This Youtube Strategy Feels Like Cheating transcript

You might be calling it strategy or research, but what it really is is fear dressed up like productivity. That is what is killing your channel. I used to have a really, really hard time doing what I just did, and that is hitting record and actually making videos. And even when I did do that, I hyperfocused on the video itself. And it turns out after making 500 plus videos that that is is just a terrible use of time. And I've kind of realized some traps that I see a lot of people get stuck in.

I still get stuck in this and I kind of want to break that down in this video. How you can escape this trap. And I guess we'll just jump right into it. The first one is kind of like a perfectionism trap, right? You have all of these ideas. I have hundreds of ideas on my notion. I have all these projects that I'm working on. And I realized that I am always trying to distract myself from the most important thing. And even what I thought was the most important thing, the video, this like what you're watching right now, you would think that you need to put all this focus on the video.

You got to spend 8 hours, 10 hours scripting, writing, rewriting, coming up with perfect hooks. This whole amazing formula that you put into the video. And it turns out that does not matter. I'm telling you right now, it does not matter. And I want to show you how it doesn't matter on my two channels right now. Let me pull this up. All right. First, let's look at my main channel. I got a nice solid nine out of 10 on this video.

We're on like our fifth thumbnail and title option. It is not doing good at all. We put tons of work into this video. We had uh everything scripted word for word. We got hooks and rehooks. We got the whole thing worked into this video and it got a nine out of 10. So much time went into this and it's it's not a bad thing. Sometimes that happens. But now I want to show you this channel. This video right here is a one out of 10 by a long shot.

It's over double what the previous one is. This one right here, I just started talking. I kind of came up with this idea for this title. I thought it was a really good idea. There were some some concepts that I wanted to talk about. I didn't really have it all flushed out, but I just kind of hit record on this video. I talked for 13 minutes. As you will see, there's no edits. That's very similar to the one that you're watching right now.

I just talk stream of consciousness sharing my knowledge and the things that I've learned and studied and saw and experienced and it did one out of 10. The one I put enormous effort into did terrible. So what is the difference there? Why does effort not equal the video doing well? Well, effort has almost nothing to do with it when it comes on YouTube. How the video is, how edited it is, how how rehooking it is, like those things are important.

They are part of it. But what is way, way more important, I really gota like this is the sauce right here that will blow up your channel. It's what is keeping you stuck. I have worked with hundreds of creators, literally hundreds of them. I've reviewed their channels. I've checked with them. This is what is holding them back. They have bad packaging and ideas. The videos themselves can be great, but if the idea sucks or the idea does not match your channel or the packaging sucks and the packaging is not enticing, the video does not matter.

It doesn't matter if you have the best video. If the packaging or idea sucks, you're literally just wasting your time. And so that was what happened on my main channel here. This idea was not a great idea. It wasn't a great fit for my audience. I kind of thought it was close. It was a little bit of a shot trying to experiment with some things, but it just didn't end up working. Whereas this one right here was a great fit for my audience.

And I just want you to really think about are your ideas the problem? Sometimes they're proven ideas like this one was kind of on my main channel was kind of based on some proven videos. It was kind of inspired by that and like okay, what can we add our own spin on to this? I have very different experiences so I wanted to put some some different things. I'm like, how can I put my own light on this? And it didn't work.

And that's okay. We'll touch on that in a second. But generally what I see, especially small creators do, is they focus so much on the video themselves. They put 10 hours into a video, but they take 20 minutes to come up with an idea, or they just randomly pick an idea. They don't really think about the packaging at all. And I can just look at the thumbnail and title and be like, "This video is just not going to do well.

I don't have to watch the video. I don't have to watch more than 5 10 seconds into the video to know if the video sucks, too." And that just comes down from a little bit like on my side just experience and doing this full-time for five, six years now. I don't know, it's been a while. But like I've seen so many videos that I can just kind of tell from that stuff. And so many small creators, they don't know what a good packaging is.

They don't know what a good idea is. And if you don't know what a good idea is, it doesn't matter if you know how to make good videos. It's they're not going to click. So really working on your ideas, studying what makes you click on a video. The psychology of your audience, what are they trying to accomplish? What how can you spark intrigue? How can you make the title in the thumbnail more clear so that people don't have to think to say that I have this problem?

I have this curiosity and this sparked my intrigue enough that I want to click on this video to find out if this person has the solution to my problem. And another thing that people do is they treat YouTube like a school project. Listen to how dumb this is. School has you work on your weaknesses and avoid your strengths. If you are great at math, you just don't have to study and you just kind of phone it in and you move on.

You put all your effort into history because you suck at history. So, you have to keep doing it, keep working on, keep trying to get better at it. That's just like it might be necessary for parts of school, but it's really dumb when it comes to like success in life where you should be focusing on your strengths and ignoring your weaknesses for the most part. Like I realized after years of doing YouTube that editing, while I'm okay at it, I'm not great at editing and I'm good at a few other things that I try to put more of my energy into, but I was just trying to work on things that I was bad at instead of just trying to avoid those, outsource those, and focus on things that I was good at.

School also teaches you to like study and prepare and you put all of this work into this project to get a good score on the thing. And while some of that is important, ultimately when it comes to YouTube, you need to come up with again a solid idea, title, thumbnail, and then you need to post. And so many people get stuck in this perfectionism trap where they're like, I got to have the video perfect. I got to have the sound perfect.

I got to have this perfect thumbnail that I spent 12 hours on. And sometimes the better option is to take a screenshot thumbnail, to post a video, to talk to the camera, because no matter how good you even are at the idea, the title, the thumbnail, the editing, if you just suck on camera, cuz you've only made three videos, those don't even matter. What matters, especially for new creators, is getting in reps. You need to get in so many reps, like 100 reps.

You need to try to get 1% better each one of those reps so you can continue to get stronger. It's kind of like going to the gym where you're building these muscles of talking to a camera, of editing, of knowing good flow, knowing good pacing, knowing what is a good title and thumbnail. Like, you can only learn so much through research. If you go to ride a bike, you can read all the books you want on how to ride a bike.

You could take a course on how to ride a bike. Till you get on the bike, you don't know if you suck at it or not. You don't know how to do it. You need to practice. You need to pedal. You need to put in effort. It's going to be hard when you start. You're going to fall over. You're going to have nine out of 10. You're going to have nine out of 10 tens the whole time. Just let me let me tell you that. I've been doing this for years.

Side note on that. We'll just we'll divert just a little bit. You're going to have like probably two out of 10 videos are going to do well. Three to six of them are going to do average, like five out of 10, six out of 10, and then the rest are going to flop. So, just if you expect that to happen, it takes a lot of the stress off. You're not going to get one out of 10 every single time. Very few people do that. You're always going to have ones that flop.

You're always going to have ones that bang. If you post once a week, you're going to have one that bangs. Maybe like, you know, every couple months. So, um, just expect that. Takes a lot of the stress off. But something we really need to focus on is exploring before we start exploiting, right? A lot of people get into YouTube because they want to make money. And I've been able to exploit right from the get- go uh on a couple channels.

Like, I have a channel with 500 subs that's made close to $25,000 now, which is stupid. plus another about 15,000 in free products. So 500 subscribers is about $40,000 total. This is so stupid. So like what I'm telling you is you can make a lot of money on YouTube. You don't need a lot of subscribers. You definitely don't need to monetize. That's kind of dumb, but that's for another video. Unless you're getting a million views a video.

AdSense really sucks. But everybody is obsessed with finding the perfect niche, by getting everything all figured out. They're like, "Am I talking too broad? Do I need to talk about just this? Do I need to talk about just that? Should I change my channel? Should I start a new channel? Cuz I want to talk about all these things." But I'm here to tell you, you're not going to have that figured out right from the get- go, unless you already have previous experience.

If you see somebody who starts a new channel and they see a success, they make a lot of money, they do whatever, um, which I've been able to do a couple times on multiple different channels. We have three new channels in the past 2 years that have all had a video with 100,000 views, uh, gain tens of thousands of dollars and and all that type of stuff because I have years of experience and I know how to kind of make these things work.

I have the the skills that make it possible. But for new people, if you don't have those skills, you need to experiment. You need to try new things before you nail down your niche. Unless you're like crystal clear and you have everything figured out and you're like way more organized than I ever was and you have a bunch of experience, like whatever. If you can do that, that's awesome. But for everybody else, if you're not exactly sure what to do, try things.

Try vlogging. Try doing tutorials. Try different energy levels. Try walking and talking. Try sitting down. Try superedited stuff. Try making a movie. try, you know, really raw stuff. Just try different things. If you're interested in a bunch of things, talk about a bunch of things. Obviously, like not too extreme, like you don't want to do fishing and cooking and tech reviews all in the same channel, but if there's things that are kind of similar, try them.

I literally did cooking, house hacking, book reviews. I somehow got into minimalism and decluttering and like some travel vlogs. Like, I've tried a bunch of different things on my main channel. Was able to build that up to a very large following. But the only way to be able to find your voice is to explore stuff, to see what you like, to see what your audience likes, to see what resonates with people. You're really just trying to find yourself.

You're trying to find this connection. And sometimes what you thought you'd talk about isn't what ends up working. It's like you're trying these different things and then one of them clicks and you're like, "Oh, I guess we'll go this direction, you know, kind of with this channel." And so always make things that you're okay like talking about for years. But how you start does not have to be how you end. And I've seen a lot of people, especially a couple of my students who have been able to leave their 9 to5s and really have a lot of success on YouTube.

The first two years they were doing it, their content was totally different. They were talking about different stuff than what they landed at, than what they saw success at. They were all over the place. They were scattered. They were just finding themselves, finding their audience, finding uh the skills to make good YouTube videos. And then after sticking with it for years, that's when they saw the click. That's when they're like, "Okay, this video clicked.

This is what I decided I like talking about. this is what I decided I'm passionate about. I really was passionate about that and then I made three videos and I realized I can't talk about this for the next, you know, 5 years. So, we're enough with that. And they just experimented with stuff and that's when they started having some things that clicked. And so, this is where I think it's really important is to not pay attention to the stats.

Like, literally uninstall YouTube Studio off of your phone. You don't need it. Please stop checking the stats. Don't look at the one out of 10s when you're getting started. Like some of that is good feedback, but ultimately if you get 300 views on a video versus 200 views on a video, could be a little bit of a sign, but it doesn't really matter. If you get 10 views on a video versus 100, like, okay, those things can give you like little bits of cues of what what's working.

But you also need to find what you like. You need to get work on the skills of it. You're not going to blow up before you have the skills. And until you have those skills, the stats don't really matter. You just need reps and reps and reps. Study. Learn as much as you can. Talk to people who actually know what the heck they're talking about. figure out what you suck at and then work on those things. You're going to have a one out of 10 video and then you're going to have a nine out of 10 video.

None of those matter really. Like I showed them at the beginning, they don't really matter because one video is not going to change your channel. It might give you direction, but you need another video and another and then another 3 years of videos to make a career out of it. So, the stats, while they can be useful tools, a lot of times will be a trap and you be like, "Oh, I gained a subscriber today." Who cares? The stats, for the most part, don't matter.

Especially if you are hyper obsessing about them. I I don't want to say they don't matter. They are a great tool, but so many small creators hyper obsess over them. They overthink everything. They get stuck in the planning, researching phase and they never actually accomplish anything cuz they're just way overthinking it. That's literally one of the things that I am most passionate about. for the past week. Um, some family members been having some health issues and honestly like the ability to not have to go to a job to have complete time freedom, location freedom, do whatever the heck I want has been amazing and it's really made me realize like the importance of being able to do that cuz everybody else who has a job has to go back to their job and I don't have to go back to my job.

I don't have to go anywhere. I have complete freedom to do whatever the heck I want to be there for my family, to be there for the things that are important, for the things that matter to me. And that's one of the things I love about being a creator is you can travel the world, you can be there for family, you can make money talking about what you're interested in. And like my whole goal is to inspire enough people to get them to, you know, working a 9 to5 that they hate to building something that actually helps people and makes their own lives way better.

And so I'm going to be running my last 5-hour YouTuber cohort, how to run a profitable YouTube channel 5 hours a week coming up soon. And then I'll be taking about 6 months off. So, if you are interested in that, there's a wait list down below. Again, it'll probably be the last one for a while cuz going to be doing some stuff, but we've already had five people leave their jobs through it and we're trying to get to 100.

So, uh, hope you enjoyed this video. Hope this was helpful. Get out there and post and I'll see you in the next