---
title: 'How to Grow on YouTube: The Three-Level Framework'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=GJHH3SI_9Fo'
video_id: 'GJHH3SI_9Fo'
date: 2026-07-14
duration_sec: 0
---

# How to Grow on YouTube: The Three-Level Framework

> Source: [How to Grow on YouTube: The Three-Level Framework](https://youtube.com/watch?v=GJHH3SI_9Fo)

## Summary

The speaker presents a three-level framework for growing a YouTube channel: Get Going, Get Good, and Get Smart. He emphasizes that success requires making videos people click on and watch, and that quantity leads to quality over time. The talk also covers the importance of deciding whether to treat YouTube as a hobby or a business, and offers practical advice for each stage.

### Key Points

- **Three-Level Growth Framework** [00:00] — The three levels are: Get Going (start making videos), Get Good (improve quality), and Get Smart (treat it like a business). Between each level, creators must make a choice: casual vs. serious relationship, and hobby vs. business.
- **The Billion Dollar Formula** [05:00] — Success on YouTube requires creating videos that people want to click on (high click-through rate) and want to watch (high watch time). This is simple but not easy.
- **Quantity Leads to Quality** [10:00] — The pottery class parable illustrates that making many videos (quantity) leads to better quality over time. The average channel with 1M subscribers has 3,873 videos; with 100k-1M has 1,171; with 10k-100k has 418; with 1k-10k has 152.
- **Consistency and Compound Growth** [15:00] — The speaker's channel took 52 videos to reach 1k subscribers, 91 to reach 10k, and 287 to reach 1M. Compound interest applies: starting early and persisting is key.
- **Defining 'Good' Videos** [20:00] — Extrinsic good: metrics like views, likes, comments. Intrinsic good: passing the 'cringe test' – not feeling embarrassed when someone finds your video. The speaker's videos passed the cringe test around video #80.
- **The 99/1 Rule for Monetization** [25:00] — 99% of content should be free; 1% of the audience will buy paid products. Focus on providing massive free value first.
- **Niche Down to Blow Up** [30:00] — Define a specific target audience (e.g., 'a 22-year-old medical student at Imperial College London named Muhammad') and solve their specific problems. This leads to faster growth.
- **Architect vs. Archaeologist Approach** [35:00] — Architects plan everything before starting (good for level 3). Archaeologists try different niches and dig deeper when they find traction (good for levels 1-2).
- **Sponsorship Pricing** [40:00] — Use 15 CPM (cost per mille) as a benchmark for sponsorship rates.
- **Networking on Twitter** [45:00] — Twitter is the best platform for connecting with other YouTubers. Focus on being so good they can't ignore you rather than cold outreach.

### Conclusion

Growing on YouTube is a long-term game that requires consistent effort, continuous improvement, and a clear understanding of your audience. The three-level framework (Get Going, Get Good, Get Smart) provides a roadmap, but the key is to start, keep making videos, and gradually improve.

## Transcript

let's turn the music off we're gonna be doing fun little uh vibe around how to grow on youtube and well so i'll be doing some schpeeling for maybe about half an hour and then we'll do about half an hour of q a from anyone in the zoom call who has questions about youtube and stuff so we'll probably do we'll do a mixture of chat and hands up and things so we can get people on uh btw this is being live streamed on youtube on the main channel of which i think there are about 500 people watching on the live stream maybe a bit more 600 very nice uh which is which is pretty exciting um if you're watching this on the live stream do please sign up to our youtuber academy waiting list because the enrollment for the cohort opens on monday if you're interested in growing on youtube if that's up your street you can join the waiting list um and all you guys here on the zoom call are already in the waiting list so well done that is fantastic stuff anyway let's talk about how to grow on youtube i'm gonna i'm gonna do something funky here let's see if this works basically here we go there is like this three-part method which is sort of how i think about growing on youtube and sort of being a creator more generally and the three steps of that are get going get good and get smart and then in between get going and get good we have a choice and this is choice number one and then in between get good and get smart we have another choice and this is choice number two and this is sort of like level one this is sort of like level two and this is sort of like level three so that's kind of the model that i want to talk you guys through um of how how this sort of stuff how this sort of stuff works and at each different level what are the things we can be doing to grow on youtube um you know i knew none of this stuff when i started my channel about five years ago since then it's grown to 2.7 something million subscribers we've got like now i think five million dollar business annual in terms of annual turnover about 60 margins which is pretty reasonable as far as businesses go uh this is not like i'm i'm not saying that hey if you follow my magical three-part method suddenly you're gonna become a millionaire and stuff like this is not the vibe oh i have a you know that's not the vibe at all um what i'm saying is that like there's so much stuff that you can learn from people who have gone through the process but we've got to keep in mind you know take take everything i say with a pinch of salt because all i can really speak from is my own personal experience which does have a large element of survivorship bias associated with it and um you know this this model was also kind of built off of running four cohorts of our part-time youtuber academy over the last like 14 months where we've taught over think about about 1500 students now and basically we found that like these this this like three-level system was actually a perfect way to describe how how to grow on youtube so let's get started with level one um level one is get going and this is when you are a complete beginner where you haven't yet started or you haven't yet started taking it seriously now actually i'd love to know from the from the uh from the audience in the zoom chat like which of these levels do you most identify with level one is sort of like the sort of complete beginner or very close beginner level two is like i'm trying to make my videos good and level three is i'm really you know i already have good videos now i'm just trying to optimize my system and like treat it more like a business etc etc okay so we've got loads of people between level one and level two um that's awesome oh picture in picture this is nice yeah loads of people between level one and level two here um which is cool fantastic i'd love to hear in the youtube chat as well i suspect most people are level level zero haven't even started my youtube channel yet versus level one level two level three uh level one is get going so i'm i'm gonna focus on level one and level two level three is sort of like treating treating it more like a business that's the more the more of the advanced stuff and kind of the stuff we teach on our youtuber academy is mostly level two and a bit of level three so this is the audience that our youtuber academy is most useful for if you're still in the get-going stage you've never made any videos you're a complete beginner it's going to be very overwhelming we always have a bunch of those people in our youtube academy it's always very overwhelming um but let's go through what are the different things that we can do to grow at each level now the point of level one is basically all we have to do at this point is to get going we just need to film our first few videos and when you're at level one it's like you're filming you're making one video at a time and those videos are probably quite bad because you're probably not very good at making videos because making videos is actually genuinely quite a hard thing now i have a presentation that i want to share here uh let's have a look can i share this share screen i hope this works perfect oh here we go hopefully you should be able to see this on the zoom call and also on the live stream in theory if the tech works i'm gonna assume it works it always works um this is the three part method for growing on youtube now for getting going so part one get going part two get good and part three get smart where really part one is all about getting out of your own way it's about just taking that first step and filming those videos and starting that channel and even if you're just filming videos with a phone it's about just doing it there are so many people that get caught up in level one where they're like oh i haven't yet started but like i'm i can't bring myself to start can't bring myself to put myself on camera i hate the sound of my voice etc etc i'm worried about what people will think but like 99 of that fear goes away when you hit publish on your first video so that's really actually to be honest that's kind of how we get from level zero to level one where you have not yet started a youtube channel now the people who are stuck at level one which is which is totally fine are the ones who have not yet taken youtube particularly seriously and really the stop share screen the choice that i'm talking about here this is really your choice of you know this this there's three options once you've done youtube for a little bit of time once you've gotten going you kind of have three choices and that is do i want to break up with youtube uh that's option number one option number two is do i want a casual relationship with youtube casual relationship and option number three is do i want a serious relationship with youtube so the people in the audience those of you who are still at level one what what are you what's your what's your take on this are you like do you want to i mean i imagine you don't want to break up with youtube because you're here but do you want a casual relationship or a serious relationship with youtube okay loads of people are key oh it's complicated a lot of people want a casual relationship a lot of people want a serious relationship it seems like okay it seems about eighty percent of our crowd here ninety percent of our crowd wants to once a serious relationship with youtube good once you make the choice that you in fact do want a serious relationship with youtube at that point we progress from level one through to level two where we've already gotten going and now our aim is to get good so i'm gonna share some slides again and see what this looks like um what what does it really take to succeed on youtube the thing it really takes to succeed on youtube is to create videos that people want to click on number one and that people want to watch number two it is that simple like that is the billion dollar formula if someone could come up with a formula to consistently get people to click on their videos number one and actually watch them number two preferably for a long time that person would become a multi-millionaire basically overnight because that is the only thing you need to do on youtube it's simple but it's not particularly easy some of the stuff we go over in our introductory slides for youtuber academy to be a youtuber to be good you know this is level two get good you need to know how to write you need to know how to film you need to know how to edit you need to be good at storytelling you need to be good at branding you need to be good at public speaking you need to be okay with putting yourself out there on camera you need to be okay with like hearing the sound of your own voice there's so many skills that go into being a good youtuber and therefore to grow on youtube which is what this stream what this event is all about there's so many skills in that and all of these skills could be entire three-year university programs in their own right there are species like specific graduate programs in writing and filming an editing story telling branding speaking but as we as youtubers we have to be kind of good at all of these things and we have to do it in a way where we're filming our own stuff editing our own stuff we're doing it all ourselves at least at the start of the journey and we're generally having to do it part-time that's why this is the part-time youtuber academy that we teach because most people that started youtube and certainly i did when i first started for the first four years i was doing it as a part-time gig while i had a full-time job or for a year while i was a full-time medical student and so this is actually really hot this is really hard to do um you know this is one of my one of my favorite videos on the internet this is mkbhd who is now a youtuber with 15 million subscribers one of the biggest tech youtubers in the world and this is his first video oh nice first video you'll see [Music] so yeah welcome to video number 100 um i would say it's pretty good that i've got to upload 100 videos for you guys over the past couple of months basically and so what i'm going to go into is that right now i have i'm gonna check right now um i have to say it's pretty good that i've gotten to upload a hundred good videos for you guys over the past couple of months basically and so what i'm gonna go into is that right now i have i'm going to check right now right now i have approximately 70-ish subscribers i'm just looking at yeah wait now if i go to my page youtube.com marcus brownlee just click on the link over there i have 74 subscribers right so marcus brownlee who's now one of the biggest tech youtubers in the world multi-millionaire i'm sure has a team of like 12 people something like that made 100 videos before he got to 74 subscribers um obviously times have changed since 2006 or whenever it was that he recorded this video times have changed a little bit but um you know if you if you've decided that you want to you want to take youtube seriously here's an interesting thing so like if you if you've seen these slides before because if you've been an old student of youtuber academy please don't let let on in the chat but i just love for you guys in the chat and the live stream over on youtube to be let's see how many videos do you think the average channel with one million subscribers has it's like stick a number in chat 50 500 a thousand four hundred one thousand one thousand one fifty at least one hundred five k three hundred eight hundred one thousand one thousand five hundred two thousand four thousand et cetera et cetera the average channel with one million subscribers does in fact have 3 873 videos to include shorts uh no this data is from pre-short zero so it's all it's it's a few years old at this point how many videos do you think the average channel with 100 000 to 1 million subscribers has 300 500 2 1500. the answer is one thousand one hundred and seventy one how many videos does the average channel so the median i think uh this data is from tubebuddy so 10k to 100k subscribers how many videos does this average channel have it has 418 and how many videos does the average channel of 1k to 10k subscribers have the answer is 152. so it takes 152 for the average channel the the median the so 50 of channels will grow faster than this 50 of channels will go slower than this the average is 152 videos there are so many people i know who are like you know even students in our youtube academy where we say these numbers were like oh gosh darn it i've made 30 videos and i'm only at 800 subscribers it's like bro you made 30 videos and you were 800 subscribers that's absolutely sick that's like way faster than i was growing back in the day it's also way faster than the average um but i think these numbers are interesting because they show us that success on youtube takes a large amount of time if it requires making a large amount of videos and if you're going to choose to be in a serious relationship with youtube and you actually want to potentially treat it like a business like i do you've got to be realistic about the amount of work that this takes the good news is the work is quite fun and there are a few things that we can do to accelerate the process but we have to keep in mind this is a large amount of work if you're hoping that hey part-time youtuber sounds pretty cool i can put in two hours a week on youtube and i could make a full-time living it's just not going to happen like you cannot possibly have the audacity to think you can make a full-time living by giving two hours a week to anything let alone to youtube which is a really fun thing to do and really the more fun something is and the more autonomy it gives you the more competitive the space is going to be because everyone wants to be a youtuber you know kids these days their number one job is being a youtuber not so much take talker you know everyone who's big on tick tock wants to be big on youtube because youtube monetization and stuff is just so much more mature and and generally better than it is on tech talk um my channel took 52 videos to get to a thousand subscribers and 91 videos to get to 10 000 subscribers again i know a bunch of people like loads of people on our youtuber academy who are like oh my god it's really annoying my chat i've made like 10 videos and my channel's on on only a thousand subscribers and i'm like dude that's like five times faster than the growth of my channel so for mine it took six months and 52 videos to get the first 1000 and then about a year and 91 videos to get to 10 000 subscribers which is like three times faster than the average or twice as fast as the average it took us 92 to 143 videos to go from 10k to 100k it took 144 to 287 videos on youtube to go from 100k to 1 million and i think um we're now on like 440 or something 440 videos on youtube with 2.7 million subscribers so you can see that over time much of my channel started off growing twice as fast as the average and then it became like three times as fast and then like five times faster than 10 times as fast obviously there are a zillion different things that go into what makes a youtube channel successful but you know broadly well we're going to talk about that um so like june 2017 was when i started zero videos zero subscribers zero dollars a month june 2018 i had 23 sub 23k subs and i was making about 1500 a month and then i started a newsletter and built a website a year later i had 178 videos was making approximately 9 000 a month from 250 000 subs started instagram seriously started podcast number one a year later 250 videos this was all while i was working full time as a doctor 743 000 80 000 a month mostly thanks to skillshare in fact but we also start taking twitter and linkedin a bit more seriously and now 416 videos 2.7 million subscribers more than 250k a month in annual revenue we've got a youtube academy i'm working on a book we've got a second podcast and we started taking tiktok a bit more seriously so this is like five years worth of progress it starts at zero most of us are in sort of level one to level two stage where we're still probably not making that much money or maybe making a little bit but this stuff takes a large amount of time and really the key thing is illustrated by this little maths possible so warren buffett start investing at the age of 10. by age 30 his net worth is about a million dollars uh he's still invested in age 90 or at least he was last time i checked uh and he's got 22 annual return so he's a pretty solid investor and he has a net worth of around about 85 billion dollars whereas a normal person might start investing at 30 rather than 10 they might have a network net worth of 25k and they might quit investing at age 60 because they're like you know i want to play golf with my kids and stuff and they still have 22 annual returns so this person is just as good an investor as warren buffett and so the challenge is if you haven't seen this before like what is this person's net worth when they quit investing what are they gonna have in the bank the answer is 11.9 million which is pretty good but it shows that like it's way smaller than 85 billion and it shows that 99.9 of warren buffett's net worth exists because he started early and he just kept on going and this illustrates the idea that einstein allegedly said although he probably didn't which is that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world so really it kind of is let's let me uh make a new slide i can excite ah screw it i'll just use this diagram it's kind of it's kind of like this kind of way like obviously over time this is what you know revenue subs views etc looks like on a youtube channel but like you know this can sometimes be two years it can sometimes be three years it can sometimes be six months you just never really know but like what you don't want to do you don't want to quit over here because you've quit before you had a chance for it to really go wild the problem is when you're at the start of the journey it does take sort of a large amount of effort or rather perception of effort like you know when you're making your first first 100 videos it feels as if it's really hard and you're putting in so much effort into all the videos and you remember all the effort whereas when you're at my point where you're sort of five years later your memory of how much effort it was has actually kind of decayed to the point you don't really remember it and so at this point you know we're pulling in millions of subscribers millions of dollars etc and it's very easy for me to sit there there and be like oh it's really easy starting a youtube channel anyone can do it lol but i i have genuinely forgotten the amount of time and effort it took um but i don't think uh like i think really the key to growing to staying consistent with this is to make it fun like honestly if youtube is fun for you then you don't need you wouldn't think of it as work and certainly for me like even while people would always ask oh my god you you work as a doctor that's kind of hard and then in the evenings aren't you so tired how do you bring yourself to film youtube videos and i'm like for the most part i didn't need to bring myself to do it because i genuinely enjoyed it yes there were some days there were some days where i was like i really don't want to film a video but there was a sponsored deadline or because i committed to consistency and committed to being in a serious relationship with youtube and serious means consistency in my book i'd committed to that and so there were some times where i had to force myself to film a video but like 95 of the time i filmed videos because because it was fun so i think that's kind of what it takes to get to that level of consistency but consistency alone is not enough and that's why level two in this whole process is to get good now i'm going to start a new start a new page here it's quite fun i enjoyed doing this analog analog drawings and things okay let's talk about getting good what we said our gambit here is that the only way we're going to grow on youtube is if we make videos that people click on and videos that people want to watch i.e we make good videos so good is defined as people click people click and people watch the problem is making good videos is quite hard there's so much stuff that goes into it like you know what is it that makes a good video there is these pens are starting to run out uh yeah what is it that makes a good a good video there's a good title there's a good thumbnail there's a good concept or topic there's a good hook that keeps people attention there's a good structure there's good writing there's good personality there's good production value there's maybe good entertainment value depending on what sort of youtube you are and there's good branding and there's good storytelling so there's actually quite a lot that goes into making a you know good youtube video and you know to come back a good youtube video we've defined as a video that people click on and that a video that people watch so how do we get to making good youtube videos well firstly let's define good a little bit differently and i think there's like two definitions of good as well like this is the objective definition that people are clicking on and people are watching it for like you know what does that actually mean realistically i think there's like an intrinsic definition of good like an internal one and then there's like an extrinsic definition of good um let's start with the extrinsic one the extrinsic definition of good basically means your videos are starting to get traction you're getting likes you're getting comments you're getting views and you're getting subs and all of these things mean that your videos are a point where where other people people other than your mom or your grandma think that they are good because they're telling you like and you know in the world of startups there's this concept of uh product market fit like where you you spend ages working on a startup and talking to customers and stuff and then at some point you hit on product a product market fit where suddenly it's like yes you have the right product for the right audience and now it feels like you can actually grow pretty fast and people who you know post product market fit generally defined as per matt mcrisbook the great ceo but then as being a million dollars in annual recurring revenue once you're at that point it feels like okay we're kind of out of the woods it feels like we're getting traction it feels like the borders rolling downhill rather than rolling uphill and it's kind of similar similar on youtube like you know i kind of sometimes think of this as like creator audience fit which is sort of like startup product market fit and that's when you start noticing that oh my my channel is actually getting some kind of traction it's getting some views subs comments likes people are like oh this is actually really good and you start getting these extrinsic metrics for success so um that's one way of defining good it's not my favorite way of defining good my favorite way of defining good is in fact the intrinsic ones and an intrinsically good video like an internal definition of good is a video that passes the cringe test and the cringe test is as follows if someone said to you hey i came across one of your youtube videos the other day how would you feel would you cringe what do you feel oh my god it's really bad do you cringe at your own videos if you do your videos are not yet good you know your videos are good defined internally when you stop cringing at them it took me maybe 30 videos to be in the get going stage where i was like still finding my feet getting going and about 50 videos in the get good stage and by video number eighty eight zero i was like fairly comfortable that they passed video 80 that it had passed the intrinsic cringe test of is this video actually good so it took me 80 videos i didn't i didn't have any background filming or editing or anything like that i did have background in web design which helped because i could make stuff look pretty but it took me about 80 videos for my videos to not be cringe-worthy to myself so if someone came up to me and said hey i saw your video the other day i wouldn't feel like oh god that's the worst thing ever so that's how you know your video is good right so we have a few different definitions of good we have the objective definition which is people clicking click clicking on them and people are watching them you know the metrics if you care or click through rate and like watch time and like percentage engagement all that crap but to be honest when your channel is small and you don't have tens of thousand subscribers analytics are kind of useless because you just don't have enough data points for it to actually matter so i wouldn't personally worry too much about the analytics i would focus on these more like these sorts of metrics to you know are my videos good as just by an outside observer or preferably like what i do is the intrinsic metric of does my video pass the cringe test so we know that we need to get good um but the next question is how do we make our videos good given that they require all of this stuff um now the answer to this question is not let me learn all about all these things and then let me put them into practice the answer to this question is you just got to keep making videos and make them slightly better over time so the final little thing i'm going to draw here is like how how do you make good videos well you make lots of videos you start with quantity and then over time you make them one percent better each time if you can but you don't have to wedded to that but just broadly over time one percent better and that leads to quality now a lot of you might be familiar with the parable of the pottery class and if you're not i'm going to tell you anyway there's this pottery class and there's a teacher in the pottery class and he splits the class into two halves one half he says okay for the next 30 days you guys just need to make one pot just one pot only and then the other half of the class he says you know you guys for the next 30 days you need to make 30 pots one pot every single day for 30 days so at the end of it half the class has made one pot and the other half of the class has made 30 pots because they're doing it a lot quicker and then there's some judges and they come in and they figure out what are the top 10 best pots and surprise surprise all of the pots come from the quantity group they come from the group that made 30 pots rather than the group that made one so what does that mean it means that quantity leads to quality over time it's very very hard to take all these things that make a good video and get quality straight away this is never going to happen unless you are already a professional filmmaker although if you're a professional filmmaker you're probably not watching this maybe we have some professional filmmakers here in your case maybe you can get quality from day one but for most of us we have to start with quantity we have to start making crappy videos and then over time as we uh improve all these things like title thumbnail concept hook structure writing personality personal value and similarly random storytime as we improve all of those things over time our videos will get good to the point where people are fighting to find them useful by these extra extrinsic metrics like traction likes and comments and views and subs and we are internally thinking they're good because it passes the cringe test so let's go back to our initial thingymajiggy oh professional animator sick we're looking for a professional animator to do some stuff for us um coming back to our little diagram so level one was get going we've tackled that basically you just need to get started and then at that point you decide are you going to break up with youtube you've had a go you've tried it out seriously and things haven't worked out that's totally fine no problem at all um that's one way of doing it i get it at least you're not going to live a life of regrets because you've at least tried this thing the second option is you want a casual relationship with youtube where you're just going to make videos whenever you feel like it when i feel like it and that's okay as well but you can't expect any traction like you cannot expect to make decent money on youtube or any money on youtube if you're gonna have a casual relationship with it that's just not how it works yes maybe some people will get lucky but we're talking talking about how do you succeed without getting particularly lucky now if you've decided you want to commit to youtube for a serious relationship and you have committed to consistency at that point we need to get good and the way we know we're good the way we know we're beyond level two is because our videos are passing the cringe test number one and because we're seeing some level of traction and now we have choice number two now this is where it starts to get interesting because choice number two then becomes do you want to treat youtube like a hobby or do you want to treat youtube like a business and this is a spectrum it is the hobby to businessman the hobby to entrepreneur spectrum of youtube and there's nothing wrong with either so people people in the chat i'd love to get an idea if hobby is zero and business is 100 where are you on the spectrum of how you want to treat youtube from zero to 100 okay and the halfway point probably is 50. let's say you aren't allowed to choose 50. you have to put you can do 49.51 but you have to go one side or the other there's no such thing as being bang in the middle being on the fence it's not a thing we should be trying to be honest with ourselves about exactly what our goals are for our youtube channels as well okay good so broadly in the zoom chat we have people who are on the business end of the spectrum that is very good i'll be honest or if you want to join our youtuber academy it's more suitable for the business end if you want to treat youtube as like a hobby that's totally fine but it's a very expensive course to go on so i wouldn't recommend going on the course if you just want to treat it like a hobby would i attend a 1500 to 5000 odd course if i just want to treat it like a hobby maybe if i had loads of money to burn but i would be spending my money on better things this course is mostly aimed at people that like actually want to treat it like a business rather than those who just want to treat it as a hobby for the record absolutely nothing wrong with treating youtube as a hobby i have lots of hobbies i like playing the guitar i'm not trying to monetize it i like drawing i'm not trying to monetize it because i suck at drawing i like playing the piano and singing not trying to monetize any of it um but i do have this thing called youtube which i treat like a business i.e i want to make money from it and you know i'm not saying and you know if you're here and you want to do like a hobby i'm not saying you need to monetize your passion i'm not saying you have to do any of this stuff what i'm saying is that if you do want to treat it as a business we then get into level three get smart now this is where it starts to get really fun and this is where i'm probably gonna stop talking because like we have loads of people on here mostly at level one and level two but let's see level three get smart at this point you already know how to make good videos because you don't printed them and you're getting some level of traction but now if we've decided that we want to treat it like a business then we need to get smart about it and when you start treating youtube like a business in a way like level two and treating uh it's it's kind of like this like you know if you're if you're treating it like a hobby you're doing it for yourself that's the primary benefit of doing youtube kind of you know you're making the videos that you want to make you're exercising your own creative freedom etc etc but if you're treating it like a business your focus needs to shift from yourself and needs to shift towards the audience like you know if i enjoy making coffee and i'm just making coffee for myself that's all fine i'm enjoying the coffee i'm enjoying the craft i've got my fancy machines i'm a hobbyist et cetera et cetera but if i want to start a coffee shop if i want to start a business of doing coffee i can't just think hey i'm really good at making coffee for myself therefore people will buy from me no i have to think about the audience i have to think about a ton of other things that are around actually building a business and there's an absolutely fantastic book that if you're if you're on this level three thing i'd really recommend a book called the e-myth revisited by michael gerber that's a book that i read in 2019 and it completely changed my life because the point he makes in the book is that you know he he talks about he talks through the story of this this lady called sarah in america who's starting a who who has a bakery and you know it's one thing to be good at baking pies but it's a completely other thing to be good at running a pie making business similarly it's one thing to be good at making youtube videos that you're making as a hobby for yourself because they're artsy and nice and you enjoy the creative flair and you enjoy the craft but i would suggest in my opinion it's totally a different skill to actually build a business based on youtube where the requirement the basic requirement is you know how to make good videos but that is not sufficient for business success so what are the things that we need to do if we're treating youtube like a business you'll be you'd be unsurprised to know we have a three-part model for this and you know if you are treating youtube as a business we um i like to think of it as like creatorpreneurs and we are in fact making a course about this which will be filmed sometime next week so i've been i've been living through all this stuff and there's basically three things there's workflow there's cash flow there's outflow so we're just going to keep it broad broad general concepts because these are the things you need to treat as a business and really the key the key here is that like if you are going to treat youtube like a business um what i've realized over the last four years of building a team and building a business around this is that you can like it's it's actually pretty easy to take insights from the world of business and apply them to life as a creator so i've read like dozens of business books at this point spent like probably tens of thousands of dollars on business coaching and management coaching and leadership coaching and operations and finance and all that crap done the whole vision values all that jazz for our business and this was stuff that a few years ago i would have thought was complete corporate none of this matters who cares it's all about making good videos but now that i operate my youtube business like a business i've realized oh my god like there are so many ways in which creators could benefit from thinking more like businesses and anytime i have chats with you know i've got a bunch of youtuber friends these days some of whom have like millions of subscribers hundreds of thousands of subscribers and a lot of creators really struggle to think like business owners because they feel like oh you know it takes away from the craft and things and maybe it does it does take away from the craft a little bit but if you think a little bit like a business it means you can have a far more sustainable and lucrative career as a youtuber than if you're stuck thinking about the craft but if you do want to treat it like a hobby that's that's totally cool i'm just i'm speaking only to the people who actively want to treat it like a business you should treat it more like a business anyway one of the vibes here workflow is basically about strategy and systemizing so strategize and systemize strategy is things like niche target audience uh competitor analysis this is the sort of stuff we go over on the youtuber academy um unfair advantages and like competitive edge slash like alpha whatever you want to call it depending whatever technology you want to use um and then systemize is how do we create systems around our content production pipeline so like org charts and live mapping systems and then like processes um and then yeah basically how do we make things more efficient as individuals trying to optimize our workflow for content creation cash flow is really about how do we start with a stranger turn them into a fan through content turn them into a friend through email turn them into a prospect generally also through email and turn that prospect into a customer um where like in the middle of this kind of we call it the pentagon model we have this idea of an evangelist and a fan can become an evangelist or a friend or a prospect or a customer basically by you giving them loads of value so cash flow is about starting with value first and then creating products around it and gary vaynerchuk calls this the jab jab jab right hook model where you're creating loads and load of the free content and some people will buy your paid stuff the way i like to think of it is i use numbers so 9911 so 99 of my content is completely free but one percent of my content is paid and one percent of my audience is gonna i you know i would ideally want to sign up for one percent of my content which is paid and this is like a nice way of approaching youtube it means that for example you know how many people are watching this live stream so we've got like we've got 2 000 people watching this live stream in total so 1400 on the youtube channel but 500 on the zoom call and we had i think 4 000 on the waiting list on the attendance list for this course who for this video who are getting a recording afterwards um i think we have about 20 000 on our mailing list for the youtuber academy when i'm waiting this for it um but of my 2.7 million subscribers 20 000 of them are potentially interested in the part-time youtuber academy i suspect if i'm being honest most of the 1500 people watching on the youtube live stream who have not signed up to the waiting list don't care about signing up to a 1500 to 5 000 course it's probably out of their price range they're probably not interested that's totally okay now i know that 99 of my audience will not give a toss about the paid products that i'm making but i know that one percent of them will and those are the people on the mailing list those are the people that we generally tell about the course and we talk about the course i don't really mention the course much on my youtube channel we're talking about it on this live stream but hopefully this live stream is adding value to people because i'm recognizing the 9911 rule which is that it's totally fine if our content our paid content only appeals to one percent of our customers it does not need to appeal to the 99 of our customers um and that's why like within this model like you know probably 99 of our effort should be focused on providing really good free value and that's what most of our videos youtube videos are hopefully they're providing loads of really good free value and then one percent of our effort or maybe like 10 of our effort can be spent providing paid services to people you know we now have a team of 18 people of which like half works on the free stuff and half works on the paid stuff we have a full-time team behind youtube academy all that kind of stuff um but that all happens because we've built this audience where 99 people don't care about the paid stuff they don't they either can't afford it or they don't want it and that's totally fine um whereas where's one percent of them well so that's like the idea of uh cash flow for example and um you know there's all sorts of ways of doing this and then it's outflow which is basically like hiring like hiring freelancers potentially building your own team and then like managing and these are all things that businesses do as well oh i forgot to mention like planning over here it's a big part of the planning and like strategy yeah so this is like i'm i'm going to leave it here because this is like you know we have a whole freaking 20 hour course on this coming up at some point um if you sign up to the ptya waiting list we will let you know about this course as well filming it like sometime next week but um this is not relevant for most people watching this even on the zoom call because if you're at level one and level two you don't care about this stuff this stuff is all irrelevant the point of level one and level two is to get to a point where you are making good videos and making good videos is very different to being good at the business of youtube being good at the business of making videos so broadly yeah this is the model for growing on youtube number one get going basically just make the bloody videos don't worry about it don't be shy everyone is shy initially 99 of the fear disappears when you when you publish that first video and then decide are you in a casual relationship or a serious relationship with youtube if you decide that you're in a share serious relationship with youtube at that point you can think about getting good you can think about quantity you can think about one percent improvements and that can lead to quality and then at that point you can make the choice between do you want to treat youtube like a hobby or do you want to treat youtube like a business and if you are more towards the business side then you want to get smart and you want to start thinking in business terms about growing on youtube now there's a bunch of um a bunch of other youtube channels some fantastic fantastic youtube channels out there like think media and video creators and stuff and they generally focus on the getting good side of things um which is in fairness the place where most of us are so there's like tons and tons and tons of free content about it on youtube but if you like you can sign up for a youtuber academy which is kind of more aimed at people who are in this segment and also in this segment so between level two and three our part-time youtube academy is a pretty solid course but yeah anyway i'm going to open up the floor to questions now so we'll see if we can take questions from the zoom chat and also from hands up so if anyone wants to do a hand up um you'll need to have your video on i'm afraid because otherwise you know this is a video thing a bit pointless otherwise so yeah i think the first person we had for a hand up let's see if this works is ray hello ray how do i ask you to unmute there we go hello ray what's going on hey how are you i'm pretty good that was pretty good um should i just dive into the question dive into the question let's go for it awesome so i'm i'm between one and two and something you said that really stuck out to me was if you want to treat it like a business you have to kind of like forego sometimes your own personal interests and kind of like be human-centric and think about the audience um i struggle with this because if i'm i've treated arts for example dance in the past as like passions but as soon as money was associated with it and i wanted to make a business out of it i lost that passion and the enjoyment of it and i'm just wondering if there's like a healthy balance to strike in between the two yes that's such a good question this is one of my favorite topics because like there is all this stuff around monetizing your passions and a big part of why people want to be youtubers is because they think you can make loads of money from it but i will tell you now and this is true of all of my youtuber friends whenever you add money to anything uh it it runs the risk of crowding out the reasons why you did it in the first place there's a lot of evidence about this i'm actually researching this stuff for the book that i'm writing around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and it's like we're intrinsically motivated to do things that we find fun but as soon as you bring extrinsic motivation into it like rewards or grades or money like if you start paying people to do something they stop enjoying it for its own sake and they start to want to only do it for the money so i think the balance that i think about here the the healthy way i think about it is like let's say you've got a passion right um it's really nice to monetize it but it's not very nice to rely on it on it as your only source of income as your only source of excel derek sivers has an amazing blog post about this where he says that look if you enjoy art for god's sake don't try and make a living from it because if you're trying to make a living from it you spend 90 of the time focusing on the business stuff and 10 of your time drawing whereas if you make a little bit of money from it if you make it sort of like uh pocket money then it makes it more fun because now you get the excitement when yay someone's brought my art but you don't have any of the oh my god no one's brought my art for a few days so i think it's i think it's really important to have that like i think there are ways to to like get around this um like i treat youtube like a business but i really enjoy the business side of things i also really enjoy the creative side of things so i like i found a way especially through delegation and hiring people that they can kind of take care of the business side for me so that i can focus on the creative side but you actually have to go quite far along the business route before you have a team who can feasibly handle all the business stuff so it is something to keep in mind it's something that always always keep a balance of um there are no easy answers to this i'm afraid but yeah kudos for asking a question cool let's go with um gene hello gene how's it going hello can you hear me yeah loud and clear what's up i'm good thank you how are you very well thank you i can help um so my youtube is quite in the level three like later stage i'm not sure if this is the right place to ask but i was wondering because there was one video in particular that did very well and i found out that it was because youtube picked my video and show up on browse like home page and i'm i'm just trying to get into the bottom of it of why that happened so that i can apply this to other videos and wondering if you have any insights to share yes i can try it can you put a link to your channel in the zoom chat please and we can take a look um um it's like personal so like i'm not sure if i wait it's it's a personal youtube channel that you want to treat like a business yes it's it's quite a business at the moment it's um it's not an english language as well so i'm not sure if you can oh i see okay i mean i can give you so sorry did did youtube shoot pick it to go in creator spotlight or in uh so basically it say the main source of traffic came from browse ah okay and it said home page yes so um how many subscribers do you have if you don't mind me asking um like a thousand something so this is like um basically every youtuber every youtuber who's big has most of their views coming from browsing home page um the other source for views is broadly search so there's sort of like two two ways of approaching you sorry views um there's browse and suggested and there is search so a sort of video that might be that might work in search would be ipad pro 2022 review where someone is literally searching on youtube and they find the ipad video and they click on it and then they watch the video a browse video is one that appears on someone's homepage so when you go on your youtube homepage or anyone watching this you see a bunch of videos that are recommended those are based on a bunch of different factors it's it's not that someone at youtube has decided to put your video on the homepage it's that your video had a high click-through rate and had a sufficiently high watch time that youtube thinks this is a good video and then it starts showing it to the right people so the youtube homepage looks different for everyone um because it's all based on like personalization and stuff but really the way youtube channels grow is by targeting browse the way you grow when you're very small is by targeting search but like for example for us like i think 95 of our views come from browse and suggested so really there's no there's no secret source here uh a video gets pushed out by the algorithm when the video is good it has a high click-through rate on the thumbnail and people and it has a decent watch time and there's another factor of session watch time which means that video has made people stick on youtube itself for longer because youtube is trying to optimize for more people's sales platform there's also a new feature the algorithm is running with recently which rates which asks some people to rate how they enjoyed the video in terms of satisfaction and enjoyment and stuff and it takes that into account it sort of takes into account likes and comments but everyone who's an expert on this says that that doesn't really matter anymore so there's like a zillion different factors that go into what makes video appear on browse and suggested but the things that we can control is we need to make a good video so you clearly made a good video there's no secret source to it you just need to make more videos that are like that or that are good i high click through rate high watch time and you'll get more videos on on the home page as well but that's very useful thank you so much cool no worries um let's go with sarah hello sarah uh oh cool okay i'm unmuted hey everyone uh my name's sarah i am a notion consultant i also run notion for designers um so my youtube channel i've had for like 10 years and the only content that is doing good right now is notion because notion is very trendy and it just is what it is so my question is how can i maximize and this might actually be a better question for youtuber academy but if it's not notion content it doesn't do well and it's very frustrating because i'm i'm my whole channel is about systems and processes and and just being a better business owner especially as a solopreneur and so what tips or tricks do you have to like get people to watch things that aren't just trendy and stick with your channel that way if that makes sense yes absolutely um so this is a this is an issue that like loads people have i i have this issue all the time as well um would you mind posting a link to your channel in the chat please so we're going to take a look let me i'm going to unmute myself cool and how many how many subs do you have i just run welcome back uh this is my channel um i just passed like 1.3 000. so and i and that's like the hard thing too is my channel i started 10 years ago because i was the first person to go on youtube as an americorps member that's how i got my following um yeah so okay so a few take it seriously until recently so don't don't go too far back um yeah so so there's so much that goes into answering this question um i'm gonna try and uh how do we stop basically um the problem is that you don't i i you probably haven't defined your target audience um there's or or rather i'll ask you the question to what extent have you defined your target audience do you know who the ideal person you want to be watching your youtube channel is hang on can we meet you again sorry muted me and then wouldn't let me do it yeah so you know because i own a design agency too my audience is designers it's you know freelancers creatives and i did not define that it just is kind of what's happened um based on you know how notion has worked out and all of those things um yeah so i'm just kind of been riding the wave there because it's been working for me okay so generally the way that we would advise it is like you kind of start like some sometimes if you manage to ride a wave you accidentally end up with an audience which might be the audience you want to target but it might be the audience you don't want to target so in your case it sounds like maybe a given that you given that you do a design thing anyway it's it's it sounds like you probably do want to target like freelancers and designers and stuff is that fair to say yeah definitely okay cool so you are lucky in the sense that you had sort of stuff that was trending or viral and you've now got an audience that is already kind of resonating with your stuff what i would do and this is going to be sort of very top-level advice um is like really define who who is that person and what are all of their problems so to the point of you know i used to have a target persona for my channel which was like a medical student at imperial college london called muhammad who is like 22 years old who is interested in tech who wants to read more books but doesn't have the time for it who wants to study for exams and do reasonable in med school but wants to have a social life as well who is like a guy he's not very hence he doesn't really go to the gym but he wants to work out a bit more he's like not in a relationship it wants to find a girlfriend and he's like he cares about productivity he cares about tech but doesn't worry about it too much and he's got all of these lists of problems that i then figure out okay now that i know who this person is i'm gonna try and make videos that solve some of their problems not all of their problems i'm not like you know the savior of the world or the messiah or anything i'm just trying to solve a few specific problems and generally the more specific that problem you solve can be initially the more growth you'll get so there's that classic phrase of niche down to blow up and then over time you slowly slowly slowly expand your circle a little bit more so if you're finding for example that notion content is doing really well which it does but you really want to end up talking about systems and business generally one way to do that is by okay i'm going to make notion videos once a week but every other video is going to be a video aimed at systems thinking where i'm using notion but to get the notion trend but i'm not really talking about notion i'm just using notion as an illustration of wider systems theory then another one might be you know i'm going to talk about hiring and delegation and i'm going to have a notion template in there because i'm going to show a to-do list using notion and like delegation whatever using ocean but really the wider lessons i'm teaching people are about business and delegation and stuff and then at some point you'll figure out what kind of products you want what sort of audience you want to drive to your paid products but i think it's it's about like when you're lucky enough to have landed on a trend like notion um and also you put in the work to land on a trend like notion which is awesome you want to hitch a ride on that trend for as much as as long as possible but like slowly slowly slowly move out into the other areas that you like um but it all starts from defining who is that target audience specifically how old are they are they male or female where do they live what do they want and i like weirdly the more focused your message is on one person the more it will resonate with more than just than just that one person i don't know that's helpful like we can dive into it in much more specifics but like yeah yeah and i i just finished reading founder brand from dave gearhart i don't know if you've picked it up yet it changed my life um he has an entire section about defining the villain of your niche which is something that i've never really considered before so everything you're saying and what i've read recently is like you know wordpress might be your villain but you know squarespace fixes the issue kind of thing so um yeah it's called founder brand it came out somebody in the chat was asking um it came out i think last week and dave gerhart's the cmo at uh drift oh sick nice i will check it out thank you so much by the way thank you that's quite all right thanks for hopping on uh let's go with ash hello ash how are you doing uh m eid i'm not going to you because you're don't have your video on so if you turn your video on let me go to you next hey ash i'm good thank you so much i've been following your content for ages love it i'll try and be quick um i have a channel which i've just posted in the chat productive insights i help small business owners grow using digital strategies mainly coaches and consultants channel features some of the world's leading minds like seth godin guy kawasaki james clear and so on i've only got 589 subscribers i've been doing it for about five or six years i've deleted some of my videos that weren't performing i hope that's not a bad thing my question is i've got two questions one is would ptya be a good fit for me and two um when you create videos do you first come up with a do the seo research and then create a video around that which i find is very creatively restricting for me or do you just create what you think is right for your ideal audience like you said and then later on optimize it for seo and a third question is i i've already communicated with angus about this but i'd love to have you on my podcast if you're open to it i've sent you a couple of emails i haven't heard back but i know you're busy so oh cool um third question sorry i'm in book writing mode right now and we've got pty about so i i just have no time in my life but yeah we'll we'll definitely be interested at the end of this next cohort so in like may time if you're still down thank you we're on the same page anglers are just sitting across there uh the second question was the whole seo thing uh what do you mean by seo um optimizing for looks i use tubebuddy morningfame a whole lot of things and basically just figuring out what my channel is likely to rank for based on the number of subscribers and stuff like that and then creating content around that so for example one of the most highest performing videos apart from the one with seth godin is rome research versus notion i'm not really all that keen on roam research versus notion i did an interview with natalia and that worked well but that's not my jam and that's not what brings money into my business you know the seth godin thing is more aligned with what i do or the guy kawasaki thing okay um and sorry i'm i'm asking lots of questions here because really that like for the audience who might be annoyed that i'm not giving you a very clear answer there is something i like to think of which is the law of equal and opposite advice which is that the advice that applies to one person these equal and opposite advice could apply to someone else and so this is something we try and do on a youtube account we try and ask ask questions rather than be like you should do this because it might it might be right for you so um another question is who are the sorts of people you want to be watching your videos to get into your actual business um service-based business owners who can afford my membership program which ranges between 99 us a month and 809 a month depending on the level of access they get to me i see okay so it strikes me that [Music] that's a very kind of niche target audience which is good it's good to have a niche for that target audience you you've got a membership program right so you know what sort of problems the people in your membership program are facing um can you give me an idea of what sort of problems those things are like what are the sorts of questions people come to you with they tend to have one or two problems uh the overwhelming one is i don't have enough leads and and i don't know how to grow my business and the second type is i have too many leads and i don't know how to scale and scale delivery and that's where i help them create information products and create their own membership sites only the first more than the second okay i don't have enough leads so if i look at your past few lots of videos almost none of these are targeted at the question of i don't have enough leads it sounds like you're trying to cast the net very wide um if i can if i can be honest with you the thumbnails are absolute the banner is productive inside helping to grow your business profitably i mean if i were you there would be something about there about service based business owners because like i have a business and i'm not sure i'd be in your target audience i mean such channel banner is a small thing if we look at production value um it looks like you're filming with a webcam does not really inspire any any sort of like uh with a 4k sony um uh zv oh i see okay fine um there's a the there's a few things we can do to to up the production value like i think if you if you're targeting a high net worth ish like business owner clientele having having like upping up in production value is like a very reasonable way to go about it yeah so there's a lot that there's a lot that we can do here um but to answer your original question i think you want to start with the target audience you want to figure out and this applies to everyone as well you like figure out like that target audience member and find out what all of their problems are problem problem problem problem and then you as the youtuber or you as the business owner provide solutions to those specific problems and then you don't worry about seo like for now you want to think you want to start off with like concept and topic so maybe something like how to generate more leads for your business and then for the 20 videos in that series hey guys welcome back to our ongoing series about how to generate more leads for your business as a service-based business owner this is episode one and in episode number one we're talking about how to market your services door-to-door cool that's a video hey guys welcome back to our ongoing series about how to get generate more more leads for your service-based business this is episode two and now we're talking about how to use print everyone says print is dying but actually i've got loads of great value for my print course people in my membership has gone loads of value from a print course by the way sound membership number in this video we're gonna talk about print social online tv whatever whatever whatever whatever whatever um how to have a sales school how to have this that like i'm just sort of making this stuff up because you know more than i do about what exactly your your target audience problems is problems are and i would focus on making videos around those generally i mean seth godin is a big name guy kawasaki is a big name it's a big name but like interviews with random people that are 40 minutes long is not the sort of content that your target audience would probably care about watching on youtube i suspect because i'm kind of speaking for myself because i don't care about that what i'd love to see if i was in your target audience is oh my god ash please break down for me the top 10 mistakes people make with when it comes to closing leads like stuff like that and once you've landed on the topic at that point you can think okay what's an interesting title what's an interesting thumbnail um and what's the vibe that i want to create for my channel uh yeah so yeah hopefully that was helpful this there's like so much stuff that goes into it um thumbnails how do you uh is there something you can recommend to learn how to make better thumbnails um yes basically you want to learn how to use canva canva is a great tool uh you have a business you have money you can probably outsource to a thumbnail designer i'm sure so that could work um the first step to figuring out thumbnails is to figure out what kind of vibe you want uh we have a phrase that we like to talk about your vibe attracts your tribe so what are the sorts of thumbnails that people in your target audience would be clicking if you for example were watching youtube would you click on these thumbnails if you saw buying and selling websites risk forward minimum viable offer maybe you would i actually quite like quite like these thumbnails maybe you wouldn't i would i would start off by doing a mood board like it's it's like if you were hiring someone to be a website designer you would get a mood board together i really like these sorts of things this is sort of thing i like you get feedback from your target audience you know would you click on this sort of vibe thumbnail and once you've landed on a vibe at that point you can then optimize the thumbnails for that particular vibe technically youtube advice is like facing the thumbnail oh my god meme meme face that kind of vibe flames in the background contrast ramped all the way up that advice is very skewed towards kids kids who are nine to 14 year olds who spend lots of time on youtube that advice is not applicable to 35 year old business owners who are yeah 35 year old men business owners service based business who want to have like concise decent advice on how to get more leads so ignore the traditional youtube advice around thumbnails but you do need to figure out like what is the style the vibe that will appeal to your target audience which i appreciate is not a useful answer because it's not specific but like there there is no right answer to the thumbnail questions beyond it depends it depends what you like it depends what your audience is like like and then you figure out the thumbnail for each individual video thank you so much for your generosity i've got to jump off of corvette thank you so much good luck um okay sweet i think we are we've hit the top of the hour um i am just going to take um a few questions from the chat um [Music] let's have a bit of stuff in the chat how do you know if a niche is profitable generally a niche is profitable if it's if the people who are in that niche have money and generally a niche is in fact we have a diagram i like diagrams oh profitable niche or not profitable niche two ways of thinking about it um have money don't have money this is the audience don't have money and where the thing that you are you're doing for them your product either makes money or saves time or it does not make money or save time generally this is a good niche to do uh this is a very bad niche to do and these well this one is okay and this one is also not good because these people don't have any money uh this is why generally i don't un unless you're a student i don't recommend trying to target students because students famously don't have money unless you are targeting students where the the the gatekeepers for their financial decisions are their parents so for example uh college admissions college admissions is like a very lucrative sphere because the people buying college admission stuff is not the students themselves it's actually the parents and parents definitely have money and this thing they hope they're hoping that college degree is going to make the money and save some time so college admissions is a good niche uh though that's like the sort of the matrix i would think about in terms of the profitability or otherwise of a niche but to be honest any niche can be profitable because you have adsense you can always create your own product around them but generally you do want to target people who have money if you care about treating it like a business rather than people who are broke um this is why all my stuff for students is free rather than or like on skillshare rather than like as a paid course because like you know they won't be able to afford the paid course okay let's see any other questions um oh god the chat is going too fast any tips to go from script to filming yes bullet points bullet points is the answer it's so hard to film a scripted video you could use a teleprompter most youtubers i know who do scripted content use a teleprompter and they swear by it and they stay like it takes ages to learn how to use like a few days of like practicing non-stop to be natural with using a teleprompter but um the way i go about it is bullet points because to be honest if you if you're creating content generally educational content doesn't necessarily need to be scripted but if you're creating content based on your personal experience like i can i can talk about this youtube stuff without having notes because i've been doing it for five years and i've been teaching it for three years and i've got i've been taught teaching 1500 students if anyone asks me a question about youtube i don't need a word by word script to read from because it's very easy to sound like you're reading from a word for word script but if i was doing like a business analysis of how i don't know zuckerberg's metaverse concept is actually being overtaken by microsoft's concept and it takes a ton of research and writing obviously i have to script that and if i had to script that i would use a teleprompter so teleprompter for fully scripted videos but bullet points for not for descriptive videos would be my suggestion um okay let's see oh hello oh my god this chat's going so fast no worries beatrice uh want to make a youtube angle channel in english but it's not my first language any tips oh that's really hard i'd start with target audience um actually i mean it depends which level you're at if you're at level one then get going if you're a level two then get good you can you can get good without making videos in english if you're getting smart i would consider the target audience i would figure out like how bad is your english are people willing to people in your target audience willing to sit through english not being your first language you know there's loads of different levels of english speaking there's different levels of accents like the there's there's so much stuff that goes into it um that it's hard to answer in one go but it depends the answer to that question it depends what level you're at um let's see oh we've had a zillion questions angus tells me on how to find your niche right how to find your niche there's lots of different ways of thinking about this we we have a whole two-hour section in a session our youtuber academy about how to find a niche um there's like you know do you want to be niche to a topic or do you want to not really have a niche and people follow you for your personality this one is like really hard because then your personality has to be super super interesting but if you start with some kind of topic you can slowly transition to people following you for your personality and um this is also why vlog channels are really hard to grow because unless you have large unfair advantages to grow a vlog channel it's really really hard whereas if you're teaching a topic and it's like educational or inspirational uh preferably a bit of both it's a lot easier to find defined content ah the the way how do you person each question uh i'm trying i'm trying to condense a two-hour long youtuber academy session into like five seconds but basically uh level one is like uh you like what are you interested in what do you like what are you good at that kind of stuff level two is you know what is your audience interested in what do they want that kind of thing and level three is how can you sort of combine one plus two to make three where you get you can sort of have that sort of venn diagram of things you like things you like and things your audience needs if you don't have an audience you make one up um and what's that like overlap and then you just try it you try 10 videos in that niche and you see how it feels the the other way of thinking about niche and again there are no easy answers here i wish i could give you a formula there is no formula i'm just giving you the mental models to think about this philosophically the other way to think about a niche is not to think about a topic but to think about the target audience so for example you know what's an example um let me target audience target audience okay let's say my target audience is uh beginner youtubers in a way it's not really a niche it's not really a topic by the traditional definition because beginner youtuber is not necessarily topic but it's like if i know that my target audience is beginner youtubers or um home cooks with i don't know five plus years experience or for example new dads it's like if i define my niche based on my target audience it makes it so much easier to make loads of content whereas if i target my if i choose my niche based on a topic like productivity broad uh or i don't know that's another problem that's another topic uh food or cooking it's it's like this there's no like right or wrong answer here but there are multiple ways of thinking about the question the way i think about my niche is in terms of broadly in terms of like i don't want to have a niche but i do keep in mind what my target audience is so right now the people i'm targeting with my content are like people who are around about 24 25 years old male living in the uk care about tech similar character basically myself but a few years ago that's the person i'm directly targeting with most of the videos on the channel but that doesn't mean that that's the only person that's going to watch the content that content is actually going to be watched by a lot of other people um the third way to answer the niche question is to think like okay in terms of like tiny tiny topic and then slowly expand out over time so for example when i started my channel i was just making videos for medical school applicants who were applying to medical school at cambridge oxford or imperial or ucl that's a very very tiny group of people because i was making videos about these entrance exams but that was a niche that made sense because i had an unfair advantage in the space because i was a medical student at cambridge so the other way you know not the other way the other thing we want to think about and this comes to this is like what are your unfair advantages how could you potentially stand up stand out in a crowded in a crowded niche um and if you don't have any unfair advantages in a particular niche and you're on level three get smart you might want to reconsider the niche because then it's like hard it's hard to grow without unfair advantages unless you put in a load of work you can outwork people but that's not very sustainable and not very fun i much prefer to grow in issues where i have an unfair advantage similarly to when you know companies like y combinator are um assessing startups for their accelerator programs one of the things they're looking for is founder market fit like how much of a fit is the founder do they have any specific knowledge do they have any unfair advantages that make them a good person to make a business in this in this particular niche if we're treating our youtube channels like a business we also want to think in those terms but the other way to think about a niche it depends it it it again all sort of sorts it sort of depends on on what level you're at so you know level one level two level three uh so this was get going and get good sorry i'm trying to be as comprehensive as possible but going all over the place to get smart if you are at level one or level two in a way you don't really need to worry about your niche because the way that you can think about any issues in two ways there's the architect approach and there's the archaeologist approach now what does an architect do an architect builds a house or rather designs a house but they don't lay a single brick until the house is entirely designed they know all the details of what it's going to look like and they have a plan that is one way to approach building have finding a niche on youtube by having a plan from day one generally i would not recommend the architect approach unless unless you are starting at level three if if you're really if you if you're at level one at level two you want to go for archaeologists if you're at level three maybe you can think about architect but the way an archaeologist approaches finding a niche is that what do archaeologists do they find sites that might be interesting hot sites and then they dig and they dig a bit more they dig a bit more and most of the areas in which they dig they're not going to find anything but occasionally they're going to dig they'll be like oh i found something i'm going to dig a bit more they're going to excavate dig a bit more do more more and more work so when you're an archaeologist you're sort of like maybe there i'll make a few videos maybe i'll make a few videos there and there and there and you're sort of hopping from like niche to niche and then eventually you might be like oh  when i made videos about notion suddenly my channel started to grow absolutely freaking wild so now you've stumbled upon a niche that's kind of interesting and now from this point you start thinking in terms of target audience like okay i think i found my niche let me narrow down the target audience and figure out what kind of content i can make for them but if you're at level one and level two you wanna kind of follow this windy windy windy approach that's another way to think about finding a niche so ah so much stuff we have a whole two hour lesson on this in the youtube academy feel free to sign up if you like or not um any other questions angus that have come up fairly regularly off the top of your head that was the main one um please can you talk about sponsorships how to set your price etc um yes the number you care about is 15 cpm that's generally considered a standard for most sponsorships so you can do that obviously there's loads of nuance to that question that i'm missing but of that that i'm sort of not talking about but basically 15 cpm is the number you want to be using as your benchmark um growing channel with youtube ads possible no you do not grow your channel with youtube ads i've asked tons of people about this who are experts on youtube the answers always know uh do you have any recommendations for courses or channels for level level zero and level one students yes um we are launching a skillshare class like next week on how to grow on youtube so sign up to the pty waiting list in the link below somewhere it'll be in the zoom chat will be in the live stream and we'll let you know when that class is out it's free and you can that's a step-by-step guide starting a youtube channel which i filmed a few weeks ago we're in the editing process of it right now other channels that are really good i really like video creators and i really like think media those are solid channels for level zero level one okay free access to that course huh oh if you sign up for the for youtuber academy the pty you get free access to the um the online the course on how to how just how to basically go from level zero to level one in a bit of level two actually no in fairness it's how to go from basically how to go from zero to one or how to go from one to two that's like what the course is for you'll get free access to that if you sign up for the engineer academy um we get to officially sign up for pty in three days yes it opens on monday at 4 p.m uk time yes that's right um how do i convert viewers to subs ugh that's hard uh they have to like you and they have to like your content there's no shortcut the way you convert videos to subs is by make consistently making videos that are good and that deliver value to the audience and then we go into the how do i make good videos well you start with quantity you go one percent improvements of time you get equality the other thing i had to know what my audience is well we think about target audience defining target audience in terms of like what do you like what do they like how can you help them it's a how do i convert viewers into subs is like a whole a whole it's basically all of it's like how do i do youtube so there's it's hard to answer that question this whole this whole class this whole session has been my attempt to somewhat answer the question of how do i do youtube uh you're following this following the three-part framework oh okay what are your thoughts about shorts please um like short shorts are relatively relatively new we know some channels we had a guy in our youtube academy last cohort who went from like 500 subscribers to like 120 000 subscribers in the course of a few weeks using shorts the problem with shorts are the people who watch shorts don't translate necessarily to people who watch long form content we have started a new channel for shorts because we wanted to experiment with that peter mckinnon has a very good video where he talks about his philosophy on shorts recently i'm sure someone can find that and link oh daniel was in 400 000 now my god he was on cohort four incredible um yeah four hundred thousand zero to basically zero to four hundred thousand subscribers in a few weeks by using shorts but it'll be interesting to see what happens with that further down the line someone please link that peter mckinnon video in the chat uh the one where he talks about shorts because i think that's that's really interesting any tips on networking and meeting people in your niche yeah great great um i have a one-word answer to that and that answer is twitter and maybe instagram most niches on youtube people are on twitter twitter is how you make friends some niches on youtube generally the more lifestyle you want instagram is better but they often also have twitter as well i have made all my youtube friends not through youtube but in fact through twitter so the way you meet people who are other youtubers is by being on twitter weirdly um oh nathan are shorter videos better than longer videos oh that's so big it depends um youtube algorithm team released a video about this recently they said that there is no preference in the algorithm for shorter videos versus longer videos uh the answer is the video needs to be as short as it needs to be and no shorter and as long as it should be but no longer not very helpful but there's no there's no clear answer to that question um how do you register for ptya via your website click the link that angus is going to post in the chat uh you can't register yet and enroll the enrollment will open at 4 pm on monday 4pm uk time on monday i think last time we sold half we sold like 200 places in the first like 10 minutes or something like that so like you should create a calendar calendar invite if you're if you're keen on signing up how did you meet angus i just emailed me he cold emailed me being like hey do you i do you want to hire a writer this was like two years ago i was like yeah and now he's a core member of the team uh what's your process for creating a pipeline of ideas oh my goodness that's like a whole other lesson in pty as well that's two hours basically we have the idea generation machine there are six seven different ways to generate ideas for youtube videos i can't go over them at the time but it's it's not it's not that fancy like to be honest you're just like you know you can come up with ideas by yourself you can come up with ideas to find them in different places you can look at other youtube channels you can do some competitive research some market analysis you can look on reddit you can look at buzzfeed you can look on websites like upworthy back in the day you can like there are dozens and dozens and dozens of ways to generate ideas when we go over lots of them in the course is search volume important when building content no generally you the way you grow on youtube is generally not by targeting search it's by targeting browse so search volume is not that important there is a theory that when you're starting out targeting search is a good idea but if there's a large amount of search volume for something there's also a large amount of search competition for something and so if you're small maybe targeting that large volume is not a good idea and targeting a smaller niche search volume might be a better idea but generally most channels that blow up don't blow up thanks to search they blow up thanks to browse um huh okay we're going to wrap up soon anxious telling me to leave uh do you think twitter is better than linkedin for networking yes i have made dozens of friends on twitter i've made none on linkedin uh how do you approach people you want to connect with without sounding like you're chasing for clout um basically you want to connect with people who are in your in your lane like for example there's no point in me trying to connect with tim ferriss i gary vaynerchuk because like they're way bigger than me and that would be me chasing for clown but i can connect with other youtubers that are my same level that are smaller than me maybe a bit bigger than me and then we kind of become friends and then over time we built this network and then maybe one day i'll get an intro to tim ferriss or gary vaynerchuk but my philosophy on this is number one be so good they can't ignore you and number two put your head down and do the work because putting your head down and doing the work and creating the content is the thing that will get you noticed by the creators that you admire because they have also put their head down and done the work so i tend not to reach out actively reach out to people who i want to be friends with i kind of wait for it to happen organically through like connections and it happens it's great like when you put your head down and do the work you end up making a lot of youtuber friends it's absolutely fantastic and one of the best perks of the job um anyway oh have people found the session useful would love some feedback how would you rate this out of 10 and yeah sweet amazing pen work thank you um yeah i think we'll i think we'll wrap it up there if anyone's watching this on the zoom chat you're already on the pty waiting list we'll email you when the car is open but it's opening at 4 p.m uk time 4 pm gmt or 4pm utc gmt gmt on monday the 28th of february so you can sign up for it then if you're not on the waiting list you can sign up there'll be a link in the chat i mean you're on the if you're if you're if you're on the zoom call you're waiting this uh but if you're watching this on on youtube and you want to sign up for the waiting list for whatever reason there'll be a link down in the video description thank you so much everyone for attending i've been talking for so long i feel like i need some water now because i'm kind of kind of losing my voice but if you like the session this is the sort of stuff we do on our youtube academy we have like two hour long sessions twice a week with me we have a one two one two hour long session every week with elizabeth phillips there's another big youtuber who's part of our team we have friday q a panels with me with the team with a bunch of other big youtubers we have guest workshops we have matt diabeta we have mr who's the boss 10 million subscribers we have pat flynn from smart passive income and we have what do we have i can't remember the top my head charlie we have charlie from charisma on command 5 million subscribers we have guest workshops from these people with like millions sometimes 10 million plus subscribers who are also going to be giving their advice and stuff all of this stuff is great and if you sign up to our ptya you get access to our community forever and we have community events happening every week as well so check it out if you want if you can't sign up for it don't want to sign up for it we go by the way we also have a lot of scholarships scholarship details are going to be opening on the same time on the monday so check the website out on monday the 28th at 4 p.m gmt if you want details about the scholarship program and we are also in the process of launching a brand new youtube channel wink wink about exactly how to be a part-time youtuber um that will be free videos for ever on how to grow on youtube so like keep an eye on the i mean whatever happens just sign up to the poi waiting list and you'll get more information about all the stuff and i'll let you know when the skillshare classes out and you'll get free access to it from going level zero to one if you sign up to peter way all right i've lost my voice officially my tea has gotten cold thank you everyone for watching this has been fun have a great time and i'll see hopefully hopefully see some of you on our part-time youtube academy from the middle of march onwards which is where the cohort starts