How to Make Money With Social Media (My Exact Playbook) | Ep 1005

Get your personalized $100M scaling roadmap: https://www.acquisition.com/roadmap?el=yt-alex-486r&htrafficsource=youtube Algorithms reward what most people like instead of what your best buyers need. In this episode, Alex shares behind-the-scenes data on how his most-viewed videos produced zero sales while lower-viewed, advanced business videos generated the most revenue. He also shares a high-ROI content framework that maximizes revenue rather than reach. In this episode 00:00 Choosing between media and business goals 02:02 Analyzing results from views vs revenue tests 06:20 How the algorithm misleads content strategy 07:21 The vertical value content framework More Value: Book Your Spot at the 2-Day, Interactive Scaling Workshop in Las Vegas: https://www.acquisition.com/o-vegas Get the $100M Book Bundle: https://shop.acquisition.com/pages/100m-book-bundle Watch My Latest Episodes on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi/featured Learn How to Scale Your Business to Millions in Revenue: https://www.acquisition.com/ Discover The Easiest Business I Can Help You Start (Free Trial): https://www.skool.com/hormozi Additional Free Books and Video Courses: https://www.acquisition.com/training DISCLOSURE: Information shared here is for educational purposes only. Individuals and business owners should evaluate their own business strategies and identify any potential risks. The information shared here is not a guarantee of success. Your results may vary. Copyright © 2026.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Hormozi?

  What type of content should you make that makes the most money? Not necessarily gets the most reach. And so I've hit grand total of $3 billion impressions last year. We gained over $4.5 million subscribers and we did that making 35,000 pieces of content. And just to give some validity to the Mikey Money part, we did over $106 million in sales in a single weekend at my book launch. And a big reason for that was because of the content strategy. And so I want to outline high value, high ROI content strategy, which I think is different than what the vast majority of people are telling you to do. FYI, I'm also going to show you our behind the scenes data of the videos that made the most views. That one's public and more importantly, the videos that made the most money. And guess what? They're not the same. Number one is we have to answer the question like, why do you make content to begin with?

• 0:43Alex Hormozi?

  If you were somebody who makes content to sell as a media company, meaning you want to sell sponsorships and things like that, then you indirectly want to get buyers because you're getting buyers for your advertisers who are paying you dollars for ad spots, right? But the vast majority of the time advertisers don't know how to appropriately price media. And so they basically just go off of audience and views. And so when that's the case, you are incentivized to just get as many views as possible because that's the business model. But the vast majority of people who are making content are not trying to build media businesses. They're usually trying to build businesses and use media as a way to get customers. And so if that's you, then pay attention. So number one, I remember when I had my biggest belief broken around this is there was a girl lady

• 1:25Alex Hormozi?

  who had less than 5,000 or less than 6,000 followers on Instagram. And she was doing over a million dollars a year just from that. And I was like, this is crazy. When I looked at her account, she was getting like nine likes, 18 likes, 20 likes on a big post. And all she talked about was being a registered dietitian and how to bill insurance as a registered dietitian. So there's nothing about weight loss, nothing about the how to be literally just billing. And it was so niche, I was like, how is this making money? But the thing is, is that I can guarantee you that of the five or 6,000 people who were following her, almost all of them were registered dietitians who were trying to build insurance better, right? And so I decided to put this to the test. And so I've done two tests on this in my career. One I did, I think 18 months ago, where for one quarter, we made more top of funnel stuff.

• 2:08Alex Hormozi?

  Cause the idea was if we make bigger, broader content, we're going to get more overall people. And then even though it'll be a smaller percentage, it'll be a bigger absolute number of the people in that bigger net that are going to be kind of whales or our customers, right? And so after doing that quarter, what was really interesting is that we, we broke all of our views records. And so all the numbers, like all the vanity metrics were going up. The problem was book sales were down, leads were down, portfolio company applications were down. And so all of the metrics that I care about for the business were down, but all of the metrics that other people talk about for media were up. And so I had to make a decision of like, what kind of creator am I? And for me, I'm about the business. Like that is why I made it, right? That's why I started doing this to begin with was because it's a great way to build trust with an audience,

• 2:51Alex Hormozi?

  deliver value and just overall just grow. Now, I then, because I apparently like to learn the same lesson multiple times, decided to do another version of this more recently. So I wanted to show you something really, really cool. And so check this out. Now, I almost never make content that's not about business in general. And that's just because like, I like business and so that's what I make content about. Okay. And it's also where I think I have authority. I don't have authority in other spaces. I don't really talk about this much. Now, these six videos that you see here are the top most viewed videos over the last quarter. All right, you can see 1.2, 1 million, you know, 800K, 500K, 500K, 350, okay? So these are most viewed videos. So what's interesting about these videos is they made no sales.

• 3:34Alex Hormozi?

  Think about how wild that is. Zero, none. Now, what are these videos all about? All of these are, I would say beginner oriented. And that's because I have a little bit of a, a personal mission on that side, which is like, the reason I write these books is because I always wanted someone to show me how to do things better than I feel like I got help on. And so I try to make this content to help somebody else out. And for whatever reason, it makes me feel like I'm making some sort of impact, which when I'm alone at night looking at the ceiling, it makes me feel a little better. All right. That being said, from a business perspective, let's look at which videos actually generate the most revenue. So number one, most revenue video.

• 4:18Alex Hormozi?

  This was a 278,000 video. And I'll tell you this, when I made this video, I was like, this video is so good. I was like, I fucking loved it. It was my favorite video of the whole quarter, which by the way, you should check it out. I think it's fucking awesome. But it's purely about like where the money is, how to make it, how to segment customers and like the real stuff that makes money in a business. But by its very nature, it tends to talk to people who already have businesses, right? And not just like smaller businesses, enough that you can like segment customers, right? And so it's by definition going to have a smaller viewership because only 9% of people in the United States, for example, have businesses. And of those 9%, that's people who like have LLCs, including like your hairstylist and your nail salon girl. To be clear, nothing wrong with that. It's absolutely a solo entrepreneur business and there's going to be more of them.

• 5:03Alex Hormozi?

  But in terms of what this was going to impact more, and it does work for that business as well, but they might not have the data to really utilize it. And so even of businesses that are doing over, let's say a hundred thousand dollars a year, all of a sudden you take that 9%, cut it by probably two thirds, right? So it's a very, very small percentage of people who the content that I make at the most valuable level applies to. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish, I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it? And then what steps we actually took to graduate.

• 5:44Alex Hormozi?

  And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you, all free. And so these other two videos were episodes of what we're calling Cash Gals, which we're going to have a new version coming out soon. That we're calling something secretive, which I'll tell you later. But this is me going deep with businesses that are all multimillion dollar businesses, right? And so these have, you know, 100,000 views, 250,000 views. So like not super high view counts, but these are the ones that generated the most revenue. And so the reason this is so important is that the algorithm will give you the wrong signal for your business. And so the algorithm will tell you what the most people like, not the most valuable people like.

• 6:29Alex Hormozi?

  And so if you think about it, I would honestly encourage you to just watch the 51 to one rule video because it actually takes this idea of where like, if you transpose money against population, you realize visually how disproportionate it is. And so you're trying to fight for this 50% of the audience that has $2, whereas the other 50% of the audience has $98, right? A lot more. And so this is where the mistake is happening and people are taking the views as their signal for what their media strategy is going to be. And as somebody who's made this mistake multiple times, because it's hard to, it's hard to pull yourself back because it's like, wait, but what if I have a video that is generate revenue? And it's the right type of video and it gets a lot of views. It's like, well, that's Nirvana, right? That's what we call quality, right?

• 7:13Alex Hormozi?

  That's quality and volume put together. But if I had to pick between both videos, I would obviously want to pick the one that generates revenue. So then the next question is, okay, well, are there videos that are called, you know, top of funnel that are videos that kind of bring people into your world? And then videos that kind of like middle funnel, bottom of funnel, that kind of convert those people? And so I think the answer is yes and no. We want to make videos that apply in terms of value equally to people at all stages in business, which is different than only having something that's valuable for somebody who makes over a certain amount. And so if I'm going broad, I still want what I'll call vertical value. I want the starter and the hundred million dollar guy to both be able to get value from this video.

• 7:56Alex Hormozi?

  Whereas if I'm talking about how to go from one to 10, I know that video is going to absolutely tank, but it's going to bring people who are between one and 10 million or looking to get to 10 or 20 and beyond. And that is going to generate significantly more revenue because they have more buying power, even if the numbers are smaller. And so I would encourage you to do a little bit of a challenge. And so on that point of this verticalization of value, this fourth best revenue generating video is kind of a good example of that, which is if I'm talking about how the 1% actually think about money, people who are the 1% can still get a lot of value in terms of like what I'm talking about in that video. And also somebody who's brand new could get value from the video as well. And so that's kind of a video that's like, that generates dollars, but it also gets views. And see, it has more views than the top one, two, three do, right?

• 8:41Alex Hormozi?

  And all the way at the end there, that video is literally just a straight Q and A for service businesses. But it's still generated the sixth most revenue out of all videos that we made over the quarter. So this is my challenge to you. If you're afraid of making kind of deeper, more advanced content, do not be. And do not think that when you get low views, you are somehow, you know, dis-serving your audience. You're serving a different audience. And the algorithm has gotten so good at transcribing and knowing exactly what you're talking about, that they will serve it to only those people. But you have to remember that there's far fewer of the most valuable people than there are of the least valuable people. And so if you have any concepts of business strategy, the idea is you want to serve,

• 9:24Alex Hormozi?

  you either have a business that you want to serve everyone for as low cost as possible. And that's a Walmart strategy. Nothing wrong with that. That's a very hard business to run, but you can absolutely do it if you start with that day one. Or what a lot of people who get into services do, because it's significantly less scalable, is they go for the higher end of the market because that's where the money is. If you want to get more buyers in your content, you have to make videos for your buyers. And if you don't know who your buyers are, you look at your customer base, you look at the people who spent the most money, look at the top 20%, look at the common factors they have, look at what messages and problems they had, and then create messaging and video topics that solve the problems that the people with the most money in your audience had, and then make content about that. Be prepared to see your view counts go down, your subscriber counts go down, but your sales go up. Yeah. And from a tracking perspective, we just put UTMs on the links

• 10:08Alex Hormozi?

  that were below the descriptions in the videos. And I'd make CTAs inside the videos to take the next step of whatever kind, a lead magnet, whatever. And that is how we could see on the backend, how that translated into revenue for the business.