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Anything related to matters of the mind

Michael Greene

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Hey guys,

In "Unscripted " MJ gives 9 steps to applying the Process Principle. Steps 4 and 5 are "Apply mathematics to the goal" and "Segment the goal into it's Daily Action".

My question is, How should you apply these two steps if you can't directly control the outcome of a situation? For ex. If your goal is to lose 50 lbs you can directly control that outcome by how you eat or how you exercise. But if you're a Youtuber and your goal is to get 1m views on a video...that's not as straight forward. And you may not know what the daily action is.

So in situations like that, is there a way to do it or should you change the goal to one that is output focused rather result focused?

Thanks
 
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amp0193

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But if you're a Youtuber and your goal is to get 1m views on a video...that's not as straight forward. And you may not know what the daily action is.

Divide the process up into steps, until the steps are small enough for you to understand and take action on.

If you don't understand the process well enough to divide it up into actionable steps, then learn more about the process.

If you don't understand the process to getting to the end (1M views a vid), then just getting started doing whatever you think is best, is just a stab in the dark.
 

RobD88

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If you don't understand the process to getting to the end (1M views a vid), then just getting started doing whatever you think is best, is just a stab in the dark.


I feel a lot of business decisions are stabs in the dark. What makes them successful or not is whether or not they are educated guesses. Once you divide your process up into actionable steps and then take action you simply document the results of each action. What worked, what didn't work. Plan, do check, adjust, repeat.

Simple process improvement ideology.
 
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amp0193

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I feel a lot of business decisions are stabs in the dark. What makes them successful or not is whether or not they are educated guesses. Once you divide your process up into actionable steps and then take action you simply document the results of each action. What worked, what didn't work. Plan, do check, adjust, repeat.

An educated guess isn't a stab in the dark. It's a stab in the dim light. Big difference. :)

If you wait until the room is well lit, you'll never get started, because it won't ever be.
 

Michael Greene

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IMO, If you are a content creator like in the example you stated above, the focus should be on putting out valuable content every time without thinking about how many views you would be getting for it.

Thank you for dropping that link! I appreciate it. I think you are right. I am asking this question assuming the content is already good.

Divide the process up into steps, until the steps are small enough for you to understand and take action on.

If you don't understand the process well enough to divide it up into actionable steps, then learn more about the process.

If you don't understand the process to getting to the end (1M views a vid), then just getting started doing whatever you think is best, is just a stab in the dark.

Thanks for the response man.

Yeah that concept is simple enough to understand, i am really just wondering whether or not you should be measuring numbers outside of your control.

For ex. in the book MJ says "if you're goal is to write / finish a book than a good day to day task would be to write 500 words". Fair enough, you can measure that and you can control the outcome. After so many days you will have a book without question. But if your goal was "Write a NY Times Best Selling Book".....that's not as easy to measure even though it's specific because you can't directly control the outcome after the book is written and released. The only thing you can control is the effort you put into trying to reach the goal.

Like in the example before, if i'm a youtube creator i have no way of knowing what's going to happen once i upload a video because i can't control how people respond. It could go viral, it could do nothing, it could do just okay. So according to these steps would i measure myself by the amount of videos i release, the effort i put into promoting them and assume eventually that will lead to 1m views? Or how would you apply these steps to a goal like that?
 

BD64

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It's hard to really visualize how to reach a goal until you start trying. If you've never posted a youtube video before, then yea.. you'll be pretty clueless. Chances are 10 videos later you will have a bit of a better idea hopefully.

Also success leaves clues. Don't be afraid to implement and iterate based on someone else who has already done what you are looking to do. Go find the youtuber with the 1m views and see how he did it. Look at his older videos and see why he started gaining steam. Look through his top viewed videos, what makes them attractive?

Now start implementing. Test, track and tweak what you're doing. If you know you average 100 views/video now you know that you need 10,000 vids at that rate.
 
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AndrewNC

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Hey guys,

In "Unscripted " MJ gives 9 steps to applying the Process Principle. Steps 4 and 5 are "Apply mathematics to the goal" and "Segment the goal into it's Daily Action".

My question is, How should you apply these two steps if you can't directly control the outcome of a situation? For ex. If your goal is to lose 50 lbs you can directly control that outcome by how you eat or how you exercise. But if you're a Youtuber and your goal is to get 1m views on a video...that's not as straight forward. And you may not know what the daily action is.

So in situations like that, is there a way to do it or should you change the goal to one that is output focused rather result focused?

Thanks

So I'm in the process of building out my YouTube presence and I'm reflecting upon some of my videos that gained a little bit of traction last year. Take in mind, up until this point, I've been focusing on content creation as opposed to content marketing (AKA I just recorded what I felt like on a whim - which helped me and hopefully helped other people), but I wasn't mathematical and strategic for it.

Out of my hundreds of videos, I ranked the ones most watched in order.

The top two used to be the travel videos (freedom is the one I recorded of my road trip after I quit my job in 2014). Driving from Seattle to the East Coast was another road trip I took in Fall 2015, for very different reasons. I think those were viewed the most because of the emotional music in the background, and emotional aspect of freedom to travel.


Screen Shot 2018-01-31 at 10.31.56 PM.png

Aside from those, I recorded two videos in an industry I'm very familiar in. I know that NLP Anchoring is a common phrase that anybody in the NLP realm should be familiar with. So I titled that video with that term, knowing it was a common term that people search for.

In the screenshot below, on a channel I forgot I created, I know that fear of cold calling, fear of failure, and fear of rejection is something that is a problem people face. So I recorded a video on the solution for that.

I originally posted it in Fox's web design group a year ago, not thinking much about it and I think it got 150 views.

Completely forgot I had that channel at all - and after reading your post, I did a search term for something I would search for naturally and I found it in the 10th position (or somewhere around there).

It's now up to 622 views with almost no promotion.

Screen Shot 2018-01-31 at 10.30.18 PM.png

So my positive takeaways and learned from that experience were to gain some industry experience and know exactly what people are searching for. This came from my mind and my experience.

But it's not mathematical.

So the other week, I went over to the house of one of my friends who I'm in a business mastermind group with together. He has one YouTube video with over 300,000 views; and was teaching me his strategy for ranking that, based on math and numbers.

Number 1 - Going into Google Adwords and creating a campaign.

Not to actually create a campaign, but he said that gives much more accurate search volume than the google keyword planner. By typing in certain phrases that are common in the industry, it gives various suggestions. The philosophy behind this is that there are parallels between how common something is searched on Google and YouTube (similar trends).

So when you understand your target audience, your industry, and if you're creating videos on something - you should already have a good understanding of what the market wants, so that will help.

In my example of 'overcome your fear of cold calling, failure, and rejection' - If I were to do that again, I would go to google and see if there are better terms to rank for. Also, comparing the number of views of the top results on that search on YouTube gives me a good understanding if there is view potential there.

From there, after I get a complete list of everything within the target realm of what I can create content on (NLP for example), I can have the numbers of searches, the numbers of views the top videos get, figure out typical click-through rates on videos, conversion rates for traffic, etc. and then determine how I fit in there.

After that math is done, I'm going to reach out to YouTube marketing specialists to incorporate the strategies for ranking those videos organically and getting traffic to them.

1. The title of the video.
2. The thumbnail image.
3. The description of the video.

The format of the video, the type of content I put in there, and the CTA in the video will all be a part of the process of turning views into loyal subscribers; and more.

Anyhow, this is how I'm moving forward now with the YouTube channel I'm building out this year.
 

amp0193

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But if your goal was "Write a NY Times Best Selling Book".....that's not as easy to measure even though it's specific because you can't directly control the outcome after the book is written and released.

"Write a NY Times Best Selling Book" is a goal as long as there are actionable steps to reach it. Without any steps, it is a dream. Writing 500 words a day, hoping for a magically bestowed NYT best seller isn't going to happen.

There is something that NYT Best-sellers do to be NYT Best-sellers. It's not luck.

Is it on merit alone? Are all of the books simply that good? If so, what makes a book great? How are you ensuring that the book you are writing is exuding that same greatness? How can you improve the greatness of your writing daily?

Is it being published through a major publishing house? If so, how do you get to be an author published by a major publishing house? What are the steps others have taken? What are the relationships you need to build in your network? What does it take to get them interested?

Do the authors already have an audience, online or otherwise? What are you doing to build an audience like that? Is there content you could be creating on a daily basis to build an audience that is primed and ready to buy your book when it launches?

Is there a launch strategy that NYT best-sellers use? What are they doing to launch their books? Who do you need to know to make a launch like that happen? What are you doing daily to increase the odds of your successful launch?


The only thing you can control is the effort you put into trying to reach the goal.

You can also control how focused your efforts are, which I guess is what I've been getting at. You can control what the goal ought to be for today. For this week.

I can put a lot of effort into my goal of digging a swimming pool in my backyard with a 2x4, but it doesn't mean I'll ever have a pool.

So according to these steps would i measure myself by the amount of videos i release, the effort i put into promoting them and assume eventually that will lead to 1m views? Or how would you apply these steps to a goal like that?

There is no assuming. You make an educated plan based on data.

It's not just about posting videos, although that's obviously necessary to do on a very regular basis.

It's about making sure the quality of those videos is constantly improving. Learning from every video you post, on how to make it better the next time. Listening to the market feedback and delivering more of what the market wants. How do you continually create fresh, engaging, unique content? What sort of market research needs to be done to figure out what the niche needs? How much time daily do you spend studying what the successful youtubers are doing? Is your finger on the pulse of Youtube and any and all upcoming changes to the platform that could give you an edge?

Let's say the goal is an average of 1M views every video upload. For youtube channels with these numbers, how many subscribers do they have? I think subscriber count is a more tangible number. if you want 1M views on a video, maybe you need 10M subscribers. Let's say you want to get there in 5 years. Can you break down how many subscribers you should have at the end of year 1,2,3, and 4? It's exponential growth, so set your targets exponentially. 100k, 400k, 1M, 4M, 10M.

Now that you know what your subscriber counts need to be at the end of each year, you break it down by quarters. 10k, 30k, 60k, 100k. So you need 10,000 subscribers by the end of the quarter, or at least 111 a day, which is a much more tangible goal than 1M views on a video. When goals are tangible, they put urgency in your daily action. If the videos you post get an average of 10 subscribers, then you need to be posting 11 videos a day. That's a lot of videos. You better work on hiring a team to help make more videos if you want to make your 10M in 5 years goal.

What are youtubers doing to consistently increase subscribers? It's not just posting videos. How are they tagging their videos? What CTAs are they putting in their videos, when, where, how? How are they driving traffic to these videos from off of youtube, if at all? Are you split testing your CTAs? Are you split testing your headlines and keywords? Are you taking the time to look at that data, so that you can have more effective future videos with a wider reach?

The average subscriber per video metric is a multiplier. If you can increase this 50%, and you keep churning out the same amount of content, you're now getting way more bang for buck on the time you put in.

And yes, as you said, promoting. What are the big youtubers doing to promote their content? Maybe they're getting, say, 10 big media features a month on their content. Assuming 3 out of 100 media contacts are interested in featuring your content, then you need to contact 330 this month, or 11 a day. Likewise for cross-promoting with other youtube channels.


I don't know anything about youtube, I'm just going through my thought process on how I would approach the problem of defining daily goals.
 
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amp0193

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It's hard to really visualize how to reach a goal until you start trying.

True. Action, of any kind, will bring clarity to the theoretical.

You have a plan, you take action, you learn from the action, you modify the plan as needed.
 
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DeletedUser052

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True. Action, of any kind, will bring clarity to the theoretical.

You have a plan, you take action, you learn from the action, you modify the plan as needed.

That's how things are done.

Instead of spending time on strategizing every move before taking a step, start doing and then adjust along the way.

You will be surprised and wish you started earlier.
 

RobD88

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Like in the example before, if i'm a youtube creator i have no way of knowing what's going to happen once i upload a video because i can't control how people respond. It could go viral, it could do nothing, it could do just okay. So according to these steps would i measure myself by the amount of videos i release, the effort i put into promoting them and assume eventually that will lead to 1m views? Or how would you apply these steps to a goal like that?

While you have no way of knowing you can still take action. It's marketing 101...make an educated guess at what you think will drive traffic to your video. Implement that action and track the results (views). If you see an increase determine if it was a direct result of that action. If so continue the action until it no longer results in increased traffic. If not, either tweak it or discontinue it and repeat the process.
 

Michael Greene

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Also success leaves clues. Don't be afraid to implement and iterate based on someone else who has already done what you are looking to do. Go find the youtuber with the 1m views and see how he did it. Look at his older videos and see why he started gaining steam. Look through his top viewed videos, what makes them attractive?



"Write a NY Times Best Selling Book" is a goal as long as there are actionable steps to reach it. Without any steps, it is a dream. Writing 500 words a day, hoping for a magically bestowed NYT best seller isn't going to happen.

There is something that NYT Best-sellers do to be NYT Best-sellers. It's not luck.

Is it on merit alone? Are all of the books simply that good? If so, what makes a book great? How are you ensuring that the book you are writing is exuding that same greatness? How can you improve the greatness of your writing daily?

Is it being published through a major publishing house? If so, how do you get to be an author published by a major publishing house? What are the steps others have taken? What are the relationships you need to build in your network? What does it take to get them interested?

Do the authors already have an audience, online or otherwise? What are you doing to build an audience like that? Is there content you could be creating on a daily basis to build an audience that is primed and ready to buy your book when it launches?

Is there a launch strategy that NYT best-sellers use? What are they doing to launch their books? Who do you need to know to make a launch like that happen? What are you doing daily to increase the odds of your successful launch?

This really got me thinking. Thank you for this.

What are youtubers doing to consistently increase subscribers? It's not just posting videos. How are they tagging their videos? What CTAs are they putting in their videos, when, where, how? How are they driving traffic to these videos from off of youtube, if at all? Are you split testing your CTAs? Are you split testing your headlines and keywords? Are you taking the time to look at that data, so that you can have more effective future videos with a wider reach?

The average subscriber per video metric is a multiplier. If you can increase this 50%, and you keep churning out the same amount of content, you're now getting way more bang for buck on the time you put in.

This also got me thinking. So thank you as well.

That's how things are done.

Instead of spending time on strategizing every move before taking a step, start doing and then adjust along the way.

You will be surprised and wish you started earlier.

While you have no way of knowing you can still take action. It's marketing 101...make an educated guess at what you think will drive traffic to your video. Implement that action and track the results (views). If you see an increase determine if it was a direct result of that action. If so continue the action until it no longer results in increased traffic. If not, either tweak it or discontinue it and repeat the process.

This is going to be my strategy. In my field there's a lot of smoke and mirrors, no one to really directly model. So, I am going to apply this. I'm just trying to find the best way to turn this into a daily discipline, a way i can hold myself accountable and make sure i am taking action daily on the RIGHT thing.

While we're talking about this....I''ve heard of something that kind of deals with a similar concept as the daily actionable task called "the powerlist". Which is where you write down 5 things everyday to get done before the end of the day and check them off. So my question is How would you guys make sure that what you’re putting on your powerlist is actually progressing you in your process and not just random action fakes or busy work? Basically how do you make sure what you're doing is EFFECTIVE action.
 
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RobD88

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How would you guys make sure that what you’re putting on your powerlist is actually progressing you in your process and not just random action fakes or busy work? Basically how do you make sure what you're doing is EFFECTIVE action.[/QUOTE said:
Personally, I don't think you will know until you do them and measure their impact. There are things that common sense will tell you is just busy work but the rest will have to be implemented, measured, tweaked or eliminated....repeat.
 

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