The Anti-Influencer Strategy Making Millions on YouTube in 2026

If you guys are all feeling that it is harder to stand out, it's harder to get subscribers and views, you're not crazy. Things have changed. The game is changing. In the last 12 months on my YouTube long form, I've gotten over a million views. And then more importantly, I've driven millions of dollars of sales to my businesses. The crazy part is all of this has been done by uploading just one video a week to YouTube. I want to share with you guys the strategy on how this is possible for all of you in this room. But more importantly, how most of the advice that you hear outside about YouTube is actually built for the wrong goal. So how many of you guys have a business or passion separate from YouTube? OK, so almost all the room. OK, so nobody's in here to be the next big YouTuber. You want to obviously be a YouTuber, but also grow your business. Is that correct? OK, good. This is the roadmap I'm going to take you guys through today. OK? We're going to shift your perspective on a few things and we're going to walk you through this framework and I'll give it to you afterwards. So here's the thing. Views feed your ego. I want to get views just like everybody else. I want subscribers just like everybody else. But like I said, respect is what gets you paid. Okay? And there's a difference. There's a lot of people posting informational content right now, but if they post— like, I know people with a million subscribers, I know people on social with a million followers, and if they were like, I'm in Vegas at you know, the Think Media workshop. If you guys want to come hang out with me, you know, here's the time, here's the meetup. And no one would show up because nobody cares about the creator. They only care about the information, right? And so what happens is in a world of AI where information is becoming so prevalent and everyone's going to ChatGPT, right, you need to stand out. Otherwise you just get lost in the sauce. I think of the viewer's brain right now as a snow globe. You ever shake, you know, shake up a snow globe and there's just all these things falling down, right? That's people's brain. Does anyone feel like that's our brain sometimes? Some days, maybe right now, that's your brain today at this workshop, right? So in this case, we want to cut through the noise. We want to be very clear. Clarity is very important. Most people are not taking things seriously. You know, I say that 80% effort gets you 80% results. 100% effort gets you 1,000% results because the last 20% is what nobody will do. So in the lessons I give you today, there's going to be a lot of small tweaks that give you big leaps, right? It's just maybe you can change this a little bit and now you can reach double the people. Now you can get double the sales or maybe 4x the business or 4x the sales, right? So don't think about like changing the everything that you do. It's just the small things that you need to do that you can actually implement and implement them consistently. Does that make sense? We talk about views don't pay bills, respect does. That's important. I'm doing one upload a week. Okay. But I'm focusing on the right topics, I'm speaking to the right viewer, which I'm going to show you how. Information has become commoditized because of AI, and so there's this whole concept out there right now that the death of information— you can still teach, but you have to teach in a different way in order to get respect, in order to stand out. So high-value information— this is very important— high-value information is scarce, and that's what's working. Low-value information is the— is very crowded,. It's AI replicable. It's the tips, hacks, tricks, you know, 3 ways to do this, 7 ways to do this. And that's good. It's better than nothing. But what you want to do is get into this perspective part. So there's 2 types of content on YouTube right now. There's commodity content, which is tips, tricks, and hacks, tells people what to do. That is replaceable. Okay. That is replaceable by AI. The second category of content is perspective content. Perspective content teaches people something new, shifts their perspective. Think about this right now. The people that you respect the most in life, it's authors, creators, teachers, maybe people that you look up to. They did one thing. They changed the way you think about something, right? Even if it was just a small shift in the way you think about something, that's what happened. And so those are the people we really look up to. And so that's the type of creator you want to be. That's the creator I want to be, because that's what gets you the most amount of respect in business. And so here's the formula for taking a piece of content, any informational piece of content,, but making it a perspective piece. Okay. And if you make this shift, this is what will be the difference for you in 2026. People who ignore this are starting to see that shift down, you know, and getting lost in the sauce. 5 years from now, everyone's going to look back and say, man, I wish I locked in in 2026. It would be like not buying prime real estate 10 years ago. This is exactly why I'm hosting a live virtual event called Escape the Middle. So there's no cost for any of my subscribers, and I'm going to walk you through the The 2026 Power Curve, how to stand out in the sea of sameness, and how to build a personal brand that brings you business while you sleep. There's no fluff, no theory, just a solid game plan. I'm also bringing some special guests and we're going to be doing a crazy announcement for the 2026 Forward event. So there's a link in the description where you can quickly register. Hope to see you there. And now let's get back to the podcast. So we're going to have a tactic. It's the information we want to teach. Your interpretation of it is very important. If you don't have a point of view about what you're teaching, then it just could have been said by anybody. So we want to include your point of view. And then is there a greater principle that this attaches to? Is there a bigger picture thing here, right? I'll give you an example. Super, super basic. There's a real estate agent in my community who wanted to teach how she— she's a top-producing agent. She makes a lot of money for her clients, and her specialty is selling homes. High-value homes. Okay. So she wanted to make a video about the 7 things you must do to your home before you sell it, like decluttering this, all these things. So those are just tips, right? And this is how she gets top dollar for her clients when she's selling their home. And so she wanted to make a video, give away the secrets, right? Give the best information out there and give value. It's very important. Okay. Here's what— here's the thing. That video is on ChatGPT. You can type in, give me the 7 things, right? So how do we turn her expertise, years of knowledge into actually perspective content? So here's what we came up with. We, we had some ideas and we used AI to refine this. We came up with the fact that the number one factor when someone's buying a home, when they're buying a primary home, not an investment property, but their primary home for their family is the fantasy in their head. When you walk— and you guys have seen this too— when you walk into the home, you— if when it's the right property, you're picturing your family in the kitchen. You look at the backyard, you're seeing your kids run around, right? And so this is what is the biggest factor that determines whether they want to buy the property and how much they're willing to pay for the property. And so when that client who's walking through the property has the fantasy in their head and they come up to one of the doors and they turn the handle, the door handle falls off the door. The fantasy is broken. And so when that happens, they may not want to purchase property. And if they still want to, it greatly impacts the amount of money they're going to pay. This is why I tell my clients to do this. So you see the difference? Like, one is just tips and tricks. One is like, here's the greater meaning behind this. And if you ever want to know what is the greater thing and ask AI to help you, you can work through these ideas, right? By the way, is this helping you guys? Okay, good. So we're going to go deeper. And I'm a nerd, so I get into the psychology of this. But this is the stuff that's actually going to work. Okay? The surface level stuff is good to get started, but if you really want to get to the next level, this is what's going to make the difference. Okay? These small things. So again, not what should I do, but how should I think? And I know somebody is thinking in this room, man, I don't, I don't know if I can pull that off. Well, like I said, you can use AI to help you. But the other thing is it doesn't have to be groundbreaking information. You just need to shift someone's perspective a little bit to get into this top category. Okay. And this is how you go from this is helpful info to I want to work with you. You create a shift in the way people think. And the greatest compliment you can get on your videos is somebody in the, in the comments saying, I never thought of it like that. When I get a comment like that on Instagram or YouTube, I know I'm winning, right? Because that person will never forget me. Right. That makes me unforgettable, makes me respected, all those types of things. So this is the most important thing today. You might— one of you might say that about something. One of the Think Media people said, right? You might say it about me and my talk. That's what's going to make this work. So again, tactic, your interpretation, your interpretation, and tie it to a bigger principle. So I want to give you 3 ways right now on how you can apply this to your content. Okay, it's really simple. Here are 3 things you can do, and this is good for topic selection, or it's taking an existing topic and making it way better, and it might even make your video viral. Who knows, right? This has happened to me a few times with my outlier videos. The first one is the contrarian take. Okay, what does everybody believe that is wrong, right? How many of you guys have a contrarian take? You're in an industry and you think something different than most of the people in your industry. A lot of you guys. Have you ever spoken these thoughts on the internet? Some of you. Some of you. Are you scared too, a little bit sometimes? No. You in the back, you raise your hand first. What'd you— what's your name, sir? Jake. Okay. What is your contrarian take? Okay. Golf pros don't know how to help a senior person. Correct. So most of the advice on YouTube is built for the wrong person or is built for the wrong goal or the wrong audience if you're a senior. Yeah, it's all the tips and tricks on YouTube are based for or built around a 20 to 30-year-old athletic golfer. Okay, great. So whenever you're teaching or whenever you're framing up this content and we're going to talk about intros and the importance of this, You need to make sure that, you know, if that applies, you would include that contrarian take because what you need to do is let the people know in the beginning of the video that there's something novel about what you're about to teach them, something interesting. Okay. It's not going to be the same old, same old video that they're used to watching. The other one is the reframe. Okay. What problem do people think they have versus what's the actual problem? Right. So does anybody have a case where Go ahead. You have one already. Go ahead. I hate the side effects. Okay. So you think that most people are worried about side effects, but the truth is they're completely predictable and avoidable. You can avoid them.

There are things you can do, and I can help people do that.

And you make content about this, correct? That's what I make content about. Okay, cool. So then anytime you are doing these intros, you're doing the videos, you want to make sure that this is somewhere in there, that we're going to let them know that the problem you guys are thinking is this, it's actually this, right? And it's going to— you're going to be like, wait a second, what does that mean? Right? So this is just going to help you level up the topic selection and the content. Now, the last one here is the borrowed lens. This is really cool. And I very rarely see people use this in their content and it crushes. Okay, this is what did a different area of life teach you about this? So I'll give you an example. There's a guy in my community, he teaches money principles. But he also is like a former poker pro. So he's always talking about what poker taught him about investing, what poker taught him about this. And so that's a very unique take for him because he's applying that unique connection that is in his life. So does anybody have something you've done previously that you can connect to what you're doing now? Go ahead.

Right here. My background is engineering, and I now help people resell used clothes online, but it's very like data-driven. So I'm kind of taking the analytical piece and then—

So is there a lesson from— what was the first thing you did? Um, engineering. Engineering that you could apply to clothing.

Looking at the data, reading your data to be able to make decisions, um, to be able to make more money selling clothes.

Okay. And what was your name? Lee. Lee. Okay, so I'm very confident that if Lee includes this in her content, or— and you maybe— are you already doing this? No. Okay. So when you do this, Lee, you will be the only person to have done this. Possibly. It might be the only engineer that has somehow connected engineering to selling used clothing. You understand? It's 2026. We're in a room in Las Vegas and Lee's come up with an amazing outlier. So we all have these things in our head and you're sleeping on them. A lot of the, the biggest problem we have in the room is like we're thinking to ourselves, oh, that's not that cool. And so first things first, before we get into other concepts, I want to give you just a mental shift that will change the game for you in business and in content. We need to stop thinking about why something won't work and start considering why it will. Do you understand? So many people I talk to, I give them a concept and they tell me all the reasons why it's not going to work or why they just— it's a thing you have in your head and you need to turn that voice off. Okay. There's a dude in my head who's trying to keep me at a certain level. And I learned how to get rid of that guy. He's still there, but I just have him in a closet somewhere. But that dude comes out a lot. He'll start telling you why this won't work, seeing all the problems. And yes, we need to be realistic. But more importantly, what if that video does work? What if it crushes? And why don't we optimize? Like, why don't we go down that road first, right? So just think about this. I know it sounds like woo-woo to be optimistic, and that's going to lead to more. But it is so true. The most successful people I know are always solution-oriented. The wealthiest people I know are always looking for things on why they will— why things will work in their business and in their content. So when you get to doing more of this content, I think of on my short form, I'm trying to do a 70/30 where, you know, I'm making discovery content, but I'm also including perspective content. You might be at a 50/50 at some point, but I think of making sure that there's some perspective content because like I said, commodity content might get you seen, it might even go viral, but Perspective content is what's gonna get you paid, okay? So I just wanted to go on my channel. This is just from yesterday or this week's video uploads. Somebody said, hey, this is one of the most, this is not a viral video by the way, it's only got a few thousand views for me, but this Jeff dude, my new friend Jeff Firestone said, you shifted my perspective many times, right? One of the most useful videos I've seen on this topic. And by the way, this was not a topic that wasn't done. There's a million— there's probably thousands of videos on the topic that I uploaded, but my perspective was slightly different. Hey, I've been struggling to put this in words and you were able to do it for me. So I go through all these comments and I screenshot them because there's just— that's indication for me that I'm on the right path with that piece of content, even if it's not got a million views. It might have 5,000 or 10,000 views, but it's moving the needle for my business. Now I want to get into intros, okay? So this is my— this is the most important part. The reason why most of my videos were failing in the beginning, in that valley of like 100-view Death Valley, I call it, of YouTube, right, where I just couldn't break out, was not because my information wasn't good. It was because of packaging. And I'm sure you guys have heard about title, thumbnail, and intro, right? These are the most important parts of YouTube packaging, because if you can't get that part, it doesn't matter if there's gold in your video. 20, you 10 minutes in and nobody's going to get to it. But I want to share intros because intros is something that we've cracked in the last few— I think it was probably 6 months, and it's led to exponential growth in the views and the channel and all that stuff. So would it be cool if I share with you guys this framework for intros? Okay, cool. So this is just— and this might be stuff you guys have heard before covered, but I have a little bit of a unique take on it. So this is my 3P framework for YouTube intros, and some of these might go viral for you. And it's 3 Ps: pain, pivot, proof. Okay. And I'm going to show you guys an example of this. Basically, it's like this, okay? You want to identify the struggle and you want to have an aha moment. So there's a pivot, and that's typically where I'll put in my perspective. And then there's got to be some proof that what you're teaching, you have some expertise behind it or some knowledge, and it could be research expertise or personal experience expertise., right? So I think for me, I have business background, so I can talk about that in my business success. But for some people, it might be just the content that you've viewed or you've researched. So let me give you an example of one of these intros. Okay, here's an intro from a video that's crushing for my channel right now. I just uploaded this in the last few weeks. If you want to build a personal brand that attracts premium clients, makes you money, not just views, most advice out there won't cut it because it's built for influencers. There's a new playbook out there that's built for entrepreneurs. I built a personal brand that's made me millions of dollars and put me on stages throughout the country. It took me 7 years to figure this out, and I'm going to teach it to you in the next 30 minutes. Okay, so that's my intro. It was 20-something seconds. I was making 1-minute intros. I even had this cool montage of myself and like this little Neil Holmes Show thing, and I looked at the retention chart and I'm like, everyone's leaving at the coolest part, you know? Nobody cared about my cool edits. They care about like getting into it quicker, right? And so when we tightened up that intro to make sure I give the 3 Ps plus keep it under 30 seconds, like that one is 20 seconds. You can tell a lot in 20 seconds. You can hit on all those points. And so if there's one thing I want you to take away from everything we're talking about today besides the topic selection and perspective shift, it's going to be how can you make these intros shorter and more impactful? Okay. I'll give you another example. There's two types that we do. We do direct-to-camera teaching. The second type is I'll sit down with someone and have a conversation like podcast. That's what we call it, the Neil Holm Show, for my channel. Now, there could be a strategy where I should separate those onto two channels, but right now we're blending them on one channel. And some— one of the coaches in the room is probably going to be like, Neil, you need to put these on separate channels. But right now I'm putting them on the same. And what's going to happen is on the videos where I have a guest, I'm going to do the same intro before we get into the conversation. When I started doing these, even if it was a random conversation that led to a really good goal, when I started putting these intentional intros, that's when the conversation content started taking off. And we've gotten hundreds of thousands of views on our 100K per video on certain videos and doubled views, tripled views on some of the other ones that when we didn't have this intro. So let me show you the intro when I'm going to have a guest. Okay, this is the same, same formula but different format. If you ever watch someone else who doesn't know as much as you get an opportunity or get more attention than you, but you feel like you actually know more than that person, this is why. In 2026, we are in a trust recession. The winner isn't the smartest in the room, it's whoever gets people to trust them first. For today, I brought in a former magician with a TEDx talk at 3.5 million views who's trained hundreds of people across 6 continents on this exact topic. And by the way, what he taught me helped me make millions of dollars last year. This is 20 years of knowledge in the next 60 minutes. So that was a, uh, almost a 30-second intro. I think it's less than 30 seconds, but it was an interview with this guy Brian Miller. Now Brian Miller was not known on YouTube, but I know he had some great success. So if you're ever having a conversation and the other person has expertise to offer, This is a great way to mix up your content. It might eventually have to be its own channel, but it's a cool way to mix it up and do a conversation together. You can co-teach. That's the way I do it. It's not like a typical podcast where we're just hanging out. We're actually teaching together. So I love doing this. And it is also easier for me to be consistent because some weeks I'll be like, man, I'm tired of making these videos and I'm burnt out, but I'm not tired of having a conversation with one of you. Like, if you and I just sat down right here and we filmed it, we could probably teach. And then I don't have to script out everything. I have like bullet points. We want to keep the conversation on the rails. And by the way, if somebody goes off on a random tangent, we just cut that shit out the video. You know, like that happens a lot. Sometimes I'll ramble. I might ramble today. I have ADD, so I might just go off on a tangent. We're going to upload what I'm teaching right now on YouTube in the next few weeks. So if you check out my YouTube channel, this talk will be there. Some of you might be in it if you're OK with that. Hopefully you already released your rights before you came in the room. You've agreed to be on my YouTube channel. This is the formula for intros. Before we go on to the next section, do you guys have any quick questions on intros? Are you struggling with intros? Go ahead. So I have to ask this, Neil. Number one, I think it's an awesome formula, but the thing that I'm struggling with, and especially within my niche, when you get to the point of providing the proof— yes, my fear is I'm going to see more people dumping out when they want to get directly into the content. Okay, so the— your fear is when you give the, the one line of credibility, they're going to leave to me, right? Okay. So everybody, whether you guys like it or not, is thinking, who are you to teach me this thing? Okay. Now, again, it could be your results, it could be your client's results, it could be your research. So there's always ways to provide credibility. But essentially, no one— sir, you, the golf pro in the back, how long have you been golfing? Over 10 years. Okay, cool. So without that, I don't want to learn golf from you, you know. So we need that line, right? Of course. So your fear is that people would leave the video. I think that they would actually have a reason to stay around. Would you guys agree? So you shouldn't worry about like, why would they leave? I think where it goes wrong is the fact that people want to embellish and stick around. It's usually just one line. So it's like, and I've used this strategy to help hundreds of people improve their range, or and do this or make this money. So it doesn't have to be all your list of credibility or some long drawn-out intro. It's usually 1, maybe 2 lines at the most. Somebody else have a question on intros?

Go ahead. Your introduction is one of the best I ever seen in my life. It's really good. It grabs attention. It's amazing. And the formula is great, but I feel like it's easier said than done because I don't have a problem speaking, but I can spend 2 days trying to find the right intro. Yes. And even if I put that formula in the AI, I get the worst answers ever.

Yes.

So how do I overcome this part? How can my intro become more and more like yours?

Okay, great question. Here's the thing. What was your name again? My name is Shirin. Shirin is talking about overthinking.

Okay.

How many of you guys struggle with overthinking? I mean, Overthinking Anonymous, you know, like, so I can give you some advice on this. This is the thing. We're all thinking of all the different rabbit holes and things like this. And so what you have to do— I use AI to help me with this, but when you go into AI, you're getting garbage back. So what you have to do, what changed the game is— are using ChatGPT or Claude? Both. Both. Okay. So I like Claude for the YouTube intros and for creative writing. I feel like it gets better response. But what I do is I give it examples of intros that have done really well or crushed. And Lou, this is the other thing I did with those is I put in examples from people I look up to, like, you know, the creators like Cody Sanchez or the other people who have been on my show and things like this, or Alex Hormozi. And some of the people are way more qualified than me, but I looked at what are the components they're using in intros that are doing really well. And then I looked at smaller creators as well. So I need to— you need to feed it examples of these are the intros that are doing really well.. And here's the thing, don't just feed it and then say, hey, give me some, give me something for me based on my topic. You have to learn with the AI. So imagine it's your thought partner. So here's what I do. I put in those intros and then I say, why do you think these videos did well for this creator? Here's an intro from an outlier video for this channel. Let's talk. Teach me why this one did well. What are the components? And go back and forth with it first to learn. Then after we've done that whole thread of learning, I say, here's the thing I want to teach. I'm going to brain dump all my thoughts. I tend to overthink and I tend to overexplain. So help me refine this into an intro that follows the formula that we discussed earlier. And then now it gives you way better— if you try that prompt, you're going to get an insane response. And then I use that prompt, like those results, to stay on the rails. I don't say it verbatim. I put it in my words. But that's what's helped me make these intros. I'm going to move on because we have limited time here, but I want to go into Pain Into Pivot. This is one of those intro formulas. You guys can screenshot this if you want to use it in your videos, but essentially it's going to be like identifying people's struggle, talking about what, what maybe is a reframe for them. And in this case, the algorithm didn't change, the game did. And then you deliver— you can deliver your thing that you're about to teach. This is another intro that crushes. Now I want to share with you guys something that's helping us get way more views right now. And that is to not just tell people things but show them. Most of us here are making talking head videos, and what's happening is it's harder and harder to retain the audience with talking head informational content. But what I'm doing to overcome this is just show people things. So what we found is when we make visuals and we show people, it retains the audience. Even in the beginning, I showed you guys that roadmap. When I do that on a YouTube video, here's the roadmap. We retain people. So it shows people that there's going to be a plan for this video. It also shows people that I've done a bit of pre-work, that there's actually some method to my madness. Right. But the other thing is I found is people on YouTube are dumb. I shouldn't say it like this. Not literally dumb. They're, they're in a dumb state of mind sometimes. You know, they're like, hey, maybe overconsuming. Maybe they're watching your video while on their phone. Or it's on the TV, they're multitasking, they're doing other things, right? So you can't— like, some people are definitely there with notes and they're fully engaged in learning, but a lot of people are just kind of in a snow globe brain. So you want to make it easy for them to consume. So what I found was the easier I make it on the audience to consume, more people stick around. One of the easiest ways is just to show people visualization of what you're teaching. Okay, so I'm going to show you how I do this. It's really crazy. I put in what I want to teach in terms of like, here's the graphic I want, or here's all the information I want to teach. And then I hit generate infographic on this tool called NotebookLM. And then in about 30 seconds to 90 seconds, it gives you the infographic. And it's actually good to use. Is anybody in here using NotebookLM? Okay, awesome. A lot of you guys. So have you noticed that it's pretty good results? Way better than previous tools I've ever used. So this is a hack. Like these, some of these graphics today I make my slides, but then some of them I was like, hey, I want to teach this stuff and this is the first time I'm putting it into a PowerPoint. I literally just use NotebookLM this morning to put some of these in here. So you guys should be using this to create infographics for anything you want to teach and you can flash to those during the lesson. You should think about it as a live presentation and put those in there. When you do this, you'll get a lot more retention as well. Now, this is going to be how we monetize. This is how I monetize. I think it'll help many of you guys in here. Okay. Like I said earlier, the AdSense is just, you know, free money for me. It's the icing on the cake. I'm not trying to build a YouTube channel for sponsored brand deals, all those things. And if that's your business, that's cool. But my business is a little bit different. I'm trying to get clients, right? So the concept that changed the game for me on YouTube in terms of monetization was be your own sponsor. So I'm going to sponsor my own video. What's the thing that I want? I want clients for Forward Academy. I want people to come to our events. I want people to take the next step in business with us. So if that's the case, I need to be sponsoring the video. So I'm teaching a concept, and then I could be the person, or our company could be the person, to help them with that goal. So that's the next step. And so this is the thing I was doing wrong. I was thinking about it like, okay, the client's over here, my service is over here. I'm going to make the YouTube video. They're going to watch it. They're going to have trust because everybody knows, like, know, like, and trust, right? That's going to happen through all my content. And then they're going to take the leap and go ahead and book a call with us, purchase the product, purchase the program, start the process, buy the ticket. So I'm saying you're over here, watch my video, go over here. What I found is it doesn't quite work like that because people need more nurturing. They're more uncertain. They're overthinking. Just like we're overthinking, the customer, the viewer is overthinking it. And so I started to sell some or push a step before the thing I wanted. So this is a step in the middle. Okay, so the big mistake is I was selling my service when I should have been just giving them the next step or a blueprint. Right. Just think about lead magnets. You know, the biggest health and fitness people are giving people a resource that they can use for their next step. And the best lead magnets solve one problem, but they create another. Right. So if I'm giving you a guide, if I'm teaching this video, if I'll show you an example, but if I'm teaching a concept and then we have a quick break, like an ad break for 30 seconds, 20 seconds, and I offer them a lead magnet, which is going to be a resource that helps them do the thing that I'm teaching in this video. That thing should be something simple that they can grab right now for free. That's great. But that thing is going to really help them. It needs to actually help them. And it should be something that I technically could charge for. It's that good. But now they've created another problem where they need help implementing this. They need help with guidance. They might even just say, you know what, this looks like too much. I want to do it. Can somebody just help me do this? And so you create another problem when you give people this, and that's where your service comes in. Does that make sense? Okay. So we actually want to make these lead magnets more valuable. But again, don't be this dude. Okay? I was just like going straight for the sale instead of, you know, trying to take the next step. You know, this is a bad joke, but essentially, like, I think about— I met my wife at a company party in 2005. She worked in Vegas. I was in Reno, and I met her at a party at this company Christmas party. And I was like, I saw her and I'm like, man, I got to go talk to this girl. How How could I work up the courage to go do it? Imagine if I just walked up to her and I was like, hey, you want to go upstairs? Like, I probably wouldn't have a family right now. You know, maybe one of these guys could pull it off, but I could not pull that off. So just think about, can we take a slow step on this process? This is the spectrum of people on YouTube. There's people who are never going to be interested in what you offer on one side, and there's people who are ready to transact now. I have found that most people are trying to make offers to the people who are ready to transact now. This is a fraction of the opportunity. The biggest group is 85% of the people who are in the not yet crowd. The not yet crowd needs more nurturing, more information. And so those are the people you can offer this next step to. The way I do this and what's changed the game for me is driving them to a webinar. And I could do a whole talk on webinars and how we're using it to drive most of our sales. But that has been the biggest converter for me, as I'll say, Hey, here's this, here's a concept I'm teaching. If you want more help with this or you need, you know, you want to take the next step, come to my webinar next Thursday. And so here's an example of that ad read that we would put in the video. And we do this in the first 10 minutes of a long video and in the first 5 minutes of a short video. 5 years from now, everyone's going to look back and say, man, I wish I locked in in 2026. It would be like not buying prime real estate 10 years ago. This is exactly why I'm hosting a live virtual event called Escape the Middle. So there's no cost for any of my subscribers, and I'm going to walk you through the 2026 power curve, how to stand out in the sea of sameness, and how to build a personal brand that brings you business while you sleep. There's no fluff, no theory, just a solid game plan. I'm also bringing some special guests and we're going to be doing a crazy announcement for the 2026 Forward event. There's a link in the description where you can quickly register or scan the QR code that's on this screen. Hope to see you there. And now let's get back to the video. This was like 37 seconds. We ended up taking out 1 or 2 lines to make it shorter, to make it right at 30 seconds, because I think it should be no more than 30 seconds. We do have a link in the description, and I started putting a QR code on here because I noticed a lot of my viewers were tagging me on Instagram as they're watching my content and they're watching it on their TV at home. Have you noticed this? A lot of us are now consuming on YouTube TV rather than just on the phone or the laptop. So I started to put the QR code up and that is driving more people to take action. Okay. And we are doing this virtual event. If you want to scan this QR code, it should work right now. But this is our ad read that's in my video right now and it's crushing for me right now. We just shortened this. It was about 7 seconds too long is what we noticed. So essentially, this is the thing I'm doing. The goal— I'm earning their respect with the video and then I'm just doing the ad read to get the click to the next step. Not to my service. Now, you might get lucky, by the way, and people do take the next step. They book all the way to the end. They book an appointment with your team. They take the next step, and that's fine. Like, but you'll get way more people here because it's a not yet group, is not yet ready for that. The now people are ready, and there are people in that group, and you can prompt them to take to book with you. But I just found more success talking to the not yet group, and then we get so many more people into our funnel. And then the goal is going to be to sell your solution at the end. Does that make sense? That's what I do. The goal is I make my offer on the webinar, not in the YouTube video. So we do the YouTube video, come to the webinar, that's when I make an offer like, hey, you should come to our event, you should come to our workshop, whatever I'm offering that day. So here's the whole kind of summary of what we've done here to get respect on social and on YouTube. Number 1, we're going to create perspective, not just commodity content. We're going to use this pain pivot proof intro formula. We're going to, when possible, use visualization, include some sort of illustration to show people what we're teaching because it reduces the cognitive load of the audience. We're going to really kind of ignore AdSense and just sponsor our own video with our own product or service that we're selling. And then we're going to treat our YouTube channel as a sales asset. YouTube for me is my best salesperson. It's like the number one person behind me, you know, because it is me. It's duplicated, right? So think about your YouTube being your sales team. I'm just interested. One of the things I love about YouTube is that it's evergreen. And so you're talking about offer to webinar every week. So how do you find that to be? I guess I'm feeling a little bit of tension with that if I'm making a new webinar every week. Yeah, like content. Die or something. So yeah, so I don't have a new webinar every week. So what I'll do is I'll do a webinar once a month and then the two, you know, in leading into that, they would be driving traffic to that. Now, some of the ad reads are just going to be to join my email list. Some of the ad reads would be to get a lead magnet where we have a resource that we've created to get. And this is more detailed funnel strategy, which we could have a whole talk on. One of the things I do is when I drive them to a lead magnet, I ask a few questions to determine if it's a good opportunity or not. So I say, hey, quickly answer these 3 questions. And I learned this from a guy, Daniel Priestley. Have you seen Daniel Priestley on YouTube? He's been blowing up, doing really well. You should check Daniel's content out. He's actually going to be at our event as well. So Daniel was teaching me one day, and he's like— he's a marketing strategist who's helped scale multiple companies to, uh, 10 figures and beyond. But he told me, he's like, Neil, I was, I was helping this company grow, and they sold tutoring services to adolescents, like to kids who wanted to go to college. And they were getting leads from YouTube. His team, the sales team, was telling me that the leads suck. Like, we call these people and it's no good, right? And so I was— he was like, how do we get better leads? So they started asking a question. They put together questions that would identify what would be a good lead or not a good lead. One of those questions they found was they asked the audience, the people who are inquiring about this tutoring service, do you have a nanny or have you had a nanny in your home? 80% of the people who checked yes ended up purchasing their program. So they found out that like if somebody had in-home help, they were the ideal person. So what all of us need to start thinking about is what's your nanny question, right? What are the attributes of your best clients, the ones you really want to work with, the people who take the next step, the best? They didn't, you know, they were a pleasure to work with. They referred you more clients. Look at the attributes of those people. It might even be like, hey, side note, or a quick question off topic, do you prepare your own taxes or do you hire a CPA? You know, I found that our best clients have tax professionals versus, you know, like that's just an example. But you can ask questions about these things. So we ask questions and then those determine better leads because that makes it more sustainable because obviously we can't follow up with everybody and you want to know who are the good ones and honestly the ones who are more just in the nurture bucket. Does that make sense?

Cool.

Go ahead. So we do a lot of content, but it's search-based. And this is about the webinars. If it's search-based and we get a lot of traction months, if not years later, is the webinar funnel still relevant or would you just not suggest doing that?

Or how would you package it? So what would be your offer, your next step to work with you?

We do like a strategy for— we do Atlassian Jira services. So it's like a software and we do a strategy kind of packaged into that and it's kind of us diving in, auditing, giving them feedback.

Okay. Is it more higher ticket? Yeah. $10K. $10K offer. Okay, cool. So it would be tougher to sell $10K offer straight from the video, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So what you'd want to do is get them on the webinar, educate them more, and then sell the $10K offer. And so the webinar, meaning like you have all this content, it's search-based and it might come up months, months in the past, but the link can be an evergreen link. So for example, if you pulled up that link to my webinar, it's called Neil's Big Day or neilsmasterclass.com. That link would be updated with the current version of the webinar. So even if somebody pulled a search-based piece of content from 7 months ago, if they clicked on the link or scanned the QR code, it would go to the current webinar.

Okay. And it's always relevant to the topic that you talk about.

It's like kind of all-encompassing. Yeah. You would have to like switch it out depending on— but I have a couple different versions., and then those general purpose umbrella URLs could house a webinar of my choosing, you know, so you can— and if they come to the, to the actual webinar and it's not the thing that's most relevant, you can like— they would just opt in for a lead magnet. You can always change what's on the URL.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay. And then would you pitch that $10K offer in the webinar or would you pitch a call and then pitch the $10K on yours?

I would maybe do the call. But I have seen— so in my case, we would— we've done this in the past where we've sold an $8,000 offer on the webinar. So if somebody's got the respect and kind of knowledge and they've watched multiple pieces of your content, they might be coming to the webinar in a high trust state already and just need the nudge from you on the webinar to take the next step. So you could test both. But one time I was— this is— I was shocked. I did the content and then I got to speak at a live event and I said, I'm going to do sales calls or take a deposit and then do this $8,000 workshop. And I just decided I'm just going to try it. I'm just going to sell the $8,000 thing from the directly in the, in the content. And, and it filled up from that and it broke a belief for me that there are people in the audience depending on how long you've been posting content. That are willing to take the next step now if the webinar is good. But that requires that in the webinar you break beliefs, that you, you know, you have all the proof and you have all the case studies, and then they take it. Got it. Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome. Go ahead. So you're talking about nurturing and webinars and at what kind of price point? Because what I found, I was— I had initially gone like for the higher ticket and then I found, oh, I can just sell right in the video and people go and buy.

But like, at what kind of price point?

Yeah, what price point were you selling and they would just buy directly in the video?

Um, anything probably under $100. Yes. So that's low ticket, and you can definitely sell low ticket directly in the content like that. You've done that already, correct? Yeah. But let's just say you want to sell something for $1,000, $2,000, $10,000. At that point, there— it's going to be difficult for people to take that leap directly from your content. There are going to be cases where they will because they've been watching a lot of it. But more importantly, that not yet group, which is 85% of your viewers or more in certain cases, they're not going to take the next step unless it's like a baby step or a step on the way to buy the $2,000 thing. So that's where the webinar comes into play. So our top grossing offer was and still is, is the video that leads to a webinar. On the webinar, we would sell a $2,000 thing and there would be like 100 people to buy the $2,000 thing. So does that make sense? Yes. And then so, yeah, you just have to think about your price point and then if it's a higher price point, you need to— that was where you would use the webinar funnel. We'll do one more.

Somebody said they had one over here. I just have a quick one. So my primary traffic is search. I'm a recipe food blogger and but I'm trying to shift into more like selling cookbooks and digital cookbooks. And digital products and how to cook dinner in 2 minutes or less, those kinds of things. Yep. So I struggle with my intro because my intro now is basically like, today I'm going to show you how to make da da da.

Hi, I'm Carrie.

I help people eat well on a budget. Very boring. Um, so how can you take something that's kind of boring to turn it into like an intro, like what you said?

Okay, so what were the—

what are people's beliefs about doing this on a budget? Well, they don't have time to do it, and grocery prices have skyrocketed, so it's not worth their time anyway.

Yeah. What if you started with that? What if you said— what if you called it out? You called out the problem. We talked about problem in the, in the intro. Oh yeah. They're like, if you guys are thinking that, you know, grocery prices are really high, and what did you say, and you know, and people's schedules are busier than ever, you're probably thinking like you don't have time to make gourmet meals on a budget. Well, I want to share with you how you can do this, this, and this, and it doesn't break the bank, and it's only going to take you 15 minutes, and it's only gonna— so you put in the thing that they think disqualifies them in the thing. While you're saying this, make sure you're showing B-roll of the actual food. Yeah, but that would crush for you. Okay, because that makes sense. You're breaking the belief and you're showing them that maybe there's something novel about your concept or your video that they're about see. Yeah, perfect. I think all of us be shocked to see the difference in a few of you guys. There's going to be a handful of you in this room that this marked that change, and I'm pumped to see where you guys end up 12 months from now in February 2027. But thank you guys so much. Appreciate all of you.