Want Real YouTube Revenue? Watch This Video

99% of YouTube videos don't drive any revenue. I'm going to show you how we plan on doing it and how we're doing it right now. Because if you're not driving revenue, you're not taking care of your lifestyle, what are you doing this all for, right? So if we look at my channel right now, this is Leveling Up. And you can see, sure, I got 662,000 views on this interview that I did with Vivian Tu, and she's great. We talked about personal finance there, and that's what she's known for. So 662,000 long-form views, that's fantastic. And I did this interview with Dr. Orion Taraban and then he got 338K views on this one. And then there's also another one over here where he got 247K views, right? So he's more around, let's just call it dating. And so we have one on personal finance, we have one on dating. What's interesting to me is that sure, we got a lot of views on this one, but how many conversions did we drive at the end of the day? So my main business is an ad agency and a conversion for us is someone that fills out a lead form and maybe they're interested in our services, right? Our marketing services. And so imagine this, like you think, okay, combined over here, you probably have 1.2, 1.4 million views, maybe 1.5 million views with Vivian, with Orion Taraban, and with Humphrey Yang. But how many leads did that drive ultimately? Zero. It drove zero leads for us. Now, when we talk about, let's say, top careers in marketing or how to write cold emails that always get read or the best new Google Ads tricks, Like these are videos that have done well, but these were posted 5, 6 years ago or so. But those are the types of videos that might get less views, but you might get more qualified views at the end of the day, right? When I interview business people, for example, you can see I'm talking to Alex Hormozi over here, Leila Hormozi, Christo. Those get less views, but the people that are watching them are not only interested in entertainment, they're interested in business entertainment, right? Where we can call it edutainment. And so what's worked out well for me in the past is whenever I'm talking about things that are related to marketing, which will definitely drive more leads, or if I'm talking to business people. It's not when I'm talking about these, I'm talking to influencers that are maybe in a higher total addressable market when it comes to their topic. It's better that I narrow down, right? And when I narrow down, I might get less views, but I'm going to get more leads. And that's ultimately what matters for my business. That's what I wanted to bring your attention to first. So if we think about that now, okay, it's like, well, what do we need to do to come up with the best ideas that are maybe going to go viral. And the first thing I wanted to talk about is package hacking. Let's say I'm on YouTube, I'm searching for the keyword SEO strategies, and I want to understand what videos have actually worked well in the last year or so. And I can just simply tell by clicking on filter. So SEO strategies, that's what I typed in. And then I type in filters, or I click on filters rather, and I sort by view count, okay? And not only that, because it's showing videos from 3 years ago, let's look at videos that are from this year. So from this, this year I can see, okay, how to rank on the first page of Etsy, Etsy SEO tips for 2024. Okay, that's cool. This one's SEO strategies. And so it's finding things that are relevant or kind of similar to it. New way to do SEO in 2024, which that's interesting to me. Okay. So to me, package hacking is this package seems to work. This is a new way to do marketing in 2025, the new way to do marketing channel in 2025. 5 full guide, right? And this one's only 16 minutes or so. And so that's interesting to me because this has proven to work already. Why do I need to reinvent the wheel? And a lot of YouTubers do this. They just look at packaging that works and you can just find a keyword that you're interested in and look at the ones that got views. If it got views, then you can think about, okay, how can I duplicate this and how can I make it better? And so for me now, I might just look at this video over here, the new way to do SEO in 2024. And I just took one of our videos. I'll give you an example. We have this one complete SEO strategy for 2025, right? And this one, we changed the packaging here. It's a 30-minute video and we might adjust it a little bit, but it's actually starting to move up and to the right. It was struggling initially. It was struggling to do well initially. And now after we changed the packaging, it's starting to move up and to the right. So your packaging is your headline, it's your thumbnail, and it's also your first 30 seconds because your 30-second retention matters. and getting people to click through, and that matters a lot, right? But you have to retain the people as well. And that's what's going to work out well for you. And so this one, for example, The Real Future of Marketing with Seth Godin, we're talking about marketing again. Again, I have a marketing agency. And so for Seth Godin, this video struggled initially. It didn't do well. In fact, if I click on this video, you can see the graph over here. Initially, it was struggling, right? And this is with legendary author Seth Godin. And you can see after we changed the packaging over here, See, we changed it. We had marketing insider reveals the truth about marketing that businesses don't want you to know. That's a little wordy. So then we just change it to the real future of marketing with Seth Godin. So you can see 10/23, we had this and then we adjusted this and then it started moving up into the right, right? Because it was really struggling in the beginning. That's another thing that you have to think about. Okay, let's look at packaging that works, but if it's not working initially, then we need to do something about it, right? So you can also argue that the YouTube algorithm, takes time to kind of figure out who to show the video to. And then once it takes off, they'll show it to more people. But I would like to think that the real future of marketing is a lot more intriguing than Marketing Insider reveals the truth about marketing, the businesses that don't want you to know, right? So that's that. That's how package hacking works. And you got to think about what works in your industry and then go from there. I like these tier videos for sure as well. These tend to do Pretty good. And so this has 119K views. And then this one over here, YouTube SEO, how I rank number 1 on YouTube in 2024. So how about I just change that for 2025? And how about I make it instead of a 6-minute video, how about I go for a 15, 20-minute video or so? So I don't need to reinvent the wheel here and I can just copy this packaging over here and they already did the work. Why do I have to reinvent the wheel, right? And sometimes you can adjust it. You don't want to make it exactly the same thing. And that's what it is. All right, quick note, this is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site, we're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. The package hacking is not necessarily you trying to just copy everybody. It's you trying to jumpstart your creativity at the end of the day. And so that's what I would say initially about that. Then once you have your package ideas, I would take it over to ChatGPT. And so here's an example of a couple of ideas that I threw in for ChatGPT, and I'm using 01 Preview. Okay? So if you're paying for ChatGPT, use the 01 Preview model because it's a lot more detailed and the model actually takes time to think. It's not just going to randomly spit out an answer for you very quickly. And you're going to get a more well-thought-out answer. And so I said, okay, take these and what do you think about the packaging? Rate them 1 through 10 for these 4 YouTube ideas, right? And I kind of just post them over here. This is actually the packaging for this one right now. It thought for 14 seconds, which is great. And let's just use this one as an example, right? So how to make YouTube videos that actually drive customers in 2025, rating 9 out of 10 feedback, hook compelling and forward-thinking appeals. Story establishes credibility, right? Points offers actionable insights, and then suggestions over here. Emphasize how the 80/20 focus has impacted your results, which I'll talk about in a second. Include real-life examples or case studies, which I've kind of been sharing with you, right? And so you can kind of keep going further and further. I just like to use ChatGPT-01 preview as a thought partner. And then I was like, okay, give me more ideas for viral hooks, right? So this one over here, okay. 2025 YouTube strategies, turn views into customers now, stop wasting views, right? I don't think these packages, the packaging on these is that great, but I think it actually is better for the LinkedIn post that got 728 leads. So 728 leads from one LinkedIn post, my step-by-step strategy, viral LinkedIn over, you know, hack that where I got leads overnight and then how I unlocked 728 leads using this LinkedIn trick, right? So you want to use ChatGPT as your thought partner and When you use O1 preview, you can just go back and forth with it. And that's going to help you refine your thinking a lot more. And you're going to get better results that way. If we look back at the results that we have, sure, this video has 25K views, maybe it'll go up to 50K views or so. But when we put our mid-rolls into the video itself, so we show ads for Single Grain, for example, which is my ad agency, or we show ads for other products or other services that we have. We're constantly promoting what we have and while we're also showing it to the right people. Because even if we get 600,000 views on one video long form and it's not, it's towards a dating audience, they're not going to convert. They're not going to be interested in marketing services because who's watching dating podcast episodes? It's people that are interested in dating. It's people that are probably younger, right? Personal finance is probably people that are younger, people that don't understand personal finance as much. But when I talk to a bestselling author of marketing, More marketing experts are going to listen to that one. And you can see for this one over here, this package where I did an interview with my friend Anthony Pompliano, that was a 90-minute interview and it only has 377 views. If we look at these at the end of the day, some of these might have less views where I talk about SEO, for example, where I talk about marketing. But you have to think about, and I think maybe this is where I'll talk about the 80/20 rule here. You have to think about what content you actually want to create. And so sure, I might have 377 views on this one, but I actually enjoy these conversations when I'm talking to business people. So when I talk to business people, I enjoy the conversation more and I know it's helpful to more of a business audience and they're going to get value from it and they might tell somebody else about it and that's going to get me into more relevant views. Have you ever wanted to target a bunch of accounts on LinkedIn at once and personalize them? Well, previously you couldn't do this. Let's say you wanted to target 500 enterprise companies and you wanted to hyper-personalize personalize those ads. You can do that now. And LinkedIn has confirmed with us that nobody else can do this right now. Only we can do it. The product is called Karrot. That's K-A-R-R-O-T, and it's Karrot account-based marketing. So if you go to karrot.ai, you can go learn more about it, and we'll see you on the other side. To kind of wrap a bow on this, I am constantly looking at alternatives, right? So this is a DJI, DJI Osmo Pocket 3, and This is a— it's basically a vlogging camera, right? It's easy to carry around. I can tie it to anything. I can, when I travel with this, I can bring this anywhere. It's actually much easier for me to document rather than create. So when I have to come up with all these ideas, first and foremost, I have a business to run. But when I'm recording these videos in the middle of the day, it does take up time. But when I can just record what's going on, if I'm traveling, if I'm on a plane, or if I'm going to have a meeting with somebody, or I'm going to meet with entrepreneurial friends, we're going to have a dinner, things like that. And I can kind of reflect on, hey, what happened? Here's what happened today. Here's how things are going. Here's how I'm feeling about everything. That's a story that you can follow. And so that's why I bought this. This thing's, I think, all in with some of the other devices. There's a microphone on it too. It was like $700 or so. And we'll see what happens with it. Maybe I'll use it a lot, maybe I won't. But overall, how I've recalibrated my strategy is to focus more on 80% of me doing the talking And me sharing information, me documenting, me sharing what's happening to me. So it's me that's kind of sharing my learnings at the end of the day. And then 20% of the time I might do interviews with people, but I want to focus it more on business. But just understand that when you're doing a podcast, you're putting someone else on a pedestal and it doesn't exactly help your brand as much as you think it does, right? So, you know, Chris Williamson, they've done podcasts over the years. Tim Ferriss, you know, well known for podcasting as well. And they've certainly, They've done a lot of interesting episodes, but when I think about how it's helped them with their personal brand, sure, they get to throw events and things like that. They get maybe early allocation into angel investments. I'm most interested in building my business. And I know for me to build my business, I have to build— if I'm going to do it, it makes more sense for me to share my learnings because then it builds more affinity for me at the end of the day. And it's not trying to be selfish, it's just human nature. And that's ultimately going to lead to better results. And I remember I was at an event a couple months ago and 4 or 5 other entrepreneurs came up to me and they're like, hey, I saw your Shorts, or, hey, I saw your long-form content. And it wasn't necessarily the ones where I was doing interviews with people. It was one where I was sharing insights. You just have to understand the game that you're trying to play ultimately. And if you want to drive the most revenue, hopefully you have some type of business mechanism where you can focus in on that versus just selling ads. Selling ads is a way to make money as well. But I think if you want to capture the most value, you have your own business at the end of the day. So I'm excited. Let me know what topics you are interested in to have me vlog about in the comments below. And, you know, I'll certainly consider them and hope you all have a good rest of your day.