Everything You Do Is Content

Everything you do is content. When I started making content I kept asking myself what do I post about, and I ran out of ideas. That was the wrong question. The discovery call is content. The setup is content. That is the reason I built this studio.

5:38

“Everything you do is content.”

My name is Daniel Ro. I have been working as a content creator for over 10 plus years and I have worked with around 400 plus clients. It has been a long ride. I made a ton of mistakes. A ton of mistakes. I think I finally figured it out.

Start with three podcasts

Madison came in with a real problem. She had a video from a ski trip in France that she thought would get a million views. It got about 400. It is actually a good video. The problem is it is a three minute video and no one on Instagram is watching a three minute video. It starts with her and her husband walking down the street. No one cares. There was no hook.

My recommendation for her was to start a podcast. The topic does not matter at the beginning. Pick three topics you are passionate about. Travel, for example. Talk about why it matters to you, the places you have been, the stories. That is a solo episode where you talk to the camera and drop in video of the experiences.

The other format is you bring someone in. If you do that, find the opposite of you. I have a client in insurance. The owner is very professional and tactical, he can teach on camera, but he is not funny. So we paired him with another employee who is hilarious. They talk, they laugh, then they talk about insurance, and people stay.

Why long form is the foundation

I am a big believer that you need long form content. If I post a video on YouTube today, somebody is going to watch that video three years from now. Five years from now. There is always somebody who is going to watch it. On Instagram that is not the case. What you post today is very hard to find in six months.

The natural human behaviour is that if I connect with who you are, I want to consume more of your content. It starts with short form. Then you mention you have a podcast. The person goes to the long form, and the long form builds loyalty and audience. That is your tribe. YouTube is also very good at finding who your tribe is.

20:33

“Somebody's gonna watch the video five years from now.”

AI employees, not chatbots

There are two different things. Chatbots and agentic tools. Most people only use the chatbot. The way I explain it, and please do not attack me in the comments, is that agentic tools are your employees.

My first employee is Sofia, my assistant. I pick up my phone and say Sofia, text Madison and remind her the podcast session is on this day. She sends the text. You decide what she gets access to. Your Gmail, your calendar, your contacts. It asks for approval before it takes any of it.

You do not need to know how to code. You talk to it like you talk to a human being. You say I need to create an agent who is going to do X, Y and Z for me, and it builds it for you. That is the beauty of AI now. You can build your own employees.

I have a video editor agent for each client. At the end of this podcast I take the cards out of the cameras, put them on my MacBook, and the AI video editor notices there is new footage. It asks me if I want to start the multicam edit. It does the switching, my camera when I talk, the second camera when the guest talks. By the time I wake up the edit is ready to review. Then it asks if I want to publish to the YouTube channel, and the YouTube publisher agent posts it with the title and description written the way I told it to write them.

25:50

“You can build your own employees. It will code for you.”

Then another employee chops the podcast into reels. It picks the parts it thinks will do best on Instagram, asks me if I agree, and schedules them. For Gabby we post Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10am. And the YouTube video becomes a blog post. A couple of hours after we upload, it is on her blog.

Followers are not the point, but views are not either

I do not believe in views. Views are a metric Instagram uses to keep you on the platform. If a client tells me they need views, the strategy is different and it is simple. You look at what is already going viral in your niche and you recreate it piece by piece, but it is you.

Madison had a reel of her daughter at a dance recital sitting at almost a million views. It brought her around 200 followers and roughly 80 percent of them were grandmas. That is not her demographic. She got the followers but they do not engage with her content. That is the question that matters. Are they staying for the other content.

Build an agent that reads your own analytics

Instagram shows you all the analytics but it does not show you the next step. That is what we need. For Gabby we built a tool that takes the month, analyses every piece of content, the carousels and the reels, and breaks it down by topic. There is a line for followers and a middle line. Every time the topic line goes over the middle line, it means non followers are watching.

That told us she needs to talk about body image, eating disorders, running and training. Then it gives three ideas for each topic. She creates reels on that, we reach non followers, and she gets more followers. Gabby has ADHD, so her version gives her one thing at a time instead of six.

43:40

“Every time the line goes over that middle line, non followers are watching.”

Then we take the reels that are doing best and post them to YouTube shorts to validate. If they do well on Instagram, most likely they do well on TikTok and YouTube shorts. That is what is happening.

Do not let it just agree with you

Language models tend to agree with you. If you say I think I should post more, it will immediately say yes, you are right, you need to post more. So I always say do not always agree with me. Be critical of my thinking.

A chatbot will also drift onto things that have nothing to do with you. That is the advantage of the agentic tool. My agent knows this is Daniel, this is his business, these are his offers, this is his website, this is the way he talks, this is our ideal client. It thinks inside that box.

51:00

“Do not always agree with me. Be critical of my thinking.”

If you have spent months feeding ChatGPT your story, you do not have to start over. Ask Claude to write you a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT to pull out everything relevant about you and your business, then paste that back. Or export your data from ChatGPT settings and bring it across.

Hooks are a test, not a compromise

A lot of creatives think using proven hooks is not being creative. I made a guide years ago with 50 hooks I tested on TikTok and Instagram. You feed the PDF to your content agent and ask which one to use for the next reel. Then you film the hook.

Think of it as a test. If you use one and it does not work, now you know. If you use one and it works, you push it.

Same with prompts. There is a massive belief out there that your prompt has to be technically perfect. It does not. I do it live with my accent and I mess it up and it still does a good job. What matters more is constraints. When I want AI to build me a carousel in a style I like, I screenshot the slides and give it the screenshots as reference. My camera roll is full of screenshots. Otherwise it could think about all sorts of things I did not ask for.

One last thing. Organic growth is slow. Madison started trying to be a creator in March, went from around 1,875 followers to 3,280, and that is good. It probably takes a year. That does not mean one reel cannot blow you up. Gabby had one reel about Ariana Grande, posted a week ago, no AI involved, and it is bringing her a lot of followers. But the followers are not the win. She texted me that a post got her three discovery calls and she thinks she is going to fill up next month. That happens when it all comes together. The reel, the podcast, the website, the YouTube channel. Someone sees it all and decides they want to work with you.

39:15

“That post has gotten me three discovery calls.”