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Building a Personal Brand On YouTube + Other Social Medias

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

mikecarlooch

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I initially made a progress thread in INSIDERS but realized how many more people can be impacted and inspired on the open forum

I'm Mike, I'm 19, I started building my personal brand on social media in December Of 2021 in the self improvement and fitness niche.

I've got to be honest i'm a bit obsessive over entrepreneurship since the age of 14, but I'm going to keep it real. I experienced the success of making 30-40k by 18 utilizing reselling discord groups, buying into basketball card boom and selling high, and putting $ into ethereum at $900. But ultimately.. I got satisfied and didn't know what to do with the money and didn't know how to do actual entrepreneurship at all because all I had done up to that point was get lucky on trends. It lead me into a dark depression rabbithole of excuses and procrastination because all I would do all day is listen to Gary Vee videos trying to get some kind of answer. The problem was, not only was i not executing, but Gary Vee isn't someone that really gives practical business advice like MJ does (that's why TMF was a real game changer for me in terms of belief in myself and execution..) Before TMF , my thoughts from listening to people like gary vee is that "I'll be rich at 50 if I grind my d*ck off for 30 years".. But now my goal is to set myself up by 30 which I wholeheartedly believe I can do.

Year Goals:
100,000 YouTube Subscribers In a Year
Have an Awesome Productocracy
Fastlane Business Becoming Profitable
Completely Outsourced YouTube Channel besides making the videos and responding to comments
Become a great marketer (skill)


Long Goals:
I want to be "Retired" at 30

I have a full 1/5/10 Planasy.. I won't go through all my goals




What I've Done So Far:
Created a YouTube Channel a month ago, it has 16 videos posted so far, I try to upload atleast 2 videos a week. It's actually doing a lot better than I thought and I've noticed just how fast your following goes up after you hit a milestone. In my case, it took me quite a bit of time to get to 100 subscribers, but when I hit 1,000 subscribers, getting to 1.15k subscribers (https://www.youtube.com/c/MikeCarlooch/videos) came almost instantly as I kept posting videos. I should also mention that having an audience of 43,000 on TikTok (@mikecarlooch) helps a lot. I should say: I was mostly able to build a 43k audience in a some-what niche topic because I have experience from having another account with 260,000 followers and helping friends grow their accounts using the same blueprint and things of that nature. Anyways, I've noticed that if you can post a lot on tiktok and build and audience and get people to search your name a lot to get to your video after you advertise your youtube video on tiktok, YouTube will push your video to MORE people based on the search demand. I've invested in my YouTube education too, I recently purchased Graham Stephan's course (about a month ago) on YouTube, but I will say this - save your money on YouTube courses because you yourself will find out what works and you will be able to act, assess, and adjust based on the reaction to your videos and trial and error is the best teacher from what I've seen so far.. Testing out different thumbnails, etc. For example, I initially wanted to start posting FITNESS videos, but the market tells me to post self improvement videos instead every single time I post one, and every single time I use a specific "face" that i made in a thumbnail, the video seems to do significantly better (you can see it on my page).

I've unsuccessfully released 2 products so far that were straight up bad. One was a membership site for fitness (I realized how generic the information I was giving inside actually was and how little of a value skew there was, so I trashed that idea even though I got one sale.. who also cancelled the membership a few days in because the product was not as good as I thought it was). The other was an amazon book for self improvement, which was an absolute failure even though it got 10 sales. I didn't put any time into learning about writing, I kind of just put it together, made a cover on canva, and marketed it. 10,000 views on a tiktok video marketing it, and barely any sales.

My Current Makes In The Works:
I realized something recently.. Instead of providing a fitness audience of teenagers who likely don't have much buying power... and I don't currently want to go and make some cringy tee shirts or something and actually want to provide value.. I looked deeper at what I could do to generate income from social media while I'm working on a fastlane venture. I completely overlooked that people reached on tiktok.. are in fact PEOPLE.. People with EYEBALLS.. and MONEY. Who wants eyeballs on their stuff and money? Business owners. Hmm. What If I could go full on building that fitness audience of teenagers without selling them anything for a while, which will build loyalty and credibility, and I could sell my skills of building TikTok accounts to BUSINESS OWNERS and help THEM do it.

Currently I'm in the process of creating two courses that can't be easily replicated due to the "nicheness" of them
One is a TikTok Course SPECIFICALLY For Fitness Professionals To Grow Their TikTok account (which then builds them a loyal following that obviously could convert into online clients for them)
The OTHER is a TikTok Course that I teamed up with my roomate who also has gotten tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers on tiktok and we are going to put all our testimonials together for people who's accounts we've helped build (our own, and friends who've had massive success, such as how my roomate managed to use tiktok to make a musicians song get 300,000 videos under it)

My Current Challenges:
Focusing On One Thing
Becoming More Skillful
Thinking If There's More I Should Do For Business Owners Than JUST Sell Them Courses, Considering I'm Just Starting Out Trying To Market To Business Owners.
Creating a Longterm Fastlane Venture
Making a Good Income

Conclusion:
If you have any questions let me know.

I don't have much right now but I hope there's a way I can add value to someone in this forum

Thanks guys..!
 
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Last edited:

Mathuin

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I initially made a progress thread in INSIDERS but realized how many more people can be impacted and inspired on the open forum

I'm Mike, I'm 19, I started building my personal brand on social media in December Of 2022 in the self improvement and fitness niche.

I've got to be honest i'm a bit obsessive over entrepreneurship since the age of 14, but I'm going to keep it real. I experienced the success of making 30-40k by 18 utilizing reselling discord groups, buying into basketball card boom and selling high, and putting $ into ethereum at $900. But ultimately.. I got satisfied and didn't know what to do with the money and didn't know how to do actual entrepreneurship at all because all I had done up to that point was get lucky on trends. It lead me into a dark depression rabbithole of excuses and procrastination because all I would do all day is listen to Gary Vee videos trying to get some kind of answer. The problem was, not only was i not executing, but Gary Vee isn't someone that really gives practical business advice like MJ does (that's why TMF was a real game changer for me in terms of belief in myself and execution..) Before TMF , my thoughts from listening to people like gary vee is that "I'll be rich at 50 if I grind my d*ck off for 30 years".. But now my goal is to set myself up by 30 which I wholeheartedly believe I can do.

Year Goals:
100,000 YouTube Subscribers In a Year
Have an Awesome Productocracy
Fastlane Business Becoming Profitable
Completely Outsourced YouTube Channel besides making the videos and responding to comments
Become a great marketer (skill)


Long Goals:
I want to be "Retired" at 30

I have a full 1/5/10 Planasy.. I won't go through all my goals




What I've Done So Far:
Created a YouTube Channel a month ago, it has 16 videos posted so far, I try to upload atleast 2 videos a week. It's actually doing a lot better than I thought and I've noticed just how fast your following goes up after you hit a milestone. In my case, it took me quite a bit of time to get to 100 subscribers, but when I hit 1,000 subscribers, getting to 1.15k subscribers (https://www.youtube.com/c/MikeCarlooch/videos) came almost instantly as I kept posting videos. I should also mention that having an audience of 43,000 on TikTok (@mikecarlooch) helps a lot. I should say: I was mostly able to build a 43k audience in a some-what niche topic because I have experience from having another account with 260,000 followers and helping friends grow their accounts using the same blueprint and things of that nature. Anyways, I've noticed that if you can post a lot on tiktok and build and audience and get people to search your name a lot to get to your video after you advertise your youtube video on tiktok, YouTube will push your video to MORE people based on the search demand. I've invested in my YouTube education too, I recently purchased Graham Stephan's course (about a month ago) on YouTube, but I will say this - save your money on YouTube courses because you yourself will find out what works and you will be able to act, assess, and adjust based on the reaction to your videos and trial and error is the best teacher from what I've seen so far.. Testing out different thumbnails, etc. For example, I initially wanted to start posting FITNESS videos, but the market tells me to post self improvement videos instead every single time I post one, and every single time I use a specific "face" that i made in a thumbnail, the video seems to do significantly better (you can see it on my page).

I've unsuccessfully released 2 products so far that were straight up bad. One was a membership site for fitness (I realized how generic the information I was giving inside actually was and how little of a value skew there was, so I trashed that idea even though I got one sale.. who also cancelled the membership a few days in because the product was not as good as I thought it was). The other was an amazon book for self improvement, which was an absolute failure even though it got 10 sales. I didn't put any time into learning about writing, I kind of just put it together, made a cover on canva, and marketed it. 10,000 views on a tiktok video marketing it, and barely any sales.

My Current Makes In The Works:
I realized something recently.. Instead of providing a fitness audience of teenagers who likely don't have much buying power... and I don't currently want to go and make some cringy tee shirts or something and actually want to provide value.. I looked deeper at what I could do to generate income from social media while I'm working on a fastlane venture. I completely overlooked that people reached on tiktok.. are in fact PEOPLE.. People with EYEBALLS.. and MONEY. Who wants eyeballs on their stuff and money? Business owners. Hmm. What If I could go full on building that fitness audience of teenagers without selling them anything for a while, which will build loyalty and credibility, and I could sell my skills of building TikTok accounts to BUSINESS OWNERS and help THEM do it.

Currently I'm in the process of creating two courses that can't be easily replicated due to the "nicheness" of them
One is a TikTok Course SPECIFICALLY For Fitness Professionals To Grow Their TikTok account (which then builds them a loyal following that obviously could convert into online clients for them)
The OTHER is a TikTok Course that I teamed up with my roomate who also has gotten tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers on tiktok and we are going to put all our testimonials together for people who's accounts we've helped build (our own, and friends who've had massive success, such as how my roomate managed to use tiktok to make a musicians song get 300,000 videos under it)

My Current Challenges:
Focusing On One Thing
Becoming More Skillful
Thinking If There's More I Should Do For Business Owners Than JUST Sell Them Courses, Considering I'm Just Starting Out Trying To Market To Business Owners.
Creating a Longterm Fastlane Venture
Making a Good Income

Conclusion:
If you have any questions let me know.

I don't have much right now but I hope there's a way I can add value to someone in this forum

Thanks guys..!
Subbed. Thumbnails are looking good dude!
 

Alin Farah

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Thanks Man!
Hello Mike it’s nice to meet someone of your age in this forum. I am also 19 Years old, my name is Alin and I’m from the UK. I respect your hustle man and I can relate that TMF has changed my beliefs and encouraged me to exceed my limits, I also want to retire before 30.

Good luck with your journey and let’s retire at 30 or sooner my bro
 
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mikecarlooch

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Hello Mike it’s nice to meet someone of your age in this forum. I am also 19 Years old, my name is Alin and I’m from the UK. I respect your hustle man and I can relate that TMF has changed my beliefs and encouraged me to exceed my limits, I also want to retire before 30.

Good luck with your journey and let’s retire at 30 or sooner my bro
Alin nice to meet you man! We should make a fastlane groupchat! let me know if you're open to it. We could get a bunch of others our age involved as well
 

mikecarlooch

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So I made a fascinating discovery today (it's probably common sense for a lot of you) but to me, it's fascinating. I hope someone will find this valuable.. i'm posting this here because it's definitely going to help me on my journey.

As a matter of fact, I am writing this post to help me utilize this method.

So, last night I was watching a video about marketing which explained the importance of understanding LTV, CAC, and 30D Cash (ex: CAC $200 30D Cash $200, 1 customer can be acquired) and how other peoples money can be used to acquire customers by increasing the LTV of a customer, therefore profiting more without using your own money. Since I have a very great desire to learn about marketing, I went to bed determined to remember exactly what was said in this video because it seemed so valuable to me.

The reason I was so hard on myself about it, was because typically when I read things I tend to forget them easily even if the information is valuable.

But something different happened here. I THOUGHT about everything that happened in the video and I was able to successfully recall almost all of the key points to the point where I actually can understand how to utilize this information in a marketing scenario. Keep in mind, I don't typically use this strategy for many things.

But I woke up today, and to my surprise, I STILL remember everything that was said.

Then I watched a "key points" summary on a book called ultralearning, because it seemed to be a book that covers what I experienced.

In the book , Scott Young talks about how "Free Recall" which is the ability to recall information after reading it once and training your brain to recall things will accelerate the learning process by 50%.

He also talked about how starting things by taking a direct approach and then just jumping in, and only utilizing research when you hit a bottleneck, then jumping right back into a direct approach after you acquire the information is a great way to learn and retain information.

But anyways, today I decided to start utilizing this strategy by making a challenge for myself. Every single time I want to recall something or I need to remember important information, not only will I apply the information as soon as possible, but I will also get a sheet of paper and a pen and recall EVERYTHING I can possibly remember from the information I read.

It makes me sad how much valuable information I've obtained in my life but have forgotten it due to not utilizing a strategy like this or not putting it into action immediately in order to be able to recall it and accelerate my process.

I hope this helps someone. Thanks for reading
 
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mikecarlooch

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Update- I posted my 20th video today, i've been uploading for about two months. Every video is made with dedication to make it better than the last. Here's my channel's current statistics:

Total Views: 18,918
Subscribers: 1.46k
Watchtime Hours: 917/4000 (4000 is required for monetization)
Top Video: 2,000 Views
AVD On most Videos: 50-70%
 

jazzdorf

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Update - 1.5k Subscribers !
HI Mike,

happy for you and congratualtions!

Can you elaborate more on your video production process? I would be curious about the details.
What you do, how you do it and how long it takes.

Cheers!
 
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mikecarlooch

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HI Mike,

happy for you and congratualtions!

Can you elaborate more on your video production process? I would be curious about the details.
What you do, how you do it and how long it takes.

Cheers!
What's up jazz thank you!

My video production process goes something like this every single time-

Script-->Record-->Edit--> Thumbnail+Title-->Post

In my two months of posting so far with 21 videos, I've had a lot of trial and error to figure out exactly WHAT works. Through that, I do a lot of subconscious things like paying attention to extremely small details such as - the exact structuring of the video (i've noticed that if the video is NOT structured in a certain way it does not do as well)

There's a LOT to it and this would an absolute massive thread if I put everything here.

Is there anything specific you'd like me to touch on? If so I will give you any information I've learned up to this point on that particular subject
 

mikecarlooch

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UPDATE -

Yesterday, I posted the first video on my channel that got NOTICEABLE traction from YouTube promoting it. For my other 20 videos, on average it took about 3-8 days for them to hit 1,000+ views. However, the video I posted YESTERDAY is sitting at 1.7 thousand views within the FIRST DAY.

I am hoping that this is an indication of the YouTube algorithm about to bless my consistency lol...!
 

The WolfPreneur

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Update- I posted my 20th video today, i've been uploading for about two months. Every video is made with dedication to make it better than the last. Here's my channel's current statistics:

Total Views: 18,918
Subscribers: 1.46k
Watchtime Hours: 917/4000 (4000 is required for monetization)
Top Video: 2,000 Views
AVD On most Videos: 50-70%
Come on BRO!!! You can do it.
You really have the guts to make it happen
 
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The WolfPreneur

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UPDATE -

Yesterday, I posted the first video on my channel that got NOTICEABLE traction from YouTube promoting it. For my other 20 videos, on average it took about 3-8 days for them to hit 1,000+ views. However, the video I posted YESTERDAY is sitting at 1.7 thousand views within the FIRST DAY.

I am hoping that this is an indication of the YouTube algorithm about to bless my consistency lol...!
Bro if your videos are about self-improvement, why don't you promote your videos through signature in this forum.
 

mikecarlooch

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alexson

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Creating a video blog or channel isn't hard at all. With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can set up a free YouTube account and begin uploading videos.

But getting people to watch your videos is another story. The sheer number of channels on YouTube combined with the overwhelming amount of content made available on other social media platforms makes it difficult for anyone to get noticed.
 
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mikecarlooch

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UPDATE - Approaching 2,000 subscribers! Less Than 30 Away!

Approaching 50,000 Followers on TikTok

Still have the goal of 100,000 subscribers within the next year.

Aside from building this audience organically, my main focus (which is a bit difficult to think of at the moment) is finding a unique way to serve this audience in terms of building some kind of productocracy. I do have some thoughts which I feel are limiting beliefs that this audience I'm serving (teenagers) don't have enough money to buy much products.. But I know it's just a limiting belief. (advice to get over this limiting belief, or maybe it's NOT a limiting belief and it's just truth, would be greatly appreciated!)

Anyways, that's an update!

Thanks guys!
 

mikecarlooch

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UPDATE -
Learned something new today about YouTube that is really powerful, and I now see basically an EQUATION for growing a YouTube channel.

If you look around at every single big channel on YouTube (most of them that are succeeding today atleast) what do you notice? All of them use other people's names in the titles. But why do they do this? How do they KNOW who's name to use in the video?

Recently I downloaded a tool for my YouTube channel called VidIQ that shows how many people are searching for a keyword and how much competition there is for that keyword in terms of how many videos are being uploaded.

I noticed a smaller YouTube channel in my niche that had less subscribers than me, was consistently posting videos and getting 20, 30, 50, 100 thousand views PER VIDEO. WTF? How does this dude have less subscribers than me but he's pulling 50x the views I'm pulling?

As I scrolled down his page, I noticed something. Every. Single. Video. was titled the same exact thing. There was SOMETHING to this that I had to figure out.

I went to vidiq and I searched the exact keyword that this channel was using for their videos, and here's what I saw:

Out of 100 on the "GOOD" scale, this keyword was a 70! Not only that, a lot of people were searching for it. Since I've been using vidiq, the highest I've EVER seen it was 45 or 50, but never 70.

On my channel, I've only had one video so far that's really gotten noticed by the YouTube algorithm and I thought it was just luck, but it's not.

I decided to model what the channel was doing, I used the EXACT same title, a similar thumbnail.

The video started off slow, but at 2:00 AM it SHOT UP. The video is currently growing and has about 10,000 impressions and according to my analytics, is on pace to being the biggest video on my channel by a long shot.

But here's what's funny...

For the other video that hit the youtube algorithm, a lot of the people came from TikTok and I think that might've caused youtube to push the video because it was a good video and a lot of people were searching for it.

For this recent video, I didn't use ANY TikTok promotion, I wanted to test what would happen if I just used this keyword combined with a good video, and it WORKED.

Then I started to say hmmm... Okay well what are the keyword rankings for the names of the people that most of these big channels are using in their titles?

Whoa. 70, some even 80+... with HIGH search volumes! This is how channels are growing in today's YouTube world! I was confused as to why my first 25 videos didn't really get much traction other than TikTok, but now I understand it.

I was using keywords in my titles that had scores of like 20 (which means the keyword is super competitive)

So, from what I see from this, the equation to YouTube success in today's world is:

INTRIGUING THUMBNAIL + TITLE WITH HIGH SEARCH LOW COMPETITION + HIGH SEARCH LOW COMPETITION TAGS + HIGH AVERAGE VIEW DURATION + COMMENTS, LIKES, SHARES ETC = YouTube Success.

An example of two YouTubers that have blown up in my niche that do this almost every single day are: Greg Doucette and More Plates More Dates. Both of these channels post about twice a day and it seems like they're just constantly taking advantage of this opportunity, and they also have good content, therefore both their channels have millions of subscribers.
 

mikecarlooch

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Is The YouTube Algorithm Screwing Us Over?
UPDATE - So, I wanted to do a little bit of a test.

For most of my YouTube video content since I started, a lot of the traffic I've gotten has come from my tiktok following. I would simply just tell them to go watch my video and a bunch of people would come watch.

But recently, I noticed something. For the past 2 videos or so I did not do any promotion on tiktok, yet in my YouTube analytics I became aware of something very valuable that I think can help a lot of people with their channel.

YouTube is showing my videos to THOUSANDS of people. As a matter of fact, the 2nd most recent video I posted has gotten about 50,000 impressions and no advertising on tiktok.. It's all organic from YouTube

Yet only 3,500 of those 50,000 saw the video... HMMM..

I wanted to see if this would happen again, so I posted another video recently and even though it didn't blow up like the last one, my newest video has been shown to over 9.1 thousand people YET it only has 500 views currently..

Here's why this is so interesting and valuable:

It proves that YouTube is still a working platform that you can build a massive audience on IF you do it right..

What I mean by right is: Guess what the click through rate of the video that got 3.5k views was?

6.3% - Although that's not TERRIBLE.. It just goes to show. What if I absolutely NAILED the thumbnail and a ridiculous amount of those people clicked on the video?

Here's my guess as to how the YouTube algorithm seems to work in terms of this:

YouTube will show your video to thousands of people, but when they do this they're only TESTING your video. If you absolutely nail the video idea, title, and thumbnail, you will get a massive amount of clickers, and YouTube will WANT to promote your video..

Yes. They will WANT to promote your video and give you success on your channel because your video is keeping people on their platform.

But the title and thumbnail are HALF the battle. The other half is actually creating a video where people STAY and watch the whole thing, and like, comment and share the video.

In conclusion, the click through rate and audience retention percentages are the most important part of a YouTube video.

After seeing this in action I am officially out of excuses as to why the YouTube algorithm would ever "Work against me". Nonono, YouTube is gonna show your video to people no matter what. Even if you have the shittiest video of all time, they're going to test it.

The YouTube algorithm isn't "working against you", it's just that the audience that YouTube showed it to had 0 interest in your video, or your video just wasn't really that, good, or even your thumbnail just didn't make any sense.

BONUS Insight:

* I've noticed that YouTube never stops testing videos. Just because those 50,000 people saw my video and only 6% clicked doesn't mean my video was bad (it might), because that's just one audience. YouTube will continuously TEST the video through the years with new audiences. If it hits an audience that loves the video, the video could explode in the future when I'm least expecting it.


I hope this was valuable!
 
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Madbarb

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It's really inspiring to see other young entrepreneurs in the game trying to make it like me. I checked out your vids and they're great, you get straight to the point. Honestly not bad.
 

mikecarlooch

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It's really inspiring to see other young entrepreneurs in the game trying to make it like me. I checked out your vids and they're great, you get straight to the point. Honestly not bad.
Thanks man!!
 

Madbarb

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Thanks man!!
I also got an idea. I'm 19 years old from Sweden, freshly done with high school in about a month. I don't have that bright of a future ahead of me academically, I won't be able to get into a good uni, and any job I'll be able to get isn't paid well. Definitely will NOT be taking the slowlane route and work 9-5 for the rest of my life.

I feel like it would be really good to have accountability partners that way we hold ourselves to a higher standard of responsibility and work. Almost kind of like competing with each other in a way for the sake of achieving maximum input.
 
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mikecarlooch

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I also got an idea. I'm 19 years old from Sweden, freshly done with high school in about a month. I don't have that bright of a future ahead of me academically, I won't be able to get into a good uni, and any job I'll be able to get isn't paid well. Definitely will NOT be taking the slowlane route and work 9-5 for the rest of my life.

I feel like it would be really good to have accountability partners that way we hold ourselves to a higher standard of responsibility and work. Almost kind of like competing with each other in a way for the sake of achieving maximum input.
I completely Agree bro!! I’ve been needing something like that 1-1. I say we do something like we have to write tasks in a google doc or something and then we could confirm when each task is finished, and hold each other accountable. How can I contact you off forum?
 

Madbarb

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I completely Agree bro!! I’ve been needing something like that 1-1. I say we do something like we have to write tasks in a google doc or something and then we could confirm when each task is finished, and hold each other accountable. How can I contact you off forum?
Yeah exactly, that is what I was thinking. I have no clue why I can't PM anyone on this forum, but my Discord is Madbarb#9334
 

mikecarlooch

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mikecarlooch

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Why Less Is More On TikTok/YouTube (my experience)


Posting on social media became a habit for me in the last few months.. If I did not get 8 videos out on TikTok per day, I saw it as a failed day in terms of my social media growth. I had a plan to do daily uploads on YouTube and thank god I didn't do it.

here's why:

When I started my newest tiktok account, I really knew what I was doing from past experience and in terms of views and followers (vanity metrics) my account was an instant success, getting hundreds of thousands of views within the first three videos on the account.

I started coming up with EVERY SINGLE IDEA I possibly could and just started making it on the spot because that IS how tiktok works. Every video is treated equally. You could post 3 videos back to back and all of them could get a million views.

But recently, after doing that for months on end, I started looking at my comments more.

People were telling my my videos were getting repetitive.. and to be honest, they were.

Because I was ignorant to this for a while, I didn't realize that there's only so many viewpoints and things I can say relating to the topic of my account, and in order to uncover the gold, I had to give myself time to think.

Most of my videos were just "pull out my phone and say something"

I can't say this strategy didn't work, because it definitely did for a while.

But then all of a sudden, I noticed my account started tanking a little bit.. Not only were people saying my videos were getting repetitive, but that I was just "talking to talk" and that my videos were starting to lack value compared to my old videos.

At first it made me angry and I just labeled these people as haters, but no. It was true.

My viewers went from hundreds of thousands of views or even millions of views a day to about 50,000 views a day.

So I started thinking. How do I fix this?

What I decided to do is chill on the content. Start adding more value and coming up with topics that are actually actionable for people to follow.

All of a sudden, even though I was posting 1-2 times a day now rather than 8-10, my account was back to normal, getting 50k+ views on a lot of the videos.

The same thing applies to YouTube. The guy that thinks out one amazing video per week is going to beat the guy that sh*t posts every single day (in most cases... this is not true in some cases)

But yea, quick learning experience there. Quality > quantity is the game.
 

Cameraman

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I've noticed that YouTube never stops testing videos. Just because those 50,000 people saw my video and only 6% clicked doesn't mean my video was bad (it might), because that's just one audience. YouTube will continuously TEST the video through the years with new audiences. If it hits an audience that loves the video, the video could explode in the future when I'm least expecting it.
I think you are spot on with your observations. I've seen a similar pattern.

I also think they test different channels separately as well. ALL of my best performing videos seem to have great traffic from External (Google mainly) and YouTube search. These channels take longer to develop, often +90 days before they take off. The CTR for these videos also shoots up from around 5% initially to 15% or more when this happens. I've even had a few hit +25%.

Google also features quite a few of my videos in their search results and this causes the traffic to grow but it doesn't affect the other channels. Then after a while, the YouTube search traffic also kicks in.

Search traffic like this will never compete with Browse views BUT it seems to be ignored by most people (including me). It's made me think that I need to switch the approach for my channel.

Thanks for sharing everything you have. You're doing some great thinking and work.
 
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mikecarlooch

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I think you are spot on with your observations. I've seen a similar pattern.

I also think they test different channels separately as well. ALL of my best performing videos seem to have great traffic from External (Google mainly) and YouTube search. These channels take longer to develop, often +90 days before they take off. The CTR for these videos also shoots up from around 5% initially to 15% or more when this happens. I've even had a few hit +25%.

Google also features quite a few of my videos in their search results and this causes the traffic to grow but it doesn't affect the other channels. Then after a while, the YouTube search traffic also kicks in.

Search traffic like this will never compete with Browse views BUT it seems to be ignored by most people (including me). It's made me think that I need to switch the approach for my channel.

Thanks for sharing everything you have. You're doing some great thinking and work.
Thank you for this man!!

Very interesting.. How do you get youtube videos to rank on google? That's definitely something new to me. Any tips?
 

Cameraman

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Thank you for this man!!

Very interesting.. How do you get youtube videos to rank on google? That's definitely something new to me. Any tips?
Sure. I can explain how I do it but can't guarantee it will work for you.
Here's an example from one of my videos when you do a Google search.

Google.jpg

You need to approach it a bit like SEO rather than you would YouTube research. I use a free account I created with SpyFu to do keyword research on the topics I'm thinking about. For example, if I were creating a video about watermarking photos using Photoshop I could search "Watermark Photoshop". It then gives the results below.

Watermark Photoshop.jpg

I can see this would probably bring an OK monthly search volume in the US (I usually check UK and US figures) but I like volumes to be +1,500 searches a month. I could make a good video about how to remove a watermark in Photoshop but I don't agree with that.

Now I research the same idea in the TubeBuddy Keyword Explorer to find out what people are searching for there. It's usually different to how people use Google.

Watermark Photoshop TubeBuddy.jpg

I can see from this the volume is much higher than Google at 38k monthly searches but I might not be competitive against existing videos. I'll now try to find an angle I can use for the video. In this example, I can create a video explaining how to batch watermark multiple images because there are quite a few monthly searches but much less competition. I'll also check out the ideas on SpyFu to see if people are searching for similar ideas on Google.

When I upload the video I'm sure to add Tags for the keywords I've chosen. I also write a reasonable length video description (+200 words) that mentions my chosen keywords a few times. I've found this seems to be important for Google to pick up the video.

After this, it's a waiting game. Hopefully, either YouTube search will pick it up or Google will pick it up and start to promote you. Whichever pick you up first, the other tends to follow later. It's slow growth but it's regular. Here are the figures for the video I created.

Views.jpg

Here's where the traffic is coming from.

Traffic.jpg

External is 88.8% Google in this example. Here are the traffic growth figures

Traffic Growth.jpg

The green line is YouTube search and the blue line is Google. The video only pulled around 200 views in the first week so was very disappointing. The CTR was only 1.2% at that time but it's now 10% - 15%.

I guess this is an example of an evergreen video and it's the approach I had been following until around 8 months back when I started to experiment with trying to make more popular videos. The nice thing about the evergreen videos is that my viewer figures don't fluctuate a lot. A typical new release will get me around 1,500 to 4,000 views in a week but look at my 30-day stats and you don't really notice the weekly video releases.

30 day figures.jpg

BUT there can be problems when you get picked up by Google. For one, it can make your viewer retention look like this

retention.jpg
The graph looks terrible because Google picks out the key points in the video that might interest the searcher and recommends they watch that section.

Overall, I've had reasonable success with this approach and after experimenting with another approach for 8 months, I'm going back to it. I'm not on YouTube to be famous, I'm there as it's part of my promotion strategy.

I don't know if this will help you but hopefully, it's given you something to think about.
 

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