Why You Must Build A One Man Media Company Right Now

Today we are going to talk about the one-man media company. We are still in the midst of this pandemic right now. We're in the middle of COVID And I think a lot of people are realizing that just relying on one job on one employer is a pretty risky bet. So maybe they're looking at starting a side hustle. Maybe they're looking to build an e-commerce shop or maybe looking to do freelancing. Um, but you know, I think a lot of people when they're starting out, it's like, okay, where are the leads going to come from? Where is the distribution going to come from? Where's the traffic going to come from? And, you know, traditionally people have relied on ads, the big ad networks such as the Facebooks, the Googles, the Amazons of the world for traffic. So you are buying traffic from them. And, you know, what ends up happening is these are auction-based systems. So the ad costs go higher and higher and higher. A lot of people talk about having to build your own brand, build your own media property. You have to create content. You know, the Gary Vees of the world always talk about You have to create content. You have to create content. A one-man media company, people talk about personal branding. Personal branding is a, it is a moat. It's a defensible moat. And Warren Buffett always talks about, you know, how can they like to invest in companies that have a moat, something that's defensible. And the reason they bought See's Candies was because it has a defensible moat. It's, they can actually continue to charge more and more because it is a premium product. Now Coca-Cola has a moat as well. And when you think about Coca-Cola, they are a— you might think about sugary drinks, but reality is they have tons and tons of different brands and it's not all just sugary drinks, right? But Coca-Cola is a brand and people will remember that. You take a look at Amazon as well, uh, or Apple, they have different types of brands. Tesla is, is also its own brand. But for you specifically, you watching right now, you know, how do you take advantage of this concept? We all know that brand is a very defensible thing, People talk about personal brands and they think about Kylie Jenner, they think about Tony Robbins. But, you know, my point is you can actually start doing this today. Uh, you can become a one-man media company and you don't need to become really big. And I'm just going to give you a couple of examples. So, um, Gary Vee is a really good example. He started working for his dad and helped take that business from $3 to $60 million a year. And then he started speaking and then he wrote the book Crush It and then he built his agency. But now he's got millions and millions of followers across different social platforms because he's been very consistent with creating content. And so now he can leverage that and he's put so many deposits into the bank that he can start to, you know, make withdrawals now. That's all about what content is. Even if you're starting out right now, you might be thinking, Eric, well, I don't have any experience. How am I supposed to do this? Well, I mean, the first thing that you have to do is you have to hit like and then you have to hit the subscribe button because you want to grow faster and watch stuff like this, right? You got to create content and if you don't have any experience initially, well, then you can document, right? Gary always talks about documenting. You can watch his stuff on YouTube. He's all about documentation, right? And so that's, that's one example. If you don't have— if you don't have experience, you document, and then you document your journey. As you start to pick up more and more experience, you can start to make how-to videos like this one. You can make how-to videos, you can make reaction videos. You can— once you start to have an audience, because people just— they'll come back to you and they'll watch your stuff. So my point is, it's important to start thinking about, okay, how are you going to build that audience? And the first thing that you should do is think about what you're actually good at. If you're good at writing short-form content, maybe Twitter is good for you. If you're good at audio, maybe podcasting is good for you. If you're good at video, you start with video first. If you're good at illustrations, you go to illustrations. If you're good at designing stuff, you go with designing, right? There's a guy named Visualize Value on Instagram. He does really good work and all his stuff is really simple designs. Naval Ravikant, he He built his brand off of Twitter. Jason Lemkin built his brand off of Quora, right? He's got this, the largest SaaS conference in the world right now, the largest SaaS community. When I think about the podcast that I have, Marketing School, we've got a decent-sized audience as well. And from that audience, we are able to sell advertising. We have events that go on as well. We have virtual events. We have education program that we have coming out as well. We have a lot of things that are centered around that, but that also gets clients for the ad agency that I have. And also gets clients for the software that I have. And I did that with another marketer named Neil Patel, um, and he's got a big name in the space. And we, we do the same thing. He drives to his software, he drives to his agency, and then we drive to our events. And we're like, we have a nice system working out. But you don't necessarily need millions and millions of downloads a month, um, or, you know, a very large audience with hundreds of thousands of people following you, right? Uh, there's a guy named Dave Perell. I think he has under 100,000 Twitter followers. He just writes really good stuff on Twitter Guy's in his mid-twenties, and you know he just teaches. He teaches. He just he teaches people how to write, teaches people how to use Twitter. He sells courses. He sells training. But his whole shtick is you know you just got to learn how to write. You got to learn how to build a brand, and the best best time to start doing it is is right now, especially in the time that we're in right now. You start building that brand. I think a lot of people think oh other people are so amazing. You know I'll never get there, and I think those are really self-defeating thoughts. But You know, I'm sure he's probably doing a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. Another guy, Anthony Popliano, this guy gets— he has a podcast, 2.5 million downloads a month. His YouTube, I think, is about 173K subscribers. His Twitter is about 300,000. He started building this a couple years ago, and I would not be surprised if he's not at least doing 7 figures a year take-home, if not at least, you know, a million dollars a year in take-home. That's a one-man media company because for him, He might have someone else helping him, but he's creating all the content. He's spending a ton of time creating content. He's writing daily newsletters. Even when I think about the content we're creating with this YouTube channel, the Marketing School Podcast and all that, um, a lot of it, the base content starts with me and then my team's helping me kind of repurpose it. But a lot of it, a lot of it initially started with me kind of grinding away, starting, starting with, um, you know, the Leveling Up Podcast and now I have the Marketing School Podcast. I just kept going and going and going. Same thing with our blog. When I first took over, my ad agency Single Grain, 4,000 visits a month. Now we're about 300,000, which is decent. Um, you know, it's not millions and millions, but I'm just saying, look, it's the best time to start is now. Well, obviously best time was yesterday, but now is the next best time. And you start to build this one-man media company. You don't need a ton of volume. If you have like an investor's podcast or investor's newsletter, maybe you can charge a couple hundred, a couple thousand dollars for people to subscribe to your newsletter for an annual thing. You can make good money off of that. You could be making, you know, we're talking You know, $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year and you'll do great for yourself. That's a one-man media company. I know in China, there's a teacher that makes about $8 million a year just, you know, teaching, you know. And, you know, granted it's hard work, right? But point is, when we say one-man media company, you start out, you don't need a lot of resources initially. And then once you start to really get going, you can start to scale out from there. But this all comes back down to, you know, how do you build a defensible moat around you? How do you make sure that when the next disaster hits that you're protected, that you're insulated from it and you can take shots, right? I think that's the, that's the key point here. If you're able to build a one-man media company, then you will have so many different income opportunities that you do not need to worry as much anymore. And you can, because your nest egg, your foundation is set already, you can take shots. You know, I'll use American football analogy. You can throw, you can throw Hail Marys, you can throw, uh, you can go for the end zone every single time. And that's a lot more liberating because you can work on the things that you want to work on. You can live a life of more freedom because you have put in all the hard work initially to build the leverage that other people don't have because other people aren't willing to put in the hard work initially, right? It's all, it all comes down to action at the end of the day. The people that have these one-man media companies, they started out that way. And now a lot of them, a lot of these have teams, right? Um, I look at, you know, my wonderful team that helps me with content. Um, even this setup over here, it's because my team is helping with that. So I think it's, I think now is time start to start to think about, you know, it doesn't matter if you're in India watching this. It doesn't matter if you're in Singapore, you know, Philippines, or it doesn't matter if you're in Australia watching this, the United States. It just doesn't matter. What matters is that you take action every single day. You're taking, you know, you're getting 1% better each and every day. You're improving, you're improving, you're improving, and you're doing what other people aren't willing to do, right? Sure, you can watch some Netflix here and there. You can get some entertainment here and there, but You know, by and large, you should be focusing on how can you provide more value to the world. Maybe you start with documentation first, then you teach, then you build that one-man media company one block at a time, and you will become indestructible, alright? Let me know what you think in the comments about this. Don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button because you wanna grow faster, you want more videos like this. Alright, so that is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.