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Dollar-a-Day Strategist

Amplify PROVEN organic content with Dennis Yu’s Dollar-a-Day — $1/day for 7 days, kill the bottom 90%, $30 over 30 days behind winners, lighthouse and podcast clips first. Use to turn posts with real engagement into reach, retargeting pools, and deals.

Skill file dollar-a-day-strategist.md · last updated Aug 2, 2026

Use this when you have organic posts that already earned engagement and want to convert them into reach, retargeting pools, and deals for less than your coffee budget. Step 7 of the Local Service Spotlight method — the Promote P of the Content Factory.

Inputs

• Your organic posts/clips with REAL engagement numbers — comments, shares, watch time, not raw impressions.
• Your lighthouse list (marquee people/brands you’re tied to) and your podcast clips.
• Plumbing in place: pixels, analytics, saved audiences. Boosting without a pixel is reach you can’t retarget.

The rules — non-negotiable

• Boost ONLY proven organic. Boosting amplifies a winner; it does not rescue a weak post. A hook that failed at $0 fails at $100.
• $1/day × 7 days per post. Small money buys real signal.
• Kill the bottom 90% at day 7. No mercy, no sunk-cost stories.
• Winners get $30 over 30 days. Unicorns get new audiences and bigger budgets.
• Lighthouse pieces and podcast clips jump the queue — borrowed authority converts.

Steps

1. Rank your last 60–90 days of organic by real engagement. The audience already voted; respect the vote.
2. Pick the top 5. For each, write the GCT chain: Goal (leads, retargeting pool, authority — what is this boost FOR), Content (this proven post), Targeting last.
3. Boost $1/day for 7 days. Layer one new post per day; with five posts your daily spend peaks at $5.
4. Read each post’s day 7 through MAA: Metrics say what (CPM, CTR, cost per engagement, watch time). Analysis says why (hook, audience, or offer). Action closes the gap — kill, re-cut the hook, or scale.
5. Kill the bottom 90%. Put $30 over 30 days behind each winner.
6. Hunt unicorns. Test survivors against new audiences and higher budgets. A post that holds its numbers at 10x spend is your ad — found for $7, not a five-figure test budget.

Targeting — the T in GCT (choose last)

• Warm first: engaged viewers, profile engagers, site visitors off your pixel (the plumbing from step 5).
• Lighthouse-adjacent: followers of the marquee people and brands in your clip.
• Cold last: lookalikes of converters — only after a winner proves itself warm.

Week one, laid out

• Day 1: boost post A ($1/day). Day 2: add B ($2/day total). Day 3: add C ($3). Day 4: add D ($4). Day 5: add E ($5).
• Each post gets its own day-7 read (days 7 through 11) — make the kill/scale call as each lands.
• Day 8 onward: layer next week’s five from fresh organic. The machine never stops; the spend barely moves.

Budget math

• Test: 5 posts × $7 = $35. Scale: each winner × $30/month. A real signal-and-scale program runs on under $100/month.
• The byproduct is the asset: everyone who watched joins your retargeting pool — the warm audience for your next offer.

Output

• A 7-day boosting calendar: post, hook, goal, audience, daily budget.
• A kill/scale decision per post at its day 7, and a $30/30 plan per winner.
• A growing retargeting pool that compounds with every boost.

For DealCon — agency owners & acquirers

If you run an agency: Dollar-a-Day is a productized add-on with near-zero delivery cost — clients see compounding results on $30–90/month of media, and the kill/scale discipline proves stewardship better than any deck. If you buy & sell companies: put $1/day behind your deal-thesis content and lighthouse clips so sellers and brokers have been seeing you for months before the first call; post-close, boost the acquired brand’s already-proven posts for immediate lift with zero new creative spend. Your edge: which one clip featuring your biggest lighthouse deserves $30 right now — and what does it say that it isn’t boosted yet?

Run on a persistent agent (Fable 5)

• Loop to done: this skill IS a long-horizon loop — day-7 reads, kills, $30/30 scaling, next week’s five layered in. A persistent agent holds the whole calendar and never misses a kill decision; a missed kill is a failed run.
• Self-verify: check every boost against the non-negotiable rules before it spends a dollar — proven organic only, $1/day × 7, bottom 90% dies on schedule.
• Compound with memory: keep the engagement history, kill list, and winners in memory so each week’s ranking starts from evidence, not a fresh export.
• Log the run: record every kill/scale call with its MAA reasoning — the unicorn pattern emerges from the log.

See boil-the-ocean.md for the full operating principles.

Notes — Dennis’s method

• This is how Marko Sipila scaled HVAC Quote past 300 customers: phone-shot conference interviews → the HVACQuote YouTube → $1/day on the winners. Meta wrote the method up as a case study.
• It’s a PR team that works for a dollar a day: test cheap, kill losers fast, pour fuel on unicorns.
• Targeting comes LAST in GCT. Goals and content first — no audience can fix a post with nothing to say.
• Prioritize podcast clips: appearances are third-party proof, and boosted proof converts to deals. Dennis tracks 236+ of his own for exactly this reason.
• You don’t need the factory running to start. Boost what you’ve already posted; once content-factory (step 8) comes online, it feeds this skill every week.

Definitive article & pairings

• Reference: https://blitzmetrics.com/content-factory/ (Dollar-a-Day is taught inside the Content Factory) · https://dennisyu.com/podcast-appearances/
• Pairs with: ai-search-visibility → dollar-a-day-strategist → content-factory → definitive-article-writer

Other skills: ai-search-visibility · boil-the-ocean · client-access-checklist · client-relationship-cadence · content-agent · content-factory

The full run order is on the skill-pack directory. Every skill here is one task from the Task Library — the library is the catalogue of what can be done; a pack is the subset you install; an agent is who runs it.