YouTube Workshop Week 11 - Mistakes EVERY YouTuber Still Makes

And we are live. Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake, helping you create something awesome today. Welcome back to another workshop for Wednesday. We're doing another session here. I'm gonna make sure that we're actually doing this across platforms and make sure we have that set up for you. So we should be on YouTube, LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, x.com. twitch.com, and kick.com right now. So we have another Wednesday workshop for you. This is week eight in our Creator Playbook series, and we're gonna be mostly going over common mistakes that YouTubers make and teaching you how to avoid them. So hopefully you all get a ton of value from that, and hopefully you've been looking forward to this. We're getting close to wrapping up our full 12 weeks right now. So we are doing that. We've got the mods on standby here throughout this. And so we're going to be going through our full workshop presentation on this. You can also watch the replays of our previous workshops on my YouTube channel if you go to the live tab. We're also going to deep dive into some YouTube analytics. I'm going to be showing you some lifetime analytics, which people rarely ever show. in terms of just the overall channel history and we're gonna break some of those things down. We'll also take a look at the analytics of a successful evergreen video and things you would want to know about that and how to make those successfully since that will play a role in what we'll be talking about today. So we've got a lot of ground to cover. We've got a lot that we're gonna be addressing here. put in 45 different mistakes. So there is a lot to take notes on. And also shout out to our friends over at one of 10. They're gonna be sponsoring our YouTube channel reviews as well as a future workshop on content strategy that we're doing. So thank you to our friends over at one of 10. Make sure you're checking them out. We have a link for you there in the chat. We're also going to make sure at if you use code roberto if you use code roberto they're going to give you 50 off of your account with one of 10.com so make sure you use code roberto at checkout so make sure you're checking that out there and just to give you a quick uh preview here of the uh presentation this is going to be the first set of mistakes we have three different slides with 15 different mistakes that creators make this is going to be the first set of mistakes here but we have a whole presentation to kick off and to go through here so we have a lot of ground to cover so one of the first things we're actually going to do is help you set expectations but i want to remind you that you're going to be able to get the downloads of these i have to make the link for this live um after the workshop uh finishes tonight i'll be able to finish the link upload for this now What I want you guys to know is that for every one of our workshops, we have a link over at awesomecreatoracademy.com, www.awesomecreatoracademy.com, slash week 01, week 02, and so on and so forth. And that's going to help you download the slide presentations for each week. And next week we will finish week 12 and then we'll be moving into a new workshop series. For those of you who are not familiar with me, maybe this is your first time watching one of our workshops or any of my content. My name is Roberto Blake. I've been a content creator and entrepreneur for over a decade. And I've been making content for over a decade, 1700 videos, and I've monetized using all seven. Of the magnificent seven monetization methods for creators, I've done the YouTube Partner Program, obviously donations and fund funding, my own membership website with Austin Creator Academy that does over $100,000 a year in revenue with memberships and coaching. We also have our free, free, free, free Creator Foundations course over there. 900 students, I believe, have signed up for that since January. So we have creator foundations for free for you guys. I've made money with affiliate links. I started with the Amazon Influencer Program. Was earning before AdSense with that earning... i think when i was doing tech and tutorials on my way to 100 000 subscribers that was my main content uh before helping creators i was doing like 1200 1500 a month with the amazon influencer program we used to call it amazon associates back then so that was amazon's affiliate program i moved on to software instead of just hardware and then grew that it was very successful and have done hundreds of thousands of dollars with affiliate links for uh software So I've done that as well as sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and proof of sales helped me move into very lucrative sponsorship relationships. I've been doing over $100,000 a year in sponsorships. It's probably my largest overall income stream like most content creators. So we have just a history here for you to understand. I've been doing this for a long time. I've been doing it successfully. If you wanna know why should I listen to this guy, these would be the reasons. So, how long does it take to succeed? One of the first mistakes that creators make is they underestimate how long it takes to succeed because a lot of people just watch the most popular creators, so their only exposure is really to popular content creators who go viral and blow up overnight. They're used to content creators that are either a hero or a zero and not much in between. Now, typically, the content creators who blow up and go viral, they're successful in a year, they do well in a single year. They have outlier circumstances. They come from a, you know, a upper class background. They're young, single, not married, no kids. And it does make a difference. It does make it easier to make content where you don't have a lot of responsibilities. And when you don't have a nine to five job that you work 40 to 50 hours a week and then have to come home with the scraps of your spare energy and spare time. And if you're lucky, you get 10 to 20 hours a week to make some content. The creators who blow up, that's not their situation. do not have that, they're college kids or they drop out of college or they're teenagers, they live at home. So they don't have those things competing for their success and they're able to go all in on content creation in YouTube. You may not be able to do that. You might have the situation of most working class content creators where you are doing this with what little you have. You are doing the best you can with what you have where you are. You might not have a lot of money to invest in this. I've known the secrets behind some people's blow up. Their parents financed the back end of their YouTube channel. I know a guy whose YouTube channel was literally successful because his wife was a successful real estate agent, boss lady crushing it, making six figures. She hated seeing him go to a job he hates. And the only thing he was really passionate about was YouTube. So she financed his YouTube channel, gave him... some time to launch it she took money out of um her accounts she helped them finance his youtube channel i believe is like thirty thousand dollars i'm not going to name the creator very successful um you know couple actually because then later um when he became successful after i think two years of doing this um he ended up making more money than her in the real estate and he um you know retired her out of that and then they went on to do content creation they both became content creators so guess what a lot of you that's not going to be the fortunate circumstance you have. I tell you that story because a lot of you make the mistake of thinking these successful content creators might be all coming from the same circumstances as you. You might be under the mistaken belief that it's a completely even and level playing field. And I'm here to tell you that for a lot of you, it's going to take you five to seven years to get any real traction. And that's not to discourage you, but I want you to understand. You are competing sometimes with people who have resources. They have other people's time. They have money to hire folks. They have a lot of emotional or financial support. You may not have those things. So if your journey looks very different and someone else is starting out, you start out with someone at the same time, you don't have the same circumstances just because you're on the same platform and you're in the same niche. So I want you to just understand your journey is your journey. You got to do the best you can with what you have where you are. To also give you some clarity and make expectations reasonable, I got these data points from Mario Juice, who was the head of content strategy for MrBeast, went on to work with the Stoke Twins. So he helped two different channels get to 100 million subscribers before. So Mario Juice is one of the leading experts that I trust in the community. He's one of the people who's absolutely not a fake guru. I've had the pleasure of meeting him multiple times. He has this data that he pulled from doing expensive Social Blade reports. So that I didn't have to. And one of the interesting things to note here is that only 3 million creators have 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. And less than 100,000 creators... Sorry, less than a million creators... Sorry, less than a million creators have 50,000 subscribers. Less than 600,000... have a silver play button with 100,000 subscribers. Even the United States of America, we only have about 90,000 channels in America speaking English with silver play buttons. So one, YouTube is not as saturated as you think with quality content because if you're an American, there's less than 100,000 channels with silver play buttons across all the different niches of YouTube. So there's not nearly enough quality content for you to say, that the market is saturated and there's no space for you. There's space for you if you're going to be that good. The only thing the platform is saturated with is the mediocre majority. If you're gonna make low effort, mediocre content, then yes, the platform is saturated with that. If you're gonna make high effort, high quality content, the platform is not saturated with that. Not in your language, not in your region, and not in your niche. Over the last couple of weeks, there are a couple of fundamentals that we always talk about. You've heard of topic, title, thumbnail, and timing before. Usually for me, I coined that. But you rarely hear about themes, attracting your tribe, the talent you need to bring to the table, the total addressable market, the size of the audience that will relate to your ideas, the transformation that your audience is gonna have through your content. uh triggers psychological triggers we can use to get clicks uh testing as an a b testing of titles and thumbnails tracking our data trust and transparency uh testimonials people who can vouch for us especially our collaborators and takeaways that people get when they watch your content one way or another so those are things that i think are fundamentals that all creators could be focusing on most creators struggle with what to make and understanding their place in the creator community and the thing that gets talked about the most is passion what rarely gets talked about is the skills you need to bring to the table to create value how to monetize your content properly and how to make sure there's a large total addressable market for the content you want to make so all these things become very important but most people over focus on passion you need to also be good at something so you can't just be passionate about something and be bad at it and then wonder why you're not getting attention, why you're not getting views. You actually have to be good at the things you want to do and that you're making. If you can't monetize this properly, then you can't sustain this. You can't do this indefinitely. And the thing is you have to make things people want to watch. You have to make what the market demands. You have to supply that. So the thing is when you hear about niching down, You hear about niching down to a topic. I believe that a niche is not a prison that you need to avoid. I believe it's a community you need to embrace. A niche is not a prison. It's not a topic that is gonna trap you. It is a community that will embrace you. And it should be not only like-minded people who share your interests, but it should be like-hearted people who share your values. and for you to be able to create value for those viewers you have to bring the right skills to the table this could be your presentation skills your communication skills your editing skills your video skills whatever it looks like that you need to know to be able to create value for these people and it's skills that are going to pay the bills it's not passion that pays the bills it's skills that do that so you need to bring the right skills to the table to deliver for your brand partners to be friendly to advertisers and to be relevant in the platform So let's start with some of the initial mistakes that you should be avoiding as a content creator. No clear direction, random. I'm sorry, the era of random video uploads is over. That's not really gonna cut it when it comes to YouTube. You might get traction with that on TikTok. It's just, it is what it is. There will be exceptions, people will cherry pick, but as a general rule, this is just the truth. Sad as it might be for some of you to hear. No clear audience avatar. You do not know who you're making content for. Therefore, you don't know how to appeal to them. You don't know what thumbnail they'll like. You don't know what titles they'll like. You don't know what will alienate them. You don't know what will give them the ick. You don't know what will make them click right away because you don't know who you're creating for. And if you create for everyone, you create for nobody. Thank you, Katie, for dropping a really good synopsis for Ikigai there and the importance of it. So one of the things that we're looking at is also no clear unique value. How can you stand out in your niche? That's something that you have to consider. This is going to be important so that people can make your videos and your content a priority and go looking for it and looking for you specifically. No consistent themes. If you don't have consistent themes and you keep making random content or making whatever you feel like, people don't know what to expect from you. So it's hard to make your content a priority. No clear branding. When your branding is not clear, your videos are not as recognizable, it's harder to make them a priority and to click on them right away. Core thumbnail quality, I think this speaks for itself. Neutral titles. If you make your titles neutral or boring and there's nothing provocative, exciting, polarizing, or extreme about them, it's also harder to make those a priority and make them stand out. Weak hooks and long intros. If you spend too long on your intros and there's no hook, there's no introduction to the value that people are going to get from the video. then you lose people and most creators lose 30 to 60% of their audience in the first 30 seconds because they're not just getting right into the content. Weak topic selection. Making videos that nobody cares about and that you have no evidence of demand for. This is something that hurts most people's content. Poor timing. Waiting too long. to upload a video, making it perfect instead of getting it out when it's relevant to most viewers, very important. Overthinking videos, analysis paralysis, this makes people inconsistent, this makes people have anxiety, makes it hard to upload. Ignoring performing formats, sometimes you make a video and it does really well and maybe you've made that video once or twice or even three times. and then you decided you were bored with it even though no one was telling you that they were getting bored or the format was stale. A lot of creators, because we see 100% of our videos, we get bored and we move on before the audience does. A lot of times, they're not getting bored, and if you just made more of your performing formats, you'd get more views. Not learning analytics. You don't need to obsess over analytics, but avoiding them and not learning them. makes it hard to understand what is growing and why it's growing. A lot of you shy away from analytics and you're afraid of them because you feel like you're gonna get discouraged from them. You need to emotionally divest from the analytics and just let the data guide you and don't be emotionally invested about it. Don't be emotional about it. I know it's easier said than done, but you have to do it. Inconsistent and long breaks. This is the thing that has hurt me the most. When YouTube says taking a break will not hurt your channel, Don't believe them. Believe every creator who said that it's hurt their channel. No offense, YouTube. Not monetizing properly. This has hurt a lot of you in terms of your potential. You could be doing more if only you were making more money because then you could buy back your time or go full time or invest in the content being better. But a lot of you do not monetize properly and you overly rely on AdSense and you also wait for brands to come to you instead of pitching them. So what would be interesting for a lot of you to do if you're watching live or if you're watching the replay at home, it'd be interesting for you to go through these first 15 and see how many of these mistakes you're actually making and write them down. And then maybe even grade yourself on a scale of one to five. Five being, oh, I'm really doing this poorly. one being I'm doing this really poorly, and five, oh, I don't think I'm doing that bad with this. If you guys graded yourself on these mistakes, that could be really interesting for you. It could help give you some context on what you're doing and how to improve. So we talk about audience avatars. We've done this a couple of times throughout the workshop, but not everybody understands. what an audience avatar is. And an audience avatar is a phrase that I kind of popularized around content creation where this is the personality of your viewer. This is the person you want to attract into your tribe. This is who your desired audience is. So they have their demographics, that's where they live, what age they are, what gender they are, et cetera. Psychographics, what are their beliefs, what are their biases, et cetera. What are the challenges that this viewer has one way or another with regard to even how they might prioritize content? And what are their preferences? So understanding these things would help you in making the right content for the right people and attracting that tribe that you desperately want. Value for the viewers. It's impossible to get views without creating value for the viewer. It's not about quality content. We don't know you make quality content. We're judging your video by what we see at a glance. I'll give you an example. This is a book. We judge a book by its cover. We judge it by the upfront value demonstrated in the cover and the back page here. We have no idea what the quality is because we haven't read the book yet. We do not know how to judge the content. We don't know how to judge the content. We haven't read the book. So we're just judging the cover design and we're judging... the back cover. We're judging the social proof of the author, either with something like this, where I have my YouTube play button, or if that's a recognizable name. So we're judging the upfront value. We're judging the title, the topic, the cover slash thumbnail, and how relevant it is to us. We're judging those things and we're doing it at a glance very, very quickly. Books are judged by their covers. YouTube videos are judged by topic, title, thumbnail, and timing. So These are the things we're judged on. We are not judged on our editing, our storytelling, or our script until they click on a video. This is where we win or lose the click. You will win or lose the click based on topic, title, thumbnail, and timing. So the topic and the timing are the intersection of relevancy. Do I care about this? And do I care about this right now? So this is relevancy, and this is how I make something a priority. A thumbnail getting my attention and also being relevant in timing, that makes me make that thing a priority. So that would be that spectrum. The topic and the title. All right, am I interested in this? This is the only thing that can communicate whether I'm interested in this. And then the title and thumbnail, you have my attention. So this is how we perceive value. This is very important. and so this is how we create value for the viewers this is how we get a click this is what drives our views nothing else this drives our views nothing else so here are another 15 mistakes to avoid another 15 mistakes 15 more mistakes so confusing name if your youtube channel has a name that we cannot spell we cannot pronounce and we cannot remember You're in trouble, and a lot of YouTubers decide they're gonna be clever with their name instead of just being clear and making something easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and easy to remember. So those are your three rules for a YouTube channel name. They don't make any binge-worthy content. It's just one-off videos, and they have no interconnectivity, and there's no binging. Or they don't make enough content to binge. Or it's not long enough to binge. No playlist strategy. The YouTube homepage, if someone referred their channel, if their channel got a shout out, and we go to your YouTube page, and you don't have channel playlists, and you don't have them organized well, then we don't even know where to look for your channel, and we're not gonna hunt. We're not gonna click over to the videos tab and hunt for this stuff. We want to see it when we go to the channel. So you need a playlist strategy. No gateway content. How can I find your content as a new viewer? What if I'm new to the niche? There's no gateway content. And what if in that content, you're just treating me like I've been here forever. You're making all these inside jokes I can't follow along with. That's really annoying. There needs to be gateway content that is very beginner friendly to people who have never heard of you before or also new to the niche. So you do need that. No shareable content. You want content to grow and reach new people? Make content that is worth sharing. Make content that other people are gonna share in their friend group, their text message, or talk about, or that other creators might want to react to. Content where the video quality and production is below the standards of your niche. You don't have to make the best content in the world, but you do have to make videos that at least meet the standards of what we expect. from good channels in your niche. It's very important. Good audio usually is the most important thing there. Frequently selfish content. So just making content for yourself, sometimes it's important, sometimes they'll keep you from burning out. But if you just do that constantly, and it's not what the viewers care about, and you are derailing the content to talk about yourself or to vent, people are gonna tune out that's going to be for them that's going to be a no from them they can watch something else they can watch a creator that puts them first filler uploads uploading just to upload while i do believe in making consistent content i don't believe in uploading just to upload and making something low effort is a throwaway i think that your videos should be something that create value for your viewers you shouldn't do filler Understanding multiple video formats and strengths. Some people think that they can just repurpose their long form into shorts and go viral for no reason. You need to understand and respect every format and understand that every format has its strengths and weaknesses and has value that can offer. Live streams have a different value than short form. Short form has a different value than regular videos. Regular videos have a different value than vertical videos or vertical live streams. Just understand the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Poor or outdated SEO strategies. People thinking they can just throw keywords or use big YouTubers' names and that will always perform for them. They have all these outdated ideas. There are still benefits to SEO. I have several videos that are friendly to SEO and do really well in YouTube search. This is an example of one of them where almost all the views for this video come from YouTube search. However, you don't use outdated SEO tactics. And the external here is Google search. So almost all the traffic here, like a good 90% of the traffic here is search. But again, it's not outdated old strategies that make that work. Too few uploads to launch. a certain amount of content for YouTube to understand your audience, especially if you're making content that's different. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule where people have made very little content or made one video and gone viral. That happens almost never. You shouldn't be relying on it. Your answer is to launch content and make gateway and binge-worthy and shareable content early on and to make back-to-back videos that people want to watch. Consider launching your YouTube channel with a mini-series of three to five videos people could watch. Relying too much on trending topics. If you're like, oh, there's no news, so I have nothing to upload, then your strategy isn't strong enough. Not learning creator skills. A lot of people just go straight into making videos. They treat this like TikTok. They don't think thumbnails and titles are important. Thumbnails and titles are important. This is YouTube. It's not TikTok. You do need skills to pay the bills here. Keyword stuffing. Just putting keywords and YouTubers' names into descriptions and into the keyword section or at mentioning them is not going to cut it. You cannot hack your way to an audience. Blaming the algorithm. This is definitely a staple. A lot of times people blame the algorithm instead of auditing that they may have made any of these other 29 mistakes. And we have another 15 mistakes here. I could have made this 60 mistakes that YouTubers make pretty easily, but I felt 45 was gonna be good enough. So let's help you with some of your mistakes that you're making with some of the basics. Let's help you have a framework for your thumbnails. We've done a dedicated thumbnail workshop as one of our earlier weeks that you could watch the replay of, but we have a framework in Awesome Creator Academy that we teach called the Vibes Framework. We want our thumbnails to be visually attractive at a glance. We want them to convey an interesting idea at a glance, bold text and color contrast, eye-catching elements, and social proof for status in the thumbnail. If we do these, we can get clicks. Speaking of clicks, when it comes to titles, we have a framework for that. Concise wording, leverage psychology, identify with the viewer, compel emotions, use keyword triggers, meaning words that they will care about and be emotionally invested in, and use status or social proof. If we do these things, then between our thumbnails and our titles, we can attract the tribe that we want. We can attract that audience. hooks. When someone clicks on that video, we got them. We passed the vibes check. We got the clicks. Now they're watching the video. We have less than eight seconds to get them emotionally invested here. And we can lose 30 to 60% of our audience in the first 30 seconds of a video. We cannot get this wrong. We have to validate the video so they don't think that's clickbait. We have to deliver on the promise that the topic, title, thumbnail, and timing expresses. We have to offer some upfront value. We have to open up a curiosity loop so that they want to stay. We have to keep them invested emotionally, and we have to do everything in our power to stop them from clicking away and just watching another video. So we have to get our hooks right. We have to have strong hooks. They cannot be weak. In terms of picking our topics, this is where most people fail in the first place. Your topic, your idea for your video has to fit the audience avatar. You should qualify demand and make sure that there are people who want to watch this by studying whether there are outliers for this idea that have overperformed. And so you can use one of 10 for that. Context. you have to make sure that this is something that will be meaningful to your viewers, uniqueness. okay if this idea has already been done and done very well by someone maybe a bigger creator can you take a unique angle on this that stands out you know if there's a creator that's huge and they have an opinion on anything and let's say they have a million views i promise you that there's a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand people who disagree with that big creator maybe just because they're a big creator they disagree so that's an audience you could cater to if you have a different point of view that you can present And specific intent. For videos that people have to click on, they're clicking on them for a reason. Make sure that you make that as clear as possible and that they have a specific reason why this video would matter to them. And so a lot of people go, okay, Roberta, that's all great. How do I get people to watch more of my video? How do I get them to, how do I get better retention on my videos? Well, you have to win attention, add value to viewers. have proper timing and pacing, make sure you create clarity instead of confusion, and hook them with moments that they might even want to re-watch or that will bring them back to this video or make them want to ask a question. Those are things you can do in the watch framework to increase your watch time and retention. So here are another 15 mistakes that almost every creator makes, at least at some point. They may not pace their videos well. No script or outline to keep you from yapping. You're wasting viewers time. Over editing the videos, thinking that will save you from bad storytelling or bad production or bad pacing or bad scripting. All the special effects in the world can't save a poorly executed idea. No emotional connection with the audience. You gotta get people invested in these videos and invested in you as a creator. No evergreen content. Your content is one and done. It has a short shelf life. This makes it harder for you to grow. Not engaging with the comments. Every time you engage with the comments, that's an opportunity to turn a casual viewer into a loyal subscriber. Code switching on the viewers. It's very hard when your viewers don't know what to expect from you and when you don't bring that same energy or when you flip-flop on your point of view. It's very difficult for those viewers. If you built your channel, on being a diehard Apple fan, and then Apple does something to annoy you, it's one thing to call them out once in a while. It's another thing to completely abandon Apple and switch over to a competitor after building a loyal Apple audience. You cannot code switch on your viewers. They will abandon you, because they'll feel you abandon them first. Uploading outside of your niche. If you are doing tech videos, we don't need to know your opinion on what MrBeast is doing. If you're doing tech videos, we don't need a prank video from you. Do not upload content your viewers are not expecting from you. Too much variety content. If you do too much variety and say, okay, I'll avoid that by saying I'm gonna be a variety creator. It doesn't really work well on YouTube. It works well on Twitch. Works well on TikTok, but not on YouTube. It makes it too confusing for the audience and they lose focus and they can just move on to something else. Poor new viewer experiences. You might have a loyal audience of people, but you're struggling to grow because maybe it's hard for new viewers to keep up with you. Scale Train Station says, what is over-editing? Trying to tighten things up? Or Mr. Beast, Beastifying with all the kinds of transitions? You answered your own question here. It's the Mr. Beastifying things. But also, here's a good stance to editing. Editing should eliminate distractions. and add value and context. If you're not eliminating a distraction, like fixing the audio so that there's not distracting air condition or a dog barking, that's a good thing to do, it eliminates a distraction. Making sure that you add context if you say something, popping up a visual on screen that shows instead of tells, that adds value and context. So you should be subtracting things that distract from your enjoyment. and you should add things that give more viewer enjoyment and context that adds value. So that's how you edit properly. If you're adding something for the sake of it being there or because you think it's cool, you're over-editing. Let's see. Relying on gimmicks. Relying on gimmicks means that there's shallow value for the viewer. You don't want to do that. Begging your fellow creators for collaborations. Instead of organic collaborations, this is a big problem. A lot of smaller creators will beg bigger creators to do stuff with them. They'll feel very entitled about it. They will beg people in general to do collabs and help them grow. They will feel they're owed that. I knew a creator that started making their content, literally daring their audience and telling their audience to tell this big creator that they have to collab with them, put them on their radar. You don't want to beg for attention. You just don't. It's not a good look. Engaging in drama. Another thing that's not a good look. You want to avoid this. You want to be as professional as possible. Low returning viewer value. It's important to get new people in the door, but you also want to create value for returning viewers and make sure that they feel like there's fresh content. And while it's important to be consistent, you want to avoid being too repetitive. And finally, many creators make their content too easy to duplicate. by a competitor and then are surprised if someone can execute it better than them or put more resources or more consistency behind it. So you want to avoid that if you don't want to be replaceable. High effort content. We want our content to be something that is very difficult for our competitors to replace. A lot of people think that being irreplaceable is your personality. Usually that's not true, at least from a viewer's perspective. So what I would say is you want to do something that's too good to ignore, too weird to ignore, and too difficult for someone to copy in many cases. High value content. This is something that your audience can make a priority and something that they recognize as a priority for them and valuable to them at a glance where they don't have to think about it more than two to three seconds. to decide that it's worth clicking on and again we focus around topic title thumbnail timing this is all about packaging high quality content high quality content is about delivery so if high value content is about packaging then what's in that package once you open it up so what's the experience and this comes down to your style your structure your storytelling good production, good audio, aesthetics, all of those things. And those are important because while quality doesn't get you views, it gets you returning viewers, and it gets you loyal subscribers, and it does help you get brand deals. So quality does matter. I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm just saying it doesn't play a role in your initial views and clicks. High consistency content. So if you deliver high value, high effort, high quality content, keep doing that. Make them come back for more and make sure it's not just about your upload frequency, but that you're giving them more of what they love and that you're giving it to them way that they've come to expect from you. So consistency is not just about frequency. It's about bringing that same energy. It's about creating that same vibe, that same feel, that same experience. And it's about delivering on those expectations and giving them more of what they want. It's the law of supply and demand. And so, in conclusion, just do these things to grow. Have distinct branding so that people recognize your content. Create clear value for the viewer up front. Bring big creator energy. That's your presentation value. That's your packaging. That's how you deliver. That's your consistency. That's how you bring it. Be consistent in your uploads within the threshold of what the niche expectations are. And, of course, consistently upload evergreen content that also is growth content. And if you do these things long enough, your channel will thrive. What is long enough? It's not 100 videos. It's usually 500 to 1,000 videos to break through to get anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers. MrBeast had to upload 460 videos to get to 10,000 subscribers. You might do better than that and do better than him initially. So just keep that in mind. PewDiePie had to upload 100 videos to get 2,500 subscribers. PewDiePie's first 100 videos, 2,500 subscribers. MrBeast's first 100 videos, I think it's 780 subscribers, less than 800. Marques Brownlee, MKBHD, biggest tech YouTuber. 100 videos, 78 subscribers. So you... shouldn't have wild expectations those first 100 uploads you just have to kind of get through them but i find that usually it's 500 to a thousand videos before you're successful if you are ever successful so when i say consistent that's what when i say do this long enough that's what that looks like a good cadence for that is you could find yourself being successful if you do 100 to 150 videos a year as a two to three video a week upload cadence um if that is not something you feel you can keep up with it might take you longer to succeed and uh that's why it takes people five to seven years so just keep those things in mind so if you want to join the awesome crater academy pro group um get uh twice a week sessions with me and the other creators in the pro group. You can join us over at www.awesomecreatoracademy.com slash join to learn more about that. If you become a member, you will also get access to all of our digital products. current and future courses, downloads, templates, email, swipe files, and more. Plus, you can join us live twice a week in our private office hours, and you can post every day to the community. We have a couple of our members here, like Ask Papa. He's been doing great. We have a great thriving community that you can join. And like I said, we go live twice a week to answer all your questions and to give you feedback on your content. So you can find that at www.austincreatoracademy.com slash join. And of course, you can find me on social media at Roberto Blake pretty much everywhere. So that's it for the slide presentations. We'll take some of your questions here. And while I'm waiting on your questions and the mods are going to have your questions over in the form, And let me just bring up Google Sheets here. Thought I had the current form bookmarked. Give me one moment, everybody. Just need to get to the form for the questions here. Thanks to the mods for keeping up with that. So we answered the question about over-editing already, so that's good. And while we're waiting on that, I can go ahead and I can show you a few things about YouTube analytics because I said a lot of you don't read analytics correctly. Click-through rates are an average and you guys are misreading that. So this looks like a good click-through rate and it is. Don't get it twisted. This is a good click-through rate, but it's not my real click-through rate. My real click-through rate right now for today is 22%. It's almost twice as much. So that's what my current click-through rate is today. What you get to see in YouTube is an average across your click-through rate over time. So your click-through rate is misleading if you just look at it at a glance. It's your average over time. And so that's my high of 22 versus my low of 0.3 or 1.2. So it's your average over time. And so that's important. You could be misjudging your video if all you do is glance at the click-through rate so very important Looking at your audience Look at this most of the watch time and most of the views on this video are from non-subscribers in this case 98% That's a good thing because this is a growth opportunity means I'm reaching people who aren't subscribed to me a lot of you really obsessed about Loyal subs and you get frustrated by this but the truth is your growth opportunities come from people aren't subscribed to you, so I got You know 300,000 views on this that means that my potential my potential to get more subscribers is Very high and I should be happy about that This is also interesting that because this is a tutorial video Most people watched it on their computer not on their mobile phone So we have a question here from Cool Breeze. How to know when it's time to change the thumbnail or title if the video isn't getting any more impressions? If the video isn't getting more impressions, usually changing the thumbnail or title will not help or save the video, and your best bet is to move on and make a new video. So if it's not getting impressions... I don't want to try to agonize over making a new title and thumbnail for a video that's not getting impressions. I would move on and make a new video. Because a new video has the best chance of getting views or impressions. I'm wasting my time trying to save an old video that I already made that's not getting impressions. So that's my answer to that question. I don't want to bother wasting my time trying to save an old video. If an old video is not getting impressions, if an old video is not getting impressions, I don't want to save it. If a video is getting impressions but the click-through rate is abnormally low, a new title and a new thumbnail can help you extract more view potential from a video that's already getting impressions, already getting reach, already getting an opportunity. If YouTube is not giving this reach and an opportunity, then... Better packaging won't save it. Having a really nice package that's on the back room shelf where no one can see it doesn't matter. So I hope that analogy makes it a little clearer and easier to understand. But good question. It's a good question. So understanding the audience. This one was overwhelmingly male and it's largely professionals. So this is a video about green screening. It doesn't surprise me that most of the people watching this overwhelmingly were between 18 and 34 because that's probably who would care about visual effects and green screen. So we have a question from Terry. Question about a brand new one that has zero impressions after three days. If it's three days and it has no impressions, I would worry that something went wrong and I would probably... pull down the video if it's not getting any impressions and nobody saw it, I would delete it. And I'd try re-uploading it again because it just feels like something went wrong there. Yes goes sometimes, rarely, rarely, changing the title and thumbnail can jumpstart if it's not getting any impressions. That's rare. But usually if that's the case, it's not the thumbnail. If that's the case, you really screwed up the title. Usually it views you really screwed up the title, or that YouTube can't understand the video, or that your transcript is atrocious. Do you pay any attention to returning viewer data versus new viewer data graphs? Yes, I do, actually. So I actually do pay attention to this. You could argue very much so. And what I look for is I look for it over a 90-day period, and I consider that to be the active audience, honestly. So I do pay attention to that. I'm hoping for new viewers. I'd like returning viewers, but I'm really hoping for new viewers. And the reason I'm really hoping for new viewers is because that's an opportunity. So it's more of a growth opportunity. And so I feel like your unique viewers in a 90-day period is your actual active audience. I feel like this is the actual active audience. And new viewers are an opportunity. to grow and to get more subscribers. So that's what I pay attention to there. Returning viewers are nice. It gives you some expectations. You'll also notice a pattern that, in general, I get more new and returning viewers and more opportunities the more consistently I upload. I have not been consistent with uploads. I have been consistent with live streams over the last 90 days, but not uploads. a combination of uploads and live streams if i had no gaps and if i was stronger on that like making an upload when i'm not live streaming then i would probably have um more than tripled these numbers uh so that would be really good and that just shows you how important consistency is would you keep that old video up if it's not getting any views um Usually I don't worry about it because it still could get views in the future. So I just move on. I just move on. I don't worry about being embarrassed by an underperforming video. I just move on and do the next upload. I don't worry about it. Do not be emotionally attached to your videos. I know it's hard to say and I know it's hard to feel that way, especially if you're working your butt off, you're a small creator. I understand. Here's the truth. Most of you will be stronger. Most of you will be better YouTubers. You'll be stronger YouTubers. It'll be easier to be consistent if you emotionally divest from it. And when you're making the video, be emotional in making the video, filming. Be excited about filming. Be excited about editing. Be excited about making the title and thumbnail. Be excited about hitting publish. The minute you hit publish, emotionally divest from the video and stop caring. The minute you hit publish, emotionally throw your emotional kill switch, turn off your humanity switch, and once you hit upload, move on to the next video and do not be emotionally invested. That sounds weird and that sounds harsh and it sounds, oh my God, Roberto, don't be passionate about the videos you uploaded. Be passionate about what you're making while you're making it and not about how other people feel about receiving it. Those are the numbers are the numbers, and you need to be ruthless and analytical about that or you're going to make yourself depressed. So emotionally divest from the outcome while being emotionally invested in the process. Emotionally invest in the process, divest from the outcome, and move on to the next one. Yep, let go, move on, let it go, let it go. That's right, absolutely. Let go and let YouTube, yeah. Absolutely. So, yeah, I look at these numbers, and again, I just take whatever I installed, and I just take a lesson away from it. Like, oh, upload consistency would do better here if I uploaded two to three times a week and streamed twice a week. So that's what I should do. Miss Kristen's music says, question. I've been constantly posting to my music school, but sometimes I miss a week. Should I make up the missed videos? No, don't pressure yourself. If you can, then you can, but don't pressure yourself. Just try to do better, but don't feel like you have to make it up or meet a quota. I'll do that sometimes, but you shouldn't bother forcing it. Yeah, if you don't fall in love with the process, it's going to be hard to stick it out long term. This is also the problem with people that are outcome driven. They cannot be motivated by the process. They have to see the outcome be a certain thing or they can't continue. So that becomes a problem. So I have a question that just came through like over on Reddit, believe it or not. And so this this person's asking me because it's in response to an ongoing thing, but it's like. Their question is, what stops a 30, 40, 50 year old from making YouTube videos for fun, though? Regardless of what stage of life you're in, it's unrealistic or silly to chase YouTube simply only for money reasons, since there's absolutely way more and easier surefire ways to make money over YouTube. My simple answer to this is that, again, this is a creator that is like under 30. They're roughly 25. So they're just not, in my opinion, in a stage of life where they get it, is in general. As you get older and like if you're in a relationship or you're married or you have children, you have responsibilities, you're a caregiver, you're doing any of those things. Setting YouTube aside, you just don't have the time and energy for hobbies a lot of times in general. And if you did, they would come at the expense of time you'd be spending with your family or doing things that you really, really, really need to do. to better your health or your career if you're for example i i recently turned 40. um if i were married i would not be able to justify doing youtube for fun at a high quality level of spending 10 20 hours a week of doing youtube for fun if it did not make money because that's 10 20 hours a week that i wouldn't be spending time with my wife that would be time that i'm not spending with my kids it would make very little sense to have a hobby that i had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in and that over a 50 week and a 50 weeks in a year that i spent 500 to a thousand hours in 500 to a thousand hours and i'm like 40 and i would not be a low-wage worker that's tens of thousands of dollars of opportunity cost of something I could have done productively for the family. And if I wasn't gonna spend time making money for the family, then I needed to spend time with the family. And outside of that, if you wanna do something for yourself, doing something for yourself generally at that age should be something that makes you smarter, makes you fitter, makes you healthier. From my point of view, and this maybe is just my moral framework, I don't think it's justified to have a sunk cost and sunk opportunity cost hobby as a 40-year-old married man. I think if you're a 40-year-old single guy, you can do it. I just don't see the value in that. And I would say that about video games and a lot of people would be mad at me. I think you can justify a few hours a week, but 10 to 20 hours a week for a hobby that's a sunk cost hobby where that's time, the opportunity cost if you're 40s and you're not a minimum wage worker. Think about it. If you're not a minimum wage worker, and you're worth $50 an hour at 40, and you spend 10 hours a week, and your value is $50 an hour, then that's $500 a week. There's 50 weeks in a year. That's $25,000 you didn't earn because you wanted to have fun making content for strangers on the internet to praise you, and you didn't go out and make $25,000. You didn't play with your kids. You didn't spend more time with your wife. You didn't spend that time making yourself a better person. You are seeking the validation and attention of people on the internet making videos for them for free or at a loss. That's not justifiable at that point, at that stage in life from my point of view. From my point of view. I think that's how you find when that people get divorced. i think you find that that's how people get divorced i think that's why you will find that content creators that are at 10 million subscribers are mostly aside from mark rober um roman atwood and casey neistat those creators and case arrest that uploads very infrequently now mark rober is divorced has a kid with special needs uploads in um infrequently as well Roman Atwood's family is now the content. They're family vloggers. So if I use the example of YouTubers over 40 that are big YouTubers over 40, and by that I mean 10 million subscribers. So Roman Atwood's family is involved in it. Casey Neistat pulled back for his family. And Mark Rober did sporadic spectacle content, but also you could argue and you could listen to his podcast episodes and interviews. There's a role that that played in the family divorce. Not to be putting people's business out there. It's just public knowledge though. So if you look at one of the main reasons people get divorced in America, not having enough quality time, not spending enough time with the kids, not making room for your spouse, that's a big part of divorce. And also money is a big, so if money and quality time are the two biggest factors in divorce outside of abuse and infidelity, then you could make an argument that if you're at a certain age and you're investing in content to the degree that we talked about, 500 to 1,000 hours in a year, and you're not making money at it, you're creating the conditions for a breakdown in your relationship with your family. So that's what I would say. Roberto, how important is it adding shorts to a content strategy? If you add shorts, what kind of publishing schedule would you follow? It would be do it when you can, for the most part, for growth. For growth, daily is optimal. Three times to five times a week is optimal for growth. People who have high value but low effort shorts, weird facts, that kind of thing, lore videos, gameplay, et cetera, they'll do one to three times a day, and that's for growth. for upload frequency and cadence in general it's just whatever you can sustain while meeting the threshold of acceptable quality in your niche and that you're capable of i'm not saying people can't spend eight hours a week making videos because they love it i'm saying there's an opportunity cost to doing it and i think that most people don't reconcile the opportunity cost and what the justification is and what the what the long-term effects of that are and why it's not sustainable. I'm not telling you you can't do it. I'm not telling you there are people whose dynamics and situations will work for it to each their own. I'm telling you in general, even without YouTube, this doesn't work in terms of hobbies in general after a certain point for people at a certain stage in life a lot of the time. And we as a society should acknowledge that. Question, can I use any music in shorts without a claim or strike? Scale Train Station, typically the answer is that you can use whatever's in the YouTube audio library. In general, if you don't have access to it through the YouTube audio library or you don't license it through Lict, you should assume that you can't just use anything you want. You can't even do that on TikTok anymore. Yeah, Ghost Pirate Entertainment says, I wish I only put 10 to 20 hours a week. I've been putting over 50 hours a week for years now, and I think you're 100% right. If I wasn't single, I could never do this. Yeah, if you're not making money from it at that point, it becomes very hard to justify it and rationalize it. Trust me on this. If you're doing YouTube only as a hobby as an adult, it's better to eliminate all your stress from making money. It better eliminate all your stress from making money. It's got to do something, or you have to already be making comfortable money. You have to already be making comfortable money. You can't have financial anxiety and justify a hobby that has a large financial or time commitment. It's just not practical for an adult. It is practical for young people to do it, but that's that. Yo Ang says, do you feel that live streams of real life are the biggest growth area of YouTube at the moment? They're not the biggest. They are a trend, but they're not the biggest. The biggest growth area of YouTube right now is politics, and it probably will be for the next four to five years, maybe longer, maybe forever. Politics is the single greatest growth vertical of YouTube right now that has high demand, low effort, and can not be detrimented by quantity over quality at all. The largest growing, the largest growth opportunity, the largest monetization opportunity right now in YouTube is politics. It just is. Sam says, do you think YouTube promotions work? Sometimes I see failing channels get more views and subs after they do any movement on their channel. Then all of a sudden the video pops off. Never do YouTube promotions, period. Never do it. If you're not a brand selling a product, never do it. Is there a way to increase traffic for TV? There's not necessarily a way to increase traffic for TV other than making the kind of content people want to watch on a big screen. IRL content, real life content is something people want to watch on big screens. Coolbrief says, should we use the AI audio dub right now or should we wait for the time being? It's fine to use it now. We already answered, can you use any music in shorts without a claim? Discord, has Roberta released the updated Creator Foundations course you mentioned during week 8 of livestream, or as you mentioned, when it would be released? Still being filmed as far as the updates. The updates for Creator Foundations, for the six-week launch, the six weeks to launch your YouTube channel, like what to do the first six weeks of YouTube, that thing, still... uh finishing the outlines still recording then it'll need to be edit uh just give me more time it'll be out this summer but yeah yeah if you're super comfortable in context if you're comfortable then there's not a financial anxiety driver that makes it unjustifiable to spend that kind of time in a hobby um but it also just depends on the general dynamics of your family But make no mistake, it's not an accident that the majority of the biggest YouTubers with 1 million to 10 million subscribers that you all see are single people that are unmarried and childless. It's not an accident. That pattern and trend is not an accident. It's the same thing in celebrity culture as well. It's the same thing as celebrity culture as well. The success that these things demand, the obsession that these things demand to be wildly successful. don't make as much room for other things. There are exceptions, but that's generally the rule. And that's how it is. You know, I need to find a more positive note to end things on though. So again, I don't have anything against people doing YouTube as a hobby, especially as you get older. I'm just one of the only people I feel is honest and realistic about the opportunity cost. I feel like I'm one of the only people who's honest about the opportunity cost. honest about the dynamics and honest about the correlation between young creators and outlier success um shake chili says great live apologize i missed you talk about this before but should a working class creator with limited time to create just wait and front load uh 10 or more videos if you're launching a channel i think launch with three to five videos and give yourself a head start there i'd rather hear the ugly truth than beautiful lie yep And let me just reply to this writer. Yep. I mean, think about it. With career divorce rates, if it's hard to stay in a relationship where you are not investing as much quality time, but you are creating the best lifestyle ever, you're making hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, and that's not enough to justify, oh, just not enough time with me and the kids, then, and that goes both ways, actors, actresses, athletes. successful men and women that are captains of industry. If that happens to those people who are creating disproportionate value and are the wealthiest, most attractive people in the world, if the same thing that happens to them is just not enough time, not enough attention, is what destroys their relationships, what do you think the rest of us can expect when we don't create? when when the thing we do outside of being with them doesn't create hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and it's competing for attention and resource if that's not working out for people when they're bringing in millions how are you going to make it work for a zero profit hobby yep so again i just had to answer that person read it they're not gonna listen by the way Yeah, there's no point in trying to apply logic or common sense to r slash new YouTubers because, again, it's just people who want to believe what they want to believe a lot of time. And that's no offense to people. There are some very nice, lovely people in the YouTube Reddit communities and subreddit communities. But a lot of them, they just believe what they want to believe, whether it's negative or positive, with no basis in reality or logical framework for it. Yeah, if you want to make better thumbnails... These are some of the best fonts for doing it. The bold versions of Bebes New, Poppins, Oswald, Compacta, Open Sans, and Futura. Those are very safe fonts that you can use. Those are six safe fonts you can use that basically work in almost any YouTube thumbnail. Yep, when you can't be consistent, you do find that views can drop. Final Cut, but sometimes you just want to edit fast. Any recommendations? CapCut. CapCut. Are you a fan of using creative Thompson thumbnails or you think it's overrated? I think it's overrated. I think just make something people can read. I think just make something people can read. I don't think it has to be that fancy. Sabertooth asks, do you think ASMR is an outlier as far as time required to make videos? Definitely it can be. Yep. So I think I've answered pretty much all of the questions here. Yeah, pretty much answered everything here. I think we're just going to call it a night for this one. Tune in next Wednesday. We have another workshop. This one will cover a complete and comprehensive strategy for any YouTube creator under 20,000 subscribers on YouTube. So I think that you guys are definitely going to want to watch that one next. And remember to check out AustinCreatorAcademy.com, everything we offer over there. And you can watch the replays of this workshop and all of our other previous 10 weeks of workshops on the YouTube channel. Make sure you're checking out the community tab. I'll be posting links to the slide presentations so you guys can get access to the slides for each week. We also are going to make sure that with next week's workshop, we're going to really deep dive into a complete holistic strategy of what you should do if you're under 20,000 subscribers. It took me two years to get 20,000 subscribers, but after I got 20,000 subscribers, it only took me 14 months to turn 20,000 into 100,000. So there's a lot that I've learned over my years as a content creator. and we're going to make sure that we put you on a good path uh with closing out these uh last 12 weeks of the workshop and then we'll be moving on to a six-week workshop on the business of content creation setting up your llc you're doing payroll doing taxes hiring freelancers all of that monetization all that stuff so we'll have that um going forward after this workshop is done so That's it for everybody tonight. Stay awesome and we will see you next week. Tune in Friday. We might be doing channel reviews this Friday as long as I'm feeling up to it. So make sure you're subscribed, you got notifications on and that you're staying tuned. So stay awesome. You're going to learn a little bit more about Awesome Creator Academy and that's going to be it. Take care. Becoming a content creator can be a very lonely process and adventure, but it doesn't have to be. When I first got started going from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had to do it all by myself. I didn't have a community of like-minded and like-hearted creators to talk to or to ask for advice, and I certainly didn't have a mentor to guide me along the way. I built the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group because when I was getting started, what would have meant the world to me is not to have to struggle alone when it comes to being a full-time content creator. If I had a community of creators that could talk to and share information with, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes in my early career. And there would have been opportunities with brand deals where I would have gotten a better understanding of how to negotiate. And I wouldn't have undersold myself. I wouldn't have been taken advantage of in those early situations. so in the awesome creator academy pro group myself and our co-instructor andy rivera we meet twice a week for office hours with our creators and we share information we talk about how we're building our creator businesses and we offer constructive criticism and critique on the things that we're working on for our projects we'll be part of a community of usually around a hundred like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are you also have all access as a pro group member to all of our past, present, and future courses, training, templates, digital downloads, and swipe files. You have full access to our creator blueprints where you'll see our systems and the frameworks that we use to execute. You know, you always fall or rise to the standard of your systems. A lot of people really underestimate how important that is. We have digital download templates that can help you so you don't have to start with a blank canvas. These done for you, files are actually incredibly helpful especially for things like your thumbnails your media kits and anything you need for your branding as a content creator to look professional we have email swipe files that help you with reaching out to brands we have great information in helping you price yourself and build your packages appropriately and remember as part of the pro group you have the opportunity to ask questions from myself and all the other creators participating and so this means that if you need to ask questions about negotiation or a brand deal there's something you're not sure about trying to find a better monetization opportunity with merch or affiliates you have people who have done it before who are already making money that you can reach out to for advice as i said when i was starting out and i was flying solo this is the thing that i wish i'd had the opportunity to be a part of and it would have made all the difference in the world in helping me be an even more successful content creator If you have questions, you can always reach out via support. We're happy to help you figure out if the pro group is right for you. Also, we do have the opportunity to become a VIP member if you also would like quarterly one-on-one coaching with me directly. Now go out there and create something awesome today and hopefully we'll see you in the pro group. Take care.

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