7 lessons from 7 Years of YouTube transcript

7 years ago, I was working three jobs. I had no degree. I had never picked up a camera before. You know, pretty done. Pretty done. I uploaded my first YouTube video. I was literally my only viewer. I almost quit a bunch of times, but today I make more in a month than I used to make the entire year working three separate jobs. And so after 7 years on YouTube and having multiple successful channels in different areas, I wanted to share some lessons [music] that helped me grow multiple channels from scratch and make a lot more money than most other creators.

The first thing I learned you've probably heard before unlike the rest of this list, but the first 100 videos literally don't count. I won't spend a lot of time on this, but like you're probably going to suck when you start making YouTube videos. to take way longer. You're going to be bad at it. You're not going to be natural on camera. You're going to look at yourself over here instead of looking in the lens. You're just bad at doing it cuz you've never done it before.

Until you've made 100 plus videos, you're probably not going to have success unless you're a bit of an anomaly. Once you've done that, you can generally just replicate success. You can just start new channels and they'll succeed because you know what you're doing. But it's a skill like anything else and it takes time to learn a skill. I used to think it was more luck and stuff, but it's a 100% a skill that once you learn it, you can replicate it.

I know cuz I've literally helped hundreds of people do this. When they listen to my advice, they do well. When they don't and they try to be original and do it their own way and try to be creative and try to, um, you know, like reinvent the wheel, it just doesn't work. It it's not rocket science. It's just you follow a proven path. The next one is getting stuck in your niche. So, most people when they start a YouTube channel, they have this idea like, "Oh, I want to talk about this.

I want to be this type of creator." They're they're dialing everything in ahead of time. They've got the perfect banner, the perfect, you know, like ideas and pillars and lead magnets and all this stuff. And that can be good, but generally that's only going to actually work for more successful creators. Like you watch other people, you know, that that teach how to grow on YouTube, but their only successful YouTube channel is how to grow on YouTube.

They're going to generally tell you to have this kind of blueprint figured out and you know, like you you plan all this ahead of time. Generally, you start and what you start with is almost never what you end with. I started doing like real estate content and like different stuff that I was into at the time 7 years ago. I did cooking videos. I did I've done a lot of stuff. And what I landed with was not at all what I started with.

[music] And even this channel or my other channel which have both become very successful monetarily at least, I was able to kind of start these more or less in a bit of a specific niche only because I knew I had now had the experience from that first couple hundred videos and I could, you know, kind of plant that seed. For most people, you're going to start something. You're going to try day vlogs. You're going to try tutorials.

You're going to try whatever. You try a bunch of things and then you listen to the audience. You make noise and you listen for the response back from the algorithm, from the audience, and then you adapt to that. One of my students started making kind of like self-improvement videos like I do on my main channel. And he was making those. They weren't really connecting and then he made like a refinishing a frying pan video, which is something he was interested in.

Nothing was sticking. So, he was trying different things and that video took off and he adapted his whole channel. He deleted all his old videos and now he has a channel about frying pans that is getting close to him leaving his job. He just came on one of the group calls and was like, "Hey, listen to Gabe." He hadn't been on a couple months. He was like, "Hey, listen to Gabe cuz I'm literally getting close to leaving my job now." He made his first $1,000 in one day talking about frying pans.

Like how ridiculous is that? But he never thought he would have a frying pan channel that would give him freedom. What you start with, just because you don't have it figured out at the beginning, doesn't mean you have to have it figured out. You need to get past that first 100 videos. You need to start posting, learning, [music] seeing what you like. You might think you like day vlogs. I like to watch day vlogs. I hate making them.

I've tried a few. I hate it. If I started making a channel just about day vlogs, I would have to pivot into other things. So, it's okay to pivot. It's okay to turn. It's okay to try new things. If what you're doing is not working, experiment and try new things. And this is where we get into what I'm going to call the revenue lie. So many creators are focused on AdSense and it just really drives me up a wall. I've talked about this before, but I have another channel that just passed 1,000 subscribers.

It made 30-something thousand dollars before I ever got monetized. Like how stupid [music] is it for me to focus on monetization as a strategy as a small channel? It just it makes literally no sense if that's your strategy. You're you're just never going to make any money. But you can literally make tens of thousands of dollars, a full-time income on 20 videos if you have a way to make money. So, that's either having some type of offer, it's affiliate, some type of program.

It could even be working for other creators. Like there's a lot of really good ways to make money that aren't AdSense. And if that's your focus, unless you're getting probably hundreds of thousands of views per video, it's just you should never ever ever ever focus on that. Even now with my main channel gets a couple million views per month, makes good money AdSense-wise, AdSense is always always my lowest way of making money.

Even if it's making five figures a month, my affiliates make more. My sponsorships make more. My courses make more. And it's going to be the same thing whether you're a small channel or a big channel. Like I've done literally and helped a bunch of other people do. Small channels can make a lot of money as long as you're not making AdSense. Big channels can make a lot of money generally as long as it isn't AdSense or unless you're like talking about viral stuff.

I will say that if you are taking sponsors, you should always always make sure [music] that it's something that you use yourself and you actually love and you'd recommend it to your friends. And that is why the only sponsor I've had on this channel is Storyblocks because I remember as a smaller creators like, "I really hope to work with them someday." Because I use [clears throat] them all the time. And now I have that opportunity.

So, this video is sponsored by Storyblocks. Yes. If you're a creator and you're just trying to level up your videos without spending a ton of time or money, Storyblocks is like the toolkit to make that happen. I wish I had start using them earlier. It's an all-in-one creative library with over 7 million [music] human-made clips, music, sound effects, templates all in one place. You're not bouncing between five [music] different places to try to find all your music here, to be roll here and the the sound effect.

Like it's all in one place and they're all actually high quality. I use this a ton especially on my main channel when I need B-roll to cover a cut, when I need a sound effect for something like this or [music] I'm pouring my invisible coffee. Storyblocks. And everything's made by professional filmmakers [music] and artists. It's not like AI-generated sloppy crap. And their licensing is super clear so that you can, you know, have the music and all that type of stuff [music] in it and you don't have to worry about getting striked or anything like that.

If you're posting consistently, [music] Storyblocks can save you a lot of time. They even have like plugins and templates that let you move from idea to a finished product a lot faster so that you can focus on the the storytelling and it's just a tool to to really just improve your videos in a lot [music] of different ways. Check them out. Head to storyblocks.com/theprocess. They are offering 15% off any annual plan [music] for a limited time.

There is a link down below you can check out. That's only available through my link. And now, the next thing is you need systems and accountability. When I was doing everything myself, I felt like I needed to maintain [music] control. I got really capped. I got really stuck cuz I wasn't getting any feedback on my videos. I didn't know what was going wrong. Generally like when you get actual good feedback, not from your mom, not from your cousin.

You get good feedback, you figure out like, "Oh, okay. My thumbnail sucks. Nobody understands my title." It makes sense to you. You spend a week thinking about it. Nobody else knows what you're talking about. The story that you thought was compelling was [music] really boring. The music in the background that you loved was really annoying. You don't know that stuff. I didn't know that stuff until I started to get around other people who were as experienced or more experienced than me and then they could give me real valuable feedback that like doesn't hurt.

Like if you you ask your mom for feedback, they're going to be like, "Oh, it's great. I loved it." That doesn't help you at all. You need somebody to be like, "No, that sucked. What were you thinking? Change [music] this." And ideally somebody who like knows what they're talking about. And so, that's one of the reasons I am such a big fan of [music] like getting in groups of other creators and getting feedback from them.

Whether it's finding people reaching out to them on Instagram or like something that we do on our cohorts that we've done in the past or like the year-long program that we just started where we're having weekly calls where you can get in the room literally either me or my direct team that's been working with me for years and we give actual feedback on why your videos aren't doing well. If you don't know why it's not doing well, it's generally the idea wasn't good, the thumbnail wasn't good, title wasn't good.

Packaging your video is generally the last issue that it is, but it's generally like a a strategy or packaging issue. And that's where unless you have that experience, you just don't know what's wrong with your video and that's why you get stuck in this loop of never seen success. As long as you're doing everything yourself, you're always going to be capped. As long as you're not getting feedback, as long as you're editing every single video and doing every single step of the process, as long as you don't have system, as long as it's all relies on you, a lot of times you get caught in a bubble until you reach out, somebody gives you some feedback and then you kind of like explode off that.

That's what I've seen with most creators is they get stuck in their own loop and they just need somebody to bounce ideas off of. Next we get into the boring skills. I kind of just touched on this, but most of how your video is going to do is going to be the boring things. It's not the actual video itself. Like that's kind of important a little bit. But like the idea, how it fits in with your channel, and then the title and thumbnail.

Those are not the sexiest things. They're not the filming, cinematography, beautiful music. That it's not that as much as the idea of [music] the video itself. If we look at Smart Money Bro for instance, all his videos are very low effort. Sits down. It looks like it's shot on a potato. I don't know what's going on. Love you, dude. But he posts a ton of videos, but the packaging is very good and the ideas are very good.

And he just needs one or two to click a month. Let me see how much money he's making. So, he's got about 2.3 million. Oh, dude, almost the exact same number as me. What did I make? So, I made about $15,000 in AdSense last month. So, I'm guessing he's doing about the same. Posting the lowest quality videos you could imagine and he's probably making at least that in AdSense, at least that in uh either products or sponsorships.

So, realistically for extremely low effort videos, but very high quality ideas and thumbnails, even if he just gets a couple to click per week because he posts often and he has proven formats and ideas and thumbnails and stuff, he's able to make minimum 15 to I'd say 50,000 dollars per month doing this strategy on horrible quality videos. Like again, not busting on the videos, but the video doesn't super matter as much as everybody thinks it does.

It's the other stuff. Next up is the comparison trap. As a smaller channel, when you get advice from somebody who doesn't have a smaller channel, a lot of times it is going to be bad advice. Like you can't copy the same things that I do on my main channel, I can't do them on this channel, and I can't do the things I do on this channel on my other channel. If you're trying to emulate things that bigger creators do, a lot of times they won't work the same for you and you have to use different strategies.

Like one strategy that a student of mine [music] used was when she came back after like a year-long break, I believe it was, she posted two videos back-to-back that were linked to each other and was able to get 100,000 views [music] plus on I think at least one of those videos after taking a huge break off. It was like one of her best performing videos ever because she used a lot of the strategies that I just talked about [music] and she used this kind of hyper loop that like the the videos kind of push into each other and help each other out.

While that can work for big creators, there are different things that work for different circumstances and sometimes that works better for smaller creators than bigger creators. Or if you're having time off versus if you post consistently, you just do different things. Even like a lot of smaller creators, we teach a lot of authority hacking, trend jacking, and stuff like that where you're finding bigger creators or you're finding topical ideas or brands or things like that where you already steal some of that trend and get people to care about you and return for your other content instead [music] of just making stuff that is just about you, you're able to actually steal authority from other people.

And that can be like a huge jump-start for a smaller creator that you can't necessarily copy from a bigger creator who can just talk about themselves because they're big enough that they can do whatever. And then we just we land at what I think is the most important, it's the 1% rule. You get 1% better every single week. It doesn't matter if the first year you see very little progress. If you get 1% better every week, each month you should look back and just cringe at everything that you've done because your skills have improved.

[music] And once your skills get to the threshold and you understand your niche, you understand titles, thumbnails, and you get a lot of feedback, and you're just like your videos are better, your packaging's better, everything's better, then you'll generally have like a big pop where you kind of explode because you got to that threshold where your videos are good enough to compete with Netflix and every other YouTuber and everything else.

But until then, you're just trying to improve your skills and that's really what the name of the game is. So, if you enjoyed this video and you want to work with me directly, we're going to be opening up the next cohort of the 5-hour YouTuber. We've already had hundreds of creators go through this and a ton of different and a ton of different success stories. I think we're opening up in about a week. So, if you're interested, there is a waitlist down below.

We are limiting the spots so that everybody who joins actually gets a lot of like personal feedback and stuff like that. This is literally everything that I have ever learned on YouTube about monetization, about building six-figure affiliate marketing channels, about titles, thumbnails, lighting, filming, and not just theory, I literally come up with an idea, script it, film it, shoot it live in front of everybody who joins just to prove that I can run all of my channels in under 5 hours a week, and I literally don't think anybody else does that.

So, so if again, if you're interested, waitlist down below. We'll see you next week.