474: Don’t Start YouTube Like Everyone Else (My 2026 Strategy)

Hey, if you want to start or grow a YouTube channel in 2026, we've got a brand new resource you need to know about. Starting YouTube can feel overwhelming. What camera to use, what niche to pick, what to post first, and most people quit before they even get started. That's why we created the YouTube Creator Toolkit. It's your quick start system to go from confused to confident, fast. And for a limited time, you can save big during our holiday sale at ThinkMediaSale.com. You'll start with niche finder to get total clarity on what kind of channel you should build. Then you'll use the AI-powered video topic generator so you never run out of video ideas. Plug those into ThinkMedia's AI Title System Tool to craft titles that get clicks and finish with thumbnail templates and trainings so your content actually stands out. And we've even included a ticket to our ThinkMedia strategy briefing that's happening right at the start of January to help you lock in your entire growth plan for 2026. It's incredible. And the crazy part is during our limited holiday sale, you can get the YouTube Creator Toolkit for less than the price of a trip to Chipotle. Just go to ThinkMediaSale.com to take advantage of this special offer before it expires. Okay, let's jump into the podcast. With over 20 million videos being uploaded to YouTube every single day, the sheer volume of content on the platform is posing a massive threat to any creator and any creator's business. You're not going to win by posting without a plan. You need a system. Before you launch out and start making videos, what are you even doing? Who is your content for? What problem does your channel solve? What makes you different? Most people will quit. Most people will give up. You can bet on that. I'm going to press record, do it anyway, post it anyway, and get through those early cringy videos. Today we're going to unpack and share publicly our core system, the proprietary process of our video ranking academy that Sean has used for over a decade to help content creators, grow their views, grow their subscribers, and their income. And Sean, this system really, like it's been updated recently and light of all the disruptions, and light of all the challenges and changes with YouTube. It's all my excited because we're really going to share from the front lines here exactly what's going on in this system, how we've updated it, and the exact steps that someone who's getting after YouTube or restarting YouTube could go through today. I'd love to just jump in right to the first step here. So there's a series of steps we need to go through the very first thing that we do. And this is actually before even pressing record is reverse engineering. Break that down for us. Yeah, so step number one of the seven steps is reverse engineer your winning channel. And so this has a couple steps to it. It's like at the beginning, before you launch out and start making videos, what are you even doing? Like, who is your content for? What is the growth strategy of your channel? You mentioned right now YouTube announced that over 20 million videos are uploaded to the platform every single day. So figuring out your difference is what you want to answer at this step. And you also want to do a little competitor research. You know, the thing about this seven steps is this is kind of an advanced conversation. You know, we've never had this conversation publicly like this before. And we have another framework that's really just about starting. It's in the YouTube secrets book. But and you can do this as a beginner. You should, like this can be a really helpful video. But if you really want to take YouTube serious and not just have the same old generic information, you want to be having conversations like if you're going to start a real business, you do market analysis first. What's out there in the market? What are the competitors doing? What are similar channels doing? What are their formats? A lot of that goes into reverse engineer and reverse engineer is a longer process than people think inside of our video ranking Academy program. We have a quick start and then we have foundations. It is all about speed for people to get going right away. But again, at an advanced level, people take sometimes weeks, even months in strategic planning market analysis to again develop a winning plan for their entire channel strategy. So step one is reverse engineer your winning channel strategy. This is big. And this already I think might have thrown somebody for a loop because you coming to contact with Think Media, it's not too long before we'll hear you or one of us say, you know, have you reversed engineered or have you researched before you pressed record. And we're all about pressing record punching through in the face. But this whole, I love how you teed that up. It's so true. And this is our actual system. And even in our deeper coaching programs, one-on-one coaching programs, private client experience stuff, we are still doing this. Like this is the exact steps we're working through because what good is it to post a video and press record unless we've actually identified where is this video going? Who do we want it to reach? What are the things and assets that are attached with it? So that the video actually does something. And speaking to the business owners, which if you're listening to this, I'm just going to consider you a business owner whether you have something or not, because that's the mindset you need to succeed on YouTube this year. Because you posted a YouTube video, what changes in your business? What changes in your life? And that could be as blunt as like dollar signs showed up. Cool. But like at least just being aware before pressing record, before going through this whole journey, what in the world are the videos that I'm going to create going to do for me? That's like one of my favorite questions to ask, Sean, because it's immediate clarity. It's like, okay, yeah. Why hadn't even thought about the before? Well, great. We shouldn't be publishing a video then because we have some stuff to flesh out. So what's probably, you know, what's the thing that most people get wrong about reverse engineering? I think that a lot of people actually rush this step. I think that one of the most powerful things to do in life is reverse engineer. I mean, you could go all the way back to one of the best personal development books of all time called the seven habits of highly effective people. And one of the habits is starting with the end in mind. So the question in reverse engineer is what do you actually want to happen? And a lot of people have conversations with is like, I think we have general goals like I kind of hope I have money. I hope my relationships are good. I don't know. I want my kids like turn out okay. But if you're like, no, describe and explicit articulate detail exactly what your life and business is going to look like in the next three years. Like if we were having this conversation three years from now, what would have had to happen in your life and your business for you to be happy with the results? I hope my channel grows. That's shallow reverse engineer. But if it's I'm making $5,000 a month because I have ranked videos. We'll get to what those are. But basically I'm getting views from videos that even though I posted them a year ago, they're still getting views today. They're connected to income streams. So I have a certain level of passive income specific number. I have this is how many customers I would need because here's the monetization strategy of my channel. So the interesting thing about reverse engineer is there's kind of two pieces to it. One is like get a napkin plan, get started quick, get going. And then there's another piece to it where you could have a 40 page strategy document of exactly what's going to happen. You know, another interesting framework here on reverse engineer is another great book and we'll link these up in the show notes just because these are some very influential books in my life. The one is called your next five moves by Patrick Bet David. And value attainment today. It's fascinating because in his book, the next five moves and he actually spoke at our event called Grow a Video Live that happens in Vegas. I interviewed him on stage. At the back of the book, he wrote down 15 moves for his YouTube channel value attainment and bigger brand. Now fast forward to today, value attainment is getting like more views than some new stations as I can independent podcasts, start up with some different talent. Like it's a new media company. Well, it's shocking to look at that he sat down at the beginning and wrote out the next 15 moves. And they're explicit details. It's worth picking up that book just to see that list. And it's like clarify a strong brand and logo and lock it in and trademark it. Now you don't necessarily have to do that for a YouTube channel. Yeah. But it was it's like psycho the level of detail. So I think kind of the biggest mistake is people either they skip past this step. They go too fast. Again, there's two tracks. It's like start messy get going because you might not, you know, it's about momentum at first. But there's a lot of people listening to this that like need to take this to a whole nother level. And they just have a shallow they have a shallow level of clarity. And I don't blame you. We generally as soon as we're asked the question, what exactly do you want your life to look like? What does your ideal day look like? What does your marriage feel like? What does your health look like? What are the numbers for it? We're just bringing that same level of clarity to your YouTube channel and clarity is power. So, you know, as someone's going through reverse engineering, I definitely think this is something that most people aren't going to be doing this year as we're starting YouTube channels. We're just going to rush out in guns blazing press record, put things up and unfortunately, one of the stats correct me from wrong was 22 videos, 22 uploads before someone calls it quits. Yeah. The average, even though there's like millions of creators, the average creator quits after 22 uploads. Okay. Yeah. And that's like, that's the peak. So there isn't really millions of creators that have competition just because they started and they stopped. So that's not your competition. They started a YouTube channel, but they have such a dabblers mindset and they're not being consistent. That's not a threat. They stop posting. So the actual real math, I'm not trying to minimize what it takes to break through the algorithm. But most people will quit. You can bet on that. And so that should be encouraging that if you can summon resilience to just say, listen, I'm going to stay in this. Even if I have a bad week, I need to take a month off, life hits you, health challenges, stuff with me. We have stuff happening. If you just are committed to the long haul, then you are going to outpaced 99% of people because most people quit. Man, I think that's so powerful. If you're listening, watching right now, like you can bank on the fact that a lot of people are trying to do what you're doing, but most won't continue doing this thing that you're trying to do. So at this first stage, before I've been pressing record, really thinking about your winning channel and what does it look like for your channel to be winning and how that impacts your life. Sounds like the cheesy hallmark card sort of stuff or like, yeah, I'd love to just sit and think about what, but like you have to, like you really have to. This is the differentiator. This is the thing that nobody's going to really do. And they're going to peter out. And if you do this at the beginning to the point two of reverse engineering, when you get clear on what you want this thing to do, it's more exciting. Like you're just more stoked to get up and keep going to get to the 23rd upload, so to speak, right? Okay, so we've reversed engineered. That's the first step where we start with when it comes to making videos. The second step that we're going to go through still isn't recording, still not recording yet. We're going to start researching. Yes. Right. And we're going to try to research and outline a winning YouTube video. There's a good bit to unpack here. But like, as you hear me say that, Sean, like, fresh take. What does that mean to you? Yeah. So before you press record, the two things we'll do here is we're going to seek out video ideas and topics that are have the highest likelihood of getting views. They've been validated. And then we're also going to build out the next video we're going to make. So it's like we identify the topic, move that over to I recommend a Google doc. Maybe someone uses notion. You then are going to brainstorm titles around that and even start outlining the video. And so research, there's a lot of forms of research. We go super deep in our program, but it's like there's keyword research and trend research and competitor research. There's market research. Like, meaning there's tools like answer the public.com. So you can get fierce clarity on the questions. People are actually asking in your niche. And there's about eight different forms of research. What's interesting in 2026 is keyword research is still relevant. I've seen some people and I think they're trying to clickbait and they're saying SEO is dead. That's not true. SEO is alive and well. You know, the other day I was chat GP team, a question and the answer was a YouTube video search engine. In the thread. In the thread. Yeah. Yeah, chat. GP is response was a few words. And then here's a YouTube video while search engine optimization is in dead. It's just different. YouTube is still the second largest search engine. Google is still the first. It's way more divided. Now it's ticktox search engine, Instagram's a search engine. Amazon is a search engine and it gets massive amounts of search. And there's actually tools that you can scrape the data of what is searched on Amazon. Wow. That's actually a massive insight for finding the types of products that people would want to see YouTube videos about already. We're at a level of game. Yeah, because because that's it's like a level of research depth that most don't do. And so you are validating the idea keyword research, trend research using tools. You want to use a smart video outline framework. You know, we could cover that at a future time, but it's like now you're also thinking about, okay, if I'm building out this topic, how is what's the beginning of the video, the hook, what's the content, how could I improve this, how could I make this stronger. And then you want to, you know, ultimately outline the video, define the title and craft the content for watch time and ranking. And so there's a lot here, but that's really what step two is. And the mistake that people make is I think they do shallow research. They're not sure what the tools are. And then even if they, just because you have a good idea, too many people get stuck, we have some tools that we love, different software that we love. Getting an idea is not enough. You then got to build the idea out. And so there could be, like when I say research, now we've identified the topic, we have greater access to strengthening video ideas with AI. I think there's going to be too many people that will just find a topic, use make a chat GPT response and have like an AI voice, deliver some faceless videos. Well, that's generic information. The difference is you, you're the uncopyable asset, your personal brand. So when you sit down to outline a video, this is also planning out that your story or your metaphors or your analogy or your pain or your trauma is woven in. But you know what else should be stronger? You should have better stats than ever before, better case studies than ever before, better points, stronger language, stronger articulation because AI is at your fingertips. So, so I'm also researching to say, how do I make this video more powerful with some of these modern tools before I sit down to press record? Man, okay. So hang tight podcast, right? Like we are already in deep waters. But that's what we're doing. I mean, I'm like, we're literally sharing our system, right? That has helped so many students, you know, build their channels. And so I just wanted to say like already, I'm trying to put myself like back when I first started. This could already sound overwhelming, right? And so a pretty helpful tool. One of the tools that we love is vidIQ. And if, you know, if you're interested, you can go to vidIQ.com/think. We hooked you up and you can just spend a dollar and you get 30 days inside of their pro, their boost plan. It just unlocks everything, all their AI tools. And what's cool about that is the way that they've divvied it up is if this is overwhelming, you're like, okay, I want to take a shot at reverse engineering or take a shot at researching. You can actually click certain buttons inside of that software. It's connected to your YouTube channel, your niche to help you actually go through this process. So it's pretty cool. I'd encourage you to check it out. It's 30 days. Just spend a dollar. And maybe that'll help you with your next upload, work through these steps in a tangible collaborative sort of way. Okay, so there's one thing I want to clarify really quick. Sean, what is a ranked video? Yeah. So a ranked video is a video that keeps getting views long after you've uploaded it. So traditionally, a ranked video met rank in search, meaning if you typed something into Google or you typed something into YouTube, the top results were the videos that were ranking. Your video ranks number one, it ranks at the top of the page. Your video ranks number two, it ranks at the second spot on YouTube. But in a 2026 world, a ranked video is simply a video that keeps getting views long after you posted it. Maybe because people do still search, but the largest source of views on YouTube is actually YouTube's algorithm recommending the video. And the language for that would be YouTube suggesting your video. So we say there's search traffic and there's suggested traffic. Suggested traffic literally means the video shows up on the homepage or it's suggested underneath the video over on the right side. And if a video cracks off in the algorithm, then that's where big views and viral views can come from. But here's the big idea. I don't care where the views come from. I just want to keep getting views on a video I post today three years from now. So a ranked video is a video that keeps getting views long after you post it. And that's why our actual course and program and community is called video ranking academy because we're obsessed with it because it creates leverage and all the more reason for these steps being in the right order because we're actually reverse engineering and researching with the intent to craft a ranked video. There's other types of videos you could approach doing like again, if you're going to jump on like a new story and just catch a news wave that has a three day timeline, that's a whole 50% of our program. We teach that too. It's like that's good for some views now. But then the story expires. That's not a ranked video. I want to portion of my video library that has a shelf life opportunity. What does that mean? It's like if you go to the grocery store and you're buying supplies for your pantry, what's the shelf life? You know, a year or two years before it expires. So if you're making your next video, what's the shelf life? Is it a year or two before it expires? Or could you create a topic that is positioned and architected and structured to still be getting views for years to come? If the shelf life of food is too long, that's a bad thing. It's probably really processed. But if the shelf life of a YouTube video is too long, that's a good thing. That means it's going to bring you a lot of profits. And so I think that ultimately we want to create ranked videos. And this is the process to do that. Oh, that's powerful. And so I think real quick, a hard explanation of what that means because someone's listening into your niche, like I remember when my mind was blown going through video ranking academy and connecting the dots here, the power of a ranked video is this. Even your niche me, I was in the music space and I was helping people who wanted to make songs produce through music and stuff like that. So I would answer a lot of the common questions that aspiring music creators would have, right? So if I can make a video that can always, around the clock, meet somebody where they're at as they're dipping their toes into my niche to learn something to get better to transform whatever it is, that's a ranked video. So like in my case, I made a whole lot of videos about this software that a lot of people would use to create music. The cool thing about that is everybody's always trying to learn that software. So every year, every month, it's like, yes, it can get views all around the clock. Did it blow up overnight? No. But like after a year or so, like it's hundreds of thousands of views because people are always checking into the software. Oh, how do I use this to make a song? Well, there I am. You always say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Yeah. That's the idea. So thinking about in your niche, what are those common things? What are people always going to be interested in that if you could show up once and then continue to show up? I heard you say like create your clone army. So to speak, right? Where you're always showing up for people, you could be sleeping and getting views. It's a crazy way to do YouTube. Yeah. A ranked video is like your Star Wars clone army. If you had to go live every day, but you only got views while you were alive, that's what you could do as an individual. But if you can record a video that gets views of you today and only a few, but then you do that a hundred times and they're all getting views, then you've duplicated yourself a hundred times. You've cloned yourself. Cloned yourself. And now you have 99 digital YouTube clones working for you while you're sleeping, all those videos getting views. And some might have died off, you know, some 30 of the clones didn't survive. They got some views. Yeah. Yeah. They got some views, but they plateaued. They didn't keep getting views. And then some they get a view an hour or something. But then you have like your top 10 or 20% where we're like shoot. Now it's a couple of years later in that video as 10,000 views or 100,000 views or a million views. And we're obsessed with this because if you commit to ranking videos, you could get a lot of results in three months. Things could be amazing in nine months, but the compound strategy of this over years is also why we have a lot of success students, but it takes time. I think we have more success students in our program than any other YouTube education program out there. I'm very deep in the, you know, that industry, the niche. There's other great programs respect a lot of different approaches, but we use the money.com board to study our students over 29 billion views generated from our students. But and many have quick success. But I think what's interesting is what's happened is people that it's like you're one, you're three, you're five, silver play button, gold play button. And it's it's a compound effect. Okay. So moving on to the third r here. We want to record our video now. So we reverse engineered, researched, ready to press the record button. We're talking about setup now, right? Like how do what are some best practices now? You know, when you get to this step for creating and recording, winning YouTube video. Yeah. So if we're going on the checklist, it's record the video, but this implies that you're also going to edit if necessary, right? So it's like the cool opportunity is there's a big revival of vlogging right now on YouTube, a big revival of raw and authentic content. And so if you record your video with the, by the way, the first two steps, now you're sitting down, you might just communicate extemporaneously, which simply means you hit record, be brief, be bright, be fun, be done, turn the camera off, upload it. Like upload an eight minute video or 12 minute video, how you, even if you're just free styling, we really recommend you, you've outlined it. You know what you're saying, you know what you're saying in the beginning, maybe you're kind of freestyle in the middle, but you have a few bullet points. So you might not edit, but this also means craft your video. So you're going to record and create your winning video inside our program. We talk about the perfect video recipe, but you know, for this podcast, for time's sake, I think it's about, you know, being intentional here. And then also answering the question about workflow, all you need is your smartphone, but what's your workflow? Okay, I'm going to film and I'm going to set it up and set up my office. I'm going to open the window. I might buy a lighting kit on Amazon audio video lighting stabilization. Am I going to edit? I'm going to download CapCut on my phone or use CapCut on desktop. Is that a good editing software? Yeah, it's great. I recommend CapCut. There's a lot of good ones though. The best video editing software to use is the one you actually do use. It's like get something that's simple. I movie, you know, you got a Mac, I movie. It's like, let's get started, you know. And so, but it is what is my workflow? How am I going from raw ingredients on my kitchen countertop to a finished meal? That's what these first steps are all about. And what tools am I using? Your smartphones are all you need, but maybe you want it to look a little crispier. Maybe you want to start a video podcast and you're going to do it through your spouse or your partner. Okay, well, then get that set up. Figure out your workflow, the process from raw ingredients to final product. That's what the record art is all about. What do you think is most important? You know, if someone limited budget, I get it. I mean, just check out Think Media for a whole bunch of budget-friendly options to create content. But if, you know, if someone had to pick, all right, you know, I have my smartphone, but if I had money to spend, do I go lighting, do I go microphone? What's like kind of a hierarchy there? By far, number one and number two and number three is audio. So it's like audio, audio, audio. Right on. Like people will forgive bad video, but bad audio is really frustrating. Too much echo, not good audio. You want to really be able to hear and, you know, we'll link this in the show notes. We have an updated video with how that you need all these. You just skip to the best one for your budget. But I think Craig on the Think Media team did 32. It's like every budget. Every like single best microphone out right now, reviewed. And so, you know, and these can plug in your smartphone, hook onto your jacket or your shirt, and having good audio. I would focus on that. You know, because when it comes to lighting, if you're going to be outdoors, walking around creating content, you're a real estate agent, you're in neighborhoods, you're vlogging, even if it is nighttime, it's just the nature of the content. You're just out and about filming. Then you're not really going to bring lighting with you. If you are doing a home studio, lighting would be next on the list, because it allows you to film whatever you want to. You have control over that. And so I would actually say audio. And then I would say lighting because lighting will make any camera look better. Your smartphone will look better if you add lighting. Your fancy camera will look better if you add lighting. And even if you have a fancy camera and you don't have good lighting, it's not going to look that great. So, but I wouldn't overthink it. You can upgrade your audio video and lighting as you go. You know, after we go through these seven hours, for anybody that's interested, you know, you might not have ever heard about our video ranking academy program. And we actually do have a special offer for our podcast community. We'll tell you a little bit more about that later, but you can check it out at VRApodcast.com. It stands for video ranking academy. That's VRApodcast.com. But besides the core program with these seven hours, you're right. We have a bonus program called camera confidence. And that goes into a lot of, that goes into wardrobe, you know, routine to get into a confident mindset. And it's a lot of science-backed principles for hacking your psychology when it comes to confidence. But a few tips that I think about the biggest one is everybody sucks at the start. And so I think it's accepting that like your first videos are going to be your worst videos. And you have to be willing to put yourself out there and cringe a little bit. Like embrace the cringe. Like, you know, you watch it back and you won't want to post it. My challenge is post it anyways because it's all about momentum and getting used to posting videos. And it's also about practicing in public. I understand there might be some stuff where you're like, I'm just not putting that out. But there's too many people that never put anything out. And if you don't practice in public, you don't really sharpen those skills. So many skills are developed by reps, repetitions. And recording videos is one of those. So I think it's about kind of just making a decision that I'm going to practice in public. So after the video has been recorded, the next R in our system is to release it. So, you know, releasing your video, but the right way. So in a, you know, new year landscape, what's on your mind when you think about releasing the video? Yeah. So the checklist here is like your upload settings. So you want to have, you know, good title, still good metadata, you know, in 2026 tags don't matter like, like they're not going to make or break your video. But YouTube still gives you 500 characters to do tags and tags can help validate, especially you mentioned vidIQ earlier. It will show you. It's a good way to measure ranking. So there's a reason why it's so part of our process is like you want to know what keyword search terms your video ranks for. Tags are validating. And I would even say this, if you have pre identified, the key here is again, it's not the actual like, it's not that tags help your video, but what you have done is you've gotten such fierce clarity on exactly the language people are actually using. And you're weaving that into your video, whether it's in your title or it's in your script. So it's just about doing all the things, titles, descriptions, tags, upload uploading your thumbnails, are you going to make the video just public as soon as it's done, are you going to schedule to upload it at a particular time, you're going to put it into a playlist, there's a whole playlist strategy. But 2026, the game really has changed and what it's changed with is thumbnail split testing and title split testing. Overwhelming. But it is the new game. And it's the idea that now YouTube allows you to actually create three thumbnails and split test those against each other or to write this is the easier one to do. You could create one thumbnail and split test three different titles all at once, which is a major game changer. Now the cool thing is like one of the tools inside of our program is called our Think Media Title Generator tool. And it walks through all these psychological frameworks, it walks through like 10 years of data, the whole program, it's all in there. So it's not just some generic, it's like a real, it goes through human psychology. But the cool thing is it like just as a for you. So you like enter your video topic, you workshop a little bit, you talk about, you know, maybe your script or your outline. And then it really just breaks down and gives you all these options. Here's what's so amazing about that is you can run three titles now. So you like which one is best? And which one do I pick? The new question is what are the top three titles? Upload all three. And that's just a line of text partner with AI. Boom. And then let that thing play out. And it's so cool that YouTube gives you this and then allows you. And what's interesting about the new title and thumbnail split testing is it's not just solving for click through rate. It's actually solving for watch time because that proves to you what YouTube cares about most minutes matter most time on platform matters most. One title might be more sensational and get more clicks. But it kind of lies or it's disaligned with what the content is. So people click on it more, but they jump off the video. One might have a lower click through rate, but leads to higher watch time because it's better aligned with the content. That's some strategy right there. But also the tool really solves for essentially what YouTube wants most powerful. Okay, the next are now that the video is released. Gonthrow was best practices. This next R is ranking your video for views 24/7. We already identified the definition. What is ranking a video? And when you think about ranking now, what's on your mind? And so the interesting thing about this R is on the one hand, there might be nothing to do. If you've done the first four steps correctly, then ranking is the result of you reverse engineering, researching and outlining your video, recording a video, editing it, uploading it, releasing it the right way, optimizing it, and then boom, your video ranks. It's also an interesting caveat that sometimes it takes patience. And this also comes straight from a YouTube employee. People always overestimate the upload time of their video. They're like, man, the video's tanking. It's not doing very good. But we just are sitting on enough data. We see videos take off a day 35. We see videos start to take off a day 168. We've seen videos take off a year later. And so there's something about specifically the video ranking academy process where it's like a disciplined approach. It's a systematic approach to YouTube that also takes patience. And yes, let's get short-term results, but we're also playing to the long-term mindset. So rank is the result of doing the other steps right. Here's the pitfall or mistake to make that people make though. Do not share your YouTube channel with your mom. And do not try to get your friends to go subscribe to help grow your channel at the start. If you're going to do the one-to-one growth hacking views and building your core audience, you want to make sure the right viewers are consuming your video. And if you have a Pokemon channel and your mom is not a psycho Pokemon fan who's collecting cards and building out sets, then like her giving you watch time when everything else she's been watching is conspiracy videos and weird AI-generated politics videos. Like her consumption of your video is just going to confuse the algorithm. Oh, that's massive. Okay, so we are getting our views at this point. This is a pretty powerful R step in our process that I don't think a lot of people will go into this year with YouTube channels not doing or just not even knowing how to do this. And this is reviewing your results. Like what worked? What didn't? How do you go about even reverse engineering a video that you posted? Let alone something that someone else has done in your niche that's maybe been successful and you're trying to figure out why did it do well? How do we go about this step after you've published this video about reviewing? Yeah, so review your results. Your question is what's working and what's not. And in any professional context and business context, it's understood that what gets measured gets improved. So if we want to see no matter where you're starting, if your videos suck at the start, everybody's due, but you're getting better, what gets measured gets improved. You're going back, you're reviewing. In this case, we're reviewing the analytics. So it's a skill set to learn how to read your analytics. What does click through rate mean? What is watch time? What is average view duration average percentage viewed? But we could go deeper. It's how many people are still watching a 30 seconds in the intro. How many return viewers are you getting? YouTube has continued to improve the analytics feature on the platform. And so what you're looking for, though, at this stage is you want to spot outliers, you want to spot things you should double down on. Like success leaves clues, make part twos. So it's like there's certain videos. Okay, I have posted 10 videos, 100 videos. What are the themes? What are the lessons? And how could I maybe follow up that? And then also could I make a part two follow up with a series, even remake it, talk about that again, maybe just a one off idea could be a consistent show like those types of insights. And you also want to identify underperformers. You might want to just trim off. You were excited. And about a particular series or idea and it kind of flops. No worries. Yeah. You know, failures are the stepping stones to success. So you just putting videos out there on YouTube. You don't fail. The video might fail. For sure. It's actually. But it's like it's a lesson. So it's like the failed video is a lesson. Okay, how do I pivot next time or try something different? You still might have an intuition. Like it's not just a guarantee. It was a bad topic. There's so many pieces that could have been broken. The content might not have been great. The hook kind of might have lost people. And so that's why you need to learn. Again, it's where we spend a lot of time here at a much deeper level than this because also you're what you think is an underperformer was actually one of the best ideas of all time. But you might go in and look that like the hook just didn't get people to even wasn't clear enough. So so that might you might need to give that same topic another shot. And it helps you make smarter decisions with data. But let me give a tactic that we haven't haven't shared this publicly. One of the cool things you could do. It's helpful if your channel is actually established is going to your YouTube analytics. Go to advanced analytics. Look at your top. It'll give you your top 50 videos, but it'll tell you you have to you can export your top 100. I think are 200 videos. Okay. Yeah. Click the export feature. Export it as an Excel spreadsheet. Take that file. Drop it into chat GPT. And then say hey chat GPT. This is the analytics of my YouTube channel. And it's all crazy data. It's going to click through ray views, impressions, RPM, CPM, all of that. So you're just dropping that file and you're saying what outlier videos should I make? What are the bright spots? What are the common themes of the best performing videos? What type of videos should I stop creating? What a adjacent topics would be inspired from what you see here? Because if you start seeing there's themes and there's patterns. And so it's I think important to develop the mind of a strategist to know what to do with data. But that tip right there has to be crazy. So for listeners to this, you're sitting on, I mean, you could do a 20 videos. But if you have 50 to 100 videos, export that thing. Drop it into AI. Prompt it and have a conversation with AI to maybe see some things you've never seen before. Of course, you know, vidIQ takes that kind of stuff to a whole nother level because they're plugged into your channel. So they're seeing that data anyway. So that's kind of like a manual process of doing it. That could be free or some people pay for that. But like there when they're plugged into your channel, they're able to see that stuff. That's what's really nice about that are is it could be overwhelming. I don't want all this math and all these numbers and whatnot. So those are some ways to make complex data simple. So you can make smarter decisions on your next video. What's pretty gnarly and if we need to cut this out because I can't say it, it's fine. But what's pretty crazy is with vidIQ's latest update. I believe you do have to be on the pro or boost plan to get this. There's this little toggle that if you activate the extension in your browser pops up over someone else's channel. And you can do what you just talked about. You can export a CSV file or whatever of that channel. There you go. So like if I'm just saying like if someone's listening and you're like, oh man, I don't even have, I mean, post any videos yet. You're like, how do I even understand stuff? We'll take a look around your niche, go back to that, you know, this is probably part of the process of those first couple ours, like reverse engineering, researching, go to some of those channels that you are looking up to. You aspire to be like, you want to do your own thing like them. And I would just say go to vidIQ.com/think, just spend a dollar, you get 30 days on their whole thing. A hundred percent of people listen, you just need to do that. That is crazy. I'm not about that yet. Oh man, it's nuts. Because you're actually going to be making better decisions than your competitors are making. It's crazy. Because they don't even know that. And they're not doing that. So now you're seeing their stuff. You're in a similar niche. You don't, you know, some people too, there's a little, you know, they say good artist copy, great artist steel. And YouTube is kind of that environment where, you know, you start singing your niche, like people taking your titles and your thumbnails or whatever else. But the powerful thing about that is you get that data. You're not just going to copy other channel. You'd be innovating. You would innovate. Pass them with AI plus that export. Yeah, it's cool to see how vidIQ continues to innovate and stay ahead. So, yeah, that's review. Your results, the sixth are. And I'm excited for the next one. Man, yeah. Okay. So this last are here part of the process. By this point, if you've done all these steps, you are a legend. And you have made it through quite a good bit here. The last one though is repeating what works. The last r is repeat building momentum through iterating. We kind of think already started this conversation. But like when you think about especially iterating now, Sean, like at the top of this, like the stat of 20 million, I can't even comprehend that number. That means that during the time we've been talking, there's like ridiculous amount of videos already uploaded. But amidst all the saturation, how do you iterate and how do you go about this process of repeating what worked? Yeah. So the point of this are, and you can now learn that this is a system. It's a cycle. And you just keep doing it over and over and over again. What am I doing in 2026 to win on YouTube? This is the exact playbook. This is the new changes to it and how I continue to innovate the process. But you're going to repeat these steps. But now you're going to repeat it with more data and more insight. So that's one piece. But I think the other piece about this are, is every time you've gone through this cycle, you want to ask the question, okay, how can I create a more sustainable content rhythm? So what did I just learn that next time it could go a little bit smoother, a little bit better? And so now that I've done it, now I maybe know how long it takes, you know, it takes me, it took me a little longer to research a little time to film. So it's a chance to schedule your next week. It's a chance to now plan out your next three to five videos strategically because you've went through all these steps. And it's a chance to audit everything that you're doing so you can create a plan to stay consistent without burning out. You know, one of the biggest things to, of course, having success on YouTube is actually not quitting. So even if you have a couple of great months, but you stop, well, that is then when your channel stops. So repeat has kind of those two aren't repeat the process to get views. But also how do I make this a sustainable content rhythm? And so there's a lot of different ways you could do that. You know, we go deeper in the program. But that's the big idea with repeat what works and then build momentum through iteration. The key here, I love that we're just coming back to the system. And I love actually, you called out like, how do you iterate? How do you repeat what works? Well, you repeat what works. It's kind of like the answer is the question itself of like you, this is iterating coming up with the system. That can withstand all the ups and downs of YouTube that can encourage you to think bigger, to think about a money plan and to think about how this rank of video could connect to things off of YouTube. We didn't even really get into that today. You know what I'm saying? But like, that's a whole other awesome side quest that's inside the, you know, inside the program. And so, man, I'd love to take a little bit and talk about what you're most excited about, Sean, who's spent a good bit of time updating all of this with like AI tools and a whole bunch of stuff. And so, yeah, what's what you most pumped about when you think about the system? How it is now? Well, yeah, I think about for some of our, especially podcast community or maybe someone's new on this channel. And I'm super grateful. If you're new, by the way, subscribe is the number one podcast bringing you unfiltered YouTube tips for building a profitable YouTube channel. But a lot of people haven't even heard of like our full program or what exactly is it? And so, I think it'd be cool to kind of explain it. And the core program of what we're talking about here is called Video Ranking Academy. And it's three pieces. It's the membership area where you can go through the video trainings that your own pace. It's the workbook, but it's also the private community. And I think one of the things I'm most excited about is yes, the depth we go into the system. That's not just for beginners, but it's also got VRA masters. It's a bunch of advanced stuff. The workbook that gives you checklists and the whole things based on adult learning theory. So it meets you with different modalities of learning. You're watching videos. You're filling out the workbook. You're immersed in becoming a YouTube expert, even if you're just starting. You don't know anything. But the community thing is the edge. Like there is nothing like Video Ranking Academy on the market because we have the most vibrant community and we actually have like a legit faculty. You know, 30 people work at Think Media. We have coaches. We have our customer success community. We schedule welcome calls like when people join our program. They get a welcome call on Zoom. And we have like a concierge that helps people figure out their exact next steps. And there's also a few bonuses that we're offering for our podcast listeners. I'll talk about those in a moment. And sometimes it can feel like, oh, there's so many different things I could do. That's why we do a welcome call. It's like we actually, you know, you meet with a coach, a couple of other people on the welcome call. They just happen all the time, like twice a month. If you miss one, you just schedule the next one. So the community, I think that's the edge because, you know, in a 2026 world, information is important, but the problem for most is implementation. The doubt isn't that VRA works. The doubt is like, will I implement it? Yeah. And so by having community around you accountability, like we have such a vibrant group of content creators, entrepreneurs, business owners. And that for some people they might have gotten to, oh, like this comes with a group and you go there, it's like, you know, grasshoppers. There's like nobody, nobody's really engaging. There's not really feedback. We structured our entire company because we are obsessed with helping people win on YouTube. And so that's video ranking Academy. But I think I'm also excited about the bonuses because we sat down to think about, okay, for podcast listeners, if you go to VRApodcast.com, we'll put the link in the show notes. We wanted to put together a special offer that's like a disease of everything you need for YouTube success. So you don't have to get like multiple different programs. You just have it like all in one place because there's a few other things. But before we talk about those bonuses, I'm just curious like you, you joined Video Raker Academy before we ever met. I did years ago. Yeah. You built a channel that earned tens of thousands of dollars. You follow the whole system. How many times did you watch VRA? Oh my goodness. I think I went through it two or three times, like the whole thing. Yeah. So, and so the system was something you really learned, really mastered. And I'm curious before we talk about bonuses, though, any thoughts on now as a coach. And just you get to interact with people all the time. You're in the community. You've seen the updates. We'll talk about the AI tools, but you're just you're seeing what it is now. What are your thoughts? Yeah. 100%. I mean, it's it's trippy even to be here right now. Like, you know, because I'm someone who went through this very thing. We just broke down. So it may be in your nervous system. And maybe it's in my kind of nervous system. Whatever the other part is. Yeah. I feel like a biosmosis. I've absorbed some of this. And it is just so cool to be living the life of a coach here at Think Media and helping people do this day in and day out. Because I just I have such a bias towards this thing. I have such a bias towards YouTube. And I just get it. If you're listening or watching, you're like, you see that people make this YouTube thing a thing and people can go full time. And you can make money from it and it's lifestyle and free to all the things, right? Like I don't think we have to convince you of that. But it's just like, can you do it? Is the question? And so I love my day to day because I get to see this this process, the system in action and see it work across any niche. It doesn't matter. The niche, you could be faceless. You could be a business owner. We work with real estate agents. We also work with cooking channels. Let's just like anybody and everybody. What's beautiful about a system is that it doesn't care what niche you're in. It just cares that you do the steps, you know? And so if you do the steps, you can see the fruit that comes from it. And so that's my own story. Yeah. I went through video ranking academy. It was like music creation niche and all the good things. It decided to jump in. And by following the system, I ranked videos that just kept showing up, right, for my specific audience. And then because I went through the program, one of my favorite modules in there is talking about like a money plan. And it was like, my mind was blown because that's when I was finally like, oh, this is how you make money on YouTube. I mean, I got the whole like YouTube pays you if you get monetized thing. But I was also just like, I mean, I could just be up and down. But I didn't know how like I could make other sources of revenue exist off the platform. And so going through the whole process and going through it a couple times in utilizing the community, showing up for some coaching calls. Man, like this system is the thing that helped me rank the videos. And I had a side hustle, you know, and like I think we talked at one point on the podcast like at that as high as the guy's about 30 K year, but it took 10 hours or less a week to run. And I'm like, talk about a side hustle. Are you kidding me? And I'm talking about a thing that I like. I'm just making videos. Yeah. It has this up and up and down. But the fruit of years after ranking videos and just constantly pointing people to other things that I was offering. Like, man, that was, I was in such a spot where I was like, okay, maybe I could take this full time. Maybe this is like going to be the thing. And I think I could have. But what's also kind of crazy, Sean, is like just by starting YouTube realizing, actually, I would, I'd even go so far as to say just by ranking videos and becoming like somewhat proficient at doing this YouTube thing. You have no idea what other options are available to you. You might think you're destined to build an empire in like have your own thing and like solopreneur all the way. And I get that have a heart for that, right? But what's cool for me in my story is I get to say, yeah, I got to do that for a little bit of a season. And it provided for my family help us pay off debt and like a whole bunch of cool stuff. But what I didn't see coming was this whole other avenue of getting to even jump into like a company like Think Media. Yeah. And so it's just like just to say, I'm like, wow, Nathan, we're talking like, yeah, okay, this is like a multi-year journey that's been unfolding. But all that to say, the other side of just getting into a program, getting into a system to learn how to make videos to make it an easier way that's bullet proof against whatever's going on and just keep showing up and doing that. I had who would have thought that it'd lead me to be right here getting a chat with you and encourage some other people. Yeah, I love your story. It is interesting. Like I think one of the biggest opportunities because yes, there's opportunities even at Think Media like workwiththink.com. At different times we are building our team and whether that's YouTube experts that are coaches because we have coaches here like yourself. But the other one big opportunity is YouTube strategists are one of the most in demand roles right now. And so investing in something like video ranking academy, yes, build your own channel. But like I just got a text from Anthony O'Neal. He said, hey, bro, I hope you're well. I'm looking, I haven't opened it yet. I'm looking for a strong YouTube channel manager producer. I haven't opened it. I'm going to open it right now to help grow my, my channel. You know, we just hit a million subscribers. It's got too big for me to manage alone. Do you know anyone? Well, usually I'm like, no. I'm like, I know our coaches, but I mean, actually, you know, private client experience, Anthony, you know, like, like, but ultimately, like, so for those listening to this, that might be an interesting tweak. Like this is a modern skill set. You go out, one of the reasons to start your own channel, learn some stuff, cut your teeth is not only is it like super in demand right now, but it's just going to continue to be more in demand. Marcus Sheridan said in the next five to 10 years, your YouTube channel to brands and businesses is going to be more important than your website. So there, it's like a career opportunity. What's it going to look like? Yeah. Am I going to, I think about this couple that Kristen and Jeff Lascola in Oceanside, they did video ranking Academy. Now their kids ministry channel has taken off. But why it was still a side hustle, he took his skills and went to local businesses. Wow. With some video skills, but also YouTube channel management and landed a 30k retainer client for six months, 5k a month. And that was a first step. So I think there's a lot of ways. And you know, what's interesting is VR ray itself is the seven hours we just talked about at a crazy level of depth. I think also, you know, the private community and all that stuff. But also I've tried to keep the framework clean in the sense of like, you might be stuck in other areas. So we have other bonuses. For example, our niche finder because you could just start with the seven hours reverse engineer might be finding your niche. But I'm like, we could talk about that for a long time for like four hours. Yes. So niche finders like a bonus program that we sell separately. But that's included in this offer. Avvra podcast.com. And this is people's one of people's favorite programs because they get so much clarity and self awareness. But we just added a brand brand new AI tool. So when I think about some of the new updates, I recommend people, yeah, they should go through the program. But people are busy. And in five minutes, it'll walk you through our proprietary process for either improving your current channel topic in niche. So that you make it stronger. You get more clear on it and might need a few pivots or developing the self self awareness of like what do you even start your channel about and what would be the most profitable channel to start. So like that's an additional bonus. We include our camera confidence course video editing basics. Some people are like overwhelmed with the tech and I get it fear of the gear. How do I use my camera? How do I use you know, simple editing? I get that I could like there's all this kind of complex editing stuff. That's why we made video editing basics as just a mini course to get people going. If you have no clue how to do anything, you want us to hold your hand and video creation made symbols included in that as well. That's going to be how to simply use the smartphone you have or the best and most affordable gear. We walk you through it step by step. But you were talking about money. And I think one of my favorite bonuses that we've added to this offer is our YouTube money secrets. My new unreleased book. Yes. Second book YouTube money secrets. You get the PDF version as well as YouTube money secrets program with five deep dive videos. And this is how to monetize your channel from day one. But it's it's thing goes crazy like this brand new. We just recorded this a few months ago and it goes really deep into step by step checklist for signing up and getting approved for affiliate programs. A place where a lot of people get stuck. A big list of the best affiliate programs for all different niches, their percentages, their commissions as well as like zoom out from that like best practices with if you want to get leads for your business going into UGC. And so specifically like that didn't exist when you started. No, not a lot of this actually, you know, it's like, yeah, it's amazing. So we were talking about money plan. We like took that thing like a thousand x did and like basically put that into a program. And this is a meant to, you know, be an overwhelmed thing because again, this program is is like investing in a YouTube college for a fraction of the price. It like actually costs like for the one course at your local community college. If you just audited one class. Yeah. That's like how much VRA is and you could get, you know, access to so much more all these bonuses and everything else as well. And then lastly, I think the other big game changer is the VRA AI toolkit. So because we don't just have 15 years, I mean, if you have combined YouTube experience, your channel that you built or other coaches, the data of our students, all the different psychological frameworks, all the different best practices. And, you know, these aren't just like generic chat GBT prompts. These are actual tools, the channel optimization assistant, the keyword universe tool that title AI generator tool. And then also the niche finder AI tool. Those are all included as well. And so we also keep them updated. So it's like AI is always changing or there's also new data psychological triggers as it comes to title generator new trends. So anyways, I wanted to put this all out there on the podcast because some individuals are not even sure what our program is all about. And so if you're interested in, you know, learning more about this, if you go to VRApodcast.com, this conversation, we have this offer for you, just as podcast listeners, whether you listen on Spotify or audio or you listen on YouTube, you could get the best price right now. If it's not something you value, you definitely should have joined. But if you value skill development, community learning the system and you want to, you know, you still got to put in the work. But you're going to get to your YouTube goals faster by joining VRA not slower. And I've seen that play out time and time again in my life with every single skill and competency I needed to learn. Once I discovered this, it was like develop the skill and find a system. When I wanted to get out of debt, it was like develop the skill of money management and follow Dave Ramsey's baby steps. That's right. So I was like, whoa, you need, you need the skills and the mindset pieces that he teaches and you need the system. And if I go through this result, I'm out of debt. And even if it takes time, even if it takes years, even if it takes a decade, but it's a system and a proven process of skill development and a system. And not that I know, but I don't know if financial PC anniversary has a community. I know there's coaches. Yeah. I was just like, you can book a call. I don't think there's like a, yeah. So I mean, whatever. We love that program. Yeah. But like, I think then that's like that other piece we've discovered is like, man, you have the community in there. So anyways, again, at this point, if you're like, do this is, you know, a sales pitch, no, you're right. Like, you're so here. I mean, we talked about the seven hours at the stop. Start of this thing. Like, you know, if you want to go deeper, we just wanted to fully explain this. So VRApodcast.com, if you, if you want to check that out. So that is your next step. If you're still here, watching or listening, and hey, even if it's not, and we understand that we have a heart for that, stay close, would you? Because it's going to be quite a year, 2025 was quite a year on YouTube. I mean, even 2024, every year is a crazy year on YouTube. So please stay close. So you know, how to navigate everything through the ups and downs. But we'd love to see you inside the VRA family at VRApodcast.com. This is the Think Media podcast. I'm Nathan Eswan, and I can't wait to connect with you all throughout this year.