The Exact Systems Behind a $1m YouTube Channel

This is the thing that's actually going to get you the outcome that you want. Joanna Vee, she started to implement a system. The first video that she did has got over 200,000 views overnight.

Tintin Smith is a YouTube strategist and coach who helps educational YouTubers turn their channels into 6-figure businesses. What exactly should I be spending my time on?

Obviously number 1 is just filming, positioning and strategy, ideation, scripting and planning. And finally, number 5 is just—

What's number 1 on your list of what you should not do?

Number 1—

is he spent 2 years as Ali Abdaal's head of YouTube, running the entire operation while the channel grew from 3 to 6 million subscribers and generated millions of dollars in revenue.

Whilst I was there, he typically averages around $5 million in revenue and a few million in profit. The YouTube channel is like the number one traffic source and core driver behind all of that revenue.

If you have a channel and you're trying to scale it into a serious business, this episode is a masterclass.

You don't get to the good ideas by trying to just focus on a few. You get to the good ideas by coming up with tons. And the way that you actually select the best ones is incredible.

I'm hooked. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Nathan. Happy to be here.

So I want to start with a question that I've been curious about, which is how many subscribers do you need to earn $1 million a year on YouTube?

Uh, a really good question. Makes a lot of sense. I think it's probably what a lot of your audience are thinking about. Uh, the real answer is that there is no specific number, and it can be as low as 500 or 1,000 subscribers on your channel, I think. Because if those 500 or 1,000 people are the right people and you have a high-ticket business where you have a very expensive product, then you only need 1,000 of the right people following your channel. So yeah, I mean, I've seen 7-figure channels with tens of thousands of subscribers all the way up to obviously millions of subscribers. So there's no right answer.

Who comes to mind as someone maybe outside of the like business or making money online niche who has a smaller following and then an outsized revenue from, from that?

I think the one I know personally the best is a friend of mine called Arman Manaseh, who actually went through Ali Abdaal's kind of YouTube course. And his channel is all about helping software engineers land jobs. So it's a great niche because obviously software engineers typically get paid quite well.

Yeah, and maybe $100,000, few hundred thousand dollars a year.

Exactly. And so they can, he can charge quite a, like, a high price for his coaching program where he helps people land those jobs. And he started to hit 7 figures in revenue when he was around, I think, 50, 60,000 subscribers.

Yeah, it's a lot fewer than I would expect.

Yeah. And so, and he's like 24 as well. He's a very impressive guy. So, you know, not necessarily the average example, but it really doesn't matter, or it matters less how big the audience is. It just matters how intentionally you're creating that audience and the kind of offer that you have on the back of your YouTube channel.

Yeah, something that I talk about is the difference between an audience and a crowd.

Yeah.

Where an audience is the right people paying attention and a crowd is just any, any views, anything. And so if you get the right people and you have the right offer in front of them, you can actually earn quite a bit.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that, I mean, that's what I do is, help YouTubers turn their audiences into businesses. And sometimes that involves like shifting from this mindset of building an audience to, or just building a crowd.

Yeah.

To intentionally curating your audience to be full of people who actually wanna buy from you. Yeah.

And we'll get into all of that. Uh, before we do that, you spent a couple of years as the head of YouTube for Ali Abdaal.

Yeah.

So Ali is someone who's built a very, very impressive business. I feel like anyone who is studying YouTube, studying entrepreneurship, like knows him, knows his content and all that. You have like a behind the scenes look. I'm curious, first, are there any numbers that you can share? And Ali's fairly public with a couple of these numbers.

Yeah, he's fairly public. Yeah, I won't claim too much credit behind any of these numbers. You know, Ali's like a very unique and impressive guy and I absolutely loved working for him. But whilst I was there, he was, and I think still to this day, typically averages around $5 million in revenue a year and a few million in profit. And over 50% of his revenue comes from his own offers and products. So for a long time, the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, and these days he's got a new one called the Lifestyle Business Academy where he helps people kind of build a lifestyle business. And the YouTube channel is the main traffic source behind the business. So he's obviously on Instagram, on LinkedIn, a little bit of paid ads, but until recently especially, he wasn't actually running any paid ads. And so the YouTube channel is like the number one traffic source and core driver behind all of that revenue. Yeah.

Yeah. It's the, the top of the funnel, the main thing that draws everyone in. He's got all the other aspects to it. I think a lot of people see YouTube and they get excited about it because of the ad revenue, right? Most platforms, Instagram, these other platforms, they don't really pay you money, whereas YouTube will actually pay you on ads. And so people have this assumption that if you get really big on YouTube, then you're going to be making all your money from ads and going from there. People make money that way, but the channels that you're talking about, that is not the main way they monetize, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So typically on YouTube, you can earn an average, let's say somewhere around $5 for every 1,000 views that you get, which means that if you get 1 million views, you might get $5,000 from YouTube itself, which is way better than any other platform. But the trick there is, or the catch is that it's very hard to get 1 million views and increasingly so it gets harder and harder. And the whole game with content creation really, or kind of with just with ads and with marketing is how much money you're getting back for how many eyeballs you get. And YouTube give you that stat with AdSense, which is RPM, revenue per mille. So how many, how much money do you make for every 1,000 views? And you can increase that with like, you know, a sponsor or brand deal. You might be getting, let's say, $30 for every 1,000 views that you get. That's kind of maybe the deal that you set up, or maybe that's roughly how they price your channel is like, you get around 20,000 views per video, so we're gonna give you this much for a video. But then you can increase that that return, that RPM, even more by selling your own offers and products. And you can start to get into territory where if you get 1,000 views, you might get $100 or $500 or $1,000 if you have a really good audience and high-quality audience and also the right offer behind it.

So now what you're doing, now that you're out on your own separate from Ollie and his team, um, give me a little breakdown of that. And then if there's an example of one of your students who has like a really high, you know, revenue per thousand subscribers or views based on having a really good offer.

So after leaving Ali's team, I decided to launch this coaching program accelerator to help educational YouTubers with audiences, but without massive audiences like Ali Abdaal, turn it into a business. 'Cause that's what Ali did. He kind of, he grew this audience and then he turned it into a business. And I wanted to help smaller YouTubers without as bigger followings do the same and build like 6-figure businesses rather than trying to, um, you know, build something crazy like 7 figures. Just help people make that initial leap. And one very interesting channel or client that I work with is called Amy. She has a channel all about, uh, breaking unhealthy relationship patterns through somatic healing as well, like in, in the, uh, dealing with like your body and the kind of nervous system and things like that. And she has a high-ticket coaching business off the back of her channel where she helps people kind of overcome those hurdles. And she only has, I think at the time, 45,000, 50,000 subscribers. And she makes a multiple six figures, which is an amazing return on that channel. And considering she doesn't work like insane hours, she puts a lot of effort in, but it's not like an overwhelming business. And so she's just very intentional about the content that she makes and then the offer that she presents to those people.

And what I love about that is it's not like she just went viral or something. There's actually a system behind it.

Yeah.

And then these videos, they go out, they keep working for you. Yeah.

Right.

These videos, they might get a lot of traffic initially and then level off or dip. Yeah, but they're going to continue to get traffic and views and drive leads and all of this towards a sustainable business for a long time. So it's like these little assets or annuities that continue to pay you a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. Over time, I think one of the best ways to think about your channel is the goal over time is not to go viral every single time. The goal is to make a library of bingeable content around one specific transformation. So I think most of your audience are probably gonna have channels where they're like teaching something or helping people go from A to B in some way, like not entertainment channels basically. And we wanna make our YouTube channel a bingeable library of content, helping people go from A to B and covering all the different things that they might need to know about.

All right, so you have flown halfway around the world to my studio here in Boise, Idaho in order to teach a masterclass on YouTube. Like what are we gonna cover today?

So we're gonna cover the ins and the outs of the production systems behind a $1 million YouTube channel from the perspective of the founder or entrepreneur. I love that.

I'm super curious to learn this myself. So let's jump up to the board and cover it.

Awesome.

All right, so this might be the most pre-prepared board that we've had coming into an episode. What do we have going on here?

Yeah, so I mean, I thought a bit about it before coming in. So we've got, first of all, on this side of things is really like essentially the inputs from you and your team. So what's the team behind one of these channels? And like that can be scaled up or down as well, depending on whether you're, you want to go all out like someone like Dan Martell or Alex Hormozi, or whether you just want to have like one video editor and it's just you and them. And so we can talk about why you might want to do different things there. Then, uh, the schedule. So what does your schedule look like as an entrepreneur trying to build a successful YouTube channel, and how much time is it going to take you? Then what is the overall production system? So we've got 7 steps here, the different things that it's going to take to actually build one of these channels and where you're going to be involved in it. And then we've just got 5 things to do and to not do as the entrepreneur, just to kind of guide you on where's gonna be the highest leverage use of your time.

Incredible, I'm hooked. Where do we go from here?

Okay, so why don't we just start with the YouTube production systems? 'Cause that's gonna give us the overall picture of what we need to do and what team members we might need to have in place as well. And you know, there's that famous James Clear quote, which is like, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So this is the thing that's— are actually gonna get you the outcome that you want. You don't just get views or whatever by thinking about getting views. You think you have a system in place. So I think let's cover that.

What's number 1 on the system?

So number 1 is positioning and strategy.

Okay.

So positioning strategy is a core pillar behind your YouTube channel. Obviously it's like, what are the kind of videos you're gonna be making? What is the overall picture of your channel? And there are 3 things that I think make this up that people wanna be thinking about. Keep it nice and simple. We just have you, your avatar, and your niche. So those are the 3 things. We can just quickly explore each of those. Keep it nice and simple. This is also something that really evolves as you make videos. You don't wanna like really overthink it to begin with because as you start to make videos, you start to get into the YouTube process, these things will change. But to start with, you wanna have a clear idea of you. So your backstory, your credibility, and fundamentally answering this question, why should I listen to you? So your viewers, like why should they care about what you've done? In your case, if you're starting like a typical talking head channel, like, Dan Martell or whatever, Alex Hormozi. You'd be saying, I'm the founder of Kit and it does this much in revenue.

We have a team of 100 people. We built it to $50 million a year in revenue and we serve clients like James Clear, Dan Martell, Matthew McConaughey, Dua Lipa.

Immediately I'm going to listen to this guy. That's incredible. What an amazing kind of story. And so being really clear just about what is your credibility, what's your backstory, but also what are the elements of your personality that you want to bring into the content? So just like, dialing up as much of you as possible, 'cause it's gonna be a key thing. You are obviously the differentiator from Daniel Priestley, Alex Hormozi, or any other channel in your niche. I'm just using those as examples.

They teach the same. So I might bring in, like, contrast some things. I don't live in a Las Vegas high-rise. I live on a little hobby farm in Boise, Idaho. You're gonna find me woodworking, playing volleyball, and gardening when I'm not building a software.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I think that, that's what makes you likable. It's what makes people relate to you and differentiates you from the other guys in your space. And obviously we've been talking about these guys in the make money niche. All of this stuff applies to any channel, whatever niche you're in. And so then the next thing is avatar. So just being very clear on who it is you're targeting. Now, if you're an entrepreneur already, you're gonna be pretty clear on who is your ideal customer. And that's the same person that you wanna be targeting in your content. So Hopefully you have a reasonably clear idea of that, but that's just because when you're making your videos, when you're going through the rest of these steps, you wanna be super clear on who are we actually making videos for? Who do we want to be watching these? And yeah, that can be the same as in your business. And then your niche is when you are coming to building your channel and taking your channel more seriously, you wanna have an understanding what's going on in your space. So if you're in the relationship space, the health space, the kind of like software engineering space, you wanna understand who are the other channels And the most important thing is to look for patterns in what's working. So we don't wanna just copy people, but we wanna understand or get a picture of what's working, what's not working, what are people typically looking for, what are they not looking for? And through that research, you're gonna get a clear idea of, okay, where are the gaps? Where can I come in? Where does my experience and background lend itself to filling the gaps and the opportunities that I've see— that I see from this research?

Yep.

That all make sense?

Yeah, that does.

Cool. Okay. So next thing after positioning strategy is just gonna be ideation. So generating and then selecting video ideas for your channel. So yeah, ideation, there are two really simple steps here. It's just generating lots and lots of ideas. You know, you don't get to the good ideas by trying to just focus on a few. You get to the good ideas by coming up with tons.

Okay.

And what are all the different things I might wanna talk about on my channel? And then the second thing is just selecting the best ones. And the way that you actually select the best ones is through doing a bit of research, what's working well, in your niche, finding those patterns, but also if you've got videos on your channel before, what's worked well before. It's gonna be important data for selecting the next ones to make. But those are the two simple steps to go through.

That sounds good.

Then the third step here is packaging. So titles and thumbnails. So titles and thumbnails, in case people don't know, they're the first thing that viewers see when they come onto YouTube and they come to the platform. You don't see videos, you see the little image, the thumbnail, and the title of the video. And so we want to be thinking about before we commit to a video, before we actually commit to making anything, putting time into something, we want to have thought about what is the thing that the viewer is going to see first. Are they actually going to be interested in this and click on it? If they don't click, they don't watch. It's a good thing to just have in your mind. And this is where it can be very helpful to have your first team member, particularly outsourcing your thumbnail. So everyone in your audience, because they're all entrepreneurs, they should definitely be outsourcing their thumbnails. You're going to want to outsource your thumbnails, which we can come over to to the team here to have a look at kind of what the overall team picture might look like and then come back to the systems as well. So at the top you've obviously just got you as the entrepreneur and, uh, you're in a little box like that. Yeah. And we're going to assume that to build a $1 million YouTube channel you don't need to have this, but you might want to have a YouTube producer. So that is the role that I had with while I was working with Ali Abdaal. And what I would do is then communicate with Ali be his main, his like really his only source of communication to keep it simple for him. And then I would communicate with all the other team members involved. So let's put YouTube producer below you. So you definitely don't need this role. You like, you've got, you know, free time as an entrepreneur, which like some people can do, like have, you know, less time spent on delivery depending on the nature of their business. They might just have the time to do the YouTube producer role themselves, but you're gonna get a lot of return with someone who's very good in this role. And so the YouTube producer will be coordinating with the thumbnail designer.

Okay.

So where do I put them?

Are they thumbnail designer right here?

Let's put them over to the left. Let's put them over to the left. Yeah.

We're just gonna say designer.

Just designer. Yeah. Nice. And again, you know, there are lots of different variations of what a successful team might look like, but the YouTube producer could be doing the thumbnails themselves. I did that for Ali for a while and then we decided to outsource them because I'm not a particularly good designer. So, you know, again, if you happen to be like your background is in graphic design, you might be good at designing thumbnails, but it's just not gonna be the case. It's a different skill set.

Yeah. And it's like being immersed in that world, having someone who specializes is a good idea.

It's a very high return on your time because it can be the difference between a successful channel and a successful channel.

How expensive is this role?

So thumbnail designers, The benchmark really is, like typically you're paying per thumbnail.

Okay.

And you'll start to find good ones at like $50 per thumbnail.

Okay.

And they can be harder to find. Obviously the more you're willing to pay, then the easier it is to find someone. But the best ones, they will start to charge up to like $100, $200 per thumbnail.

And is that per thumbnail concept they develop or per video that they do a finished thumbnail for?

It's typically like per finalized, thumbnail. So if you want multiple concepts, then it might be a little bit more. Maybe you get some kind of package deal. But I work with a designer who I pay $50 per thumbnail, but they will do a few variations for me. Like they change the text and maybe it's a slightly different concept and things like that.

But— Let me write that down. And so you're saying basically $50 to $150?

I think $50 to $200 is just to give that range for your audience. 'Cause there are gonna be some people watching who have the budget. To spend on the top designers. But again, this can—

It's not that expensive, right? If we're talking about a video a week, we're in the $200 to $800 a month on this cost here.

Yeah, exactly.

And you're saying this is worth it. Titles and thumbnails matter. So getting someone who—

Yeah, it can be the difference between a channel that gets 1,000 views and 50,000 views a video just because people are clicking on it and people wanna click. But it is important to say that with AI getting better and better, there are tools that help you do both titles and thumbnails with AI. So something like One of Ten, oneoften.com, is probably the best one out there at the moment. It doesn't yet make your finalized thumbnail, but it can give you great inspiration and great concepts that you can tweak a little bit. And so the cost is going down, but a good designer is still worth their weight in gold. Definitely something to consider trying to find.

Okay, that sounds good. What's the next role?

Let's just go to the next step in the systems, 'cause that's gonna then bring out another role, which is script writing and planning. So that's the next thing. Once you've come up with a video idea and a title and thumbnail for that video idea, then it kind of goes officially into production. And that's where you then wanna start writing and planning the video. And so things, Can I stop you there?

Because me not being a YouTube expert, these steps are backwards from what I would do. I would come up with the, I would write the script. I would actually have titles and thumbnails much later in here. Talk to me about why it's number 3.

So there's, I guess, the theory here and then also the reality and what actually happens in your experience as an entrepreneur or just as a YouTuber. So the theory is that it's the first thing that the viewer sees kind of as we discussed. And so we wanna start with something that the viewer wants to click on. And then think about the content that comes afterwards. Because sometimes you come up with, well, if you make a video and then think about the title and thumbnail afterwards, you realize, I can't figure out a way to package this very well. And therefore you've made this amazing video, but no one's clicked on it in the first place. And that's when you get let down, the performance doesn't work, the performance doesn't go very well and you kind of get a bit despondent. So it makes sense to just start with that. But the reality is that it's very hard to finalize title and thumbnails every single time before you commit to writing and planning. They can be a little bit more like, these aren't just 100% completed one after the other. You sometimes go, as you write and plan, you're like, oh, actually maybe we should tweak this thumbnail a little bit to this.

So it can be fluid between the sets.

So they can be a little bit fluid.

But start with, I mean, you said packaging. I wrote titles and thumbnails.

Yeah, that's fine.

So you're saying start with packaging so you know exactly, have we come up with a concept that is gonna get people to click? Because if not, let's not go spend the next, 20 hours on the video.

Exactly, yeah. And this can really depend on the channel that you have as well. For this podcast, we're posting this on YouTube. We put a lot of time into, I mean, coming out here, you organizing it, giving up your time, and we want it to succeed and work. And so we spoke about the title a little bit and even the thumbnail beforehand because we want to know that this is going to be something that, this conversation's going to be something that people are interested in. So you want to have, as best you can, a finalized title and a finalized thumbnail concept. It doesn't have to be completely ready, but it's just like, we kind of know what we're doing here. We know what the thumbnail text might be, and then we can go into production and the writing and planning.

Okay.

And so once it's kind of in production, again, you can do this all on your own. You don't need a team for this, and it's easy to overcomplicate YouTube. However, if we're trying to recreate maybe like a very successful channel like Ali Abdaal or something like that, you might have a scriptwriter or someone to help you with research and planning as well. So we can add that to the team. So an example we mentioned earlier was Arman Manaseh, who has a channel about software engineering, landing software engineering jobs. Now he kind of wrote and planned all of his content for a while, like a year to 2 years, where he was just kind of sitting down thinking about what are the things I want to share in this video. And obviously, this is the preparation for the video itself. This is really important. You want to put time into this, put effort into this. However, recently he has hired a scriptwriter and someone he's trained through over several weeks and months, and someone who also had a background in this already to help him systemize that side of things. So what they'll probably do is they'll have a meeting where they come up with, or they agree on the video that they want to go ahead with. And then Aman might brain dump some kind of interesting things to talk about, and then they'll turn it into a word-for-word video script. But you obviously don't have to have a word-for-word script. In your niche, if you were to do your YouTube channel, your competitors like Daniel Priestley, Alex Hormozi, Dan Martell, they don't have word-for-word scripts. They're kind of just explaining the ideas and concepts that they've had in their brain for years.

Okay. Or they may have They've distilled a bunch of things down into a book or something like that. And then someone's going through, a writer on their team might be going through and saying, hey, here's something you talked about in the book. Like, we have a video packaged in this way that we wanna do. And you're like, okay, say no more. Like, just roll the camera and I'll give you some good stuff.

Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. 'Cause they're just so fluent with those ideas. But the thing that you do wanna do with writing planning is you do wanna script the intro word for word. Because as I'm sure most of your audience know, with content, when people start watching it, the intro, the first 30 seconds is where you see most drop-offs. Right. So retention matters. It's worth scripting the intro word for word and to set up the promise of the video, to demonstrate your credibility, to make it sound like something that people actually want to watch. And importantly, to confirm the expectations set by the title and thumbnail as well.

Okay. Why don't you write intro right here and we put a star next to it or something? 'Cause that's something that's really important.

Yeah. Yep. Little star.

I like it.

So that is worth scripting word for word. There are some people out there who will argue that your whole video should be word for word scripted, but it doesn't often account for just enjoyment. It can just be really boring to read off a teleprompter. Some people are really good at it. I don't know if you've seen Ramit Sethi's channel.

Yeah.

But he's just like, his videos are scripted word for word, and they're so good. I love watching his channel. I love learning about like personal finance from him, but it's all word for word. He's just so good on camera and he's so good at acting and all that kind of stuff.

He's done a lot of media training.

He's done so much. He's just been doing this stuff for 15 years now. But then if you look at Daniel Priestley, who's building his channel recently, he is not scripting word for word. He's kind of drawing stuff and he's kind of being fluid. He's just got that natural kind of charisma that comes across very well. And so it is really personal preference, but it's also gonna be revealed kind of just through time of like making videos, what's gonna work for you, whether you need a writer, whether you need a researcher, someone to help you kind of like bring your ideas to life. It is just very helpful to have someone who's just to bounce ideas with, to kind of create, to help you create the content together basically. That can be your YouTube producer. So you don't necessarily need a writer if you've got a competent YouTube producer who you can bounce ideas with. And they can do a kind of put some content together as well. So there are two more quick things that we wanna think about in this phase as well before we commit to filming, which is calls to actions and lead magnets. So I can just go through both of those. Yeah, you're great. So those are actually gonna be the things that are gonna allow us to take someone from being a viewer who's found us on YouTube for the first time, they've watched one of our videos, and then we take them from being a viewer to being a potential lead, potential customer eventually as well, which is where your amazing software comes in. Yes. Kit. Uh, let's start with lead magnets. As you're planning your video, you might want to be thinking about what is the specific resource that I can kind of bring into the content that my viewers are going to want, and maybe even build the content around that. So it could be some kind of template or checklist or whatever you walk through in the video, and then you can say, if you want this, uh, this resource here, you can get it by going to the first link in the description, and then viewers have to put in their email to get it, and then they obviously become a lead. So I'm going to put down here, um, kind of— I'll put down LMs for, okay, um, lead magnets. And then the second part of that process, obviously, is once you've got the lead magnet, is planning when you're going to say your call to action. Typically you don't really want to be doing it before 3 minutes into the video because 3 minutes we're just focused on retention. Your viewers haven't really earned that— you haven't earned that trust with them yet. They're still just like seeing if they want to watch the video. And so we want to kind of provide enough value before we make that call to action. If the lead magnet is so specifically integrated into the content, you might want to bring it out in the intro and just be like, the thing we're going to be talking about in this video is this thing and you can get it with the first link in the description. That could be like 30 seconds in.

Hey, so I got a comment the other day, which was, what do you actually do? They'd been listening to the show for a while, been enjoying the content about growing a creator business, but didn't understand what I do. And they thought, Maybe you're a full-time podcaster. They didn't realize that this is the side hustle. My main thing is building Kit. Kit is an email marketing platform for creators. I think one of the groups that should really pay attention to and start using Kit is anyone who's grown a lot on social but doesn't own that audience. Kit is built for the creators who mean business. So those are the people who have gotten a bunch of attention on social and then turned it into a sustainable business with a diversified revenue stream, automations, a team, and more. So if that's you or you want to become that type of creator, go check out kit.com and learn what we can do for you. Okay, so what you're saying there is that the lead magnet can't come in the very beginning, but you don't want to wait to the very end, right? You need it partway through the video.

Yeah.

What does a timeline look like for that?

Let's draw a little timeline. But again, there's obviously nuance and context to this. So let's just do it down here. Let's say this is the length of your whole video. Okay. We have the kind of intro here, the first 30 seconds. Let's put just 30 seconds there. Typically you wanna script this word for word and you just wanna be focusing on confirming the title and thumbnail expectation, setting up your credibility, why they should listen to you, and laying out like a plan for the video, what value they're gonna get. And then in terms of your call to action, again, this doesn't have to be to a lead magnet. It can be that you go direct to your offer. Let's say you have a coaching business and it's just book a call down below if you want help doing this thing. So your call to action can be to direct the offer or to the lead magnet. But typically, let's say, let's put the 3-minute mark here. You don't want to be doing call to action before that, right?

Because we're pure value in this section.

We just want to be winning their attention and trust.

Hook to there and then value.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

I think that's a good way of thinking about it. And then the reason for that is like at 3 minutes, you've still got a large percentage of people watching. Maybe 50% of people who clicked on it are still watching and lots of them are still gonna see the thing that you're talking about. But the later on you do it, the call to action, then the more engaged viewers are gonna be the ones who are watching. And so you do see some videos where the call to action is like right at the end, it's like, let's say 15 minutes in and the people who see that are just like the most engaged viewers. So there's no like 100% right or wrong. Can I do both? Absolutely, yeah. So if you do 2 call to actions, it typically does increase the number of conversions.

So I might do a quick one here at 3 minutes.

Yeah.

Especially if it's for a lead magnet that might help someone implement what's, you know, they're taking notes and like, actually don't need to take notes.

You can go to this link and download it right now. Exactly, yeah. The one exception though, as we said, was that if the whole video is like around the lead magnet, was around the template, then you can mention it in this like 30-second mark and just say, If you wanna get the template that we're gonna be using in this video, then it's the first link in the description. And I do that on some of my videos where I'm talking about a specific thing. So yeah, let's just put on here CTAs for call to action. So these are the things you might wanna be thinking about in the writing and planning phase. But we spent a while on this. So let's go to the next one, which is filming. So with filming, I think it makes sense to come to the schedule down here now, 'cause this is obviously a key part of your responsibilities as the entrepreneur. At the top of your team, no one else can do it for you. And I mean, all of these talking head channels are gonna be, it's gonna be you're the one doing it rather than you can't really outsource it. And we don't want it to be a faceless channel either. So there's a bunch of different ways of approaching filming, but one good principle to have in mind is batching. So trying to batch record videos. So trying to record at least 2 in every filming session is like a good way to approach it. Some people find that hard because they find filming just like such a tiring thing. It's a very helpful principle to bear in mind. And so this is a kind of monthly calendar for you as an entrepreneur. Everyone's gonna find their own like schedule that works best for them. But I mean, what I do is I actually record every single Thursday and I try to film at least one, ideally two. That's kind of the rule I set for myself. And that's because I like filming on a regular basis. I find that if I film once a month, I just lose kind of touch with the skill, I guess. And it is a skill. It's like a really key part of the system is you coming across well on camera, presenting your ideas well, articulating stuff well. So that's what I do. But I know Alex Hormozi, for example, he's shared that he just does one filming day a month and he just batch films 4 or 5 videos. 6 videos all in one day. So they do all of this stuff, the preparation in advance, and then just knock it off in one day.

So he's gonna take a single day, I don't know, let's say it's this Tuesday or something like that.

Yeah, just one full day.

And he's got the entire day.

Yeah, just to really get into it. But that, again, can be quite a lot. It's just quite draining. Filming videos is quite tiring. So—

One thing that I found is, Once on a trip, we tried to do 4 podcast episodes in a day because we had the studio, we were offsite and all of that. And we actually didn't end up publishing the 4th video because we didn't quite get the packaging right and a few things, but really it was just, I didn't have the energy to do it anyway. I was like, I did not produce a good video because it was on hour 8 of filming and the fire alarm had gone off at 5:00 AM in the hotel that morning. So there's some complicating factors. But really, like what you're saying is, or what I heard in that is two different things. One, or three things. First, always batch record, even if it means two.

Yeah.

Right? Because then if you miss a week, you end up being sick, whatever.

Yeah, exactly. And you've got a little buffer.

The second thing is to keep it to a system where if you do it often enough, you stay in the rhythm and you're not like a month later, you're like, how do I do this? Especially if you're not a professional yet. Alex Hormozi doing this at such a huge scale, he's a machine. But maybe you or I starting on YouTube, we're like, I need to actually keep this skill fresh. You and I are both pilots, right? If you were to not fly for a month, that first time you get back in, you're like, okay, yep. Let me, like the muscle memory has to come back. So same thing on the YouTube videos. And the third thing I heard you say is to really align the quantity of recording with your own output and energy levels and all of that. 'Cause the last thing that we want is to record a bunch of videos and just notice later in the edit or something else of like, oh, I just didn't have any energy. Like those later videos just weren't good. I didn't do, like I did a huge disservice to the writing and the thumbnail and the planning.

All this prep. Yeah, prep.

Because I just, I didn't perform.

Yeah, exactly. 100%. So I think it's gonna look different for everyone. You need to find your kind of rhythm. And it's worth saying here as well that filming is a really core pillar, obviously, in the whole process. And putting filming dates in the calendar is what forces all of this stuff to actually happen. 'Cause you're like, oh my gosh, I've got a filming day next Tuesday. I need to get some fricking ideas down. I need to get some titles and thumbnails down. I need to plan some videos. So it's the thing that when it's in the calendar kind of forces everything else into action, which is really helpful. So you find your filming schedule and then you commit to it. That's what then makes everything else happen. And I also think it's quickly worth mentioning here, at this point you might be like, one of your audience might be listening or watching to this and being like, oh my gosh, there's so many things, there's a whole team, there's all these systems and whatever. But we spoke previously about this channel by a guy called Azul Wells. And Azul's strategy for all of this stuff was, to just take out video, take out his phone and record a video every single day, about 10 minutes long, and just share his experience working as a financial advisor for 20 years. And he just didn't overcomplicate it.

I think he's been to Craft and Commerce.

I think he's been to the studios. He probably has.

He lives in Salt Lake, right?

I actually don't know where he lives.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's been. I've met him. I think he's recorded here in Kit Studios.

He's a great creator and entrepreneur. And that was his strategy. And he went to 0 to 100,000 subscribers in a year. And so whatever variation of this you end up going for, it's gonna take a lot of effort, but it doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to feel heavy. You have to find your version of it that feels fun, feels energizing, 'cause otherwise you're just not gonna continue with it. So I think we should encourage your audience to take everything with a pinch of salt here to find their rhythm, to find their approach. And this is very much the all-in kind of strategy. The down martel kind of approach. Maybe you could've got a videographer in there or something. Yeah, okay. I think that's everything with filming, I guess. Anything else you wanted to go through that or?

Yeah, that sounds good on filming and then we'll come back to the schedule as we fill in more things.

So number 6 is then editing. So definitely not something you should be doing yourself, which is like a little teaser for one of the things not to do. But yeah, most videos on YouTube need to be edited. So I know that we just mentioned Azul, His videos aren't edited. They are a bit more now. But most of them are gonna need some kind of editing and is not a good thing for you to be spending your time as an entrepreneur doing. That's another team member too. So this is another team member, video editor. Cool. So I think it's worth mentioning at this point that it can be that you don't have a YouTube producer here. It's just you communicating with the writer, the editor, and the designer.

Right. The trade-off that I'm noticing in that, there's always this time money trade-off. And I don't know how to map it out exactly, but if we, you know, if we have this trade-off between time and money, there might be an element of velocity as well. So of how quickly do I want results? So if I have far more time than money, then let's eliminate this YouTube producer role, right? And I can do more of this myself and all of that.

And upscale myself as well.

Exactly. Which is always a good thing.

Always helpful.

If I have more money than time, if time is the biggest constraint in my life, then absolutely hire this role. And because the other thing is, how long am I willing to wait for results? If I need results this year, I'm probably going to double down on a high-quality team, spend more money, and do that early. But if I'm like, look, I'm playing the long game, and I'm okay with this curve looking pretty flat and then starting to climb, and I'm money constrained, then great.

Yeah.

Go without the producer. Exactly. And learn more of these yourself.

I mean, also generally, long term, you're better off knowing more about the process.

Yeah.

Learning the skills anyway, setting up the foundations for a good channel. But yeah, if you want to kind of, I think when Dan Martell, I know we've mentioned him a few times, when he wanted to go all in on YouTube 2, 3 years ago, he hired the whole thing. Right. And was like consultants and everyone and just all in. And then surprise, his channel really blew off. Blew off. His channel blew up. But yeah, video editing and ideal world as well. If you've got a YouTube producer, you don't even review edits. So when I was working for Ali, it was kind of amazing to watch really. He would like film the video and then he would press like the button on the camera to stop recording and that was the end of his process for the whole thing. I would then take the SD card out. I would then upload the footage to to Google Drive, and then the editors would download the footage automatically because they have access to the folder. Then they would edit it, upload it to a software called Frame.io, which is probably the most popular one for reviewing content. And then the YouTube producer, so me in this scenario, I would then review the video because I'd learned the skills and Ali was trusting me at that point. And then it would be I would do a round of feedback, just share some comments. It's great if you can get to just one round of feedback. That's what I do with my editor now is they send me the thing, I leave a couple comments, and then they just upload it straight to YouTube Studio. So they have access to YouTube Studio, they upload it there. And yeah, that's kind of like what it should look like from the entrepreneur's perspective in an ideal world.

All right, so in a minute we're gonna get to the 5 things to do and the 5 things not to do. But before we do that, what is the last system?

The final part of the system is admin and analytics. So just putting them in one kind of bucket. Admin is just like managing YouTube Studio. So actually scheduling the videos, making sure they've got the right descriptions and things like that. And then the analytics side of things is reviewing the video performance, not just from a views perspective, but also from how many leads did it generate for your business or potentially just sales. Directly. And so that's kind of just like all the stuff that comes after you've posted the video as well.

So who on the team is doing that?

So yeah, if you've got a YouTube producer, it can be them. If you don't have a YouTube producer, it can be you. It can also be the video editor because they're the one who's also uploading the video to YouTube.

They're already in there.

They're kind of already in there. They might as well just continue on. It depends on the relationship you have with your editor. But we also didn't mention the cost for these guys as well. Should we quickly go through?

Yeah. So what is the cost for the— actually, let me take orange because I got my colors to match. How do you structure payments for a writer and what does that cost?

So writers can be a tricky one because it's often not that good a return for, or not necessarily worth it for you as an entrepreneur to pay for what it takes a writer to do. And obviously we haven't really mentioned AI in that part of the process. AI can obviously do quite a good job these days with scripting something for you if you can train it and give all the context. But a good scriptwriter these days is, it might be somewhere between $500 to $1,000 per video.

Okay.

So I think per video is typically the best way to think about it. And some scriptwriters might charge per the hour or something like that. I'm sure there are some scriptwriters out there who are like, either I'm not getting paid that much or I'm charging way more. Yeah. But like it's something to go off. Yeah. But it just, 'cause it takes like to write a good word-for-word script, it's gonna take someone like maybe a day or two even with AI to kind of really actually get something high quality.

And hopefully they're reading it out loud to themselves and they're thinking like not just is the written word great, but does it flow? Does it sound good?

Exactly. And two good channels to look at there, actually both in the personal finance space, are Ramit Sethi, who we mentioned earlier, very well scripted videos. Just like, they're so good. I watch them and say, wow, this is a work of art. And I'm sure that he pays his script writers somewhere in that range. And then the other one is Damien Talks Money, a UK personal finance channel. And he has a team something like this, but he spends 90% of his time writing. 'Cause that's where he thinks like the leverage is on his channel. He personally spends that time writing. He doesn't have a script writer, but his videos are very well produced and made and word-for-word scripts. So just a good example channel to look at.

Okay.

And then should we come to the video editor? Yeah. So this is, again, there's nuance and context, but typically $150 per video is the kind of lowest you probably want to be as an entrepreneur trying to take this seriously. So above that, you're going to start to find editors who have good experience and actually know what they're doing. You can go all the way up to like $1,000 per video here. Now, if you're getting videos that are edited, something like Ali Abdaal's videos or Daniel Priestley's videos, which have lots of graphics and kind of animations, it's going to be like near $1,000. But obviously if you're just getting started, you probably want someone in the like $200 range.

If someone's cutting a talking head video and that sort of thing without the animations or the cuts.

Yeah, they're just doing the basic stuff. Yeah, maybe like 200 to 300 for someone who's good. And typically per video, you can get people on retainers as well. You can have different setups there.

As you have a predictable schedule. You're like, hey, we might, we could be doing, you get someone really good, you might be like, okay, we're 4,000 a month for the 4 videos.

Yes, exactly.

But I'm able to lock somebody because I'm making this bigger commitment.

Yeah, exactly. And a good tip actually just for everyone watching is that the best place to find all of these people, typically is in your audience. So obviously if you don't have an audience, then you have to go find them elsewhere. But if you do have an audience already, the reason that's so good is because they—

They already love your material.

They already love your stuff and they already know what your channel's about. They just like, they know, they have that intuitive sense of what not to do and what to do.

So these are all freelance roles. Do you do the YouTube producer?

Yeah.

Part-time, full-time, freelance?

It depends on how seriously you're taking it. I think if you're going all in, you know, You wanna hire someone full-time, it's very helpful. They're just gonna be helping you make the channel better from, like, well, yeah, from day one. But you can get someone kind of fractional or part-time to start with. And best way probably is just like a day rate to start with. It's like, think about what should that be.

And so from the fractional side, how would you structure that?

So maybe it's just they're doing like a set number of hours or some days per week. And transparently, I actually have less experience with knowing exactly what someone who's doing that would charge. Even though I was doing it myself, I was on a full-time salary. From the full-time perspective, I can share that salaries for the YouTube producer role, someone who's good, might range between like in dollars, $60,000 to all the way up to like $120,000. If you've got a really serious channel and you've just got someone who's got tons of experience in the YouTube space, it might be somewhere in that range. Like, you know, Hormozy is probably up at that top end kind of thing.

Maybe even higher.

But then if you're just like, yeah, on the lower end of that spectrum, it's probably gonna be somewhere around there. But you want someone who's got experience doing this stuff.

What if on the fractional side, if you're just like, look, I need someone part-time to do all of this, is that like a monthly retainer?

Yeah, I think I'd probably structure it with a monthly retainer, maybe a day rate to start with and then transition into a monthly retainer as well. And the day rate, different people come to you with different, obviously asking for different things, but you might say it could be somewhere between $250 to $500 a day potentially. Again, take that with a pinch of salt.

It was a $250 loss per day.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

And all of these roles, well, actually, not all of these roles. These roles, editor, writer, designer, you want someone with experience typically. You can train people, but you'll just obviously move faster with someone who's done it before. And with YouTube producer, that role is quite trainable. So you can find someone who just loves YouTube Has a good sense of organization.

Loves your content.

Loves your content. It's like someone to just help you with the channel. And then they can learn the skills of ideation, titles, thumbnails, all that kind of stuff.

And because they're following a system that someone like yourself has put together and said, watch this video. Here's the role.

In theory, yeah.

As the producer, you're working on these aspects of it.

Yeah, exactly.

That kind of thing. So the things I would look for in that producer and add to this or correct anything, I would look for a love for the niche that you're in.

Absolutely.

You know, your content specifically. A love for YouTube where like on their free time, they're studying all of this stuff. Like a high aptitude for learning where they tend to learn something once and it sticks with them or that kind of thing. You don't have to tell them like, go learn this exactly. They're like, oh yeah, I was already watching videos about that.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm learning it. And last thing is someone who's good at systems and follow-up.

Yeah.

Of like, is this schedule running on time? Can I coordinate between these people? Did we make sure the editor hit their deadline?

Yeah, exactly. A good YouTube producer is like a manager of a business, like a general manager. They're like, okay, this is the system that we have. Like, is everything working? What needs improvement? Where are we kind of falling short? Like all that kind of stuff. And they're just taking a ton of stuff off the entrepreneur's plate.

All right, so this gives a clear view on the team. What I'm most curious about is this list of 5 things to do and then what not to do. Because I'm like, okay, I can jump into all of this and be like, okay, but what exactly should I be spending my time on versus what things should I not touch at all?

Cool, yeah, let's just go through the first, the 5 things to do first, then we can come to what not to do. So obviously number 1 is filming.

Right, that requires me as the talent.

You can't really replace it. And if you don't like filming, then YouTube's gonna be hard.

Pick a different—

Or just pick something else, yeah. But yeah, you're not gonna be able to remove yourself from that. And so obviously you wanna put that into your calendar, have those blocks of time very much cemented in there. So then after filming, the next thing is gonna be positioning and strategy. So you wanna be involved in that. Obviously you don't want someone making that up for you. And that's just a conversation either with yourself or with your YouTube producer. We were just like, how am I fitting into the space? Is it the space? Space. And obviously thinking about these things like you, your avatar, your niche, just being very clear about those things in your mind when you're kind of approaching the channel. Then the next thing is ideation. So I even noticed before this session we're doing now, you were talking to your kind of Instagram person about different ideas that you have for Instagram Reels. It's just very much like, a natural thing for the entrepreneur to be doing. It's just like you're gonna have ideas about the content you wanna make. And so the way that I would be thinking about this is number one rule is whenever you have an idea for a piece of content, YouTube or anything, just write it down or tell someone about it. So either tell someone on your team or just write down on your phone, it's gonna come to you later. But then, but you don't wanna be doing the deep research into what's performing well, trying to really understand your niche, trying to like, use tools like One of Ten to try and find video outliers to get inspiration of what's working. That you ideally want a YouTube producer to be helping with or potentially just a consultant that can help with that. Obviously if you're on your own, you can do it by yourself. But with the more complicated team setup, really you wanna be in the approvals process here. So you come up with video ideas, you pass them on, and then you have a dedicated meeting potentially once a month or once every 2 weeks. Yeah, where would we fit that in the schedule? I think you can just put like maybe once every 2 weeks or something like that. You have like an intentional ideation meeting. Exactly like that, yeah. You have an ideation meeting, which is where you just discuss the video ideas that you wanna make on the channel. And it can be half an hour, it can be an hour or something like that. And your producer or you and someone else, you can just go through the list of ideas that you've got it might spark some new ones, and then you can just choose the ones you're actually gonna commit to production. So it's very helpful to have an ideation meeting. It can be once a month, and you just set the videos that you're gonna do for that month on one day. That's kind of nice and simple as well. But yeah, that's kind of how it would work from the entrepreneur perspective. And then the fourth one was scripting and planning. So—

Okay, you're involved in that.

You're involved in it in the sense that Obviously you are like the source of all the knowledge and experience. This channel is about you and your—

Right, your 25 years of personal finance experience.

Exactly. You can't just outsource that to a writer completely.

As much as you might want to. A lot of these creators who are really successful, like they come on the scene and they blow up in a big way. They have expertise already. They're not like trying to learn being a creator and become a neuroscientist. Yeah, exactly. Andrew Huberman already had all this credibility and he's like, cool, so this podcast thing, how, like, yeah, just talking to the mic and, you know, like, great.

Exactly. Yeah. And he can't just get someone to like script his content for him or plan his content. So, uh, an interesting channel.

He's gonna be like, 7 viral ways to do it. He's like, this has no credit.

Like, yeah, exactly. Um, a channel that's like been blowing up recently is a guy called Callaway. Have you come across him? So he's got like 300,000 subscribers maybe in the last like 18 months or something like that. And his video is scripted word for word, but his content is about his experience in the social media game. So he helps people kind of blow up on social media. And so he's probably working with a scriptwriter, but he'll be sharing, like brain dumping kind of what he wants to talk about, maybe an interesting anecdote that he's like, well, we should get that into the video. And then someone can take that from him and turn it into a script if you want to turn it into a word-for-word script. But then Alex Hormozi is just an example your audience know. He has unscripted videos. But what he'll probably be doing is having conversations with his team about, okay, we're going to go through these specific points, maybe these diagrams I'm going to draw. And his team, I wouldn't do that, I would do that. All that kind of stuff. But you need to be involved in the scripting planning process. You don't want to turn up to a filming day that you've got in the calendar and see a script that you've not read. So that is a mistake that me and Ali made a bunch of times, was that I'd be like, Ali, we've got this script, we're going to film it today. And then he would read the script and be like, I wouldn't quite say it like that, or all this kind of stuff. We'd approved the idea, but then the script wasn't what he was expecting.

And so these scripting days, review days are really, really important.

Yeah, so these ones, we had them in for ideation, but they can be—

Would you do it together?

Well, actually, what I did with Ali was we had a separate then script review session. So from Ali's perspective, all he was doing was the filming day, which he actually did every week, an ideation session or kind of an approval session, and then a script review. And the reason we kept them separate was just to kind of have like just distinct stages.

Well, there's something in ideation, there's no bad ideas. You're throwing it out there.

You're in a different mode.

In scripting and writing and planning, there's lots of bad ideas. You're like, don't say that, that's terrible. And so to step into the different headspace.

Yeah.

So then what am I doing here?

Orange again. Yeah.

Maybe?

Where am I? I guess you're putting it— It depends on your filming schedule, but you just want to make sure that for the filming day that you've got in, that you have seen, you know what you're going to do.

Would you do it on a different— Actually, I'm going to stay with yellow, but a different shape.

Yeah.

Would you do it on A, let's see, we're on scripting. Would you do scripting every week if we're recording every week, or would you batch that more and we could review and improve 3 to 4 scripts?

Yeah, I think it obviously depends on your team and your setup, but I would batch script writing as much as you can. Okay. So yeah, why don't we put in like—

Like 2 for the month?

2 for the month. Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

Here's our, I'm gonna have to draw a key later so people can understand this.

So essentially what we've got going on here is like potentially the entrepreneur in question, every 2 weeks they are deliberately coming up with some video ideas, committing to a few. Then they're scripting and planning their videos. They're batching it. Maybe they're doing that just like a whole morning or a whole day. They're just like getting all the content down that they wanna talk about. Maybe turning it into a word for word script. And then they're filming once a month, twice a month, or 4 times a month, whatever works for them. Yep.

So if I were to map these out here and if I just put my legend on here, the film is a check mark. Oh yeah. Or our all-day filming was the heel.

Yeah.

Our grid. That's our Alex Hormozi where it's like—

Yeah, yeah. He's just going for it.

Do the full batch. Then ideation was our circle. And scripting is our axe. And so there's sort of the key for anyone watching of what those align to. And you could put some of these on the same day or some other things, but what we're getting at is that these are ideation and scripting are two separate things. Go get lunch between those two activities. Go get in a different headspace.

Different headspace, yeah. And finally, number 5 is just performance. And so as the entrepreneur, you wanna be reviewing whether all this effort that you're putting in, the team potentially that you've put together, is actually generating return, is actually performing for you. And obviously the most important metric behind all of that is sales. So we don't care about views for views' sake. It's nice 'cause it builds our personal brand, more people know about us. More views is nice, but ultimately entrepreneurs care about sales. And so is the work that we're doing driving sales for our business? And so A big part of this, we didn't actually talk about this too much up here, but in analytics is tracking your links. So that was one thing that we actually, we missed was being able to track how many links, how many clicks are your links getting.

To our lead magnets.

To a lead magnet or to an offer. And potentially how many sales are those clicks generating as well? Because there are tools out there that do that. So one popular one is SegMetrics. Which is like a very popular software for just tracking your marketing costs. So seeing where people come from.

If you're on the pro plan for Kit, you get a free license to Segmentrix.

Oh, amazing. Ideal, yeah.

It's a great piece of software.

So that probably integrates super nicely with using Kit for your lead magnets and stuff like that. There's one from Ed Lawrence who has a channel about a lot of this stuff called RevTrack, which is like, I think a little bit more expensive, and a little bit newer. But yeah, ultimately you just want to be keeping a pulse on, is this effort worth it? Are we getting a return? Checking how the videos are performing, not obsessing over YouTube Studio and the analytics you get in there because you can waste hours.

So you're saying this is at a higher level.

This is at a higher level. Are we actually generating a return?

Are these thumbnails actually working? Like, look at it at a monthly view.

Yeah. And assessing the team members' performance, all this kind of stuff. But ultimately, yeah. A week.

Would you put this on the schedule as well?

Yes, actually, that's a very good question. I think I would probably set aside an intentional hour a month or something like that to look into performance review. I love that. So just thinking about what could be improved. Maybe it's a conversation with your YouTube producer if you've got one. It's a meeting with them. It's just like, look back at everything we're doing.

How is the business performing?

How is the business performing?

Basically all this time and money that we're putting in, is it paying off? Yeah.

I like that. Ali would often ask me for a kind of, well, I would do monthly reports actually is what I would do as YouTube producer. I would kind of be like, this is how many views we got, this is how many leads we got, this is the best performing videos, the worst performing videos, and this is how many clicks we got to our links, how many, like all this kind of stuff. And so just like a wrap up of like, you know, Is this working? Weather's working.

That also helps getting that from your YouTube producer helps you understand how well are they seeing the big picture.

Yeah.

If they're like, oh, this is great, we're getting more views. And you're like, wait, we're up by 100 more views than last month.

Yeah. Oh, we're getting tons of views, but we're not gonna get any sales. And so that's why tracking is part of the flywheel. Maybe we have time for that or not, but the flywheel of making videos, sending people to your offers, your lead magnets, and then kind of making sales. And stuff like, so depending on which videos perform well, actually drive sales, you're gonna obviously wanna make more of those videos and less of the videos that don't drive sales. So that's a very key piece that actually we should have come to in that kind of step 7.

So that would be coming back to the admin analytics is tying it back.

Yeah.

All these underlying analytics here 'cause they're tying it back to the performance.

Yeah.

Not just of that video, but of our broader business.

Yeah, exactly. And understanding which videos actually move the business forwards and which videos are just getting views but not generating leads or, yeah, exactly, vanity metrics.

That sounds good. Let's dive into what not to do. 'Cause I think the tendency for a lot of entrepreneurs, creators, all of that is to be like, I can do it all. I can learn all these skills. I can dive right in. What's number 1 on your list of what you should not do?

Number 1 is for every entrepreneur is just editing. You don't need to be doing the video editing. So it's a simple one. It's just worth being on the list because—

Let me write that down in orange of the don't do this.

And just to expand on that slightly, you obviously shouldn't be reviewing the edits as well in an ideal world. You can obviously do that if you have the time, but if you have a YouTube producer, they should be able to do that. If you don't have a YouTube producer, then obviously it's going to be you. But then the next one is titles and thumbnails. Okay. Titles are obviously a simpler skill, and like you can see how good the titles are, so you can contribute to them. But then thumbnails are the big one that you definitely don't need to be doing. And You don't really need to have a skill set in it either. It's helpful if you understand what makes people click, but it's not something you need to be worrying about if you've got a good thumbnail designer and a good YouTube producer. If you don't, you do want to know if your thumbnail designer is doing a good job or not. Then the next one on here, number 3, is just admin. So kind of uploading files, uploading stuff to YouTube, doing the video descriptions.

Being in the weeds on YouTube Studio.

You don't need to be doing that either. It can be your editor, it can be your designer, it can be your YouTube producer. It could even be you have a personal assistant who just helps you with a bunch of other things and they just do all the setting up the links, working with psychometrics, all this admin-based stuff. You don't need to be doing it. You definitely should be hiring.

You actively should not be doing it.

Actively should not be doing it because it just takes you out of your creative headspace as an entrepreneur in general. And it's just low leverage work. So someone in the team, can be doing it. Okay, and then the next one, I know we've touched on this already, but it was reviewing edits. So just wanna kind of reiterate that point. It's not an essential thing for you to be doing. Now, obviously, your videos are very, very important. This is the whole thing. It's like the videos are the actual thing that's driving the whole system forwards. But you can watch your videos, analyze them, and intentionally review them in the performance meeting or whenever it is. but you don't actually need to be reviewing the edits at some point if you have a YouTube producer. So in this system, if you don't, obviously it makes sense to—

You're trying to get everyone to operate at a higher level. Stay at this higher altitude, focus on the performance, the quality of the business, what's the impact's having there, the quality of your performance when you're recording on screen. What I hear you saying is I would far rather have a content creator or a founder spend the time looking back at, okay, how can I have a better on-screen presence than, well, hold on, that exact cut isn't what I would make. Why did you run it for 3 seconds there instead of 5?

Yeah. And being like, oh, there's a spelling error in that text or that kind of stuff because that's—

That's a flaw in the system. Don't try to be a cog in the machine.

Yeah. And your editor should be good enough that there aren't many mistakes or you're working to that point where you have an editing guideline document where the editor just knows what they're doing and they know what they're doing. And when they send you the video, if you don't have a YouTube producer and you are reviewing the edit, you're just like, nice, yeah, looks good. And it's not taking up a ton of your time. But in general, yeah, you wanna avoid these kind of lower leverage tasks. And then the final one here was expecting results too soon. So it's obviously less like a weekly task that you're gonna be having on your schedule, which is a kind of mindset point. It takes time for YouTube channels to kind of get working and sometimes it doesn't. There's obviously all of this is just like, there's so much context to apply to your own business and channel stuff. Sometimes YouTube channels can take off very quickly if you get the right team behind it, you have the right strategy, all this kind of stuff. But a good mindset to have is like, okay, I'm gonna take YouTube seriously. I'm gonna commit to filming days and a posting schedule. Of once a week or every 2 weeks. That was actually something we missed was how often should I post? Yeah. Which is like ultimately once a week is like just the staple.

That'll work just fine.

I wouldn't go less than once every 2 weeks because you're just not making enough content to grow. And if you wanna be gold standard or you wanna like push, then twice a week is gonna be like a reasonable maximum. Going beyond twice a week is just like the content quality starts to dip. Your audience can't keep up and it's just the returns aren't there. So that's—

So we're talking about expecting quick results. So what time period am I allowed to take a step back? I implement the system. When can I take a step back and be like, is this working? And start to see based on results.

Yeah. I think 3 to 6 months is like—

Okay. The first time they were online.

Yeah. I think within 3 months you're like, we're just, I'm just trying to make videos and get the system kind of going here. Whether it is with a team or without one, whether it's just you or you've got a little bit of help, you're just like, I'm just finding my feet. I'm taking this seriously. I've got my filming days scheduled in and all the inputs are in place for at least 3 months. Because there's that saying, results are a lagging indicator of inputs. We want to have the inputs for at least 3 months. 6 months would be a better frame. Even better than that would be like, I'm doing this for 2, 3, 4 years.

No matter what.

Or just for the long term.

I will try to be 1% better.

And I'm just going to keep going. So yeah, there is that mindset as well. And yeah, it's very tempting to start YouTube, put in lots of effort, realize how draining filming is, planning content, how intense this stuff can be, and then just be like, I'm not seeing any results after 2 months and I'm going to give up because I'm not enjoying it. And obviously that's a totally fair business decision, but it can take time to get results.

So I've talked to literally thousands of creators in my, the last 13 to 15 years that I've been in this business. And I have never met a single creator who showed up every single day for at least 30 minutes or an hour, like actively tried to get better and did that for multiple years and was not substantially successful, like 6-figure to 7-figure creator.

Exactly.

I've met tons and tons of creators who tried it for 2 weeks, 2 months, that sort of thing, and died out and never found success. But I have never met the person who's like, I was grinding it out, I did all of the things, and I learned continually, and I didn't find success. I've never met that person.

Yeah, exactly. So you can expect results if you put in the work.

But set that timeframe around, in 3 to 6 months, I'm looking at how well is my system, my inputs, am I checking all these boxes? Am I doing all that? And then 6+ months is when I'm allowed to start to see, okay, are the results, like, are we improving in results based on the inputs that we have?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And are we actually driving sales to our business, which is what this is all about? We're getting the return that we were hoping for when we started to take this really seriously. And an interesting channel who's actually gone through a very kind of, gone through this shift very recently is a woman called Joanna Wiebe, or Wiebe, I'm not sure how to say her name, but she has a channel about copywriting. Do you know her?

She's a friend of mine from like 10 years ago.

Oh, okay. Okay. So have you seen her YouTube channel?

I have not. We used to speak at the same conferences and all of that, but I haven't seen her like, right on YouTube.

I don't really know much about her. I've just like, One of her videos popped up on my feed and I was like, look at her channel. I was like, whoa, this is super interesting. So she, for a couple years on her channel, was just posting like 2-minute-long, 3-minute-long videos, like clips of stuff, or just like little talking head bits. The titles were really just like descriptive and boring. And they just weren't following like basic title principles. The thumbnails were like really amateur. Look, they'd be designed in Canva without any kind of thought in them. Not that Canva's actually a bad thumbnail tool. But she was making these kind of basic mistakes. Then you can see the video where she clearly got some help. She started to understand the platform. She started to put in some regular filming sessions. She started to implement this system. And the first video that she did kind of with her new approach to YouTube has got over 200,000 views overnight. So she implemented the system. And it just went like, her leads skyrocketed, her business skyrocketed. And she has got a bunch of unqualified leads coming through 'cause she was getting so many views. But her business is also flourishing as a result. And so she did, it doesn't have to be complicated. It can feel super overwhelming, especially looking at this board right now. But ultimately, the more seriously you take stuff, the more effort you put in, for the longer timeframe and just get 1% improvements. Like you're gonna get the results that you're looking for eventually. Yep.

I love that. Okay. I wanna ask you a couple rapid-fire questions and then I wanna recap this thing.

Yeah.

And, uh, let people know where they can find you and all of that.

Oh yeah.

So first rapid-fire question, how much time as the founder, let's say I hire out, okay. Hire this team and all of that.

Yeah.

What is the amount of time I should expect to spend per week to bring this to life?

Cool. Uh, I think per week, you should expect like a day. I think of your working week, around that at least, is gonna go towards growing the YouTube channel.

You think 8 hours a week, I can get this done?

Yeah, 8 hours a week is gonna be kind of at least probably what you're gonna need to do to implement this. It might to start with take up like 2 days a week of your time. If you're getting into 3 days a week, then you're probably spending too much time. Something's wrong with your system. Yeah, I mean, maybe to start with, it is a bit heavy and hard and you're trying to figure everything out. But ultimately, it doesn't have to be 2 full days as well. It can be mornings or different blocks here and there as we've got. But yeah, 1 to 2 days. When I was working with Ali, he had 1 filming day per week and then these 2 ideation and scripting meetings, which were an hour each, let's say. So it was kind of amounted to a day and a half per week. So yeah.

But he's also like at the top of YouTube. Someone who's running a full-time business could be doing it in less time. But it's important to call out, like that is a meaningful commitment.

It's a meaningful commitment. But as we discussed before the episode, you can set the constraint. I don't want this to take more than a morning a week.

Right.

And that's an interesting kind of thought experiment. It's like, okay, if I had to do YouTube in a really fun, light way that was gonna energize me in a morning a week, or maybe even like 2 hours a week, what would that look like? You're gonna go through all these steps kind of regardless, cuz they're just how you make a YouTube video, right? In whether it's you're spending 5 minutes on one of them, you're gonna be doing them. Uh, but that's also an interesting thought experiment. It's like, okay, I don't wanna spend 8 hours a week, but I'm kind of interested if I spend, you know, 2 hours a week, what does that look like?

Right. And, uh, you know, that was gonna be my next question is like, what constraints could you put on it? And one of my favorite questions to ask is what would have to be true And so you say like, what would have to be true for me to hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube from zero in 12 months with only 3 hours a week of my time? And you could map it out. You're like, well, I have to spend more money than time.

Exactly. Just play with the pieces. Because it's a production system. It's just like, okay, this here, this there, like just moving it around. I think that's an awesome question. And that is the one that people should be asking is like, what outcome do I want and what would have to be true to get that outcome?

Okay, final question. Of everybody that you hire, what is the highest leverage role that you bring in?

I think the best way to answer that is to think about, just look at the production system here. These first 4 steps are really where your gains are to be had. It's like the 80/20. This is the leverage. And that comes before filming. So the 80/20 of YouTube is all in the preparation. So what videos are we actually choosing to make? What titles and thumbnails are we going to put on them? And then what is going to be in the content?

Right.

Before you even get to filming. So that's what the 80/20 is. And so—

Whereas most people do the reverse.

Yeah.

They're like obsessed. They spend all their time filming and then tons of time editing. Yeah. And then they're like, oh, and the analytics and all of that. And you're like, well, the analytics aren't good because your ideation, your positioning, your thumbnail, those were all not good.

Exactly. There's a channel I love by a friend of mine called Lewis, who has a channel called Mule of Knowledge and 600,000 subscribers or something. He teaches like this on a whiteboard. His videos are like 15, 20 minutes, no editing, no cuts, kind of like Azul. But he spends so much time thinking about how do I want to explain these concepts? He's talking about psychology, mindset, being a social person, dealing with social anxiety. And it's all just on a whiteboard like you're in a classroom with him. There's no editing, but his camera presence is just so good that he doesn't really need it. But all of his returns are in this writing and planning and ideation phase and not in the editing and stuff like that.

So that's something else that has stood out to me about Dan Martell. He's been a friend of mine for, I don't know, 10+ years now. And I once went and spoke at his mastermind for his SaaS founders group. So it's the top people in his group, maybe 25, 30 people there. And I spoke about a concept and shared it all. And he jumps up and he's like, you know what you need? You need a diagram. And he's like, put it in a triangle. Here's these. And he had that ability, like your friend, to say, let me take this complicated idea that, you know, I talked about for like 6 minutes or so. And then he like heard that, distilled it down, put it in this neat diagram that everyone could walk away with. And Dan Martell, Taki Moore, a few of these people who are really influential have gotten very, very good at that. And like, that's in the 80/20.

Exactly. Yeah. I've started to watch Taki Moore's videos as well. I don't quite have the problems that he's like talking about in terms of like, 8-figure entrepreneurs, but it's a lot of it is just in these first 4 steps, isn't it? Like he's very good on camera, but he's not really editing the videos. He's just, you know, so he's definitely thinking about these things even though it looks simple on camera when you're watching.

I love that. Okay, so we've got a bunch of things here. What I love about this overall is you've mapped out the entire system, given people a playbook that they can clone directly into their business and say, okay, if I'm willing to put in this level of commitment, the money that we've outlined, all of the steps are here. I think this is fantastic. Now, if people want more help going through this process, right? And they're saying, okay, this is good.

Yeah.

In an hour and whatever, hour and 15 minutes, you gave me the breakdown. But talk for a second about one, where people can find you and your content, and then two, the program that you run to help people with this exactly. Yeah.

So what I do is actually I help people who have built audiences on YouTube already. So YouTubers first and help them build businesses kind of off the back of it. Bit more of the monetization side. And that is a program called the 100K YouTuber or $100,000 YouTuber. It's just like a fun name. And so you can find that at 100kyt.com is the URL. But my YouTube channel is Tintin Smith. And then, so yeah, I can definitely help people kind of like, I can coach people to implement this system kind of through that. Programme if they're the right fit. If you want this actually done for you, there are people who do just come along and we will take all of this off your hands except for filming and a bit of scripting and stuff like that. A friend of mine, Saf, I don't know if you've come across him, but he's not my business partner, he's just a best mate. And I'm going to give him a plug because he has a done-for-you YouTube agency and it's one of the best in the space. And you can just go to his LinkedIn, Safwan Mohammed, and book a call there with Saf if you want a done-for-you version, which I don't offer. So I think it makes sense to— I love that.

Well, everyone should So if you go search on YouTube, just Tintin Smith.

Tintin Smith, yeah.

Go find you there. And then for anyone who's watching who is obsessed with YouTube, maybe already has an audience and is like, well, hold on, you're talking about numbers that are far beyond the revenue per video that I'm getting, then that's where your program comes in.

You can say, hey, let me help you build the business. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I have a weekly newsletter, which I send on Kit, obviously as well. We can put that in the link in the description or something to that as well. In case people want to kind of read my, my weekly updates on, on YouTube and building one of these businesses and stuff.

Perfect. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you very much, Nathan. I really enjoyed it.

If you're thinking about how to structure the right offer for your YouTube audience, episode 87 with Jay Clouse is the next one to watch. Jay breaks down why courses are losing ground and what high-ticket offer structures are actually gonna work long-term. Specifically for creators who already have an audience, coming in from YouTube. Like the video if you enjoyed it, hit subscribe on YouTube or wherever you're listening, and I'll see you next week.