11:19Ed Lawrence · Tutorial
How to come up with YouTube ideas (like a $10M strategist)
A five-step system for picking video topics off buyer data and revenue-per-view, not off whatever already got views.
August 24thThe argument in one line.
Live streams require no editing or scripting, and when they're packaged and re-uploaded like normal videos, one live stream can keep generating views and sales for months after it ends, instead of value being locked to the day it aired.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run a coaching, course, or service business and want a lower-production way to create sales content than fully scripted, edited videos.
- You have little or no existing audience and assume live streaming requires viewers you don't yet have.
- You already publish videos but have never treated a live stream's thumbnail and title with the same care as a regular upload.
- You want a repeatable system for filling a live audience without paid ads.
SKIP IF…
- Your channel is pure entertainment or vlogging with no product, service, or offer to sell.
- You're looking for editing or scripting technique, not a content-and-sales format.
The full version, fast.
The video argues that edited, scripted videos aren't required to grow a channel or sell an offer: live streams do both, with far less production time. YouTube re-promotes a finished live as a normal video, so a stream with 575 concurrent viewers picked up 18,500 views afterward, and a single presentation-style live generated 76 sales worth over $55,000, with most of those sales landing weeks after the live aired. The creator lays out three live formats (Q&A, presentation, live coaching/review), a four-step system for getting people to show up (community wall poll, email application, email reminder, going live when the audience is online), and a 'splinter' loop where the strongest clips get re-cut into standalone videos whose end screens point back to the original live, so clips and live feed each other's growth indefinitely.
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00:00 – 00:45
01 · Cold open: skip editing, skip scripts
Challenges the idea that editing and scripting are required to grow a channel and sell, then previews a live stream that made $56k from three hours of work.
00:45 – 02:24
02 · Two big pros of live streams
Introduces live streams as the format: pro #1 is that YouTube re-promotes a finished live as a normal video (575 concurrent viewers became 18,500 views), pro #2 is that one live netted 76 sales and $55,000+, with most sales landing after the live rather than during it.
02:24 – 02:52
03 · Picking a live format
Sets up the three styles of live stream he has used over the years, each with different pros, cons, and prep requirements.
02:52 – 04:34
04 · Style 1: Live Q&A
The beginner format: his own first live stream (68 views), coping with trolls, sourcing questions through an email form, and using the community wall or FAQ-scraping (Reddit/Google) when there's no audience or email list yet.
04:34 – 04:52
05 · Style 2: Presentation
The exact format behind the $56k live: a plain slideshow presentation walking through one specific result, with zero editing required.
04:52 – 06:20
06 · Style 3: Live coaching / review
Reviewing audience-submitted work live; used to refill a slowing monthly waitlist back to capacity, plus an example (James Smith) coaching someone through a problem on camera. Viewers who show up for this format are already serious buyers.
06:20 – 07:38
07 · Thumbnails and titles decide the replay views
Comparing his old live streams (a few hundred views, weak packaging) to later ones (200,000 and 275,000 views) once he applied the same thumbnail/title effort he gives normal videos.
07:38 – 09:05
08 · The 4-step system to fill a live
Community wall poll to pick the topic, email the list to apply, send a reminder, and go live when the audience is online; also reassures that an empty live has no one present to witness it being empty.
09:05 – 11:08
09 · Turning one live into a self-perpetuating machine
The splinter loop: track which lives convert, cut the strongest sections into standalone videos with fresh intros, post them to the channel, and point their end screens back to the original live so clips and live feed each other's growth.
11:08 – 11:32
10 · Next-video CTA
Points to a follow-up video breaking down his video-ideation system, which he credits with over $10 million in results.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- One live stream that picked up 575 concurrent viewers went on to get 18,500 views after YouTube re-promoted the replay as a standalone video.
- A single presentation-style live stream generated 76 sales and $55,000, and only 10 of those sales happened on the day of the live.
- The other 65 sales from that live came in over the following months, after YouTube pushed the replay as a normal video.
- Viewers who stay for a 30-minute live watch far longer than viewers of a typical video, and that sustained attention is what converts them into buyers.
- Treating a live stream's thumbnail and title as an afterthought caps its replay views at a few hundred, no matter how good the content inside it is.
- Giving a live the same thumbnail and title treatment as a regular video took one channel's live-stream views from a few hundred to 200,000 and 275,000.
- A live coaching or review format, where the audience submits their own work to be critiqued on camera, converts to sales faster than open Q&A because only serious viewers show up for it.
- Filling a live audience runs on four steps: poll the community wall for the topic, email the list to apply, send a reminder, then go live when the audience is actually online.
- Cutting a live stream's strongest segment into a standalone video, then using its end screen to point back to the full live, turns one live into a permanent, self-feeding growth loop.
- A beginner's first live stream can double as email list growth: promote it on the community wall, then route question sign-ups through a form tied to the list.
- With no audience and no email list yet, pulling live topics from the internet's most-asked questions about a niche removes the need to already have viewers lined up to submit questions.
One live stream, packaged like a video, can outsell months of edited content.
WHAT TO LEARN
A live stream that gets the same packaging effort as a normal upload keeps generating views and sales long after it airs, because YouTube re-promotes the replay and a simple splinter loop of clips keeps feeding it new traffic.
02Two big pros of live streams
- A live's initial audience is not its real audience: once the stream ends, YouTube treats the replay as a regular video and promotes it independently on the homepage.
- Judging a live stream by day-of sales undercounts its value, since most of the revenue lands in the weeks and months after, once the replay circulates as a video.
- Extended watch time, not raw concurrent viewers, is what makes a live convert: viewers who stay for 20-30 minutes absorb enough value to become buyers.
03Picking a live format
- There isn't one correct live-stream format: matching the format to experience level and goal (practice, sales, or lead generation) matters more than picking the 'best' one.
04Style 1: Live Q&A
- A first live stream should be the lowest-prep format (open Q&A) so the host can focus on the technology and the possibility of trolls, not on content quality.
- Sourcing questions in advance through a form, rather than taking them live in chat, lets the host pick questions relevant to the widest audience, protecting replay watch time.
- With zero existing audience, pulling a topic list from Reddit or Google's most-asked questions about a niche replaces the need for viewers to already be submitting questions.
05Style 2: Presentation
- A presentation-style live built from a slideshow, walking through one specific result, requires no editing and can still function as a full sales asset.
06Style 3: Live coaching / review
- Asking the audience to submit their own work for a live review filters for viewers who are already serious about the topic, which is why this format converts faster than open formats.
- A live-review format can be used defensively: increasing the cadence of these lives was enough to refill a slowing monthly waitlist back to capacity.
07Thumbnails and titles decide the replay views
- A live stream's packaging should get the same design effort as a regular video upload, because the replay competes for clicks the same way any other video does.
- Skipping packaging effort on a live because 'it's just a live' is the single biggest lever holding its replay views to a few hundred instead of hundreds of thousands.
08The 4-step system to fill a live
- Fear of nobody attending a live is a non-issue in practice: an empty live has no audience present to witness that it's empty.
- A four-step promotion sequence, community wall poll, email application, email reminder, then going live when the audience is online, is enough to seed attendance without paid promotion.
- Even a live with almost no email list still works as content: worst case, it becomes an authentic-feeling video that lives on the channel and earns views over time.
09Turning one live into a self-perpetuating machine
- The strongest segments of a live stream can be re-cut into standalone videos with a freshly recorded intro, and reposted even to viewers who already saw the original.
- Giving a splintered clip a new end screen that points back to the full live turns each clip into free traffic for the original live, and vice versa.
- Tracking which live streams converted well, then deliberately making more regular videos and follow-up lives on that same topic, compounds the system instead of restarting it each time.
Terms worth knowing.
- Splinter (content)
- Cutting the strongest segments out of a long piece of content, like a live stream, and re-releasing each one as its own standalone video.
- Community wall
- YouTube's post/feed tab on a channel, used to publish text updates, polls, and announcements directly to subscribers outside of video uploads.
- Concurrent viewers
- The number of people watching a live stream at one specific moment, as distinct from the total number who watched across the whole broadcast.
- End screen
- The clickable overlay YouTube shows in the final seconds of a video, used here to link a re-cut clip back to the original full-length live stream.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
01:30
“This is one that netted 76 sales and over $55,000.”
07:39
“If nobody turns up there's nobody there to see that nobody turned up, so you have nothing to worry about.”
11:08
“It's the circle of life. Oh, where did that come from?”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
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metaphor
Is editing videos slowing your business's views and sales down? Well, when I looked at the data and the current trends, it appears that no editing or even writing a script could actually generate you more views and sales with significantly less work. So in this video, I am going to show you how one piece of content used this system to generate over 76 sales in three hours, netting $55 ,000.
And I'm going to show you how to turn this same format into a content machine that grows your channel and your business without it taking over your life. All right, let's start with what this strategy is. And on screen, I've put a couple of examples of it.
Now, these aren't videos, they're actually live streams. But before you go, but I don't have an audience to live stream to, do not worry about that. You don't need one to generate views and...
sales doing live streams. And later I will show you how anyone can do this no matter the audience size. But what you need to focus on right now is the massive pros they have for pretty much every business.
So firstly, Have a look at this. This is the live stream I did and it got 575 people to join the live when it was live over the 60 minute duration.
But it got 18 and a half thousand views after it was alive because when you go live on YouTube, YouTube also saves it and then puts it on the homepage and promotes you all over YouTube as a video, which is why all of these other channels you can see on screen right now who are doing this strategy are also getting massive views on their live stream too because live streams become f***ed.
videos. Now, the next big pro of these is the sales. So this live stream here, this is one that netted 76 sales and over $55 ,000.
Why? Well, check this out. The average live viewer stuck around for around 30 minutes and that's massive.
And when you pump your viewers with a ton of value for long periods of time, this is what will get them buying. But what's also interesting about this is if we look at the sales graph here, you can see 10 sales were made on the day of the live stream. The other 65 came after when the live was pushed as a video.
So you don't think of lives as having to create all these cells the day you perform them. Really this is about creating a sales machine that lasts forever. But also you can do this.
You can then, after the live, cut out the strongest sections and then re -upload them to your channel as videos and then point those videos back to the full live. And suddenly one live stream generates views and sales for months and continues to grow itself. Now I'm going to show you exactly how to do that.
in more detail at the end, as well as what to do if you only have a small audience, but now you know the big pros of this. Let's look at what to actually make because the style of live that you produce is gonna impact how many sales and views you can get. And there are three styles that I have used over the years.
They all have their own pros and cons and different ways to make them. So let's dive a bit deeper into them, starting with the first style I recommend. If you are a beginner, you should start on this one.
And here is my first ever attempt at it. So my last haircut. was nearly seven months ago.
What? All right. Yep, that was actually what I spoke about on my first live stream.
I got 68 views. But what I want you to take from this is that I first went live to a very small audience and then I just ran a Q &A because they take very little prep. But also because I wanted to practice.
When it's your first live, the tech to set this up, it's going to feel a little bit new. You're probably going to be a bit nervous. You might be worried something goes wrong.
You're probably thinking, what if someone trolls me? Which, by the way, they did. Every time I used to go live, someone came into the stream and told me I'd never make it.
So you need to learn to deal with these things. And that is why... If you are new to lives, just start with the simplest format, which is a live Q &A.
You can use them to grow your email list too, because what I did was I would... pop up a community wall post and then tell people to hop onto my email list. And I would then send the form where they could ask questions on my live to that list.
So my email list grew this way. Now, if you don't have an email list, you can just ask on the community wall for people to submit questions. And if you have no viewers yet at all, go on Reddit or Google and just find the internet's most asked questions about your topic and then package up your video like this.
Something like answering the internet's most asked questions about whatever your topic is. Now if you do have a following you do exactly the same things I just said.
Now you don't actually have to have people send in questions before the live you can just take them in the chat but I've always preferred to get sent them first because I want to pick the ones that are the relevant to more viewers otherwise you watch time will take a hit and it might not perform as well as a video after.
Now the next style is the one that generated 76 sales and it's basically just a presentation so you can see this live I did on screen right now. It's just me presenting from a slideshow.
There's no editing in this at all. I just showed people how I doubled my business in 90 days. And that is it.
You can do a presentation on anything you like. They are incredibly powerful for sales and views. Now the third style, this is a weapon.
If you want to grow a waitlist, if you want to fill a program, if you want to generate calls without ever directly kind of promoting anything in your content. So last year I used this, I used to have a waitlist system and I knew that if I got 500 people on every month, it would sell out. So one month I was looking at the waitlist numbers and it was growing a bit slower than normal.
So I wanted to fill it up faster. So I asked, what do I do? So I decided, well, put on a live doing the style I'm about to show you.
And it filled up the waitlist and fixed my problem for another month. So I would highly recommend this. to anyone who has an offer where they coach, kind of like I do.
And all you do for this type of live is you ask your audience to submit something for you to review live. If you are a music teacher, that might be recording them playing. If you're a coach, it could be their funnel or their content strategy like I do.
Or you just kind of coach someone live through their problems. So if you look at what James Smith did here, this is actually a video, but he coached someone through a problem on camera. And if you look at the comments below this video, they tell you everything you need to know.
Now, the people who show up to this kind of content and really value it, they are serious. They are serious viewers and they are serious buyers and they really value it so it gets them over the line to become a customer quicker. So those are the three styles I'm now recommending that my clients do too.
But now the question is, how do you actually get people watching them so you don't waste your time producing something that doesn't grow your business, that doesn't grow your channel? Well, let me show you the first thing that you must do if you want this to work. So if we go back to the first ever live stream I did on my old channel, Film Booth, let's just scroll up the page and look.
here at the view count now you can see each one was getting a few hundred views but look as i did more and more of these lives and as my following grew you can see the view numbers here are ticking up a little bit but now look at this boom 200 000 views i got on a live stream and then this one here got 275 000 views so my lives went from getting a few hundred views each time i did them to getting over a million views combined because I changed this one thing.
So you can see how bad my thumbnails and titles were on my old live streams, right? I was doing boring Q &A titles. The thumbnails kind of suck.
They have no curiosity. Design's awful. There's nothing there that's going to hook a viewer.
But the ones with all the views, all I did was come up with the idea for the live in the same way I used to come up with ideas for video. And that would mean I would start with the thumbnail and title. and work out a way to make it create curiosity.
So when it becomes a video, people might want to click on it. That's the main lesson you need to take from this. If you want to get views on these things when they become a video, don't treat your packaging as an afterthought.
Give it the same time and attention you do when you make your videos. And then you build your whole entire live stream's idea around it. But that's how you get it views as a video.
How do you get people to turn up to the lives? Because you're probably very worried nobody's actually going to turn up when you're going to be sat there . Well first you don't need to worry because if nobody turns up there's nobody there to see that nobody turned up so you have nothing to worry about but otherwise the first thing you do is You get people to attend your live just by posting about on the community wall.
So look what I do. I put a poll out to start. I get votes on the topic and then I will make the topic of my live the winner.
So now we've got some people kind of interested before we've even made the thing. And then what I do is I email my list a form to apply to the live for a review or to ask a question on it. In that, I remind them of the day.
And then on the day of the live, I email another reminder. That's pretty much it. You can do way more emails if you want.
You can do way more reminders. The other thing to remember is when you go live, you also appear on the YouTube homepage to your existing viewers. So YouTube's going to promote the live itself, which is why you want to go live when your audience are online and awake.
Now, if you have no email list, then you can't do this, but... this is just another reason why you need to grow an email list otherwise just go live and just think of it as a fast easy way to make an authentic style video that's going to live on your channel forever and could get lots of views too i'm pretty sure i only had 10 people turn up to my first ever live and you know what i was pretty happy with that one of them was the mega troll so now you know i wonder what happened to them okay so now you know what to make and how to get people to the live and why it doesn't matter if nobody turns up anyway now we have the best part of this strategy that's gonna earn you more it's gonna get you more views too.
So let me just quickly draw out my current live stream plan. So what I'm going to do is this, I'm going to do more lives. If I look at my rev track data, seven days after and I can see this live stream has generated a lot of sales, I'm then going to what's called splinter the content.
What that means is I'm going to ask, what did I talk about in that content that converted so well, and then I'm going to plan more regular videos around it that I post on the channel. and then maybe more lives that go deeper on the topic too so this is going to help me learn so much faster as well and then i'm going to cut out any section from a live that i think was strong and make a new thumbnail and title for them and then possibly write them a new intro and then i'm going to just post them as individual videos on this channel yes some people might have seen it before but it doesn't matter they're just going to watch and go oh he's clipped it out from his live and they'll either just keep watching it or leave you can still get from people who have not seen it, or you can get views from people who haven't been really paying attention that well, which is very common.
And if you're like me and you don't really like watching really long videos, this appeals to people who don't want to watch a 90 minute live stream too. Though I actually think it's kind of a good service if the content that you cut out is actually quality. Now, the thing that I really love about this is let's just say you track sales from a live.
And it made a lot of sales. All you need to do is find ways to get more people to watch it. So when you cut out a clip and post it as a separate video, you can then film a fresh ending that says, hey.
This was taken from a big deep dive on the topic. If you loved it, watch this video next. And then what you'll do is you'll use the clips to get more views on the original live that is growing your business too.
So your live gets views and sales and then creates clips that can be posted to your channel to grow your channel and get you more views. And then those same clips push people back to the original live to get you more views and sales. It's the .
Oh, where did that come from? The thing is, the secret to all of this is... making sure that you know how to come up with ideas that will get your live clicked on when it becomes a video.
So if you don't know how to do that, you wanna watch this video next and I'm gonna break down my exact step -by -step video ideation system that's generated over $10 million from YouTube so you can use it too. Is that the Lion King? I don't know.
No, it's not.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Ed Lawrence opens by attacking the assumption that growth requires editing and scripting, then points at a single unedited live stream that made $56,000 from three hours of work to prove it.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:56list
Two Pros of Live Streams
- Lives get re-promoted and watched as videos after they end
- Lives get sales forever, not just on the day they air
The two structural advantages of live streams over pre-recorded video: YouTube re-promotes the replay as a normal video, and most of the sales attributed to a live land in the weeks and months after it airs.
Steal forreframing why a live is worth the setup time over a scripted upload
02:32list
Three Styles of Live Streams
- Live Q&A
- Presentation
- Live coaching / review
A difficulty-and-purpose ladder for choosing a live format: Q&A for beginners (low prep, practice), presentation for straightforward value delivery and sales, and live coaching/review for filling waitlists or programs with pre-qualified, serious buyers.
Steal forpicking a live format that matches current audience size and offer
07:49list
4-Step Live Attendance System
- Poll the community wall to pick the topic
- Email the list to apply to attend or submit a question
- Send an email reminder before the live
- Go live when the audience is online
The exact sequence used to seed attendance before a live goes out, run through the community wall and email list rather than paid promotion.
Steal forany launch or event that needs a warm audience without ad spend
10:05model
The Splinter Flywheel
- Live stream
- Cut best clips (splinter)
- Post to channel
- Point end screens to original live
A closed loop where the strongest segments of a live are re-cut into standalone videos, those videos link back to the original live via their end screens, and the live in turn keeps generating views and sales as it circulates as a video.
Steal forrepurposing any long-form recording (webinar, workshop, podcast) into a compounding content loop
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
11:08next-video
“I'm gonna break down my exact step-by-step video ideation system that's generated over $10 million from YouTube so you can use it too.”
Ends on a natural next-video hook tied to the unresolved piece of the system (how to come up with an idea that gets a live clicked on), rather than a hard product pitch.
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.
