The System I Used To Make $2 Million From YouTube in 2024

This is going to go over the system that I use to make over $2 million in revenue from YouTube in 2024. And I stress videos like this because YouTube is by far the number one way to get clients for your agency. You make YouTube videos, you have a lead magnet in the description, they fill out a form and start getting your email marketing. And that's how you get clients. So this is the exact system I used in terms of ideation creation, thumbnails testing and posting. And if you can see, I barely made $6700 in ad revenue for the whole year of 2024. And all of my $2 million in revenue was from selling a thousand X leads, my 10k per month school group and one on one consulting. So if you're gonna get into videos like this and you're gonna record, just know that almost none comes from ad revenue. So what I'm gonna do in this video is I'm gonna go into what I did and what I'm going to do differently very soon in 2025. So you can see what my plans are and probably save yourself some time if you plan on doing it. So if you don't know who I am and why, you should listen to me. My name is Matthew Larson and I currently consult with about 550 clients on a monthly basis. I have started or co founded and sold three agencies in the last 12 years, in 2017, 2018 and the last one was in 2023. And I make videos about agencies and agency marketing and Legion every single day. So I actually have a free training in the description of this video. This is my last video, but it'll be in the same spot if you want to go download it. And I also have a bunch of free tools on my website@MatthewBlarson.com Here are some reviews of working with me. You know, had no idea would add this much value to my business so quickly. You know, this is the agency cure and it's the best high ticket training we've ever bought. Just to show you that people actually do use this stuff and use my advice and I do like to think that I know what I'm talking about. For this video I'm going to go over 10 different things. The content, strategy, the style of video, the posting schedule, the equipment and setup, the titles, thumbnails, descriptions, audio funnel and the analytics. So what I'm going to do is go over what I did and what I did not do or what I didn't do well and then I'm going to go over what I plan to do in 2025 for all of them. So let's get started in a sec. You want to work with me and you're doing over 500k per year. My mastermind's the best call. If you're doing between 10 and 50k per month and just lead generation's your focus, join my program a thousand x leads. And if you're under 10k per month, the 10k per month school group is where you should go into. So let's get started into the system that I used to make 2 million from YouTube in 2024. And basically what you can do to copy it to get clients for your agency. So for my content strategy, I stuck to three overarching topics. They were lead generation, they were a little bit of personal optimization, and they were like time management. You could kind of think of that as personal optimization as well, But I've viewed them as three separate buckets for the purposes of my content. And a lot of people ask me how I made that many videos or what I do for my videos. Basically, what I do for a video is, let's say I just want to make a video about paid ads. Like, I just. Now is the time to make a paid ad video. Typically what I'll do is I will do 5, 10 minutes of research on chat GPT on quora.com or just using my own brain, and I'll think of, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20 FAQs. Like, what do people need to know? Like, okay, what do I do to set it up? What do I do for the pixel? What do I do for the ads? What type of ads? That kind of stuff. And basically I have an outline before I start the video, not unlike the one that I'm showing you on the screen right now. And then I basically hit all of those in the order that I think most people would have them. So if FAQ number three that I came up with was definitely the one that was, how would you say the most needed? Or like, most people had that faq, I would do it first, and then I would just keep going down the list until I figured all of the FAQs were done. The thing that I think is important if you're gonna make videos is the hidden alpha or the actionable tips that you can only get through experience. A lot of people have a video that either says and does nothing, really. Like, you don't even know what you watched because there was just nothing good in it. Or they just have stuff that is so basic and generic that you could find it on Google. It's the actionable tips. It's the stuff you can only learn from experience. It's those one or two nuggets of gold that's really valuable in a YouTube video. It's not the entire thing in itself. And really focus on that. And if you are thinking to yourself like I don't know what I do for that, it's probably because you don't have any experience or any alpha and you just need to get some. It's no real trick or stuff to say about it. Besides that. In terms of stuff that I'm going to do differently in 2025 because I just recently joined a very good YouTube course and I think it's very good. It's by film booth if you want to join it. I'm going to position all of my stuff solely as for being for agencies going to have a title of my channel is that all my thumbnails and titles where the videos are going to be about that? My intros. And I want to be known as kind of the agency expert or the agency guy. And I was resistant to this because realistically anybody could buy who's in a B2B service business could buy one of my offers. But looking at the data, 93% of my clients are agencies. So I think this just makes more sense to be known as the go to on YouTube for agencies. So that's what I'm going to do for my content strategy going forward. For the style of video, I kind of purposely made it very dry and specific. The kind of videos I make are not the videos that you would just randomly watch. You know, scrolling bed at Night and TikTok or on YouTube shorts. They're very unscripted and unedited and they focus on in my like it's my hope at least. And you can tell me what you think that they are going to give you valuable stuff that you can apply to your agency. I try to make it valuable, actionable and consumable. Sometimes I've done a better job than others at those, but that's at least what I try to do. I don't do any editing or jump cuts or anything like that or stuff on the screen because I don't think that really is helpful. And I think in most cases that's cover for the person who's making the video not really knowing what they're talking about. So in terms of 2025 and what I'm doing differently, I'm trying to make videos that are easier to follow and Working off bullet points based off FAQs for each topic. So kind of like what you're seeing on screen. That is my plan for 2025 in terms of style of video. Put it to action and I'm going to try to speak better on camera. I'm going to try to make better intros, I'm going to try to make it flow nicer and choose better topics to speak about. But this really is what you're going to get in 2025. It's a good balance for me because I can make them in terms of the outline pretty quickly and I can yap for a long time just because I'm so experienced. And I think it's the most valuable kind of video that you can get where you can just listen to it even and take notes. You don't have to look at anything. And I think it's just so good for the viewer who's actually trying to learn and not just be entertained. For my posting schedule, I really believe in just trying to post as close to daily as possible. And I think the purpose of that is one, it keeps the momentum for you pretty good. Like you just becomes part of your life. And two, your viewers really get into the daily routine of just watching and, you know, watching your videos like that. There's times in 2024 where I fell off a cliff and you can just go back in my channel and see that. Like if we just go back to, let's just see for a sec here. Videos, filter, visibility public. Like there's certain times where, you know, December 13th to the 29th, I fell off November 11th to the December 2nd. There are definitely times where I was consistent and times where I basically did nothing at all. And this year I'm really trying to just make it, you know, 300 plus videos, every video is better than the next and that kind of stuff. If you are doing YouTube for your agency, I really recommend just from 0 to 100 videos. Try to just do it as fast as possible. Maybe watch your previous video every day, make a new one, Write down three things that you could basically improve and just keep trying to do those small incremental improvements and your hundredth video will be a hundred times better than your first one. One stat that I've read from an internal Google document was that only two in a hundred videos go viral and only three in ten reached cold audiences. Something that I definitely got discouraged by a little bit this year. Maybe I just didn't understand that this is just how it works is where should we go? Here, like you see here, this is not a really good example, but you see like a lot of the time when you posting, you don't really get. Maybe I should go into a different video actually to show you that, like a lot of the time when you're posting, you see like, this got 811 unique viewers, but it got 644 returning viewers. Like basically no one knew watch the video. And that's kind of discouraging as someone who like puts a bunch of time into it, right. I'm sure everybody could relate to that. But only 3 in 10 audiences reach, or only 3 in 10 videos reach really any cold traffic at all. And only two in a hundred videos go viral. And viral means five times your average views is what the internal definition of viral is. So in 2025, like this year, I'm laying out four videos per day just to practice making these type of videos faster and also just making sure I always have something to record. So you can see my bookmark here. You'll see this fill up if I ever show it again. And I just want to be consistent in 2025 and just make it, I'm not going to bed until a YouTube video is posted type thing. For my equipment setup, I have a Sony ZV E10 camera. It's about 800 bucks. It's pretty nice. For this purpose and for the price point, I have a shure microphone. So maybe you could see it right here. I think it's one of the best microphones and you can tell me what you think about that. When I'm at home, I really have the big softbox lights going in and then I have one me, the three point lighting setup. But I've been traveling so much that I've got these table lights. And the problem with traveling is a lot of the lights and a lot of the microphone, like boom arm and stuff will have a clamp to the desk. But if you're constantly traveling in hotels and Airbnbs and on the road, it's kind of unpredictable because a lot of these desks aren't very nice to just clamp like that. So what I did is I bought for my camera that you're looking at, you can't see it. For my microphone and for my lights, there's one there and there's one there. I have actually where there's just like a stand on the table where you can just have it and it will just be there. So if you're traveling, that's a very good option for you. So I use a MacBook for these. I switched from Windows to Mac earlier in the year, and Mac is definitely better for recording, in my opinion. And I've been traveling a lot, so I'm prioritizing a lightweight setup that can fit in a suitcase that you can take apart. And I think I've got the magic set up at this point. So in 2025, when I stop traveling and settle down a little bit, I'm going to invest in a better home studio with one of those cameras that mine pretty good, I think. I'm just looking at my other screen here, but I'm going to invest in one of those cameras that, like, it looks like a movie. And I just haven't done that yet because I haven't been in one place long enough to. I don't think that kind of stuff's really practical to take with you on the road. In terms of the title, the basically what I've been doing is coming up with the idea. So let's say it's for paid ads or let's say it's for whatever. I've searched that on YouTube and kind of tried at least to see what kind of videos about that topic have gone viral or got more views than normal and changed the title to be something like that. Not exactly, but something close. And one of the things that I've not done a good job of, but I know and agree with, is that the title needs to give them reason to click. You want the title to be very clickbaity and then you want to deliver. And in 2025, because I'm trying to shift to just being known as the agency person on YouTube, I'm going to put the word agency in almost all of my titles one way or the other. Thumbnails, the same descriptions, that kind of stuff. So that's what I'm going to be doing here. So come up with an idea that you want to talk about that you think is valuable. And the idea can be different than the title and the thumbnail, the packaging, if you want to call it. So come up with something, turn it into an idea that sounds clickbaity and that could go viral and then go from there. Just because you have the title like that doesn't necessarily mean the entire video has to be like that. At the start, I did not do anything for the thumbnail. I just had the thousand x leads screenshot. I did this because I want to prioritize upload speed and getting to 100 videos as fast as possible, more than waiting for a designer. I've Tried a bunch of thumbnail designers. Even 48 hours when you're trying to post, every day is too long to wait. And in my opinion, the thumbnail barely matters at all for your current audience because they just know what your look. You look like you're in their subscription, they're going to watch it. But it definitely does matter a ton in the 3 out of 10 scenario that your thumbnails get pushed to cold audience. The thumbnails are so important in that situation for growth. And that's why I haven't been growing that fast to new audiences, in my opinion, because my thumbnails are absolutely ass for cold traffic. They are pretty good for, you know, being consistent and my audience knows what they look like. But for someone who's never watched one of my videos and doesn't know who I am, not good at all. What I think is the sweet spot is finding a thumbnail style that's very consistent. So every video is a different thumbnail but very consistent between it. So your audience can learn and instantly, subconsciously spot what your thumbnails look like and click on them in the feedback. But the, but also the thumbnail would work good enough with cold traffic to click. That would be the promise land. What I learned is that titles matter just as much as the thumbnail. And both of the title and the thumbnail should be congruent with each other and give them reason to click. Think of them as a pair more than two separate things. So what I'm going to be doing in 2025 is I'm training an AI bot for thumbnails. Hopefully you can't notice when I do it if the AI bot is good enough. And I'm going to be doing ABC testing on all the styles of my thumbnail. Because what you can do is let's see if I have one here. Like you can actually go in YouTube, where is it here? And you can actually do thumbnail ABC test if you want. And it will make watch time share as the metric. And you can see that this one performed the best, but this one was chosen and this one's the worst. So I think if you have like three different styles of thumbnails that you think you could do, you could test them over the course of 20 videos, like one of each style and then you could see what's actually the best. If you're going to put long term effort into this, the problem with having three different options is like if one or two of them perform that much worse, then you're just kind of screwed your own video. So there are positives and negatives of that, but it is what it is. The best thing that I did with, I guess it is common sense, but the lead magnet is always in the first line of the description as well as some of my offers are in the pin comments. And I've been doing that because I've gotten a very significant amount of completely organic traffic this year from that. And trust me, I blast the hell out of my email list. So you'll see that 5,600 people here, but there's like 20, 30,000 from YouTube alone. I just email them so much and try to get to buy my stuff. Like it's just one of those things. So capture their email address and then start marketing them. And then what I've been doing is instead of going on the A thousand x leads site, now what I've been doing is going to my personal site. And then you see, I get as much information as possible because they trust me enough, they watch my content, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then I get, you know, here and then on the thank you page it directs them to which offer is best for them. So if they're at 500k, it's a mastermind. If they're at a, you know, 10 to 50k, it's a thousand. Next leads, 0 to 10k is 10k per month. Or if they're at a million EBITDA for the past three years, I have a new offer where I'll help you sell your business. So what I'm going to be doing differently in 2025 is I'm going to be adding something of a description and try to rank in YouTube SEO better and have my all my offers more clearly in the description. So if you go into my upload defaults right now like I have download my training, I'm going to get rid of this workshop link or put it at the very bottom. Was just thinking about that before this video. But I've downloaded my free training, my website, the 5 mastermind, thousand x leads, 10k per month and then sign up for my live workshops. So I'm going to basically change it to that. But you can see I don't have anything like tag or not tags, but I don't have a description that ranks in SEO with the keywords. I'm going to put greater emphasis that in 2025. So basically what I'm going to have is I'm going to have my free training here so it's visible without clicking. And then I'm going to have my description here to try to rank in YouTube SEO, and then I'll have the rest of my bio like that. And I think that would be the best way to do it for you as well. So just something to think about there. For the audio, I've learned quite quickly that the sound quality is way more than the video or way more important than the video quality, if you had to choose one. Video quality is very important because it makes you look professional. But sound quality, if it's bad, just destroys an entire video. So what I've been doing is using this thing called a phonic to optimize my sound. So it's an AI sound engineer for podcasts. You can use it for videos as well. So basically what happens. Let me see if I can show this here. I don't want to show how it works in obs, which is my recording tool, because it might screw up recording this video here. But basically when I save a video, it's automatically saved into Dropbox. So let me open up my Dropbox here so you'll see apps here. A phonic. So all my videos are saved here. And the A phonic workflow will watch that. So it's watching it. And then I have a preset, it's called. And then I have my description in there. I'm gonna have my chapters in there. It's going to do the noise reduction. It's going to normalize everything and make these audio sound way better. And then it's going to automatically upload to my YouTube channel. So I wish I had an example here, but when you screw up when you're recording, it goes through this process and shows them and uploads it all here. But the sound quality difference for like $13 a month is like an entire studio setup. So you gotta be doing that. It'll save you a lot of time uploading it because it'll do it automatically. But it'll also make your videos sound 10 times better tuned differently in 2025. I put a blank there. I don't think I can do anything better for the sound other than probably speaking more confidently with more conviction and that kind of stuff. But that's not really the audio. So the next thing in the funnel, I want to go back to what I said before. So the lead magnet and I kind of jumped the gun on this. But the lead magnet is in the first line here. So if we click on it and then we go to my site and then we have our stuff like this, we download the free lead generation Training. Now we have the offers on the thank you page and I'm going to put a VSL here. That's why there's a big space there. There's just haven't recorded it yet. And basically now I have their email, they've seen the offers on thank you page. They're going to get my emails that I am creating now because I'm just creating them from scratch again. So I have a 30 day welcome flow coming in here. Sign up to my list for sure because I'm going to do one agency tip per day for 30 days on this as my nurture sequence. And then what I think you should do, and I said it before, but you want to get as much information as possible because that's going to help you qualify people, that's going to help you call them for your appointment setter. If you're doing paid ads, for example, you might have less just because it's more friction. It will increase your cost per lead a lot. But because it's YouTube, you know, there's no warmer lead than some lead that comes to your site through YouTube. So you can just basically get as much information as you can in 2025. And I've already done this, I'm sending it all to my site and then splitting it out instead of just a thousand x leads just because I have different offers for the analytics. And let's go into my analytics because my analytics are not the best, not gonna lie. But we wanna focus on the CTR especially. And something I think is very important is your ctr. Now this up here is not that useful. Your CTR has to be like because you're gonna get a different CTR from search versus browse versus your channel, page versus direct and that kind of stuff. So your CTR might look good or it looks look bad. But you know, it all depends in the context of this. Like this is a bad ctr. I'm not saying it's not. But what you need to do is think of it like that. You want to focus on your ctr. But if you post a video that doesn't perform basically and only your returning video viewers see it like your CTR is naturally going to be higher because it's. Your subscribers are the only ones that are watching it versus if you post a video that goes kind of viral or goes to cold traffic, your CTR is going to be naturally lower because it's a broader and broader audience who doesn't know you. So just keep that in mind. The second thing that I'm going to focus on, and I think everybody should focus on this year is the retention at 30 seconds. So I don't know why I can't open it there. But at the 32nd mark you want to have, as far as I'm told, at least 60% of people who are still watching at the 32nd mark. And if you actually click on this and it goes properly and it's not broken for some reason, you can sort it by new viewers versus returning. So it's almost like you want 60% of new viewers to keep watching at 30 seconds and like 75 of returning. So that's all in your packaging and your hook and your intro and that kind of stuff. It's very, very important because that's what's going to have an outsized impact on the how many people watch the entire video. And then the final thing I want to work on and learn and do that kind of stuff is the average view duration. And when you're trying to get clients for your agency through this, I think the number one thing you want to optimize for is total watch time, in my opinion. So that usually means making longer tutorials. But the average view duration as a like true number is kind of deceiving because it's naturally going to be higher if you make an hour long videos as opposed to 10 minutes, just because there's certain people who are going to watch a full hour and those that's going to. It's kind of almost like the, you know, average net worth or average income. The people at the very top skew it drastically higher. So you got to make sure your average view duration is high, but also in the context of how long your video is. So I'm doing six minutes here, let's say of a 37 minute video and in this one I'm doing, let's see, 3 minutes and 14 seconds, but of a 12 minute video. So in terms of like the percentage that someone watched, this one has a higher percentage than the other one, but the average view duration is lower. So just keep that in mind. So what I'm doing in 2025 is I made a spreadsheet, I think it's right here. And I just made this today. So I'm gonna actually track all of this stuff because what gets measured gets improved. And I'm gonna be tracking impression CTR retention as a percentage average watch time and that kind of stuff. And I'm gonna do that seven days after posting. I know it can perform better or worse after seven days, but I'm just gonna choose seven days. I'm gonna try to make these numbers go up and you're gonna see that. So it's gonna be very, very important for me because YouTube is a large percentage of my sales and I wanna make 5 million this year from that's the end of the video. If you want more from me. The five mastermind if you're doing 500k a year or more thousand x leads if you're between 10 and 50k a month, 10k per month if you're doing under Connect with me on Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn and subscribe like comment and suggest other video ideas. Thanks for watching. Subscribe.