Welcome to Make life easy, Breezi.

Your friend who sends you a weekly update on what she's working on, reading through, and thinking about – in a list.

Welcome to your crash course on TikTok

1. Should I aim for views, engagement or followers?

2. How can I go viral on this channel?

3. How to decide what videos to post?

4. Non-negotiable's if you are serious about being successful on TikTok

5. The secret that's changed the game for me

Before we dive in, here's who will benefit from this TikTok crash course

• A brand owner: more awareness and more sales

• A tech founder: more awareness and more downloads

• An aspiring creator: find your community and make money through brand deals

• An entrepreneur: build your personal brand and increase recognition

• A regular human being: make friends and find an outlet for your creativity

1. Should I aim for views, engagement or followers?

• You should aim for all of them, but prioritize one at a time

• Go for high views if: you're looking to build brand awareness at a very rapid pace. By prioritizing views, you bring in hundreds and thousands of users top-of-funnel but they may not be loyal or educated on what you're actually selling – they're just here because the video caught their attention. Therefore, you also need to make sure you have middle-of-funnel conversion strategies in place when the eyeballs come rolling in. Think: waitlist signup in your bio, email drip campaigns and pinned educational videos at the top of your account.

• Go for high engagement (likes + comments + saves) if: you're trying to validate product-market fit and your goal is to learn more about the end consumer. Imagine you're a brand owner trying to decide what product to launch next. Create a video explaining the product you have in mind and post it. You'll probably only get a few thousand views but the likes, comments, saved and share section will tell you a lot about whether this is a good business decision or not. My video on Breezi only got 10k views but was saved over 150 times and led to 38 new waitlist signups – this was a great validation point for me.

• Go for high follower count if: you only care about vanity metrics. In my opinion, prioritizing follower count doesn't actually improve your business. Instead, focusing on creating videos of value and building a community will inevitably lead to more followers over time.

2. How can I go viral on this channel?

• Going viral on TikTok is a double edge sword

• On the bright side, you get a huge rush of dopamine as you watch your numbers rise into the millions and feel like you finally made it

• The downside that not a lot of people know is, once you go viral for something – you get put into a specific part of the algorithm and getting out is extremely hard

• Consider this story: when I used to be at Three Ships Beauty, we filmed a video about being in Target and it blew up (2.3M views in a day). I was elated and thought we had finally cracked the code. Then we filmed a skincare tutorial video that flopped. Then another flopped. And another. Two weeks later, we filmed another Target video and boom - 600k views. I realized we were stuck ... in Target-Tok.

• Going viral was great except we went viral for the wrong thing. It led to no increase in sales, no increase in site sessions and barely a lift in Target store sales

• So takeaway here: be very cautious about your desires to go viral – you don't want to be categorized wrong by the all-mighty algorithm

3. How to decide what videos to post

• Tip #1: Make videos that make you want to make them

• I used to film daily vlogs on my channel. I dreaded it. I hated having to take my phone out all the time and stitch everything together. Now I make sit-down videos in my car where I talk directly to the camera for a minute. Don't feel like you need to do what everyone else is doing. Think about what you enjoy: do you like being on camera, do you like doing voiceovers, do you like editing aesthetic clips? With TikTok, consistent uploads is extremely important and the only way you'll be consistent is if you're doing something you semi-enjoy.

• Tip #2: Decide if you're aiming for views or engagement

• If you're aiming for views, make shorter videos that have an extremely clickbait hook, in line with what's currently trending

• If you're aiming for engagement, make longer videos that tell a complete story and include lots of personal facts

• Tip #3: Always film videos in a series

• I rarely ever film a one-off video, most of my content always starts off introducing the video as part of a bigger series: "How To Text Boys Back", "30 Days of Building My Startup", "Date Night Ideas Pt 3"

• This gives viewers a reason to stop scrolling, go to your profile, watch additional videos and follow you for more content

4. Non-negotiable's if you are serious about success

• Post minimum 5 times a week, but ideally 1-2 times a day

• Show your face and let your viewers be familiar with you

• Learn how to edit videos and how to cut clips to be compelling

• Highlight imperfections and failures, it's relatable

• Don't quit even when you think it's a flop

5. The one secret that's changed the game for me

• DRIVE ALL YOUR TIKTOK FOLLOWERS TO AN EMAIL LIST

• Emails are the most powerful and valuable piece of owned customer data you will get

• Followers mean nothing, you can't talk to them and they are owned by the platform - you'll lose everything if TikTok shuts down

• I try to end most videos by directing my community to my app waitlist and personal newsletter list

• Emails = peace of mind

Here are 3 generic strategies you can take to your account today

1. Include as much video description as you can in the caption: use the same words as you did in the hashtags and write 2-3 full sentences

2. Aim for consistent covers on your account page: use the same font, same placement and something recognizable (your product or someone's face)

3. I always like to test different video hooks and different video lengths: I'll take one video idea and post it six times (hook #1, hook #2, hook #3, 15 second video, 45 second video, 2 min video)

Final thoughts on TikTok

• The rise of TikTok has lowered the barriers to entry for new businesses

• However, it is so much more than "we'll pay someone $100 per video to churn out 5x videos per week"

• Behind the algorithm, it's still human beings watching your videos and taking time to understand them, their fears, their motivations and their behaviours will ultimately be what makes this channel successful for you

• I've been on TikTok for a year and I only have 18k followers but they are the most incredible, loyal and supportive community I could ask for

Some of my favorite books lately

1. Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss

2. Start With Why by Simon Sinek

3. Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Top 5 quotes I liked from Never Split The Difference

*In case you haven't heard of this book, Chris Voss is a previous FBI hostage negotiator and he provides strategies for effectively negotiating

1. "I want to wear brown shoes with it and you want me to wear black shoes, so we compromise. I wear one black and one brown. Compromise, splitting the difference, is borne out of uncertainty and means you get a bad solution. If we water down both solutions and we'll both be happy, but we'll have a really bad outcome."

2. "Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do."

3. "What does a good babysitter sell, really? It’s not child care exactly, but a relaxed evening. A furnace salesperson? Cozy rooms for family time. A locksmith? A feeling of security. Know the emotional drivers and you can frame the benefits of any deal in language that will resonate."

4. "Prepare, prepare, prepare. When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to your highest level of preparation."

5. "No deal is better than a bad deal."

I'm a sucker for motivational Youtube videos

• I watched to this one while on the treadmill this morning and I was fired up

Thoughts I had with myself this week

• "Authenticity doesn't guarantee success but inauthenticity will guarantee failure"

• "The worst time to start is tomorrow"

• "I'm so grateful to have parents who are proud of me for simply existing"

• "Why couldn't I be passionate about building B2B saas products!"

• "Change and transformation both mean the same thing but one sound so much better than the other"

In case no one told you

If you read all the way here, I have one more thought

I was going to wrap this newsletter up but I wanted to say that TikTok is a really disheartening channel. It's really hard to get right and as crazy as it may sound, it's actually really emotional. Sometime you come up with an idea you love and spend time creating an awesome video just to have it completely tank. It legitimately impacts your mental health. As TikTok savvy as I am, I feel it too. I've literally cried because one of my videos only got 500 views.

Do not attach your worth or your intelligence with how well your content performs on this channel. Post things with no attachment. Put it up and close the app.

What to look forward to in the next newsletter

• I haven't decided yet and I would like questions from you guys - reply and let me know what I should write about!

If you found anything in this newsletter helpful, I'd love to connect on Twitter – tweet me a screenshot of your favorite part and let's chat 👋

I'll be back next week with more lists!