Be Consistent. What exactly does that mean?

Hey, everyone. We're going to talk about three, three very important, important topics today. We're going to talk about what is consistency? Everyone talks about consistency, consistency, but no one really defines exactly what that is. We're going to talk about how to get consistent. So if you're not consistent, what steps can you take to actually change that? And then we have the compound effect of consistency, which I can speak to very personally at the moment. I'm going to share that with you because it's. It's a very cool thing when it happens. So first up, what is consistency? Okay. Consistency is doing an action over and over and over again for a long enough period of time to have a positive impact or just have an impact. You could do something consistently for a long time and have a negative impact if you're doing the wrong things. Okay? So it's just doing something long enough, for a long enough period of time to have an impact that changes your current situation. So let's talk about that for me. Okay? So consistency, for me has been posting at least one YouTube video a week for the last eight years. All right? On my guitar teaching platform over on YouTube. I have a. I think I have 525,000 subscribers now. And I have been posting consistently every Saturday for eight years now. Okay. In the beginning, it was inconsistent. So I can't say eight years. The first two, two and a half years was very, very haphazard. I was not consistent at all. I was kind of posting when I could. Probably, like a lot of you, very, very busy. Okay? I had my music schools. I had lots of stuff that I was doing. So that was where I was making my money. So I couldn't. Couldn't take my focus off of that because that was paying my. That was paying my rent, that was paying my bills. So that was important for me to keep the focus on that. So I kind of did content a bit haphazardly in the first couple years. And what happened was that I had haphazard results. Okay. My channel wasn't growing as consistently. I felt frustrated because. But then when I look back, you know, in the moment, I thought I was doing a lot of work. Cause it felt like a lot of work, you know, recording content. I'm editing content, I'm putting it out there, I'm uploading it to YouTube. I'm creating the thumbnails, the titles, the descriptions. Felt like I was doing a lot of work, and I was, because I was doing everything myself. But when I look back in retrospect, I was like, wow, I really didn't do a lot of work. My first year. I posted 19 videos. It's not. That's not a lot of content. There's 52 weeks in a year. I should have posted 52 videos. Okay. In full transparency. And finally, I did get consistent. And I would say in year three and four, possibly even most of five. So years three, four and five, I posted twice a week, every week. Okay. And there were some weeks when I did get busy and maybe I only posted once, but I made sure I always posted once a week and sometimes I posted twice a week. Okay? So I was doing eight pieces of content every month, and I did that for three years consistently until I started feeling the impacts of burnout and constantly pushing out content. And I said, I'm going to dial that back to once a week. And I could do that because I had been consistent enough for a long enough period of time that I had a backlog of content. Okay? So consistency, just as. To reiterate what we just talked about, consistency is doing something for a long enough period of time that has an impact that it actually changes your current trajectory from one position to a different position. Okay? So that is consistency. So how do we get consistent? All right, how do we actually get consistent? How do you get to the point where you are posting one video a week? And I'm not talking about shorts, okay? You're posting one long form piece of content every week. Okay, I just got an email today from Facebook. I'll see if I can even find it. They sent me an email and I was like, oh, this makes YouTube so much better. YouTube is saying, download your old Facebook Live videos by July 8th, as it's going to be deleting all of your old content. All right, Facebook Live videos will be retained for 30 days by default, and then they would be deleted. So now even, even Facebook is only keeping your content on its platform for 30 days and then it's gone forever. Whereas YouTube. I could do this video, and this is going to exist for years, and it could work for me for years. I have videos on my guitar channel that I recorded seven years ago that are still getting views today. And there's not very many platforms that will do that. And that's why I focus, focus most of my time and energy on YouTube. And that's why I tell my business clients that I work with, I'm like, focus on YouTube. Because the best way to build a relationship with the client is through long form content. So consistency is getting at least one video out a week. Preferably a long form video. Okay. Long form is more than 60 seconds. It doesn't have to be a 20 minute video. Be a five minute video. It could be a 10 minute video. I have many videos in that five to 10 minute range. Some of them have over a million views. Okay. So it doesn't have to be a very long video. So how do we get consistent? We have to have a schedule. Okay. So I would recommend a schedule to record content, a schedule to, to research your content or even just write out the ideas of what you're going to talk about and maybe write some bullet points to script those. And depending on your time, those might be two different days. You might spend an hour just kind of prepping, doing prep work for three or four videos. And then my recommendation is to pick a day where you go and you record your four videos for the month. Okay. You sit down for an hour or two hours, whatever it takes you. But if you're only doing videos that are five to 10 minutes, it shouldn't take you more than an hour. Okay. Unless you know something happens with your mic. And that's happened to me. I've done, I've recorded videos and I go back to watch the footage and the mic died like halfway through and I have to do it all over again. That does happen, but for the majority of time, if I'm doing three or four videos, it's taking me under an hour to record the content for that. Because I know what I'm talking about. I have my script. Okay. I can freeform. This is a live video, so I can, I just literally have some bullet points about what I'm going to talk about. And I know this content inside and out that I can freeform it. Okay. And I don't have to worry about editing and cutting on, on a live video here. So that's all I would do. I would just prep, I would write down my little script. Okay, what, how am I going to start this? What are the bullet points that I'm going to talk about? And then you go and you record it. Okay? So create that schedule. And maybe that's going to be every Sunday. All right? And if you don't like working on Sundays, maybe it's going to be every Saturday. Okay. I would recommend picking a specific day of the week that you dedicate to your content. Okay. For me, that's usually Tuesdays and Thursdays. Okay. So if I'm going to film, it's either going to be a Tuesday or Thursday, typically if I'm doing courses. So Courses are much longer. I might do those on the weekend because I can film an entire course in a weekend. I once did a 50 lesson course. I did 25 videos on Saturday, 25 videos on Sunday. I might have done a few on Monday, but I, I was in the mood, I wanted to get it done and I really busted that course out in, in two days. So sometimes if I'm going to do a long session, I will do it over two days. Okay? But pick a day of the week and say, I'm going to spend one to two hours on Saturdays, 8 to 10am I'm going to spend that on working on my YouTube channel. And it's going to be prepping, it's going to be filming, it's going to be editing. Okay? Pick your schedule, stick to it. Then coaching, mentoring, right? If you can't be consistent, get a coach and it could be a friend. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be someone you pay for. Get someone who's going to hold you accountable to what you say you're going to do, right? I'm going to put out one video. If you can't hold yourself accountable to it, find someone who is. And you might have to pay for a coach to do that. All right? You might need to get someone like me to ride your butt every week or every month and be like, hey, what's going on? Like, what are you doing? Did you post your content this week? I'm not seeing what's going on here. Like, why didn't you post something? Oh, you know, because it's easy for us to come up for the excuses of why not to do something, but if you're working with a coach or you have a friend that can hold you accountable then and say, hey, no, I don't want to hear the excuses. You said you were going to do this and you're going to follow through with it. All right? That's why we hire coaches, for accountability. All right? If you can't hold yourself accountable to the schedule, you have to hire someone who is going to hold you accountable to that schedule. All right? Three, how to get consistent. Have a big enough why, okay? And part of the reason why we make excuses and we don't be consistent about the schedule. Like a lot of people all will make the schedule and then we'll do it for like a month and then we fall off, right? It's like New Year's resolutions. It's, it's March 10th, everyone, at this point, 90 of people have fallen off their new New Year's resolutions by now, okay? We just, we just do. Because the why isn't big enough. And I always tell people, you know, whether you're learning guitar or you're in business, all right, why are we doing this? Why are we starting the YouTube channel? Why am I going to post content for once a week, every week for two or three years, for little return. For little return. And we're going to talk about why in a little bit because I'm going to talk about the compound effect of consistency, all right? And how that will affect your time, your income, your freedom, and why this is so important. So if you don't know why you're doing YouTube or you're trying to grow YouTube business, or course business, or whatever you're doing, ask yourself why? Why are you doing it? And keep asking yourself why until you come up with the real reason. Because usually the first reason why isn't really why we're doing something. Okay? Because money's great. Money's a great tool. But I can speak from personal experience. Like, making a lot of money isn't motivating enough to keep you going. Okay? Once you start making money, like, it's really exciting in the beginning, but then you start making the money and you start kind of making it consistently, you're like, oh, great. Like another, you know, $50,000 a month, another $60,000 month. Like it doesn't really have the excitement that it does the first time, like a fifty or sixty thousand dollar month. And, and, and, you know, it sounds pretty, you know, weird, but you kind of get bored by just making money. And then you're like, okay, well, I made money, but what now? So you really have to have a deep purpose behind why you're doing something. Because the money's great. The money is a tool. It's a wonderful tool. Everyone should want to make more money. But you need to have a deep purpose behind why you're doing it, or the money isn't going to mean anything anyway. Um, and I can speak to that from, from very personal experience, you can make a lot of money. And if you're not enjoying what you're doing, you're not loving what you're doing, it doesn't matter. Trust me. Number four, my last point on how to get consistent. Stop being so picky, all right? It doesn't have to be perfect if you want to get consistent. I know a lot of people and, you know, I can put my wife into this category. You're so worried about having the right credentials, having the right Lighting. You know, look at this. If I look there, you can see the glare of the window in my office. Like, oh, my God, I can't have that on the video. And you know, is it a little bit distracting? Yes. Could I, you know, should I have remembered to shut my window shades? Absolutely. But I forgot and it's here and it's not perfect. And I'm not going to let that distract me or, or keep me from putting this content out because it's so important. And you have to have that attitude like, what I have to say is so important because I am helping people. All right? And even if I do it here for free on YouTube, this conversation might help someone wake up, okay? And realize that it doesn't have to be perfect, but you have to get started. And trust me, those first 2030 videos are not going to be perfect. My first video is horrible. I have videos out there where like, my hair looks like this. Well, maybe not that bad, but I have some funny videos where, because I do this a lot to my hair and sometimes my hair ends up in a really weird position and my editor will have my guitar, like, make fun of me and be like, nice hair, Lauren. But I don't. A lot of people like, oh, my God, I can't leave that in there. That's horrible. I leave it in there because I'm human. All right, you are human. Show your human side to people. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be done. Okay? And I want to talk about the compound effect of consistency, because I don't think a lot of people talk about this. You know, we talk about what it takes to be consistent. And we've defined that. Consistency is putting out one video a week. Perfect. Preferably one long term video, long form video a week on YouTube. Okay? That is what consistency is. And we're going to do that over a number of years and hopefully we're putting out the right content that we're connecting with the right audience. All right, if you haven't figured out who your audience is, you know, go to the creator. Launchpad.com I have a little niche finder course. It's not even that expensive. I think it's like $27. But if you don't know who your audience is, go find out who that person is. Because all your content has to be directed to that person. Because if you do that over time. I don't know how many videos I have on my guitar channel. I think there's over like five or six hundred videos now. So I have quite the backlog. And the last few months, I really haven't worked a lot in my business, okay? I just moved house in. Just around Christmas time, I moved to a new house. And that moving process, that transition process is very, very busy. So I've kind of been doing the bare minimum, which is I' been getting my content up every week, been being consistent, okay? That's why I'm doing this live. I'm showing up, okay? Because I didn't have the time to pre record. So I'm like, I'm going to go live and record because this is content, okay? So you don't always have to pre record content. It could be a live podcast, it could be anything, but you just have to be consistent with it. All right, I'm showing up. I'm busy, but I'm showing up, all right? And the last few months, I haven't had a lot of time to focus on my business. But surprisingly, I've worked less in my business the last probably four to five months than I ever have in my life. Lice life. Hopefully I don't have lice. That would be horrible in my life. But strangely, I'm making more money than I ever have, which is interesting. I was just like, you know, my instinct was that, oh my God, the business is going to suffer. I'm not going to make as much money, but that's okay. When I get back on track, I. I can, you know, I can build it back up again. I can make more money. Not a problem. I was really worried that if I stepped back, you know, from staying busy and doing all the busy work, that my business was going to collapse. And it didn't because I had remained consistent for the last eight years. So that consistency allowed me to take my foot off the gas a little bit and still have a business that thrives because I have all this back content now that is working for me. You probably heard from the beginning of the video. I have videos from seven or eight years ago that are still getting views today, all right? And that compounds over time. Every time I release a new video, that's new viewers. That's new viewership, right? That's new people. So my biggest recommendation to you is if you're not consistent, get consistent. Create that schedule. Decide what. What's going to be the one day a week that I'm going to focus on my YouTube channel, on my business, okay? If it's Saturday from 8am to 10am, no distractions, lock yourself in a room and focus for two hours, on prepping content, recording content, doing what you need to do to get your business to move forward. And I guarantee you, your life will be very different from a year from now. You might not be making a ton of money a year from now, especially if you're just getting started, but you will see the foundation has been set. You will start getting more consistent views on your videos. You may even get monetized in a year. If you are consistent, all right, with YouTube, and if you're smart and you do what I do and you have your own course or your own product that you can sell, you can make money a lot faster. Because it's really hard to make money on YouTube advertising. It takes millions of views, you know, or at least like, I would say, 500,000, 600,000 views every month to make a, you know, a decent, consistent salary here on YouTube. So I highly recommend making a course around your YouTube channel, but get consistent. And even if you're not making a lot of money, guess what? You're going to learn a lot in this next year, all right? You're going to be a better creator. You're going to create better content. You're going to know what your audience likes from you, what your audience does not like from you, and then you're going to focus in. You're going to dial in on that content that gets more views, that gets more response from your audience, and you're going to dial in on that and deliver more of that content. You're going to get more consistent and more focused in your messaging, all right? Your content is going to get better because maybe you've upgraded your camera, you got some lighting, all right? Be consistent. And if you are not consistent, make the schedule, commit the time. And I promise you, it will change your life forever changed mine.