Build a ONE PAGE Creator Business Plan to Become a Full-time Creator

Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake, helping you create something awesome today. Welcome back to the channel. Today we have another Wednesday workshop for you. We're doing this one very late in the evening, Night Owl edition. If you're watching the replay, you can definitely get the full slide presentation by using the link in the description. This week is week three of our YouTube creator business playbook. And so today we're going to be focusing on how to build your one page business plan. as a content creator. This one is actually going to be great for a lot of you. And I'm actually going to end up showing you the one page business plan in the presentation, as well as giving you some more general advice on building your creator business. So very excited about doing that with all of you this week in our workshop. Remember, you can download everything. in the description down below in terms of not only the week three slide presentation but also download our one sheet our one page creator business playbook for yourself it's an editable pdf actually and you can use it and fill it out once you download it and you can run through it as your own business plan so that's really great for you to get a little sneak peek of that let me go ahead and show you what you'd be getting here show screen and so this is your creator business plan this is a one-page greater business plan where you would fill out each of these And so this is an editable PDF, so you can just go ahead and type that in, and you can go ahead and have this for yourself. You also can print this out if you want to write in it by hand. So this just gives you an overview of the Creator Business Playbook. We will be going over this in the presentation tonight. So this one will be somewhat of a shorter overall presentation. We only have... How many pages do we have to go through tonight? This is only a 15-page deck instead of our usual 25-page deck. So we'll keep this one a little bit shorter, a little bit sweeter for you guys, and we'll answer any questions you have at the end. So for anyone not familiar, you can download the playbook over at www.awesomecreatoracademy.com slash bizweek03. Or you can use the QR code on the screen. You can screenshot that. Or you can go directly on your phone and you can access the entire slide deck presentation. Remember, we also have a link for you down below for just downloading the OnePage Creator Business Plan itself. So make sure you check that out. Also, consider joining the Academy Pro Group. We meet twice a week for group coaching calls. I also offer one-on-one strategy calls with creators if that's something you're interested in. You can find out more at awesomecreatoracademy.com. So a little background on me. I've been doing YouTube for over a decade. I've built multiple income streams as a full-time content creator. I started taking content creation seriously in 2013. Started uploading on a regular basis. went daily in 2015, went from 20,000 subscribers in 2015 to 100,000 subscribers in 2016, 14 months. And then since then, I've been growing continuously until I took a... fail of a retirement during the pandemic years. I think a lot of you might be able to relate to that. Pandemic was rough on all of us. But I built a successful six-figure business through mostly sponsorship and brand deals. I also built my Awesome Creator Academy education business, working with content creators one-on-one as well as the Academy Pro group. And so... Excuse me, that's done very well. Also did very successful in affiliate marketing with YouTube. When I first got started, the Amazon Influencer Program was very different. It was called Amazon Associates back then. I was able to get to $1,500 a month pretty quickly through tech and tutorials, mostly around electronics, camera gear, budget laptops, budget tablets. And so that worked out really well for me. And $1,500 may not sound like a lot to some of you, but back then in North Carolina in a small military town, that was literally rent and utilities. And I'm not kidding. Back in my day, back in my day, everything was cheaper, right? So again, I've been doing this for a while. I've helped multiple creators earn their way to six figures. Realistically, how much money can you actually make on YouTube? It's not unreasonable to make $3,000 to $30,000 a month. depends on your business model. You will not make this kind of money if you treat YouTube like a hobby. If fun is the most important thing to you and you're not the most extroverted, crazy 20-something-year-old in the world, then just putting fun first doesn't really work as a YouTube strategy. I'm being fairly honest here. When... I talk about this, a lot of people get discouraged when I say that, but realistically, if you want to make money from something, you don't get full-time benefits out of part-time habits, they say. So in terms of this, you need to be realistic. If you are just doing this for fun and a hobby, my content's probably not the best for you, and you should probably watch somebody else. I'm going to be very upfront about that. My content is meant for people who take this a little bit more seriously. A lot of times, while I'm not opposed to working with younger creators, I primarily work with people in their 30s, 40s, 50s who take this very seriously and want to build it into a career and either leave their full-time job or already retired or using this to help also grow a real business. So over here, we take it very seriously. We focus on the monetization. We try to enjoy ourselves, but I'll be honest with you, the way that I approach YouTube, Fun is not in the top three or top five priorities in my approach. So if that's something that really is important to you, that's perfectly fine. I'm just probably not the best mentor for you if that's the situation. I'm mostly focused on trying to get creators to either build a side hustle income that helps support them and their family or be able to turn this into a full-time business, making the money they need to not only survive, but to thrive. And realistically, it can be done. but it really depends on what stage of life you're in, how seriously you want to take this, and developing a solid business plan, which is what our focus is gonna be on tonight. So some things you need to know upfront about YouTube is I'm not here to sell you snake oil. I will tell you the truth, and it is very difficult. I do not believe this is based on luck. I believe this is built on personality, skill, and temperament. I believe that most creators that do not succeed are doing things that get in their own way due to the priorities that they have or the personality that they have just keeps them from doing what is necessary. And it's a harsh reality, but it tends to be true. Creators who put the audience first will be able to grow. Creators who are able to make the content their audience wants to watch can grow. 97% of creators fail to get to 10,000 subscribers. 90% fail to even get 1,000 subscribers. I attribute a lot of this to either quitting too soon, getting discouraged, or frankly, making content that is all about themselves and not about their audience. I believe that you need to niche down to a community of people that you genuinely are excited about serving, but I also think that you need to be honest with yourself. about what content gives you the largest chance and largest potential, not only financial success, but a large enough audience to satisfy your ego and insecurity and the desire to be validated. Again, that's very blunt, but I'm being very direct about this. A lot of you know deep down that you were not going to be satisfied with 100 true fans, 1,000 true fans. A lot of you will not be satisfied with that. You wanna be validated. with a community that feels more substantial than that. I understand that. I appreciate that. So you're going to have to make decisions where if that's your ambition, your actions are going to have to match that ambition. You're not going to get where you want to be. Again, if you want full-time status, you cannot have hobby habits. So if that's your real ambition and you're honest about it, then you got to do what it takes. And some of that will not always be the most fun thing ever. So with that in mind, we actually approach this with a strategy framework for business. And these would be the things that I tend to say people should focus on more or most if they want this to be a business that's full time. This is not largely come down to having enough income streams and scaling them to where they earn enough money. So that's why a whole column is dedicated to specifically varying types of ways. to make revenue or rather different forms that revenue takes. Then some of the specifics around that in terms of things you could be doing like memberships, long-term sponsorships, affiliate commissions. platform ad revenue, print on demand products, et cetera, just as examples. And then there are some of the more important business things that you have to do to be legitimate. We actually did a full workshop on setting up your LLC, getting your tax EIN number, the business bank account and payment processors. That was our week one workshop for the Creator Business Playbook that is still available over on the YouTube channel. So make sure you're checking that out. We keep those live and up and running for you. We also make sure you can download the slides from the previous weeks if you go to the description of those videos. Here are 15 different revenue streams that you could pursue as a content creator. In going through this in our previous weeks, I actually addressed the fact that I basically have done all of these at some point, one way or another, and I've had varying degrees of success with these. a lot of creators don't realize how many opportunities exist for them. So this slide basically is there to help people realize just what is possible for them and to try to just see which opportunities suit them best. But there's a lot here and many of you are leaving money on the table. Now, the reason that I believe that creators actually need a formal business plan is that most creators overly rely on ad revenue. They do sporadic brand deals once in a while, and they also struggle to sell their merchandise consistently. Not building a business plan leaves a lot of money on the table, and it leaves you directionless in your own business. And so a lot of creators, they're just avoiding this because it's intimidating to build a business plan. It's intimidating to do this enough in regular traditional businesses, but as a content creator, you mostly are watching young entertainers. who don't reveal the details of their creator business because it would make them unappealing to their young audience. I'm just being very honest about that. The majority of the biggest content creators on this platform are big because they have very young, impressionable audiences who don't care about the boring business side of being a content creator. So they very rarely reveal that side of themselves and just how smart they are. A lot of these creators are brilliant. They're very successful business people. They're smart, savvy entrepreneurs. They rarely reveal that to their audience because again, it's just another way of signaling to your audience. There's a gap between you and them, haves versus have nots. And sometimes it just feels unrelatable and it can fly over those audiences' heads, especially if all they're used to is being entertained. So that's why a lot of your favorite successful content creators don't share these things. It's not that they're really trying to hoard the information or don't want you to succeed. A lot of them just aren't teachers to begin with. And then the majority of their audience, frankly, just wouldn't appreciate it and would just look at it as them being out of touch, rich people. With that in mind. you need to understand your audience and really build out your audience avatar. We talk about that in the one page business plan for content creators. And so I would say you need to understand their priorities, preferences, problems and personality. These things help you really understand. who your audience is, who is the tribe that you're attracting with your content and what you have to offer them that they will genuinely enjoy and where they will create or get value. So I really think that it's really, you know, it's really important to try to gain a sense of this. I think the creators who understand their audience more and understand their audience most will win. I think that a lot of creators assume that They're making videos that they would want to watch. That advice has been put out there a lot. But a lot of times you are not the avatar for who your audience is that you want to attract. Sometimes you think you are, but that's not the case. So sometimes you really need to step back and realize who the audience actually is versus who you wish they were or who you assume they were. Now, this slide. You can download using the QR code here. You can also use the link in the description. This itself is the one-page business plan. And at a glance, this would allow you to really understand how your content is going to work and make money and function as a business. So we can look at each of these blocks. And so if you look at the blocks on the left here, on the top left, We have traffic, trust, transaction. This is really the creator monetization flywheel in a nutshell of you have to drive traffic. And we usually do that through our content itself. Our content drives traffic. It drives traffic to YouTube and our videos and our content. Then we could divert that traffic we want to our email newsletter. We could divert that to our own landing pages and products. We could divert that to affiliate links for commissions, whether it's Amazon affiliate links or other product affiliate links. Some of you should be doing affiliate links with the manufacturers. YouTube has a shopping affiliate program. So we can take traffic. we get from YouTube and social media, all of our platforms, but where do we put that traffic? A lot of you will try to use that traffic just to grow one of your other social media platforms or to grow. your YouTube channel, that benefits the platforms a lot more than it benefits you. And you're usually getting a tenth of a penny per view when you do that. So your traffic is precious. More of you should stop being scared of taking away one to 10% of your traffic away from the content and sending it to your own website. You should be sending it to a website where you can benefit from the trust that you've garnered with people. and use that to get a transaction, use that to get a sale. You can even get a $1, $10 sale. That's worth the same as you doing 1,000 to 10,000 views on YouTube, depending on what your niche is. 1,000 to 10,000 views to get $10. is the same as one transaction from one person who trusts you so driving a little bit of that traffic to your own website to your own products to your own merchandise to your digital downloads to your courses could be worth the same thing as driving 1 000 10 000 or 100 000 views on YouTube or your other platforms. So stop hesitating to sell. Now, in terms of how you build trust and you nurture, you do that through the way that you execute the content, your consistency, your reliability, your quality, your messaging, the value that you create, keeping a good reputation, replying to comments. You can nurture and build trust that way. Same thing for your email list. And so eventually... those things lead to transactions they lead to sales you just have to make sure that their offers that people want if they're going to buy something you want them to remember to buy it from you same thing with transference of trust with your brand deals so it's traffic trust transaction. This is the virtuous cycle for making money as a content creator. This also works in any other online business if you really think about it. So it's traffic, trust, and transaction. That's the monetization flywheel. Let's look at reach, reputation, and revenue streams. So your reach is going to be dependent on how you're going to reach people. What traffic sources are you using to reach people? What methods are you using to extend your reach? What are the barriers to you getting more reach? That's something you could address and you could write down there. I'm going to reach people with my YouTube channel. I'm going to reach people with my podcast. This is how much reach I feel I need to get. These are things you need to write down. So, okay, reaching people. How are you going to do that? oh i'm going to reach people with my live streams i'm going to do them on tuesdays and thursdays or whatever have you so you would re write this down reputation what do i want to be known for what am i already known for what is the reputation i want to have what do i want people to say about me what would boost my reputation is it going to be winning an award growing to a hundred thousand subscribers is it going to be getting um Notoriety from a publication. Is it going to be a collaboration that I do to boost my reputation? How am I going to increase my reputation? And what reputation do I want to have? What do I want to be known for? And then revenue streams. What of the 15 revenue streams am I pursuing in my creator business? What makes sense? What are the revenue streams that my competitors in my niche are pursuing? How are they making their money? How should I be making my money? You can write these things down. What are you going to be pursuing there? So I think those are important. Now, before we get to the center, let's go to the far right here and look at promotion platforms and partnerships. How are you going to promote the things that matter to you? And what are you going to promote? What methods are you going to use for promotion? Are you going to promote yourself? with every paid advertising. Are you ever going to do that? I don't recommend using the YouTube promotions button, but if you're going to do it, it should be to sell something specifically. I recommend doing it to sell a physical or digital product or an online course, but never to promote organic videos. I would never use the YouTube promotions button for that. Are you going to do promotions by collaborating on somebody else's channel, TikTok? podcast? Are you guys going to cross promote each other? Are you guys going to lift each other up? Are you going to be part of a group that promotes each other? Is this something that you're pursuing? What are your primary platforms? Are you doing a YouTube channel? Are you going to be multi-streaming? Are you going to be doing podcasting? Are you going to put stuff on Spotify for creators and have a video show on that program and an audio platform? are you going to publish books and put them out on Amazon KDP for Kindle? What platforms are you going to use to elevate your brand? Very important. What are your partnerships going to be? Are there companies that you're going to pursue brand deals with? Who are the companies you can do brand deals with? Who are the companies partnering with the people in your niche and your competitors? Who are going to be your big collaboration partnerships? you know, in terms of working together? What are those partnerships? What are those relationships like? So you need to think about those things. And finally, moving to the center in this business plan, who is your person that you're trying to reach and address? What is your customer avatar? What are their preferences? What's their personality like? What are their unique priorities? What matters more and matters most to them? Who else do they like? Tell me as much about this person as possible. Okay, what is the problem that you are best able to solve for them? What problem can you uniquely solve for them? Fantastic. What products can you offer them? What are they already buying? What are they interested in? What will they legitimately spend their money on? And then what is your position in the market? are you the person in the market who offers a premium experience are you the person in the market who offers the the best deals the low price leader in the market are you the person who is considered the most trusted authority in the market are you the person that is the uh in the market that really has the heart of the people you are considered more relatable what's your marketing position what makes you unique here is it that you get things done faster is it that you get them done better is it that you get them done cheaper is it that you are more reliable is it that you're more relatable is it that you have um authority is it your authenticity what is the thing that you are known for and respected for that makes you unique in the market? What do you offer differently? Is it depth? What do you bring to the table? What is your position in the market? So you need to write these things down. If you write these things down, you will have absolute clarity for how your business functions and what your business is. You'll know how your business makes money. You'll know. where you're getting your traffic and your traffic sources from. You'll know who you're working with. You'll know who you're pursuing for your brand deals. You know what your strongest platforms are. You'll know what problems you solve for people. You'll know how you want to be perceived in the market. You'll know what your diverse revenue streams are. This, you'll know what the products you're offering are. This. is your clarity roadmap that's why you want this one page creator business plan we've had the mods put it here in the chat in youtube we have it linked in the description for you um And you can go and you can find this over at awesomecreatoracademy.com, www.awesomecreatoracademy.com slash biz plan. You can download it for free today. You don't even have to buy anything for it. We do have several other offers for you, including our creator business blueprints. You can join the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group, but the one page creator business plan is absolutely free. And we do think that this will make a huge difference for you. in just having absolute clarity in how to properly monetize your content and turn your passion into profit finally. So make sure you're checking that out. So hopefully I've explained the one page greater business plan and how it works. and why it works. And again, I feel like this is important because a lot of you, you're just winging it and you're like, well, maybe I'll make some ad revenue. Maybe I'll get a sponsor when they finally reach out to me when they notice me. That is not a plan. That is a wish. That is a hope. That is a dream. So a lot of you, I feel, could be successful if you had a proper plan to be successful. And I believe that this gives you that. And so. That's why we feel that this is so very important and why I felt I wanted you to have it. So I designed this myself custom and this ties to the frameworks that we've been going over in our workshop Wednesdays for Awesome Creator Academy. If you remember, we've actually done videos about the audience avatar before. We've done videos about marketing yourself and about positioning. And we've talked about brand deals and partnerships. In fact, last week's... live stream workshop was dedicated to brand deals and partnerships and helping you better understand those. We did a whole presentation on that. We also offer a product when it comes to brand deals called the brand deal starter kit to help you get those first brand deals. We actually include a 100 plus master list of brands that work with creators, pay creators and sponsor creators. We've reviewed several brand deal platforms, agencies. and PR companies that work with creators to help them get brand deals. I've worked with a lot of those companies as a creator and gotten brand deals through them. So we wrote reviews on those as well in the Brand Deals Starter Kit. We also gave you the Media Kit templates that you can customize. to reach out to brands yourself and pitch them using your media kit as a pitch deck to entice them and also to make it easier for them to get approval for their boss to work with you as an influencer during my time in marketing and agency I used pitch decks to help us close all the time in our presentations. And I cannot stress how valuable they are to get an approval from the person above you in the chain of command. So by giving your sponsors a media kit, you're putting yourself in a position to be easier to say yes to and for them to not have to retain or remember. questions and answers about your brand, your stats, and your audience, or to have to look them up. They have a tangible doc that helps them, and it's better and clearer than email. And it also helps you to present yourself in the best light and do some storytelling. So that's why we talk about media kits. Now, with your one-page business plan, for a lot of you, I designed this so that at a glance, you could print this out, have clarity, and... brain dump on this one page and understand what it is that you're actually doing and have a vision and have clarity around your creator business a lot of people end up ultimately just floundering in their creator business not making money not knowing what to do because they just never put the information down and make a commitment to it if you want something to happen you write it down if you want clarity you write it down it removes so much anxiety and it takes the mystery out of all of this if you can take the mystery out of it and you can know what you're doing and why you're doing it it matters so much it's so very important so again that's why we created this because as you can see This answers almost all of the questions you could have for yourself as a content creator and how your business is going to operate and how it works. I mean, you know, the only other column we could have really put in here is a team column to know, oh, here are my team members or what have you. But I honestly think that that. should be literally its own one pager in terms of you know having your team your organization your freelancers who's part-time who's full-time what roles and tasks and goals do you have i feel like that's its own one sheet um in terms of like an org sheet so maybe that's something we put together in the future for you um as a document but i feel like this is really helpful just as it is. And it's just enough to not be overwhelming. If you at least figure this much out about your creator business, I feel like this is a way to keep it from being overwhelming. And that's why we wanted it to be a one page business plan. Because with this, anybody can sit down and fill this out in a weekend or maybe in an hour and understand what their creator business is all about. So that's why I put that together. We talk about person, problem, position, and product. And I wanted to show you guys this Venn diagram because I think it helps you understand the intersectionality between these things. So the position you have in the market and the person you're trying to reach really describes what the value is because it's how that person perceives you. Okay, I might need this thing. I might care about these things, but... I value you because you're the most authentic or you have the most authority or your packaging is the most attractive or you're faster, your price is cheaper, your quality is better. Some combination of that. So again, it's about your position in the market and your uniqueness. The product itself, the product versus the positioning determines the uniqueness. okay you have this product and the other person has this product but yours is cheaper or yours is higher quality or yours has better packaging or yours is easier to understand or yours has more trust and testimonials so that's a uniqueness the offer itself represents the relationship between the problem and the product and so that's why they would be enticed by the offer overall. And again, the person and the problem relationship that really describes the avatar. I make this thing for this person experiencing this thing. So if you are this person going through this, then this solution will help you because I blank. And so that's kind of how the person problem product position works. So for example, Hey, are you an aspiring content creator? That's the person who struggles with understanding how to make money as a content creator and go full time. Okay. So you have that. I invite you or offer you to join awesome creator Academy and our pro group, the product where we do two weekly office hour sessions and help our creators with feedback. also giving them information and guidance on their brand deals and negotiations for their contracts and also help them with their content strategies and any problems they're having or any technical issues that they're experiencing as a creator so that's person problem product so what about positioning awesome creator academy is unique in the fact that when you join, we give you access to all of our digital download products, templates, email, swipe files, and any and all future and free courses. And you get grandfathered into whatever price you came in at. We also give you a discount on one-on-one coaching with me. So again, this is the positioning. This is where we create the uniqueness positioning versus the product. So we came up with person, aspiring content creator, problem. Struggling with becoming full-time product. Austin Crater Academy. Positioning. Roberto's authority, access, and the resources. So there you go. Person, problem, product, positioning in the market. That is how you approach things. So you need to figure out who your person is, what problem they have that matters more or matters most to them, position your product accordingly to solve that problem in a way that's appealing to that person, and then have a unique position compared to your competitors. And so that would be the framework for your creator business and how you approach that. So again, we thought that was really important. guide you through and it does go back to why we need to understand our audience avatar so that we can turn our viewer into a customer and so that we understand them in this particular equation And so you can see how this is all interconnected. And so we get true clarity for all of that through having this overall plan that puts us in that strong position overall by having absolute clarity and a vision for our creator business and how we can best serve our audience. So monetization clarity really does matter because again, the big mistake is that a lot of creators build their... brand they build their audience with the assumption that they can figure out the boring business stuff later but the truth is if you don't make it a priority you're going to have a problem sooner rather than later because you're going to try to force the business side in on the audience without understanding them or without having a real plan. And that's not gonna work. It doesn't work out for the full majority of creators. A lot of people look up to unicorn creators who managed to make this all work without being very business savvy, without having a plan, but they are few and far in between. And a lot of those good old days where you could just be a creator and wing it are gone. You have to take this very seriously because it's very competitive now. More people want to be creators now. More people can be creators now. There are more resources for it. So if you have hobby habits, you'll get hobby results. So the goal here is to take this seriously. And so again... we invite you to consider joining Awesome Creator Academy. You can go www.awesomecreatoracademy.com join and get access to the pro group. Also 100 hours of our exclusive video training, hundreds of digital download resources and products to help you as a creative entrepreneur. So that's the full presentation there. Thank you for giving me your time. And I'm going to take some Q&A from the chat now. so you can ask your questions about this and as always you can get the downloads they're linked in the description here so make sure you're checking that out we've got plenty of resources for you like i said you can download the entire one page business plan and it is a pdf that you can fill out so i demonstrated here that this is an interactive pdf so you can just go ahead and fill that out And you can have that. So you can see here how you can type in all of these. I'm actually a graphic designer by trade. So I did these in Adobe InDesign, which is one of the Adobe Suite products. I actually am an Adobe Suite master. I used to be certified, an Adobe certified expert, an ace, as they say. I might renew my certification one day. I don't know. But yeah. So again, I made this for you guys. You can download it. You can fill it out. If you do end up downloading this and filling it out, I'd love to see screenshots of this stuff. And you can tag me over an X or Instagram for this creator business blueprint, this one page creator business plan. And just let me know. Because again, I love to see this stuff. I love to see you guys using it and making use of the resources. and like i said that's free that's over on awesome creator academy.com we have it linked over there www.awesomecreatoracademy.com biz plan and you can download that for free right now but yeah we'll take your questions in the chat if you have them hey what's up world according to briggs i need to focus on merch yeah merch can be um good it can be a good opportunity for a lot of people um Some people it's more lucrative than others would definitely say that that's the case. But yeah, there are a lot of opportunities with merch and print on demand products in general. So would not be surprising if that's a good avenue for you. We actually have a full workshop on merchandise here on the channel. I believe that that workshop has over 800,000 views over the last two or three years. And so like three hour workshop that we put out for free. We worked with our friends over at Spreadshop on that. So we took everybody through exactly how to design, sell, and market their merchandise and how to set up their online store. Miss Megan says, this is so good. Yeah, glad you appreciate it. Grape Tea News, appreciate you. Yep, we got links to everything in the description. It doesn't look like any of you have come up with any questions for me, but something for this workshop to keep in mind is... really sit with this creator business plan and think about it and fill it out. I think a lot of you, even right now, one of the reasons you might not be asking questions, a lot of you probably downloading it live right now. But also thank you for the compliments. I will take the compliments. Should you ever promote a YouTube video? So the YouTube promote button is something people have a lot of questions about. And the short answer is no. When it comes to you guys who make organic YouTube content, the answer is no. You shouldn't be using the YouTube promote button to promote a video. The YouTube promote button exists for e-commerce brands and people who sell on YouTube and who run ads on YouTube. The reason that button exists is because millennials and Gen Z who are in marketing right now, Gen Z adults and millennial adults who are in marketing departments, and at businesses hate the google ads product but they want to run ads on youtube so to run ads on youtube they created the youtube promote button and the youtube promote interface and it's really meant for brands i really hate that there's not some disclaimer that says that this is mostly for brands and to warn creators to not touch it because in my opinion creators are wasting money on it And it's not helping them. If anything, it's hurting their channel. And it's a temptation. And then when you go into Reddit, everyone says, oh, I screwed up my channel by using the YouTube promote button. So just never use the YouTube promote button. Just never do it. There are exceptions to this rule. For all intents and purposes, if you're watching this video, you're a creator who probably doesn't run a company. You probably don't have an e-commerce brand. You probably aren't selling a tangible product that's not merchandise. So just don't. use the promote button uh terry w good to see you question is the recommended path hold off on creating actual products until i get an audience in case i need to pivot i have a 9pg biz plan vision mission avatar uh transform etc with monetization plan i think it's okay to have a product there beforehand you can always pivot later and offer something else but there i don't think there's something so wrong about having a product or an offer that's already in place that your audience might want um i think sometimes um we think that we know what people want or we are afraid that we don't know what people want but i think it's fine to have a product already for you terry and then people can let you know how they feel about it so i don't have an issue with that I know what I want to build. Just want to make sure it fits the audience that you attract. Yeah. And again, you know, you can test it. You can always test it. You can always refine it and make it better over time. You can make it better over time. It doesn't have to be perfect from the very beginning. You can make it better over time if you feel like you jumped the gun. And you can always make a different offer for people. If you find that they like something more or they like something most, it's fine. Giselle says, hey, Mr. Roberto, thank you for your advice. I don't get engagement on social media. I think it's because I don't have a large following. I don't know how to gain followers. Please advise. No one starts with followers. So how does anyone get followers? How does anyone get engagement? Because everyone starts with zero engagement and zero followers. The answer is to make content that is interesting or valuable to the type of people. you want following you on social media so you need to look at who they already follow why they follow them what that value is you need to be creating that value no one starts out with followers so having a bunch of followers doesn't mean anything having a bunch of followers doesn't mean anything you have to actually create value for people i need to get some mods on twitch so that when we have um people sending comment spam from twitch that we can get rid of it. But yeah, but everyone starts from zero. So, you know, just focus on who you want to attract and what it is that would actually attract them. TM Popcorn says, I have two business ideas, one for my personal brand and another for my YouTube channel. Should I focus on one business at a time? In general, yes, but it's possible that some of those things can overlap. What I would do is I'd print out or download two copies of the one page creator business plan, fill one out for the personal brand, fill one out for the YouTube channel, see how much overlap there is so that some task you can double up on. And so it might be low lift to take that approach. Thank you, Doug. Appreciate you. I need to, I'd have to get into my Twitch and make you a mod. I'm probably gonna have to do that this evening. Yeah, Jackie, you can definitely watch the replay for this one. This one is a little bit of a shorter presentation because it's so straightforward and we really focused on this one page creator business plan and filling it out. And so we made that available for you as a download. You can get it in the description and you can get the slides in the description as well. But this. is uh very very short and direct because this one is a hyper actionable workshop yeah don't get desperate and use the youtube promote button it's just it's not really helpful or meaningful to do that and that's what happens is the youtube promote button is bent for brands and businesses uh mostly doing e-com and doing physical products and such and then creators When they aren't happy with their views or slow growth, they get desperate and they try to hit that pay to play button and use the promote button and try to grow. And it actually hurts them. So if you've done that, don't worry about it. Just go back to organic and go back to struggle busing. The main reason most of you struggle bus, though, I'll be honest with you, either the topics are not that interesting. The titles are too bland. And most of the time. The thumbnail is a one out of five thumbnail. And a lot of you know that graphic design is not your strong suit. And you know that it matters on YouTube to be competitive. So it's most of you, it's your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is your thumbnails are not great. For that, we have the YouTube Starter Kit. You guys can feel free to get that. I think we've linked it in the description. You can use code 20OFF to get 20% off the YouTube Starter Kit. Over 100 thumbnail templates for you in there. We also have code SUMMERSLAM25. I think that gets you 30% off right now. So you can use either of those codes for as long as they last. The 20% off, I think, is always good for the streaming audience. SummerSlam is only good, I think, until Labor Day. So SummerSlam25, 30% off until Labor Day for the summer. So again, you can get the YouTube Starter Kit. We have all the templates you can need to make better thumbnails in there. Most of you, your thumbnails are not good. They're not readable. They're not visible. They're not attractive. They don't pass the vibes check. And that's a big one, big one for a lot of you in terms of packaging. It decides the fate of a video. You know what they say about books? Books are judged by their cover, not the quality of their content. A book review will be about the quality of the content, but you'll never get the review. if people don't buy the book and that's based on the cover it's based on the title the credibility of the author um a little bit of flavor in the back cover there as well so again um it's just like uh youtube it's topic title thumbnail and timing you don't buy a book on a subject or a genre you don't care about so that's topic title you got to be enticed by that by the title uh timing You want a book that feels relevant or that you're interested in at the time. And again, thumbnail, that's a book cover. So again, all it is is packaging. Packaging is so important. And again, a lot of you are so focused on, oh, I'll edit harder. I'll work harder. I'll put more time in. And you put more time in, you put more effort in when really it's just the bloody packaging. Everything is done at a superficial surface level. That's just how human beings are. And the quality of content, quality of character, all of those things come after we get past the packaging, my friends. Terry, I actually explained the traffic square. earlier at the beginning of the presentation if you want to rewind if you rewind the beginning of the presentation i definitely explained that you could also though think of that as what your traffic sources in your content actually are or which ones your strong ones are but in general i talked about that i think for about six minutes uh pretty early on in the presentation yeah no problem Giselle says, question, I'm a life coach and I get emails from people who ask to be coached, but they never book a session. Any suggestions what to do when this happens? It sounds like those people are looking for someone who will do it for them for free. So they just weren't qualified customers. I would consider follow-up emails potentially on them and asking them. hey, is there a reason you haven't booked a session yet? Just to make sure that they were serious people. But a lot of them are just not ready to pay for anything. They were looking for something or hoping against hope that it would be free usually. So you can always write a follow-up email to those people and ask, is there a reason they haven't booked the session yet? And send them a link to the booking. And then if you never hear back from them, you know they basically were looking for free. So that's what most likely is. JinxJones says, hello, how would you suggest using different social media accounts to feed into accounts such as Instagram, Facebook groups, YouTube, or Twitch? I wouldn't. I think it's actually stupid. And that's no offense to you, JinxJones. I just think it's stupid to use social media to grow other social media because think about it. You're going to direct traffic that's going to make you no money. on those other platforms, or if it makes you money, it's a penny per view if you're lucky, usually a tenth of a penny per view. Why would I take traffic from one social media account to another social media account? I can take that traffic from social media directly to my online store and sell a hat, t-shirt, hoodie, or book and make five or $10. It takes you a thousand views on YouTube to make five or $10. If you just take one piece of that traffic directly to your own website, you make it in one transaction instead of trying to get it without selling anything on social media by just driving traffic to a social media platform. So no, I don't believe in using social media to feed each other and grow each other's social media. You take social media, you feed your own business with social media. You don't sit there and you don't keep taking somebody from one establishment to another establishment to another establishment to another. At what point are you going to feel comfortable to take them back to your establishment? Why would I do that? Why would I keep focusing my funnel on driving traffic for the benefit of a social media company's business instead of for the benefit of selling my merchandise, hats, hoodies, books, coaching courses, membership platform, Patreon, whatever you can. Yep, direct people from your social media feed directly to your business, your storefront. Turn that into a sale. if nothing else capture the email and have them on your list and then sell to them later um a lot of you don't think that big youtubers have email lists just because they're entertainers they have an email list it's called that they got you to buy a sticker or something on their shopify store or a hat or a t-shirt on the shopify store they have the emails and they can market to you and a lot of them do later whenever they want to launch a new project do a gofundme release music They end up hitting you up with that email because you bought merchandise from them because they have the email list from the Shopify store. So even the big YouTubers have email list. They just have it through and acquire it through selling their merch on Shopify. That's their way of doing a email list without having to have a newsletter per se. Right? So business YouTubers will have a newsletter, but... Entertainment YouTubers will still build an email list without a newsletter by selling the merch and getting your email anyway. And then when they want to launch something, they'll hit you up and they'll have that. And you'll hear that they're running a discount to sell out the inventory of their merch or that they're launching a book or that they're going to start doing music and they want you to help them get onto the billboard charts or et cetera. So that's how they'll do it. Yep. Doug Houston's got right. Serve people where they are. Absolutely. Yeah. And again, more of you should be less. Hopefully this creator business playbook makes more of you less scared to try to sell something and to build a real business. A lot of creators shy away from building a real business and they're like, you know what? I'll just play and dabble with merch and put my logo on it. Or, oh, I'll do the AdSense thing. Maybe I'll get some donations here or there. oh i'll try and see if a brand will reach out to me and again that's not how you do an actual business a lot of you need to just um really take this seriously yep uh we'll take one or two more questions real quick for the chat and we'll round this out to being essentially an hour since it's uh just after midnight here on the east coast uh so we're doing a late night run here but we're not gonna have it go too long We'll get everybody off to bed. We all have work to do tomorrow. Yeah, you can grow your email list as an entertainer. Again, the method that I gave there is pretty straightforward. With me, of course, a lot of it is me using the free downloads as the lead magnet opportunity for that. I also think, I think this time we will be doing... youtube channel reviews on friday i know it'll be fourth of july but i'm pretty sure that we'll just end up doing it um somewhat late at night uh because um i'll just do it after whatever festivities are going on for fourth of july i'll just end up doing it in the evening um but yeah so we'll probably still end up doing channel reviews on friday yeah if you haven't downloaded in the live chat if you haven't downloaded the one page creator business plan yet, I highly encourage you to do that. We have about 240 of you watching right now across the six platforms. So we've got some of you watching on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitch, x.com, kick.com. And again, I'd encourage you to use the link in the description to download the one page creator business plan. You could also download the slide presentation. um here tonight from this workshop we'll be doing another one of these workshops next wednesday this is part of a six week workshop master class that we're doing and this is week three so we have three more weeks of this before we start our next workshop which will be a strategy workshop that we'll be collaborating on with our friends from oneoften.com around youtube strategy and growth but we wanted to really make sure that you guys got the real no-nonsense business approach to YouTube, monetizing and making money. So you definitely want to do that. Jinx Jones asks, how do we get weeks one and two? On my YouTube channel, they're in the live tab. I'm putting together a playlist for you for this workshop. We also had a 12-week workshop we did before this. But we have Weeks 1 and 2, and they are live in my YouTube Live tab for you to watch the replay of any time. We also have the slide presentations for those weeks in the description, so you can always get those as well. And so this will probably be our last question. Giselle says, I want to start a membership outside of YouTube, like on Vimeo, but what do you think I should do a membership on YouTube first before launching on Vimeo? I'd have to look more into Vimeo's memberships. Most people, what they do is Patreon or they do YouScreen. If they're selling courses, they'll do Kajabi or School. So in terms of Vimeo, I'm not sure what it is about Vimeo that you want to do specifically. I don't have an issue with it with Vimeo, but I would say that most people, you don't necessarily need to start with a YouTube membership first. if you're not monetized that's like you could just start with uh patreon or vimeo without being monetized on youtube and just link to it in your description and promote it and then if you also have other social medias you could drive traffic to it there so that would be the approach for that so hopefully that answers your question yep but i think that's gonna be it for tonight's workshop thank you everybody for tuning in also if you guys want to check out um the episode we did of the podcast to create something awesome today podcast i linked it over in my community tab if you want to check it out you can also go to the podcast channel you just type in roberto blake podcast you'll find it there uh so we did that live this morning it was really good we did five segments on a lot of the things going on with youtube ai uh youtube versus tick tock and so that was really good so if you want to check that out if you want to watch the replay of that podcast um it's available for you we'll have the audio version out on spotify uh either tomorrow or friday so uh look forward to that as well uh we're also going to be doing uh spotify video for the podcast as well for people who prefer spotify or just want to watch shows over there So some really interesting stuff. But other than that, you guys have the links to the resources in the description. We're going to close out and you're going to learn more about Awesome Creator Academy. I encourage a lot of you to go and look at what we offer over at awesomecreatoracademy.com. I think we have some of the best free resources and best paid resources in the entire creator community. So make sure you're checking that out. And we're going to let you watch a video as we exit to learn more. But stay awesome. And I will see you for our channel review session. and I will see you in the next video. 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 had a community of creators that I 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. You'll be part of a community of usually around 100 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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