“You’ll learn the most important ingredients to short-form success, Daniel’s framework for making attention-grabbing videos, the full process he goes through to make a video on TikTok, and why he believes storytelling is more important than anything else.”
Okdork has an inspiring interview with Matt D’Avella, who has 2.8 million followers on YouTube.com and is the filmmaker behind the popular Minimalism documentary that sold to Netfilx.
Matt talks about how publishing a YouTube video of his minimalist apartment generated a million views and was an inflection point for his career direction. He discovered that creating one high-quality video per week was much more effective at growing his audience than many shorter videos. He decided he was going to be an experimenter rather than an expert, so he published videos of his experiences with such things as taking cold showers, quitting coffee and waking up early.
Matt is a great example demonstrating that it is possible to make a living doing what you love.
DoYouEvenBlog.com has a massive post on how to build an audience on YouTube. There is detailed advice on keyword research, finding topics to post about, and strategically managing all the content you are creating. The YouTube training is solid, but there is also a lot to learn about SEO and online businesses. Sites like DoYouEvenBlog, TheBlogStarter, StartaBlog, Ryob, can earn tens of thousands of dollars per month with long-form, optimized content that ranks in search engines. Website hosting companies can pay up to $250 for a new referral so “start a blog” topics are very popular and competitive. Are you creating comprehensive content and building backlinks for your niche? Do some searches around the key pages on sites like DoYouEvenBlog.com to see the business model for yourself.
The Gee family have 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and get over 4 million monthly views.
“The Gees say they turned down a $10 million offer from a major studio, and thus sought to raise that same sum independently. They say they opted to form an indie studio to order to be able to pursue interactive learning activities, tell global stories with complete creative freedom, and develop “software to bring a new age of animation to life.”
Big Idea: There are major opportunities for creators to raise money, start investment funds, and promote their own products and services. There has never been a better time to be a creator!
“Your unfair advantage to wealth creation is in using the power of the people in your audience to create leverage. They become a force multiplier for your content. I call it your personal flywheel. This is how Joe Rogan maybe 9 figures with Spotify, how Kylie became the youngest Billionaire and how a bunch of people you’ve never even heard of make millions or hundreds of millions.”
Noah Kagan is the founder of AppSumo, the popular software deals site. Last year, he shifted his focus to YouTube and has recently passed 100K subscribers.
“I’ve started companies, I have millions of dollars.
For my channel, I don’t want to talk about starting a business. I just don’t fucking want to show another goddamn person, how to go and get a customer because it’s just not interesting to me. But guess what, those are really popular.
I think part of success is boring. The more boring it is, the more successful you are. Because that means it’s working. And that’s the hard part. Cause when it’s boring, you’re like, well, let me mix it up. But no, that’s the part you actually got to keep doing. “
“Meet Emma Chamberlain, a 19 year old with one of the biggest YouTube channels (10M+ subscribers) and owner of her own coffee line, Chamberlain Coffee.”
YouTube joins Snap and TikTok in using a creator fund to court influencers.
A creator fund is the company’s latest attempt to grow its product Shorts, a TikTok competitor.
Big Idea: There will likely be some big winners among the early adopters to YouTube shorts. Opportunities are always the biggest for the front runners.