Over the last two decades, I’ve built a career most digital marketers dream about—billions of organic views, millions of followers online, and a reputation as the go-to guy for video marketing, social strategy, and over the last few years, artificial intelligence. But here’s the uncomfortable truth most creators won’t tell you.
Going viral doesn’t mean you’re successful.
It just means your content worked—for a moment.
I’ve had Shorts with tens of millions of views, Instagram Reels that flood my DMs with messages, and TikToks that make even the dancers jealous. I run a YouTube channel with over 600,000 subscribers and manage 20+ faceless video channels across niches. But you know what that adds up to in ad revenue some months? A couple hundred bucks a month.
Most content creators go into creation thinking that ad revenue monetization is going to change their lives! That just simply isn’t true for most creators, even if they’re pulling absurd numbers.
Build businesses that allow you to create content. Views without having a business backend is simply just vanity metrics for your own ego.
Here’s what I’ve done to build businesses around my content so that those billions of views become millions of dollars, not hundreds.
1. My first company was a social media marketing agency
I had a simple philosophy for growing that business. Practice what I preach. My theory was, for a business to hire a marketing agency to help them grow on social media, are they more likely to hire the agency with no social media presence themselves or the one that was getting millions of views showing how to grow on social media?
It worked. I was able to grow that agency to multiple seven figures in revenue entirely organically from social media, creating helpful content every day.
2. I leveraged my audience to book paid speaking engagements
I had always wanted to become a paid professional speaker. I attended conferences for years, learning from the best and networking my way up. When I started to gain a large following online, TikTok in particular, I was able to leverage that. I reached out to the owner of AI Marketing World conference, and shot my shot because I had 50,000 TikTok followers at the time and got the gig.
Then I leveraged that experience to get on other stages. Today, I speak all around the world as a thought leader due to my social media following. I get paid a speaker fee, and I often times also get paid in ticket sales as a commission.
3. I went deep into AI SaaS content for high-paying affiliate marketing and paid brand deals
The type of content I’ve created over the years was very strategic. It went from digital marketing tips, to SEO, to video marketing, and now AI/SaaS over the last 3–4 years. This has allowed me to open up several very successful streams of income, affiliate marketing and brand deals.
Affiliate marketing in the SaaS world can be incredibly lucrative because it compounds as recurring commissions stack up. Brand deals can also earn you a lot of money to promote other software companies.
4. I started my own AI SaaS company
Eventually, I got to a point where I asked myself, “Why am I promoting these other companies for only 20–40% commissions? Why couldn’t I own the company I was promoting? So, I started a company called Syllaby.
It’s a tool that fits perfectly with the content I was creating and in my area of expertise online. More or less as soon as I launched Syllaby, it became profitable because of the audience I built from creating consistent content every single day.
