There new job lets creators make $300-$500K/year inside their favorite brands

Today’s Tip: The Creator-In-Residence role will become extremely popular over the next 5 years…and earn $300-$500K+ per year without having to work full-time.

We’re entering the distribution era.

This means that building products is getting easier (because of AI) while generating attention for those products is getting harder (also because of AI).

In other words, companies will only have one core question…

How do we get customers to pay attention to us?

The answer is figuring out how to consistently drive on-target virality with organic social posts (and then juice the winners with paid spend).

If you can engineer free attention with content, you win.

I’ve seen hundreds of companies print millions of dollars with this strategy over the last few years.

As a company, “figuring out social media” is no longer a marketing task for the side of the desk…it is the only growth lever that matters.

Every company needs a viral engineer…that’s what I call people that can drive organic social traction on demand.

Viral engineers can be embedded into any company and build a content function that generates winning organic content at will.

They can set the strategy, come up with the ideas, build the team, build the system, and execute iteratively.

There aren’t many of these types…maybe a few hundred of us in the world that are truly world class at this (way fewer than the total number of marketing professionals).

And this is because to become a viral engineer, you needed to spend time in the trenches as a creator to learn the first principles around content, virality, and social psychology.

This is one of those skillsets that cannot be bought or gamed because of the nuance between good and great.

A trend I’m seeing is that companies are starting to hire these viral engineers in-house (and paying them big money).

This role I’m coining “Creator-In-Residence.”

Most viral engineers don’t want to work full-time for a single company, but are willing to spend 10-20 hours per week, with aligned upside, to help install their formulas, systems, and way of working into the org.

These arrangements are extremely lucrative for both sides and will become more common as attention shifts from legacy media to newer channels.

If you’re young or lost in your career and genuinely enjoy the process of content/marketing/psychology, I encourage you to consider this as a viable career path.

The best way to get started is to begin down the path of making content. Your goal isn’t to become an influencer (although brand deals will come as sawdust), your goal is skill acquisition.

As someone with this skillset, one of my priorities over the next few years is helping to upskill more ambitious creators to take advantage of this wave (there are simply too many brands that need it and not enough supply).

If that’s you, the best free content supply on the internet for this is my Youtube channel and free content community, WavyWorld.

More to come, but look out for this as a massive trend and opportunity.

PS - If you want to make better content, you need to make better hooks (to stop a scroller in their tracks). I put together the best video about hooking a viewer that exists on the internet