How I grew 0 to 100K followers in 5 months (without going viral)

In April, I began a challenge to design the perfect social media strategy for business owners.

My goal was to live build & test it on my own @kallawaymarketing channel to validate it worked as well as I’d hoped.

Spoiler alert…it crushed.

Here are my results over the last 138 days…

Constraints:

• Cannot use existing channels to boost growth (no outside help)

• Cannot have any video go viral (viral = 1M+ views)

• Cannot spend more than 5 hours/week on content (must use team/systems/AI/batching)

Inputs:

• 123 short-form videos posted

• 41 carousels posted

Outcomes:

• 6.9M views

• 0 → 100,000+ followers

• 131,000 Manychat runs (request for lead magnet)

• 44,000 emails collected

• $250,000+ in directly attributable revenue (multiple more 6-figures in ricochet revenue)

This amount of lead gen, revenue, and follower growth on that small of a total view number indicates a level of precision targeting & efficiency that is not commonly taught in social media land.

This is the dream for most business owners…no need to go viral, but super aligned views that convert to leads at an insane rate.

Most coaches encourage business owners to rip a mix of top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel content.

And this is directionally correct, but the top of funnel viral posts are actually destroying the algorithm’s ability to source the exact right person that would become a buyer.

They either go too broad (and bring in the wrong people) or dumb you down too far (and lose trust with the right ones).

This is why your views and followers go up, but the conversion just isn’t consistent.

I’ve found there is a super specific approach and execution framework that ensures you scale trust/authority and actually convert views into dollars at an extremely high rate.

I call this the High Conversion Method…instead of prioritizing views, you prioritizing lead gen and conversion.

This is what I’ve been using on my channels for the past several months.

I’m confident that this exact approach is the ideal fit for any business owner looking to scale a lucrative personal brand (without needing to go viral or spend 40 hours per week making videos).

Here’s a couple of limiting beliefs // nonobvious principles I learned through this experiment:

1. You don’t actually need to spend 5 hours/video (5 hours total per week is fine with the right team in place)

2. Quality matters more than quantity, but a lack of min. quantity is a losing strategy

3. You’re dramatically underutilizing CTAs

4. You’re dramatically overfitting your topic selection for virality

5. You’re not using data nearly enough in some areas & completely overusing it in others

6. Consistency of audience matching is much more important than anything else

7. Clarity on strategic positioning before posting is critical to speed up success

I have a few spots left in my Short Form Academy before we’re changing the offer and pricing.

If you’ve been on the fence, now’s the time.

PS - If you want to work with me 1:1 in SFA to install this exact content system to scale your personal brand, reply back with “Conversion”