---
title: 'The ''Just Be Consistent'' Advice Is Keeping You Broke — Here''s Why'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=9vqmzSnbXYM'
video_id: '9vqmzSnbXYM'
date: 2026-07-31
duration_sec: 703
---

# The 'Just Be Consistent' Advice Is Keeping You Broke — Here's Why

> Source: [The 'Just Be Consistent' Advice Is Keeping You Broke — Here's Why](https://youtube.com/watch?v=9vqmzSnbXYM)

## Summary

The video argues that the common advice to 'just be consistent' won't grow your audience if your strategy is flawed. It identifies three practical reasons content fails and explains that confidence in a winning strategy, not sheer willpower, makes consistency easy. The creator shares her own 18-month research journey and encourages experimentation to find what works.

### Key Points

- **The consistency thought experiment** [00:02] — If you posted every day for a year, the results might not be as spectacular as you hope. The creator's own 2-year consistent effort barely grew her audience.
- **The danger of the consistency trap** [01:55] — Believing you just need to be more consistent can lead you to spend more time on strategies that aren't working and quite possibly never will.
- **Three common reasons content doesn't grow** [02:08] — The main reasons are: not actually being consistent, not choosing popular enough topics, and insufficient content quality.
- **Topic research matters** [02:34] — Creators often guess or chase trends without doing keyword or trending-topic research, leading to content that performs poorly.
- **Quality is the third pillar** [03:15] — Even with consistency and good topics, poorly structured videos, weak captions, or uninteresting shorts won't stand up to competition.
- **It's not a character flaw** [04:29] — Lack of audience growth isn't because you are not consistent enough; big creators are not morally better, they just have a working strategy.
- **As audience grows, consistency becomes easier** [04:57] — Success creates obligation (subscribers expecting content), which makes showing up easier — a chicken-and-egg problem.
- **Confidence makes consistency easy** [05:37] — When you have a strategy you're confident will pay off, posting regularly becomes easy and self-sustaining.
- **Consistency with the wrong strategy wastes more time** [07:45] — Being consistent with a bad strategy results in greater time waste than being less consistent with the same strategy.
- **Permission to experiment instead** [08:58] — The solution is to branch out, test different strategies, and double down on those that produce real results.
- **Strategy and consistency work together** [10:09] — Once a strategy delivers results, consistency takes care of itself; they compound.

## Transcript

and travel to one year from today. And imagine that over this past year, you've been super consistent with doing everything that you think you need to do to grow your audience and finally start making some money from your content
online. So maybe you've been posting every day on Instagram, doing stories every day. Maybe you've been making a new reel every day. Maybe you've been making a new YouTube video every week or even two YouTube videos every week. What
of that? Do you think your audience would have grown a whole lot? That you would finally be making money? Well, I would like to propose that the results might not be as spectacular as you might hope. And the reason I say that is
because I did this a few years ago. I was ready to finally grow my audience and start my online business. And I posted as consistently as I could for 2 years. And yet, at the end of that time, my audience had barely grown and I
And I don't think I'm the only one. In fact, I know I'm not because I've seen a lot of other people, and maybe you have too. People on Instagram who are posting friends who are trying to make it, trying to grow their audience. Have you
ever seen any YouTubers who they've been posting for years and they still only have like a few hundred followers? I know. I've seen that so many times. And so today I really want to talk about why this is why consistency isn't going to
save you and what you need to do instead so that you don't wind up wasting a massive amount of time over this next year or years. Often times we think that we are the problem and that if we can just finally be more consistent then
audiences will finally grow. We'll finally start making money from our side hustle or start getting customers for our businesses. But this can be a really dangerous trap to fall into because it can lead us to spending more time than
ever before on strategies that aren't working and quite possibly never will. So really where we need to start is with a diagnosis. Why isn't your content growing your audience? Aside from consistency, and we'll set that aside
because that's a possible reason, but it's not the main reason for most people. There are probably three most common reasons. The first one is that you're not being consistent. We'll talk more about this later, but maybe you
trying to be consistent, but the reality is that it's actually not happening. So, more on that in a little bit. Reason number two, super common, is that you're not choosing popular enough topics. Now, sometimes this comes down to just not
doing the research, right? The keyword research or the research on trending topics. And so maybe you're just trying to choose ideas that seem to you like they'll perform well or that you've seen another video do similarly or a post
that went viral and so you try to do the same thing. So either you're just guessing or you're chasing trends that there's not enough data to actually back totally be doing the research, but maybe you're posting quote unquote like
business content, content to try to attract your target customers and all of that to market your business, to grow your business, to get the customers. But the problem is that that content, it often really falls flat on social media.
It doesn't get engagement. It doesn't get reach. It doesn't grow your following at all. And then the third super common reason is that maybe the quality isn't high enough, right? Maybe you are posting consistently. Maybe you
even have good topics, but your videos, they're not structured well enough, or the image quality isn't high enough, or your captions on Instagram, they're not compelling enough or your shorts, they're not interesting enough, right?
Like, the content has to be good quality if we wanted to stand up to the competition and to really be good enough for people to pay attention to. Now, these are just a few of the most common reasons why your content might not be
growing your audience. There are a bunch more. I'm going to link this video up here in the corner that I made recently about five of the most common reasons why your audience might not be growing. So, if you want to learn more about
really what I want to focus on in this video today. The the reasons why your content isn't growing your audience. The main point here is that it's not. And no
amount of doing the same strategy harder or trying harder is going to change that. No amount of being more consistent is going to cause you to get different results with a strategy that's not giving you results at all right now. But
the thing that I want to focus on very most today is that if your audience isn't growing, it's not a character flaw. It's not because you're not consistent enough. The fact of the matter is that the people who have big
audiences, like I have a pretty big audience, it's not that I have a better character than you. Okay? Not at all. It's not even that I'm more consistent than you. The fact of the matter is that as your audience grows, it becomes
as your audience grows, it becomes easier and easier to be consistent. Why? Well, because you feel obligated like I have all these subscribers and I need to make a video because they're expecting a video. I have over 60,000 email
subscribers and they're expecting an email from me tomorrow. So, when I'm done recording this video, I sure as heck am going to write that email to them. And it becomes easy to be consistent because of that feeling of
kind of like a chicken and an egg problem, right? Like, can you just not of obligation that comes with having an get an audience? And we might be stuck there. Except that thankfully, there is
one other thing that can make it easy to be consistent, and that is confidence. If you have a strategy that you are confident is going to work, is going to grow your audience, is going to have a payoff, then it becomes way easier to
consistently post the content. This was exactly what happened to me when I finally started growing on YouTube. I'd been posting slightly inconsistently for about 2 years and feeling like if only I could be consistent, my audience would
finally grow. but at the same time struggling to be consistent because I wasn't seeing growth with the effort I was putting in. So then what happened was I ended up spending about 18 months I took an 18month break from posting on
YouTube where I just studied YouTube. I studied YouTube like a scientist. I analyzed thousands of channels, thousands of videos looking for trends as to what made some channels take off while others struggled to ever grow. And
by the end of that time, I was able to identify a handful of factors that if a channel met those criteria, if a channel, if a creator did those things, then they grew. And I couldn't find actually a single exception. I couldn't
find a single creator that was doing those things that wasn't either already big or else quickly growing. And that gave me a ton of confidence that if I just did those things that I would grow. And spoiler, I mean, check my subscriber
count down there. It worked, right? But it worked both because of the strategies, but also because of the confidence I had in those strategies that led me to then be consistent. And if I hadn't had either of those things,
then I never would have experienced that growth. If I had had all the confidence in the world, but the wrong strategy, then I might have been super consistent, but I wouldn't have grown. And on the flip side, I could have had the perfect
strategy, but if I didn't have the confidence, so I wasn't consistent, then I never would have grown either. Because consistency, it is super important. It's just that being consistent, it's not enough to get you there. Being
consistent with the wrong strategy, it's just going to result in you wasting more time than if you were less consistent with that same bad strategy. Now, if you take one thing away from this video, I really want it to be that you are not
broken. You are not even bad at consistency. I am confident that if you were really confident in your growth strategy, in your content marketing strategy, that you would find it easy to be consistent. You would find it easy to
follow through, easy to show up each and every week without exception. When I finally had confidence in my strategy, I committed to posting one video per week and then ended up ramping it up to two. And I consistently did that for years
until I finally decided to change my strategy and only post a couple of times a month cuz my audience had grown so much and I didn't need to be turnurning out so much content anymore. But as long as I wanted to consistently post a video
every week or even two videos every week, it was actually easy to make that happen. Even when I was traveling, even when I was sick, it was easy because I to pay off. So consider this your permission to stop trying to muscle
through and just be consistent. Just try harder. If your strategy isn't working now, then what you need to do instead is branch out. Experiment. Explore different strategies. Try them out. And when you do, you'll find some things
that work better than others. And then you can double down on the things that are working, that are producing results for you. And you'll find it to be so much easier to charge forward with those strategies than to keep trying to be
consistent with the current strategies that aren't producing results and aren't giving you confidence. Because seriously, once you find a strategy that works for you, a strategy that is producing real results, and by that I
mean you're getting new followers each and every week, you're getting hundreds followers, they're not just any followers, but they're the right followers, your right target market that turns into customers for your business,
turns into customers for your business, then really it becomes so easy to be consistent. Like it takes care of itself. And these two things, the strategy and the consistency, they work together to get you the results that
quite some time. Now, to wrap this all up, if you have no idea what to experiment with or you want some help figuring out what strategies to try first to figure out the winning strategy faster, that's exactly what I help
people do so that they can grow their audience as quickly as possible. Basically, I work with creators and online business owners one-on-one to grow their audiences so that they can easily make money online, whether that's
just through their content or with a little side hustle or with a full-blown online business. And if you'd like to work together to get the time that you're currently putting into your content, your social media, or your
business to start actually paying off and start actually getting paid for all the work that you're putting into this, then I would love for you to apply to below. It's gillianperkins.com/apply-to-grow.
togrow. Again, link is down below. And yeah, I would love to see your application come through and explore possibly working together. My specific goal for you is to grow your audience to over 5,000 followers over the next 6
months because that's really the threshold where everything else when it comes to making money online starts to get a whole lot easier. All right, well you want to catch my next video, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it.
And then you can check out this video right here all about why your audience right here all about why your audience isn't growing.