This is one for the dreamers, doers & disrupters who don’t fit in the box… when the world tells you, you can’t or you shouldn’t… you say “How can I” or “I will.”

Today’s story is about Neel Dhingra, a name you may know, but you may not know like this.

I dive into how he felt like he never fit in, yet he always found a way to carve his own path:

• Coming from an Indian family, instead of “getting good grades & a good job, saving all his money & retiring,” he left college to enter the mortgage industry.

• He came from the processing side, he focused on the system efficiency & making the process better for consumers.

• He never felt hosting agent lunches & product pitches were the right way, so he switched to out-of-the-box content marketing in 2018

• He turned his business around from $300k to over $4,000,000+ NET.

• He launched Forward, one of the largest & most unique education companies in the industry helping thousands of others in the industry achieve growth and success.

So let’s get into it!

— Andrew

📱 Personal Branding King: How Neel Dhingra went from struggling at 35 to making millions by 40

Neel's story begins like many entrepreneurs.

Our families want the best for us, and coming from an immigrant family, Neel’s family unknowingly set constraints, wanting him to go down the traditional path. (like many of us)

Work hard.

Focus on stability.

So while leaving college was met with resistance, entering the mortgage industry was another blow against tradition, going an unconventional path.

And it didn’t stop there.

Neel started in processing, so he thought differently than most lenders & bankers.

Instead of boring agent lunches & mortgage product pitches, he built a multiple 6-figure business by focusing on an amazing client experience.

He had an extreme eye for detail, developing systems, and efficiency that helped him become a high performer in the industry.

But he ran into the same issues many high performers do, there’s always a limitation on one’s time when next month’s income relies on you.

Neel always thought he was meant for more, so he went the unconventional path again and started making videos before they were cool.

The Real Estate King of Instagram Reels was Born

At 35, Neel found himself at a dead-end job, no real net worth, and was struggling with depression.

And his journey into content wasn’t successful from the beginning.

He was only getting 100 likes a post in 2018-2020, which back then wasn’t that many.

But unlike many, he never quit.

He stayed consistent.

And he kept getting better.

Fast forward five years, he's now running multiple successful businesses, having generated $100M+ in sales, and is the happiest he's ever been.

Oh, and it’s not just him.

He took a communication expert, Rene Rodriguez, from underperforming to a mind-blowing 1000% increase in just 3 videos…

And with Forward Academy he’s helped hundreds & thousands more do the same.

So let’s break down Neel’s content strategy:

🤳 The Surprisingly Simple Secret Sauce to Video

Neel has a clear focus with his content. It’s about "wealth building" and "financial fitness.” Making more money, investing, and real estate.

As humans, it’s natural to overcomplicate things…

But there’s a reason why most people try to sound smart, but the truth is that even the most successful & smartest people in the world prefer learning at a 3rd to 5th-grade reading level.

So if they want simple-to-understand information, then what do you think the rest want? (Hint: the same…)

1. Ideation 💡 

It’s easy to get stuck in our heads about what to post because saying you want to get into content is like saying you want to get into art.

Art can be anything.

So instead, we have to think of lenses we can think through to find great ideas.

Here’s some ways to find a great idea:

• Solve everyday people's practical problems in a unique way.

• Find trending topics or search trends in the news or on platforms like Google, Reddit, TikTok, etc.

• Find inspiration or curate from others (news, people or things you follow).

• Look in your inbox or CRM, see what clients are asking you.

• Share what you’re doing or have done. You can also share what you’re researching, and learning.

• Get something off your chest: the heart.

• The most underrated source: the comment section on any platform.

Find things already being discussed, don’t try to be clever or cute.

In business, you don’t try to create your own market for a product/service.

You find a starving crowd who’ve demonstrated they’re hungry.

Here’s some places you can source ideas from:

• Browse Google, YouTube, TikTok

• Answer the Public & AlsoAsked

• Google Trends

• ChatGPT & Bard

• Industry, News, and Current Trends

• Podcasts

• Events

Here’s the content buckets Neel recommends:

1. Teaching information to the consumer in an innovative way

2. Explain the news

3. Sharing success stories

4. Sharing your opinion about X

5. Showing how to do something - tutorial

Your content should seek to entertain, educate or do both. Think info-tainment.

Neel suggests focusing on content that helps people make money, save money, or avoid a mistake but in an innovative way.

2. Refining 📝 

When scripting, Neel focuses on having a niche topic with broad appeal, aka talking about real estate in a general sense.

But why? The algorithm, aka people, platforms send our content to is broad. It won’t send our content to our followers, our market or our niche to start.

First, it tests the content on 100 people.

Then 1,000.

Then 10,000.

And if it can’t appeal to random people, it will never reach the people we want it to reach, our target market.

A great hook can make your topic more attractive and relatable to a larger audience.

And then creating a slippery slope with each new line.

This means that you may start broad, but you keep getting more narrow toward the topic with each subsequent sentence. And you get them to read/watch the next sentence.

This is also called the rate of revelation, which in writing is how fast you introduce something new.

Neel believes our content should be a mix of growth content (to bring people into your audience) and content that’s narrower, on more specific topics.

Neel’s other scripting tips:

• Keep it valuable so that it’s saveable & shareable

• Neel finds that within the 30-40 second range can do well on Instagram

• Focus on common questions and solving problems

• Don’t talk about the product, process, or features, focus on benefits & results

• Always have an amazing hook, it will make or break a video

• Iterative improvement and learning from the past

Here’s some examples of hooks from Neel:

• Here’s when the housing bubble will burst

• Here's how you can X , even if you Y...

• Here's a harsh truth that's costing you X

• This is the secret to X

• Here are 3 simple steps to X

• How I did X in Y [time]

• This is a huge mistake people make when they are X

• This is a simple way to get X

• Did you know it's actually easy to X

3. Shooting 🤳 

You don't need expensive gear to start.

Neel recommends (and started with this too):

• iPhone

• $50-100 light

• $50-100 mic

These are the only 3 things you need to start creating content.

The difference between the successful and most other people is a “bias toward action.”

Quality is important, but it's not everything. Neel notes that some of his lower-quality videos performed just as well as highly-produced ones.

However, quality does have an impact on how your audience perceives you and high-quality videos can subconsciously assign a higher value to your content.

Neel’s shooting recommendations:

• Prioritize video and audio quality: if people don’t like what they look at and are listening to, they will swipe.

• Lighting is crucial. If you don't have a light, you can use natural sunlight.

• Positioning and contrast between you and the background can make a difference in video quality.

• You can create an interesting to look easily with 2 lights, one for your face & one behind you, and having depth in the shot.

• Don’t worry about dressing fancy. Neel dresses simple and authentic that blends informal with business casual.

4. Editing 💻

Neel is an Apple person, so he loves Final Cut Pro, but you can do most of the same editing in CapCut which is a much simpler platform.

But he recommends that if you’re a producing agent, lender, salesperson, or entrepreneur, then your time is better spent not editing.

Instead, you should buy back your time and hire someone to edit your videos.

The key to editing is earning every 2-3 seconds.

This doesn’t mean flashy intros or overdoing it.

This means that every sentence matters so cut the fluff and do your best at adding engaging editing that shows what you’re talking about or trying to add to telling the story with visuals, captions, b-roll, and other things that break up the monotony of us talking.

5. Converting 💰

“It goes down in the DM.” - Neel.

Neel had 263 people DM him the word “INVEST” from 1 post…

But it’s because he Jabs, Jabs, Jabs…. then right Hooks.

And he takes it a step further, this has worked for us too, in content and even on ads across the board on any platform:

Post informational & interesting content before you make an ask.

Even when you’re posting a call to action (CTA), share an interesting article or case study before you make an ask.

And make the CTA SIMPLE!

Example: DM me the word “INVEST” to get started.

People are lazy scrolling and feel awkward starting a conversation so you need to make it easy- or you’ll get few to zero responses…

The first message is simply them raising their hand.

Then you can go deeper and create an actual lead.

Neel also recommends Manychat so you can automate the initial response and if you’re sending them something like a link or PDF, then Manychat can automate that too.

👀 Visibility BEATS Ability

The biggest thing to remember is content is a game. You have to start if you ever want to get results.

Neel often says it’s not the best who wins, it’s the most known.

Building a personal brand, being consistent, and adding value changed the course of his career & life forever.

So if you want to learn more about Neel and his content, check out the conversation I had with him on Breaking and Building Leaders.

And he posts helpful content for agents & lenders on his YouTube + Forward Instagram page.

🧱 Unlock Wealth & Wellness: Build a $384M Empire w/o Losing Family Time

In this episode, we discuss how Kyle Whissel transformed his hate of real estate into a $384,000,000 real estate empire without sacrificing his family and his well-being.

So let's dive into how Kyle built a real estate team to be #1 in San Diego, a massive market with huge competition, for 7 straight years.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• secret to avoiding 80-hour work weeks

• how he scaled his biz & bought back his time + freedom

• going from a 4-day work week to 4-hour work week

• what some coaches don’t actually teach you about building a real sustainable business

• his unique strategy to leverage 1 listing into 4 clients

• His legacy plan which might make you redefine yours

If you want to improve your wealth or wellness then this is a conversation you won’t want to miss!

🧵 Threads vs. Twitter:

The huge question about Threads is whether it will follow TikTok’s rise or Clubhouses’ demise.

My quick take is that what we’re witnessing is unprecedented.

There has never been a platform that reached this level of scale, it’s growing faster than ChatGPT which says A LOT.

The biggest issue new social media platforms face is consumer adoption.

Threads blows that problem out of the water, but raises a new one: will it be sticky & stay? Or is it just hype?

Honestly, it doesn’t matter.

First, I still believe that having a main thing, whether it’s YouTube, podcast, TikTok, Instagram, an Email newsletter, etc. is important.

Keep doubling down on the main thing and don’t get distracted.

But if you’re already creating content, then you can repurpose it on Threads.

Think of Threads as both the Instagram feed and stories combined.

There is pleasure in knowing your post doesn’t need to be perfect, you can send quick thoughts, and it has a low barrier of entry.

But for real estate, the problem is always local.

Currently, the virality and discoverability do not match TikTok or YouTube, so it will be harder to attribute to local business.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time.

Check it out.

Test it.

And you may find you love it, or you may end up never using it.

Either way, there is always a benefit in being early on a platform because platforms go downhill after the initial boom… ads + supply & demand.

If you’re curious if Threads will replace Twitter, then you can see my thoughts here.

🔥 Other Interesting Finds:

• Check out Ken Pozek’s latest video that went viral ranking #1 out of all of his videos in the first 24-48 hours. (inside info: 8 mins his now his minimum length for YouTube videos, I’ll explain why longer is becoming way better later)

• But if you want to know why now, then here’s how Ryan Pineda got 1 billion views and what is his new content strategy.

• How Mr. Beast’s & Logan Paul’s Video Editors went from 0 to 2,000,000 views on their podcast: full breakdown.

• An unfiltered conversation with Mr. Beast.

• You’ll never watch a movie the same one you understand this story framework.

• The AI short form video editor that everybody is talking about

• Building a 100-year brand that lasts the test of time

• $400m story behind a bipolar founder and managing mental health + burnout (his book is great)

• YouTube 2023 culture + trends report

📝 In Case You Missed It:

• Last Week’s Issue is perfect if you want to make better short form videos or promote listings better. It’s a short-form masterclass: How Tyler Hassman went from broke on a bike to $26,000,000 in 1 year.

That's it for today! See you soon!

If you have any questions, then reply & let me know so I can make sure that I'm not just making stuff out of my head, but answering the questions you care about!

Let's have an amazing week!

Andrew Bayon

P.S. It would mean the world to me if you found value from ANY of the content I put out, if you could subscribe to Breaking and Building Leaders on YouTube or Podcast IF you think you may like it & share it with 1 person!

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