6 Steps to Becoming a Successful Educator on YouTube

I'm going to give you the six steps you need to take as an online educator to start making money this year. The first thing you need to know is you need to pick a topic. All right, so what are you going to teach people? Okay, you're going to have this big, broad topic, and for me, that was guitar lessons. That's where I started. But then you're going to take step number two, which is you have to niche down. What do I mean by that? So say you're going to be a piano teacher. Okay, what kind of piano are you going to teach? Are you going to teach classical? Are you going to teach sight reading, that very, very strict classical method? Or are you going to do pop music? Are you going to take more of a chordal approach? Are you going to focus on a specific demographic? Are you going to focus on children? You're going to focus on, you know, young adults, or are you going to focus on older adults? Because that's going to determine what kind of music you're going to put on your channel. See, that's a big mistake that a lot of YouTubers make is they don't really focus on who they're making content for. People ask me all the time because people are like, wow, you were successful on YouTube, and you actually did it pretty quickly. And these are people who are usually above me on YouTube, and they're like, wow, you actually grown very quickly on YouTube. Like, what do you think was the biggest thing you did to grow so quickly? And I really think it's because in the beginning, I niched down very early. I knew that my audience was going to be an older adult and an older male. Now I get females. Okay? It's not that I only teach men. I also have many, many female students as well, but. But my target was the retired male. The people who, like John Denver, you know, Johnny Cash, ccr, Elvis, those. Those were the audience that I wanted to focus on. So I focused on that style of music. And I only do acoustic guitar. You'll very, very rarely. I think I only have maybe two or three videos on my channel with an electric guitar. All right. Even my guitar has been niched down. I do mostly strumming and singing and finger picking. You won't see me doing too many lead guitar things or electric guitar things, because that's not what my channel's about. My channel is about acoustic guitar. Singer, songwriter style music for guys, retired men over the age of, you know, 55. And by niching down, we get to step number three, which, like, I was just saying you can create very, very specific content for your audience. Now, I know on my channel, when someone younger watches a video. Cause they're like, oh, you're too slow. You don't go fast enough. You talk too much. And that's fine. Because my audience, my true audience, the person that I make my videos for, likes the fact that I go slow. They like the fact that I repeat things many, many times. They tell me, they're like, oh, finally, someone who's not just like, flying through the lesson. Someone who's actually taking the time to slow down and show me things multiple times so that I can understand it. I. All right, so just understand that your teaching style has to adapt for your audience. If you're an educator, okay? And you are going to attract certain people and you are going to repel others, and that's not a bad thing. We want to repel the people who are not our ideal audience. That's not a bad thing. So you're going to cater all of your content for this specific audience. And. And you're going to keep doing that for years to come. Step number four, once you start building up a little bit of an audience, you're starting to get some pretty consistent views on your video. What do I mean by consistent views? I would say your videos are getting 50 to about 100 views when you release them. Not talking about thousands of views. All right. If you're getting 50 or 100 people onto your content when you release it, that's awesome. Okay. You want to start building a course around the top problems that your specific audience is having. So for me, I focused on a very, very beginner guitar course, helping people with some of the very, very common problems. You know, they can't move their fingers fast enough. Remember, I have an older audience. A lot of them have arthritis. So, you know, I focus on a method that goes a little bit slower. Because remember, they don't like going 0 to 60 much slower. We focused a lot on finger dexterity, getting chords going and just giving them the win of strumming and playing along to songs. That's what they want to do. Okay. This has been their lifelong dream. This is like a bucket list item for my audience. And all they want to do is just have fun, play a song, and have their spouse come in from the next room and say, oh, my God, is that such and such song? I get that all the time. That makes my students so happy. So think about the things that bugging your students. What are the specific problems they're Having. Okay, what are the things they dream about at night? Oh, man, I wish I could be a rock star on stage. Or I wish I could do X, Y and Z. Those are the things you want to put in your course or help them be able to do in your course. And now when you're creating videos on YouTube, you can let people know, hey, you know, if you really like this video, guess what? I have an entire course that goes a little bit more depth on, on this topic. You can scroll down to the description below and you can click on that video and purchase my course and support the channel. And a little bonus tip here, if you guys are looking for a good course platform. I host all of my courses on Kajabi. I will put an affiliate link below if you guys want to go check out Kajabi for hosting your courses. Tip number five, yes, we're going to be promoting these courses on YouTube. But I would highly recommend. If you, you don't have a website, you need to get a website up. Even if it's just a one pager with a landing page for your course, you need to get a website up to start collecting emails. Just start promoting yourself and your brand. Okay, I see a lot of YouTubers do this. I think this is a big mistake, especially for educators, is they rely solely on YouTube. And remember, YouTube is only one search engine. It's the second biggest search engine. The biggest search engine is Google. All right? So if you build a website, we want to start building content on a website with additional information. Because what happens with me is my website gets anywhere from 50 to 60,000 viewers a month. Okay, that's a lot of people. And I get, you know, I get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views over on YouTube. And those things work together. I'm sending people from my website over to YouTube to go watch videos, which YouTube loves. YouTube loves when you send traffic over to their platform. And then on the opposite side, I'm selling courses through my YouTube videos, or I'm giving away like a free PDF and I'm saying, hey, go over to my website. So they're going over the website, feeding traffic there. They're filling out forms, they're buying courses. So these two things are working together. So you want to make sure that you're promoting yourself through YouTube, through a website and through other social media platforms, all right? Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Wherever your audience is hanging out, make sure you are set selfishly promoting yourself. And step number six, create a community for your clients to interact and support each other. This is one of the best things I did during COVID You know, when I first got started and I was selling courses, I wasn't selling a lot of courses in the beginning, but when, when it started picking up and I probably had about a couple hundred people that had actually bought the course, I emailed all those people and I reached out to them. I was like, hey, I created this Facebook group for us all to come together and hang out and. And it ends up becoming like this really tight knit community. And I had an event this past summer and a lot of those people came to my event and they met each other and it was like they were meeting their friends because they had been hanging out online together already. And communities are a great way for educators. One to give that extra support to your clients. They always have questions and sometimes you're not always available to answer those questions. And the great thing about having a community is some of your other clients who've been through your course or been with you for a while, they will sometimes jump in and answer the questions for you. So they'll help you do a lot of work on this community side of things. And it just helps you build a better relationship with your clients. And when you build that really good relationship with them, they'll want to buy more of your courses, they'll want to attend your events, they're going to want to share you out and promote you. So definitely, as soon as possible, get a good community going and supporting your clients. Now, I've done over seven figures in online course, seven sales. And if you guys are really interested in seeing how long it took me to get there in my growth trajectory over the first five years of me being on YouTube, I highly recommend you go check out that video over there. It's a really honest, in depth look of where I was each year in my YouTube journey, how many subscribers I was getting, how much money I was making, how many courses I was selling. Very, very insightful. Go click on that video and I'll see you over there.