First video over 10k views (now >70k) - what I’ve learnt and focused on

Apr '23 (edited) in Other

(Update, the video is getting about 20k views a day now so while the over 10k statement is accurate it's still growing rapidly)

Here’s the video btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-CYdjX5_A

There are a couple things that have led up to this moment and as much as I would like to tell you it was an overnight thing it's unfortunately an accumulation of years worth of work. I’m still at the very beginning of my journey and there is still a long way to go which is super exciting to think about.

But here’s what’s led to this.

I have been making videos for around 10 years, not consistently and only a couple a year, but I have tried a lot, from gaming videos, to finance and comedy and a bunch of other stuff. None of it worked. I just tried to emulate (often poorly) the creators I watched. This is an embarrassing but important first step because I learnt how to edit and tell a story with these very bad videos.

I went to film school and studied screenwriting, and became a competent writer and learnt the fundamentals of storytelling, these apply not only to feature length movies but also to Youtube videos and educational content. People resonate with stories, not just straight information.

I then got a job as a journalist and video producer and really got to put in the hours writing multiple articles a day and producing, filming and editing a few videos a week for a year. This was miserable and I didn’t like what I was doing but it was great practice to get better and better at these skills. I also had the opportunity to work with and learn from some very experienced and brilliant people which was great and helped with figuring out my vision.

I also had the pleasure of working with

@Andrew Kirby

and his team, and spent a lot of time chatting with

@Wiktor Romanowicz

which taught me a lot about the content game and contextualised a lot in my mind. I also followed the journey of people like

@Hamza Ahmed

and analysed the way he and others created content which was the most effective and (very importantly) the most helpful to people so they would stay and absorb the content. And this leads to another important point.

There are 3 reasons why people watch content:

It’s interesting
It’s entertaining
It’s informative/helpful

(They may also watch it cause it’s cringe but that’s obviously not what we want)

The way to create the best content is to either go heavy into one of these or have it be a makeup of 2 or 3 of them.

@Hamza Ahmed

goes heavy on interesting and helpful, but leans towards helping people.

@Andrew Kirby

is the same. Andrew Tate used a combination of all 3 which is why he built up such a massive audience so quickly. But you have to appeal to something in order to get people to watch you. No one will watch you just because you want to be a creator, you have to give something of value.

If you have a really charismatic personality you can do almost anything. Play games, vlogs, story time videos, or whatever, but almost no one falls into this category so you have to either construct something very entertaining. Or provide some value and now you have to look at yourself.

Find your point of maximum authority. This is what you are an expert at, the thing you could give a 30 minute presentation about without being prepared at all. It’s usually the thing that people ask you the most about in everyday life. In my case it’s fitness. My friends and family are always asking me for tips and tricks, and a couple times a week I’ll have strangers stop me in the grocery store or at the gym in order to ask for advice on how to get into shape. So it makes sense that that is the thing I have the most authority on. And I can actually just make my life easier by turning what I would tell people in conversations into content and release it for the world to see so I don’t have to explain it one by one. If nothing has come to mind when you think of your own authority, then you need to find something you’re interested in, go all in on learning about it and post about your process of being educated. There’s a strategy of creating content learning alongside your audience and not just teaching them.

The second point is to focus on your maximum point of leverage. How can you turn your authority into leverage? You need these things to intersect in order to create effective content. You might be the world's leading authority at stubbing your toe, but no one is going to want to watch and learn how to do that from you. Your authority might be insanely niche but there is usually some way to contextualise it into a grander scope to reach a bigger audience. Like having a deep understanding of colour and its effects on human psychology doesn’t do much for people unless you aim that at people interested in marketing and branding which now becomes a huge market.

You then have to produce content like you already have a million subscribers, don’t have the ego of someone with a millions subs, but do your very best to have a level of quality which would seem appropriate of someone with a millions subs. You want people to literally be shocked that your sub count is low. Like with the people in the comments below.

Finally, video editing is a massive barrier, don’t worry about it too much if you haven’t got the skills yet, the video doesn’t have to be perfect but for god’s sake write a script. At the bare minimum have bullet points about what you’re going to talk about, I see way too many videos of people rambling about nothing to their webcam for 30 minutes, and they wonder why no one watches their videos. You aren’t Hamza, or Andrew Kirby they established themselves and built an audience from hundreds of well written videos. they can now instinctually make content with less planning. Until you’ve reached that level you need to at least plan out what you're going to say before you hit record.

I really hope this has been helpful in some way. If there’s anything you can add or disagree with me about please don’t be afraid to bring it up in the discussion below.

We’re all going to make it, good luck and godspeed.

I also want to just say I really appreciate the conversations I've had with

@Corey Bennett Boardman

and

who have added a lot of insight and I've learnt a lot from what they have had to say.

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