10 Tiny YouTube Habits That Actually Work in 2026 transcript

If you're feeling stuck in your channel and you're just not seeing success even though you're putting in a lot of work or you can't stay consistent, these are some tiny habits and tricks that helped me blow up my channel and actually start seeing success and making money. And even if you implement just one of these, it can make a huge difference. To start off with, it's never too late to change. I posted this video years ago.

Let's see. After 260 days, this video was stuck at 15,000 views, which is pretty good. But then somebody randomly emailed me and said like, "Hey, you should change the title of this." So, I went ahead and I changed the title and then it popped off and got an extra 50,000 views and now has over 120,000 views. That's over 100,000 views more than what it probably would have had if I had never gone back and changed that title.

And what I've learned from this is it is never too late to go back and change your title, change your thumbnail. This has happened over and over where even a year later if you know stuff now that you didn't back then or you think a video deserves to get more views. Just keep changing stuff. It can't hurt anything. Especially if a video is already dead and it can be the difference and make your videos take off. So just go in, change the title the next week, change the thumbnail.

Do that on a bunch of your videos and most likely some of them will just randomly pick up. Try the lottery test. You should ask yourself, if I won the lottery, would I still do YouTube? And if the answer is no, then you're probably going to have a hard time sticking to it. A lot of people who become successful at YouTube, it's because they enjoy what they're doing. Like, I've talked about minimalism and finances on my main channel for 6, seven years now.

And if you aren't so obsessed and passionate about whatever you're talking about that you can talk about it for 3 years, for 5 years, for 10 years, then you're probably just going to fail after like a couple weeks. You're going to run out of things to talk about. You're going to lose that passion. So, if you can treat YouTube like a game, which is a way I really like to frame YouTube as like I'm just trying to build skills and level up my channel, level up my life, because when I do level up my life, it ends up helping my channel do better.

And I treat this like a game where I'm building something. I'm building assets that are going to pay me forever. I'm building skills that I can translate to almost anything else. I am building I'm treating YouTube like a game and having fun with it. And when you can do that, it makes staying consistent a lot easier because instead of having phone games, which I used to have these little world builders on my phone and I'd constantly be like trying to level up those.

Well, now I do that in real life with YouTube and it's super super fun. So, if you can treat it that way and you can change your mindset like that, it actually helps staying consistent a lot easier and just trying to make sure you're getting different skills to level up your character, which is you by like, you know, learning editing skills and learning how to shoot better videos and how to title better, how to thumbnail better, and instead of, you know, buying coins, you're buying courses and and you're you're going to seminars and you're watching YouTube videos like this one because you never know what one thing is going to be the, you know, the title change that changes your video, that changes your channel.

You're just looking for those things that can help you level up. Pay yourself first YouTube edition. So, a lot of us know that we should pay oursel first when it comes to our finances. You invest in your future first. You invest for retirement. You do whatever before you start having fun with your money. You should do the same thing with your time because if you want to become a YouTuber, that is your dream. You want to be successful.

You want to grow this. You want to start making passive income on something that literally has no ceiling. Like, some of the top creators are making tens of thousand dollars a day doing YouTube. There's literally no limit to how high you can go with this. And if you want to be one of those people, stop stealing from yourself. Start time blocking time every single day. Make it a habit that I spend 5 minutes I spend 30 minutes at like 6:30 a.m. till 7:00 a.m.

I work on my YouTube channel. I work on this thing that is super important to me. Because if you don't create time and set it aside and treat it like work, then most likely you're not actually going to do that stuff. And it's going to get buried. It's going to get pushed to the side. and then you come home from work and you're too tired and you can't work on it. If you don't set aside time and treat it like something super super important, you're just going to fizzle out and you're not going to have success because you're not consistent with it.

You have to really block this in and create a habit out of it. Embrace good enough. I've worked with hundreds of creators and one of the top reasons I see a lot of them fail is because of perfectionism or or even a lot of them don't start because they want to be perfect. They want to have the perfect name, the perfect thumbnail. They want to have the perfect title. They want to know exactly what their channel's about.

You don't need to know anything. You just need to start shooting videos. You figure your niche out as you're going. I never thought I'd be talking about half the stuff that I talk about when I started. Like, I would never think I'd be teaching how to do YouTube, but I've done it for 6 years and spent tens of thousands of hours doing it and made hundreds uh of videos. And because of that, I landed talking about something I never thought I would talk about.

And the same thing is true with most creators. What they start off with is not the thing that they end with. So, start with something. Be consistent with anything. Figure out your channel name as you're going. Figure out your banner as you're going. Figure out your niche as you're going. But just get in the habit of making content because that is where you're going to find out, oh, I I wanted to make day vlogs, but it turns out I hate vlogging my day.

It's super awkward. So, instead, I'm going to do this instead. And that's how you figure that out. Uh, you don't figure it out all ahead of time because you're going to be wrong about almost everything. Bird song awareness. This is a habit that not only adds a lot to my life, but also is super helpful for YouTube is this idea that you are looking for ideas everywhere. I watch a movie, I have like pictures on my phone of like, "Oh, this is such a cool frame.

This is such a cool shot. This is such a cool skit or so funny. I'm going to recreate this and do it in my YouTube videos." And you do that everywhere. You listen to a podcast, you're like, "That's a great idea. I should talk about that. I should learn this." Everything that you see, every book that you read, every song that you listen to, everything is inspiration. Once you start to look for it, you just see the world differently.

You watch YouTube videos differently. You do everything differently. When you have this bird song approach, systems over goals. Goals are like elbows. Everybody has them. Actually, I don't I don't know what the correct saying for that is, but having a goal is pretty much completely worthless. What it comes back to is having systems to do everything in the process. You have a system to make script writing quicker. I can do mine in like 20 to 30 minutes.

You have systems for shooting your videos and not procrastinating. You have systems for editing. You have systems for titles. you have systems for everything that you do and you're not just winging every single video. That's how I got it down from 20 hours a week to like 5 hours a week to make the videos that I make now is by taking the time to actually build systems instead of having goals. And that's how you do something.

Like if you want to hit 10,000 subscribers, you don't just say, "I want to hit 10,000 subscribers. I'm going to make some videos." Like, "No, I'm going to do one video a week for the next year and hopefully that will lead me to, you know, my goal." But the system in order to get there is broken down into like, okay, I'm going to post one video a week because I know on average, like, you know, they're going to get this many views and this many subscribers and that's what's going to help me get my goal.

The goal is pretty much worthless. The systems that you build are going to be the thing that leads to success. Treat yourself like an athlete. Athletes train a lot and then they perform and then they recover. And yet, a lot of us just try to perform constantly. We don't train. we don't take a lot of time to learn things or we just get stuck in training and we never actually get to the point where we're on the field doing something which is hitting record by the way and we generally get stuck in one of those two first areas and we never take the time to recover.

It's when I go out for a walk, it's when I'm at the gym. It's when I'm doing other things that I have a lot of really great ideas that I write down and I that's, you know, a little too far sometimes and I have to turn it off. But it's good to have times where like, okay, I'm in training right now. Like right now I'm learning a lot about marketing and that's what I'm doing this year. I'm learning a bunch of stuff and then I'm implementing that stuff, but I'm also taking time to recover, to think about other things, to uh reflect on what direction that I'm going.

And it's good to have all of those built in and have a balance of all of those and not just get stuck doing one of those things. The simplification audit. If you want to try this out, I will leave a PDF down below. But pretty much, you want to track every step of the process that you do on your next YouTube video and check how long it takes for each one of those. And then find out where you are wasting your time. If you do this, it'll probably save you a couple hours minimum.

Um, because you'll realize like, oh, okay, right before I shoot, I procrastinate for 3 days because, you know, I I'm scared about hitting record, which is definitely not something that I've been doing. I haven't. It's a trap. or when I edit, that's when I watch Facebook. Or maybe I spend 12 hours scripting and that's just way too long to script. You want to take an audit of how long each step of the process takes, how you feel during those, and which ones make you procrastinate, and then start building habits and systems around each one of those so that you can stop yourself from falling off track.

Just kind of cheat. All right, hear me out on this. Uh, this is a great hack if you're trying to stay consistent every week and you're just struggling. you're really really going through it and you're just like, it takes so much to make a video, then cheat. Once a month, do a really easy video. Sit down at your desk and just talk to the camera about some points that you wrote down quickly because it's something that you know about and you could just talk off the top of your head.

Really simple to get done. You could shoot an entire video, edit, upload in like an hour and a half. It's great. Or like do a Q&A. Sit down and do a life update. Find some videos that are really easy, really simple. Do like one a month and then you can kind of get some time back. You can get that recovery time. you can catch up on everything else. You can get a week ahead every once in a while working in some easy videos and not having every single video be a grind and a slam and you're trying to shoot for the stars every single time.

Just take some time, just take a couple and you know they're not going to go viral. You know they're not going to do amazing, but you got a video out there and it's going to build depth with your community cuz it's a solid video that gives value or gives an update or just something you're thinking about and it's easy to do. There's also nothing wrong with clicking on this video right here and dropping a like if you got any value whatsoever out of this video because I'm going to do more like it.

So, hope you enjoyed this. Catch you next Thursday. I I don't post on Thursdays. I'll catch you sometime.