YouTube Workshop Week 12 - Content Strategy for Creators Under 20K Subscribers

And we are live. Hey, everybody. This is Roberto Blake, helping you create something awesome today. Welcome back. We have another Wednesday workshop for you. This is week 12 of our YouTube Creator Playbook series. And so we want to make sure that you guys have everything you need to grow from zero to 20,000 subscribers. Those of you who have been watching the channel for a very, very long time already know that when I was a small YouTuber, I went from 20,000 subscribers to 100,000 subscribers in 14 months. Took me two years to originally get my 20,000 subscribers. So we're going to be going through our creator playbook. We have a full presentation for you. And we're going to cover some things for those of you who may not be familiar with our Wednesday workshop sessions. We're also going to be covering my 15-step strategy framework. for growing uh small youtube channels and so this is something i haven't shared with you publicly before we're of course going to talk about ikigai the fundamentals audience avatars and we're really going to go through how to grow your audience, build your content pillars. I'll even talk a little bit about how to properly use YouTube advice correctly since a lot of people get that wrong and have the wrong idea about YouTube advice and YouTube help content. No surprise there. In general, most people do not understand education as a whole and how to apply it properly in life. We're going to break down some things around how I got to my first 100,000 subscribers. We might even dive into some YouTube analytics potentially. So this just gives you a sneak peer view of the full presentation here. And so that is what we're going to be doing in the live stream with you guys tonight. We are going to make sure the slides are available for you after this. We have those available at awesomecreatoracademy.com. We have the previous live streams available. If you go to my YouTube channel, you go to the live tab. We have all 12 weeks available there. On my YouTube channel's homepage, we also have an organized playlist so that you can watch all of the... 12 workshops in order we've been doing this for 12 weeks now we have a different workshop series coming up after this we have a six week series specifically dedicated on wednesdays for the business side of youtube helping you with understanding setting up an llc versus an s corp a little bit about youtube taxes please make sure you talk to a tax professional or cpa for a lot of that stuff but we're going to cover it anyway we're going to be teaching you a little bit about brand deals finding those uh management working with talent agencies so we'll be covering the business side of youtube with our next workshop series so that will be starting next week it'll be a six week series um it will not be another 12 week series so um that is something uh to think about and like i said we will be doing our deep dive today on how to grow to your first 20,000 subscribers if you haven't done that. And we will be answering some of the questions from the chat, but mostly we will be focusing on making sure we get you the information up front for the workshop. The mods are going to keep track of your questions so that we can put them in the form and we'll answer them once we get through the presentation. All right. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in to our creator playbook. So reminder that you can visit awesomecreatoracademy.com and you can access to our slide presentations from our previous workshops. You can also learn about the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group and what we do over there. We meet twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. for office hours sessions, and our Academy Pro group members get access to all of our digital download products, our email swipe files for reaching out to brands, our creator monetization matrix, our niche avatar profiles, over 200 different Photoshop file downloads, and many more assets. So check out awesomecreatoracademy.com join if you want to find out more about that. So a little bit about me as your instructor here. My name is Roberto Blake. I'm a creative entrepreneur, public speaker, and best-selling author. I've been doing YouTube content for over a decade. I've uploaded over 1,700 videos on this channel, over 2,000. videos in my career i have streamed for over 2 000 hours in my career as a content creator as well i've been uh monetizing as a full-time creator for many many years I average maybe 300,000 a year in revenue across all of my different revenue streams, not including the most important one being sponsorship and brand deals being the most important one. YouTube ad revenue probably being one of the lower income streams, if I'm being honest. I've been doing this for a very long time. I made myself a six-figure creator even before I started doing YouTube help and YouTube coaching. The coaching business does very well. Awesome Creator Academy generates over $100,000 a year, but my largest income stream by far is still brand deals and sponsorship and UGC. Just like every other full-time content creator, brand deals are my main source of... income, but my other ones are not that bad. I still do tens of thousands of dollars a year in affiliate marketing links. In the early days, I made about 1,200 to 1,500 from the Amazon Influencer Program back when we called it the Amazon Associates Program, mostly doing tech and tutorial content. Before I ever helped anyone grow a YouTube channel, I grew to 100,000 subscribers with tech and tutorial content. Made very good money doing that. And ended up getting heavily into affiliate marketing. Used to be my biggest income stream. Used affiliate marketing to help me secure brand deals. Made that my largest income stream. Then started helping and teaching creators with Awesome Creator Academy through the pro group. Not from a $500, $600 course. Our main course is the... creator foundations course, which is free. The mods, we'll make sure you have a link to our free creator foundations course. That is a free pay what you want, pay what you can course. Usually people pay $0 or $5. It's kind of your choice of what you wanna do there. But as I can tell you, I've actually found the main seven ways to monetize as a content creator and I've been successful at pretty much all of them. And so it's something that I've went on to help teach other creators. Now, in terms of becoming a full-time creator, how long does it usually take people to succeed when it comes to content creation and specifically YouTube? Five to seven years, typically. Now that could be discouraging for a lot of you, but the main reason it takes five to seven years is because most people are what I call working class content creators. You work a 40 hour plus a week, nine to five job. You may or may not have a family on top of that. And you are making content with these scraps of spare time, scraps of spare energy you have left. It's very difficult. And when you're doing that, you're competing in your niche, not really with any of the small creators getting almost no views. What you're really up against is not saturation, but you're up against the fact that majority of all the views on YouTube and the majority of the views in any given niche go to the top 1% of creators in that niche. The top 1% of those creators absorb about roughly 90% of all the views. um on youtube so you're competing with people who make youtube their 40 or 60 hour week job and who usually have help from a thumbnail artist an editor or both or a team now again that's not meant to discourage you it's meant to help you realize that you're probably not doing as bad as you think and that you probably shouldn't try to approach youtube from the perspective that you need to succeed right away or that you're failing. For the majority of creators who are not full-time, they just don't have the resources to invest the time, freedom, and flexibility in their schedule, the manpower, or the experience to grow right away. So we teach you here the snowball method, as I call it, the slow and steady build-up method to growth. We don't focus on viral breakout videos because the truth is that most of you are not gonna be in position to make viral breakout videos. Again, you just won't have the time, freedom, flexibility, manpower, resources, not if you work a 40-hour-a-week job. Viral videos are rare as it is. And to show you how rare, um it is here are the stats you need to know now 88 of all videos on youtube never get a thousand views if you're getting a thousand views on a long form video you're actually succeeding uh more than 88 of all the videos that have ever been uploaded to the platform that sounds harsh but it's just a reminder of just how difficult it is to make quality content that attracts an audience now when it comes to that The overwhelming majority of people struggle to monetize on YouTube for exactly the same reason. So according to the CEO of YouTube, Neil Mohan, there are about 3 million creators worldwide in the partner program. That means people who are already monetized directly on YouTube as a platform. So when you look at something like Hill Country Husker who's saying, I'm heading into retirement. How long could I expect to be able to have a supplemental income from constant? uh content creation uh it depends on your business model for your content if you're trying to live off of adsense it will be very difficult to make that a supplemental retirement income but it depends on your business model it depends if you're taking this seriously versus treating it as a hobby and it depends on whether you're going to build a business model around utility content or if you're trying to do a entertainment-based hobby and hoping that takes off it really depends on your approach to YouTube. Your results may vary, and it depends on the niche you go into, what your business model is, who the audience avatar is. If you build a real business, then it's not nearly as difficult to build a supplemental income as long as you can be competitive in that business, in that industry. But if you try to reach a broad entertainment audience, especially as someone older, you might find that much more challenging. Now, to put YouTube into context here, you need to understand that You know, very few creators even break 10,000 subscribers. 97% of channels on YouTube fail. 97% of channels on YouTube don't get to even 10,000 subscribers. much less grow to 100,000 subscribers. So I got this data from Mario Juice who was the head of strategy for MrBeast. He got this by downloading reports via SocialBlade. But there are actually over 114 million channels on YouTube. Most of them are so small though that SocialBlade doesn't track all of them. I believe it was Nielsen and ClearMedia. who got us the report that 115 million YouTube channels exist worldwide. That's also something similar that I was told by my contacts at the company. So take that for what you will. Most channels never get to 10,000 subscribers. If you manage to accomplish that, you're doing better than you think. So what I've developed over the years is basically a 15-step framework for growing YouTube channels and I've outlined it pretty much here. I think it's important to find your focus niche. A niche is not a prison, it's not a trap. Your niche is not a topic you're stuck with. It's a community that you're happy to show up for. Your niche is like-minded and like-hearted people that share your interest and share your values. So do not think of a niche as a prison. Think of a niche as a community of those like-minded and like-hearted people. Identify your audience avatar. These are those people who are your people, who is the tribe you wish to attract. Instead of thinking purely about the concept of, and we will talk about more of this, instead of just thinking about building and growing an audience, think about attracting a tribe. It will help your mindset, and you need to think about who those audience avatars are. Excuse me. Declare your mission. it's very hard for a lot of creators to articulate why you should watch them and what they're trying to accomplish with their content a primary example i tell everybody that i am trying to help you become a full-time content creator by increasing your reach your reputation and your revenue and that makes my mission very clear my mission is to help 100 000 creators get monetized, and if we can, get 10,000 creators full-time making $100,000 a year. So that's a very clear mission for my channel. It dictates the focus of my channel. My channel focuses on making YouTube sustainable and making it content creation a full-time career. My content does not focus on having fun making content. My content is not made for the part-time hobby YouTuber who doesn't take it seriously. The minimum viable level for watching my content is you at least want YouTube to be a side hustle or you want to get monetized, you wanna make some money. My channel is the channel for making YouTube a business or a career and making money doing YouTube. My channel is not for getting famous, my channel is not for having fun. It is great if you enjoy what you do. but is not, for me, fun is not a priority in my approach to content strategy. A lot of people don't like that about me, but again, having a clear mission makes you different, makes you stand out. You're wondering how you stand out. A clear mission, a clear focus for what you do and why you do it and how you do it will make you stand out from the crowd. If you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing, so to speak. So you want to clear your mission. Research your niche and your niche neighbors. So research the creators in your niche, but also research people in nearby or similar niches, find opportunities and things that you can use to combine from those niches or from different creators and use that to inspire you and to make something very different. Choose your video styles. Video styles, we used to call these video formats, but video styles, you can take multiple approaches to videos. Just because you're covering specific topics or themes in your videos doesn't mean you have to make them all the same way. Some videos could be talking head videos, other videos could be narrative, other videos could be vlog-like and cinematic. uh depending on the style of videos you can make different styles of videos under your brand and so you could have multiple content pillars and then within uh those individual pillars you could have maybe um you know two styles of content for each of those so it's just something to keep in mind There are videos that I do that are talking head videos is one style. There's another style of video I do that is green screen videos. Other videos I do presentation like how we do on the live streams and lecture. Other videos are reaction style. The channel reviews are reaction style videos. So you could think of it from that perspective. Build your content pillars. Your content pillars are going to be the themes. that govern your channel. You can think of these as playlists as well. They're on the homepage. But for example, if I was a camera view channel, and let's just pull this back a little bit so that we can talk here. So let's say that we were doing a camera channel. Let's say instead of doing anything else, we were back in the old days and I was doing a camera channel. so if i was doing a camera channel my content pillars would probably be individual camera reviews and camera reviews would be one pillar then behind the scenes photo shoots doing real world photo shoots would probably be pillar number two so okay i've reviewed the cameras with you so we know what the specs are we know how we feel about it we know everything this camera can does let's use the camera in the real world so let me take you on a photo or video shoot with these cameras so those are two separate content pillars a third content pillar could probably be something like doing photo editing and also doing critiques of your photographs and your portfolio. So that'd be pillar number three would be these photography tutorials for editing and also doing reactions and reviews of your photos. So now I'd have three content pillars right then and there. A fourth content pillar I could do for a photography channel would be doing photography challenges. and so that could be me versus another photographer it could be something like that so then i'd have these four different content pillars and think about the different styles that these videos would represent the camera reviews would be cinematic talking head videos that also have product features and b-roll and so on so forth so that's one style of video that's a regular locked off sit down youtube video so that's a talking head video with a lot of cinematic b-roll but the real world behind the scenes photo and video shoots would basically be cinematic vlog-like irl content so that'd be my reality tv show format for you that'd be my reality tv style video the doing reviews of your photography portfolios and also showing you photography editing Those tutorial style videos, that would give me a mix of doing screen recorded tutorials, but also screen recorded reaction style videos. So you see those are different styles within those content pillars and those themes. But the overarching theme here would still be cameras and photography for that channel. So that's something that we would be doing. The other pillar that we talked about would be these. photography challenges doing challenges with other photographers or solo would still be another style of irl content it'd be irl content and it'd probably be done in a vlog like cinematic video fashion so those would give me four content players usually i tell people have three to uh six content pillars we usually um go for around five so what would be another one that i would have inside of this it probably would be camera gear guides, which would be these bigger videos. They would be sit down talking head videos, but they'd have a lot of B-roll in them where I would most likely have multiple cameras, multiple camera lenses, multiple accessories, and I would be doing buyer's guides. So I'd be doing these buyer's guides and those would probably make up the five or so pillars for... a photography channel for me. So that would give you your five pillars. So that is a example. At some point, I do need to make a slide where I literally just show a visual demonstration of five pillars for a particular type of content. And then I would show like photography is my example for like how to an educational content. And then I would probably just show you like, here's how I'd break down a Star Wars channel for like entertainment style content so that you just have those comparisons. so um that's how you would do um structured content pillars and how you'd uh make it make sense for a channel so hopefully that makes it clear and you understand it the next thing you would do is with those content pillars you want to generate a hundred video ideas and then try to organize them around your content pillars the reason i like having maybe five content pillars is because then i could sit there with a hundred video ideas and I could organize 20 video ideas per pillar or mix and match some. If I do three videos a week, 150 videos in a year, it could be 30 across the five pillars, something like that. Doesn't have to be exact, but it gives me structure and it gives me a way to think about it. In terms of refining your title formulas, this requires some research and finding potential outlier videos. We use one of 10.com for that. uh by the way mods uh code roberto gets them 20 off now um one of ten uh change some things with our coupon code because they upgraded to the new pro version of one of 10.com if you use one of 10.com and you use code roberto at checkout they get you 20 off of your account so you might want to use that tool it can help you with your titles and your thumbnails it even has a title generator and an ai thumbnail generator to um help you oh and mods um Code Awesome doesn't get them a 30-day free trial. We are working out the free trial with them. So many people used the free trial that apparently became a problem. So for right now, they'll just use code Roberto. So yeah, but one of 10.com can help you with your titles and your thumbnails. In general, you want to try to build titles that are repeatable. um for some of your formats and the reason you want to do that is because once you have something that works you don't want to try to change it too much i'll give you a primary example this with title formulas most of you are familiar with mr beast so he will have title formulas like um surviving um a volcano for 24 hours then he'll be like surviving in a volcano um you know for a week surviving in a volcano for 30 days he'll just use the same format and then it'll go from surviving um in a volcano to surviving in the middle of the ocean i was buried alive for 24 hours buried alive for 72 hours buried alive for a week you know so he will use consistent titling formulas to be able to um take a successful video and turn a successful video into a sequel, a trilogy, or a series. Another example is Last to Leave wins a jet. Last to Leave wins a Lamborghini. Last to Leave wins $100,000, et cetera, et cetera. Take things that work and replicate them. You don't have to make every single video an original idea. You can use title structures and formulas, and you can repeat bangers. You can repeat winners. Let your winners ride. If something works, make it a sequel. If a sequel does well, make it a trilogy. If it's a great trilogy, make it a series. So that's what we wanna do. Create a thumbnail system. You also wanna get to a point to where you stop having to create some of your thumbnails from scratch. You want to at least use consistent fonts and consistent font layouts. We help you guys. uh with some suggested fonts that um typically work for most videos and most type of content fairly regularly um so we give you guys six fonts that work for almost every video ever um and we find that to be really helpful but also i have come up with some um thumbnail layouts uh that i did for a faceless channel that is a men's personal development channel that focuses on stoicism. And what you can see is that simple layouts work. And so simple layouts in terms of text layouts for left, right, and center, color blocking, consistent fonts. This font, I believe, is... This is probably Futura here. So this font... What's going on here? I know that a lot of times we'll use Poppins, but this one I believe is Oswald Bold. I believe that one's Futura. But typically we recommend Oswald, Futura, Babis New, that sort of thing. And generally it works. As you know from my YouTube thumbnails, I try to keep things fairly consistent. Here is Poppins. And again, I use recurring themes and elements. I use this 3D element for the YouTube logo pretty regularly in my videos. And so another example here for thumbnail systems would be... What's a good example here? Actually, this one is for a completely different channel. Let me see if I can open this for you just to show a different example here. So again, this is an example of a thumbnail system that uses similar colors, text lockups, and placement. As you can see, the text goes in one particular place here with the goal being avoiding the, what do you call it, the timestamp in the bottom right-hand corner. So the useful fonts that we always recommend are bold versions of Bibis New, Poppins, Oswald, Compacta, Open Sans, and Futura. And there is a reason for that. And it's because just generally speaking, we can make really easy to use thumbnails. I think I have another example here. Maybe this one, is it? This is an example of a thumbnail where I used Midjourney to help me with the AI side of it, but we used a very simple text lockup for that one. Let's see. I think this is a general thumbnail layout system here. It'll take a second for this to open up in Photoshop for you. But the general idea is just to have, one, consistency in your font choices. have a few different layouts you can use, a left-aligned layout, a right-aligned layout, a center-bottom layout, a center-top layout. Those typically are best. Maybe a split comparison layout or a before and after layout. You want to have these things pre-designed in such a way where you can just drop assets in. You also want to have repeatable assets elements and color schemes so that you're able to be consistent and you don't have to just keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. So you wanna create an ideal thumbnail system. This one actually I think is just a bunch of my different thumbnails. So again, as you can see I have a system for my thumbnails and my thumbnail elements and layouts and I can just drop text and assets in wherever I would need to and I can make... new YouTube thumbnails that way. I also have a system in terms of variety of poses. So I have hundreds of photos, believe it or not, with different poses, different props, dozens of these with me and my play button, dozens of these with me and my camera, et cetera. Even some different outfits, believe it or not. And so this allows me to just be able to make... high-quality thumbnails whenever I might need to and just use a lot of the same elements in order to accomplish that. So that's what we mean when we say building a thumbnail system. And we build a thumbnail system to be able, again, to make just our entire flow a lot easier in terms of our workflow and not have to constantly reinvent the wheel. So very important. Plan your launch videos. When you launch a YouTube channel, sure, you can just upload one video at a time and launch with one video. But typically, if you can launch with three to five videos in the first week, it does give you some breathing room and it does give you something for viewers who do find your channel, something to watch. It gives you an easier way to collect data. I usually recommend launching with a mini series. And so if you can launch a mini series. where there are three to five videos for everyone to watch to get a sense of your channel and to see that you're committed to this, it could really help you in the early days of your channel. A lot of people get discouraged because they're like, oh, it's my first video, no one's gonna see it. But the thing is, if you do it well and you launch well enough with a mini series, you can set yourself up to where people want to subscribe early on and have some way of decent expectations. for what you're going to do and that you will be consistent at least in theory so you can just start with a strong showing that way and so i find that launching and having a launch plan is particularly helpful structure your schedule if you can structure your schedule you'll find your life as a YouTuber easier, especially if you're a working class content creator. I find that if people structure their schedule to where they maybe only take 30 minutes to an hour on the weekdays or whenever their workdays are and don't let themselves stress about their channel, that tends to work better. I also find that if there's people, if they are going to try to get more done for their channel on a weekday, the answer is to wake up early in the morning before you have any other commitments, before anyone else steals your energy and to work on your channel for 90 minutes before anybody else in your household wakes up. So waking up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m. usually is really helpful. If you can wake up at 5 a.m., you can probably work on your channel for 90 minutes before anyone wakes up and before you have any responsibilities and anyone has a claim on your time. and a claim on your energy. I call this peak energy or prime energy. And if you can spend 90 hours doing deep work, you can accomplish more in that 90 minutes. You can accomplish more in that 90 minutes than most people do in four hours. So if you are gonna do this during your nine to five job, Monday through Friday days that you work, the answer would be to wake up early, probably 5 a.m., 5.30 a.m., do 90 minutes of deep work and get... as much as you can done before about 7 a.m. and before anyone else has a claim on your time and a claim on your energy so then if you do that you can go to work come home in peace not really worry about trying to film a video for your channel i don't recommend doing that i recommend you do your filming on your days off and that you schedule that way so that tends to be helpful for a lot of people again for whatever your lifestyle is you just have to schedule that way make 100 videos per year. The reason that I recommend you make 100 videos per year is it will give you the fastest way to learn and that is going to be two videos a week. Oh Roberto, my niche, I can't do that. My videos take forever. I don't believe in taking forever on videos when you're a beginner and I don't think it's gonna help you and I don't think it's gonna grow you. I understand that there are people, well this person only makes bangers and they only made five videos and they got 20,000 subscribers on their first five or 10 videos, that is rare. That is a unicorn event. It almost never happens for most people. It's usually not worth pursuing. And the people who it works out for usually don't work a nine to five job. They usually are people who are doing YouTube now because they... left their job they have a hiatus they have a severance they retired they're taking time off from school they might be taking a break from the job they might be furloughed they might be laid off and taking their time and seeing if they can get youtube up and running while they're on unemployment so they're like it's not normal circumstances where people especially most people over 30 are able to just launch a channel with very few videos and be successful. It rarely ever happens. Even the most successful YouTubers, MrBeast had to make 460 videos to get his first 10,000 subscribers. His first 100 videos, he didn't even break 1,000 subscribers. He didn't even break 800 subscribers. Marcus Brownlee, MKBHD, he just hit 20 million subscribers. His first 100 videos, he only got 78 subscribers out of them. PewDiePie, one of the biggest YouTubers of all time. One of the OG biggest YouTubers. He made 100 videos. He only got 2,500 subscribers. Most people cannot grow a YouTube channel with their early videos. It just doesn't work out for them. So if you're thinking, well, my videos take three, five, six days to make, if you're a small YouTuber, you probably shouldn't be starting out with that if you work a full-time job. If you work a full-time job, you should make videos that are simpler. And the thing is, trying harder at a video will not save you and get you more views. You're going to be very disappointed with the results. The thing that gets you views is the topic, meaning the idea, the title, and the thumbnail, and whether the timing is right and it's relevant. Showing up on time or, God forbid, being early. And being early and flawed is better than being late and perfect every single time. In fact, most of your favorite YouTubers and the reason they got big or blew up was just that they had the opportunity to be early to an important video topic before anyone else. It's called early mover advantage and it's called first mover advantage. So that is something that helps. And so. You also want to make 100 videos per year because that first year you'll be able to analyze those videos. You'll be able to learn analytics. You'll have data and you'll have enough video results and outputs to know what worked and what didn't. And so then we can use the 80-20 rule of refinement and we can go back over those first 100 videos in a year and figure out what worked for the top 20% of them. And then the next 80 out of 100 videos, we will apply what worked best and make more of that and then use 20 experimentation and finally one of the most important things is branding your channel that is going to be your brand design for your channel your colors your themes your fonts your elements your channel banner your profile pic the language that you use how you how you introduce yourself to people, everything that makes you rememberable. So you want to become memorable and that's your brand, that's your style. It even might be your wardrobe and how you dress on camera. It might be your aesthetics and your set design. It might be all of those things and all of those quirks. And so branding is very important. So this is my 15 step YouTube strategy framework for beginners in terms of what I think you should be focusing on. Now in terms of fundamentals, there are some fundamentals we'll cover, but I want to talk about Ikigai. Ikigai helps you decide what your content is going to be and help you put this in perspective. A lot of people give you bad advice about following your passion. I think you should be doing things you're passionate about, but I don't think most of you qualify, unfortunately. to do your number one passion in the world most of you probably don't qualify to your number one passion in the world because you're probably not in the top 10 of people doing that thing you're probably not that particularly good at it in some cases it is what it is so what do you do then okay roberto you're killing my dreams here what do i do well i'm going to tell you the thing that you're going to want to do and the thing that would make sense for the far majority of you is actually very straightforward. It's that you do the thing that you are good at and that you're passionate enough at to keep going. That's what you would want to focus on. That's what you would want to do here. If you focus on something that you are good at, that you also are passionate about, it tends to work better. And this is realism. This is what you need. you need skill and the reason you need skill is because you need to be able to create value for the people aka the market you need to be capable to create value for them so usually you need skills that allow you to do that so you have to like something enough to be good at it and you have to actually be able to get better at it and people have to desire and want this thing and you also had better learn how to properly monetize it so you do not starve to death that is important So I would say you have to balance, can I make money at this and what's the business model for it? And I better learn. You better figure out whether or not there's a market of people and that market of people, they shouldn't just share your interest. You should be attracting a tribe that shares your values. So that's why I say tribe is important. So your vibe attracts your tribe. You want to focus on what is the tribe I want to attract? Who are my audience avatar? What do they like? What do we have in common? What are our values? What are our interests? Where do we align? Align with that audience. Align with your tribe. Attract your tribe. So you want to do that. You want to be passionate about things. I would say that passion should be a fuel that drives you, not a force that leads you. You need to be led by purpose. Ikigai helps you find that purpose. Your process is the vehicle. So if your passion is the fuel, if that's the gas and the tank, then your process is the vehicle. Your how is the vehicle. And then ultimately, I would say that your purpose is the destination. And if we're talking about money, profit is the engine. Keeps the thing running. So that's why that would be important. Ikigai. Find your Ikigai. And Ikigai, by the way, for anyone asking, is from Japan. It's a Japanese philosophy of basically your reason for being while you wake up in the morning. Find your purpose. So, creator fundamentals. Themes, tribe, talent, total addressable market. Total addressable market is how many people can care about this idea. Transformation. What is the transformation? What happens before they watch this video? What happens after they watch this video? Topic, title, thumbnail, timing. This is your packaging. We could also throw triggers in there. How are you triggering an emotional response from the audience? How are you compelling emotion? Testing, usually A-B testing of thumbnails. Very important. And tracking your results. Studying analytics. Understanding trends. Trust and transparency. Very important for developing that and establish that with the audience. Testimonials. You want people saying good things about the comments. You want people sharing your videos. You want people recruiting for your channel. And then takeaways. What is it that people find value in when they watch your content? And that works for both entertainment and education, by the way. Audience avatar. Who is your audience? Who is the audience avatar? We bring up this phrase so much. What does it mean? You have to understand people's problems, preferences, and priorities. And if you understand that about them and their psychology, then you can attract your tribe and you can serve them well. And you can serve them better than someone who doesn't know this. A lot of content creators, they might be good at getting attention, but are they good at keeping it? And all attention is not equal. It doesn't do any good to go viral for something that gets you canceled. You might want to grow, but do you really want to be infamous? Do you really want to be infamous? So that's a problem. A lot of people blow up their channel, but also blow up their life because they don't understand their audience. And you have to understand what will turn people off. So that's something that becomes very important. I was explaining to a young creator and they were like, man, I'm making better content than ever. Where are my views down? This creator was a gamer. And I explained to this gamer, I was like, well, the game had an update recently and everyone's complaining about it. You were complaining about it. Is it possible that if the game... has a negative spiral and the community is upset right now? Is it possible that less people will watch content if the game is not doing well? Can your channel really do better than the game is doing itself? And that was a wake-up call for that creator. If you're a TV show reviewer and the TV show is canceled or a season finale or series finale really, really ticks people off, Maybe your content also suffers because the fandom is suffering. So you have to understand that your audience's demographics, preferences, priorities, prejudices, and biases will play a role on how your content performs. Your content does not live in a bubble where it performs based on how hard you work. It performs based on the sentiment of your audience avatar, the sentiment of your community. If they are angry and you don't validate what they're upset with, maybe they will find someone who will. If you do something that gives them the ick, they'll find someone who doesn't. So you have to really pay attention and understand who your audience is and why they are who they are and what that means for your content. let's talk about how to attract that tribe how to grow an audience one of the harshest lessons in youtube you will ever learn is that what you want to make is not always going to be what they want to watch just because you want to make something and you want to express yourself and you're really passionate and you tried really hard does not mean that anyone cares again i know that i sound like the dream killer of all youtube i don't really try to do that but it It just works out that way. And the reason is because I'm being honest and realistic and I will not lie to you just for you to like me more or to buy anything. I will tell you the truth. I will be realistic. And realistically, you might want to express yourself and you might have to accept that somebody is not interested in that and they will move on to someone who is focusing on them and putting them first instead of putting that um themselves first so keep in mind that understanding your audience is understanding their biases what could you do that attracts them what can you do that makes yourself unattractive to them and a lot of creators don't realize that they sometimes make self-serving content that is unattractive to their audience I'll give you an example. The easiest example of this is let's say you get into a conflict with another creator and you decide to make a video about it instead of making a video your audience cares about. Let's say that you make soccer YouTube videos, for example. If you make soccer YouTube videos and then you get into a beef with another creator outside of your niche and you upload a video calling that person out. Your audience doesn't care. You're making a selfish video. You're making a video to vent your frustrations. You're looking for validation. You're looking for attention. You're looking for support. Your audience was looking for a video on their favorite soccer player. They were looking for a video on Manchester. They were looking for a video on the playoffs. And instead of giving them something that they were looking for, You decided you needed to be validated and that you wanted support and that you have a beef with this YouTube gamer or something that you got into an argument with and your audience isn't even in that niche and they don't care. So that'd be an example of selfish content for this. What's selfish content? That's an example of it. Making a video your audience has no reason to care about that is self-indulgent and is largely you wanting to be validated. So, what you want to do is this. You want to always ask yourself, how does this video put my audience first? If you struggle to answer that question, it's probably not a video you need to make, even if it's a video you want to make. If you want to make that kind of video, I'm going to recommend that you have an Instagram account and that you make Instagram Reels and Instagram Stories and build a personal brand on Instagram. And you let YouTube be an audience first platform and use Instagram and TikTok to express yourself. So that would be an example of how you can balance. Well, I want to feel like I'm being authentic and I want my audience to see the real me. Fantastic. Your polished content lives on YouTube. Your personal content lives on Instagram and TikTok. That is your answer. Harsh as it may be. So we grow an audience. by actually prioritizing the audience. So what does that look like? Value for the viewers. Topic, title, thumbnail, and timing. This is one of the most important slides I've ever made. This one teaches you the intersectionality and relationship between topic, title, thumbnail, and timing. Topic and timing are the intersection of being relevant to somebody. Timing and thumbnail, with thumbnail being something that can be attention grabbing and timing being this matters to me now. Thumbnail, this matters to me most. Timing, this matters to me now. So that's priority. That makes you a priority. Title and thumbnail are your play for attention. Overarching topic and title communicate what you're interested in and why you're interested in it. So this Venn diagram is the perfect intersectionality to help you establish the concept of value for the viewer. Now, value is different than quality. Quality content isn't what gets you views. Value-based content is what gets you views. So to give you the real world example of this is a book is judged by its cover. So this is my book, Create Something Awesome, How Creators Are Profiting from Their Passion in the Creator Economy. The book is judged by its cover. It's judged by its back cover because that's your at a glance way to understand the value. that I can deliver. And so you're making a judgment call based on packaging. You are making an at a glance value judgment of the book. You have no idea what the quality of the book is because you have not read the content of the book. So the content and its quality is not what makes you decide to buy a book. It's the cover and the back cover. It's the social proof of the author or the social proof they convey on the front or the back. So those are the things that ultimately decide whether or not you're going to get a book, not the quality of the content. A YouTube video is no different. The thumbnail is the book cover. That is what does it. The back cover, you could think of that as even the title and the description. So those things all are your at a glance value judgment as to whether or not you're gonna click on a video or buy the book. It's the same thing. The quality is the experience you have when you read the book in the same way that the quality is the experience you have once you've watched the video so that is what ultimately decides how content is going to perform it's the at a glance value judgment and that's based on the topic i'm in or i'm out the title i understand it or i don't the thumbnail it gets my attention or i don't the timing it's relevant or it's not those are your binary decision making factors in whether or not you will watch a video You have no idea how well it's edited. You have no idea how hard someone worked at it. All you have is the at a glance value judgment as a viewer. So plan everything around your packaging. Plan everything about your packaging. It doesn't matter how good you shot or edited this video. What matters is how well you packaged it to be attracted to a random people, attracted to a random person scrolling on their phone or flipping through their TV in the middle of the night. In the middle of the night. In the middle of the night. So that's how this works. You need to win them at a glance. If you don't, they will never give your video a chance. Packaging isn't everything. It's the only thing to, you know, riff off the great Vince Lombardi. Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. Well, I say packaging isn't everything. It's the only thing. This is what decides views. bottom line it's packaging so clear versus clever content if you ever have the choice between being clever quirky and original and just being bloody clear and saying what something is choose to be clear over clever for the love of god choose to be clear over clever don't overthink these things don't think that your quirky personality is going to win you over when it's most likely to just confuse somebody if you have a choice between being clever or being clear, just be clear. Don't confuse people. It's very simple. Make 100 crappy videos. This is one of my most well-known YouTube videos and titles of all time. Make 100 crappy videos like MrBeast and PewDiePie did. And it's one of those videos that stands the test of time. But a lot of people think that this advice is outdated or this advice is misleading and I'm gonna tell you why it's not. I tell you to make 100 crappy videos not because I'm telling you to post for the sake of posting or for a quantity over quality type thing. I'm telling you to post 100 crappy videos because for most of you, it's the only way you learn. How does a musician learn? They're gonna have to perform a song badly. 100 times, maybe even 1,000 times before they can perform that song well. How does someone become strong? You're going to do 100 crappy push-ups before you can do 100 push-ups without dying. Your first 100 push-ups are going to suck. They're gonna be crappy, your form is gonna be bad, your butt's gonna be all up in the air, your arms are not gonna be straight, and you are going to probably look terrible doing it. Your first 100 pull-ups are gonna be crappy. You know, you are going to probably miss the majority of the first 100 shots you take at a basketball goal. You most likely are not going to be able to do your first 100 videos any justice your first videos will most likely be the worst videos you ever make as my friend sean cannell would say your first videos are your worst videos so my answer is to get it over with in year one in the first year of your uh journey as a content creator you should go ahead and make 100 videos and if there are videos you want to make to express yourself if there is selfish content you just want to see exist down in the world go ahead and get out of the way now Get it out of your system, get it out, get over yourself, and just get it out there. Go ahead and know that you're going to make these videos, and when you look back on them, when you made video 101, everything will feel like a piece of crap compared to video 101 if you've done this correctly, because if you've done it correctly, you learned something. You learned 101 lessons along the way. You learned a lesson every time you upload. You got 1% better every single time you worked on this. Therefore, you should see a significant difference between video one and video 101. And if you've done this right, you will look back on almost every single one of those 100 videos and say, this is a piece of crap. Because what you can do now will make everything you did before look terrible by comparison if you've done this correctly. If you failed to do this correctly and you just post a post, there will be no growth and... By growth, I don't mean audience growth. I mean there will be no improvement in the look and feel of video one versus video 101. And I say this, and I'm sorry to call you guys out, but I say this mostly to the YouTube gamers watching or listening to this. Most of you YouTube gamers do not improve your content. over time, you just make the same crappy video over and over, which is not what I'm telling you to do. I don't mean make the same crappy video 100 times. I mean improve, improve, improve and get less crappy every time you are doing this. And again, most gamers do not put in the effort. I'm just calling you guys out. It's the truth. I've coached hundreds of you gamers. I know what I know. And the truth is most of you do not make the effort to improve. You are still trying to just make what you want to make because you think it's cool. So you're not putting the audience first there and you're not trying to improve. It happens. But that's the key to this. The key... is that you're trying to do the best that you can and you're trying to improve what your best is. The same way you would as an artist, the same thing you would do as a musician, the same thing you would do as an athlete. Nobody starts out drawing perfect lines, perfect circles, perfect art. It just doesn't happen. You don't wake up coming out of the womb playing the perfect violin solo. It doesn't happen. You have to work at it. You have to practice. You have to have things on the coal pile. No one gets anywhere with practice, practice without practice. Practice makes progress. So yes, make 100 crappy videos is still good advice and you need to do it. And then your next videos will be better. Your next 100 videos will be better. And your next 100 videos after that will be better. That is the goal. If you cannot improve after 200 to 300 videos, This may not be for you. It may just be a hobby. It may not be something you're capable of doing. Making content pillars. We talked about this. Variety content is basically dead on YouTube. I'm sorry. You're not gonna be able to make a video channel where you do fishing one day and then do video games the next day and then do movie reviews on day three. It doesn't work. I'm sorry. Does not work. So what you want to do. is you want to find something that you gravitate toward and then try to make that as interesting as possible and build out different content pillars around it. So like I said, with the example of a photography and filmmaking channel, I would probably make camera reviews. Then I'd probably make behind the scenes. a video showing you real world photo shoots. Then I'd probably make videos where I do photo challenges against another photographer. Then I'd probably do reaction videos where I react to your photos and I critique them. And that'd be my fourth content pillar. And then maybe my fifth content pillar is making buyer's guides for you guys. in terms of how um like what content to uh sorry what um what camera gear to buy collectively what's in my camera bag type stuff or the best uh lenses for wildlife photography things like that so that'd be an example of content post an entertainment uh style channel let's say i was doing Star Wars content, my content pillars would probably be something like, I'd probably do Star Wars fan fiction videos, Star Wars lore videos, probably Star Wars episode reviews, and then Star Wars character analysis of individual characters as my content pillars, and then probably Star Wars. philosophy videos teaching you about what the philosophy of star wars or george lucas was when he was uh creating the films and the shows so that would be how i get six content pillars out of something like star wars okay um for a lifestyle channel if i was um a college let's say you're i was coaching a female college student if i was coaching a female college student and let's say she got into um a university, I'd be like, okay, cool. Let's make some videos for you that are about lifestyle content, but incorporate your student life. And then because people are going to spend the next four years with you as your student life, they're probably going to still be interested in you as a personality and you can grow with that and you can move these things into your career. So let's focus on being a student, but let's find lifestyle aspects and let's combine lifestyle with productivity. So that means you're a student, you can make some videos around productivity and study hacks. And you can make some videos about life hacks and adulting. And you can do some of these with a vlog-like style so that people are attracted to your personality. but it's still evergreen content. Some of it still could be search-friendly content. It's also still gonna be homepage-friendly content for people to click on. If you're a female lifestyle creator, we just have to make sure the aesthetics and packaging are good and that the aesthetics of the vlog style is good. We're not making vlogs. We're making things in the style of vlogs. So you don't make, oh, this is my vlog. You don't put that in the title. You can make videos about, you know, it could be, 15 study hacks for new college students. That could be an example. How I cram for exams as a college student. And the thing is, if you want to leverage social proof in those titles, you can leverage social proof by using your university if you got into an Ivy League university. So again, if I was coaching a female influencer. that was a college student, it would be around things like this. It'd be so like, okay, let's make some lifestyle and productivity hacks. And so life hacks, study hacks, productivity hacks. We could also do day in the life of a college athlete. Like I'm assuming in this case that she got in on an academic and athletic scholarship, probably volleyball. So, and in this case, I'm kind of thinking of my goddaughter here. So like volleyball. Okay, cool. So, Day in the Life of a College Athlete. That's a video series. And you could do different videos around that. It still ties into this overarching theme of I'm a college student. Here are videos that relate to my life as a college student. If you're of my generation, come watch me figure out how to be an adult. If you're younger than me, hey, look at me. you're gonna be like me in a few years or you might want to be and so you would do things like that and you would build out those um pillars so you would build out these pillars to have some variation of variety within a theme that's overarching in this case it's you know my life you know um first time living alone in the big city in college it's that whole thing it's a lifestyle channel so you could also get out of that some aesthetic things like a series on cleaning and decorating your dorm room and so that allows in that channel a thing that makes sense for the college viewer the college student viewer the audience avatar for this is someone who is going to college or wants to go to college or who missed out on the college experience That's why they would be watching. So that's the audience avatar. So what appeals to that person? Dorm life. Dorm life videos. And so in the dorm life series, you get to do things about cleaning your dorm, organizing your dorm, decorating your dorm, setting up your dorm for the holidays, packing up your dorm to go back home. So you get to do dorm life videos. You get to do study with me videos. You get to do, you know, student hacks. you get to do um videos and then as you start to get phase out of the college thing it's about figuring out your life as a young adult so adulting with me adulting 101 type content so there's all these um things you get to do you get to start to Make videos and vlog-like content about starting your career and starting your adult life. Moving into your first apartment. Okay, I'm moving out of the dorm for the last time. Goodbye, dorm. Oh, we had some special memories here. You move on. You start doing, okay, finding my first apartment. Got my first apartment. Got my dream apartment. Decorating my thing. Buying furniture for the first time as a young adult. Buying... furniture for the first time as a gen z adult getting my first apartment as a gen z adult you start to make that type of content as you move on in this lifestyle brand and personal brand that you built when you were in college you transition that into young adulthood that gets to go on and then assuming you know things go well you get to maybe transition that one day into a lifestyle channel around building your family because then you have an audience that grew up with you saw you move out of your house go to the college of your dreams, saw you achieve your goals, saw you start your adult life, start your career, and then theoretically start your family. It's a lifestyle brand that you could probably live in for 10 or 15 years. That's how I would coach a content creator to do variety content. without doing variety content. That's how you build content pillars within a lifestyle brand that lends itself to some variety, but with an overarching theme. And the themes can change in a seasonal way in your season of life if you do it correctly. So that would just be an example. Improve constantly. Improving constantly is very important to this whole thing. You want to constantly be evolving. You want to constantly look at specific areas of improvement. I wanted to see myself improve as a public speaker, as a presenter. My earliest videos, if you go and watch my earliest videos after this, you're gonna see I was not anything special and I was very, very bad at YouTube. In fact, it'll be probably very hard for you to make worse YouTube videos than mine, as far as my early content. I really don't think a lot of you could make worse content than I did when I started my YouTube channel. But I got better at it, and that's because I didn't stop making videos. You have to be consistent. Now, I wasn't consistent until 2013. I had barely uploaded any content in 2009. I think it was like four videos. I barely uploaded in 2010. I think it was five videos. I didn't have an audience in 2013 at all. I didn't have an audience in 2013. You can go check. And why? Because I wasn't uploading anything, and I wasn't... uh taking it seriously but when i did i got better i got better at speaking i got better on camera energy i started bringing that big creator energy started having more confidence and it wasn't that i gained more subscribers and then became more confident i became more confident and that attracted more people to me and that's how i grew my subscribers because i became more confident i became a better communicator And I became better at connecting with an audience on an emotional level. And so those are the things you would want to focus on and you'd want to improve when it comes to your initial YouTube journey is you really want to focus on things like being a better presenter, being a better speaker, editing. You know, the biggest YouTubers, they're not all... excuse me they're not all editing in a fancy way a lot of them are not the fanciest editors in the world a lot of them just focused on being clean and fast editors and not really doing anything fancy no fancy tricks i might be one of the only large youtubers who still edits all their videos i might be one of the only ones who actually knows how to green screen well um i don't say that to brag i say that say most of them outsource this very early and so they're not even and a lot of their editors are not doing stuff that are particularly hardcore so a lot of people it's not editing that carries them it would be their ability to produce good content, plan good content, present and deliver and perform good content. Those things matter a lot more than you would think. So it's more about what you can do on camera than what you can do in the edit, if I'm being honest. It's young YouTubers who created the trend of hyper-editing and fixating on editing and making editing cool and doing this retention-based dopamine hacking. A lot of you, if you just make very clean content and the audio is good and you just sit down and you film it or you vlog it and you make it clean, you make the camera shake not too bad, the audio is good, you'll be just fine for the most part. Most of you, that's all you really need to be doing. And again, just focus on improving your communication skills, your ability to connect emotionally with the audience. and your overall confidence on camera and your performance, and you will find that you do better. And then of course, obviously your packaging, if you do that, the packaging will help you get views. But your real retention hack is just being more interesting and being more confident. Most of life, once you get past the aesthetics and packaging of attractiveness, will come down to, if you can be, at least if you can make yourself, if you aren't inherently physically attractive, dress very well. and then be very confident, be an excellent communicator, and be able to read a room and read people cold and connect with them emotionally, most of success in life is down to aesthetics, confidence, communication, and consistency. If you can nail those things, most of life will work itself out, I promise you. So ideally, Obviously winning the lottery, be attractive physically at a glance. If you need to augment that, get into excellent shape, dress very well, have great posture, good hygiene, and that will do most of the work for you. After that, be confident and learn to be charismatic, learn to be charming, learn to be a good communicator, and learn to connect with people emotionally. And then be consistent and keep your word. if you can do those things life works out content creation works out it's it's general it just works so that's what you would uh want to do how to use youtube advice a lot of people are cynical about youtube advice because a lot of it can be broad and repetitive that's part of why we do deep dives on this youtube channel with the workshops and with the five the analytics deep dive sessions that we were doing And with the Friday channel reviews, let us give specific advice to individual creators for individual niches and show the value of specific advice. So we do those channel reviews usually on Fridays, sponsored by friends over at oneof10.com. And what we do on Wednesdays is we do workshops where we go into specific details about aspects of YouTube and best practices, and we do these concentrated workshops. This one was a 12-week workshop. We're finishing up this week. Next week, we start a new six-week workshop focused on the business side of content creation in YouTube. Things like your LLC, your S-corp payroll, hiring freelancers, doing taxes, all the boring business stuff, right? So we do those type of things. Now, what I will tell you is that YouTube advice often gets a lot of unfair criticism in my opinion because you get out of it what you put into it and a lot of people complain about the advice but they don't take it or they don't take responsibility for their lack of understanding the advice. They will not ask questions. to get clarity and when they execute on advice badly or poorly they blame the advice instead of considering that they may have used the information wrong much like the fact that you can go to a school and if you go to public school there will be a students b students c students d students and f students and they all have the same teacher they all have the same textbook they all got the same lecture so why did they all get different results it wasn't the material It was how it was perceived. It was whether it was acted on. And it was whether they paid attention to it at all. And it was whether they executed it well. And it also has to do with what they did on their own time. That is not to say there are no bad teachers. That's not to say there are no bad YouTube educators. They're not to say there are no bad course sellers. But the majority of how you learn is your own responsibility. Now, what people can do to make that easier is they can think about the fact that there are multiple ways to learn. There are multiple learning styles. There are multiple learning aptitudes. There are multiple learning models. Now, one of the things we try to do is we have these podcast episodes with interviews with people for people who learn better by listening. And we do tutorials for people who need demonstrations and hands-on. We have the Creator Foundations course for people who learn at their own pace. We have Q&As for people to get feedback and answer questions. We have channel reviews for demonstration purposes and direct learning. There are seven learning models and we try to accommodate a lot of them. We even have graphs for people and data and charts and infographics for people who are visual spatial learners. People learn in a lot of different ways. I even write books for people who learn best through reading comprehension. And same thing with posting articles and data over on X and case studies. And one of the things I think about constantly is the different ways people learn. And some people also learn by interacting with others. That's one of the reasons we have the Awesome Creator Academy Pro group. And for people who can't afford that, we have a Discord server. The Creator Foundations Discord server along with the free Creator Foundations course. And why do I say all this? It's because a lot of people do not take responsibility for their poor execution of YouTube advice and the fact that they do not practice enough and the fact that they sometimes skip ahead or think they're too good to learn the foundations, fundamentals, and basics. There are basics that you need to learn. If you skip over the basics and you think you're too good for them, you can find yourself making mistakes later that could have been avoided. A lot of people, for example, don't think they need to watch the videos about What gets your videos or channel demonetized? I made videos that show you seven things that get your channel demonetized. You know when people watch them? When they get into trouble, not before. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So you might want to learn YouTube's policies of what will get your channel deleted from YouTube and banned or what will get you demonetized before it happens to you. That's an example of skipping the basics and thinking you're too good for the basics. That's the idea. A lot of people do not think that they need the basics and they're tired of hearing them and it's repetitive. A lot of people, as much as they've heard topic, title, thumbnail, and timing, they execute it very poorly. You can hear topic, title, thumbnail, and timing, then why are you still spending 20 hours to get a video out and getting it out a day late instead of being first? It would have been better to try to get that video out in two hours and be first or be early in the first wave than spend 20 hours trying to make it perfect and being late. Most YouTubers in the past have won by being early to a topic, early to a trend, early to a video, and that was the only reason they went viral. That was the only reason they stood out. That was the only reason they got attention. Being early and... imperfect is better than perfect than late and it's not even close but again some people think they're too good for topic title thumbnail and timing some people say yes i've heard it yes i've heard it okay why are the thumbnails still a one out of five thumbnail if you've heard it if you've taken all the youtube advice why are your thumbnails still using impossible to read fonts Why is your font layout still so bad? Why is your font color still so bad against the background color of your video and doesn't have proper contrast for readability and accessibility? Why is it that somebody who's colorblind can't see your thumbnail because it's too cluttered and it's garbage? Why is your thumbnail not accessible? If your thumbnail's not accessible, it's probably a bad thumbnail. If the thumbnail's hard to read, it's probably a bad thumbnail. It doesn't matter how hard you worked on it, it's probably still bad. And that's because you didn't learn the basics. You didn't learn the basics of typography. You didn't learn the basics of color theory. You didn't learn the basics of graphic design as it's applied to YouTube thumbnails because maybe you thought you were too good for that. Maybe you thought that, no, I edited this really well. It doesn't matter what the thumbnail looks like. And you would be wrong. That is the thing. You have people who swear up and down. They've watched 100 hours of YouTube advice. If they've watched 100 hours of YouTube advice, why do they still have bad thumbnails something so simple something so simple what's the point of watching 20 hours of thumbnail advice and thumbnail reviews if your thumbnails are still going to be bad if you're not going to work to improve them if you're not going to learn the basics of here are the six fonts you should use here are the color combinations that make sense oh here is why i don't put white text on a white background because people cannot read it So there are very simple things that people get wrong. Oh, I've watched so many videos about YouTube titles that I'm still not getting views. Then why do I go to your video and why is your video title at a 12th grade reading level when the average American has a third to fifth grade reading level? If you learn so much about YouTube advice. and you watched all the videos why is it you don't know that the average american has a third to fifth grade reading level and that you should have put your title back through chat gpt and had chat gpt simplify your video to where your title is at a third to fifth grade reading level if you watched all the youtube advice why do you still have a five second animated trailer at the beginning of your video and waste the viewer's time and have them clicking off the video? And why are you still losing 60% of your audience in the first 30 seconds of your video? Because your title and introducing yourself and talking about what you're passionate about instead of just getting into the bloody video. You see, most people say they watch YouTube advice videos, but they're watching to be validated. They're not watching to hear anything. They're watching to be motivated. They're watching to be validated. They're commenting and chatting to be validated in what they're doing. They are not actively listening. They're not actively taking notes. They're not actively asking questions specific to their content. And they are not getting feedback from peers. They're getting support from peers. They're getting people encouraging them, but they're not getting anyone to challenge them and tell them that maybe they should take a different approach to what they're doing. and why they should do that or what's not working or what's making their content less accessible to people. So that's what the problem really is with YouTube advice. The problem is not YouTube help channels. It never has been. And I'm not saying that all YouTube help channels are good channels, but I'm telling you that most of the fault does not lie with the material and what is being told and what is being taught. It is in the fact that people are not active listeners and they're not active learners and they're not active practitioners and they do not seek feedback and constructive criticism. If you're not getting constructive criticism and you're looking for some, you can join our free creator foundations discord server. If you're looking for structured information and making it convenient, you can buy my book, create something awesome, or you can join our free creator foundations course or both. And that might help you. with just having reference material and being able to look to something and to get some structured material that helps you in approach to content creation. You can also watch this free workshop series in its entirety and watch all 12 of these workshop presentations. And that's about roughly I think maybe 18 hours, 16, 18 hours of content you could be watching. And it would be a very good... free course for you essentially to get a better understanding of all of this at a deeper level but it doesn't help you if you do not put this into practice and that if you do not execute on it and if you do not seek feedback and criticism and if you don't expect that you will make some mistakes and learn from those mistakes a lot of you are too impatient to grow because what you really want is to be validated and that's the issue It's normal and it's human to want to be validated, but you want that more than you want to create great content. So you have to learn how to navigate a bit of humility with trying to put the audience first and accepting that you may not have done the work to attract your tribe yet and that you still have a lot of room for improvement. Everyone does, even me. How did I get to 100,000 subscribers? Well, I'm at 600,000 now. How did I get to 100,000 subscribers? I made 800 videos like a lunatic. Bottom line, most of you, you're not gonna be Mark Rober. You weren't an engineer at NASA. You can't leverage that social proof or that skillset to make less than 100 videos and get a million subscribers, 10 million subscribers. You're not Mark Rober. Even Mr. Beast wasn't Mark Rober. Mr. Beast had to make 460 videos to get 10,000 subscribers. Mr. Beast and I started making content around a similar time, and I got a silver play button faster than he did. He got it a couple of months later in that same July of 2016, by the way. And now he's much bigger than me. But the point is, if you measured our careers, at a certain point, if he quit, I would have won because he quit. Mr. Beast never quit. He never gave up. That's why he's the greatest winner in YouTube of all time. Just a lesson in that. It's not a humble brag on my part. is to illustrate a point that you have to keep going. You have to keep iterating. And in his case, he just kept taking more and more risk. I am a risk-adverse person. I am not a 27-year-old. I am a 41-year-old come June. I am risk-adverse. So the more risky your YouTube channel is, the higher its potential, both for success and failure. I'm more middle of the road than that. Comes with the territory. The older you get, the more risk adverse you become, typically anyway. So I made 800 videos to get to 100,000 subscribers. I exploited evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that has a long shelf life. It can live forever or at least live for one to three years without being too outdated. And so I exploited that. I abused that. All I made was evergreen content. And if I had something that became outdated in a year, I made a new version of it. And I kept doing that over and over and over again. And a lot of those videos given time, they wouldn't get video views right away. I used the snowball method. So I abused the hell out of the snowball method. of YouTube. The snowball method is videos that get slow and steady views. The avalanche method of YouTube is and I'll make a video about this at some point. The snowball method of YouTube is videos that get slow and steady views. The avalanche method of YouTube is videos that blow up fast and get all their views up front and then kind of die off in a blaze of glory, so to speak. So an example. of this slow and steady avalanche of views. Sorry, not avalanche, sorry. Slow and steady snowball of views is a video here that I'll show you on screen. So this video is a video I published in 2022 that's still crushing it today and has over 300,000 views. It's steadily gaining views. In fact, yesterday it got 1,400 views yesterday. So it got 1,400 views yesterday. And so this video initially at launch didn't necessarily do great. This is impressions. Let's go. Sorry. 1400 impressions, sorry, not 1400 views. It got 600 views yesterday, almost 700 views, excuse me. So the first day of this video launching, it got 1400 views its first day of launching. Oh my God, how embarrassing for a 600,000 subscriber channel. So... It did 1,400 views its first day, then it slowly trickled down to 100, 70, 12, 18, dozens of views a day if it's lucky, a dozen views a day if it's lucky, and then wait for it. Snowball gains speed, snowball gains speed, snowball gains speed, momentum, 200 views a day, 200 views a day, 100 views a day, 300 views a day, snowballs to, and it keeps picking up and gaining momentum and speed, and that snowball keeps going and going and going. and gaining momentum, and now it's a juggernaut of a video. And given time, let it cook. Let it cook. 325,000 views. If I got embarrassed by the fact that this video did not initially do well at launch, which it did not, its first 24 hours were abysmal. Look at its first 24 hours. That is abysmal. It's not good. It's not good. But given time to cook, it did all right. 300,000 views. So my strategy in YouTube throughout my entire career has been to abuse the snowball method of evergreen content that can keep getting views indefinitely. Indefinitely. So that has been how I've done it. So there are other examples of this in terms of videos usually revolving around Adobe Premiere Pro, typically. So an example of that, this video, I can't show the first 24 hours because this is such an older video. This is one of the older videos on the channel. Lifetime views on this is gonna be about 700,000 views. In fact, YouTube's struggling to get the data right now. So this video, again, is the type of video that did not do well at launch. Less than 1,000 views at launch. But again, slow and steady wins the race, my friends. So that snowball, that snowball effect, and again, eventually the video petered off after a few years. The video petered off. I have made an updated version of this video that currently is not doing the best. But for example, this video right now, this video right now is not doing the best. However, my belief, so this video right here, this is a new version of this, how to add background music. And again, Slow, like struggle bus views, but we've seen this before and oh, it's starting to, it's starting to pick up. So we've seen a video like this do struggle bus views before. Here's another example. This video is on its way to 30,000 views. Starts out, oh my God. This is impressions, sorry, views. Another thousand views at launch, okay. Struggle bus, struggle bus, struggle bus. Still going strong and keeps picking up. So again, I abuse what I refer to as the snowball method. I abuse slow and steady consistent views over long stretches of time. Again, usually these one, two, and three year stretches. So I abuse the snowball method. Whereas viral content creators abuse the avalanche method. They get all their views up front in this big avalanche, and then when it's done, it's over, the ground settles, and the video is dead. I have this snowball that builds up momentum and becomes an unstoppable juggernaut as the snowball comes down the hill. So that's the way that I approach it. So that's a methodology that I use, and that's helped me. uh over the years to grow i focus on simple to create formats i focus on videos that let me get out formats fast and consistent so i can be early on videos i need to be early on the uh fast i don't have to do the most editing sometimes i don't have to be over the top even if i want to do the most editing i try to still make that as efficient as possible i try to cap even and again i have videos with hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of views some are very edited some are not very edited so i um you know do that uh consistent uploads within my pillars uh the the more i stick to my core pillars at any given time the better that i do and so i try to be consistent at that focus on community and engagement doing live streams has helped me build a solid community and it's helped grow the channel make success make revenue um it's been very good to me When I was growing to 100,000 subscribers, I replied to every single comment until it became unsustainable. But until about 100, 150,000 subscribers, I replied to every single YouTube comment on every single video. And that's how I did it until it was unsustainable. So those are the things that allowed me to grow. Thank you guys for tuning into this presentation. We're going to do a little bit of Q&A before we wrap up for tonight. We're not going to go too much longer. Even with that Q&A, just to make sure that my voice gets some rest. But we want to invite you to join us in Awesome Creator Academy and make sure that you have the opportunity to learn more about that. We do two private live office hour sessions where we get together on our group video calls twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Awesome Creator Academy pro group members get access to all. of our resources including all of our digital downloads all of our email swipe files for reaching out to brands our uh youtube starter kit our brand deal starter kit with our uh media kits for reaching out to brands as well and also you get access to all of our uh workshops all of our online courses everything that we do past present future if you become a full Awesome Creator Academy pro group member. You can find out more about that at www.awesomecreatoracademy.com slash join, and you will find out more about that. We also have the VIP program that includes quarterly coaching calls for direct mentoring, and so that is something available to you. I also offer one-on-one coaching, and I do offer both channel reviews, private channel reviews where I can get on a call with you one-on-one. or recorded channel reviews where i'll do a 15 minute recorded review of your channel we have a couple of those in the queue now so i'm clearing the queue but we do offer those things so go to awesome creator academy to find out more so now without further ado we will go to our q a and we'll also put the chat up on the screen here so we'll turn that on So let's see. That's solo. And that is presentation mode. All right. So that should be chat mode. So hopefully, eventually, chats will show up on the screen here on the sidebar. This is a new thing that StreamYard is doing to where you can have your chats show up. So there's Katie. So Katie says we have two super chats. All right. So let's get to them. We have Dex, not Dexter. So is there any benefit to starting a fresh channel for AI now that I'm gaining traction since my current one had mixed content like layoffs and tech? If you mean, is there a benefit to doing a fresh tech channel that's just tech and tutorials? um sorry um ai and tutorials uh probably there might be and if you can get to monetize youtube channels in a growing niche like this then yeah that'd probably be great for you so um no i don't hate this idea at all to be honest with you so um i'm good with it um yeah i don't see a downside for that KratonTV499SuperChat says, hey, Roberto, what's your opinion on making custom thumbnails for shorts? Should that be left for long form content only? Thanks. God bless. So I love this question. I think it depends. on what your goals are for the youtube shorts and also how you're packaging them youtube shorts can appear on the youtube channel home page they can appear in a lot of different places in youtube and so if you like the idea of the custom thumbnails from a branding or attention grabbing standpoint and you can make them more clickable that can help you uh so i don't see a problem with it as long as it's not taking up too much of your time um i don't see a problem with it especially if you like showing your youtube shorts on your home page then and you also see it show up in youtube's home page then yeah i don't see a problem with doing uh branded thumbnails at all yep and so we have a couple of questions here in the form uh that i didn't get to earlier so lewis houdini says uh hey roberto i'm new how often should i post currently i'm at 866 subs um twice a week post uh twice a week is fine two to three times a week is optimal for growth but when you're new my big thing about is not audience growth and i don't think new creators in their first year and their first 100 videos should be focused on growing their audience. I know people get excited to do that. I think you should be focused on learning to get better and learning to make really good content and saying, oh, I feel like my thumbnails are a four out of five or a five out of five in thumbnails. They look good. They're some of the best looking thumbnails in my niche. I think you should be focusing on that your first year as a content creator. I think you should be focusing on, wow, I really got some titles and I figured out how to get, you know, a thousand, 5,000. views on these videos with these titles i learned to get more views than i even have subscribers on these videos my titles are getting coming along i feel like i'm becoming a better headline writer you should be thinking about that you should be thinking hmm i feel really good about my confidence on camera i don't make as many mistakes and have to edit them out i don't stutter as much I don't get as nervous. I think you should be focused on becoming a better speaker, being better on camera, getting your comedic timing, your charisma, and being like, okay, yeah. That's why I think people should be focused on their first year. I think you should be like, wow, it used to take me 10 hours to edit a video. Now it only takes me four hours to edit a video because I actually learned my software and I know how to use it. We did a whole workshop about video editing. And we actually did a live video editing demonstration. And you can use this for different video editing software. We focused on just techniques and things you could use in almost any software to just become a faster, more efficient editor and have a workflow for editing. So it's like I'd be focused on those things. So posting cadence, in my opinion, is good just because it's reps. It's like I think that posting to YouTube two to three times a week is the same way I feel about going to the gym. or working out two to three times a week. Get them gains. The real gains are your personal growth, not the attention. A lot of people, they're focused on gaining attention. I want you to get personal gains. So that's what I think you should be looking at. Hill Country Husker says, how important are keywords these days? Keywords in your titles, and by keywords, I mean trigger words that your audience will respond to. We did an actual entire workshop about titles. And about that, we did another one around optimization. And like I said, titles are what matter. And they give you impressions. Thumbnails get and drive a lot of the clicks. Title and thumbnail combinations drive the clicks. Your title and the topic classification for your title determines your initial impressions. So your initial impressions and reach are on your topic, your title, and the timing. Because your initial impressions are based on how many people recently watched similar videos to the video that you're making right now. And YouTube only knows that based initially on the title and how the title classifies the topic. And it also verifies that by studying your transcript. So it's your topic, your title, the timing, your transcript youtube also reads your time stamps why do we know this because your time stamps even show up in youtube search and they show up in google search so we know we don't have to guess the youtube algorithm we don't have to guess the o2 algorithm we know you know why we know we know about the topic because if you go to the youtube homepage right now there are these teeny tiny bubbles at the top of youtube that tell you what a topic is And then if you click on those bubbles, you'll see all the videos that YouTube classified as being that topic. So we know that YouTube uses titles and transcripts and timestamps for topic classifiers. I mean, the topic classification matters because why would YouTube have those word bubbles and group videos if it didn't know? what those videos were about and how can it know what the videos are about youtube and its ai can only know the video what the video is about by checking your title checking your time stamps and verifying your transcript of what you actually said in the video matches that that's the only way it can know that that's logical so we have a logical reason to know that that's what the youtube algorithm does and so that also determines the initial impressions so we know that Because what else could do it as far as initial impressions? Performance later impacts impressions. And we know that your initial period is usually around the first 48, 72 hours. And we know that because we even looked at the launch history of all of my videos. And we look at that seven-day window and we can see, okay, here is the initial maturation period in the first 48, 72 hours. So we can see that. You know why else we know that? YouTube's own real-time analytics in your smartphone or your desktop if you go to YouTube Analytics. YouTube Analytics, real-time analytics, measures the current 48 hours, the current running 48 hours. So we know that that period of time, it's not that your video has to do its biggest views in that period of time. We just know that that's the window of sensitivity to where if you want to make adjustments to your title, if you want to make adjustments to your thumbnail, that's the time to do it. That first 48 hours. We know that because YouTube measures it. So what YouTube displays and what YouTube measures tells us what the algorithm is. So we know that. So we know that from a timing standpoint that that matters. We also can make the assumption that the viewing pattern of our viewers in last 48 hours matters. because of that the other thing we can look at is youtube looks at the viewing pattern of our audience and what they watched in the last seven days why do we know that because in the audience tab of youtube analytics it says here is what viewers watched in terms of other videos in the last seven days so we know that that matters and that youtube's algorithm makes recommendations based on that for people's home page and suggested so we know that for a fact Other channels that your audience watched in the last, other things that YouTube's analytics says is here's the other channels your YouTuber, sorry, viewers watched on YouTube in the last 30 days. So we know that the 30-day watch history matters. We know that the seven-day watch history matters. And we know that the 48-hour watch history matters. And we know the previous last hour. Watch History Matters for relevancy of recommendations to a viewer because we know that because YouTube measures it and tracks it and puts in our analytics. Whatever YouTube measures is what matters. If something matters, then something is measured. so we know that the youtube home page display tells us that topics matter because it puts them in bubbles at the top of youtube and you can organize and see bubbles of what's recommended to you based on what um you are likely to watch and what youtube thinks you care about so if i go to my youtube home page um if i click on home it is going to give me uh the force because i watch star wars it's going to give me naruto because of anime it's going to be podcast and it's going to be dragon ball z science fiction comic books lo-fi presentations and so yeah those are the word bubbles that exist in my youtube uh home page because it's telling you here's the content that roberto would watch so it knows me extremely well So that's what it's categorizing. So that's what my personal YouTube algorithm as a viewer actually is. So that would be important. And we will get to some of the other questions you guys have here in the chat. I'm just giving somewhat of a lecture here so that we all have the information because I just think it's really important to know. So those would be things that... are important so the most important thing is obviously your title your transcript and your time stamps and your title and your transcript and time stamps also inform youtube of what topics you can be classified for and obviously the timing and relevancy of those things would matter whether you're trying to be relevant and timely right now up front or evergreen and everlasting for the future so um those things would all matter and we know it because youtube measures those things it displays those things those things show up in google search um when we search for things we can see them by time stamp and so on so forth so again what's displayed matters and what's measured matters um so we have a question from sarah don question i've got youtube short where i want to change the thumbnail i know how i've done it before but no longer have the option it seems to be a known bug any info would be helpful uh you got to reach out to team youtube about that if it's a known bug um nothing i can do on my end um hill country huskers question can you expound on content pillars we already did we did a whole section on that uh so reference that in the replay Hill Country Huskers ask, how important or influential are shorts that are created from long-form content to driving more views to the long-form content? They matter for podcasts and interviews and not much else. They matter for podcasts and interviews and much else. They're not going to help most content formats outside of that to try to pull people that way. Shorts viewers usually have a preference and bias for shorts content, and they don't code switch from watching short form to long form without a reason. The main reason would be here's an interview. Oh, I want to watch a clip. Oh, this is a clip from an interview. I want to see the full interview. Oh, this is a debate. I want to watch the full debate. Oh, this is a podcast. I want to watch the full podcast. So usually most people do not move from short form to long form. There's a reason for it. They are watching short form because they want to scroll right then. It's a low agency act, so they don't want to transition to high agency content. Let's see. Love Wisdom 2 says, hey, Roberto, I have a Sleep Sounds channel, not this channel, and it's a very competitive niche. I've heard YouTube isn't monetizing these channels from someone. Do you know about this? Any ideas how to stand out? I have not heard that rumor, but rumors like that fly around all the time. There are plenty of people who monetize those channels. I've known people to monetize those channels as I know a lot of faceless creators. How to stand out is going to be per usual. It's going to be aesthetics. It's going to be branding. It's going to be visual. We are visual creatures. It's going to be at a glance. So if people are doing something. If the normal or the norm in your niche is something, you need to deviate from that in a way that makes sense, that visually contrasts with that. But it also has to visually contrast with even people not searching for that content. It'd have to visually contrast in their feed scrolling through YouTube. So you will have to find a unique aesthetic style. It's branding. Branding is how you stand out. If you're not a good graphic designer. that's a skill you need. Or if you're not a good illustrator, that's a skill you need. Or you have to get very good at AI prompting or you have to hire a thumbnail artist. But it's going to be that we are visual creatures. It'd be the same thing if you had a sleep product and everybody else's pill jar is green. If your pill jar was purple, you would stand out on the aisle. So if you guys are worried, how do I stand out? Think about how you stand out on a grocery aisle or a shopping shelf or, again, if someone was scrolling in Amazon looking for a product. It's visual. You stand out through aesthetics and branding. The Thinker's Bible. Question, Roberto, how long would you let a video flatline before removing it or would you keep it posted no matter what? If I remove a video, I remove my algorithmic connection to anyone who did watch that video. So here's the thing. Stop being embarrassed by underperforming videos. I've had to live with them. Stop being embarrassed by underperforming videos. No one remembers or cares that your videos flopped except for goons in Reddit. Goons in Reddit and haters who want to dig it up, throw it in your face are the only people that remember your videos flopped. If a video flopped, nobody saw it. Nobody cares. No one remembers how many shots Michael Jordan missed. And then one would care because he's a champion. So, and he's rich. So it doesn't matter. It's your own ego and insecurity that, and I'm saying this to everybody, including like myself, it's your own ego and insecurity that makes you think that anybody cares that a video didn't perform. And everyone who watched that video and enjoyed that video and gave it a chance matters more than everyone who didn't give it a chance. So unless you feel you made a mistake, A video being up isn't helpful to anybody or productive unless there is a legitimate reason that is negative or harmful to the audience. You don't remove the video. The only other justification for removing an underperforming video is if you feel it is drastically dragging you down in a brand negotiation. That would be the only real reason. Josiah Rises with a $20 super chat or super sticker there. Thank you, man. Appreciate you. thanks for the support man terry w says question roberto what are some easy options that won't break the bank to go live with a circle pick in a screen share for educational content i think that they may help create personality which arrow um personality rich irl videos like you say um for live streaming with a circle pick screen share for educational content um i'll be honest with you terry i think for educational content you should take the approach that i'm taking i think if you're going to do educational content you should do screen sharing presentations and i don't think you need a circle and you can do it with stream yard to be honest you can do it with stream yard we have a link for it in the description that the mods can get you a link for it for stream yard um but stream yard probably be your best overall option for simplicity's sake budget and presentation you can do a circle with a presentation in um or square you can do a circle square in a presentation but i don't really feel like that is the big thing or what anyone cares about or that makes it um special in any way What I think actually is important and the reason I do my presentations my way is I just switch back and forth between a face cam and a full screen presentation so that people can be immersed in the presentation. So that's something that I think is actually important and would actually be helpful because you'd have the ability to put slides up like I do and navigate them and display them well. And the thing is, you can do this and you can have yourself on screen. If you organize and design it right, you can even have the chat on screen. You can do all of those things. So that's an option for you. Yeah. So again, it's just something to think about. I think just taking similar approach, if you want to do live streaming and be interactive, maybe the approach I'm using is probably an answer for that. Let's see. Hill Country Huskers. How important is the last 90 days, Roberto? I tend to watch that because I think that gives me a longer view of how a video is performing. I do like using the 90-day view of analytics personally. I think it's a more realistic view. Measure things in quarter like a business does. So I think that that can be incredibly helpful. But in terms of immediacy and importance, recency, theoretically matters now for a long tail absolutely but again don't overthink these time frames don't overthink them and don't let them make you neurotic yeah uh doug stylistic circle is just an aesthetic choice agree and again a lot of marketers just have it it doesn't um matter too much Exploring Canada. Thank you. Thank you, Roberto, for all you do. I never miss an upload or live stream from you. My channel is doing well. Here is wishing you even more success. Just know you're an important leader in this space. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, Exploring Canada. Yep. So, yeah, I think that's it for the questions. I think we got all of them, if not most of them. We got our super chats. Appreciate you guys. Just remember, I'm going to be speaking at VidCon. uh june 21st which is my birthday i'm also going to be moderating a panel about short form uh content strategy on the uh 19th i believe as well and so i'll be on la during uh that week um and then after that i'll probably uh come back home real quick and then i will um before i have another speaking engagement take a uh quick mini trip to new york So I'll be doing those things and having some adventures. I'll come back before 4th of July. And so, yeah. Thank you, everybody, for joining the workshop. Again, this is week 12 with us wrapping up our 12 weeks for YouTube beginners. So we have a couple of things going on for this one. After the stream is over, I'm going to try to make sure that the link for the downloads for this week is working and available for you. Hopefully, I'll have it in the morning if I don't finish it tonight. I might decide to go to bed on time. So if nothing else, I'll finish it and get out to you in the morning. The slides are already done. They just need to be uploaded and linked properly for you. So we'll add that to the description for the replay. The replay of this stream will be available on YouTube in my live tab on YouTube. So whether you're watching on Facebook, LinkedIn, we have across all the platforms, 341 people watching right now. LinkedIn, Facebook, kick.com, twitch.com, x.com, YouTube. So we have six platforms via StreamYard. that we're streaming to with 341 people watching live across all of them um we definitely appreciate you all we're going to make sure that the stream is up for you on youtube uh permanently there if you go to my home page we have a playlist for the workshop series for this 12-week series eventually we're actually gonna um chop this up edit out the Q&A's and these will be live. The Q&A's will be live. But we're going to do an edited version of this where we combine all 12 episodes of the workshop minus the Q&A and minus any super repetitive stuff from the intros. And what we will do is we'll package that up for you. Eventually, we will create an enhanced version. of the pdf slides where we will um do a combined version that will also have some slides i haven't made yet that i took notes on that oh i want to make a slide for this i want to make a slide for that like the one about content pillars where i visually display a demonstration of content pillars so we're going to do that eventually in about maybe two months we'll have a fully edited um video on youtube for free that'll be like some enormous 16 hour long course video that we will put up for you guys that just has all this and we'll have some absurd timestamps for it we'll figure that all out and what we will do is we will also have the ultimate youtube creator playbook and it'll probably be combining all these pdfs trimming the fat some places and putting some more custom slides in there and that'll end up being something that grows the email list and that will be Probably a close to 200-page slide deck, and it'll be the ultimate YouTube creator playbook, as we said. So that's the goal for that one. And what else do we have going on? Next week, we'll begin our six-week workshop series. We have a six-week series planned, and that will be on the business side of YouTube. You don't want to miss that. After that, we will be having a dedicated series. on content strategy from our friends over at oneof10.com we'll uh we'll be putting together um a probably four or six weeks i think it might be six on content strategy so we'll have another six week workshop then we'll have another set of workshops after that so um that's going to be the current uh plan going forward friday as long as my voice holds out we will be having another set a friday channel reviews brought to you by our friends over at oneof10.com use code roberto at checkout and they will give you 20 off i believe that's a 20 off for the lifetime of account sorry to all the early birds that missed when we had a 50 discount yep so those are some of our announcements uh also don't forget to check out my book uh create something awesome the mods are linked in that in the chat i believe it's also linked in the description you also can pre-order my new book the creator economy How to Become a Full-Time Content Creator and Turn Your Passion into Profit. That will be releasing later this year. About 40,000 words into the book. I need to give a link to the mods to actually see my Word document for that book to get feedback from the mods and also make sure all of you are pre-ordering that mod. You gotta jump on the pre-order. um but the uh the that book is coming out later this year probably closer to when i'm at vid summit um if not then then when i'm at um kajabi heroes live later in this year um in la so i i have the second book coming out that this book is going to be thicker than ever it's going to be about one and a half times a bigger book than the current book i've already written almost as much for this book as i did for the first book already and i still feel like i'm only two-thirds of the way done uh so i think this is going to end up being instead of being a 44 000 word book this one will be closer to a 65 to 70 000 word book it will be a meaty tome it may in theory from a word count perspective it might end up being the um largest book on the creator economy by the time i'm done with it So we're still a couple months out with it. I've been banging at pages for that. In the future, I've been debating this, whether I do it on this channel. I might do it on one of my other channels, or maybe I end up just doing it on every other... No, I'll make sure I back it up on one of the YouTube channels. So probably on my Roberto Blake highlights channel, and then streaming to all my streaming platforms, I will probably actually just start streaming. some write with me sessions where you all literally just what i also want people to see that i did not write my book with ai um i did have i do have ai edit my book for errors and omissions and grammar and structure but i write my book by hand just like i wrote the first book before chat i'm so glad i wrote this first book before chat gpt was the thing so no one could accuse me of writing it but chat gpt but um what i'll probably do is when i'm getting closer to um 45 000 words or so um i will probably start doing some morning write with me sessions and i'll just start you know banging out uh chapters and stuff like that in the book um live in the mornings and evenings and stuff like that. And I'll probably just stream it on my highlights channel and on X, which kick LinkedIn and Facebook. And then there'll be like kind of an archive of just proving that I've been writing my book the whole time, you know, proof of human. So I think that's going to be a thing. i think in general from now on when i write books that's probably how i do it i'll probably even do it early on is like when i write the third book i'll probably literally live stream almost the entire writing of the third book if i'm being honest with you so uh it's that it's that kind of thing i also think it'll excite more people for the book to like literally be part of the process and seeing me right and just seeing me you know type away and what it'll probably look like is i'll probably just screen share in one part or i might even do um there's a version of my stuff where it's like there's a half and half screen that I have a layout for for screen sharing. So I'll probably just do that where it's half the screen is watching me and, you know, just watching me write. And the other half will probably just be seeing the actual screen and just seeing that I am writing and that I am typing and that the book is getting done. So it's that sort of thing. that I've been thinking about. So that's just some of the housekeeping. Again, this is the kind of stuff that will get trimmed in that video compilation of all of the stuff. I'll probably also film chapter transitions for each chapter in the big mega upload compilation of the workshops. So that's one of the things that also have it take a little bit longer. But yeah. Look forward to it. Those are the things coming up. So my speaking schedule is VidCon, most likely VidSummit, Kajabi Heroes Live. That's all the speaking I currently have on deck for the rest of the year. Maybe some more speaking will come up. I'll try to line up some early speaking gigs for next year that I think will be good. There may be something with PodFest might be doing something with VidFest here in Atlanta. If they are, I'll probably speak at that. So we will see what happens there. We will see if I do anything locally. I think that DragonCon conflicts with VidCon, so I probably won't do anything with DragonCon. So we have those things. So that's what's coming up. Make sure you guys check out the Discord server. Make sure you check out the free Creator Foundations course. Remember, it is a free pay-what-you-want, pay-what-you-can course. You can choose to pay $0 and get it completely free, or if I've ever given you any value, you can do a $2, $5, $10 donation, whatever you want. So it's a pay what you want, pay what you can style course. That's how we decided to do it. You'll get a lot of materials with that. Actually, recently with that, we also upgraded the creator monetization matrix where we actually gave you the requirements for every creator platform, how to get monetized. We also did a spreadsheet where we have all of the monetization. offers that each platform has in a grid and we also what else did we cover in there yeah i think those are the main things so we uh we did that so now you'll have one place and it's in the creator foundations course you'll see that you have one place where you're like oh here is all the monetization requirements for every platform here's all the monetization offers that every platform has in terms of features so we have uh stuff like that coming up uh that's already in the creator foundations course so that's an update we did to that course we are still adding things to that course we're adding a six weeks how to like just do this for the first six weeks if you're lost we have something with that coming up A lot of different additions to that course. Working on that free course is why the brand deals course that I was supposed to launch is delayed right now because we've just been doing so much for the free course that I haven't launched my paid course yet. But we're working on it. So those are all the things. We will catch you guys later. We will have a Friday. channel review session as long as i have a voice on friday we will have channel reviews on friday so stay awesome we'll catch you on the next one we're going to close out and you're going to learn more about awesome creator academy and how you can join the pro group today 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 a hundred thousand 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 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. 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

YouTube Workshop - Content Strategy for Creators Under 20,000 Subscribers. This Workshop is meant to help Small YouTubers and New YouTubers who are struggling to grow on YouTube.

WEEK 12 SLIDE DECK PRESENTATION 
https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/week12

Get 200+ ChatGPT Creator Prompts - https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/creatorprompts

Get Over 100+ YouTube Photoshop Templates and more w/ The YouTube Starter Kit - https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/starterkit
Use Discount Code 20OFF to save $20 at checkout

Join the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group - https://www.awesomecreatoracademy.com/join


🚨10 BEST TOOLS FOR CREATORS🚨

💡  Best YouTube IDEATION Tool (1of10) https://geni.us/get1of10com
🚀  YouTube Optimization  (CreativeFuel ) https://geni.us/get_creativefuel  
🎵  Music (Epidemic Sound) - https://robertoblake.com/go/epidemicsound
🎬  Repurposing & Clipping (OpusClip)  https://geni.us/getopusclip
🔴 24/7Live Streaming App (Gyre) - https://geni.us/getgyre_now
🎤 Podpage Simple Podcast Site Builder https://geni.us/getpodpage
👕  Make and Sell Merch (Spreadshop) https://geni.us/getspreadshop
💰  GeniusLink Link Shortener https://geni.us/get_geniuslink
🎨  Hire Freelancers and Artists (Fiverr) - https://geni.us/getfiverr
📚  Learn New Skills (Skillshare) - https://geni.us/getskillshare


Want to create live streams like this? Check out StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5653080527863808