# How ‘Regular’ People Are Making Millions From Social Media

Channel: Kallaway
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqzd0h0gmU0
Duration: 21 min
Language: English
Words: 4574
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/bqzd0h0gmU0

---

[0:00] The social media playbook is about to change forever, and that's because regular people have figured out how to use content to build generational wealth. And I want to be specific here. I'm not talking about influencers. I'm not talking about professional creators with massive budgets. I'm talking about normal people, regular business owners who have cracked the code on how to scale with content without it taking over their life. Now, I've spent the last few months obsessively studying this archetype of content maker. And what I realized is that most of these normal business owners are playing the content game completely differently than

[0:34] what most professional creators preach. So, in this video, I'm going to break down the secret sauce for how they're doing it. These are the six non-obvious principles for how regular people are winning the content game without spending hours making videos. By the way, if you don't know me, I'm Callaway. I have a million followers. I've done billions of views, and content is all I do all day long. All right, here's non-obvious principle number one. Most people think to win with content, you've got to be everywhere all at once. Every platform, every content type, heavy

[1:02] volume, machine-gunning insights 24/7. But regular people are not playing the content game in this way. They do the exact opposite. Normal people understand they don't have 28 working hours in a day. They accept that building a business and making content is like having two jobs in one. And doing both full-time while balancing their life is

[1:23] unsustainable and will lead to burnout. So, to minimize their effort on content but still maximize their results, they narrow their focus and minimize the set of unknowns. They pick one content type, either short-form or long-form video, one content platform, either Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and they focus obsessively on cracking just that for 6 months in a row. Only when that first content type is figured out and systematized do they pick their head up and look to add something else to the plate. This is one of the secrets for how regular business owners are making millions from social media. They start by doing less on purpose because they

[1:59] know doing more will lead to everything breaking. Here's the trap most people fall into. They study the biggest creators in their industry, see that they're on every single platform across every content type. Stories, posts, short-form video, long-form video, live streams, podcast, Twitter, newsletter, and on and on. And when they see that, they assume they need all that in order to win. But here's the truth. You don't need all that in order to build a

[2:23] business that does millions in revenue. To build a hundred million-dollar personal brand, you definitely need to be everywhere all at once. But most real business owners aren't after that. They don't want or need it. Now, this is probably a relief to hear, but it's actually easier to grow bigger when you narrow your focus and only play on one platform at a time. Because by doing

[2:42] this, you get much better, much faster. And this is what the non-professional, regular business owner creator has figured out. Imagine spinning five plates versus just one. You might be able to keep all five up, but it's inevitable that the speed those five are rotating will always be slower than the one that you're just hammering every day. Now, personally, I've lived this. I started with just short-form only for the first 12 months because the data loops were tighter, the feedback was faster, and I could compound the learning curve quicker. And I used that as a bedrock to build my content skills

[3:13] to then eventually add long-form later. But I spent literally 12 months on just short-form before I even thought about adding YouTube. The regular business owners that are making millions from social media, they aren't trying to boil the ocean. They focus on one spot obsessively until they crack it. Now, the second most obvious learning I

[3:30] figured out builds on this first point. Because the next logical question is, if I should only focus on one platform, what should it be? Normal business owners winning with content keep it super simple. They just focus on the platform where the highest density of their customers spend the most time. They don't pick the platforms they personally like watching the most. They don't pick what's trendy. They go with what the data says. Where does the highest density of my customers live? In other words, they fish where the fish are. If you're a B2B services company, you're not going to have strong lead gen on TikTok. So, don't even worry about

[4:02] spending time there initially. Are your direct competitors winning with TikTok? Do you have proof that a high density of your customers spend more time there than anywhere else? If not, you should completely ignore that platform for now. Because when you have limited time resources like every business owner does, tradeoffs are a relative game. It's not that zero customers in total spend time on TikTok, but relatively speaking, it's just not the highest

[4:25] leverage place you could be focusing on. For B2B services, for example, you should be spending all of your time on either LinkedIn or YouTube, depending on the product. If you're a commodity consumer products company, well then TikTok or Instagram might make sense. And the list goes on and on with every example. Now, I made another video breaking down every social platform and exactly which business should prioritize playing there. I'll link it below if you want to watch it. But the takeaway is business owners focus solely on the platform where the most of their customers live. That is what you need to do. All right, the third non-obvious

[4:56] learning is about formats. And this one is really interesting. Normal business owners just don't have the time to spend editing these crazy fancy formats. So, what we're seeing is a mass migration from the fancy, heavy visual formats down to the simpler ones. Lots of business owners have found a niche in between the super unedited, rambly, raw yaps and the highly edited, crazy visual

[5:19] cinematic pieces that we typically see. Most business owners are playing in the middle. And these types of visual formats take way less time to make but are still driving insane results. Now, this is happening because we've officially entered the storytelling phase of social media. If you haven't noticed, storytelling formats like these, where creators tell their first-person point of view, are absolutely outperforming almost anything else on social right now. And this is happening both because of an increase in AI content as well as the commoditization of lower-value educational content. This combo, a shift to storytelling as well as a constraint for bandwidth to edit, has given birth

[5:54] to lower-lift formats that are crushing. I'm talking about things like scenarios, ranking, tier list, three levels. These are lower-lift formats that can be one-shotted and edited fully on an iPhone. And this is exactly what a lot of business owners are winning with right now. Now, if you're someone that hasn't figured out exactly what winning format you should go with, I actually built a visual database of all the top 20 formats that we're seeing across

[6:18] educational and storytelling content. And it's really all you need to figure out where to experiment and which formats to try. It's completely free. I've linked it below if you want to get access. All right, non-obvious learning number four is all about how these normal business owners are turning views into dollars. Because them crushing on social media is both about their content systems as well as the monetization playbook they're using. Specifically, how are they so effective at turning this traffic into cash? And this is probably the most important point in the entire video. Business is actually

[6:46] extremely simple when you boil it down. It's just traffic, funnels, and offers. You got to get someone to know you exist, take that person down a path, and then get them to give you money for something. Most business owners understand this deeply. And so, before they make content, they focus on dialing in a validated offer with proof. This is critical. Validated offer before content. By doing it in this order, they know exactly what content to make on which platform because they know who their customer is. This results in a much tighter content-offer fit. The truth is, you can figure out how to make content work for almost any offer, but

[7:23] you can't always make any offer work for any audience. So, the takeaway and what all these normal business owners crushing on social media have done is that they built a validated offer first before laying the content rails. Now, most people don't do this because the offer validation part of business is the boring part. They want the dopamine, so they jump straight into the content, and they tell themselves, "I'll just build an audience and can figure out the offer later." But from personal experience, this is the wrong order to do things in

[7:49] and will likely lead you into a trap. So, here are the exact tactical steps I recommend for helping build and craft that validated offer first. And the good news is, this doesn't actually take that long to do, maybe a couple weeks if you hustle. If you're struggling to figure out who to sell to, start with any domain expertise that you have. If you have unique knowledge about any industry, go to the players in that space, interview them, and try to figure out where they have gaps. Based on what they say, go develop your skill set around that if you don't already have it. If you have skill set but no domain

[8:19] knowledge, you're going to have to pick some industry and then also go talk to people in that space. So, either way, whether you start with skills or knowledge about a domain, you're going to need both, and both lead to talking to someone in the industry to figure out what they want. From there, when you talk to them, figure out what they're willing to give up in order to get that result. Is it money? Is it time? Is it both? Sometimes they just want to be coached, and they'll do the majority of the work. Other times, they want a done-for-you service, and they'll spend no other time on it. Even other times,

[8:49] they just want a tool and want you to leave them alone. You need to figure out which delivery model best drives value for them and maps to a lifestyle that you want. People don't talk about this, but business model-lifestyle fit is actually important for the average business owner. If you don't want to run a done-for-you services agency, well then don't. But there's only so many business models you can choose from. You either charge high, medium, or low, one-time or recurring, and then you either tell the customer what to do, do it for them, give them a tool, or some combination of those three. Those are the three axes of business model

[9:21] construction. Now, once you craft the three combinations of those things that you want, and you build the full offer out, you then need to go actually deliver it for real customers to prove that it actually works. This is the validation part. Once you have proof of getting the results you claim, you now have a validated offer. And only then do you start making content because now you know the exact type of customer, what they need, and what they'll pay. This what I just described is how regular

[9:47] people approach business and marketing. It's offer, then content, not the other way around. All right, the fifth non-obvious learning for how these normal business owners are winning so big on content is about mindset and expectations. The common wisdom from most business gurus that you'll hear is to think in decades. And the truth is, the average business owner on social media doesn't really have the patience for that, but they've still acknowledged they need to play in years instead of weeks. The reason you haven't gotten to where you want to go yet can be most simply explained by just you not having spent enough time doing it. I know I'm

[10:19] starting to sound a little Hormozi-ish, but he's right about this and it's the truth. Most things we're doing require 1 year to get average, 3 years to get good, and 5 years to get world-class. Now, with AI, those timelines are compressing, but it's kind of foolish to expect to go from zero to amazing in like 6 weeks. You never expect to learn a language from scratch in 6 weeks, so why do you expect to build a million-dollar business on social media in 6 weeks? The problem is that most people set their expectations for success comparing against somebody who's actually spent 5 years doing the thing under the surface. My point by saying

[10:50] this is that the regular people, the normal business owners that are crushing on social media, they've accepted this fact and they jump straight to the beginning. That hockey stick chart, it looks like a hockey stick for a reason. Never has there ever been an entrepreneur that's been able to go through the flat part of that curve without losing over and over. Once you accept that the notches on the graph of the hockey stick are years instead of weeks, the game becomes a lot easier and you'll get a lot more patient. Most of the content game is just tricking yourself into not quitting and as soon as you accept this years versus weeks

[11:19] dynamic, things get a lot easier. Another biggest non-obvious learning I had when studying how these regular business owners are printing millions on social media is this. They are all aggressively building content systems. [music] If there's one thing to prioritize and invest in for the next few years, it is this. Because systems are how you actually free up your time without giving up the result. Let's be really honest. Very few people watching this actually want to spend all day making content. They're the artists, for sure, but if you're a business owner, you want to spend minimum effort on this, get your business to grow, and then enjoy your time with your family

[11:54] and the rest of your life. The only way to get off the content treadmill while still getting the results it brings is by building what I call a content machine. And this is really what all these regular business owners have figured out. This is the secret sauce to their success. A content machine is a system that is specifically using data to tell you exactly what content to make because it has the highest chance of turning views into leads. Essentially, you put time into one side of the factory and cash flow comes out the other. What happens in the middle is content creation. Now, the reason I've

[12:24] personally had so much success with content on every platform I've tried is because I obsessively pursue setting up these content machines. It's the only way I can produce this much output. And here's the playbook that I run every single time. First, I obsess over manually learning how to make content at a seven out of 10 quality on whatever that platform is. Then, once I have the foundation, I obsess over reducing the time per rep at a seven out of 10 quality as low as I can go. And this is with a combination of systems, AI workflows, and humans in the loop. Once I have the base system set, I then push

[12:56] quality up to a nine out of 10, often breaking the system. I then rebuild the system so that it works pumping out at nine out of 10. Then, once it's at nine out of 10, I twist the knob to ratchet up volume while still staying at the nine of 10. That's how I build a system. My last step is to open-source that system for all of you on this channel so you don't have to waste all the time figuring out how to do it. Now, I've determined the most valuable thing I could do for the business and marketing world is to make those content systems available. So, for the first time, I

[13:24] finally have them available for both short-form and long-form. If you want to get access to my entire short-form content system for free, it's at shortformsystem.co. I'll link it below. If you want to get access to the YouTube one, it's available at calloway.co/youtube blueprint. We'll link that below as well. Now, to make sure you're still getting one of one tactical value in this video, I'm just going to summarize the most important parts of the system right here. It's very simple and straightforward. You can tell I like to simplify things all the way down to the atomic unit, but I do recommend taking notes on this because this will be

[13:52] something you can put to work right away after you watch this. For short-form system building, it's all about figuring out what content works so you can build the machine around it. Ultimately, the answer we want to get to is what content formula or recipe seems to outperform at a 5x or more outlier for consistently driving leads. That is the only thing we're focused on. The system is building a structure to get to that answer. So, here's exactly how you're going to

[14:17] approach this for short-form content. First, you need to accept that you're going to make batches of 10 videos. Single videos have too much volatility and it's way too hard to predict trends off one, so instead you're going to make batches of 10, not one. In the first batch, you're going to pick 10 outliers from other channels in your space that have already outperformed well. An outlier is any video that's a 5x or better in terms of views. So, if the average views is 1,000, any video over 5,000 will be a 5x or more outlier. Now, when you find those outliers, you're going to keep everything the same except

[14:48] change the substance of the video to swap in some non-obvious point of view that you have. Everything else the same. The topic, the format, the hook, the story structure, editing as close as you can. Now, the best way to find these outliers in the first place is to go to sandcastles.ai. Go to the channels tab and first build your watch list of the 20 to 30 channels that best approximate the audience you're going for. Who is the best in the niche at making content for that audience? You want to aggregate those channels in your watch list. Now, you can either paste in the channels manually if you already know who they

[15:18] are, go up to that link icon in the upper right, click it, and then paste them in. Or, you can describe what type of content you make in the description box and Sandcastle will proactively suggest channels for you to add in. Either way, you need to get that list of channels, that's critical. Now, once you have that list dialed in, go to the videos tab. You can now see all the videos from just those channels in one place. You can then sort on the upper right by outlier score, which will bring the best ones, the best performing videos to the top. That little green number with the X on it below every

[15:48] video, that's the outlier score. So, you're looking for 5x or more. Now, if you've used Sandcastle before, there was a brand new update out in the last week to make this next part insane. For any of the videos you see in that grid that look interesting, hover over it and click save to vault. You'll notice that anytime you do this, the vault does a deep analysis of those videos. Once processed, if you click on that video in the vault tab, you will see a complete breakdown of everything about it. Full transcript, explanation for why that idea worked so well, the hook format, the hook text, the storytelling

[16:18] analysis, the visual analysis, everything you would need. Now, if you like this video after you watch it and analyze it, and you want this to be one of your first 10 in batch number one, click shortlist idea or type S on your keyboard. This will add this video as inspiration for your idea shortlist. You want to do this 10 times on 10 different

[16:35] videos to represent your first batch. Now, when you go to the ideas tab, you will see those 10 videos that you shortlisted in order for you. You can now make your own version of these videos either using any AI tool you want or Sandcastle's built-in script flow. If you want to remix these in Sandcastle's with the new script flow, just press create script. It will bring that outlier over as inspiration and you can tweak based on your description on what you want to change. If you'd rather just use ChatGPT or Claude cuz you have a workflow you like, go to the original video analysis in the vault, click more

[17:05] actions, and then click export to LLM. This will package all the analysis about that video into a single prompt that you can drop into Claude and it will converse with you to help you build your own version. If you tried Sandcastle in the past, it didn't have a lot of this functionality. Most of this is brand new. It is now the Ferrari of content research. Now, to zoom all the way back out to our system, the whole goal of this process was to get the 10 videos for batch number one. So, using Sandcastle is the best data-backed way to find the 10 that have the best chance

[17:32] of hitting. So, let's say you found those 10, you made those 10, and you posted them. Now, based on those 10, you want to look at the metrics in whatever platform you posted and you want to see were any of your versions also a 5x plus outlier based on your average views? If so, then you've created your own outlier. And in your next batch of 10, the second batch, three of those 10 videos should be replications of the winner you made. The other seven, you're going to go back to Sandcastle and run this again. The goal is to keep making batches of 10 until you get three viral

[18:04] winners, three recipes of videos that are at least a 5x outlier that you replicated. Once you do this and have three recipes, you will essentially have built a content machine that takes very limited incremental effort to just post new videos and drive leads for your business. This is really how you build a content system that is data-backed. And this is what the normal business owners that are crushing, they're all doing this. They're not taking eight hours to

[18:26] make a video they're just guessing on. They're using data to de-risk their effort and increase their hit rate. Now, tools like Sandcastle did not exist even as early as 2 years ago, but now normal people can win on social media with real data-backed strategies because of this tool. So, that kind of was in a nutshell how you attack the content system part of it using data with Sandcastle. Now, let me zoom all the way out and just recap. What is the playbook from these six learnings? What really did I take away when I analyzed these normal business owners? What are they doing that works so well? This is the playbook

[18:58] in a nutshell. It's one offer, one content type, one content platform for one customer avatar. They start by making the offer before they make content. They build and validate it with real customers. Then they make one type of content on one platform, either short-form or long-form video, and they focus obsessively on growing that, figuring it out for 6 months. They choose the platform they post on based on where the majority of the customers they want spend the most time. When they do start making content, they use a content system that is data-backed to reduce their risk and increase the hit rate probability. They fully trust this

[19:32] content system because it's based on data and not intuition. They do this day in and day out and after a couple years, they have a seven-figure business. This is actually how regular people, regular business owners are building million-dollar businesses on social media. If I told you all you had to do was focus and in two to three years there was a very high probability that you would have a six- or seven-figure business, you would do it. But, the reason you haven't is because you're trying to chase these shiny objects that

[19:56] just print all this money in a weekend. That's really not how business works. There are millions of regular people making millions on the internet. I genuinely want you to be one of the next ones that does it. If you want help, just follow this channel, watch the videos. If you want direct access to me, I've got some stuff below, you can check it out. But, either way, this is the playbook. All right, guys, that is all I've got for this video. As always, I'm trying my absolute best to just cover stuff in marketing and business that you really don't hear everywhere else. In this video, I broke down the framework

[20:23] to the six most non-obvious lessons for how regular business owners are crushing right now on social media. They're not playing the same game as influencers or pro creators, they're doing it a different way. What I think is easier and more data-backed. [music] If you're a business owner and you're struggling with any part of the content stack, whether it be skill stacking, systems building, or scaling, I've got a bunch of stuff in the description to help you with that. My goal, as I've stated, is to help 1 million business owners make 1 million in revenue. That's 1 trillion in market cap, and I'm dedicating my career to making that happen. Now, I have lots

[20:53] of resources in the description to help you with this, but like I said, the best one, and it's free, is my entire short-form content system. If you make short-form, there's no reason to not get this. shortformsystem.co, it's completely free. It'll take you through all the steps you need to kind of run the system I went through, but

[21:08] step-by-step it in a much deeper way. All right, that's all I've got. We'll see you guys on the next one. Peace.

---

About this transcript
Read from YouTube's own caption track and laid out by ViewRank AI (https://viewrankai.com).
ViewRank AI finds the videos already beating a creator's own average on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, transcribes them from the audio itself in more than 60 languages, and turns what worked into new ideas and scripts.
Free transcript tools, no account needed: https://viewrankai.com/tools
How to read any video this way: https://viewrankai.com/llms.txt