SETTING UP YOUR LLC AS A CREATOR | YOUTUBE BUSINESS PLAYBOOK WEEK 1

Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake, helping you create something awesome today. Welcome back. We're doing another workshop Wednesday here on the channel. So today we're going to be doing a workshop that is going to be about helping you to embrace the business side of content creation. So what that means is we're going to be going through a presentation here as I load up, excuse me, our slide deck for this week. The link in the description. on the YouTube channel here will give you access to all of the slides from this week's presentation. So you should be able to download that from awesomecreatoracademy.com. And we're going to load up the slide deck here and we're going to walk through the first week of this six week. presentation so we're going to have a six-week presentation you're going to learn everything from setting up the llc for your creator business and youtube channel we're going to talk about building your one page creator business plan and a lot of other things here so this is uh the slide deck and i'm just going to give you guys a more or less a quick preview of what you can expect here. We're going to talk about different creator revenue streams. We're going to talk about the business strategy framework. So basically, this is what you're going to be seeing throughout our presentation. So a lot of stuff to look forward to. Now... if you're new to our wednesday workshops what you end up getting is a full 60 minute to 90 minute presentation and then at the end we make time for some q a's because we do this live and so that's uh what you can expect and uh next wednesday our topic is and let me just check my notes here because I have to remember the order we put this in. Next week, we'll specifically talk about the business side of negotiating brand deal contracts, as well as a little bit of salesmanship and also the difference between sponsors and affiliates. Speaking of both, make sure you check out... oneoften.com and use discount code Roberto. We want to give them a shout out. We're going to be doing a strategy workshop when this six weeks program is over regarding the business side of YouTube. The next thing we'll be doing is a strategy workshop that will completely cover a full content strategy and how to build that out from zero. But one of the best tools for helping you when it comes to your ideation and strategy is 1of10.com. If you use discount code Roberto, they give you 20% off of the basic plan or the pro plan. And you can use all of their great AI tool features to help you with your ideation, your thumbnails, and your packaging, and your titles. So make sure you're checking them out. Links in the description. Shout out to our friends over at 1of10. Excuse me. We also have our mods to help with some of your questions while you're waiting for us to get to the Q&A session. But let's go ahead and dive into the presentation here and break down week one of the Creator Business Playbook. So just a reminder that you can get the slide presentation over at www.awesomecreatoracademy.com slash bizweek01. and you can download that directly and you will get this full presentation deck we're going to be doing this every week so you have the downloads available to you and to give you kind of a primer of who i am and this is kind of perfect for this is i'm someone who built a successful creator business um i have been a successful content creator for over a decade now I've done over 1,700 videos on YouTube. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars per year through different methods on YouTube. The YouTube Partner Program has made me in my lifetime over $346,000 in revenue, I believe, through doing one-on-one coaching and courses, over $700,000 in sales on Kajabi. Make sure you check out... awesomecreatoracademy.com for that. I've done similar revenue in affiliate sales. My first affiliate program was the Amazon Influencer program back when it was called Amazon Associates. When I was a small YouTuber, because I was doing product reviews. Before I ever started teaching people YouTube, YouTube coaching, I was doing tech and tutorial content. I was doing product reviews. I was making $1,200 to $1,500 a month with the Amazon Influencer Program alone. So that was very successful for me. My biggest revenue stream, like most content creators, has been brand deals and sponsorships. So working with partners, doing content. I believe we've done another $100,000 plus already this year. contracts at least. That's not necessarily all up front, but that's through the contracts we've done with brands. So I've been doing that successfully for a while to where for the last couple of years, over 100,000 through brand partnerships that do very well for me. Usually, you know, mid five figure contracts. So very good with those individual brands that I've worked with and partnered with. And that's been very helpful. And of course, I have my own digital download products. Right now, our big thing is our free Creator Foundations course, which is a pay what you can, pay what you want free course. I think it's somewhere between six and eight hours of material currently. So we've had over a thousand creators sign up to that since January of 2025. So we're very happy with how that's going. But that gives you background on why I can teach you about the business side of YouTube is I've monetized multiple income streams through YouTube. And I've grown many of those revenue streams to the point to where I've either made $100,000 with them all together or hundreds of thousands of dollars in those individual revenue streams. So when it comes to digital products, I've done over $100,000 in sales on digital download products. I've done over $100,000 in terms of direct sales. I've done that with affiliate marketing and affiliate links, specifically in terms of partnering with companies to sell products and get a commission. You can get commissions not only with the Amazon Influencer Program. There are multiple affiliate programs you can use. and that creators have been using for years to make revenue with this, especially for those of you who do beauty reviews. If you do beauty reviews, you do tech reviews, you do software and tutorials. There's a lot of money to be made there. And then, of course, direct sponsorship, doing partnerships with brands, doing public events, speaking, workshops, and demos on stage for companies. That's been very lucrative. consulting so again multiple ways that we will cover that you can make money and i've done basically all of them uh to some varying degree of success in terms of how much money you can make it's not one size fits all some people prioritize making money on adsense that makes you very very dependent on the platform It can lead to burnout if you rely on AdSense because you have anxiety about every upload and the views that you're getting on every upload. I find that if you can grow your channel enough to where you can do partnership deals and you can get long-term contracts, and we'll talk about this in our next week's workshop, if you can get long-term brand deals of $1,500 to $2,500 a month. you get three to five of those brand deals, you can become a full-time content creator. You don't have to be huge or get massive views to negotiate those kinds of deals. You just have to work out the deal itself. And we'll talk about the deal framework for that next week, but that would make you a full-time content creator. Or if you can grow three to five of any of your revenue streams outside of AdSense to $1,500 to $2,500 a month, you can become a full-time content creator. So you just have to decide what you want this to be. If it's just going to be a fun hobby for you, you probably will make $3,000 a year or more. You could make more. But if you take it seriously as a business, you could make $30,000 a month. You can make really good money with this. Not everyone will make $10,000 or $30,000 a month. Those are numbers that I've been fortunate enough to hit. over the years but i didn't do it overnight either and it was because i've treated this like a business very very early and a lot of people want business results with part-time hobby habits now something you should know up front about youtube success is uh the numbers and by the numbers not everyone has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You might be watching YouTubers all the time that have hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers, but that's an outlier result. That is not the norm. What is normal is for most people to struggle to get to 1000 subscribers. In fact, 90% of channels don't have a thousand subscribers. 97% of channels don't have 10 000 subscribers and less than one percent of channels ever reach a hundred thousand subscribers on youtube uh less than uh 600 000 creators in the entire world right now um if i'm not mistaken have a hundred thousand subscribers on youtube in fact if i were to just triple check that number I believe that in terms of that, that that's probably true because in the United States right now, there are still less than 100,000 channels in the United States that have silver play buttons. There's less than 14,000 channels in the United States that have gold play buttons. So it's still extremely rare to do. The country with the most play buttons is still India. um india has 124 000 creators with silver play buttons that have 100 000 subscribers uh third largest country is brazil second largest is the united states so you just have to really put into perspective that um succeeding on youtube it's not luck just because it's rare Most people don't qualify because they don't take it seriously. It's also a lot of very young people. If you're an older content creator, you're over 25, you're over 30, you're over 40. In some ways, you have an edge because in some ways, while you may not always be as tech savvy as a younger generation, it's possible you are, by the way. But if that's not your advantage, one of the advantages you might have is... taking things seriously and having professional standards. And that can actually go a long way. It's a huge advantage. So I just want the creators that are in their 30s and 40s to know that YouTube isn't entirely just for young people that are super passionate about it. You can be serious about it and be successful, but you would have to take it seriously. And if you're an adult, that is something you're capable of doing. So I want to introduce you to the things that kind of matter and that we're going to cover together over the next six weeks with this creator business strategy framework. This is probably the part of the slide presentation that a lot of people like to take screenshots of. So I'm going to let you do that real quick right now. If you want a screenshot of this, just feel free. Remember, you can download the entire slide deck, but some people just like to have a screenshot. for whatever reason and it makes it easy for them so you just feel free to do that now all right so what we have here is we talk about on platform revenue off platform revenue monthly recurring revenue passive income sources multiple income streams long-term sponsorships memberships and subscriptions print on demand products affiliate commissions uh platform ad revenue incorporating your business or S Corp as an LLC or S Corp, utilizing bookkeepers and CPAs, obtaining a tax EIN number, setting up a business bank account and setting up your payment processors. If you do these things, you largely have your bases covered as a full-time content creator because our goal is that we should make a one-page business plan, which is something we'll cover. Really, we'll cover a lot more of that in week three. And we'll definitely be expanding on just the multiple streams of income when we also talk about building the one-page business plan and how to basically set up your income portfolio as a content creator for diverse sources of income. So that's going to be really important. We also talk about that and the seven main ways that YouTubers make money. in our creator foundations course if the mods can post the link to our free creator foundations course in the chat while we're live that'd be great it also is linked in the description of the video and one of the reasons we definitely encourage you to take that free course is uh there's a lot of great info in there there's a lot of faq videos we have some lecture videos we're actually going to be expanding it but there's also a 90 minute free masterclass from an in-person event that I did in New York with an event company that doesn't exist anymore. They struggled a little bit after the pandemic, so they're not really around anymore. But I did an in-person workshop focused on monetizing beyond AdSense. It included a live Q&A session with questions from the audience, especially a lot of questions around sponsorship and brand deals. And so you get that 90 minute workshop as a free bonus in the free creator foundations course. That is a pay what you want, pay what you can course. So it could be $0 if that's all you have. The usual donation people give is five, 10 or $15, but it can be $0. That's why we tell you it's a free course. So you're not obligated. It's something you can do if you want. But we definitely encourage you to take that course because It explains a lot of the details that help you if you're a smaller creator under 20,000 subscribers and explains to you which monetization methods are the easiest to do when you're starting out, especially if ad revenue isn't making you a lot of money because you're not getting views yet or you're not in the partner program yet. So very important. But with... regard to this on platform revenue is when you're earning revenue from things like the youtube partner program or the tick tock creativity program or any other platform that's paying you usually just with like ad revenue or a creator fund right now off platform revenue are things like when you do affiliate links because that's off platform it takes people away from youtube tick tock spotify whatever it is right so that's off-platform revenue is like affiliate links off-platform revenue could be your sponsorship and brand partnerships and there can be a lot of different ways you're doing sponsorship and brand partnerships you can be doing ugc content where you upload videos and license them to the brand to use on their social media instead of reaching your audience So that's UGC, right? So that's an opportunity that's off platform. You could be a host for a brand of their event or their experience or a pop-up or an activation in the real world. That's also off platform revenue. If you have your own store, let's say you have an Etsy shop. If you have an Etsy shop, that's off platform revenue if you're a YouTuber or a TikToker or a podcaster, right? So. or a Twitch stream or what have you. So those are all examples of off-platform revenue. You wanna balance your income portfolio as a content creator with money you earn on the platform and money you earn off the platform where you drive some of your audience, your hardcore fans, your 1,000 true fans. You want them supporting you off-platform and not just on-platform. That way you control more of your money and you're not beholden to these platforms. if they want to delete you, suspend you, ban you, throttle you, suppress you, anything could happen with your accounts, you always want your brand to still be something where people can go and support you off platform if you have to ever get into it or fight with the platform to do right by you for any reason, whatever it is. If you ever have to get in a dispute with the platform or it's not treating you right, then you want this off-platform revenue so that your supporters can back you up and keep you afloat and make sure that you still have income coming in. You also want monthly recurring revenue. So for YouTube, a lot of people go, well, I'll just do the YouTube channel memberships because it's right there and I don't have to set anything up or I don't have to take people away from YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. That's really convenient for YouTube. And it's a 70-30 split. They get 30%. and we love YouTube, but 30% is a lot. You can set up your own membership with things like Patreon or Kajabi or YouScreen or whatever. And there may be some fees associated with it, but you're not gonna necessarily be giving up 30% of whatever you make. The fees are just the fees. So that could be better for a lot of you in terms of an opportunity for monthly recurring revenue with memberships being an example. Another type of monthly recurring revenue could be if you have long-term sponsorships. And let's say it's $1,500 or $2,500 a month. For some of you, if you get two or three of those, that's pretty much replacing your salary, some of you. So that would be... recurring revenue that you'd get every month. Because the goal for that is you don't do one-off brand deals. You do a six to 12 month contract. Like I said, if you don't know what to charge, just make two packages, a $1,500 and $2,500 package per month and do six to 12 month contracts if you don't know what to charge. If you don't know what to charge, haggling and sales gives you anxiety, just lock in two rates and let them choose one of your two rates. and set the deliverables for that and call it a day. Let's talk about that more in next week's workshop. So that's what you'd want to do. So that's an example of monthly recurring revenue. Another type of monthly recurring revenue, something that worked out really well for me, is some affiliate commissions have monthly recurring revenue. Not all of them, but subscription commissions like NordVPN or with me and one of 10. or kajabi or anything like that my biggest one back in the day was tubebuddy before they changed their affiliate program i don't really make any money off that anymore but um affiliate programs can pay you monthly recurring revenue as long as the terms don't change you can make money in passive income off of that for a long time now with passive income a lot of people think passive income means oh, you sell an online course or they don't think passive income exists. You know, funny thing is everybody who's ever told you there's no such thing as passive income on YouTube makes passive income off of those videos saying it doesn't exist because they keep making money two or three years later when everyone makes that video, when everyone watches that video that says passive income doesn't exist or that passive income is a scam or whatever, the person making that video is still getting paid two or three years later. you're not getting paid for work you did for your nine to five job two or three years later after you put out that work. Your boss might be making money off of work you did two or three years ago, but you're not. But that YouTuber who told you passive income doesn't exist is still making money off of that video. So that's passive income. Passive income usually and historically. has been recognized by the IRS to be royalties in most cases. It's usually royalties or it's licensing. So an example of royalties or licensing is the fact that back in 2018, I licensed content to LinkedIn Learning. So LinkedIn Learning flew me out to Carpinteria, California during the California fires. So I had to actually fly back when the fires were over because it was a problem. And we filmed content in their studio. And they licensed that content from me and they licensed my name, image, and likeness. This was called an NIL deal. An NIL deal means name, image, and likeness. This is going to be very important when we talk about this in next week's workshop around sponsorship and brand deals because it's another opportunity to make money. So what we did was I made content for them to host on LinkedIn Learning. We scripted it. Mostly me. I wrote it and then I performed it. They did the editing. I licensed it to them permanently, but with a royalty commission structure for the course. Now it's been seven years since we did this. It was a course on video marketing basics and fundamentals. Interestingly, the fundamentals of video marketing haven't changed even though the platforms have. So the course is actually still getting very good reviews and people are still interested in it. It's been seven years and I've still been making commissions from that course for the last seven years. And they pay it to me in what's called remittance fees. So this is remittance fees. Now, those of you who may be familiar with the entertainment industry right here, actors call these residuals. Okay. So in the world of acting, if you had a deal and let's say, especially if you're in the Screen Actors Guild and you're in the union, you might be getting remittance fees, sometimes called residuals. Now, in some cases, these are also called royalties. So you can get that by licensing content. Now, another way that people traditionally make passive income besides licensing. is the royalties on music. So if you are, let's say you were a vlogger and then your audience who loves your vlogs knows you wanted to be a musician your whole life and they decide to support your music career, you get your vocal lessons, you put out a couple of albums, they do decently, you're making money on the Billboard tracks. Let's say you put out those tracks and you You either get a record deal or you start your own label with DistroKid and you're now distributing it under your label. You'd get streaming royalties from Apple and Spotify and Amazon. You might even be selling your albums and set it up to where you're distributing digital downloads. Maybe you did CD Baby. You're doing those things. You'd be getting royalties on your music and that's considered a form of passive income by the IRS and it's considered royalty income. So you'd be getting royalties and passive income from that if you decided to become a musician. Now me, I wrote a book. I also did have music done for my faceless channel. So I actually do get audio royalties on the music that I own. I had a ghost producer do it for me, but I own that and I own the rights to it. So I actually do get royalties sent to me from Spotify and Apple and Amazon when people stream my music. But I also have a book and I published my book on Amazon. I also published it on Google and I published it in iBooks and so on and so forth. I distribute it through Amazon KDP and through IngramSpark. And I've been doing royalties on that. We've sold 5,000 copies of the book. most self-published authors never sell 100 copies of their book. I bring it up because I get a 70% royalty on every book that I sell. So if there's an ebook, if I sell the ebook, I get $7 out of 10 for the ebook. So the ebook is about $9.99. I make about seven bucks from that because it's a 70-30 royalty split with Amazon. That's what you typically can get if you're an independent. publisher. Now I've done a traditional publishing deal as a co-author on a book, I believe it was the ultimate guide to social media published by entrepreneur.com through their publishing arm. So I was a co-author on that. I got a different royalty deal. So we got a much smaller royalty deal from the publishing house. Because one, it was multiple authors. And then two, if the traditional publisher does the heavy lifting and the promotion, they take a larger cut, but still get some royalties in perpetuity off of that book forever. Right? So I would get that. So between Amazon self-publishing and then also a traditional publishing deal, that's passive income. You can make money off of books forever. Even your descendants can make money off of your books. So royalties as a form of passive income do exist. As content creators, we have much more leverage to either get support for our music or our books in order to get royalties. And we could also partner with brands, license them content. And then we could get residuals from the licensing, which are called remittance fees. And those are, according to the IRS, forms of passive income. So this is traditional passive income that has existed in media, publishing, traditional publishing, and in music longer than any of us have been alive. So passive income is very real and it exists. And so all of this. adds up to being multiple income streams that you can have as a content creator. And some of these don't require you to make on platform revenue from YouTube. You should certainly look at making YouTube ad revenue, getting donations as a streamer. You should do all of those things, but there are all these other opportunities for you to make money. And it's important for you to have different types of money. You want monthly money coming in, but you might also want to have. um money coming in in cash flow on the daily from selling your own products this could be print on demand products this could be digital download products this could be uh not just people streaming your music but buying it outright uh with either physical cds or digital downloads uh could be print on demand merchandise uh you could be getting affiliate commissions that come in on the daily that you could uh then withdraw from paypal if you make the with uh withdrawal threshold for that for most uh things, the withdrawal threshold is either 50 or a hundred dollars to pull your money out. And obviously there's platform revenue, but platform revenue usually only comes in once a month. Long-term sponsorships, that could be one-time deals or it could be long-term deals. If you do a long-term deal, even that first month, you might have to wait 30 days on the first month or 60 days. Or if it's a one-time deal, you might have to do what's called net 30, net 60. We'll talk about that next week and wait on the payouts. so again you want different ways to make um money here as a content creator and one of the reasons you definitely want multiple streams of income is you don't want to sit there and wait and know you only have one payday a month one payday a month is really really stressful uh to deal with so you absolutely don't want to deal with like one day a month as a payday that's just too anxiety inducing so if you can set up multiple streams of income and multiple ways to get paid, you can have multiple paydays. Now, speaking of getting paid, you definitely want to make sure you set up a business bank account. You want to talk to your tax professional about this, but you want a business bank account and I'm going to tell you why. If you talk to an accountant, you talk to any tax professional, they're going to tell you that when you have a business, you don't want to co-mingle business funds. and personal funds you don't want to use the business as a personal um piggyback um so that's you know really important now to have a business bank account you're going to need a tax ein number you can get a tax ein number if you have a dba so if you don't have the money usually it's not that expensive to set up an llc in most states in america you can set up an llc from anywhere from 99 to 199 to 299 dollars it's not that bad now you can go through the secretary of state for your particular state to set up an llc you'll want to create a name for your llc what i would recommend is now you could also do a dba doing business as If you do a doing business as, you can use a stage name, you can use a nickname, you can make up a name. And this can be great for you for privacy or if you don't want to use your real name or reveal that or have people look that up. So you can do a DBA called a doing business as. Okay? So very important. Now, what I will say... is that a doing business as doesn't give you all the benefits and protections that an LLC does. So you will want an LLC, which means limited liability company, at least if you're here in the US. In other countries, they call it something else. So that's something you want to think about. Now with an LLC, You need to have a business name for it. I recommend creating a professional business name and not naming it the same thing as your YouTube channel or naming it the same thing as your legal given name. One of the reasons is that this helps protect your privacy. When you register your LLC, I also recommend that you go ahead and set up a local virtual address. at a UPS store or a post office, usually not the one nearest your house if you can help it. And the reason why is you don't wanna use your home address as your LLC's place of incorporation. Something that can help you with this and where you might decide that instead of registering with the Secretary of State and you might want to use something, don't use LegalZoom in my opinion, use Zen Business. I don't have an affiliate link for them yet, but. Use Zen Business. I've incorporated with Zen Business. You can incorporate with Stripe and their thing, Atlas. I've done that for one of my LLCs. I currently have, I think it's, is it three or is it four? I have four LLCs. I have that for various reasons that I'll get into at another point. But I have... four different LLCs because I have more than one business venture and they operate under different business classifications. So when you form your LLC, you also have to make sure the name is available. Use, you know, again, a potential business name that's different than your name or the name of your YouTube channel. And you want to make it something professional. You don't want to be cute or quirky. You're going to have to live with this. You want to name it something professional, something that sounds reasonable for an adult. So that's something you want to do. And you want to make sure that you check for your specific state if there are specific rules for LLC names in your state. There are some names you are going to be prohibited from using and they will revoke your LLC and your tax EIN number if you use um certain names there are states that will not let you use a vulgar name as your llc so again don't try to be clever don't try to be clever about it so that's something that you definitely want to make sure you're looking at and then you want to make sure you're reading the rules for the state about the organizational rules the articles of organization for your business So you have to do things like what's the purpose that the company exists for? What's its lawful business that it's pursuing and things of that nature. And when you use something like Zen Business, you can have what's called a registered agent. So that will also help protect your privacy in terms of your contact information if anyone is trying to get in touch with the company that you've built, the LLC. So that is something important. They'll also help you with things like the articles of organization, the operating agreement, so on and so forth. Most of you don't have to worry about... like splitting a partnership with an LLC unless you're starting this with friends or your spouse. I recommend you get the book by Carolyn Martin. It's called the LLC Beginner's Guide. It's actually very helpful for anybody that needs a very quick crash course on this. And it's a fairly easy read. And it's a small book that's only about 100. uh 70 pages or so so uh it's very helpful and it has a lot of great resources in it if you're trying to um understand this there are some advantages to um using a company like zen business versus secretary of state for one thing The interface is going to be usually better because the government websites you have to use look like they're the 1990s and they're very, they might be from the 1990s and they're very confusing. And so you can screw things up very easily. Also, things like Zen Business, they have chatbots and customer support to help you, real customer support. You can call a human on the phone and they can help you. The Secretary of State is not going to hold your hand through setting up your business. So that's very important. Now, one of the reasons you get an LLC, even if you're going to do the S corp for tax reasons, and again, talk to a tax professional, talk to a lawyer about this, is that with an LLC, that's going to protect you from being sued when you get specifically, you want to get business liability insurance. And you want what we call media insurance. And then you also want what we call gear insurance. Now, you're going to get the general liability. And that's like if you're filming and somebody slips and falls and gets hurt or drops a camera on their foot or gets hit in the head by a camera, you know, it's going to cover you for accidents and things of that nature. So that's going to be very important. It's very similar to like you getting car insurance, collision insurance. Okay. So that's very important. Now, the media insurance is usually said to be you want errors and omissions. Errors and omissions is what we call media insurance. You want to make sure that includes defamation. All right. So what that does is let's say you're a commentary YouTuber and someone like, let's just say. um logan paul decides to sue you because you call out uh crypto zoo or something or one of his other different crypto schemes or what have you or any of his improprieties and he says nope that's defamation you're lying um you know you would want protection from that and you'd want your legal fees covered and you don't want to go broke and bankrupt so there's two things that happens here the llc and the tax EIN and the business bank account help you, the human and your creator business be separate legal entities. And it's also why you don't want to co-mingle funds. So this is very important. Then what you want to do is you want to have that errors and omission insurance because it can, and make sure that it has a clause in there for defamation, because that will help you. And if you get a good policy, it'll help you with up to $2 million of damages and legal fees per incident. You want to make sure that it says per incident and not per contract term, aka per 6 or 12 month term of your policy. You want to make sure that that's covered. So that will help you. The reason you want equipment and gear insurance is in your policy, you should probably get... uh, $20,000, uh, dollars of gear coverage and insurance because that'll cover all of your equipment. Why 20,000? Well, some of you are going to have very expensive camera gear, but you're also going to have a laptop. Maybe you have a laptop computer. Maybe it's a 3000, $5,000 MacBook pro. What if you're traveling and, uh, something happens with the airport or on a shoot and your camera and your laptop are damaged or stolen or lost, um, via the airport so um this is very important and then also um like katie is saying in the chat you want to make sure you check the uh and talk to a licensed insurance agent in your state when you're signing up for your insurance now there are some affordable ways to get this insurance that i'm talking about um some uh organizations offer it. For example, if you're with the Professional Photographers of America, even if you don't consider yourself a photographer, if you're a YouTuber, if you're a content creator who uses a camera, join the Professional Photographers of America. One, you get access to a lot of great resources, but one of the things you get access to is the ability to buy a very, very affordable gear protection policy and insurance policy very affordably. for up to, I think, $10,000 to $20,000 worth of your gear, and you'll pay a reasonable price for that. I think maybe it's, and don't quote me, but I've seen prices for that for like $20,000, $30,000 a month, I believe, to cover $10,000 worth of your gear. And if nothing else, that's a great backup policy for just the camera gear side. Now, I have a comprehensive policy, and the company I use is Hiscox, which is H-I-S-O-X. So that's the company I use. I've used them for a couple of years now. And you want to have this and make sure that for the gear policy, it covers loss, theft, and accidents. And so you don't want a situation like, let's say there's a storm and it blows out your desktop computer and your monitor. You want the coverage for that. If you are traveling, I had $10,000 worth of camera gear stolen. I had, it was three camera lenses. And two camera bodies, they stole it right out of my backpack. That was $10,000 worth of camera equipment. It was a professional Sony camera equipment. The camera bodies, it was two camera bodies, that was 5,000. And then they stole another 5,000 in lenses. So I didn't get the footage back, obviously, but I was at least able to replace my camera gear. So that was very helpful. And they got me reimbursed and got me... um a direct deposit check uh for the uh basically 10 grand about 9 800 they got me that it was a very painless process and we got taken care of the main thing was i i filed an incident report at the hotel that it was stolen from i filed a police report in the state of florida even though i'm a georgia resident because the event was in florida and i called it in right away And that's what we did. And it got taken care of. And in two weeks, I got my money. In three weeks, I had new gear. So you want to make sure you put yourself in that position to where you're covered if the worst should happen. So that's why we get liability insurance. We make sure we get gear insurance. And we make sure that we get insurance, what's called media insurance for errors and omissions. You make sure there's also a clause for defamation in there. So that's extremely important. To get that insurance policy, you do need to have an LLC. And that gives you a tax IEN number. They're going to ask you for that tax IEN number, which is an employer identification number. And you're going to want that business bank account. And you don't want to commingle funds. The other thing you're going to want to do as a content creator is set up your proper payment processors. Now, all of you should have a PayPal and a Stripe account. These are the two main accounts that every creator knows they need to have besides a bank account. They need to have a PayPal account and a Stripe account. Most of your affiliate programs will pay out via PayPal or Stripe. Some of them, like the Amazon Influencer program, will pay. direct deposit to a bank account. So that's good. Now, when you're working with brands, some of them might use a bill.com or pay.com or might use wise.com. You will want to look into having accounts with some of those major payment processors in advance. So you're not cut off of guard when they, um, you know, want to pay you and they have to go through a different pay porter. Now, some of them will use other pay porters, sorry, pay portals like to Palty and things of that nature. So they might want to sign up, get you sign up for an account. When you start making an agreement with a brand, you want to get into their vendor portal and payment processor as quickly as possible. Extremely important to do that. So just make sure that you're doing these things in advance. And so these are the main things. Now, one of the other thing is to make sure for tax purposes to use bookkeepers and CPAs. Now, you see that have S-Corp in there. When you start doing payroll and you start taking on part-time and full-time employees in your business, Or when you start reaching the threshold of maybe you're making over $50,000, $60,000 a year, you might look at converting over to an S-corp and you might want to talk to CPAs and bookkeepers about that process because then that could start to save you money on taxes. The LLC itself isn't what saves you money on taxes. Talk to your CPA and accountants about this, but it's really the S-corp declaration. that saves you money on taxes and setting up pass-through income and making sure that you're taking owner's draws and distributions as the owner, but that also you put yourself and all the other employees on payroll and you'll be a W-2 employee within your own company. And so you're going to be taxed at a lower tax rate on that personal income through your wages that you're getting through your own company. So your own company is paying your wages, but then as an owner, you're taking a distribution. Since these are different forms of income, you're then going into a lower progressive tax rate than if you just did one source of income here or one type of income rather. So that's what's going to end up saving you the money on taxes. This becomes more relevant to creators making over $100,000 a year or so, but... you start thinking about it usually in the 50, 60,000 a year range. Your mileage may vary. Again, this is why it's important to talk to tax professionals and CPA certified public accountants and bookkeepers. You also, if you ever want to buy a house as a content creator, which I did, you're going to want to have about two to three years of your bookkeeping done and your profit and loss statements. I needed to have that done. I had to have it backordered. uh when i um did that and you're gonna need um about two three years of your tax transcripts about six months of your bank account records from the account that you are making your income in which will be your business account and then also whatever the account your personal account that you're making the down payment on your house from so you'll uh need that so this is why this is very important to have bookkeeping and accounting and to not try to do this yourself once you start making money as a full-time content creator if you're thinking about in the next couple of years buying a house once you have a tax ien number and a business bank account you also have the ability to take out business lines of credit business credit cards under the business if you have a business bank account an llc and a tax EIN number. You also, when you have payment processors like Stripe and PayPal, once you start doing decent revenue in Stripe or PayPal, you get access to what's called working capital loans. So working capital loans through your payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, and even Authorize.net, what they will do is when you start making really good money, They'll offer you business lines of credit. You've heard people say, oh, access to capital. I need access to capital to grow a business. I need access to capital to start a business. You've heard of the concept of access to capital. Well, what they do is instead of checking your credit or asking you to put up any collateral is they judge your worthiness for this capital and your capacity to pay back a loan by the income and profits you generated through your business. And what they'll typically do is let's say you wanted to borrow $10,000. Now don't quote me on this exactly, but this is a simplified version of how it works. If you wanted to borrow, let's say you wanted to borrow $10,000, then what they would do in that situation is if you wanted to borrow $10,000, they'd look at your PayPal or Stripe account, whichever one you're working with, and they would say, okay, we're going to charge you a flat fee on a $10,000 loan, we're going to say, okay, instead of charging you interest, what have you, let's say you give us $1,200 as a flat fee for a $10,000 loan. So you're going to really end up getting $11,200, right? Okay. And then what they'll say is on every sale you make, for the next whatever the terms are, 18 months, 24 months. We're going to take 15, 20% of every transaction plus our normal processing fees until the loan is repaid. So you'll have that money, but we're going to get our money back by taking a 20% cut on every transaction that comes in until we get all our money back plus the flat fee those terms are not that terrible especially since you get upfront cash and you can spend it to grow your business or pay your current business operations so that's not an unreasonable thing to do but you get to do that when you're using these payment processors like paypal stripe and authorized.net I have multiple payment processors and I've used them over the years. I built up a lot of goodwill with them. I've done a couple of these to invest in equipment right away when something new comes out or something started to get a little old, whatever, and do some upgrades. And it worked out really well for me. Now, I'm not telling you, you have to take out a loan to grow your business or to start your YouTube business or your channel. What I am telling you is that If you're someone who's always heard that phrase and like access to capital, access to capital, then when you really do have a situation, like maybe you are in between renewals on brand deal contracts or something, and you're still doing payroll or you're trying to hire freelancers or you have a big project you're trying to do, you could take out one of these working capital loans with PayPal or Stripe. I've done that successfully and paid them down over the years. I've been a content creator for well over 12 years successfully. I've been a 100K channel since 2016. And I think I've done this particular thing maybe three or four times. It was once with PayPal and I think either two or three times with Stripe. And so I've done this successfully. Again, your terms will vary based on the performance of your account. So in my case, with these people, I've done hundreds of thousands of dollars with them in the past. So that gave me the access to that kind of capital. that's how it worked out. Like I said, instead of charging you interest in APR where annually it's this percentage, that percentage on the remaining balance of the loan, it's a flat fee. You can argue in some cases that that might be better and more favorable terms than you would get with a traditional bank. So when they say, well, if you're a content creator and you're an entrepreneur or you're a solo business owner, oh, you don't get these other things you get in the traditional system. You don't have access to capital. You can't do this with the bank. You can't do that with the bank. Yes, you can. You absolutely can. And if you have a business bank account, you can do all kinds of things because also as a business owner with a bank account and tax AEN number, you can also set up your own solo 401k with the bank, or you can set up a SEP IRA with the bank, and you can contribute both as a employee. and you can contribute as an employer and that can give you the opportunity to put away more money for your retirement and reap the tax benefits of those accounts. I've done that before in the past as well. And you can invest your money. Now, just remember that with retirement accounts, that money is locked up. You can withdraw it, but you will pay a penalty and you will have to pay taxes on it. So again, talk to a tax professional. uh for advice on this and talk to a financial advisor a lot of you also don't realize you can set up a uh appointment for zero dollars at your bank with a financial advisor that can explain any financial terms you don't understand, can explain any tax implications about certain accounts and things you don't understand with your retirement accounts. They can do that and it costs you $0 and they have to, by legal mandate, be honest with you about it. So you can set up an appointment with your bank anytime to talk to a financial advisor and for 30 minutes, they will educate you and help you become financially literate. Again, this is very important. And they will also tell you what they can and cannot do and what the bank offers. Now, what I will tell you is another thing you may not realize is you can use assets with some financial institutions as collateral and secure a line of credit using your stock portfolio. as leverage. Now you've heard them talk about billionaires doing this and millionaires doing this, but to do this, you actually only need to have $50,000 in assets that are liquid, meaning in a trading account that's not a retirement account in order to do this with most institutions. Chase. bank of america fidelity they offer uh these things uh people also uh you've heard the phrase a second mortgage it's really called a heloc home equity line of credit people sometimes leverage their house as collateral for loans i do not i'm not this is not financial advice i don't recommend it i'm just making an example of when people talk about access to capital this is part of what they're talking about I believe that you get an advantage as a business owner and content creator who has money coming into PayPal from your memberships or your merchandise or your affiliate programs. I think it's better if you needed money to look at something like PayPal working capital loan. They're not a sponsor or a Stripe working capital loan. I think the terms technically are more favorable and less risky than dealing with a regular bank loan because they're just taking 20% off of your sales or something, 15 or 20% off your sales. You're already used to YouTube taking 30% of every super chat. So, you know, what's the difference, right? So I think that that's just a reasonable thing to do. um if you have that opportunity so again another benefit of having these payment processors another reason to talk to bookkeepers and cpas to help you another reason is to have your llc and your tax ein number set up so you have these opportunities if you're like oh I'm just a YouTuber. I don't want to go through this formal business process. Well, I've told you exactly why. You should learn the business side of YouTube across all platforms for this workshop right now. We have 310 live viewers now, so thank you for that. Now, this is, you know, again, the important boring stuff. This is the masterclass that a lot of the big YouTubers won't give you, you know, so. This is something that a lot of entertainment channels themselves don't know about or don't understand. And this hurts them later when they don't understand this. And not knowing this stuff, when I was a small YouTuber, not knowing this stuff did hurt me. It had consequences. Now, there are 15 major streams of revenue that you could look at as a content creator. Ad revenue is the obvious one. You have donations and fan funding. You have memberships and subscriptions. You have sponsored content. You have UGC partnerships where you upload content to the brand's social media accounts. You have affiliate links like the Amazon Influencer Program. You can start your own affiliate program and you don't have to just be a coach or a course seller or sell digital products to have your own affiliate program. A lot of you don't realize that some of the print-on-demand companies for your merch, your t-shirts, your hats, your hoodies, all of those things. So any of your merchandise, a lot of these different companies, I haven't had my merch in easy reach right here where I'd show you, but a lot of these companies, they will give you an affiliate setup. So that you can give commissions to people who sell your merchandise. You can absolutely do that. The digital product platforms let you do that. The main one that allows you to do this is Shopify. And Shopify integrates with almost every social media platform. So Shopify integrates with YouTube shopping. I believe it integrates with Twitch. We know it integrates with TikTok. We know it integrates with Instagram. So, and Facebook. So Shopify is the big one. Shopify also, I believe, distributes to Amazon. But you can have your own affiliate program where people can sell for you and you can give them a small cut and you can make passive income because they're working as a sales force for you and getting commissions instead of a salary. Now, again, this is something we typically see with course sellers. and people who sell digital products, possibly even coaching businesses. But it is possible to do this with your print on demand and your merch products. And if you sell other digital products like templates or stock footage or sound effects or photography presets or anything like that, you can also do this. So again, you can have your own affiliate program. Now, print-on-demand products. For print-on-demand products like merchandise, posters, T-shirts, hats, hoodies, YouTube Shopping integrates with four options for this. It integrates with Shopify, like we mentioned, but you pay money for Shopify. It integrates with Fourth Wall. Fourth Wall is also free. Looks very good like Shopify. And then you also have... Spread Shop, which is also free. And you have Spring for Creators, which is also free. There are other print-on-demand and merch platforms out there, but these are the four that directly integrate with YouTube Shopping. To my knowledge, they all also integrate with Twitch. Most of them integrate with Instagram. And I think that both Shopify, Spreadshop and fourth wall integrate with TikTok. So again, that's going to be extremely helpful to you if you're a multi-platform. And I believe at some point, they're probably going to start working out with something with Spotify as well. So that's something to look into when it comes to print-on-demand products. Now, digital download products. Some of these places offer the ability for digital download products. I think actually... Almost all of them offer the opportunity for digital download products alongside your print-on-demand products, but not necessarily course sales if you're looking for that. For that, I recommend Kajabi. We'll link to that in the description under the business tools. And also, if the mods could post the affiliate link for Kajabi, that'd be extremely helpful. Shout out to our friends at Kajabi. That's where my digital products exist. But yeah, there are a couple of platforms that do that and make that available. Physical products, that could include merch, but it can go beyond merch. For most people, for physical products, they outsource that through vendors, and they can find those people and source those people usually through Shopify in many cases. So this could include plushies. that people want to do this could include manufacturing something like a tripod accessory my friend pat flynn did a product called the switch pod you could do any number of these things so physical products and it could go beyond that with regard to physical products physical products could also be a book like my book is a physical product there's also a digital version of that in terms of kindle so that's another opportunity so Physical products can take on many forms. Bookmarks are still a popular physical product. So then you also have online courses. For that, definitely recommend Kajabi. You have email marketing. Now, a lot of you may not realize this, but kit.com, for one thing, if we could drop my link for that as well in the chat mods. Kit.com is in many ways the YouTube of email marketing. Because they do have, well, it starts out one. The first thing you should know is that your first 10,000 email subscribers, they can give you a free account for up to your first 10,000 email subscribers. But if you have the paid account, it could pay for itself because they offer ad revenue in the email marketing if you insert ads into your emails. So they do have the ability for you to earn passive income through advertising if people are opening up your emails using kit.com. They also have a tip jar feature if people want to tip you. They offer the ability for you to directly sell your own digital download products in email. So they also have that. They've created an ability for you to have your own storefront now. So they have that. The other thing with kit.com, K-I-T.com, kit.com, not to be confused with kick.com. So kit.com. um has these features they also have their own sponsorship platform they also have a referral network where if you help other people and other people help you grow their email list they have a referral program so you could um some people if you are referring people that sign up to their newsletter there are some companies out there they'll give you a one or two dollar commission for every email signup that comes from you for their newsletter because they have a newsletter network. They have organic growth. So there are these different monetization opportunities with email marketing on kit. But the other thing you could do is you can directly promote your own products, promote your merchandise, promote your courses, promote your book that you're selling, promote your coaching, whatever it is. So that's an opportunity. Public speaking events. I speak at events like VidCon, VidFest, PodFest, VidSummit, I speak at every year now, Social Media Marketing World. Not all of these events pay. A lot of them don't. But I also do private speaking events on top of public. I've been able, especially as a best-selling author, to get $5,000 plus speaking fees plus travel covered for the weekend. Uh, so if I, you know, if I can get a public speaking fee, uh, it's a weekend trip. Usually I usually, um, have to be there for the whole event or at least two days of it. They usually cover two to three, uh, hotel days for me. In most cases, any overage I have to pay, um, if I want to stay more days or come in earlier than that, whatever. And they'll usually either pay for my flight or reimburse my flight. So public speaking can be very lucrative if you do enough of it, especially if you do public and private events. Some companies will pay more. You could haggle for doing five grand for the public speaking and then also do an extra day of after work to do consulting for the company. So you can make it a 10 grand round trip if you do it that way. There's a lot of opportunities with that. Professional services. Professional services. could include by the way if you're an entertainer this could be hosting duties instead of being keynote speaker some entertainers are keynote speakers as well but it could also be hosting duties for an event you could be in esports for example and be esports host and you could make money doing that you could do an event where you're doing an activation or a pop-up collaborating with a brand so there are there are different opportunities there professional services. Professional services could include consulting for a brand. That's not necessarily the same as a brand deal. Let's say you've done a brand deal in the past, but you can make the product better, whether that's a physical product or a software or something. Let's say you can literally make the product better than it was, that's consulting. You can charge for that. I've done that with many companies, especially in the software space. I've done that with even consulting services for YouTube as a platform before. There's a lot of opportunity in consulting and you could start the process working with a brand as an influencer, but it could evolve into something to where you're doing consulting for them. Or you could end up in a relationship where you end up doing a stint in the company as an actual public-facing figure of the company, but you work behind the scenes as well as a marketer or a fractional CMO of some kind or a chief creative officer for a company or a brand or a media company or a publication. You could leverage your cachet as a creator. to even maybe be a media personality or a writer and get fees for that as a contributor. I was a contributing writer for Creative Pro Magazine, How Design Magazine, and Print Magazine, and I was paid, and I was paid very well for my articles. This was when I was a younger creator, and I leveraged that to work with these companies. I believe that FW Media owned them at the time as a parent company. I also licensed a course to how design back in the day. I licensed a course on branding to them. And what, you know, so that was licensing and royalties, but you can offer professional services. So you could be, you can offer your services. as a writer, for example, the Boates sisters offer their services, or at least, you know, Andrea Boates, like she offers her services as a DJ in addition to being a content creator. So there's different opportunities that can arise from your creator career to work with companies in a different capacity, in a different capacity. And then, of course, we talked about licensing and royalties, licensing of music, licensing your name, image, and likeness as a brand ambassador, royalties from books, residuals from appearances on screen, sometimes called remittance. So you could have that. There could be licensees for... your photography if you're doing that some of you are vloggers you could be taking time lapses and drone footage you could be licensing this to stock companies you could even be licensing if you i mean some of you um are worried about the ethical implications of ai but some creators are just saying you know what they're gonna try and take it anyway they're gonna train on my content anyway what if i get a licensing and royalty deal and just give it to them so um i can get paid for that so some of them um are doing that as well so licensing and royalty so these are 15 different revenue streams for content creators i'm sure some of you can think of more and subsets of this maybe i'll put together something with um you know 50 different ways uh to make money as a content creator which would be variations of this but these are the main 15 and if you want to screenshot this um you definitely can you absolutely can and This might just be a really good breakdown or crash course for, oh, here's how I make money as a content creator. Here's what's possible for me. This is what I could be doing right now. So that's just something for you to take a look at there. So real quick, I do want to let you guys know that I will be, as we get closer to the end of the presentation, I'll be answering the questions from the chat as we go through this. uh presentation but just want to let you guys know that we will also be doing uh the part two next week wednesday i'll have that scheduled you'll find the replay of all of these on the live tab on my youtube channel and so we'll make sure that the replay of these are available for you uh this is a six week workshop. This is a six-week masterclass on the business side of content creation. And week two will focus specifically on brand deals, affiliate links, and negotiating and salesmanship around sponsorships and partnering with companies. So you definitely will not want to miss that. Now, something that I think is important, and I bring this up in almost every workshop, is the concept of Ikigai for creators. What are you passionate about? What are you good at? What does the audience, the market, the world want from you and how the hell are you going to make money? And this is important because if you don't have all four of these things, you will suffer. You will absolutely suffer if you don't have all of these things. If you're passionate about something and you suck at it, you're bad at it, then you can't create value for the market. The audience will reject it if you're not good at it. If you're enthusiastic as hell, but you're bad at something, most people will reject you. You also will find it very difficult to make money. If you are good at something, but you hate it and people really want it and you do make money from it, you'll feel like a sellout and it won't be sustainable. You will hate yourself. You will suffer. If you make money doing something and you're not particularly good at it and you're not creating any real value, a lot of people will start to wonder, and you might start to wonder if this is ethical or if you're a fraud. So again, you will suffer. You have to be able to have some humility at some point and say, it's not enough to be passionate about something. I also have to be able to create value for others. And I should be able to focus on attracting a tribe of people. that are passionate about something in the same way I am and can acknowledge that I'm good enough at it to justify me making money. So that's why we have Ikigai. You have to have these things in balance or you will suffer. A lot of creators burn out because they are passionate about something, but the market doesn't align with them. So that's a problem. You need an audience that you're aligned with and you need to be passionate about things in the same way. The reason we will tell you to niche down, at least from my perspective, is not just so you can pick a target and pick a topic and run with it. We want you to niche down to a community so you can attract your tribe of people that are passionate about things in the same way that you're passionate about them. And you need to be passionate about something you are good at so those people won't reject or dismiss you. And so you can feel good about actually creating value for them and having an impact. And those things will also make you not feel guilty about monetizing and making money. And it will also make it possible to do so. So that's why this is important. And some people also refer to this as market fit. Now, we talk a lot about audience avatars and customer avatars. The reason this is important is for you to understand your person and what they care about more and what they care about most. They're gonna have priorities. They're gonna have quirks. They're gonna have challenges. They're gonna have preferences. And this is gonna decide. um what is and is not a priority for them what is going to get clicked on what is going to be worth their money what is not what is going to be worth their time what's going to be worth their time money and emotional investment will be decided by these things so we niche down to an audience avatar so that we can attract our tribe of people and so we can build true fans that support with their eyeballs and with their wallets when they're able to That's why we do it. This is how we do it. So your creator business should really kind of look something like this. And at some point we'll build out our one page business plan as a creator. There'll be an interesting template that I show you guys working on that. But this is what you want to do as a creator. You want to focus on a specific type of person. And you want to solve a particular type of problem for them, even as an entertainer. I'll give you the example as an entertainer. Let's say you were a gamer. It's very hard to do business as a YouTube gamer, but let's just use it because it'll be the, well, what about gaming? What about gaming? It'll be the thing. So if you were a gamer, for example, I'll tell you what this looks like. Your person is not every gamer in the world. It is a specific type of gamer who has certain types of preferences and certain types of challenges. So the thing that you would look for in terms of a problem in the market is here's a new game and nobody is helping onboard players to really understand how to set themselves up for this game. everyone's doing and also, oh, there's no personality behind it. And they're also just wasting people's time. And it's not really good. And people just want to learn how to play the game properly and set up their character right, get the right equipment, get the right gear. They want to be able to enjoy this game, but they won't want someone wasting their time. And nobody needs another generic Let's Play channel. So that's how we look at, okay, here's how we're going to find and exploit a problem in the market. Let's play videos are oversaturated. What if I make really good guides that help people navigate the game? And what if it's so good that it can help a new player or returning player for the game? So that would be, oh, here's a problem as a gamer that I can solve. Here's another one. If a game has a meta, how can I help new and returning players understand the meta of the game? So this could be Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel. This could be Magic the Gathering Online. This could be Brawl Stars. This could be Clash of Clans or Clash Royale. How would I help new and returning players not feel left behind and feel like they can enjoy the game? and they can navigate it and how can i give them that in the shortest videos possible but also the best video possible for a new or returning player and how can i make sure that i also don't come across as boring so this is the subset of problems that this is the cluster problem that okay this is the problem that i care about and that's how i'm going to approach the content okay fantastic and so oh here's my person it's the person that is this new or returning player to the game all right fantastic so what's my market positioning well you have to pick and choose if you're a pro player that makes life really easier if you're a pro player and you're ranked and you're you know you don't have to be famous you could just be ranked that's a good position in the market hey learn from a high tier player learn from a pro player learn from an esports pro learn from a champion that could be a good position to have in the market of here's what makes me stand out if you don't have that you need some other positioning That position could be new videos every day. That could be like a market position that you have. Your other one can be the most comprehensive tutorials on the game, the deepest tutorials on the game, the most accurate and precise or honest ones on the game. Okay, cool. This is easier if you're a product reviewer, by the way. So that could be a position. You being, oh, I'm funny, is not a position. It's not. My personality, that's not a position. Now, a difference on position in the market is the best channel in this language, the best channel in this region, the only daily channel in this region. Or another position could be the vibe and atmosphere you create. So another market position could be I'm wholesome. I don't curse. I'm friendly friendly or you're another market position is I play this game and I'm a Christian gamer or I play this game and I'm a cozy content creator and a safe space for other female gamers. That could be another thing that you, so there's any number of positions in the market you can take. My personality is not one of them. So understand that that's a way to, for uniqueness, uniqueness. Okay. So that's how you stand out. So then product, what do I offer to my community? So what you offer to the community, it doesn't have to be a course. If you're a gamer, the product usually is a membership. And the way that a membership could work for that would be, this is where you should put the other non-gaming content. that is about your personality for hardcore fans behind this paywall so that you can still express yourself. And then everything that you want to do is instead of being validated by views, it's being validated by money. And it's only for the people who really want to care about that content. You can make like an exclusive series and it's this members only thing. And that's where all your personality stuff or all the weird things that you like, ah, I know this won't get views, but I still want to make it. That's where that content would live behind a membership. And that would be your product if you're a gamer. Now, obviously there's a different version of this business model that exists if you're in different niches. I just used gaming because it's the easy throwaway example of, oh, entertainment channels, entertainment channels and everything like that. Some of this stuff is very similar if you go to vlogging or something else that's kind of off the beaten path, because this is a very easy model if you're doing education. If you're doing education, even if it's infotainment, let's say you're a product reviewer. Okay. I, All right. So if you're a product reviewer, it's like, hey, you want to make your life better with tech. You're a big you. Hey, if you're a person who loves tech, but you don't know what to buy on a budget and you think that everything is junk, then I give you honest reviews on budget gear. So you always know what to buy and you buy once, cry never. And that's your position. And it's like, hey, if you want to support what I'm doing on my honest reviews channel, make sure you're supporting my affiliate links in the description. I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. And it's great because I'm saving you money. Boom. That's your product offering is the affiliate side of every product that you're promoting, that you're getting a cut from that. In terms of a direct. benefit for a product again another good one in that situation to some degree is memberships because then they can see the behind the scenes of things that you're doing if you want to offer a behind the scenes series or if you want to offer some kind of hey uh come see my vlogs of my day in the life with this tech it's a members only exclusive series where you get to see this or hey i put together setup guides that are members only and you can check those out for these other things or hey i know i i do budget gear but if you want to see the stuff that i can afford that i like and you have a bigger budget then join us over at the membership and so that would be another way to do the membership you get you get my point so again person problem position product um and that's how you would uh do this so this helps you this is not the same thing as the one page business plan but it's a primer for the one page business plan and how to think about these things and what you're gonna do with your community and how you're going to ultimately make money and how you can look at for different niches as a content creator. Now we talked earlier about the setting up your LLC. One of the things that I said, for example, is you want to not use the same name as your YouTube channel for safety and security and privacy reasons. It's very important. You also don't want to use the same legal name as your legal name for privacy and protection purposes. The way you do tie it to your YouTube channel is through your AdSense account and having that go to your business bank account. That's what you're going to want to do here. And this is also going to be important for tax reasons. So that's what you're going to want to do. This is very important. And as I said earlier, the other thing that you probably want to do is use a virtual address through a P.O. box or post office box that gives you a street address, usually through the UPS store or the post office, so that you don't have to have your real address out there. For things like copyright claims and copyright strikes, if you do this and you set this up as this kind of entity, you could use that address as the address when you set up your YouTube channel. And then that means if someone does a copyright claim or copyright strike and you decide to appeal it and you decide to fight it, you're not doxing yourself and they're not getting your actual address and contact information. They're getting the contact information of the business you registered as an LLC. And again, if you've done that that way, then your information is protected. So that should answer that particular question. So that's how you would approach that. You want to, again, make sure you have that set up if that's something that's important to you. And if you're hyper paranoid about privacy, then that's the way to do it. In general, if you've already done your YouTube account and it's already under your real name and all that stuff, then the main thing is just to tie the AdSense account to your business bank account. It's a very easy thing to do. As far as your business bank account, your local bank should be able to take care of that once you register your LLC and once you acquire your tax EIN number, your employer identification number from the government. Once you've done that, then you should be fine. So not particularly difficult to accomplish that. Now, in terms of thinking through the entire idea of treating YouTube like a business, when it comes to treating youtube like a business we're still growing um a community and the way this is going to work is you go you are going to need to publish content that's the only way anything works but you shouldn't stop at publishing content you should be promoting your content and promoting your products that you offer. You can do that in your live streams. You can do that in your community tab. You can do it in the description of your videos. You can do it in the pinned comment. You can do it on your other social media platforms. You should always be doing that and driving awareness and creating leads whenever you're publishing content. You should make people aware that your offers exist. If people want to whine because, oh my God, you're selling something, it's free content, let them whine. Oh, ad revenue should be enough. If you were getting a $10 RPM, you're making a penny per view. Their eyeballs are valuable in terms of support, but monetarily, it's a penny per view that you make off the ad revenue. And if they still want to whine and complain, I'm sorry, that's just kind of entitled and it's kind of pathetic. Sitting through you, Give 15 seconds of a spill that your product exists, your merch, your hat, your hoodie exists. Cry me a river. If you're promoting a brand or affiliate link and they're whining that in 10 minutes of content, you sold something for 15 to 30 seconds, or they had to sit through two 30-second ads that they probably skipped on, cry me a river. You don't make that much on ad revenue. If you're in the highest RPM niche, you're making one to two pennies per every view. Their eyeball is not that valuable at that point. And if you're in a niche like gaming or vlogging, you're making a tenth of a penny per view or a half a penny per view. So again, I don't really feel like the complaint is valid. So I think it's okay for you to promote your products. I think it's okay for you to want to make a profit. And I think that for publishing quality content, that's completely valid to do. It's a reasonable thing. If they don't like it, they can always buy YouTube premium. And then, yeah, they still have to sit through you doing a manual ad read for a sponsor for your own product, but it is what it is. As we said earlier, creator business portfolio, you want to... grow your channel in subscribers specifically because it is a filter for sponsorships. Now, if you're a small creator, but you have really high production value, you can do UGC, user-generated content partnerships. You can sell yourself as a UGC creator and UGC agency without a huge following, but you will need to bring results to the table in terms of a portfolio. I highly recommend that you show affiliate link commissions. and what you've generated for affiliate links to show that you can sell with your content it's also another revenue stream for you so highly recommend that you want to generate passive income usually through your own products but also through affiliate commissions where possible or licensing you want recurring revenue which could be memberships subscription or affiliate or recurring long-term sponsorships and then of course you want platform revenue which could include ad revenue fan funding and things of that nature creator funds like you know tick tock etc also uh snapchat so if you're wondering I definitely make over $100,000 a year as a content creator. That's because I have multiple revenue streams. My biggest one's usually being sponsored content and UGC partnerships. I have my own membership website, Austin Creator Academy. That is very lucrative for me. That's six figures by itself. Platform revenue does okay for me. It does five figures for me, but it's not high five figures. Fan funding from live streams. I get generous donations from viewers like you. And of course, digital product sales are also something I do. And over the years, at least cumulatively, it does relatively well. So that's how I make my money. This lets you know what's possible. Some final thoughts before we get to some questions, answers, and a break for more water is that in terms of YouTube advice, a lot of people get confused about how to use YouTube advice properly. who to listen to, information contradicting each other, et cetera, et cetera. My main thing is that you should try to learn advice in the context of the problem that you already have. And you should look at people whose strengths represent your weaknesses. So if you know your biggest weaknesses are time management, energy management, and productivity, You should look at somebody who teaches about productivity and systems building and speed, especially around things like editing. And that would be very valuable to you. We've made some videos. We even did a workshop on editing fast, effectively, and efficiently here on the channel. So that would be, okay, if that's your biggest weakness, that's a creator who focuses on that or is expert in that. or makes content specifically about that is what you should be watching and prioritizing. And you should try to tackle, in my opinion, you should try to tackle one weakness at a time for 90 days. That's my belief is 30 to 90 days, 30 to 90 days focused on one weakness for 30 to 90 days. And so I would watch content and focus on that weakness for 30 to 90 days. If you're trying to make more money, You should look at content like mine where someone's focused on the money, the business, the monetization, and you should be watching those things and putting those things in the practice for 30 to 90 days and look at that exclusively in that 30 to 90 day window. You should tackle those things one at a time. The big problem with YouTube education is you guys are going off in 12 directions on 12 or 20 problems all at once. with no consistent focus on any of them. That's your biggest problem in many cases. So that's what I think you should be doing. And I think you should be looking at that focused implementation and that focused structure behind the education and putting it into practice. The other thing is you need that 30 to 90 days to start to see results on any one thing in isolation and the improvement that it's making. So that's where a lot of you are going wrong. If you struggle specifically on packaging, you should lock in for 30 to 90 days on titles, thumbnails, or the combination of them. We've done a free thumbnail workshop multiple times that you can watch on this channel. And we have those in the live tab of the channel so you can check those out. If you're looking for YouTube thumbnail templates, you should check out the YouTube Starter Kit. We have a discount code, I think right now for 30% off on the YouTube Starter Kit with over 100 YouTube Photoshop templates for you to download plus other resources. So we have hundreds of resources in the YouTube Starter Kit. Mods can post that in the chat. If it's the summer of 2025, use code SUMMERSLAM25 and get 30% off. If you miss out on that, you can use our evergreen code for our streamers, code 20 off, and you'll get 20% off of the YouTube starter kit. So like I said, we have over 100 Photoshop templates in there. We have over 100 more download resources. So it's incredibly powerful for you. So definitely urge you to check that out. But any weakness that you have, study. YouTube content focused on that one weakness for 30 to 90 days, whatever it is, whatever it is. So whether that's thumbnails, then focus on learning thumbnail tutorials, thumbnail strategy, and Photoshop tutorials and basics of graphic design, typography, and layout. Focus on that for 30 to 90 days if that's your biggest problem and struggle because oh, your thumbnails suck compared to the people getting more views than you, then that's what you would focus on. If you know that you're inefficient on videos, you're missing your window on timing of making videos and getting them out early or first or relevant, then focus on editing faster and watch editing tutorials and creators who are using the editing software that you're using. And that would help you. So when you are confused about how to use YouTube advice, The main thing is to focus on one specific weakness for 30 to 90 days. And I don't think anyone has ever said that out loud to a lot of you. That's the best way to do it is not to try to learn and do everything at once. You won't even know what's working from what's not. Focus on one dimension of fixing your YouTube content for 30 to 90 days and look at results. Put those things into practice. In terms of, well, who to listen to, it depends on your temperament and your personality. If you can stomach and have a thick enough skin for tough love, no BS advice, harsh, unapologetic truth, and a little bit of ruthlessness, this guy right here, I'm your guy. I'm your guy. If you want no BS advice, if you want someone... to be your tough as nails track and cross country coach take you on a 10k run of suffering so show up and suffer i'm your guy if you need someone more gentle than that i'm not your guy so i would argue that as much as results and methodology matters i would argue that temperament and who is aligned with your values matters more in terms of who to learn from. You would probably want to learn from someone and probably best learn from someone. If their teaching style and personality is something that you're either attracted to, resonates with you, you relate to that, or you know you need that even if you don't like it, but you have a thick enough skin to stomach it. So you need to be honest with yourself is, do you need someone Do you need somebody whose big value proposition is patience and gentleness? Because you might need that. Some people need a mama bear as a coach. Some people need tough love. Some people need someone who does a lot of patience and hand-holding. Some people need someone whose temperament is they explain things in the simplest language possible. Some people need a coach that literally speaks the same language as them because they're an international creator or they can be patient with people for whom English is a second language. If you're trying and struggling with who to listen to as a content creator, I would tell you to stop trying to use a checklist for fake guru bingo and to look at value system, look at temperament and how they teach. and look at whether they fit your circumstances. You might need someone who really is conscious about people with budget constraints. You might want to learn from a creator that's a parent like you. Like maybe you have a family. Maybe you should prioritize learning from somebody that can relate to your family dynamics and struggles of split attention, time, energy. Maybe that's your situation. Maybe you need to relate to somebody that can relate to you because they're a female content creator, so they will put things into perspective knowing that there are different challenges for you, like the extra effort and time in catering to your online appearance in front of a camera or would understand certain anxieties that you might have. about your privacy and safety at a higher level or degree. Maybe if you're a family vlogger and you have concerns about your children's privacy, safety online, and how being an online personality affects their psychology and development, you would want to listen to a content creator who themselves has a family or has young children that have been in the content. So you should be looking at those things. more than I think you should be looking at the numbers that someone has. Yes, numbers are important or people verifying their claims, whatever. But I would say the most important thing is probably the dynamics that I'm talking about in terms of their temperament and their background, making them appropriate to serve you and understand you. Now, it's not to say that someone who exists outside of your background can't understand, relate, empathize or offer an outside perspective because you have a blind spot because you're too close to something or because there are things outside of your orbit that you need more help with because you understand your own dynamics and situation. What you might want, you might value an outsider. You might value an opposite, especially if you're not your target audience. Not every single creator is their own target audience. And in some cases, that's because you aged out of the thing or you don't have that interest or something else is going on or you want to reach people that are different than you for some reason, which is perfectly valid. Not everyone wants to live in an echo chamber of people exactly like them. So there could be a reason for it. So maybe you would want a creator that exists outside of your comfort zone because your audience exists outside of your comfort zone. So maybe that person can coach you and help you relate to the demographic. So sometimes maybe the person you take advice from or your coach or your mentor is not like you, but they're like the person you want to reach. That could be important. So I would say that these are things that are important to take into consideration in terms of how you utilize YouTube advice. And you may have just never heard these things. Like, you know. That's important. So what I would tell you is that you should also look at other creators that are at your level or right above your level and not just big creators. I think you should get feedback from a lot of sources. This could be overwhelming or confusing, but I think it's important. And one of the things we definitely want you to look at is we have our free creator, you know, foundations course. And we also have our free creator foundations discord community where people get feedback because not everyone can afford the Austin Crater Academy Pro Group. So we create an open study hall that more creators can join with the discord server. And where you guys can encourage each other and you can hold each other accountable. Because the other thing about learning YouTube and using YouTube advice is it's harder to do on your own. And sometimes you need to hear how other people are executing it. And it can give you perspective, encouragement, or an example or go, oh, I hadn't thought of that. Or I didn't look at it that way. Or I didn't try that yet. Or, oh. I got that wrong. I thought it was this. And so that would help you tremendously. So we wanted to create that potential opportunity for people. So when I preface YouTube advice, and a lot of people don't think YouTube advice helps or it's skeptical, they're skeptical of it, or they don't think it works. A lot of times they're doing it wrong. And the biggest things I think that people get wrong is they don't focus on one thing for 30 to 90 days. and measure their results and do before and after to see where they were and where they are after 30 to 90 days of trying to do things differently and getting 1% better with every execution. So I think that's a big deal. I think people get overwhelmed trying to fix everything all at once, and it's a real problem. And then they don't know what worked or why it worked. So I think that that hurts them. The other thing is, I think people also don't look at the personality or values or alignment of who they're learning for, sorry, learning from, and that that should play a role. It's not just, oh, do, like, it's very simple to say, learn from somebody who has the results you want. There is truth to that. But you should also look at what your goal actually is and say, maybe I need someone who has experience in introducing me to that thing. Cause maybe I'm not at a level where even if I had access to someone who gets the results that I want, maybe I'm not ready for those things or do those things, but maybe what I need, cause it could be someone who's a smaller creator, but they're bigger than you, right? This is what I'm getting at. Sometimes you just need to listen to a creator who is just a little bit bigger than you. or is a little more experienced than you in a weakness you have. So don't overlook that as an opportunity to learn and don't think that you can't learn from somebody with less than 100,000 subscribers. I have a half a million subscribers, but some of you can learn from somebody. If you're at 10,000 subscribers, someone who's at 25K and got it faster than you might have an insight that you're overlooking. And there just might be a bad habit that you have that they would notice immediately. So do look at other parts of this beyond just being dazzled by the numbers. It's very important. If you've gained value from the resources we provided here, we definitely invite you to come check us out at the Austin Creator Academy Pro Group. We meet twice a week for live. private office hour sessions. We have over 100 hours of exclusive video training. And we, of course, have all of our digital download assets, templates, email swipe files, Photoshop templates, media kits, and more. So that's something you can learn more about over at awesomecreatoracademy.com. You can also join our free creator insider newsletter. We have that linked for you in the description and the chat. You can also get our free 12-week creator playbook. If you are on the YouTube stream, remember we do have the ability for you to download tonight's presentation in terms of the slide deck. You can get that entire 18-page slide deck completely free. If you sign up with your email, we have a link for you in the description down below. And so that's pretty much it. for tonight's workshop. We're just going to go to Q&A now. So one, I'm just going to acknowledge our super chats and we're going to go to the Q&A in the form here tonight. Let's see here. Excuse me. So we got our friend DePaul. My guy Roberto added again, always giving the nuggets of value to the community. Respect. Thank you, man. Appreciate you, Ryan. We have Zippy. How do you tie your LLC to your YouTube channel? Do you set up a YouTube channel under LLC name? We actually answered that earlier. I'm also going to recommend this book. It's not specific to YouTube, but the LLC Beginner's Guide by Carolyn Martin. Very helpful. I wanted to have this on the desk just to show it to you on camera. So very helpful there. Let's see. Non-Super Chat questions. Traveler Squad asked, question, Roberto. I have 19K subs. I've not posted for two years. I have low views when I post. What should I do? I've been watching you since I had 75 subs and learning. So yeah, a long hiatus definitely hurts, I feel for you. I actually recently revived my music channel after not posting for well over a year. and um getting views with those posts but it can feel like a struggle bus um but i can tell you that youtube does give uh channels that are reviving themselves an opportunity uh it might take you more than a couple of posts to get out of the poll i don't know how many you've done i also don't know what the packaging is like but uh don't be too discouraged now in theory it is true that newer youtube channels do get a boost. If you're feeling discouraged, I have a suggestion. You can keep trying with the same content the channel was known for two years ago to revive that channel. But I would also encourage you to consider putting some effort into a new channel. on a new topic so that you have something to look forward to and so that you don't get caught up in small views because if you have a new channel, then you can get excited again because it's fresh and it's different and it's a different audience and a different community. So consider that as a possibility and an option. Colette Elizabeth says, question, Roberto, I have a copy, a hard copy of your first book. Can we expect a hard copy of the new book? Yes. So in the chat, we have pre-orders for my new book. You can also check that out on Amazon. For anyone who hasn't bought my first book, Create Something Awesome, How Creators Are Profiting from Their Passion, Their Creator Economy. That's been out since the end of 2022. We published this in, I think, September of 2022. and it's been doing really well over the years. We have a new book that I'm putting out. It's the sequel to this, which focuses specifically on making money as a content creator, the business side of content creation. So it's very similar to what we talked about tonight. It's a dedicated book. It's coming out October of this year, I believe. If I can't get it out any sooner, it comes out the end of October of this year, 2025. I'm 40,000 words into the book, and we believe it's going to be 55,000 words when it's done. And then it's going to my editor, who's also a YouTube creator. So I have a new editor. She's a YouTube creator, and she's seasoned. She's been doing this for many, many years. So that's going to be great. And then I'm going to have the internals. uh designed i did i did the first pass of the cover design for this next book myself and a lot of you saw it on x um and you really liked it but i'm gonna have that finalized and see if it can look any better i'm gonna have marco do that again um because i hired him for the first book and then the internals for that so um the goal is to finish the manuscript in july probably by the end of july get it out to kristen have her finish um everything for the editorial by August. Continue some advanced reads on that feedback. Do final polish. Then get it over to Marco sometime in September. Give him time to cook. Get it in all the formats. Get it finalized. And then get some more advanced reads. set up promo and publish at the end of October. And that's the current goal. So that's the second book. If you want to check that out, if you just type in Roberto Blake in Amazon, you can pre-order the new book. Also, if you're live in the chat, the mods got you covered and you can see what's going on with the new book and you can pre-order it. our hope is to uh get to before the release is to get to like 300 500 pre-orders um so that's the hope yep and we have that here at the link if you guys want to check that out and again of course you can get the first book you can get the first book uh so yeah so those are uh the things so um we have another question from terry w question He says, my question is on what type of insurance you recommend, when do you get it? I already have an LLC set up approved supplementary class 41 trademark. Okay. So in terms of the insurance and Katie actually. has answered some questions about this because she's in Texas and she has been a registered insurance agent. This is not financial advice and this is not legal advice. You definitely have to talk to the person in your state. For me, if I know that my business is forward facing and I give any kind of advice, You want that error and omissions insurance right away. If I film and I have other people around when I film, I want the liability insurance right away. For me, when I was traveling more, and I still do this at conference, I used to have people, usually either my brother or my friend Jason, work for me as a contractor and film. my speaking engagements. Nowadays, Jason has been working with my friend Pat Flynn on the Deep Pocket Monster channel. A lot of you might know Pat Flynn, Deep Pocket Monster and Short Pocket Monster, both over a million subscribers in two years. Fantastic. And before that, successful entrepreneur, multimillionaire, smartpassiveincome.com, multi bestselling author. So my friend Pat Flynn. Now, three of the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group members ended up working for Pat because Dan Norton, who's an OG Awesome Creator Academy member, still a member actually, started an agency. We had a talk at a conference and I encouraged him to pivot from his YouTube channel around parenting to go hard on a content agency helping other content creators. uh with channel management and services so dan zach and jason ended up becoming the team for the deep pocket monster channel and they were all uh collaborators uh in awesome crater academy and were trained up by me in austin crater academy and they went on to uh work for my friend pat flynn and help that channel grow from zero to a million in like two years and they got the youtube shorts channel to grow to a million in about one year um so they did extremely well for themselves um i bring it up because um jason also used to produce and film for me he also used to help with some of my live streams early um he was working for me as a freelancer um same thing uh my brother does for me sometimes and then also My operations manager, Andy Rivera, she sometimes comes to the conferences with me and she will help film and do photography. Why do I bring that up? When you have people physically involved with your content, or if you're doing interviews, man on the street, woman on the street, you're doing podcast in person. You want liability insurance in case anyone gets hurt for any reason while in the process of your content being made. That's why you want liability insurance, if for no other reason. Also, in case your equipment, property, person, or anything damages a property, public or private, where you are filming. You want liability insurance. So unless all of your content is basically filmed at your house in a room by yourself, you want liability insurance. If you ever talk about someone else, a product, a service, a brand, a company, you're reviewing products, you're reviewing movies, or you're ever going to take sponsorship or brand deal money or affiliate link money, you want. Or if you're ever going to give advice of any kind, you want errors, omission insurance. You want the media insurance and you want to cover defamation and disparagement. So you want those things. Absolutely. So that's because, again, liability, it's a problem. And if you have any gear beyond your smartphone, get the bloody gear insurance. So hopefully that's your answer on. uh the insurance things um like those up and katie since you you would know you can tell me if i got that right like so katie um as a mod in the chat you can tell me if i um got that right when it comes to insurance and why and when you actually need it and uh whether i fully covered that so uh katie says uh sounds right to me and that you're given um general definitely yeah good appreciate that absolutely yeah so um you know hopefully that uh covers most of it for a lot of you and uh katie can you give uh can you give a quick uh quickie on what the uh bop uh insurance is bop is a business owner policy yeah yeah i have that so yeah Yes, but always check the state requirements. Yep. Always check local. Absolutely. So yeah, you want someone that's specific to your region. If you're an American, you want it for your state. Absolutely. So hopefully that answers most people's particular question on that. So over the next couple of weeks, the main thing we're going to talk about is next week, it's going to be brand deals, sponsorship, affiliate marketing. and uh sales so we're going to talk about that in week three we're going to talk about your uh business uh building your business plan and we're going to uh create a template for building your one page business plan and filling that out um i'm working on a product around the one page business plan oh excuse me one page business plan for content creators um it should be finished by week three so hopefully we'll have that and um we'll we'll walk you guys through it but hopefully for a lot of you that'll probably be like a nine dollar product or something that you can just buy as a template from me and download and you'll have the ability to fill out your one page business plan with a couple of examples so we'll do that for you um week four is going to be about creating and selling your products to an audience so we're going to cover uh print on demand products like merchandise and give you a primer on that we've done a full merchandise workshop that was sponsored by friends at spread shop that is still live in the uh youtube channel it's on the live tab it's still the replay available that video has gotten over 800 000 views it might be the most comprehensive and most watched video about merchandise and print on demand products on YouTube right now, because that was about a three hour and 40 minute workshop. And it's over 800,000 views on YouTube. Again, we're going to cover some of that in week four, but we're also going to dip into digital products as well. So you understand that angle. So whether you want to do physical products as merch, or you want to do digital products we're going to talk about that both creating but also selling to an audience and also um the importance of leveraging an email list we'll talk about that as well um in week five we're going to talk about productivity consistency and systems for your creator business very important to put those things in place and look at um you know things like the bookkeeping the accounting uh you know for the tax side of things but other systems as well certain things for automation certain things for uh record keeping um being able to set up uh your calendar and your appointments and uh things of that nature and then in in week six we're gonna uh definitely talk about hiring freelancers to help you or even what hiring uh your first team members can look like and outsourcing so those will be things that we'll be covering yeah So if there aren't any more questions, we can bookmark it here tonight. We've been live for about two hours. We've had across all six of our platforms, we've had almost 400 of you come through the channel this evening. So it's been a very fruitful workshop tonight. Hopefully you guys got a lot of value out of it. And hopefully you learned something. that you hadn't learned before. I know that the workshops are not as visually stimulating because you have to listen to me and hear my voice and watch my slide presentations. But I find that with the slide presentations, the information might be easier to absorb if you have the visuals to go with it. So hopefully this is something that's been helpful to the majority of you. watching the live stream or watching the replay of the workshop. And we're going to continue this for the next couple of weeks. Next week, I'll be back from VidCon this weekend. So we will pick this up again on Wednesday. with the information around sponsorship, brand deals, and affiliate marketing so that you can know the difference between them. We'll talk about UGC. We'll talk about negotiating a little bit and pricing. So we definitely want to encourage you there. And of course, remember, you can download the slide presentations. over at Awesome Creator Academy. We've linked that in the description on the YouTube channel for you to make sure that you guys are able to get the full presentation so that you can take your own notes and so you can have those. Colette says, the most helpful information for me was to focus on one thing for 30 to 90 days. Thank you for that. Yeah, a lot of people. It's a big one, a lot of people to overlook. Yes, shout out to our friends over at 1of10.com. If you are going to use them, use code Roberto at checkout and get 20% off. That is 1of10.com. Make sure you're using my link. Use code Roberto at checkout so they know Roberto sent you. You can save some money. If you're looking to build courses, of course, check out our friends over at Kajabi. They are going to be linked in the description as well, of course. And thank you to our mods for posting the link. And of course, if you want to join Awesome Creator Academy, you can go to www.awesomecreatoracademy.com slash join and learn more about the Academy Pro Group and our different membership offers. You can even consider becoming a VIP member and get quarterly one-on-one calls with me in addition to our twice-a-week group coaching calls in office hours and, of course, access to all of our digital products, any future courses that we do, and, of course, our downloads and templates. Wasn't there from the beginning, Roberto. Yep. Believe got to go refresh, learn content. Wasn't sure what time. Yeah, no problem. The live replay of this stays available on the YouTube channel. So we have the live stream available of this on the YouTube channel. In fact, we also on the YouTube channel have the playlist of our previous 12-week workshop for YouTube beginners. They're under 20,000 subscribers. We did a whole 12-week beginner workshop. for people so definitely helpful for anybody that's a beginner to YouTube but for this workshop again the live replay will be available and you can definitely make sure you check that out yep so I think that's it for tonight everybody stay awesome and we will catch you next time we're figuring out channel reviews for Friday since I'll be at VidCon um i think i'll be able to do channel reviews but if i do they will be a crazy late night time because i'll be on la time so um if that's gonna be rough for you guys then uh just push it for uh next week the next time uh but um i'm gonna be in vid i'm gonna be at vidcon for uh friday so um it's not that i'm canceling channel reviews it's that if i do them it will be L.A. time late night because I'll be at VidCon all day and Friday is also the night before my birthday. So we'll be doing VidCon stuff like the entire time. So channel reviews will be shorter and Friday it'll be crazy late. So, you know, that's just a whole thing. uh saturday is my birthday i'll be speaking on stage at vidcon for my birthday i'm going to try to film it uh that will definitely end up being in uh members only also academy members will get that so um we'll be doing that uh hopefully planning to do some interviews while i'm there so yeah But yeah, that's it for this one. We're going to end the stream and you're going to learn more about the Awesome Creator Academy Pro group. So if you want some more information on that, you can check that out. You can also DM me over on X and ask me any questions about it. But yeah, stay awesome and we'll catch you next time. 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. We part of a community of usually around 100 like-minded creators who are taking this seriously just like you are. You also have all access. as a pro group member to all of our past, present, and future courses, training, templates, digital downloads, and swipe files. You have full access to our creator blueprints where you'll see our systems and the frameworks that we use to execute. You know, you always fall or rise to the standard of your systems. A lot of people really underestimate how important that is. We have digital download templates that can help you so you don't have to start with a blank canvas. These done for you, files are actually incredibly helpful, especially for things like your thumbnails, your media kits, and anything you need for your branding as a content creator to look professional. We have email swipe files that help you with reaching out to brands. We have great information in helping you price yourself and build your packages appropriately. And remember, as part of the pro group, you have the opportunity to ask questions from myself and all the other creators participating. And so this means that if you need to ask questions about negotiation or a brand deal. There's something you're not sure about. You're trying to find a better monetization opportunity with merch or affiliates. You have people who have done it before or already making money that you can reach out to for advice. As I said, when I was starting out and I was flying solo, this is the thing that I wish I'd had the opportunity to be a part of and it would have made all the difference in the world in helping me be an even more successful content creator. If you have questions, you can always reach out via support. We're happy to help you figure out if the pro group is right for you. Also, we do have the opportunity to become a VIP member if you also would like quarterly one-on-one coaching with me directly. Now go out there and create something awesome today and hopefully we'll see you in the pro group. Take care.

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