Dollar-a-Day in Action: What Dennis Yu Shared on Lewis Vandervalk’s Marketing Without Rules Podcast

Most marketing advice is vague. Worse, it’s not actionable.

Working with Dennis Yu changed that for me.

At BlitzMetrics, everything we run — from VA operations to content distribution — follows his systems. While consuming content and learning the strategy is useful, we get the added advantage of building these systems directly with Dennis—inside real campaigns, for real businesses.

Lewis Vandervalk of Blue Crocus Solutions recently had Dennis on his Marketing Without Rules podcast, and that conversation reminded me how powerful the Dollar-a-Day strategy still is—especially since so many people continue to miss its core point.

This article is a practical guide built directly from the valuable advice Dennis Yu shared during the podcast. I’ve taken those insights and mapped them to how we run campaigns, create ads, and scale content.

The Real Takeaway From Dollar-A-Day

We use dollar-a-day to test dozens of stories quickly, see what gets engagement, and double down on what performs. That’s why Dennis’s benchmark is 10% engagement. If your post gets 10%+ of people clicking, liking, watching, commenting? That’s a signal to keep running it.

“Dollar-a-day is how you get more of what is already working well.” – Dennis Yu

Here’s the structure:

• Batch create 30+ one-minute videos
• Post them natively to Facebook, YouTube Shorts, Google Business Profile
• Boost each for $7 total ($1/day for a week)
• Track which hit 10%+ engagement
• Reboost the winners for a month or longer

We’ve had some posts run for over a year — pulling in leads while we sleep.

You Don’t Need Fancy Production

Dennis shot videos inside St. Peter’s Basilica, the Great Pyramids, the Coliseum — just using his phone.

One clip was him talking about how to build a location service page — while literally standing in front of a global landmark. The point? Authority isn’t in the setting. It’s in your expertise and your process.

When our clients struggle to shoot good content, we give them these exact prompts:

• Walk through a job site and explain what’s being done
• Ask the client on the spot what they thought
• Record behind the scenes — your team talking through problems
• Capture “before and after” visuals with voiceover

This is exactly how we guide local service businesses through their first pieces of content — nothing fancy, just a repeatable process they can stick with.

Real People, Real Places, Real Stories

Dennis talked about Greg Beebe, a concrete coating contractor in Wisconsin.

Greg and his family had been burned by multiple agencies. Thousands spent. Zero ROI. Then Dennis showed them how to:

• Record short videos on the job
• Capture team and customer interactions
• Share simple walkthroughs of each project
• Post on Google Business Profile, Facebook, YouTube

“Stories are what matter. That’s what people connect with” – Dennis Yu

Once they started boosting that content — just $1/day — calls started coming in.

Greg’s son now runs the dollar-a-day campaigns. They no longer rely on SEO agencies. They own their content.

Dollar-a-Day Is Self-Targeting

The biggest misconception Dennis blew up in the podcast is that dollar-a-day is about targeting.

It’s not.

Dollar-a-day works because the content becomes the targeting.

You don’t need to specify: “Women aged 35–55 with a dog and a pool in Tucson.” Instead:

• Make the content relevant to the audience
• Let the algorithm do its job
• Whoever engages becomes the signal

“The targeting isn’t something you have to go into Ads Manager and specify… The content itself becomes the targeting.” – Dennis Yu

That’s how Dennis’s restaurant videos get found. How his pest control clients rank. How local junk removal guys build brands with no SEO experience.

What BlitzMetrics Does Differently

At BlitzMetrics, we scale this system with the Content Factory.

We use a 4-stage process Dennis mentions in the podcast:

1. Produce content: film one-minute stories (cell phone is fine)
2. Process: Use Descript, Opus Clip, or even ChatGPT to transcribe + title clips
3. Distribute: Post to Facebook, YouTube Shorts, Google Business Profile, and repurpose into blog articles
4. Promote: Boost each post for a dollar a day. Test, learn, repeat

Common Mistakes (And How Dennis Avoids Them)

1. Too many static images. Most contractors post “before and after” images with no context. Dennis’s content has voice. It tells you what happened and why.

2. No story. Seeing Greg’s son on-site in his own neighborhood carries more weight than any stock video.

3. Outsourcing content without understanding it. Some agencies collect $3K/month with zero results. Dennis gives the blueprint away — because the value is in the execution.

4. Thinking it’s about reach. It’s not. It’s about depth in your city, your niche, your platform. Not global fame. Local leads.

Takeaways

If you want to rank in Google, win in your neighborhood, and stop relying on shady agencies:

• Shoot real content
• Tell stories
• Let the algorithm find the right people
• Boost for $1/day
• Track and repeat what works

If you’re ready to scale, copy what Dennis does.