LIVE CHANNEL REVIEWS - & REALISTIC Advice for Small Channels

And we are live. Hey, everybody. This is Roberto Blake. Hope you create something awesome today. Welcome back to another set of channel reviews. It is a Friday the 13th, interestingly enough. So what we're going to do here is we're going to do some YouTube channel reviews. We're probably not going to do 10 of them tonight. We're probably going to do maybe five of them tonight. I'm not really feeling great tonight, but I promised you guys the channel reviews. I want to try and do that. you know feeling just a little bit under the weather um don't know what it is but you know we'll power through we'll do maybe five youtube channel reviews and of course the rules are in the description on the youtube channel as per usual and until we have our reviews uh ready and raring to go what i'll be doing is i will be I'm walking you through some YouTube analytics and giving advice to small channels. I'm one of the only channels that shows you my actual lifetime income and stats from YouTube analytics. I was actually one of the first people to do that, I think, back as far as 2015 even. And that's something we try to do here. If you're not familiar with me and my content, I'm Roberto Blake. I've been a content creator for over a decade. I did tech and tutorials, mostly laptop and camera review stuff. I was teaching people photography, video editing, video production, graphic design, doing camera and drone reviews and budget laptop reviews back in the day. Grew myself to 100,000 subscribers before I really started bothering to try to tell anyone how they could grow. on youtube back then there was a point where i went daily for like three years So I grew from 20,000 to 100,000 subscribers in year three of taking YouTube seriously with weekly uploads. And then I just went hard, went daily in 2015. So from February of 2015 to about May of 2016, about 14 months, I grew from 20,000 to 100,000 subscribers. Then when I kept the daily upload schedule going, I kept that going for like three years. I do not recommend it. It is not healthy for most people to do that. So unless you build a team around yourself, probably not a good idea to do that. Unless you have a very, very simple format, you do a daily show, you do a daily live podcast, you do simple, not necessarily easy, but simple to produce. commentary maybe like um an anton daniels it's still very hard work but it won't grind you down the way that editing videos and for to get out every day would probably grind you down a lot more especially if editing is not your thing so uh yeah i just personally for most people it will grow you in most cases when you get to a decent level and you figured out 10 000 20 000 subscribers if someone figures out 10 000 20 000 subscribers and they figured out how to maintain consistency with a two to three upload a week schedule if that person triples down and goes daily they do tend to grow I can't swear how fast you will grow, but it tends to compound almost exponentially. If you already have that audience, the audience grows. If you respond to every single comment, that's someone who could maybe not in a year like I did, but in two to three, they could get a hundred subscribers a day. They could in two to three years, get a hundred thousand subscribers and a silver play button if they do that. So I can tell you that in many niches, um, that as long as you could maintain the acceptable quality for your niche and then do that kind of output without a loss in quality kind of like how you know soap operas they're a monday through friday daily show news and commentary that's like a daily show usually monday through friday or seven days a week those things don't have to keep chasing quality and spectacle in the way that mr beast does or some entertainment channels do sketch comedy Doesn't have to be highly produced. Look at Caleb City. Caleb City's videos, very low production, but very great at the storytelling. And they're not very long. And he just cranks them out, cranks them out. The quantity doesn't hurt him. So like a lot of people are very, very over the top when it comes to the idea of quality. And I get where people are coming from, but people overplay the quality. and the editing like editing is overrated in youtube you will find some of the least edited content even some of the biggest creators don't do the editing all the way over the top you know but if you can get other things to a high standard of quality your script writing your packaging title topic thumbnail timing you can do those things and if you can get the audio the video the lighting quality good that's just tech that's just tech if you get the production good the quantity consistent and the baseline of quality is acceptable and the performance on camera is good then yeah if you do uh quantity it usually works uh that happens for most people who do it if they've already not people starting at zero who don't know what a good video is but if people have gotten 10 20 000 subscribers their pathway to a silver play button could be just going Monday to Friday or going seven days a week with long form content or doing a lot of short form. If you've grown an audience and you know what people like, that's also been proven to work. I know this because I have data from hundreds upon hundreds of channels. I've coached personally over 700 YouTubers now, I think. Yeah, and then just this last two years, I've coached 100 gaming YouTubers, mostly mobile gamers, with a partnership that I do with Supercell and AMG. So a lot of people who play Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Brawl Stars, things like that. So I've looked at the data from hundreds of channels. We've done shorts, live streams. We've done every format. I've coached a channel. to a silver play button in each of YouTube's 15 categories. That's not to say every single one of the 185 niches that we're looking at, but the 15 categories that YouTube has that they categorize, you know, in your little dropdown menu, we've looked at that. I've helped grow a channel to a silver play button in every one of those. And I've definitely by now helped directly in coaching coach multiple gold play button channels, whether it was growing them to a gold play button or helping a channel that already had a gold. play button usually with that ones it's refining something on the business the brand deal side we're launching a new workshop I believe next week which will focus on the business side of YouTube brand deals making money all that stuff so you know we've got a lot of interesting things that we do here but we do have a request for a channel review from Courtney Denise thank you for the $20 super chat so she has a commentary channel something about toxic moms that sounds like it could be interesting it sounds like the um you know like you ever uh those reality tv shows that they do on the uh tlc what used to be called the learning channel um you know how you have those like manager moms or you have uh momsters as in monsters and their moms like those momagers like you know that wrangle their kids career and become um More obsessed with it than the kid is like maybe it's something like that I guess we're gonna find out together what her channel is all about So we're gonna plug that in and that's gonna be our first review tonight Should be interesting and you guys will get to see how we handle the reviews So we have Courtney Denise short funny educational gossip interesting so this banner actually is doing a couple of things really well design wise i always try to help you guys with the channel banners it's actually more important than you might think so one thing it does well is it is visibly easy to read right off the bat it does tell you what you can expect one thing i would like to see more of you do in your banners is if you have an upload schedule i'd love for you to um just post in the banner somehow some way get the upload schedule in there say oh videos once a week videos every day whatever your schedule is um just so that you could set expectations and a first impression but visually this is very good uh recommendation for the profile picture here would be to maybe use some of this pink branding in the profile picture as well The hey cousins line doesn't do anything when you first see it here. I would go with something that once again explains what the channel is about when they hover over it or even throw your schedule in there in that first line or something like that. So maybe you use this first line instead of the hey cousins because it doesn't do anything at a glance when people come to your channel to just see hey cousins you could use that opportunity to help set expectations and make that first uh impression for the channel so i would uh do that maybe even tell people that their favorite uh stories um from reddit so in terms of the channel layout you um You have a thin channel layout here. You have videos. There's the recommendations. There's the shorts. And then there's the past live streams and then created playlist. If you're going to have created a playlist, I would maybe put some of them here in the channel using the customization feature, maybe two or three more of them that would fill this out a little bit. Let's see. You've got. 97 videos uh some of them are short so not bad how many long forms do you have um not that many and it looks like you've changed video niches from vlogging you went from vlogging to this commentary stuff so that looks like a pivot that you made um so you made a pivot so really we can only go off of maybe the last three months and in the last three months the videos haven't been super consistent but you're getting more consistent now so that's good and you're getting some views so what I would do Courtney is there's a youtuber you should study and you could improve your thumbnails dramatically by studying this YouTube actually there's a couple of youtubers you could study we've got great teen news here in the chat you can study her channel for some visuals and some branding since she does things similar to you there's a gentleman named anton daniels you may or may not be familiar with him but he's been blowing up and popping off here for a while his uh content is growing um the thumbnail style that he uses for commentary does very very well um i would say that maybe borrowing some elements from that could do well for you there's another channel a gentleman does that's a little similar to your content in a way. It's called Poor Man's Podcast, but he's the male-centric equivalent of some of what you're doing. So you could borrow from him. You can borrow from Anton Daniels. You can borrow from Grape Tea News. There's another one I think called The Spill or Tea Spill. So visuals-wise, with the commentary, visuals-wise, You should look at that because your thumbnails are not necessarily where you would want them to be to maximize views yet. But you're showing some level of skill. The other thing is for these commentary videos, you don't have to put yourself in the thumbnail. And a lot of times... it's not useful or particularly helpful to put yourself in the thumbnail when it comes to commentary videos when it comes to commentary videos you want to focus on the subject themselves in the thumbnail um to give you an example of one of the youtubers uh youtube's most famous commentators is more pegasus so if we look at more pegasus he's like one of the biggest most successful youtube commentators uh you can see He gets wild views. If you literally did this same format with your subjects, but you used the pink and white aesthetic, and you could go with white and one other color for the text, and then use pink instead of his gray, and you literally just went with this, you couldn't lose. Not really. You couldn't lose because this just works in terms of... basically tabloid style content for YouTube. And this is a very, very simple format, obviously, but it just works. Now, you might want to learn a little bit of Photoshop or photo editing because one thing I'll say in yours is when you cut people out or you have this stuff, they look flat and you can sharpen the images. and they could use some more contrast so i would go that way um but i think also the text needs to be more readable and i would stick to like one font i would probably use this sans serif font that you used for the kanye video so um i'd probably go with that and then in terms of the video format um you might want to go with something closer this isn't bad with the Courtney in her mess I got the receipts like use that style text but make it readable make it white with a drop shadow and the thing is you don't have the green screen the entire videos but maybe having some segments to edit in there maybe that could help you for these videos with them being long form I wouldn't turn your camera the way that you you know vertical I wouldn't turn your camera vertical I would keep your camera widescreen doing these so in theory you might even want to do these as sit down videos at a desk you might even want to consider how you might approach doing inserting yourself into it with skits somehow potentially so those are things you want to look up but the main thing here is going to be the branding needs to be more consistent and it can be more powerful if you um simplify your approach very similar to what uh say more pegasus does here for example um because i just don't think that you're advanced enough in the um photoshop department let's say to do a more complex thumbnail style like an h3 productions or like a um swoop or uh who else is in commentary or anyone like that um so i would just try to keep it simple again good example of clean here is just like what more pegasus is doing but you could do it with a more feminine aesthetic, but it could still be very clean and easy to understand. Those things are very clickable. And then you could just use, you know, your headlines. Another example, like I said, there's, he does it differently. And again, the thumbnails, they're effective. They're not necessarily the greatest thumbnails to ever live, but they work. So Anton Daniels does these and yes, he does put himself in the thumbnails reaction style. But again, he's an established YouTuber and it's hit or miss. I think that when you're doing commentary, a lot of times it's just better to not bother putting yourself in the thumbnail and just go with a tabloid style where you focus on the subjects and then you make them pop off more. You sharpen them up. You add contrast. You brighten up the colors a little bit. So, yeah. So I would just say keeping things very clean and packaging them very clean. Because here's the other thing. Your banner is clean. Your banner is clean. So the thing is, I would go and use this hot pink in the banner. I would probably do something with your profile pic where you can use more of a pink aesthetic. And I would just make this all be on brand. I would just make it. be very very on brand uh you had a question here it looks like about um there's a question you had that says you notice the ones that did a general statement you said the ones that did a general statement of gender versus specific person commentary was more evergreen would you agree i'm not sure if it's more evergreen so much as it gets more of a reaction or response it could be more evergreen you could argue that um but you'd have to you'd have to know your audience very well to say that and you might want to even do some um you might want to ask even your audience about what they respond to and why they respond to it because you can try to make judgment calls and assumptions off of this but sometimes it's better to just straight up ask the audience why they respond to certain things but that's a good question and the thing is i also don't know how what the what the how what percentage of the audience is male to female i assume it's very skewed female on your channel but i don't know but to what degree what percentage is it 80 20 is it 70 30 is it 60 40 so that could have an impact as well commentary can be time-based but if the commentary um also involves a greater social aspect to it. You can make commentary channels evergreen. You can make commentary channels evergreen if they are, even if the story speaks to a larger reality or a larger truth or a figure that's always controversial like Kanye, then that extends the evergreen of your, let me phrase that, it extends the evergreen nature of a video. beyond just a hit and run style video that's good for a week or two if the subject matter is something people will always care about either because the topic always being a topic that has broader social relevance or if if the person the subject is constantly in the news or constantly stirring trouble and stirring the pot or constantly being talked about. People will actually even watch stuff for scandals they missed and go back on it or see if it's relevant again or try to see how we got here. So people will also do that. So commentary doesn't always have to rely entirely. on recency so yeah and you don't have to do celebrity news by the way you don't have to do celebrity news um that's helpful once in a while when you can get views out of it but if you also just do things and you tell uh people that their stories from reddit people will always be interested oh a juicy story from reddit what you might want to do is you might want to put the reddit guy somehow in the thumbnail If you're going to use the Reddit angle for their stories, you might even want to make a playlist as one of your content pillars. You might want to make a playlist as one of your content pillars that is stories from Reddit. So then like if I was doing a commentary channel like yours, there could be stories from Reddit. There could be stories from the news themselves. And then it could be celebrity gossip. And then another commentary bucket might be the battle of the sexes. or it might be some other cultural thing that's going on. It could be reacting to the manosphere. So I would build like five. In your case, I'd probably build, and I'm not telling you have to do these things. I'm just telling you what I would do. I'd build like five content pillars. So I have these buckets of content. We call them content pillars. I'd be like, okay, here are juicy stories from Reddit. here are things where oh here we go battle of the sexes again yay and then here is stuff that maybe is off or the culture and then here is breaking news and then here is celebrity gossip and then here are reaction videos and then you could react to things that are going viral um so that's um that's how we do it and in the chat we have our wonderful mods explaining uh content pillars if you want to learn more about content strategy and content pillars i definitely recommend you watch our 12-week beginner workshop i also recommend you guys use our free course creator foundations to learn more about setting up your content strategy your content pillars and your titles but yeah overall i think this channel has potential you're getting more views than you have subscribers which is a very good thing you have some videos that popped off you're starting the beginnings of a decent upload cadence for a commentary and reaction style channel. But the big thing to tune up is consistency in how you shoot your videos. So again, I would shoot in widescreen. I would stop shooting with the phone in vertical. I would shoot in widescreen. You're making these for YouTube, not TikTok. So I would do that. If you're gonna go vertical, go with YouTube Shorts. If you're gonna go vertical, so for anything you wanna do like that, just do the YouTube Shorts. i would tune up the branding and what you might do is maybe you do a live show and you do a live show in the mornings about all this stuff and then you cut up those videos package them with thumbnails and then those videos become your uh those videos you cut up uh become the videos on the channel from the live stream if you do it as a morning show you could cover like two or three stories or something that's an option for a commentary channel as well so Just something to think about, but that would be my advice for you, Courtney. So hopefully that helps. So that's my review of Courtney Denise and her gossip and commentary channel. You know, do you agree with me and disagree with me on the approach, the cadence, building out the pillars, the fact that you could just do it as a... morning show or an e or a late night show and then you could cut up the videos and then get multiple videos out of that that might make the process easier that might make it more consistent that might give you more options but you guys agree with me disagree with me would you do anything differently for a commentary channel like this again I think the big thing is branding the thumbnails I think the titles are carrying the videos right now I think the views could be even higher if the thumbnails are there and i think growth and subscribers could come from just um more consistency on the video production script side uh even if you're gonna shoot on your phone uh shoot widescreen not vertical and i think that that will help a lot but let me know what you guys think in the live chat if you're watching live let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay and there we go that is uh courtney's so hopefully you found that helpful so let's see So we did Courtney. We've got Eat Plants, Lift Weights. Great channel name. Great channel name. We'd like a review, please. Also considering renaming, rebranding my channel name to one word. Potentially thoughts on that. Nah, I like this. Eat Plants, Lift Weights. You're making it very straightforward in terms of what your channel's about. So we can go with that. All right. So here we have a channel, Eat Plants, Lift Weights. uh gonna compliment you on not only the physique but the profile pic here very strong but the banner is not as strong so what i would want to do is i would definitely want you to really apply the how strong this profile pic is and how strong this channel name is The banner is lacking and we want that to go full fully widescreen so that works on connected televisions The mobile devices and desktop right now. This is not working for all devices And I don't think you guys really need to worry as much as but playing subscribe in your banner People are gonna do it if you call it out in the video. That's gonna be more helpful What I would recommend is that you put your upload schedule in here. I'd also recommend that you match the branding of the banner here to the branding of the thumbnails so again commit to some kind of color scheme and to some type of font if you're watching live in the chat um the mods have posted our five helpful fonts for you to uh take advantage of there um And for anybody who's interested, we have some stuff that helps with, I mean, you seem to have good thumbnails. So it seems like you've hired a thumbnail artist. I would recommend that you have the thumbnail artist also design your banner for you and maybe some other graphics. For your homepage, you haven't really fleshed out your custom homepage. So I would add two or three playlists. at least to the homepage besides your popular videos and your latest videos. You have your featured videos, your weight loss journey and stories, so that's good. Let's see how long you've been doing this. You have 15 videos, so you're off to a very strong start, my friend. And you're starting really strong with these 15 videos. You're getting good views. You've only been doing this for a couple of months, trying to gain some consistency. Most popular videos from three months ago. That's to be expected. These are actually looking good. It feels like to some degree you've watched one of my clients, Dr. Mike Diamonds. So Dr. Mike Diamonds is somebody I started working with. I think it was at 400,000. We started working together. He's at well over a million. I think he's at like 1.5, 1.6 million now. his focused on or rather we when we work together we focused a lot on just targeting weight loss especially belly fat so we looked heavily at that what i would recommend from a content perspective because your thumbnails are good i would just try to start get getting to a point where the packaging might feel more consistent or there's some recurring colors or themes or styles of um thumbnails But I would start building out your content pillars. You still have a lot of room to experiment with this. You don't have to build out five right away. But you might want to start thinking about building out some content pillars of like, okay, here are five topics that I cover. I think you're already starting in a very good place. Like, okay, what to eat. So I would say what to eat is a content bucket. So you could focus on the nutrition part of it. So that's the nutrition pillar. the what to eat pillar. Then you could focus on things that specifically are about losing fat. That's a pillar. Building muscle is a pillar. And then I would go specifically that maybe weight training is a pillar. And then I would say body transformation is So that's probably where I'd go for a content strategy side. Again, for your packaging, the main thing is just consistency. Overall, I think the proper upload cadence for a channel like this is absolutely one video a week is the right cadence and schedule for this. So that's what I'd probably want to see happen here is one video a week. I know that can be challenging. The main thing, would look at is your editing is fine so that's good the production looks pretty decent so fantastic it's actually really above the quality that has a right to be this early in a youtubers career so that's fantastic for you so the main thing is if you can do stuff at that level but get it out once a week at minimum Then you will be fine. You will be fine. I don't think you need a rebrand. I think Eat Plants Lift Weights tells people what the channel is. And then your first line here sells it with the documenting my fitness journey of losing fat and gaining muscle as a vegan. So that is a powerful, compelling value proposition that's unique. What I would tell you is you could look at. someone like my client dr uh mike diamonds and take the vegan approach to similar types of content and i think that that could do very well for you um because if you even have one percent of his success you will be doing very very well again i wouldn't change the name of your channel i would change the banner and i would also put an upload schedule in there and again um i would try to get to a place i know he's still early in your career but i would try to get to a place where you can put out one video a week because if you have this momentum with 15 videos already then it shows you that the proof is in the pudding to grow so i think that that could be incredibly helpful for you um and again i'd like to see you try to um learn from the videos that performed the best and understand why they performed the best. I could tell you a little bit of these ones that performed well. This is very specific in terms of a transformation. This is a classic before and after video. The thumbnail here is not perfect, but at least communicates the idea. Same with this one of going from fat to fit. So fat to fit thumbnails are of are some of your best performers and they're going to be you have more views than you have subscribers on all of your fat to fit thumbnails transformations are a thumbnail style that resonate very well with people because the value is clear they're also very evergreen so they can keep getting views and authentic stories people love that so you don't need better production thankfully looking at your videos you don't need better production you don't necessarily need better editing those things will improve over time your your your gold star where those things are concerned you could tighten up some of these thumbnails and you can repeat versions of this because here um You even said it yourself, fat to fit transformation. So that's like a really good secondary part of the title. How I lost 35 pounds on a vegan diet is a great qualifier. Another one is how I lost 35 pounds in three months as a vegan or two months or whatever it was. So I did this very difficult thing in this extraordinarily short amount of time under this really weird circumstance. So that's like actually really, impressive in my opinion um in terms of something i want a lot of you smaller content creators to strive for is i want you to try i want the smaller content creators watching this or listening to this strive to get to a place to where you're getting at least in like and this sounds wild strive for a goal where you are going to do whatever it takes to get 50 to 100 new subscribers a month if you can set yourself the goal of getting 50 to 100 new subscribers a month might sound really challenging might sound like a lot you're putting yourself in the mindset to get to a place to where you're at least going to get monetized within a year if you actually shoot for that goal or a more ambitious goal if you want a more ambitious goal is to try to get 10 to 30 new subscribers a day. That one's a little more challenging, but for those of you who feel ambitious and are feeling about it, you could go that way. I'm not the biggest fan of subscriber goals for small YouTubers in general, so my grain of salt condition on this is I don't want you guys setting this goal until you've done the following requirement. Upload 50 videos first, all long form. all long form before you set a subscriber goal before you're allowed to set a subscriber goal do me this favor and do yourself this favor upload 50 long form videos before you ever set a subscriber goal or a monetization goal and the reason you're going to do that is you're going to then use that to evaluate what videos Are your top 10 videos? And what was the response they got? What was your top 20% of videos? What did they get you? And why did they do that? Because now you can establish why that worked and you can plan all your videos around those top 10 performers. So that's your top 20%. So what you want to do is you want to do that. That's going to help you understand what a realistic subscriber goal could be and should be if you're going to duplicate that success. If you're going to duplicate that success because you have results to measure, you can now set a reasonable subscriber goal and it would actually make sense and it'd be something you could reasonably accomplish now if you follow the data. So if you follow the data, you'll have a way to make this work. If you do it without following data and you set an arbitrary subscriber goal, You won't even have a focus for improving the content itself. If you can measure 10 videos and say, why did I do better in these 10 videos than the other 40? Why is this 20% of results better than this 80% of the results? Then it can steer and give you direction, focus, and purpose in improving your content with growth in mind. Because then growth becomes a plan, not a wish. If you can't follow data, then growing is a wish, not a plan. So that's what I'm looking at here. And hopefully that advice is helpful to you. What I would also look at is listicle videos. I'll give you an example here of something you could do. 10 best high protein foods for vegans. will probably do well. And you probably use different numbers with that. 10, 5, 10, 15, 20. Listicles are great. They work. You guys respond very well to my 15 tips for small YouTubers, 15 tips for new YouTubers, 15 tips that actually grow your YouTube channel. No BS advice. You guys respond to listicles very well. So if you did 10 best high protein foods for vegans, you'll get clicks. 15. best high protein foods for vegans you'll get clicks um 10 high protein foods to build muscle and lose fat as a vegan so those uh titles would work for you but yeah those are my thoughts on the channel but what did you guys think i think eat plants lift weights like me I'm a meat eater, so you'd think I wouldn't be good at this one, but I'm good with Eat Plants, Lift Weights. I don't think he needs to change his channel name. I think of anything, he just makes the channel banner look as good as his thumbnails, and I think that he'll do well. The profile pic, it sells it. It's spot on. His profile pic could be a Calvin Klein ad. It works. It shows the result. It shows the physique. So I think that that... helps sell it what i'd probably do is this eat plants lift weights i'd probably make the banner something that has him um a really good photo designed with a bunch of weights then another one with a bunch of plant-based food and i'd sell the idea in the banner i'd make it look good i'd probably put an upload schedule in there i also probably would upload at least one video a week give them that consistency. With these channels, eventually the goal is to get to a cadence of at least two videos a week. And I'll tell you why with these channels, two videos a week, in general, a good philosophy for a lot of you. And I know a lot of people push against this, like, oh, quality over quantity. But I want you to be, I want to be honest with you guys about how YouTube works. YouTube disproportionately favors volume with value. So if you have volume of content and is valuable to people, that will work better than quality over quantity. Quality over quantity is, in my opinion, it should be reserved. If you don't have a filmmaking or photography or media background or a public speaking background, quality over quantity, I think, should be something a YouTuber thinks about. when they're closer to 100,000 or a million or a half a million subscribers, that's when they can start thinking about that. Or if they're getting brand deals already, they can start thinking about that. Most of you, quality over quantity is stagnating your growth because you're not getting your reps in. And neither is your audience getting your reps in with you. Because my philosophy of how this would work, and this worked out just for me, I've coached hundreds of creators. There are some creators that are, they should absolutely do quality over quantity. But that's James Johnny. That's someone who's going to spend 200 hours editing one video. That's Magnate's Media. Those guys, they can do that. A lot of you, you would do better with two to three videos a week because two to three videos of the week would represent you getting your gains and lifting your weights and doing your good habits. Two to three videos a week is the same thing as you go into the gym two to three videos a week. Same thing for your audience. They're building a habit. of coming to your channel two to three days a week the same way they would go to the gym so it's about a habit forming and it's about basically building that conditioning of an audience because i'm not worried about using upload frequency to hack the algorithm i want you to use upload frequency to hack your viewers brain i want you to become their habit and you you should think that okay be a good habit if you're going to be addicted to something be addicted to me and i'm going to be healthy for you instead of being sugar or toxic so that would be so that would be the idea the idea that i believe in is becoming that viewers um comfort channel or becoming their guilty pleasure you know like that sort of thing or becoming their healthy habit two to three times a week They're indulging the healthy habit of watching your content the same way that two to three times a week is the appropriate amount of them being in the gym. And I think that that's right for more channels than it's not. I think most of you early on suffer from the idea of quality over quantity because you're being seduced by people who have convinced themselves they're artists or by people who are incredibly privileged celebrities who can get away with that because they're not worried about growth anymore. They can do that. They're worried about maintaining a reputation, not building one. If you're going to build something, you build something with frequency, consistency, and incremental improvement. There's no such thing as quality over quantity for a beginner. A beginner shouldn't be capable of a certain level of quality anyway. A beginner should be building good habits and should be showing up and should be trying hard and shouldn't be scared to fail. even in public. That's what a beginner needs to do. A beginner needs to try hard and needs to work their butt off and needs to improve incrementally and build the habit of showing up and show people that they're willing to do that because that's endearing and we can root for somebody who's building something. Acting like you're supposed to be perfect is holding you back. And again, that's not necessarily a message for eat plants, lift weights, but a message for all of us. um i would embrace that philosophy the goal is not to churn out bad videos it's to accept your imperfections and that done is better than perfect and that failure is part of the process and there's nothing to be ashamed of when you're building in public because no one has the right to sneer at the man or the woman in the arena when they're sitting in the cheap sheets up in the bleachers. So that's one man's perspective. But do you guys agree with me? Do you disagree with me? Let me know if you're watching live in the chat. Let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay. So as I promised you, not only did I give you a review, I gave you some advice. And hopefully, I hope it lands well and that you guys understand my perspective on that. I've analyzed not only the hundreds of channels that I've coached and thousands of channels that I've supplied with screenshots and data and talking to thousands of creators over a decade of my career, I've also studied. extreme data reports from view stats and social blade and case studies and white papers have ran the numbers in the data the average youtuber that gets to over a hundred thousand subscribers um in 15 different categories the median amount of uploads was between 500 and 700 videos in long form not counting youtube shorts in long form not even counting youtube shorts um the median that i found for the top oh say, 5,000 channels in any category or channels in general over 100,000. I even did an investigation on this before TubeBuddy got sold when Phil was still the owner. When Phil was still the owner, we did an anonymized data study of 3 million channels, and we found a correlation between channels that grew and had larger subscriber counts. had a pattern of usually doing youtube for five to seven years and usually had an upload cadence that suggests that they did 100 um to 150 video uploads per year throughout the majority of their career and on average had 500 to 750 uploads when i did an independent case study of channels in um social blade i ended up in all 15 categories with a very similar number and that's even among the top creators even the people who preach quality over quantity the minority of them did that to grow and a lot of them did that after they already made it but their early journey was about consistency that's how they built they only did quality over quantity after they reached escape velocity and after they were already known And it doesn't matter what niche they were in. That tends to be true. There are outliers. The people who, oh, well, Charlie, moist, critical, Penguin Zero, he doesn't make thumbnails. Well, you're not him. You're not an OG YouTuber from 15 years ago who had a certain gimmick and was early and had less competition. Not taken away from his talent at all, but he had first mover advantage. You don't. You don't. If you have first mover advantage, there are things you can get away with. But also, 2025. is not 2008 or 2010. There's a different game. There's a different culture. There's a whole new crop of viewers now with a different mentality and different expectations. And there's a new system. So your favorite OG creator doing something is meaningless. Whatever worked for them, that's like a meaningless metric of, well, this person did this, or this person did that. It's like, well, when? Because the other thing I study is I study, and I have in the Awesome Creator Academy program, I have people who've grown 100,000 subscribers in the last two to three years. We have people like Victoria from Contempo Coding. She came to us. I think she had less than 10,000, less than 20,000 subscribers. She's over 200,000 subscribers now. She just hit another 100,000 milestone. We have Cassandra. uh from becoming a farm girl she is over 300 000 subscribers she came to us with less than 30 000 subscribers she's done that in i think two and a half years um and she's an academy pro group member uh magnify reacts he went daily went hard went three reaction videos a day he's at over a hundred thousand i've been studying people who grow in real time I've been studying and helping and growing channels where they do long form YouTube shorts, even in gaming. You have Obdude. Obdude is killing it. He has grown even now in the last 14 months. And we worked together twice. I think we worked together for 12 or 14 weeks. He is now becoming one of the strongest class royale channels in existence. and he had to be pivoted from clash mini and he became in his gaming niche one of the most beloved uh creators in his niche in just like 14 months um so there are things that work right now and they're very different than what worked back then and they're not always what people would expect and again the the quality over quantity advice works in very narrow specific categories and there are also usually special circumstances around that usually involving either a degree of inherent talent some people have unlimited time that you might not have especially if you're an older content creator if you're an older content creator you're over 30 you have kids you have a 40-hour week job you can't do the strategies that work for somebody that's in high school or college and has more free time more stamina more energy and no responsibilities you can't always compete in the same lane as somebody who if they fail failure is going back to mommy and daddy and living in their nice house in the suburbs and then working for one of mommy and daddy's friends at the firm if like that's not your life and for you failure is i'm out i'm on the streets i'm living out of my car then you don't have the same risk capacity as some of these younger youtubers who do blow up they can take risk because their um capacity to withstand failure and bounce back is higher. Also, someone who's older and retired might have more resources. A lot of creators that are older, they come to me. I had to change one of my policies around working with people who aren't monetized because of some of the older creators who are retired who come to me and they either have a business or they just sold their company or they... you know just retired and they were in a high income bracket thing they can come to me and work with me without already being monetized or established or coming to work with me from zero because their answer to everything is they can hire a video editor they can hire a thumbnail artist they don't have to get these skills they can use their knowledge and that's their skill set their skill says the knowledge they have as a subject matter expert and they can throw money at any problem and they have unlimited time unlimited money they have decades of confidence built from crushing it already. So there's a lot more to work with there. So we're not having to build from nothing. We have a really good foundation when it comes to those type of folks. But that's an undisclosed advantage. So when you're comparing yourself to other people, you have no idea what's going on. And that's the thing that breaks my heart about a lot of you small YouTubers. You compare yourself and you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. That person might be starting the same as you, but they're not starting the same as you. They're starting the same as you. Oh, we're starting our YouTube channels at the same time. But here's the difference. If they're rich... It's different. It's different. If they have no kids and you have five kids, it's different. If you're 40 and they're 20, it's different. You know, so there's and again, there's just. a difference in circumstances resources time availability investment capital um experience manpower support um and so it's never a one-to-one comparison and so you shouldn't bother comparing in my opinion you should learn from other people you can use them to also set standards or expectations for yourself to some degree but comparison is the theft of joy but it's also really imprecise and unscientific because you don't know everything and it's not a controlled one-to-one scenario So I just think it's unreasonable. I think you're unfair to yourself when you compare yourself to people because you have no idea. They haven't disclosed every advantage they have that you don't know. So you don't know what you don't know, and you might be judging yourself too harshly or unfairly because you don't know everything about what the playing field even looks like. So, yeah, cut yourself a little slack sometimes. Yep. By the way, we do have the replays of these live streams, so they don't go away. I keep them up. We're also multi-streaming to multiple platforms, so you will always be able to find the live streams. Yep. Savvy Tech Tips says, you just bought the book? Yeah. Hope you're enjoying it. My book is out, Create Something Awesome, How Creators Profiting from Their Passion in the Creator Economy. I also have pre-orders available for my second book. That's coming out much later this year, close to the end of the year. Yeah, normally we would do 10 reviews. We'll get to some of you guys next week. I will figure out how I'm going to do reviews while I'm at VidCon next week. I'm going to be speaking on Saturday, which is also my birthday. So I'll be speaking at VidCon next Saturday, which is my birthday. I'll be speaking twice that day. Friday, I will still figure out some way. We'll work the schedule around. I'll be in a different time zone. Friday, I will find some way. to do channel reviews. We'll just have to figure out the timing, but we'll find a way to do it. So we'll do more of these next week, but let's move on to the next review. Again, today I'm just not feeling well. So we have Ebony Daily, 35 videos, 2.9, so almost 3,000 subscribers. Great. If you're a millennial woman that's ready to glow up in faith, purpose, and love, then you're in the right place. Okay, great. So this works. Let's see. You have popular videos, you have the for you side, you have the videos, and then you have the create playlist. I would add more of the playlist to the customized feed here, maybe three of them. You have 35 videos. That's probably enough to add some here. Decent banner. Could use splash more color maybe, but this is a decent banner. Might love, like I said, to see the schedule in here because it looks like you're doing at least weekly videos. So it looks like you're doing weekly videos. Let's see what the most popular videos look like. So the most popular videos you have clearly are working off of their subject matter and title. The thumbnails are not terrible here, but shy away from things where even though this one did very well, the title is carrying it. Try to use drop shadows behind this kind of text because the red here, and in red, becomes hard to read. Also, try to stick with one font, and I would recommend sans serif fonts in this situation. And if you're going to use fonts, again, two fonts can be mixed if you're going to do them, but this how to prepare for your husband. um i would have used two sans serif fonts not a serif and then a sans serif i would just use two sam serifs and again um color schemes i'd get these consistent so these are not terrible these are very good beginner thumbnails believe it or not actually these are quite good for beginner thumbnails you're doing your cutouts right you're doing a lot here that works well the biggest issue i have here is the inconsistency in fonts and inconsistency and commitment to color schemes because again you want your stuff to be recognized at a glance and not just when your face is in it and the easiest way to get there is uh colors and fonts and the the the stronger drop shadows this one's a decent one this one could have been a little darker again it's about making the stuff um easy to read at a glance the minute that you see it also your audience may not be responding to this one even though you could argue that oh this is a really uh leveled up design to your thumbnail uh same thing with this one the audience may not be responding to that because they're used to the aesthetic that you've already created there is a familiarity bias this is why again you want to start trying to do things to condition some familiarity and get the audience to respond to things uh right now they are responding to the titles uh some of them are responding to your face so that's good you're kind of establishing yourself there but you want to kind of start to lean in direction of getting together um you know a font that you always use so that your thumbnails can look consistent so it's going to make it easier for you to make thumbnails in the future um she Ebony would like to know why she's not getting more views from her audience, even though she sticks to the same topic that got her monetized. Oh, that's a great question. In general, you're not always reaching the same exact people, and your subscribers aren't necessarily going to get your videos. In my entire lifetime as a YouTuber, 80% of all of my 41 million views were from non-subscribers. In general, most of you, if you look at your data, 80% of your views will not be from your subscribers and it will be from new people who have not seen you before. So that is part of it. The other thing is you might feel you're talking about the same thing. You might feel you're saying the same thing. That doesn't mean that's the way they're hearing it. You always have to understand that just because you feel that you're saying the same thing or you're saying it the same way or you're doing the same thing doesn't matter. to how someone else sees it or how someone else hears it so you think ebony that i'm saying the same thing i'm sticking to the same topic i'm doing what worked before you might feel you're doing that that's not the same thing that someone else hears and you you have to accept that you can't control that but you have to have some grace for the fact that just because i think i'm doing this isn't how they're taking it so you have to open up some grace there the other thing is What if that's just not what they need today? What I needed to hear from you Monday is not the thing I might need on Friday. I might not be ready to hear that message. I might not need that message right now. Or even if I did need it, I might not accept that I need it. So you have to consider that, especially with your subject matter. With your subject matter, you cannot control. where somebody else watching your video is in their journey or whether they're in their feelings. You can't control. You doing the same thing doesn't matter if they're not living the same every day because you could have people... that they might be at a spiritual crossroads. They might be struggling with their faith at the moment. They might be struggling in a way where they don't want to hear it from you. And that has nothing to do with you. You didn't do anything wrong. So the thing is, remember in life, you can do everything right and still not get the same results. You can do everything the same and not get the same results. Because the other thing is the world does not sit still for you. And that's not a criticism of you. It's a philosophy thing that I just want to put out there is that A lot of YouTubers struggle with this idea that I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do. Why am I not getting a consistent result? That only works at a nine to five job, if you're lucky. If you're lucky, that only works at a nine to five job. Because your viewer, you don't know who's on the other end of the screen. You don't know what is making them accept or reject your video that has nothing to do with you. It could be their mood. It's like if someone in your audience or a bunch of people in your audience, if something happened and it shook their faith. How are they going to click on your video? They may not be in that place. They aren't there to receive the message. And that's okay. If it's an evergreen video, when they're feeling better a week from now or a month from now, then that might be exactly what they need. And maybe the algorithm or the hand of God moves you in their path at that time. So that's the difference. And the thing is, you can't necessarily, you might always feel that when you're speaking to someone, like you had 95,000 people watch this video, seven signs God is preparing you for marriage. But here's the thing. Somebody might be in there. What's the odds that I have those 95,000 people that like a lot of them right now may just be struggling in general with their faith and not watching your videos because they're like, I thought that I saw the signs. Why am I not there yet? And that's not your fault. That has nothing to do with you. Or maybe they had a bad breakup and they're like, okay, I just don't want to hear it from anyone right now. Right now they want to feel their feelings or they want to validate their feelings. So just keep in mind that for a lot of you watching right now, and especially for you, Ebony. People are allowed to say no to your videos, and that's not necessarily a rejection of you. Or even if it is, you shouldn't take it personally. You should never take how your videos perform personally, which is really hard to say, because you want your work to do well. You want your work to succeed. But we all have to remember that when we don't watch videos ourselves, it has nothing to do with that creator. It had everything to do with us. It had everything to do with the mood. And there's videos in my feed from creators I've been subscribed to two years. i didn't watch them because i just wasn't in the mood to watch videos at all that day or i wasn't wanting to watch a video that might make me go shopping in amazon maybe you know because like i'm on a dave ramsey kick of trying to not spend money on things and going to zero debt and paying down my car note before i do anything so like um pay off the mortgage so if i'm in dave ramsey mode as much as i love certain youtubers i can't watch their unboxing video Because I'm going to want to buy something. So do keep in mind for all of you that sometimes you did nothing wrong. But you're just something that might have shifted with the audience. It could shift in the culture. It could shift for them personally. It could be something happening in the niche. It could be something happening with them. And if you're making videos about things that are very, very personal to people, you have to understand that not everyone hears the same message the same way. And you might have to make a video, even if you feel you're saying something one way, you might have to package that video five different ways before it hits and resonates to where people understand what you're getting at, or it's done in a way that they can receive it. I remember there have been people who've tried to teach me something, and it was just one person finally said it the right way that I was ready to hear. And it made all the difference. So for content like yours in particular, Don't lose patience with it just because sometimes not everything performs. And I get it. I go through this. I go through cycles of this myself. My most successful video of all time got 90% of its views six months after I uploaded it. So sometimes those things happen. Now, again, we just try to control the things we can control. What you can control is you can look at things like your titles. And you can try and do some more research and see what's resonating in another niche or someone similar where things are performing. Or you could try and tap in to an existing conversation that's happening in the culture at a cultural level and tap into that. So something to think about. In general, What I'll say is your channel is strong and you do have something here and something that people are looking for and something people want. And you can take this further. I do think that there are topics you should be exploring. I would explore the popular... If you look into dating culture right now, there's a lot of negative... things that are out there in the secular world of dating and relationships, I would look at the most high-level performing content around that from the dating and relationship world and look at the negativity around the secular point of view there of relationships between men and women. Then I would interject what you feel God says about those things and offer people hope. and offer people hope. Because I would just use the counter narrative. In general, for a lot of you, if there's something popular and you disagree with the popular narrative, and you're someone who's willing to say all of you are wrong, I would stand on business and I would make a video that counters the most popular prevailing narrative if I don't believe in that narrative, or I have a different point of view, or I'm ideologically the opposite. And I think that's another way to tap into attention. But I also don't think it's clickbait. And I think it's authentic to do that if you really want to take a stand. And I think that people are rewarded when they take a stand and when they have strong opinions. So I would look at here are the most popular opinions that I disagree with about my subject matter. And then I would make a video coming out strongly, not ugly, not hyper aggressive, but very strongly. against the thing that I don't believe in and then interjecting what I do believe to be true. So hopefully you find that helpful. But what do you all think about my advice for Ebony? Do you agree or disagree with me? I think that if you really look at social media right now, what people are looking for is strong opinions. Being non-confrontational, go along, get along, that's not cutting it anymore. It's bland, it's vanilla, and it's not working, and people believe it's insincere. What people believe is sincere is someone will take the sincere honesty of someone who has the conviction and faith to stand on their opinions, come hell or high water, whether they agree with them or not, they do respect at least the honesty and that you're not trying to mislead them or pretend. uh to be more neutral than you are or to be ambivalent to things people like people who stand on business and to some degree they respect people that they disagree with when they do it very openly and when they at least are um not ugly about it because i think it's possible to stand on business be very firm or even forceful about what you believe in but not be ugly to people just because they happen to disagree when people do that It resonates because you want to attract your tribe. And the thing is, it's okay to repel people who would reject you anyway. It's okay to repel people who would reject you anyway and attract your tribe and attract who's for you. They say your vibe attracts your tribe. I believe in leaning into that. And so I think that's something that all creators could embrace and could look at. And I think that there's a strength in being willing. You can be polarizing without being negative. You can be polarizing without being negative. A lot of people just are very reluctant to take that leap of faith and commit to that content because it feels very high risk, high reward. And it is. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. So that's my review and my thoughts on Ebony and also a broader idea of something that a lot of you could do to grow. I think for 35 videos, having almost 3,000 subscribers is impressive. most impressive. So that's what I think. Do you guys agree? Let me know if you're watching live in the chat. Let me know in the comment section if you're watching the replay. There you go. Hopefully you found that helpful, Ebony. Yep. No, I promise I don't bite. And for, yeah, if it's your first time here, you can see I'm not harsh. These are not roast sessions. I leave that to the... 20 something year olds the the 20 something year olds who want to roast people and tell them uh that they suck or whatever that that edgy stuff i leave that to people in their uh 20s i was more aggressive in my 20s so i get it and um you know it could be cool all the way up until about 30 32 to try to be an edgelord um you know and i i i might uh dress in all black but i've i'm not in my emo phase anymore i've left that behind even though i'm back to all black um i'm you know in my steve jobs elder statesman era but yeah um yeah there's nothing to be afraid of with these channels reviews i'm tough but fair but i'm always looking to try to help where i can lead a creator in the right direction give them some much needed advice i'm not going to coddle you i'm not going to be overly gentle but i'm not going to be mean-spirited about anything there's nothing productive in it there's there's nothing productive in that teaching style um i think a firm hand is great in a teacher a coach or a mentor but i think you also have to be able to understand where people are at and how they would best receive something and how you might best receive something is not how they might best receive something i have benefited a lot from tough love and people not pulling punches but i've also learned to not um project that onto other people it's a lesson coaching hundreds of people one-on-one has taught me that and so i'm doing thousands now we've done 5 000 live channel reviews in my lifetime so i do think that you know it's important so yep let's see yep i'd agree with that oh all of my early videos are horrible You guys will never, I mean, you guys can watch some of my earliest videos after this if you want. You guys will never make videos as bad as my first 50 or 100 videos. It's not possible. I had all the grace of a sack of carrots and the charisma to match. So, you know, there's not really a way to make worse videos than my first couple of uploads. They were particularly bad. I had no on-camera presence. I wasn't a particularly good public speaker back then. No energy. It was not great. That was also, I was in my 20s back then, but it was not good. So I don't think it's possible for you guys to make worse content than I made in my early career. I think that'd be a particularly challenging thing to do. I think it'd be very impressive. I think it'd be very impressive to make worse content than my early content. Yeah. Yeah, the public content, the earliest public content on this channel. is 16 plus years ago, the early days of YouTube, 2009. I did a channel in 2006. In 2006, I did a channel with my friends that's no longer active or available, which is my earliest, earliest foray into YouTube. I had another channel in my 20s. I think I was 22, 23 at the time from 2006. That no longer exists. So my earliest existing content on YouTube is from 2009. At least it's still around. All right, so we have Francis Stone up next. So Francis Stone, 73 videos, 149 subscribers. Addictions counselor. And then you have your email in the banner. In your case, the email in the banner is probably fine because you probably are looking for people to reach out to you. If you are going to do an upload schedule, I would put it in the banner. The color here is not terrible, although with your complexion, I might suggest going a different direction. You could either go with the all white for the background, and then you could do the black text and maybe another color, and that would actually probably be fine. The tan here... isn't necessarily doing anything and i don't think you're going to use that in your branding overall so i would ditch it and i would just go ahead and um cut yourself out in canva and either do a plain color or white here um if you're going to use two fonts this font for francis stone is actually pretty good but i would stick to maybe one font for the rest of this so yeah so i would only use two fonts not three I think that that would probably do better. Let's see. 73 videos. With 73 videos, there's probably enough to put in the customized feature more here on your YouTube channel homepage for people to see what videos you make. You're not particularly doing thumbnails yet, it looks like, or like you've tried to do some, but they're not necessarily consistent. um in general for your videos well those are three years old so maybe i don't want to count those we'll just go from um seven months ago up i think you could make simple thumbnails and canva does have some thumbnail templates if you struggle with those but i think that in general for a lot of you and here's the approach that you can use for thumbnails for a lot of you So I'll just switch back to the camera here for a second. So for a lot of you, what a lot of you should do is just take maybe 30 minutes on a weekend or something. Don't stand directly because you don't want a shadow to be a big problem. Don't stand directly in front of a white wall, but stand enough in front of a white wall. Get a friend to take photos and selfies for you and just do different poses. dot bg or you can use adobe express for free you can use adobe express and you just remove yourself from the background and that will give you a bunch of options for poses for your thumbnails and you can do this a couple of different times if you want to do different outfits that's fine but people really don't care if your same outfit matches your thumb that people do not care about that at all they barely notice um and you would do that And so for a lot of you, that'll give you these poses for your thumbnails. You'll already be removed from the background in Canva. And then you can just put some color and text and then your thumbnail's done for the most part. If you're going to do talking head style content, that is a way that you can do it and approach it to where you can feel very confident that you have good thumbnails. Here's the thing. I actually like the pose in this one. um youtube sobriety and not giving up i think that that don't give up on change your life it's hard you're worth it um very good very positive message there for the title for that um i feel that it inherently is motivational and it's got uh views so you got a response on that i feel that that thumbnail would have worked even without text but i you know While this is not the God's gift of thumbnails or anything, the pose actually works here because it's a thoughtful pose and it resonates. So there's a humanizing element of that. The title, I don't think the title is the worst. I do think that you don't ever need to put a date in a title ever. Because I felt it would have been stronger and you lost some opportunity with the text here. For example, and this could have been shorter. So it's like, let's see. I would have probably went feelings are not faxed. How to not become overwhelmed in trying times. And that might have been just short enough. That might have been the 65, 60, 65 characters needed to get this all in without YouTube cutting it off. So I feel like for you, you might need to always run your titles through ChatGPT and say, have it help you keep it under 60 characters if that's something you struggle with. Let's see. I would have went more compelling with this one. I know you were trying to be straightforward with this one. I might have changed the title to Addiction is Not a Choice. The Harsh Truth. about being an addict. I feel like more people might have clicked on that. You could still change that title to something like that if you so desire, if you so choose, because I think that's just a stronger title. From a content strategy standpoint, what I might suggest is that you lean into some beginnings of, because you're still relatively early here. i would start the beginning of a content strategy and maybe it's three to five potential buckets so i would think about videos for people that are struggling with sobriety because i think um so what they usually say is um problem product offer right sorry or rather well they say problem sorry they say person problem product right we're going to skip the product part because we're not talking about the business side we're talking about strategy here so if we're going to look at this we could look at here's my person here are their problems so here are my pillars right so what we're going to do is we're going to take what would normally be for sales which is person problem product and we're going to go person problem pillar okay so for your people people who are struggling with addiction, and they have a couple of different things. One bucket, one pillar that you could do is videos that people should watch if they're struggling with sobriety. In fact, a good video title in general is, if you're struggling with your sobriety, watch this video before you do anything. It's a very straightforward title. It speaks to exactly who that person is, and it tells them, hey, if you're struggling with sobriety right now, watch this video, don't do anything else. And that literally is what the title should be of that video. And obviously the thumbnail should be compelling and should be relatable to that person, but that would be a really excellent video to make. So again, from a playlist standpoint, a playlist for people struggling with sobriety, it's a very good playlist to have. So that would be a good pillar. Another pillar, would be um motivation to help you maintain your mental health maybe you can name it something more concise with that but it would just be videos that are mental health maintenance right so that would be a good set of pillars to do there are just videos that are uplifting but they should target people that are specifically in um that situation and that have titles that are related to people based on the different triggers for them. Specifically, another pillar that I might suggest for you might be videos that speak to people who, for example, I would probably maybe make this other pillar sobriety and social media and help people understand the impact that social media is having on their sobriety and to help them with things like doom scrolling help them with things like brain rot help them not replace their addiction to substances with an addiction to their phone or an addiction to media so i would look at things like that So I would start planning out these kinds of themes as your content pillars and build a content strategy. One, if you have these pillars, you'll never struggle with what video should I make today? Because you'll be filling out inventory in these pillars that you've made, right? So you'll be filling up these buckets and that'll be very helpful. It'll also make the value clear to the audience. And again, you can fill out some more, you can make some more pillars. These are just three that I'm recommending to you. I don't have the experience in your field to tell you exactly what you should be doing for your audience. You would know them better. I have some experience in working with mental health channels. I've had my own very different mental health journey, not struggling with addiction, just other things, depression and anxiety instead. So what I would say is if you look at the constellation of issues and problems and topics that would matter more and matter most to your audience. You build out about five or six different pillars and then there's always topics to fill those pillars as far as individual videos. You'll never struggle for what to make. And you can always repeat topics in a pillar, but from a different angle. Some can be short and sweet. Some could be tips. Some can be... shared experiences or storytelling. There's all kinds of angles to do those topics from. So just something to keep in mind here. But those would be my thoughts about your fledgling YouTube channel here. I think that there's potential for improvement. I think that what you're doing is a great service to a lot of people. There are a lot of people who struggle with these issues. and need to feel supported and build community i just think it could be done both strategically and sincerely i don't think those things are mutually exclusive and i think that this just gives you direction because right now you know you're putting a lot of your feelings into this but i think um if you can align that and align passion purpose through a process that will actually give you more range and reach, then more people can be helped. And so this is what my approach to that would look like. So those are my thoughts. But what do you think? Do you guys agree? Would you do anything differently? Let me know in the chat if you're watching live. Let me know in the replay. Sorry, let me know the comment section if you're watching the replay. So there you go. Yeah. We'll be doing reviews again next week, by the way. i'm not feeling great tonight we normally would do uh up to 10 channels uh we only did five uh tonight first come first serve because again i'm not feeling well and you can tell my voice is a little raspy i'm trying to save some of my voice for uh vidcon i'm speaking there on saturday plus i've still got to make content before i go and i still um have to um do some uh coaching calls before i go on my uh trip to vidcon next week So we're only doing five tonight. We got one more in the queue, and we're going to call it an early night because Roberto needs to rest and recover. Excellent. Excellent. Appreciate you. Glad you found that helpful. Yeah. But, yeah, we'll be doing more channel reviews next week, everybody. Again, just not 100%, but I didn't want to skip out tonight. So and I wasn't going anywhere. It's Friday the 13th. I'm like I'm not typically superstitious But Friday the 13th is just one I don't play with I ain't going nowhere. So all right, we got solo cruising and then we'll be calling it an early night So we got solo cruising and more 148 videos 473 subscribers exploring the world of solo cruising. I did my first semi solo cruise Okay, so this is pretty solid. Again, one thing I'd recommend is in here you have a profile pic and you have your banner. I think that the banner pic should be different than the profile pic here. I think the profile pic here sells it. I think that's really good. But I think that the banner pic should be different. I also, once again, would recommend posting your channel schedule in there. vlog is probably fine for your featured video but if you have a more recent vlog that's performed well it might be good for people to see something that's in the current year to give them a sense of what your channel's production value looks like right now so let's see you've got recommended videos play those shorts you have 148 videos so you probably could do more featured playlist on the channel in the customization feature on youtube you'll want to do that on desktop let's look at the videos um first impression of these thumbnails is that in some cases there's too much text to be able to read at a glance um and in this case what i would have done is i would have like this last one i would have cropped this very differently You never want, if you could avoid it, to put text over anybody's face. And you want to avoid that. Because it looks like there's this really interesting, fun time happening. But we don't get to see any of it because we're overwhelmed by text that's in front of people's faces and bodies. And that's something I would think about. Right now, it looks like there might be some bottlenecks in your editing. You're probably doing all your own editing, so it doesn't look like you can get videos out every week. But ideally, that is what people would look for for this type of channel. So when you can get to that point where you can edit a bit faster, that's going to help with growth. This thumbnail, I think, could have been stronger without the ship tour and without the logo. It did really well. Mariner of the Seas, 2.4K. It did really well. I feel like the thumbnail would have been stronger without that. This thumbnail, there's not a drop shadow, so it makes it very difficult to read. If I glanced at this on my phone, if I didn't have my glasses, the text might be impossible to read for me. So that's something I am thinking about here. I'd like to see. You're getting consistent with the text, by the way. You're at least getting consistent with the font choice. A lot of these times, the logo isn't always going to be visible, so I get where you guys are trying to use the logos for credibility, but sometimes it doesn't work because it's not even visible to us. I don't think you need to put Junior Balcony Cabin Tour. in the thumbnail i think that that could have been in the title and it would have been fine here i'm fine with um you having mc msc magnifica in there i think that that works for you but i don't think you needed that extra text um for the best priced resort stay in orlando the text should have been on the opposite side if anything i get that you were trying to show off the pool But putting text over anything with people just doesn't work. And if anything, you could have shrunk the text a little bit and made this work. Let's see. What's your best performing content? I think these could have performed better if but for the thumbnails. The titles carried them. For you, a lot of the titles, the topics are interesting. The subject matter is interesting. And that's working. But you could actually be getting even more views really and truly than this. um if the thumbnails could just improve um by a little bit and the thing is you have a lot of great material to work with and then one of the other things i would recommend for someone in your situation is always shoot wider and think about taking shots to make the thumbnails and make them as wide as you can because you can always crop in you can't always zoom out So remember, for thumbnails, especially on location, for any of you doing travel content, shoot wide and always think about, oh, that might make a good thumbnail. Oh, that might make a good thumbnail. Shoot as wide as you can because you can always crop in. You can't always zoom out. So always remember that. Once again, maybe try to get to a consistent font style. And try to incorporate body language into your poses of thumbnails if you're going to be in a thumbnail. Try to interact with the environment or have poses or put yourself in a position to where you're just going to cut yourself out strategically and plop yourself in a thumbnail if it's not going to be a realistic selfie thumbnail because it doesn't always need to be a realistic selfie thumbnail. In terms of production, I don't know what you're using. Because I think you're using your phone, but I don't know what kind of gimbal you have for that. But I'm going to recommend you get the DJI Osmo 7P gimbal with the tracking attachment. It's this here. So everything for this is magnetic. Let's see here. So this has a tracker. It has a... receiver it has a light and it has a motion tracker uh built in let's see here yeah so i would i would get something like this i'd get a gimbal like this you know throw your phone in there and so yeah that's what i would uh do and then this thing other interesting uh thing about this is it pops out with a tripod there Which explains, like, I didn't stabilize this. But, yeah. But it even has a light there so that can, you know, work in low-light situations, all that good stuff. So I would get a stabilization gimbal like this. And that's ultimately what I would end up using to just make the content a little bit more, for lack of a better word, smooth. and so that might help with production a little bit yeah dji makes really cool stuff in fact they even have a um wireless mic system that goes with this perfectly and um so i'd be using all that and it's perfect i'm going to be using it while i'm at vidcon myself because they have um you know their policies for safety that means you can't bring like a bunch of heavy equipment and stuff around so that's really annoying for me With how much I spent on all my gear. But yeah, so that's what I would do in your situation is I'd absolutely make sure that I'm using a stabilizer like that just to make my production value a little bit better. Production value is decent. Don't get me wrong. This just makes it a little bit better. Gives you something that other people don't have. Your biggest issue is the thumbnail design, but that can be overcome with a little bit of work and a little bit of planning. Like I said, the zooming out when you want to have shots for the thumbnail, shooting as wide as possible so that if you want, you can tighten it up later. You can zoom in, but once you take a shot, you can't artificially zoom out, not without AI. I would do that. And like I said, getting consistent on fonts, not covering up people's faces with text, that sort of thing. Logos can work. If you're going to use logos and you want to say, but I do want to benefit from it, it's iconic. Then what I would do is I would actually put it in the top left hand or top right hand corner and then just make the font a little bit smaller. And then I get to take advantage of the logo. And that's the easiest way to benefit from the logo. The good news for you is like, your topic is interesting and it sells itself oh excuse me let's see there's the voice going your topic is interesting it sells itself in many cases it overcomes not having the strongest thumbnails i think that you just need to strategically uh plan the thumbnails a little bit more and think of what would be the most interesting instagram photo you could use for the thumbnail before you ever slap text on it. And I would try and shoot that. And I think that that would help you a lot in this situation. I also think trying to duplicate some of your best performers. I think that if you literally do a free things to do series on each of, anytime you're on a cruiser, anytime you're on a cruiser, you should do a free things to do series on that cruiser. So that's definitely something. should do I would also do videos that show people what the cheapest versus the most expensive room can be like on those cruisers so I would talk to other people on the cruiser and like be able to try to get a way to do a tour or review or like oh touring every you know Cabin class on you know the blah blah blah whichever cruiser it is Because people would really care about that. I also think doing a ship tour for every cruiser So like if I was doing these cruises the way I'd be doing it is I'd be doing okay Here's all the free things you can do on the cruiser. Here's a tour of the entire ship Here is the most expensive versus least expensive cabin you could do And I would also maybe doing a video where you Maybe I do a... Oh, I'd probably do a... I don't know if you have the budget for this. I'd do a trying everything on the menu video for whatever cruise I'm on. So I'd be making formats like that that are extremely interesting. I think that those all are videos that would get a lot of views, if I'm being honest. So those are some thoughts that I have for you there. But yeah, solo cruising and more. That is my review. What do you guys think? Do you agree with me? Disagree with me? Again, packaging is a recurring theme, but it wasn't the only thing that I found that could be improved here. I think the channel is actually doing well. I think it's got some good individual outlier videos, but I think that one, just certain ideas and creating these formats could actually be really strong. And I think that going through and showing people things like reviewing everything on the menu, I reviewed like, you know, um reviewing everything on the menu people really would watch that um most expensive versus least expensive cabin um people would watch that ship tour obviously does well for you and then again free things to do everyone will watch that so i would do a free things to do i would be uh always doing a free free things to do on blah blah cruiser uh 10 things to do on this cruiser um most expensive versus least expensive i would always be doing that so those are different ideas that i think you can use by the way all of you doing any kind of travel thing not just for people doing cruisers like all of you can use those and um take advantage of those title formulas for anything travel related it'll work so those would be some of my um thoughts but what do you guys think do you agree with me disagree with me if you're watching live let me know in the chat if you're watching the replay let me know in the comment section And there you go. Solo cruising and more. Hopefully you found that helpful. Yeah. So that's it for reviews for tonight. Like I said, we only do five of them tonight because, again, I'm feeling under the weather. You can kind of hear it in my voice and my throat is done. Throat is done. It's done, done. And it is now officially up for midnight. We've survived. Well, if you're on the East Coast. You survived Friday the 13th. So for my East Coast viewers, congratulations. We've all survived our Friday the 13th. It's over. But yeah, yeah, I'm probably I'm going to have some throat coat tea when I bought some of that from the store. So thanks, Katie, for reminding me. But yeah, I'm going to be at VidCon next week. So hopefully I'll see a bunch of you guys there. i'll be speaking on saturday i'll be one of the last sessions on the creator track uh so i'm there for the i'm doing the last day i'm doing the last session on the last day on the creator track so hopefully i'll see you guys there i'm gonna fly in friday morning i'm gonna leave sunday evening uh so after i speak on saturday i might try and do something for my birthday uh with whoever's still around and so yep that's the current plan that's the current plan but other than that uh shout out to our friends over at uh one of ten can't forget about them appreciate our friend and sponsor one of ten always a fan of the channel um we do these on fridays even though i'll be at vidcon on friday with a time zone change i'm going to figure out some way to still do the uh channel reviews so we'll do that next week hopefully we'll have uh 10 slots like we normally do next week i just have to figure everything out we may or may not have time to do uh 10 slots as you know that takes almost twice as long but we'll see what we can do but i definitely appreciate everybody who submitted their channels for reviews we had some really interesting ones tonight uh we got them into the spreadsheet uh we're going to be keeping track of these and we will watch your progress and careers with great interest because we've been tracking um all the channels that have um been doing reviews um katie when we can let's create a column in the reviews where we also get the email that they have listed in their about section that way if i ever want to send them a coupon code for one of my products and everything like that we can get them a discount on one of the starter kits or something like that um we can do that for the people who do uh the channel reviews we can get them a discount and coupon code on the starter kits just uh in the sheet from now on if we can have a column and we can paste the um email they list in their about section uh that'll help with just sending them those coupons so that'd be cool oh already on the list to add great thank you thank you so that'd be cool but yeah I appreciate all of you guys. If you check out oneoften.com, they do a lot of great things that a lot of the other YouTube tools don't. They're a more modern YouTube tool. They have a title generator. They have a thumbnail generator for some of you who struggle with that specifically. They can also help you with research in your niche. They are very sophisticated. They're the best tool that I've seen for what they do right now. I've been using them with a lot of my clients. And one thing I definitely think you should look at is the fact that you can take inspiration from some of the other channels that are being successful in your niche. And you can actually make bookmarks of the thumbnail and use them as an inspiration. Kind of like making a Pinterest board. Kind of like making a Pinterest board of YouTube thumbnails. And I think that that's actually a really good idea to make a collection like that. So definitely check out 1of10.com. Use code Roberto at checkout. They give you 20% off. on your plan so that's something they did for us so shout out to one of 10.com make sure you're checking them out um right now in addition to my uh book create something awesome i have a second book that i'm writing that's going to be released uh probably the end of october but you can pre-order it now if you're someone who's read and benefited from the first book you absolutely want to pre-order this second book it's going to focus on creator monetization all the ways you can make money in the creator economy but also the business side of the creator economy and what it takes to run a business successfully as a content creator and it doesn't just address youtube address podcast or streamers even online writers um and it's really in depth uh the book is almost done now the manuscript's almost done i'm 40 000 out of 60 000 words in my manuscript um so we're knocking that out and it's most likely coming out um in august of 2025 the uh sorry not august but i say it was october i meant october 2025 i'll be sending it off to the editor in uh then i'll be sending off to my editor in august at this rate they've got 20 000 more words to write but you know um i think that you guys will benefit tremendously there's some people that one of the things that they do to learn is actually read and i think when you read about a subject it's one of the deeper ways to learn watching videos is great reading often can be better for some people so would definitely recommend that it's been a blast hanging with you guys tonight doing these channel reviews i've got to go make some tea and get some rest and i got to do that if i want to still have a voice so we will catch you next time thank you to all the mods for holding it down thank you to everybody who was in the chat you're all great i will see you next week and other than that you're going to learn a little bit more about awesome creator academy And yes, Alex, at some point, probably do something. Even if it's on my other channel, I might revive my gear guide channel to do something with a gimbal setup video. But we definitely will be doing a new workshop coming up that is on the business side of YouTube. We usually do workshops on Wednesdays. that will be scheduled so you guys will see it in my live stream tab and we'll have that scheduled up for you guys we're going to do a six-week workshop on the business side of content creation in youtube so you definitely want to stay tuned for that but you're going to learn a little bit more about awesome creator academy and what we offer there one of the best products i think we've offered recently is the creator prompts product it's only nine bucks if you want to support that way and this one gives you 200 prompts that you can use in chat gpt as a content creator for productivity organization and ideation so have definitely recommend that as a cheap affordable product we also have our free creator foundations course but you're also going to learn about the academy pro group here at the end of the stream so stay awesome and i will see all of you next week take care Becoming a content creator can be a very lonely process and adventure, but it doesn't have to be. When I first got started going from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had to do it all by myself. I didn't have a community of like-minded and like-hearted creators to talk to or to ask for advice, and I certainly didn't have a mentor to guide me along the way. I built the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group because when I was getting started, what would have meant the world to me is not to have to struggle alone when it comes to being a full-time content creator. If I had had a community of creators that I could talk to and share information with, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes in my early career and there would have been opportunities with brand deals where I would have gotten a better understanding of how to negotiate and I wouldn't have undersold myself. I wouldn't have been taken advantage of in those early situations. so in the awesome creator academy pro group myself and our co-instructor andy rivera we meet twice a week for office hours with our creators and we share information we talk about how we're building our creator businesses and we offer constructive criticism and critique on the things that we're working on for our projects to be part of a community of usually around a hundred like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are you also have all access as a pro group member to all of our past, present, and future courses, training, templates, digital downloads, and swipe files. You have full access to our creator blueprints where you'll see our systems and the frameworks that we use to execute. You know, you always fall or rise to the standard of your systems. A lot of people really underestimate how important that is. We have digital download templates that can help you so you don't have to start with a blank canvas. These done for you, files are actually incredibly helpful especially for things like your thumbnails your media kits and anything you need for your branding as a content creator to look professional we have email swipe files that help you with reaching out to brands we have great information in helping you price yourself and build your packages appropriately and remember as part of the pro group you have the opportunity to ask questions from myself and all the other creators participating and so this means that if you need to ask questions about negotiation or a brand deal there's something you're not sure about trying to find a better monetization opportunity with merch or affiliates you have people who have done it before who are already making money that you can reach out to for advice as i said when i was starting out and i was flying solo this is the thing that i wish i'd had the opportunity to be a part of and it would have made all the difference in the world in helping me be an even more successful content creator if you have questions you can always reach out via support we're happy to help you figure out if the pro group is right for you also we do have the opportunity to become a vip member if you also would like quarterly one-on-one coaching with me directly now go out there and create something awesome today and hopefully we'll see you in the pro group take care

YouTube Channel Reviews via Super Chat (rules in description)

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Review will address titles, thumbnails, one criticism and one compliment, and one piece of ACTIONABLE ADVICE.

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