How to Start a YouTube Channel With Claude in 2026 (Full Course)
An hour-long operational blueprint walking through every step of building a YouTube channel from niche to monetization using Claude as the core production tool.
Posted
3 weeks ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
97K
5.4K likes
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
AI has collapsed the skill gap in YouTube production, making brand voice the only remaining competitive moat, and Claude can build that brand voice in minutes from a raw voice-note brain dump.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You want to start a YouTube channel but have been stuck in planning mode and need a step-by-step operational system.
You are already posting and want a research-driven process for idea validation and title testing rather than guessing.
You want to see exactly how Claude fits into every stage of the production cycle, with real prompts shown on screen.
You have domain expertise and want to systematize it into a two-videos-per-week publishing machine.
You are considering sponsorships or selling your own product and want a practical monetization ladder to follow.
SKIP IF…
You want editing tutorials; the course recommends human editors and links out rather than teaching editing.
You are building a faceless automation channel; this system is designed for a creator-fronted branded presence.
You are looking for advanced monetization depth; the monetization section is a brief overview, not a deep dive.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
AI has made it cheap and fast to produce good YouTube videos, which means production quality alone no longer gets you found. The course builds the full creator stack with Claude: niche validation using total addressable market thinking, a Notion content database, a brand voice guide generated from a voice-note, viral idea sourcing through a trained burner YouTube account and 1of10 outlier research, title and thumbnail concepts from Claude, bullet-point script outlines rather than word-for-word scripts, the eleven YouTube Studio settings that actually move the needle, and a framework for reading analytics. Three monetization paths close the course in ascending yield order: ad revenue, sponsorships, and your own product or service.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Six years of channel growth credentials, course promise, AI context.
00:35 – 06:20
02 · Pick your niche
Passion vs TAM two-filter framework. Claude niche validation prompt. Validate with YouTube search and 1of10.
06:20 – 19:25
03 · Content planning
Notion database, 2x/week cadence rationale, brand voice guide via Claude from voice-note brain dump.
19:25 – 31:40
04 · Viral ideas
Burner YouTube account to train the algorithm. 1of10 outlier scoring. Find 4+ outliers on same topic before committing.
31:40 – 33:00
05 · Viral titles
Claude title prompt generating 10 variations scored 1-10. Pick top 3 to test over time.
33:00 – 38:47
06 · Thumbnails
Three-element simplicity rule. Claude thumbnail concept prompt. Outlier thumbnail search via 1of10.
38:47 – 42:41
07 · Write scripts
Bullet-point outlines over word-for-word scripts. Claude outline prompt. Three hook variation types.
42:41 – 43:47
08 · Recording
Audio quality is top priority. No teleprompter. Face optional. Voiceover is legitimate.
43:47 – 44:12
09 · Edit the video
AI editing not ready yet. Human or self-edit. Front-load value in first 30 seconds.
44:12 – 46:47
10 · Post + optimize
Eleven YouTube Studio settings. Ignore tags, long description, A/B testing before 3k avg views.
46:47 – 56:07
11 · Scale with analytics
What matters: AVD, first-30s retention, new vs returning viewer split. Claude as personal strategist.
56:07 – 58:37
12 · Monetization
Three paths by yield: ad revenue, sponsorships, own product or service.
58:37 – 58:50
13 · Outro
7-day challenge CTA.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
AI has collapsed the execution gap on YouTube — the only remaining edge is brand voice, not production quality.
Passion matters not because you will burn out without it, but because you will make bad videos if you are not genuinely knowledgeable.
Total addressable market is the filter that kills most niche ideas before they start — pick something people will mindlessly watch, not just study.
One viral outlier proves nothing; four or more outliers on the same topic in the last six months is a signal worth betting a video on.
A brand voice guide generated from a raw voice-note brain dump is more accurate than anything you would write intentionally about yourself.
Bullet-point script outlines consistently outperform word-for-word scripts because they force natural delivery instead of robotic reading.
CTR is a vanity metric on its own — a video with 4.7% CTR can still reach 500k views if watch time is strong.
Posting two long-form videos per week is the sweet spot — more than that splits your subscriber base and lowers per-video baseline views.
The YouTube algorithm is itself an AI you can train: a fresh burner account watching competitors for 30 seconds each becomes a live outlier feed.
Swapping a title and thumbnail weeks after posting is a legitimate growth lever — videos can spike on a second or third title attempt.
End screens that send viewers to another video increase channel-level watch time, which compounds algorithmic favor over time.
Most of your watch time should come from non-subscribers; majority-subscriber traffic signals the video failed to break out.
Never A/B test titles and thumbnails until your channel averages at least 3,000 views per video — the sample size below that means nothing.
Ad revenue is the weakest monetization path; your own product or service reliably produces the highest yield per viewer for creator-led channels.
Claude can write a cold outreach email, a sponsorship media kit, and a monetization strategy for your channel from a single prompt.
Takeaway
How the YouTube algorithm actually picks winners.
WHAT TO LEARN
The algorithm does not reward the best video — it rewards the video that holds strangers longest, and brand voice is what keeps strangers watching past the first 30 seconds.
02Pick your niche
Niche selection is a two-variable problem: passion so you make videos worth watching, and total addressable market so enough people exist to watch them. Failing either filter makes the whole system break downstream.
Outlier validation removes guesswork from content planning: before committing to a topic, find four or more videos on the same subject that over-performed on different channels in the last six months. One outlier is luck; four is a repeatable pattern.
03Content planning
Brand voice is the only variable that cannot be copied at scale, and Claude can generate a precise brand guide from a five-minute voice-note brain dump faster than you could write one in a day.
04Viral ideas
The YouTube homepage trained on competitor watch time is a free constantly updated outlier research feed — a burner account watching 30 seconds of six competitor videos is all it takes to activate it.
07Write scripts
Bullet-point script outlines consistently outperform word-for-word scripts because they force natural delivery, which holds attention better than read-aloud prose.
10Post and optimize
Post-and-forget is the correct operating tempo for a small channel. Obsessing over early view counts before YouTube finds the right audience is noise.
Title and thumbnail swaps weeks after posting are a legitimate second-chance mechanism — videos that plateau at low views often spike on a changed title because YouTube re-tests them with a fresh audience sample.
11Scale with analytics
CTR is a lagging vanity metric: as a video reaches a broader audience CTR naturally falls even when the video is performing well. Compare first-24-hour CTR against your own past videos, not industry benchmarks.
The gap between new-viewer and returning-viewer watch time is the clearest signal of whether a video broke out or stayed trapped inside your existing subscriber base.
12Monetization
The monetization ceiling for a YouTube channel is a function of offer quality, not view count. Ad revenue at -10 RPM is the floor; a course or coaching offer converts a far smaller audience into far larger revenue.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
TAM (Total Addressable Market)
The maximum possible audience for a video topic. A key niche selection filter alongside personal passion.
Outlier
A video that over-performed relative to a channel average by a defined multiple such as 2x or 5x, indicating demonstrated demand for the topic or format.
1of10
A Chrome extension and web tool that scores YouTube videos by their outlier multiple, helping creators identify which topics are repeatedly breaking out.
Burner account
A fresh YouTube account with no viewing history, used to train the recommendation algorithm toward a specific niche by watching competitor videos for 30 seconds each.
Average View Duration (AVD)
The mean watch time per viewer on a given video. Most useful when compared against your own past videos of similar length.
Hook retention
The percentage of viewers still watching at the 30-second mark. A target of 60-70% is cited as a strong hook benchmark.
Brand voice guide
A documented set of tone rules, vocabulary choices, visual cues, and core beliefs that make a creator immediately recognizable — distinct from production quality, which anyone can copy.
“Post and forget. Delete YouTube Studio from your phone.”
Blunt, actionable, relatable to anyone who has refreshed analytics compulsively→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
16:57
“This honestly knows me better than I know myself.”
Genuine reaction mid-demo that lands as an organic Claude testimonial→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
story
00:00Today, I'm gonna show you how to start, scale, and monetize a YouTube channel using Clawd. Over the last six years, I've helped grow channels for some of the top creators, brands, and agencies in the entire world, generating millions of dollars and over a 100,000,000 views in the process for these channels. But what used to take me hours of work every single day and huge teams can now just be done with AI.
00:20It's kinda crazy. So in this free one hour course, I'm going to break down the entire process step by step, including the prompts, workflow, and strategies that I would use to blow up a YouTube channel and monetize it quickly using Claude. I'll also leave chapters in the description so that you can skip around two different sections.
00:34Let's get into it. Step one, we need to pick a niche that we can actually go viral in using AI. See, if we pick the wrong niche, we basically just cook ourselves from the very beginning because if the niche doesn't have enough view potential and can't monetize, then there's nothing we can do even if we make the best videos possible.
00:50So there's basically, like, two big things that we wanna look at when deciding. Here's how to find profitable YouTube niches using Claude. So there's two things that you really wanna focus on when you are picking your niche.
01:00Let's start with passion. So everyone says passion is important because you're gonna eventually lose motivation if you're not passionate about whatever you're making videos on. But I honestly think that's just a complete lie.
01:10And the reason is if you blow up a channel very quickly and you make a bunch of money and you're using AI to make things really easy, then you're really never going to lose motivation. You're gonna wanna just keep posting because you're making money and getting views. But what most people don't realize is if you're not passionate about whatever you're making videos on, you're actually just gonna make really bad videos and won't even be able to blow up in the first place.
01:30I know so many people that start a YouTube channel and pick something like the finance niche, for example, because they hear on TikTok or YouTube that they think it's gonna be really, really profitable. But the reality is you're then competing against people that have made millions of dollars and you haven't made any money.
01:44So how are you gonna make good videos in the finance niche? You're not truly passionate or knowledgeable enough in that niche. Now, obviously, you can research things, but certain niches are going to require a lot more expertise than others, which is why passion is very, very important.
01:57And then the second thing is TAM. TAM stands for total addressable market. It's basically like, imagine you make the best video possible on a certain subject.
02:05What is the maximum number of viewers that it can reach? A video that's like how to make $1,000,000 is actually going to have a way lower total addressable market than 10 people compete for $1,000,000.
02:15Because the first video is very educational, most people don't have the patience to sit down and learn things, whereas the other one can basically just be mindlessly watched. Another example is the niche that I make videos in on this channel, which is the YouTube strategy niche.
02:28Another example is like the yo yo tricks niche. There are really not very many people at all that want to learn how to do yo yo tricks versus there's like a ton of people that wanna watch a video that's like a challenge or watch a video about art, food, you name it.
02:42So not only do you need to pick a niche that you have some expertise or passion for, but you also need to make sure that you don't pick a niche that has too low of a total addressable market or you're just gonna be cooked. Moditization doesn't matter when you're picking a niche because if you have a big enough total addressable market, then there's going to be some way for you to make millions of dollars, whether that's selling a course, coaching offer, product, merch, or even just getting ad revenue and sponsors if the niche is broad enough.
03:06So to find a good YouTube niche with Claude, we're going to use this prompt. I'm thinking of a YouTube channel about whatever your niche is. Pick something that you're passionate about.
03:14What are five problems that I can solve for this audience, and how big is this audience? I'm gonna use a personal branding channel as the example here. I'm thinking of starting a YouTube channel about personal branding.
03:24What are five problems I can solve, and how big is the audience? The reason I ask it, what are five problems that I can solve, is because this is going to help us come up with viral video ideas later once we select this niche. And now Claude shows us that this niche is actually very big.
03:37It attracts business owners. It attracts people with nine to five jobs that are looking to advance their careers, coaches, consultants, and creators, as well as students and recent grads. So now Claude has shown us that we have a big enough audience to pursue this niche from people that are very young to people that are very old, from people without money to people that have a lot of money.
03:54Claude even tells us too that this is a very monetizable niche because viewers are actively trying to improve their personal brands and will pay for something whether that's a course coaching, you name it. Claude even gives us exactly what we can do to stand out in this niche because the reality is if you don't stand out in whatever niche you're making a YouTube channel on, you are going to be cooked.
04:12So Claude says here, most personal branding channels are either too tactical or too vague, so we need to be somewhere in the middle, give good information. But at the same time, don't be too boring and, like, corporate professional. I'm young, so if I was starting a channel in this niche, probably need to be a little bit edgy or cool or casual.
04:29And once we've done that, we want to further validate whatever niche we've decided to go with by using these two tools. The first tool is YouTube search. We basically should just look up topics related to whatever niche we're making videos on to see if other videos have been made about these subjects and are getting views on YouTube right now.
04:45So I'm just gonna look up personal brands, see what pops up. Perfect. Literally one month ago, a video has over a 100,000 views.
04:52Three months ago, a 170,000 views. Two weeks ago, 10,000 views, 60,000 views, 240,000 views.
04:59Seven months ago, 300,000 views. So lots of videos right now are getting hundreds of thousands of views in this niche. We can tell that this is a good niche for us to go into as long as I have some expertise in personal branding, which I do.
05:11The other tool I'm going to use to validate this niche is called one of 10. One of 10 is what we call an outlier search tool. Basically, imagine YouTube search, but you only get videos that are super viral and you have better filters on what you're searching for.
05:24So I'm gonna look for videos in the last six months that are at least a two x outlier, which means they over performed by at least two times the channel's average, have at least 50,000 views, and are at least ten minutes long to show that they're high quality videos. We're gonna click apply changes, and I'm going to look up the same thing, personal brand, or you'll look up anything related to your niche.
05:45Click enter. Okay. And now as we scroll, we can see that there are many viral videos surrounding personal brands that have been published in the last six months.
05:53One person business plus personal brand with Claude. That's funny. We're making a Claude video.
05:57Social media strategy for your business, how to start a personal brand, what I'm betting my marketing strategy on, why you must build a personal brand, how to build a personal brand. All of these things are within our niche and show that this niche can go really viral and makes it a very good niche for us to start as long as I have the expertise.
06:13I'll also leave a link to one of 10 documents in the description if you wanna use it yourself. I'm not sponsored, but I do use this tool every single day, and I'll actually use it later in this course as well. Moving on to step two, we are going to come up with an optimized content plan to make sure that we are posting content in a way that is going to make us go viral as quick as possible, and we're going to use Claude to do this.
06:31First though, before we do that, we are going to use a tool called Notion to plan out the number of videos that we are going to post. I'll leave a link to Notion in the description. It is free.
06:41But basically, we're just gonna make a new page for our channel. And we're gonna start by outlining the number of times we are going to post every single week. For a YouTube channel to blow up as quick as possible without overwhelming the YouTube algorithm, we're probably going to want to post two long form videos per week.
06:56The reason we don't do three or four is because for most niches at some point, we're actually going to be giving YouTube too many videos at once for them to properly recommend them to our subscribers and returning viewers. Basically, if we have 1,000 subs and we post five times per week, those subscribers are not going to see every video and it's actually going to lower our baseline views over time.
07:15However, if we're only posting one time a week or once every two weeks, growth becomes very, very slow. And I don't know about you, but I like blowing up channels fast. I don't like to wait around.
07:25So we're gonna do two times per week. I like to just write this down. Eventually, we're gonna do shorts.
07:29So we're just gonna write this down. Alright. Next, we're gonna build out a quick content database to use to organize all of our videos.
07:35So in Notion, we're going to make an inline database. Click new empty source, and we're going to name this long form videos. Alright.
07:42Next, we're gonna change the name of this first thing here to title, and we're going to add in a few properties to keep ourselves organized. First thing is going to be a status. We're gonna have a bunch of different statuses to track where videos are in terms of the production process.
07:55We're gonna start everything as random idea. Then we're going to do needs scripting so that it'll tell us that we need to write a script for this. Then we're gonna do needs filming so that we know when we're ready to film.
08:05Next, we have needs editing. And finally, we are going to have published. Next, we're gonna make another status called thumbnail status.
08:12For this, we can keep the default not started in progress and done. And finally, we're going to click new page here and we're going to make a template for each video. We're gonna click create a template.
08:21We're gonna call this l f for long form. This is the exact content planning system by the way that I use for all of my clients and my own channels. This is being used currently on channels with hundreds of thousands and even millions of subscribers.
08:33So I promise you this is the best way to do it. You're gonna do slash h one to create a header. The first header is going to be called research.
08:41You're gonna go to the left of it and you're gonna use this little caret sign to make it a toggle. Then we're gonna do this again three more times with three different toggles.
08:51So we're gonna go concept, then we're gonna go titles, then we're going to do thumbnails.
08:59And I lied. We're actually gonna do one more. We're going to do script.
09:03Again, to make this toggle, I go this and hit space. And now we have these toggles that we can eventually fill with different things. Instead of research, I'm also going to do slash.
09:13Slash is the shortcut in Notion, by the way. We're gonna do two columns just to keep things more organized. Boom.
09:18So now we have this. We click out of this. Now anytime we make a new video, we can go like this and immediately we have a full long form concept, which I'll show you how to fill out very shortly.
09:28Last thing we're gonna do is we're going to add a sort and we're gonna sort things by status. We're gonna do descending so that videos that are the furthest along in the process. For example, if I go like this, it's going to immediately go to the top.
09:40I know this says to post one time per week, but I honestly have a ton of confidence in you. Yes, you. And I know that if you do the right things and you're using AI effectively like I'm gonna teach you, you'll be able to make videos very, very efficiently and you're going to be able to post two times per week.
09:54Alright. Next part of content planning, and this is probably the most important thing that most beginners overlook is brand voice. Now, I'm gonna lay some knowledge on you.
10:01It is no longer good enough on YouTube to simply make good videos and expect to blow up. Because the reality is, with the development of different AI tools and all the free resources out there like this one, the number of people that can make good YouTube videos has exponentially gone up, and honestly, pretty much anyone can make a good YouTube video in 2026.
10:19It is no longer good enough to simply have good editing, good thumbnails, good scripts, and good ideas. The creators that are blowing up in 2026 are actually just copying other people, but doing one thing that most people miss. So let's use Leila Horror as an example.
10:31She is one of the biggest channels in the business niche and is pulling in crazy amounts of monthly views. I'm gonna use this video as a case study. How to articulate your thoughts more clearly than 99% of people?
10:42If I go to similar titles in one of 10, notice how there's literally three videos with the exact same title, and Layla's wasn't even the first video. This video was posted eleven months ago, and Layla remade the same video or around the same top. It actually got five times more views than the original guy.
10:58And then this channel made the same video again and got less views, but still got nearly 200,000 views all by doing the exact same video topic. These channels are all in similar niches and are basically just copying each other to get a ton of views.
11:11Or have a look at this thumbnail made by Dan Martell. Before he made that video, I actually made this video for Neil Patel that got over 700,000 views with the exact same style of thumbnail.
11:22Is that crazy? It looks very, very similar. Now, I'm not saying Dan stole my thumbnail or anything.
11:26I'm definitely not mad at him because this guy here actually came up with the thumbnail concept and I basically just stole it and used it for myself and it got over 800,000 views. And then even one more layer deeper, he's actually reusing this thumbnail concept on his videos that he posts later. So if everybody is copying everybody on social media, then why can't you just copy a big creator and go super viral?
11:46Well, the reality is a bigger channel will always beat you out unless you give YouTube a reason for them to push your video out. Because bigger channels have a much higher degree of trust within the YouTube algorithm. YouTube just tends to know that they make good videos and will probably prioritize them over a smaller channel.
12:00But also, big channels generally have a very strong viewer base that will engage more with the big creator's video than they will with your video giving it a boost in the algorithm, which is why these three videos here with the exact same thumbnail all do really, really well. But if a small creator simply rips this thumbnail, they probably won't do as well.
12:17Might get like a 100 or a thousand views. So the way to break through this jail is to develop a brand voice that makes you stronger in some way than these big channels. Brand is everything on social media, from the way that you dress, the way that you talk, the way that you edit, the way that your thumbnails look, the colors that you use, your tone of voice, the stuff you make videos on, your core beliefs, etcetera.
12:37You name it. Look at a guy like Alex Hormozi, for example. In pretty much every single YouTube video, he wears this tank top either with or without this flannel and wears his acquisition doc hat.
12:47He's super big. He has the same core beliefs that he basically repeats in every single video, which is like, you need to work harder. You should only work cut out distractions.
12:56He's very like cutthroat. It is very, very clear what Alex Hormozi's brand is. And there's a reason people gravitate towards it because it's a good brand.
13:03He's not out here just kinda sitting in the middle like, oh, you should probably go make money. You should probably go do this. No.
13:09He's telling you exactly what he needs to do. If I heard a sound bite of Alex Hormozi and the voice was like an AI voice, I could totally tell it was Alex Hormozi talking because his brand is so well defined. There are things that Alex would say and there are things that Alex wouldn't say.
13:23His brand voice is clearly defined and it makes him stand out over everybody else talking about the same things. He is a big channel, but he wasn't always a big channel and he definitely didn't get lucky. I have seen this video here made probably a billion times on YouTube, how to win with AI in 2026.
13:39I literally just showed you that I made this video for Neil Patel over a year ago and Alex Horne just remade it again, except he does it in his own brand voice with new information and makes himself differentiated and unique and stand out from everybody else who has made this exact type of video. I'm gonna give you another example in Iman Godsey.
13:56He's a guy who makes videos in the make money online niche. And you wouldn't know it, but this guy is like 24 years old. He's very, very young.
14:03But if you look at his videos, everything about his videos screams good brand. Everything about his videos screams old, wise, mentor, classy, rich.
14:13Right? His brand is very clearly defined. Look at the way he speaks.
14:17He speaks very slow. His hands are placed in a certain way. His mannerisms are very calm.
14:21He wears these, like, very thin glasses that make him look older. He's got the facial hair. He always has some kind of suit on.
14:27I don't think I've ever seen him in, a white t shirt. His background is very well composed. He uses complementary colors to really soothe the viewer in the background with the blue and the orange, and he even has a candle lit in the background.
14:39Everything about his brand, even though he's literally, like, four or five years older than me. Like, the age gap is not that big. He screams, wise old mentor.
14:48This guy speaks like he's 60 years old, but able to speak to younger people, which is exactly what he's trying to do. This guy's brand is very clearly defined. So when he makes this video here, best online business to make 10 k a month in 2026, which I've seen been made probably, again, a billion times on YouTube by big channels, by small channels.
15:06Why does this video over perform? Not because the information is super good, but because his brand is so clearly defined in the video and his channel is so differentiated from everybody else. So brand voice is extremely important and we're going to use Claude to find your brand voice.
15:21So the first thing that we're gonna do before we actually dive into Claude is we're going to open up our phone and we're gonna open up voice memos on our phone and you're gonna just brain dump exactly what makes you unique. What, like, unique beliefs do you have? What experiences have you had in your life?
15:34What makes you very qualified to talk about whatever niche that you're making a video on? So for me, it's personal branding. So I'm gonna talk about for the personal branding I've grown and scaled dozens of personal brands to hundreds of thousands and millions of subscribers.
15:48I'm very young. I started YouTube when I was 14 years old. I'm very, very hardworking.
15:53I am obsessive. I truly believe that brand is everything, not even just on social media, but in real life. I think everything you do is part of your own brand in general.
16:03I think all businesses could benefit from a founder led personal brand. I think personal branding content is the best way to grow a brand's exposure, not by making content for the brand, but making content with a face of the founder. I'm very informal, very casual, very, very high energy.
16:17I like to talk a lot and yeah. Super, super easy.
16:21Right? Just like a it kind of like a yap sesh about you. You're going to get the transcript of that voice note.
16:27So I'm just gonna text it to myself. We're gonna open Claude and do this prompt. We're gonna do write a brand voice guide for my channel about whatever your niche is, tone, phrases to use, phrases to avoid, and three example sentences.
16:39I also added talk about setting, colors, editing style, wardrobe, and core philosophies. And then I'm gonna say here's what makes me unique, and we're going to paste in this big transcript and see what Claude has to say. Claude literally just generated a full brand guide for my YouTube channel.
16:55This is actually insane. It doesn't matter if you are a Fortune five hundred CEO or you're just some kid in their room right now watching this video. This literally tells me everything.
17:05This honestly knows me better than I know myself. I hope you can see that this is, like, actually very reflective of, like, who I am. You're the young founder who's done it.
17:13You don't lecture. You transmit every video. No fluff, no padding, no safe takes.
17:17You talk fast because your brain moves fast. Excitement is one sentence away. Like, I'm getting excited reading this right now.
17:23It's, like, very, very reflective of me. Right? Keep these in your vocabulary.
17:27Brand is everything. Here's the truth. Personal brand is your unfair advantage.
17:30Nobody talks about this. I've literally said half these things in this video as we've talked. Cut these phrases, synergy, leverage your assets, like and subscribe, thought leader.
17:40I agree. Those are very like corporate. That's not what I would say.
17:43Because I gave Claude that voice note, it knows this and can craft a brand that just really and can craft a brand that not only accomplishes what I want to accomplish with my content, but it also sounds like me and is very authentic. Here's some example sentences. A color palette.
17:57Oh my god. Look at this. Full black, white background, black black.
18:02Who would have thought that this actually knows me better than I know myself? This actually recommends that I do some very, like, dark dramatic setups. So instead of a white curtain, maybe I do, a black background with a more cinematic light.
18:12That's honestly a really good idea. Wardrobe, all black. It's a brand signal.
18:16It makes you memorable and removes the decision from every filming day. And then it also gives me an editing style. So if I have an editor or I'm editing myself, it doesn't matter.
18:23It's going to be the same editing every single time and you keep the consistency. It also has my core philosophies. This is honestly so insane.
18:30Most channels just skip over this part and it's the whole reason they don't go viral. You need to differentiate yourself and lean into your unfair advantages as a creator. In fact, I used to make branding guides like this for clients, and it would take me multiple hours.
18:43And we just did this in, like, ten seconds. That is crazy. Going back to Notion, we're gonna do slash page, and we're actually just gonna go store this.
18:51So I'll just be like brand guide. And then we are just going to paste everything in so that we have this for safekeeping. Lastly, for when we make the channel, we're gonna want a good channel description that we include in our bio.
19:02You can simply just use this Claude prompt, write a YouTube channel description for whatever your channel name is. It could probably honestly just be your name or something else about personal branding, who it is for, what they learn, and why subscribe. I also like to say remove m dash so it doesn't look like it's AI.
19:17And just like that, we'll copy that and then paste that into our channel about. That is in YouTube Studio. And then we go to customization and then just the channel.
19:25Moving on to step three, we are going to come up with viral video ideas. This is probably the most important thing in this entire course because if you don't have good ideas, literally nothing else matters. Your niche doesn't matter.
19:38Your thumbnails don't matter. Your titles don't matter. Your editing matter.
19:41Your scripts don't matter. For this step, we're actually not going to use Claude, but we are going to use two other AIs to come up with these viral video ideas. So the new YouTube so our channels so Nate search and we're going to create the channel.
19:58Now that you've made a new YouTube channel, we call this a burner account, you're going to basically look up around six to seven of your competitors and open their channels in new tabs. So if you're making videos in the make money online niche, then you'll pull up like Iman Godzi, Alex Hormozi, Daniel Dalen, whoever.
20:15If you're making content in the challenge niche, you might pull up up, like, Mike. If you're making content in the d y niche, Nile, Mike Shake, etcetera. You basically should have a good understanding of who's making videos in your niche.
20:27Then just look up terms that are, like, related to your niche. So I would look up, like, personal branding, social media, viral, etcetera, etcetera.
20:35So I'm gonna do this right now. Just look up a bunch of people in brand niche that make similar content to what I want to make.
20:44So Matt Gray is one. Who else? Caleb Ralston's another one.
20:49Joanna. Free promo to these people. They're all great creators.
20:53Orin meets world. And if you run out of people to and if you can't figure out these competitor channels, again, just look up keywords related to your niche. Okay.
21:01Personal brand launch. See who else I can find. This girl, Daniel Priestley.
21:10So now that you have these six to seven competitor channels, you're going to open at least six or seven of their top performing videos in a new tab on your browser. So we're gonna go to popular. You should prioritize videos that have been made in the last year.
21:24So now that you have all of these channels open, you're going to go to their six to seven most popular videos from the last year and open all of them in a new tab. And you're going to watch at least thirty seconds of the way through of each one on this new YouTube account. So I'm just gonna go through these.
21:45Right? They can all play at the same time just to be efficient. So these are all just gonna play while I just like open more videos.
21:51It doesn't have to be their most popular videos but it should just be videos that have like a good amount of views and are kinda similar to stuff that you would make. So like, how to build a personal brand, how you think about content, how to lead a creative team.
22:04Again, we're just gonna have these all play at once and you should watch at least thirty seconds of the way through of each one. And it seems kinda weird, but this is actually going to be the key to us coming up with viral video ideas. Alright.
22:14So we have all these tabs open. We're just letting these videos play out. We should let them play at least thirty seconds of the way through, and then I'll show you what to do next.
22:22So I'm gonna do this. Alright. Once you've done this, you're going to close all these tabs.
22:27Once you've watched at least thirty seconds of the way through every single one, you're gonna all the tabs and you're going to go to your YouTube homepage. And this is the first AI that we're going to use to come up with viral video ideas and that AI is the YouTube algorithm. This is actually the best AI when it comes to making viral YouTube videos because this is literally the AI that is going to either put your video in front of nobody or put it in front of millions of people.
22:51What we've just done is basically tricked the YouTube algorithm into thinking that our fresh new burner YouTube account is a YouTube viewer and is actually the ideal YouTube viewer for the type of content that we are about to make. Now, our YouTube homepage is an unlimited source of inspiration of viral videos in that are recently blowing up and getting recommended to viewers that would watch your content as we speak.
23:13So this just gives us so much inspiration that we can use as the base for coming up with our content calendar and viral video idea. If your YouTube algorithm isn't quite all tailored to your niche yet, like for mine, there's a couple that are more business focused, not so much personal brand focused, which is my niche. You can just do what we did more.
23:30So on your homepage, just find videos that are within your niche and simply just open them in new tabs and watch them and then refresh your YouTube homepage again. I'm actually gonna do that right now. So we're gonna watch these through just to train the algorithm a little bit more.
23:43Alright. So once you've done this enough and your YouTube algorithm is fully trained to your niche, you're gonna download this free Chrome extension. Called the one of 10 extension.
23:51It's again free. I'll leave a link to it in the description. And what this is going to do is it's going to show outlier scores of certain videos on our YouTube homepage.
23:59Again, an outlier is just a video that has over performed by a certain multiple on a channel. So if a channel averages 10,000 views and a video gets 30,000 views, that video is a three x outlier. And the reason that is so important is because if we base our videos off of other outliers, our video will also an outlier or we could also call that a breakout video or just like a super viral video.
24:21The great thing about outliers is because even on a big channel, we can still study outliers because a big channel could maybe average a 100,000 views per video. But if one of their videos gets like 500 k, then that's a five x outlier. And then there's still something about that video that made it go viral that we can study and maybe remix for ourselves.
24:38So we're gonna scroll through and basically just look for outliers within the last six months. So and we're gonna screenshot these too. So I'll screenshot this one.
24:47We're just gonna screenshot these and save them for later. Alright. So now what we're gonna do is scroll through this YouTube homepage and constantly refresh.
24:54And so now what we're gonna do is we're going to scroll through this YouTube homepage and look for outliers within the last year that we think we could make on our own channel. And I'll tell you how to make these unique in a second, but for now, just focus on videos that you think you could also make on your channel. So for example, this one here, I definitely could make a video about Claude in YouTube or think a little bit outside the box.
25:13It could be Claude in x, Claude in LinkedIn, Claude in a personal brand, whatever. The reason that video over performed is because of Claude. Keep going.
25:22Content strategy that made us millions. Perfect. That would work on a personal brand channel.
25:26If you're starting a brand, watch this first. Perfect. Hooks that will go viral.
25:30Perfect. New rules of YouTube. Social media blueprint.
25:33Alright. Yep. We're just gonna screenshot a bunch of these.
25:35Come back when I'm done. And again, if your algorithm isn't fully trained to your niche, simply just watch more videos in your niche, and you'll basically trick the algorithm into recommending you these videos. Alright.
25:44Now once you've done this and screenshot a bunch of different outliers that we can use as inspiration, we're going to dump this all into our Notion. So we're gonna make a new header slash h one and we're going to do research inspo, make it a toggle.
25:58And then we're going to basically just then we're gonna go slash two for two columns, and we are going to paste in all of those screenshots that we just took. Alright.
26:06Now we have all of these pasted in. And one by one, we're going to go through each of these, and we're going to use the second AI tool to outlier validate each one of these. Now what is outlier validation?
26:17Well, just because one video was an outlier really doesn't mean shit. What you really wanna find out is if multiple videos have been made and became outliers on the same subject within the last six months or so. What this proves is if there is a video concept that has overperformed for multiple people very recently, then chances are if you make the same concept but make yourself different or unique in some way, then it will also do well for you.
26:38This is a much better strategy than simply just making a video and hoping it will go viral. Instead, you are doing something based on past success, which is the best indicator of future success on YouTube.
26:49So we're gonna start with this first one, four steps on how to start your personal brand from scratch in 2025. And the second AI we are going to use is one of 10. Again, one of 10 is free.
26:58There's a link to try it yourself in the description. But if you pay for it, you can also use one of ten's filters. I'm actually going to use their filters.
27:05So we're gonna filter by the last six months. I'm gonna do at least a two x outlier score and at least 50,000 views. You should make the views a little bit higher if average videos in your niche are getting a lot of views, but for the personal brand niche, it's really not that big.
27:19Like most of these videos only have, like, a 100 or 200,000 views versus, like, the gaming niche where videos can get, like, 10,000,000 views or 20,000,000 views because this is a smaller niche. So I'm only gonna give so I'm only gonna put 50,000. And I'm also gonna make the video duration at least ten minutes just because videos that are a bit longer tend to just be a bit higher quality than maybe something, like, really short.
27:40Uh, and I'm trying to go for a very, like, premium focused channel. So we're gonna do those filters. And I'm basically going to try and find other videos that are a very similar topic to this one right here, four steps on how to start your personal brand from scratch in 2025.
27:52So I'm probably gonna search start a personal brand. And if I can find at least four outliers from the last six months that are around, and if I can find on one of 10 at least four outlier videos that are very similar to this video that have over performed within the last six months, then chances are this is a good video for me to make because it has gone viral for many other people very recently, and so it will probably also go viral for me.
28:16So we're gonna look through here, and chances are this may act not even be the best video for us to Because we're searching on one of ten, one of 10 is also going to give us outliers that have kind of similar topics, but not really. Like this, how I built a $1,000,000,000 brand in my twenties. That could be another idea that we save for later.
28:32But we're gonna scroll through here and see what patterns we find. Here's one, how to start a personal brand, full course. This is like a five hour video, so we're gonna screenshot that.
28:40How to become famous in your industry and make a million dollars. The video is about building a personal brand, like that's why you build a personal brand, so we'll screenshot that one. Why you must build a personal brand, close enough, I would say.
28:50How to build a personal brand so magnetic, screenshot that. See if we can find one more. Yep.
28:54How to build a personal brand in any industry. Alright. So now we're gonna go back to Notion, and we're gonna make a new long form video.
29:00We're actually just gonna use this and we're going to put in this video topic, which is how to start a personal brand. Inside the research column, we're just going to paste in those four to five outliers that just back up the original outlier that we found within the last six months.
29:14So now we have the research to prove that this video will probably go viral if we make it and it's a good video. Now we are no longer shooting in the dark and trying to just make a random concept and hoping it will go viral. We actually know this will go viral if execute on it well, because if it has worked this many times recently with a small twist on it, then we can do the same thing and it will also work for us.
29:34This is how top channels come up with their video ideas. This is why everyone copies each other, because this is the best way to achieve the most virality and make the most money on YouTube as quick as possible without guessing. Alright.
29:44Next, we're gonna move on to the concept summary. This is just a quick description of what your video is going to be about. Typically, I like to write these in third person.
29:53So I'm just gonna open voice memos on my phone. I'm just gonna basically yap about what this video should be. This video is a full course on how to start a profitable personal brand in 2026.
30:03This not only focuses on how to get really big as a personal brand, but also how to make lots of money and sell a product or service and be super magnetic. And then also, should talk about how to use AI to do this as well because AI is super trendy right now. This should be pretty long, maybe around, like, one hour and should be really, really alright.
30:22So I did the voice note. I'm going to text it to myself again. Yes.
30:26I know Claude. You can talk to Claude voice, but I'd rather do this. I like talking to my phone.
30:31Alright. We're gonna go to Claude, and we're going to prompt it and say we're gonna say write me a concept summary for a YouTube video about We're gonna paste in our transcript.
30:42Alright. Now we're going to go to Claude and we're going to prompt it and say write me a four sentence concept summary for a YouTube video about, and then we're gonna throw in that voice note. Alright.
30:50We're going to copy this and we're going to put it into the concept summary part here. Not only does this keep us pretty organized, but we're also going to use this to write a viral script later on for this video. Moving on, we're going to come up with at least three different titles for this video.
31:03The reason we don't just do one is because a, can we a b test and b, you can actually swap titles and thumbnails later to make videos blow up later. And two, it's actually really easy to just swap a title and thumbnail later on and the video will actually blow up. The reason we do three titles is because it gives us more things to test and maybe also just like swap to later on to have a video blow up even like two weeks a month into its lifetime.
31:27I've had videos sit at like 10,000 views or a thousand views for like two weeks and I changed the title and thumbnail and they blow up and they spike. So it is very important to come with titles and for each video that you make.
31:39We're gonna focus on the titles. Uh, we're gonna use Claude for this. Next, we're gonna move on to titles.
31:43There's a very easy Claude prompt that I use to come up with all my video titles. Write 10 title variations for your video. Score each from one to 10 for click worthiness.
31:52No dashes recommend a top three. So we're going to take at least three cool. So we're gonna take our top three to four different titles and paste them into the Notion.
32:01So these are the three titles that I picked. I actually refined the second one and added the AI thing. In general, when we are copying outliers, you don't just wanna, like, flat out copy outliers or just do the same thing as everybody else.
32:11Like, these are objectively very good titles, but a lot of these other videos that are blowing up recently are just, how to build a personal brand, how to become famous, how to build a magnetic personal brand. Right?
32:21So we need to add some kind of unique edge or twist or something to make our video different. Now, part of that was actually saying that I want this video to be an hour long. Notice how all of these videos are around like fifteen to twenty minutes except for this one here.
32:35So my unique twist is that it's gonna be an hour full course type video as opposed to just, like, a normal YouTube video. On top of that, I definitely think we could talk about AI. Just looking at all of the outliers that I initially screenshotted, a lot of them talk about AI and Claude.
32:50Also, the video you're watching right now is Claude. AI is obviously going super viral right now, so that's another unique twist that I can add to the mixer. This will probably be our top title here.
33:01So we're going to highlight this. Next, we're going to make thumbnails. I would not recommend you AI generate your thumbnails, but what Claude can do really, really well is actually just give you concepts for your thumbnails.
33:12In general, thumbnail should be very, very simple. Right? Very, very simple.
33:17People talk about, like, the three element rule, which just means that thumbnail should have max, like, three main elements. In general, just keep your thumbnails very, very simple. Everything should fill the space, and there should be clear color contrast so it stands out on the YouTube homepage.
33:30Avoid using, like, your logo. Avoid using you don't need your face, but you can have your face. Anything you have in a thumbnail should basically just add some sort of value.
33:37So if your face is just there to have your face, I would remove it. On the contrary, if you have, like, a facial expression that adds value or adds emotion, then, yes, your face should be there. Same thing with text or another element or a background.
33:48Everything must serve a purpose. So this Claude prompt will tell you exactly how to do that. So this is the prompt that we're gonna use.
33:54Suggest three thumbnail concepts for how to start a personal brand in thirty days with AI, visual composition, emotion if faced used, three word text max color palette make distinct. So with this, Claude will give us three rough thumbnail concepts to use as the base for our videos thumbnails. Now, I would honestly not do exactly what Claude is telling you, but you still can get some really good takeaways from what it's going to suggest.
34:14So for example, for me, it says I should do this before and after. I would honestly not replicate this exact concept because again thumbnails should be very, very simple. But the idea of a before and after is a really viral YouTube thumbnail concept that could definitely work for this type of video.
34:29Maybe the left side shows shows, like, somebody without followers and the right side shows them with a ton of money and a ton of followers or it's it's me, obviously. This one here talks about using data in the background. We could definitely use, like, some AI logos or some upwards graphs.
34:41Those always go super viral. And this last one here tends to be a little bit simple using like a rocket ship as symbolism for the brand blowing up. Honestly, you could just swap that with like our face and keep this very simple just saying you're gonna blow up in thirty days.
34:53You can also use the outliers that you screenshot it as inspiration for your thumbnail. So for example, this right here, I could easily just screenshot and then throw this in the thumbnail section right here to show that I wanna make a thumbnail very similar to this.
35:07I mean, this honestly looks a lot like this one here. I could just swap myself in the middle, change the text right here to, like, thirty days, and then I could say and then I could do, like, a nice up arrow to show that the brand is blowing up, let's say.
35:19Or I could literally just replicate this, go, like, thirty and days, let's say. I could do another one. I'll screenshot this one.
35:25Using the Claude prompts, it recommended that I use, like, some sort of, like, data or graph in the background. So what I could definitely do here instead of, like, this little progression that he shows up here, I could put, like, a graph in the background, me in the middle, and then text up front, let's say. And then for this last one here, this before and after, none of these actually follow the before and after format.
35:45But if we do enough digging on YouTube, we can totally find a bunch of thumbnails that do this before and after really well. So for example, from ten months ago, I found this thumbnail here and we're going to throw that in here as well. And then I like to leave just like a brief description of how I'm going to design each thumbnail.
36:01So this one here is going to be a before and after of $0 and $1,000,000. The right side is gonna have him, like, in a nice office space with a lot of money and a lot of followers, and the left side is gonna be him not doing that. If I wanted to, I could also add other variations.
36:15So, right, this variation here does the money angle, but I could also do, like, day zero, day 30. But I could also do, like, the reference day one, day 30, or zero followers, 1,000,000 followers. You should honestly test these.
36:26In general, for a lot of niches, money is gonna be the driving indicator of virality, so that's why I always go with that first. So for this one, I'm gonna say there should be an upwards graph in the background like Claude said to show the data. I'm gonna go in the middle, and then below me, it's gonna say magnetic brand just based off the outlier research.
36:42There's a lot of people talking about a brand that is like magnetic. So I'm going to use that in the thumbnail as well in the hopes that it'll go viral. And then the last one is going to be the simplest.
36:51It's gonna just be me in the middle. It's gonna say thirty and days. Super, super easy.
36:56This is literally what I do for all of the channels that I work with and this is how top creators come up with their thumbnails and titles too. You can see some examples that I actually recently did for another client in the personal brand niche. These are all based off of outliers and look super unique and original and tailored to this person's brand, but are still based off of those outliers.
37:15Here's some other ones. This one is literally based off of this one. Super super simple.
37:20And then to and then to actually make these thumbnails, I would use either Canva, which is free, Photopea, which is also free, or I personally recommend Photoshop if you can afford it or already have the Adobe Creative Suite in this course, but there are plenty of free tutorials online teaching you how to use Photoshop. I'll actually link a bunch of these in the description that are really, really good.
37:39And that is one complete video concept. Now, you are going to do that seven other times or do it as many times as you want. We have this unlimited source of inspiration here.
37:48So we'll remove the video that we just did. We're literally gonna go through and do this for all of these videos. Every single one.
37:55You're going to find other outliers related to each of these. You're going to go through each of these research videos and you're going to find at least four other outliers that back these up and use that to come up with a concept summary, titles, and thumbnail concepts in addition to Claude. Do this and you can come up with all your videos for the month in just one day.
38:15Again, seven more times, we have eight videos, we're posting two times a week. That is our content calendar for the month. Again, to summarize what we just did, we first use the AI in YouTube's algorithm to find a bunch of viral videos that have blown up in the last six months to one year.
38:30Then we all of those videos using one of Ken's AI to basically find if other similar videos have blown up in the last six months. And if they have, then we use those outliers to come up with viral titles and viral thumbnail concepts for each of those videos to create our content calendar calendar for the month. Next, we're gonna move on to step six, which is writing viral scripts for each of these ideas using Claude.
38:53Now, we're actually not going to be writing word for word scripts like most people do with their YouTube videos. In fact, what I always do for my clients and my own videos is I write bullet pointed outlines.
39:03And there's a couple reasons for this. Number one, it's way quicker. I can write a really solid outline very, very quickly with or without using AI.
39:11Second, if you're reading off of a word for word script, generally, people don't write the exact same way that they talk, and it can honestly look like you're just reading off something like a robot if you have a script in front of you. Instead, I like to have bullet pointed prompts and an outline because then it allows me to simply just talk more naturally, talk in my natural tone of voice, and riff from the top of my head so that it sounds way more natural and is more engaging and more like a casual conversation.
39:35Whether I'm the one recording a script or one of my clients is, this this always leads to better results and more views in the long run. The only time I will write things word for word is when I'm scripting out the hooks for a video. So we're gonna go back to our Notion and we're going to first copy over this concept summary.
39:51Then we're gonna prompt then we are going to prompt Claude like this. We're gonna say, write a bullet pointed script outline for this video.
39:58Bullet points, not full sentences. Hook thirty seconds max. We're going to paste in that concept summary.
40:04And then finally, we are going to paste in all three options for titles. And the reason is Claude will allow the script to basically fit for any of these titles in case we want to swap to one of these titles later. So we're going to click enter.
40:16Okay. So now within, like, five seconds, this spits out an entire script outline outline for us to make a video on. I'm even gonna prompt it a bit further.
40:24I'm gonna say add more bullet points for this, be more detailed so it's fully ready to record. Like, for example, the known, like, trust ladder. I kinda, like, don't know what that is, to be honest.
40:33But Claude can tell me what it is, and I can also swap this out for my own expertise if I really want to. I'm also gonna ask it to make the hook a bit more broad because it says content before identity. It's like it's a little bit too niche.
40:43You know what I mean? It's just a little bit, like, too much jargon. I'd rather this be just, like, more viral optimized.
40:48And then it also said twenty twenty five for some And then boom. Just like that, we have a viral script that is literally ready to record right now within about five seconds. If I was just starting out, I would not waste my time taking hours to write a script.
41:00I would either do exactly this or you could even adjust this first prompt so that you're like, also consider this voice note or this information for example, so that you have a very, very unique take. Or you could also just like slightly edit this yourself. It's very, very, very, very, very, very easy to do.
41:17And if you want to make this script even more unique, you could even either prompt it another time or adjust the first prompt so you also feed it a massive voice note transcription of you just brain dumping whatever the concept is. In the case of this video, this video is over an hour long, so I'm probably not gonna sit down and do like a thirty minute voice note.
41:35And what you can also do if you wanna make your videos even more unique is actually add a small section to this first prompt with a transcript of a voice note brain dump. And basically, just open up your phone, get voice memos, and simply just yap about whatever you know about this concept, and Claude will actually insert it into the script.
41:53You can even do this now. Like, say I don't agree with some of the stuff that he's saying. Say I don't agree with some of the stuff that it's saying, I could simply just edit it manually or I could add this voice note and prompt it to just change it for me.
42:03But honestly, this script outline is more than enough for me to make a video about. So we're going to go into Notion and we are going to paste it in. And now we have our script outline ready for recording.
42:16Next to take this even a step further, we can have Claude generate us different hook variations to make sure we are coming up with the best angle for our intro. So we're gonna use this prompt here. So we're gonna use this prompt here.
42:27Write three hook variations for this video. Bold claim, relatable pain, surprising fact. Those are three different types of variations and angles.
42:34Bullet point format, not complete sentences. Cool. So now we have three different hooks that we can swap into our script as we please.
42:41Moving on to step seven, which is recording. You don't need to show your face when you record your videos, but you can. The most important thing is actually audio quality.
42:50And this is why I almost never recommend people use an AI voice if they're making a channel for themselves. A faceless channel a faceless automation channel is a totally different thing, but most YouTube channels should not be using AI voice, and you should really invest in a good microphone or at least get the best quality that you can.
43:05A phone mic is decent. A phone mic is decent, but just look up like good microphones within your price range, and I would get the best microphone possible that you can. Highly recommend this microphone, but it's also not cheap.
43:16You can show your face or not show your face. It doesn't really matter too much. If you're gonna show your face, make sure your lighting is decent.
43:22Get like a nice ring light or even some soft boxes like I have if you have a bit more money. Or you can also just use natural light from like a window. I would not recommend you use a teleprompter.
43:30Make sure you're not just constantly staring at your script, but have a glance at your script, look up, you see the bullet points, you know what you're about to say, and then just start riffing, start speaking. If you are passionate about your niche and you're somewhat of an expert in it, which you should already be, then this should honestly come pretty naturally.
43:47Step eight is to edit the video. I would honestly not use Claude to edit your YouTube videos. AI editing is not good enough yet, and people are going to see right through you and probably not engage well with your content.
43:58Every channel that I have ever worked on has maybe used some AI visuals here and there, but actually edited the video with either a human editor or by the creator themselves. Check out this playlist here for a bunch of tutorials on my channel about how to edit viral videos. I've covered this very, very extensively.
44:12Alright. Step nine is to post and optimize. These are the exact YouTube settings you should be using to go viral in 2026.
44:20First off, never select yes made for kids when you upload. The reason is if you do select yes, then when you eventually monetize, you'll make a lot less money and your videos won't get recommended as much. Even if your videos are meant for a younger audience, never check this.
44:33This is very misleading. Number two, always set your category. This is very self explanatory, it helps the YouTube algorithm, especially when you're small, figure out who to recommend your videos to.
44:41Setting number three, set your upload defaults. Go to YouTube studio settings, upload defaults, and set a default description template.
44:48It should be one link at the top, then a short description of the video, then a description about your channel, and finally, a place for chapters. You'll obviously fill this out video by video, and that top link can either be a link to an email list, your offer, or just one of your other social medias. This is what appears above the fold on YouTube description, so you definitely should optimize this.
45:08You can also set a default category here, as well as setting your videos automatically to unlisted and never made for kids. Setting four, always leave checked, publish to feed and notify subscribers unless you are dramatically pivoting your channel to another niche.
45:22This is a very, very small use case though. You should leave this alone most of the time. Number five, always add an end screen to your video.
45:28I usually do subscribe and best video for viewer. The reason for adding an end screen is if somebody gets to the end of your video and you send them to another video, YouTube will recognize that you're sending viewers on long watch journeys and generating lots of watch time on their platform. This makes YouTube more money.
45:44When viewers watch more of your channel, YouTube makes more money from your channel and is more incentivized to push out your content. Ultimately, the algorithm will just favor channels that get lots of watch time from viewers. So the more that you can send viewers to other videos of yours at the end, the better performing your videos will do.
46:00Number six, almost never use cards unless it's really late in the video. Number six, almost never use cards unless it's really late in the video. Like, I know I just used the card, but it's because I'm very, very far into this video, and I said watch it after this one.
46:12You don't wanna put cards early in your video because then you're just dragging people away from your current video and decreasing the watch time on that video, giving it less viral potential. Use them intentionally and use them late in your videos if you are going to use them. Number seven is chapters.
46:26You can use AI tools like Descript. I'll leave a link in the description to automatically generate chapters for your videos, or you can do this manually. I would recommend just using AI for it though.
46:35I would always recommend turning off auto chapters because if you add your own chapters, viewers can more easily navigate your videos. As a result, engage with it better, pushing it out in the YouTube algorithm. Setting number eight, always put a link as the very first line of your description.
46:47This way, you can always direct viewers somewhere else, whether that's another video, another social media link, or more importantly, your offer, email list, website, whatever it is if you're a business owner. Number nine, you should always put a pinned comment right after you post. Just like ask a question, maybe link another video, link one of your socials, affiliate link, you name it.
47:04This is just free traffic because pretty much everyone goes to the comments at some point. Number 10, I would honestly just completely ignore tags. They do absolutely nothing.
47:11And finally, setting number 11. Even though we made multiple titles and thumbnails, I would actually not AB test from the jump unless your channel is averaging at least 3,000 views per video. The reason is if you're not averaging more than 3,000 views per video, you're not going to give YouTube enough data to realistically tell you any sort of sizable result from an a b test.
47:30Instead, save your titles and thumbnails to switch them later. I would wait, like, one week between each change or so when your channel's small because YouTube needs time to push out your content, but changing your titles and thumbnails can be very, very good to do and actually boost your videos well after they've been published.
47:45I would use this prompt, write a pinned comment for this video that asks a question to increase engagement, no m dash, to get a pinned comment to put under each of your videos, especially when you're small. You can very easily copy paste this into the video that we post. But the most important thing that you have to do after you post a YouTube video is actually something that AI cannot help you with, which is setting your expectations and keeping your mental health sane.
48:08See, social media has us all brainwashed that everyone who posts a YouTube video or a TikTok or an Instagram reel blows up immediately with no experience and instantly gets rich. And honestly, I'm even guilty of this too. I blew up my own channel with the very first video.
48:22It got over 200,000 views. But the reality is this is not my first channel.
48:26I'm pretty open about this, but, obviously, people will make very absurd claims on social media that they're blowing up accounts with no experience, instantly getting monetized, getting monetized with zero subscribers. The reality is YouTube takes time.
48:39Even if you are shortcutting the process by paying for information or watching free guides or you get really lucky, YouTube will always take time. When you first post a YouTube video, YouTube knows nothing. They know nothing about your channel.
48:53How can you expect YouTube when they know nothing about you to instantly find the right audience to push your video out to and instantly blow you up? The reality is YouTube is going to take time. You can see this too.
49:04When you post a video, it is going to be painstakingly slow for it to get the first impressions, the first views, the first comments, the first likes. You really do need to ride it out as a small channel.
49:14I I like to say post and forget. Don't even worry about optimizing it in post. Don't worry about your title and thumbnail switches to, like, a week or even two weeks later if it's your very first video.
49:24Post and forget. Move on to the next video. You're gonna post two times per week.
49:29You need to post a video and move on to the next. K? Don't get caught up.
49:33Delete YouTube studio from your phone. That is just going to destroy your mental health.
49:38You're gonna constantly be refreshing, have, like, 10 views. You need to set your expectations. You need to chill out, and you need to just post and forget.
49:46But as you start to get impressions and views on your videos, you'll actually start to get a lot of data that you can use to continuously make better and better videos until you go super viral. And we can even use Claude as our personal YouTube strategist to allow us to scale even faster. So let's talk about what actually makes a video go viral.
50:07First, let's start with what does not matter at all when it comes to your YouTube analytics. Number one is CTR. Anyone that says, oh, you need a 10% CTR to go viral is actually just lying or just dumb because CTR does not mean anything.
50:22I could show you one of my most viral videos. So this is the first video that I ever made that went viral. It got over 2,500,000 views.
50:30So objectively, this was a banger viral video with a banger title, a banger thumbnail, and a banger idea. Alright.
50:37So this right here is one of the most viral videos on my channel, the one that you're watching right now. This has nearly 500,000 views.
50:45Got me almost 10,000 subscribers on this channel, which is pretty crazy. The CTR is 4.7%.
50:52You might look at the CTR and be like, wow, your title and thumbnail must have been really bad. Your idea must have been really bad.
50:59Of course, it wasn't bad. The video got 7,000,000 impressions and 500,000 views.
51:04The reality is, as a video gets more and more views, the YouTube algorithm is recommending it to a broader and broader audience. You remember the burner account we made? We're basically imitating a viewer that is one of the first people to see any video that you post within your niche.
51:19The very first people that YouTube's algorithm recommends this video to are people that have watched multiple other videos about video editing and social media and YouTube and making money. And as the video continuously performs well with the people YouTube recommends it to, it goes broader and broader until it starts to get recommended to people that have never watched a video about video editing before or never watched a video about making money or YouTube strategy.
51:42And so naturally, the CTR will dip significantly.
51:46I think this started at like 10%. It is now nearly half of that. But that does not mean this was a bad title and thumbnail because the video still performed well.
51:54So CTR does not matter. The only time you should look at CTR is if you're comparing your CTR within the first twenty four hours to other videos on your channel. As I already said, your views early on do not matter at all.
52:06It actually means nothing because YouTube takes time to find the right audience for your videos. Over like a one or two or even three week period, you should just look at if you're still getting impressions, if your view curve is positive like curving upwards, and if metrics like your average view duration are actually increasing, it just shows that YouTube is taking time to find the right audience.
52:27Again, post and forget. Subscribers don't matter really at all. Like, obviously, it's nice to get a 100 k because you get a nice little shiny plaque, but subscribers are largely a vanity metric.
52:38You should care more about your average views in general. And then also, like to comment ratio, dislikes, the number of comments, the number of likes, none of that really matters. In general though, the more engagement you get, whether it's a like, a comment, high watch time, a share, it's going to boost your video in the algorithm, but there's no hard number that's gonna just make you viral.
52:54So I would not obsess over it. I would not be commenting on 10 burners in the first thirty seconds of posting a video. It's really not gonna do anything over the long term.
53:02If you wanna have a viral video, you need to just make good content. What you should instead watch very, very closely in your analytics first average view duration. You should compare it to other videos that you've posted of a similar length.
53:14Naturally, if I post a one hour long video, it's gonna have a much higher average view to than that of like a five minute video. But you should compare your five minute videos to your other five minute videos. Your eight minute videos to your like, ten or six minute videos, let's say, for example.
53:27Retention in the first thirty seconds, which is basically your hook, is very, very important. You should aim between 6070%. That will go down a little bit as you get more views, but generally, those are actually hard numbers that you can look at and decide whether a video hook is good or not.
53:41I already talked about this, but CTR within the first twenty four hours compared to your other videos, that's another good one. And then also your split of returning versus new viewers. If you're only getting returning viewers and no new viewers, it means that your returning viewers did not engage well enough with your content.
53:56I'm actually gonna show you this. So, yeah, your AVD is important. In general, just compare it to your other videos.
54:02You should also be looking at your intro percentage. So this is gonna go down as a video gets more views. But in general, this should be between 6070% higher than ideally 65 when your video is first fresh and getting new viewers.
54:16But as it gets more views, naturally, this will drop. In general, you can aim for, like, 70% ideally. Your retention graphs should also be relatively flat.
54:24If there's big dips in your retention graph, then that means that you did something wrong, whether it's in your script, in your filming, or in your editing, and you should just never do that ever again. You can literally go in YouTube studio and see where the dips are. This video has, like, no dips except for the end, so that's probably a signal I should have made this outro much shorter.
54:42And, yeah, again, the hook percentage will go down. This started off, like, 70%, and now it's a lot less. Your split of new viewers to returning viewers is also very important.
54:51So you can go to the audience tab, and you can see not subscribed versus subscribed. If you have majority subscribed and if most of your viewers are subbed, then it means that your video is basically not getting pushed out to new viewers.
55:04What you can also do, go see more and then change this here to new and returning viewers. You can see the split of watch time between new and returning viewers.
55:12Basically, most of your watch time should be from new viewers. And the reason for this so if you go to audience, you can see this right here, watch time from subscribers.
55:23Now just because somebody is a returning viewer does not mean they are also a subscriber. There are a lot of people that actually will not subscribe to you, but still come back to your videos. But but in general, not subbed versus subbed is kind of the same thing as new viewers and returning viewers.
55:38In general, most of your views should be from new people. If you are getting most of your views from your subscribers, it means that the video is not good enough to break through that first group of viewers that YouTube recommends it to. So that would be a signal that you need to make your videos better.
55:51In general, your analytics should look like this. You should have mostly not subbed new viewers. Clog can also help you out with this.
55:58Literally just screenshot any of these analytics in your last eight to 10 videos or four however many you've posted and just ask it to analyze whatever patterns it sees and how you can improve. Finally, how do you monetize? You can actually use Claude to help you out with this.
56:12There's three ways that you can use to make a million dollars on YouTube. Number one is ad revenue. You can unlock the YouTube partner program when you have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public watch hours in the last three hundred and sixty five days, as well as no strikes on your channel, as well as no community guidelines violations on your channel.
56:29Typically, you'll make between, like, 2 and $10 per every thousand views. To be honest with you, I would not use this as your main income source. My RPM on average on this channel is around $3.
56:39This is because I have a very international audience, not majority US. You should immediately apply for this in YouTube Studio when you hit these thresholds, and you should just obviously take the money. But this is not the sustainable way to make a lot of money with a YouTube channel.
56:53Method number two is sponsorships. I'm sure you've seen a video where in the middle of it, someone's like, by the way, this video is sponsored by Random VPN or whatever company.
57:03Right? I've done so many sponsorships sponsorships in in my my time. Time.
57:06So many creators do these. These are a great way for creators to make money. I have a full video here on how to get YouTube sponsors, but anything that I explain in this video, you can literally ask Claude to write you a cold email to a brand, response emails to a brand, ask Claude how much you should charge, have it build you a media kit with prices for different types of integrations.
57:26It is extremely, extremely powerful. I recommend you watch this video after this one. Typically, for a sponsor, you can get paid anywhere depending on your channel size from, like, $500 all the way up to, like, $10.
57:38Most I've ever been paid for a sponsor was $4. Super, super crazy, very easy way to make money once your channel starts getting traction and has high average views. And then finally, the best way to monetize on YouTube, and this is the way that creators are making millions and millions of dollars off of their traffic, is their own product or service.
57:56This can be a course, ebook, coaching, community, software, you name it.
58:02Pretty much every large creator is monetizing in some way using this, or they have a business behind their channel and they're just using the YouTube channel as traffic to their business. This is where the first line of your description is very, very important. You should always be leading people to that first line in order to drive traffic to whatever you're trying to sell.
58:20You can use Claude if you have your channel and just say, hey. What types of ways can I monetize using a product service or software and ask how much you should charge? You can also use this Claude prompt to create things like launch videos, landing pages.
58:32Claude is extremely powerful. Literally, whatever you're trying to do, just ask Claude how to do it. And that is exactly how to start, scale, and monetize a YouTube channel using Claude as fast as possible.
58:42If you wanna work with me directly, check out the first link in the description. And if you have any questions, drop them in the comments. I'm here to answer.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Six years and a hundred million views across client channels is the number Nate Curtiss opens with before making a claim that would have been laughable two years ago: that everything his teams used to spend hours on can now be done in minutes with Claude.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:35model
Passion + TAM Niche Filter
Passion (genuine expertise so you make good videos)
TAM (large enough audience to go viral)
Two-filter test for any YouTube niche. Both must pass.
Steal forAny content strategy session where someone is stuck choosing between niches
26:20model
Outlier Validation Method
Find one potential video topic
Search 1of10 for same topic in last 6 months
Require 4+ outlier videos before committing
Store validated ideas in Notion content calendar
Evidence-based idea validation. One outlier is luck; four is a pattern.
Steal forReplacing gut-feel content calendars with data-backed topic selection
19:42concept
Burner Account Algorithm Training
Create a fresh YouTube account and watch 30+ seconds of 6-7 competitor videos to train the recommendation AI, turning your homepage into a live outlier research feed.
Steal forAny creator wanting free ongoing viral signal without paying for research tools
44:12list
Post + Optimize 11-Setting Checklist
Never: yes made for kids
Always: set category
Always: set upload defaults template
Always: publish to feed and notify subscribers
Always: add end screen (subscribe + best video)
Almost never: cards (only late in video)
Always: custom chapters
Always: first line of description = one link
Always: pinned comment with engagement question
Ignore: tags entirely
No A/B testing until 3k avg views
Eleven upload decisions that compound over every video posted.
Steal forA repeatable upload checklist that ensures no optimization step is skipped at publish time
56:07list
Three Monetization Tiers
Ad revenue (-10 RPM, apply at 1k subs/4k hours)
Sponsorships (-10k+ per integration, outreach and media kit via Claude)
Own product or service (course, coaching, community, software — highest yield)
Ordered from weakest to strongest yield per viewer.
Steal forExplaining why chasing ad revenue before building an offer is suboptimal
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
58:37product
“If you wanna work with me directly, check out the first link in the description.”
Single soft CTA at the very end after full value delivery. Low friction.
A live demo of seven chained Claude Code skills that handle gap analysis, ideation, hooks, titles, thumbnails, repurposing, and performance tracking — for under $1 per cycle.
A 17-minute walkthrough of a Claude Code skill system that goes from topic to on-brand carousel in under two minutes by baking your design system into the pipeline, not the prompt.
An 8-step system that turns a single sentence into a fully-voiced YouTube script — by loading memory, projects, skills, and connectors before you type a word.
A 10-minute listicle tutorial stacking three AI tools into three side-hustle pipelines: Claude to ChatGPT image gen to Printify, Copyfy.io one-product stores, and PopStore + Echo-Me autopilot DMs.
00:17
00:27
00:50
01:39
02:22
03:49
04:29
05:00
05:45
08:24
08:36
09:40
10:42
12:09
13:03
14:30
15:36
17:58
18:27
19:25
21:40
22:29
23:40
24:38
26:27
26:49
27:55
28:50
30:08
31:09
32:20
32:46
33:52
34:53
35:23
35:54
36:56
37:21
38:21
39:46
40:44
41:30
42:16
43:13
43:36
43:51
43:59
44:07
45:48
46:27
47:08
47:45
48:34
49:17
50:24
51:27
52:03
52:53
53:57
54:19
55:02
55:57
58:39
58:43
58:47
12:27
06:13
19:16
17:43
20:59
10:02