Building a YouTube Empire: Unveiling the Ultimate Growth Hacks

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0:11[Music] Austin Lieberman everyone welcome to the show [Music] Greg how are you thanks for um not blocking me when I replied to your your post with your new YouTube video okay let's let's maybe start with that so I've been working really hard on growing this YouTube channel as in the last few months and I'm on Twitter and I've started tweeting about it and then bam you come in what happened tell the story yeah um you so I've been a fan of yours for a long time and learned a lot from you and um I know you've done various different things that have been like super successful and then so I saw you share

1:11uh this YouTube video and I go and check out your YouTube channel and the first thing I see when it is um the title is everything I learned this week I was like okay so the thing about YouTube is like it's I've been trying to learn it as well and I think it's a huge change for people that have um very large Twitter accounts or like a very large account somewhere else YouTube is is so big and has so so many people viewing it that 99 of the people on that platform have never heard of you and never heard of me especially and so I think

1:49um what a lot of people do who have huge followings on other platforms um is they kind of assume that that like the audience on YouTube is is gonna have is gonna know them and have the same kind of like trust Equity that you've built up with your followers on Twitter over so long or in your email newsletter or whatever I I think a mistake that I've made and and that I sort of like alluded to in my reply to your Tweet was it almost felt like you were assuming that people that watched that video know you and and so you like I watched the first 30 seconds or minute of the video

2:27and I I still had like no idea what the video was about and what value I was going to get out of it and while I know you and I know the value that you bring on a regular basis so I was willing to watch that because I've I've followed you on Twitter for a long time 99 of people that watch that video and come across that video are not gonna do that and so they're immediately gonna flip away and so that was kind of what I called out like there's a few best practices if you will that I've I've learned and biggest one and this is like

2:55a Mr Beast thing right where it's like within the first 20 to 30 seconds you have to get people's attention and tell them what value they're gonna get out of watching the video at the beginning of the video just tell like literally the simplest thing just tell them why they should watch it you know if you're putting a million Orbeez in a pool don't start the video with you shopping for you know your mom's birthday present at the beginning of the video just say we're gonna put a million Orbeez in this pool and so yeah I mean that that was the reply and um I just found that on

3:23that piece sorry not sorry to interrupt but on that piece we're recording on YouTube right now what value are people gonna get by watching this video yes that's great so this should be like what this video starts with uh by watching this video I think people who are maybe working a job and wanting to be a Creator or make like monetize their brand online uh and learn how to transition from working a full-time job working on their like Creator passion part-time to actually turning that into a business uh that's kind of what my journey has been like and I think that they'll learn some actual tactics and

4:01I'm happy to share the process that I've used over time to not make millions of dollars from my own business right now I think that's possible in the future but to make like a livable income and if if nothing else then you make a nice side income while you're working a full-time job that's that's I think what like the most value I can bring to your to your viewers and your your audience to love that and maybe let's start with YouTube um if you're trying to build an audience on YouTube how do you think about that I I think like in in my opinion YouTube is

4:35the best place for people to start building an audience outside of also having an email newsletter or a way that they can capture people's emails and and information and be able to contact them on a regular basis um why do I think YouTube is the best place to do that because it's they've they've got uh massive a massive audience hundreds of millions of people if not over a billion people um on YouTube over the course of a month and there's uh literally nothing stopping you from from getting started they have amazing analytics so you can you can see the results of what you're doing um and it's automatic monetization so

5:22once you reach the YouTube Partner program which is I think it's a thousand um subscribers and 4 000 watch hours which feels like a lot you automatically start getting paid for your videos you don't have to have any relationships with getting your own advertising or finding your own Brands and sponsors you can do that in addition to the automatic AdSense that you get paid from YouTube um and then in addition to that every single video you can in in the description and on your channel you can link to to the digital product that you're selling the course that you might sell your email newsletter which is

6:00which is what I do and affiliate links in in the description so yeah I think YouTube is an incredible place to start this is what I did I started in 2022 I guess it was I think it was March of 2022 started actually creating on YouTube um and have gotten to a point that um I think in December of 22 maybe it was October uh it was I don't know somewhere between August and October of 2022. I'm having like screen sharing we can go over the analytics um I got monetized on YouTube and and am now making anywhere between um 300 to 800 a month just from ads

6:38AdSense on YouTube that they automatically place I'll show I'll show mine if you show yours let's do it let's play that game yeah let's do it so I'm gonna share my screen right here so I make so I I have YouTube earn or AdSense enabled I recently did it I'm making about a hundred dollars a month I actually you can even see like I if I go to there and tab over here I literally haven't even put in my banking information um That's how little I care about the hundred dollars a month um because to me I don't care about the the actual AdSense like to me the value

7:13is in like I I have a bunch of businesses um that I run um and if I um sort of plug it in the YouTube video like that's gonna be worth a hundred times more uh than you know the hundred bucks a month so the way I see it and I think you know the reason I bring this up is a lot of creators actually are not going to even care about the ad sensor or earn part of it um in the ad part of it but you know just really care about plugging their products within the YouTube videos yeah so a couple things though is like that

7:46AdSense is just a reflection it's a reflection of a couple things right the amount of viewers that you get on your video shows the amount of time that they're engaged with your videos the uh it's also based on kind of like the quality of the viewer and that that it sounds horrible to say this I'm not labeling people here I'm labeling people in terms of um how advertisers view them like how valuable advertisers view them and so that comes down to what country are they viewing from what's their age group and so even though that hundred dollars for you isn't meaningful I think it's still like whether we're talking about revenue

8:27or we're talking about views or view duration or the um geography or demographics of the audience I still think it's like a valuable metric because if that number's going up it means that you are getting a wider reach in a higher quality audience that's going to be ideal for you know your brands or or other people that you partner with totally oh don't get me wrong I wish that number was yeah you know 50x you know and that's why I brought you on the Pod to try to under you know help me you know yeah but I I just want to let people know though that

8:59like it's it's a metric to keep an eye on but it's for me not my core metric um if you go do you mind going to um analytics on the left side there and then go to audience um it's up top yep and uh and let's see you should so scroll down a little bit so here like this is where I think and and you may not even know this because again like your focus is on your businesses and not 100 on like YouTube analytics right but I've never been here by the way yeah so we've never been here this is where I think for you when

9:34you're thinking about like how you're positioning your and again like I'm sitting here giving you advice right when when you've been uh far more successful in your own businesses than I have so I just want to like openly say that but but how I think about this is is for you or any business owner um maybe it's a startup that has a YouTube channel and they're trying to use use it for top funnel demand generation or whatever you can the amazing thing about YouTube is is they have like some of the highest quality analytics in the world and so you can see where your viewers are coming from

10:04you can see uh their age group so if you go if you go up um so this might be easier if I share my screen and and just click around um you wanna do that yeah let's do that the other thing I love about YouTube for anybody who's thinking about starting a channel is you don't have to have a a following anywhere else to get really large on YouTube and I think like the next three to five years is gonna be more about especially as we see like Twitter deprioritizing um outside links and then trying to prioritize uh in the algorithm uh organically uploaded pictures and videos

10:44I think the next like three to five years is actually going to be about growing disconnected um audiences on different platforms and so what I'm trying to do is share less and less of my YouTube links to Twitter and just grow YouTube independently from growing Twitter and um and the same thing can be said about LinkedIn or whatever platform and I think the reason that's beneficial is because then in a way you're like diversifying your audience and you're not becoming too reliant on any one platform if you're kind of growing them all and and there's of course a risk of like trying to do too many things at once right so we

11:23should maybe focus on like one or two at a time but um and the other part of that is like if somebody's a huge fan of you on Twitter and you just mention somewhere that you have a YouTube they're gonna find you on YouTube like your super your thousand true fans are going to be fans of you everywhere but if you if you spread across you're doing organic uploads to each uh you you benefit from kind of like the natural growth drivers of each platform so okay um I've got my YouTube Studio open right now and I think the best thing that do is to maybe just we'll just jump into

11:56analytics and we'll go to estimated revenue for the month and so I've got uh I have 6400 subscribers and I've never paid a dollar for any type of organic um or I'm sorry like paid marketing or anything like that I do all the editing myself this is entirely you know self self-driven stuff and then the I think the the most important point is if we go to analytics and we go to audience you can see where people come from and the reason I want to point this out is because um just give me a second and maybe we can like we can edit this if we need here we

12:38go traffic Source right so I'm in analytics I'm in traffic source so I have 50 000 followers on Twitter and one of the things I did early on when I was starting the channel which I'm still early is I would link to every video on Twitter and you would think that that would mean that most um most of my views would come from Twitter but actually so if we go to Lifetime so we're going to Lifetime analytics this says 2016 that's because I uploaded like two videos a long time ago that anyways you could see where all this started this started in March uh or Yeah March of 2022. uh external so the

13:18views coming from external is 2.6 even though like the vast majority of my following anywhere online is on Twitter and I used to share a link to every video on Twitter it just to me goes to show you how independent you know these platform forms are and how the benefit of like growing on YouTube right and so the reason YouTube is so beautiful is these two right here that browse which is uh anytime somebody's on the home page of YouTube and you just are looking at what comes up on your dashboard that's what those are 51.6 of all of my views have come from browse that's why

13:56YouTube is like such an important top of funnel you know lead generation in my opinion and then YouTube search is at 30.6 percent and so when you create videos you sort of have to think about what are you prioritizing for are you prioritizing for browse the videos that people will see in their timeline and click on or are you prioritizing for YouTube search that is very much um you're gonna find what are the topics trending on YouTube what are the topics trending on Google analytics and you can just see it out there in the wild right like right now ai in anything AI related is getting a ton of search volume and so

14:39if I wanted to orient towards uh search then right now one of the most popular search topics in the world is YouTube or is AI and so I would start making videos about about AI but but those are the two important things and so then what decisions does that drive if you're going for browse or you're going for search I talked about search a little bit it all comes down to kind of like keywords and you would want the title of your video in the things you're talking about in the video to be very SEO friendly topics right and I'll talk about how I've worked on that in the

15:15past on YouTube with browse the by far the most important thing is the thumbnail and then the first like 60 characters in your title those two things have to grab people's attention immediately and get them to click on it and so yeah that's I mean that right there is where a lot of the demand comes from is YouTube itself which is why I'm such a fan of the platform if we go to um I'm gonna go to revenue here and uh get into why I think um for people who are like long form video creators and by long form I mean anywhere from uh eight to 12 minute

15:56videos is what I would consider long form I think shorts are actually a complete waste of time and um actually hurt your channel long term and so right now we've got my Revenue chart up and uh over the last 30 days I've made 206 dollars I was um traveling for two weeks so I didn't make a ton of videos and you can kind of tell I've got basically two videos done over the last I don't know 15 or 20 days or whatever Which is less than normal but if we go to Lifetime I've made 2959 from YouTube and again starting basically in August 8th of 2022 I made

16:41three dollars and 62 cents and the cool thing about YouTube is every video you make I heard Ali abdall talk about this every video you make is like its own little business right and it can generate revenue for you forever ever is a long time for however long YouTube stays relevant and people keep watching um but that's a cool thing and so I'll share kind of a cool use case but one thing you notice is there was a short period of time where I jumped from in in August I was making four dollars a day to 32 dollars a day on October 14th and I jumped to

17:2286.58 on October 23rd and then it's like slowly gone down 54 November 2nd um November 9th 22 and so what happened there um I had one video that was super popular so let's see if we go to views 100 134 000 views on one video um my channel is about Finance stuff right which um you can make a YouTube channel about anything there's there's super popular YouTube channels about um knitting and Pokemon and stuff like that there is a difference in in the amount of Revenue you get paid per thousand views that's dependent on again topics you talk about and how it all comes down to how valuable your viewers

18:11are to advertisers and so um if we go to revenue right now we've got this my most popular video ever open 180-ish thousand views made 949 dollars from that video and if we go to the the way that you can see the kind of the value of your viewer comes down to RPM which is revenue for every 1000 views so I got paid seven dollars and six cents on this video for every thousand views right now it's got a hundred and thirty four thousand so I was off whatever whatever I said before 134 000 views um so 134 times 7 is how we get to that 900

18:57that it made and then you know YouTube right here in CPM which is the playback cost for every thousand views that tells you how much YouTube is charging advertisers to advertise on your video so that is 19.56 for this video I keep seven dollars and six cents which in my my opinion is very fair for the Creator and um this just shows the potential of of each video on YouTube and the cool thing you can see is is that I made trying to show how much money this video has made over time um and so I made um 28 on it on October 14th I made 77 on

19:43this video on on October 23rd but even since then every single day I'm getting paid you know some amount of money for the people that are watching this video and I don't have to do anything to it right and so then Greg I guess this just comes back to you know talking about um the value of YouTube either to somebody who is trying to create income themselves and this is something that um I do was doing on the side while I was working I literally made this video while I had a full-time job 40 plus hours a week and I'm in the Air National Guard which takes time I was still able

20:22to find the time a lot of it I guess is because I work from home and maybe I wasn't always working you know when I should have been or whatever but I think a lot of people are in that situation um this was something I was able to do on the side and and so when you think about the macro economic situation we're in people are losing their jobs like how valuable is that for people whether you're a founder or not and you're trying to Market your product or you're just an individual trying to make some extra money to be able to make 949 dollars from a video that you create

20:51um on the side like there's a lot of things that you can do with that money and then um on a you know on a monthly basis um and go back to overall um Revenue uh this is a decent amount of uh income for somebody on the side I'm trying to get to so here's kind of the revenue growth all this is my total Channel Revenue per month um August I mean the crazy thing is it's the growth right like the growth in it you I mean you've been going from 100 bucks you have you know some months over 900 but you know um you're just seeing that like if you

21:29continue doing this like it's not crazy that you 10x the amount of Revenue you get you just have to like stay the course and then then all of a sudden you're making you know thousands of dollars a month um and that's when you hear about like creators you know quitting their job and going full time on YouTube yep and and the other thing that comes with this too and you have to like balance this is is I don't do any um I haven't done any brand deals where all everything we're looking at right here on this chart which if you're listening to this I'm just showing the chart of Revenue over

22:01time it started 112 bucks in August um has slowly gone up and then I had a few breakout months um December November and October was 300 740 and then 922 um either way it's it's slowly turning up and then you have kind of like a breakout month but still the average is still kind of trending up over time the thing about that is like as that gets bigger and as you get more views it attracts things like Brands reaching out wanting you to feature their product in their video as part of the video that's additional Revenue but the other thing too is like startups reaching out that

22:40need Consulting and they need they're trying to grow people who like there's a number of different things that you can do from YouTube and so um again like there's millions of people out there that have like far more successful businesses than me and and all of that stuff I'm by no means trying to say I'm the most successful Creator in the world but I guess just what I want to share with people is like you could do this I have zero video training everything I Learned was through watching people do it on YouTube and just like learning from other channels the place I got the idea for this video

23:12and I like told the person the place I got the idea for my most popular video ever and this this is the crazy thing about YouTube is like people have created the blueprint for you where I got this idea and made it my own was another Channel called uh decade investor and this is how I like come up with ideas for videos right like I'm not I'm not saying I'm the most creative person in the world and all these ideas are my own but I find similar channels to me so if you're creating a channel what I think you should do is find people that are not the biggest channels

23:47in the world so like I'm not looking at Ali abdall right now and trying to make videos like his because he's got three million subscribers on YouTube and his videos will be popular if he literally just posts a video with him as the uh in the thumbnail it doesn't matter what his video is about he's going to get a hundred thousand plus views that's not to take anything away from him but he's got the subscriber base to do that so if you're looking for ideas start with channels that are like mildly more successful than you and so I was looking at this channel um he's a friend of mine

24:20actually decade investor 33 000 subscribers I just went to most popular and he has a video that's called I'm retiring off just vo which is a an index fund I saw it had 211 000 views he made it a year ago so it's still like relatively um new or or you know that like it hasn't been that long ago and then I went and made a video that's called I'm retiring off just schd which is another ETF and like here's the thing here's the secret is like is it a little clickbaity yes but it you have to make the connection in the video to where the

24:58thing in the title and the thing in the thumbnail is related to your video it doesn't have to be like a hundred percent what the video is uh but it has to be like related and believable um for people to actually watch the video right and so um like you don't have to come out and have all of your own ideas you can look at at what other people have done that has worked and there's a tool I don't know if you use this Greg but it's called tubebuddy and so it's like 50 bucks a year I pay for it you can go to launch keyword Explorer now and so

25:33um I make Finance stuff but let's let's say we we want to make a video about um uh chat GPT right I don't know people have probably never heard of that but um so uh how to use chat GPT you come in here and do Jake by the way what's that I I that was a good joke thank you I hope everybody's laughing um and anyways you could just put kind of like the title in here and use this tool to get an idea and again like a business owner could use this to to think about um marketing their products or whatever so it doesn't have to just be for you

26:05know YouTube nerds like me um how to use chat GPT what this tool does is this side of the tool tells you how your channel ranks compared to other people that are making these videos so we can see the search volume on YouTube for chat GTP GPT is excellent that's good but the competition is there's a ton of competition so if I go right now and make a video about chat GPT after never talking about on my channel before I'm probably not gonna like have that much success because you you don't have that that following and that kind of like brand equity on YouTube to be

26:45popular and then the optimization strength tells you how well are the videos that are out there optimized are the people optimizing for for keywords and titles do they have a good thumbnail that's kind of what that score is but what I do and the way that I use this is I'll come up with the title and figure out what my video is going to be about and then here on this the right side here this tool gives you all of the keywords and the tags that people have used and so kind of an immediate thing people can do to improve their their YouTube is to just start using a tool

27:21like this and start to improve the topics that you're doing and make sure they're topics that at least have you know somewhat of search volume and then use keywords which there's a back and forth about like whether or not you even need keywords but if you're a small Channel I think you need to be doing everything you know to put the odds in your favor you just copy all of these um to the video tag limit you can copy all of these and then when you go to uh create a video you could just like put those in in kind of the keyword block I won't go through that right here but

27:57that's the main thing the other thing I do is I look at the results here and I see like what do these thumbnails look like and it in I just use this for me to get an idea of like which one would I click on um and and then are they popular or not and so the the basics of thumbnails though is like you should never have again unless you're like some massively popular Creator already you should never have more than like five words on on your thumbnail and even you know you should even try for under four because people when if you're browsing YouTube you're just like scrolling across your

28:32screen right and so if it's more than four or five words like people aren't sadly aren't going to take the time to read that um and so that's what I'll do is I'll just look at some of the the titles and see kind of what they look like and then um I just make all of my titles in canva and uh I've got like a couple a couple templates in here that I use and I see the ones that are um most popular and when I say most popular I mean I have the best um click-through rate and we can jump into to click-through rate but what

29:08you'll notice wait going back on those templates are those templates that you created uh yes these are ones that I created and um yeah basically um it I just kept it simple though like and different things are gonna work for different channels right um for people listening I'm just just got like a black background here I make Finance stuff so I've got the name of the company I'm talking about in on the thumbnail which in this case it's Amazon and then something big and shocking right uh the title here is just bought ninety thousand dollars which uh is another thing like it's not investment advice I

29:44don't recommend anybody who want to do that um it was true I did that and it's kind of a shocking thing right so it uh that drove a decent amount of of views but the way that you can you can judge that is impression click-through rate and so what I'll do the thing is is like you can't see anybody else's click-through rate so that's the tough thing um and then I always wonder like well how is my click through rate versus everybody's else and the truth is I don't know but um what I can see is that that title that I just talked about why the title of the video is why I just

30:17bought ninety thousand dollars of Amazon stock um the the thumbnail has um two words on it and a company name the click-through rate is 14.4 percent which is extremely high uh you know in my own numbers and a little bit of research I've done if you can get over seven percent over a seven percent click-through rate then that's great and so that's what I'll do is I'll look at my videos that have performed the best anything over a 10 click-through rate then I'm Gonna Keep testing you know those Style videos and those style um titles and topics and so the other so the other thing Greg that I'll share is

30:59like it's when you find something that works uh double down on it um I'm trying to scroll over and so I started my channel off talking about kind of like my investment journey and individual stocks well then I made this video about schd which is a an ETF exchange traded fund and it got 134 000 views well then I tried to make more videos about uh schd and ETFs right and like all of my most popular videos now are basically about schd and about ETS and so we're kind of getting off topic Greg from kind of like what your point was you know you use YouTube for your Brands and stuff

31:41like that if if you're using it for a business for yourself and monetization yourself and make an income yourself if you find something that works and you enjoy talking about it and double down on that because um there were 1 million people that that schd video that I made the original one I made has one million impressions uh how many people use YouTube daily so that video got one million impressions YouTube has 122 million daily visitors and so if you find something that works 99 of people on YouTube have never seen it and never heard of you so you can double down on the same thing

32:28um the other thing about YouTube and I'm I keep going all over the place but whatever uh hopefully this is helpful um most people who watch your videos are not your subscribers um they are just random people on on YouTube and the way that you can tell is by going to traffic Source subscription status so uh not subscribed for me so this is over the last year people not subscribed to my channel 81 of My Views uh people that are subscribed to my channel 18 of views and so you need to um like if people subscribe to your channel they need to kind of like get

33:10what they came for to to stay subscribed don't limit Yourself by thinking um if you if you make this video your subscribers aren't gonna like it or it's different or whatever the vast majority of people out there um that are watching your videos and again on on YouTube have like never heard of you and never seen you and so um that's what I think about and and I'm just like willing to test new things um let me show you just showed me a hundred things in my and my mind is like my jaws dropped literally like I'm trying to pick it up from the floor and

33:43I'm gonna show you one thing so go to go to your dashboard okay like your um like you're just my main yeah your main YouTube Studio dashboard yeah yeah so yeah we run a bunch of agencies and sometimes I drop on YouTube Hey like we have this Innovation agency we have this design agency we have this you know organic SEO agency that's Ai and we have this you know AI engine it's all like drop that and if you scroll down um on this page like the main page recent subscribers got it this to me is like so valuable that I think people don't really like it you know talk about

34:23so you can actually we see who subscribed to your channel and also sort them by you know date subscribe but off but also subscriber count I was noticing like I had like some pretty big people yep who started subscribing to the where it happens YouTube channel and I just reached out to them some of them so for example one of them was a senior leader at a Fortune 500 company I reached out to him and he was like stoked that I reached out he was like whoa like I subscribed to your channel yesterday you reach out all of a sudden like we're closing a six-figure deal on one of like

34:58a really cool company doing like Innovation work and design work and prototyping all from YouTube that's that's awesome and thank you for sharing that because I had literally never looked at that part and and I think that goes a show like why YouTube can be so valuable for so many different reasons depending on what you're using for like that is like the perfect use case I think for like you to be using YouTube for and so then then it can down to different things right it's like what is your um your purpose for using YouTube or whatever platform and you you do kind of have to optimize for that right and

35:36and not so back to like this whole conversation so for you like yeah it totally makes sense I think to optimize for the things that the your most valuable sounds bad but it's like your most valuable viewer uh optimized for that which means yes you you may give up views because you're not going to have the most viral titles in the world because that's not going to attract the person that like is the most valuable to you and your business and your life but I still think like there's definitely opportunities to increase that that pool as much as possible back like to the best Practice Things is like making sure in the first

36:1530 seconds of your video the uh people know what you're talking about basic thumbnail stuff like you know things things like that I think like um can still be super valuable but that's a great point where and that that's kind of why I think like YouTube shorts for most people at least right now is a total waste of time because like um if you think about the audience for shorts and and I'll just talk about me specifically my goal with YouTube is like a couple things primary way I make money online right now is through people subscribing to my paid email newsletter um and so everything else I do Twitter

36:51Youtube whatever is all in my opinion top of funnel to try to funnel more people into my email newsletter eventually um I I try to provide like a lot of free value on these different channels I think that's like how you grow an audience what that means is that um I like it's tempting on Twitter or on YouTube even to to try to make shorts or on Twitter to do like these memes that go viral and get millions of views and stuff like that like if you do that and you have some meme that goes viral on Twitter like how valuable is that really to me getting somebody to trust me

37:34enough to then sign up for my newsletter and do it and start a paid subscription I don't think that's really valuable and every time I think I do that I go down that route I think I'm like losing a little bit of um brand Equity if you will with the people who are most valuable the thing about shorts and I don't even know if I have any on here I guess I still do so I shared my RPM of my videos it's around seven bucks around my long form videos and uh YouTube Studio like the analytics platform is like so robust it's like just just insane yeah you can spend like

38:08a month on this and still like only scratch the service with the shorts I I shared my long form videos get about seven a seven dollar RPM seven dollars per thousand views shorts for me right now and I've looked and this is kind of um what other people are getting as well six cents per thousand views is what I get from shorts that is 100 times less than what I get for my long form videos and so what that means is like we talked about how um these videos can your growth can kind of be like exponential over time right and so if I'm at um a seven dollar RPM

38:49seven dollars per thousand views well if I get a million views on YouTube that would be seven thousand dollars a month that I'm getting paid just from YouTube and so if you break that down I I do Finance stuff so again everybody's different but I would share my own stuff I do Finance related stuff I could and I can I don't have a lot of editing I'd literally just like Film It Make Some Cuts where I sound like an idiot and then I still sound like an idiot a lot but I sound less like an idiot and then post it right and so I can realistically

39:23do um we'll say 90 videos a month I'm bad at math so we'll just call it 100 videos a month right and so 100 videos a month to get to a million views would be 10 000 views per video I think I don't know if that Matt's right I've I've seen it in my numbers that I can have a video that pops to 130 000. I on average right now I'm getting over time like five to six thousand views per video it is a very realistic goal for me to get to that number over time if I keep working at it in in my opinion what is not

39:59realistic for me is to get enough views on shorts uh to make that six cents per first short like actually work out economically for me but then beyond that what happens is you may grow your subscriber base from doing shorts but are those people who subscribe to your channel to watch a less than one minute video a are they the type of person who um if you're on it to Market something that that would be valuable for you to Market to and then B are they the type of person that's also going to watch your seven or eight or nine minute video and if they're not and if you now all of

40:42a sudden have 500 000 subscribers on YouTube but none of them care about your long form videos YouTube's algorithm starts to think like well this person's subscribers are seeing these videos and not even clicking on them they must not be very good or if they click on them and watch and click off you know like quick and so your view time is low it you start to get penalized from YouTube's algorithm and so um I guess that's just like a word of caution like I've been very tempted and I've actually started working with an agency and paying them to like work on some short form videos and I just decided that like

41:22when I really thought about it and after seeing kind of this RPM stuff and then think thinking through it that it's really not worth my time or the money to pay somebody to edit them because that's a whole other thing and I would be much better off just focusing on long-form content and and kind of like sticking to what has worked already right so it's like really tempting to to go with shorts and it's exciting that there's monetization there but like six cents per thousand views to me is just not like worth it not livable okay I I had a few game-changing insights that you said so one is the Ali

41:57abdall each YouTube video is a business and I think the framework for thinking about that is just really smart because it all the insights that we have to building startups and businesses I.E build a minimal viable product test optimize like all the basically all the learnings that you you have from building startups you can apply that to YouTube so I think that that was a huge light bulb for me my only edit to that quote is it's not that each YouTube video is a business it's each each YouTube video is a product and you optimize the product so that was that was really helpful to me the other the

42:31other thing I learned here is I've actually been spending a lot of time thinking about shorts but not enough time thinking about long form which makes no sense because I was like oh if I need to grow my subscriber base I need to you know go to shorts spending a lot of time and money on these shorts when I should be really thinking about what is the process for coming up with titles thumbnails um optimizing that flow using tools like tubebuddy or vid IQ to to basically help me help me there even though to be honest I kind of hate that and I hate it because I love art not science

43:05and to me this feels like more of a science so I I I'm I'm not gonna take I like I'm just gonna be straight with you I am not going to do everything to optimize my YouTube I'm going to do the minimum amount I want to optimize me having fun with this channel too like as soon as I do that sort of stuff and I'm optimizing optimizing I lose that fun bit so I think it's important for folks to don't over optimize is is sort of another Insight I have what else do you want to leave people with before we rap yeah yeah exactly so that's a really

43:37good point Greg is like I talked a lot about optimization don't be intimidated by um thinking everything has to be optimized and then like not start right like the most important thing that anybody can do if they're thinking about starting is just get started and um your your thumbnails are going to be bad your videos are going to be bad you're going to ramble your editing is going to be bad you're um have a good mic because like your audio matters far more than video quality but but aside from that and by good mic uh 60 bucks you can get a good mic aside from that if you're thinking

44:11about doing this get started and then just it's like so common like improve one percent every every time or whatever um just get started and then work on one thing at a time that you want to kind of like fix and improve and improve it and so the one I felt the exact same thing as you um Greg not just about like YouTube but about um social media in general right like I started on social media when I was active duty in the military and like literally especially my career field everybody made fun of me for like being on social media and um I was like oh

44:44that's like uh whatever I I I'm and then I was like oh okay social media is dumb I'm not gonna do that well now social media has turned out to be like the most important and most valuable thing I've ever done for my personal income and personal life it allowed me to get a job after leaving them at like so many things and I would say the same thing about like optimizing at least a little bit and and not even optimizing but I think just don't create barriers to your stuff being found that you could easily avoid is I guess the way I'll put it in

45:17and then the reason for that is like yes it needs to be fun for you to keep doing it so it certainly don't over optimize but if you believe in what you're doing and you think like more people your passion for it which you clearly do and more people need to find it which I think they do they learn from you like you and I kind of have like and if we think what we're doing is valuable we have an obligation to help as many people find that as possible while not being tacky and so I just try to at least do some things to like not get in my own way and and you

45:50know some simple things to to help um more people find it so that's that's I guess like what I I will import all my wisdom on you Greg is like yes don't optimize to where you don't make it fun but you have important stuff to say that's valuable to a lot of people so just like help more people find it basically appreciate you for coming on Austin where uh where could folks find you on YouTube uh yeah if you search Austin Lieberman you'll find me on YouTube on Twitter I'm Lieberman Austin and then my sub stack is austin.substack.com um thanks for having me and I've been a

46:26huge fan of yours for a long time so this is this is really cool I love it and um I appreciate you I I know you don't give Financial advice but I definitely watch your sphd video and I definitely bought some PhD after that so good there you go cool all right well cool man this is fun later