186. If Your Personal Brand Gets Less than 500 Views, Watch This.

- If you're serious about building a personal brand or scaling a creative business, 2026 is the year you go all in on YouTube. - Today we're breaking down why YouTube is the most important platform for your content strategy and our top 10 tips for success. - Whether you've never uploaded a video or been in the game for years. - This episode is gonna give you the blueprint to set yourself up for real success on YouTube in 2026. - Let's get into it. - All right, Braden, to start us off, why should people go all in on YouTube in 2026? - I think first off, it's the full stack. So you have a long form thing can live there 10 plus minutes. We could also have shorts live on that same platform. On that same account, we could also have shorts live on that same account that can generate some traction. And let's say you have a really long thing you could have a Clips channel that's like two to 10 minute pieces of that longer cut, just like our podcast. So we're starting a Clips channel in 2026. It's gonna be a huge area of emphasis. And then we also have a vlog channel where it's not, it's like a vlog format, but we're gonna be giving out value in this new channel. So it's like another stab at the Apple every single month to get new people into our ecosystem. - I think the fact that it is like the main platform for long form content helps build trust with your audience more than any other platform. There's people who have built incredible personal brands on short form, but I think about the people who I gravitate towards most, who I enjoy consuming their content the most, and who I've built the most trust with, are the long form creators. And I totally understand that creating long form content on YouTube takes a lot more time and effort than it might for short form. But I think it generates the highest ROI bar none like more than any other platform. - I think the creators who actually build businesses, 99% of them in my opinion come from YouTube. - Yeah. - Like the ones that you see end up doing, oh a successful brand, not just, oh I sell this like digital good in my store, that happens a lot on Instagram. Like you see creators selling like, oh this is how I color my videos or this is my little PDF, creators are actually build a real business off the back of their thing, whether it be a clothing brand, a SaaS company, they do online courses, whatever that may be, usually funnels from YouTube and what I've seen. Like when they actually build seven figure plus businesses, it happens there. Some of them, some of them like the biggest short form creators. Yes, you'll see them do it, but they have such a huge net, the majority of them never see like that crazy success I think that's just doing short form. Some of them happen, but very few. - You bring up a really good point too. I think the fact that it is full stack. There are multiple ways that you can post on Instagram and TikTok. You can post both vertical video, you can do horizontal as well. You know, you really don't have a limit, I don't think on Instagram, I believe it's what like at the most 10 minute videos, but you don't really see a lot of like 10 minute videos on Instagram, it's usually like 15, 30 seconds, maybe 60 seconds, maybe slightly longer, but you can post video and photo, like carousels or single photo, but the fact that on YouTube, like you can do shorts, and then you can post videos really as long as you want. Like you said, you have opportunities, like you could do a talking head sit, or you could do a sit down talking head style video, you could do a vlog, you could do a podcast. There's so many different formats that you can do on YouTube, and you also have a lot more options as far as like how long of a format you can make. - YouTube's also evergreen, right? So like something that would be posted two years ago, they still get views, which is amazing when you think about like, the stuff that you're creating whereas on Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn, you post that video, it's dead. After that, pretty much that 24 hour period, it's not really getting kicked up. You might randomly see a real kick up in the algorithm, but it's super rare. Like I've maybe had that happen one time, and it feels like an accident on their end. - We see it on our channel too. We'll check analytics and we'll be like, oh, whoa, this channel, or sorry, this video is starting to pick up a lot more. Me and you, I think, used to get so caught up in how a video performed or a podcast performed in the first 24 hours, or even in the first week. And then we'll notice, we'll come back to a podcast, maybe two or three months later, the first week, maybe it got five to 10,000 views, all of a sudden it's at like 25 or 30K over the course of like a few months. And so there's no other platform that does that because Instagram and TikTok, it just dies after 24 hours. Like it's not really getting pushed out to other viewers. - It's also the way that you guys can monetize the most, right? Like AdSense pays us quite a bit of money every month. Like it's kind of crazy to see like, originally you get like your first $100 check and you get $500,000, $2,000. You have $3,000 check. That's the most you've ever made from YouTube in a month. They'll be super transparent with you guys. But when we got that check, I was like, oh my god. - This ain't nothing. - We can actually put some money back into the operation and it's really crazy to see it now. It's just every single month. You're just making money every single day from these views. And if you are in a niche that has a more spending power, i.e. let's say you were talking about credit cards, for example, your finance, your whole niche was financed. Your RPM, you'll get from making videos, your rate per 1,000 views is gonna be a much higher than the entertainment channels that are much more broad. Those channels don't get anything for their AdSense. So it's super interesting. We get about, it depends. It fluctuates on the episode. But we've seen some episodes get like $30 for the RPM. We've seen other episodes get 15 and it just depends on who you have on and what the talking points are and brands are like buying AdSpace in that video. It's super interesting. - Another really interesting thing about YouTube, it's a permission based platform. People are choosing to watch you. When you're scrolling on TikTok or Instagram, you're scrolling a feed. So you really don't know what's coming next. - To lottery. - Yeah. With YouTube, you have the opportunity to like really get a viewer who wants to watch your video. They seeked out your video. They saw your title and thumbnail and they said, "You know what, that's a video that I think I'm gonna get value out of." And so that's also why YouTube is completely different as people are choosing to watch you as opposed to just being fed your content because of an algorithm. - 100%. Number one, that we're gonna kick you guys off. We have 10 fire tips. We have some bonuses. So just make sure you stay to the very end. But it's to start with the packaging, not the content itself. So think about what your title is gonna be, what your thumbnail's gonna be. That's infinitely more important 'cause if they don't click, they don't watch. So it doesn't matter how great your video is or how much time you put into it. Nobody cares. What I would do is screenshot your YouTube brows, like you're recommended, right? When you open the app, screenshot what those nine videos are. And then place your thumbnail in there with your title. And then just look at it and be like, what I click on this one. Is this one that draws my attention? If the answer is no, then you need to rework it. You need to think about that and keep testing and iterating 'cause that click through rate. The likelihood that someone could show in your video and click through to it is so, so, so important. - I think one of the worst mistakes you can make as a creator and something that we learned after doing the podcast for a few years is the worst mistake is packaging a really great video with weak packaging or pairing a really great video with weak packaging. Early on, before we started working with our YouTube strategist, me and Fig thought we knew a lot about YouTube. And our mindset was, we just have to make an incredible show and provide a lot of value. And this thing is gonna grow and we're gonna go to the moon. We saw some really great success on it like a micro level, like the word of mouth spread about our show, which is amazing. But until we started really paying attention to the packaging, our show was like growing very slow compared to what it's growing now. We've more than doubled our subscribers over the past 365 days, over the past year. More than we did over the first three years of having the show. And so, and that is a hundred percent because yes, maybe the show has gotten a little bit better. Maybe we've, you know, up the production quality a little bit more, but the packaging, we've even like gone back to old videos and repackaged and seen a spike after, which you can't do that on Instagram or TikTok. This YouTube's the only channel you can do that on. - If you guys have a video that's not doing super well, right off the bat, like if the AVD, the average view duration is there, and you're like, people are watching this, they're seeing it, but very few people are clicking on it. You gotta go back in and change the title of the thumbnail. This is the interesting part too about YouTube is like, you guys might say, oh, this thumbnail is awesome. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what your opinion is of the thumbnail. The marketplace decides. So if you think it's a banger, like we've had that happen where we post them, and like this is a banger to thumb, title for sure, most of the time we're correct, but there's odd outliers where we're like, damn, why didn't this hit? We need to repackage this. And like you get another chance at the, like you get another bite at the apple. - Another big one with a thumbnail is to not restate the same exact thing that you put in your title onto the thumbnail. - Yes. - A lot of people waste real estate, and they'll be like, you know, this is big. Let's just say they say that in the title. This is huge. They'll put, this is huge on the actual thumbnail, and it's like you're wasting precious real estate. Like use those few words that you do get on the thumbnail to really drive curiosity. Like I should read the title and be like, oh, I think about myself when I scroll on YouTube, I immediately am going for the picture first. So the picture has to draw my eye. Like immediately I'm like glancing these nine images. I'm like picture, that's cool. Then I go to title, does that align with what I want? And then the first 60 seconds of your video, it better real line with what it is that you're talking about. Something that Mr. Beast does really well is whatever the thumbnail is, you notice it at auto plays, right? When you hover over a video on YouTube, it'll auto play. It usually, most of the time is at said location that the thumbnail's at. - Sure. - So let's say it was like at a private island, and then those first 10 seconds were him in an office, there'd be a disconnect of what's happening for what you clicked on. You're like, I clicked on this private island thing, and now he's in an office building. So why are we in an office building? You take notes from what these really big creators do, and then you try to implement that on a small scale with what you guys are doing. So let's say you were going to buy a car and you're talking all about the car. You're like, I'm getting this new car, and the first video is like you in your office. It's like I'm clicking on this video 'cause I want to see the car. I don't give a shit what you're doing in your office. So get me to the part where we're talking about the car, and then I'm like, okay, I confirmed the click. That's why I'm here. Then I can learn a little bit more about your expertise with the car and all that good stuff. - I also think, I've heard Con and Samir talk about this. They give the advice of having no more than three things in your thumbnail. - I think a lot of people make the mistake with their thumbnail packaging of it being too busy. You want a thumbnail to be easy to digest. For our podcast, we'll just do a person and then something they said. Text to go along with the title that opens up a curiosity loop. That's also another hack. If you have a title for your video, just plug that title into ChatGPT and say, this is the title for my YouTube video. What is a thumbnail that I can make that opens up a curiosity loop if you are putting text on the thumbnail? And opening up the curiosity loop makes somebody curious to be like, "Oh, the title is something I want to learn about." And the thumbnail's not answering the question. It's keeping this curiosity loop open so that it makes somebody want to click on the video, just a tip, but also keep things simple. I think the best thumbnails like Con and Samir talk about is a few things no more than three because you don't want to confuse somebody and kind of overstimulate them in the thumbnail. - Number two is one clear idea per video. - Yes. - Think about this. You write up all your ideas. You don't want to put all your 10 best ones in one video. Break those up so you have more bites of the apple. That's my saying of the day. More bites of the apple, dude. - I think that trying to fit in, and it almost sounds counter-tuitive 'cause you're like, "I want to provide a ton of value." But if you have more than one idea per video, you're almost talking about too much, and it's almost like information overload. And so you want to think about what is the one clear idea that somebody is gonna come to my channel or to this video and learn about in this video? And like, can they explain in one sentence what this video was about? If you're covering too much, it's just gonna confuse the viewer. Dude, kiss, keep it simple, stupid. That's the motto, you feel me? That's the motto with you. - Keep it simple, stupid, or keep it stupid, simple. Either or? - Sure. - Yes. - Kiss. - Kiss. - I love it. - Just think about kiss when you're making these YouTube videos, dude. Number three, okay, I mentioned this a little bit earlier with my Mr. Beast example. That goes right here is to confirm the click, right? So if we're talking about, hey, these are gonna be the top YouTube tips, and then we started the episode off with talking about a bunch of random BS. You'd be like, yo, I came here for this thing, you're not talking about this thing, so then I'm gonna leave. Which is what we did this in the very beginning of our pod. We messed this up so, so bad. Where we would just BS for 10 or 15 minutes, and we're like, why are people not watching this? Well, 'cause you click on a video with context of that's what they're gonna talk about, and then we're talking about a story from the weekend, and you're like, dude, I don't know these guys. You don't care about this. I just came here because I want value. That's what I'm coming here for. YouTube is like a value exchange platform. Remember when we first ever started on the platform? We just didn't understand that. We didn't understand that this was like a value exchange that was happening. YouTube is not, oh, who can make the best video? It's like, I'm looking at the title in the thumbnail, and I'm promising you, this is gonna happen. And if it doesn't happen quick, you're gonna lose people. You're here to crush YouTube. I have an amazing resource for you, it's Stan. Oh, dude, we love Stan. You know what Stan does? Okay, it allows you to bring your entrepreneurial ideas to life, if they're a platform where you could sell products, you can take coaching calls on there, you could put a digital PDF on there to sell, and it's a one-click checkout. It allows you to dare to dream. God, it's dare to dream. So that's their campaign. I gotta read this to you guys, 'cause it's crazy. So it's their annual campaign. They're going to give a creator, a lucky creator, $100,000. And they're gonna give five of them $10,000 to support their business. Wow. It's so easy. All you have to do is post a short TikTok or an Instagram video sharing your dream and how you'd use the prize money to chase it. And demonstrate the impact they would have on the community. This is great though, 'cause you guys got some time. Okay, it opens Jan 1 and it goes till January 31st. You got a little bit of time to think about your idea. Dude, what are you doing with 100 bands? God, I don't know, man. A lot. I might go snowboarding quite a lot more often. Yes. Maybe share your snowboarding content. Maybe that's our thing. We could become professional snowboards. I think you could build out a full team for 100 bands. And then you literally have no excuse. You'd have no excuse. I mean, you get an editor. You get to have some filmer. It's filmer, someone on the back. Maybe a second filmer. You get a penthouse. Yeah. $100,000. Dude, and then you'd have some money leftover to go buy Air 1 for lunch. Literally. And vlog yourself doing it. Everything is covered. Everything is content. You can check it all out down below at that top link. Top link in the description. Don't make the same mistake that you made last year and knock it in on this challenge. That was one of the biggest mistakes. We almost went into a podcast. Or we went into our podcast being like, we're going to provide a lot of value. We started off talking a lot about content creation, but like photography and videography. But in our head, we were thinking like, okay, we need to cultivate a awesome relationship with our viewers. So they need to learn about what's going on in our day-to-day lives. And we're going to be asked for 10 to 15 minutes on the front end. And then we're going to get into it. Like Braden said, you got to confirm the click. And so whatever value you are giving to the viewer, you need to lead with that. And so we kind of brought back the BS portion, like talking about what is going on in our everyday life. But we moved it to the back end. Because if you want to learn more about us and hang out with us a little bit more, you can stay for the PPD. But let us give you the value up front because, do nobody cares about you. And I don't mean that to be like mean. It's just when people are scrolling YouTube, they want to get value. And so like they don't really care about what you got going on in your everyday life. They care about like what value are you going to provide them in your video and they're looking at that. And so it might sound harsh that like nobody cares about you, but that's just the facts. - And I'm not sure about you guys, but I'm assuming you clicked on this video. Many of you might not know us. You've ever seen us before. You're like, I'm here for this thing. I could care less of what they have to say. And I even think about myself when I scroll YouTube. So much of what I listen to is when I'm driving. So if I pop up to a red light, like I just pop on a video and I put it into X speed, the person that's sharing it doesn't matter. It's interchangeable for me. It's just the value, right? So if I'm not getting something quickly, I'm like, off to the next red light, I'll switch it out to something else. You know what I'm saying? That's a perfect example of like I am the viewer that really isn't there for like your thing. I'm not there to hear about your thing. I'm just there to get something, which is interesting. So like think about how you like to watch videos and the stuff that you're watching. Like yeah, obviously this is going to depend per niche and all that stuff. But specifically in the business niche and like if you're content creation, learning about making money online, personal brand, whatever the heck, it has to be value based. Granted, yes, do you click on certain people because of their personalities and you start to be interested in them? Yes, absolutely. But at first, it's like what do they have for me? That's how you got to think about like making the stuff. Like what are you given to people? Yeah, then after a while they'll start to ask questions and then you can go talk about your backstory, how you got to know all this stuff or whatever. I also think we're talking to people who are more so in the educational space as opposed to entertainment. For sure. These rules or these tips could help a entertainment based creator, but that's not really who we're talking about. We're talking to people who want to build a personal brand and want to make videos to build a personal brand and monetize in some way. And like you can do that as an entertainment based creator, but like it's not really who we're talking about. I think with entertainment based creators on YouTube, like it's so much. Dude, you're having to follow up every single video with it. It's such a spectacle. Oh, it's brutal. It's brutal. You're like in the circus and you're like, you got to watch the circus. It's so difficult week after week. And there's people that make a good living doing it. But I think there's a far majority that never end up breaking out of breaking out of that space. So you really only see like those tip top dogs. Number four is to batch and pre-plan your content to stay consistent. This is a big one. This is something that as we add another. Actually, we're adding two channels onto our workload going into 2026. Have someone that's gonna be helping us with one of them, but the other we're really taking on. And it's gonna be so important for us to just write out what the value is going to be in these videos before we shoot them. We're not just gonna like walk outside with our cameras and be like, today's the day. We're gonna film a video. That would be stupid. We've done that before too. We've done that before. Like we've been making videos on YouTube for both of us like over a decade each. And like I go back and watch these videos that I made in college. And I'm like, man, I was making videos every week. Why weren't they growing? I made 55 daily vlogs in a row. And I'm like, why aren't these growing? And I go back and like, of course they weren't growing. There's no value here. This is just like, look how cool I am. And it's not that cool. What you thought the value was in. Was in the aspirated, yes. People are really interested in my lifestyle. And I'm really funny. And they're like my friend group. And they're not. That's the thing though, they're not. They're not. If you go back and you watch David Dobrik stuff when we're in college, that's a value. Or that's an entertainment creator, right? You watch this stuff. You were giggling within six seconds. And it's like constant laughter. That is the value proposition. And like, you go back and I look at mine and I'm like, these weren't funny. These weren't entertaining. They're kind of cinematic, but that's it. And it's just not enough to like get people to be interested 'cause there's nothing, there's no exchange happening, you know? - I think you should sit down and write down and come up with like 50 to 100 titles for videos. - I love that. - And if you can't do that, you're kind of screwed. You should be able to talk about your niche or whatever it is you teach about. And think about 50 to 100 different ways you can talk about that thing. You shouldn't be sitting down week after week being like, okay, what's the video I'm gonna make this week? Like you should have an ongoing list of video ideas that you can make and having a list of like 50 to 100 that might sound like overload. If you don't wanna do 50 to 100, write at least 20. - So I've been soft and do 50 to 100. - That's what I'm saying. 50 to 100 because if you can't think of 50 unique titles, how are you gonna stay consistent over a year of making videos? Like ideas is at like the very, is one of the very first steps. It's like one of the most important parts of creating content. Like you have to be able to come up with different ideas and talk about the same few things in different ways. - I would also recommend, I don't think it's on our list, is to just pick something that's like at the ethos of what you're creating. I think too many people start YouTube and they're doing, oh, I'm gonna do plants. I'm gonna do finance. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that. Like YouTube categorizes you in a bucket. - Dude, when I was first-- - You know what I'm saying? - When I was 100%, when I was first starting out, I was like, because I consumed a lot of different content that I like. So I was doing challenges. I was doing skits. I did a few like fashion things. I did different styles. And I was like, I don't wanna really pick one thing because I'm interested in a lot of different things. But the fact, the facts are the facts. Like you kinda have to narrow down into one specific niche because YouTube needs to figure out who to serve your videos too. And if you're switching around way too much week after week, YouTube's just gonna be confused as to who to serve your content to. If you think about, let's say you're making a video one week about finance. And then the next week you're making it about cooking, you're gonna gain the, you're gonna attract the finance people on your first video. And then it's gonna serve your cooking video to the finance people. I know this is kind of like a very broad random example, but like, think about if you're into this one thing and then you get served a video or suggested a video that isn't about what you're originally interested in, you're not gonna click on it. And that goes back to the rule that you were saying is like, if they don't click, they don't watch. And so you gotta kind of stay aligned in the same niche to see success. Number five is underrated, but so key. And it's to remove financial pressure from yourself when it comes to creating. This is something that everybody wants to be a YouTuber. Everyone wants to create content and they wanna go all in. And yes, I do think that like to be successful at content and on YouTube, you need to go 100% all in because if you don't go 100% all in, you just won't see success. With that being said, the caveat is, when you are a 100% reliant on your content creation, your YouTube to produce your income, it's a dangerous place because then it affects the decisions that you're gonna make. And especially when you're first starting out to see success on YouTube, you have to try a lot of different things, a lot of different formats. And when you have the financial pressure or the burden of making money from content creation, you're gonna not, you're not gonna take as much risk as you would if you're like, okay, to start off, I'm just making YouTube videos just for fun, just to see where this goes. And like if you have the added pressure of, I need to make money from this, you're not gonna see as much success. Yeah, and I think go at this. Like, you're going to see success if you post 52 videos. Like, that's how you got to think about success. Like the uploads, not view count. 'Cause I'll tell you from experience, it's gonna take way longer than you think. You think it's gonna take a year, it'll probably take three or four. Well, I love our last episode with Jeff. Yes, yes. He was like, I went into this with the mindset of, if I post two years, every single week, I will see success. And he'll change his life and he was right. He's now at over a million followers on subscribers on YouTube, he makes great money with it. It's his full-time thing. Like, the possibilities are endless. If you can just cut out the noise and just look forward to like 64 uploads, 100 uploads. Yeah, and I think a lot of people go into content, especially YouTube. And everybody's got a handful of videos in them. And especially when you first start out, it's just like shiny new thing. You're like, oh, this is exciting. We're gonna go off on YouTube. But I think the reason why most people quit is because they don't see success as quickly as they thought they were gonna see success, like you said. And if you're not reliant on the income from YouTube or your content creation to like live, it allows you more time to change up your videos, to test out new things and to stay consistent for longer. And the whole, the whole bottlenecks, the whole game, is to just keep stay alive enough to make another video and give yourself another at-back. 'Cause one video will eventually hit. But if you're reliant on that income, it's you're like, I wanna make another video, but like, I gotta make money, you know? And dude, there's no shame in balancing a full-time or part-time job. It might take more work, like Jeff said, he was working, you know, 80 hours, 90 hours a week when he was working at Google and doing YouTube. But that's just kind of the trade-off that you have to make if you wanna see success, and you're balancing a job on top of content creation. - 1,000%. - Well, I mean, for you, right? Like, when you were working with the Lakers. - Yeah, I couldn't just quit and do the pod. I had to do the Lakers to make enough money to be able to do the pod. And you were making videos for brands, you didn't wanna make the videos for the brands, but you were doing it 'cause you're like, this is the only way that we can do this. And now, I mean, now seeing it, it's like the full-time thing is kinda crazy, but you gotta think about how many years later in the brands that are now a part of it, how the ecosystem works, of how we support the pod and all that good stuff. It's just different than when we started. We didn't have anyone listening to you, so you don't have leverage. Now you have leverage. You're like, there's these eyeballs. This is who listens. This is the demographic. And then the brands, the come, that are interested in your stuff. - I would say we've really seen success, and I say success in like quotes, like success to us in traction on the podcast really over the last five to six months, which means for about three and a half years, maybe a little bit longer, we were struggling trying to figure it out. And so the fact that we weren't reliant on the podcast to provide both me and you a full-time living, while we were trying to build it, allowed us to stay consistent over three and a half years before seeing even some sort of success. - Most people, it's gonna take a similar amount of time if you're longer. - 100%. - It's just the price of rice. - I think you're right, dude. If you can go into it with the mindset of like, this is gonna take me at least a few years, 'cause I think that what's the famous quote, a lot of people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade, something like that. - That plays with me. Number six is to do research before creating. It's a big one. You guys need to go and look at the people who you're most interested in and said space, and write down one to two things that you can steal. Whatever it is, whether it's format, color profile, whatever the heck the thing is, how they talk, they're set. If you take one to two things from five to 10 different people, you will inevitably be way different than whatever it is that you're stealing from. - To go back to Jeff's episode, though. He was like, when you're first starting copy, your favorite creator, he's like, because no matter how much you try to emulate and be exactly like them, there's no way you can be 100% like them, but I also think Caleb Browston brings up a good point where he said on our podcast, if you try to copy the top creator or the top person, the best you can ever be his number two. And so emulate, take things that you like from creators that you enjoy their content of, but also try to go into it and make it unique to yourself. - Yeah, with your talking style or how you go about making the stuff. What's the app that we have on Chrome that shows how in a video did compare to a different video on the same person's channel? - I can't remember, I can't remember, but there's like one of 10? - No, that's people we work with. - Is it vidIQ? - Man, there is a Google Chrome plugin that you can use and it shows you how a video did on a person's channel compared to all the other videos on their channel. - Put that into a Geminier, yeah. - Yeah. - And so that'll help you because you can be like, okay, if this person's making similar videos to my niche, let me see what the outliers were for them. And let me see how I can make a video and give my own take on this particular topic because I know it's gonna do well. 'Cause there's research behind it. - Number seven, long videos, low competition. If we can crack high retention for a long video, connected TV, dude, YouTube is the number one connected TV app in the frickin' world. That's above Netflix, that's above Disney, that's all of them. YouTube is numerous. So people are watching long videos on their TV while they're cleaning their house, while they're doing errands, doing chores, whatever the heck thing may be in their house. That is the place that I would be thinking about. What thing can I make that is long form? - It's time on brand. - T-O-B. - And T-O-B, dude, and that's what builds trust. - T-O-B, if your goal is to monetize your YouTube channel in some way, trust is the thing that will make somebody want to buy something from you. - Trust is what precedes the transaction, right? - I think so. - That sounds good. - You need trust. Somebody needs to either trust you or the product that you have before they actually hit buy. And so if trust precedes the transaction, more time on brand is gonna allow you to have or build more trust with your audience. - You can also give away your best stuff. - No one's listening, no one's listening. - You could tell people bar for bar exactly what you do and people won't listen. - People wanna pay for proximity and implementation. And so I know you can be nervous about being like, well, if I talk about all my sauce for free, I'm not like, what can I sell? But like you would be surprised because you can also talk about the same thing in a different way and repackage it, but you're right, like I don't think you should be scared to give, you shouldn't be scared to give away all your best stuff for free. - I completely agree, we had someone, there's a creative that I was talking to a minute ago and they were telling me that they're like, if I give away one thing, my color, my sound or something, and I think it was Scott. Scott Ohashi, long time ago, like years ago on the pod, he's like, if I give away one, like my best thing and someone can just be as good as me, I'm not as good as I actually think I am. And I was like, I like that, yeah, I like that a lot. 'Cause I think it's true. I could tell you, oh, I got this client using LinkedIn or I got this client doing this. You still have to go do it. You still have really good work and have a sales process and be really good on the phone and be able to communicate your value and all that good stuff. Like it doesn't just happen from you telling someone, and then like 98% of the people are gonna sit on their ass anyways. - I'll give you a perfect example. - Give me a perfect example. - The old cohort that me and Braden used to do. We talked about most of the stuff in the cohort throughout the three and a half years that we were doing photo video content on the podcast. A lot of that content you could go find on YouTuber or out there using Chatubeteer or whatever, maybe. But people paid us to learn how to level up their specific creative business and implement it into their specific situation. And so that's a perfect example of like their problem. There wasn't really stuff that we taught in the cohort that maybe we didn't talk about in the podcast before on short form content. But people paid us because they wanted procsimited to us and they wanted us to teach them how to implement it into their specific situation. - Yeah, you're paying for speed, right? - Yes. - And a transformation. - The things that I've paid for that I've paid like large amounts of money for were to learn things really fast. It took someone else, or would have taken me years. It's like, I can learn this in a few weeks. If I just pay for it, it's gonna suck right now. I'm just gonna bite the bull up and I'll learn this in a few weeks and I'll be able to just implement it 'cause speed is everything. Number eight is to find the format that works for you. You might be listening to this and saying, you know what, I can't talk to the camera for 10 minutes and that's totally okay. There are a lot of faceless YouTube channels. You'd be shocked. If you're an amazing writer and you can do a voiceover and go capture B-roll and learn how to do that whole thing, that could be a way that you find success. Maybe you're like, hey, you know what, I'm gonna start with a shorter episode time. I can't do the 10 plus minute thing right now. It's just too much for me with my full time job. I have a kid, totally fine. Start with four minutes. Start with three minutes and then slowly start to level it up. Start with what you can repeat week after week. Don't go into this with like, I'm gonna do 30 videos in 30 days, you won't do it. It's not possible. You're not gonna do it. - If you're not great at having off the cuff conversation or you don't even want to make videos with other people starting a podcast might not be for you. - Might not be the thing. - If you would rather sit in your bedroom and write out a full script and kind of like read lines and maybe BS a little bit and add to it, maybe the sit down eight to 15 minute talking head style video is more so for you. If you don't like being in the house and creating, maybe go create outside and create a vlog and bring in value throughout the vlog. So find the format that works for you that you enjoy the most because if you don't enjoy it, you're not gonna stay consistent with it. And just because a format works for another creator doesn't mean it's gonna work for you. - Max Tuning, when we interviewed him in Texas was like the reason why I can keep doing this vlog. He goes, I don't have anyone working for me that does this. I do this myself. We pop in with the guys. We record for an hour and then we're out and I take the SD card home and I use autopod and I do the thumbnail and five minutes. I literally do this whole thing under 15 minutes. I can get all of it done. And he's like, I've made that work for me because I really like this format and that's the simplest way to do it. And for him that works. But for you it might be something different but take that and put it into what you're doing and figure out something that's gonna make the most sense for your lifestyle and all the things you're doing for your full-time job if you have one or for your business. - Yeah, I mean, for us specifically like the second channel that we wanna start is more so vlog focused. There is gonna be, it's gonna be a mix between vlogging and showing you guys behind the scenes of the pod and our lifestyle and our business. But there will be like some whiteboarding sessions and some sitting down and talking to the camera but me and Braden both have no desire to do like full-on scripted videos, added desk talking head style videos. It just doesn't interest us. And so it would be harder for us to actually create that style video and using that format versus the format that we wanna go with. And so again, find the format that works for you. Try a few different kinds of format out and go with what is easiest to create for yourself. - Number nine is you don't have to do it alone. You could hire people, you could hire an editor. You could do this really cheap to start. I have a friend who was getting into golf content on YouTube and hired an editor. So he just films, ships it off, editor does this thing, sends it back to an amazing working relationship. He works a full-time job, super busy at the full-time job. But that's a way that he's starting making golf content consistently every single week. The most important thing that you guys can do with YouTube is to just replicate it week after week. If it's twice a month, it's twice a month. But stick to something. Don't be like, oh, I'm gonna go every week and then you do three or four weeks, three or four weeks is easy, eight weeks, super easy. It's after like eight weeks where it gets hard. - If you can think about what your biggest weakness is, I think everybody wants to be like, I wanna have a creative director. It's like, okay, well, sounds sick. But is that what's gonna move the needle forward and is that what your weakest in? Like, if you're spending way too much time on the editing and that's not natural for you, maybe hire an editor first. For us, our team is, we have somebody that helps us edit our clips for short form. And that's because me and Brandon could do that, but it takes a lot of time and we don't have the time. It's okay, we're gonna pay somebody to help us make short form clips. We also pay a YouTube strategist. And we didn't understand the value of a YouTube strategist until we talked to our good friend, King Calloway, and he recommended our YouTube strategist and he's like, you know, packaging is the whole thing. And we're like, now we just have to have a good conversation. Once we started working with the YouTube strategist, we realized how big of a difference it makes. And then we worked with the YouTube strategist for a little bit. We thought we understood what they did. We stopped working with them, tried to do it ourselves. We noticed we can't do it nearly as good as them. So understand what your weaknesses are and lean into that. And number 10, you just gotta keep going. - Just keep swimming. - Oh yeah. 'Cause right now, you're listening to this. You might be stuck at 100 views. You might be stuck at 50 views. You might be stuck at 10 views. But you cannot get down yourself. The only thing that you can control is continuing to upload. Continue to upload, continue to get better and iterate. And if you have to, course correct, but it's only gonna come from you uploading. You'll get back data from what's doing well and what's not doing well. And you'll get better every single time you post. - Yeah, you might be listening to me like, "Oh, that's a cop out BS last tip." But it's so true. Like, I would say consistency fixes 90 to 95% of people's like success issues. - If you were consistent, you wouldn't be here. - Oh. - Let's be real, dude. - Did someone might be consistent here? - You posted 100 plus times, you're not listening to this. - Sure. - On YouTube, specifically. - Okay. - That's my point. Okay, that's my, I feel like we've earned the right to say you can be consistent to have number 10. We've been pretty fucking consistent. - Totally. - You know what I'm saying? We've earned the right to have that one as a thing 'cause we've done over 185 episodes like, you know. - I think also another big thing that we've learned about YouTube is like, not everybody else gonna hit. - Oh, that's good. That's a really good piece of advice. Then, dude, once you think you're gonna hit. - And might not hit. - Let me tell you, we've had a few really good like four to six episode runs. We got it figured out. - Dude, we're hot. - And then we're hot. And then you put out a video and it humbles you really quick. And then, I'm not even kidding. Like, man, we had a really hot run and then we got one video. We did a podcast and it just didn't perform. We thought we were like completely past the performance in which it got. And we were like, oh my god, like we're cooked. And then you start kinda spiraling and you're like, dude, should we still do the pod, whatever? And then you kinda come back with another banger, eventually another one hits and you're like, dude, we're so back. And so, like momentum is such a key thing, but like, just remember that not everything's gonna hit. - It's all cum, it's cumulative. YouTube is very cumulative. So don't look at it. Like, Costa was saying, oh, like what's this doing week after week? We're just looking at the month. Like, how's it doing, month after month? - For the year. - Here are the year. Like, look at it though, I think in like one to three to six month periods and you'll see like it would, if you're really not growing that decent far out, something needs to change, big time. - Yeah, if you've been doing it for a year and like you're really not seeing growth, either your videos just like aren't that good or you're just not. - You're not doing something right. - There's something that we just talked about in here that you need to go back and rethink. 'Cause we've told you damn near everything that you could possibly need. Oh, bonus time. Is it bonus time? - Yeah, I was gonna say this could be a fun game. How many videos should someone do until they just hang up the towel? - For you just call it quick. - Yeah, you're like, dude, you know what? You do this not for me. - I feel like you get, I think you get a hundred uploads, man. - Hundred? - Yeah, you get a good hundred. 'Cause it a hundred, it's like, if you're still getting 10 views and a hundred, just, you know. - Hey, maybe try not YouTube. - Don't do YouTube. - Yeah. - It's all good. - It sums a little off, it's all good. - We do have bonus tips. - Dad of that actually matters. - Okay, click through rate. This is the one that says who's clicking through your thumbnail. - Yeah, like out of everybody that sees your thumbnail on the homepage or recommended, right? - Yeah, so if we showed 10 people your thumbnail and one of them clicked, we would have a 10% click through rate. - Which is really good. - Just really high, okay? So typically I'd say, you know, four to seven%, it's okay. Like congratulations, you're not doing terrible. Like if we see that, we're like, okay. First day though, we want like eight to 10% plus percent. We're in a great place. We're doing really well for, we have a long form show. So this is gonna change depending on how long your thing is. But look at the data for your channel specifically. Like how many, you put up 10? What's the data for the average click through rate? You want to be that little green arrow up. You don't want to be read down. And if it's low, change the title and the thumbnail. Don't be afraid to repackage it. Like you brought this up earlier. Like just because a video doesn't do well, doesn't mean it's a bad video. You might just have to re-title it and re-package the thumbnail. And that might be the difference between it, getting, you know, 105 views and 10,000 or 20,000 views. - Look at the retention as well for the first 30 seconds. You want 90 plus percent to be there. If they're not, if it starts dipping, 60, 70 percent, you mess something up in the intro. You didn't do a good job. - You're not confirming the click. - You're not confirming that click. AVD is so, so, so, and that's your average view duration. So, I mean, if you can get a 50 percent AVD and like blow a 20 minute video, sweet spot. - Yeah. - You're doing amazing. Realistically, we want on something that's like an hour long, if you get 20 plus minutes of someone's time, average, you did really well. And that you're factoring and some people are watching for two hours and some people watching for two minutes. Like that's where you get that huge skew, you know? - I think for us, our podcasts are typically between like one, 30 and two hours. This one might be a little bit shorter. But if we get like 16 plus minutes, we're like, oh, this is great. Like 14 to 15 is our average view duration. So anything 16 plus is phenomenal. With that a doubt, for as far as where you guys are getting traffic, YouTube back, YouTube not that long ago was really searched. Like someone would, you would see a heavy thing on search. Like getting traffic for someone to be like, oh, what's the top podcast in 2026, whatever, whatever pops up, that's search, googling it or searching it in YouTube. Now it's browse and suggested. And browse is when you first pop up in the app, right? That's where we get like 90% of our traffic is browse. And then 10% comes from suggested. Suggested really screws us. If it was just browse, we'd be in, we'd be in heaven right now. So suggested when someone clicks on someone else's video and it's the stuff on the right hand side, that's suggested. - It's like, hey, you like this video. So we also think you'll like this. - So it's tough, man. You really got a battle on that suggested side of things. And that's like, we noticed that is what absolutely plummets our click-through rate is the suggested. But that's how if you really have a breakout video, suggested is also humming for you and doing super well. - Yeah. And then the last thing to pay attention to is new versus returning viewers. And I think you should almost have videos that are gonna foster that relationship with your returning viewers. And then you should also have some that are like, okay, I'm really targeting new viewers here. And the more new viewers you get, the more you're chance is gonna grow. - We always, we're wanting new rocks. - But dude, I will say. - But you gotta take care of the rocks that are there. - Yes, you gotta take care of the rocks that are there. - And dude, I'm so excited to start another YouTube channel. - If I had to buy stock in 505, - You're buying? - I'd be hammering, hammering it right now. Dude, you're getting a low price on this stock. Cut this clip in like four years, you're getting a low price. I'm telling you, dude, tell me if you haven't subscribed, and you stayed this long, what are you doing? - I feel bad for you. - I feel bad for you too. - You think there's anyone that has stayed this long that hasn't subscribed? - They're gonna comment, they're gonna let us know and be like, yo, I was the guy that wasn't subscribed and I'm real sorry about that. - Dude, also, last thing I want to shout out, someone who's doing YouTube and a good buddy of ours, is Johnny. - Johnny Hocksteller. - Jay Hock. - Check out my hat. - With our lab culture. - I'm locked in. - Dude, I didn't even, couldn't even see your hat. - Yeah. - Didn't even know you weren't a hat. - Just headphones up here. - I was just like, dude, forehead and then wood panels. - Mm-hmm. - You know? - That's all you see. - Yeah, and headphones. - I thought your headphones were just kind of flowing. - Yeah, yeah. - A lot of-- - You see sick designs, dude, so shout out to Johnny.