How We Reached 33 Million Followers Without Paying for Ads

I Am Not Paying to Grow

Let me say this clearly, because people don't believe me when I say it. I am not paying to grow. Let me repeat that. I am not paying to grow our followers. The real way to grow on social media is organically. And you keep doing it until you crack the code. Some videos go viral, some videos don't, but if you're consistent, you're going to eventually win the game.

Social media is an opportunity. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google. All of these platforms are attention-grabbing opportunities. My job is to show you how to leverage them to get attention without having to break the bank.

Here's what that has looked like for us. Our brand is really three separate brands that all feed the same company. In 2021 we had 16 million followers. In 2022, 19 million. In 2023 we exploded and got to almost 33 million followers across social media. All organic. These are organic followers.

Attention Turns Into Revenue, and We Prove It Every Year

If your content is good and valuable, it will help a lot of people. And it will help you get attention. And when you get attention, you know what happens? You can get revenue. That's something we actually get to prove every year.

When I look at our reach statistic, how many accounts we reached, we got 6 billion accounts reached. And when I put the revenue graph next to it, they actually match. The gross income of an organization is going to almost exactly follow the global following, the global views, the global accounts being reached. It is amazing how similar those two graphs are.

In my book, Marketing Magic, I talk about the formula behind this. I call it the primary content strategy.

Stop Worrying About Length. Worry About Value.

Primary content is your long-form material. Four-minute videos, 10-minute videos, 20-minute videos, it doesn't matter. You don't have to worry about how long they are. You have to worry about how valuable they are.

When you think about the value of your content, ask one question: how much better is that person going to be able to accomplish the thing you are teaching in that video? If you did that well, you have value. And if you have value, it will grow with time. It is just one of those certainties of life. If you are confident in your ability to impact the lives of people, give them value, service them, provide education, inspiration, whatever that may be, you're going to eventually catch fire. Your content will take off.

But understand this. The primary content game of putting content out there is a long game. It is not an overnight game. If you want to do this for a couple of months and see what happens, don't even start.

And here's why the long game pays. That content keeps living forever. People today are finding content I created six years ago and signing up for my marketing services because of it. People are going to keep finding you forever because of the content being posted on your platforms every single day.

First, You Need a Content Unicorn

Everything starts with one person. Who is your content creator? Is it you? Is it somebody else? Who's the one that's passionate, likes to be in front of the camera, wants the attention, and wants to communicate to a camera non-stop? Somebody willing to create content every single day. You have to figure that out. You have to name that person.

Hopefully it is yourself, because there's nobody like you to communicate the power and the value of your message, your brand, your business, your everything. You are the right person for this. But if you're not comfortable doing that, get yourself a partner or hire somebody. You're going to have to pay them really well if you think they're going to be good. That person becomes your content unicorn, and from that unicorn the primary content gets born.

One more thing about primary content: it feeds everything. Some of the best podcasts in the world were born without anyone ever sitting down to record a podcast. I built one for a major health educator we worked with. He has never made a podcast in his life, and it became one of the most popular podcasts on the planet. How? We take his audio and upload it as a podcast. The long-form video goes to YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. All of it is born from the primary content.

The Team That Multiplies One Video Into a World of Content

From the unicorn's primary content, you build a line of people who create a world of content around it. The content miner looks at what comes in from the unicorn and finds the clips, quotes, and moments that are valuable. The video editors take that content and cut 60-second clips, 90-second clips, short-form content. The copywriter turns primary content into publishable posts with attention-grabbing headlines, hooks, and calls to action, and even writes the emails and text messages that bring people back to watch.

Then you have schedulers, who take everything being produced and schedule it across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. You have a community manager, the person managing engagement, answering people's questions, and feeding the comments back to the unicorn so you get inspiration about what communication is being well received and what content you should create more of. And you want a data analyst, someone watching what's performing and what's not, feeding that data back so you create more of what's actually working.

At our scale, with 33 million followers, this team is big. Around 25 community managers and moderators. Two data analysts. About four schedulers, because we publish 3,000 times a month. Two copywriters. Maybe eight editors creating attention-grabbing videos and learning from the analysts what works. And five or six content miners, because with our content quantities I want a lot of people finding great content.

2,400 Pieces Become Thousands of Publications

Here's the math that makes this insane. In a single 12-minute video, I can find three to four clips of a minute or less that have incredible value, and those go viral on social media and do really well. So 2,400 primary pieces of content become thousands and thousands of publications, month after month.

How insane is it that I can reach 2.4 billion people in a single year without paying a penny? That is the marketing magic I talk about in my book. Create valuable primary content every single day, build the line of people that multiplies it, be consistent, and play the long game. Execute on it correctly, and you win.