50 YouTube Hacks From 500k Subscribers transcript

I've been on YouTube for 6 years. I've posted over 500 long- form videos. I've talked to creators who make from hundreds of dollars a month to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. And I've compiled a list of 50 tips that if you follow these will help your channel do better. And don't worry, they're not the normal tips like, oh, stay consistent and all that type of stuff. We're getting high level, lowle. Whether you're a beginning or an expert, you'll learn something cool here.

Let's start off with the startup rule. There's this rule about startups that I found out applies to YouTube as well. Generally with a startup, if you invest in 10 of them, you'll have five that underperform or lose you money, they go out of business, whatever. You'll have four that do pretty good, they they make you a little bit, and then you'll have one that makes up for all of the lost ones, that banger. And the same thing applies with YouTube.

Generally, about one out of 10 videos is going to get you a ton of growth, a ton of new subscribers, you're going to make a bunch of money on, and then you're going to have a bunch that fail. And if you realize that and you accept that not every single one is going to be a banger, it's much easier to follow point number two, which is to have one year of focus, and that is to commit to posting one video every single week for a year.

If you're willing to do that, you're going to beat like 95% of other creators. Most people don't make it past three or four. If you're willing to commit to weekly for a year, and you actually keep improving that entire time, you're almost guaranteed some level of success if you keep improving the entire time. If you just keep posting without getting better, you're just wasting your time. but either commit to it for a year or just don't bother.

And that kind of leads into the next point, which is the first 100 videos are pure education. So you can do something that a lot of channels are doing right now, which is posting pretty much every single day. Get good, which forces you to learn really fast, forces you to learn how to talk on camera pretty fast. Can be a really cool way to grow, or you can take a really long time to do it. But generally, the first hundred, you're just learning this skill of making YouTube.

So take some pressure off. You're just getting in reps. And while we are going to get into some really nerdy analytical stuff in a little bit, I also want to point out that one year of YouTube I think is more valuable than four years of college. First of all, it doesn't cost you like $100,000, which is literally insane. Second of all, I literally know somebody who started YouTube. They posted on their own. They were at 2,000 subscribers, but they learned how to make highquality videos and how to edit.

And they got offered $100,000 a year to edit for somebody and they turned it down. And now I think they made 30K last month just from learning the skills of YouTube. They are incredibly valuable. If you can take a year to learn them, you can easily make six figures easily. I know so many people who do it on the editing side, on the writing side, on the channel management side, and that's without even taking into account your own personal brand.

These skills around YouTube are incredibly valuable. So stop watching YouTube and start creating something. Learning without taking action and implementing the stuff is completely waste of time. You might feel like you're making progress, but you're really not. Make more stuff. And that leads into money follows attention. We're in what they're calling the attention economy. And if you have attention, money will flow to you in like disgusting amounts.

If you can figure out how to get views, how to provide value for people, how to get attention at scale, you will have no problems monetizing, but as we'll talk about in the monetization section, you can actually start monetizing right away. You don't have to wait till you have millions of views. Please don't do that. It It ended up costing me so much money. Let's shift it up and get to some analytics. First of all, your idea matters so much more than the quality of the video itself.

Most people spend 80% of their time working on this video, making it perfect, making the music right, the cuts right, and all this stuff. If the idea sucks, doesn't matter how good you are at editing. None of it matters if the idea isn't there. And on top of that, if your idea doesn't match your audience, it doesn't matter. I could have the best video ever. I could have a Mr. Beast video and post it on my channel, and it probably wouldn't do that great because my initial people who see it aren't going to click on it because it's not what they're interested in.

They would probably download it because they think it's stupid. Well, maybe eventually if it can get past my audience into the algorithm, I do okay. Ultimately, you have to give things that your audience that follows you finds valuable. So, ideas are super important, but ideas that also fit your audience are incredibly important. And that leads into the 8020s. So, 80% of things don't matter. 20% of them are going to lead to 80% of the results.

And that's generally the title and the thumbnail. So, idea number one, title, thumbnail number two. Nowhere in here is the editing and the story and the color grading. Okay? You should be making your title and thumbnail before you even think about turning on the camera. That is how important they are. But if your video did end up underperforming, change it. I posted this video and it was an 8 out of 10. I changed the thumbnail and it went up to a 2 out of 10 in a couple of hours.

Generally, if a video is not performing well, I will change the title and thumbnail at least three to five times within the first week trying to find that combination that is going to click. And a lot of times a video will not do well and then out of nowhere it'll start doing well because I found that right combination. So if you have videos that you think deserve more views, go back, change the title, change the thumbnail.

I've had some that are even a year or multiple years later and they have gotten 50,000 views out of nowhere simply by changing a few words on the title. It's never too late to go back and change them. You can also do this right off the bat with AB testing. You can use things like TubeBuddy or YouTube has this feature now where you can test up to three thumbnails when you're posting a video or at any time. So, make sure you use some of those features.

Get some advice. This is the thing that I think is most important, which is to get advice from somebody who knows what they're talking about on your title and thumbnails or honestly on a bunch of different things. But show your title and thumbnails to some friends and ask them, would you click on this video? Which one's your favorite? This is something we do a lot in my course is just asking for advice on title and thumbnail.

That way, you can get some honest feedback ahead of time. Try the unfinished story. This is something that I try to do in thumbnails is to spark curiosity by showing a picture that more or less represents the entire story that I am trying to tell and leaves people intrigued and wanting to learn more. Why is he sad on the floor looking to the left? I don't know. The only way to find out is to click on the video. By the way, if you're looking to improve your videos immediately, I have a free miniourse down below.

Really dives deeper into titles, thumbnails, even story structure, stuff like that. Super valuable. Definitely check it out. Let's talk about retention. The 5-second rule. The first 5 seconds of your video are pretty much a thumbnail. Everybody's been trained to scroll. So, you pretty much have 5 seconds to stop somebody dead in their tracks and have them decide they should watch your video over Netflix, over Mr. Beast, over Amazon, over every other thing on YouTube.

Why should they watch yours? You have a few seconds to make that happen. So, put all of your effort into the first 30 seconds, but especially the first 5 seconds of your video. Pretty much, you're trying to answer the question for them. Why should I watch this? And then after that, you got to keep them hooked for the first 30 seconds to a minute. If you can get somebody to commit from holding their phone like this to switching it like this, they're generally in for most of the video.

Once you have them hooked, they're going to stay in as long as your video doesn't suck. So again, frontload all of that effort. And then you want to create familiar patterns. People enjoy watching the same thing but different. You watch one episode of Friends, you pretty much seen them all. They follow the exact same story format. And yet most of us have watched Friends multiple times. Even though we know it's going to happen, we know there's a payoff.

We know there's a setup, a story, and then a payoff at the end and then a rehook. So, create your own version of that. What is your pattern for telling a story? A lot of mine revolve around lists. People seem to like them. I like making them. It's a good way to tell a story. You know what to expect and also makes making the videos easier. And then somewhere around halfway through the video, you want to put in a rehook.

For instance, some of the last things we're going to talk about is how I've made over $15,000 with a channel with under 300 subscribers. And I've done it multiple times. You can do the exact same thing. Just make sure you you watch to that point so you don't miss how to do that. It's called a rehook. And while I will give you some tips at the end of this video, I just made an indepth miniourse for under 10 bucks. I'll walk you exactly through how I made over $10,000 the first year on a brand new channel.

If you want to start making money with affiliates, this is an absolute no-brainer. And another tip that works really well is to engagement bait. When you're making a video, you have to think, why will someone comment or share this video? An example that I've done is if you don't have any money, you probably shouldn't own a dog. They cost on average about $5,000 a year. So, if you're broke, you shouldn't have a pet. That being said, I don't really care if you have a pet or not.

But, if you look down in the comment section, you'll probably see a bunch of people defending their choice of having a dog. Mathematically, you can't really argue that if you have no money, you should be spending $5,000 on a dog. So, therefore, I'm kind of correct. But I'm also purposefully saying that because I know it will get people to engage in the comment section, which will help my video do better. So, why is somebody going to comment on your video?

Another engagement trick is to have a watch next. This is why I have series whether it's a list of 50. People watch YouTube like they watch TV. They want to watch the same thing but slightly different. Ryan Tran pretty much does the same thing every time and yet he makes millions of views. So at the end of your video, have it set up to recommend the next one. So like at the end of this one, I'll probably recommend another video on how to grow on YouTube with the goal that you would find so much value out of this video that you would go and click on the next video.

And that would also show YouTube that people like this channel and I give value and whatever and it really helps the algorithm and you should try to do the same thing. Now, let's talk about some hacks that I hate that exist, but uh they work really well. Recreate your own bangers. You want to know how I got the idea for this video? Some of my top videos are lists of 50. 50 ways to save money, 50 minimalist habits, 50 whatever.

And therefore, I am recreating the same format, but in a different style. I've also done this with how to save 10K fast, one of my top videos ever. Then I thought, what is the next logical step for someone who has watched this video? Well, they might want an updated version that is more current. So, how to save 10K fast in 2025. they might want to start saving their first 100K. So, how to save your first 100K. What are the next logical steps for somebody who has watched one of your videos that you can make a sequel to that will retarget that same audience.

Then, of course, there is stealing like an artist. There are viral videos that go around that if you hop on them will give you free views. For instance, going back to that how to save 10K fast video, pretty much everybody else in my niche did that. And these videos that got half a million views made them multiple thousands of dollars. if they had a sponsor, maybe $10,000. If you can literally take an idea that a lot of people are interested in, put your own spin on it, put your own ideas into it and repackage it and pretty much be guaranteed $10,000.

Take it. But don't steal points. I never actually watch anybody's videos who's in my space. I only look at title and thumbnail and then put my own spin on it. But if there's something that is a proven concept, that's what all the professionals do. Speaking of which, you need to move from being an amateur to a professional. An amateur is just going to be somebody who does it occasionally, who does it when they can. And a professional is somebody who shows up every single day and makes it happen no matter what because that is their job.

If you stop treating YouTube like a hobby, you start doing math, which is how I do everything, you start investing into yourself, going to seminars, taking courses, watching stuff, and then implementing what you're learning. That is how you go from someone who's probably not going to have success to not just doing it only what you're interested in, not just doing what is fun, not just doing it when you're motivated, but that's how you stick with it for a long term and actually start getting some success.

And that leads into the 90% rule, which is even 80% good. You know, your video is not totally perfect, but it's good enough. Just post a stupid video. Move on to the next one. Every video I make could be better. I could edit it for another week or another month. I could reshoot it. I could do something better. But at some point, good enough is good enough. and done is better than perfect. So, you need to move on. Post that video and don't worry because nobody cares.

That's the advantage of being a small YouTuber. If it gets no views, literally nobody cares because nobody sees it. So, it doesn't matter if you suck. Literally doesn't matter. Your friends and family probably don't care that much. They're probably not going to see it. Honestly, I wouldn't tell them that you're making this channel. They're probably not your target audience and will mess up your algorithm. So, just don't tell them.

But if you do and you know they make fun of you a little bit, like who really cares? They probably are rooting for you. Most people said if they have the opportunity they would be a YouTuber. So if they are making fun of you, it's probably just jealousy or they don't understand what you're doing. So don't worry about anybody else. They don't care. YouTube has updated the algorithm so that it's now easier than ever for any size channel to be discovered.

They're kind of using like Tik Tok's algorithm where it's interest driven now. So if you make highquality videos at any size channel, you can be discovered. It's no longer the people with the big channels are guaranteed success. It's now open for everybody. And that's where supply and demand come in. I found the keyword frugal living where there was a ton of people searching it. There was very bad content being made at the time.

And I just thought if I could put in way more effort and make higher quality videos than everybody else about the frugal living that I was actually doing, I could beat that keyword. And I did. I became the top person for that keyword. And that was a simple supply and demand issue. There's a lot of people interested in it and not enough people making quality content about it. So find areas in the market where you can serve a need where there's more people searching than there are people making that content.

They're tools, not crutches. You can use tools like Vid IQ, like TubeBuddy. Like one out of 10, there's a bunch of really cool tools out there, but again, they're just tools. They're they're not going to make or break your channel. While they're helpful, ultimately, if you make good quality content that people are interested in, that's what's important. Re-watch your videos. You should go back and look at a video that you shot last month and about 6 months ago.

And if you are not disgusted and cringing at the video you shot 6 months ago, it means that you haven't been learning enough. You should always look back and say, "Man, I could have done so much better because I know so much more now. I I could have done the intro better. Could have done the music better. I I should have made this thumbnail." If you don't look back and say that, it just means you're not growing and therefore you're probably not going to have a lot of success in your channel.

Embrace the cringe. Ultimately, it is about quality over quantity. There are channels that post every single day that do great. There's channels that post once a month that do great. Ultimately, one quality video will probably do better than a bunch of average videos. But the best way to get to one quality video might be to make a bunch of average videos, if that makes sense. So focus on quality, but putting the reps in order to be able to have the ability to make one.

Think about the edit in your videos. For instance, like when I make my videos, I'm thinking about the graphics on screen. I'm thinking about the music. If I have upbeat music, I might talk a little bit more like this. If it's a slow, relaxing one, I might talk a little bit more like this. If I know that I'm explaining something and I need graphics over here, I'm going to purposefully sit on this third of the video. So, as you're shooting your video, think about the edit and it makes it so much faster and it makes the quality of the video a lot better.

Pin a comment. You should always have a pin comment that asks a question to get people engaged or it leads to a valuable resource, maybe whatever your sponsor is for that video. Take advantage of the comment section because you can actually get a lot of clicks out of it, which can really help your channel and a boost engagement and a whole bunch of stuff. Embrace your quirky side, especially as YouTube is coming back to this more raw natural feel.

If you're a weird dude, you know, you you have things you say y'all. You say whatever other people say. I'm from New England. I have things that I say and I just totally forgot them right now. But if you have things that are quirky that are unique to you, you enjoy doing skits that are weird and filming yourself in the shower with clothes on, just embrace that weird side of yourself because that's what makes you different and unique and gets people to connect with you and that's totally okay.

Now, that leads into authenticity. One of the best ways for smaller creators to get started is being authentic. You look at Sam Suluk, you look at Moses the jeweler, you look at a bunch of smaller creators who are literally just turning on a camera and talking and doing things and talking about their own experience. Instead of trying to teach, they're just sharing their own journey. That's how you can get started without being an expert, without being great at cameras.

You just turn on your phone, start talking, and that leads into try batch recording. Contrary to what you might be doing right now, you don't have to come up with an idea, write out the video, shoot the video, come up with title and thumbnail, edit, post, and do it in that order and repeat the process every single week. You can come up with a few ideas, write a few scripts, shoot multiple videos in a day, make a bunch of thumbnails in a day, post a bunch, and then end up getting ahead.

I'm currently eight videos ahead right now, so I could technically take a couple months off because I actually took the time and I built systems. It took me years to build those systems. But now that I have them, it's super easy to stay ahead on videos and like batch produce every area of the video and actually treat this very much like a business where I have inventory that I can sell to sponsors and pretty much everything that I do is now, you know, based on math.

And some of it is just stuff that I'm interested in. A lot of it is just almost guaranteeing myself success by understanding how YouTube works. And that's where I want to encourage you not to stop during the six months. I had six months where every time I posted a video, I lost subscribers. And that really sucked. And I think that's where most people quit. And because I just for some reason kept posting videos, I've been able to have success that just keeps building on itself like compound interest.

So, if you realize that you're building up a catalog of videos and you need to get 50, 100 videos out there so that when one does well, it brings all the others along with it and gets you a lot more views throughout everything. It really kind of helps you through those difficult times. And the cool thing is as you continue to stack and stack and stack and just get a little bit better in that baseline of your videos keeps going up and up and up, like now you have three people who show up for every video.

Now you have 10 people. Now you have a 100 people who show up for every video. Now you have a thousand. Now you have 10,000. Now you have 50,000. as that baseline keeps going up, you put in the exact same amount of effort or even less effort and how much you get rewarded is like a billion times higher. Literally, cuz I used to lose money on my videos, now I make money. All right. Now, before we get into some mistakes that are probably killing your channel, let's talk about making money because I think that's a reason why a lot of people do this.

And I think also, you know, collectively of the the people watching who have YouTube channels right now, you're probably losing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars collectively because you don't know some of this stuff. First of all, you don't need to wait until you're monetized to start making money. In fact, you really shouldn't even think about that as a possibility or a strategy. You should just ignore it completely.

Even as a big channel, my income from AdSense goes way up and then it goes way down. And if I relied on that, it would be the most stressful existence imaginable. Plus, it's just a terrible way to make money, unless you get millions of views every single video, which is super hard to do. So, let's start with the fact that you can make money from day one simply by having a monetization strategy. Now, I'm going to go into a couple here, but there are eight proven ways to make money, and I have a free course teaching how to do that again down below.

Totally check that out. But, as an example, I have one channel that I specifically designed to be an affiliate income channel. And in just a few videos on that channel and 300 subscribers, I have sold over $100,000 in product from one of the products that I promote on there. I have a couple others that I promote as well. And that's made me over $12,000 in the past year. And I think I've made seven videos on that channel.

Again, this is simply math. Nothing about this was lucky. It was all organized and thought out and planned. It's a total repeatable system. I've had tons of my students go through and do the exact same thing. We could start earning money without ever looking at AdSense by affiliate, by making your own product, by a couple of these other strategies we're going to talk about simply by following the math. All right, so next up is to have a targeted audience and then monetize it.

So even if you're only getting a 100red views for a video, you should have a product. Literally, you can go open a stand store. You can set up so that you can start receiving coaching or make a course in a week like I just did and then start making money. Even if you only make, you know, 250 views a video, you get four videos a month. You just get one person to buy your consulting on the thing that you teach that you are an expert in, which most of us have one thing that we are somewhat an expert in.

If not, you just take 6 months or a year and become an expert in literally anything. Then if you just make one sale a month, you start making $500 or $1,000 a month, even with very few views, as opposed to if you're waiting for AdSense, you're probably going to make like three bucks. I can't stress enough. It's such a bad way to make money. Next up is to make a digital product. So, we have affiliates, we have consulting, and then we have a digital product.

Again, there are specific ways to do this that I I go way deeper into in my course, which is one of my digital products, but also with a live aspect. But pretty much you just spend in my case like a year creating solutions to people's problems and then you charge them money to actually fix their problems. Like if I can guarantee somebody that I can fix their problem because I spend way more time thinking about it than them, then depending on how painful that problem is for that person, I can charge more or less money.

You can do the same thing. Whether it's training your dog, whether it's communication with your partner, whether it's learning to grow on YouTube, if you have a solution to somebody's problems, you can make a course and start monetizing almost immediately. And the cool thing about digital products is it's passive income. Much like affiliates, if you have a video that promotes a digital product that shows up in search, you can make a video once and years later people can still buy that product or they can still buy the thing that you are reviewing for affiliate.

So, that's a way to make long-term passive income through YouTube and specifically targeting search. I would also highly recommend that you start collecting emails as soon as possible by making some type of free lead magnet for people with just pretty much offering something like a course that it's incredibly valuable and people be willing to pay $100 for cuz it's that good and giving it to people for free in exchange for an email so that when you have something to offer people, you can sell to those people.

Let's talk about some mistakes that you really need to stop. First of all, don't ask me what camera that I use. That's kind of a joke. It's a Sony A73iS, I think. But honestly, it does not matter, especially when you're starting out. Don't buy a multiple thousand camera. It won't make any difference. One of my top videos recently, I shot half of it on my phone with no microphone walking around. And it was totally fine.

Nobody noticed. Honestly, all that's really important is idea, title, thumbnail. Get a good microphone for like a hundred bucks or 50 bucks. And totally just use your phone in like a $20 tripod until you start making money. Don't get caught in the upgrade syndrome where you always think that, man, if I only had a coffee cup that looked like a lens, but it was actually a coffee cup, then I would be a successful YouTuber.

No, you don't need another lens. You don't need another camera. You need like some very basic stuff, especially when you're starting. And then you need to make videos that are highquality and engaging. Next up, uh don't edit your own videos. Yes, this might be kind of controversial, but it used to take me like 8 to 10 hours to edit a YouTube video. And if I can pay somebody $100 to $200 to do that and I can earn more than that at my day job, I was better off paying somebody to edit my videos and I go work on other things and I can end up a couple hours ahead that way.

Now, it's okay to edit to learn, you know, how to edit videos if you enjoy doing that. But if you're really treating this like a business, you might actually be more efficient working more and not editing than you are trying to save the money and editing. Quality is probably going to be like a billion times better. In YouTube, speed wins. If there's a trending idea, if Bitcoin is going viral, if something's happening, if there's a trend going around, you can ride that wave and be successful.

The people who overanalyze and overthink and get stuck in analysis paralysis and never hit record, they're the ones that fail and are stressful and say that the algorithm hates them. Don't be so positive. Now, I personally wish this did not exist. So, a lot of times if you negatively frame things as opposed to positively frame things, the video might do better. For instance, you could do five hacks that will make you grow on YouTube.

That might do well. But you could also negatively frame it and say five habits that are destroying your channel and that might end up getting more views than the positive version of it. Have a core promise. If you can't tell somebody what your channel's about or what your video is about in like half a sentence, then you need to work on your channel and your video. Like I make videos about minimalism and simplifying your life.

Like this video is a bunch of hacks on how to grow on YouTube. That's all I need to tell somebody so they understand what the video is about. If you are just rambling for 20 minutes and you don't even know what you're talking about, how is anybody ever going to click on that video and expect something that you're promising them and then get a payoff for it? If they don't even know what they're clicking on, they're not going to click on it.

Capture your ideas. The best ideas come when you're in the shower, on a walk, or in bed. So, make a system to capture those ideas. So, think like an investor. Every video that you're making should be an asset that has the possibility to pay you for a long time. And all you're doing is making as many assets as possible because that's literally what they are. The 1% rule. You want to get 1% better at making videos every single week for years. 1% better at thumbnails, titles, storytelling, lighting, camera, audio.

Hyper obsessed over one thing for a week and you'll have that skill for the rest of your life. Don't be the 99%. 99% of people will think about starting a channel, they'll never take action. They'll make one video, but they'll never make four. They'll definitely never make 40 or 400. They'll never even pick one thing from this video and apply it. They'll never sign up for the literally free courses down below. They'll never invest into themselves to learn more.

Literally spent hundreds of dollars on audiobooks that have completely transformed my life. I've spent thousands of dollars going to seminars taking courses. It's way cheaper than college and you can apply this stuff immediately. I know so many people think about doing it, but they never actually take action. And that leads to the last point, which is to have no last point. Just end your videos. Always leave people wanting