Video of the Day19:32Wes McDowell · Tutorial
The NEW Way to Make YouTube Videos FAST (Start to Finish)
A YouTube coach breaks his weekly video down into five one-hour sessions, one AI tool assigned to each day's real bottleneck.
September 29thThe argument in one line.
Buyers cannot judge expert work, so they hire whoever already feels familiar, which means visibility is a system any expert can build rather than a talent some people happen to have.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A consultant, coach, advisor or agency owner whose clients arrive through referrals and who starts every sales call proving themselves from zero.
- A service provider who keeps losing work to someone less skilled and more visible, and wants to understand exactly why that happens.
- An expert who has been circling the idea of a YouTube channel for a year without recording, and wants a step-by-step first ninety days.
- A local or hands-on business owner who suspects their knowledge could earn more than their hands do.
- Anyone whose paid work is mostly explanation and judgment, and who is watching free AI answers eat the explanation half.
SKIP IF…
- You want views, sponsorships or ad revenue, because every recommendation here is tuned for clients and deliberately sacrifices reach.
- You need revenue inside ninety days, since the honest timeline here starts around six months of near-silence.
- You are unwilling to appear on camera, which the author states flatly has no workaround in this system.
- You already run a mature channel with a defined audience and are looking for advanced analytics or growth tactics.
The full version, fast.
Skill stopped deciding who gets hired the moment your judges changed from peers to clients, because clients cannot evaluate the work and fall back on whoever feels familiar. The fix is an expert brand: your name attached to one problem, for one kind of buyer, built through weekly long-form video that stacks the roughly seven hours of exposure trust actually costs. YouTube is the only platform that both introduces strangers at the moment of need and holds them long enough to build that trust. Start with searchable FAQ videos pulled from questions clients already ask, script them word for word, teach from experience rather than information, chain each video into the next, and keep one obvious path from the video to a booking page.
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00:00 – 02:54
01 · Cold open
Two kinds of expert exist in every field: the secret genius and the known expert. Which one you are was never about talent.
02:54 – 12:22
02 · Personal brand versus expert brand
A personal brand only controls the impression of someone already looking at you. An expert brand ties your name to one problem and brings its own discovery mechanism.
12:22 – 21:01
03 · Five levels of living in a buyer's head
From being placeable to being pre-chosen, with each level requiring more hours of a buyer sitting inside your thinking.
21:01 – 29:24
04 · Buyer fame and picking your person
Wide fame and peer fame do not pay. Three questions surface the one buyer whose problem you should attach your name to.
29:24 – 39:58
05 · Connoisseurship, the half AI cannot copy
Clients were never buying information. The wine shop analogy separates label-reading from judgment, and judgment is invisible until shown.
39:58 – 49:36
06 · The trust gap and the commodity trap
Fear picks the familiar option, so an invisible expert is compared on price alone. Three costs of being unknown, including a client who fired him on a Skype call.
49:36 – 55:49
07 · Teaching in the open
A mortgage broker who lost three clients in his whole run, and a pool installer who answered the questions nobody else would during the 2008 crash.
55:49 – 1:15:27
08 · The platform bake-off
Social, ads, search, writing and podcasts each scored against four questions. Nothing passes more than two.
1:15:27 – 1:34:49
09 · Why YouTube goes four for four
Search plus faces, touch point density, evergreen compounding, and a 60K to seven-figure before-and-after with only one variable changed.
1:34:49 – 1:49:34
10 · The 500-hours myth and the quit curve
Follow the army of uploads and it disappears. Your real competition is the handful of channels in your lane that got past video ten.
1:49:34 – 2:08:04
11 · Camera fear and the client math
Why nobody is grading your looks, a 77-year-old first-timer, and working backwards from fifty clients a year to two hundred weekly views.
2:08:04 – 2:24:05
12 · Shorts versus long, and the buyer journey
Clips cannot bank trust hours. Most future buyers sit at problem-aware, which is where the fewest videos get made.
2:24:05 – 2:33:46
13 · Packaging the problem
Titles and thumbnails are the storefront window. Put the buyer's problem in it and keep your named method inside the video.
2:33:46 – 2:46:35
14 · Talking to one person, failing in private
Record for a real client rather than a lens, and treat low early views as shelter while the skills are still bad.
2:46:35 – 3:06:00
15 · Information gain and signature concepts
Eight tokens, the conflict radius, and five ways to manufacture newness, including naming ideas you already teach in six possible shapes.
3:06:00 – 3:17:26
16 · News, the AI twist, and FAQ videos first
Translate the news for your person instead of breaking it, connect technology shifts to one niche, and start with the questions clients already ask.
3:17:26 – 3:32:09
17 · Scripting and the teleprompter
Why word-for-word scripting frees rather than flattens delivery, how to write the way you speak, and the rules that keep a script tight.
3:32:09 – 3:49:05
18 · How YouTube tests a video
Small test groups widening on signal, why new channels have no data, and why searchable pull videos are the only reliable door in.
3:49:05 – 4:10:20
19 · The SCAR scale and four deep-end formats
Surface, Competence, Adversity, Reframe. Plus the walk-up webinar, teardowns, counter-advice and live sessions.
4:10:20 – 4:29:17
20 · Binge chains, comments, and the expert's curse
Never end a video, treat replies as public office hours, and recognise perfectionism as the quietest form of quitting.
4:29:17 – 4:49:58
21 · Spears, nets, AI bookends and gear
Leveraged hours, the ten-eighty-ten split with AI, batching, repurposing into a video podcast, and under a hundred dollars of equipment.
4:49:58 – 5:06:02
22 · Who does what, and the three skills in order
Face, topics and scripts stay yours; thumbnails and editing get handed off. Topic selection outweighs everything else.
5:06:02 – 5:32:11
23 · Timelines, plateaus, and the 90-day MAP
Six quiet months, growth as plateaus broken by jumps, beacons versus client-getters, and the Mine, Accelerate, Position plan.
5:32:11 – 5:51:12
24 · Three families of offers
Time for money and its ceiling, audience-leveraged products, and teaching your business model when the work is local and physical.
5:51:12 – 6:13:22
25 · The YouTube-to-clients bridge
Links, landing pages, booking widgets, lead magnets and email, then the close on his own program.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The best-known expert beats the best expert every time, because the contest is settled before skill is ever visible.
- 81% of buyers have already picked who they want to work with before the first conversation happens.
- 73% of buyers trust helpful content from an expert more than they trust that expert's credentials.
- 83% of happy clients say they would refer you and only 29% ever actually do, which is the feast-or-famine cycle in two numbers.
- Trust costs roughly seven hours of time spent with you, which works out to more than 800 short-form clips.
- Half of all new YouTube channels never post a fourth video and 90% never post an eleventh.
- To an invisible expert's buyer you are a name, a title and a price, and that is the definition of a commodity.
- Only 3 to 5% of your future buyers are shopping for a solution right now, so the biggest crowd sits at problem-aware.
- Nobody searches for the name of a framework you invented, so the problem goes in the title and the method goes inside the video.
- YouTube tags every video with eight markers, and only the last two, the idea and the signature, decide how far it travels.
- Copying a successful video lands you inside its conflict radius, where YouTube simply declines to show yours.
- Naming an idea you already teach manufactures information gain without inventing anything new.
- A realtor whose videos average 150 views pulls two or three solid leads a week, and one of those calls became a $10 million client.
- Views measure how wide a video went, not what it earned, and the quiet narrow videos are the ones that book calls.
- A $5,000 VIP day sells fine off a channel averaging 30 views per video, because the right 30 people outvalue the wrong 30,000.
- Friendly subscribers from your real life scramble the only data a new channel has, so supportive views actively jam it up.
- A social post is a spear that feeds you once, and an evergreen video is a net that keeps catching while you sleep.
- Email returns about $36 for every $1 spent and is the only audience on the list that no platform can take from you.
- A master plumber's YouTube sponsorship income eventually matched his entire plumbing company's revenue, so he sold the plumbing company.
- Mentioning a free download at the end of a video reaches only the 20% of viewers who made it that far.
Being chosen is a system, not a talent
THE KNOWN EXPERT PLAYBOOK
Buyers cannot judge expert work, so they hire whoever already feels familiar, which turns visibility from a personality trait into an order of operations anyone can run.
01Cold open
- Two experts exist in every field: the secret genius doing great private work, and the known expert whose clients arrive already decided.
- If every new client makes you justify your price from scratch, you are being judged as a stranger rather than as an expert.
02Personal brand versus expert brand
- A personal brand only controls what people think once they are already looking at you, which does nothing if your name never comes up.
- An expert brand attaches your name to one problem and carries its own mechanism for being found, instead of waiting on referrals.
- Skill stopped paying when the judges changed: teachers and bosses could grade your work, clients cannot, so they treat visibility as the proxy for quality.
03Five levels of living in a buyer's head
- Being known runs five levels deep, from merely placing you to having already chosen you before the first conversation.
- Repeating a name and a message only reaches the shallowest level, because the deeper ones require hours of a buyer sitting inside your thinking.
04Buyer fame and picking your person
- Wide fame and peer fame flatter the ego, while buyer fame means being known by the exact people with the problem and the budget.
- Attach your name to one problem rather than one audience, so that having the problem is what makes someone think of you.
- Your person comes from three answers: whose problems you solve best, who you enjoy working with, and what they call the problem in their own words.
05Connoisseurship, the half AI cannot copy
- Clients never bought your information, they bought your judgment about which option fits them and what they should skip entirely.
- Judgment stays invisible until someone watches you use it, so advice given on private calls builds trust with nobody else.
- A flood of machine-written content raises the value of a real person reasoning in public rather than lowering it.
06The trust gap and the commodity trap
- Fear chooses the familiar option, so a sales call asks a stranger to close the entire trust gap in thirty minutes.
- When buyers cannot weigh expertise, price becomes the only comparable thing and you get treated as a name, a title and a number.
- Being findable is not being known: top search rankings still produced calls that opened with an audition and a price question.
07Teaching in the open
- The person who explains the problem best is assumed to be the person who can solve it best.
- Publishing the answers competitors make people call for turned one hour of work into decades of compounding business.
- Invisibility says nothing about how good you are, which makes it the most fixable problem in an expertise business.
08The platform bake-off
- Judge any platform on four questions: right people, right moment, trust before the call, and whether one busy person can sustain it for years.
- Social posts die in two days, ads stop the day the budget stops, and written work delivers the insight while leaving the author behind.
- Podcasts build real trust but cannot introduce you to strangers, which is exactly the gap search fills and vice versa.
09Why YouTube goes four for four
- A search engine with faces solves both halves at once, because strangers arrive at the moment of need and then spend real time with you.
- Touch point density matters more than touch point count, since fifteen minutes of watching you reason outweighs dozens of scrolled posts.
- Evergreen videos compound rather than expire, so a two-year-old answer competes directly with one posted last week.
10The 500-hours myth and the quit curve
- Half of all new channels stop before a fourth video and ninety percent never reach an eleventh, so persistence alone clears most of the field.
- Your real competition is the handful of channels in your exact lane that kept going, not the millions of uploads per minute.
- The barrier guarding this opportunity is a feeling that fades after the first few attempts, which is rare among business advantages.
11Camera fear and the client math
- People already choose to listen to you one at a time, which makes this a visibility problem rather than a personality problem.
- Small imperfections make a competent person more trusted, so stumbles cost you nothing the viewer actually came for.
- Work backwards from clients: fifty a year needs about two inbound leads a week, which needs roughly two hundred weekly views across your catalog.
- An entertainer sells attention at around two dollars per thousand views, while one client can outweigh a hundred thousand views of that revenue.
12Shorts versus long, and the buyer journey
- Thirty-second clips cannot bank the hours trust requires, and that viewer arrives distracted rather than searching for help.
- Only three to five percent of future buyers are shopping right now, so most videos should name the problem rather than the solution.
- Switching audiences between videos discards everything the algorithm learned, which is why a narrow lane outperforms a wide one.
13Packaging the problem
- Put the buyer's problem in the title and let your named method live inside the video, because nobody searches a name you invented.
- Thumbnails shifted from loud to thoughtful, so a counterintuitive line or a real environment now outperforms shock and bright colors.
- Open by saying the viewer's own worry back to them, and save credentials for one sentence that sounds like a story rather than a plaque.
14Talking to one person, failing in private
- Record for one real client you enjoy talking to, because a lens with nobody behind it produces the same flat delivery actors give a tennis ball.
- Confidence follows recording rather than preceding it, and watching your own footage back is what wears the cringe out.
- Early low views are shelter rather than failure, because the room fills at roughly the pace your skill improves.
15Information gain and signature concepts
- The algorithm now weighs the idea and the signature above category and format, so a close copy of a successful video gets quietly suppressed.
- Naming an idea you already teach creates ownable territory without inventing anything, the way constellations made ordinary stars famous.
- A signature concept can take six shapes: a named idea, an acronym, a diagram, a numbered list, an equation or a rule.
16News, the AI twist, and FAQ videos first
- On breaking news you do not need to be first, only to be the one translating what it means for your specific person.
- Connecting a broad technology shift to one narrow audience is an open lane in almost every field right now.
- Start with questions clients already ask, because those topics are pre-proven and there is nothing left to research before recording.
17Scripting and the teleprompter
- Scripting word for word removes the search for language while recording, which frees your natural delivery instead of flattening it.
- Write the way you speak and read every line aloud, since written English and spoken English are effectively different languages.
- Mention real client work throughout, because that is what tells a viewer you are hireable rather than a free teacher.
18How YouTube tests a video
- A video is tested on fifty to a hundred people and widened only if the signals hold, so breaking out is sequential rather than random.
- Search is the one view the platform never has to guess at, which makes searchable topics the only reliable door for a new channel.
- A plain utilitarian title is the most interesting sentence on the page to the one person who just typed those exact words.
19The SCAR scale and four deep-end formats
- Surface and competence content is the assembly manual, while adversity and reframe content is the person who has built two hundred of them.
- Telling the story of a plan that failed buys more belief than another win, provided the story lands on what it taught you.
- Four formats sell hardest: an ungated overview of your whole system, live teardowns, counter-advice, and unscripted live sessions.
20Binge chains, comments, and the expert's curse
- Never wrap a video up. Name the next problem, attach a cost to it, and point at the video that solves it.
- Treat replies as public office hours, since everyone who reads that exchange watches your judgment applied to a real situation.
- Perfectionism is the quietest way to quit, because you never have to admit you stopped, you are just not ready forever.
21Spears, nets, AI bookends and gear
- Spend hours on assets that keep working rather than tasks that pay once, the difference between building a net and carrying a spear.
- Keep the first and last tenth of any script human and let AI handle the structuring in between.
- Batching topics, scripts and filming into separate sittings removes the twenty minutes task switching costs every single time.
- Under a hundred dollars of equipment is enough to begin, and audio is the only quality dimension nobody will forgive.
22Who does what, and the three skills in order
- Your face, your topics and your scripts stay yours, because the entire point is that the trust accrues to you.
- Editing and thumbnails are the first jobs to hand off, since neither one carries your judgment.
- Topic and title selection decides roughly eighty percent of a video's outcome before you record a frame, so master that first.
23Timelines, plateaus, and the 90-day MAP
- Expect about six months of quiet, then growth arriving as plateaus broken by jumps rather than a steadily rising line.
- Wide videos bring new people in and narrow videos book the calls, so views and revenue are two separate signals to read.
- The first ninety days split cleanly: two weeks mining searchable topics, six weeks of volume to build skill, then permanent depth.
24Three families of offers
- Selling time directly caps income at your calendar, which means being fully booked is the ceiling rather than the goal.
- An audience lets you sell the same knowledge without your hours attached, through courses, groups, memberships or tools.
- When the work is local and physical, the second market is people who want to run your business in their own town.
25The YouTube-to-clients bridge
- When readiness finally arrives, the path to hiring you has to be short and obvious, never a scavenger hunt.
- One call to action per video, one labelled link at the top of every description, and a page that continues the video's promise.
- Offer the free download early, right after your first real teaching moment, since most viewers never reach the ending.
Terms worth knowing.
- Expert brand
- A reputation built around solving one specific problem for one specific buyer, including a mechanism for strangers to find you. Distinct from a personal brand, which only shapes the impression of someone already looking at you.
- Buyer fame
- Being known, liked and trusted by the exact people who have the problem you solve and the money to pay for it, as opposed to being known by a wide general public or by professional peers.
- Connoisseurship
- Expertise combined with judgment: knowing not just the facts but which option fits the person in front of you, what to skip, and what to do first. The half of expert work that cannot be looked up.
- Touch point density
- How much trust a single interaction builds. A fifteen-minute video where someone watches you reason through their problem counts far more than a scrolled text post, so dense touch points reach the trust threshold faster.
- Conflict radius
- The territory a platform assigns to a video that establishes a genuinely new idea. Videos that land close to its center, meaning near-copies, get shown to far fewer people.
- Information gain
- The degree to which a video says something other videos on the topic have not said. It is what lets a video claim its own territory instead of being suppressed as a rehash.
- Signature concept
- A name you attach to advice you already give, turning scattered common knowledge into something recognisably yours. It can be a named idea, an acronym, a diagram, a numbered list, an equation or a rule.
- SCAR scale
- A four-level model of content depth: Surface, Competence, Adversity and Reframe. The top two levels are replaceable by AI; the bottom two require lived experience and are where expert authority is built.
- Pull video
- A video on a topic people actively search for, which gets discovered without the platform having to guess who to show it to. The opposite of a push video, which relies on the platform recommending it.
- Walk-up webinar
- A full high-level overview of how you solve your clients' main problem, published publicly instead of hidden behind a registration page or email gate.
- Pratfall effect
- The finding that when someone is clearly competent, small visible imperfections make people like and trust them more rather than less.
- Parasocial relationship
- The one-sided sense of friendship a viewer develops with someone they watch or listen to over time. It is the mechanism that makes hiring a stranger from video feel safe.
- Lead magnet
- A small useful asset such as a checklist, guide or tool, given away in exchange for an email address so you can stay in contact with people who are interested but not yet ready to buy.
Things they pointed at.
4:32:23toolClaude
48:07bookThey Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan
2:00:54book10x Is Easier Than 2x
2:56:00bookDeep Work by Cal Newport
2:56:48bookRadical Candor by Kim Scott
2:59:02bookThe Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
3:00:05bookBuilding a StoryBrand by Donald Miller
4:45:38toolPromptSmart Pro
4:46:06toolDJI Mic Mini
5:59:00toolCalendly
5:49:54channelContent That Sells podcast
Lines you could clip.
00:24
“The best known expert beats the best expert, every single time, in every field, and it isn't even close.”
11:58
“Most experts I meet are just sitting on a full tank of gas with no engine, wondering why the car won't start.”
31:48
“Reading the labels is information. Her handing you the right bottle is judgment, and the judgment is the thing you actually needed.”
44:36
“Being findable is not the same thing as being known, and I had to learn that difference the long, hard way.”
48:00
“The person who explains the problem best is assumed to be the person who can solve it best.”
1:12:08
“A podcast is kind of like a library with no librarian.”
1:34:27
“You don't have to beat the crowd to the party, you just have to still be there after it ends.”
2:42:02
“Stop thinking of low views as failure. It's actually temporary shelter.”
2:54:37
“Those were the stars that people navigated by, not the brightest ones. The named ones.”
3:49:05
“I call it the SCAR scale because teaching from your scars is where true experts live.”
4:27:40
“Go down the list of everything you've been told to do for marketing and just ask yourself for each one, is that a spear or a net?”
4:45:28
“Repurposing your videos into shorts, that is just busy work, but repurposing them into podcasts, that's basically a second shelf for the same books.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
If people pay you for what you know, your judgment, your expertise, your taste, this is the most important video you're going to watch this year. Here's why. In every industry, there's one person who isn't the best at what they do, but everyone knows their name anyway.
You can probably picture them right now. Their name comes up in rooms they're not in, they get the inbound leads, they get the speaking slot. And you've sat there more than once thinking, I'm better than that.
And you're probably right, but it doesn't matter. The best known expert beats the best expert, every single time, in every field, and it isn't even close. Here's the truth, there are two kinds of experts and almost nobody chooses which one they are.
The first is the secret genius. They're brilliant at the work, head down, doing it in private, just waiting to get discovered. And every industry is full of them.
Some of the best people you've ever worked with are secret geniuses. And most of them are going to stay that way until the day they retire. And you know if you're one of them because your life has a certain shape to it.
You know, every new client starts you back at zero. You explain your process from scratch again. You justify your price again.
Ten years in and every call still feels like a job interview. And that's the weeks where the phone rings at all. The other kind is the known expert.
Not necessarily more skilled, often less actually, but the right people find them and trust them before they've ever even met. So their first call doesn't start at zero. It starts at yes.
The client's already watched him think and they've already decided. They're not asking why they should pick you. They're not even asking what it costs.
They're asking how soon can you start. But here's the interesting part. Which one of these you are isn't permanent and it was never about talent.
It's a playbook. It runs in a specific order and I can teach it to you in the next five hours. You've probably heard of personal branding and it may have been sold to you as the answer.
It isn't. What you need is an expert brand, and those are not the same thing. And that distinction is what this entire video is gonna be about.
So I've run this playbook on YouTube for eight years. It's built a channel past 430 ,000 subscribers for me, and it's built a seven -figure business. It's also put thousands of my students in front of the exact clients that they wanted.
I've tested every other marketing method available to someone like you, and I'm just gonna say nothing else is even in the same league. So here's my promise. By the end of this, you're going to know how to become the best known expert in the exact market that you want to own and how to get clients who show up already sold.
Now, here's where we're headed. This course is divided into four parts. Part one is the mechanism.
So how being known actually works underneath the hood. Part two is the vehicle. Why YouTube beats everything else for this with proof from real experts.
Part three is the actual system. So everything you need to launch and your first 90 days step by step.
Part four is the money. So what to sell once you're known and the bridge that turns a viewer into a client. So let's start with a question that's probably been bugging you for years.
If you're this good, why aren't the right people finding you? Well, there's a really specific reason for it, and it might not be what you think.
Now, if you've been living any version of what I was just talking about, you probably already have a reason or an explanation in mind. Most secret geniuses do. You might figure the problem is how you're packaged, right?
Something about how you come across isn't landing. And if you could just get the presentation right, the clients would follow. And there's a whole industry standing by, very happy to agree with you.
The fix you've probably already been sold is just to build a personal brand, right? Get a good logo and brand colors. Get professional photos.
Tighten up your message. And look, that advice is fine as far as it goes. And if you've already done any of that, nothing you built was wasted.
But let's just be really honest and really precise about what a great personal brand actually gets you when it's done right. It gets you exactly one thing. You get to control what people think when your name comes up.
And that's a good thing. It's worth something. But it still doesn't really solve your underperforming business problem.
Why? Well, a couple years back, I hired a copywriter to do some stuff on some of my sales pages, and she was really good. And her personal branding...
was really on point. She had a great website, really cool photos that showed a lot of her personality. The copy on her site was excellent, which, of course, she's a copywriter, so you'd hope so.
Everything felt really polished and cohesive and personal, so if you were to give her site to a branding consultant, they would be like, I have no notes on this. And then anybody who looked her up... got exactly the impression that she designed.
But as far as I could tell, the only way anyone ever found her was through referrals. That's how I got her name. It was from my business coach.
And I couldn't really say for sure, but it seemed to me like she was struggling financially a bit. Like she was charging a lot of money for her services, rightly so, but she wasn't getting a ton of bites. So her personal brand was still, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
And that's the catch that nobody says out loud about branding, personal or otherwise. A brand only kicks in when the buyer is already looking at you. Your name has to come up first for it to work.
You can control what people think of you all day long. But that's only if they think of you at all. And honestly, that's my biggest beef with how personal branding gets sold.
You know, the whole industry treats it like a design challenge combined with a messaging challenge. You know, get the right words on your website, make the socials look great, wrap it all up in a nice package, and you're done. And I do get why that version sells, by the way.
It's buyable. You know, you can hire it out and check it off your list. But this isn't Field of Dreams, right?
You can build it, and they still won't come because they have no idea it exists. If nobody can find any of it, what good is it? And these days with AI, anyone can make themselves look like a brand in a weekend.
You can literally use AI to make awesome looking headshots of yourself from scratch, and Claude can design you a beautiful website in just a couple minutes. All that like high -end polish got really common, so that stopped being the difference maker it used to be. So if that polish isn't what decides who gets hired anymore, What is?
Well, it's the next evolution of a personal brand, what I call the expert brand. A personal brand makes you known. You know, it's really built for an attention business, influencers, creators, entertainers, where the money is really in how many people are watching.
But the expert brand goes a few steps beyond that. It makes your expertise known, tied to one problem, to the right people. It comes with a built -in mechanism for actually getting found, so you're not relying on those referrals or just hoping someone comes across your social media accounts.
An expert brand is built for a trust business where the money is in how much the right few people trust you. You're not becoming a personality or a lifestyle brand. You're becoming the answer to one very specific problem.
And if you want to see what a fully built expert brand looks like at full scale, I'm sure you've heard of Alex Hormozy. You know, if you run a business and you want to scale it, he's the guy. Dan Martell for buying back your time.
Amy Porterfield's the go -to for online courses. Marie Forleo, she's like the ultimate girl boss, and she can show you exactly how to start a business from scratch. Russell Brunson's got sales funnels, and it's not even just all about business experts.
You know, Dave Ramsey. Ask 100 people who to call about getting out of debt and you're going to hear his name before you finish the question. Marie Kondo for organizing.
She's the one who coined the phrase, if it doesn't spark joy, toss it out. None of those people has a trophy for being the number one best in their field. There's not even any trophy like that to begin with.
What every one of them has is a specific problem that their name is attached to. That's the expert brand version of known. Not famous to everybody.
known by the exact people dealing with the thing they solve. Those people go looking for help. The name's already sitting in their head.
And that's where the money comes from. Now I can already hear you like, okay, Wes, that's Alex Ramosi. That's Dave Ramsey.
I'm not gonna be that famous. And yeah, you're probably right, but you can relax about that because you don't need to even come close to their level to make this work for you. Experts at a teeny tiny fraction of that visibility are still running high six and seven figure businesses right now.
And that's the version we're building here. But those big names are useful to think about because they prove the pattern at full scale and because you already trust it. When you think of their topic, you think of them.
That, at whatever size fits your business, is the goal. So if you're an expert, personal branding is not what you need to be focusing on. You need to be focusing on this because here's what an expert brand actually does for you.
You get to live in your buyer's head before they ever contact you, which makes it the one asset that's marketing and sales at the same time. So it's going to find the right people and pre -sell them. both from the same effort.
Now, real quick, I know this is a lot of material and I wanted to make it as actionable for you as possible. So I created the Expert Brand Launch Kit. It's a free companion bundle you can download.
It's got a bunch of worksheets and playbooks that go right along with what I'm teaching you in here. So please take advantage of it. The link's in the description below, or you can just snap the QR code that's on your screen.
Okay, so where did this new set of rules even come from? Well, it started with a swap that most experts never even notice. You probably always heard some version of, do great work and it pays off.
And here's the thing, for most of your life, that rule genuinely held up. In school, hard work and skill got rewarded with grades. At your first job, it kept working.
Good work got you hired, and then better work would get you promoted. So before I had my own business, I was a graphic designer, and I was going after regular nine -to -five design jobs, just like everybody else was. Now, I was mostly self -taught, and my portfolio was...
Honestly padded with pretend projects because that's just what you do as a junior designer when you don't have real work to show yet We all did that But the work itself was genuinely good. And I ended up landing a job from one of the first interviews that I ever went on.
And I landed it off of that portfolio, right? The quality of my work. And from there, I moved up to a better job than into another one.
And every single time, it was the work that got me in the door. Then I went out on my own with my own business and the rule just stopped working for me. And it took me years to understand this, but I know why now.
Every single person who had ever judged my work up to that point knew how to judge it, right? My teachers knew the subject they were grading me on. The design directors who interviewed me could flip through my portfolio and know within about 30 seconds whether or not I was any good.
So skill kept paying off because skilled people were the ones doing the judging. But once I was working for myself, the old judges got swapped out for new ones. The people judging my work weren't design directors anymore, they were clients.
And clients aren't usually great at judging the work itself. So in my case, these were micro business owners who couldn't really tell a strategic, highly converting website from one that was just pretty. And it's gonna be the same in your field, whatever it is.
If you're a financial advisor, your clients can't really look at a portfolio and tell whether the thinking behind it's brilliant or just okay. If you're a coach, they can't tell how good your advice is just by hearing it. Whatever it is you do, the people paying you can't judge it.
the way another expert would. And honestly, if they could judge all that stuff, they probably wouldn't need to hire any of us in the first place. So in the absence of knowing how to judge your work, what do they do instead?
Well, they just go with the most visible option because in their mind, visible means good. It means safe. There's a little thought running in the back of every buyer's head that says, well, if they got that known for this, They must be really great at it.
And that one assumption, right or wrong, is running your entire industry right now, whether anybody admits it or not. And it's funny because being good probably isn't even the reason that the visible person got to where they are. And none of this is to say quality doesn't matter or that being good at what you do doesn't matter.
It matters a lot. Being good is the fuel. But being visible and known...
is the engine. And most experts I meet are just sitting on a , wondering why the car won't start. So buyers hire the one they already know, which brings up the real question.
What does being known actually mean? Because I promise you, it doesn't involve buying billboards or being on the New York Times bestseller list. It's much simpler than that, and it happens inside your buyer's head, and it goes a lot deeper than most people even think.
So here's the framework this whole course is built on, because once you have this, everything else is going to click into place. So I want you to think about one single buyer, one person out there who could hire you someday.
The question that decides everything is this, how deep inside that person's head do you live? Because it turns out there are five different levels and each one is deeper than the last. So let me take you all the way down.
At level one, they can place you this is the shallowest one where your name and your thing are linked together like oh yeah she's the burnout coach for nurses that kind of thing and this is all personal branding gets you you get to own the association that's real and it's worth having but it only works when something else brings you up at level two they think of you on their own nobody has to bring you up anymore right the problem does it for them.
What do I mean? Well, okay, let's say it's 11 o 'clock at night and the thing they've been dealing with flares up and your face just pops in their head. You know, wait, that guy talks about exactly this.
And at level three, going deeper, they think with your words. You know, your way of seeing the problem became their way of seeing it. They're explaining their own situation to people using your phrases and they don't even notice that they're doing it.
At this point, you're not just a name they know anymore. You're part of how they process their problem. At level four, they feel like they actually know you.
All the hours spent with you turns into something that to them feels like a real relationship. They know your stories. They know how you talk.
They could tell you what you'd probably say about something. You're a stranger that they trust like a friend. And at level five, the deepest one, you're already their choice.
The decision got made before hopping on a call, before any comparison shopping, before you even knew this person existed. They show up pre -sold and the call is just a formality. So the deeper you go, the more of the sales already done before you ever talk to that person.
At level one, none of it's done. At level five, all of it is. So this is why just putting your name and your message out there over and over only gets you to level one.
That's as deep as it reaches. Because all that repeating really does is help people who already had to find you on their own remember you. And the deeper levels aren't just about remembering.
They're about the buyer spending real hours inside your thinking. A logo can't do that. A bio can't do that.
A color palette. Great, thoughtful messaging. None of that puts hours of you into somebody's life.
But the known expert is somebody who lives deep in the right people's heads, not just at level one. That copywriter I worked with, she lived at level one. Graded her work, filed away neatly, waiting for someone to think of her.
But we want to get past level one into the right people's heads, which brings up the first big question you have to answer. Whose heads? Because it turns out being known comes in different sizes, and only one size actually pays.
So let me be really clear about what being the known expert means. Because when most people hear known, their mind jumps to the giant names out there. The Hormozis, the Gary Vs, or whoever the equivalent is in their own industry.
That one person who's just everywhere, on every stage, every podcast, every feed. And they think, that's not me. You know, those guys are experts at being out there, running a media machine.
I'm an expert at the actual work. I'm just trying to grow my business. Good, that instinct is correct.
The thing is, best known. doesn't necessarily mean known by the most people. It means being known best by the right people.
Imagine there were three doctors in the same city, right? The first doctor is everywhere. He's doing medical segments on the local news.
He sponsors all the little league teams and his face is on, you know, park benches and billboards. Everybody in town knows his name, but his waiting room's half empty because most of those people already have a doctor. They just recognize his face.
That's what we call wide fame. You're known by tons of people, most of whom just aren't in the market for what you're selling. Now the second doctor, he's well known in the medical community.
He speaks at conferences, he publishes papers, and other doctors really respect him. But his peers don't pay his bills, patients do. That's peer fame, and it's really more about vanity and recognition than anything else.
Then there's doctor number three, and most people in her town have never even heard of her, but Every single person in that city and five other towns nearby who has a torn rotator cuff knows exactly who she is. Her name comes up in every Google search, every referral, every conversation about shoulder injuries.
She's booked out for the next six months, and she charges triple what the other two charge. That's buyer fame, when you're known, liked, and trusted by the exact people who have the problem you solve and the money to pay you for it. That's worth more than the other two put together.
So let your competitors chase the billboards and the conference applause from people who will never hire them. You're after something much easier to get and much more valuable. Being best known to your buyers.
That's the backwards math of being known. A really small audience of exactly right fit people beats a huge audience of almost right people every time. Good aim beats wide reach.
And I learned this on my own channel before I knew any better. Some of my earliest videos, like the first ones I ever made, were about web design trends for the year. I think the first one I did, it was like 2016.
So it was 2016 web design trends. And those videos actually got a ton of views right out of the gate. Just one teeny problem.
Who watches a video about web design trends? Other web designers, right? My peers, the people who could actually hire me, business owners with websites that weren't bringing in clients, they didn't care.
about web design trends. So what I was doing was building peer fame, the wrong one, and calling it marketing. My clients weren't even in the room.
And Alex Ramosi actually approved this recently too, and he's got way more data to look at than any of us. So he pulled up his top content from the previous quarter. One video had 1 .2 million views, another had a million, then 800 ,000, 500 ,000, and on down.
Really big numbers. And not one of those videos made one single sale because they were mostly beginner level stuff. So they pulled in this giant crowd of people who were nowhere near ready to buy anything from him.
Those videos were going for wide fame. Then he looked at which single video from the quarter brought in the most revenue of all of them. And that one only had...
$278 ,000, which sounds like a lot, but not for him. And that content was about customer segmentation or something like that. So it's much deeper strategy stuff.
And by its very nature, that kind of topic is only going to attract people who are already in running a real business that's mature enough to care about that kind of thing. So there's a much smaller audience. but it had way more buying power.
And I've seen this play out even at the tiny end of the scale. So there's a registered dietitian. She's got fewer than 6 ,000 subscribers and her posts barely get any engagement at all.
We're talking, you know, nine likes, 18 likes, maybe 20 on a good day, yet she's making over a million dollars a year. How is she doing that with those numbers? Well, it's because she's not posting about general nutrition or weight loss, the stuff that would attract those bigger.
broader audiences. Instead, she teaches other registered dietitians how to bill insurance better. So her audience is teeny tiny, but almost every single person in it is the exact person she's selling to.
So it's a small pool, but it's full of buyers. She owns that audience and they know her, which means you should actually expect something that feels a little strange when you start down this road. Your best, most profitable work might look kind of unimpressive from the outside.
And I know that can feel uncomfortable, but most of the time, that's not a sign that you're doing it wrong. It's a sign that you're aiming at exactly the right people. So buyer fame's the target, and buyer fame has a trick to it.
So you don't really aim at people at all. You aim at a problem. It's really simple.
You just want to attach your name to one problem, and you do it so tightly that... when somebody actually has that problem, you're not just one name on a list that they're comparing. You're the answer to the question that they're asking.
So you become, in a way, the only real option. Here's what I mean. So there's a therapist named Ross Rosenberg.
Now, out of everything that a therapist could possibly choose to treat, he went all in on one specific problem. Why certain people keep falling for narcissists over and over again, and how they can finally break out of that cycle.
And he got so known for it that he actually gave the pattern its own name, the Human Magnet Syndrome. And today, his teachings have more than 34 million views, his books have sold 200 ,000 copies in 12 different languages, and his podcast sits in the top 2 % of all podcasts in the world. And all of that grew out of one problem he decided to own.
Now, he's not the most famous therapist alive. I don't even know who that would be, like Dr.
Phil or Freud. I don't know. But he doesn't need to be the most famous because to the exact people living with that exact pain, he's their guy.
Their narcissist problem is what brings him to mind. So that's really the target we're going for here. Not just more people.
More of the right people all gathered around one specific problem. And that turns this whole big idea into something that you can actually decide right now wherever you happen to be sitting. Who exactly do you want to be known by?
And I don't mean a demographic here. I don't mean, you know, professionals from... age 30 to 55.
I mean one kind of person with one kind of problem and specifically the problem you get paid to solve. And here's why getting this right matters so much. So when the person paying attention to you is the same person who can hire you, everything you put out is doing two jobs at once.
It's growing your name and it's filling your pipeline from the exact same effort. So Let's say we've got a business coach.
We'll call her Dana, and Dana coaches gym owners how to get and keep more members for their gym. Now, if the people paying attention to Dana are actual gym owners, then every single thing she makes is doing both of those jobs at the same time. But Let's imagine a different version of Dana who decides that what she really wants is a big audience.
So she starts posting motivation and productivity content and maybe even general business advice that any business owner could use, you know, that kind of thing. And it sort of works, right? She builds a following, she gets comments, she gets likes.
The problem is that almost nobody in that big audience actually owns a gym. and none of them are out there shopping for a business coach. So that's what an audience of the wrong people does for you.
Pretty much nothing, right? The attention's there, but the business never comes. You've probably seen experts stuck in exactly that same spot, wondering why none of this is turning into revenue.
But we're not going to let that happen to you. How do you actually find your person? Well, it comes down to three questions that you can probably answer for yourself right now.
Question one, whose problems do you solve best? You know, where do your best results come from? Not just who you could help because almost every expert could technically help a really wide range of people.
I want you to concentrate on whose problems you solve so well that the results still make you a little proud when you think about them. Question two. which clients do you love working with?
Because this is going to bring you more of whoever you aim it at. So if 50 more of those people showed up tomorrow, would you love your business? If the honest answer is, well, some of them, then you haven't found your person yet.
Question three, what did they say their problem is? Not what your industry calls it. What did they call it in their own words on the first phone call before you've...
taught them any of your vocabulary words. So here's what those answers might look like. So let's say we've got a financial advisor named Tom, okay?
Whose problems does Tom solve best? Maybe it's pre -retirees, people in their late 50s and early 60s who are scared of running out of money. the results he's gotten for them are the ones he's proudest of.
Which clients does he love? Well, it's that 60 -year -old couple with a decent nest egg and they don't have a plan. Not the 30 -year -old day trader looking for stock picks because the day trader pays just as well.
but Tom hangs up from those calls just completely wiped out. Okay, so concentrating on that 60 -year -old couple now. What do those couples say their problem is?
Because not once in Tom's career has a couple walked in asking for a decumulation strategy, right? That's the industry's word. They say, can we actually afford to retire?
That's the wording. almost every time, and he's been asked that for 20 years now. So that's Tom's people, right?
The couple laying awake at night wondering if they can afford to retire. That's who he wants to get known by. Not just anyone who's interested, who wants more money.
One couple with one fear and one problem that he happens to be really great at solving. And I'll bet a face already showed up for you, right? Somewhere in those three questions, a specific client probably came to your mind.
You know, maybe the one whose calls you don't dread taking. Maybe it's a couple like Tom's. You don't have to be sure yet.
But if somebody surfaced, that's worth trusting because that person was never just going to come from a list of options. They come up the way yours just did. A real face out of your real years of experience.
And by the way, you've been inside a live example of all this. the second you started this video. I made this whole thing for one viewer, the expert who's great at the work and invisible to the market.
So if you've had the feeling somewhere along the way that this video seems weirdly specific to your exact situation, that wasn't a coincidence. It's what it feels like to be somebody's chosen person. And the cool thing is your future audience can have that same feeling about you.
So once you know whose head you want to live in, the obvious question is, how do you actually get in there? Past level one down into the deeper levels where the selling happens before you ever even show up.
Now, if you're like a lot of established experts, when I ask how new clients find you, The answer I get a lot is referrals. Maybe your whole business runs on them, and that's great.
A referral is a gift, and nobody's telling you to turn them down. But a referral is somebody else bringing you up, which is that first shallow level again. You only exist when a friend's memory happens to fire off.
You can't control it or turn up a dial when your calendar starts to look empty. And this has been studied. 83 % of happy clients will tell you that they would gladly refer you to a friend.
29 % of them actually do. That gap is the feast or famine cycle you've been living in. So referrals are a gift, not an engine.
So when one shows up, Take it, do great work, and enjoy it. You know, same goes for networking, by the way, because a room full of handshakes is really just referrals that you went out and collected in person.
You're still depending on someone's memory to fire later. So we're just gonna be done pretending that gift is a plan, right? The plan has to be something you can actually control, something that takes strangers past level one without a friend having to make the introduction for you.
Remember what those deeper levels need. The buyer has to spend real time with your actual thinking. So this whole system runs on content.
And I wanna be specific about what that word means here because the version I'm talking about isn't the chaotic, be everywhere, hustle and grind version that all the marketing bros love to preach at you. This is a calm steady rhythm of showing your thinking in public at a pace that a busy person with a real business can sustain for years it's not posting every day it's not chasing trends and it's certainly not trying to be everywhere at once that is a hamster wheel and it burns people out and guess what burned out people quit what i'm teaching you here is a long -term plan so everything about it has to be built at a pace you can actually keep but let's talk about what your content actually has to show people because here's the twist it's not information not anymore and to explain why yeah we need to talk about ai because there's a question hanging over every expert business right now your clients can ask ai anything they want anytime they want for free so what exactly do they need you for now and that's not hypothetical the question is a real answer so let's get into it so here's what happened
it stopped costing anything to make information that sounds really smart. Anybody can type a question into an AI tool now and get back a really clean, organized, professional sounding answer in about four seconds on any topic they want, including yours. And anyone can prompt the same AI to write something that sounds just as professional and smart that they can just slap their name on.
So all that stuff that used to prove you were an expert, the tips, the explanations, the how -to steps, a machine can just hand all that out for free now and it never gets tired of doing it. And I know exactly what that AI written stuff is worth because I was there even before ChatGBT came on the scene. I tried to have an AI write for me early on.
I think it was called like Jasper or Jarvis. or something back then, which was just way worse than we have now. But I still see it all the time in my student scripts when they lean on ChatGPT or NowClawed way too hard without putting enough of themselves and their own ideas in first.
And the stuff that comes out isn't wrong exactly, you know, it's correct. And yeah, we can talk about AI hallucinations another time, but... It's just researched and regurgitated information, right?
Nothing more than that. It's clean, organized. It's mostly right, but there's just nothing in it, right?
It's stuff anybody... could have written, and that brings up a bigger question. If a machine just hands out that kind of information for free now, as much as anybody wants all day long, what were people ever paying experts for in the first place?
The thing is, information was never the product, not even before AI came along. The information was really just the wrapper around the thing that your clients were actually buying. What's that?
I think we've all been in this situation before. Imagine you're at a wine shop, you're picking out a bottle for dinner tonight, or maybe you're going to someone's house, you're bringing it over as a gift. But if you're like me and you like wine, but you don't really know wine, you've got two ways to pick a bottle out.
So you can stand there and read every label on every shelf and try to guess which one is gonna be best, or the owner of the shop can walk over. ask you what you're having for dinner, how much you wanna spend, whether you like sweet or dry, and then just hand you the exact right bottle, right? Reading the labels is information.
Her handing you the right bottle is judgment, and the judgment is the thing you actually needed. More than just judgment, really, it's what I call connoisseurship. Connoisseurship is what you get when expertise meets good judgment.
Knowing the facts is the cheap half of what you do that AI can do too, right? It's literally been trained on everything everyone's ever known pretty much. So the valuable half is knowing what those facts mean for the one specific person standing in front of you.
It's knowing which option fits them, what advice they should just ignore, what they need to do first, and what they should probably skip out on. AI can stack that wine shelf all the way up to the ceiling, but it can never be the shop owner because it never tasted any of those bottles and it can't make any kind of judgment about them that matters.
So here's what that means for those clients who don't know how to judge your work. They were never buying your information anyway. They're buying your connoisseurship, your judgment, your experience, your take on what works and what doesn't.
You earned all that. You didn't look it up. It's just about bringing your full self to the table.
And by the way, you already do this, right? Somewhere in the last month or so, I'm sure you were on a call with a client and you told them what not to do. right?
You said something like, skip that option or, you know, don't bother with that upgrade or do this one thing first and the rest can wait. And it probably didn't feel like anything special when you said it. But nobody could have looked that up.
Anyone can do the label reading half of your work now. But that moment you said to skip it? That was the wine shop owner in you talking, not the label.
But connoisseurship has one big problem. Nobody can really see it from the outside. It doesn't show up on your website, it's not in your credentials, and there's no certificate for it.
The only way anybody ever finds out you have it is by watching you actually use it. And right now, the only people who ever get to watch you use it are the clients who already hired you. That skip it moment that we just talked about probably happened on a private Zoom call.
And the only person who saw it was that person who was already paying you, which means with everybody else on earth, you're still stuck at level one. Nobody gets deeper than that with you off of your about us page on your website. Now, if you want to see what it looks like when an expert uses their judgment right out in the open, there's a dermatologist named Dr.
Dre. with one of the biggest skincare audiences in the world. Is she the single best dermatologist alive?
I have no idea. I wouldn't even begin to know how to measure that. But her audience assumes she's pretty damn good.
And the reason they assume that is how she guides them. She takes an overwhelming topic and she makes it feel simple. She tells people what to skip, not just what to try.
You know, 10 minutes of her videos and you can feel her lived experience with patience and her judgment going into her advice. That feeling is doing all the selling and she never has to say a word about herself. So she gets to basically live five levels deep inside a million heads at once.
And the only reason she's in there is that all those people got to spend hours with her thinking. And there's one more thing that people go looking for that no AI can provide, and that's proof. The receipts that what you say or recommend actually works.
Because people don't just want the steps, right? They want to see a real person who used to be exactly where they are and actually made it to the other side and how it all went down along the way.
That's what an expert really is to them. Not a better answer machine, but proof that the path works. So now...
we can flip that AI panic around. Every day the internet fills up with more of that machine -made, you know, lights are on but nobody's home kind of content. And that means a real person using real judgment and doing it publicly stands out now more than ever.
So AI never lowered your value, it actually raised it. But only if you do it where people can see you, because to a buyer, invisible judgment looks exactly like no judgment at all. So that's the plan, your judgment shown in public on a pace that you can keep aimed at the person you wanna work with.
But maybe part of you is still thinking, okay, but does that honestly beat just being better at the work than my competition? Let's talk about it. When someone's serious about hiring an expert, they don't actually research their way to the single best option out there.
Choosing can be scary because it's real money that they have to spend. And remember, the buyer doesn't really know how to judge the work. So fear ends up doing the choosing.
And what does fear usually grab onto first? Whichever option feels safest. Think of it like a trust gap.
So on one side of the gap, the buyer's thinking, this person seems qualified. And way over on the other side is, here's my money. Every expert has to get their buyer across that gap somehow.
The secret genius tries to bridge the whole gap in one sales call. You know, they show up as a total stranger, they list out their credentials, they explain what they can do for you, and they hope that 30 minutes is enough to earn somebody's real trust. And it almost never is.
Because look at what's actually happening on that call. The buyer's still scared. and they're listening to somebody they've never met make claims about themselves.
The buyer can't really check any of them. But there's a second way across that gap, and it doesn't happen on the call at all. It happens way before it.
So some buyers walk into that exact same call having already spent hours with the expert on the other side. They've seen how this person thinks, they've heard how they explain things, and they've gotten a feel for who they actually are. So the call doesn't feel like they're meeting a stranger anymore.
That's familiarity. Skill cannot make a stranger feel safe because skill is pretty much invisible. But time spent with you can make them feel safer with you, and they don't need more convincing when they feel like they already know you and can trust what you say.
That buyer is all the way down to level four. And I've been on both sides of this. So over the years, I've hired at least, geez, I want to say like six different...
experts just from their content. I hired a business coach who I followed for years, online business coach, followed from her content, and then a couple ads managers as well. So by the time I reached out to each of them, they didn't feel like an option.
They felt like the only option, and I wasn't even up for shopping around or interviewing anybody else. Were they actually the best in their fields? Again, I don't really know that, but they were.
the most known to me. They were the ones living deepest in my head. So they were the ones who got the call.
And I'm not telling you just to take my personal stories and anecdotes as proof here. There's actual studies of this kind of thing. And I've got some numbers here.
So 81 % of buyers have already picked who they want to work with before the first conversation ever happens. And 73 % of them say they trust helpful content from an expert. more than they trust their credentials.
Now put those stats together and look at what they mean. The contest for who's going to win your next client is being held before you ever even hear about it. There's no call, no meeting, no chance to wow anyone in a room.
So if you're invisible right now, you're not just losing those contests. You were never even entered to win. So what exactly does being the secret genius cost you?
Well, there are at least three big costs that I can think of right away. So the first one, you never even see, right? Somebody out there needed exactly what you do and they went with whoever felt familiar.
You never get an email and your phone never rang. It keeps costing you too after the phone rings and the further in you get, the more expensive it gets. let's talk about the calls you do get.
Because when you're invisible, I want you to think about who's actually calling you. It's somebody who didn't have a familiar option. If they already knew an expert they trusted, they'd be calling that person instead, right?
So the people who find you are starting from zero and they're not just calling you. They're probably also talking to like three to five other people too. And remember what's going on inside that buyer, right?
They're still scared, real money is still on the line, and they still can't judge the work. But this time, nobody at the table feels like a safe option. So the fear that normally grabs onto the safe, familiar option has nothing to grab in this case.
It needs some other way now to compare everyone. And there's only one thing left that that buyer can actually see and understand, which is the price. And that's the second cost.
I call it the commodity trap. So when people can't see your expertise, they can't weigh it out and compare it against your competition. And when they can't weigh it, price just becomes the whole conversation.
And by the way, this doesn't even mean that clients are cheap by nature. Price shopping is just what people do. when it's the only information they have.
So you would do the exact same thing, and you probably have done the same thing with every plumber or contractor that you've ever picked off a list. And by the way, this doesn't always mean that they choose the lowest price, right? There are plenty of people, depending on what they're hiring for, who might be most enticed by the highest.
price, right? Thinking that it's going to be the best quality. And then there's a lot of people who will default to going with the middle price because they think there's some kind of balance in that option.
Either way though, price becomes their biggest deciding factor. And you felt this trap. as the expert, even if you didn't have a name for it.
You've been on those calls, right? They're polite, but they stay distant. You hear, so what do you charge in about the first five minutes before you've even finished explaining what you do, right?
And you find out you're stacked up against, you know, two other quotes. And after you send the proposal, they just ghost you.
And under all of it there's that grinding feeling where you know you were the best option they talked to and still the call never ever feels like it. You've been priced like a commodity because to that buyer You're nothing more than a name, a title, and a price.
And so is everybody else on their list. That is the definition of a commodity. And these days, that commodity category starts at free.
Because even the free AI tools out there can give out the information half of what you do. And during my invisible years, I just remember hearing... yeah, yeah, yeah, but how much do you charge?
Just basically on repeat. I mean, they didn't say it like that, but it's how I heard it. Like they were just super dismissive.
So to set this up, like 10 years ago, I ran my own little web design studio in LA. You know, I said we a lot, even though we was just me in my one bedroom apartment. And I'd even finagled my way into the top three on Google for the search phrase web design Los Angeles, which meant...
I got a lot of inquiry emails and the phone rang a lot. It kind of seemed at the time like I had made this whole SEO thing work. But those calls didn't go the way I wanted.
They were mostly all small businesses who wanted a web designer and they all wanted a... cool website, whatever that meant. But what I actually sold by then was website strategy, not just design.
But what I sold was all based on buyer psychology and copywriting and structure, all the invisible things that make a website actually do something for your business. And all that stuff is worth way more than cool, but it's also the kind of value that a caller can't really see. or evaluate.
So I would try to explain it and honestly back then I wasn't great at explaining it. I'm not exactly a salesman and I was even worse at it back then. So every single call turned into this 30 minute audition where I had to prove from zero that I was worth more than the other two quotes they were talking to.
So I'd always get the sticker shock reaction. Then they would basically grill me why I was worth that price which by the way wasn't even out of whack with what other places were charging.
I got all the, you know, why should we hire you kind of questions. And one guy actually said that if he hired me, he wanted me to literally come into their office and they'd be like watching me work the whole time. The trust was just not there.
And by the way, that was a contract job, like not as an employee, like they were just hiring me to design their website. He wanted me to come in the office. That isn't done.
So all that to say, I was... Top three in Google, my phone was ringing off the hook, and I was still just another search result to every single person who called. Being findable is not the same thing as being known, and I had to learn that difference the long, hard way.
And I ended up spending years on calls like that. Now, you might think actually landing one of those jobs ends the trap. Usually doesn't and that's the third cost the trap follows you through the end of the project or engagement Because think about what that client actually bought they didn't buy your judgment because they never really saw it yet They bought a price from a stranger.
And we already know it builds real trust, time spent with you, and this client never spent any. So on day one of the project, none of that trust exists yet. They're handing real money to somebody that they don't fully believe in, and that shows up in how they treat everything you do.
I had a logo client back then that I'll never forget. So he came in really sure of what he wanted and very sure of what he didn't. And that's fine.
And I did the exploratory process, weeks of work, and I presented him a whole bunch of concepts, and I thought they were pretty strong. And because one concept in that folder touched on a direction that he had ruled out, which, you know, I explained my reasoning, he pretty much exploded on the call. It didn't even matter that I'd given him at least a dozen other directions, because I don't even think he was mad about the one concept.
was up for debate. His opinion about design and my opinion about design carry the exact same weight in that room. This is a man with zero background in design.
I think he owned a business in the housing industry or something. It's been a while, I don't remember. Anyway, I'd been doing this kind of work for years, but he had never watched me think, and that was on me.
He'd never seen the judgment that he was paying for. So to him, I wasn't an expert that he had chosen. I was just the quote that he said yes to.
And he fired me on that same Skype call. And I remember hanging up feeling super embarrassed and frustrated. I remember the exact question that I was asking myself for the rest of that day.
What is it going to take for people to finally take me seriously? That's the real cost of being invisible. When nobody can see your expertise, even the people who pay you treat it like a suggestion.
Here's the thing about that story though. Nothing in it says the work was bad. The work was strong and there were concepts in there that would have worked really well.
The skill wasn't missing and it probably isn't for you either. Being invisible says nothing about how good you are. It only says nobody can see how good you are yet.
And unlike talent, nobody can see me yet is a completely fixable problem. It actually might be the most fixable problem in your whole business. So there's this mortgage broker, Kyle, who teaches everything about home loans right out in the open on his YouTube channel.
Things like what lenders look for, what the fine print hides, the mistakes that cost buyers real money. Now, again, is Kyle the best mortgage broker in the world? Maybe, maybe not.
But since he started teaching mortgage stuff publicly, Kyle has gone on record saying he has lost a grand total of three clients to competitors. Three clients in his entire run. For his viewers, the trust gaps closed before they ever send that first email.
That's what teaching out in the open does. The person who explains the problem best is assumed to be the person who can solve it best. And you may have heard of Marcus Sheridan.
He actually wrote the book They Ask, You Answer. It's one of my favorite business books of all time. But before he wrote that, way back in 2008, he installed swimming pools for a living.
or at least he owned the company. I don't know if he was doing the installation, but he owned the company. I think it's called like River Pools and Spas or something.
Business is fine, but then if you remember 2008, what happened? The housing market crashed, right? So his pool company's phone.
pretty much stopped ringing, and customers who already put down deposits started calling to pull the money back out. So he lost about a quarter of a million dollars in deposits in like 48 hours or something crazy like that, and his company was pretty much just days away from going under. Now here's what he didn't do.
He didn't buy some course on building better pools. He was already good, so that was never the problem. The problem was that his customers had disappeared and the advertising that used to keep the phone ringing cost money.
And money was exactly what he didn't have anymore. Because I want you to think about who was still shopping for a swimming pool in 2008. Almost nobody.
And the ones who were had become the most careful buyers on earth. They were researching everything online long before they'd get on the phone with anybody. And that's where it clicked for him.
You know, Marcus was sitting on the one asset that the crash didn't take away from him, his connoisseurship. Every prospect who ever called asked him the same questions. What does a pool really cost?
What can go wrong? And he'd been answering those questions for years, one buyer at a time in private. Meanwhile, those careful buyers were googling those exact questions and finding nothing because nobody in that industry was answering them in public.
So that's what he did. He published the answers where anyone searching could find them, which cost him nothing but time. And time was about the only thing he had left to spend.
And he didn't just stick to the comfortable questions either. He was answering what pools really cost, what goes wrong, the stuff that everybody else made you call them to answer. Marcus just became the one guy in the whole industry who would just tell you.
And I'll let the numbers tell you what happened next. Buyers who went through 30 or more of his answers before ever calling closed about 80 % of the time. Buyers who hadn't, that was closer to about 25%, which was the industry average.
And one single answer, the honest cost breakdown that nobody else in the industry would touch, took him less than an hour to make, to put together. It gets credit for more than $35 million in business over the years it kept working. One hour to make $35 million.
And his company came out of the worst housing crash of our lifetime, stronger than it went in. So he didn't get better. His content made him known.
The known expert. always beats the secret genius. And skill doesn't even break the tie because the tie gets settled before skill is ever seen.
Buyers can only pick from what they can see. So I've got good news and bad news for you. The bad news is someone less skilled than you working out in public will beat you every time.
But the good news is you can beat someone more skilled than you the exact same way. Here's what being known actually feels like in the day -to -day. Prospects show up warm, sometimes even a little starstruck to meet you.
They've already watched you, so the conversation starts in the middle instead of at zero. Nobody asks you to prove yourself. You stop performing your competence and just help them.
Do you know how much energy performing competence eats up? You will the week you stop having to, trust me. And there's one more thing that being known fixes.
And I say this one from experience. It's a little voice in your head. So in my invisible years, that voice got pretty loud.
So I would build a genuinely beautiful website for a client. And if it didn't produce any results for them, the voice would whisper to me, do you really know what you're talking about? Then I'd win a project and I'd get second guessed on every decision anyway.
And then. the voice would pile on. Am I really as good at this as I think I am?
You know what finally made it shut up? Not a compliment from a friend, not my mom telling me I was talented because she's legally required to say that. As screwed up as it might sound, strangers.
A stranger who found me, watched how I think, and decided with their own money that I was the one. You can't argue with that. The imposter voice has no comeback for a stranger who chose you because to them, you're not a stranger.
And being known didn't just change how I got clients. It changed what happened after they hired me too. Remember the logo client that fired me?
For years, that was kind of how a lot of my client work went, right? I would turn into design and the pushback would start. My judgment and theirs dead even in their minds on the exact thing that they were paying me to be the expert at.
Then clients started coming in through my content rather than just finding me on Google and that whole dynamic completely died. Suddenly I would say, here's what your site actually needs. And they would say, great, do that.
The second guessing didn't even shrink. It pretty much just stopped. They'd already spent hours watching How I Think, so the debate was over before the project ever started.
And Jamie Wolfer might know this feeling better than any expert I've ever talked to. She's a wedding planner, and for years, she marketed herself the standard way that a lot of them do. These expensive bridal expos, right?
running the booth, standing there all weekend, pitching stranger after stranger who compared her to the three other planners they talked to before lunch. Most of those weekends she did this, she actually lost money. Think about that level of grind.
for a second, right? Paying for the privilege of being compared and scrutinized all day. So she didn't really love going to these things.
And one day she had the thought of putting her best advice online. So she started making YouTube videos. And by the time she got to the next bridal expo after that, the whole dynamic was different.
Brides actually started running up to her booth when they saw her, some of them in tears, because they felt like they already knew her. And some of them, the ones who could afford a planner, just booked her on the spot. And eventually she was able to quit those expos entirely because her content was working so much better.
And the business she built on that audience basically quadrupled her revenue. Or take James Canole, he's a financial planner. Over one 18 -month period, his videos brought in more than 4 ,000 inquiries.
The wait list just to get on a call with him was over four months long. That's what being known can do to your calendar. The known expert gets the trust before the first sales call ever happens and gets a better working life to go with it.
The secret genius, on the other hand, waits to be discovered and just keeps waiting. Now, real quick before we go on, you probably clicked on this video because you wanted to build your business. But what you understand now is bigger than that.
You understand how your industry actually picks its winners. And most experts go their entire careers without ever figuring that out. Not because they're not smart enough, but because nobody ever explained it to them.
So now that I've explained it to you, you're already well ahead of most of your competition, and we haven't even gotten to the how -to part yet. Which brings us to the question that this whole video is about.
How does a genuinely good expert actually become the known one? Well, it starts with a choice. You need one vehicle, one platform, where the right people can find you, watch you think, and get to know you, thousands of people all at once.
That's how you get past that first shallow level in anybody's head where they can barely place you and down into the deeper ones where the sale gets made.
And that platform is YouTube. So you probably already know that YouTube can be a really great way to attract clients. So maybe you're at least curious about starting a channel or maybe you've even made some videos already that didn't exactly go anywhere.
But either way, you're in the right spot for now. Now, the reason most experts never move past that spot is that this is a real commitment.
People get curious, but then they look at what it actually asks of them, and then they back off from it. And actually, the very fact that so many people are unwilling to do YouTube is exactly why it's so powerful for the few people that are actually willing to do it. And I want you to end up in that willing group with your eyes open, not because I talked you into it.
So you need to be as informed as possible if you're gonna stick with this. So we're gonna do the due diligence together, the same way that you would vet any big business decision.
So every popular option is gonna go on the table, everyone's gonna get a genuinely fair shot, and we either rule it out for real reasons, or we find out it actually deserves a spot in your plan. Because if there's something out there that fits your business better than YouTube, You deserve to know that now, not a year after you went down the wrong path.
Now, there are some pretty big marketing and business gurus out there saying that if you want to be successful, you have to post everywhere, like 10 times a day or more. You know, Gary V, he's been preaching the, you know, be everywhere thing for over a decade. And honestly, it's not.
that he's wrong. You know, I'm sure if you posted everywhere 10 times a day, you'd probably eventually break through. But it's just kind of like a financial advisor looking at a broke person and saying, you know, you should do you should be saving half of your money every single month.
Technically, yeah, that'd be great advice. And it would absolutely work if the person had the money, but they don't. So it's never actually going to happen.
So it's the same thing as posting everywhere all the time. That advice is just completely unrealistic for you. The guy's telling you that they've got entire content teams.
You know, when Gary Vee tells you to be everywhere, he's describing what a whole staff does with his footage. You're probably either a solopreneur or maybe you've got a small team and you have a business to run and clients to take care of. You don't have...
The resources that they have and being everywhere doesn't really get you six times the results for one busy person It just means doing six things badly instead of doing one thing the right way So i'm going to argue you only need one platform at least to start get really good at it Then you can think about repurposing it to other places, but just one for now.
You just need one platform that compounds So we're going to look at every option together every option gets the same four questions youtube included and the answers are just gonna fall where they fall. And notice, none of these questions are about which platform's the coolest or the newest or where everybody else seems to be doing their content.
So our criteria are only about one thing. What actually carries a stranger deeper down those five levels and turns them into a client? Question one, does it put you in front of the right people?
Meaning people who could actually hire you someday. Not just a big crowd, right? A big crowd that could never buy from you is worth a lot less than a small room full of people who could.
Question two, does it show up when they need you? Because people go looking for help at a very specific moment. Not before, not after.
Somebody who doesn't need an accountant today is not out shopping for one today. But the day they do need one, that's when they go looking. And if they can't find you in that moment, you don't exist to them.
Question three, does it build trust before the first conversation? You know, we already know that people hire whoever already feels familiar and safe to them. So whatever you pick has to do all that warming up work for you ahead of time while you're busy doing other things.
Because let's face it, you can't personally warm up every stranger in your market individually. There just aren't enough hours in your life. And question four, can one busy person actually keep it up?
not talking for a month or two. Can you see yourself doing it for five, 10 years? Becoming and staying known is not a 90 -day sprint.
So if something burns you out in three months, doesn't really matter how good it is because you'll quit it and then you end up with nothing. So that's the test. Does it reach the right people?
Does it catch the right moment? Does it build trust first? and can you actually keep it up?
So we're gonna hold every option up against those four questions one at a time, and we're just gonna be really honest about what we see. So let's start with the big one, the one you've probably already sank the most hours into, or at least felt the most guilt about not sinking hours into, social media. Now I know some of you have probably already tried this one, and you might just be over it.
Social media is where the attention is. It's free to start. And yes, some people have one big there.
So it has earned a real look here. So walk through an average week of social posting with me. So you spend Tuesday morning making a post or shooting a short or real TikTok, whatever.
That goes out. And a few hundred strangers scroll past it. A couple of them like it.
And some people follow you. Nobody calls you. And then by Thursday...
That post is gone because the social platforms have a huge recency bias, meaning they show people the newest stuff, then it just fades out with every passing day. So Tuesday's post, it's never going to bring you another client as long as you live. So you make another one and then you make another one every day forever just to keep putting yourself out there in front of people who don't really even seem to care.
And the stuff that survives on these platforms has to be entertaining pretty much because that is what the algorithm feeds on. So you're doing a little performance for strangers who didn't really even ask for you. And even when it does work, it builds the wrong reputation, right?
Your buyer doesn't need to be entertained by you. They need to watch you think. So you're forced to become the fun one if you wanna survive there, not the one they would trust with their actual money.
And if you want to see how shallow a social media follow can be, there was this really famous example of an influencer. Her name was Ari, and she had about 2 .6 million followers on Instagram. And she launched her own t -shirt line.
All she had to do was sell 36 shirts before the company that she was partnering with would start production. And she couldn't even get that. She had 2 .6 million followers, not even 36 of them.
would spend 20 bucks on a shirt that she was selling. And a T -shirt, that's about the easiest sale there is. Somebody hiring an expert is deciding to spend thousands of dollars on a serious problem.
If those followers wouldn't even buy a $20 shirt, imagine how hard it's gonna be to sell them on your consulting package or $1 ,000 course. And even in the best case, there's a number that social just can't. get around.
Google actually studied this and they found that building trust takes about seven hours spent with you. So think about the last professional you hired, the last coach, accountant, the last anybody really. You didn't hire them off of one 30 -second clip or even five of them.
You either read about them or you watched something, you asked around, you sat with it, you came back to it. That's what trust actually requires. It's hours, not seconds.
And in 30 -second chunks, seven hours is more than 800 posts, right? Nobody ever sees 800 of anything from any one business. So let's score it.
Right, people? Some, actually. You know, these platforms really are smart about interests.
You post about retirement planning and they're going to find you people who engage with retirement content. And a few of your actual buyers are going to be in that pool somewhere. But most of your people that are engaging with your topic day in and day out, they're probably more just people who like the subject, not people who are shopping for help with it.
The right moment. No, nobody scrolls Instagram at the moment they need professional help. Trust before the call.
We just did that math. 800 clips, no. And can one busy person keep it up?
Multiple posts every single day forever that each die in about 48 hours. Only you can answer that for yourself. And if you've tried it, you've probably already felt the answer.
So social media is gonna get a one out of four. And if part of you is a little relieved to hear that, like maybe you just got permission to stop doing something that you secretly hated, I'm giving you that permission slip right now. So what about just paying for the reach?
Ads are the only thing on this list with a built -in dial on it, and the targeting is genuinely smart now, so ads can even catch some of those right moments. But trust is the one thing you really can't buy. No matter how smart the targeting gets, your ad's gonna show up with that little sponsor tag on it, and everybody knows that an ad is just a stranger who paid to be there.
It's just a few seconds you paid for, so all that trust is still gonna be left for the sales call, the exact trap that you're already in. in right now. And nothing you buy accumulates, right?
The day the budget stops, everything stops. I've tried doing ads myself several times over the years, and even when I hired a pro that I believed in who was running them, I did make some sales, but I was either breaking even or sometimes just taking a loss.
The math just never worked for what I sell. It can be tricky if it's too low of a price because then you don't really make your money back. And it's definitely tricky at too high a price because people don't trust you enough to pay you a lot yet.
So when we talk about can you keep up with them, there's two things here. First, you're going to need to keep making new ad creative. Like even if you work with someone, they're going to bother you all the time saying we need 20 new videos this week or 20.
new images for the ads. So you have to keep supplying those to them. And it's also about, can you afford to keep running them?
And honestly, if you can get ads to work for you and be profitable, that's great. I would do it all day long. They just tend to be hard for experts to sell what we sell.
So ads are going to score a two out of four. They can find the right person sometimes at the right moment. Unfortunately, that's where it ends for it.
But if you manage to make them profitable, Go ahead and add a point. Then that brings us to what built my first business, Google Search.
Remember my little LA web design studio I was talking about before? I was in the top three on Google, which meant my phone was ringing all the time. And that's search doing its two best tricks.
It's the right people finding you at the right moment when they're looking. But every one of those calls was still an audition, remember, because findable is not the same as trusted. But it got even worse because the story continues when I ended up moving to Chicago in 2015 from LA.
So new city, new market, and every established studio here had years of Google rankings built up before I got here. It just seemed like the agencies in Chicago were way more businessy, right?
My LA competition seemed, they just seemed a lot more creative focused, you know, cool websites, design awards, just like, you know, vibes first. The Chicago agencies just seemed way more savvy on what mattered. Like, they had been doing SEO seriously at a level nobody had competed with in LA ever bothered to do.
That's my theory anyway. Plus, SEO itself had just gotten a lot harder in the years between. You know, more crowded, more competitive.
So, the head start... that I had spent years building in LA, it didn't carry over at all to Chicago. I tried to do everything I knew that had worked for me for years, and I couldn't even crack the top 20.
And the big nerdy SEO joke is, where's the best place to hide a dead body? On page two of Google. So the phone went quiet, my leads...
pretty much completely dried up. Years of work gone because I had the bright idea to move. But the more I thought about it, the more I started to see that those rankings were never really mine to begin with.
I was renting them. And the landlord, Google, can change the rules anytime it wants. And if your competition can outdo you, which all it really takes is just a higher budget, you are wiped off the map.
So it was a bad bet then, and it's even worse today. I mean, look at what a search result page looks like now. AI answer boxes, ads, forums, with the actual websites buried underneath.
So even if you worked your ass off to get to number one, you're still way down here. So Google search is gonna score the same two out of four that ads do. Right people, at the right moment, but the trust and the keeping up with it just isn't there.
But there is one strange exception on that page, one thing that Google still puts right up near the top of a lot of searches, and you may know where I'm going with this, but we'll come back to it in a bit. Okay, next is written content. So I'm talking articles, guest posts, those long LinkedIn essays, maybe even writing a book.
And writing can absolutely make you look like an expert. The problem is what happens inside the reader's head. They take the insight and they leave the you behind.
Think about the last article that genuinely helped you with something. Maybe you loved the advice and you actually used it, but try to remember who wrote it. The words did their job.
but the author never made it up into your memory. And there's a real reason that happens, because there's this pretty famous study by a guy named Albert Mehrabian, and what he found is that only about 7 % of communication is the actual words. The rest of it is tone of voice and body language.
So a reader is only ever getting about 7 % of you. The other 93%, the part that makes somebody actually feel like they've met you, that never makes it onto the page.
And that missing 93 % is exactly where the trust lives. So scientists have a name for this kind of bond that you build with someone that you watch and listen to over time. They call it a parasocial relationship.
That basically just means like a one -sided friendship that people tend to develop with celebrities. You've probably developed one or two of these yourself. You know, somebody you've watched or listened to for so long that they feel like they're someone you know, even though you've never met them.
that bond feels real and it's exactly the kind of trust that makes hiring someone feel safe. The thing is, people need to be able to see you or at the very least hear you for that kind of thing to form. You know, written words don't build that same kind of connection.
Nobody's ever had a one -sided friendship with an article, no matter how many of them they read. And even setting all that aside, the practical math here is rough. So let's imagine you wrote a book, right?
That's so many months to possibly years of your life, usually to make a few hundred sales. That's just the math on that. So that's if you wrote a book.
But let's face it, articles were the first thing to become obsolete once Google started answering questions with its own AI that's actually been trained on those articles. So that little box at the top of a Google search, that now answers the questions before anybody even clicks through to read what you wrote on your website.
And sure, written materials can still land in front of the right person, but not usually when someone's looking for it. AI just replaced it. for search, so it can't really build the bond you need, and you probably could sustain writing articles, especially with AI helping you, but if nobody's gonna find or read them, why bother?
So I'm gonna give writing a one, possibly a two if I'm being extra generous, which brings me to podcasts. Now, I'm gonna be giving podcasts the most credit of anything so far because they actually deserve it. When someone listens to your podcast, they're spending real time with you.
I'm talking an hour or even more than that sometimes with your voice in their ears while they're driving, walking a dog at the gym, you know, whatever they're doing. And real trust gets built in hours like that. And those seven hours can actually happen there pretty fast.
But podcasts do have one fatal flaw that kind of kills everything. new people just usually don't find them. You know, a podcast is kind of like .
Your episodes are just sitting on a shelf waiting for someone who already knows your show to come looking for it. So a podcast makes the people who already found you trust you more, but it can't really make strangers find you for the first time, which is why podcasters tend to end up marketing their podcasts on social media anyway, and now you're back on that treadmill.
So let's score the podcast. Trust before the conversation? Yes, it's best on the list by a mile so far, genuinely.
Can you keep it up? Also yes. Talking into a microphone once a week is actually pretty doable, but the right people and the right moment?
No and no, because nobody new ever shows up. So that's two passes and two fails. And look at which two.
Podcasts pass exactly the questions that Google search fails and Google search passes exactly the questions that podcasts fail, which means we now know exactly what we're looking for. Something with a podcast depth where people spend real time with you and something with a search engine's discovery where strangers can find you at the exact moment that they need help.
Something that doesn't disappear in a day that you can actually keep up with. and control. And one of the most successful podcasters I know figured this out too recently.
So I don't know if you've ever heard of Amy Porterfield, but she was actually a pretty huge inspiration for me and helped me make my pivot from relying solely on client work to selling what I know in the form of digital courses. I first found her on her podcast. It was probably 10 years ago.
It's one of the biggest marketing podcasts in the world. And she's got, I think, tens of millions of downloads. And she did it audio only for more than 10 years.
And she really didn't just avoid video. She like really vocally avoided it. She'd always say how she never felt comfortable on video.
You know, she wasn't comfortable with her weight and she just didn't want to show up like that and have to do all her makeup and all the stuff that women feel like they have to do on video. And her podcast truly built an empire for her. So if anybody on earth had proof that you could become a known expert without video, it was her.
But then earlier this year, she announced on her podcast that she was going to be going all in on YouTube. Why? What changed?
I mean, nobody talked her into it. She just saw her own numbers, and that made up her mind for her. So her podcast, she had found, was still feeding the audience that she already had.
it had pretty much stopped bringing any new people in. Even with her name on it, and she is a pretty big name now, strangers just weren't finding their way in anymore. And I love this quote that she said when she was telling people that she was going to finally do the thing that she'd been scared of for years.
She said, And I love that quote. That's just the most perfect encapsulation of YouTube, right? Don't let your fear stop you from doing the thing that works.
So if one of the biggest, most successful podcasts saw the need to pivot over to YouTube, that's pretty telling. But this isn't about her story or any one person's opinion. I want to put YouTube through the exact same four questions that we just put everything else through so you can judge this for yourself.
Criteria one, does YouTube reach the right people? Yes, because here's the thing about YouTube. People always want to lump it in as social media, but underneath everything, it's a search engine, right?
People type their exact problem into it, and your video can come up as the answer. Remember the whole problem with social media? You know, you're putting yourself in front of strangers who didn't really ask?
This is the opposite of that. They came looking. and there you were.
Finding you was their idea, just like with the Google search. And then it gets even better because the algorithm is watching all of this. It looks at who watched your video, it learns what those people have in common, and it goes out and it finds more people just like them, and it puts your video in front of them too.
So the prospecting runs in the background while you're off doing other stuff. Strangers that have the exact same problem that you solve are delivered to your videos day after day without you doing anything after making it and posting it. Criteria two, does it show up?
when they need you? Well, the moment they need you is the search. Somebody's problem finally gets annoying enough or scary enough that they sit down and they type it out.
You know, maybe it's a Sunday night and the thing that they've been putting off all month just boiled over. Whatever it was, that exact moment, the one that referrals can only reach by luck and social media can't reach at all, that's the moment that YouTube shows them your video. And the person whose video comes up in that search, that doesn't feel like an ad to them.
It feels like help right when they need it. All right, criteria three. Does it build trust before you talk?
Well, people see your face. They hear your voice. They watch how you handle a question, how you explain a complicated thing simply, and how you think.
Not for three seconds on a scroll. for 10 or 20 minutes at a time. It's got the depth of a podcast, which we want, plus it has the extra addition of your face and your body language, not just your voice on it.
And remember how written posts really only communicate at 7%. With video, you're giving them the whole hundred percent.
And there's a second half to that seven hours idea, because the hours don't usually show up all at once. They stack up across separate encounters with you. So we call those touch points, and the research says you need to make around 11 of them on average.
But touch points aren't really created equal. They can be weighted depending on the quality and depth of where each is coming from.
So a text post that's scrolling by somewhere, let's just call that one point. But a 15 minute video where somebody's watching your face, they're hearing your voice and following your thinking through their exact problem, that's not even just a few points. That's a different category of touch point altogether because all the signals that someone uses to size you up is running the whole time.
I call this touch point density. In other words, how much trust does one interaction actually build?
Because by that math, one good video, that's gonna beat dozens of posts and emails put together. And Google's own research backs that up. So people are 98 % more likely to trust a recommendation they get on YouTube over any other platform.
And here's where this is going to get really good for you. So the seven hours and the 11 touch points are what trust costs when it's built out of traditional encounters. You know, things like posts, ads, emails.
But when you rack up enough dense touch points, some buyers won't need the full seven hours at all. So that trust threshold just comes early because every encounter they had with you was doing so much more heavy lifting. So those really dense touch points you get with video, they don't just build more trust, they build it faster and that shortens your whole sales cycle.
So yeah, YouTube can build lots of trust. All right, criteria four, can you keep it up? Yes, if you know what you actually need to make.
So the pace to keep up with on YouTube is just one simple video a week, not three posts a day, one video about 10 minutes long. once a week. That's a pace a real person with a real business can actually make work.
But the bigger reason is what happens to each video after you post it. So unlike a social post, which we said just, you know, poof disappears the next day, a YouTube video doesn't because all the other social platforms run on recency. The feed really only cares about what got posted in the last day or two, and everything older than that just sinks, which is why you're stuck on that treadmill forever.
But YouTube doesn't run that way because search behavior is built right into the platform. People show up with their problem, they type it in, and then YouTube's job is just to serve them the best answer, not the newest one. So when you make evergreen videos, you know, the kind that answer questions that people are always searching for, a video you made two years ago is gonna be competing right alongside one you posted last Tuesday.
And when a new person shows up with that exact problem, YouTube is gonna hand them your video no matter how old it is. There's a guy on YouTube named Jeff Su, and he made a video about how to write a resume. That video is five years old, it's got four million views, and it's still picking up new views every single day.
It probably took him like a day to make that video, and it's just been working for him ever since. So every single week you post, you can have one more video there working for you, stacking up instead of disappearing.
So let's add it all up. YouTube is four for four and nothing else on our list passed more than two. This is where known experts are born.
Now, a few years back, I read a book that really changed how I think about business. It's called 10X is Easier Than 2X. I don't know if you've heard of that or read it, but if not, the idea is really simple.
So it just says that if you set out to double your business, you're mostly gonna end up doing more of what you're already doing. You know, more posting, more outreach, more calls, more hours squeezed out of the same week. But if you were to set out to 10x your business, more of the same stuff can't get you there, right?
A goal that big pretty much forces you to find a completely different path. And the surprising part that the book argues is that the bigger goal is actually the easier one because instead of just pushing a little harder on everything you're doing, you basically drop most of it and you go all in on the one thing that's got the biggest upside.
And I've used this idea in my business more than once. tripled my business twice over the years. And both times I actually was able to do that, it came from walking away from something that was working okay and just going all in on something new.
It was never from grinding harder at the stuff that I was already doing. And if you're an expert who isn't on YouTube yet, this is about as pure a 10x play as you can find. Every other option we went through is pretty much a 2x play, right?
Where growing just means giving it more of your time. This is the one where you change direction once and then everything after that changes with you.
And it gets better from here because YouTube itself made a shift a while back that plays right into your hands. Now, it wouldn't be a video about YouTube without a MrBeast story. I'm sorry, and I promise this is the only one.
So if you don't know MrBeast, he's the biggest creator on YouTube. I think he still is, but he's got 380 million subscribers or something crazy like that. And not too long ago, his views took a really big hit.
You know, they were down by about half. And the YouTube world lost its mind over it because if the biggest channel on the entire platform just lost half its views, what hope is there for anybody else, right? But then the guy who manages MrBeast's business, he explained what actually happened.
People didn't actually leave YouTube. The algorithm had changed in a pretty smart way, actually. It stopped pushing the giant entertainment channels to everybody.
and it started routing viewers to the more niche down topics that they actually care about. So if you watch business videos, you get shown more business videos. If you watch more fitness videos, you get more fitness.
I happen to be pretty much square in the cruise video crosshairs, so they show me a ton of videos about cruises. But just notice how backwards all that panic was, right? Everybody looked.
at the biggest channel losing views and thought that that meant the whole platform was shrinking. And nobody asked the obvious follow -up question, where did those views go? And make no mistakes, YouTube's overall views actually went up, so somebody got them, and that somebody was thousands of smaller, more specific channels.
So the opportunity didn't shrink, it just moved toward experts. You know, channels exactly like the one that you'd be starting. And one more thing, because this is where it gets almost unfair.
So your videos won't just be working on YouTube. Remember a few minutes ago when I said that Google is now putting something else? pretty high in the search results page, usually above website listings, they're putting YouTube videos there because Google owns YouTube and it knows that for a lot of searches, even on Google, people would want a video to answer it.
So while it's burying websites under the AI boxes and ads and forums, it gives your videos that super coveted top of fold real estate that it took away from the websites. And there's actually one more distribution channel that didn't even exist a couple years ago and it's growing fast, AI itself. Because AI doesn't just answer questions anymore.
it recommends people. I don't know if you know this, but almost 30 % of Google's AI answer boxes include a YouTube video because the AI reads everything you say in the video. So the same answer box that's pushing websites out is also showcasing YouTube videos.
And that's actually leading to real business for people. There's a guy, Jonathan Skarden, and he owns a gutter installation business in Tennessee. I think it's a few other states as well.
But anyway, a few years back, he set up a little spot in his garage and he got about 40 different gutter guards and he started testing them on camera, right, side by side. So he made all of these gutter review videos, he put them up on YouTube, and yes, people did find the reviews on YouTube and they watched him and they hired him, but...
Those videos also got pulled into the AI models. So somebody out there shopping for gutter guards, they ask Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude, you know, whatever AI they're using. they ask it for a recommendation about who can do the installation in Tennessee for me.
And because the AI systems were trained on all of his videos and they know what states he works in, they recommend him over and over again. And he actually gets a lot of his business from those AI recommendations now. And it's all because he did the YouTube videos.
Now I think my YouTube story might be useful for you because it's about as clean a test as you're ever gonna see. Because normally when a business takes off, you can't really pinpoint exactly what did it.
Maybe the owner got better, maybe they raised their prices or changed the offer, the market picked up, and maybe several of those things were happening around the same time. So good luck figuring out which one made the difference. But my business wasn't like that.
My skills didn't change, neither did my services or my prices. Only one thing was different. Before, I didn't do YouTube.
then i did do youtube so when the results flipped and they flipped pretty hard we know exactly what caused it so let's go back to when i moved my web design business from la to chicago my google rankings were gone wasn't even in the top 20 anymore and i pretty much stopped getting any new inquiries from my website and i want you to understand how scared i was this was not like hmm, business is a little slow this quarter.
The way I'd gotten business for years, the only way I really knew how, just didn't work anymore. I was like, do I need to get a job? And that thought gave me serious anxiety.
I loved working for myself. So it wasn't just money stress. It felt like the ground was moving underneath me.
So here's the dumb truth about how my YouTube channel started. And I'm telling you this part just so. that you can hear how unimpressive it was.
It was basically just a Hail Mary SEO play to try to get my site back in the top three. Because I had heard that putting YouTube videos on your website could help your Google rankings. You know, Google likes pages with video on them and they own YouTube.
And I was hearing, you know, for whatever reason, uploading a video to YouTube, then embedding it on your site was supposed to... work for better SEO. So the early videos I made, they were just meant to prop up my website and nobody was even really supposed to even watch them.
I didn't really believe in YouTube and I wasn't like ready to make videos. I only did it because I was out of better ideas. And I want that on the record right now because later in this video, you might be tempted to think that this all worked out for me because somehow I'm built for this.
And I promise you, I was not. I was just a scared web designer. kind of trying to claw my way back into Google's good graces.
So I just started making these little videos that were answering the most common questions that my clients were always asking me and, you know, other things that I thought would just make good videos. Like, remember I told you I made ones about website trends that only other web designers ever watched? Point is, I didn't really have a plan, but after maybe three or four months of posting these kind of videos, something else happened.
People started finding me on YouTube itself, not even through my website. Strangers in other cities were watching videos that I'd made to impress Google, and they were scheduling consultations with me.
And those phone calls that I would get from the people who found me on YouTube were a night and day difference to how they'd gone before. Remember how I said the old calls were pretty much just me auditioning where I had to prove myself from zero every single time? And it always came back to the price question.
But these new calls opened with things that I had never heard in my life. Things like, you know, I can't believe I'm really talking to you. I feel like I know you.
One guy even said, oh my God, you're real. I mean, he was probably joking, but you know, still people were like genuinely excited to be talking to me because they'd been watching me. They'd been learning from me for months.
And think about what those sentences actually are because that is... those deep levels being said out loud from real buyers. For someone to say, I feel like I know you, that's the definition of level four.
And I hadn't been doing anything for those months other than my usual work and a few extra hours a week making that week's video. They'd been watching them while I was just going about my business, you know, working and living my life. But by the time we got on the phone or on Skype, they were already 90 % sold.
That's level five. The price grilling just completely went away. I mean, they would ask, but it was never as early in the conversation and I didn't get anywhere near, you know, the level of pushback on it anymore.
I didn't really have to prove myself on these calls now. And the question changed from why should we pick you to, you know, how do we start? Can you fit us in?
And I got to be honest about how it felt getting there because it was slow. You know, you do all the work feeling like no one's watching because Like I said, I didn't really even count on anybody watching.
And you do start to see those little view numbers, you know, ticking up, but it doesn't feel real until you're on the phone with someone who's been watching your videos and suddenly all that work was for something. People are watching, and never forget, these are real people watching you. They're not just numbers on a screen.
So when this all started, my business was doing about 60 ,000 a year. Last year, it did over a million. So 60K to a million, that's about a 17 times jump.
So did I get 17 times better at what I do? Hell no. Well, honestly, the one thing I did get better at was making videos, but that part is inevitable.
You just get better at anything you keep doing. What grew my business was the visibility I was racking up. Video after video, stacking up over the years.
That is what made me known. But I know it's probably going through your head right about now because it goes through everybody's head at this exact spot. So some version of, sure, it worked for you, you're a marketing guy.
This is literally your field. Fair enough. So I want to show you what this looks like for real experts more like you, right?
People who started late, started small, in fields that looked full, and what happened when they went for it anyway. And I want to start with the number that stops more smart experts than anything. 500.
As in, 500 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every single minute. You hear that and the math feels finished before you even start, right?
It's too crowded, you're too late, how could anyone new possibly get noticed in all of that? That number is real, so I'm not going to wave it away or tell you it's fake. And 500 hours a minute is a genuinely enormous amount of video.
And if I just put a little knot in your stomach, if you're thinking of trying this before, It's a reasonable reaction to have, but that number really only tells you about the supply. What it leaves out is the demand side and what happens to all those uploads after their first week.
And that's the part that works completely in your favor. So 500 hours per minute makes it sound like you'd be competing against an endless army of videos. So let's actually follow that army for a minute just to see what happens to it.
About half of all new channels never make it past their third video. Think about that.
Three videos in, half the army is already off the table. Keep going, and about 90 % of the channels never post more than 10 videos, which means if you just upload 11 videos, congratulations, you're statistically in the top 10 % of active channels on YouTube. And business channels quit even faster than the regular ones, or they never really even got started in the first place.
Go take a look. at most company YouTube channels sometime. I wouldn't actually even call most of them channels.
They're more like these filing cabinets full of HR training videos and raw webinar recordings from 2019 with like 24 views on them. And can I say, I find those channels weirdly fascinating because every one of them is a company that knew it should be doing this, right? Somebody in a meeting said, we need to be on YouTube.
Then everybody nodded along, so they uploaded their three videos, and then the whole idea just died. Multiply that meeting across every industry in the whole world, and that's a huge slice of your so -called competition. We're talking probably millions of channels that got abandoned before anybody ever even knew they existed.
So yeah, the crowd at the front door of the party is huge, but the crowd that's still standing there at video number 11? It's almost nobody. All that quitting, all those abandoned channels, all that noise is exactly what keeps serious people scared, and it's exactly what makes the handful of people who keep posting stand out so much.
You don't have to beat the crowd to the party, you just have to still be there after it ends. So let me show you what it looks like when a real expert just keeps showing up. I have a student in my YouTube to Clients Academy named David Jackson.
So David runs an SEO agency out of a pretty small town in Kansas. And for about 10 years, he did it the hard way, going to local networking events, relying on referrals, and calling up all of his old contacts just to drum up new business with them. And some of those months, he'd get four or five referrals and think, this is awesome, business is doing good.
And then those are the months... when you kind of stop marketing, right? Because you think it's always going to be this good.
So then for the next couple months, it'd be like, you know, one or two leads. And then he was scrambling to go networking again. And all the leads he would get, they came into the consultation asking the same thing.
Say it with me. How much does it cost? Just give me the price.
And he told me himself his close rate was terrible because those people weren't comparing expertise. They were comparing prices. there will always be someone out there who's going to beat you on price.
Now David was thinking about starting a YouTube channel for over a year. He talked about it all the time, but he never pressed record because he was afraid he wouldn't know what to say and afraid that he would sound like everyone else. Like how many other people were talking about SEO on YouTube?
Myself included. I used to talk about that. And that year where he was just kind of hemming and hawing, that cost him real money week after week, and he got nothing back for it.
And if you've been thinking about this for a while yourself, you know exactly what that year felt like. But one day he's like, enough's enough, I'm gonna record a video. And that video that he made could not have been any simpler.
He just opened up a screen, put himself in a little box in the corner, and he walked through exactly what his agency does for a client, click by click from his living room. And his first video was just 30 minutes of him optimizing a Google business profile. That's it.
No studio, no editor, no hook formula. Just a screen, a little box, and an expert who knows what he's doing. And the first few months were quiet.
And this is the stretch where most people give up because it feels like nothing's happening, right? It's the exact spot where half of all new channels quit. But David kept posting anyway.
Then around month four, the inquiries started coming in and they... pretty quickly started ramping up to where he was getting, you know, two to four a week every week with no ads, no paying for leads, nothing like that, all from the videos. And understand what happened at month four.
Nothing about David had changed. He didn't get better at making videos that month, and he didn't crack some secret code. What did change is that by month four, there were enough videos out there that were findable, working around the clock, that the math finally tipped into his favor.
So the quiet months weren't really failure. That was the videos piling up. So I talked to him for a bit last year after he'd been on my program for a while.
And at that point, he had nine videos on the channel with about 100 subscribers and around 200 views per video. And in just one single month, that little channel brought him five new clients. Each one of them was worth between $18 ,000 and $30 ,000 a year.
which comes out to over $100 ,000 a year in new business from just one month's worth of inquiries. And his clients are on retainer. So every month as he adds new clients, they stack up.
So YouTube's a really lucrative marketing strategy for a business like that, especially. And just like with my story, his sales calls changed a lot too. You know, people who come through YouTube weren't asking him for the price anymore.
They're asking him for direction and for his opinion. because they've already decided he's the guy and they just want to know what to do next. And he got to that point with just nine videos.
And remember, 90 % of channels never get past 10. So David was pulling in six figures of new business before he even reached the wall where most people quit. Now, I'm not saying it would be the same for you.
There are a lot of factors at play here, but he wasn't doing anything all that special and his videos are still really simple. And he's stuck with it. He's up to about 40 videos now and he doesn't even post every week and he still gets all the business he can handle.
So here's how I want you to think about competition from now on. You are never competing with 500 hours a minute. The gaming channels aren't your competition and neither are the makeup tutorials or that weekend phone video with 12 views.
Your real competition is the small handful of channels in your specific lane that kept going past video 10. Go look at it sometime.
In most expert niches, that's maybe five or 10 channels and that's it. Not millions of creators, but a group that you could fit around a table. That is the whole army that that 500 hours number had you picturing.
And even that little group is softer than it looks because in some niches, half of those channels haven't even posted in like a year or more. So yeah, they're on the list, but they're not exactly in the race.
And I know the next thought, because I'd have it too, you might be thinking, okay, but those five or 10 channels, they're ahead of me. They have the head start on me now. Sure, and every single one of them started behind somebody else too, right?
The list isn't closed, but it is short because it costs the one thing most people won't pay. You have to keep posting past video 10, through the quiet months after everybody else stops.
And think back a little bit ago to that little flinch that you might've felt when I told you that YouTube is the best way to build your expert brand. A lot of people watching this probably felt that little flinch too. And they probably left right then and there.
Multiply that across every expert who's ever considered doing this. That is why your lane is open. the crowd thins itself out all on its own all the time.
You know, most people can't get past the discomfort and the camera fear, so they never start. Or they make three or four videos, don't see results, and then quit. Which means...
The few people who can stomach it end up with the whole field to themselves. And look at what's actually guarding the door here. It isn't talent or money, and it isn't some head start you missed five years ago.
The only thing standing between most experts and this whole opportunity is nothing more than a feeling. Think about how rare that is, because almost every other edge in business something real like money or connections or a decade of grinding.
But this one's guarded by a feeling that's gonna be strongest in your first few videos that then fades. So the best known expert in your industry is not necessarily gonna be the most talented person in it. It's just gonna be one of the handful of people who didn't let their comfort zone dictate their strategy and they kept showing up.
So the math says there's plenty of room for you, but I know the thought that survives all that math because room isn't really what keeps most experts hidden. Even if there's space for you, why would anyone want to watch you? I hate how I look on camera.
I'm just not interesting. Nobody cares what I have to say. If any of that's going on in your head, you are so not alone.
I think this is the biggest reason that people have for never starting a channel. I have students making great money from their channels who still feel aversion of it every time they hit record. And you know what I say to them?
Do you have friends? Do you have clients? Are there people who call you for advice and end up staying on the phone longer than they planned because talking to you about this stuff actually helps them?
Is there somebody in your life, either a friend or a client, who whenever a certain kind of problem shows up, you're the call they make. I'm going to guess yes, which means people already choose to listen to you on purpose.
Some of them literally pay you for it, right? You didn't get to where you are without being genuinely useful to talk to because you can't build an expertise business any other way. The evidence that people want to hear from you, it's right there.
It's in every client who stayed longer than the hour they booked and every friend who says, you know, Can I ask you something about XYZ before they even say hello? You have years of proof that you're worth listening to.
You just never counted it as proof because it happened one person at a time. And the people on YouTube, they're not a different species of human. They're just more of the same people.
The only difference is they haven't met you yet. So the question was never, why would anyone listen to me? Because people already do.
The real question should be, how do more of them find me? And that's not a personality problem, that's just a visibility problem, which is a much less scary problem to have.
A personality problem would mean something's wrong with you, and you'd have to become somebody else to fix it. A visibility problem just means the right people can't see you yet, and fixing that just takes a camera on the right topic. And whenever big personality standard is sitting in your head, nobody's asking you for that and nobody even wants it.
When somebody with a real problem finds your video, they're only asking one question and it's not, is this person charming or funny? It's, does this person get my problem? And can they help me with it?
That's it. Charisma doesn't answer their question. Real expertise and connoisseurship does.
Your regular office, your normal way of explaining things, the little stumbles here and there, none of it's going to cost you the viewer because a real person is exactly what they came looking for. Especially... with all the AI stuff that's out there now.
They just want your real, whatever that looks like. And this is not just me blowing sunshine at you because there's actual real research behind this. It's called the pratfall effect.
When someone's clearly competent, small imperfections make people like them more, not less. The occasional um or little mistake, the natural pauses, those things build trust because they're really human, right?
Or you could just edit them out if you wanted. It's not like anything you record has to go out unfiltered. You get to control that.
So it's just one less thing to be afraid of. And if your version of the fear is about how you look, I can prove that one doesn't matter either with your own watch history, actually. I get these comments all the time on my channel, people saying like, you know, I'll start once I lose 10 pounds.
And I actually had one guy say, just flat out that nobody wants to look at his ugly face. And I think he was just being self -depreciating, but I really hate when people say things like that about themselves.
And it's just not even true. But I did say I was going to prove this, so here's the test. So I want you to think of every channel you actually watch, and then ask yourself, how many of them do you watch because you think the person's hot?
None, right? You watch them because the content's good or they teach you something or they're just fun to have on. And not only do you not watch them for their looks, I'm going to go a step further and guess that you've never once even thought about their looks.
They are way more worried about how they look than you are. And it's going to be the same for you when you go to record as well. And I get it.
We as humans, we just have a weird thing about seeing ourselves. I was this exact same way when I started. I actually dreaded.
the editing part because that meant I had to actually watch myself back. And when you're not used to seeing yourself, it's just weird. And I do think it's easier now for most people than it used to be just because we're so used to being on Zoom calls thanks pandemic.
And I think we do tend to fixate on ourselves on the calls. We tend to like look at our own little square a lot. So you're probably a lot more comfortable seeing yourself now than I was then.
And just know if you do feel uncomfortable, so did every single YouTuber you can think of. Every one of them cringed at their own footage and they just made their videos anyway. So that feeling is not a sign you shouldn't do this.
It's just a sign you're a human person. And if you're still pretty sure that this is gonna work for everyone except you, I want you to meet Sherry.
Sherry is awesome. She is 77 years old. And before this, she had zero social media following, right?
She posted her very first YouTube video about losing her dog at 77 years old. And that video got 37 ,000 views. and around 500 comments.
That is her first video ever at 77 years old starting from absolutely nothing. And think about what those 500 comments actually means. That's around 500 people who didn't just watch a first timer.
They stopped what they were doing and they typed something out to her. The audience that's supposedly so impossible to impress showed up for a total beginner on day one because she was talking about something they cared about. And not one person in that comment section was grading her camera presence or her looks or her age.
She's not larger than life or putting on a show. She's just talking to you, the viewer, like a real person. So let's just be honest with each other.
The standard in your head has you facing off against like these super polished professionals with camera crews. But meanwhile, The real bar just got cleared by a 77 -year -old first timer with zero existing audience.
So if Sherry isn't disqualified from this, then nobody watching this video is, including you. Okay, so there are people who will want to watch you. The next question is how many of them you actually need.
That answer doesn't come from YouTube at all. It comes from your own business because you figured it out from a number you probably already kind of know. how many clients do you actually want this year?
So let's just say you want 50. Whatever your number is, the math is gonna work the same way. And 50 clients a year works out to about one a week.
So let's just go with that for our example here. And here's what makes that easier than it sounds. We know that leads who found you through your videos don't show up cold.
Now just to show you how this works, there's a gym owner named Jay whose YouTube channel has under 400 subscribers get an average like 250 views each. Yet his gym did over a million dollars last year.
So when someone books a call with him after watching his videos, about 70 % of those people sign up. And in my own experience and after talking to a lot of my students about it, that 70 % close rate seems to be the standard when they come from YouTube.
The other important number to note here is 1 out of 100. Meaning, in general, if your videos are made specifically for people that would need what you're offering, you can expect roughly 1 out of 100 of those viewers to be interested enough to actually go to your website and book a sales call with you.
Now let's just finish the math together. So if you want one client a week, that means you need about one and a half leads reaching out every week. So obviously you can't have half a lead, so for simplicity's sake, let's just go ahead and say you need two leads reaching out.
That's dropping you down to a 50 % close rate, so we're being super conservative here. Now to get those two leads reaching out, you would need about 200 viewers per week, right?
Spread across your entire catalog. And remember, Jay's videos average about 250 views each, so one of his videos covers a whole week's target all on its own. And yeah, 200 views a week may sound like a lot if you're brand new.
but it's 100 % doable if you stick with it and keep putting out weekly videos that stack up. One of my other students, Kayla, runs the Upwork Academy channel, and her channel is super new, like five months old, and she got to the point where she was getting hundreds of views a week, I think in her first three months or something like that.
And it doesn't work that fast for everyone, but it just shows you that with the right plan, you can get there faster than the average person. And another one of my students, Dean, his math is really adding up for him. He's a realtor up in Whistler, and his videos get somewhere between 100 and 200 views each, so he's definitely in that sweet spot.
And those little 150 -view videos bring him two or three solid leads every single week. And people are calling him up, and Dean actually told me that they say some version of like, you know, We've been watching all your videos, and we only want to work with you.
And just picture what that couple's doing leading up to that moment that they call. They're thinking about buying a property in Whistler, and it's a big decision, maybe the biggest they've ever made in their lives. So they start watching videos about it.
And there's Dean over and over, video after video, walking them through the neighborhoods and the market, the mistakes to avoid. So then by the time they're ready to act, hiring anyone else, would just feel weird.
They don't just want a realtor. They want the guy from the videos. And keep in mind, at this point, Dean has never met them or pitched them yet.
He didn't even know they existed. His 150 -view videos were doing the relationship building for him. One of those calls even turned into a $10 million client.
from a few hundred videos a week. So for what you're trying to do with YouTube, low views are not a failure. In fact, flip it around because when a channel's built the way Dean's is, low views are by design, right?
A video made only for Whistler buyers is supposed to be ignored by everyone who isn't one. So those 150 views aren't a small slice of a big audience.
They're almost the whole target market showing up on purpose. And Dean's channel, for only having about a thousand subscribers, out earns channels a hundred times its size. But Wes, I'm not trying to become a YouTuber here.
I'm trying to grow my business. Yes, that instinct is correct and it's going to save you a lot of wasted effort. Honestly, the experts that don't push back on that worry me more because they're usually about to spend a year or more copying all the wrong people.
So if some part of you has been digging in your heels about this, refusing to become a content creator, good. Stay a little stubborn because you're about to find out that was actually good judgment.
But there are two completely different jobs being done on YouTube and most experts struggle because they accidentally take the wrong job. So think about how an entertainer makes money on YouTube. They get paid through ads and sponsorships and ads pay based on how many people watch them.
So an entertainer needs millions of views just to make their business work. They need to pack the stadium every single week because that's their job.
And once you understand their job, all their little tricks start to make more sense. The crazy editing, the clickbait, the constant uploads. None of that's a personality quirk on their part.
It's what the ad business needs from them. And honestly, they're doing their job well. Now think about your job.
You're not selling eyeballs to advertisers. You are selling your expertise to clients. And one single client is worth more to you than a million random views.
And I'm not even exaggerating when I say that. When an entertainer gets a view, money comes with it because the view itself is the product the advertiser's paying for. Your money, on the other hand, only shows up in one way, and that's through a client.
And one client pays your actual bills, and a good one... keeps paying them, so you don't need the stadium at all. You need a few hundred of the right people watching.
And let's put some actual dollars on the entertainer's side of this, because the numbers are actually almost funny, right? The creator economy pays somewhere around two dollars for every thousand views and that's talking about the money that youtube pays on you know entertainment videos and adsense money and it's about the same in brand deals as well so two bucks per thousand views that is the going rate for attention right now so let's run the same math on your business model one client just one single client is going to be worth more than a hundred thousand views worth of that ad money probably a lot more.
Those attention businesses, the influencers and creators where the views are the product, this is the money their whole model runs on. Two bucks per thousand views, you're not in that business and you never have to be. Yet, almost all of the YouTube advice that's floating around out there is for the entertainment channels.
Once you know that, you can sort every piece of advice you've ever heard. So you have to post every day That's entertainer advice because an ad business starves without a constant flood of new videos.
Or, you know, jump on trends while they're hot. That's also entertainer advice because trends bring in the broad audiences and that's what advertisers pay for. And it's not worth it until you hit 100 ,000 subscribers is more of the same because subscriber counts help channels negotiate higher sponsorship rates.
None of those rules were ever about you and that's why the whole thing always felt so wrong to you. So every number the creator world obsesses over, you know, subscribers, viral moments, ad revenue, that's somebody else's scoreboard. But what if you have the kind of business where you think, you know, nobody's searching for what I do.
It's too specific or weird or even boring for YouTube. No, I don't know what your niche is. So all I can do is just show you what's actually out there because every one of these is a real channel on YouTube right now.
We have a vertigo specialist. There's teaches people how to grow fruit trees. There's a husband and wife team who do bee rescues.
So if you've got a hive living in your wall, they're going to come and get them out alive. There's a company that restores old gravestones.
There's a coach who helps people pass flight attendant job interviews, not job interviews in general, flight attendant job interviews. And my personal favorite, there's someone on there teaching people how to build a worm farming business. I got worms.
We're gonna specialize in selling worm farms. These are super niche and kind of weird, right? And maybe boring to 99 % of the world.
But it doesn't even matter because all of them found their audience anyway. And I'm not talking 12 views here. The smallest of these channels gets about 400 views a video and some of them get 10 times that.
And remember, your target was only about 200 a week. Because here's the thing about boring and weird. That's just what people on the outside would say about them.
Nobody with the actual problem is thinking that. I mean, if everything starts spinning every time you stand up and you find a channel run by an actual vertigo specialist, that is the best thing on the internet as far as you're concerned. And if you're trying to become a flight attendant, you're gonna be binging the hell out of a channel where someone with real experience is gonna help you get that job.
So in other words, your topic only sounds boring to the people who don't need it. those people weren't going to be your customers anyway. And I promise you, somewhere out there tonight, somebody is watching a worm farming video and thinking, finally, someone who takes this seriously.
So whatever your thing is, it fits because we all have our things, right? So now that you see that YouTube can actually work to make you the known expert, the only question left is how to actually do it. The system.
From here on out, it's all about the how. The whole plan. start to finish.
Now there are two things that are both true at the same time. First, it's never been easier to put yourself out there. You've got a phone, you can start a channel for free, and technically you could be on YouTube in the next 10 minutes.
There's no application, no interview, and nobody checks your credentials at the door. But second, it's never been harder to stand out. Nobody owes you views just for showing up and checking some boxes.
Now, most people only ever really internalize one of those two truths. And it probably breaks down along the lines of whether you're a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person. The people who only hear the first one think it's gonna be easy, so they just upload a bunch of random stuff, they get nothing, and then they quit confused.
And the people who only hear the second one, they're just more pessimistic about it, so they get intimidated up front and just never start. But look closer at those two groups, because they're both actually missing the exact same thing. The optimists didn't fail because YouTube's too hard.
They failed because they walked in with no plan. And a bunch of random uploads is exactly what no plan looks like.
And the pessimists didn't stay out of it because they were wrong about it being hard. They stayed out because hard with no path in front of you just looks like a wall.
So one group needed a plan and didn't know it, and the other group would have started if they'd had one. And that's what separates the channels that work from the ones that die off. It was never talent or luck or a fancy camera.
It's just a plan, and the rest of this video is all about that plan. Before the first step, though, I do want to set up the expectation that none of what's coming up is about becoming a YouTuber, right? Everything I'm going to show you, the videos, the gear, the schedule, all of it, it's there for one purpose, making you the known expert to the exact people who can hire you.
So every single decision from here on works toward that purpose. If something grows a channel but doesn't grow a business, It's not gonna be in this plan.
And you're gonna see me throw away a lot of really popular advice for exactly that reason. In fact, the very first decision coming up is one of those, so you're gonna see this working right away. And here's what's coming up ahead.
So you already picked the person your channel's for earlier. So we're going to pick up where you left off there. And everything ahead is really just doing one job.
And that job happens inside your buyer's head. So the topics we're going to pick are going to get your name attached to their problem. The camera is going to turn you from just a name they saw once into a person they feel like they've met before.
And the way the videos work together is what's going to stack up the hours that turn watching into trust stacking. exactly what to film first, we're going to solve the camera problem once and for all, and you're going to learn what makes your videos impossible to copy, how they chain together into a real funnel, how to fit all of this into your life that's already full, what gear you actually need, and the honest timeline of what happens when.
So by the end, you're going to know every step of the way. So let's get into it, starting with the very first decision you're going to face. Should you be doing shorts, longs, or both.
So you may think that shorts are the best place to start because, you know, maybe you heard that they get more views and subscribers and they just get more attention than long -form videos do. But here's the problem with shorts. They're basically the same thing as the social media posts that we talked about earlier.
A short gets its little burst of views, sometimes even a really big burst, and then it's gone, usually within a day or two. And think about what a short actually is. It's 30 seconds, maybe 60.
And remember what trust actually costs. Hours, not seconds, right? We did that math earlier and we saw that it takes more than 800 clips for one person to spend seven hours with you.
So becoming known takes real time with a person. 30 seconds has just been shown over and over again that it can't do that. But longer videos, 15 minutes at a time, can.
There's also a difference in how people watch, and it's worth noting because the two types of viewers are just really different from each other. So picture the average shorts viewer, right? They're filling up their car with gas, or they're killing time between Hulu ads, or they're waiting for the microwave to beep.
Their thumbs is just moving on autopilot, their brains half off, killing three minutes at a time. So your clip appears, plays for a couple seconds, and then just gets swiped away mid -sentence between whatever more entertaining clips the app thinks that they're going to like.
They're probably never going to think about you again. And honestly, they never really thought about you while it was playing either. But now I want you to picture the long video viewer, right?
They typed a problem into a search bar. Your title matched their problem and they chose to watch you. They're sitting still in the moment, you know, giving you real attention because they want help with something that's been bothering them.
One of those viewers can become a client and the other one barely knows you exist. And just so you can really see the difference here, there's a music teacher named Charles Cornell and he blew up on short form video practically overnight with millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers, which... You know, to most people, that's the goal they dream about.
But he's gone on record and said himself that almost nothing came out of all of that attention business -wise. So like the money and the student signups were basically zero. So think about how confusing that had to be from the inside, right?
He had done the thing that everybody's chasing and he won on the visible numbers. But the business those numbers were supposed to build just never showed up. he rebuilt his whole approach around deep, long -form YouTube education instead.
You know, real videos where somebody could actually sit with him and learn. And that's what finally turned viewers into a real business for him. The big flashy numbers couldn't pay his bills, but the long videos could.
And notice, we're talking about the same expert with the same exact knowledge on both sides of that story. The only thing that changed was the format. And that one change is the difference between an audience that swipes away and one that buys.
And honestly, that's the story pretty much everywhere. Shorts get views, sometimes a lot of them, but that's where the story usually ends. My own students come into our small group sessions all the time and they say things like, you know, my shorts are getting so many more views.
Like, why shouldn't I just be making them anymore? And then I just say, well, are they scheduling sessions with you? Are they booking with you?
And then the answer every time is no. So then when they go through the program and they actually do the kinds of videos they're supposed to make, the longer ones, like eight to 15 minutes, that's when they start getting the clients. Shorts just aren't it.
Now, the big channels post clips all the time and plenty of experts copy them. And for the ones copying, the honest question is just, how's that working out for you? Now, if your whole business is built around just getting attention, maybe it's okay, but I don't even know what kind of business that would be, right?
even if you're just an entertainment channel and all you want is ad money, what YouTube pays on short form per view is laughably low. I think it's like a hundred times less than the ad money you'd get from long form. And I do kind of get the impulse to, you know, chop up your longer videos into shorts.
The idea being, you know, if you already made the video, why not get some more traction out of it? But A, Again, people just kind of swipe past it and don't register you, so it doesn't really move the needle much to begin with.
And B, it's not like that doesn't take up any time, right? Sure, a lot of channels have teams doing the chopping for them, which maybe you have someone on your team that could do that for you, maybe not. Even if you did, you still have to pay that person, and is that really the best use of their time and your money?
I'd argue no, so even the popular middle path, you know, taking your long videos and chopping them up into little clips. isn't really worth your time when you're building. It steals your hours and it steals your attention and it buys almost nothing back.
I always say if you've got the time and energy to slice up last week's video, you've got the energy to make next week's full video. And that one's always going to be worth way more. Just remember which one goes on the shelf.
The long video is another book in your library still working years from now. And the clips are pretty much gone before the week is over. Now there is one good thing I can say about shorts.
It's pretty good for practicing your on -camera skills. Because like when you're brand new and recording yourself still feels scary, shorts are pretty low stakes. You know, they're quick.
They get you the reps of talking to a lens. And nobody really expects anything in the way of production value from a short, which makes it a really forgiving place to be bad for a little while. I actually think it's a pretty good idea for any new YouTuber to just, you know, pull out your phone every day for a month and make a quick short.
I wouldn't even bother editing it or adding text or anything if you don't have time. It's not really meant to go viral. It's literally just practice for you.
So use them as a warmup if you want. Just know that they're practice, not strategy. Okay, so you're gonna be concentrating on making long videos, which brings up the question everybody asks next.
Videos about what? And this messes a lot of people up because they either get completely blocked by it and just never know what to make so they end up making nothing or they answer the question way too fast. They grab the first thing they see and usually that means they're just copying the other videos they see in their niche and just put like a slight spin on it to make it their own.
So basically they're just rehashing other people's videos. But think about what this whole thing is for, right? The goal is becoming the known expert and you can't get there by just adding one more copy to the pile.
The other way people mess this up is a little sneakier and they don't usually even realize they're doing it. And that's they just start making videos about their own business, their services, the process, why you should hire them. And it never feels to them like they're making commercials.
It just feels like they're talking about what they do. But that's exactly what those videos come across as, little commercials. And nobody goes to YouTube to watch commercials.
And there is a third mistake, and this one's the sneakiest of the bunch because the videos it produces... seem exactly right. So the mistake is making too many solution videos.
What do I mean? What's a solution video? Well, it's any video that's all wrapped up in your solution, right?
Your method, your program, your process, the particular way you do the thing you do. You know, if you were to make a video like, you know, inside my four -phase retirement planning process, or what makes my coaching program different, or a walkthrough of how I work with couples. And it's not that these are commercials per se, they're genuinely educational, they lean into your expertise, and they're the most natural videos in the world for an expert to want to make because your own solution is the thing you know best.
And that's what makes this mistake so sneaky and so common. The problem is who those videos can actually reach. So a solution video really only lands with somebody who already knows they need your kind of solution.
They've already diagnosed themselves, they've already decided that an advisor or a coach or a counselor is their answer, and now they're comparing options. Now that person does exist and you do want them, but they're just such a small slice of everybody who would ever be able to hire you. Everyone else, the ones who pretty much only know that something feels wrong right now, They're gonna scroll right past that video because your video is answering a question they haven't asked yet.
Most of your future clients are not thinking of solutions at this stage. At any given moment, only about three to 5 % of your future buyers are actively shopping for a service like yours right now. Those guys are the ones who are actively comparing providers.
The other 95 to 97 percent, they know something's wrong in their life or their business, but they don't know what the solution is and they're just looking for answers at this point. So where's everybody else? Well, they're just earlier in the buyer journey.
And that journey really has three stages. Stage one is problem aware. So this person only knows something's wrong, right?
Think of the gym owner who's lying awake because 10 more members canceled this month. He's not searching for a business coach. He doesn't even know coaching is the thing he needs right now.
He's just typing in, why is my gym losing members? So a problem aware video meets him right there. It names what's happening to him and starts explaining why.
That would be like Dana, our business coach for gym owners, making a video called something like why your gym is losing members. Then stage two is solution aware. Now they know fixes exist and they're weighing their options.
You know, Tom, our financial advisor, and the couple that's wondering if they can actually afford to retire. At this stage, they know they probably need help. They're just not sure what kind yet.
Do they need a financial advisor or just software? Are they going to do it themselves? So a solution -aware video from Tom might compare the paths, something like, do you need a financial advisor to retire?
And stage three is decision -aware. And here, they know that they want the thing you sell, and now they're just deciding who to get it from. So picture a marriage counselor, let's call her Rachel.
Her couple already decided on counseling, and now they're wondering what it's actually like, what it costs, and how to pick somebody. So Rachel makes a video called what to expect in your first couples counseling session. That video meets people at the exact moment of choosing.
So now look at where the crowds actually sit. The biggest one by far lives up at problem aware. And that's exactly where the fewest videos actually get made because everybody's down at the other end, just kind of fighting it out for the little three to 5 % pond.
But when you talk to the something's wrong people, you become the person who named their problem for them. And that's super powerful. You met them months before your competitors even knew they existed.
And watch what those 95 percenters do between now and the day they're finally ready. They watch a video, then another one, and they start to understand their own situation better using your words. By the time they become one of the 5%, they're not starting their search, they're ending it.
And their shortlist has exactly one name on it. You are their natural first step, not the guy running ads, you, because you've been helping them all along and you're the expert they know. And one thing to keep straight here because these two ideas can blur together.
This is all about who your video meets, where that person is in their own journey. How YouTube spreads your videos around is a completely different thing and we are going to get to that in a bit. And this is where that AI idea from earlier pays off for your topic list.
AI basically took over all of the shallow, casual questions, right? The definitions and quick lookups. So your topics should start exactly where AI stops.
I'm talking about where the question gets serious, personal, and specific to somebody's real situation. You know, something like, what is a 401k? That belongs to the chatbots now.
But can we actually afford to retire? That still belongs to a person they trust now more than ever. And every stage of that journey aims at the same person, just at different points in the buyer journey.
But here's some good news. Remember, you already did the hard half of this earlier when you picked your person. So you're not walking in without a filter.
You're walking in with your person in mind from the start. So rather than asking, what do I make videos about? Ask a different set of questions.
You know, what does your person ask you on every call? What do they always get wrong? What do you find yourself explaining over and over and over again?
That's your topic list. It already exists. So let's get back to Rachel, our marriage counselor.
What do couples ask Rachel in almost every first session? Probably things like, is it normal to fight this much? Or how do I get my husband to actually open up?
Or like, you know, can you just tell him he's wrong? I mean, you get it. The same questions come up all the time with clients.
So her topic list isn't something that she has to invent on a whiteboard somewhere. It's literally her last 20 Tuesdays in a row. And it's probably like that for you too.
You know, your perfect topics are sitting in your inbox right now and they're in the questions that you answer in every discovery call. The wrong idea. that you correct in every first meeting with a new client, and the thing that you've explained so many times that you have a little speech for it.
Experts always think making content means inventing something new, when really, it's closer to just writing down the thing you already say. Now there's also a second reason that you wanna stay locked in on one person, and it comes down to how YouTube itself works. When the same kind of viewer keeps showing up and watching your videos, YouTube learns who you're for.
And once it learns that, it starts showing your next video to more people just like them on its own without you doing anything. So each video feeds the next one. So your 10th video launches with an advantage that your first one didn't have because YouTube already kind of knows who to show it to now.
You know, it's that snowball finally starting to roll. But watch what happens if our marriage counselor starts bouncing between different audiences. So one week she posts a video for couples who can't stop fighting.
Then next week it's red flags to watch for while you're dating, which, you know, that's a video for single people. Then it's how to co -parent after a divorce, which is for people whose marriage is already over. And then maybe she throws in one about how she built her counseling practice.
And that one isn't even for clients. That's for other therapists. See, every one of those topics is inside of her own expertise, but they're all aimed at a completely different type of person with a different set of problems.
So that single person watching the red flags video has absolutely no use for the co -parenting one. And the couple that's trying to save their marriage? doesn't want either of those videos.
Now think about the algorithm side of it. So YouTube watched her, you know, how to stop fighting video and it started figuring out who likes it. Then she handed the algorithm a video for somebody who isn't even married yet.
So who is YouTube supposed to show that to? When the algorithm's confused, it doesn't push it at all. So the snowball just stalls out.
And every time you switch audiences, you just throw away everything the algorithm had learned from your last few videos. Now, I watched this exact thing play out up close. There's a relationship coach named Meadow DeVore who I was in a YouTube mastermind group with.
So I got to see this shift happen in real time. And she was making these general self -improvement videos, everything from, you know, improving your self -worth, setting boundaries, and getting over having your heart broken. It was good stuff and it was getting good views, but nothing was really taking off for her yet.
Then one day she posted a video about how to spot a narcissist and it spiked. That video got way more views than anything else on her channel. And at first she kind of just figured it was a fluke and she went back to her usual mix of the rest of her topics.
And honestly, that's such a human thing to do, right? The data points one way, but she went the other because the usual mix felt... more like who she was.
And most people do that and just kind of discount what the data is telling us because it doesn't feel right. But anyway, every time she came back to narcissism videos, those ones were always her, you know, one out of tens. So the same fluke kept happening, which is the point where it's not a fluke anymore.
So she eventually took the hint and she committed. And every single video from that point on was all about spotting and dealing with narcissists. And that one shift took her videos from getting an average of like a thousand views to getting tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and some of her videos actually have over a million views.
And Meadow's got over 110 ,000 subscribers now. She didn't suddenly get more talented halfway through that story. All she did was locked in her direction and YouTube finally knew who to put her in front of.
And by the way, as I was putting all this together, I realized that Meadow's the second channel I've talked about so far that deals with helping people with narcissists. The first guy, Ross Rosenberg, that we talked about before, he's still bigger in that space, but I wanted to throw Meadow in here too, not just to tell you that story, but also to show you that there is room for more than one known expert in a niche.
And they can all get all the business they can handle from it. So now Ross and Meadow are both selling books and booking tons of clients through YouTube in a pretty narrow niche together. And just to show you how narrow Elaine's allowed to get, there's a pharmacist named Dr.
Megan who built her whole channel. around one single medication, prednisone. She doesn't talk about medication in general, just prednisone, nothing else.
Things like, you know, how to handle the side effects, how to taper off of it, what to eat while you're on it. And she's got around 20 ,000 subscribers and over 4 million total views. And that super narrow channel built a six -figure business for her where she charges 200 bucks for a 15 -minute consultation with her.
Do the math, that's $1 ,000 an hour, not bad. And she also sells a supplement that you're supposed to take alongside prednisone that she developed. So between those two revenue streams, her channel more than replaced her pharmacist's salary.
So much so that her husband was able to retire based on the new income, and this is all in a niche where she legally isn't even allowed to run a single ad. And here's why it works. It's not that she's the best pharmacist in the world.
There are thousands of pharmacists out there with the same license. And just statistically, I would guess plenty of them know more about medicine in general than she does. But none of it matters because none of them did the work.
to get known for it. Certainly not known for this one specific medication. She picked a lane so specific that she's the only one in it.
And picture her viewer for a second, because this is where being narrow stops feeling small. Just imagine somebody got prescribed prednisone, right? They're worried, they're searching, and they find an entire channel exactly about their situation from a pharmacist who has actually been on the medicine that they're on.
Now, there's no way that that person keeps shopping around. In a broad lane, you're competing with everybody who has your job title. When you get narrow, you're usually the only one who showed up.
And the narrower it is, the more completely you get to own everyone in it. So once you've got your person in your lane, there's a simple question that keeps you in it. Before any new video idea, ask yourself, would the person who watched my last video want this one too?
If the answer is yes, you're definitely building momentum. But if the answer is no, that idea probably belongs on a different channel. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
It's just not the video you should be making right now. So think of Dana, our gym business coach. So let's say that she gets to brainstorming and she has a video idea about her favorite productivity apps and she's excited about it.
She'd actually enjoy making that video. But with the gym owner who watched her last video about filling their gym, Want a personal productivity video?
Probably not because that's a different viewer with a different need. It's a fun idea, but for a different channel. So she lets it go and she makes a different next video that's much more specifically for her person.
That little gut check takes about 10 seconds before every video, and it protects everything that the last 10 videos you made taught the algorithm about who you're for. And that makes it the best, cheapest insurance in this whole plan. And I know that staying on a narrow path can feel like you're giving something up, right?
Like you're closing a door on people who you could genuinely help. You know, you've spent a career being able to help all kinds of people, and now some guy on YouTube is just telling you to pick one? But here's the real truth about those doors.
The wide open version of your channel actually lets less people find you because a channel for everybody trains the algorithm on nobody. So those doors may look wide open, but nobody was actually coming through them. And Dr.
Megan probably felt that way too before her niche turned into a six -figure business. So the narrow lane toward becoming truly known for something. So you've picked your person and their questions give you a pile of topics to at least get you started for your first 10 to 20 videos.
Now there's one rule that ties everything in this section together and it's the rule that I probably repeat more than any other. Most of your videos should package the problem and then let your method live inside the video as the answer.
And okay, so I'm gonna be using the word packaging a lot in the rest of this video. So let's just define it real quick. Your packaging is the part that people see before they click, aka your title and thumbnail.
Together, those things are your packaging. It's the storefront window. So their problem goes in the front window and then your method, your approach, your actual solution All of that waits for them inside.
Now watch how this plays out for Dana. So her instinct might be to make a video that's all about her own framework that she came up with that she calls the Momentum Method. And her idea is to title it something like The Momentum Method Explained.
And that method might genuinely be the best one on earth, right? Her clients could swear by it because it actually works at keeping their members active. But...
Nobody out there has ever typed momentum method into a search bar because Dana made the name up. And the only people who've ever heard of it are already paying her. You know what a gym owner does type in midnight after another member cancels?
Why is my gym losing members? Or how to stop losing members at my gym? So either of those would be a much better title.
And she still gets to keep the whole framework in the video. She can even name it and tell people about it. inside the video after she got him in the front door.
based on the problem as the packaging. And every topic you pick this way is doing the same thing for you. It's tying your name to their problem a little tighter every time.
That is how you actually get known for fixing it. And this is one of those things that's in the free kit that I'm including here. So there is a worksheet in there for turning your client's questions into your first video topics.
The link is in the description below, or you can snap the QR code on your screen to get your hands on it. So topics and titles aside, let me give you the next big piece of advice I have about packaging your videos. Ideally, you wanna figure out what your thumbnail's gonna be before you plan the video.
If you can picture a thumbnail that would make your person click on it, you've got something. And if you were to sit there and you just can't come up with anything that would actually sell it, I say don't even make that video because if the packaging can't sell it, the video was never gonna get clicked on anyway. And while we're talking about click -worthy thumbnails, let me just show you what that actually looks like these days because it has changed.
For the longest time, the winning style was loud. Screaming colors, big arrows, that shocked YouTube face. Everything was just fighting to be seen.
And that can still work for entertainment channels, and a lot of business channels are still copying that style just because it's what they grew up watching. But it's actually flipped around. Here's what wins now.
Much more real. fewer bright colors, more real environments, you know, more neutral facial expressions, maybe a short counterintuitive statement or a visual that hints at a story. In other words, loud got replaced by thoughtful and interesting.
And for you, that's a gift because interesting is what gets clients. Nobody's going to be booking a discovery call because your thumbnail had the brightest yellow background on the page. Now, there is some pretty popular advice out there that says that you should actually design your thumbnail first, fully finished, before you script a single word.
Full honesty, I don't actually do that myself, and I don't even really sketch anything out up front either. But what I do before I script a video is I at least come up with a rough concept. You know, what the thumbnail's gonna be, roughly what it'll say, and I write that down, and then I make the real thing later.
closer to when I published the video. And the good news is, AI is really good at this part now. ChatGPT can brainstorm thumbnail concepts with you, and then in the same chat, it can actually make the thumbnail.
All you have to do is just give it a photo of yourself. Ideally, you wanna be like making the same face in the photo that you want to be making in the thumbnail, tell it which concepts you want to see, and it's going to put together something that looks legitimately good.
And the coolest part of that is you can ask it for like five or ten concepts at the same time, so you've got a bunch of options in just a couple minutes that are honestly way better than you'd get for most thumbnail designers out there. So you can actually make the thumbnails whenever you want, but you at least want to decide on the direction first.
Okay, so that's the packaging which carries us right into how your videos should start. So remember, your video's packaging made a promise to the viewer and your video has to pick up right where that left off. So don't open with your name or your resume or, you know, thanks for coming guys, it means so much you're watching this, be sure to like and subscribe for more comments like this, blah, blah, blah.
We're not gonna do any of that. If somebody clicks a video about their problem and the first thing they hear is, Hi, I'm Tom.
I'm a certified financial planner with over 20 years experience. Welcome to my channel where I talk about all things finance. They're going to click away so fast.
And it's not because Tom isn't qualified. It's because for those few seconds, the video was basically the Tom show. And the viewer doesn't know Tom.
Sorry, they don't know you yet, which means they don't care about you. Not going to sugarcoat that. They don't care about you.
until they do. But for now, they came for themselves. So you want to open by saying their struggle in their words, because whenever someone hears their own 2 a .m.
worries said back to them, almost word for word, something interesting happens in their head, right? They start thinking, this person gets me. And that thought in the first 30 seconds of your video is worth more than any credentials you could ever list out.
So Tom's video should open with something like, if you're in your 60s, you've been saving for 30 years, and you still aren't sure you actually have enough saved to retire, this video is for you. And that couple that Tom's talking to, they just heard the question that they keep wondering to each other come out of a stranger's mouth.
The credentials can come later in a single easy sentence, but the recognition has to come first. And let me tell you exactly where later is because there is a right spot for it. Your credentials should come fairly early, just not first.
We've already talked about why. But once they know you get their situation, that's when you can slip them in. And that's the way you want to do it.
It should feel more like a story as opposed to a resume. So instead of saying, I'm a certified planner with two decades of experience, it really should be more like... in my 20 years of doing this with couples, here's what I keep seeing.
Or even just something as simple as, I was working through this exact thing with a client last week. You feel the difference? You know, one's like you're pointing to a plaque on the wall, and the other is a person showing you how this goes for other people all the time.
And honestly, just mentioning client work is usually enough of a credential because it tells the viewer that somebody pays you for this, but you never had to say it like that. And you also want to watch your language. You know, I don't...
mean like swearing that's up to you some experts do because they know their clients don't care and you know they want to be the most real version of themselves but i would say most professionals on youtube try to stay away from swearing just because you never know who you may offend right but what i really mean is just not talking above your viewers heads right your viewers aren't experts and that's exactly why they need you And this one can actually be pretty hard to catch and it's not even your fault.
You know, you've spent so many years around your colleagues and you all speak your industry's language. So at some point, the vocabulary stopped sounding like vocabulary to you. It's just your normal words now.
But there's actually a famous saying about this. I think Einstein said it actually. And he said, if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough.
So no industry jargon, no acronyms your clients don't actually use. So for our marriage counselor, Rachel, her clients have never once come up to her asking for evidence -based couples interventions. They ask her, how to stop having the same fight every week.
So if her titles in her videos are full of that conference vocabulary, the couple who actually needs her, they're just going to scroll right past. And it's not because they disagree with what she's saying. It's just because they don't see their own life reflected back in those words.
And if you've been speaking expert for so long that you can't even hear yourself doing it anymore, This is another great thing that AI is really good at. Just paste in whatever you wrote and ask it to rewrite it at a lower level.
So I've actually played around with this a lot, asking for different grade levels. And seventh grade is what seems to work best in most cases. It's high up enough that it doesn't actually sound childish or anything.
It just sounds like the words that a real person would say in a normal conversation. So it's going to be easy to understand and your viewers are subconsciously going to appreciate that. So yeah, plug your words into Claude.
Claude is the better writer, at least right now it is. And it's gonna do a nice little rewrite for you. Okay, so that's your packaging and your language handled.
And all of it's doing the same thing, just making sure that the right person can look at your video and know in a second that it's about their problem, which leaves the one thing that's still standing between you and all of it, the camera. Now you may be kind of scared of talking to a camera if you're not used to it or at the very least you might be nervous.
So let's talk about that because what feels like one big fear is actually two separate ones and they each have a different answer. Fear number one is I'm not good on camera but fear number two is what if people see me fail?
So let's take those one at a time. First of all, being good on camera isn't really what you think it is, not for the known expert anyway. It's not a performance and it's not about having big energy.
Our only job on YouTube is holding on to one person who already came looking for us. Some of the most successful known experts on YouTube are actually pretty soft -spoken and calm and honestly, You might even call some of them boring.
But they win anyway because of one skill. They're able to talk to the camera like there's a real person on the other end of it. Because make no mistake, there is.
There's always one specific person on the other side of that lens, sitting on their couch or at their desk on their phone. And they have the exact problem you solve. And that just...
talking to the camera and being able to relate to it like it's a person, that's what being good on camera really means for people like us. Look at Chris Doe. He describes himself as a shy designer.
Not a performer, not a hype guy. He's really more of an introvert, which, by the way, it sounds weird and counterintuitive, but of all the YouTubers I've ever met in real life and talked to, they almost all describe themselves as introverts at the core, myself included. No, you don't have to be the life of the party to do this.
But anyway, back to Chris. He built a multi -million dollar design agency. Then he became one of the most known creative educators alive.
He didn't get there by getting louder. He just got there by being able to talk to one viewer at a time like a person. And somewhere along the way, that shy, calm way about him stopped being a limitation and actually became part of why people trust him.
So if being good on camera really required having big energy and TV polish, a success story like Chris's could never have even happened. And let me tell you how the cringe actually starts to fade away because I lived through all of this myself. So remember when I said how much I dreaded watching myself back when I was editing my videos, when I was getting started?
Well... That turned out to actually be the cure for all of this because editing forced me to watch myself over and over, take after take, in just video after video. And somewhere in all those reps, the cringe just wore itself out.
You just can't stay horrified at your own face for 100 hours straight. Your brain gets bored of the horror and just moves on. And that's the honest answer to how most people get over this.
It just is exposure. You can't really get confident first and then get on camera. It actually works the other way around.
So you get on camera and that's what builds the confidence. Everybody I know who is comfortable on camera now, they got there by recording, not by waiting. But here's the thing about talking to a camera.
This is kind of the practical side of it. So if there's nobody in particular on the other side of it, it's going to come out looking like you're just talking to a wall, right?
Same thing if you're just pretending to talk to some abstract version of your viewers as a whole. And your viewers can feel that. They can't really tell you what's off, but the connection isn't going to be there because you weren't actually talking to anyone.
Have you ever seen behind -the -scenes footage of actors filming in a big effects movie like Jurassic World or Independence Day or something, and they have to act like they're scared of a tennis ball and a stick because the dinosaur is gonna be added in later. And those performances can come out really bad sometimes, and the actors actually hate doing it that way.
Turns out, it's just really hard to have a genuine reaction to a tennis ball. And these are trained actors, you're not, and a lens with nobody behind it is your version of the tennis ball on a stick. So what you need is a way to trick yourself into seeing the dinosaur.
You need the person on the other side of that lens to feel as real as possible. So the single best camera tip I can give you is to think of one client you know and genuinely like talking to. Now, you're gonna record the video for them and pretend like they're gonna watch it later, like you're just recording it and then you're gonna email it off to them right after.
Not for the masses, not for some made -up avatar with a fake name, a real person that you already know how to talk to naturally. And if it helps, you can literally start your recording by talking to them. Like you'd hit record and you'd say, hey, Jill, just thought I'd make this video for you to help you with XYZ.
Take a beat, then start the actual video. So you then edit the first line out later so nobody ever sees it. But now you're not performing for a lens anymore.
You're 10 seconds into a conversation with Jill and your brain just keeps talking to her for the rest of the take. And it works because you've probably done something like that before, right? If you've ever recorded a voice memo or a quick video for a specific person, I'll bet you sounded completely natural while you were doing that.
No script, no nerves, no weird presenter voice. You were just talking to someone you know like normally. And the camera is the same thing in both situations.
The only thing that changed was who you believed was on the other side of it. Because the natural voice you have, that was never missing. It just...
needs a person for you to aim it at. Now, this is very different from the advice that I used to give on this. There's a saying that a lot of YouTube experts say, which is basically that the camera cuts your personality by half.
So you have to compensate for that. Now, obviously, there's nothing about a camera that physically takes away half your personality. It's more just in how the average person reacts to the camera and how people tend to shrink in front of it at first.
So I used to tell people that they should actually dial their personality up on camera to compensate and just be a little bigger than felt comfortable to do that on purpose. But I gotta say, I don't know that I really believe in that approach anymore because the evidence just kept disagreeing with me. I've watched too many experts win by just relating to their viewer instead of performing for them.
It's more about dialing yourself in and focusing rather than projecting out. So unless big is genuinely your real natural self, don't be big. You don't even need to be 1 % bigger than you naturally are.
You're not a game show host. You're a person who's talking to another person. That's what creates the bond, that parasocial relationship we talked about before.
Performing puts the viewer in an audience, right? They watch you the way they'd watch a show from a distance, kind of at an arm's length. But relating puts the viewer into a conversation with you.
They're not watching some expert perform. The experience feels more like they're sitting across the table from you at a restaurant or a happy hour, being able to pick your brain. That's the scenario that builds the most familiarity and makes you feel like the expert they can actually trust.
So focusing on talking to one person isn't just a camera trick for your nerves. It's literally the trust building part itself happening on camera. Okay, but now let's get back around to fear number two, which is what if I fail and what if people see me fail?
This is a weird one because the advice I'm about to give you is going to sound good and bad at the same time. And that advice is nobody's actually watching you yet. So if you fail, literally nobody's going to see it.
And when I say that to my students, I always get back this like uncomfortable laughter that's like, well, if nobody's watching, why are we even doing this? And I get it. But people not watching in the beginning is actually a blessing, not a curse.
It's built -in protection because YouTube makes you learn a bunch of new skills all at once. Scripting, being on camera, titles, thumbnails, just all of the strategy of it. And odds are, you're not gonna be good at any of them on day one.
Nobody is. I mean, just imagine if you've never picked up a basketball a day in your life and then someone throws you out into an NBA game. It's a sold -out arena in front of like 20 ,000 fans.
Trust me, you don't want that. But luckily, that's not the way it happens in real life, right? You shoot around in the driveway, you play some pickup at the park.
Maybe then you join a rec league, you know, playing in front of a few dozen people. And then way down the road, if you keep up with it, maybe the NBA comes calling then. You earn the crowd gradually, and it grows right along with your game.
And YouTube works the exact same way. Yes, your videos are technically public in the same way that someone could drive by and see you shooting hoops in your own driveway. But when you're at your newest and your worst, almost nobody's seeing your videos yet.
You get the luxury of being able to be bad and let's face it, actually fail in private. The system literally protects you. So stop thinking of low views as failure.
. And here's the answer to that uncomfortable laughter that I get from my students, by the way. It's not about being invisible forever.
The room fills up at exactly the pace that you improve by. So by the time more people start to show up, you're not the same person. from video one anymore.
So the audience that eventually finds you is almost never gonna see your worst work. They're gonna meet the version of you that 10, 20, 30 videos got you to. But that's strangers.
What about the people in your life that you told you were gonna do this? Wouldn't it be embarrassing to have them judge you on it? And what if they just don't get it?
I mean, honestly, I would actually just not tell too many people. in your life that you're even doing YouTube. And certainly, no matter what you do, do not ask your friends and family to watch.
And there are two reasons why I say that. Reason one, it's mostly mental, right? Knowing that people from your real life who you know are gonna watch and possibly judge you, people who don't even understand why you're doing this, that's just gonna make you more nervous on camera, not less.
Recording for a stranger with a problem is fairly easy. Recording something while imagining your brother -in -law seeing it and then bringing it up at your niece's birthday party, that makes it harder.
And that actually happened to me. It's a real story. So it was a few summers ago.
We were at my mother -in -law's house. It was like a pool day. And I had to film this little B -roll clip of me in a pool for one of my videos.
And I remember my brother -in -law just like watching. with this look on his face. And I remember hearing him say like, I am so confused.
I thought he does marketing stuff. What is he doing? And even now my family still doesn't totally get what I'm doing on YouTube and they probably never will.
And that's fine. You're not doing this for your friends and you're only doing it for your family in the sense of what this can provide for them. They were never the audience, so their feedback is pretty much useless anyway.
They'll usually just try to be supportive and say, yeah, the video looked great. I don't understand what you're talking about, but you looked very professional. And it's just like, thank you.
You know, you'd just be collecting compliments from people who were never going to hire you anyway. So just keep this project to yourself for a while. There's real freedom in a project that nobody in your life...
is grading you on it just belongs to you and to the the strangers that it's meant to help you know your future clients and those are the only two people that this matters for now the other reason not to tell people is a little more mechanical so a few weeks ago inside one of my small group sessions for my youtube to clients academy one of my students said wouldn't it be a good idea if all of us in here were to subscribe to each other's channels and we would watch every video just to all support each other and kickstart each other's videos.
And it was a really nice thought, I'm all about everyone supporting each other, but I had to shoot her down, politely of course, because when your channel's brand new, YouTube is trying really hard to figure out who your videos are for and it's only got a tiny handful of signals in the beginning to go on. So that means your first views are its first clues.
So if those early signals are five random friends or 10 random people that you're in a coaching group with and they all have completely different viewing habits, your cousin who watches gaming videos, your mom who watches cooking shows, the whole picture just gets scrambled up and YouTube never figures out who your real audience is.
So these friendly or supportive views don't kickstart a new channel. They actually jam it up.
Okay, but what are you actually gonna say in these videos? Remember, your initial topic list is already sitting in your inbox. It's those questions that your person asks you over and over again.
But here's the thought that hits most experts right about now. Those same questions are what your competitors answer every day too. If everybody in your field gets asked the same things, what makes your video the one worth clicking?
Well, to answer that, you need to know what YouTube recently did with its algorithm because they made the biggest change to it in over a decade. And while most creators are panicking about losing views over it, this update is actually the best thing that's ever happened to you as an expert if you know how to lean into it.
Now, a big thing YouTube looks at for now is whether your video actually has something new to say. Because if someone clicks on your video and it feels like they've seen this exact take three times already this week, That's not a satisfying experience.
That's a waste of their time. And this is where most of the older YouTube advice is actually going to steer you wrong. For years, the standard advice was always find what's already working in your niche and copy it.
Just make your own version of it, add your personality, that's gonna make it different enough. And honestly, that trick used to work, but now YouTube system got a lot smarter about what's actually in a video and it rewards videos that say something that other videos haven't said. And it holds back the ones that are just a rehash.
So if your video sounds like 10 other videos or just sounds like something AI could have written, it's just not going to get shown very much. So let me show you how the system actually knows what's in a video according to YouTube's own engineers.
So the new algorithm tags every video with eight unique tokens or markers. And the easiest way to see how this is going to work is on a real video. So there's a tax attorney named Jasmine Delucci, and she's got a video called Why Choosing Between an LLC and an S -Corp is Costing You Money.
So on that particular video, Token one is the category. That's the most top level one, and it's pretty much either entertainment or, in this case, education.
Token two is the niche, business. Token three is the sub -niche, tax strategy. Token four is the subject, LLC versus S -corp.
Token five is the format, and I would call this one a comparison. And token six is the style. talking head with graphics.
Now a lot of videos out there could be made of those same six tokens. Pretty much any talking head video that's comparing an LLC to an S corp could share all of these. But these next two are the important ones that the algorithm really focuses on.
So token seven is the actual idea and content in her video. So these are her takes, right? And the actual information, her examples, her opinions, her stories, her Ultimate recommendation and token eight is what we call the signature This is her speaking style her face her background behind her the graphics everything that sets her video apart from another video Even if it were to use the exact same script and Jasmine's video did really well with the new algorithm Because she had ideas and takes that YouTube hadn't really seen before she actually goes against the grain Her advice is that you don't actually have to choose between an LLC and an S corp.
You can have both. So when this happens, when YouTube identifies a new idea, they draw a circle around that video and they call this the conflict radius. Her video owns that territory now.
If you were to copy her video exactly or even really closely, yours is going to land right inside of her conflict radius. And guess what? YouTube limits how many people will ever see it.
The closer you get to the center of her conflict radius, meaning the closer your video comes to hers, the worse your chances of YouTube ever showing your video to anybody. But the more you differentiate it, the different stories, different examples used, different opinions than her, the more it moves away from the center, your odds start to go up.
But if you bring enough of a new angle or a hot take or information that her video didn't cover, you can land outside that circle, and then they draw a new one around yours. We call this information gain.
And info gain is what lets you claim your own territory so that YouTube pushes you. Now, everything I just explained happens under the hood, right? You're never gonna actually see a token or a circle drawn around your video anywhere on YouTube, but you can see the results with your own two eyes.
So recently I went down a rabbit hole studying all the outlier videos on business channels across all kinds of niches. And if you've never heard the term outlier video before, these are just the ones that blew up way bigger than everything else on their channel. So if your videos usually get like 20 views and then you have one that got like 100 or 1 ,000, that would be an outlier for you.
So anyway, I wanted to figure out for myself what all these outliers and all these different niches had in common. you could probably already guess what I found. Almost every single one of those outliers had something new and novel about it.
Infogain over and over again. Sometimes it was custom research that the creator had done themselves. Sometimes it was a brand new method that nobody was talking about yet.
But the problem with both of those things is they're hard. You know, running your own research can take months and inventing a brand new method isn't just something you decide to do on a random Wednesday. So how do you give your videos info gain and make sure they land inside their own circle without having to do much work on them?
Well, there are five different ways to do it, and not one of them requires really having a brand new idea from you. So the first way is to lean on your own hot takes. So the goal here is just anywhere your experience taught you something different.
Like, what's some advice you used to give and then stopped? Or the stuff you'll say to a client in private but you would never hear anyone speaking on a stage saying it at a conference. And the best way to share those takes on camera is through your stories, because your takes came from somewhere.
Something happened, you watched it happen, and it changed your mind. But this is a really important distinction to make. To YouTube, your story is not necessarily the new thing.
It's all about the lesson that that story lands on. If it ends on just giving the standard advice that everyone else gives, you're probably going to land right in their circle. But if your story ends somewhere different, that's brand new territory that you can claim for yourself.
So the story is really just the wrapper. The different lesson inside That's the whole point.
And that's exactly what Jasmine's LLC video got so right. Her lesson was different than what most people in her niche would say. And I'm sure you've got your own version of that.
Every field has all the standard advice that you secretly disagree with. And if you don't think you have anything like that, I would actually just open up either Claude or ChatGPT, turn on voice mode and tell it. you want it to help you uncover your own hot take opinions on your industry.
And it's going to be able to ask you some pretty interesting questions to get you there. Okay, way number two is my favorite, and it might be the most powerful thing in this whole section. And I actually stumbled onto it when I was digging through all of those outlier videos, because at some point, I just looked over at my bookshelf, and I saw the book Radical Candor.
I saw Building a Story Brand and Purple Cow by Seth Godin. And it hit me, these books... aren't really about new concepts, right?
They took pretty common business and marketing ideas and just gave them names and made them feel brandable, like the author owned them. And once I saw that pattern, I started seeing it everywhere, not just in books, on YouTube too. Because the business channels that were consistently outperforming everybody else were doing the exact same thing.
as those authors were doing. They were taking ideas that other people were already talking about and just giving them a name that made the idea feel like theirs. And here's why a name changes everything.
So think about the stars in the sky and the constellations, right? The ones everybody can find, you know, Orion's Belt, the North Star, the Big Dipper. The funny thing is there are way bigger and brighter stars up there.
But nobody points at those. The famous ones are famous because a long time ago, somebody looked up at a few scattered ordinary stars. They drew a pattern around them and they gave the pattern a name and told a little story about it.
And then from there on, those were the stars that people navigated by, not the brightest ones. the named ones. And that's exactly what naming does for your advice.
Right now your best advice is scattered across your field like loose stars. Other experts may say pieces of it, but nobody owns it. The moment you draw the pattern and put a name on it, people can remember it and attribute it to you.
So all you got to do is take an idea that you already teach and give it a name. That's it. The idea doesn't even have to be new because honestly, there aren't a whole lot of new ideas anymore, right?
It doesn't matter. Only the name has to be. And the name thing itself, I call that a signature concept.
And a signature concept is just newness you can create on demand. It's the same advice you were already going to give. It's just wrapped in something that YouTube and your viewers can recognize as yours.
you get to claim brand new territory without inventing a single thing. And a signature concept can take six different shapes. Probably more if you're creative, but these are the six that I figured out.
So let's just go through each one because at least one of these is gonna fit whatever you teach. Now, the first shape is the simplest one with the lowest barrier to entry.
You just take an idea and you give it a proper name. There's a Georgetown professor named Cal Newport who took the pretty old idea that focused, distraction -free work is more productive, and he gave it a two -word name, deep work. Monks knew about focused work.
You're a grandma. knew about focused work, right? The idea of focusing has always been valuable, but nobody owned it until the name became a best -selling book and a whole movement that he now owns.
He even named the opposite thing, calling it shallow work, so now that's his too. And one of those books for my bookshelf was doing the exact same thing. So Kim Scott took something that good managers have always known, that you can be honest with your team in a productive way.
And she put a name on it. It's what she calls radical candor. That name turned into a best -selling book, and it's just a phrase that people now use in offices all over the world.
And I don't know if you ever watched the show Silicon Valley, but there was a whole running joke in an episode about that phrase, so it definitely caught on. So the second shape takes it a step further. So instead of just naming an idea, you compress a whole method into a single word where every letter stands for a step, a .k .a.
an acronym. FIRE is a perfect example of an acronym. It stands for Financial Independence Retire Early.
And it's now a huge concept in the finance world. Spin selling is another one. A guy named Neil Rackman turned an entire sales methodology into four letters.
Situation, problem, implication, need payoff. And that's been taught in sales trainings for decades now. And then there's IDS from Gino Wickman.
Identify, discuss, solve. It's basically just a more efficient way of running meetings, but it turned into a branded ritual that thousands of companies run every single week now.
And I think acronyms work so well because they're instant memory triggers. So they give structure to what would otherwise just be a loose list of tips. So your viewers can still remember your method weeks later because the word sticks.
They also happen to look great on screen, right? You can do some nice B -roll of yourself writing out each letter, which just makes them natural video content. All right, the third shape is a diagram.
So the Eisenhower matrix is just a simple two -by -two grid that sorts every task by urgency and importance. Do, schedule, delegate, or delete. Jim Collins' hedgehog concept is just a Venn diagram of three things.
What you're passionate about, what you can be the best at in the world, and what makes you money. And the overlap, is where you're supposed to focus.
And Simon Sinek's golden circle is just three rings showing that great companies start with why they exist, not what they sell. And diagrams are unique here because they don't just support the content, they actually are the content. Remember those two tokens that YouTube cares the most about, the idea and the signature.
A custom diagram feeds both of those at once. It's a brand new way of seeing the topic and it's a graphic that exists on only your video. 50 other videos can give the same basic advice, but you're the only one who showed it visually in a diagram.
So on a crowded topic, a diagram can really make your video read as new. Shape number four is the numbered list. So a great example of this one you've definitely heard of would be the five love languages, right?
Gary Chapman was a marriage counselor, and the idea inside his book was something pretty much every other counselor already knew. that people give and receive love in different ways. All Chapman did was count and name the ways and put the number right in the name.
That book has sold over 20 million copies, and people who have never even been anywhere near a marriage counselor office will still ask each other, you know, what's your love language on a first date? And that five in the title, that is doing some serious work. It tells you that there's a finite list, it signals there's a structure, and it makes you want to know what all five of them are.
Without the number, it's a nice thought about relationships, but with the number, it's more of a system you can follow. And you may have also heard of building a story brand. So this guy, Donald Miller, he took the old storytelling framework of a hero's journey, you know, the stuff that screenwriters have used forever, and he turned it into a seven -step formula for writing brand messaging.
He calls it the SB7 framework, and that became the foundation of everything else he teaches. And there's a built -in content bonus if you were to invent a signature numbered list of your own. So he could do one video on all seven parts, then a separate video going deep on each individual part.
So that one signature concept just turned itself into eight videos. Okay, now shape number five has a specific advantage that none of the other ones do. It makes your advice look scientific.
even when it isn't. It's the signature equation. So check out Ray Dalio's Pain plus Reflection equals Progress.
It's not even a real equation, there's no real math or science to it, but writing it that way just makes it feel like a law of physics somehow. or at least a law of nature, right? It takes a soft idea, in this case, learning from your failures, and just gives it the weight of a real formula.
And this one's my favorite. I remember my brain completely lighting up the first time I saw it. It just felt so smart.
It's Alex Hormozy's value equation. Value equals your dream outcome times the perceived likelihood of success divided by time delay times effort and sacrifice. It's probably his most shared piece of IP and every variable in it teaches a lesson.
So each one has become its own piece of content. And trust me, equations like this are YouTube gold because whenever I draw a formula on screen, I can actually see my viewer retention go up. And that's just because people rewind it to watch it again.
So a signature equation literally makes people lean into your videos. And shape number six, instead of framing your advice as a tip or a suggestion, you frame it as a hard and fast rule. I don't know if you watch The Money Guys on YouTube, but I love them.
They're just these two financial advisors, Brian and Beau, and they actually have a lot of signature concepts, but for one of them, they turned this really common sense car buying advice into a three number rule. Put at least 20 % down, pay it off in three years or less, and keep the payments under 8 % of your income.
And they call this the 23 -8 rule. And they trot it out every time that they get someone asking them if they can afford a certain kind of car they want to buy, and the repetition makes it stick. Then there's James Clear's two -minute rule that just says, if a habit takes less than two minutes, you should just do it now and not even think about it.
Now let's just call that what it is. It's a time management tip. But calling something a rule changes how the audience receives it.
A tip is optional. A rule feels universal. And that framing gets more clicks on your titles too because it promises that you're going to give them a super clear -cut answer instead of just suggestions.
And naming a signature rule can actually do double duty as easy packaging for the video itself. Just put the name of the rule in the thumbnail and that's a huge curiosity driver. People see it and they think, wait, the what rule?
Now I have to watch this to find out. The channel Charisma on Command does this with their thumbnails all the time. And once you've established a rule, your future videos can reference it, like how I said the money guys keep going back to the 23 -8 rule.
It just starts building a little internal vocabulary across all of your content, which... you know, rewards the people who keep watching because they get to feel like insiders. And I brought up the money guys for a reason because naming stuff is basically their whole playbook and they show you exactly where this can go.
Their biggest signature concept isn't even the car rule. It's called the financial order of operations. They call it the FOO for short.
And what is it really? It's advice about which order to put your money in. You know, fill up this account before that one.
Finish this goal before that goal. Solid advice, and it would be completely forgettable without the name. And every financial advisor out there watching this right now probably says some version of it themselves to their clients.
But with the name, it feels like a law of nature. When they do live videos, viewers even ask questions about the food, and they bring it up by name. So that name turned ordinary sequencing advice into a brand.
And that helped turn them from a regular advisory firm to one of the biggest financial advice brands anywhere. So back in 2017, when they weren't known experts yet, their firm managed about 115 million in assets. Today, they're quite well known, not the most well known in the money niche, mind you, but their dollars under management number is closer to 1 .4 billion.
all from getting themselves known. And I actually include signature concepts in my videos all the time. I can tell you they do make a big difference.
In fact, the term signature concept is my own signature concept. And way earlier, I told you about the idea of connoisseurship, which is also mine. And the thing is, don't tell anybody, I'm not great at coming up with these names on my own, but I don't have to be, and neither do you, because AI is weirdly good at it.
especially Claude. So it's really great just thinking through something and coming up with a creative name or how to turn a concept into a visual diagram or an equation. Just all you have to do is just give it the concept that you already teach.
Just tell it what it does for people and ask for 10 options. Most of them are just going to be like whatever to bad, right? But then if you were going to surprise you, then you just keep the one that sounds the most perfect.
Okay, so if you're keeping track, we're still going through the ways that you can create info gain in your videos. Signature Concepts was just way number two. So moving along to way three, you can jump on the news.
So whenever there's a new development breaking in your field, like a rule change or some big study, a major announcement, there is a window where your audience wants answers. Now, you're not gonna have that window to yourself, so let's be honest about how this really goes.
There'll probably be a few channels in your niche that's gonna have something up the same day. But most are going to take up to a week or two to get around to it. And you don't even have to beat the fast ones.
You just have to be quicker than most. Because your video isn't going to be there to just break the news anyway. The news itself gets covered within a few hours.
Your video needs to be the translation, right? What does this actually mean for your person? And that version of the news story is the part that almost nobody else is going to do, at least not fast.
So let's go back to Tom, our financial advisor. Let's say that there is a social security rule change that drops today. So his clients see the headline and then they start wondering immediately, you know, what it means for them.
So then the big finance channels are going to be on it the same day. And good for them. That's their job.
But look at what those videos actually say. Here's what changed. Here's the new number.
Here's a chart. And meanwhile, think about who isn't posting yet, right? The other financial advisors, Tom's real competition.
Almost none of them will ever make a good video about it. So when Tom's take goes up in two or three days, not just what changed, but what it means for you if you're 62 and hoping to retire next year. He's one of the only advisors in the room.
And think about who's typing that search, right? It's Tom's exact client. They saw the headline and they want to know what it means for their own retirement.
The news clips don't tell on that, but Tom's video does. And that's how a stranger meets their new advisor. And I've actually done this one myself.
So when ChatGBT5 came out last year, I know there's been so many since then, but at that point, it was one of the biggest AI stories. Everyone was super gassed up about it. And the tech and the AI news channels were all over it within hours.
And I think my video didn't even go up until about a week later. So I definitely was not the first one to that party, but I remember working all weekend on it. But all of those early videos, they were just about the release itself.
It was about the news event. So like the features, the demos, everything the new model can do. And if you ever watch any of those...
AI release videos. It's always like them showing you how to make a really stupid looking video game. So that's not helpful to my audience.
So what I did, what nobody else was really covering yet, was what you could do with it specifically to help you grow your business. I think it was like nine use cases to grow your business with ChatGPT -5, something like that. So even a week after the news dropped, that lane was still sitting there wide open.
And that one video that I worked a whole weekend on ended up getting more views faster than anything I'd ever posted. And it actually finishes my top viewed video of the whole year. So you don't need to win the race to the story itself.
You just want to be the first one there for your corner of it. And there's a special rule for this one too when you're doing the news stories. This is the one place where speed beats polish because these videos aren't gonna really be evergreen.
They're not gonna keep pulling in views for years the way your other videos can. A news video. you know, even if you're covering your angle of it, it's going to get a big burst for a week, maybe two if you're lucky, and then it's going to be pretty much done.
So no, it just doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to spend two weeks polishing a video that only has, you know, two good weeks to live. And your viewers get that too, right? When you're handing someone something this new, they're surprisingly forgiving about the rough edges because they would rather have your take today than a prettier version of it next month.
So for these videos and these videos only, I... I would skip the full script and just work off of some notes, just turn the camera on, give your honest take, and get it out the door. And I'm not suggesting you become a news channel here either.
This shouldn't be your focus. All I'm saying is just jump on the news every once in a while. And the cool thing is you don't even have to go hunting for the news yourself because AI can just scan your niche for you every morning and just give you a two -minute summary to skim first thing.
And most mornings, there's not gonna be anything in there worth making a video about, but at the worst -case scenario, you learned a little about your industry that day, and then the one morning that something big drops, you know it's your week to move fast. And speaking of AI, that's also going to play right into way number four to create info gain, which might be the widest open door on this whole list.
I call this one the AI twist. So if your field connects to AI in any way at all, or even could potentially connect to it, there is a gap sitting right there for you because think about what all the AI content out there actually is.
Again, it's the news, it's the new releases, whether jobs are being lost to it, all that big picture stuff. So that side of it's covered wall to wall, but what's still rare in most niches is somebody taking AI and connecting it to one specific group of people, showing them what they could actually use it for. So the twist is you're not making another video about AI.
You're making a video about what AI can do for your person. You know, take Dana, our business coach for gym owners. So her clients are hearing about AI everywhere they turn, but almost nobody is showing them how they can be using it.
So if she were to make a video like seven new ways gyms can use AI to retain members, that's talking straight to them. And this one's actually the gift that keeps on giving because every major AI release is going to hand you a brand new reason to make the next one. The topic refreshes itself a few times a year, whether you're ready or not.
And way number five to create info gain is going to be your safety net for the weeks when you've got no story to tell, no new name to coin, and no news to jump on. You can always remix. but never copy.
So most people hear, you know, make your take on a proven topic and then they go find one successful video and basically redo it with their face on it. But we've already said that's not a take. It's a knockoff.
And YouTube is going to see that it's the same and they're not going to punish you for it. They don't really do that. They just won't show it to anybody.
So rather than copying one video, you find two or three proven videos on the same topic. Watch all of them, pull the best insight from each one. Then the trick is to combine those pieces into something bigger than any one of them said on their own.
So you're not copying one source, you are remixing three different ones. And the combination of that can create something that the algorithm treats as genuinely new. Now, before we move on, I don't want you feeling like you need to come out of the gate, you know, coining frameworks and jumping on the news by your second video.
Everything in this section is stuff that's going to serve you well, but it's stuff that you want to start layering on once you get the basics right, because, you know, we all have to learn to crawl before we can walk, right? So the real question is, what should you actually be filming first? This one's an easy answer.
You should absolutely start with simple FAQ videos. You just take that topic list from the questions you answer on every single call, pick your top five or 10, and just make one simple video answering each one. Five to 10 minutes per video, one question at a time, that is how you start.
And notice what these videos probably aren't, right? They're not meant to be your grand thesis.
They're not your best material and they're not the big video that's gonna put you on the map. That video can wait and honestly, it should wait because right now, you would be making the 30 % version of it and burn the topic out. So for now, it's just the questions people already ask you answered the way you already answer them.
So like Dana's first video might be, how should I price my gym memberships? Because every gym owner she's ever coached has asked her that. Tom's would be, when should I take social security?
And Rachel's is, can this marriage actually be saved? So their first five videos are sitting in their inboxes and their call notes right now. And so are yours.
You could probably list them out loud right now. And this starting plan does one more nice thing for you. It takes the whole idea of a big debut off the table.
Because most people treat video one like it's opening night, right? They pick their most ambitious topic, they spend six weeks polishing it up, and they pin all their hopes on how it's gonna land. But here's the thing about opening night on a brand new channel.
nobody's in the theater yet, right? And honestly, you're not gonna be very good yet anyway, so you don't even want them there. I sure wasn't very good when I first started, so that's exactly why you wanna start with the easy questions you already know cold, where you're not sitting there worrying about how much people are gonna like the video or how well it's gonna do, because your first videos aren't gonna do much of anything.
and that's okay. I always say it's just a shame that you can't make your 50th video first, but math just doesn't work that way. The only way to get to that video is to make the 49 that come before it, and these easy FAQ videos are a really low pressure way to start racking those up.
So you knock one out this week, another one next week, and at this stage, showing up every week like that is the achievement. But other than that, there are two more reasons why FAQ videos are the perfect place to start.
First, the topics are pre -proven, right? You're not guessing whether anyone wants this answer. People literally keep asking you for it one at a time, year after year.
Every FAQ is market research that your clients already did for you. And secondly, the pressure's off because there's nothing to figure out.
You've already answered these questions out loud 100 times. You can answer them half asleep. There's no research phase, no outline anxiety, no what's my angle on this.
The video is just you doing something you already do. This time, you're talking to a camera. But remember, you're gonna be talking to that camera like you're talking to a real person.
Don't forget about that. But your first videos just have a way different job than the videos you're gonna make later. You're making them now.
to build your muscles, right? Putting a script together, talking to a camera, finishing something and hitting publish. That last one, hitting publish, that's a muscle too, by the way.
Finishing and publishing instead of, you know, polishing forever might be the most important rep of all. And look at whose questions you're actually answering while you build those muscles. Your buyers.
So even your practice videos are still aimed at the exact people you want to be known by. So nothing ends up being wasted. But these go out to the empty room at first, which is exactly what you want.
Reps, not views. There's actually another really big thing that the FAQ videos are doing for you. They are training YouTube on what your channel's even about.
Because honestly, if reps were the only point here, I would just tell you to turn the camera on and talk about whatever makes you happy. But these videos still need to be built on the things that your clients actually search for on YouTube because every time one of your people finds one of your answers, YouTube gets a little smarter about who your channel's for and who to show it to.
And that's what lets your channel actually start growing sooner than later as you keep making better and better videos. Now, there are a few different ways you could go about making these videos. And it brings us to the question that I get possibly more than any other one.
Do I have to script my videos or can I just work off an outline? Or better yet, can I just wing it? And I get why everybody's hoping.
that I'm going to say wing it because scripting sounds like the most work. Winging it's even having a little moment right now. There's actually a new term for it.
People are calling them yap videos. I don't even know if I should be bringing that up because it's probably a term that's going to date this video for sure. But if you're watching this in like 2028, do you remember yap videos?
Leave a comment below if you do. But sorry, we were having a serious conversation. But my honest answer is yes, you should be scripting your videos pretty much word for word, and here's why.
So yapping and just kind of making it up as you go can be totally fine on a personality or entertainment channel where hanging out with the person is the whole draw. But remember, you're not here to become a YouTuber. You're here to become the known expert in your field.
So your viewer didn't show up to hang out with you. They showed up with a problem. And the whole time they're watching, they're deciding whether you're the expert with the answer.
Nobody hires a rambler. And before you reach for the middle option, you know, recording off an outline, it's a lot closer to winging it than you'd think. You're still searching for the actual words you're saying live in the moment.
So you're still going to do a little wandering. You can still repeat yourself. It just makes for a harder recording session and honestly a harder edit when you're done.
So my honest answer still stands. You want to script your videos. Now plenty of famous creators do seem totally unscripted.
Almost always one of two things is true. Either they're scripted and skilled enough that you can't tell, which is exactly the goal you should eventually try to get to, or they've made hundreds of videos and gotten enough practice to be able to wing it and not ramble and not repeat and not forget. what they wanted to say.
Either way, that effortless thing you're watching probably isn't really as effortless as you think it is. Now, scripting has a reputation for making people stiff, right? Especially for people who are already good on their feet.
They lead meetings and they talk for a living. But that reputation is exactly backwards. A script doesn't make you stiff.
Unpracticed reading makes you stiff, and reading naturally is a skill you can pick up way faster than you think. And once you have that down, the script is what's gonna set your natural talker loose because you're not burning half of your brain power deciding what to say next while the camera's rolling.
All that natural speaking ability that you have, it's gonna go into saying it like you. So the good talkers don't lose anything to a good script. And you're looking at the proof right now.
This video, the one you're watching, was scripted by me word for word. And you can see how long this video is, so it took kind of a while. Every single sentence you've heard so far was written, rewritten, and then put in this exact spot on purpose.
Because imagine if this long -ass video weren't scripted. If it were just me sitting in front of my camera with some vague memory of all the parts I was supposed to say. Even if I had note cards in an outline, it would still be really hard.
And one of two things would happen. Either it would balloon up to nine hours of rambling, or... I'd forget half the points.
And I'd probably do a little bit of both at different parts in the video, actually. You'd have checked out a long time ago, and honestly, you'd have been right to leave. A script is just how you control the flow of information.
Every point needs to land once in the right order, and nothing worth saying gets lost along the way. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have an impromptu thought while you're reading and break from the script for a second and have a human moment. I do that all the time.
But here's the trick that makes the script actually work. And it's the difference between sounding natural and sounding like you're reading a script, right? You have to write it the way you actually talk.
And that's very different from the way you would write an article or an email. Because written English and spoken English are honestly just two different languages. When you write something that someone else is going to read, it can sound like you wrote it.
You know, interesting and thoughtful phrasing that comes... off is perfectly polished, but nobody sits across the table from a friend and says, you know, in light of these considerations, that's weird. If you said that, you wouldn't have friends anymore.
So when you're writing your script, you want to use the exact phrases that you would say across a table from someone. Your words, your rhythm, little connector words that get you from one sentence to the next. And there's an easy test for this.
You just want to read a line out loud, and if your mouth stumbles or it just feels stiff coming out, it's too written, right? So you want to rewrite it the way that you would actually say it. Your mouth already knows the difference, even when you're typing fingers forget it.
So now you might be like, wait, so I have to write it out word for word like I'd say it, then what? I have to memorize the whole thing? If you think I memorized this whole script, you are out of your mind.
I use a teleprompter. It's right there. I'm reading off of it right now.
And I'm sorry if that ruins the magic, and you don't have to tell people you're doing it, but I want you to know how easy this can be, so I'm telling you. It wasn't always easy, though. I used to just work off an outline in note cards.
I'd write my main points down with my terrible handwriting, and I'd hold the card down here so you couldn't see it, or I would tape it up next to the camera so I would look at that quickly, gather my thoughts. and then I'd look into the lens and just do my best. And the problems just piled up.
I'd forget the details, I'd ramble my way between points, and I'm the kind of person, if I don't have all my thoughts put together, it's really hard to just deliver information like that. I can have a conversation with another human being just fine, but giving a monologue is a different kind of thing. Keeping even just one point straight in my head while performing it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, so filming days were just always stressful.
It was all thinking on my feet with a camera pointed at me back when the camera already made me kind of nervous. So it was two hard jobs at once, remembering everything and concentrating on saying it like I was talking to someone both at the same time. And all that rambling just meant doing take after take, which got me flustered in the moment, plus all those takes meant editing took about double the time it should have.
Back then, I was still editing my own videos, so every time I rambled or had to retake something, it took more time for me twice. Once in front of the camera, and then again at the desk when I was scrubbing through my own takes and trying to decide which one to keep and which one to delete. So then I was like, enough is enough.
I'm gonna get a teleprompter. I'd, you know. been told teleprompters were the way to go.
So I went to the Apple store and looked for a teleprompter app. The problem is almost all of them work the same way and it kind of sucks. The way most teleprompter apps work is they scroll at one fixed speed.
I mean, you can set the speed to whatever speed you want, but however fast it goes, that's how fast it's going with or without you. So either you find yourself racing to keep up with the screen. or it really drags and you just feel yourself talking weirdly slow.
And even if you get it just the right speed, if you make a mistake, which I do all the time still, it just keeps going and then you have to back it up, right? It's just a pain. But then I found one teleprompter app that actually listens to you and it keeps pace with your voice.
It was so much better. And ever since I found that, my recording days are just way easier. It's night and day.
Because now I don't really have to think about the words at all when I film. The words are already handled. My whole job on a recording day is the performance of it.
And when I say performance, remember, I don't mean big or put on. I just mean reading it in a way that doesn't sound like I'm reading. I just try to make it sound as natural as possible.
And that is something you have to try at because the biggest hurdle that people run into when they first get a teleprompter is that they look like they're reading. whether their face is animated or not, it just doesn't feel like a real person who's having a real conversation with you. So let me now just give you my actual routine for avoiding that since I read off a prompter to make pretty much every video I ever make.
Now to be clear, I don't really have to do this stuff anymore because it just becomes muscle memory and it's gonna be like that for you too with some practice. But this is what I did in those early days. So first, I would read the script all the way through a few times before I ever sat down to record so that by the time the camera's on...
Nothing in there surprises me. Second, we already covered this one. I write the script the way I actually talk so the words fit my mouth and I can act my way through it like it's all just coming off the top of my head.
I do still do that one, obviously. That part never goes away. And third, this one's just a small trick that helps me.
So I capitalize the words that I want to hit, right? So the emphasis is sitting right there in the script as I read it. And yeah, reading naturally off a prompter felt awkward for maybe my first few sessions, but it's a completely learnable skill and it's really worth getting good at because it's gonna pay you back every recording day forever.
It just makes the whole thing so much easier. Now I've just got a couple more rules for when you're actually writing your script. So the first is to always stay on the path that your title promised.
So you gotta remember, your viewer clicked on your video pretty much only seeing the title and the thumbnail. Those two things together made a promise that they would get something really specific out of this video. So every minute you spend on something else, that's just gonna be a reason for them to click away.
So if your video were called, you know, five puppy training techniques, wouldn't be the best place for your thoughts on choosing the right breed. Because the thing about tangents in videos is, The second a viewer feels that you're wandering away from what the video promised, they don't usually think, oh cool, bonus material.
They pretty much just assume you've already said everything important and they're out of there. Now while you're writing, those side topics are probably gonna pop in your head all the time. And if you use AI to help you research, it has a real tendency to wanna go down every rabbit hole surrounding your whole topic.
But it's your job not to let them into this script. Write those other ideas down somewhere else because that's not just a tangent trying to sneak in your videos. That might be your next potential video idea.
Okay, the next rule is once you've made a point, move on. You want to resist the urge to repeat it just to be safe. And I can tell you exactly how sneaky this one is because I used to do it all the time without even knowing I was doing it.
So I'd do a script and I'd make this really great point using a really cool analogy or a metaphor so it would land better. And then I would basically say the same thing again without the analogy, you know, just in case they didn't get it. They got it.
I actually was working with a script editor for a little bit and he kept calling me out on that exact thing. for pretty much every script. And look, I get where the habit comes from, because in a live room, repeating yourself feels like you're being thorough.
But on YouTube, it's the moment where the viewer decides you've run out of new things to say, and the second they feel like you're wasting their time, they're gone. And this is another place where AI can mess you up. It tends to add a lot of redundancies in a script, and it's not really always good at picking them out and removing them, even when you ask it to.
So you're gonna always wanna read your script back and cut anything out that feels like you already said it in a slightly different way because you probably did. One more thing that belongs in your scripts, and honestly, this one's less of a rule and more of a habit that you wanna start building. You want to mention your clients.
Seriously, you want to do that a lot in your videos. Nothing over the top, and they don't all have to even be full -blown stories. You just want to add little references sprinkled all throughout your videos.
You know, stuff like, a client of mine ran into this exact thing last month, or I've watched probably 30 business owners I work with try this. That kind of thing. And there are two big reasons to do this.
And the first is it tells the viewer you're hireable because without these mentions, you can make helpful video after helpful video and the viewer just thinks of you as some kind of a free teacher, right? You become a YouTube person to them, someone who's smart and generous and somebody it would never even occur to them to pay.
So they never make the jump from this person makes videos to this person could work with me because Nothing in your videos ever told them that that was on the table. And all it takes is just, you know, one casual, when I do this with my clients, it fixes all of that.
Because now they know you do this for a living and real people pay you for it. And maybe they could be one of those people. And you never pitched a single thing.
You just made it known that you're an expert for hire. And the second reason is just that client stories make for better content. So just take any tip that you would normally give and just put it inside of a client story.
So instead of saying, you know, make sure you always do this thing, it becomes, I had a client who skipped this thing and let me tell you what happened. and how he fixed it. Because the naked tip on its own is something any video could say.
But the story version has a real person in it with real stakes and a real result. And it can only come from somebody who is actually wrapped up in the process and the outcome. So build this habit early and try to include at least one client story in every video you make.
And really, the reason I care this much about your scripts has nothing to do with algorithms. It's that your video is the first work sample a future client ever gets from you.
Before they've ever seen a proposal, before they've ever sat in a meeting with you, they've just spent 15 minutes experiencing how you think through a problem. So a really tight, focused video that respects their time is telling them that this is what working with me feels like. And a rambling, repetitive one says something about how working with you will go too.
It's just not saying anything good. They're getting a sample of how you work either way, so Make it the best possible first impression.
So if part of you is still worried that a script is going to make you stiff, what the script really does is just takes everything off your mind except for the delivery. No remembering, no deciding, no mid -sentence panic about what comes next. The script should be what makes you calm once you master the skill of reading it off the prompter.
And I just want to point out real quick right now that most people who start channels never learn any version of what you now know. And we're not even finished yet.
They upload, they guess, and they quit confused. What you're learning right now is the difference between those channels and the ones that end up establishing known expert status. So next, we actually need to talk about how YouTube decides what videos to show to who.
Now, at the end of the day, YouTube just has one job. They want to keep every viewer watching stuff they like. That's it.
So for every single video that gets uploaded, YouTube's just asking one question. Who would like this? And for once, what the platform wants lines up exactly with what you want.
YouTube wants people watching for as long as possible, and every extra minute that somebody spends watching you is another minute of trust getting built with exactly the right person. So YouTube doesn't just blast your video out to everyone to see what happens. It actually runs a pretty controlled test and there are two versions of that test depending on where your channel's at.
So if you already have an audience, YouTube starts with them. Your most loyal viewers and subscribers are the first small group that it tries your video on since they're the people that it knows the most about. But if you're brand new, YouTube actually has to test it based on what it knows about the video itself.
So read your title and remember it can actually see into your video and read the whole transcript so it knows what it's about. So it takes all of that and it figures out which small group of viewers might like it best. And small really means small here.
I'm talking like 50 to 100 people. And it shows your video as an option that they could watch and it just sees what they do. Did they click on it?
If so, did they keep watching it? Did they finish it? Did they keep watching more videos after that?
If the signals are good, it's going to show your video to a bigger group. And if those signals are good again, it goes even wider. And that's what blowing up is.
It's actually not luck and it's not some viral lottery. It's just a video passing test after test with the group getting bigger every time.
And as soon as this signal comes back weak, the testing pretty much just stops. And by the way, you've been on the other side of this thousands of times without even knowing it. Every video that YouTube has ever recommended to you was pretty much a test just like this.
And you were part of the test group. You either clicked on it or you didn't. You stayed or you left.
You got to decide the fate of that video just like other people on YouTube get to decide the fate of yours. So when your videos go out, they're not being judged by some, you know, mysterious black box algorithm. They're being judged by real people and how they're reacting to it.
So where do those tests actually take place? It's mostly on the YouTube homepage. And what that looks like has changed a lot.
So back in 2016, this is what your YouTube homepage looked like. It was six videos across. five rows deep, so it's about 30 thumbnails all competing for your attention at the same time.
By 2020, it dropped to four across. Still a wall of options, still pretty chaotic looking, but now we're at three. So we got a row of three long -form videos, then a row of shorts, another row of three, more shorts, and so on.
So YouTube is hand selecting a small number of videos per person based on their watch history. They're not just throwing 30 options at someone and hoping they pick yours out of a hat. And this top row here, that's almost always gonna be videos from creators you've already watched.
And a lot of creators are pretty upset about this new design. All they see are fewer long -form slots with shorts eating up homepage space. But this isn't necessarily bad news for you.
It all has to do with something called the paradox of choice. So there was this pretty famous study from the 70s that gave one group of shoppers 24 different types of jam to choose from. And then another group just got six.
options. Now, you would think that more options would lead to more people finding the one they want and more people would buy. But as it turns out, the group that got fewer options was 10 times more likely to choose anything at all.
And that's because when people have too many options, we just tend to put the choice off or skip it altogether. So when your video shows up on someone's homepage now, there's way less noise competing with it. They're not scanning a wall of 30 unbroken thumbnails.
They're looking at a much more, you know, carefully selected three options that YouTube already thinks they'll like. And as far as everybody getting upset about the shorts rose, I don't personally feel like the sky is falling there. I mean, think about what you would do.
You just scroll right past them, right? I know I do. I'm not really much of a shorts watcher, so I just...
unconsciously go down to the next row of regular videos. People know how to scroll. But with only three slots being shown like that, a test appearance is literally your thumbnail sitting right there on someone's homepage, bigger than ever.
Which is exactly why all those loud thumbnails that we saw earlier stopped working, by the way. A thumbnail the size of a postage stamp that's fighting against 29 other ones had to scream to stand out. But a big slot with only two next -door neighbors only has to be interesting.
But there is a real catch for new channels, and it explains something that frustrates most beginners. Those first groups that YouTube tests your videos on, they're really just educated guesses on YouTube's part. And good guessing takes data.
Because, don't know if you know, but YouTube doesn't run on vibes, it runs on data and only that. So a big established channel has years of data under its hood, right? YouTube knows exactly who watches them.
but your brand new channel has basically zero data on it. So YouTube doesn't know who you are, who you're for, or who might love you. So it can't really pick a smart test group to start with yet.
And that's why it can feel like it's not showing you to anybody in the beginning. It's just not in the business of gambling with its viewers' time on an unknown stranger. It's not punishment, it's just missing data.
And I gotta warn you about those early months, because I know exactly what you're gonna be doing during them. You'll be checking your stats, you know, obsessively refreshing the page. And I'm not even calling you out on it.
Literally everybody does it. You post video number three, hour later you're refreshing the numbers, then again before bed, then the first thing you wake up in the morning hoping something happened overnight. And the numbers barely move and it feels like the whole thing is broken.
But it's not broken. The machine just hasn't finished figuring out. who to test you on yet.
So all those refreshes, it's basically you check in the oven every 45 seconds and wondering why nothing's baking yet. It's happening, it's just happening slowly. And I would love nothing more than to tell you that that urge to constantly check your numbers wears off.
Unfortunately, it doesn't. Eight years in. here's what my actual launch mornings feel like.
The video goes live and I immediately start refreshing because YouTube always shows you where a new video ranks against your last 10. You know, one out of 10 being the best and I just sit there refreshing that little number like it owes me money, right? Because if it's doing good, I refresh purely for the dopamine fix that I get from seeing it be number one.
But if it's doing bad, I refresh it too just in case something changed in the last 15 seconds. I admit it's not helpful behavior, but it is extremely human behavior. I am getting a little bit better about it, but it's still there every Tuesday morning when I upload something.
But watching that number for eight years did finally teach me something. So fairly recently, I put out a video that I really believed in. It was kind of a tough love video about why people fail on YouTube, and it completely face -planted on that ranking.
It was dead last. 10 out of 10, which is the kind of morning where all that refreshing stops being fun, actually. But in its first few hours live, that same video had already sold three spots in my program.
So I'd gotten three actual buyers coming in from a video that was sitting in last place. And more times pass now, so that video that I thought was a dud ended up selling $6 ,000 in its first week alone. So check your rankings all you want.
I clearly still do. But just remember what these stats can and can't see.
They can absolutely count how many people watched your video. What they don't see is the one person who watched it and decided to hire you, or in my case, bought into my program. So a video can look like a total flop on your stats page, but still be out there making you real money at the same time.
In fact, that's how it works more often than not. I have found over and over again that my big wide videos bring new people into my world, but they don't make the money, not directly. It's the smaller, quieter videos that don't get the big views, but they make the big bucks.
But now let's talk about how you grow past those first few months where you feel invisible on YouTube. Because if YouTube can't guess who to show a brand new channel to, how does anybody new ever get seen at all? Well, there's exactly one place on YouTube where nobody has to guess anything, and that's the search bar.
Remember, underneath everything, YouTube is still a search engine. People type their exact problem in and your video can come up as the answer. It's one of the main reasons why YouTube beats every other platform for becoming known.
But right here at the very start of a brand new channel, it turns into something even better because a search view is the one view that YouTube never has to guess at. The viewer walks right up and it tells YouTube what they want in their own words. And if your video matches those words, YouTube can show it with much higher confidence even when it knows next to nothing about your channel yet.
So that viewer did the targeting for them. So while the discovery side stays slow for you at first, you know, that's the people just being served your videos on their homepage, the search bar is a wide open door starting on day one. And the people coming through that door are the right people.
They type their problem in 10 seconds ago and somebody searching for an answer to the problem you solve is about as warm as a stranger gets. But those searches are also doing a second job for you. They're filling in all your missing data that YouTube doesn't have on you and your viewers yet.
Every single person who finds you through search teaches YouTube a little bit more about who your people are. So that data starts to slowly fill in and it completes the picture that YouTube has about your channel and who your audience should be.
So these are the videos a new channel should start with. And I call these pull videos, as in videos that viewers search for specifically and pull them off the shelf, as opposed to push videos which YouTube just pushes toward you without you searching for anything, like the ones they show you on the homepage. Just remember those FAQ videos that I recommended you start with.
Those are textbook pull videos. For our financial advisor Tom, it might be, how much do I need to retire at 62? The push version of that video, you know, might have some clever curiosity title like, why this retirement advice is dead.
Nobody's going to be searching for that. But the pull version, the searchable version, gets found by that 60 -something couple that he wants to be known by. Now I know how pull titles feel to write because they can feel utilitarian and just kind of boring, right?
But here's the reframe. Boring to who? To you maybe and to strangers who don't have this problem, but to the person who just typed those exact words into a search bar, your boring title is the most interesting sentence on the whole page because it's the one that matched what they asked.
So titles don't need to impress the crowds, right? They just need to match what that one person asked for. And I learned this lesson the hard way myself.
If you look at my early videos, I was making things like, you know, five things to remove from your website and five questions your web designer should be asking you, stuff like that that literally nobody was searching for. But then I flipped it around. I started titling my videos More to Match.
what business owners were probably typing into the search bar. Things like how much does a website cost and how to get Google reviews for my business. And those titles weren't sexy or anything, but the right people started finding them.
And by the time that those people called me, they'd usually watched about four or five of my videos, so they came into the call trusting me. And those titles were where all of it started. Nothing about my knowledge had changed between video 12 and video 13.
I just stopped titling videos for an audience that I didn't have. And I started titling them for the person actually looking for an expert like me. And this is where the whole thing comes full circle.
So remember how that top row of the homepage is almost always creators you've already watched? Well, the moment that somebody watches one of your videos, you get to join that club, right? You're now one of the creators that can show up there for that person the next time they open YouTube.
But until someone's seen you once, you basically can't exist on their homepage. And the way you get that first view is through search. That is your front door.
But poll videos have one more thing going for them. they are your long -term high performers that can get you new customers for years. Remember Jeff Su's video about how to write a resume that's five years old, but it still gets views every single day.
So think about it like this. A typical push video that YouTube just pushes onto people's homepages, that can go kind of viral, usually with some kind of a curiosity -based title, and it tends to burn really bright for a week or two. Then it just fizzles out because the algorithm moves away from it and starts pushing out.
the next viral video. But a pull video is a much slower burn that gets found steadily for years because, you know, assuming the problem itself is evergreen, people aren't going to stop searching for a solution to that problem. And I'll tell you a little insider trick of mine that proves which one is worth more long term.
So my channel is established enough now that I can do push videos. So I'll give them titles like, you know, copy this video style, it'll get clients to chase you, or why every smart person should start a YouTube channel.
You know, these are titles that are meant to get clicked on if you happen to come across them, but nobody's going to be searching for either of those titles, right? So when one of those videos just completely stops getting pushed out to people by YouTube, you know what I do? I actually go back in and I retitle it.
for search. And that one little change gives it the opportunity to have a second life on the shelf. Think about what that means.
So when a push video dies, it's retirement plan is just to become a pull video. So pull videos aren't just the beginner option. A lot of times, it's the better one in the long run.
But not every video on a searchable topic puts you in the expert seat because different videos have different depths to them. Just think about how people actually get answers now, right? They ask ChatGPT or Google and they can get a pretty decent answer in about 10 seconds.
And then a lot of those people will head over to YouTube anyway to kind of double check the AI and just fill in whatever it left out. So by the time your viewer ever hits play, they already kind of have a good sense of what they're supposed to do, right?
The question that they're actually still wondering at this point though is, what do I do when that doesn't work? And that's the kind of question that only somebody like you can answer. Just think about the last time you bought anything from Ikea.
You know, you get that little manual with all the diagrams and technically it's correct start to finish, but then you start building. but you find like one of the little pieces is warped and you stripped a screw hole by tightening it too hard. And now nothing grips or the pre -drilled holes don't quite line up.
And you know, if you force it, it's gonna crack the particle board. And none of those problems are in the manual, right? The manual assumes you got perfect parts and you're a builder who never makes a mistake.
That's what information content is. It's all technically correct. but it's useless the second that real life doesn't quite match up with the diagram.
What you actually need in that moment is the guy who's built 200 of those dressers who's like, yeah, that happens all the time. Whatever you do, don't force the holes. You want to run a bar of soap.
along the screw threads first. That's experience content and that's exactly what you have if you've been doing this work for years. You've seen your share of less than perfect dresser legs and you've stripped those screws yourself and you know what the manual doesn't say.
So the old YouTube playbook just told you to basically make the manual. The new one says make videos as the person who's built a ton of dressers in less than perfect conditions. So how do you make videos that answer that question on purpose?
Well, I came up with something for this and I call it the SCAR scale because teaching from your scars is where true experts live. Unfortunately, most experts who start a channel, they only ever make content at the two most basic levels. And those two levels are exactly where AI can replace you before you ever post your first video.
The content that makes people see you as the expert, that lives at the two deeper levels that most people never even touch. So let me walk you through all four so you can see the difference for yourself. S is for surface.
Now this is that pure information only content. So for Dana, our gym owner business coach, this could be a video called, you know, five ways to get more gym members. This is the Google -able layer and it's the stuff ChatGBT answers perfectly already.
So if someone can get the same answer to their question from AI in 30 seconds, you are at an S. C is for competence.
In other words, how does this actually work when you do it? These are videos where you show the process. So that might be Dana sharing her screen, walking through how she builds a gym's referral program step by step.
And it's a lot better than the surface level because at least now you're showing instead of just telling. But any qualified business coach could probably give that same walkthrough. So basically, you're still building the dresser on a perfectly flat floor in a well -lit room.
It's useful for sure, but it's also kind of replaceable. So S and C are the IKEA manual. That's where most people park their whole channel, but the next two levels are gonna be much more valuable.
Okay, so A is for adversity. These videos are more about, okay, when does this break? and what did you do about it?
So this would be something like Dana saying, you know, a gym owner came to me after spending 15 grand on a rebrand that looked incredible and brought in zero new members. I've seen this exact pattern at least 30 times now, and here's the thing, I had them fix first, and it works every time. And she learned that from doing the work, not from reading about it.
And R is for reframe, as in reframing your thinking. So these videos answer, why do most people get this completely wrong, and what should they focus on instead?
So this would be Dana saying, everybody obsesses over getting new members in the door, but after coaching a couple hundred gyms, I can tell you the number that actually makes or breaks your gym is one most gym owners never even look at. So that is no longer a tip, right? That's a complete reframing of how somebody thinks about their gym.
And this takes years of doing something real and seeing the mistakes. So AI isn't going to know about it and no beginner can fake it. So if your content lives down at A &R, you've gotten a real competition here because nobody else has your lived experience and your exact takes.
on what to do when things aren't perfect. Your scars are yours and nobody's earned them except for you. That's the deep end of the scale.
And the whole AI flood that we've been talking about since the beginning, that only ever fills up the shallow end, right? The Googleable half. But you are gonna be working from the deep end where it can't really reach you.
Now, I'm not saying every video needs to live at the two deepest levels. A healthy channel still needs some of that top level content too. Those are the videos that target search phrases and bring new people in the door.
So that's your pull videos doing exactly the job they're meant to do. And they're especially important when you're just getting started. And remember, your videos are somebody's first work sample of you.
Some of your most serious potential clients actually wanna watch you walk through a process just to feel out whether your approach fits them. And that's C -level content doing real work for your business. I'm just saying.
Don't stop there. You want to layer your scars into it whenever you possibly can. So when you're making that surface video about, you know, the five ways to get more gym members, drop in the client story.
Mention the pattern you keep seeing. Bring up the thing that the steps don't prepare you for. Just one real experience woven into an otherwise informational video changes everything about how you come across.
So I want you to think of the scar scale less like... you know, four boxes you pick from and more like a dial. So the further you turn it toward the bottom, the harder your content's gonna be to copy and the faster your viewers turn into clients.
But even turning that dial just one click down makes your content way more AI proof. But isn't it backwards to get on camera and tell your future clients about the times things went wrong for you, you know, when what you did didn't work.
Clients are supposed to see the wins, right? But think about it from the viewer side for a second. The whole internet is basically one giant highlight reel at this point, and people have learned to be pretty skeptical of it.
Everybody knows that real work doesn't go undefeated. So if you're out there saying yours does, they don't really think you're amazing. They probably just think you're hiding stuff or lying, right?
And if you're worried that your stories aren't impressive enough for YouTube, you've got that a little backwards too. So the messiness is exactly what makes them believable.
Let's go back to our financial advisor, Tom. So his instinct would be to make videos about the couple he helped retire right on schedule with enough money to spare. And that video is good.
He should probably make that. But the one that does the real work for him would be called something like... the retirement plan I built that didn't survive 2008.
You know, the plan looked perfect on paper, then the market fell apart, and Tom walks us through what that year cost his client. And here's the important part, what he builds into every single plan now because of it. So a pre -retiree watching that video isn't gonna think, oh wow, this guy failed somebody.
They're actually gonna think, okay. This guy has seen the exact thing that I'm scared of up close and he came back with an answer for it. That's the guy they want handling their money, not the advisor who claims it's never once gone wrong.
It's just not believable and you don't even need like a big dramatic failure to talk about. Just being honest about the limits of your advice does the same job. Just tossing in a casual Now, this doesn't work for everyone in the middle of a video.
That's going to buy you way more trust and belief in you than just another wind story would because that's a sentence that no salesman would ever say, right? There is one rule here, though. You're a working expert sharing lessons.
from real client work. You're not just journaling here, right? The loss is only gonna earn you expert status when it lands on what it taught you.
In other words, a scar should come with a lesson attached to it. Otherwise, it's still just an open wound and I'd never recommend teaching from open wounds that aren't resolved yet. So when we talk about making videos that live down at the deep end of the scar scale, there are four video types that do this.
really well. Not only do these establish you as the known expert, but they consistently make more sales than just about any other video type out there. Okay, so the first type of deep end video is one I actually named myself.
I call it the walk -up webinar. So think of a traditional webinar where you give a full overview of your entire system, that whole map of how you solve your client's biggest problem. The only difference between a regular webinar and the walk -up webinar is that this one doesn't hide behind any kind of a registration page or an email gate or anything like that.
It's just up on YouTube so anyone can walk up and watch it, get it? This is just a great, you know, here's how I work kind of video. Now, to be extra clear, This should be more of a high -level overview, not you drilling down into every last detail.
So let's say your process has 10 steps to it, right? You would want to lightly touch on all 10, but you don't go too deep on any one of them. You know, just like any webinar, there is a balance to it here.
So if you do too much teaching... then people are gonna start feeling like they don't need you anymore. But if you teach just enough, they can actually see what's possible and they just need a bit more help to actually pull it off.
And throughout it, you wanna include some of those scar stories where things didn't quite go to plan or reframing what they think the problem is to what they should actually be focusing on instead. And I've had really good results when I've tried this. So earlier this year, I was doing a five -day launch where I was, you know, basically doing a sunset sale of my old program.
And I put my walk -up webinar on YouTube and it sold 264 spots for a $497 program. So that one webinar got me $131 ,000. Not bad at all.
All right, so the second type of video are teardowns or audits and just any kind of real -time client help. So that would be you reviewing a client's current situation or even just a viewer who volunteered for it. So like if I were to record myself talking to one of my students or one of you guys about your YouTube channel and I look at it and to come up with suggestions on the spot of what you can improve to get the results you want.
And that works really well for visual things that we can actually look at and see together like a YouTube channel or a website. marketing stuff. If you're an interior designer, you could look at photos of someone's living room and just start showing things you would change.
Or it doesn't even have to be visual. It can just be you talking through it conceptually. Like the money guys, we talked about them, right?
They do this all the time on their channel. You know, people are just in the chat, you know, commenting about their financial situation and the guys weigh in on what they should be doing. The point is, and the magic happens because you're doing it on something real where the answers aren't, you know, all pre -prepared ahead of time.
And the whole time they're watching, the viewer's having one thought. That could be my website up on the screen. That could be my numbers.
So they're not just learning about your service anymore. They're previewing it. It's proof you can actually do the thing you say.
It's not just theory that some AI could spit out at them in 10 seconds. All right, now the third type of video is thought leadership and counter advice. So this would be some kind of a genuinely new idea or the honest case against.
something that everybody else in your field keeps saying. Now this is reframe level content, which is as deep as videos can get on that scar scale. Remember Jasmine's video about LLCs versus S -corps, where she said you actually shouldn't choose between them, you should do both.
And this one from Premium Brand Builders that's reframing what premium branding really is. You think it's about looking expensive, but it's really this other thing over here. And the fourth type of video is going to be the scariest sounding one on the list, live videos.
So in this one, you're teaching something or you're helping people in real time with no edits and no safety net at all. So you can see this kind of thing in the finance shows that take live callers now. You know, Dave Ramsey and the Money Guys do this all the time.
And all the business coaches who, you know, pull up some founder's actual numbers and work through them right there on camera. It's just popping up a lot more lately and that's not a coincidence. Because when someone watches you help a real person and it's in real time, nobody has to tell them you're an expert, right?
They're literally watching you be one right in front of them. Anyone can just research a topic and put together a nice polished video about it. But sitting down with a total stranger and figuring out their problem on the spot and actually getting them somewhere, you can't fake that.
There's no take two when you're alive. So whatever the viewer sees, is what really happened.
And that's exactly why I think that lives are going to be the next big thing on YouTube. There's so much AI stuff out there right now, and it's only going to get more and more as the years go on. So when everything polished might be machine made, going live cuts through all of it because everyone can see it's really you reacting to whatever's in front of you with nothing to hide behind.
And the trust goes even deeper than that. You know, a live viewer, they see your pauses and your thinking and your little recoveries.
That little place where you go, hmm, let me think about that. And then you land on something really smart. And remember how small imperfections make a competent person more trusted, not less.
When it's live, it just makes that even more powerful. So what kinds of things can you actually do live? Well, you can pretty much do any kind of video you would prerecord.
You could also do it live. You would just have the curriculum and you would just teach it. live.
But for me, the real sauce in a live video is the interaction with your audience. So you could be teaching what you'd normally be teaching. This time you're just answering their questions as you go, or better yet, at the end.
Or you could do the, you know, teardown kind of thing I was talking about before, where you're looking at their work and their situation and giving your best advice on it right there on the spot. And if nothing else, just do a simple Q &A. That's about as easy as it gets.
They just ask whatever questions they have on a given topic. And you answer them. Now, if you're hearing this and the thought of going live makes you scared or anxious, it's really common.
You're definitely not alone. I was super nervous about it in the beginning. So let's just talk about the two main fears that people have about going live.
So the first one is you're going to schedule it. You'll show up. Nobody else shows up.
So you're just sitting there talking to an empty room. Won't that be embarrassing? And the second fear, honestly probably the bigger one, is that people do show up and somebody asks you a question you don't know the answer to or you stumble on your words and you end up looking bad in front of the exact people you were trying so hard to impress.
So let's just take these one at a time. So the nobody showing up thing. Yeah, so first I would just say if your channel is brand new, you probably shouldn't be doing lives just yet anyway because there really won't be many people around to show up for you.
But once you've got some people watching your regular videos, like maybe when your videos are getting, I don't know, 20 to 30 views each, maybe that's a good time to start, right? You just wanna make sure they all know about it so they can show up. So YouTube actually makes that easy.
You can schedule a live ahead of time. So you would upload your title and your thumbnail. I'd probably do it like a week early.
Then that's gonna sit on your channel with the date and time on it. And it's gonna say upcoming. Basically, it's going to push that out to your viewers, you know, however many you've got, as an upcoming event.
It might sit on their homepage or something like that. So if you've got an email list, you want to tell them about it too. Because if you announce it ahead of time, a live becomes an appointment, right?
People want to interact with you, so they would show up to this the way they show up to anything they put on a calendar. But let's just say the day comes, you go live, and nobody showed up. it may happen.
And if it does, you just keep going. If you planned out something to teach, just teach it to the empty room. At the very least, that is going to live on as a replay on your channel for people to watch later.
So just switch your mind around to, okay, this is just me doing a normal video that people will watch later. But whenever I did lives early on, I mostly did Q &As. I didn't really have like a set curriculum that I was going to teach, but I was afraid that it might be slow to start so I always came with like 10 questions that I pulled for my comment section just to get the ball rolling because you know questions can take a little while to start rolling in even if you do have people there a lot of times they need like 10 minutes to warm up before they'll like think of a question so definitely do that and if you don't have any comments yet Just go to Claude, tell it what you're doing and have it come up with a good list of 10 questions that your audience would probably want to know the answer to.
And when even one person wanders in, give them all the attention you've got. Just say, hey, do you have any questions about this? I'd love to answer them for you.
And I know sitting there with two people watching, it can feel like a waste of your time and it can feel like... you've failed somehow, but it's actually super valuable training time. Because I'm telling you, going live is a skill you can take right to the bank once you're even just decent at it.
And trust me, you do not want your very first live to be in front of 100 people because A, that's just going to make you nervous, and B, you're probably just not good enough for that big of an audience yet. It is so much better to get all the little stumbles out of the way and the feel for how it all goes in that safety net.
of a small supportive audience first. So maybe it's two people this time, then next time it's 10, then maybe 20 after that. And your skills grow right alongside the crowd.
Because honestly, thinking on your feet is a muscle that you have to grow and small rooms are a great place for that. So don't wait around for some big audience before you try this. Get in early, prove your value in a live setting and just build those, I guess I would call them improv skills as you go.
Okay, so now let's talk about the bigger fear, the one where you're afraid you might just blank on camera in front of everybody. So what actually happens when you get a question you can't answer? It's happened to me plenty of times and I just say so.
I'd be like, you know what? I actually don't know that one off the top of my head, but I can look into it and try to get to it in another video. Or I've even said a lot of times like, you know what?
I'm not sure that's not really my specialty and I wouldn't want to steer you the wrong way. That's all you got to do. And nobody watching is going to think any less of you for it.
If anything, they trust you more now because they see you've got enough integrity to not. fake your way through an answer. And honestly, when you think about it, admitting that you've got a limit to what you know right there on camera, that's proof that everything else you said was pretty solid.
And think about your actual odds here for a second. You know, you've answered client questions for years, I'm betting. So the stuff people ask in a live is more or less gonna be the same stuff they ask you on calls all day long.
So the question you can't answer at all, That's going to be the rare exception, not the rule. And look, I get lives sound really scary, but if you actually know your stuff and you've sat in plenty of meetings before, you're going to feel surprisingly relaxed once you get going.
I'm going to say for me, the nerves are always the worst right before it starts in the lead up to going live. Once I'm in, I'm in and I'm in the zone and it's fine. And I can vouch for lives from the very beginning of my own channel because I did my share of them in my first year.
I actually... I did more then than I'm doing now. And I mostly did those Q &As, and eventually I was reviewing people's websites, you know, live on air, showing them what to fix as they watch.
Now, the view counts were always way lower than on my regular videos, and that's what stopped me from doing more of them. But we know now that it's not about lots of views. It's about the right views.
And those were concentrated, valuable viewers, the right people spending real time with me asking about their actual businesses. And there's another bonus I didn't even expect, right? Going live early is one of the fastest ways to get comfortable on camera because live doesn't give you the option of being precious about it.
You pretty much just have to talk. And I don't know what it is, but there's just something about when you know it's live and you see that people are there watching, you just show up way differently than, you know, if you're recording yourself in an empty room. It's just much more like you're talking to a real person, kind of like how you'd come across on a Zoom call.
Even though you can't actually see the people who are watching you, you still know they're there and it helps, right? So once you're a few lives in, that energy is going to kind of... creep into you and you can use it when you sit down to record your normal videos too.
And going live is one more superpower that might just be the best part of it. So it's the one video you barely have to plan. And once you're done with it, when you click the stop button, there's literally nothing more for you to do.
No editing, nothing. So if you're ever scrambling for a video some week, just go live and answer questions. And not to get too meta about this, but because this video you're watching right now has basically taken me about a month, to plan and write and shoot now, I have no choice but to do a live for my next video because I don't have time to plan anything else out and my editor doesn't have time to edit anything, so live it is.
But enough with the logistics and the fears. What about the results of going live? There's a coach named Carly Hill.
She's got about 300 subscribers and her videos get anywhere from 20 to 50 views each. yeah, pretty small numbers, but she makes 100 grand every time she runs a five -day event of going live and helping people in real time. Even Dr.
Megan, the prednisone pharmacist we talked about earlier, she says if she were starting over today, she would absolutely start with live streams. It's the lowest barrier that there is. Now, while I was talking about those four types of deep videos, one of them probably felt different to you, right?
For some of you, the walk -up webinar sounded like a mountain and live sounded weirdly easy. For others, live makes you wanna throw up, but auditing a viewer's situation sounds like a normal Tuesday. And that reaction you had is information you should absolutely pay attention to.
So all four types of those work, which means the one that sounds like something you would actually enjoy isn't the lazy choice here. It's the best one you should start out with. Okay, so now you know what videos to make, let's talk about how they work together.
Because here's the truth about this whole strategy. You don't establish yourself as the known expert to somebody who then hires you from one video. You want to create binge sessions.
Remember that a stranger needs about seven hours with someone before they feel like they know them. So a good binge session or a few of them spread out over a few weeks can really bank up that time pretty fast.
And every video in that session is one of those dense touch points stacking up right alongside the hours. So for some viewers, that feeling of knowing you shows up way before the seven hour mark. One viewer just watching you from their couch, four of your videos in a row.
That's the kind of trust that normally takes months, but it's compressing into a single night. And you create binge sessions in a way that might sound a little strange at first, by never really ending your videos. So no wrapping things up in a bow, no recapping what they just learned.
You know, nothing like, thanks for watching, or even just something as innocent as, okay guys, because what does that sound like, right? It sounds like you're signaling. that the video's over, so they're on to the next one and it might not be yours that they watch next.
Instead, what you want to do, rather than wrapping up a video, you want to give them the next step in just one seamless motion. You would say something like, so now that you know how much you need to retire, the next thing you need to figure out is when to take Social Security because getting that timing wrong can cost you tens of thousands of dollars.
I made a whole video about it and it's right here. And then you just point them to the exact video that's in your back catalog that makes the most sense for them to watch next. So it's really all in how you think about it.
The video doesn't ever end. It continues inside of the next video. And look really close to that handoff because every piece of it's doing a job.
So it names the next problem so the viewer realizes they have it. It attaches a cost so solving it feels urgent. And it makes the next step seem really effortless because the answer is just one click away sitting right there in the next video on screen.
So you're not asking them to stay, you're just showing them the next thing they already want. So for financial advisor Tom, his retire at 62 video just seamlessly hands off to his social security video, which then hands off to his withdrawal order video. And just picture how that evening's going from his viewer side of things, right?
They're sitting on their couch, they put on YouTube, eight o 'clock, they find a video and they press play on it about the one question they have. And that video answered their question, but then it surfaced the next question that they didn't even know they had. And then each time, the answer is just sitting right there.
So that's one viewing session, you know, three videos maybe. And then by nine o 'clock, Tom's a known expert to that couple. they didn't sit down and decide they were going to binge some financial advisor's channel.
They just kept having their next question answered by the same guy, and it built to it naturally. It's funny, I actually get comments all the time in my channel, some version of them saying like, I can't stop watching your videos because you never let me stop. And I'm just like, yep, it's all part of the plan.
You know, some of them probably see exactly what I'm doing, some don't, but nobody minds either way. You know, the next video... really is the thing that they wanted to know next, whether they knew it or not.
Nobody's ever gonna resent being handed the next right thing for them. And every next video in the chain multiplies everything at the same time. More time with you means more trust.
Those seven hours are filling up pretty fast. And longer sessions on your channel also tell YouTube that people are actually liking your videos. which earns you more push.
And somewhere around that third or fourth video, something happens in the viewer's head. They cross that line from watching a stranger into feeling like they know you. And you've definitely felt that line yourself with creators that you watch.
I'm sure that there was a video where they stopped being just some channel. and became the channel that you would watch anything new that they ever did. And it's hard to point to the exact moment that that happens, but it always happens inside of a session, never inside of a single video.
That's how a known expert actually gets made. So just start that habit now from your very first uploads. Every video you make, points to the next one.
Even a catalog of like five videos can still make a chain. And while we're building habits here, there's another thing that you should make a habit of, and that's giving your comment section the love it deserves. Most experts treat their comments like an afterthought.
Like, you know, you'll go in once in a while and you'll just respond to everybody with a, you know, thanks for watching. But for an expert brand, you should really be thinking of your replies more like public office hours. Somebody asks a real question under one of your videos and you give them a real answer, then every single person who reads that exchange just got, you know, a sense of your own judgment out in public on a real situation.
That's something AI doesn't really do yet and it's sitting there for free under every single video you make. And honestly, when your channel's new, being able to personally reply to every single comment you get, that's a gift and it's not gonna last forever. Because right now when your channel's still small, you actually can give a really thoughtful response to everyone.
So do it as much as you can. Sometimes all it takes is one really thoughtful reply to take someone from, you know, I just found this person all the way to... I really trust this person overnight.
And if you keep doing that and you keep this up, there is going to come a day when you can't really keep up with them anymore. And you'll probably actually miss being able to. I know I do.
Well, except for one kind of comment. So while we're here, let's talk about trolls for a second. Trolls in the comments that fear that people are going to say mean things to you on YouTube.
So let me tell you what the comment section of an expert channel is actually like after having been there for eight years reading mine. The overwhelming majority of comments are nice, like genuinely nice. People thanking you, people saying you explained something really well for them, and you know, of course there's going to be the real people asking real questions about what you covered in the video.
That's the normal day -to -day that you're going to see most of the time. But you're going to get some of the bad too, it's just part of the game. But let's actually flip.
how you look at troll comments, because honestly, trolls are usually a good sign that you're actually growing, because when the negative comments do eventually start showing up, it means that YouTube has started putting your videos in front of bigger, broader audiences, way past your core people. And a broader audience is gonna include everybody.
More of your ideal clients, yes. but more trolls too. So if you can just flip it in your head, and I know that that's easier said than done, we are human, a troll showing up really just means what you're doing is working.
They only wander in once the room gets big enough to wander into. And I'll just say here, I realize I'm a guy, and from what I've heard, women do tend to deal with a bit more of this on their channels, but misogyny is still alive and well on a lot of corners of the internet. So I just say don't let them win.
You know, assuming your content is good, your comment section is still going to be overwhelmingly positive. And either way, you hold all the controls here. You can actually block someone with one click and they never even knew they were blocked.
So they're still out there. probably typing more troll comments thinking they really got to you and you never have to see a word of it. So yeah, you can block individual people if someone ever gets out of line, but what's even more useful is you can actually filter out specific words so that certain comments that you don't want to see just never even show up for you at all.
For instance, I got Invisalign this past year because if you're an OG to my channel, you may have seen some of my earlier videos where my teeth were pretty bad. My bottom teeth were really bad. So I got a handful of comments about them.
from a few different strangers and they were pretty mean about it, right? Didn't get them a lot. I think it was like two or three times over the years, but it was just something I was self -conscious about.
So whenever I got one of those, it landed with me to the point where like I would think about it all day, which sucked. But all I really had to do is I added the word teeth to my filter. So, you know, just one word, one time, then I never had to see another comment about it.
So you can control it that way. So, you know, a few bad apples aside, the comment section is really not an ambush waiting to happen. It's mostly a lot of grateful strangers.
And luckily, you get to be the bouncer and toss anyone out who you don't want to be there. It's a free country, but guess what? It's your YouTube channel and you get to make the rules for it.
And about the people you're replying to, you know, for every person who comments, there's a ton of people who are just a silent audience who are just watching. And a lot of them are just reading through everything. People tend to worry when they don't get many comments, but I have found that the most serious buyers usually aren't the ones commenting anyway.
Those people are busy, so a quiet comment section doesn't necessarily mean no one cares. Some of the best clients you'll ever get will never write a single comment, and that's fine. Okay, so a few more things about the comment section.
First, YouTube lets you write one comment and then pin it to the very top. of the comments on every video so that it's really the first thing anyone sees when they scroll down. And think about who's scrolling down there, right?
It's somebody who just watched you, they probably liked what they heard, and now they're poking around trying to figure out what this channel actually is and whether there's more here for somebody like them. The pinned comment is where you can answer that before they ever have to ask. Something like, you know, you could say, you know, if you're in your 50s or 60s and wondering whether you can actually afford to retire, you're in the right place.
Watch my video on, you know, when to take Social Security next. It's linked right here. And if you want my free retirement checklist, grab it at this link.
That one little comment tells the right person that they belong here and it points them to their next video and makes the path to your website just one tap away. And the next thing is your comments can give you so many ideas for what videos to make next, right? You're getting real questions from real viewers in their exact words.
That could be next month's videos writing themselves. So remember the FAQ videos you start out with, the comment section can keep adding to that forever. So now with all of this laid out, you got the person, the topics, the depth, the binging, a fair question now is why doesn't everyone just do this?
And I think it's just because so many people, experts especially, feel like they need to be 100 % ready before they ever act. I call it the expert's curse, aka perfectionism. And this can show up in a few different ways, so let me just run through the big ones and you can tell me if any of these sound familiar.
The first one is the research phase that just never ends. As in, you're going to start the channel for sure, you're just watching a few more videos about how to do it first. And you've been watching those videos for, what, eight months now?
And yeah, the irony is not lost on me. Some of you are doing that exact thing right now, watching a very, very long video about how to do it. I'll tell you the difference, and I really mean this.
Most research loops don't have an exit point, but this one does. So by the end of this video, you're gonna have the whole plan, and there's gonna be genuinely nothing left for you to research, which might feel a little weird for some of you, so heads up on that. Then there's the whole setup rabbit hole.
You know, you can't start until everything is 100 % ready. The right camera, you gotta have the right lights, the right background. You wanna get that cool blurred background effect.
Somehow getting your setup ready is just turned into a part -time job that never ends because there's always one more thing to figure out before you can press record. And then my personal favorite, the calendar one. I'm gonna start once things slow down.
Come on, things don't slow down. You know that and I know that. Things have never once slowed down when you're running your own business, even when you're not busy with clients.
That's when you decide to redo your website or whatever it happens to be this week. And I get it, putting everything off until everything's perfect feels like the responsible thing to do. It feels like quality control, right?
Like you're protecting your reputation by not just rushing out there before you're ready. But really, it's the sneakiest way there is to quit because you never have to actually admit that you quit. You're just...
not ready forever. And they call this the expert's curse because it bites experts harder than anybody, which makes total sense. You've spent years being the sharp one, the credible one, the person in the room who has all the answers.
And your first videos aren't going to come anywhere close to showing how good you actually are. Mine sure didn't, and neither did anybody else's. And that gap between how good you are and how good your videos are feels embarrassing.
So you just wait until you feel ready. And here comes the tough love part. That feeling you're waiting for, it ain't ever going to come, right?
It actually gets worse because the more you know, the more you can see everything you don't know and the louder that, you know, not yet voice gets. And by the way, this isn't even just a you problem, right? 71 % of CEOs say they deal with imposter syndrome.
And that's the people running the world. So apparently, feeling not ready just comes with being good at what you do.
So you can't really wait this one out, and I'm not saying this to push you. There's a really famous experiment about this exact thing from a photography class at the University of Florida. So the professor, he split his class into two different groups.
Group A was gonna be graded on quantity, just the more photos they turned in, the higher their grade was. Group B, was graded on quality.
So they only had to submit one really, really good photo for the whole semester, and they had the whole semester to make it. Now, if perfectionism worked the way it feels like it should work, group B would win that contest, right? All that time, all that care just poured into one perfect photo.
But at the end of the semester, the professor looks at all the work, right? And the best photos in the entire class, all of them came from group A, the quantity group.
Because just by taking hundreds of shots, they learned things like lighting and shadow, composition by actually doing it over and over again. And meanwhile, group B's over here spending the whole semester just like theorizing about the perfect image. They're planning it all out on paper.
They had almost nothing to show for it. And the kids that weren't even trying to be great got great kind of by accident. Now this is Dave Zoeller and he's a financial planner who decided he wasn't going to overthink everything and he's just going to do it.
So he started his channel with just an iPhone in a really simple corner of what looks to be his home office. His videos were super short, shorter than I would even recommend, and for seven months not much happened. He just kept showing up every week anyway, which we know is a lot further than most people ever take it.
So then one video he made about social security, it finally found its people and the appointment requests started pouring in that same weekend. Today, that same channel brings his firm $60 million a year in new assets. So what actually changed between the quiet months and the $60 million?
Did he get a new certification? No. Did he upgrade the camera?
No. Honestly, the videos weren't even the difference. He just kept posting until something caught on.
All those quiet months of, you know, just whatever videos weren't the failure part of the story. They were his runway. So let me just reset the expectation completely.
Being bad at first is the plan. Every expert you've met in this video was bad at first, in an empty room where being bad is just free practice. Okay, so next up.
let's talk time. How long does this take to start working and how much of your week does it actually need? And I'm not going to tell you what the hustle and grind guys would say, right?
You don't have time for a second job. The good news is you don't have to take one. There are two fixes for the time issue and together they're going to be the difference between this plan being realistic or just a fantasy.
Here's the first one. So imagine if you're stranded on an island and you need to eat as people do, right? And you can see that there's lots of fish out in the water and you want to catch some of them.
So you've got a couple of ways you could do it. You could spend an hour out on the rocks with a spear, you know, spend some time, get good at it, and you catch a fish. Awesome.
You get to eat tonight. But what about tomorrow? You're back out on the rocks with the spear for another hour because...
The spear only feeds you on the days you use it. Or you could spend a week building a net. And yeah, that week costs you way more upfront, right?
You're building a net while you could be out there eating fish and it feels slow. But once that net's in the water, it catches fish while you sleep, right? It keeps catching day after day, whether you're standing there or not.
So now go down the list of everything you've been told to do for marketing and just ask yourself for each one, ? A social post, spear, right? Feeds you once, if that, and it's gone by tomorrow.
A cold call, spear. A networking breakfast, a flyer, a Facebook ad, a booth at the expo, spear, spear, spear, right? Every one of those stops working the second you stop doing it.
But a video that answers a question that your person's still going to be searching for in three years from now, that's a net. You build it once and it catches clients for you for years. When you're busy, you just have to think about how you're gonna spend your hours, right?
Now, you could spend them on low -value tasks that feel productive, or you can spend that time making a video. Now, that's what we call leveraged time, right? It's the single most valuable hour you could spend on your kind of business because it has the longest stretch of being useful.
And let me put a real number on this net. There's a realtor in Vegas named Dale. He spends about four hours a week on his channel.
That's it. That's basically a Saturday morning. And those four hours a week bring him around $700 ,000 a year in closed business.
Is he working harder or spending more time than the agents who are grinding out the cold calls and door knocking all day? Obviously not. He's working a really tiny fraction compared to how they're marketing themselves.
His hours just go into making nets and their hours are going into spearing fish one at a time. So that one choice, that one net is worth about 700 grand a year to him. All right, and the second idea is that making a video just takes way fewer hours than it used to because AI has done a really good job at collapsing the work at every single stage of the process for us.
AI can find your best topics, right? The ones that people are actually searching for. And it can do it in minutes, by the way.
That alone used to take a whole afternoon. And that's even if you knew what you were looking for, which most people don't. Then when it comes to planning your video out, it can take all of your messy, rough, you know, half ideas and stories and opinions, and it can organize them all into a structure that feels like a real video.
And I love this one. It can actually even interview you to pull even better stuff out of you, like all your real opinions and hot takes and all that stuff that maybe you weren't even thinking about when you first had the idea for a video. And I mean it can do it out loud by voice, like a voice interview.
So it'll ask you a question about your topic, and then you just answer it like you're on a phone call, and then it's smart enough to ask you a good follow -up. And that's the magic here in those follow -ups that can really pull expertise out of you that you would never even think to sit down and type out. And that matters a lot because remember, your videos need to have information gain, right?
They need to say something new. And that new stuff is buried in your experience and in your brain, but not always on the surface. That AI interviewer can really dig it out for you.
Then it can write a really good first draft of your script. So you never once have to, you know, face every writer's worst fear, which is the blank page. AI can also help you with every other part of it, like graphics, animated text to put in your videos, B -roll.
It makes great thumbnails from scratch. It can even handle the editing if you want to go down that road. And I admit AI editing's a little more advanced than I am, so I haven't tried that one out yet, but there are plenty of videos on YouTube that'll show you how to hook certain AI systems up to where all you have to do is just drop in your footage of you talking, and it's gonna come up with all the text on screen graphics and edit out your bad takes.
and it'll literally edit the whole thing and put it all together into a finished video for you. It's pretty crazy. And I'm sure that kind of thing is gonna be even easier to do soon enough.
Now my point here isn't to steer you toward any one AI tool because let's face it, the tools change every few months anyway. The point is the before and after on your calendar. You can do YouTube now in four hours a week if you wanted to.
But since a lot of that extra speed comes from AI, how do you end up with videos that don't sound like everyone else's? You already know what the algorithm does with a video that sounds like everyone else's. Not to mention, you don't get to be the known expert through AI content alone.
So the real question is, how do you use it to help you save all that time without losing what makes it yours? I use what I call the bookend rule. So the first 10 % is all me, right?
I start every new video by just... brain dumping everything I know about the topic. All the steps, all the tips, my opinions, that one client story, it got me remembering.
And messy is totally fine here. The AI really shines at organizing all the chaos that you can throw at it. So just get it all out of here and onto the page.
Then the middle 80 % is the AI. So I personally use Claude the most for this. That may change as the tools keep swapping, you know, which one's better.
I gotta say Claude has been the better creative helper and writer for a while now, so I'm not too sure if that's gonna be changing anytime soon, but it's good at organizing it, structuring it, and doing any additional research that it has to do to fill in any gaps, and then drafting it. But I give it pretty strict orders that it's supposed to build off of my own stuff first, meaning if I give it my own thoughts and everything, and then it does its own extra research, I always wanted to prioritize what I gave it over that information layer that it found in the research, because obviously my stuff's gonna draw on all the things that we've talked about up till now that make it a known expert video.
The research is just there to help round it out, if that makes sense. So that part's the grunt work, and I'm happy to let Claude have at it. And then the last 10%.
is me again. So I go back through it, I fix whatever feels off, I rewrite things the way I would actually say them out loud. Remember how important that is?
Or maybe I add in an extra story that I just remembered while I was reading the draft, which that kind of thing happens pretty often actually. Sometimes reading what it gives me just kind of sparks a new thought or makes me remember something good that I can add in, which is great. So I'm just bookending the part that AI does in the middle.
So it never touches the two ends because the ends need the human stuff the most. So that way the video still sounds like me and the hours that I have to put into it still stays small.
But there's one more trick you can use to compress the time even more. So rather than doing one -off videos on a rolling weekly basis, I say you should really be doing three or four at a time. So we call this batching.
So basically you would just come up with all four topics at once while you're in that headspace. Then you move on to scripting all of them while you're in writing mode. Then you just shoot them all in one sitting.
So why does that take less time? Well, they've studied this a lot actually, and it comes down to not losing time to something called task switching. Because think about it, whenever you start on a new task, you're not always productive doing it right away, right?
It usually takes like 20 to 30 minutes to really settle into it. So batching just really lets you save all those little 20 minute chunks by staying inside of one headspace and one lane for each phase. So if making one video a week, were to take you four to six hours, you could probably do four videos in like three times as long, not four times.
And then that way you're covered for a whole month in like two days of work. And honestly, the best proof of this is Dr. Anna.
She's a full -time doctor, which is already like 50 or 60 hours in a normal week. And then when she's working at the hospital, it could be closer to 80. And then on top of that, she had a new baby at home too.
So there was just no way, her schedule wouldn't allow for it, for her to sit down to make a new video every week. So she started batching instead, and that completely changed everything around for her. And she actually took it so far that when she was 38 weeks pregnant, she recorded 10 videos in a single day.
And her channel just kept posting out its normal schedule for weeks while she was at home with her newborn baby. And that's another beauty of batching, right? You can just get ahead when you've got the time, and then it covers you whenever you need to step away, like vacation or anything like that.
And that's just an extreme example of what she did, but she also was just able to make batching work for her where she was just doing it over a couple nights a month, kind of in her evenings after her kid went to bed. And that lets her keep her busy schedule, and she has time for all of it. And while we're stacking up the leverage, there's one more play here, and it's my favorite kind, where you do the work once.
and it pays off in two different places. So remember Amy Porterfield from before? She's the one who taught me all about selling online courses, and she was always podcast only, but now she's putting them on YouTube, that one.
Well, here's the fun part. You get to run her play in reverse. She had to add video to her podcast to get extra visibility, but you can get a whole podcast for free out of the videos you're already making.
So the format is just called a video podcast. And for some of you, this might be the most comfortable format in this entire plan. So what is a video podcast?
I think that most people get a picture of like a fancy studio set up with a certain kind of microphone. We've all seen these clips all over social media, but it's really not about that at all. All a video podcast really is, is it's just a video where you just talk to camera, really similar to what I'm doing right now.
Don't worry, way shorter. It doesn't have to be this long. It's just this kind of format.
But the important part is that it works just as well as audio only. It's just you on camera talking. Maybe you're solo, maybe with a co -host, maybe with a guest.
There's no set structure you have to follow and there's no visuals to gather and no fancy anything really. The whole thing just leans on the one asset you already have, you talking about the thing that you know about. And I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that YouTube is actually the number one podcast platform in the whole world now.
More people find and listen to podcasts on YouTube than anywhere else, even beating out Spotify and Apple. And that's the thing, on YouTube, people can either watch you or... Just listen, whatever they feel like.
And because it's just talking, two nice things can happen, right? You can comfortably go a lot longer, which you now know is exactly where the trust gets built. And that finished video works as watchable or just listenable.
Somebody can just as easily watch it from the couch, or they can just have it on in the background while they're making dinner. They can play it in the car or at the gym or walk in the dog. They can even have their phone put away in their pocket and they don't lose out on anything important either way.
It banks up the trust hours, it can get found in search, and one busy person can absolutely keep it up because the production burden is just so low. But I did mention that a video podcast can work in two places at the same time. So what do I mean by that?
So you would upload it to YouTube just like any other video and then... you take the exact same file, you change nothing about it, and then you can upload it to Spotify, which is the number two spot for podcasts. And Spotify is really pushing video podcasts hard now, so it's got a little bit of the same discovery that YouTube does.
Now, to be fair, it's like a baby version of it. It's nowhere near as powerful. But Spotify will still, you know, try to put shows in front of me that I've never listened to before based on what I've already been listening to.
So there's at least a chance of a total stranger stumbling onto you there, which is more than you can say for the rest of the podcast apps. And then from there, all you have to do is check one little thing when you upload it to Spotify, and that makes a connection that sends it out to Apple Podcasts too, and basically all the other podcast apps out there.
And that's all the extra work there is. It's the same video working double or triple duty for you. Now, honest expectations here, because I like to keep everything totally real.
The podcast side is going to grow a lot slower, but the extra effort to upload it there is so close to zero that slow growth is still free growth, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm actually doing this exact thing myself right now. I've got a podcast called Content That Sells, and it's basically just my YouTube videos uploaded as episodes.
And I've only been doing it this year. So far, it's picked up thousands of listens. Yeah, that's a far cry for my YouTube numbers, let's be honest.
But it's building and it costs me almost nothing. And a couple of years from now, I would expect it to be a real second door into my business. Now compare that to the other kind of repurposing that everyone's always trying to push, which is, you know, chopping your videos up into shorts.
On paper, it sounds easy and fast. Like, you know, I already made the long video. Why not just spend an extra minute getting more out of it?
Especially now that we've got all these AI tools that, you know, they make a lot of promises. They say they'll find the best viral moments for you. cut them up automatically, but hey, it doesn't really work as well as they say it does.
And it still eats up way more of your time than you would ever expect it to. And I actually used to do a version of this. I just hired a VA whose whole job was making these clips.
And not only did I pay her to do it, it still took hours out of my week because I basically had to sit there and review all of them. And most of them just weren't very good and they didn't work. So I'd have to then explain what was off.
She'd go try it again. And then I'd review them all over again. And it just went around and around like that.
And that's time that would have been so much better spent me just making my next actual video. So I ended up pulling the plug on it. It just wasn't worth it.
And it might have been worth it had they actually done anything for the business, but we've been over this. Shorts just don't get you the trust or the business results that you would want. So you're just catching someone for a few seconds while they scroll, which we already know it's the wrong kind of attention.
So it's just more work that's aimed at exactly the people who are never gonna hire you anyway. But the podcast version of repurposing is the opposite. It's almost no extra work because you're not actually modifying the video at all.
literally just repurposing the whole thing, and you're putting it in front of the people who are actually in the mood to sit and listen for a while. So repurposing your videos into shorts, that is just busy work, but repurposing them into podcasts, that's basically . Oh, and there's actually one more benefit here that takes care of a real fear that I have myself.
So this whole plan is built on YouTube, right? Anytime you build on one platform, there's always this little what if in the back of your mind.
What if something ever happened to my channel? Or what if something ever happened to YouTube itself? And that's not likely to happen.
But it's also not crazy to think about. You know, well, repurposing my videos to podcasts is kind of like my insurance in a way, right? Your episodes living on Spotify and Apple means that your audience has a second and third place to find you.
It just gives you a cushion for no extra work. Okay, so the next big thing I want to talk to you about is gear, right? New YouTubers either love to obsess over it or they're kind of scared off by it.
So here's the entire list of everything you need to get started and I promise you it's shorter than you think. So first, you obviously need a camera, but do you need to go out and buy one? No, your smartphone is 100 % good enough to start with and it's honestly...
All you'll ever really need. And sure, you can get fancier later if you want to, but a newish iPhone is a pretty great camera. And I guarantee you no one's going to think any less of your expertise or even your videos if you use one.
Remember Dave Zoller, the financial advisor? His $60 million in new money came in... through his iPhone lens.
And then there's a realtor named Karen Carr who gets most of her business from her videos and she started out on an iPad with a cheap clip -on mic. An iPad video is honestly pretty bad but she still made it work. Ty Myers also ran the first two years of his channel on an iPhone and it was all he needed.
And honestly, using an iPhone or a smartphone of any kind isn't even a compromise. In the beginning, it's 100 % the right call because it's one less thing that you have to learn. Any kind of fancy camera, even the simple ones, it's just going to add a bit of a learning curve between you and starting.
I started with a big fancy camera that I barely knew how to use, and I was crammed into a tiny office at the time, and the lens was way too zoomed in. So I literally had to set the camera up outside of my door, shooting into the room, just so that I could fit myself in the frame. And then the door frame...
was packed so tight with all that stuff, my tripod. So every time I had to like go out and go to the bathroom or get a drink of water or whatever, I'm like, you know, ducking around the tripod just so that nothing moved in between takes. So honestly, an iPhone would have been better.
It would have fit the room and I wouldn't have had to go through all that. Okay, so next you definitely want a teleprompter app. So specifically...
You want the one that follows your pace as you talk. So I told you how most of the other teleprompter apps suck because they go at one fixed speed. And that's a huge flaw because real people do not talk at one fixed speed.
You know, you speed up when you're excited and then you slow down to emphasize something. You pause. Basically, you just talk like a person.
You know, people don't talk at a set speed. It's unnatural. And a fixed speed ruins the illusion of naturalness, right?
And your delivery is just gonna be flat, trying to keep up with it. So the one I personally use is called PromptSmart Pro, because it's the only one that I found that actually keeps up with me. No, I'm not sponsored by them, it's just the one I happen to use and I like it.
Next, you want a decent microphone, for sure. So people on YouTube will forgive almost anything visual, so if you've got grainy footage, or weird framing, or a window blowing out behind you, they'll still watch all of it as long as they like what you're saying.
People will even watch you on a webcam if they like what you're saying. But nobody's going to put up with bad audio because it's annoying, right? So mine here is just a wireless clip -on.
It was like $65 on Amazon. It's the DJI Mic Mini. You can even go cheaper than that if you want to.
There are definitely mics you can buy on Amazon for like $30 or so. You just never want to use the built -in mic on your phone or your camera. They're just...
never good enough. One more thing, and this one's optional, and that's a light. So to start, a window does the job just fine, right?
Just sit facing one and you're lit for free, courtesy of our friend Mr. Sun. The only catch with him is he keeps his own schedule.
So down the road, a light you can control is just going to free you up from, you know, having to chase the sun around the house. Mine's a flat panel, cost me about 200 bucks, but there are plenty of good ones for a lot less.
I have graduated to this one. It's a space saver, I like it, but it is a little expensive. But as I said, having a light at all is optional.
A window works fine for a long time. Don't not start because you're saving up for a light first. Okay, so your background, let's talk about that.
This is something that can stop people for a really long time if you're not careful. Here's the thing. Pretty much any corner or wall of your home or office is gonna work just so long as it's not too messy or distracting.
And I know you see all those perfectly decorated sets in other channels with the bookshelves and the plants and one of those neon signs. Honestly, I think mine looks pretty good now, but I still am on YouTube and I see other channels. I'm like, oh God, I wish I had that one, right?
So you could go through that exercise forever. I don't think anyone will ever be satisfied with their own background. The thing is, you can do all of that later if it's fun for you, but just to reality check, your viewer, they're only looking at two things, your face, and are you talking about how you solve their problem, right?
The wall behind you isn't really on their list. I am telling you, you're gonna care about your own background way more than your viewers ever will. And yeah, I know I've got a pretty good setup now and a nice camera, but remember, I've been doing this for eight years and this is making me real money.
So I like to reinvest back into the channel where it makes sense to do that. None of this was here at the start, other than my like big, stupid camera. I started adding things slowly, a little better each year as things grew for me.
I even moved to a bigger house at one point, partly so that I would have an office that could fit all of this in without everything being crammed together and crammed into doorways. And you can do all that too if you want later. As you start seeing some success, you can put a little money back into your setup.
A nicer camera, a better light, a better space to record in. It's a fun thing to do once the videos are already working. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend that better production quality does nothing for you at all, right?
As your videos get better looking over the years, it can, you know, lift how expert you come across at least a little bit. And that's not nothing. It's just not the thing that makes people hire you.
And it's nowhere near the top of the list, actually. So start simple now and get fancy later once the simple version is already bringing people through the door. So if we tally up the total damage, the phone you already own, let's just call that free because you need it anyway, a $30 mic and a $30 teleprompter app.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, you'll probably just need like a cheap tripod to mount your iPhone on. Let's just also call that about $30. You can get them for less, but $30 is probably the average.
So all in, under $100 to start. The gear should not be the thing standing between you and starting this week, which brings us to a question that actually matters way more than gear. Who's going to do all this work?
Because I get two types of people that usually ask me this question. One type of person is just hoping to hire all of it out. Like, can I just pay an agency to run my channel?
I'm busy. They do this for a living. Let's hire it out.
The other type's the exact opposite. They're planning just to white knuckle every single piece all by themselves. Maybe they can't really afford to hire any help or they're just like, nobody's touching my stuff.
Nobody's going to do it as good as me. And both of those people are half right. So in that book I was talking about earlier, 10x is easier than 2x.
That book explains exactly why. So the main topic of that book is just going all in on one big direction, but that's only half the idea. The other half is what do you do with your own hours once you're going in that big direction?
Ideally, you keep the couple of jobs that only you can do, and then you get everything else off of your plate. And that's really how you get really, really good at your part instead of staying stretched really thin across all of it. So some of these jobs really are gonna be yours forever and some of them you should probably hand off as fast as you can.
So let's just go through the jobs that YouTube really involves and who should be doing each one. Okay, so who is actually on camera? This one should be obvious.
It's gotta be you. You're trying to become the known expert, that person who the right people come to know, trust, and choose.
So of course that's you. I only bring this up because every so often someone asks me if they can, you know, put a team member on camera instead, or I've even had people say they want to hire an actor to be the face of the channel. And I get it if being on camera isn't your favorite thing, but...
put a hired face on your channel, and theoretically everything still works, right? The trust builds, the calls come in, it just all happens for somebody else. That person then becomes the known expert that people wanna hire, and you're just the one paying to make it happen in your own niche, so no.
When the camera's on, it's you or you're missing the whole point. And whenever I get that question, I can usually hear the real question hiding underneath it. It's the same one I get in my comments more than almost any other.
You know, what if I just don't want to be on camera at all? Is this still going to work? And I wish I had a softer answer for you, but the honest answer is no, it won't.
There's no work around here, and I would just be wasting your time pretending I had one. A willingness to get on camera is that line that divides the 90 % of experts who will never do it from the 10 % who will. And that divide is a big part of why this opportunity is still sitting there for you at all.
If everybody was cool with doing it, we'd be having a very different conversation right now because I'd probably be telling you that YouTube's too saturated to stand out. But thanks to all the people who are, I hate to say it, but afraid, it's not. There's still room for you.
All right, next up, writing the scripts. That is also going to be you. with some help from AI, of course.
So this is one of those things that people get in their head that they could just hire a cheap writer to save them time. But trust me, I've tried outsourcing it several times with a series of writers who are good at writing. But script writing for these kinds of videos isn't actually about the writing part.
It's about putting your expertise on paper. in the words that you would actually use. So anyone who you'd hand this off to doesn't have your experience and doesn't know how you actually talk.
So every script that I handed off and outsourced, it just came back really shallow. There was just no there there in any of them. They'd basically all just done a classic research and regurgitate job.
And it was hard to even give notes on it because the thing that was missing wasn't something that I could fix. The expertise just wasn't ever theirs to write about.
And what's different about it now is that AI fills in those exact gaps better than any of those writers ever did. And I think that's just because it knows a little bit about pretty much everything, so it makes for a really useful writing partner. It's kind of like the expert wingman that I could just never actually hire before.
But all the judgment and the stories and the hot takes, those are still yours. You gotta take that on yourself. But use AI, preferably Claude, to take the bulk of the writing, that first draft for you.
Then there's picking your topics, and that is also you. But again, AI can help you here a ton. So this is another area where people have this daydream about bringing on some kind of a producer they can hire, usually as a contractor, not full -time.
But someone who's just basically going to magically tell them what they need to be making videos about that are going to get them the most views. Ideally, they'd come up with all your topics for you. They'd plan out every video and just hand you the finished plan.
So all you have to do is show up and be the on -camera talent. Sounds great, right? But even if you found that person and could afford them, because trust me, the good ones that do this are really expensive.
The topics still have to come from you for the simple reason. you're the only one who knows what you can do justice to and what you can't. So you're the filter, right?
Someone else picking your topics is just going to chase whatever looks clickable, whatever they think can go the most viral, which we now know isn't the plan. Plus, half of what they're going to suggest won't be stuff you can deliver on, and a channel full of videos you can't deliver on misses the entire point of you being the known expert.
Topics are yours. But yeah, use AI's brainpower to help you sort it all out. Thumbnails, on the other hand, might not be you.
Because now we're crossing into the other half of the list, the jobs that don't need to come from you, right? Making thumbnails used to mean either learning Photoshop or at least Canva or hiring it out to a designer. And I've hired plenty thumbnail designers over the years.
And most of them were really bad at it. It's just the job that a lot of really junior designers take on. I think because they think it's easy money, they think it's like the current thing to do.
But really, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of thumbnail designers were just people who had Photoshop, which does not automatically make you a designer. So that was your old choice to either do it yourself or pay somebody mediocre. But now...
remember what we already saw AI do with thumbnails. It brainstorms the concepts and it makes the finished designs, you know, five or 10 at a time. And what you get back looks way better than what hiring a designer ever got you even a year ago.
And when I say it might not have to be you doing this, what I really mean is anyone on your team can own this part, if you have a team that is. You could even hire a cheap VA to do this for you. And the reason even someone cheap can do it is because it's pretty much just chat GBT at the wheel.
They just have to go through the process and give you the concepts for you to choose between. There are even ways, and my team and I are exploring this right now, to set up an AI agent that's literally going to make thumbnails for you overnight while you're sleeping. And that's more technical that I want to get into here because I haven't really even mastered that myself yet, but it's all figureoutable on YouTube if you want to go down that road.
Okay, that just leaves us with editing. So this is the one that I cannot recommend enough that you not even bother doing yourself. As soon as you can afford to outsource this, do it.
Why do I say that? Well, as someone who started off editing my own videos, I can tell you it is just a time suck and a skill that you personally never need to master. Most new YouTubers will tell you that when they sit down and edit the video, that takes them about double the time that all the rest of the video planning and shooting took.
So especially when you talk about being busy, this is the easiest way to like kill your hours for sure. And a decent editor isn't really even all that expensive, not for what you need. Think about what a client getting video actually needs from an edit.
You need to cut out the mistakes and the long pauses, you know, throw some text on screen here and there, maybe some simple graphics that Claude Design can make you in about five minutes now, and maybe just some like B -roll footage here and there. Those are all things that would take you a little bit of time to learn how to do, but it's all really standard for any halfway decent editor to be able to handle it for like 60 to 100 bucks a video.
And yeah, when you want the crazy custom looking stuff that looks like a million bucks, yeah, that'll cost you, but you don't need that. Again, simple now, you can always get fancy later if you want to. But I will say this, fancy editing can actually work against you.
Now, that may sound like it clashes with what I said a few minutes ago about, you know, how better looking videos can lift how expert you come across. Both are true, and the difference... is what kind of editing we're talking about.
So the flashy stuff, right? A cut every two seconds, a lot of zoom -ins, a lot of sound effects on everything. That is built to keep the most easily distracted person on the internet watching you for just a little bit longer.
that's not your viewer and it's definitely not your buyer. All that noise and chaos just tends to attract the wrong people and it gets between your actual viewer and the thing they came to learn. And if you want proof, let's look at Hormozy again, right?
He's basically the guy who invented that style. All the big bold captions popping up word by word, the emojis flying across the screen like literal fire explosions. And half of the internet copied him for it.
And editors actually started using the term Hormozy style editing. But then a couple years ago, he came out and said that he was just done with it. He'd looked at his own numbers and all of those views weren't turning into revenue.
Think about it, his buyers are business owners who want to learn stuff that's actually important. And the people that he was pulling in with the half education, half explosion videos, they just weren't buying anything. So he stripped his editing way back.
And he went all in on just plain education. And Hormozy is one of the smartest people out there when it comes to selling through content. So when he figures something like this out, I tend to listen to him.
So your editing should never ever feel chaotic, right? You're not going for the lowest common denominator because keeping that person around does nothing. for you, right?
Where you wanna end up eventually is videos that just look nice and clean, a little sophisticated, right? The kind of polish that you barely even notice. It just gets out of the way and lets your expertise shine.
That's the version of editing that's gonna help you come across as more of a pro, but for now, the simple edit we just talked about, it's all you need. So all that to say, I would just much rather see you hand off this week's video to an editor to get it over the finish line while you get to work on next week's video.
So there's the whole staffing chart, right? Your face and your judgment are what build the expert business, so those stay yours forever. Everything else on the list is really just tasks and hours, and hours are for buying back.
So at this point, you've seen every skill this whole system needs if it's gonna work. Picking your audience, finding topics, writing, being on camera, packaging, and editing. And...
If that list feels like a lot to get good at, I want you to take a breath because here's the part that makes it a lot more manageable for you. You can't master them all at once and you don't actually need to. You don't need to be good at six things by next week because all of those YouTube skills, they're not equally weighted.
Some of them barely move the needle and one of them practically is the needle. So here's the order that I would go in when building up your skill set so that your effort just can go where the results actually are. The first skill you wanna get really good at, and there's not really even a close second, is picking your topics and titles.
Being on YouTube for eight years, I can tell you with a lot of confidence that the topic is about 80 % of a video's success before you've ever even recorded a single frame of it. Either it's something people care to watch, or it isn't, and that gets decided at the title level.
You know, no amount of production quality is gonna rescue a topic that nobody wants. You can have the best camera and the best lighting and the coolest editing that YouTube's ever seen, and you can be as charming and witty as anyone's ever been, but if nobody wanted that topic, nobody's gonna click on it, and none of that other stuff ever gets seen.
So getting really good at telling the difference, you know, which topics people are hungry for and which ones just sound good in your head, that is the single most valuable skill on this entire list by far. And there's actually a tool that's gonna make this a lot easier on you and we're gonna get to that in the 90 day roadmap in just a bit.
All right, so the second skill to master is just gonna be getting really good at your hooks and your basic scripting. And if you don't really know what a hook is, It's just what we call the opening of a video.
And if you get it right, it gets people to want to stick around and keep watching. And there are a ton of videos on YouTube that are literally just about hooks all by themselves. And honestly, most of them really overcomplicate what makes for a good one.
It's actually simple. Your opening has one job, and that's to prove really fast that the title told the truth, right? Somebody clicked on your video for an answer.
So if you can just tell them. that they're in the right place, they're gonna stay. So that's the hook side.
Then there's the scripting side. And look, the mechanics here do matter, right? You wanna keep it moving, you don't wanna repeat yourself, all the stuff we covered before.
But the skill that's really worth building is getting your actual expertise into every script, right? Teaching from your scars, giving your real opinions, even the unpopular ones, especially the unpopular ones. Bringing in all those client stories and the things you've watched work and watched fail up close.
Because remember what this is all for. You're trying to become the known expert and that only happens if your scripts sound like they could have only come from you. So that's the muscle that you want to work out here.
Every script you want to get your experience in there. And the third skill is going to be getting more natural on camera. Again, not presenting, just being able to talk to it like it's your best client and You know, basically being able to fake that connection.
And once you get good at it, it won't even feel like you're faking it. It'll just feel natural like it does for me now. So this one sounds really important, right?
So why am I putting it last? Well, as we've said, a natural charming delivery of a topic that nobody wants still gets zero views. But I would say a fairly stiff delivery of a topic that people are actually genuinely hungry for can still get views, believe it or not.
Not as many people are going to stick around for as long as they would if you were more natural, but some are going to stick around just for what you have to say. But the real reason I'm putting this last is probably just because your camera skills are just going to grow with reps anyway, almost automatically, as long as every time you sit down to record, you actually intentionally try to get a little bit better at it.
And when you think about these three skills, it's the same order. that a stranger meets you in, right? The topic decides whether that person ever finds you at all.
The script is why they stay once they do. And then being natural on camera is what gets them to know, love, and trust you because that part is just you. So work on mastering those three in that order.
Outsource some of the other stuff. You know, everything else is really just icing on the cake. Okay, before we put this whole plan together, we need to get really clear on expectation setting because most people go into YouTube expecting too much way too fast.
And that expectation is what actually stops them from getting those real lasting results. So please hear me when I say that YouTube pays you back slowly, but once it does, it pays big and it keeps paying. So realistically, I want you to expect about six months of pretty much nothing at the start.
And honestly, I'm actually even hesitant to give you any timeline at all there because it's not like six months is some magic time marker where it always gets good, right? It's just a rough benchmark that I have found with a lot of the channels I've worked with.
It can take longer, and honestly, some people just never really get good enough at it, so it never actually works for them. And those people are usually the uncoachable ones who just never really fully apply the concepts, and they just keep doing what they're doing without trying to improve. But it can definitely go faster too, especially if you lean into those searchable pull videos on the right topics.
Remember my student David Jackson? He's the SEO agency owner, and he was seeing results by video nine. And I had another student land a $15 ,000 client off of his fourth video.
So that can happen, and it's awesome when it does. But if you need results fast, YouTube's just not gonna be your answer. YouTube is the answer for long -term results that last.
And you gotta understand what kind of commitment you're actually getting into here because this is a habit. It's not just some blitz where you sprint at it for a year and then you coast on that work forever. And yeah, your videos can have a long shelf life, that part's true, but a channel that just goes quiet over time is gonna stop bringing in clients.
You know the whole January gym thing, right? Every, you know, beginning of every year, everyone's super gung -ho on getting in shape because they just made their New Year's resolutions. So they're like, I'm going back to the gym.
Then they go in for like three weeks, they lose the drive they had, and then they just stop. And YouTube has a major January mentality like that too. And you don't want to be that guy or girl going all in for a month and then just giving up on it.
You want to build a steady habit at a pace you can actually keep up with. Just one calm 10 -ish minute video per week sustained for the long term. Now, having said that, I know life is going to happen and I don't want one bad month to ever feel like it's the end.
There's this consultant named Ashley Rose, and she helps businesses automate their operations. So she put up a handful of videos back in early 2023, but then she got busy. So she stopped, and honestly, she kind of forgot she even made those videos.
So then a full year goes by, and when she happened to check, she saw that those videos were still getting pretty decent views. And yeah, they were definitely on the decline by then. but they were still working all by themselves the whole time that she had stopped.
So seeing that and seeing that those videos were still working, that was enough to get her motivated to keep going and try again. So she started posting again, just those simple weekly videos, like I'm saying, and then within a few months, people were messaging her out of nowhere wanting to work with her. She actually got so many requests that she had to open up extra spots just to keep up with that demand.
And I'm not telling you that as permission to go dormant on your channel. It's just kind of cool what having videos on the shelf can do for you if life ever knocks you off the horse for a while, because it happens sometimes. So as long as you don't make a habit of it and you're not gone for too long, the door back in for you stays pretty warm.
A restart is not a cold start. So keep the habit as best you can. But then if a season of life ever breaks your momentum, you didn't lose the channel.
You just... took a pause and now you can pick it back up. So what does growth on YouTube actually look like?
I can tell you it's not really an avalanche, it's much more of a snowball. So it starts off pretty tiny and it gets bigger as it rolls and picks up more views. and perfect viewers.
People kind of expect that every video is going to do better than the last one and that their growth is going to look like this, you know, steadily rising line on a graph. But that's not really how it goes. So it's much more like a series of flat stretches broken up by little jumps.
So it's going to feel like nothing's growing. Then you'll have a video breakout and then that lifts your baseline to a higher flat line until the next jump. So it's really much more of a series of growing plateaus.
But the unfortunate thing is most people quit right here when they're on the flat part, you know, just before the jump. And I kind of understand why, because from the inside, you know, the flat stretch feels like nothing's working, right? Like you're the exception that everybody else had something you don't.
But I'm telling you, the flat part... That's just what the middle looks like. And I bring all this up right now because knowing this in advance is what's going to keep you working through it while all of your competition calls it quits.
And there's one more thing you want to make your peace with here because it's true on just about every channel, even the ones that look unstoppable. Most of your videos are going to land right about in your average. About 20 % are going to come in under that.
And then only about 10 to 20 % are going to be your outliers, right? The ones that jump you up to that new baseline. It's not a bad thing.
It's just how it works for pretty much every single channel on YouTube. Now, I like to think of those outlier videos as your channel's beacons. Their whole job is pulling in brand new people into your world for the first time.
And when a video pops like that, it's a much... wider crowd than usual. And some of them are exactly the right people.
And honestly, a lot of them won't be. That's just what a big video does. It casts a wide net.
It can't help it. And that's fine because bringing new people through the door is the beacon's whole job. And your winners aren't just beacons, by the way.
They're clues. So when a video blows up way past your average, your audience just told you something, right? They want more of that.
And I know the instinct that kicks in because everyone's thinking it. You think like, I already covered that topic, though.
I can't do it again. And that's such an expert thought to have, right? You know, covered it, box checked, moving on.
But don't do that. Your audience doesn't want the box checked. They want more of it.
Think about how you watch videos, right? If you're interested in something, you probably go hard on it for a while, right? You'll watch multiple videos on the same topic.
I know I do. I tend to kind of obsess over something and I want to absorb as much about it as I can. So take the clue and then plan the sequel.
So that doesn't mean just remaking that first video. You can come at it from another angle or go deeper into a particular aspect of it or just change the format a bit. But the flip side.
is the really important part. Those videos you'll make that look like they tanked, the ones with the sad little view counts, more often than not, those are actually gonna be your sneaky client magnets. And it makes sense when you stop and think about who is gonna click a video that narrow.
Only somebody who needs that exact answer. Nobody else even bothers, so the view count looks tiny, but the room is full of buyers. Remember that video I just made that came out dead last in my rankings?
It was a 10 out of 10. but yet it did six grand in a single week in sales. So views only measure how wide a video went, right?
They don't measure what it actually did for your business. So when one video pops and the next one does average, that's not a slump. That is just the ecosystem working.
The beacons pull the crowd in, the rest of your back catalog gets them to know you, and the quiet little videos down here Book the calls. Every video is never gonna be a winner and the sooner that that's peace instead of panic for you, the calmer this whole thing gets.
Just know that you're reading two different signals now, right? The big view numbers tell you what pulls new people in. The smaller client getters tell you what actually converts.
And you want more of both. That's what I mean when I say topic selection is a living, breathing thing. You never just want to lock in a list and coast on it.
You got to get better at reading the signs, the good ones and the bad ones. And reading the signs has become kind of a little ritual on my team. So we put out a video every Tuesday.
Then every Thursday, we have a standing meeting where we go over that week's video performance and we try to pull at least one good lesson out of whatever happened. Good week, bad week, doesn't matter, one lesson. And there are way more average to flop weeks than winter weeks.
Eight years in and that's still the case. So most Thursdays, the conversation's basically, okay, what do we do better on next time? And the way I've started to think about this is, if I do this long enough and I take away enough lessons, eventually I'm just gonna run out of ways to fail.
So that's the mindset. that I recommend going into it with. A flop is really just data that you can use for next time.
And this is what makes all of those early quiet videos worth it. When one of those beacons finally takes off, the new people that it brings in, who are the actual good fits for your channel, they don't just watch that one. they go back, they binge on your older stuff, those chains you built, doing exactly what you built them for.
So somebody shows up for that breakout video and then 40 minutes later, they're three videos deep into something that you made months ago for what felt like an empty room at the time. You know the saying, ? That is exactly what's happening here.
One hit lifts your whole channel up with it. So that means those early unwatched videos were never actually waste. They're inventory just waiting for the crowd to show up.
And let's be really clear about what's compounding here because it isn't just views. It's your known factor. Every video sitting in that catalog is another, you know, 10, 15 minutes that a future buyer can spend with you before you've ever met them.
It's accumulating buyer fame and storing up trust. I watched this whole thing happen with Kayla, my student with the Upwork Academy channel that we touched on a bit ago. Her early months were quiet.
You know, she's making videos that are going out to a basically empty room week after week. But then around month four, one video she made actually broke out. And then all of those earlier videos she'd made for nobody suddenly started getting a lot of views one after another.
So those three months of quiet work paid out all at once. Well, not really all at once because they're still getting views. And that one breakout video is still the beacon that brings the most people in for the first time.
And remember Kyle, the mortgage broker who only lost three clients since he started YouTube. There's actually one part of his story I didn't tell you back then because I was saving it for right now. So after his first full year on YouTube, showing up, you know, writing and recording and posting, Kyle had about 100 subscribers.
at that point after about a year. Now think about what that year must have felt like for Kyle from the inside. You know, he had no proof it was working, nothing to really show anybody, and it took him two full years before his channel got any real traction.
But he kept going and good thing he did because today he's at 198 ,000 subscribers with a business where he builds so much trust in advance that his viewers just wouldn't imagine going with anyone but him. And if we asked Kyle whether he would do it all over again, even with those two slow years, I'm pretty sure he would give it a big hell yes.
Now, after everything we did to shrink the hours you actually need to spend on making your videos, when somebody says they don't have time for a bet like this, the hours are almost never the real issue, right? What they usually really mean is that none of this comes with a guarantee and pouring a year of real effort into a maybe feels dangerous to them.
And it's completely true. There's no guarantee that any of this is going to work. But you kind of already made a bet like this once.
The day you started your business, there was no guarantee there either. In fact, you probably knew going in that most businesses fail and you bet on yourself anyway. Which leaves the one question that nobody can answer for you, including me.
Will you or won't you? And if your answer is I will, You deserve a lot better than a pep talk.
You deserve to see exactly what I will looks like day by day right from the very beginning. So let's snap everything into one picture. The map for your first 90 days on YouTube and map spells out exactly what you want to do.
So the M in map is for mining for topic gold. Because picking the right topics is worth a fortune to your business. Like I said, it's the most important predictor of whether a video's gonna do well or not.
And this whole first phase, your first two weeks, is all about finding the best possible list of searchable pull video topics. And you already know why. Pull videos are how a brand new channel gets found because instead of waiting for YouTube to hand you an audience, you're just showing up when your ideal client types a question into the search bar.
But what should your pull videos be about? Most experts sit down to brainstorm video ideas and they immediately start to overthink it. They try to come up with something clever or original, something that'll stand out.
And then they either land on topics that are just way too broad to rank for or too niche for anyone to actually search for or they just stare at a blank spreadsheet and give up. When Alex Cattoni launched her YouTube channel in 2019, she didn't start with some grand content strategy.
She just posted a handful of videos about copywriting, and then she paid attention to the clues that her own audience was giving her. Then when she was about six or seven videos in, someone left a comment asking, how do you become a freelance copywriter? So she made that exact video.
And that one video ended up being the flywheel for her entire channel. And now she's got like 300 ,000 students in her program. She didn't invent her best topic or pull it out of a hat.
Her audience handed it to her. And you probably already have a goldmine of topics and don't even realize it. So just start with the list you already built earlier, those questions that clients are asking on every call, the things you find yourself explaining over and over, that's your starting list.
But then you wanna expand on that using the right tools that are gonna help you find what real people are asking about in your niche. Things like adjacent questions that you haven't thought of or common misconceptions or problems they keep running into. This step is gonna be really good at filling in the gaps that your own experience might miss.
So here's how I recommend you do this. You can actually connect Claude to vidIQ, which, and if you don't know vidIQ, it's just this really cool research tool that's built specifically for YouTube. And it's got a ton of data about, you know, what people search for, what all the outlier videos are, all that kind of stuff.
So you hook the two of them up. So you let Claude pull the actual numbers directly from vidIQ, including your own channel data, if you have any yet. But it just knows all the things like, you know, what people are searching for, how often they're searching for them, and how competitive each topic and, you know, keyword phrase is.
So vidIQ has all that information. Like, think of it as just raw data. And then Claude is able to crunch all of that up into your best topics and then just hands them all to you on a silver platter.
I was trying to explain how vidIQ and Claude worked together in my small group the other day, and I think I finally came up with an analogy that works. They seem to get it. So think of vidIQ as like that $10 an hour data processor who's just putting stuff into a spreadsheet.
They've got the data, and that's kind of where their job ends. But then Claude is like the CEO who can take all that raw data and do something brilliant with it. So vidIQ's got all the numbers.
Claude has the brain power to do something with it that you can use. So Claude will take all of that and it'll tell you what topics you should actually be making. Then just take whatever it gives you and just put it into a spreadsheet.
But then when you're deciding which topics are actually gonna make your calendar, I want you to lean much more heavily toward ones about the problem. that you solve, not the solution itself. Remember the math we covered earlier, only about 5 % of your future buyers are gonna be actively shopping for help at any given moment.
The other 95%, they're just walking around knowing something isn't working. So you want most of your videos on that list to be talking to what feels wrong in their world right now. Topics about the solution itself still matter.
They do tend to attract the people who are closest to buying. They just can't take up the whole content calendar or you're just not going to attract as many of your people as you could otherwise. So now you've got all your pull videos, keyword phrases, and just overall topics.
But a keyword or even a topic isn't the same as a title. So let's go back to our gym owner coach, Dana. Gym losing members.
is maybe what her people type into the search bar. But that would be a pretty weak title on its own, right? So in the next column of your spreadsheet, you actually want to turn each keyword phrase into a title that makes someone curious enough to actually want to watch it.
So spice it up. Add words like, you know, best, easiest, fastest, or even better, you can hint at a specific result. So for gym losing members as the keyword phrase, that becomes something like, the easiest way to stop your gym from losing members.
If it gave her the keyword gym membership pricing, that could become how to price your gym memberships for maximum signups. So see what we're doing here. We're just taking these flat keyword phrases and turning them into a good enough reason that people should click.
So the keyword gets you found, but the title gets them to want to choose your video over all the other ones they come up to. And if you're having a hard time turning them into titles, even if you're not having a hard time, you should 100 % use Claude to help you out with this part too.
So after it gives you all of those keywords, just tell it, okay, now turn every one of those into a really clickable, compelling title. So by the end of those first two weeks, you should have a content calendar of at least 15 to 20 pull video ideas that you know people are searching for that you're qualified to make. And that list is gonna feed directly into phase two of the map, which is A, accelerate.
So this is where you build the skills of making good, watchable YouTube videos, and you're gonna build that skill as fast as possible. And fair warning, this phase is probably gonna stretch you a little bit outside of your comfort zone, and that's the point. Speaking to the camera, organizing your thoughts clearly, being a little likable and engaging on screen, these are all skills.
And like any skill, you don't get good at it by studying it or planning for it or watching other people do it. You get good by just doing it over and over and over again, and most of your early attempts won't be that great, and that's fine. Because like we said, when you're brand new, your videos aren't really ranking anyway, nobody's watching yet, which means these first messy attempts...
They're free practice. You're getting reps in front of an empty room before anyone's even paying attention. So here in the accelerate phase, you just want to speed run through as many videos as you can.
It's that photography class from earlier all over again, right? The quantity group wins. Reps are the shortcut to quality, and all the theorizing about the perfect video never taught anybody anything.
So your only job for weeks three through eight is to make as many pull videos from your topic list as you possibly can. I want to push you to do two per week during this phase if you can swing it. Think of this as your sprint within the sprint.
And if two a week is genuinely too much for your life, just do what you can handle, but no less than one per week. Because I'll be honest with you, YouTube is a skill that can make you rich no matter what you're an expert in. But it won't if you treat it like something that you're just going to squeeze in when you have the time.
The people who see results are the ones who commit to a concentrated stretch and they come out the other side a little bit different on camera. The dabbler is not so much. And the only scoreboard during the stretch is, did you upload this week?
And was it a little better than last time? You're not measuring views or subscribers. None of that matters yet.
And production -wise, keep it as frictionless as we already set it up to be. We talked about your phone, a nice clean background, the simple edits. And the second you can afford to hand the editing off, do that.
You just want to remove every barrier between you and pressing publish as soon as you can. So by the time you're done with the accelerate phase, you should have a pretty good library of pull videos on your channel. But let's be honest about what those videos actually are.
They're going to be mostly FAQs, right? Straight answers to the exact questions that your people are typing into the search bar. But remember the SCAR scale.
Those types of videos live at the very top of it, right? Surface and competence. The Google -able layer, right?
Now that was still the right call to do those videos. The whole job in Accelerate is about quantity. And FAQ videos are one of the fastest ones to make and the easiest ones to get found.
But it also means that almost nothing in that library is stuff only you could have made. It answers questions and explains concepts and walks through how -tos, gets found in search, builds some trust and shows you know your stuff. It's just not what's gonna close the deal.
That's why the P in the map method is about positioning your expertise. This is where you slow down and you swap quantity for quality and you start turning that dial down toward the deep end. After all those reps you got in the accelerate phase, you should have naturally gotten better on camera and at making videos in general, just as a byproduct of all that practice.
So now you can really afford to spend more time on each video and make every single one much more intentional. Remember James Canole? He's the financial planner with the four month long wait list, this is how his content got that way.
Once he got comfortable making videos, he didn't just keep answering general finance questions, right? He got much more nuanced with it. He started making videos like the $3 million retirement portfolio instead of how to invest for retirement.
He started sharing opinions that only someone who had sat across from hundreds of retirees would actually have. He told stories from real client situations, and this kind of content, it attracted a much more serious kind of viewer. They only need to have a single conversation with James now before they sign on as a client because they show up having already watched all of his videos.
They don't need more convincing. They've already decided he's the guy. So starting in the position phase, every video should still start with a searchable topic from your calendar.
But now, you're gonna be layering in your real experience. Case studies from clients you've helped get a real result. Hard -won opinions.
Positions that only someone who's done this work for years would take. So now, you're going deeper down the SCAR scale, right? Where you're no longer just answering questions.
You're positioning yourself as the obvious person to hire. And the position phase isn't temporary. This is your new normal.
You've built the skills, and now you're operating at a higher level. So keep making those pull videos, but bring your full expertise to every single one of them. So over time, this combination of searchability plus your real expertise is what builds a channel that makes your expertise known.
And that's what generates clients, and you never even had to chase them. And I've actually added this whole 90 day plan as a worksheet in that free expert brand launch kit if you want it. So the link again is in the description below or you can just snap the QR code that's on your screen.
But here's a picture of where all of this is going. So just picture it's a normal night, about eight months from whenever you start, maybe today, maybe next week, I don't know. But then somewhere out there, There's a stranger who's on their couch with the exact problem you solve, and they just finished their third video that you've made, and they're about to start on a fourth.
They've never met you in person, but they're already starting to trust you. And while all that's happening in that person's house, you're just eating dinner with your family, or you're watching a game, or you're asleep, right? The net that you made is in the water.
And you watching this right now, further along than you think. You have the whole system in your head now and most people who want to start a YouTube channel to, you know, get known and get business, they never get one tenth of what you have now.
But building the system is one thing, turning it into real money is another and it's the question I've been saving for last. So let's talk about how being known actually gets you paid.
Because being the known expert's wonderful and all, but known doesn't pay the mortgage all by itself. So the rest of this video is really gonna be all about the kinds of offers that sell perfectly off the back of an expert brand, as well as how you're gonna move people from YouTube to the sale. Because there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.
But for now, let's just talk about what being known actually lets you sell. Trust turns into money through offers, right? A thing with a name and a price that somebody can say yes to.
And you only need one offer to start, but you can start stacking offers over time too, if you want. YouTube opens doors that you never even knew about. So you're gonna see what I mean in a bit.
And real quick, if you haven't grabbed it yet, that free expert brand launch kit that I mentioned, it's gonna walk you through building this whole thing for yourself. So the link's in the description, or you can just snap the QR code that's on your screen. Okay, so the first family of offers is the simplest one, and it's probably what you already sell.
It's just your time and your judgment directly. So that's gonna be your one -on -one coaching or consulting, advisory work, whether you sell it by the hour or in packages. And if some version of that kind of offer is your business today, being known doesn't really change the offer itself.
All it changes is how well the offer's gonna sell. Obviously, it's gonna be much, much easier now because they already wanna work with you. And just to show you how far being known can take this kind of offer, there's an extreme version out there, what experts call a VIP day.
Now that's where one client just pays you a really premium price. Like I've seen anywhere from five grand on the low end all the way up to like 50 grand on the high end. And that's for one single day of just getting your full attention.
And they usually will walk out with some kind of a big deliverable that's actually finished in that day. Now, that's not going to be a fit for every kind of business, and you don't need to do VIP days if you don't want. Just telling you because that's how far you can take this when you're a known expert on YouTube.
Betsy Jordan is a great example of this one. So she helps consultants and coaches, you know, nail their marketing message. And she sells a VIP day where the client walks out with all of their messaging or their proposal actually done.
And her packages start at around five grand. And here's the part that I love, right? She sells that from a YouTube channel that has just over a thousand subscribers where a lot of her videos...
get right around 30 views. So 30 views a video feeding these $5 ,000 days. That's the low views math that we were talking about from earlier adding up to real profits.
You know, the right 30 people are worth way more to her business than the wrong 30 ,000 people. And there's another time for money offer for the done -for -you businesses out there. So if you run an agency or a shop where you do the thing for people in person, being known lets you climb one level up and sell more done -with -you kind of offers instead.
So your hands can really only work as far as you can drive with them, but people anywhere... can pay for what's in your brain, right? So one of my students, Bobby, is my favorite example of this because he started about as local and about as physical as a business can get.
He was cutting grass. So he ran a small lawn care business in St. Louis and he was getting these pretty low value leads off of sites like HomeAdvisor and Angie's List.
Then one day he's out cutting someone's grass and there's another crew at the same house and they're installing a patio and a retaining wall. And Bobby's like, that's the work I actually want to be getting. So he pivoted his business more toward landscape design and hardscaping.
And as part of that pivot, he started making YouTube videos about those topics. You know, the early days were rough for him, just like for everybody else. And he wanted to...
quit doing YouTube, right? He just wasn't seeing any results from it at first. But just a few weeks later, something started happening that kept him going.
So he was getting these local clients showing up on sales calls, and they were telling him that they'd found him on YouTube. So they were already sold on him, ready to hire, asking about those bigger design projects instead of the cheap jobs. So he kept going and then things started to snowball.
Then one day he got a call that changed how he saw his whole business. This couple calls him from Augusta, Georgia, and they'd been watching his channel and they wanted him, you know, Bobby specifically, to design their yard. Basically come up with a full master plan for the entire property.
And Bobby was pretty floored because he had no idea anyone in Georgia or even outside of St. Louis was even watching his videos. And just stop and think for a second because Augusta probably has plenty of landscapers.
You know, maybe they're busy on the golf course. I don't know. But, you know, there's probably plenty of landscapers there that are closer and cheaper than bringing in a guy from Missouri.
So that couple. They didn't call Bobby because he was convenient. They called him because they had spent hours with his thinking.
And by then, nobody local even felt like a better alternative. So he flew out to Georgia. He did the design and he ended up doing the whole project.
And that one call really opened up his eyes because if people in other states trusted him enough to hire him off of his videos, he wasn't limited to being a local business anymore. Now, flying around the country wasn't going to work for him, right? His wife was pregnant with her first kid at the time.
So he built a design service that could run from home. So now he just meets clients over Zoom and he creates these master plans that any local contractor or even, you know, a pretty ambitious DIY homeowner could carry out on their own. So cut to today, he has his local install business in St.
Louis. But then on top of it, He has his design business with clients all over the country.
So altogether, his business runs into seven figures a year, and YouTube is his top of funnel for both sides of it. So a guy who cuts grass for a living now gets paid to design yards in states he's never even lived in. His crew can't travel out there, but his knowledge can, and that's the whole move here.
And notice what Bobby didn't have to do. He didn't quit his local business or he didn't move or turn into somebody else. He just put his thinking on camera and the audience helped him figure out a new income stream for his business.
Now, every offer in that first family runs into the same wall eventually. If your money only ever comes from the number of hours you personally work, then it has a hard cap on it, right?
Because there are only so many hours in the day. And sure, you could raise your prices or offer a VIP day at a premium and then the cap moves up a little, but it's still capped. And being fully booked sounds like the dream, but if you really think about it, being fully booked is the cap because it's the most your current business model can ever pay you.
So let's talk about the offers where you get to stop trading your time for money altogether. So an audience is how you break through that lid because once thousands of the right people know you and trust you, they can buy things from you that don't cost you time anymore. They can buy a course from you where you explain the thing once on camera and then it teaches for you a thousand times.
They can join a group program where one hour of your time serves 20, 30, 50 people instead of one. Or a membership where the trust you've built keeps paying you every month on a recurring basis.
Some of them would even buy a book you wrote. You know, every one of these options is based on your same expertise. It's just packaged up this time so it stops being sold by the hour.
And that's the coolest part to me is you already own everything behind it. You know, the knowledge in the course or in the membership, it's the same knowledge you give clients right now, one at a time. So you don't have to learn anything new to do it.
The audience to sell it to is the only missing piece, and the audience is exactly what your YouTube videos are gonna build for you. So being the known expert doesn't just fill your calendar with clients, it makes your calendar stop having to be the thing that limits you. And here's a really simple version of this.
So there's a bartender named Steve, Steve the bartender on YouTube. So he started posting these cocktail recipes there. He's just a guy who's, you know, genuinely good at making drinks, sharing what he knows.
Now think about the lid or the ceiling on a bartender's income, right? There are only so many drinks. the one guy can pour in a night, and only so many nights in a week, and no amount of skill is gonna remove that ceiling.
Steve could become the best bartender alive, but his income would still top out at whatever a really packed bar would tip him out at. But Steve's channel grew into a real audience, and that audience changed what he could sell. So he put out a cocktail book, and it passed 20 ,000 copies sold within 18 months.
And then he actually launched his own gin brand. And the book keeps selling whether he's behind the bar that night or not, and so does the gin, by the way. Somebody in another country can buy his book at 3 in the morning while he's...
Okay, actually... He's a bartender, so let's just say while he's sound asleep at noon, somebody's buying his book. He's the exact same guy who was really good at mixing drinks for a paycheck.
All that changed is now there's an audience, and that audience is what broke through his ceiling. And to be honest, I have no idea if he's still bartending or if his new business model replaced it, but even if he's still behind the bar some nights, he's at least got a few new revenue streams that are adding to his income.
And there's a brand new kind of offer that's showing up right now, which are AI tools built on your expertise. And the difference between that and a course is pretty simple. A course teaches somebody how to solve their problem, but an expert -backed AI tool lets them actually use your thinking, right?
Your frameworks, your decision -making. rules, and it's all packaged up now so a client can get your judgment on demand, two in the morning, right in the middle of when they need it. And this scratches a niche that your people already have because they're already asking chatbots about this stuff anyway.
The tool just puts a finer point on that and it makes sure that the answers they get are yours from your real expertise. It's not tied to your time, so it scales without costing you any extra hours.
And you could sell it on its own as its own product, or it could be an add -on that makes the course sell twice as well, or... If you have a membership, you might add that to the membership to make it too useful to ever want to cancel it. You can even just offer it as an extra revenue stream if you want your main offers to stay completely traditional.
Okay, so the third family of offers is for the trickiest type of business. Like if you're really tied to your own town and if you're tied to your own two hands where neither of those first two types of offers really fit. So this is where you would stop teaching your customers.
And you would start teaching the people who want to be like you. So basically teaching your business model itself becomes the product. So that just means a full pivot on who your person even is and what you make videos about.
So let's say you have a car detailing business. You know, you could teach people how to detail their own cars on YouTube, but honestly, it's not super likely to turn into them hiring you. You're just too local, so most of your audience wouldn't live anywhere near you.
And you can't really sell consulting for that, probably. So instead, you could still keep your whole business, but you'd start making videos that teach people how to start and run a car detailing business of their own in their own towns. Or like how to build a photography business that actually pays the bills.
And picture who's on the other end of that video, right? It's somebody in another city that are watching YouTube at night after their shift at a job that they probably hate. And they're seriously wondering if they could build what you've built.
So if you can present a business opportunity that they believe in and can see themselves doing, they'll watch everything you make because a business opportunity is, you know, one of the best selling things on earth. People will always pay to learn a real path to income. So if this sounds like the kind of offer that might work best for you, it's totally doable because you've probably spent years mastering your business, right?
You know, All the pricing mistakes, the equipment lessons you had to learn, the customers to avoid, and the jobs that actually make the most money. That mastery of your business model is expertise all on its own, and people in your field everywhere want that.
And teaching that is going to be 100 % remote, so the whole local problem just disappears. But it goes without saying, this only works if you've mastered the business first, then you teach it. You've got to be able to point to your own results to make this work.
That's how you're going to earn your expert status in this case. You know, the pricing you figured out the hard way, the jobs you learned to turn down, and the actual numbers from your own books. That's what's gonna make your teaching worth paying for.
And it's the one thing a competitor can't fake, right? Nobody wants business lessons from somebody whose business doesn't work. And this really reminds me of Roger Wakefield.
He's a master plumber in Texas with more than 45 years under his belt. He started off as a teenager and he worked his way up through it all. And eventually he started his own company.
And plumbing, as you can imagine, is about as hands -on and about as local as a business can be. But his business just hit a wall with marketing at some point. So he had spent thousands on websites and ads that just weren't bringing in enough calls.
And he's like, what the hell am I going to do? So here's a true expert at what he does. He's got decades of skill, but the phone still wasn't ringing.
Sound familiar? I mean, being good wasn't the problem and it also wasn't gonna get him out of this jam. So in 2018, he started making YouTube videos and his goal was actually pretty modest.
He just wanted to make the phone ring. He didn't set out to be the most known expert in the plumbing industry. He was just trying to drum up some business.
And at first, almost nobody watched. Here's a guy in his 60s posting, I think it was like three videos a week, into what basically felt like an empty room. But he kept posting anyway, answering real questions from homeowners and from other plumbers, actually.
Today, his channel has over 700 ,000 subscribers. And more importantly, He's got about 154 million views.
Roger became the known expert in the entire plumbing profession. And it's kind of a side benefit of that growth. Yeah, he did pick up quite a few plumbing clients.
That's just because there happened to be enough people watching him who lived close enough to actually hire him. But more than that, the door opened up for him to start coaching other plumbers and tradespeople on growing their businesses. Plus, he got paid to do speaking gigs, and he gets a lot of money to do sponsorships on his videos too.
And that sponsorship money alone eventually ended up matching what his plumbing company made in a year. So he just sold the plumbing business. So think about Roger's arc for a second.
So the videos were only ever supposed to rescue his... plumbing business, but instead they ended up outgrowing it by a lot. So the guy spent decades in about the most physical business there is, and the teaching door still opened up for him.
And if you want the craziest story about possibly the weirdest business that YouTube's helped to grow, there's this channel called Crime Scene Cleaning. A woman named Laura runs it. She cleans up crime scenes for a living, and she posts videos about it.
Talk about local, physical, probably the least glamorous business you could possibly imagine. And most of her videos are pretty gross, I'm not going to lie, but it just shows whatever your business is, I'm going to guess it translates to video a little easier than hers does. And her channel has grown past a million subscribers, with some of her videos getting millions of views.
But here's the thing, she doesn't make money from strangers booking cleanups. The whole point of her channel is selling consulting and training to people who want to start their own crime scene cleanup businesses for some reason. I mean, I couldn't imagine wanting to do that, but there's just so much opportunity out there.
Even a business like this has people that want to pay to learn how to do it. And from selling her training, Laura earns about a half a million dollars a year. So if crime scene cleanup can pay like that for teaching the business, then the door is open for everybody.
And I want to point something out about this pivot because it doesn't mean there's some brand new skill you have to go learn. This is the exact same thing that we've been building this whole time. with one simple change to it, right?
The person you want to be known by. So instead of being known by your customers, you become known by the people who want to be you. And their problem is one you already solved years ago.
How do I build this kind of business, which makes you exactly the expert they're out there searching for? Everything else we talked about works exactly the same. You already know how to do all of this.
You're just aiming it at a different person when you do it this way. Now, I know how this might... feel at first on the surface like you'd be training your own competition.
But think about who would actually buy this kind of offer from you. Your competition in a local physical business is local, right? They're the other guys in your town.
But the people who would pay you to, you know, learn your business, there are people like you in every other market running the same business three states away or possibly even on the other side of the world. They can watch every video you make and buy everything you ever sell, and they'll never take a single job from you because they don't work where you work.
And if it really bothers you, you could always choose not to sell it to any of your local competition. Just sell it to people other places. So if your business is like this, you know, physical and local, pivoting to teach other people like you, it's not some kind of a consolation prize, right?
Some of the people doing it or out -earning the original business that it grew out of. Remember, Roger sold his plumbing company.
He didn't sell his YouTube channel. This is just another door for you, and YouTube is pretty much the only platform that opens it. And there's one more really light lift that can fit alongside any offer you sell.
So you can also sell complimentary products as an affiliate. and get paid commissions on it. And I can talk about this one personally because back when my channel was still mostly about websites and website marketing, I worked it out with a couple of web hosting companies for me to sell their hosting on my videos.
So I just put a link in my video descriptions plus a mention inside certain tutorial videos and that was it. And it turned out to be really lucrative. So at the time, it was pretty much matching what I was making from selling my course.
Now, I'm not talking about the creator playbook version of affiliate marketing where you just push random products like VPNs or, you know, HelloFresh during a commission. This would be more like you're selling specific products that your people would genuinely need anyway. You're just recommending them and you're someone they trust.
Like if you're a career coach, maybe there's an app that you would recommend. Or if you're a logo designer, maybe there's a branded merch provider where they could get their new logo printed on water bottles and t -shirts and stuff like that. The company you're selling for would just provide you a unique link.
You'd put that in your video descriptions and then you'd get a commission whenever one of your viewers used it. Now, whichever offer you pick here, every single one of them depends on the same moment. And that's when a viewer decides to cross over from watching you.
to paying you. So let's spend a little time now on the part where all that trust becomes actual clients. And I've got some great news for you.
This part's actually pretty simple. It's just a few things you want to make sure you take care of to make the whole bridge from YouTube to your booking page as walkable as possible. So here's the whole path and I want you to see how easy it is.
Somebody finds one of your videos. They like it, so they watch another and another and another. And somewhere in there, they cross over from watching a stranger to feeling like they know you.
But then one day their problem gets big enough or urgent enough and they think, you know what, I really should hire this person. And that right there is the moment. That's what you've been building toward this entire time.
And when that moment comes, the one thing you have to get right is being findable. Because that person is ready right now. And if the path to you isn't sitting right in front of them, the moment passes.
They get distracted, life happens, the readiness cools off. So honestly, most of monetizing is really just making sure that when someone's finally ready, hiring you is the easiest possible next thing they could do, never a scavenger hunt. And that is what I call the YouTube to clients bridge.
YouTube is where people get to know you and trust you. Your website is where they can actually book something or buy something. And the bridge is everything that carries a person from one side over to the other.
The links that give them an exit off of YouTube, then what's waiting for them on your website when they land, and it's all set up so the whole trip happens with absolutely no friction. And some of this bridge you've already built without even knowing it. Remember how we were sprinkling client mentions all through your videos?
Every one of those is just a tiny reminder that you do this for a living, that real people pay you for it. So by the time someone's ready, hiring you isn't some cold, weird leap. It's the obvious next step in a relationship that's been building for months.
But when someone's actually ready to cross over, they need something to click on. So let's just start with the links. And there are three places.
they need to go. The first one is your channel's about page, where all of your videos live, and there's a spot for a link right there, and I recommend just the one, pointing at your website. So now you may be tempted to max this out and add multiple links to your social accounts if you have those, but don't dilute your website link with what I'll call garbage links, right?
Think of it like this. Somebody's on YouTube where they know you as the expert, and then you send them to Instagram, right?
That's sending them backwards in the buyer's journey. You're essentially sending them somewhere less powerful. So you'd be much better off just keeping them on YouTube at that point.
Because if YouTube is the top of your sales funnel, Every link should move people down the funnel toward working with you, never sideways and certainly never up. So if you want a second link there, I would just point it to a lead magnet, which we're gonna get to that in a bit.
And the second place you wanna put your website link is at the top of every single video description. And I mean the very top. So I used to tell people to kind of tuck it a little further down, but now I feel pretty strongly otherwise just based on all the data that I've seen.
So you want to put it first so it never gets cut off. And so it's just sitting right there on the day that somebody finally watches the video that makes them want to hire you. And you probably don't want to just paste a naked link with no context because they won't necessarily know what it is.
It's not that people are dumb, but they are distracted online. So what you want to do instead is label it. Something like, want to work with me or get my course or book me to speak.
You know, whatever your offer is, just say it plainly, then give the link. And the third place is inside of your videos themselves. So we talked about ending your videos by, you know, always pointing people to the next video.
And you should keep doing that, but that's only part. of the story there. About one out of every four or five videos, instead of pointing at another one, you want to point at yourself, right?
You give a direct invitation in those videos. And I don't mean in a salesy way. There is a way to do it where it actually sounds like you're continuing to be helpful, you know?
Something like, you know, if you've been dealing with this and you want more help, there's only so much I can do in a 10 -minute video. but I would love to actually talk to you and see how I can help. Then that becomes your ending call to action, and you link straight to your site from that.
YouTube does let you link out to your website in an end screen, so that's what you would do in that case. So when you do it right, it doesn't end up feeling like a pitch. It just feels like you're giving them extra help from someone who's already been helping them for free.
And for every video you do this for, stick to one call to action, just one. It's either come work with me grab this free thing, never give them a menu of options.
The second you give people five different things to click on, they pick none of them because choosing is its own little bit of work and confusion kills action. Okay, so that's how you get them off of YouTube. But now let's talk about what happens on the other side of the bridge.
Whatever the video promise, the page you send them to has to keep that promise going. So if your videos are all about helping small gyms keep members, people shouldn't land on some generic business consulting homepage.
It has to feel like they're going into the next room of the same house, which is why ideally you wouldn't be sending them to your homepage at all. You want to be sending them more to a landing page that's built for your specific offer. So it should name the problem they came with, then you get to your solution, and then there's a form sitting right there helping them get things started.
And that form needs to be stupid easy for them to fill out. Only ask for what you actually need in order to set up that call or consultation.
I know it may be tempting to ask for all this information. You want to have as much data about your people as possible, but just know for every extra field that you add, it's going to make people less and less likely to actually finish it. So for me, if I did this, it'd be name and Just one field that says name.
You don't have to say first and last name. Just ask for name and then they can decide however they want to fill that out. Then their email and phone number, only if you're actually going to call them.
If you're not going to call them, don't even ask for it. And then a message box. But you don't want to leave it labeled as just generic message because what happens is people see that and they kind of freeze up just staring at an empty box.
They don't really necessarily know what to write there. And we know when people don't know what to do, they kind of end up thinking, I'll come back to this later or whatever. And then they never do.
So instead, you want to give them a thought starter of some kind. So you want to prompt them with whatever you actually would like to know. Something like.
tell me a little bit about your business and what you're hoping to get help with. Now, there is one good reason to add extra form fields, and that is if you need to screen certain people out who just aren't gonna be a good fit for whatever reason. Like if you notice you keep getting on calls with people who can't really afford you, maybe you wanna add a budget question and then set up an automated email for anybody that falls under your minimum.
So if they choose the $500 option, you would just set it up with your email provider that, an automated email would go out that says like, thanks so much for inquiring, but we're actually not able to take on projects under $1 ,000 or whatever. And that one field alone can probably save you a ton of hours of those dead end calls.
Or you could ditch the form altogether and take it a step further and do what I think is actually way better and more efficient. So instead of a form, you actually embed a booking widget, something like Calendly, and you put it right on the landing page. Now you probably know how this works, but in case you don't, you basically, you sync it with your own online calendar and you set your own timing preferences.
So say you only wanna take calls Monday through Friday, 9 a .m. to 5 p .m. Then it's only ever gonna offer those times that are inside that window.
And then let's say you've got a meeting on Thursday afternoon and it's on your calendar. It's gonna block that time off automatically. So the only times that a person can even pick to schedule with you, are times that already work with you according to your calendar.
And the whole reason I love the booking widget option over the form is it just kills all the uncertainty. Because think about whenever you fill out a form, right? You don't really know what happens next a lot of the time.
Are you going to be calling me back in an hour or am I going to get an email in two days from now? And that kind of uncertainty makes people want to hesitate or possibly not even act at all. But when they book a time in on a calendar, they know what's happening, and they feel more in control, which just leads to more bookings.
They committed to a time slot that works for them and for you, and it lands right on their calendar, so they actually show up. Everybody's just on the same page, and that makes for a much easier bridge crossing in the end. Now, most of the people crossing that bridge are gonna be pretty warm.
They came from your videos. They already feel like they know you. And a lot of them are gonna be ready to go by the time they get to your site.
But some of them are also interested, they just need a little bit more time though. They're still in that research mode, not ready to call you mode. And you don't wanna lose those people because the hard part, you know, them knowing you, that's already been done.
So for the researchers out there, you wanna give those guys a smaller step that at least gets them on your email list. And that brings us to the lead magnet that I was kind of hinting at before. So a lead magnet's usually just a useful piece of content or even a free tool or an AI tool or something that you give away in exchange for their email address.
So say you made a video about the five mistakes people make picking a financial advisor. Your lead magnet could be a one -page checklist or 10 questions to ask before you hire an advisor. So they want it, they give you their email address to get it, And now they're on your list where you can just keep showing up for them until their moment of decision comes.
So you're gonna offer that lead magnet on your website and in some of your videos as the call to action in the description and possibly on the end screen too. And making lead magnets has honestly never been easier because AI can now make them for you in minutes. I do this all the time and the process is super simple.
All I do is I take the script of the video I just made, I give it to Claude, And I just tell it what I want, whether that's a companion guide or a checklist or sometimes if I do an AI related video, it'll just be my exact prompts that I used all packaged up. And honestly, before AI got so good at this, there was this designer who I found on Fiverr who I paid him like 40 bucks per lead magnet.
And he did a pretty decent job, but all he did. was the design. I still had to be the one to figure out what all the content was gonna be, and then I had to wait a few days to get it back from him.
Now, I get something back that looks about five times better. Sorry, designer on Fiverr. And I get it back in like five minutes.
And not only that, but Claude actually helps me figure out the exact content that's based on the script, and then Claude Design actually designs it. And they look pretty damn good on the first try. I very rarely even have to send it back for a revision.
And I'm telling you, since I started doing this much more consistently, my email list has been growing by about 100 new subscribers every single day. And it's all from these little PDFs that take me just a couple minutes to make. So that's making your lead magnets.
But there's one thing about how you offer them that most people get completely wrong. But if you fix this one thing, it's going to double how many people want to take you up on it. So what most people do.
is they mention their freebie at the very end of the video. The problem is by the end of any video, even a good video, you've lost a big chunk of the people who started. One study put it around like 80 % of your audience doesn't make it till the very end call to action.
So the better spot is going to be way earlier in the video, right after you've landed your first real teaching moment. So here's what you want to do. You just want to open the video.
you know, you deliver something genuinely valuable. So then the viewer thinks, okay, good solid stuff here. And then that's when you want to mention the free guide.
And you don't want to pitch it like you're selling something, right? You don't want to pitch it like they're helping you somehow by downloading it. You want to pitch it as it's extra help for them.
it either gets them a better result or it makes it so that they don't have to take notes, whatever that looks like. Just tell them you made this free downloadable, you know, whatever it is, and they can get it for free at the link in the description. Then you just get right back to the video.
The whole interruption should take no more than like seven seconds. Okay, so now people are landing on your email list. Why is that important?
Isn't email kind of dead? Short answer. Not even close, but I get why people think that.
We all, you know, delete spam and junk emails all day long, but there's two things here. First, what you're gonna send them isn't promotional junk, okay? And two, email is the one audience you actually own.
YouTube, as good as it is, can change its rules tomorrow. So can every other social platform. You're always going to be renting those audiences, but your email list Nobody can take that from you.
It's the one direct line to your people that no algorithm, you know, gets in the way of. And their returns are honestly kind of ridiculous. Email marketing makes about $36 back for every $1 you put into it.
And to be clear, not 36%, 36 times as much as you put in. And it's also something like 40 times better at actually landing new customers than things like Facebook and X put together. So no, it's very much not dead.
In fact, it might be the thing in the marketing world that's had the most staying power. And the people who think email is dead are picturing spammy buy now kind of garbage, and that's just not what we're doing. So what do you actually do with your email list once you've got it?
It's simple but super effective. Somebody grabs your download, and over the first few days, well, first of all, you automate it to where that download fires off and sends to them right away.
That's step one. But then over the next few days, they're going to get a few genuinely helpful emails from you. Not pitches, just more of the good stuff, right?
Building on whatever they signed up for. Like you can set up an autoresponder sequence on your email platform so they get emailed some of your very best videos and tell them why they should watch.
Like, this video is going to help solve X problem for you, so you don't want to miss it. Then after that, they're going to hear from you every week when your new YouTube video comes out. So you just email them like, hey, made a new one.
Here's what it's going to help you with. Here's the link. And then every now and then, once you've been consistently helpful for a while to them, you can send the straight up, you know, promotional email.
And that would just go something like, hey, you know, you've been learning from me for a bit now. Did you know we can actually work together one -on -one or whatever your offer is? Here's what I offer.
Here's how to work with me. And here's the link. And because you earned the right to do that with weeks of helping first, it doesn't really feel gross to do it.
It just feels like a natural offer from someone who's been genuinely useful to them. So you kind of want to go in a cadence of, you know, help, help, help, offer. And you can run that rhythm forever.
And that's the money side. It's a lot simpler than the rest of it, like I promised. So you build the bridge, you catch the researchers with something free, and you keep everyone warm with email.
So whenever somebody's moment finally comes, the path to you is short, obvious, and just one click away. And here's where it gets super meta because that's kind of where we are naturally in this video now. I've shown you the entire known expert framework for the past couple hours now, and I actually have lots more to show you, specifically all the nitty gritty.
how to kind of stuff. Like how to actually use AI to find your topics. I've got a crazy epic prompting system to do it right.
And all my best scripting frameworks and how to set up your channel for success. All the fine details that you may still need if you want to do this right. Not to mention, you could get my eyes on all of your stuff, all of your hard work for the first 12 weeks of your journey.
So if you're really serious about using YouTube to make your expertise known and you want my guidance while you do it, I want to invite you to join my program, the YouTube to Clients Academy. So here's the short version of what it is. The Academy is the step -by -step system for everything you just watched.
going all the way from invisible to known on YouTube in the right order. I'll show you everything you need to know from picking your person, setting up the channel, getting your first five videos scripted, recorded, and live. You'll see the whole road laid out in front of you one step at a time, so you're never left wondering, you know, what comes next.
But I want to be honest with you about what it actually is because the system... is not actually why I'm inviting you. You know, a little bit ago, I told you that by the end of this video, there'd be nothing left to research.
And I meant that. You have the plan now. So if information was the thing that got experts to the finish line, you'd already be there.
And so would everyone else who's ever watched a video like this. But here's what I've learned from coaching thousands of experts through this. The ones who stall almost never stop because a step was missing.
They stop just because every question along the way lands on their shoulders alone. Like, is this really the right topic, or is this title any good? That video underperformed, so should I change something or just keep going?
Those are small questions, but when there's nobody to ask, every small question can just turn into a week of hesitation, and enough weeks of hesitating, and the whole thing just stops. And that's the part the Academy actually fixes because more than anything else, it's small group coaching with me. Every week we get on Zoom with like, you know, five to 10 experts in your same situation in all kinds of niches.
And you get to bring whatever you're working on, whether it's your script or your topic list, your titles and thumbnails, even your videos themselves. And I can give you answers about your actual situation this week instead of the general advice you can find anywhere. You get another set of eyes, my eyes specifically, on your stuff before the people on the internet ever see it.
So maybe that means the title that was probably gonna flop. gets fixed before it goes live. Or the question that would have cost you a week of researching on your own gets answered by me in about two minutes so you can just keep going.
And the weekly rhythm does something that my students mention all the time. Keeps you moving even on the weeks when you don't feel like it. Because when you know that call is coming up, your video tends to get finished before then.
And there's no magic to that. It's just what a standing appointment does. for a project.
And there's one more thing that happens in these calls that I didn't fully appreciate until I watched it happen over and over again. So the thing is you're in a room with other experts doing the exact same thing you are. Some are going to be a step behind you, some are a step ahead, but you get to hear all of their questions get answered.
And half the time their question was about to be your question whether you knew it or not. So you get to watch somebody a few weeks ahead of you post their first videos and live to tell about it. And honestly, it is so much easier to do this scared when you're not the only one doing it.
Now, for coaching like this to actually work, the secret is I have to be able to get to everyone on the call. So I can't do that in a room of 500 people, which is why I keep the groups small on purpose, which means I always cap enrollment at about 30 new spots a month. So when those spots are gone, the doors close until the next month.
So here's my invitation to you. So the link is gonna be the second one in the description. If enrollment's open when you get there, go ahead and grab one of the spots.
They do go fast. And I could see you on this week's call, but if it's closed when you get there, you wanna get on the wait list and then you're gonna be notified the next time the doors open, which, like I said, is once a month. Oh, and by the way, this part's important.
So let's say you wanna join and you get to the page and there is a spot left. but maybe you're not really ready to go just yet. Like, you know, there's life stuff happening for you and you can't really get to this right away.
That's actually fine. I made it so that you can enroll whenever you happen to be able to get in. Then you can start your 12 weeks whenever you choose to.
And how that works is all explained on the inside, but basically it's just you enroll and then you get an email that you can click a little button inside that email whenever you're ready to go. So just know you can save your spot now, then you can get to it anytime now or in the future. But I really hope you get started soon because obviously the sooner you start, the sooner you can be known.
And hey, if doing this on your own is more your style, that's fine too. Everything you need is in this video and it's still going to be here whenever you want to come back for it. For some of you, doing this alone is exactly right and I'd just be thrilled to see your channel show up one day.
So if you stayed with me till the very end, thank you for letting me guide you through this. I'm truly honored. to have been able to help you through it.
It says a whole lot about your dedication to your business that you would stick with me for this long. It really shows how committed you are to doing things the right way and to wanting to be the known expert that you and I both know you are. Because somewhere down that road, a stranger is going to get on a call with you and say the words that change how all of this feels.
I feel like I already know you. And if you happen to want me in your corner while you walk down that road, the invitation still stands. The Academy link is right below this video.
See you out there.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Somewhere in your industry there is a person who is not the best at the work and gets hired anyway. This course spends six hours explaining why that keeps happening, and then hands over the order of operations for becoming that person yourself.
Named ideas worth stealing.
12:22list
The Five Levels of Being Known
- They can place you
- They think of you on their own
- They think with your words
- They feel like they know you
- You are already their choice
A ladder measuring how deep inside one buyer's head you live. Level one is all a personal brand reaches; level five means the call is a formality.
Steal forauditing how much of a sale is already done before any conversation
16:42list
Three Kinds of Fame
- Wide fame
- Peer fame
- Buyer fame
Three doctors in one city: the one everyone recognises, the one other doctors respect, and the one every torn rotator cuff in five towns knows. Only the third is booked out and charging triple.
Steal fordeciding whose attention a piece of content is actually aimed at
59:02list
The Four-Question Platform Test
- Does it put you in front of the right people?
- Does it show up when they need you?
- Does it build trust before the first conversation?
- Can one busy person keep it up for years?
A scoring rubric run against social, ads, Google search, written content, podcasts and YouTube. Nothing but YouTube scores above two.
Steal forevaluating any new marketing channel before committing a year to it
2:11:04list
The Three-Stage Buyer Journey
- Problem aware
- Solution aware
- Decision aware
Most experts make decision-aware content aimed at the 3 to 5% actively shopping. The crowd sits at problem aware, where almost nobody is publishing.
Steal forweighting a content calendar toward the largest underserved stage
2:47:36model
Eight Tokens and the Conflict Radius
- Category
- Niche
- Sub-niche
- Subject
- Format
- Style
- Idea
- Signature
The platform tags every video on eight dimensions. The first six are shared by thousands of videos; the last two decide whether you own territory or land inside someone else's conflict radius and get suppressed.
Steal fordeciding how far a new piece has to differ from the best existing one
2:52:05list
Five Ways to Create Information Gain
- Lean on your own hot takes, told through stories that land somewhere new
- Coin a signature concept
- Jump on news and translate it for your person
- The AI twist: connect a general shift to one specific audience
- Remix three proven sources instead of copying one
Ways to say something genuinely new without running original research or inventing a method.
Steal forany crowded topic where the obvious take is already taken
2:55:21list
Signature Concepts: Six Shapes
- Named idea (Deep Work, Radical Candor)
- Acronym (FIRE, SPIN, IDS)
- Diagram (Eisenhower matrix, hedgehog concept, golden circle)
- Numbered list (The Five Love Languages, SB7)
- Equation (pain plus reflection equals progress, the value equation)
- Rule (the 23-8 rule, the two-minute rule)
Naming turns scattered common advice into ownable territory, the way constellations made ordinary stars the ones people navigate by.
Steal forturning advice you already give into a repeatable, attributable asset
3:49:05acronym
The SCAR Scale
- Surface: the Googleable layer
- Competence: showing the process
- Adversity: when it breaks and what you did
- Reframe: why most people get this wrong
A depth dial for content. The top two levels are the IKEA manual and are replaceable by AI; the bottom two require years of real work and cannot be faked.
Steal forraising the floor on any explainer by adding one lived experience
4:32:23model
The Bookend Rule
- First 10% is you: brain-dump everything you know
- Middle 80% is AI: structure, research, first draft
- Last 10% is you: rewrite it the way you talk, add remembered stories
A split that keeps the human parts human while cutting the hours, with explicit instruction to prioritise your own material over anything the model researched.
Steal forany AI-assisted writing process that must still sound like one person
5:19:01acronym
The 90-Day MAP
- M: Mine for topic gold (weeks 1-2)
- A: Accelerate, two videos a week to build skill (weeks 3-8)
- P: Position your expertise, trade quantity for depth (week 9 onward)
The first ninety days split into topic research, deliberate volume, then permanently operating at the deep end of the SCAR scale.
Steal forany skill-dependent launch where early output has to be disposable
5:52:20model
The YouTube-to-Clients Bridge
- One link on the channel about page
- A labelled link at the very top of every description
- A direct invitation in one video out of every four or five
- A landing page that continues the video's promise
- A booking widget instead of a contact form
- A lead magnet offered early, for the researchers
Everything that carries a ready buyer off the platform and onto a calendar, with a single call to action per video.
Steal forany content funnel where the conversion moment is unpredictable
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
6:07:25product
“So if you're really serious about using YouTube to make your expertise known and you want my guidance while you do it, I want to invite you to join my program, the YouTube to Clients Academy.”
Held to the final six minutes after the full system is already delivered, and framed around the thing information cannot supply: weekly small-group answers to your specific situation. He explicitly concedes the system is not the reason to join, then adds a 30-spot monthly cap and a deferred start option. A free kit is seeded three times earlier in the runtime so the ask lands on an already-converted list.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
