In the past 15 months, I've grown from 50,000 followers to 350,000 followers on Instagram. I have had countless viral videos, as in videos above a million views. But what I realized throughout this entire process is that storytelling is way too over complicated on the internet. All these social media gurus will tell you storytelling is the key to going viral in 2025. They don't know whating storytelling is, and it's so frustrating. So, I have made the executive decision to put every single one of those scammy Tik Tok gurus out of business and tell you the actual proven framework to get a million views guaranteed on your next Tik Tok or Instagram reel. And this is the exact framework that I use to get 2 million views plus on all of these videos on Instagram reels and Tik Tok. That's the same format that I just spammed in the past 15 months to grow from 50K to 350K on IG. And yes, of course, I have three different Tik Tok accounts with over 100,000 followers. And also, this works for also building like an actual devoted audience that wants to buy stuff from you. Because the thing about this storytelling framework that actually works is that people actually get invested in you and they start trusting you, which is important for you actually growing a business or just monetizing in general. My business in the past 15 months has made $525,000. Let's get into the actual bread and butter of the storytelling framework. And it's a five-stage framework. If you know anything about Tik Tok videos, the most important stage is the first one. It's the hook. And very specifically, you want to use a relatable pain hook when you start off your Tik Toks or Instagram reels to really capture somebody's attention. Stop their scroll, open an emotional loop, and make the viewer feel genuinely, viscerally that wait, this video is about me. So, first use a universal belief, fear, or shame thought and try to use the word you. It's actually really simple. And then lastly, try to keep your hook under 15 words. Make sure you say them within the first 1.5 seconds, which means you have to talk fast, especially at the beginning of the video. You want to fit as much information into that first sentence as possible, into the first 2 seconds as possible, or else somebody will just not feel stimulated enough to keep watching your video, frankly. Okay, so what are some hook templates that I have literally spammed to get over a million views on my videos? I don't know who needs to hear this, but blank. I don't know who needs to hear this, but the idea that you can change your life by simply working harder is [ __ ] Here's why you still bad thing. Here's why november is actually good for you. Now, I know you're probably thinking, notice a pattern here in blue, and it's simply that it has the word you or in this case, sometimes it will say who or we or us. And the reason why this wording specifically matters so much is because a lot of times people think storytelling means me me. Hey guys, this is a story about me. The goal is to tell a story that makes the viewer feel understood and heard by whatever video they're seeing. You want to use the word you and be as embarrassingly specific as possible with this hook. Secondly is the backstory or setup. Now, this is really important and this is where the actual storytelling component comes into play because a lot of people think that storytelling happens on sentence one. I actually don't think so. The hook needs to be in sentence one to actually capture your viewers's attention. Storytelling starts on stage two in the second sentence, which I like to call the backstory or the setup more specifically. And it's two to four short sentences. One year ago, I promised my mom I hit this crazy goal. She let me drop out and pursue my dream of content creation. This is the odd pattern that has just repeatedly happened in all of my scripts that have done well. And the reason why you want to have two to four short sentences is because the story will progress quicker and especially in the first 10 seconds of video. Now, you still have to be very respectful of the viewer's time. And if the viewer feels like you're just wasting your time dragging on and on about the story, then they're just not going to want to watch. You're competing on the explore page and the for you page with a slot machine of dopamine ridden brain rot videos of tomb to tum sahur or brain rot memes that literally switch the screen and the visual on the screen every 2 seconds. And always always try to inject specific language into every one of these backstory sentences. Always try to use a location, age, or exact number. A lot of times when I work with private clients or creators who just want to improve their views, they'll say wordings like, "I used to believe that hard work was important to success." Now, that sounds like a pretty relatable sentence what I just said, right? Why wouldn't we use that in a video? And the problem with using a sentence like that in the video is because I used to is such a vague terminology that a viewer can't actually picture in their head. Instead, use wording like 6 months ago. 2 years ago, I was doing homework when I There we go. Now we have a story. We have a visually imaginable situation in the viewer's mind. I have used this framework to get millions and millions of views. And it really is this simple. You don't need to play stupid gimmicks. Just understand the like bare fundamentals of what actually drives human attention, which is creating immersive video experiences on short form video. Make the viewer feel like they are actually there with you. You have won. You've got their attention. Now, that being said though, once you've got your viewers attention past the first 10 seconds or the first five sentences of your video, what's stage three? Stage three is crucial and it's the breaking point in your story. This is where real storytelling comes into play. The purpose of stage three, the breaking point, which is just one to two sentences. It's a nice transition from the backstory element of your story. What was the breaking point? What was the turning point? The moment specifically that changed everything. This is actually a really difficult concept for 99% of creators to understand. A breaking point is a single moment. Like this moment literally should have been described as if it lasted like 5 seconds. That's how much you want to zoom in onto an event when you storytell because that's how you make a viewer feel like they were actually there. What's an example of describing your breaking point in a moment in one singular moment as opposed to a long drawn process? Instead of saying, "I started to realize," maybe you'll say, "I was scrolling through my Instagram reels and I saw this one video of this one Asian dude who told me that in that moment everything clicked." Try and find the moments in your story, in whatever process that you're describing, where you actually did have a pretty interesting moment. Maybe it was watching a YouTube video, maybe it was a conversation with a friend. really zoom into that moment and don't disregard it because the art of good storytelling is zooming into moments and bringing your viewer and your listener there with you. Here are some templates for those kind of breaking point languages. But nothing ever changed until one day or I was scrolling through my Instagram reels or I was driving when he told me this crazy line. And you want to really accentuate how epic this moment was. this line that your friend told you was insane. That one line that your ex-girlfriend told you on the phone shattered your heart. Maybe you didn't give a [ __ ] in the moment, okay? Like, actually create drama out of that moment because that's how you're going to make your viewer feel like they actually got an insane payoff and they still want to watch the rest of the video. So, make sure to zoom into your breaking point, describe it in one moment that happened literally like second by second and then dramaticize it. Stage four out of five is the takeaway. Now, this is the part that you're probably already good at, which is being preachy. If you make any kind of like how-to videos, tutorial videos, advice videos, where you want to be some kind of thought leader and influencer in your space, you're probably very used to being very preachy, frankly, to your audience member cuz you want to, you know, teach them how to do this specific workout, teach them this specific diet plan. Maybe you want to attract fitness coaching clients. So, what are some rules for making a very satisfying takeaway that makes your viewer feel heard as opposed to hating you and thinking that you're some cocky prick guru preacher? Something I like to do is actually inject a self-deprecating joke to break this kind of guru tone. And I'll describe like these weird speaking mannerisms at the end of the video that help you develop like a more authentic voice on camera. give the ex actual result that you saw in your life after you applied this wisdom as well because now that grounds your story in this applicable result that your viewer will actually get once they apply it. So instead of just being like once I actually locked in and became productive I felt a lot better about myself. Eh weak takeaway I don't really know what that looks like when you feel better about yourself. Well, what if I said after I locked in, that's when I actually was able to grow my business from being stuck at 10K a month to 100K a month. Doesn't that have so much more weight now that I've literally told you this piece of advice led to this tangible result? That is the best place to insert your social proof and to be like, "Yeah, viewer, this can be you, too." And I'm going to guess if you're still watching this video, you actually care about changing people's lives. This actually works. People have DM'd me so many times, yo, your content has motivated me to start posting on Tik Tok, to start posting on Instagram, to start chasing after my dreams while I'm a college student. And I would just rinse and repeat the same exact fivestage story structure. So, here are some templates that are literally taken straight from my own videos. The truth is, shame doesn't make you more disciplined. It just makes you hate the prog process. These kind of oneliners you should not put in the beginning of your video because if you put it in the beginning of your video it just sounds really corny and preachy and that makes them a lot more inclined to scroll. Stage five is a CTA and it's basically where you give your audience member an ask. Every single time I work with clients in my community they'll ask me how do I get more followers? How do I get my viewers to follow more? And they'll be at like 10,000 views or 5,000 views on a video. And I'm just like dude that's not your bottleneck here. I've almost never asked people to follow me or subscribe to me. Okay. people just do. If they like you and they got value from you, they will just do it. What does however work is just using an actual interesting framework of storytelling that gets people to watch your video that racks up watch time, that racks up engagement, and thus just pushes your video out to instead just like a measly 5,000 viewers. Wouldn't you rather have gotten 5 million views? I know you probably have these limiting beliefs like, "Oh, but I've never gone viral before." Trust me, if you actually apply this framework, like you can genuinely repeatedly go viral. Obviously, there are more components like editing and filming. And I will walk you through exactly what you can do to actually improve those things and what my own students do. I literally edit all my videos on Cap Cut, by the way. So, yeah, it's like not complicated whatsoever. But yeah, don't worry so much about the CTA is my main point. You do want to make it sound natural and not pitchy. Try to build your CTA or aka your last sentence or your ask on whatever your last sentence prior was. So usually that means using a conjunction like but and or so. So comment monk mode if this is where you're at. So there's a lot of also subtle ways to ask for a follow without actually asking them for a follow. So you're not just asking please follow, please follow, please follow. You might be saying yo if you actually want to lock in on your fitness goals this year, I'm going to make a video about it tomorrow so follow. Now it actually feels earned because I'm giving you something. if you follow as opposed to just asking, asking, asking. That being said, now I do want to cover something really quickly before I go into some other weird stuff that I personally do to make my content sound authentic. This is low-key like the most banger sauce in this video. I do want to tell you if you are interested in actually accelerating your content growth 5x, you actually want to have a community of people who keep you accountable to posting on Tik Tok and Instagram and growing and growing your business as well alongside your personal brand. learning from way more lessons like this, like 10 plus hours of video tutorials, live coaching calls five times a week with me literally reviewing your videos live in front of you and other creator experts with 100,000 plus followers or people making 10K a month with content creation and social media live coaching calls five times a week and 10 plus hours of video tutorials in my private creator community, content academy. And if you want to join, it will be in the first link in the description. Also, we also have like a popping community of creators, like four inerson events every single year in New York City. In Austin, Texas, we just did one. It was super lit. And there's creators who pull up to these with literally hundreds of thousands of followers. There's like multiple people in here who make more than 100K a month who just pull up to this New York City meet up. It's crazy. Like, we we cultivate such a crazy community of creators. And also, accountability is hard. Staying consistent with content creation is hard. We created also a gamified Instagram reels tracker that rewards you for posting and staying accountable. still literally connects to your Instagram, tracks your content progress, right? And then also has missions and gives you coins that then can be spent on literal like actual items like one year free of Stan's creator plan that's worth like $1,200. Also, this like hoodie that I'm wearing right now. It's pretty lit. And some other like content creator goodies, right? Just to make it more fun for you to create content because obviously script templates, coaching calls, improving your content optimization, that's important. But if you don't even post and if you don't even feel comfortable posting and getting in front of your like camera and just pressing record, pressing post, nothing matters. So, we really want to just make it fun for you to get comfortable on camera. That being said, okay, what are some other weird things that I personally do to make my content sound authentic and actually use these specific tonalities? So, this is a little bit more esoteric because it's not just about like word for word what you're scripting on your piece of paper, but it's how you're saying it, which is actually more important, right? Imagine if I sounded really like boring and monotonous during this entire YouTube video. I'd probably sound kind of like scary and scammy if I was just like, "Use these tones." Best friend rant tone, raw, slightly messy, no fake polish. pretend your friend is literally in front of you. Like, you know, it sounds weird and obviously that's an exaggeration, but like watch yourself on videos. Notice that you might actually just feel a little bit stiff on camera, which is normal to start. And the way to alleviate that kind of stiffness of feeling like you don't sound like yourself on camera is don't picture it's a camera. Don't picture like a hundred people watching you on social media because that's going to mess with your brain. That's going to make you feel socially anxious. Instead, just picture one person, one friend that is literally in front of you. And that is the kind of concept of picturing an ideal viewer or ideal client persona, which is basically the one person that you actually want to serve with your content, with your business, and the problems that you actually want to solve for them. Okay? So, picturing that one person helps me so so much in actually sounding authentic on camera. Because if I wasn't picturing my friend with this video right now, I'd probably get in my head and be like, "Wait, what if what if my girlfriend sees this?" Oh, wait, no, but what if my mom sees this video? Wait, like what if my girlfriend's mom sees this video? Like, how do I even communicate and sound like normal to her? She probably thinks I'm really weird and I cursed in this video. Like, you don't want to have these kind of overthinking moments that just mess with your presence on camera. You want to feel natural. You want to feel charismatic. And the way to tap into that is by picturing just a friend behind the camera. Next one, and this is a really interesting way of giving advice. So, a lot of content out there, especially if you're selling something, like selling your information, selling your coaching, selling your consulting, selling your agency services, like it comes off very guruy. And the last thing you want to do is sound like a guru. And something that I actually take a lot of pride in is that in growing my following, 300,000 followers in the past 15 months and growing a really successful business on top of it, I still haven't really like lost my aura in my personal brand. Let me explain. Basically, I discovered this hack where when I give advice, instead of sounding really guruy and scummy and scammy like all those other gurus out there who try to sound super professional, be like, "This is the one Instagram real hack that you haven't discovered yet that's going to blow up your content in your business." I assume this tone rather of a kind of friend who just discovered a hack. So, instead of being like, "This is the one script template that you need to use to blow up your business." I'm like, yo, this is the stuff that worked for me and I just discovered it. I'm not saying I'm better than you. I'm just saying that it's really interesting that I found it and it's crazy that it worked. Okay, so I want you to like just think in the frame that you are simply on the same level as your viewer. You are not better than them. You are the same level as them, but you just discovered something that's interesting. You just want to share it. And that kind of gives off this very friendly, warm tonality and also very charismatic and natural tonality that you'd want to assume on camera where you don't sound robotic like a guru, but you're just like, "Yo, this is lit. We're here together." And it builds this kind of feeling of connection. Okay. And lastly, a self-roast kind of tone. So, this kind of ties to these slang phrases that I naturally use, and this is something that like chat GBT noted after seeing all my video transcripts. It literally like noted these specific wordings. I say pause sometimes when I say something weird. I say little stupid [ __ ] like I say, I know this sounds cringe. I say, "Bro, that [ __ ] is so sad." When I describe my backstory or I say, "I'm not [ __ ] you on anyone. I'm just saying." Or like I say, "I thought I had to grind 247." But and like the interesting thing about reading this out loud and seeing these slang phrases, seeing these like weird not related to storytelling interjections that I'll sometimes say is that I think it actually builds great rapport with your viewer. And I'm not saying like go on massive tangents just like trying to sound all hip and facts yo yolo swag, okay? Like obviously use terminology that you actually use on day-to-day, right? But a nice thing about interjecting jokes into your script, even if you're not like the most naturally funny person, I have been told literally that I am funnier on my videos than I am in person. I don't think I'm a naturally funny person, but I will like mechanically interject jokes into my script just so it breaks the tension of sounding too much like a guru. Okay? And it creates this like nice flow of the story where it doesn't feel like your viewer feels like they're being sold to. Especially if I have a CTA at the end that's like yo comment guide for my free guide. Doesn't that sound like an ad? Sometimes I'll say like comment poopy for my free guide just to interject a little joke so I seem a little silly so they don't feel like I'm hard selling them. Okay. And this is a nice way to break the tension with your viewer. Personal preference. Maybe you aren't a jokester. Maybe you hate being perceived as a silly silly goofy guy. Okay. Maybe that's not for you. But that has worked wonders for me. It's built pretty cool like culture amongst my followers where I actually enjoy talking with them because I feel like I can be myself like a 21-year-old kid and not just be like the business business and content guru guy all the time. Okay. And that's been a nice little introjection for me just like spicing in jokes like short jokes with little slang short quippy jokes that are self-deprecating. That's been my methodology of maintaining my like humorous personality in my videos and it makes me feel proud of my videos because now I feel like it kind of authentically represents me which is a somebody who doesn't take things too seriously. Okay. And lastly, this is just like a really interesting one that I noticed works really well, but try to use short sentences and repetition in general. Try not to make your sentences abhorently long throughout your video because what will happen then is that if I have a sentence that just has five different clauses. So, first I went to the mall, but then I realized that this one trick that I was missing this whole time would fall onto my lap right when I got into my car. And then once I got into my car, do you even know what I just said? Like because the sentences had so many different clauses, ands, buts, thens, like you you've lost train of thought of what I've just said. Okay. So, you don't want sentences that drag on really long. And sometimes just saying short sentences and even repeating them helps hammer in a point. So, an example, if I were to give a backstory on like social media addiction, I would say like you scroll, you watch, you procrastinate, and now you feel like [ __ ] All of these short sentences, they hit, they're easy to understand, and they still paint a picture for you very quickly. Okay. And I I believe there's there's a term for this in literary devices. I'm sorry. Like I wasn't the most academic child. I did take AP Lang and AP Lit though. I don't think I got fives on either one of them. But like there is a literary device for this. Okay. I'm I'm not basing my entire storytelling frameworks in like stuff I made up. I wish I was a genius like this. But no. And also to recap this entire storytelling framework, you want to know what's crazy about this entire storytelling framework is it's actually the same storytelling framework that literal Hollywood shows and movies use and it's based off the three-act story structure. So literally this is act one. Okay, act two is like this backstory and then act three or act two like the climax of act two is the breaking point and then act three is the takeaway and the resolution of a story. L I'll I'll literally show up the threeact story structure like th this is the three-act story structure right you start off with the hook the inciting incident and you kind of give like the beginning backstory then you start telling your story describing the moments and the obstacles that you had to overcome right and then at the climax of act two is when you go through the take or not the takeaway the breaking point the breaking point the moment where everything changes that's like the Avengers all coming back from the Doctor Strange portals. That's like in Spider-Man Far From Home, I think. No Way Home. In Spider-Man No Way Home, when all three Peters unite and they start fighting all the big bad villains, right? It's Yeah, I I could keep naming Hollywood movies, but I'll probably sound like an idiot, right? And then act three is the takeaway. It's the resolution, the conclusion, the descending action of your video. And the cool thing is that in a real, right, this isn't like a 90 minute even like 30 minute video. No, it's just it's it's 60 to 90 seconds, which means each of these acts are really just like two to three sentences. Like act one is summed up in two sentences, act two is summed up in like four sentences, and act three is summed up in like three sentences. It's super short and it it actually I I think it's nice because yes, you have to have a lot of attention to detail in each of these sentences, but you don't actually sp you don't have to spend that much time. And the cool thing is that once you actually get into the habit of using this framework, then you can just like have it ingrained in your muscle memory and you don't even have to script it anymore. You can just start riffing off the top of your head like stage one, what's my hook? Okay, I'm going to say I don't I don't know who needs to hear this, but you need to start scripting your videos. And then you can go to, okay, stage two. Now it's time to tell my story. That's kind of where I've gotten with my videos now, where I can just whip out my phone, think for like three, three minutes, just sit in silence and think, and then just riff off the top of my head, cuz I've memorized this like the back of my head. Okay. And yeah, I hope this video was helpful in understanding storytelling down to a first principles perspective when it comes to Tik Tok and Instagram reels. Hopefully, it was actually easy and applicable to understand. And if you want more advice like this, I also have a 32minute video guide on how I grew 200,000 followers in a single year on more in-depth breakdown on the three systems I used to make really compelling edits, really compelling video, and actually just progress from a human perspective because knowledge isn't everything when it comes to succeeding as a creator. So, go ahead and watch that video. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you all in the next video. Peace y'all.