How we collected 500k cash in 70 days from YouTube

Yup.

500k cash in 70 days.

Not too crazy but not too shabby either.

Except it was while running a business, without any fancy editing, without crazy clickbait titles or ‘proper’ thumbnails, or any type of “YouTube strategy” BS that you see on Twitter.

Most people in the YouTube space will tell you:

“Oh yeah you just need to copy what works and replicate it”

But to be honest, I hate that shit.

You click on your home page, and you see 50 people that look the exact same.

When people ask things like:

“How are you different to X competitor?”

I completely understand it.

Almost every channel you see looks the exact same as the other.

1. Copying from someone who gets a lot of views

2. Copying from someone who makes a lot of money

3. Using a lazy agency who just copy pastes ideas between clients

Pro tip:

Don’t do any of those things and you’ll be better off.

3 Keys To Our Results:

1. Utility: What makes content that is so valuable that people watch you, love you, and pay you?

2. Packaging: How to make your boring business content sexy

3. Brand: How to get people to buy into YOU so they keep coming back no matter what you sell.

Utility is he state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial.

To have utility in the context of B2B YouTube, you have to teach people stuff and help them learn.

The definition of learning is “same situation, different behaviour”

So if I show my little brother how to mow the lawn, I pull the chord and get it running while I walk him through the process…

But then he tries to do it himself and doesn’t know how?

He didn’t learn anything.

If you can’t name the things you will do differently after watching a YouTube video, you didn’t learn.

You may as well of been watching the new season of The Gentlemen on Netflix.

To increase your Utility in your content, focus on providing nuggets of insight that change people’s behaviour, and removing fluff.

Big problem with the ‘yap’ or ‘authentic’ style of YouTube is that fluff gets in.

To avoid this, spend more time planning and editing content before you make it.

An extra 20 minutes spent editing your content before recording can make it 2-3x better.

Pretty good ROI.

Packaging is is what makes people click on the video and how the video is perceived.

If you look at Utility as the actual value of the content, the packaging is just the exterior surface.

• Title

• Thumbnail

• Videography

• Edits

This stuff matters but it matters less than the utility.

To be honest, we did very little of this outside of testing titles.

Basically the strategy is just to mention the sexiest thing you possible can in the title, even if it’s kinda indirect.

It’s not always better to be indirect though - if it’s a sexy title it’s a sexy title.

EG → “How I scaled to 900k/mo” is always gonna be good.

The key though, is that you don’t want to focus on the funnel or ‘the work’ in the title.

Just optimise for sexiness.

For example:

A video about creating a good newsletter might be titled:

→ “How I close 5k deals without a sales call”

Be careful here because it’s a slippery slope, but it’s likely that you can get away with more than you think.

Branding is kind of a wishy-washy topic, and to be honest the only good advice I’ve heard on this was from my friend The Combat Therapist.

He basically said (and I’m paraphrasing):

“You have to figure out what you want to stand for and what you want to be known for.

This will determine the content you make, the standards you have, and basically just how you live your life in general”

I eventually just came to the conclusion that if my content is appealing to these 3 avatars I have, then I’ll be fine:

• an younger version of myself from about 3 years ago

• myself now + people in my network

• myself at age 50 looking back

Then my branding will be fine.

Free tip about branding:

• Just make good shit and you won’t have to worry

Anyway,

Namaste.

PS - just dropped a few banger tweets.

This one was especially good.