SAM OCEAN

New YouTube Growth Testimonial: Hey, I'm Dave Asprey. People know me for starting the biohacking movement and putting butter in coffee. I've got over 1 million Instagram followers and way north of 500 million podcast downloads... But YouTube was a platform that I just hadn't cracked yet. When I hired the YouTube agency One Billion Media, we grew from about 64,000 to 151,000 subscribers in a few months (now it's 179,000 subs). One of my videos crossed a million views (now it's two videos), and five more crossed 100,000 (now it's seven). And my views and watch time are up, and YouTube's now paying enough that it's covering the costs of working with these guys. And they did it all through organic growth without spending one dollar on ads. So if you're in the wellness space and want to grow on YouTube, you might want to check out One Billion Media. --- We work exclusively with education brands, and we're zoning in on enterprise health clients like Dave. If you want to grow on YouTube then be like Dave. DM me 🙂

I wrote a 60,000-word YouTube training for my team. But in the first paragraph, I tell them none of it matters. I literally say: "Our goal is to become one of the top YouTube firms in the world, which means we need to turn you into one of the top YouTube strategists in the industry. Unfortunately, this YouTube master course is not going to help you achieve that. In fact, I don't have complicated hacks, tricks, or secrets to teach you. That's because nobody became a pro overnight by going through a course, and this one is no exception." You see, I’ve run a YouTube firm for 2 years now. During that time, we’ve hired 25 strategists, scriptwriters, and thumbnail designers for significant ongoing work. Together, we’ve produced 100 million views for some really big businesses. I’m proud to say my team can produce results without me. But it’s the hardest founder challenge I’ve ever had to solve. The only way to grow a YouTube firm is by building a team that can crush it on YouTube without you. And if you run an agency, or build content teams, you’ll know there’s a massive shortage of YouTube talent. 99% of the market don’t have the skills to get results, but the top 1% are too expensive or simply don’t want to work in an agency. So we built our model around bringing in junior level talent and building them up to our standard. But I quickly realized there’s no SOP or documentation that will turn somebody into a genius strategist overnight. You can make an incredible YouTube course, like the one I made, and somebody will only be 1% better after reading it. That’s because all that matters is developing creative taste. And you achieve this by doing the actual work. So all of our systems are designed not around teaching YouTube, but building taste. This is why we have talent like Saira who’s absolutely crushing it. Saira did the work with us and now she has taste. This is what makes her top 1%. Now, it’s a challenge I’m still trying to solve at scale. We’re preparing to grow big in 2027 which means I need to expand my team. I’m still obsessing about how to turn a junior into a senior strategist or scriptwriter overnight. It feels like a goal I’ll never achieve but I am stupid enough to try. 💪 (a shot of mezcal before my calls today, only in Mexico)

This 1960s book helped me understand YouTube more than anything else. I’ve been reading this and related books for a couple years now, and I gotta say, the old-school classics dominate over the new-age lead gen books. You see, I run a YouTube agency that’s generated over 100 million views across dozens 7, 8, and 9-figure education brands. I’m seeing how the YouTube algorithm, and other algos, are changing in a way that makes some traditional marketing advice irrelevant. This is why YouTube feels so hard for a lot of people. Let me explain… In 1964, a media theorist created a certain philosophy. That philosophy grew so big, he actually broke into mainstream pop culture. He got a 20-page spread in Playboy, Woody Allen featured him in his Oscar-winning movie Annie Hall, and people like John Lennon and Yoko Ono engaged with his theories publicly. His name was Marshall McLuhan. It’s funny because I’ve been studying Marshall’s work all year, but he’s rarely talked about today even though his philosophy is more relevant than ever. He wrote multiple books about how the medium is the message. It’s this idea that the tool you use to deliver information changes you far more than the information itself. When we look at a screen, we usually focus on the content (the specific text, video, or photo). McLuhan argued that the content is actually just a distraction. The real impact is the technology because it rewires how our brains think and how we consume information. This has a direct impact on how you need to publish your information (aka content). Now think about how marketing has evolved. We had deeper disciplines like direct response marketing, which taught us the psychology of how to persuade and convert. You would then apply this to things like direct mail, telemarketing, TV/radio, and the latest, social media. But social media is no longer social, it’s interest. Gary Vaynerchuk’s been saying this for years. But interest-based algorithms, as a medium, are fundamentally changing how we do content and even business. The moment I adapted my agency’s YouTube approach to fit this medium, results starting taking off. It’s why I believe one of the biggest false dichotomies is this debate between “views” vs “leads.” If you just adapt to the medium properly, you can have both. And both have benefits that directly feed into one another. But if you’ve struggled with YouTube, this means you’re not crafting your message for the medium. So if you want to succeed on an interest-based algorithm like YouTube, then you need to bend, shape, and shift your message to fit within that medium. This is a result of understanding Interest Marketing. I’ll be sharing more about this as it’s applied to long-form YouTube videos for educational businesses. They have the most to gain from understanding this. So every week, I’m sharing exactly how we do this in our agency on my email list at TheSamOcean(.)com Learn this and you’ll dominate the coming years.

We got 700,000 views in 7 weeks by using Demand Mapping 🔥 I created this concept and it helped get 100 million views for my YouTube clients in just 2 years. It’s really not that sexy, until it is. Let me break it down: First, you need to find a core topic. This is a topic that’s been validated on YouTube already. For our mobility client here, that topic was squats. Easy enough. Second, you need to find out why that topic works. - Did the market suddenly become aware of it? - Did someone with celebrity recently talk about it? - Did an unknown creator use a weird hook to make it trend? - Has it been an evergreen topic for reasons we don’t know? - Does it naturally tickle a core emotional desire in the market? Dig deeper to find the demand. Write down everything you find next to the core topic from step 1. For us, simply put, squats as a topic were attracting an older audience. They associated squats and leg strength with longevity. They believed squats could balance insulin, lower cortisol, alleviate aches and pains, all so they could live a longer, healthier life. By now, you should have a core topic with a cluster of reasons why it works. Which brings us to the final step… Third, create video ideas based on the underlying demand. This is where creative taste and knowing markets is required. For us, we did three things: 1. We did a topic positioned around longevity (broad outcome). We got a video with 2 million views by doing this. 2. We did a topic positioned around insulin sensitivity (niche outcome). We got a video with 1 million views by doing this. 3. We did a topic positioned around the horse stance (a squat variation). That’s this video here, which is at 700,000 views and counting. This is what I call Demand Mapping. You carve out specific parts of the “demand” for one topic and turn them into videos on separate topics. YouTube is just understanding supply and demand. When you master this, you can blow up too. If you want to learn more about how we grow businesses on YouTube, join my email newsletter at TheSamOcean(.)com - I give away all of our secrets every week for free.

October progress update in my YouTube agency: - Signed 6 new clients, we have the team for it 🔥 - Officially closed our doors until 2027. - Turned away ~15 leads due to no more bandwidth. - One lead called me unprofessional for it (oh well). - Refunded 1 client, didn’t align with our approach. - A key strategist put in their leave notice 🙃 - Panicked for 24 hours, didn’t know what to do. - Two other strategists stepped up, saved my sanity 💅 - Started a trial with huge education channel, 7 million subs. - Secured a biz partnership with client doing ~10m views/mo. - Brought on new partner to help build our marketing arm. - Struggled to find new talent to train them for next year. - Started planning my first YouTube cohort for January. - Finished first 2 YouTube scripts for my own channel. Although there were roadblocks and unfortunate news with a team member leaving, it was a great month for us. We’re onboarding every client smoothly and making sure to deliver on existing clients. In fact, we just had a record month in terms of actual client results. I’m 100% confident we’ll continue these results for our new clients too. I mean, we’re literally saying no to new business so we can focus on who we currently have. It’s not easy, but I swore to not be one of the 95% of agencies who f****** suck. This is how it looks. I’m 26 months into building One Billion Media and having the time of my life. Thank you for supporting me and excited to share next month’s update. 💪 P.S. Feliz Día de Muertos 🙏

I’m excited to share we’re officially partnering with one of our YouTube clients. 🔥 They’ll be the brand face, produce a ton of ad creative, and keep cranking out long-form YouTube videos with our help. Then me and my team will build the offer suite, marketing funnels, and manage paid ads. This is the first step in our plan to scale One Billion Media by going deeper with fewer people rather than wider with 50+ clients. It’s also the first step in my vision to build a portfolio of white hat B2C offers on the back of organic YouTube channels. For the last 2 years, we’ve cracked the code on scaling a business through YouTube content itself. There are really just a few unsexy things to focus on: 1. Targeted virality. I will preach this until the day I die, but 99% of people I talk to would solve their money problems if they just got more views. Just write a deeply educational script for your buyer, then package it to reach as much of your TAM as possible. I predict people will finally come around to this within the next 12-24 months. 2. Talk about the root cause problem. Your buyer is experiencing a certain pain, and they think it’s caused by certain problems. Help them realize those are not the real problems, then reveal the true root cause problem underneath it all. This is the first step to getting anybody to buy, in any market, regardless of the product. 3. Demonstrate the unique solution. After they see the real problem, you need explain why all the other solutions they’ve tried have failed. Once you knock off all other solutions, they will naturally wonder “well, then what SHOULD I do?” This is when you reveal your unique solution. 4. Stop pitching so damn much. YouTube doesn’t care about your ROI, it only cares about if you give them watch time or not. Aligning your strategy with YouTube’s goal is how to crack the algorithm. Focus on free value and it paradoxically turns into more sales. That’s literally it. This is all we do with our clients, and the sales they make on the backend is unreal. But I can’t imagine what happens when you pair a YouTube strategy like this with strong direct response marketing. This thought has been tattooed into my brain for years now and I’ve become obsessed with seeing it through. Now, we finally get to do it. I truly believe this is the future of marketing. Excited to keep documenting the journey and sharing what I learn 💪

I'm 33 now, but I got into this internet marketing game when I was 21. Up until I was 31, I had dozens of clients as a freelance copywriter and I started and failed multiple businesses. But for the last 26 months, all I've done is sold a DFY YouTube offer, posted YouTube content, and made YouTube videos. Literally been focused on ONE thing and I finally realize how huge of a multiplier it is. Now that I have an actual team with resources and systems and market authority, it gets a little more complicated to know what the "one thing" is. For example, we're finally launching a new backend offer to our DFY YouTube offer, but we're taking extra caution to make sure it becomes multiplicative rather than additive. But the biggest lesson to my younger self, and the lesson I remind myself of even today, is to find the one thing and go all-in.

Another 1,000,000 views with one video 🤌 Flawless example of matching your packaging to the right sophistication. In a saturated market, the viewer has seen every claim imaginable. So you need to give them something they haven’t seen. This doesn’t mean you need to come up with some wild, crazy, bizarre hook. You just need to elevate your sophistication by one level. It’s a lot simpler than it looks. Here’s the sophistication levels to begin with: • Level 1 → make a claim. • Level 2 → make a sensational claim. • Level 3 → state a mechanism. • Level 4 → state a sensational mechanism. • Level 5 → appeal to the viewer’s identity. We play in some of the biggest and most competitive markets on YouTube. These markets typically are at a level 3. If we wrote this title for level 3, it would read like this: • How To Reduce Stroke Risk By 40% (Do THIS) • THIS Reduces Stroke Risk By 40% See the emphasis on “this?” It makes the viewer wonder what “this” is. In fact, in business, you’re always selling some type of solution. You’re selling a “this.” Positioning “this,” whatever that is for you, is at the heart of how to actually sell offers on YouTube, but I’ll save that post for another day. Now, it’s a decent title, but the market is too saturated for that. So we sensationalize the mechanism. “THIS” becomes “5 Minutes Every Morning,” giving us: 5 Minutes Every Morning Reduces Stroke Risk By 40% See how this title just hits harder? It makes you want to know what you’re supposed to do for 5 minutes, right? Ultimately, it feels a lot more real and tangible… Which makes it more believable. So if your market is saturated, one way to beat it is by raising the sophistication of your packaging. This has helped us hit ~100 million views for our clients on YouTube in the last 2 years. Marketing principles for the win 🔥

Closed our first partnership deal with our most successful YouTube client in B2C health niche. In the last 90 days we helped them get ~30m organic long-form views (426% more than previous). Their main monetization model was selling amazon affiliate products. So we have data on best selling products and categories mostly tied to which videos produced those sales. The numbers are ridiculous, probably would've done 5x-7x the revenue if they owned the products and had actual funnels, SMS, backend marketing systems, retargeting ads, etc. We'll be building out one hero offer, with 2-3 supporting offers, we'll integrate this offer suite into his YouTube content strategy (which we are controlling), then we'll take it to cold traffic on Meta after roughly ~1k units sold. Our plan is to build out a portfolio of white hat offers on the back of our B2C health clients that have built strong brand and audience. This is why I've started hunting for junior direct response copywriters who want to play the YouTube game. We'll build our this marketing arm of copywriters who can do creative strategy and YouTube strategy. I've been building up to this moment for about 4 years now and we're finally here. One of the reasons I started our agency is so I could CREATE our best YouTube clients and then partner with them as our upsell. That way I could leverage my decade of direct response skill on the back of an organic YouTube moat. It's something I've been obsessed with for awhile and am betting my career on. It's a simple and modest business plan, but it's one I could play forever. Excited to document more of this 🔥

We spammed “Peptide Doctor” on YouTube and it worked 🔥 My team and I took on the impossible challenge of growing a small channel. They only had 500 subscribers and a~100 views per video earlier this year. This is hard because we need to find the winning combo from scratch. But we didn’t shy away from it because we understand one thing: Positioning. Positioning is one of the most repeated yet misunderstood concepts in business. It’s simply the act of positioning against the saturation in a market so you can stand out. So we tested a ton of different positioning and ideas for 4 months and nothing happened. Until we tried “Peptide Doctor” as an authority position. We threw it to the front of a title and into the script… And our first video took off. So then we did it again… and again… and again… And it kept working. In the last few months alone, we’ve grown from 2,000 subs to 7,400 subs while bringing patients into our client’s high-end longevity clinic. You can position your offer against other failed solutions, or your brand strength against other people’s brand weaknesses. There’s a hundred ways to do it. We still have a LOT of experiment with and figure out, but we’re making great progress. And it’s all thanks to finding a position in the market. Just gotta see what works then spam it until it doesn’t.

Cooking something 🔥 love packaging for female markets w: @theascende

We got Alex Hormozi and Logan Paul before GTA 6 💀 What’s crazy is Beyonce’s former Head of Worldwide Marketing told me this. I had a YouTube client who was working with an outside consultant. That consultant used to work for Beyonce, and he said something fascinating: “Sam, entertainment and education are not two different games, but you are still very early.” I replied, “Early for what exactly?” He said it was true, traditional media is dying. Things like TV networks, broadcast news, film studios, and large entertainment companies. That’s one of the big reasons why we’re seeing actors, athletes, and politicians start YouTube channels. But what we’re seeing is just the beginning. Traditional media talent has barely begun moving their attention, resources, and business models onto creator platforms like YouTube. And when they do, it’s going to get a lot harder for businesses. The “old media” people are entertainment, and entertainment commands a lot more attention than education ever will. That entertainment content will steal impressions away from businesses because it’s just more fun to watch. This is why he said entertainment and education will compete for the same attention as it is now, and it’s going to get harder. It might explain why the interview between Alex Hormozi and Logan Paul only has 670,000 views. This is surprisingly Logan’s most popular interview with a business creator. However, there are 100s of more popular interviews with entertainment creators. For the last 2 years, I’ve been blowing up YouTube channels for 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses. I’ve always had a gift for seeing where the market is going, and this is 100% it. I believe entertainment will be the top of funnel, and education will get pushed towards the middle/bottom of funnel. In the bigger picture, of course. The biggest businesses will add an entertainment arm to the front of their business. This is why you’re hearing people talk about “shows” more often, like Hormozi’s “Scale or Fail” series. It’s also probably why they signed a deal with CAA, which is the first deal done between a business creator and a traditional Hollywood agency. In my firm, One Billion Media, we are always looking ahead of the curve. So we’re starting to create “edutainment” formats that combine fun content with useful content. This would allow a traditional business to build a big organic audience like a media company, while still monetizing through their own product line. We’ll slowly roll these formats out across our portfolio of client channels at the start of 2027. I’m nervous and excited to see the results. But one thing is for sure, the Hormozi-Paul crossover is just the beginning. This is the future of marketing.

We're pushing our clients to spend 30 hours a month on YouTube with us. Here are the last 28 days from our best one. Talking head, education, CTAs to products, and 100% long-form.

A subscriber asked me how I come up with viral YouTube vids. We're at ~100 million views for 7, 8, and 9-fig brands in the last 26 months now, most of this from long-form. I gave him the most boring answer known to man:

A lot of YouTube agencies pitch "it only takes 3hrs a month of your time." We're hard pivoting the opposite direction and asking our clients for 30hrs a month, 2x-4x vids a week. You got Jeremy Haynes who doubled his volume and added like 300k/mo extra. Another guy in our space Ben Azadi did 5x videos a week and does $700k/mo now. Then there's James Canole in the retirement space who has $2.9B AUM and 90% of that came from YouTube and his portfolio of channels. Our clients who are doing 3x-4x vids a week with us are putting up insane numbers too, I post a lot of their wins on my profile. YouTube is objectively becoming one of the most effective channels you can do, well worth the 30hrs a month in my opinion.

I got 2 million views in 2 months by using concept splicing. 🔥 This is how we’ve gotten ~100 million views for businesses on YouTube. It’s where you combine at least 4 elements across winning videos into one. Let me break it down for this video. 1.) Winning visual hook. This is a visual market. That means I ideate based on thumbnail before topic. I found a small AI channel that did a video with 1.4 million views. It showed a big dude sitting with his legs out to the side. I modeled this pose for two reasons: • It’s one of the best visual hooks I’ve ever seen. • I found out no human had done this on YouTube yet. 2.) Contrasting visual elements. Our client got 4.8 million views in a year on one video. It had the colors had black, white, red, and blue. It looked damn good, but I thought it could look better. So I cut the blue and decided to use red as my contrasting color. See how good it looks? It’s impossible to look way from. But now, all I have is the visual hook. I still needed to find the topic and the core promise. 3.) Mass market core promise. That same video was about anti-aging. This made sense. Markets don’t care about solutions (mobility), they care about outcomes (living longer and healthier). So I chose longevity as the topic and used STOPS AGING as the thumbnail text. 4.) Expressing core promise in title. Our other client got 580,000 views with this title: 12 Minutes Every Morning To Look A Decade Younger (Do THIS) I took that core claim and changed it from “looks” to “feels” since this is movement: This Makes You Feel Decades Younger But it was missing one thing… 5.) Winning title format. By now, I still don’t know what the actual video is about yet. But that’s okay because I’m just building the packaging first. And I need to create a lot more curiosity in the title. Since this whole concept was built on the pose, I knew the title needed to build intrigue that. My buddy Max had a video with 1.4 million views with this title: It’s Boring, But It Destroys Your Visceral Fat In 14 Days (Japanese Method) It’s a level 3 sophistication title which is perfect for my client’s market. But the thumbnail I built isn’t “boring…” So I changed the word to something more aligned: It’s Weird, But This Makes You Feel Decades Younger We the first to do this in our client’s market. Now, that’s just the packaging. For the topic, I found which movements helped someone feel younger. The answer was hip routines. My client had winning videos on hip health too. So I found a hip exercise that looked like the thumbnail pose, then I wrote the introduction to build curiosity around it. We went through a list of 13 hip movements, and we saved the thumbnail pose for last. The end result? 2 million views in just two month. This is what I call concept splicting. This is how we get repeatable results for 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses on YouTube. If you want to see more about how we do this, just join my email list at TheSamOcean(.)com - I write about how my firm does YouTube every week for free.

A new YouTube client of ours in the last 90 days: • 17.4m long-form engaged views • 914,000 hours of watch time • 202,000 new subscribers • 3x videos per week This is a personal brand in the education space. Their life has changed literally overnight. Only on YouTube

Just closed a deal with a 9-figure company. I love these brands because they could care less about YouTube sales right now. They just want to deploy capital to build a targeted audience as fast as possible. Starting to get more leads like this.

We’re officially booked for the rest of 2026. 🔥 I’ve sent ~15 emails to leads saying we’ll have to wait until 2027. Now, I really don’t like turning away business, but we just signed a handful of new clients and our team isn’t big enough to handle more. Plus I really DON’T want to be one of the 95% of agencies who f****** suck. So for the next couple months, I’m stepping away from sales so we can focus on other bigger projects: 1. Building a better product. I’ll get back into the trenches and work alongside my team on each account, both older and newer clients. I want to plug any gaps in our strategy and make sure every client gets the best service possible. 2. Building V3 of our YouTube strategy approach. Three months ago, I wrote over 60,000 words across 27 Google docs about how I blow channels up on YouTube. Ever since then, we’ve had a 100% success rate across any client past the 90-day mark. The results have been insane and I’ve been posting them publicly. I’ve learned a ton about YouTube since, so I need to revamp how we do strategy. 3. Launch my brand on YouTube and Instagram. All of our inbound lead flow has come from LinkedIn, X, and Facebook. I am going to increase volume there. But now it’s time to launch video across YouTube and Instagram. I’m tripling down on founder-led content and building a world around One Billion Media, so I need the space to do it. 4. Planning our first YouTube cohort. A few weeks ago, I announced we’ll host our first cohort. I’ll teach everything I know about helping businesses go viral on YouTube. I’m going to do this in January of 2027, so I’m preparing the launch plan and what I’m going to teach. 5. Rolling out our first partnership deal. We’re on the verge of striking a big deal with our most successful YouTube client. I just checked his stats now. In the last 28 days, he got 13.4 million views, 84,700 subscribers, and 356,000 watch time hours. We’re going to help him launch offers, run ads, and scale product revenue. I’m excited to document this one. I’m focusing on product and brand. But I realized it takes 10x more work to do this than I’d like to admit. Because as a mentor once told me, it ain’t sexy until it is. What are you focusing on for the rest of 2026?

I love nothing more than to see new creatives on my team get their first big wins on YouTube. We're publicly posting 100k-1M view wins every week now, I realize I've become a bit jaded to it. But I still remember those FIRST videos I ever got to go viral. Seeing my team's enthusiasm for THEIR first viral wins reminds me of that. An appreciation for every little win will take you very, very far.

I’m (literally) begging you to BE PATIENT on YouTube. We came up with a video we KNEW would crush it. But then we launched it 💀 So we changed the title and thumbnail after 3 days to try and bring it back to life. It’s much earlier than I would’ve liked to change things, but we felt it was the right move. Again, nothing happened for another 4 days. It wasn’t until day 8, more than a week after we launched, that YouTube Lady Luck started to dance with us. It went from 9,000 views to about 190,000 views in the last 4 days. And it’s STILL going strong. We might have to name our client the “Cortisol King” at this point, we’ve helped him absolutely own that topic on YouTube. But this is why if you’re going to do YouTube, I need you to be patient. I mean, everything needs patience, but YouTube especially. We’ve created almost 100 million views for education brands in just 2 years. We’re noticing that videos can sometimes take 3-7 days to get traction. We’ve even had videos take as long as 14-30 days. It’s also why I suggest not touching it for 7-14 days. My strategist and I are discussing in Slack right now if the title and thumbnail change made the difference or not. But we might never really know, and that’s the beauty of YouTube. So just make a damn good video, publish it, and move onto the next. This will help you outlast 99% of everybody else.