SPI 905: I’m Ready to Share the Short-Form Formula for Viral Growth!

SPI 905: I’m Ready to Share the Short-Form Formula for Viral Growth!

Pat Flynn: Okay, here are some crazy stats. Video content is projected to make up about 82 percent of all internet traffic by the end of 2025. So, basically, now. Which is insane. And for short form videos in particular, 90 percent of millennials, 92 percent of Gen Z, say they watch short form video content frequently or sometimes. Boomers, who are a little bit older, of course, about 58%.

But of course, for the younger generation, Gen Alpha, and the generations to come, I mean, this is 100 percent of their content in general. Short form content, a lot of marketers say, is the content format that they plan to invest more in next year.

And around 75 percent of video viewing now happens on mobile devices. So here is the thing. If you are not creating videos, you are missing out. And more specifically, if you are not creating short form videos, you are missing out on the easiest opportunity to generate views, to generate an audience, and therefore, build your business on.

Yes, long form video is still king in my opinion, but the barrier to entry to create a well worthwhile long form video to create and of course then to watch as an audience member is much, much higher. The barrier to entry to a short form video audience is at an all time low right now and this is why we are investing heavily into promoting short form video, into creating short form video, and to helping you create short form video as well in many different ways.

For example, inside of our community, we just launched a brand new course. Short Form Formula. Short Form Formula. This is brand new for people who are already community members. You don’t have to pay anything extra. That’s what our community’s about getting access to the latest and greatest stuff. However, if you want to check out the community, head on over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community of course, and you can get involved there.

More than that, there is a challenge coming your way as well, and this is starting on January 12th, so we want to get ahead of it. This is, of course, the sort of December episode leading up to that challenge, and that begins on January 12th. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. But I want to talk more about short form video and sort of what it’s done.

A lot of you know that last year, there was even an episode about this. I started a experiment. on TikTok and shorts on YouTube. And it blew up. This is the Deep Pocket Monster slash Short Pocket Monster. This is a Pokemon channel that is now seeing 10 million views a day. 10 to 12 million views per day. The first 30 days I wasn’t getting a lot of views and on day 35 it exploded.

And I’ve told this story many times and I’m going to continue to tell it again because The audiences are there. And they’re there without you having to worry about being perfect. They’re there without you having to spend a ton of time in creation mode. But you do have to hit record and you do have to hit publish.

And doing this on a daily basis is going to be the best key to getting started. Do you have to keep it up daily for an entire year or longer? No. However, I am approaching episode 500 of Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed. Not to mention the fact that it is provided a lot of access to opportunities that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

For example, I now have a relationship with Kiki Hernandez from the LA Dodgers who follows my channel. There have been a lot of connections with other celebrities, both sports players and musicians, who are, you know, closet Pokemon nerds who grew up with Pokemon, who are involved in Pokemon, who, you know, now watch my channel who want to work together or collab.

You know, these things can happen, which is so crazy. And what am I doing? Every day I’m doing a repeatable format. I’m opening a pack of cards. It’s just built around that, a pack of Pokemon cards. Now I’m not the first person to do that, which is why the Framework, the structure and the way that you present these videos is going to be really key, right?

You want to create a formula that people can get involved with every single day, right? You’re not building a relationship in a 60 minute chunk. You’re building a relationship across small one minute chunks 60 times within two months. And this challenge that’s coming up in January is a 30 day video challenge.

And this is one that we’re going to help you figure out what your framework is, what your repeatable format is, and the structure of it is, to help you understand how to quickly create this and put it out there, not just on one platform, but many platforms, and do this in a way that you can fit it into your busy lifestyle.

Because I was able to do this. I was able to do this despite, of course, being a father and a husband, so managing, you know, and helping with the family at home and doing all those things, not just disappearing into a hole and creating these videos, CEO and founder of several companies, not to mention the long form videos that are still coming out on the Pat Flynn channel on YouTube, and, of course, Deep Pocket Monster, which is really, really close to hitting 2 million subscribers.

We might be crossing that path very soon. But just to give you some perspective, that channel started in 2021. If you’re still The long form channel Deep Pocket Monster, the short form channel Short Pocket Monster, which I didn’t link to, On Deep Pocket Monster, I didn’t let anybody know about this. I let the algorithms do the work for me, which they can, they will.

Again, if you show up and be consistent. We’re at 2.4 million subscribers now on YouTube, and we should hit 3 million within the first quarter next year. And just to give you some perspective on what this has now opened up, not just the connections to these celebrities, which is kind of cool, but it is provided an additional near six figure revenue, because of the ad revenue across multiple platforms and the brand deals and sponsorships.

Just recently, I can’t say any brand names. But, I’m in discussions with different brands around the $35,000 to $50,000 sponsorship deal. $35,000 for brands that want to get in front of this audience of millions now. And, a lot of brands and marketers are now looking towards short form video and short form video creators and short form video influencers, if you want to call them that.

I don’t like calling them that. But authorities, people who have reach, are able to generate a lot of revenue now from these brand deals and sponsorships because, again, these brands and companies know that this is where people are. They’re watching short form video. And, even if you’ve never created video before, this is a perfect opportunity for you.

It’s a perfect opportunity. It’s a lower barrier to entry to get started. You don’t need to spend a As much time to create these videos. You just need a good hook. You just need a good hook. Attention spans are getting shorter, so you might as well meet them where they are. I know there’s some people, I’ve even shared this with some people in my mastermind group, and they push back a little bit.

They say, I don’t know if I want to do that, because I want to create more noise out there. I want to create longer form content, blog posts, emails, yes, email is still important, podcast episodes, long form YouTube videos, yes. You can still do that, but you are missing out on the millions of people who are out there who could discover you today if you had your content out there.

And once they find your content, once they follow it, whether they subscribe or not, as long as they engage with it or watch it, right? So you have the, not the click and stick strategy, which is what we talk about in our YouTube course, our long form YouTube course, YouTube From Scratch. This is going to be.

A flick and stick, right? Because they’re flicking their thumb up and down the sort of feed, and there is no thumbnails. I mean, the thumbnails still are a key component for people who see it on their homepage. If you go to the homepage of YouTube, you’ll see a thumbnail of a short, for sure. So thumbnails are still important, but not as important as the first two seconds of your video.

What is moving? What is the question? What open loop are you creating to help people stick around? And what’s really neat is with these. Small videos, you know, up to three minutes. I like them just over a minute. It depends on the kind of video or the kind of style that you have and how much time you need to do what you need to do.

But you could take that one video and put it on let’s, let’s count. We could put it on, of course, YouTube and YouTube shorts. We can take that literal same video. You don’t have to create more content to get more potential reach. You can repurpose it by just simply uploading that same video. And don’t even worry about creating separate call to actions.

Some people do that across these different platforms, but you don’t need to do that. Take the same video. That’s what I’ve been doing. You take that short video and you publish it on Instagram. That’s two. So that’s YouTube and Instagram Reels. And then you publish it on TikTok, of course. So that’s three.

But you also have A Facebook page that you can set up and even if you don’t want to engage there, I don’t, I don’t like Facebook but I have it there because I know I can reach people and there are people who’ve recently purchased my t shirt that goes along with this should I open it or should I keep it sealed brand who said that specifically they found me on Facebook and I’m just repurposing the same videos there.

And that’s just four, right? You can also publish these on X, on LinkedIn, I’m even experimenting on Snapchat. I’ve made over 10k on Snapchat. Yes, Snapchat. Which, I’ve recently heard from the people over at Snapchat that they have more combined active users than Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok combined, which I find hard to believe, but then I think about it.

I’m like, Oh, this is where the 13 to 21 year old crowd is. And for Pokemon, it makes sense for other channels. It may make sense for others. It may not, but I wouldn’t worry about it. In fact, I feel really old when I’m on the Snapchat platform. I’m pretty good with technology, right? I dabble with a lot of different tech pieces and platforms.

Snapchat is just weird, bro. It is so weird. And I just, I’m still trying to figure it out. You take that one video that you create every day, and if this were easy, what would it look like? How can you do this in a repeatable fashion? How might you batch process this so that you can get ahead? In fact, I know I’m kind of jumping all over the place here, but I recently got back from Hawaii.

I was in Hawaii for Thanksgiving with my family. It was beautiful. It was warm. We had some great food, great scenery, great times. We did a bunch of escape rooms while there for some reason. It was so much fun as a family creating all these memories together. And guess what? I was still able to create content every day because the week prior to that, instead of creating a video every day and then publishing it, I created two videos.

Every day. But I published one, so that by the time the next week rolled around, I had a batch or sort of a bucket or a collection of videos that I could just publish out during Thanksgiving week, and still remain consistent. Completed all that without doing too much extra work. Just getting ahead. Batch processing.

And doing this in short form is so much easier because it’s so much easier. Easier to create short form video, right? As opposed to creating a batch number of episodes of podcasts or batch long form videos or batch emails or batch blog posts that takes a lot more effort.

Now, there’s three pillars that I want to talk about here when it comes to growing authority online that we want to use short form video for, and again, I want to encourage you to check out our new course. If you aren’t in the community already, you can check it out. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/shortform, you could check it out and just kind of read about it, get involved.

Community powered courses are the way to go for sure. But again, the challenge is coming in January where I’m going to challenge you. It’s going to be initiated on Instagram, so make sure you’re following me on Instagram if you’re not. @PatFlynn. You’ll see a post leading up to this challenge where you can get involved and we’ll send you messages to get you prepared for it.

Free to join. Just follow me on Instagram and you won’t miss it. @ PatFlynn. And of course, join the Unstuck Newsletter, all that stuff. We’re gonna make sure we announce it there as well. But this challenge will hold you accountable. To give you what you need to create these daily videos and to do that for 30 days.

And the goal is to help you already see some results, an audience that you’re building, some momentum when it comes to creation and helping you frame your head around what is this repeatable format that you’re creating. This is how you make it easy. It’s not random every day. There’s some sort of format that you can kind of follow and go from there, whether it’s day one of whatever, or experimenting with something for 30 days, or you just kind of check and publish your process as sort of a journal every single day.

There’s various ways to go about it. But the three pillars you need to build authority that I’ve mentioned before are, number one, consistency, which again, short form video is great for because it’s small spurts every single day. It’s clarity, so what is it that you’re saying, this format that you’re doing, this repeatable format, and how clear is it that a person should stick around to see what’s till the end?

How clear is it of what the outcome is going to be? How clear are you? In what you’re trying to say and how you’re building a relationship with your audience. And then finally, the confidence. And that can only come by hitting publish. You’re going to get a lot of data coming in, more data than you could ever imagine when it comes to these short form videos across all these platforms.

You’re going to have more understanding of what works and what doesn’t. You’re going to be more likely to get to that comfort point much, much sooner by, again, hitting up that short form video process. This is a huge opportunity for all of us today. And as we do here, we don’t just say things, we do things.

I always lead by example. And this is why I haven’t shared this yet until now, because I’ve been able to prove it, and stick with it, and develop a formula for it. This is the Short Form Formula. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/shortform, and follow me on Instagram at   @PatFlynn because the challenge is gonna start, it’s gonna initiate there, I’ll help you keep track every single day where you’re at, I’m gonna encourage you, I’m gonna share some wins from the community there as well, and this is gonna go down on January 12th after the new year.

We wanna start off the new year with a bang, and that, in my opinion, should be with short form video. Now, again, there’s going to be a lot of people out there who will say short form video isn’t worth the time because you aren’t able to build a relationship, but you are. You’re not doing this in one long form video with one chance.

You’re doing this with many short form videos with a lot of chances because some of those videos that you do are just not going to go anywhere and that’s okay. You just hit record the next day and hit publish and then you’re good and you kind of just continue to try to build that momentum and eventually one of those videos is going to hit.

And then you find out what it is about that video that hit, and then you kind of lean into that a little bit, and then you go further, and then you can create a sub series, and then you can go from there. And the opportunity far outweighs the risk. With long form, which again, I am I’m not saying don’t do long form, but if you’ve been trying long form, or if you’ve been struggling to get it done, then let’s focus instead on the short form content with a lot more room for error, a lot more room for play, a lot more room for experimentation, and just think about it, after 30 days, if you go weekly, how many chances do you have of something hitting?

Four. One per week. If you go daily, how many chances do you have of something hitting? of finding a stride, of getting data, of learning. You have 30 opportunities to do that, and across an entire year, you have 52 versus 365. So, I know that I sound like I’m a broken record right now, but the short form video is the opportunity that’s right in front of you right now.

You are probably consuming a lot of short form video. If you are, and you’re not creating, then you’re just going to be, you know, in absorption mode, we want to be in creation mode. If you haven’t been watching short form video, maybe avoiding it because you dislike the short attention span, the quote unquote brain rot.

My argument for that is, and this was something that I was thinking about as well, it’s like, do I want to add more noise out there? Cause a lot of it is brain rot. Right, you see a lot of kids just doom scrolling across stupid things. But how can you show up in front of people and be useful, be educational, be inspiring, be motivating?

How do you stand out amongst the brain rot that’s out there? How do you not contribute to the brain rot, but you meet them where they’re at and save them from the brain rot? That’s what I feel, Short Pocket Monster does. It does, yes, educate on cards and prices, but also is entertaining, and I would much rather build a relationship long term with people there and save them from other people who might be providing misinformation about cards or encouraging them to go down the wrong path.

In fact, many people who watch my channel say it is a way for them to feel like they’re opening expensive packs of Pokemon. It’s not always expensive, but cards that they don’t get access to, and have them feel like they are the ones doing it themselves. In fact, that’s why it’s filmed the way it is. It’s so close to the camera, it’s as if when you’re holding your phone, you’re holding these cards.

So when it comes to consistency, consistency builds that familiarity, that trust. I used to say that short form video is not useful because it’s like Halloween. People come to your house, they get the candy, and then they leave. You’re not building a relationship with them. But what if Halloween instead was every day?

And what if you had the king size Snickers bar at the end of the block? All the kids knew about, and not only did they know about it and come to your house every day to get that Snickers bar, but they all told their friends about it, because that’s what you do. I remember back during Halloween when I was a kid, we would always tell each other who had the best candy so we could all help each other out.

Hey, go over there, they got the Pixie Stix. Remember Pixie Stix? I love Pixie Stix. I used to, it’s basically just powdered sugar in different flavors, and I would, it would come in this like little straw and I would just pour it all into my tongue and then just blow out and it would look like smoke was coming outta my mouth.

Don’t do that in people’s eyes, but I thought that was kind of cool. Anyway, the consistency of you showing up builds that relationship. A lot of people fall into the habit of consuming your content every day. I’ve seen this not just on my channel, but other channels too, where they say, oh, it’s bad time.

Hey, everybody. Good night. We’re all here together again this evening watching a person open Pokemon cards. What’s the latest one that I’ve been seeing? I’ve been seeing a guy who this is the series, he is kicking a rock until it becomes a sphere. I don’t remember the person’s name, but I follow because I want to see how long this takes, I want to see just how spherical this could, this rock could get.

He has a name for this rock. He kicks it. He shares in the beginning of his video. This is such a great hook. He just says, I’m kicking a rock every single day until it turns into a sphere. And while he says that, You see him weigh the rock in its current state. It’s kind of, you know, it might be midway through, so it’s kind of roundish, but there’s still a lot of jagged edges and he weighs it.

It’s like 20.58 ounces. Okay, cool. And then he goes on this rant or whatever. He’s kicking it down the street. It stops. He kicks it again, kicks it on a trail. He’s brought it to different places and then he weighs it at the end and you see just how much weight this rock has lost. And you’re like, okay. And even if you don’t subscribe to that you see, because you engaged with it, because you watched all the way to the end, you see the next one, and then the next one, and the next one, and he’s, he’s on his second rock now. It’s a dude kicking a rock into a sphere. Do you see how simple that is? And, of course, that may not relate to your niche or what you want to do, and yes, in many cases, some things like that are like, okay, well, okay, so what?

So he’s building an audience. Well, he could have brand deals and sponsorships. For what? I don’t know. These companies just want to get in front of audiences, even general audiences. Not necessarily niche audiences. When you cast a wide net on social, you can find some people who will make sense for whatever it is that you’re doing.

Now, I’m not saying just kick a rock. Have it somehow relate to what it is that you’re doing, of course. But don’t worry about being super niche. Yes, the riches are in the niches, but the bets are in the nets. That’s not the best thing. I just came up with that. But cast a wide net, you’ll catch something.

Okay? So, I think I’m done talking about this because I hopefully have sold it to you here in December. Trying to get you convinced to either check out the Short Form course that we have, Short Form Formula. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/shortform, it’s going to be there. And get ready because on January 12th, the challenge starts.

It’s going to be a 30 day publish a video every single day challenge. I’ll tell you exactly where to publish it. It’s not going to be on all the platforms. I want to make things very easy for you to start out with, but it’s going to initiate on Instagram   @PatFlynn. You’ll see it there. Join our newsletter if you haven’t already, and get ready for it, because I want to hold you accountable to this.

I want to see some results from you and that you haven’t seen before. Just, I want you to get some progress going to start 2026. It’s right there in front of you, so don’t miss out. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. See you in the next episode.