How My Content Generates $1.7M/Month (Without Ads or Going Viral)

        I asked five of my friends who have big audiences, over a million people and big businesses, well over a million dollars, how long they've been posting on social media. And they all gave me two answers. First, they said, "This is the date where I started to post." And then the thing that made the difference was the date they decided to go pro and take it seriously. I thought about that a lot. I was really scared. What did it really take to go pro? Could I really do it? And would I have to do weird [ __ ] like dance on TikTok? Luckily, the answer to the last question is no. Anyway, I'm not even good yet, but over the last 12 months, things have gotten hectic. The audience is still small. I've never gone viral, but we're adding a million dollars a month in new business just by being consistent and implied things my way. So, today, I just want to show you five things that I've learned about going pro with content so that you can do the same. And in 12 months time, you'll be able to record a video like this about how gangster has been for you. You're on it here cuz you need to be convinced that creating content on social is going to help your business. You already know that, but there's some tensions holding you back. Certainly were for me and frankly still are. We'll talk about those as we go. The first thing that we need to do is just define what game we're playing because there are two distinctly different games you can play when it comes to creating content. By the end of this video, I want you to choose which one you're in. I've got a very strong opinion. You get to choose. I think there's the influencer model. That's what I'll call it. Let's call that them because it's not me. And then there's us. I don't want to become an influencer. I want to be influential. The way these two groups think about content, create content, share content, the whole business model is different. And if you fall into the trap that I did, which is wanting to be influential, but learning from influencers, you end up in a world of hurt. It gets super super confusing and you spin your wheels because you do all the stuff, you look stupid. Hello, Tik Tok dancers. I'm looking at you and your business doesn't grow. So, if you're going to win at this game, first thing you need to know is what game am I actually playing? There's two. Let's break these down. The influencer game is all about going viral. There's a bunch of dudes who promise you you'll get a million views by next time. That's cool and all, but I don't want to go viral. I want to go niche viral. I want to be famous in my space. I don't want it paparazzi stepping around. I don't want to get stopped on my way to Wwards or the supermarket, but I want to be influential as hell within my pocket of people and then completely unknown everywhere else I can just live my best life. Next, the problem that these guys have, this is the battle that honestly I still sometimes struggle with, is that they're creating content that they know that Algo wants. You're doing stuff because it's on trend or you know it'll go viral or this has been proven to work. It's cool, but I want to make what I want. If I'm not interested in it, I'm not making it. I don't want to say something cuz I have to make content. I want to make content when I have something to say. These two things combined give you a bunch of cover bands. No original songs, just replaying anybody else's stuff. Not nearly as good. I don't want to be a cover band. I want to be an original. Next. A lot of these guys have big teams. Some of my friends have a 13 person media team. Maybe it's more. In fact, it is more. That sounds like hell on earth. That's bigger than my entire company by a lot. I don't want a big team. I want a small team. And when I say a small team, I mean my head and a dude behind the camera. That's plenty. Again, you do you. That's important. uh these things if they're driving business outcomes. They're built on ads and funnels. We used to spend 60 grand a month on ads in the old way. We don't anymore. We spend six or seven, eight on a big month. I don't think it's about funnels anymore. I think the new game is built on a web. People find you somehow. They binge a bunch. As they binge, they get more likely to buy. That's the game that I like to play. My goal isn't to be seen. My goal is to get sold out. So right now you've got a decision to make. Do you want to play that game or do you want to play this game? Now you know those two models are really just symptoms of the big dilemma, the tension that's facing you and me and everyone like us right now. There are two sides to me and two sides to you. They're both really, really important. Challenge is who's in the driver's seat. So on one side of us, there's the business. And the business has a set of needs, right? The business is driven by a need for volume for commercial production, right? Commercial production. Its job is to produce enough content on a volume that you can't be ignored. On the other side of me is the artist. And the artist isn't driven by commercial production at all. The artist in me is driven by creative expression. I've got stuff in me that I want to say. It's driven by value. There's nothing wrong with either of these. The problem is when one of them is in the driver's seat. If it's just the business, you create a bunch of soulless slop. Let's just put slop up here. You're a cog in a machine in a contact factory spitting out content. By the way, the world doesn't need more content. There's enough in it already. Thank you very much. Okay. If the business is in charge, you're just creating volume. If the artist in charge, what's the extreme example of an artist? It's a starving artist, right? And if there are only two choices, we're in trouble. left to their own devices, you get slop, bull crap content that the internet doesn't want, or starving artist going broke. You don't want to be either of those places. But if we merge them together, you get the best of both worlds. So, when I think who's the best business creator, I'd say it's Alex Hoszi. The dude is prolific. There is just so much amazing stuff coming out of his content team, out of his mouth on a daily basis. He's got the volume game dialed. Uh, and because he's prolific, they can't be matched. Production wise, unstoppable. On the other side of the game, what the artists have got that the content factory, whether it's AI or a team producing stuff for you, can never touch is content that's actually dangerous. When I say dangerous, I mean it's got an opinion. That's the reason people get followed. The way you get cut through is by have something to say. Most people are talking a lot with nothing to say. We want to have something to say and then say it well, say it often like these guys do. If the business is prolific and can't be matched, the artist is dangerous and can't be copied. When you put them together, that's where the magic's at. If I had to summarize our job as content creators uh in this coaching world together, it's to get dangerous first. Have something to say and then prolific and say it well. When you're prolific and you're dangerous, you get paid bigly. Not only can you not be matched and you cannot be copied, but you can't be beat. Like I said, I'm not good at this stuff yet. I'm still finding my feet. I still [ __ ] it up on the daily. But this combination of prolific and dangerous has got me paid super super handsomely. And to be honest, I struggle with the tension of like wanting to make the stuff that only I can make with, oh my god, we need clients back in the old days or now that thing went really well. We should do a version of that again. The moment you become a content factory reproducing the same stuff, there's a danger that you end up kind of sloppy. Let's see if we can get this middle ground together. I don't know what part of this speaks to you or resonates with you, but there's probably a couple of objections coming up. One of them is probably, "Yeah, but my business has real needs. I need clients right now." Or, "When I produce content, it's great, but we're just not doing the volume that we should." And on the other side, maybe it's like, "Well, I don't feel super artistic, dude. I don't know that I've got something to say." So, what I want to do in the rest of our time together is talk about three things. Number one, how do we pick what to talk about? Number two, how do I find my take, a unique contribution of the topic, so I'm not just regurgitating somebody else's stuff, but it still works. And then number three, what does the actual workflow look like to to create, to shoot, to post this kind of work so you can get uh famous in your corner of the internet and get well paid for it. So whether you're creating a lot of content right now or just a little bit and you need to up your game, let's talk about how to find great things to talk about. I'm lucky enough to have some friends who are really, really professional at this. I want to tell you what they do, but I also want to tell you that I don't do any of that stuff. That doesn't make it wrong and you should know your options. Okay? So let me tell you what the professionals do. I've got probably 10 people who are really, really close friends and we text every week who are great at this stuff. All of them have got somebody on their team, a content producer or a um content manager. And what they do is they do deep research. And specifically what they're looking for is who else is creating content about you in my space. And what content are they producing that's an outlier and what an outlier means is they look at content. Let's say somebody normally gets a,000 views on their thing, but this piece of content got 10,000 views. Okay. Well, that's a 10 times outlier. What they do is they find all the outliers from their niche and adjacent niches and they pull the titles, the thumbnails and maybe the formats of those videos and they recreate them. Uh yesterday I was on a Zoom call in for Boardroom with Ali Abdal and Ryan Dice who are both great at this stuff and they've each got a person who does this research and they give them a spreadsheet with these are the videos I think would go super well for you. They look at the titles and some thumbnail ideas and they go of the 10 I think I could do that one. I think I got something to say about that one. Please note, they don't actually watch the other person's video because it makes it very easy for you to make a video just the same and that's awful. So, that's one way. Have someone look at the outliers and suggest topics and titles that would be great for you. I can see the value in that. And maybe at some stage I'll do that. But honestly, I [ __ ] hate that idea. The idea that somebody else is going to tell me what video to make. Are you freaking kidding me? That sounds disgusting. The advantage of that model is you're much more likely to hit a winner much more often. And I love that. I was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago with Dan Martell and the interviewer said, "Who's the best YouTuber of all time?" Dan was like, "Easy, Mr. Beast." And he talked about all the reasons why. And Mr. Beast is super impressive. Definitely the biggest YouTuber of all time. But the question wasn't biggest, it was best. And that's subjective. I said, "Okay, counter argument. Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber of all time by miles, but Casey Neistat is the goat." I'm from the Casey school of thought. When Casey shot a video every single day for 800 days, he wasn't researching viral trends or seeing what he thought the audience wanted. He made videos for him. Never thought about the audience once. He made videos that would make him happy, him proud that he had something to say about and he gave it to the world. And if people happen to vibe with that, amazing. And if they didn't, also amazing cuz he was he was building for an audience of one. When Casey went out into New York City every morning looking for an idea to make a video about, he was looking for one thing. He was looking for interestingness. He will let the world around him be the font of new content ideas. This is what I do. I think the loop looks like this. There's three steps. First, you see something. This is a noticing skill. What's going around that's interesting? You have your eyes open for that. And we'll talk about how in a second. Next, you connect the dots. How does that relate to me and my audience? That's the translation piece. And then you got to see something, connect the dots, and then say something. The biggest hack, the best unlock for me in like feeling free and creative and fun about this stuff and not making it into like a content job or a chore, but like something that I actually look forward to is to shrink the gap between seeing something and saying something. So, I've got news traps out all the time. Every time I see something interesting, I take a photo of it. I'll add it to my notes, but photos are the main go-to. And then on Fridays, I look through all my photos and I'm looking for what happened in the week, where'd I go, who was I with, what happened with my clients, and I take screenshots of of stuff in the group or DM conversations I have. What did I buy? Where did I go? What content am I consuming? What am I building or making right now? What conversations have I had? And I look for all of that and I'm just going, "Oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's interesting. I want to make a thing about that." And now it's a pull, not a push. I think the biggest hack I can give you is if it feels like a chore, it's because you're doing what you're supposed to do instead of what you want to do. And the easiest way to find something that you want to do is to find stuff that's actually interesting. I started sharing this with our clients. This idea of finding the interestingness, we built a little GPT called the interestingness gold mine that just helps you do a quick 3 to 5 minute weekly review and find all of the juicy interesting things that you can make content about. It's free. There's no optin or anything. You just click a link below. It'll take you there. I think you'll find it super super fun and really really useful. Noticing is a skill. Sharing something, saying something is a skill. The thing that makes it useful for your audience is connecting the dots between I saw this thing and he here's what I noticed about how it helps you in either way. Whether you're doing the content producer model, the research model, or the look for interestingness model, you only want to make content with where one of three things or all of these three things are true. Number one, it solves a problem that your prospects and clients have problem. Number two, you got some proof, right? Some actual results, either yours or your clients. There's so many people in our world who make content about stuff they've never actually done. If you got receipts, it's easy to show. In fact, marketing gets really easy when you break it down to this two-step formula. Do something cool and then tell people about it. There's a whole bunch of people telling people about it who've never done the thing. Pro tip, do the thing. It solves a problem that your prospects or your clients have. Number two, you've got some proof, results around the thing, either for you or others. And number three, you've got a position on three Ps. Proof, problem, position. Position is what's your opinion about that thing? What's your unique take on that thing? because there's no new topics in the world. You know, I'm a business coach. I'm going to talk about marketing. I'm going to talk about sales. I'm going to talk about delivery. I'm going to talk about, you know, scaling up a business. They're not new. What is new is my individual take on it. Which brings us to the fourth big idea. So Kanye West is in the recording studio with Rick Rubin, his producer, and they've just recorded a bunch of songs and they're listening back to them to work out which ones belong on the album and which ones don't. And Rick turns to Kanye and says, "If any song sounds like it could be on somebody else's album, it doesn't belong on yours." The big lesson here is to say what only you can say. Part of that's about topic, but mostly it's about what's your take, what's your perspective. And the way I think about it is this. Whatever the topic is, what I really want from you is two things that nobody else can share. And frankly, that AI can't touch. I want you to let me into your world. And I want you to share your world view. This is where the interestingness comes in. If you notice what's going on in your world, that's an experience that you've only that only you've had. And when you share your world view, that's a perspective that only you've got. Those two things together, that's what makes any dry topic fun, interesting, juicy, and yours. We just shot another video over there before. I wanted to make an example about uh looking in the mirror and making some decisions about what you see. I've just had two Italians stay with us for 10 days. It was amazing. I loved it. But I ate like an Italian. In fact, I ate like one particular Italian pavarati for the last 10 days. Three meals a day. Three causes a meal, lots of dessert. What happened? I looked in the mirror and I don't look like I should. So what? Is that okay or is it not? Now what? That's a story from my world and my world view. Does that make sense? I could just say you need to get the data and act upon it. But that story makes it mine. So the easiest place to do this, the best place for this to show up in your content is in your stories, in your metaphors, in your examples. If they're things which happened to you or that you saw or that happened to a client, those are uniquely yours. No one can tell the same stories as you because no one's lived the same thing as you. And that's one thing that frankly AI is never going to be out of touch. AI and the robots are going to win the volume game. That one we're going to have to give up to the clankers. They're going to win that battle. The one thing that they'll never take from us is unique human experience cuz they can't cuz they're not freaking humans. I want to say one more thing about this. when I was getting started, like I just making the decision to go pro and in my first few months, honestly, a lot of my problems were I had level 10 taste and like level two skill and like that's a really scary place. Like I know what good looks like and I'm not it. If that's you, I get it. Push through. Don't worry about the [ __ ] content you're going to make when you're little because like frankly, if the content is not that good, the algorithm doesn't push it and not many people see it. So, you're fine. It's started to get to the place where like I'm starting to get better at this. Uh, and a few of my friends, the people I was telling you about before, have been sending me messages or commenting on my stuff going, "That was a banger. I love this." I almost wish they didn't because I'm worried about the hype going to my head and believing it. You know, like um that One Direction song, you don't know you're beautiful. That's what makes you beautiful. It's a dumb song, especially cuz the moment they sing a song, she now knows she's beautiful, which according to cheesy song logic means she's ugly now. Um, so I don't I don't ever want to believe the hype, but there's a real trap that happens when you start to get good because if you have one video, I've just had one video do like way better than any other video I've done in terms of views. Like normally I get like two or three, maybe 4,000 views if I'm lucky. This one's got like 16 or 17,000 views as of today, which is mental. And I'm not going to lie, there's a part of me which is like, "Oh, I should just make more videos like that." Which goes all the way back to the business wanting me to create more volume. These things have got to be held in dynamic tension. And the truth is that I've never thought of myself as a business person or an entrepreneur. I'm an artist who happen to get lucky and do pretty well. And so I'm going to make sure this guy's driving because I don't want to become a soulless slot machine. And I hope you don't, too. All right. Hopefully this has been useful so far. Let's get super tactical. I want to talk about how how do you actually make vids? Well, there's three stages. We've talked about the game you're playing. That's the first decision to make. And then there's pre-production, coming up with the ideas. Then there's production, shooting the damn videos. And then there's post-production. I don't really know what happens in post-production because I've never touched it, but let's call it editing, distribution, uploading, learning some lessons afterwards. Preproduction, post. Pre we've talked about. You can either do the, you know, the what's working outlier search and make your version of that content. Don't watch their videos. Just look at the titles and the thumbnails and make your version of that. That's an option. Or you can look for interesting production. So, remember before I told you I was on a Zoom call yesterday with Ryan Dyson and Ali Abdal, two two epic humans inside boardroom and we were jamming on YouTube and I was like, "Okay, so there's these three jobs. There's pre-production, like coming up with the ideas, there's shooting the videos and then there's the post-production, editing and uploading and learning the stuff that they've both got a little bit of a media team." I was like, "If I was just getting started, is it possible to have one person who does those three things?" And they said, "Well, actually, you don't even need a videographer." They said, "But you could definitely have someone come up with the ideas and then edit them afterwards." I'm like, "I totally get that." If you run workshops or webinars on Zoom with your clients, you've probably got a setup that's kind of already there. The nice thing about that is it it exists. It's set up. It's ready. And so both of those guys, they use the same in studio like at home or whatever setup that they do for their webinars as they do for their long form YouTube vids. And I think that's great. I hate being stuck in my office. And so I like to get outside and that means I've got Sean here with me shooting because otherwise like there's a camera here and there's a camera there, there's a camera freaking there. There's a lot going on right now. I don't have them skills. So you can do whatever you want. But here's what's really helped me. I think we want a when, a where, a who, and a how. The when. We want to set up a schedule. For me, I started off shooting every two weeks and trying to get like a couple of videos done and some shorts. That was good, but I was kind of exhausted at the end. So, at the moment, we're on a rhythm where we're shooting less, but every single week. And honestly, I like it better. But I think like a weekly schedule for long form and a daily schedule for short form is probably a lovely rhythm to be in. Where? Well, it's probably where you already are in your house with your normal setup. That's what smart people do. But I'm a glutton for punishment. I like drawing and I like being outside. So I've got this this palava going on. Let's talk about who you can shoot these solo. It's completely fine for me. I don't have any self-discipline at all. I get by because of a little strategy I like to call a date with a dude. I shoot a great YouTube video every week. Why? Because I got a appointment with Sean. Sean comes and I know we're going to shoot videos that day. I work out. Why? because I've got a Zoom appointment with um with Andy the PT who's gonna make me do burpees and make me cry. If Andy's not there or he takes a week off, guess who else takes a week off? I shoot a I write an email and send an email every single day. Why? Because on Friday afternoons I chat with Ross, my email personal trainer, and we write emails together. A date with a dude has been really helpful for me and might be useful for you, too. This whole idea of dates with dudes could be as fancy like it could be as formal as having a someone come to your house and shoot the stuff or it could be booking a studio inside uh inside you know the work we do with clients in Buck Build. We do this stuff by having a cadence where clients come on uh every six weeks and we literally plan out the content live and then we have other times where we're all shooting content on Zoom at the same time with the lines muted. Why? Because it's a day with other dudes and that could work as well. When it comes to post-production, I'm miles from a master. And I think that's the point. If you're the person editing the videos, you're probably working too hard. You either hire an editor to do it or you go, you kind of you raw dog it and you just like shoot the video, maybe you chop the ends off and you hit post and that's plenty good enough. Every time you shoot one of these videos, someone says, "What camera are you using? What pens are you using? What's your fancy?" Like my friend Michael Gbon once told me, "It's the wizard, not the wand." It's much it's much more important that the messenger is magnetic and you've got something to say than any of that other stuff. So far, we've talked about content strategy uh and a little bit about your before, during, and after the shoot. We haven't talked about like, okay, well, let's say I've decided on a topic and I want to make something. What's the format for that? Rather than duplicate, I shot another video about how to do this using the idea that every piece of content is built like Lego bricks. There's only four core pieces. There's the hook, which gets people's attention. There's the build, which is like the body of the the message. There's the payoff, which is the big piece that everyone misses. And then finally, there's the call to action, the invitation, which is where you tell their feed to market. We use LEGO for it. It's a killer video. I'll link to it somewhere down below as well. You can check that out. But let me keep that promise I made to you at the start. There's two dates that matter. There's the date you start posting content, and that's probably in the past. And there's a date you decide to go pro. Today, I'm inviting you to make that decision. I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but honestly, I can trace all of the success we've had over the last 12 months back to one decision here in Manley at a park bench just across the on the other side of the the road and it's changed everything for me. When you make that decision, magic happens. Then we decide what game we playing. We're playing the influencer game, trying to go viral and get seen. We're playing the influential game where we're trying to grow a business and get sold out. We're always tensioning these two competing interests. What the business wants and what we want. And the best businesses do both really, really well. You don't want to be a slot a slot machine or a starving artist. You can get prolific and dangerous and paid if you do this well. Then we got two options for how to know what to talk about. We can do the deep research or we can mine for each. I do this, but you do you. There's a GPT that will help you out. Link below. Our job is to notice what's going on in our world and share our worldview. That's how you stand out different. We talked a little bit about these things. And to create great content, we build it like Lego. There's a video about that. Honestly, I want you to go pro. You know why? Because if you go pro, a million followers if you want them and a million dollars if you want it is super available to you. And that's why I shot another video called the million dollar plan, which walks through the quickest way I know to get you to a million bucks a year. It's fun. It's leveraged and it plays to your strengths. And that's linked here or here and down in the description as well. It's called the Million Dollar Plan. Go check it out. Thanks for watching. It's been fun. Bye. Oh, and if you want a copy of my handdrawn goodness, we just took some photos and you can get them down below.