My Client Made $19K From 5 YouTube Videos With Under 10 Subscribers

My client Nicole booked $19,000 in revenue from her first 5 videos on her YouTube channel. She had under 10 subscribers. Her videos didn't even crack over 20 views. I want to tell you the 5 things she did and that you can do to start making sales on YouTube from your very next 5 videos, whether you're starting from zero or you're not really making any sales from your YouTube videos. And the 5th and final thing I'm going to share with you is really the thing that makes this all work. Now, Nicole started with none of the advantages that you think you need. No audience, no fancy camera gear, not even any fancy editing. What she had was a sequence of videos, and I trust that sequence because not only do I do my videos this way, but countless clients of mine like Belle, who made $42,000 from just one 5-video series, and Gina, who was able to book out her coaching program before she even opened it to her entire list, use this series of 5 videos. Now, I've been on YouTube for over 10 years, and YouTube didn't used to work this way. And so when you look at my channel, I have over 60,000 subscribers, But at the moment, my channel is really struggling because I've spent time on videos where the goal was to go viral, where the goal was to get lots of views. And what happened for me and my channel, it ended up attracting a lot of beginners, a lot of people who wanted to be YouTubers. That is not the audience that I build content for anymore. I build content for the coaches out there who want to create one weekly YouTube video that will generate leads and sales for them without needing to pay ads, without needing to create daily content on Instagram.. But because my channel has been around for over 10 years, the algorithm is kind of confused with my channel. And I recently just deleted an additional million views from my channel, but there were still some videos that were attracting the wrong audience. And so when you look at my videos now, when I publish them, they hardly crack 300 views if I'm lucky. And there's a reason behind that. It's because I'm creating specific content that coaches want to watch, that coaches are going to be attracted to, and that the YouTube algorithm understands this content is for coaches. And that's why when Nicole sat down to plan out her 5 videos and we determined the topic in the sequence, that's why she knew when she created these, while we didn't need hundreds of views and we didn't need thousands of subscribers, we knew it would generate sales and it generated $19,000 in sales. So the first thing you need to do if your YouTube channel currently isn't bringing you coaching clients or you don't have a YouTube channel yet and you know you wanna use it, before you do anything, you've got to get brutally honest on what you you want to sell from your YouTube channel. Most coaches are looking at their YouTube channel thinking, what do I want my YouTube channel to be about? You should already know the coaching program that you have. That is the topic that your channel is about. You want to build an entire channel full of viewers ready for your offer. So you need to be asking yourself the question, what am I selling? Who is ready to buy it? And what does she need to believe before she will invest? Your coaching program is the product that your channel should be built around because your channel will become the sales asset that sells your coaching program. So everything that you do on that channel reverse engineers into your offer, because when you start with that offer first, what you want to sell from your YouTube channel, every video decision gets easier. But when you start with what is my channel about, you end up with a content library and no clients. I mentioned Gina, and she is a great example of this. When she came to me as a client to start using her YouTube channel as a lead generator to her coaching program, we didn't start with content ideas that she had. We started with coaching program. I call it in my program, this is your endgame. Your endgame is where everything goes. So when we determine this is the offer she's selling from her YouTube channel, these are the type of people that will buy her offer, these are the topics that are going to attract the people who will buy her offer, every video decision came after that. 6 months later, she filled her coaching program. She decided to open a second coaching program but rose the price filled it without even needing to push out any emails. And she'd started with less than 1,000 subscribers when we started to build this strategy. She never had to guess what videos to make because the offer answered that question before she even needed a channel. But here's the thing, even a perfect offer doesn't tell you what videos to make. For that, you need to know exactly who needs to watch your video that's going to be the best fit for your offer. And I mean exactly. And that's the second step you need to take. Now I want to pause here and talk about, well, Trena, I have this mid-ticket and I have this low-ticket and I have this offer and this offer. What do you want to sell the most of? I talk to coaches because most coaches, that is their core offer. That is what they're selling. That's what all of their marketing leads to. It all goes downstream to their offer. Same for me. My endgame is my YouTube coaching experience. That's where I make my revenue. That's where I spend my time. That is the offer that I want to sell from my YouTube channel. And this makes it so much easier for the content, which we're going to talk about, but for the algorithm to also understand who is the best person for your channel. And what you don't want to happen is for YouTube to have no idea who that person is or get confused who that person is. So let's talk about determining one viewer. This is step 2. When you think about that one viewer is basically who was that offer built for? Who was that coaching program built for? When I initially built my first coaching program, I had two very specific people in mind. I had Hope and I had Allison. I spoke to them thoroughly through what they were looking for, what they wanted, what transformation they needed, and I built my coaching program for them. And every time I created a piece of content, I thought, would this attract more Hopes and more Allisons? And this isn't just me thinking demographics-wise, like women age 35 to 50, income level $30,000 to $50,000. Absolutely not, because both Hope and Allison were completely different demographics. Graphics. You need to think deeper about this person. You need to think about the problem this person has that your offer, your coaching program solves. You need to think about the person that's probably already tried all the free stuff. She's already been scrappy, but she still has this problem that she can't get through. She doesn't want to DIY anymore. She doesn't want to blog post anymore. She doesn't want to listen to another podcast. You need to think about the person that is stuck there. She is at a point where she's frustrated enough, she knows she needs invest in somebody to help her get out of this stuckness. This is who I call your ready-to-buy viewer. And on this channel specifically, I call her your Expert Esther. And the opposite of an Expert Esther, which I talked a little bit about my channel, there's beginners— are Beginner Betties. Beginner Betties watch everything. They are DIYing, they are scrappy, they want tutorials, they want how-tos. They're at the beginning of their journey. Expert Esther has already been there. She's already been a Beginner Betty. She's put the time time in, she's done the work, she's ready to find the right person that's going to help her get past the place that she is stuck in, and she understands the importance of investing. And more importantly, she has the money to invest in working with you. Every video that you create on your YouTube channel has got to be for Expert Esther. You're gonna get less views. You're also going to have less competition on those topics as well, because not everybody is ready or at the level to speak to Expert Esthers. But the moment that you create a video for Beginner Betty, you've told the algorithm to find more Beginner Bettys, and it will. And that's where my channel is right now and why I've deleted over— I think I'm over 25 videos, over 2 million views that were created for Beginner Bettys. And it's the single most expensive mistake that you can make as a coach, especially when you're getting started, when you start to train the algorithm for the wrong person, for Beginner Bettys. But these are not people who are going to buy from you. They are not ready to buy. They do not have the money to buy. And I think you really need to understand the importance of this because the YouTube algorithm works off viewer behavior matching. And this isn't my theory. This is literally written out in YouTube. If you read all the YouTube workbooks and articles that it has, YouTube ranks your video, not keywords, not SEO, but against everything a specific viewer might watch. And it recommends based based on matching viewer behavior. So again, if you read these articles that they have, videos with fewer impressions and fewer views consistently show higher click-through rates and higher watch duration because they are being watched by a more narrower, more loyal audience. Hello, Expert Esther. And that's YouTube telling you in their own documentation that narrow beats broad all day long, especially for coaches looking for people who can invest in their program. Your first 5 videos or your next 5 videos, maybe if you haven't done this yet, can train the algorithm to know exactly who your channel is for. Get it right, focus on Expert Esther, and YouTube becomes a free machine that delivers ready-to-buy viewers to your channel every single day. And all you gotta do is post weekly YouTube videos. Let's jump off of that deep dive into why it's important, because I think you really truly need to this, to understand why my way of doing YouTube, my strategy is built very specific for business owners like coaches and not as a YouTuber because a YouTuber strategy is completely different. You want more views, more subscribers, more monetization. For us, we want the right people who will buy our coaching program because we are going to make the money in our coaching program sales versus YouTube monetization. So once you know your offer you're building your channel for, now you know the expert Esther you're creating content for, to send for. The third thing is pick one problem. Now, my mentor Mariah Coz, she calls these champagne problems, and I love that. As a Swifty, I love champagne problems because they're very specific. They are advanced, painful problems that your ready-to-buy viewer, expert-esser, have right now. It's not the 7 things that you teach inside your coaching program. It's not how-tos. It's not quick tutorials. It's one problem. And those first 5 videos that you create need to attack that problem in 5 different angles. Let me make this concrete with some examples. Let's say you're a health coach. The broad topic is gut health. The champagne problem, for example, or the Expert Esther problem, is I've eliminated every food group and my bloating still comes back. This person has done the elimination diets, she's bought the probiotics, followed probably the DIY meal plans or the AI meal plans. She's no longer searching for gut health basics. She's searching for why is nothing working and who can help me crack this code, basically. Do you see how that That person is an advanced, a champagne-level client. Now let's do like a money coach. The broad topic is how to budget. The champagne problem, or the Expert Esther problem, is I make good money, I still feel broke at the end of every single month. She's probably making six figures but has no idea where her money's going, and she's aware of that. She knows. And that's a completely different person than somebody Googling budgeting for beginners or how do I start a budget. Do you hear the difference between these two? The broad topic is what she did search to years ago to get to the point to realize, dude, I'm making 6 figures and I still literally have no money at the end of the month. Like, what is going on? It's specific, it's got frustration backed into it, and it means she's far enough along the journey— we could say the buyer's journey, but in our case, the viewer's journey— that she's ready to spend money to finally get out of this frustration point. And I know you might be thinking, well, won't I run out of content ideas? Won't my channel seem repetitive? Here's the answer that I give my clients when they ask me this exact question: you stay on that one problem until your ready-to-buy viewer sees you as the answer for it. For most coaches, that's at least 5 videos, usually more. And you're not gonna run out of ideas because champagne problems have more angles than you think they do. And if you really understand the clients you're working with in your coaching program, you understand that they all come at it with different angles, different frustrations that you didn't even realize that they had. Your potential client, your viewer, doesn't need you to cover a bunch of different topics. She needs to be certain you can fix her one problem that she has, her biggest frustration. Now this is the move behind Nicole's first 5 videos. She built a 5-video series around a specific problem her expert Esther had. One problem, specific angles for each video in that series, and that's what booked her $19,000 with less than 10 subscribers and videos that didn't get over 20 views. Because she doesn't need a YouTube channel to make her famous, and neither do you. You're not here to be YouTuber famous. You're here to create create some type of content that is sustainable for you to do every single week that will actually pay off on the backend, that will actually bring you clients. Because I know your ads are frustrating right now. Maybe you're spending ads, you're not seeing the conversions, and I know Instagram is frustrating right now because there's all these things you need to do and content you need to post every day and you're burnt out. You need content that is sustainable. And when you look at YouTube this way, that's when YouTube content becomes sustainable to drive you the best people, not the most people, the best people who will buy your coaching program. Now here's where so many coaches will blow it. They got the offer, they got the ready-to-buy viewer, they got the problem, then they film a great video, slap it up on YouTube, don't think through that video packaging, and that kills all momentum. The 5 things you need to do to start booking clients from your first 5 videos is you need to be determining the title and the thumbnail, which is the packaging of your video, before you even script any content. You can't be doing this after because most coaches will film their videos and then be like, what's a title for this? You can't shoehorn in a title and a thumbnail. I will never film a second of a YouTube video without knowing what my title and thumbnail is going to be because here's the truth that nobody will tell you about YouTube. The best video in the world, filming, editing, content-wise, will get zero views if you're packaging Packaging doesn't win the click. So you need to think about the packaging and then create the content of the video to deliver on the packaging. And when we're thinking about thumbnails particularly, they need to create the emotion and the title needs to create the clarity. And there's a lot of research behind all of this. Eye-tracking studies on YouTube feed scrolls show viewers look at the thumbnail roughly twice as long as the title. The thumbnail is going to do the deciding. The title is just going to confirm that click. And here's the number that should really change the way you're looking at your YouTube video packaging forever. YouTube's own data tells us that half of all channels have a click-through rate somewhere between 2% and 10%. Same impressions, 5 times the traffic. The difference between the 2% channel and the 10% channel isn't the content, it's the packaging. And the test that I run every title and thumbnail through: would Expert Esther click on this, or would Beginner Betty? Because a title that pulls those beginner is worse than a title that pulls anyone. And I actually have a quick custom GPT if you wanna determine, are any of your videos pulling beginner Bettys or expert Esthers because of your title? I have a custom GPT called the Who's Watching GPT, trenalittle.com/whoswatching. You can plug in your title to that GPT and it will tell you instantly, is this a beginner Betty title or is this an expert Esther? So go grab that. It's totally free, trenalittle.com/whoswatching. And I would love for you to drop a title down in the comment that you plugged into the GPT and tell me, was it an expert Esther or a beginner Betty? I'd love to hear. Now there's one more thing I need to talk about— packaging. And this one flips the biggest objection on its head. New channels under 1,000 subscribers typically see click-through rates about 6 to 10% higher than established channels because YouTube shows your first videos to the warmest possible audience, which means starting from zero isn't a packaging disadvantage. It's the one window where great packaging pays off faster than it ever will again, and you don't get that window back. That's why I love reviewing my clients' titles and thumbnails before they script, before they even publish it on YouTube. And that's what I do with my clients inside my YouTube coaching experience. I give them that personal review so we maximize our opportunity with our packaging because when you get it right, like Steve does, it changes everything. So Steve was following a YouTuber strategy, broad topics, broad titles, and his videos were getting tens of thousands of views. One even hit 59,000 views, but all of those views were only producing about one course sale a month. One. So we reevaluated, we strategize different videos, we came up with more specific topics for that one person for his one offer, and we repackaged our titles and thumbnails moving forward. Specific titles aimed at an actual buyer. Now his views did drop by thousands, but in his first 18 days of doing this, he made 8 sales and he got to a point where he was making a course sale every other day versus having tens of thousands of views every month and one sale, he was just getting a few thousand views a month but sales every other day. Views went down, money went up, which brings me to the fifth thing you need to do. The one I told you from the start was gonna be the biggest one, the one nobody starting a channel actually does, and the reason my clients actually make sales from their first 5 videos. Your first 5 videos should not be separate one-off videos. Videos. They need to be 5 videos with 5 specific jobs designed as one sequence before you film any of them. Most coaches make video 1, see how it does, or they get an idea in the shower and then they do that as video 2. That's basically playing content roulette. If you want to book clients from your first 5 videos on YouTube, you need to map 5 out before you even film one, because each one of your videos needs to move people closer and closer to applying or joining your coaching program. You've got to have a video that's that's going to shift her belief on what she thought before to get her to believe your way of doing what it is you specialize in. You've got to be able to give her a quick win for her to build trust in you that you actually know what you're talking about. You've got to get one that's really going to clear out all the garbage advice that she's been hearing and explain to her why that's garbage advice and why she needs to be doing it this way instead. You've got to do a video that's going to show her proof that you get the results that you're talking about with this belief shift, with this way of thinking. And then you've got to get one that's going to make final decision. That's going to show her the transformation that she wants to have and how she's going to get it with you. That is what I call a playlist funnel, and this is what I help my clients build inside of the coaching program. We determine what is the problem of the playlist funnel, and then we fill the 5 video roles in that playlist funnel while also determining the title and thumbnail before we even create the content. Because if you think about it, if you can get people to watch 2, 3, 4 videos of yours, the chances they to say yes to your coaching program go up every single video they watch. On the flip side, every single video that they watch tells YouTube that you're creating great content, you're creating a binge session. So YouTube pushes your content out to more people, just like the people who are binging your video, because YouTube's recommendation system doesn't optimize for clicks. It optimizes for watch time in session time. A viewer who binges 3 of your videos back to back is the single strongest signal that you can send to the YouTube algorithm. YouTube even evaluates what happens in the first 30 seconds of those videos. If somebody clicks and bounces, your video's gonna get suppressed. Click and stay and watch the next video on your channel, that video's gonna get pushed to more people. Sequenced content is what this playlist funnel is optimized for, and it's the exact metric that YouTube rewards. Belle had just 16 videos and generated $152,000 in sales in her coaching program with under 200 subscribers. And it's because her videos were built in sequences, not one-offs, getting about 30 to 50 views per video and making over $150,000 in sales. The subscriber and the view amount doesn't matter. The sequence does. And real quick, I want to go through a bunch of things that I would not do because the list of the things that I would skip to get this momentum and start booking sales on YouTube in the next 5 videos is just as important as the things that I would do. You don't need a channel trailer. Nobody watches those. You don't need welcome to my channel or welcome, I'm starting a YouTube channel video. Nobody cares about you yet. They care about how you can help them solve their problem and their frustration. No need to post 2, 3 times a week. 5 sequence videos beat 30 random videos every time. You don't need any trending audio. You don't need any fancy editing. You don't need a fancy background. Like, you need to be as real as you can be. More and more are questioning content, and the best type of content right now is content that proves that you are human, that proves you are not AI-generated. And you just showing up, being yourself in your environment, is the best way to do that. Your bank account will not care how many subscribers that you have, but your bank account cares how many clients you have. That's what's going to matter. Also, don't worry about keyword research and finding the best keywords. The moment you upload your YouTube video, YouTube already knows what your video is about. Spend time truly understanding your viewer, truly knowing what your ready-to-buy viewer needs to hear to say yes to working with you. Now, if you want to work with me to help you build your next 5 videos, to give you feedback on what videos you should do, to review your titles and thumbnails, to review your scripts, there's a link below this video that sends you to a video that tells you more about how I work with my clients and how you can apply to work with me. So go ahead and check out that link below.