Top 5 Lessons From Working With Over 300 YouTube Students

When you run your own YouTube channel you can enjoy many benefits:

1. Growing a following

2. Making more money

3. Building financial security

And the list goes on…

Unfortunately, there’s one thing that is hard to come by…

And that’s the lessons learned and experienced from other creators

Fortunately, as I’ve come to work with more and more students I’ve absorbed many of these lessons

And today I am boiling down the top 5

Why?

So you can become aware of them and leverage these lessons to streamline your YouTube success…

Here we go:

5. Over-relying on freelancers

Building a team is one of the most effective ways to grow on YouTube. A team allows you to leverage greater expertise and buy back your precious time. However, not everyone leverages freelancers in the appropriate way.

Where students have gone wrong falls into two camps. The first is letting their team drive their video decisions. They let an editor or writer select their video topics (which unless they have extensive YouTube knowledge is inadvisable).

Second, students fail to invest time into their team to allow them to produce videos at the quality level required for success.

At the end of the day, the video output will make or break your channel’s success. Failing to provide proper guidance or leverage the expertise you’ve gained from those you learn from is a one-way ticket to low-performing content.

4. Telling, not showing

After reviewing 100s of channels a common mistake I see is talking about a topic rather than demonstrating the topic at hand. What do you mean Adam? Let me explain…

Let’s say your video is about changing a bike tire. Those who tell you what to do would provide a list of activities such as hoisting the bike, buying a wrench etc.

Those who show you what to do would literally get on camera and change the tire from start to finish infront of you.

As a viewer, which would be more valuable? Of course the latter…

Whether you’re demonstrating tools, processes, experiments etc, the more viewer friendly you make your videos, the more chances they will continue to watch, raising your channel’s watch time, amassing more subscribers and generating all of the other benefits you aim to receive from your channel.

3. Blindly comparing

It’s said that “comparison is the thief of joy” and on YouTube that’s entirely true. Often, I have students come to me and mention that they are perplexed as to how another channel in their niche is generating 10,000s of views when their videos struggle to get 100.

They think that their videos are equivalent but with a more experienced eye I can tell they aren’t. What are those individuals often lacking?

It can be anything from the “show, don’t tell” strategy mentioned above to greater storytelling or audience targeting on their videos’ packaging.

At the end of the day, YouTube will only promote the best videos so if yours are not generating the views you want then improvements likely need to be made.

2. Overlooking analysis

Producing and packaging videos is the fun part, reviewing their results…not so much.

Many students will pour their time and money into making more and more videos and never even spend a second analyzing what’s working and what isn’t.

Big mistake…

More of the wrong thing isn’t better.

In fact, it’s actually more harmful than you think because we can only keep going for so long before the frustration leads us to quit (which is the only way you lose on YouTube).

So if you’re guilty of not reviewing your analytics, let this be the reminder you need to get started…

1. Misunderstanding the YouTube learning curve

While many students understand that mastering any social media platform of business takes time, many others thing quick results are the norm.

Perhaps this is how YouTube results are portrayed online or a general lack of patience in society.

If you’re someone looking to turn your channel into a full-time income, think of it like this.

It takes the average person 4 years to complete college to secure a $50,000 a year job.

Why would you expect it to take less time to build a $50,000 a year YouTube channel?

Especially because making money online is less linear than the college to job route completed by the majority of our predecessors?

Fortunately, with the right guidance it doesn’t have to take 4 years to achieve these results but it won’t happen overnight either.

Once you internalize that, the journey becomes much more palpable

Chat soon,

Adam