Welcome Back to Reality!

Hope everyone had an amazing Memorial Day Weekend and had a chance to spend time with loved ones. Welcome back to work.

I spent my weekend on a cruise through the Caribbean.

As I was heading to dinner on the ship, I saw this beautiful sunset and took a moment to pause.

It dawned on me that many in the USA had likely not taken a minute to stop and think about the reason behind us all being off and enjoying life on a Monday afternoon.

I want to take a moment to recognize the brave men and women who selflessly serve (and served) our country, many whom made the ultimate sacrifice and are no longer with us.

To all my fellow active and former servicemen and women, thank you for your service and dedication to protecting our freedoms.

For those who are gone, it’s our duty to THEM, to make sure they’re never forgotten. 🇺🇸

1. Top 3 Creative Formats that are CRUSHING on TikTok Shop

As you know, I’ve fully immersed myself into social commerce and have been reviewing TikTok Shop data weekly. As I help build out our affiliate strategy and execution at Avenue Z, I observe and strategize around trends I’m seeing on the platform.

I don’t think there’s been a more obvious trend to me than this one. I review the top performing TikTok Shop videos weekly and constantly see these 3 TikTok video formats appearing at the top. I’m not sure if these formats are being ranked higher in the algorithm or if these simply just perform better.

TikTok Shop is still so new and the plane is being built while it’s being flown.

Take these learnings and apply them to your current program to increase your chances of success.

Duet

@iamsk8bordb

#duet with @Itsmetho Finds #vitamind3k2 this explains a lot!! #fyp

In the last 7 days, this is THE top performing video on TikTok Shop. In just 6 days since it’s been posted, it generated $271k in revenue and 8.5m views… organically. No ad spend.

A “duet” style TikTok is a native feature and is simply created as a “reaction” to another TikTok. This is one of the easiest ways to repurpose existing content and tends to perform well since it’s raw and real.

Duets often outperform the original video that it’s created from.

Comment-Response

@influencedqueens

Replying to @Denise Dillow THE WHITE IS SO CUTE!! I ordered some color ones so ill keep you updaged but you dont need to buckle them!#TikT... See more

In the last 7 days, this is the 2nd top performing video on TikTok Shop. In just 6 days since it’s been posted, it generated $200k in revenue and 13.5m views.

A “comment-response” style TikTok is a native feature and is simply created as a video “response” to a TikTok comment. This is one of the easiest ways to draw inspiration on topics to post and generally it’s informing other viewers with a response to a question they also likely had about the brand or product. Rather than responding in written fashion, why not shoot content to engage more interactively with your followers?

This is a GREAT way to have your affiliates continue to post beyond just the first video. After their first post, they can start responding to different comments with a “comment-response” style TikTok video.

This is also how creators (and brands) can build more loyal audiences, by engaging with them!

Before & After

@ontopshopfinds

I’ve been using this neck firming cream for about a month and a half because I wanted to see if it actually worked. It did! #Gopure #Turke... See more

In the last 30 days, this is THE top performing video on TikTok Shop. So far, it’s generated $652k in revenue and 6.4M views.

Before & After videos are easily the best format to use whenever you have a functional product. If your product makes someone or something look or feel visibly better, there is simply no better format to use. Another major benefit is that this content is often banned/prohibited on other social ad platforms.

TikTok Shop is an outlet where you can test this style of content through affiliates quite easily.

Have the “before” image as an overlay on your screen and shoot a video pointing out how it looks now after using X product.

This style content works great for supplements, beauty products, cleaning products & more.

2. Top 10 Insights I’ve Learned from Building My Personal Brand

This past week, I blew past 10k followers on 𝕏, thanks to a few posts that went viral. In the last 28 days alone, I’ve generated 22M (🤯) impressions and over 5k new followers. I’m now sitting at 11.5k.

I’ve learned a lot since focusing on building an audience online.

💥 Here are my top 10 insights to grow an audience:

1. Stay Consistent

   Whether it's your posting schedule, the quality of your content, or your message, staying consistent helps build trust and recognition with your audience. When people see that you’re consistent, they know that you’re reliable. I also suspect that consistent posting (investment in the platform) is heavily rewarded in the algorithm.

2. Focus on Storytelling

   Use storytelling to connect emotionally with your audience, share your journey, and convey your personal values. Stories are memorable and can significantly enhance the impact of your message. It also humanizes you in a way and makes people become invested in your journey.

3. Set Clear Goals

   If you don’t have good goals, you’re operating in the dark.

   Know what you want to achieve with your personal brand and set goals that are aligned with your purpose. Whether it's follower count or conversions, use these goals to guide your content.

4. Be Authentic

   Don’t censor your personality out of your content.

   In a world where AI is everywhere, authentic human voices are a breath of fresh air. The more authentic you are, the more strongly your audience will relate to your content and support your brand.

5. Be Confident (not Arrogant)

   Don’t be afraid to demonstrate your expertise and authority.

   Present yourself and your ideas with confidence, but remain humble and open to learning. Confidence attracts followers and opportunities. Humility maintains them.

6. Embrace Criticism (it’s inevitable)

   Get rid of your ego. As you grow an audience, you’re bound to be criticized publicly and behind your back- even when it’s not justified. Embrace this early on. Use it as motivation to keep going.

   If the criticism is justified, let it wash over you. Reflect. Introspect. Draw learnings and get better from the experience. It’s part of your journey.

7. Provide Value

   Every piece of content should add value to your audience's life, whether it’s:

   • Insights

   • Inspiration

   • Information

   • Entertainment

   Don’t tweet or post just for the sake of it. If your post does not land in one of the above buckets, it likely is not well-served online and will be counterproductive to your brand and follower growth.

8. Engage with Others

   Engagement is a two-way street. This is social media. Be social.

   Respond to comments, ask questions, and join conversations.

   Engagement increases your visibility and shows your audience that you care about them, not just their views or likes.

9. Show Your Personality

   Don't be afraid to let your unique traits show. Your personality is what sets you apart from others. Whether it’s your humor, empathy, or passion, let your audience see the real you so they know who they’re supporting.

10. Don’t Overthink

    A slow day or week won’t make or break your success. You’re going to have periods of slow growth. Instead of panicking and adjusting content strategy to chase engagement, be patient and trust the process. Don’t over-engineer your content. Let it be raw and spontaneous, not dry and contrived.

3. Google’s SEO Documentation Has Leaked!

Over the weekend, a MAJOR leak transpired that gave away insights on Google’s search algorithm. This is probably the most significant leak to ever come out of Google.

Here’s a summary of the key takeaways:

• Leaked info is accurate/fresh as of March 2024

• 2,596 modules are represented in the API documentation with 14,014 attributes.

• Weighting: Not divulged how each attribute is weighted, just that they exist as having an impact.

• Twiddlers: These help adjust rankings of content over time.

• Demotions: Content can be penalized based on any of the following:

  • A link doesn’t match target site

  • User dissatisfaction

  • Product reviews

  • Location

  • Exact match domains

  • Pornography

• Change history: Google only uses the last 20 changes of a URL when analyzing links.

• Links do matter: Link diversity + relevance and PageRank all matter.

• Successful clicks matter: Google uses a variety of measurements, including badClicks, goodClicks, lastLongestClicks and unsquashedClicks.

• Brand and Entities matter: Google stores author information associated with content and tries to match entity to the author.

• SiteAuthority: Google uses something called “siteAuthority”

• Chrome data. Google uses data from its Chrome browser for search ranking via ChromeInTotal

• Whitelists. Google whitelists certain domains related to elections and COVID – isElectionAuthority and isCovidLocalAuthority.

• Small sites. Another feature is smallPersonalSite – Google identifies whether or not a website is “a small personal site or blog.” The jury is out on whether or not this positively or negatively impacts such sites.

• Freshness matters: Google looks at dates in the byline (bylineDate), URL (syntacticDate) and on-page content (semanticDate)

• Core Competency/Topics of a Site: Google vectorizes pages and sites, then compares the page embeddings (siteRadius) to the site embeddings (siteFocusScore) to determine if content on a site is core to its existence.

• Page titles still matter. Google has a feature called titlematchScore that is believed to measure how well a page title matches a query.

This is a significantly abbreviated version of the document leak.

This has major ramifications on SEO strategy moving forward. SEO is a significant component of our agency’s service offering and our team is digging through everything as we speak.

For more information, you can read more here.

Should You Post Video Content on 𝕏?

Today, Elon Musk came out and stated what many suspected: posts that contain external links to video content have severely limited reach vs those that upload direct videos in 𝕏.

This seems obvious as any website/app/platform wants to increase time spent WITHIN its walled gardens. The more eyeballs = the more impressions they can serve = the more ads they can serve.

Take note and adjust your content strategy on 𝕏!

What I’m Listening to 🎧

Beats of the Week: Sugar Free Radio (November 1, 2014) by Rony Seikaly

An oldie, but a goodie. The past month has been pretty slow with new music so I’m gonna throw it back a decade back to 2014 to one of my favorite mixes of all time. Rony made an appearance on one of my first newsletters, but I’m going to bring him back. His style 10 years ago was a bit different and highlights the diversity of his music. This one makes for phenomenal background music while you’re working. Super groovy.

I welcome all feedback. Good, bad, everything in between.

Hit reply, and let’s hear it! 👂

📧 Share your thoughts or what you want me to cover next!