how i stay productive (as a $120k/year content creator)

Summary

In this video, the creator shares his journey from working as a grocery store clerk five years ago to becoming a successful $120k/year content creator on YouTube. He emphasizes the importance of producing targeted content and staying productive by focusing on what's essential for growth rather than getting lost in generic self-improvement advice. By examining content strategies and learning from examples, he provides actionable advice for aspiring YouTubers on how to identify and serve their specific audience, ensuring they make videos that truly resonate and drive engagement.

Highlights

• The creator went from zero skills to earning $120,000 annually from YouTube! 💰
• Nicholas changed a thumbnail seven times and gained 15K views. 📈
• Focus on specific content that moves the needle – not broad topics. 🎥
• Tando grew to 1,000 subscribers in a month using targeted advice. 🌟
• Success comes from targeting niche audiences, not mass audiences. 🔍

Key Takeaways

• Consistency is key – keep creating until you hit the right audience! 🎯
• Stop wasting time on broad content; target specific problems instead. 🎯
• Learn from your successful videos and refine your strategy. 🔄
• Utilize critical thinking to analyze content performance. 🧠
• Engage with your community to learn what works and what doesn’t. 💬

Overview

Picture this: Five years ago, our creator was hustling at a grocery store, pushing carts with not a skill in sight. Fast forward to today, he’s making a whopping $120k a year from his YouTube channel. This video is not just about his journey but a roadmap for other small YouTubers to follow. It’s not about general advice anymore; it’s all about honing in on content that truly matters.

The magic formula? Knowing your audience and making videos specifically for them. He emphasizes the importance of ‘threading the needle’, or simply put, doing what actually makes a difference in your YouTube journey. All those 'how to stay motivated' videos? Forget them. It's time to create content that targets specific issues. If your videos speak to Bob, Bill, Zoe, and Jill all at once, they’re likely speaking to no one.

Through examples like Tando and Nicholas, who applied targeted strategies and saw tremendous growth, the creator shows that understanding your unique audience is the key. It’s about creating a community around specific needs rather than aiming for viral hits. Reflect, adapt, and engage—that’s the secret sauce to staying productive and successful in the YouTube realm.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Community Success Stories The author shares their personal growth journey, starting from a humble beginning working at a grocery store to earning over $120,000 annually through a small YouTube channel. They highlight the inspiring success stories within their community, like Nicholas, who revived a video to achieve 15K views by persistently updating its thumbnail, exemplifying that a video isn’t effectively finished until efforts cease. Another community member, Tando, is mentioned, hinting at a similar success story in progress.
• 01:00 - 03:00: The Importance of Targeting a Specific Audience The chapter emphasizes the importance of targeting a specific audience in content creation. It features examples of successes, including a person who gained over 1,000 subscribers in less than a month and another who earned $700 from a video with just 50 views. The narrator also mentions their own success, earning over $2,000 in the past week from uploading four videos. The content is described as simple and fun to produce, highlighting the effectiveness of targeted and practical strategies.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Content Strategy for Small YouTube Channels The chapter discusses strategies for becoming productive as a small YouTube channel creator. It emphasizes focusing on effective content strategies rather than general productivity tips that do not specifically help in growing a YouTube channel. The speaker acknowledges that many small creators face the frustration of uploading multiple videos with minimal views and aims to address this issue.
• 05:00 - 08:00: Examples of Specific Video Content The chapter discusses the challenges small YouTubers face in becoming productive and growing their channels. It emphasizes the importance of 'threading the needle,' which metaphorically means identifying and focusing on strategies that significantly contribute to channel growth. The text suggests that many content creators miss these opportunities, likening it to missing the eye of a needle, rather than threading through it, which is critical to success on platforms like YouTube.
• 08:00 - 11:00: The Power of Specific Video Titles and Thumbnails The chapter discusses the importance of having specific video titles and thumbnails to achieve success on YouTube. It emphasizes the need to define clear, achievable goals, such as earning $2,000 per month, which could allow someone to quit their current job. It portrays taking action and breaking down goals as essential steps, referencing everyday jobs like shopping cart pushers or grocery store clerks as examples.
• 11:00 - 15:00: Critical Thinking in YouTube Content Creation Critical Thinking in YouTube Content Creation: This chapter discusses the importance of identifying your target audience in order to succeed in content creation on YouTube. It emphasizes the need to make continuous video content while being strategic about understanding and catering to the right audience. The goal highlighted is achieving financial success, such as earning $2,000 a month from YouTube by ensuring your content resonates with viewers and not just creating random, unfocused videos.
• 15:00 - 19:00: Analyzing Thumbnails and Titles This chapter focuses on the importance of analyzing thumbnails and titles to better target an audience. The speaker highlights the inefficiency in creating broad content that does not appeal to anyone specific. By using broad video strategies, creators tend to miss the mark in terms of audience connection. For instance, in the context of the self-improvement niche, the chapter suggests narrowing down the focus to ensure the content resonates more deeply with the intended audience. This tailored approach is preferred over generic, broad content strategies.
• 19:00 - 22:00: Conclusion and Call to Action In the Conclusion and Call to Action chapter, the focus is on self-improvement strategies. It emphasizes the importance of discipline and motivation in personal growth, especially in the context of content creation on YouTube. The chapter suggests creating videos with titles that attract viewers' attention quickly, such as 'How to become disciplined in 93 seconds' or 'How to believe in yourself to grow on YouTube.' The underlying message is to encourage individuals to work on self-belief and staying motivated to achieve success in their respective endeavors.

how i stay productive (as a $120k/year content creator) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 five years ago I barely graduated high school i had zero skills and I picked up a job working at my local grocery store pushing shopping carts five years later I make over $120,000 in one year with a small YouTube channel and guess what it's this one right here now I don't want you to believe me only i want you to look at some people in my community nicholas right here made this post called Proof a video isn't dead until you give up on it and he literally changed the thumbnail seven times and now it has 15K views tando went from 100
• 00:30 - 01:00 subs to over 1,000 subscribers in less than a month from the advice that I'm going to show you today and Paul made $700 from a video with 50 views and me myself have made over 2K in the past week with these videos right here and I uploaded four in the past week and these are literally unedited pieces of content for the most part they're very simple to make and very fun to make so in this
• 01:00 - 01:30 video I'm going to show you exactly how to become productive as a small YouTube channel so you can start moving the needle instead of doing all this BS like productivity and self-improvement that is not going to grow your YouTube channel so let's get into the whiteboard of truth and justice okay so chances are if you're watching this video you have probably been uploading videos and they get nowhere so you upload video after video after video after video and they all collectively get around three views
• 01:30 - 02:00 this is not a good feeling and I've been there i've helped people that have been there and this is exactly what you're doing so the number one thing to become productive as a small YouTuber is to figure out what moves the needle forward so I'm going to draw a little imaginary needle here basically in order to grow on YouTube you need to thread the needle so you need to put the needle in here the problem is that you're not threading the needle you're actually missing the needle altogether so this is your needle
• 02:00 - 02:30 right here and it is missing the mark right here and what does thread the needle mean it basically means just get things done okay so how do you get things done well you need to break down what your dream goal is so you might want to get money from YouTube so let's say you might want to make $2,000 per month and this right here would make you quit the job that you're working right now and I'm literally Yes I'm wearing this the vest right I'm kind of too lazy to take it off but let's say you're working as a shopping cart pusher or a grocery store clerk etc you might be a
• 02:30 - 03:00 freaking whatever the case may be i don't know you want to quit your job using YouTube and the way to do that is to move the needle forward so if you want to make $2,000 a month with YouTube well the first thing you better damn do is make videos and continue to make videos but then you run into the problem of you're making videos for the wrong people so you don't know exactly who you're making videos for and why is this an important thing because if you're making random content that goes to
• 03:00 - 03:30 everyone so it goes to Bob and then it goes to Bill and then it goes to Zoe right here and then it goes to Jill you know Jill's got a messed up back here if you're making videos for all these people aka broad videos so we're going to write this down broad what happens is that you're making content that doesn't speak to anyone so let me give you an example if you are in the self-improvement niche okay so we're going to type in
• 03:30 - 04:00 selfimprove self-improve you might make videos titled and we're going to freaking write this down here because this is really important to learn how to become disciplined in 93 97 seconds for example or how to stay motivated or how to believe how to believe in yourself to grow on YouTube you know what I mean obviously we're not going to
• 04:00 - 04:30 add that but we're writing down these titles do you see what's wrong with these titles you might not even see anything wrong with these titles in the first place and this is the number one problem that you have well let me tell you this all of these titles they speak to a broad audience and is that necessarily a bad thing no it's not but it's a bad thing for most people on the platform because in order to make videos that are very very broad they have to be better than the ones that are already
• 04:30 - 05:00 out there so if you make videos like titled how to stay motivated or how to believe in yourself I mean we can literally just go on YouTube now and I can show you the competition that you have at the moment i'm just going to make sure I'm still recording here yeah we're good so if we just say how to stay how to be disciplined dude you're competing with people with 30,000 subscribers 200,000 subscribers 66,000 subscribers 3 million subscribers 3 million subscribers 1 million subscribers you're competing with all these giants in the niche so
• 05:00 - 05:30 this is your competitor and this is you you know how are you going to make a splash in this market when this is the person you're competing with that has a million subscribers while this is you with three subs right this is why you're making content and it gets no views because it's not specific enough to the niche where someone's like "Yo I haven't seen this before let me click the video and that's the number one way to stay
• 05:30 - 06:00 productive on YouTube is you need to figure out exactly what kind of content you need to make not what you want to make necessarily there's obviously a balance between the two but you need to figure out what content you need to make cuz if you make content that you think is going to blow up which is like the you know the super broad topics you're not going to get anywhere because chances are your video is not either creative enough or good enough to compete with these topics so what's the number one thing to do to stay disciplined well you need to target your
• 06:00 - 06:30 audience so let's go back into the whiteboard of truth truth and justice and we need to say this we need to target audience okay so for example I'm actually going to go right back into YouTube and I'm going to search up a YouTube channel called The Social Introvert he has 1.39K subscribers 1.3K subscribers and his most popular video is at 40K views and 24K views so also I want to say that Tando aka the social introvert is in my group called the
• 06:30 - 07:00 Winners Club and he used this exact advice to blow up his channel from 100 subs to 1K subs i actually even did an interview with him on this channel so you can go find that if you want it's like an hour long interview we we talk about YouTube growth but if we look at his latest videos he's gone through a bit of a problem here a lot of his content speaks to a broad audience so for example this one right here a message to introverts who don't fit in dot dot dot this is a bit too
• 07:00 - 07:30 broad let's say for example this one right here give me one video and I'll kill your social anxiety dead again it's too broad for an audience right there's already many videos talking about like let me kill your anxiety etc how to cure anxiety but if you look at his most popular videos you're teaching people to disrespect you this is a specific video idea okay
• 07:30 - 08:00 so it's not just saying like how to gain respect of others it's hitting you in the face is literally slapping you in the face telling you "Dude you're teaching people to disrespect you." Do you see how targeted and specific this is to someone's situation and do you see how this gets 40,000 views when this video right here gets 86 views give me one video and I'll kill your social anxiety dead same thing with this one social interactions are exposing your brokenness it's very specific instead of saying like how to get better with your
• 08:00 - 08:30 social interactions it's talking about a specific problem that people have social interactions are exposing your brokenness so how are you going to use this in your own content it's simple if you're making a video called like let's say for example how to become the man you all you want you always wanted to be you could literally retitle this and reposition this video into saying
• 08:30 - 09:00 something like "How to become a top 1% man in Western society." You know what I mean and the thumbnail could be so much more specific and it hits someone deeper than just how to become the man you always wanted to be do you see how different it is how to become a top 1% man in Western society versus how to become the man you always wanted to be now obviously this is like a pretty bad example but it's just showing you the fact that you need to be specific with
• 09:00 - 09:30 your content and even if the video doesn't get that many views it's still targeting the specific person that you are able to serve and to sell to so for example my videos right here they don't get that many views right i got 600 views this on this video 400 views on this video 800 views on this video 1.4K 4K on this video 1.5K on this video you know 10K views on this video etc etc but here's the thing in 2024 I made over $120,000 with this
• 09:30 - 10:00 YouTube channel because I specifically target a specific demographic that I am able to serve so what do I do and I'm not you know trying to promote myself or anything i help people literally quit the situation that they're in that they don't want to be in with the power of YouTube and if you don't believe me I mean you can look at the wins you can look at the testimonials people are literally getting 3K views this community is peak flabbergasted thousands of views video got 5K views 15K views things are shaping up $700 $700 from a video with
• 10:00 - 10:30 50 views didn't give up business is booming from Suzu hit 5K subs got monetized i didn't realize this one this is actually crazy my channel's going crazy thank God for this community this one this guy is getting 71,000 views on one video i mean bro how I made 500 how I made $500 from one sponsored video etc people are genuinely getting results because I talk to a specific type of person now if I was trying to go viral 247 and literally
• 10:30 - 11:00 just target a broad audience well I couldn't serve them because it's not the specific person that I'm able to help so I help people that have some sort of skill that they can monetize and grow on YouTube so they end up making money online right and that's why you want to make videos based on specific people because you can literally target the person that you can help so let's say for example you're really good at helping people with sleep right you wouldn't make a video called how to get
• 11:00 - 11:30 better sleep that's too broad you know what I mean how to get better sleep in 87 seconds because I know people love that video idea so much like the world's shortest guide course you know it could work but what about this how to increase your testosterone with 6 hours of sleep per day do you see how much more specific that video is it's targeting
• 11:30 - 12:00 specifically men that want to boost their testosterone with six hours of sleep per day and this would work specifically really well for someone that has an offer like I'll help you boost your testosterone by 100 NGL in 90 days with the power of how would I say it limited sleep okay like just some little unique mechanism
• 12:00 - 12:30 there and if you don't know what a unique mechanism is it's just basically like a like a buzzword or like a juicy drug word that people can use and like make up to make the thing sound juicier so like let's say this is your video people click on this video people like your stuff they click on your offer which is the link in the description below and then your headline is I'll help you boost your testosterone by 100 NGL in 90 days with the power of limited sleep this targets a specific person rather than if someone clicked this video how to get better sleep in 87 seconds and the viewer is like a a
• 12:30 - 13:00 female and she doesn't care about testosterone at all because you know it doesn't make sense then if that person clicks on your video with this title they're not going to click on this headline so it makes sense to make videos that get less views but target the specific person in your niche now this video is actually going all over the place but it's really the information that you need okay so anyways that is step number one is you need to figure out exactly who you're targeting and make content based on that
• 13:00 - 13:30 person so if we just take this whole thing that we learned here step number one on how to be more productive as a small channel is to learn how to target your audience that you serve okay so we're going to put this right here we're going to make this a lot more smaller because we have a few more things I want to get into which are very important because if you just have this and you don't have the other things then you know doesn't make sense
• 13:30 - 14:00 okay so let's get back into here and yes we now are making content we are moving the needle forward we are figuring out exactly what we need to do with your audience which is just make videos that the people that you can help out are watching so number two is that you need to learn how to get better with each piece of content because even if you make videos let's say you make video after video after video and you're still not going
• 14:00 - 14:30 anywhere maybe you have like seven views eight views 112 views three views 1K views and then seven views and you're wondering like yo why am I not replicating the success that I had with a few of these videos well now you need to learn the productive skill of critical thinking now I know Hamza in specific he kind of like shits on critical thinking but I want to add in my two steps here my two how would I say it my two cents is and I I don't know if
• 14:30 - 15:00 this is what he meant by by it but this is what I'm thinking you need to use critical thinking at a specific po point can't speak right now point of your YouTube channel so you need to understand that hey if this video right here got seven views this video right here got eight views but this video right here got 112 views there's obviously something about this video right here that gets people to click and gets me the result maybe it made you
• 15:00 - 15:30 some money maybe it made you a sale maybe it just got you some new subscribers there's something about this video right here that the algorithm slightly likes so you can literally dissect this video so let's go here and uh let's have an imaginary video so like let's actually say this video is the sleep video right here so we're going to use this as an example how to increase your testosterone with 6 hours of sleep per
• 15:30 - 16:00 day now you can literally break this video down and figure out exactly what worked and what didn't work so maybe the thumbnail was pretty but the title was good now you understand that the next video you make you can just try a different thumbnail have a better title maybe even the same title whatever and this video right here gets 2,000 views now you realize the bottleneck that was hurting your content in the first place it was your thumbnails so when you look at your
• 16:00 - 16:30 content now you realize like yo these videos right here seven views eight views the only reason why they didn't do well is because the title was bad and the thumbnail was bad the content was pretty all right this video right here got 112 views people commented on the video people said like "Yo this is super helpful etc etc but it only got 112 views but it was much better than these videos." The reason why was because the title was specific and the content was good now the only thing you're missing is literally a good thumbnail so when
• 16:30 - 17:00 you just fix the thumbnail you get 2,000 views again let me remind you with people like Tando people like Derek etc i'll literally go on Derrick's channel right here and he says something really beautiful here 15k views in 3 days the power of thumbnails and consistency he talks about how to create thumbnails that truly stand out etc you can literally just pause this video and just read this right here i'll give it to you for free it's in my paid group Winners Club but he talks about a lot of sauce that you can use in your own videos but
• 17:00 - 17:30 here's the thing if we go to his channel and we go to his YouTube and we look at his oldest videos this one got 180 views this one got 320 views this one got 750 views this one got 300 views do you see something here the video that did the best was the one about how to desexualize your brain as a Christian for good so if you look at his latest videos look at this video right here he
• 17:30 - 18:00 just made a better thumbnail with a better title about the same thing which is like desexualizing your brain and he got 33k views the real reasons chosen ones struggle with lust it makes people think like yo am I the chosen one is that why I struggle with uh lust etc and it makes you want to click and the video thumbnail is so much better than this one right here do you see the difference like I'm literally going to put these side by side so you guys can just see
• 18:00 - 18:30 the freaking difference in the quality of the thumbnail let me just screenshot this and let me just screenshot this so I can really show you like in depth why these are doing really good so oh all right hold up yeah my bad my bad that is my fault but yeah if you look at this content this piece of content right here how to desexualize your brain as a Christian for good you know the title is kind of like all over the place and it's like hard to read right but people have clicked it already because you know it's something that
• 18:30 - 19:00 they deal with right and the thumbnail kind of makes it's like kind of relatable you know what I mean and then people read the title they click a little bit right and the algorithm found the audience for this video this one same thing the real reasons chose chosen ones struggle with less the only thing is is the title is so much more indepth targeted simple easy to read and the same thing with the thumbnail it's so freaking easy to understand and people automatically instantly know what the video is about it got 33,000 views
• 19:00 - 19:30 literally someone that I've helped grow on YouTube used the exact advice that I'm telling you right now for free and if you don't believe this well you know you need to believe it cuz this is how to get views so these are the two ways to stay productive when it comes to growing on YouTube you need to learn how to target your audience that you want to serve and you also need to learn how to analyze your videos with critical
• 19:30 - 20:00 thinking okay simple as that and I know some people kind of on the the the term critical thinking which I get like sometimes let's say for example if you join Winners's Club right i know some people I know a lot of people actually are thinking about joining Winners's Club i've I get new members in every week here's the thing if you're going to join Winners's Club and I tell you like do this with your videos do that with your videos and like fix this this this this and you think you're critically thinking by saying like "Oh well maybe moneying isn't right because XYZ."
• 20:00 - 20:30 Well you're you're using critical thinking in the wrong way because if someone is telling you to do something and that specific someone has the dream result that you're looking for well it doesn't make sense to question what he's talking about especially when you paid that person money so for example if you are a boxer okay and I'm going to go on my Instagram real quick maybe some of you guys don't know maybe you guys do know you guys do know that I'm a professional boxer okay so this is my boxing coach right here if
• 20:30 - 21:00 I went up to him 5 years ago when I started boxing and he was trying to train me to be this pro fighter down the line and I was like "Oh you know I I already know everything i'm not going to I'm not going to throw my left left hand like this what do you know like I think you're wrong." Well that doesn't make sense because I don't know about boxing but he's the one that knows about boxing so I have to learn and you know switch off that critical thinking anyways I'm going on a rant here but basically what I'm saying is babies don't question the adults on how to walk
• 21:00 - 21:30 they just do it okay so before you need to learn to run you need to learn how to walk okay anyways I'm going off topic here but those are the two things that I would do to stay productive as a small YouTube channel and actually make an impact with your videos if you like this kind of content please feel free to like subscribe throw me a comment and you can even DM me on Instagram so I have a link down in the des description below if you have any specific question about anything could be winners club could be just a question about YouTube etc DM me
• 21:30 - 22:00 i'll hit you back up and I will see you in the next video all right peace [Music] [Music]