better.

Here's 5 not-so-obvious hacks he uses to help make his videos perform better:

1. He's interesting to watch - There's depth in the video. The background lighting adds depth. And his background is simple yet relevant.
2. Simple yet authentic - His clothing blends informal with business casual. He wears a hat that makes it less formal. His glasses are simple and actually make him more relatable. He wears plain shirts. And his watch adds contradiction + class.
3. Engaging Editing - Every 2 seconds. Sound effects. Visuals + imagery to SHOW what he's saying. Zoom in & zoom out. Plus text emphasizing what's important with constant variation to keep you engaged.
4. Quality + Quantity - Most people get stuck on posting only 1 video. Marketing is repetition over time, so 1 great video won't do much if you aren't consistent. His first video is not comparable to his videos today. Start. Get Better. Keep going.
5. Purposeful Scripting - He not only dumbs down what he's talking about for 3rd graders which helps more people understand it, but he follows a purposeful script which you can find in my Youtube video.

So how could you implement this in your short-form videos?

And if you want to watch the full video breakdown you can check it out on Youtube!

TikTok is playing chess while other platforms are playing checkers

While all the old big names like Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook (Meta) are pushing for short-form videos, TikTok is moving more toward long-form:

• 10 minute videos
• 2200 word captions
• They're building SEO discoverability like YouTube
• Gen-Z uses TikTok more than Google for search
• TikTok is preparing to launch a podcast platform (coming soon)
• ByteDance’s music app Resso offers hints about TikTok Music’s launch
• TikTok is launching a standalone hub dedicated to gaming

What does this all mean and why should we care about it? Short form is great, but TikTok knows a huge win would be in mastering long form.

We can look at Youtube, Twitch, and Spotify, and see the upside on long-form could drastically be better.

And for local businesses like real estate, search-heavy platforms like YouTube are better platforms to grow a business than short-form- the data is there to prove it.

Several big agents on TikTok with 1 million plus followers barely get 1-2 deals a month, while people on YouTube with 1,000 or 10,000 followers can get millions in business a year. And some of the much bigger agents on YouTube, in comparison to the 1 million TikTok agents, get 400+ leads a month.

Shiny penny syndrome is real. Don't sleep on what's proven to work.

The real magic is combining your YouTube strategy with TikTok to help each other grow.

If you want to find out how to execute a world-class YouTube strategy like Ken Pozek who gets 400+ leads a month, check out my video for a complete breakdown of his strategy.

📝 [Inside the Marketing Playbook: Running Plays That Work]

How Leveraging Negative News & this Viral Trend Makes Content Creation Easy 🎥

This is the easiest form of content creation because all you need to do is find a catchy news headline and then you can film anywhere. Anytime. In minutes.

Next to podcasting/recording calls, this is one of the easier forms of content creation.

How can you implement this?

1. Search major news publications like Fortune, CNN, CNBC, Fox, Financial Times, Yahoo Finance, New York Times, Bloomberg, NPR, Redfin, Broke Agent Media etc. (you can subscribe to newsletters, create Google Alerts for terms like mortgage rates/housing or have an RSS feed Zapped into Slack to automate it)
2. Plan your hook. The first line of the video is the most important. You want your hook to be understandable & attention grabbing in the first 1-2 seconds.
3. Can you be different? Most people in the same industry sound like each other. In the world of "rip off and duplicate", you need to stand out and sound different like Neel. But how? Simple, could you continue to seemingly support the negative news for a few lines but then create what's called a "reversal of expectations"? What this means is you confirm the audiences beliefs and provide more supporting information but then shift their beliefs by presenting new information or new ideas.

If you want a detailed breakdown of this check out the Notion guide I made.

Lessons from Hundreds of Thumbnails

After working on tons and tons of thumbnails, I've made numerous mistakes that has caused a low click-through-rate (CTR) of 1-3% and I've seen a dramatic shift in views when the CTR is much higher at 6-7%.

It may seem small but it's more than just hundreds or thousands of extra views.

1. Fundamentally there's only 2 things that matter on Youtube - clickthrough rate and average watch time. Or more simply, how many people click to watch your video and how long/how much of the video they actually watch. So thumbnails are part of the 20% that make 80% of the difference (Pareto's Principle). That's why some of the best people on YouTube spend thousands of dollars on thumbnails.
2. What you care about is not what the viewer cares about - Your brand doesn't matter. What YOU like barely matters. All the matters is what the viewer cares about, what's in it for them (WIIFM). Why should they watch. What will grab THEIR attention and make them click?

Now here's the checklist questions you can ask yourself about every thumbnail:

1. Is it HIGH-QUALITY imagery? - Clarity Matters. A confused mind says no.
2. Is the text simple & clear? Is it BIG, readable, brief (only a few words), and extremely easy for a 3rd grader to understand? Does it grab someone's attention?
3. Is there curiosity? Within the text + imagery, does it make you wonder, think or be intriguing enough to want to read the title & click?
4. Is there emotion? Does the FACE on the thumbnail evoke emotion through the expression or make a point? People grab attention and express convey ideas through emotion.
5. Is there action? Whether it's arrows, hands or something that conveys movement or action.
6. Is it bright or use great colors? Bright, vivid colors grab your attention more.
7. Contextually does it make sense? Does the thumbnail convey an idea (so they actually understand what the video is about) that will interest the viewer to want to click?
8. Does it read like an ad or the title? The point of the thumbnail is NOT to be the title make the entire point of the video. The ONLY PURPOSE of the thumbnail is to get them to read the title & want to click.

There are several other things to consider but these are the essentials to keep in mind when creating a thumbnail.

🔗 Marketing Resources + News

Ryan Serhants' $2.5 billion advice for recessions: 5 biggest tips & 5 golden nuggets

Phil M Jones secret cocktail to mastering convos & how to use it to follow up

How grading luxury homes helped this luxury agent go viral on TikTok *(btw I used this strategy for neighborhoods and the video has 55+ comments and over 2500 views already)

Behind the scenes of marketing 1,000 listings & what I've learned

Your 3 weekly marketing resources: email, past client engagement & social media script

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is an amazing read here's one small piece of it.

Ways you can get lucky:

1. Hope luck finds you.
2. Hustle until you stumble or run into luck.
3. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances that others miss.
4. Become the best at what you do and keep refining what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck will become your destiny.

Build and refine your character until your character becomes your destiny.

Reply & let me know more of your questions so I can make sure that I'm not just making stuff out of my head, but answering the questions you actually want.

- Andrew

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🧱 An Unfiltered Conversation with NY's #1 Mortgage Lender (Top 10 in US) | Brian Scott Cohen

Watch Now

Meet Brian Scott Cohen. This is an unfiltered conversation with Brian Scott Cohen, NY's #1 mortgage lender, top 10 in the US, and the most reachable mortgage lender in NY with over $6 billion in loans & 9,000 homeowners served.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• 00:00 - intro
• 02:15 - his story after 19 years
• 07:34 - 19,000+ TikTok followers: embracing digital
• 10:25 - overcoming tough markets
• 16:54 - high volume but high touch
• 22:55 - work life integration as a high performer
• 25:38 - over prioritizing communication
• 32:08 - becoming the knowledge broker
• 34:36 - meeting & working with Ryan Serhant for 15 years
• 40:25 - Brian's secrets for long lasting relationships
• 46:23 - educating & expanding into new markets
• 57:06 - world class leadership