We signed an industry titan 32 days into our agency:

• Owns 9 brands.
• 350 million podcast downloads.
• 4x New York Times bestselling author.

And their products are on the shelves in Whole Foods.

I’ll share exactly what we’re going to do with them in a second…

But the fascinating part?

This is our first cold, inbound lead.

All of this came from three simple Facebook posts on my personal profile with just 505 friends at the time.

No sales pitches, no CTAs, and no problem-solution frameworks. None of the ‘personal branding’ advice you hear about online either.

This is the first time a client like this has found us – and all I’ve done is talk about our business openly.

Gary Vee calls it documenting the journey. The SaaS bros call it building in public.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s my favorite style of creating content.

Because I realized this isn’t just a fun thing to do – it’s an actual marketing strategy.

I discovered this in 2023, when I grew my X following from 300 to almost 10,000 in 7 months. All I did was post content about a big Instagram influencer I partnered with, and I gave all our strategies away for free.

No sales tactics or CTAs – just sharing what I was doing.

When we launched my partner’s offer to his audience, we were surprised to see a small handful of the sales come from my audience… even though I wasn’t selling to them.

I remember hosting a group call with all the new students of the program. I ask our star student why she joined the program. I’m fully expecting her to talk about how she’s been following the influencer for years…

“I joined because Sam was taking us behind the scenes and I wanted to be a part of it.”

The Zoom room fell silent. It was almost as if I had stolen the spotlight. My face wasn’t even on the offer, yet she joined because of me and she wasn’t the only one.

That’s when I realized:

Posting content online creates results you can’t track or predict

Most marketers look at content linearly – ‘if I post X, it needs to create Y.’ It’s similar to the funnel model, where the prospect moves in a straight, logical line.

But I learned content is non-linear and illogical. For example…

• You can cater your content for beginners for fast follower growth, and still catch the attention of big names…
• Big names will work with you because of your content, even if they don’t read your content. Which I suspect is the case with the client we just signed…
• The ‘optics’ of creating content can be more persuasive than the content itself..
• It’s sometimes better to talk about yourself instead of your prospect…
• You don’t need to sell in your content to make sales…

And so much more…

These are all real outcomes of creating content, and nobody’s talking about it.

​​I’ve seen these patterns after a decade of working with brands and even doing it for myself. However, it didn’t click until this last year.

But that’s a rabbit hole for another day…

I believe in this so much, I launched a YouTube agency around it.

That’s why I’m thrilled to work with this new client.

We’re growing their YouTube channel, which is currently at 60,000 subscribers.

We’ll be ideating, scripting, and producing 1x long-form video a week. We’re also designing 9 thumbnails per video for AB testing, and factoring in SEO for the long game.

Our team has already started the long, messy process of creating winning video ideas:

1. Reading their books.
2. Studying their comments.​
3. R​esearching competitors.
4. Going through existing content on all platforms

​And tons more…

We’re aiming for a recording date in October, and we’re already finding some great ideas we’ll produce for them.

In fact, I just got off the phone with my partner, and we decided we’re going to write TWO scripts per video – one written by me, and another written by a different copywriter under my guidance.

We’ll then compare the two, and use the best ideas from both for a final script.

We’re putting as much effort into each content video as an 8-figure marketing company puts into a VSL.

We believe one video can change a business overnight, and our goal is to create that video.

You’ll see our work with this client soon, but we’ll share that closer to when the videos go live.

This brings me to my simple philosophy:

Companies should reinvest a portion of immediate profits into long-term strategies that build brand – like creating content on YouTube.

Sure, you can’t track every outcome and it’s not an instant ROI. But that’s not an argument for why it’s not a useful marketing strategy…

I argue it’s one of the most useful strategies that exist now.

One of the most profitable clients I’ve worked with was Charisma On Command.

On Graham Stephans’ podcast, they stated doing about $300,000/mo in revenue with high margins. They haven’t even posted a video for 10 months and they still get 70,000-80,000 organic views a day. All they did is post two 10-minute videos a month on YouTube, sending traffic to a $500 sales page.

No email marketing, no ads, no affiliates, no other offers.

I saw these guys start from scratch exactly 10 years ago.

They had 0 subscribers, and made $0 at the start.

Bad ROI, right?

Of course, but only when you look at it in the short-term. The longer you expand the time horizon, the more the ROI makes sense.

This is a unicorn example, and I’m not saying content is easy. But nothing is easy. And I believe if you want a long-term brand, it’s time to start the long-term journey. The best way to do that in marketing is with content.

This is why One Billion Media exists.

I want to help people use YouTube to build big, profitable brands that people love. I’m a believer that content is a needle mover for any company.

The timing may never feel perfect, but that’s true for anything worth building.

So if you’re on the fence about content, the time to start is yesterday.

This is Week 5 of building my business in public.