Speaker 1: Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. So in this video, I'm gonna take my six years of experience of growing an online audience to over 6 million followers on YouTube and across other platforms. And I'm gonna share what I would do if I was trying to grow an audience completely from scratch today. This is something I've learned absolutely loads about over the years and people always ask me about it. And so I wanted to share my best advice. And conveniently, a few months ago, I was interviewed by my friend and fellow YouTuber and entrepreneur, Noah Kagan, and he and his audience asked me a bunch of questions around how to build an online audience. And so this video is gonna be the best advice from that interview. Ideas kind of stem from niche. And for me, niche is sort of a combination of two things. There's the target and the value. Who is the target and what is the value? So for example, as a marketing agency owner, I could be targeting other marketing agency owners and teaching them how to grow their business. That would create very different content to, for example, targeting DTC consumer brand managers and trying to teach them how to use TikTok ads to level up their DTC campaigns. And once I've nailed that at that point, I would start thinking, okay, cool. What are all the different content buckets of ideas? What's popular on blogs that are targeting that audience? What are the other YouTube channels in the space? Let's sort them by most popular views and let's see what are their videos that have gone viral. We call this technique of viral replication. Just kind of funny. Basically like the easiest way to get content that works is to copy the title and thumbnail of another piece of content that has worked and then just do it in your own way so you're not really plagiarizing them. That would be how to approach it if we were to zoom out a little. I was making very niche videos teaching people how to get into med school in the UK for specific university, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL. Those were the only things I was targeting. Very, very, very niche audience, but I had an unfair advantage in that space because I was a medical student at Cambridge and I'd been running courses teaching people how to get into med school for like five years at that point. So I was making videos about what I knew. I wasn't trying to make videos trying to be a general productivity self-help guru because that wasn't even on the radar. It was literally just how do I add value to people that I'm comfortable I can add value to? Amy Porterfield has a concept she calls the 10% edge. Who is the audience that you're 10% ahead of that you can illuminate the path for? You can be a guide rather than a guru. So I was being a guide for medical students, helping them get into med school. And then they got into med school and people started asking me for advice on how to study, study for exams. And I was like, okay, I can do that. So I read a few papers. I'd studied psychology as part of my medical degree. And I started sharing the Gary V model of document, don't create. And I was documenting the stuff that I was doing to study for my own exams. So again, I don't need to be a guru here. I'm just literally like, hey, here's how I take notes. Here's how I study for this exam. Here's what I discovered about how to build a study timetable. And again, this was quite niche. I think it took me about 80 videos to get 4,000 subscribers, 50 videos to get the first 1,000. And then from that point on, people started asking me questions about productivity. They were like, huh, you're a medical student slash doctor and you managed to make videos and you managed to do all the fun stuff on the side. And it seems like you've got a social life. How are you so productive? And I'd never really thought of the word productivity before then. This was around 2019 or something, two years into the journey where I started thinking, huh, maybe I should make videos about productivity. And now if you ask people like Ali Abdaal, what's the one word that comes to mind, the word that would be productivity. I think it's interesting. It's like Ryan Holiday started out making content from marketing. And then he kind of did some journalism type thing. And then he stumbled on stoicism with the obstacle is the way. And now the one word that Ryan Holiday is known for is stoicism. And he's just doubling down on that. So similarly, I decided I wanted to double down on productivity. I'm trying to go adjacent into tech and into books and just anything associated with helping people be more productive. We really just need to figure out what is the 80-20? Like how do we really 80-20 the hell out of this stuff? So how do I put in a small amount of time to get the maximum bang for my buck in terms of content? Now, when it comes to YouTube in particular, that comes from basically title and thumbnail in terms of the packaging of the video. If no one clicks on the title and thumbnail, no one's actually gonna see the content. So spending a decent chunk of time on the packaging is super helpful. But then when it comes to the content, I think the hook plus the structure is the main thing. So for the hook, it would be the first 30 seconds. And for the structure, it would be the sort of rough three-part structure of video. Content creation can be systemized. I think people think of content creation as like a creativity thing. It's not really a creativity thing. It's more like systems and processes and SOPs thing. And actually, oh, there was a sick quote I read. Creativity is a systematic process. And I always thought creativity was like some mystical thing. It was like, I don't think I'm very creative. It's like, I need creative energy, left brain, all of that stuff. But actually, it's a systematic process. It's like that quote from some famous writer that I only write when inspiration strikes. Luckily, it strikes at 9 a.m. every morning. And I found that the more I can systemize my content creation, the less I need to worry about me being a creative person and the more I can actually just get results in my business. Oh, and by the way, if you're wondering about the absolutely sick background music that we've been using this video and that I've been using on my YouTube channel for the last six years, that has been provided by Epidemic Sound who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Epidemic Sound are absolutely amazing. They provide a huge library of royalty-free music that you can use in pretty much whatever way you want in your videos. Epidemic owns 100% of all of the music they provide. So there is zero chance that you'll ever get hit with a copyright strike. And Epidemic Sound's library has over 40,000 tracks and 90,000 sound effects with new tracks added every single week. The music is also professionally produced and it's all original music. They've got a commercial plan and a personal plan. Now the personal plan is the one that we as a team use personally and that's perfect for YouTubers and podcasters and bloggers or anything like that. And it works on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and all these other platforms. Or alternatively, if you happen to be a freelancer or an agency or a brand, then the commercial plan lets you use background music in your clients' videos without ever worrying about a copyright strike. Also, just as an aside, one of my many income streams as a result of having this audience has been affiliate income. And actually the Epidemic Sound affiliate program is also a great way to earn money as a creator. And also earlier this year, the Epidemic Sound team invited me over to Sweden to visit their offices and we took a trip to like the Arctic North and it was absolutely sick and they're super, super friendly and their music studios are absolutely incredible. And so I'm just like Epidemic Sound fanboy for life, basically. Anyway, if you wanna try out Epidemic Sound, which is literally the thing I've been using for the last six and a half years, then you can check out the link in the video description and you can sign up to a totally free trial of their personal or commercial plan. And in those days, you can browse their library to your heart's content and you can use any music that you want from that library. And then even if you don't wanna become a paid subscriber, you can still use any of the music that you used during the trial and not worry about copyright strikes at all. So thank you so much Epidemic Sound for sponsoring this video. There's no easy answer to this. Everyone I think wants a magic bullet for consistency, but really it's about patience and it's about faith. It's about patience that it takes a long time for this stuff to see results. And it's about faith that if you do the right things and show up consistently, that eventually the results will come. And that's why personally for me, I find that the main strategy for consistency is to set input goals, goals that are within my control. It's not within my control whether I hit 10,000 subscribers. It's not within my control whether I get a million views on a video, but it is within my control. Can I show up every week and share something authentically that I feel would add value to my target audience? And if the answer to that is yes, and I can find a way to make that process at least vaguely enjoyable and just know that I'm gonna do it for two years, this is the thing I tell my students. If you wanna do YouTube, commit to posting a video every single week for two years. That's the kind of time horizon you need to basically guarantee that it's gonna change your life. The problem is when people do it like, oh, I'm not seeing any results two months later. I'm still terrible at making videos. I've never talked to a camera before in my life, but for some reason I'm expecting results from day one. This is completely absurd. It takes eight years of training in the UK for a medicine to get someone even remotely in front of a patient. If you're expecting six-figure results, seven-figure results in your business, you cannot not put in the work. And yeah, of course people are busy, but if it was easy, everyone would have seven-figure businesses based on organic content marketing. It's not. It's gonna start off feeling like a really heavy lift where you're like, oh my God, I'm recording for an hour and I'm getting 10 minutes of content out of it. It's not worth it. It takes too long to edit. But if you push through that pain, just like you did when you were starting your business and you start building systems and processes and using templates, hiring people to do the things you don't wanna do, that's ultimately the thing that makes it consistent. Because time management only gets you so far. Like you can't time manage yourself to getting two videos a week out on YouTube while you have a full-time job, while you have a family and kids and a life. That's just not gonna happen. You've got to build the systems and tools. You could use the knowledge that businesses use to leverage yourself so that you can create content at scale. Early on, like first, like one year or so, literally flying by the seat of my pants, thinking, oh, okay, it's a new week. I need a new video. What's the video gonna be this week? Come up with ideas. Okay, cool, let's make the video. Write it, film it, edit it. Like trying to do that all while in medical school in a week. Hit upload. As the video is uploading, figuring out the title and the thumbnail and just being like, all right, cool. Slap some text on the thumbnail using Adobe Spark at the time. Upload the video. Let's move on to the next one. That was the very rough process. And then I realized fairly quickly, a few months in, hang on, this is a recipe for burnout. This is not sustainable. I need to systemize the whole thing. And then I read an amazing book called The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, which is, I'm sure you guys, some of you guys have read. That book completely changed my life because it introduced me to the idea of systemization and delegation. I was like, oh, I get it. I need to think of my YouTube channel as a franchise, as the prototype for a franchise. So you know how you can walk into any McDonald's anywhere in the world and you get an identical experience. The same food, the same experience. They can put any random ass 16-year-old with zero qualifications into one of those jobs and the 16-year-old will follow the process and will get the result for the customer. That's amazing. So how do you therefore create systems and structures in your own business that make it a theoretical franchise? What is the system that I would follow to franchise out my YouTube channel? Okay, cool. There's a process for idea generation. There's a process for writing. There's a process for filming. There's a process for editing. There's a process for publishing, et cetera, et cetera. And initially I was doing all of these things myself and then very slowly over time, I started delegating small bits of that. So now someone else does the idea generation. Someone else does the research for some of the videos. I still do the writing because I've tried outsourcing it and it's really hard to outsource writing for your own videos. Obviously I film my own videos, but then someone else edits, someone else publishes, someone else repurposes, someone else looks at the analytics then takes the footage and they will turn it into like Instagram and Twitter thread and a LinkedIn carousel and an Instagram carousel and a TikTok. And we've got the whole repurposing process as well. Cause what we found is that we've put in all the effort to make the video. We might as well chop it up and turn it into a Twitter thread, a LinkedIn thread, a carousel. We might as well make it sweat and repurpose it across all the different social platforms. That is what the six years later, the evolution of the content pipeline looks like with a team of 14 people, 10 of which are basically focused on the content side where we have a courses business that supports the whole thing. And we have a general manager in Angus so that I don't need to worry about the day-to-day management. Starting off with me as a doctor, trying to hustle to make videos one at a time to this whole like production empire, where now I don't even know what happens on the YouTube channel. I see a video being uploaded and I'm like, damn, that's cool. I watch it. I give feedback to our editors while recording a loom. And it's just, it's just great. So I can focus my time on the thing I actually care about, which is drawing diagrams on a page and talking to a camera, which is the thing I'm good at. Everyone else does everything else, which is all the things that I'm bad at. I'm good.