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So, I grew my YouTube channel from zero to over a million subscribers while I was working full-time as a doctor. But that was back in 2017 through 2020, and things are very different. So, if I was starting from scratch again today
Ali Abdaal shares his updated strategy for starting a successful YouTube channel in 2026 focusing on skills, strategy, and systems.
Key Takeaways
- Success on YouTube depends on mastering skills, having a clear strategy, and building sustainable systems.
- Defining your channel’s goal (fun, fulfillment, finances) is crucial for shaping your content and growth plan.
- Alignment between the creator, content, and business model drives both enjoyment and financial success.
- Without systems, burnout is likely, making consistent content creation difficult to sustain.
- Educational content often provides a clearer path to combining fun, fulfillment, and financial freedom.
Summary
- Ali Abdaal grew his channel from zero to over a million subscribers while working full-time as a doctor between 2017-2020.
- He explains how YouTube success today requires a different approach involving three key factors: skills, strategy, and systems.
- The goal of your channel (fun, fulfillment, finances) shapes your strategy and content approach.
- Skills involve creating engaging content that attracts clicks, views, and builds trust with the audience.
- Strategy aligns your personal goals, content, and business model to ensure sustainable growth and monetization.
- Systems help maintain consistent content output to avoid burnout and sustain long-term success.
- Ali emphasizes the importance of clarity on your channel’s goal to decide how much focus to place on financial gain versus enjoyment and impact.
- He discusses the alignment between creator, content, and business as essential for fun, fulfillment, and financial success.
- Ali suggests that educational channels may find it easier to achieve all three Fs (fun, fulfillment, finances) compared to purely entertainment channels.
- He also touches on leveraging existing expertise and building a business around your content for monetization.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and YouTube growth journey
- 02:04Importance of setting a goal for your channel
- 04:12Strategy and its relation to goals
- 06:18Alignment between creator, content, and business
- 08:16Skill development and content creation
- 12:10Monetization and business models
- 14:10Systems to sustain content creation
- 20:10Final thoughts and advice for new creators
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
without any of my existing followers, but still knowing what I know, this is what I would do. So, in this video, we're going to be talking about the three S's that lead to success on YouTube. We're going to talk about how
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the goal that you have for your YouTube channel and business changes the strategy that you need to follow for your channel. We're going to talk about the most important skill you need to learn to drastically increase your chances of success. And we're going to
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talk about the salient systems that you want to build into your YouTube channel if you are going for the goal of the three Fs, fun, fulfillment, and financial freedom. Oh, and by the way, if we haven't met, hello. My name is
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Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller Feelgood Productivity. And since 2017 here on this channel, I've been documenting my journey from broke-ass medical student to working full-time as a doctor to then becoming
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an entrepreneur and an author. Building a YouTube channel has completely and utterly changed my life. And so in this video, I'd love to share my perspective on this for whatever it's worth. Okay, so the way to think about this is that
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there are three distinct factors that contribute to the success of a YouTube channel and help you build a YouTube channel that makes lots of money and helps you have lots of fun, fulfillment, and flexibility and freedom and all the
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fun stuff that we all want. Thing number one is your skills. Your skills at actually making decent content. Content that gets people to click. Content that gets people to watch and content that gets people to know, like, and trust you
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as a human being. The second key thing that we need for a successful YouTube channel is strategy. It's not just about knowing how to make good videos because you can know how to make really good videos, but if your strategy sucks, if
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the way that you're approaching the making of the videos is not very good, then you kind of end up with a YouTube channel where you've just got some like really solid high-quality videos, but like no one's really watching, no one's
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really following you, and you're certainly not making any money out of it. And then the final part that makes this work sustainably is systems. You can have really good skills and you can pair it with a really good strategy, but
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if you don't have systems to help facilitate the content output of your YouTube channel, you're going to burn out very quickly and you're not going to be doing it for long enough, consistently enough, and sustainably enough to actually see results. Now, I
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would like to double click initially into the strategy point. So, we're going to put skills and systems aside. We will definitely come back to those a little bit later. Now, in order to figure out what our strategy should be for our
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YouTube channel, we kind of need something that comes upstream of strategy, and that is we need to have a goal. A strategy is basically a plan that gets you to a particular goal. And so in order to have a strategy, we need
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to know what our goal is. What is the goal for your YouTube channel? Now, in general, when it comes to goals for a YouTube channel, um most of us have some combination of three specific things that we want. And these are the three Fs
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of fun, fulfillment, and finances. We want a YouTube channel that is heaps of fun to run because we enjoy the idea of making videos and it seems like a cool, fun, enjoyable thing to do. We want a YouTube channel that gives us
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fulfillment. So, it has some kind of impact and it makes us feel good that we're using our strengths and using our skills to have an impact on other people. And of course, some of us want to be able to make money from our
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YouTube channel. For some people, the dream is some pocket money, maybe a couple hundred a month, maybe a couple of thousand a month. My dream initially when I started my business was to make $3,000, which is like $4,000 in
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additional passive income every month because that would have allowed me to go part-time in my day job of being a doctor. There is a fourth F that sometimes comes into this. Um, especially kids these days. Uh, a lot of
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people want to start YouTube because they like the idea of becoming famous in some kind of way. But in general, as people grow older, they tend not to care so much about the fame side of things.
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Or if they do want to become famous, it's because they think fame facilitates finances, which it absolutely does to some degree, or that they think fame facilitates fulfillment to some degree because like if you're more well-known, you can have a bigger impact and all
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that kind of stuff. So, I'm not going to worry too much about fame being like a good kind of goal to have as a YouTube channel. In general, for the people that follow my stuff, it's generally some combination of fun, fulfillment, and
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finances, ideally all three of these things at 10 out of 10 levels. Okay. So, how does this help us figure out our goal and therefore figure out figure out our strategy? Well, it helps us because even though in a dream world, we would
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have loads of fun, loads of fulfillment, and loads of money from our YouTube channel, it's very useful to decide which of these things we care about more. And I often put it on a spectrum like this.
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How much do you care about the financial side of being a YouTuber versus how much do you care about the fun and fulfillment side of being a YouTuber?
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Because if for example, you don't care about finances at all. You're like, you know what? I don't really care about making money from my YouTube channel. I just want to do it as a thing that's fun because I love the idea of making
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videos. In that world, you actually don't need much of a strategy. You could totally make videos about whatever you want whenever you want. You don't need to be consistent. You don't need to have an upload schedule. You don't need to
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watch videos like this one that give you advice on how to grow a YouTube channel or any of that kind of stuff. It's when you start wanting to do YouTube for the money wherever you are along the spectrum. Maybe you're like, I love the
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idea of doing YouTube for the fun and the fulfillment. But and and if it works, it would be so nice to make some money from it. Now you have some kind of financial motive behind your YouTube channel. And that is where having a
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sensible strategy really helps. This would be people that treat YouTube more like a business rather than a hobby.
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Again, of course, we want all of the above, but it is useful to be honest with ourselves about why we are trying to do the thing. And this is how we can think about strategy. There are three entities that we need to be a little bit
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strategic about if we are approaching a YouTube channel. There is you, there is your content and there is your business.
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And a word that I would love to talk about quite a lot throughout this entire video is the word alignment. What we are looking for is alignment between you, your content, and your business. Now, if there is alignment between you and your
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content, that is where you have fun and fulfillment. This is where you are making the kind of content that you enjoy making. Whether it's education or entertainment, you're making stuff that you feel good about. That is alignment between you and your content. Now, when
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there is alignment between your content and your business, that is where you get the finances. That is how you make money. Your business is in general the kind of product or service that you're selling. Maybe you're selling an online
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course. Maybe you're a coach. Maybe you're a consultant. Maybe you're selling a service like AI automation or web design. Maybe you're selling a product lik
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generally my recommendation, but maybe you're even doing the influencer business model where the only way you're making money is through AdSense and brand deals. Again, not my recommendation, but regardless, your business is the thing that you are doing
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to make money beyond just your content being passively monetized on YouTube. So, if for example, in my case, I'm selling software like Voice Pal, which is our AI ghostwriting app. If my content is about like AI apps or about
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iPhone apps or about like uh go how to be a better writer or whatever you know there is alignment between the content that's the stuff I'm making videos about and the business i.e. the thing I'm selling. If like I'm Aman who's one of
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our students in our YouTube academy my content is around helping students land a software engineering job and my business is around helping students land a software engineering job. there is alignment between the content and the business and therefore I'm much more
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liable to make money. If I'm like one of our other YouTuber academy students Key and Ben and the business the thing I'm selling is a paid membership community that teaches people songwriting then there is alignment between content and
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business if my content is also about teaching people how to write songs and in Ke and Ben's case that's exactly what their content is about which is why Key and Ben are making decent money decent finances from the content and the
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business. When you have alignment between you and your passions and also your content and also the business that you use to make money. When you have alignment between all those three things, that is when you get a perfect
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trifecta of fun and fulfillment and finances. So, if I were trying to build a YouTube channel completely from scratch and if I knew that I wanted fun, fulfillment, and finances, I'd be really focusing on this word alignment. How can
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I get alignment between me, my content, and my business? How can I make sure that the content I'm making is stuff that I personally vibe with, which would give me the fun and the fulfillment. and how can I make sure I've got some kind
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of sensible business model so that the business aligns with the content so that I can actually make money. Now, here's the thing. Most people don't know exactly what this is going to be from day one. And you certainly don't have to
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know this from day one. You could totally just start making content about random stuff and then your niche can emerge over time and then eventually after creating content for a long enough time, you can then figure out what's the
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business model going to be. For example, there was a guy called Jeff Sue who is also a student on my YouTuber academy.
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Uh he started out a few years ago making content about productivity tools. He had a job at Google at the time and he didn't really care that much about making money. his passion, what he cared about was the fun and the fulfillment
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because he really liked teaching. And so he made content around productivity for a few years. And then over time as he became this sort of like productivity for working professionals guy, he was then able to figure out like what
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products he can sell around it like course on how to use Google Workspace if you're a professional. He started out with alignment between what he wanted to do and the content he wanted to do because he didn't really care about
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making money at least in the early days. And then the product was able to emerge as a happy side effect of him being consistent on YouTube for many, many years. Now, if you're serious about growing your YouTube channel this year,
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then you're going to want to check out three of my courses that are actually available on Skillshare that are very kindly sponsoring this video. I've been teaching classes on Skillshare since like 2019. I have a really good course
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on how to edit videos using Final Cut. I have a really good one on how to get started with Notion. We use Notion to basically plan out all aspects of video production. And so, it gives you a sort
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of a beginner's tutorial on that. And I've got a pretty sick course, if I say so myself, on productivity for creators, how to actually manage your time and do the content creation stuff in a way that doesn't lead to you burning yourself out
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and completely ruining your life. If you haven't heard of Skillshare, Skillshare is a fantastic platform that has classes taught by people all around the world, including people like me. There are classes on illustration and graphic design and AI and cooking and crushing
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and almost anything you think of. Any skill you want to learn, you can probably find a class for it on Skillshare. Recently, I took the How to Draw class by Brent Everston because I've been trying to get into art and so
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my art skills are not very good right now, but through taking that class, I've been like, you know, trying to follow along and do the exercises. And what I like about a lot of the classes on there is that they have a little project that
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they sort of encourage you to do alongside the class. So you're not just passively consuming content. If you're interested in checking it out, you can get a whole month completely for free and you can watch all of my classes and
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anything else you want in that month without paying a penny. And you can get access to that if you are one of the first 500 people to hit the link in the video description or if you would like
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to scan this QR code. So thank you again Skillshare for sponsoring this video and for being the place where I've been posting online classes since 2019. And let's get back to it. Then we have another example of like content first,
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business second. That example is someone like Chris Williamson who runs the Modern Wisdom podcast which now has like millions and millions of subscribers.
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It's one of the biggest podcasts in the world. He was doing his podcast for a long time on audio only and then kind of really wanted to take YouTube, which is why he took my course to like understand
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how YouTube works. I'm a big fan of the part-time YouTuber Academy because it really helped to take me from total noob with regards to how YouTube works to pretty well informed. I understood the physics of the platform. I understood
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the reason that you need to create a hook. The way to design your thumbnails, the way to set up both your lighting and your camera. Uh it was just a one-stop shop for me. I'd already done quite a
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lot of learning online on my own. I had taken a couple of other courses that were a little bit smaller and this was my uh time to turn pro with going onto YouTube and it made a massive difference. Alli and the content that
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him and the guys have created is very very useful and still now three years after taking the course I am continuing to rely on some of the resources that I took from it then. I highly recommend it. You should check it out. Over time
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he was able to build an audience of people who knew, like and trust him by doing three podcast episodes every single week for like 8 years. At some point he was able to then monetize it through things like brand deals and
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sponsorships and stuff. But very fairly recently he actually launched his own physical product, New Tonic, which is going really well. he was able to figure out the business side of things sort of downstream of playing the content game
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first. So that would be sort of the creative first approach to building a YouTube channel. What this ends up meaning though is that you end up not making money for a while. So one big question that I always ask people when
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I'm coaching them through building a YouTube channel is how much do you actually care about making money in the short term? Are you willing to do YouTube consistently for two or even 3 years with zero guarantee that you're
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ever going to make money from it? If your answer to that question is yes, I'm doing this primarily for fun and fulfillment. I don't really care if I don't make money from it in the next like few years, then fantastic. The
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content first, the creator first path is perfect for you. But if you do care about making money, then the alternative approach to building a YouTube channel and the approach that I personally followed back in the day and the
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approach that I would still recommend if you're starting out today is to go business first. So this is where you don't really worry about the content, you focus on building a business. The key thing is that you are selling
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something that puts money in your bank account. ideally for as expensive as possible and ideally where the money that comes in is as passive as possible.
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Although it's hard to have it all when it comes to deciding what business to do. If you already have a business and you happen to be watching this video, then wonderful. You are the amongst the like 3% of people that watch my stuff
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who actually have an established business. That's amazing. You already know what your business is. So now you can just plug in content and then YouTube is a marketing channel for your business and then life is good because you already know how to make money. You
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just need to learn how to make content and then as you get better at content through like strategy and skills and systems, then your business takes off and then life is good. But if you are like 97% of people watching my stuff who
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do not yet have a business but who still want to make money then the way we would think about this is we would kind of start business first. We would think what is the product or service that I
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could potentially sell based on my own skills based on my own passions based on my own experience my own expertise and then how do I plug content into that as a marketing channel. In my case, back in the day, back in 2017, when I started my
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YouTube channel, the business I was in was a company called SixMed, which I have since sold. But that was a business that was helping kids get into medical school in the UK, I was going up and down the country in the UK, but also in
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Singapore and Amsterdam and some other places. And I was teaching courses in classrooms that was that were teaching people how to do well in the medical school exams. At a certain point, my business capped out at around £150,000 a
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year in revenue. And I decided, let me do content. Let me do content marketing on YouTube. I didn't know it was called content marketing at the I just thought if I make YouTube videos teaching the stuff, hopefully some people will think
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I'm legit and they'll buy my course. And that was what sustained the business for many years after that. I then sold that business and then focused on the content first thing for a while and ended up being known as a productivity expert.
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And that was what led me to writing my book, Feelgood Productivity. I then continued doing the content thing for a while and loads of people started asking me how you build a YouTube channel cuz I'd grown to a million subscribers while
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working full-time as a doctor. And that was when the business thing came back into it where I started selling a course teaching people how to do YouTube. So my approach to YouTube was actually business first. I had a business and
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then I decided to use content as a marketing driver for that business. Later I sold that business and then was just sort of pure content for a couple years and then the business sort of came back into it and that was what really
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helped me make quite a lot of money through building a YouTube channel. Another example of business first is a guy called Jeremy who is also instantly one of our students in the YouTuber academy. Jeremy has a software business
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where he sells software that helps gardeners do better gardening. And then he decided to start a YouTube channel as a marketing driver for his business. And so Jeremy has alignment between him, his content, and his business. That's why
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he's able to make a ton of money through his software. And he's also to able to have fun and fulfillment through creating content about the thing that he's passionate about. So, if you do not yet know what your business idea is
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going to be, that tends to be the thing that holds the most people back, I have a bunch of videos I'll link down below, including like a custom GPT that's all about how to find the right business idea. But, if I cared about making money
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in the short term, I really wouldn't be doing YouTube just for the vibes and hoping for the best. It still is possible to just make content and hope for the best and then maybe build a business off the back of it further down
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the line. But that approach to building a creator business just gets harder and harder every year. You know, AI makes it super easy for anyone to create content.
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Everything is skewing towards short form content anyway. Now, subscribers don't really matter. The algorithm pushes videos based on the content of the video rather than based on whether they subscribe to you. That's not to say it can't be done there. Obviously, in every
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single environment, every single era, even when things are very saturated, there are people succeeding. It's just that if I was starting again completely from scratch and I had all the skills but I didn't have any of the audience,
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any of the network or the business initially, I would try my best to figure out first what skills do I have that I can use to solve problems for other people. Ideally, those problems are as painful as possible. Ideally, solving
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those problems involve some kind of expertise that I that I have. And once I have an idea of what my business is going to be, then I would think about creating content that is aligned with me and my business. and then I would be
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much more likely to get to finances and fun and fulfillment without spending years in the grind of making videos without actually making any money from it. The caveat to all of this advice is that if you've been thinking of starting
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a YouTube channel for a while and you haven't yet made any videos, you can completely ignore this advice because the other framework that I've not talked about in this video, but I've talked about in many, many other videos over
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the years is the framework of get going, get good, and get smart. In the getgoing stage, we want to be making around seven videos without overthinking anything at all. You can basically, if you've made less than seven videos on your channel,
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you can ignore literally everything I've said up until this up until this point and just make those seven bloody videos because I guarantee the process of making those seven videos will teach you way more about yourself and about life
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and about business and about YouTube than watching a ton of videos about optimizing the perfect strategy while having never actually made a YouTube video. I have another video down below that will tell you exactly what seven videos to make if you're worried about
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what seven videos to make. But yeah, get going. At that point, we're in the get good stage where I generally recommend people make another 20 to 30 videos where they're not worried about the strategic side of it. This is where you
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can start thinking strategy as well. But like, you know, this is where you're focused on the craft of video making.
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You are focused on actually building some of the skills. Cuz what you might find after making 30 videos is that you actually freaking hate making YouTube videos. Maybe you'll find that you prefer writing instead. So maybe LinkedIn or Substack is better for you.
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Maybe you hate the idea of long form content and so you might want to do short form content on Instagram or Tik Tok instead because you vibe with that a lot more. And then once you've decided that like this YouTube thing is the
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thing that you want to do, then we can sort of be as strategic as we like. I'm not too wed to you making like 30 videos before you think strategically, but I'm definitely wed to you making at least
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seven videos before you start overthinking your niche and overthinking like, oh, he said there's no point unless you have a business. Bro, just make the seven videos first and then we can talk about whether there's any point in continuing to build a YouTube channel
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depending on what business is going to be around it. Okay, so at this point we've decided we want fun, we want fulfillment, we want finances. We are going to try and create content that is aligned with the business where we're
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selling something sensible on the back end of it. And we're going to try and make the content and the business aligned with our own personal passions if we absolutely can. But another thing worth knowing at this point is you will
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get bored of your content way way way faster than your business will stop benefiting from your content. Cuz here's the thing, right? Like you are not a static entity. You contain multitudes.
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And so your own perspectives and your own opinions and your own like values and your own like interests are going to change over time. I started making videos back in freaking 2017 making videos helping people get into med
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school. Do I still care about helping people get into med school? Not particularly. But if I was still running a business that relied on helping people get into med school, then I've like evolved way beyond that. My my content
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is going to start to feel weird because now my content is misaligned. So, either I change my content to reflect where I'm at and then the business suffers, or I keep my content aligned with the business and then I suffer and I have no
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fun and fulfillment anymore because there are miles of misalignment between what I'm interested in and what my content is interested in. In general, you'll make way more money if you stick to one thing and stick to doing it for a
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very long time. However, you and your own interests are probably going to change faster than your business can evolve. And so this is the conundrum that every YouTuber has pretty much after probably a few months to a few
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years of doing content. At this point, what some people do is that they sort of just start business after business. Like one day they're doing a course on productivity and then the next day they're doing a course on how to build a
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YouTube channel and then the next day they're doing a course on like how to start a business. It's like you can do that. I've kind of done that a little bit over the years where I want my content to be broadly aligned with what
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I care about and I'm okay with taking the hit of like having to build a business that that aligns with that to maximize my fun and fulfillment. But really ideally what we're trying to do is just sort of keep these things in
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alignment. They might start out in alignment. They're going to go out of alignment very quickly and then our job as YouTubers to if we want to continue sustaining the gravy train of fun, fulfillment, finances, and freedom and flexibility is to try and keep these as
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as aligned as we possibly can. So, if you are at this point in the video and you're thinking, okay, what do I do my YouTube channel and or business around?
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Here are some questions that are very practical that you can answer. You can pause this video and you can answer these questions or you can do some journaling about them. Question number one, if you were to build a YouTube
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channel and you knew you could never make any money from it, what are the sorts of topics you would want to talk about? This helps you identify what you're actually passionate about and where your interests might lie. Question
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number two, if you had to start a business and you were only allowed to sell something that was at minimum $2,000, what might you potentially sell?
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Question number three, if you were to start a business and you had to sell a cheap digital product, what kind of topic would you build your digital product around? Question number four, if you were starting a business and you had
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to build a physical product business, what physical thing would you potentially sell? And question number five, if you had to start a business where you had to make content about the thing that that business was talking about for the next 5 years, what sort of
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topics might you be interested in doing content and business about? All of these questions are basically getting at the idea of like what do you actually want to do? comes back down to the idea of strategy. If you know what your goal is,
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you can then figure out a strategy that will get you there. And my hot take in this video is that the more you have this magic word, alignment, the more you have alignment between you, your content, and your business, the better
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your life will be. Oh, by the way, this is a little secret if you're at this point in the video. If you find me on Instagram and you DM me the word strategy, that will give you a very,
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very special exclusive offer on our part-time YouTuber Academy. So, if you DM me the word strategy, then you can find out more about that if you're interested. Let's now talk about the critical skills you need as a YouTuber
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to for your channel to become successful. Now, for the most part, the skills you're developing at being a YouTuber are trying to get at four distinct things, which are in these two categories. Thing number one is you are
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building the skills that encourage people to click on your videos. The skills around how do you make a title that's intriguing enough and clickable enough without being clickbaity. And how do you make a thumbnail using AI, using Photoshop, using Canva, using whatever,
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maybe you're outsourcing it to a official graphic designer. How do you make a thumbnail that is sufficiently clickable? There is a major skill set associated with that. Then there is a major major major skill set around how do you actually get people to watch your
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videos. You know there's this whole thing of YouTube is not a video platform. YouTube is a click and watch platform. Someone has to click on your video otherwise they're never going to watch it. And then once they click on
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your video, YouTube really cares about the watch time. Like how many minutes or hours or years are people actually spending watching your stuff. This is itself an enormous skill set because this involves writing. It involves speaking confidently to camera. It
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involves like knowing how to light your video, knowing how your video can sound using like microphones, knowing how scripting and storytelling works.
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There's all sorts of stuff that goes into making your videos more watchable, but that is a massive skill set that you learn as you get better at being a YouTuber. What's less talked about I find uh when people give advice about
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YouTube is that there's two other things you want to get happen. You want people to like you and you want people to trust you. And if you can do those things, click, watch, like, trust with a critical mass of viewers, then you are
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able to build a business around your YouTube channel that gives you fun, fulfillment, and financial freedom. the three Fs that we really care about. In general, based on the way you come across, based on the way you're delivering value, based on your humor or
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lack thereof, case in point, a some percentage of your viewers will then start to like you. They'll start to develop a parasocial relationship with you where they're like, "Ah, this guy or this gal seems kind of cool." And then
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that makes them more likely to want to watch future videos of yours, which is just very good for your channel and very good for building that relationship with those viewers, one viewer at a time. But then some percentage of the people that
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like you will also start to trust you. Now, trust actually happens in two different domains. One thing that viewers start to trust is your integrity. they start to think, you know, oh, this person seems like a nice person. They seem very honest. They seem
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like they've got good integrity, good character, all of that kind of stuff. And that is important. But another thing that's also very important is they start to trust your expertise. Now, this one is very important. This is especially
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true if you are building an educational style YouTube channel rather than an entertainment style YouTube channel. And my hot take is that it's a lot easier to build a YouTube channel that gives you fun, fulfillment, and financial freedom
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if you lean into your own expertise. For example, one of the students of a parttime YouTube academy. His name is Thiago Forte. Now, Thiago makes videos about productivity and AI and like how to be more productive using AI and all
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that kind of stuff. And incidentally, Thiago took our YouTube course a couple years ago and that was when he started taking YouTube seriously. And he said that if you're coming to YouTube to just find a new way to distribute your ideas
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and find subscribers, don't try to reinvent the wheel. Don't try to learn it from scratch. Really look for the people who have invested in their own learning, their own training. And I can't imagine, I don't know of any other
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program that does that better than part-time YouTuber Academy. Thiago is not coming out there on camera and telling jokes and being like a freaking standup comedian or doing any kind of Mr. Beast type stunts. He is merely providing lots of really, really
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valuable information and is able to demonstrate credibility and expertise in the niche of productivity, AI, uh, personal knowledge management, building a second brain. When someone clicks on Thiago's videos, they click and watch and they're like, "Oh, this guy knows
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what he's talking about around productivity, personal knowledge management, AI, etc., etc." Some people start to like him. and they're like, "Oh, I like this guy." Some people then start to trust him and he is a very trustworthy guy, very nice, very high
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integrity. I've gotten to know him over the years. And crucially, they trust his expertise. Now, why is that good for Thiago? Well, it's very good for Thiago because Thiago sells products that are based around his expertise. He has a
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course on personal knowledge management. He has a course on productivity. So, that means when people watch his YouTube videos, they think, "Wo, this guy knows what he's talking about." And then some percentage of those viewers will then want to click through and see what his
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paid offerings are. And in general, when you are building a business based around your expertise, if you can use those expertise to solve a problem that someone else has, ideally a problem that either helps them make money or save
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money or save a lot of time, you can then charge quite a lot of money for your expertise because you're solving a big enough problem. The problem that YouTubers who are generally in the entertainment world have is that they
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actually find it very hard to monetize. Unless they're absolutely huge, like someone like Mr. Beast, then they can monetize, but they're not monetizing their expertise. They're monetizing their attention through like a chocolate brand or through like a burger brand or,
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you know, KSI Logan Paul through like an energy drink. No one is buying those things because those creators have demonstrated expertise in anything.
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They're buying it because they really like and trust the creators and they'll kind of buy whatever the creator is pointing to. But that's really, really, really, really, really, really hard to do. I know so many creators who are a
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lot smaller than Mr. Beast and KSI and Logan Paul who have tried, including me, to build these brands where you're selling cheap things. And it's so hard to do because it's so hard to get large volumes of people to buy your stuff even
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when the stuff is cheap. I also know a lot of creators who are in the sort of multi-million subscriber range who are doing like entertainment content. But because it's entertainment content, they're not demonstrating any clear expertise, which means the audience
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doesn't think of them as an expert in anything other than in being entertaining. Now, when you're in that mode where your audience just views you as an expert in being entertaining, it's really hard to sell stuff to your
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audience other than like tickets to your standup comedy gig or like merch. Like, you get into that territory where you're not really solving a problem for someone and therefore they're not really willing to pay that much money for it. But
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similarly, I know lots of creators who have a few thousand subscribers, not a few million, a few thousand subscribers, but who are so niched down into an area of expertise where that area of expertise is valuable to individuals and
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businesses that they are able to make millions of dollars a year from only a few thousand YouTube subscribers. That is what happens when you are able to demonstrate expertise and credibility through your content. If you have pre-existing expertise, you should
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totally 100% lean into that. And if you don't yet have pre-existing expertise, that's okay. you can totally just build those skills. Everyone who is currently an AI influencer, none of them knew anything about AI 3 years ago, but
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because they decided to learn about it and were able to document the stuff that they've learning through their YouTube channels, they now have expertise in that domain which is only like 3 years old. And so if they want to start a
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service-based business like an AI automation agency or they want to launch a course or a paid membership community that teaches people AI or teaches people how to make money with AI or whatever, they have the expertise and the
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credibility to be able to do so because they have learned the skill. So, if you're at this point in the video, the practical questions I would love for you to ponder are, what are the skills, the personal or the professional skills that
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you have learned through your job, through your personal life that you could potentially build a business or a YouTube channel off of ideally a business and a YouTube channel because we ideally want the alignment between content and business as we've talked
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about. Question number two, what sort of problems do people come to you to help them solve? And you can think about this in the workplace. So, what kind of professional problems do people come to you to help solve? And what sort of
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personal problems do your friends and family come to you to help solve? Is there anything there? Could you build some kind of business off the back of that? Question number three, what are the sorts of things that you find
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weirdly easy, but you're surprised that other people find weirdly hard? That gives you an idea of what like your natural competitive advantages might be.
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Question number four, if you knew you had to make, let's say, one YouTube short or Instagram reel every day for the next 365 days where you had to teach someone something, what might you want to teach? Again, all these questions are
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trying to get at what is your expertise? What might your expertise be? Another really good example of this is Hannah, who's again one of our students in our YouTube academy. Hannah is a professional ballet dancer. her expertise is the fact that she's a
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freaking professional ballet dancer. And when she joined our YouTuber academy, she was going through surgery and she was recovering from like this really difficult period in her life. And this is what she said. She posted this as a
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win in our community. She said, "When I joined part-time YouTuber Academy, I was going through one of the hardest times of my life as a professional ballet dancer. I'd just come out of surgery and I was stuck in the middle of a delayed
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recovery process. Physically and mentally, I'd never felt so low. I was frustrated, disconnected from my work, and desperately in need of something to pour my energy into, something that gave me purpose again. That is when I found the part-time YouTuber Academy. I
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blitzed through the main course in just a few weeks. It lit a fire under me. I took everything I learned and started implementing fast. And within a few months, I'd made £15,000 in revenue.
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I've launched my second online course. I have three more in the pipeline. And I'm now getting ready to launch my very own academy this August. The biggest mindset shift was learning to let go of the belief that I had to do everything
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myself. I used to dread the idea, for example, of working with editors, thinking it would be too much hassle to explain my style of vision. But I finally made the leap, and now I have two editors helping bring my content to
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life. I've also built a full YouTube production system in Clipflow, and content is now running like clockwork.
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None of this would have happened without Parttime media academy giving me structure, strategy, and most importantly, belief. To anyone sitting on the sidelines, especially if you're going through a tough season, this work matters. It can tr it can truly change
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everything. Thank you, darling. You're very welcome. And the entire PTI community for shaking things up when I needed it the most. Now, how can Hannah make £15,000 in just a few weeks after taking a YouTube course? Well, it's
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because she's got expertise. She's a professional ballet dancer and she's leaning into that pre-existing expertise. If you're watching this, you are probably not a professional ballet dancer, but you're probably an expert at something or other. like what are the
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skills or expertise that you have that you could build your content around? You don't need to be that entertaining to like make a big difference in someone's lives by by teaching them stuff and therefore being able to sell things that
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are based on that expertise like an online course or a membership community or a service or a consulting program or things like that. Now, this is all talking about skills, but it really is also a strategy question. It comes back
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to the point we made earlier around alignment between you, your content and your business. When your content leans into your own expertise or into your own niche, dare I say, it becomes actually a lot easier to make better content and
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also to monetize that content because it's a lot easier to be known for one thing than it is to be known for loads and loads and loads of different things.
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But if you don't have systems, then you are having to manually do the work every single time you make a YouTube video, which is fine for your first video. It's fine for your first 10 or 20 videos, but
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very very quickly you run into the issue of like this takes so much time.
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How can I possibly sustain this for years? is that is where systems come in.
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You basically want to break down every aspect of YouTube video production into like a flowchart or a pipeline almost like you're an assembly line at a factory. And then you're trying to find ways to systemize every step as much as
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you can without losing the soul and the authenticity that comes from actually being a creator. Firstly, you have ideation. Actually coming up with the idea or the concept for the video.
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Again, super easy when you're just making your first five videos. But you know, if you look at someone like me where I've made like a thousand plus videos over the last eight years, you start to run out of ideas pretty quickly
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and then you start needing some kind of system for idea generation. Then you need some kind of system for the three things of title, thumbnail, and hook.
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This is sort of like the packaging of the video. Now, yes, of course, you could manually think about the title, manually create the thumbnail every time, and manually really, really, really think about hard about like the first 30 seconds of the video. But if
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you have some kind of system for it like we've built over the years, you know, given a concept, you can like record a voice note about the concept. You can put it into an AI, give it a sensible
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prompt, and it can generate title ideas for you. You can put that concept into various AI tools and it can generate thumbnail concepts for you as well. And then you can just pick which one you like and then you're able to take the
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photo and then edit it in Canva or Nano Banana or whatever tool you want to use to make the thumbnails. Over time, you develop your own templates. Like I've got my own template system for all the thumbnails on my channel, which is why
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you notice they look kind of similar. Then it comes to actually writing the video itself. This is the pre-production process. Now, the mistake a lot of YouTubers make at this point is that they script all of their videos word for
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word. You can you can do that. It just takes absolutely bloody ages. We recommend you do bullet points instead.
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And actually, this is one of the wins that Frederick, one of our students, posted. Hey fellow YouTubers, I just want to share a big win from applying the lessons in PTIA. I feel like things are really starting to click and pay off
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big time. From my latest video, I leaned into the triplet bullet point structure for the script outline. It was so much easier than scripting word for word.
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This means I went from idea to published video in just four days. This is something that used to take me two full weeks because I was grinding through word for word scripts. This feels like a game changanger for consistency in the
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long run. So again, in the course we show you this, the templates, the systems that we use, but again, I generally recommend, and I say this a lot, don't just wholesale copy and paste someone else's templates. You kind of
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want to use the templates as inspiration. And then you want to build your own systems off the back of that because a system that you build yourself is a system you understand way more than one that you've just copied and pasted
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without thinking too hard about it. Another tool that's really helpful here is an app that we've built called Voice Pal. That's how I plan most of my videos. is I just hit record on Voice Pal. I speak to it. It asks me follow-up
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questions. And then I'm able to take all of that, put it into Notion, and use Notion AI to turn it into an outline based on the script template that I've already got. All of these are ways to systemize the process of creating
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videos, which otherwise would require quite a lot of work to sit there manually typing out a word for word script. Over time, you get good at having a system for filming. You know, back in the day when I was first
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building my YouTube channel for the first couple of years, it would take me an hour every time to set up the cameras in my living room and then dismantle the cameras, and that would waste quite a lot of time. But then I realized, wait a
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minute, if I just leave the camera up at all times, yeah, it looks a bit annoying in the living room, but at least it makes the production process of YouTube videos way quicker. Now, thankfully, I have my own little extra room in the
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house where I'm able to like film stuff, but you start to then systemize aspects of your gear and aspect and like the teleprompter and like the microphone and the cameras and the double angles, all of that sort of stuff is super hard to
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do initially when you are just learning the skills of like what ISO means and what a shutter speed is and what like an f-stop is and like how lighting works and and all that stuff. But once you develop those skills and you build your
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own system around it, everything becomes a lot quicker. At a certain point, you develop your own system for editing your videos. Ideally, you don't even edit your own videos. Ideally, once you've edited a few videos, you then outsource
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your editing and you find a video editor. And again, as part of the course, we give you like the job descriptions and stuff that we literally use and we've been using to hire editors for the last like 6 years. You then have
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a system for publishing to make sure you're going through and doing all the sensible things. You eventually have a system for looking at your analytics so you can get sensible insights from your analytics. Maybe if you are someone
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who's on multiplatforms, you have a system for repurposing content. So for example, what we do is we make content for YouTube as our primary thing. And then we repurpose some of that content onto Instagram, onto LinkedIn, onto Tik
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Tok. And all of these are systems that you start to build into your YouTube channel over time. And this is, I think, one of the most important parts of building a sustainable YouTube channel over the long term. It's having the
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right systems. But if you're thinking of starting your own YouTube channel or you're trying to level up your existing YouTube channel, the studio in which you film your videos really matters in terms of like, you know, the the systems for
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filming and the systems to make it so that it's just not a total bollock every time you're trying to film a video. So, I've got a video right over here that explains how I set up this specific studio where I'm talking you through
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exactly the process of how I set everything up from scratch, all the rationale behind it, and so you can see how this filming system evolved over time in a brand new, very small room.
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So, that'll be linked right over there. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you hopefully in the next video. But I
Topics:YouTube growthYouTube strategycontent creationYouTube monetizationAli AbdaalYouTube successcontent systemsYouTube goalsfun fulfillment financesstarting YouTube 2026
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