Hey Guys,
Look, let me cut to the chase.
Most of us don't need a viral hit.
We need a few reliable ways to get found and get paid, ones that keep working when a platform changes its mind overnight.
This edition has 12 of them. One is a $50-a-month offer that grows into a four-figure client.
Another is a quirk in how Google may weigh your links, which one tester spent $50,000 checking.
And the last one is mine: the 2-click system behind a 66,000-view post format.
I'll get to all of them.
📌 TL;DR
Simon Squibb: build your email list from every post, so one platform can't sink you.
vidIQ: a 30-day plan to get a YouTube channel monetized. Pick one lane, test for 2 weeks, then repeat the winner.
Jesse Cunningham: AI has cut the cost of building things, prices have stayed put, and that gap is where the money is.
John Whitford: sell a $50/month website, then stack services until the client pays over $1,000/month.
vidIQ: 5 YouTube fundamentals, each sharpened with AI, and AI never touches your content.
Edward Sturm: LinkedIn posts rank on Google and get cited by AI. Put your keyword first.
Tim The SEO Guru: turn 1 blog post into 3 LinkedIn posts, then automate the whole chain.
Kallaway: 6 storytelling techniques built for sales, including the broad-to-narrow order.
9x: 8 things you can build with ChatGPT Sites, from lead pages to internal tools.
Edward Sturm: a $50,000 test says links that get clicked carry more weight.
Rob Hoffman: YouTube is the #1 cited source in Google AI Overviews. Here's the checklist.
Anthony Hayes: a 3-step system to spot trending topics early and turn expert content into a finished post in 2 clicks.
1. Own your audience so one algorithm can't take it away
Who said it: Simon Squibb, 25 million followers built from scratch over 6 years.
Simon says he's posted a video every single day for 6 years, and his very first one was a clip of him and his son at the zoo.
Key points:
Simon says tell your real story. If you're still learning, share the struggle as you build.
Simon says edit your video inside each app and reply to your comments, because platforms push content that looks native to them.
Simon says every video should nudge people onto your mailing list. A list of 1,000 people beats a million views with no interaction.
Do this: Add one clear "join my list" ask to every post you publish this week.
My take: For anyone building income online, this is the survival point in the whole edition. Views are rented, and an email list is the part of the business you actually hold.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
2. Get a YouTube channel monetized in 30 days
Who said it: vidIQ, the YouTube analytics company that studies what's breaking out across the platform.
vidIQ says starting February 2027, the long-form watch-time requirement for monetization doubles from 4,000 hours to 8,000.
Key points:
vidIQ says pick one lane (Shorts or long-form) and stay focused, since the two are now monetized more separately.
vidIQ says narrow your topic without narrowing your ceiling. Ask whether 100,000 people could plausibly care about your first 5 ideas.
vidIQ says spend 2 weeks testing different topics, then copy the winner's structure, title formula, thumbnail style and length on new topics.
Do this: Run your next 5 video ideas through the 100,000-people test before you film any of them.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
3. Cash in on the gap between AI costs and old prices
Who said it: Jesse Cunningham, who runs the Rank Expander Academy and says he makes six figures a month with AI.
Jesse says he'd rather collect $1,500 every month than take a one-time $5,000 profit.
Key points:
Jesse says "build it once, rent it forever": use AI to build a site, rank it, and rent the leads to a contractor.
Jesse says go where money already moves (like Upwork). Small gigs are the bait, and the occasional big client is the prize.
Jesse says try a low-price subscription: a website for $49/month with no upfront fee, built for a dollar or two a month.
Do this: If you need cash this month, start with the Upwork play. Save the recurring plays for once the bills are covered.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
4. Turn a $50/month client into a $1,000+/month client
Who said it: John Whitford, founder of FreedomKit.ai, which he says has over 2,500 customers.
John's example stack: a $50 website, a $500 AI assistant, $400 of review management and $200 of lead follow-up. That's $1,150 a month from one client.
Key points:
John says start with a no-brainer offer (a website for $50/month) and grow the relationship from there.
John says run a monthly loop: implement a service, observe it, report the results, then pitch the next one.
John says filter your prospects down to local businesses that have no website yet.
Do this: Find 5 local businesses with good reviews and no website, and build one of them a demo page.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
5. Use AI to understand your viewer (and keep it out of your videos)
Who said it: vidIQ again, laying out 5 growth fundamentals for small YouTube channels.
vidIQ's 5 fundamentals: know your audience, study your market, speak their language, get their attention, read the response.
Key points:
vidIQ says have AI interview you one question at a time, rather than asking it who your audience should be.
vidIQ says mine the comments on breakout videos for your viewers' exact words. "Is it worth my Friday night?" beats "spoiler-free film analysis."
vidIQ says screenshot your niche's feed, then have AI play your viewer and tell you straight why your thumbnail lost.
Do this: Start here:
Interview me one question at a time to figure out who my channel is for. Ask about me, my experience and my topic first. After 8 questions, describe one specific viewer: their situation when they hit play, what they've already tried, and what they're skeptical of.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
6. LinkedIn posts rank on Google, and hardly anyone's using it
Who said it: Edward Sturm, SEO podcaster who's published an episode every day for over 1,160 days.
Edward shares a listener, Mark, who came back to LinkedIn after years of inactivity. Within a week, one post had 45,000 views.
Key points:
Edward says LinkedIn ranks for almost 120 million keywords and pulls in almost 500 million Google clicks a month.
Edward says put your target keyword at the start of the post, so it appears in the URL slug, page title and meta description.
Edward says reuse the same post on X, Threads and Facebook pages. If a post goes well above your usual numbers, read it out as a short video.
Do this: Post on LinkedIn daily, and open every post with the phrase you want to rank for.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
7. Get LinkedIn doing SEO work while you sleep
Who said it: Tim The SEO Guru, who runs this exact LinkedIn workflow for his own businesses.
Tim cites a SEMrush AI search study: 89,000 unique LinkedIn URLs were cited across 325,000 prompts, putting LinkedIn second only to Reddit.
Key points:
Tim says make every post citable: lead with the topic, give one useful answer, and add your own first-hand view.
Tim says split 1 blog article into 3 LinkedIn posts: a checklist, a mistake to avoid, and your perspective.
Tim says automate it: Arvo writes the articles, Claude or ChatGPT turns the RSS feed into posts, and Blotato schedules them.
Do this: Take your most recent blog post and write 3 LinkedIn posts from it (checklist, mistake, perspective).
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
8. Tell stories that sell, with entertainment as a bonus
Who said it: Kallaway, 2 million followers and billions of views, who spends all day on content.
Kallaway says the brain takes in information top-down, so he explains everything in this order: context, stakes, strategy, tactics, examples, principles.
Key points:
Kallaway says frame every story around your buyer's specific pain, use the vocabulary they use, show proof, and leave a path to learn more.
Kallaway says land 2 "aha" moments early, then put your call-to-action straight after the second one.
Kallaway says script sales stories in 5 steps: name the pain, the old method that failed, a new named mechanism, real results, then an offer.
Do this: Rewrite your next video script or email in the broad-to-narrow order before you publish it.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
9. Build the tool you've been waiting for, in an afternoon
Who said it: 9x, an AI training company that says it's trained over 20,000 business professionals.
9x built a live business site for a made-up plant company, complete with logo, images and a lead form, in about 15 minutes with ChatGPT Sites.
Key points:
9x says a
design.mdfile with your style guide keeps every page ChatGPT builds on-brand.9x says you can rebuild paid tools. They cloned an image compressor (capped at 20 free images a day) and bolted on auto-saving to Google Drive.
9x says an app that calls AI runs on your own OpenAI API key, so everyone who uses it spends your credits.
Do this: List the dashboards, pages or tools you're waiting on someone else to build, and build the smallest one first.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
10. Internal links that get clicked may carry more weight
Who said it: Edward Sturm, breaking down a test by Black Hat World poster "Digital Media Lab" (9 years in SEO) and a Google patent.
Digital Media Lab says they spent over $50,000 testing internal links across 15 websites, and saw ad RPMs rise by up to 150%.
Key points:
The poster says 5 internal links to and from a page was the minimum to stop indexing problems, and 20+ caused no ranking drop.
The poster says the first links on a page (in order, relative to other links) carried more ranking value than later ones.
Edward points to a Google patent (now expired) that weights links by how likely they are to be clicked. Google doesn't use every patent, so treat it as a strong hint.
Do this: Pick your 10 most important pages, give each at least 5 internal links in and out, and make the first link point where you most want readers to go.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
11. Get AI to recommend you through YouTube
Who said it: Rob Hoffman, who reports weekly on what's winning customers for tech companies.
Rob cites a new study putting YouTube as the #1 cited source in Google AI Overviews, with about 22% mention share.
Key points:
Rob says put your keyword in the video file name, the title (under 60 characters), the tags, the description and the chapters.
Rob says record interview-style, and have the expert repeat the question in each answer so the keywords land in the transcript.
Rob says upload your own transcript and captions. Gemini will transcribe the video file for you.
Do this: Pick one buyer-intent question in your niche and record a simple interview answering it, question repeated in the answer.
🎥 Watch Video: Click here
12. Spot the trend early and post the breakdown in 2 clicks
Who said it: Me, Tony Hayes, from our live Content Genesis session. I built the tool after seeing how simple this play really is.
A creator called Mario pulled 50 lessons from one fresh YouTube algorithm video and posted them on X. That single post did 66,000 views, 793 likes and 99 reposts.
Key points:
I use a 3-step system: prompt 1 spots what's breaking for your audience, prompt 2 finds expert content on it, and Content Genesis's Authority Breakdown turns it into a finished post in 2 clicks.
In an X thread, never put your link in the first post. The algorithm buries it, so put it in the second.
Always add a call to action. Mario's post had none, and a press release I once ran hit 1 million views with no way to capture a single email.
9 lessons from the session
Odd numbers win. Add your own take to those 24 points and you've got 25. Odd-numbered lists consistently pull higher click-through rates. I can't tell you why, but they do.
Let the geeks do the testing. There's always someone racing to be first to test and report on a new release. Let them. You curate their findings, credit them, and save your audience hours of work.
Be specific in Step 1. I searched "AI marketing tools and SEO" and got broad, noisy results. Name the exact audience and the exact angle (for example, "how people are using Opus 5.5 for SEO and AEO").
Use Gemini for long videos. It handles long transcripts better than the others. For the Growth Signals newsletter, Gemini pulls the insights from 10 to 12 videos, then Claude checks nothing was missed and rewrites it in our voice. My team turns out a full edition, images included, in about 20 minutes.
Threads beat X articles for most people. You don't need a Premium account to post a thread. Never put your link in the first post. The algorithm buries it, and sometimes the post just disappears. Put it in the second post, so readers see it before they drop off.
Always have a call to action. Mario's post had none. Years ago I ran a press release for Holly Stark's product launch webinar that hit over 1 million views, with nothing to capture an email. Every piece of content needs a goal: a follow, a subscribe, or better, a landing page that collects an email.
Sell the outcome. I showed a lead-gen site whose landing page is a live demo: big outcome-based headline, free credits, then its AI agents run on your own website before you've signed up. The founders say it grew to $4 million in annual revenue in 3 months. The lesson for curation is simple: posts about what people actually built and achieved beat general "here's the news" posts.
Wait for the use cases. In the first 2 days after a release, it's mostly announcements. A few days later, the outcome-based posts appear ("here's what I built with it"). That's the content to curate, and there's usually another angle on the same topic right behind it.
Know who's buying. X and LinkedIn aren't the $8 front-end crowd. Startups with real marketing budgets are all over those platforms, and they're hiring the people who show the steps and results. That's the audience worth building.
Bonus tip: Shared NotebookLM notebooks are getting indexed and ranking on Google. Turn a curated roundup into a notebook, add your call to action, and you've got a parasite SEO page.
My take: Finding the topic is the part that stops most people. The writing is 2 clicks once you know what to curate. Pick one audience, run Step 1 every morning, and post consistently for 30 days. That's where the attention builds.
Grab Content Genesis (with Tube Genesis as a bonus)
If you want to turn every trending video or post into a finished breakdown in 2 clicks, Content Genesis does the heavy lifting. It runs through your own ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, so there are no API keys and no usage limits.
Right now you also get Tube Genesis as a bonus, and it's at its lowest price.
Grab it, run the 2 prompts tonight, and have your first breakdown posted before the Opus 5.5 wave passes.
🎥 Watch the replay:
https://youtube.com/live/ey0f8gnzH5M
One more thing before you go
Half of this edition is about getting traffic cheaply. The other half is about what that traffic buys. If you're in affiliate marketing, the hardest part is picking the offer.
I built Affiliate Profit Pilot to handle that. It's a Chrome extension that finds affiliate offers worth promoting, filters them down to the best opportunities, and rates how hard each one would be to rebuild as your own product. It runs on your own AI, so nothing leaves your browser.
Before your next promo, run the offer through it and see whether it's worth your traffic.
Talk soon,
Tony
P.S. Content Genesis is at the lowest price it will ever be, with Tube Genesis included as a bonus. If you want a simple way to post consistently without writing from scratch, grab it here: https://anthonyhayes.io/content-genesis