Look at what your content marketing cost you this year.
Add up the hours. The tools, the editing, the months of publishing before anyone reached out. Then divide it by the number of clients it actually produced.
Now look at who paid for it.
You did. All of it.
Every expert I know treats marketing that way, as a cost of doing business. You budget for it and hope it comes back through the funnel eventually.
Oren John doesn't.
He produces about 20 videos a month, every month, across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and even X. That output has amassed an audience of more than 1.75 million who pay attention to him daily.
The best part... he doesn't pay to make his content. Brands do.
Where Oren's content money comes from
Half of his short videos are sponsored. All of his long YouTube videos are sponsored. Even his newsletter is sponsored.
His content generates revenue before anyone buys a thing from him.
His sponsored content alone brings in more than $100,000 a month (Oren doesn't publish his numbers, so I'm reverse-engineering). A YouTuber friend with similar view counts told me his deals run $30,000 a month per sponsor. Oren has four big brand partners plus several smaller ones working with him consistently.
That's before platform ad revenue and affiliate income. (His YouTube ads alone add roughly another $100,000 a year.)
Then the audience those videos built starts buying from him.
His streetwear label Valuables sells limited runs he designs himself. Cut30 is his short form video training program, 100 spots a month at around $1,500. He consults under his HYPER brand, gets paid to speak, and he's a partner at the agency Darkroom.
(I teach my audience to sell to three buyer segments, Clients, Members and Customers. Oren's businesses tap all three. Apparel and speaking sell to Customers. Cut30 sells to Members. Consulting and the agency sell to Clients.)
Money comes in at every stage, starting before the camera turns on.
Paying for your own marketing caps your output
When the money comes out of your own pocket, you ration it. You skip the video that would have taken two days. You tell yourself you'll get back to it after this project wraps.
Marketing is also the first thing cut when the month gets tight. Payroll wins. Your content gets whatever's left.
Meanwhile a video costs Oren nothing to make, so he asks how much more he can publish. Every additional one brings in more sponsor money.
How much you publish determines how fast your audience grows. Which means your growth rate is set by your cash flow rather than by your ideas.
Why a fundable topic has to be broader than your service
Say 10,000 of your ideal clients are on YouTube watching videos about your narrow topic.
Make videos aimed only at those 10,000 and the algorithm struggles to help you. It doesn't know who your ideal client is. It tests every video against a broad audience first, and narrow content fails that test, so the platform shows it to a few hundred people, sees nothing happen, and quits pushing it.
Make content for the million people interested in your broader topic and the algorithm has something to work with. The video gets distribution, and your ideal 10,000 finally get a chance to see it.
Oren picked well. Creative direction sounds like a narrow specialty. Underneath it he's making content about brand building, one of the biggest topics on social media, and creative direction is the angle that makes his take on it his own.
That framing pulls in people building a personal brand, and it pulls in Fortune 500 marketers watching hipper competitors take their market. Narrow it to personal brands and the sponsor money dries up. Narrow it to Fortune 500 and the audience never gets big enough to matter.
Sponsors want enough of their buyers in your audience, and a brand association with you that makes them look good. Broad framing gets you the first. Your expertise gets you the second.
This is the same expansion I wrote about in how to niche without limiting yourself, applied to your media rather than your service.
Sponsor money lets you turn down bad clients
An expert who funds their own marketing needs client work to cover it. So the wrong-fit client at the wrong rate gets a yes, because the bills don't care who pays them.
Sponsor and affiliate money keeps coming whether or not you close anyone this month.
That income buys you the ability to say no. Landing the right clients at higher rates gets a lot easier when the marketing money isn't coming from clients.
How to get someone else to start paying
Oren didn't start with brand deals. He spent more than a year pitching his own products in his videos. Then he switched to promoting another brand as an affiliate, and that became the first content anyone else paid him for.
That switch is what made him fundable. Sponsors hand money to people who can put an offer inside a video without wrecking the video, and an affiliate deal is where you prove you can do it. Every affiliate sale is evidence you move product for someone.
Which means you can start earning before a single sponsor knows you exist. Affiliate arrangements work at any audience size. Choose products your whole audience would find useful and weave them in the way you'd handle a sponsored spot.
Then keep publishing for the broader topic. Sponsors follow audiences, and audiences show up for people who publish consistently.
What you're actually building
Go back to the number you added up at the top of this email.
What you're building is the thing that makes that number stop being yours. A body of content someone else has already paid for by the time it goes to work finding you clients.
Oren never has to ask whether a video earned its keep. It earned it the day it went live, and then it kept working for months.
Start this week. Add affiliate pitches to what you're already publishing, and part of that content cost stops being yours.
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