How I Made YouTube a $5M Lead Generation Machine (12 Key Lessons)

Summary

In this captivating discussion, Liam Ottley shares pivotal insights from his 26-month journey transforming YouTube into a $5M lead-generating powerhouse. Highlighting 12 essential lessons, he details his growth from a fledgling channel to AI expertise, emphasizing three critical phases: starting, scaling, and maintaining momentum. Ottley underlines the importance of treating YouTube as a skill, experimenting to find one's niche, and focusing on real results rather than vanity metrics. His story encourages both rookies and seasoned entrepreneurs to harness YouTube's potential for customer acquisition and business growth.

Highlights

• Liam's YouTube channel generated $5 million in leads over 26 months! 🎉
• Experimentation is key to finding what works for your channel. 🔍
• Your YouTube journey should focus on acquiring skills and expertise. 🛠️
• Building a dedicated team accelerates growth and quality. 🛡️
• Teleprompters can enhance the quality and delivery of your videos. 🎙️
• Understand that metrics like views and subscribers can be misleading. 🎯
• Escaping competition means continuous improvement and reinvestment. 🏆
• Networking with peers can provide support and inspire creativity. 🌐
• Beginner-friendly guides are powerful for audience growth. 📚

Key Takeaways

• Treat YouTube as a skill, not a magic money machine. 🎥
• Experiment with different formats and topics early on. 🧪
• Start narrow and small, then build expertise. 🧑‍🔬
• Focus on real results, not vanity metrics. 📈
• Build a strong team to help with content production. 👥
• Quality videos can drive huge growth. 🌟
• Always escape competition by constantly improving. 🚀
• Network with peers to stay inspired and grow. 🤝
• Prioritize consistency in content creation. 🔄
• Collect an owned audience like emails for direct contact. 📧
• Invest in expanding your production team over time. 💼
• Have beginner-friendly content to appeal to a larger audience. 🎓

Overview

Liam Ottley's YouTube success story is an inspiring roadmap for entrepreneurs and creators aiming to leverage the platform for business growth. By sharing his 12 key lessons, Ottley demystifies the process of turning a YouTube channel into a significant revenue-generating machine. His journey highlights the importance of starting small and focusing on skill acquisition over overnight success. Treating YouTube as a skill to master rather than a quick-fix financial solution is integral to long-term success.

Throughout his experience, Ottley underscores the necessity of experimentation and adaptation in content strategy. Finding the right niche, format, and audience segment through trial and error allows creators to sharpen their focus and increase content relevance. Building a supportive team and understanding that not all metrics are equal are also emphasized as critical steps in scaling operations. His insights serve as invaluable guidance for those intent on navigating the complex landscape of content creation.

Networking, investing in your own growth, and fostering consistency are central to maintaining momentum and staying competitive. Ottley's experience suggests that building a personal brand involves continuous learning and adaptation, using tools like teleprompters for polish, and compiling beginner-friendly yet informative guides to attract a wider audience. The lesson is clear: with a strategic approach, YouTube can become a powerful channel for generating leads and elevating a brand's visibility.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction In the Introduction chapter, the author discusses the significant revenue generated by their businesses through leads from their YouTube channel, totaling over $5 million in 26 months. The chapter sets the stage for sharing 12 key lessons learned from expanding the channel to 450,000 subscribers. These lessons are aimed at helping others use YouTube to grow their businesses, and are organized into three groups, with the first focusing on advice for those just starting or considering starting a channel.
• 00:30 - 10:00: Starting Phase Lessons The chapter "Starting Phase Lessons" focuses on accelerating the initial growth stages of a YouTube channel. It covers strategies to quickly start generating revenue from the channel. The lessons included discuss scaling the channel beyond the initial phase by improving both the quality and quantity of content. Additionally, it offers strategies for maintaining success, continuously innovating, and effectively using YouTube as a sustainable lead generation platform for the content creator and their team. Thus, it provides a comprehensive roadmap from starting a channel to optimizing its role as a business tool.
• 10:00 - 21:00: Scaling and Quality Improvement In this chapter, the author discusses their journey in building businesses over the past seven years, with a particular focus on AI businesses in the last two years. They have experience in creating an AI automation agency that constructs AI systems for clients, an AI education business designed to instruct people on starting a business, and an AI SaaS that allows users to build AI agents without needing to code. The author emphasizes that the strategies shared are applicable to any business, although they may resonate particularly with those running AI businesses. Additionally, the author provides a personal disclaimer about their unexpected turn towards becoming a YouTuber, despite originally not considering it.
• 21:00 - 30:00: Maintaining Consistency and Leadership This chapter emphasizes the importance of perseverance and dedication, particularly in the context of entrepreneurship. The speaker shares personal experience, highlighting that consistently working towards a goal, even if it seems unachievable initially, has dramatically changed their life. They stress that acquiring valuable skills is key in business, suggesting that mastering certain skills can be transformative. The speaker relates their journey over the last seven years, encouraging readers to be serious about their ambitions to build a business and generate income. Ultimately, the chapter conveys a message about the power of continuous effort and learning in achieving success.
• 30:00 - 31:00: Conclusion The conclusion chapter discusses key lessons learned in the speaker's life and career, particularly focusing on YouTube. It emphasizes the importance of viewing YouTube as a skill rather than a quick way to make money. The speaker acknowledges the transformative impact of YouTube on their life but cautions against expecting immediate results. Instead, the focus should be on increasing output and consistently creating content.

How I Made YouTube a $5M Lead Generation Machine (12 Key Lessons) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 over the past 26 months my businesses have generated over $5 million and 99% of all of that revenue has come through leads that have come from this YouTube channel in this video I want to break down the 12 key lessons that I've learned in growing this YouTube channel from zero to 450,000 subscribers in counting so that if you are also looking to use YouTube as a channel to acquire new customers and grow your business I'll be breaking out all the key things that I've learned to get me to this point and it's going to be split into three different groups firstly if you are just starting out or thinking about starting out with your channel I have a number of lessons focused to that
• 00:30 - 01:00 starting phase and the things that I learned there that help you get up and running much faster and get to the point where you actually making money from the channel and the second set of lessons that we're going to cover are all about how to scale your channel beyond that starting point and how to increase quality and increase output as well and the final set of lessons we're going to cover are all about how to stay at the top of your game once you're there how to continue to innovate continue to stay at the top and most importantly turn YouTube into a consistent lead generation platform that you and your business partners and teammates can rely on and quickly before we get into it if you are new to the channel and don't know who I am my name is Liam Mley i've
• 01:00 - 01:30 been building businesses for the past 7 years and for the past two specifically I've been focused on building AI businesses so an AI automation agency where we build AI systems for clients AI education business where we teach people how to start a business and I've also got my own AI SAS where people can build AI agents without having to know how to code i build AI businesses what I'm going to teach you of course is can be applicable to any business but if you're watching this channel then you may also be running similar AI businesses to mine um on your own and also as a disclaimer before we go into this I never thought I'd be a YouTuber i remember specifically saying to myself like man I
• 01:30 - 02:00 will never do that that takes so long to get results cuz I've seen people spend 5 years and get no views still and so I thought no way would I ever do that so some of you are probably in the same position but just know that I threw myself into this 2 years ago and figured it out along the way you definitely can that's completely changed my life has become one of the most valuable skills probably the most valuable skill that I've learned in my entire 7 years of entrepreneurship so please if you're serious about building a business and making money and all the stuff that everyone wants to do these days I promise you that out of all the trying that I've done it has been the biggest
• 02:00 - 02:30 needle mover in my entire life and career so let's get into it as I said we've got three different groups of lessons the first group is all about how to get started but really what that ends up being is about how to increase your quantity and how to actually start putting out any videos at all so the first lesson I'd want to pass on to anyone who is just starting out is to treat YouTube as a a skill and not some magic money machine i know I kind of just gassed it up and said that it was completely life-changing and and all those good things which it definitely is but people often come into it and start expecting results and be like I need to
• 02:30 - 03:00 make money from this right now i need to post a couple videos getting thousands of views and really really short-term focus and this is a classic killer in an entrepreneurship and I've made the same mistake over and over and over again of just being very short-sighted and not seeing okay how does this play out in 5 or 10 years and when it comes to YouTube if you see it more so as a skill as I am here now talking in front of this camera or I'm I'm planning videos and I'm ideulating and I understand how to work with editors and and manage the whole production and delivery of video it's really just a big skill set and what that skill set allows you to do is
• 03:00 - 03:30 essentially almost for free aside from costs related to your time and the cost that you have to give to your editing team which we're going to get on to in a sec you can acquire customers for free through posting videos online and if you want to make any money online the big biggest problem most businesses have is that they don't have a way of getting more customers or it's too expensive for them to acquire customers so when you look at making YouTube videos like this as a skill it is so so bloody powerful that it is worth you giving yourself one two even 3 years and say "Look if I can get to the point where I can consistently use this these long form
• 03:30 - 04:00 videos to generate leads then everything else kind of solves itself." Like that is the client acquisition problem solved for any business that I'm running and that is just a superpower as an entrepreneur and I can confidently say that if you can put in the work and and stop trying to focus so much on short-term cash and getting leads which we're going to touch on next but to zoom out a little bit and say "Yeah sure i'm on 300 or 200 views per video." Now even though I feel like I'm throwing all of this effort into the ether and nobody's watching my videos what you're actually doing is acquiring a skill and every time you put in a rep you're getting stronger and stronger and stronger and
• 04:00 - 04:30 stronger while the results may flatline for a long time your skills and experience is going up like this and that is ultimately what's going to allow your results to catch up to it first thing is treat it as a skill because it bloody is and it is a skill that's like having a money machine in your back pocket if you know how to use it right lesson number two is to experiment with different formats and topics early on until you find your sweet spot right now this may seem kind of self-explanatory but this is what I did in my channel i'm really speaking from experience in this stuff if you scroll down and look at the first videos that I started posting I knew that I wanted to make videos about
• 04:30 - 05:00 AI cuz I was really into it right cuz I loved business and building businesses and I thought AI is going to be really impactful in this so I want to make videos in this intersection so I had kind of the general area that I wanted to make videos i just started testing lots of different formats i did those news videos i did um like technical tutorials showing you how to fine-tune GPT3 at the time i made videos of like selling AI art on Etsy i did videos of podcast with AI founders and I tested all of these different formats until I found something that worked for me which ended up being AI tutorials so showing business owners or people who wanted to
• 05:00 - 05:30 tinker around with AI as well how to build a certain thing with AI and that ended up being a custom knowledge chatbot which was kind of the first little thing that I I focused on my channel on and for you you're going to need to find the same thing what is the topic or the format that allows you to apply all of your skills and knowledge as best as possible make a really valuable video but on the other side there's also a big market for it and in my case the demand for AI tutorials and showing people how to build cool stuff with this new technology was surging and the number of people who are supplying that kind of content was very low so early on you need to be experimenting
• 05:30 - 06:00 with lots of different formats try a whole bunch of different things as long as they're in roughly in the same kind of topic that you want to work in and more importantly when you are choosing things to test look for trends is there anything that you can jump on within your space like for example mine was the custom knowledge chatbot trend people wanted to have a a chat GPT that had their own data included so I figured out how to do that and I was enjoying it myself and make videos on it um and that was getting a lot of views and and a lot of high quality views as well of people who wanted to work with me to to to buy my consulting to work with my agency but obviously right now the trends are quite different if I was starting again I'd be
• 06:00 - 06:30 looking at say like natn which if you're not familiar is a is an automations platform similar to make.com it's really blown up right now because it's got a lot of agent functionality in it and there's a lot of interest and buzz around it so I'd start to test different formats i'd test tutorials i'd test me talking about it i'd test news i'd test maybe trying to get on a podcast with him or something i'd test a lot of stuff in these areas where there's a lot of search volume on YouTube where you can get picked up like how to do X with NA 10 or how to do X with thing that's popping off right now experimenting with lots of different formats in these frothy kind of bubbly trendy areas going
• 06:30 - 07:00 to give you the highest chance of getting lucky and getting a vid that picks up and actually gets a lot of traction lesson number three is to start narrow and start small so this lesson revolves around once you've done that experimenting and you've you've sort of caught on you've put out maybe 10 20 videos and you've started to see ones that are performing better then you need to go narrow and stop trying to be this everything person and start trying to be an expert in one small field so in my case it was these custom knowledge chat bots i tested I tested I tested until I found something that hey I really enjoy making these i'm interested in it seems like a lot of other people are there's a ton of views coming from it getting a
• 07:00 - 07:30 ton of leads etc like you'll find that sweet spot with enough testing and intelligent testing in the right areas knowing what's trending that then you need to go narrow on it and say "Look people are liking these videos i'm not just going to do one of those a month i'm going to do two of them a week i'm going to say more of this content over and over and over again and I'm going to become the niche expert in this small and emerging thing or in this trending thing." And that's going to allow you to start to call yourself an expert in this little category and people buy from experts i take it you're watching this video to be able to build a business and generate leads so becoming an expert in a narrow area is so important in order
• 07:30 - 08:00 to generate some actual business for you a fatal mistake that many people make early on when I see I see it all the bloody time is you come on to YouTube and you start talking broad and you you're talking about all these broad topics like where's AI going next or in your field it might be five things real real estate agents should know for this it's just these really really broad topics and unless you have credibility and you have a lot of evidence and proof to back yourself up you simply do not belong in the pool of conversation with those broad topics you need to understand that and this is a sort of
• 08:00 - 08:30 key to understanding how YouTube and and personal branding and content works as a flywheel is you go narrow you become an expert in there you get results for those people and then you use those results and that evidence to then talk about it more in your videos and then you can shoot for broader topics whereas they come in and they start the video and they say "I've done this for this for this for this." And they go "Oh well gosh maybe he is the person or he or she is the person that I should listen to on this broad topic." It's like if you hear Warren Buffett talk about investing and he starts the video off talking about
• 08:30 - 09:00 his investing track record if Joe blogs on the internet making a video like this doesn't even start the video off explaining what his portfolio is what results he's got or how much money he's made or rah then you'll watch it and be like why why would I watch this guy's video you have to understand to get that narrow expertise to do the thing talk about the thing and then you can start to do broader and broader and broader topics and there's some great examples of this in my space there's a guy Nate Herk who was a member of my accelerator who's gone and specialized in NA10 and he's getting a ton of traction on NA10 um there's Giannis another member of my
• 09:00 - 09:30 accelerator and and a really good friend of mine who started his channel and then niched down into voice agents and building on Vappy and just started making a ton of Vappy content sure the views went down but he was serving a really small group of people who were really really interested and ultimately had a lot of high quality leads coming through there that were business owners who were watching that kind of content lesson number four is what you must learn next after you've gone narrow is that you need to be focusing on real results and not vanity metrics now views make you feel good having a big subscriber count next to your name maybe makes you feel good but all of this stuff all of the stuff that you see on
• 09:30 - 10:00 YouTube basically is all fluff what really really matters and this is a a hard thing to learn but the views and the sub counts and all of the stuff that you get per video that doesn't really really matter when you're starting off you're trying to use YouTube to acquire customers and make money that is the focus so what should you be focusing on how many link clicks am I getting you'll see in the descriptions of all of my videos use custom tracking links for tracking all of the different data that's coming in so I know what people are clicking on when it comes to my videos which videos are generating the most clicks to which of my different products or offers or services and
• 10:00 - 10:30 ultimately when you're starting off you should just have like one offer that you should have a consulting call or you should have a a book a call to work with my agency or my business it's just one or two things to focus on okay did I post this video and did we see an increase in bookings and of those bookings how many will qualify and how many of those ended up being closed deals so it's the quality of those bookings or purchases or whatever you're doing off the back of your YouTube you need to be looking at that cuz you can get a video that has 200 or 300 views but ultimately brought in 10 appointments maybe five of them were qualified and you ended up closing two of them or you make a video that got
• 10:30 - 11:00 that's broader that gets more views but it's a lower quality audience because it is broader and it's talking more about like sort of highle concepts and not showing really your expertise you may get 15 bookings but like one of them is qualified you know you just get a whole bunch of rubbish traffic going towards your booking and and conversion pages early on you must focus on what actually matters am I getting link clicks am I getting bookings of those how many are qualified and how many of those am I closing cuz it does not matter if if you're getting 200 views every video but
• 11:00 - 11:30 you're also closing multiple deals per month or multiple deals a week then that is working by all the sort of vanity metrics it may not be you may not be getting many subs but what we're trying to do is get to a point where you are making content in a way that is generating business and then you can start to reinvest that money what's going to allow you to tap into broader topics is if you have more credibility so more doing the thing makes you more money and more ways that you can talk about doing the thing which allows you to tap into a broader audience so the money goes back into reinvestments in
• 11:30 - 12:00 your team and expanding your content output and quality better editors better thumbnail designers etc but also it goes into okay at the start of my videos I can talk more strongly about the stuff I've done so it's about getting this this flywheel going and you can only do that by focusing on what really matters so focus on the conversions and that's what's going to allow you to make broader content because you've got better results and you've got more money to invest in it and that's the only way that you can start talking about broader videos and going on broader topics that can ultimately get much more views and there's been times where I've made videos that get a lot less views and it
• 12:00 - 12:30 does kind of sting you look at it you're like "Oh man I'm I'm not performing how I used to man like is it?" But if you keep looking at the data what does it show and that's it's a really tough thing to deal with that's all you should really be looking at especially early on lesson number five and the final one in this first group where we're focused on quantity and really getting your channel off the ground is to build a team around you now I was able to grow my channel to about 10,000 subs in like a month and a half i was fortunate enough to have run businesses before i had my own funds and I could invest in in paying people to edit my videos for me if you want to get fast results pay someone to do the
• 12:30 - 13:00 editing for you pay someone to do the thumbnail editing and and design for you this is obviously a no-brainer one but if you spend more of your time focused on skills that you're not really going to use you're going to spend all this time learning how to edit videos properly and sure it might be helpful down the line and suddenly it stops and you're paying someone else to do it anyway so why did you spend all this time doing all this rubbish apart from you actually need to because you can't afford it otherwise so if you can't afford it that's a whole different thing maybe go to your friends and say "Hey look do you want to start this thing with me?" Like when I first started my channel was just me and my friend Sean and he wasn't getting paid much early on but of course now once things are up and
• 13:00 - 13:30 running everyone's getting paid well and everything's all good so if you're starting out don't try to go crazy with the editing quality all you need is someone to maybe cutting between you and say a slideshow if you want to keep the editing costs down then slideshows are great because you as the creator get to put all the work into making the slideshow that's the visual right it just cuts between your face and the slideshow i could be doing this via a slideshow and going back and forth and it means you don't have to get the editors to do all of the B-roll and text and everything and so it saves a lot of effort on there so slideshow is a great one you go back and look at my early videos they got hundreds of thousands of views still just me and a slideshow that
• 13:30 - 14:00 I put together so if you're making slideshow based videos you're doing it with an editor who's just doing basic cutting and then when it comes to thumbnail designers go on to Upwork go on to Fiverr test a whole bunch of them and the best way to get the best results is to give them a whole bunch of examples of thumbnails that you like and say "These are the kinds of ones that I want mine to look like." If you don't give them that they're likely going to be rubbish and you just need to keep testing different thumbnail designers until you find someone who can take your I want them to look like this and spit out consistently ones that you like as well getting into the second stage of this video focused on quality so you've got your channel off the ground now
• 14:00 - 14:30 you're focusing on increasing quality and really ramping things up and and getting the growth phase really going the first lesson here is about what Hormuzzi calls the content accordion and I only just recently heard him put it this way but it's a great way of describing what I've been going through in my head for the past 2 years when it comes to making these kinds of videos so this content accordion strategy is really focused on the swing between quality and quantity and when to swing between the two because it's always oh should I be posting three videos a week should I be doing two should I be doing one this explains the much more dynamic nature of this relationship between quantity and quality so early on you
• 14:30 - 15:00 need to do quantity to get the reps up you need to be doing one to two videos every week building those skills getting the reps in so that you can actually become good at planning videos filming videos delivering moving your hands i wasn't always good at moving my hands like this it takes a while so you just need to get reps in so initially quantity is the the only thing you focus on just can I keep posting one two even three videos a week and just keep chopping them out and then you get to a point when you look back over maybe a month or two and you say "Hey well which videos have performed the best?" And using the testing rapidly and then narrowing down strategy you look at all
• 15:00 - 15:30 the videos that you posted and maybe three or four of them are performing a lot better than the rest and now you have something to narrow down to then you can say "Okay for next month I'm just going to try to do maybe six of these kinds of videos i'm going to put a little bit more effort into them and we're just going to do less but we're going to do better quality so suddenly you go from 10 videos a month down to like four or five or six and you're focusing more on quality now and then what you notice is like okay great now I'm getting really good results with these why don't I just try to do more of them so you've gone from tons and tons of quantity cherrypicking the best ones
• 15:30 - 16:00 that perform well if we just do those we should get the same results without all the extra fluff and then you get to the point where okay we've got now four of those coming out a month how can we do eight of them a month and then you go back to a quantity focus so it's constantly going between the two of them like an accordion and that's why this concept is really good to understand so the lesson here is that you start off with quantity and then based on the winners you boil it down to a small group of highquality videos and then once you've really got that dialed in you try to expand that so that you're doing more of them so now you're doing eight really high quality videos and then again the cycle repeats and know
• 16:00 - 16:30 okay there's three of them that were doing extra well so let's just do that so it goes back and forth and back and forth that's the best way to describe like how many should I post per week right lesson seven is that big beginner friendly videos can lead to huge growth my channel has primarily been built off the back of a handful of big and and super high quality videos that are put together so these are in this sort of stage two where you're scaling up the quality because you need to get that expertise you need to build up a familiarity with the camera with the editing process with all of this base skills to making content once you've got that base and you've got some momentum
• 16:30 - 17:00 and you've got the credibility and results from the stuff that you are talking about on the channel you've worked with some clients you've done some consultancy you've got some specific evidence about why you're someone people should listen to then you can invest more time into a bigger and more extensive beginner guide for whatever your topic is so I'll put a couple of them up on screen here my ones have obviously been around learning how to build AI agents or build chat bots i've done a three-hour chatbot guide i've done a an hour and a half long one on AI agents and GPTs done an hour long one on starting an AI business by the
• 17:00 - 17:30 time this goes out I will have released like a 3 or 4 hour video on AI agent these kinds of big videos have grown the channel more than anything else some of them getting sort of 30 40 50,000 subscribers per video so when you get to a point where you have the experience on the camera and understanding how this whole how to make videos on YouTube you've also got the credibility needed to frontload the video with it's like why you should listen to me you're about to sit here for 2 hours and listen to my listen to me talk here's why you should do it here's why I'm I'm the kind of person who you should be listening to then you can make these big videos that are beginner friendly and really just
• 17:30 - 18:00 cramming full of your value and your knowledge you get to build so much trust you get to tell your story and you get viewers who are in a bit of a relaxed pace of watching videos say "Okay I'm going to sit here and watch a two 2our tutorial." And ultimately those build a much higher quality base of of people in your audience than building it off of sort of these maybe fast news videos that are sort of 3 5 minutes or something you're getting these people who are very serious about upskilling or about learning more about a topic and there's nothing that has grown the channel more or more consistently even i know that if I put a ton of time into a really good video on a topic that I know a lot of people want to learn about it
• 18:00 - 18:30 will get views it will perform there's never really been one time maybe one time where I did a video like that and it didn't perform as well as I expected but it still outperformed all the other videos so knowing how and when to drop these big videos is the thing that will grow your channel the most in terms of subscriber count and they will perform for years so I've made videos that are still getting that few hundred views per day um and I made them like 2 years ago lesson number eight and the last one in this middle stage of quality is to use a teleprompter and if you don't know what a teleprompter is it's that little thing
• 18:30 - 19:00 that that all your all your favorite political candidates and presidents and everything are are reading off of and who knows who wrote the scripts in this case you'll be writing your own scripts and you can put them on a teleprompter there's not one on this video i'm not I'm not using it but I use it for um the larger videos that I do where I have to sort of sit down and write the whole thing teleprompter is going to be awesome because the hook of the video that you do the very start is the most important part and you should always be scripting the hooks that's probably another lesson that I didn't include but the hook and the start of the video and basically the first 30 seconds is like 80% of the work should go into that and
• 19:00 - 19:30 making sure it's really good that and the thumbnail and the title and everything what makes people click and then what makes people stay that's why you're hooking them in so spending a lot of time writing a good hook of like talking about who you are and why you do what you do and what they're going to get out of the video and how they're going to get it a really good hook and then you put it on the teleprompter and what I used to do is I'm sure many of you have tried you read a little line for your laptop and then you try to give it and you go back and forth i used to spend like 60 70% of the time maybe not that like half of the time I'd film for an entire video would just be me retaking the hook over and over and over
• 19:30 - 20:00 and over and over again especially if I didn't write down the hook beforehand if you write it down and put it on a teleprompter it's so much faster for my biggest and most successful videos I often need to write the whole thing like for some of these videos that have got a million views or or or more I've had to write like the whole damn thing down because making videos like this is a writing first process i'm having to tie together ideas and research and my experience and examples from the community and this this and you have to write and get the thoughts very clearly on a page in a way that you're communicating the topics and the points and making a good argument and then you
• 20:00 - 20:30 just put it on there and you film it and you're making like a video version of the the thing that you wrote so it can reach more people right teleprompt is a huge thing for upping that quality because you can now take your time with with the script instead of just doing it off the cuff like here you can write the whole script down put it on there and then really deliver like structured value exactly how you'd want to do it with no sort of variance of how you deliver it so lesson seven about big videos ties into lesson eight about using teleprompterss because you write big videos you put them on teleprompterss and that's sort of how you film these much larger pieces that
• 20:30 - 21:00 do really well right so now we're getting into our last group of lessons all around consistency so the first stage was uh quantity second stage was quality and now this third stage is about consistency this is about being able to consistently stay at the top of your game consistently be a leader in your space consistently lift the bar and raise the bar so that you aren't falling behind and I think a big concern well it was for me at one point that I'd make YouTube videos and you kind of pop off for a bit and then you fall off like I mean everyone seems to fall off eventually on this platform i mean I suppose at some point I will fall off too when I get sick sick of making
• 21:00 - 21:30 videos and there's no longer a need for me to do them but if you want to stay at the top of your game you need to have a sort of skill set and tool set to continue to create at the the highest level in your space and I'm going to run you through the key lessons that I've had over the past while cuz I've done pretty well in my space and I've been able to stay there for quite a while and I will remain here for a lot longer as well lesson number nine is about building an owned audience so if you've heard about rented and owned audiences this is a rented audience i'm relying on the YouTube algorithm to go and push this out to a whole bunch of people who want to make more money with their business through content same on
• 21:30 - 22:00 LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever you're renting the audience you don't own the audience i'm at the whims of the content algorithm or I'm at the whims of the platform as well they could try to ban me for for releasing too much source on how to grow on YouTube here they could literally just strike me and and knock my whole channel out as we saw a few years ago with a lot of different people talking on the wrong topic supposedly so building an owned audience is about can you use the rented audience to then capture their emails or their phone numbers and capture the ways to contact those people directly without the need for permission from the algorithm or from the platforms this is primarily focused on uh building an email list so
• 22:00 - 22:30 it's how can you use your content to push people to a lead magnet or to in my case like my school community and all these different places where it allows me to capture their contact information then I can communicate with them directly permissionless i don't need anyone there's no one going to block me apart from my my email domain maybe getting burnt out and getting a bad rap so I always land in spam i can essentially email those people directly and make offers i can communicate to them i can push them to different places so a key part of consistency and staying at the top of your game is making sure that you are collecting those emails or
• 22:30 - 23:00 you're collecting their phone numbers you're using that email to keep sending them more value to most importantly send them a notification when you drop a damn YouTube video that's the that's the most important part near-term for your YouTube channel is okay now I can send a direct notification to these people saying "Hey I've just dropped this video here's what it's about." And that's allowed me to consistently get a lot of views on my videos because whenever I make a video I just send it to 100,000 people on my email list then a good chunk of those people click through you get 5 6 7,000 people click through and watch the video that's how you fight against sort of declining results on your channel is because you keep getting that consistent group of people going
• 23:00 - 23:30 through to it and getting value from it so it's basically like a direct notification method you can also make direct offers when you when you say you need more leads uh for your business you can send out an email and say "Hey look we're taking on more clients right now um does anyone want to want to come on?" etc so lots of different things you can do with that email list but the main thing is to send them back to your content to keep them engaged with it and keep yourself consistent on the platform in terms of your views lesson number 10 is to keep escaping competition and now by this I mean when you think about the YouTube platform as a whole there's
• 23:30 - 24:00 certain types of content that everyone can create right if I have I'll use my niche or industry for an example cuz that's obviously what I know best in the AI space anyone who wants to pick up a camera and make AI content the easiest thing for them to do is like AI news right the requirements to create an AI news video are pretty damn low a lot of the time they're faceless a lot of the time the audio is AI generated so they're not even having to record anything they're just basic editing and there's no expectation of some really crazy personal touch so as a content type if I was making AI news videos on my channel I'd be competing with all these people down the bottom who could
• 24:00 - 24:30 also make those kinds of videos right one step up from that would be like an AI news channel where I put my face on it and I'm it's like a Matt Wolf i'm not competing with all these people who are faceless i'm now having a face it's escaping competition so in my case the way I initially escaped competition was I have an entrepreneurial background i've built businesses before okay i also know how to code and I've taught myself that and I've taught myself how to build AI stuff that I'm going to show them how to do and so immediately I got into this category of business experienced people who could code and could also put together a good good tutorial for it and and make it beginner friendly so then
• 24:30 - 25:00 you start to escape competition even further like okay maybe I can make an hourong video that's no one else is really doing like I can put it together in a way that using good editing and good visuals and good animations that no one else can do and so you're constantly trying to improve your your writing process or you improve the amount of value you put in it so that you keep escaping competition for the long term and the goal here really is to be in a category of one where no one else can compete with you because you are just so unique and and special sunflower that no one else can really make videos like you and that's kind of where I'm trying to
• 25:00 - 25:30 get myself to and I think I am at this point kind of in a category of one in this space because I have the technical background well selftaught like I can kind of see both sides so I'm not super developer where to the point where I can't teach people who are beginners and and don't understand their needs and their challenges but I also am development enough that people see me as an expert and be like "Okay this guy knows what he's doing." On top of that I also run my own businesses and make a lot of money from the stuff in the space and I also make videos that beginners can watch and I'm wave my hands around nicely and there's all these different things that you stack on top to basically to the point where I make like
• 25:30 - 26:00 I make vlog content people get to see behind the scenes of my team i have an office i have all of these things where now I'm in a in a category of one really and that's what you guys want to get to with your channel and that because of your background your skills the way you deliver videos the the team that you use to produce those videos no one else can compete with you in that niche and that's how you get the line share of the money lesson number 11 is to invest in expansion and this is something that I uh neglected uh for a little too long in my journey it was literally just me and my my friend Sean as I've said me and him grew our channel from zero to like 350,000 subs or something like just just
• 26:00 - 26:30 me and one other guy that put a lot of strain and we definitely could have done a lot better i could have had more time to do other things we could have had high quality editing not to say that Sean you didn't absolutely do a killer job cuz you did um but we could have had even better we could have had longer more varied videos etc i also should have been looking to invest in the script writing side or or the writing side how can I find more people to assist me on my side of things and so the point here is that if YouTube is is the core part of how you generate leads for your businesses like it is for me um and if you do things right it should be
• 26:30 - 27:00 i don't have to do anything else this is all we really do to market all my businesses and we we make millions and millions of dollars um a year and it's only going up so when content is that main thing for you when YouTube long form is the thing that is generating all of the leads in the business then we looked at it we're like why are we only spending like we can count on the our hand the number of thousands of dollars that we're spending on this part of the business despite it being the driver of everything so when we made that realization we're like okay well I think we need to invest a bit more money in this and this comes to a bigger editing team okay is there any people who can
• 27:00 - 27:30 help me with writing are there any people who can help me with other parts of this this thing on my side so investing and being willing to say now I'm making money from this we're in this stage where it's obviously working now how can we smartly invest this money that we're making to further our advantage and again go back to what I just said to further escape competition and use your financial resources and the success that you're having to push yourself further and further away from the rest of the crowd finally lesson 12 is to network with your peers so when you get to my sort of stage there's going to be a lot of other people around you who are also doing the same kind of
• 27:30 - 28:00 content or similar content to you i found that instead of being enemies with all of them and having all these like pseudo beefs like taking little jabs over content which which does happen inevitably one I would recommend you just stay completely out of that like that stuff if it does come up i've always stayed completely out of that it's something you just should never really get involved in you don't need to make a video about it you don't need to take jabs or run um it's better to just be focus on you and focus on your content so that's sort of a side note if you then reach out to those people and say "Hey like we do similar sort of stuff would be would be great to connect i mean I made a WhatsApp group we have
• 28:00 - 28:30 like weekly calls with the group of people that have put together so any other people who make content and are also in your space you guys are sort of in this together and you can build a really really cool community of other business owners like you who get what you're doing you could share ideas around." And that's been a really key factor in me sort of staying at the top of my game is by being surrounded by so many other smart people who are doing similar stuff to me and so you actually get better ideas and you get better exposure you have a a really great support network basically of like "Hey guys I was struggling with this or do you guys know any anything that would be good for this could you connect me with this?" Building a community of other
• 28:30 - 29:00 content creators and peers in your space around you and making an effort we hop on a call for an hour every week me and the people in my group and constantly looking for new people we can add and making new connections and ultimately having this group of friends sets you up some really cool inerson experiences as well and allows you to enjoy the whole thing of being in the space and meeting a public figure and being like "Oh man that's my guy like he's crushing it." And and you have collabs and stuff it's just it's the icing on the cake of everything that YouTube already gives to you so that's a wrap-up of my 12 most important lessons i know there's quite a lot to cover but I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface with this
• 29:00 - 29:30 video there's really so so much to it there's three phases there right the quantity quality and then consistency and many of you are going to be starting off and please just really really listen to what I've said in that first bit the most important thing you could really take away from this is that feedback loop of okay I'm starting off on on the channel i can't talk about broad topics because nobody should listen to me unless you're coming into YouTube and you're already like I'm one of the best real estate agents in the whole like New Mexico state or something like if you've got the the cred then you can start talking about broader topics but for many of you you're going to be starting out you need to build your reputation you need to build some kind of expertise
• 29:30 - 30:00 and that comes from going narrow getting the leads from it doing the thing with the person talking about it more and then when you make broader videos you can say "I'm this person i've done this this this this." And then you can start tapping into these broader topics where you actually deserve a seat at the table otherwise no one should listen to you say anything about it so put yourself in the shoes of someone else why would they listen to me over any other person on YouTube talking about this i just started this video talking about I've grown from 0 to 400,000 in just over 2 years made millions of dollars off the
• 30:00 - 30:30 back of that through lead generation point businesses and I'm going to break down everything that I wish I knew before in three different stages so I'm going to leave that there and hopefully the proof is in the pudding i hope you all got something out of it and uh I hope really really just get into this YouTube stuff it's life-changing it's the best skill most powerful valuable skill that I've got in a long time and I've got some pretty damn valuable skills aside from that so content creation AI all the stuff but content creation is probably still the top i've actually got a whole video on how to start creating content in the space particularly if you're in the AI space i'll put that up here but aside from that that's all for the video guys thank
• 30:30 - 31:00 you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next