SPI 858: Listen to this Before You Start a YouTube Channel (Should You Even Try?)

SPI 858: Listen to this Before You Start a YouTube Channel (Should You Even Try?)

Pat Flynn: Okay, so you’re thinking of starting a YouTube channel. Don’t. Not until at least you listen to this full episode. Should you start a YouTube channel? I’ll answer that question that’s in the parenthetical in the title. Absolutely. If, and only if, you are not in the middle of a cycle or a focus right now.

As you’ve probably heard me talk about before, you want to make sure that you commit to what you’ve already committed to. And episodes like this can absolutely be a distraction. So have this. And the opportunity on YouTube be a reward for you finishing your other obligations or your other, for example, 60 day, 30 day, whatever it is you’re focusing on, right?

If you’re focusing on podcasting, great. Get that 60, 90 days in understand the systems work to optimize it and start to remove yourself from that process of creation so that you can use that somewhere else like a YouTube channel. Now, a YouTube channel does not necessarily have to be a secondary full time thing, but many people who start to find success on this platform begin to start to shift energy into it from elsewhere because of the bigger opportunities that are on YouTube.

So what are those opportunities? What else are we going to talk about in this episode? So the opportunities, but we’re going to give you, or I’m going to give you based on my own experience with several successful YouTube channels, millions of subscribers over a million dollars generated in ad revenue since 2009 on the platform, some mindset stuff.

Stuff that you need to know going into it, so you don’t A, waste your time, B, just bang your head against the wall trying to get something to work C, overwhelm yourself with all that may or may not be required, and D, hopefully just have fun with it, which is what I hope you’ll do no matter what you choose to do and focus on.

So let’s talk about the opportunities on YouTube. I think we all know that it is a huge opportunity to get in front of a new audience. And right now, YouTube is definitely the best and number one spot that combines both exposure and relationship building. And the reason I say it that way is because there are other platforms that allow you to get in front of a lot more people like, for example, TikTok.

But TikTok is pretty limited in the way the platform works and how just the behavior is of consumers on that platform. People. Take it like Halloween candy, and they move on to the next house, right? Whereas on YouTube, yes, of course it has YouTube Shorts, which has the same sort of pattern. However, you also have your longs, and your longs is where your videos and your relationships with those videos as a consumer start to build a relationship with the creator.

You start to gain trust. You start to go deeper. This is the equivalent of not somebody coming to your house to pull Halloween candy from you, but rather somebody coming to your restaurant to sit down and have, for example, not just an amazing filling meal with that one video, but they’re going to move on to the next course, and the next course, and they’re going to come back to that restaurant, and they’re going to tell their friends Go to the restaurant together and the equivalent of that metaphorically is they’re going to sit on the couch and watch your videos with popcorn in their hands. Which I found out is what a lot of my audience does on the Pokemon channel If you’re not familiar with my own YouTube channels, I have a few I have the Pat Flynn channel, which started in 2009 that has been a very slow growth But only until 2017 when things started to speed up.

How? Because I actually focused on it. I actually committed to it. I got myself surrounded with other YouTubers who were helping me and inspiring me and motivating me. I went to Events like VidSummit and I met people who were just doing amazing things and I was pulling inspiration and learning what they were doing and I’m here to pass forward a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned and have figured out on my own as well to you today.

My second YouTube channel is called Deep Pocket Monster. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you might remember back when I started this thing in 2021, it was more of a side thing, more experimental, trying to get into a new space that I had no information or understanding of. The world of Pokemon.

I knew about Pokemon, but I had never created content around it. I didn’t even feel like I had anything to add. Which will take us to a lot of the stuff that we’re going to talk about related to your approach into YouTube in the future or the approach that you are taking right now, but we’ll put a pin in that one and get back to it.

Deep Pocket Monster started in 2021 and it took maybe four to six months to really figure out. My groove, my voice, my position in the community that was Pokemon or that is Pokemon. And there was a lot of research done, there was a lot of me getting involved in these communities, actually moderating a lot of channels in those communities to get to know who those audience members were, so that when I came in, I was able to come in and provide something new and different.

And in 11 months and 26 days, exactly, we hit 100,000 subscribers. And recently we just crcrossed 1.4 million subscribers, and this is after four years. We were able to hit what was it? I think 1 million subscribers in less than four years. This is the biggest YouTube channel I’ve ever had. And not only that, it’s generating revenue.

Significant revenue. I’m talking five figures a month through AdSense revenue. On YouTube just through ads on, on the YouTube videos themselves. Every once in a while I have a sponsorship package or deal where I’m charging anywhere between 25 and $35,000 for a 62nd to a 92nd ad on one of those videos.

I don’t do that all the time. I’m very particular about who I have on that show or on that, on that channel. And I’m an affiliate for various companies. One of those companies that I’m an affiliate for a binder company out of the UK pays me high four figures a month. From affiliate commissions on products that I encourage my audience to purchase.

It’s also given me opportunities to get to build a relationship with Pokemon. It’s given me the opportunity to meet different celebrities who are also into Pokemon. It’s allowed me to fly over to Japan and get paid to do that, to go to events and speak and be a celebrity at those spaces. Again, something that four years ago I was a nobody in.

So in the grand scheme of things, four years is not that long. To positions oneself as an expert, as a authority, as a leader, as a trusted member of a community to be able to then lead that community elsewhere. And right now we host events twice a year. We have one coming up in June in Tampa, Florida and another in Seattle in October called Card Party.

You can actually check out the website at card. party and you’ll see my face there. We have predicted that we’re going to have about 5,000. 5000 people at each of those events. Tampa and Seattle this year. So 10,000 people coming this year, which is pretty wild. My third YouTube channel was an experimental one called Short Pocket Monster.

This was a shorts specific YouTube channel that was built to house my 60 second or less videos. And just kind of get familiar with that sort of medium. That’s that form of content creation. And that channel is going to surpass deep pocket monster, probably within the next two or three months, it’s already at 1.2 million subscribers and generating a low five figures, very low five figures. I mean, just over 10, 10 K a month on ads and affiliate related things and, and stuff like that again, and that was created less than a year ago. So all that to say. Hopefully you can tell that this information that I’m about to share with you is credible.

It comes from a credible source, somebody who’s been doing it for a while, somebody who has made a ton of mistakes and doesn’t want you to make the same mistakes.

And the first mistake that you will make is wanting to perfect your videos. So you have to learn to let go. You have to accept that your first videos will not and should not be perfect.

That’s exactly how it should be. This is how you learn. This is what my book is about lean learning. Mistakes are your teacher. Understanding how it works while you’re doing it is going to help you faster than trying to read all the books about it, listen to all the podcast episodes, hopefully you’ll listen to this one, but hopefully this is the only one you need to have that YouTuber mindset to succeed.

I’m telling you what nobody tells beginners because it’s hard, and once you’re in it, you kind of forget what it was like, but I have just started new channels that have done very well. It’s going to take some time to find your voice and your style, and a little story I interviewed through the audio podcast here, MKBHD, prominent YouTuber and tech reviewer, the number one tech reviewer in the world with I think over 20 million subscribers now on YouTube.

And when I interviewed him, he told me that his first 100 videos, his first 100 videos were for less than 100 subscribers. Just let that sit. His first 100 videos were for less than 100 subscribers then a hundred subscribers that he had. All of that repetition, all of that learning, all of those mistakes, all of the editing, and the shortcuts he was learning, until one video finally hit.

And it put him on the map. All of his other videos grew as well. It’s not like your older videos don’t have a chance to grow. They definitely do on YouTube. So, it would behoove you to just get started and get over and let go of perfectionism paralysis. The second thing you’ll have to let go of is comparing yourself to others.

The comparison trap is real and more real on YouTube than anywhere else. Why? Because the numbers are everywhere and they’re public and you see them and you see the number of comments. You see the number of likes, you see the number of views. More than that YouTube encourages you to look at the analytics and I do recommend you look at the analytics We’re not going to get into the detail of how to look at your analytics If you happen to be a member of the SPI community we have a particular lesson on which analytics you should be looking at inside of our course YouTube from scratch which You should all check out if you haven’t already.

Smartpassiveincome.com/community and all community members get access to all of our courses. You should check it out. Anyway, going back to what I was saying. YouTube, when you create your own videos, you will get a ranking when you hit publish that tells you how that video compares even to your other videos.

And immediately you start to compare, not just yourself to others, but yourself to yourself. And it is a huge, huge demotivator, it is deflating, it can be a drag to publish a video, work so hard on it, and then realize that it’s just tanking. So again, you’re going to have to combine this with what I just said about perfectionism and realize that some videos are just going to be 10 out of 10s out of your last 10 videos.

This is the 10th worst ranking video. And it’s the one that you just published that will happen. In fact, that happened today for me, I could either get upset about it and quit, which of course I’m not going to do, but that’s what a lot of beginners do because they’re like, I’m not good enough. It should be better every single time.

No, because if you’re experimenting, some stuff’s going to work and some stuff isn’t in the beginning, guess what you’re doing. You’re experimenting the whole time, but it’s also data for you. Okay, this video didn’t rank very well, let me go and look at the retention graph, just to give you a little peek under the hood.

You look at the retention graph and see where people dropped off. Did you have a good hook? Did people leave right away? In which case you need to do better the next time. Okay, don’t delete the video, just do better on the next one. Let’s move on to the essential mindset shifts that you need part one was almost kind of like letting go getting rid of perfectionism Letting go of things that have to be perfect.

I know that’s often a condition we have trust me Especially if you are my age and went to school and it was all about getting A pluses or you know A minus why not A and of course the comparison trap. Compare yourself to yourself yesterday. The other thing about comparison, this is a little more of an advanced technique, but if you have, let’s say, five different styles of videos that you create over time, you don’t want to compare style A to style B, right?

Even though YouTube will give you your previous 10 videos and rank them against each other. You need to rank your style A video with other style A videos. Your style B video with other style B videos. For example, at Deep Pocket Monster we have challenge videos. We’re not going to compare our challenge videos to our collection purchase videos.

And compare that to our more historical look at Pokemon card videos. Those are three completely different buckets. But we will compare our challenge video that we just published to the last challenge video we did to the last one before that. That is a bucket and those are different buckets that you’ll be able to create.

And the only way to know which buckets work is to again, hit publish and go experiment. And the more you wait, the less opportunity you have to learn. So get started. All right. Essential mindset shifts. We need to reframe What it means to make content making content makes it feel like it is a chore and yes I know it is it takes work and it’s editing and storytelling and that stuff. But when you reframe I got to make content to you I get to solve problems or I get to serve an audience or I get to entertain my audience I get to allow my audience to enjoy the same kind of fun I’m enjoying This is so key. It’s not just making content. It is getting to, having the privilege to solve people’s problems using YouTube, to serve an audience, help them through a problem, help make something more convenient for them or something less inconvenient, to help make their day a little bit better.

Okay? So focus less on what you want to say and more on what your viewers need to hear or learn or would help them smile, laugh, cry, bring some emotion into it, right? These are other tactics and tips we teach inside of YouTube from scratch. Tell the story. And this one’s probably the biggest one when it comes to the workload and doing the stuff like just can staying consistent as much as possible.

You want to develop a systems over goals mentality when it comes to YouTube. Instead of fixating on subscriber milestones or how many views you have, you want to build sustainable routines that make consistent content creation possible. You know, you have a lot of other commitments, sure. But you need to find a way to create consistent content.

Doesn’t necessarily mean to be daily, or needs to be daily, although I was able to fit in a daily shorts channel on top of everything else because that was my force function and those were my parameters. I have to do it in the day that I already have. Where am I going to find this extra time? What am I willing to sacrifice?

And what once took 45 minutes in the beginning, Because I only had 45 minutes of time and again, that forced me to not over edit, to not complicate things, to figure out if this were easy, what would it look like? You’ve heard that question from me before. And what once took 45 minutes now takes 20. I’ve more than doubled my output and gained some time back.

This is why some days I actually post two shorts on a single day. And when you focus on your systems, those are the things that you can control. YouTube, YouTube is, is something that we’re all gonna have a love hate relationship with. Right, it gives us so many opportunities, it’s a platform where you can find your people, your people can find you, especially when you create content that gets found on the browse or suggested traffic or, or, or meaning it’s not just search based, but when people go to their homepage, your video shows up, even though they’re not subscribed, your video shows up as a recommendation, or when a person finishes a video, your video shows up next for them to watch, even though they’re not subscribed, right? That’s YouTube doing you a favor because you’ve done them a favor. What is that? You’ve created a video that people like to click on and like to stick on.

The click and stick strategy. Again, part of the practical tips we teach inside of YouTube From Scratch, inside of the community. You can control how much better your thumbnails are. You can control what you choose to include or what you choose not to include in your edits. How to tell your stories.

You can control how you actually show up every day. You can’t necessarily always control how many views a video is going to get. You can have the best video, or seemingly the best video, and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Imagine you’re fishing and you put the best bait on, you have the best presentation, you make the best cast in the best location, right in front of the best fish.

All the conditions are correct. Does that always mean you’re going to catch the fish? So what do you do? You reel in that line and you pack it up and you go home after one cast? No, you cast again. And in this case, you create another video and you try again.

Next, let’s talk about some practical success principles. Let’s have a sustainable posting schedule. There are too many creators who get really excited in the beginning, and I get it. You want to post daily, you want to post five times a week, super long videos, you’re consistent, and then all of a sudden you start to burn out.

You start to, you know, pay attention to some of the numbers when you shouldn’t. You should just commit to trying it for 60 days straight. It’s hard, and you can’t help it. You’re creating videos. Nobody’s watching them. Well, again, what can you control? How you show up, how much better your videos get every time, the analytics and how you review them and how you look at them, how you take that information and adjust over time.

But you want to start with a sustainable posting schedule, something that can fit or that you can make work. And make work for a lengthy period of time, six months, 60 days, whatever the time frame of your experiment is, the longer, the more data and analytics you’ll have to make a clear decision on the future, but don’t burn out.

It is so, so in the, in the Pokemon space, there has been so many people who have come and gone ever since I even started. Many people have come and gone. They just haven’t committed, they over committed at first and, and then just, you know, and they worry too much about the numbers. Yes, you have to pay attention to the numbers and you want to make sure it’s still worth your time, which is why it’s important to think about, okay, well, how much time you’re going to give yourself and, and what would it look like to succeed?

Sometimes it just takes a mindset shift. Okay, well, I don’t need tens of thousands of views. I just really need three customers a month. Well, that changes things right now. How might you speak to people so directly that maybe you only have 100 people watching each video, but all 100 of them are perfectly suited prospects for your business.

I know it’s very, very easy, even I’m not contributing to the sort of vanity numbers here by saying I have millions of views, but again, I’m sharing this for credibility purposes, but I also am saying this now. It’s not about the number of views, it’s who is viewing and how are you helping them even beyond the YouTube video thinking about, well, where do you take them from there?

Creating content buckets is a very practical thing to do. I touched on this earlier, but if you can going into youTube experiment or YouTube career. Think about three or four main themes or topics that you’re going to cover regularly. Coming up with those ahead of time can be great. Giving yourself room to experiment can be great.

But kind of just randomly creating videos here and there with kind of no conscious effort to consider what kind of video it is or what bucket it might lend itself to. And you get to create your own buckets. It’s not like they’re are a limited amount of buckets that exist out there and you have to fit into them.

But you yourself and your channel will have its own defined buckets that make your channel your channel, that make you you. And again, you just got to get started. Now the real secret to consistency is really to build your content around Your interests stuff that is exciting to you stuff that you’re already doing your existing routines and if you love for example morning coffee and that’s like a part of who you are.

Film during that time. And bring your coffee to the desk when you start teaching. If you’re a night owl, you know, cool, edit then and showcase on the videos just what time it is. It’s just who you are. Work with your natural rhythms. And part of what I was saying is bring your personality and who you are into your videos.

No, you don’t have to share and reveal every little dark secret or any secrets at all to who your audience is and who that, who those audience members will become, but rather what makes you, you. Think about it. There’s so much AI and automation and just so much information now that is lifeless can still be useful, but it’s like lacking emotion.

It’s lacking connection. What is it that we can connect with these days? It is other people. People, and people connect with people who have stories to tell, who have real life things that are relatable. If a kid runs into your room while you’re recording, don’t delete that. I mean, it’s up to you as far as your comfort level for having your kid in your videos, but if that’s a part of your life and you keep getting interrupted, cool.

That’s real life, and I can relate to that, and so many other people can. And if it relates to your audience, even better. They will see you as a human being that they can trust, because You know, you’re not perfect. Nobody is. That’s why perfect content often doesn’t work very well because it’s just seemingly off.

Because that’s not real life. So again, to go back to what we were talking about, staying consistent means just maybe sometimes turning the camera on within moments and times that you’re already kind of doing something can lend itself to really good behind the scenes content, for example. Again, something worth experimenting with.

The other thing that has helped me a lot Is having a consistently set up minimal, viable filming setup. I used to, trust me, I used to want all the best equipment. I bought all the best equipment, and then I never used it. It was just too complicated to hook up, and there was a lot of it, and there was wires everywhere, and I needed all these lights, and all these cameras, and additional lenses to get the best shots.

If you actually go back into my Pat Flynn YouTube channel, way back in 2010, 2009, you’ll see that I experiment with some higher end stuff, and it’s just, it was just such a waste of time. And especially nowadays, guess what? You have a phone. That’s actually all you need. A phone, and potentially a microphone, and face a window to get that natural daylight pointing to you, and take a selfie shot of you telling a story, teaching something.

Then film those things that you’re talking about, and insert that in your editing software as b roll. You can still just talk over it. That’s called a voiceover. These things are not that difficult, but we make them difficult, which is a completely natural thing for us, business owners, entrepreneurs, especially those of us who are more excited, especially in the beginning, but that excitement actually hinders us because we want the best stuff.

We want to do it well, but then we, we get in our own way, having a setup like I have now where it’s just a camera set up literally in the same spot. I can just turn on my camera, turn on my computer and I can hit a button and go. Or maybe it’s a tripod, like a SwitchPod, with a phone adapter, like the SwitchPod branded phone adapter.

So that when you walk into your office, you just pop your phone in there, and you put it on selfie mode, or you use one of those things that show you what the back camera looks like, so that you get a little bit better quality. And you just hit record and go. If this were easy, what would it look like?

The less steps for you to get to record we’re to have to record the better, right? That’s still why I use screen flow, which is an old school screen recording software that, you know, many people have moved on from that, but if this were easy for me, it would just be this minimal viable software I use to record my screen.

And, you know, anything I plug into the computer also records at the same time, and it forces me to just not get fancy.

I have some closing thoughts for you. This was more of a quick hit episode to go over some really big things that often get in our way as creators, especially on YouTube. But the opportunity is so ripe, the opportunity is so big that I would encourage you to get started when it makes sense for you, and, or complete the things that you have already committed to, so that you can get to do this.

So as a reminder, every major YouTuber started with zero subscribers. I did. Three times. And every major YouTuber started with imperfect videos. I definitely did. And my videos are still not perfect. If they are, I actually probably spent too much time on them. The ones who succeed are not necessarily the most talented either.

They were the ones who showed up, and they showed up consistently, and they kept improving. And if you haven’t, even though you wanted to, or maybe you’ve been lacking, you have a YouTube channel, but you just kind of always put it aside because it’s difficult. Every day you do that, you’re losing out on a huge opportunity.

You’re not showing up consistently, and more, you are not allowing yourself to improve. You can only improve what you put out there and create. So if there is no creation, there is no improvement. So, if you haven’t yet started, and the time seems right for you, I challenge you to film your first video within the first 48 hours of, what’s it say on the clock right now?

Check out your watch or that clock on the wall on your computer. Okay, 24 hours from now, record your first episode. You don’t have to publish it yet, but just hit record and go, and get messy. You gotta be cringe before they binge.

That’s my final word. Alright, go get em. You got this. Thanks so much, and again, that resource I mentioned earlier, Smart from Scratch, or excuse me, YouTube from Scratch Smart from Scratch is our other course. In fact, both of those courses, and all of our other ones, are available right now at  Smartpassiveincome.com/community. You can even get in on the start tier, the cheapest tier, and get access to all of those right now, including YouTube from Scratch, and I invite you to. However, the other tiers will allow you to get access to me during office hours every single week. As well as access to other community members and experts who are there to help you.

So go ahead and check it out.  Smartpassiveincome.com/community. YouTube, you got this.