Transcription
Now, four years ago, I was scrapping for freelance YouTube writing gigs just to make rent. But today, I run a six-figure per year business where some of the world's biggest creators and a combined audience of more than 20,000 people come to me for script writing advice. And in this video, I want to teach you the most important ways that my script writing principles have evolved since I left Ali Abdal's team. I grew my own business, and I've become something of a known entity, you might call it, in this space. And this is really so that you can skip the 4-year learning curve that I just went on and apply some of the most important script writing principles to your channel right away. But this is also a bit of a personal story and I'm going to be completely honest about certain things in my business in this video that I've never talked about before.
So, where did this all begin? Because 4 years ago, I was working a terrible job in a call center doing 12-hour night shifts with no real plan of what I wanted to do with my life. I had had dreams of making it on TikTok, though. And me and my comedy partner used to make comedy videos every single week where we would play different characters from TV shows and things like that. And we did go viral a couple of times. We had a few videos hit a million views and we built up this kind of loyal fan base of people who wanted us to specifically do this same like BBC adaptation of Merlin over and over again. So I'd had a taste of some of this stuff, but it wasn't turning into a career per se.
But then when co hit, I got it like a lot of people did. And when I was lying in my bed deciding how I was going to become the most productive human being you could possibly imagine once I got better, I discovered Ali Abdal. That was in that period I found one of his videos. And just by coincidence, he was hiring exactly that amount of time. And I thought, I feel like I could work for a YouTuber. That sounds like a fun thing. I used to have a channel when I was younger. And you know, why the hell not? So long story short, I applied for that job. I got that job with Ali. I was living in London and making a kind of average-ish London salary and going in to work in a proper YouTube team for the first time in a business that was doing maybe $5 million per year. And once I was in, this is where I got the first real taste of what working in YouTube looked like and the kind of process needed to try and get videos off the ground. And what we would do, there were four of us that were hired as writers. We would go in every week and we would pitch Alli different ideas and he would say yes or no. We would have to justify why we thought the ideas were good. And then we would go away and we would write those ideas.
But here's where the first script writing thing comes back in. Because for every video that I wrote for Alli, and actually there are vanishingly few videos that I wrote for Alli that are on his channel, I never felt like I was learning how to do it better. I was kind of just approaching it with the same inexperience that I felt like I had the last time I wrote a script. The blank page was just as scary and I didn't really feel like I was guided to write them in a better way. There was no system, you might say. So working for Ali had been great in many ways. I learned a lot of things about the business side of YouTube, but I don't think I really learned very much about script writing.
So where to next? Now what would come next was probably the most stressful but ultimately the most important period of my life as a script writer. Now initially when I left alleys, I was basically scrapping for freelance clients and I ended up working initially with a guy called Justin Moore, Creator Wizard, whose book I have right here, highly recommended, sponsor magnet. I also did a little proofread of this. So, I've even got a credit the back of it, which is bloody sick. And I work with a guy called Ed Lawrence as well. And both of these guys had very, very different needs for their channels. So, Justin was trying to do something of a revamp. He brought me in to try and bring some new life to his YouTube scripts. And I always feel bad because I feel like he got the worst version of me as a script writer cuz I didn't know anything, right? Like I said, leaving alleys, I felt like I hadn't really started to figure out what my principles were, what my systems were as a script writer. But that was an amazing time. And then likewise, getting to work with Ed was like a real dream because on the other hand, he knew exactly what he wanted. He had a real plan for the new channel he was launching, which is now his main channel. And he basically just needed another pair of hands to help him write a few of those launch scripts for the channel. And this was a great experience.
But in terms of the script writing side of things and why this is relevant, why this is useful, I think, is because I started to notice that already just writing in a couple of different niches. So I'd done the productivity stuff with Alli. Now, I was doing the sponsorship stuff with Justin and then the kind of YouTube strategy type stuff with Ed. And already I just noticed that I was learning a lot more. But not only was I writing in different niches, but I was also ending up writing in different formats. By the very nature of these different clients that I had, it was kind of stretching my brain in different directions. And that's where I want to really flip this back around on you. And to say that, of course, you're probably just writing for your own channel. But as a way of learning more about YouTube more quickly and improving your script writing skills, I would encourage you to try writing in different formats. So whether you normally do listicles, maybe you could instead start doing some more storytelling stuff. Maybe you could go into more of a deep dive explainer about just one topic rather than covering 10 different topics. Maybe you could do something like this where you've got a very loosely scripted outline, but ultimately you're using a kind of life story as the bedrock for the lessons that you're trying to impart. Whatever it looks like for you, getting the reps in across different buckets, different formats within your niche is going to be something that's going to make a huge difference. So, testing myself in these different formats was great, and I could feel my skills developing. But not only that, I was also making a little bit more money as well, around $4 to $5,000 per month, which was more than I've been making on my full-time salary. And that was great. But I still felt like there was something of a ceiling to this. If I was just charging per script per script per script. There's only so many scripts you can write in a week and only so high you can push your prices per script. And so I knew there was potential for me to be making more to be doing more to be smarter with the time that I had.
Which brings me back to a decision I'd made right after I left alleys that now was starting to come to the four as I was working for Justin and Ed. And that decision that I'd made at that time was eventually going to be the thing that would allow me to transition from a freelancer to a full-time business owner, if you will. And what I want to do right now is look back at the first ever edition of this newsletter. And I deliberately when I was outlining this video, didn't look at this newsletter because I wanted to see what my reaction to this is. Now, when I did this, I didn't have a plan at all. I was vaguely aware of the idea that having a newsletter would be a good thing, but I had no particular plans for it. I just wanted to start writing something and see what would happen. So, here we are. This was called the quest begins um on my old Substack and it's called the subheading is how to become a freelance YouTube script writer in four easy steps. Freelance YouTube script writer. I don't remember being told this was a thing. Indeed a decade ago it absolutely wasn't. Due to some unexpected twists and turns in the last year, this is now what I do. So I've decided that as I weighed further into this world, I want to keep a log of what I'm doing. Interesting. Okay. So I guess initially the thought was I'll just like document what I'm doing, which I guess is kind of what I'm still doing with my newsletter today. Repository for other freelance writers of whatever ilk. Oh, love that use of ilk, but particularly for those specifically interested in content creation and writing for online creators. So, it sounds like from what I'm reading here, originally this newsletter, the thought was that it was going to be for content creator writers. So, like people like me, kind of behind the scenes ghost writers, whereas now, of course, it is for YouTubers. And likewise, the content I'm making here is designed to appeal to people making their own videos. This is very interesting.
Now, this newsletter kind of developed over the next few weeks, but I was pretty much, from what I can remember, being quite random with it, and I was just writing about whatever the heck I was doing that week. Like, I can see in my initial article here, I'm even talking about how I built myself a website and sort of unrelated stuff like that. But then one week, I decided to do something which would become the format for my newsletter for about the next 6 months, although I didn't know it yet. Now, while looking through a client's retention graphs around this time, I decided on a whim that I was going to ask their permission to review their retention graphs in my newsletter and break down publicly the things that I, as the script writer, had done wrong to help other people improve. Now, I couldn't have predicted this at the time, but this newsletter struck a chord in a way that some of my others really hadn't. And so, the next week, I decided to ask people to send me their graphs. And the graphs kept coming, and the newsletter kept growing. And before I knew it, I'd been doing this same format, reviewing retention graphs every single week for the next six months, all the way up until the point when I reached a thousand subscribers.
Now, this was cool because in one way, it gave me something to focus on, and it meant I didn't really have to think about what I was writing each week. It was just another three retention graph reviews, another three retention graph reviews. But in that period of time, I was watching dozens and dozens and dozens of videos across more than 50 different niches and thinking about the patterns that I was spotting in between them in terms of their retention graphs. And this brings me back to you because again, I appreciate I'm in a position here where I've got the luxury of being able to look at these graphs across all these different niches. But truly, you're going to start to spot these patterns on your own channel after just five or six videos. Honestly, right now, if you go into your YouTube studio, you find in the last 6 months your three best performing and your three worst performing videos, take a look at all of those, study the retention graphs in detail. Spend a day doing this or cut it up into a couple of half days. You're going to start to notice so much more about your channel. And going forwards, I can't encourage this enough. Have somebody on your team or you yourself review your attention graphs every single time. Because for me, looking back at that period when I was at alleys and feeling a little bit directionless with my script writing, I realized it was because I was never doing any of this. The feedback loop that I needed from each script was never happening because I wasn't properly studying what these graphs meant in context and figuring out how to improve myself. And in the last few years, I've worked with plenty of channels who very, very rarely even look at their own retention graphs. And we can certainly get too obsessed with this, but making sure you have a basic understanding of the stuff that's going well and the stuff that isn't is paramount.
So, at this point, things were going well. I had a growing newsletter of over a thousand people. I'd actually packaged up some of these retention graphs into a product that I still have available to this day called the retention hub, which gave me my first taste of earning some like passive income, which was crazy at the time. And so, things were pretty good. And then I had an identity crisis pretty much immediately. But it was a valuable identity crisis as they go. And this was the point in the story where things really started to get going. And I think that corner had been turned where I went from a freelancer to a business owner. And the funny thing is this identity crisis began with something pretty cool. First of all, I got followed by the biggest YouTuber on the planet on Twitter, which was very unusual. Um, I don't know why I was so reluctant to name him. Maybe because these days it's like uh but anyway, he followed me and that was great. And I felt like, okay, cool. I'm getting more and more wellknown. I've got some momentum here. I wonder where this thing is going next. Then I went to an Inerson meetup in London and met some really, really cool creators. Cuz I got a picture of some of them here. Some good people and it was lovely to finally get away from being behind the screen and actually talk to people in this industry in person. But then this man here, Dodford Danny, said to me, "Things are going well. This is, you know, good, good for you, mate. Looks like from what I see from the outside, the business is growing. Uh, good for you. But I feel like we want to see more of George. I feel like the retention graph thing is great, but like what do you think? Like what do you think about things? What is your opinion on things to do with YouTube?" And I thought about this and I was like, it is a good point. Like I fallen into this format now where I'm just reviewing retention graphs every single week and people know what they're going to get and hopefully it's valuable and I think it was but I wasn't really giving much of myself to the newsletter. It had very much become a buy the numbers thing and this advice which was incredibly helpful did prompt me to ask my readers if they would still read if if I stopped doing the thing that I'd grown this newsletter on. And when the responses came in, I was relieved to find that people said, "Go for it." Like, "Talk about whatever you want to talk about as long as it's vaguely related to YouTube and script writing. Do your thing." And that was a real turning point for me. I feel like I've said that about five times in this video, but it was yet another turning point. I've turned 360° and I'm still turning. But it was another turning point because now after having all these disperate retention graph reviews where I was spotting patterns here and spotting patterns there and but actually synthesizing all these takeaways together and turning them into a system was something that I hadn't yet done. Now with this format constraint removed from me in my newsletter, I felt like I could start to explore the connections between these patterns a little more thoroughly. And as I started figuring out and codifying these different frameworks, it actually started to speed up the process of writing as well. Because unlike the Alley era where I'd felt like every script was difficult and I didn't really know where to start, now I started to develop these little rules for myself that I could fall back on every single time I wrote a script. And truly that feeling of constraint is actually very liberating because suddenly you go from this overwhelming blank page to a set of rules that I go ABC every single time and it gets the script written. And so that brings me back to you one more time here where to advance on what I said about making sure you are studying your retention graphs. It's not only then taking those patterns but making sure you're using those patterns to set rules for yourself that you can then use on every single script. That is how you make the writing process feel easier. You'll get faster doing it and you'll start to find you get better results because you're actually studying what your videos have done so far. You are then synthesizing those into your own rules and then you're applying those on your next video.
But identifying those frameworks was just the start. And what would happen next would not just completely transform my script writing into the format that I have today pretty much 2 or 3 years later, but it would also completely revolutionize my business and its revenue. So I've been writing the newsletter with this much more kind of free mindset. I'd been making up all these different frameworks from the rules that I was coming up with by studying all these retention graphs. And now I started to marry these up together and to create a system. And this would ultimately be what would become my flagship course, which is the main thing that I sell these days. And it's been the core product of my entire business for the last year and a half. Now, I did a pre-launch for this course, and it sold out over the weekend that it was first announced. And that meant I'd made £5,000, I think it was, in like 3 days, which again was the first big taste of like, holy moly, this this is truly the unleashing of time and revenue. Basically, it was a great sign of trust, I suppose, as well, that people were paying me money for something that I literally hadn't even properly started making yet.
But then there was some troubles. Like the course took me way longer than it should. It took me 6 months, I think. And I was trying to basically create this start to finish system. This idea that you could start from a place of having no idea who your channel was really even for, maybe not even having a video idea, and ultimately finishing at the other end with a retention optimized script that was ready to film. That was what I wanted to make. I wanted these formulas and these frameworks that I had to really calcify into this complete system that anyone could take and every time they took it, they would have a script ready at the end of it. But that process, it was long and to make it happen, I had to pretty much stop doing my client work to be able to get it over the line. Now, this felt like a bit of a risk at the time because I was still making5 maybe £6,000 per month. It was good and I was very happy, but the decision to cut back on the client work was scary, but I needed it because I the course was just taking so long to do. I needed that extra time. And so, in a bit of a panic, I actually did a second pre-launch, which I had never planned to do because I was I was running out of money. My comedy partner, who I mentioned earlier, we were up in Edinburgh doing a live show like all month, and that cost a lot of money. And so I remember in a panic like sat in this tiny horrible flat that we'd rented for the month just like whipping up some professional sounding emails like hey doing a second pre-launch for anyone who wants to under the surface I'm like I'm going to be out of money soon and so did that and again it sold out again which was another5 or 6,000 which was great and very much needed at that point. In fact, to be honest, the entire process was scrappy because when the course finally came towards completion at the end of 2023, my partner and I had gone traveling in Europe, we were at the time in an Airbnb in Seville in Spain. And if you happen to be a member of my course or you've ever seen any kind of extracts from it, you might be able to notice that I look incredibly stressed and sad throughout the filming because my studio setup is literally a pile of books with a camera on top of it and a microphone kind of stuffed in front of it on the desk that like kept like being knocked off and falling over and we were next to a really busy road so I'd have to pause every time there was like road rage going on on the street outside. It was an absolute crawl to get to the finish line. Hence my reaction when I finally finished recording the last lesson. But the long and short of it was it was now done. I had a complete system that I could follow every single time I was writing a script. And now I could share that system with everybody else.
And this is really the lesson that I want to try and bring back to you now is that regardless of whether or not you're using frameworks that I'm teaching in videos here or in my courses or anywhere else, my newsletter, find out what the frameworks are that work for you and your channel and find a way to systemize. And I realized this as I was writing the outline for this script here, is that these days I just take it as a given that I have my kind of grid-like format, which I love, and my setup, tension, payoff, setup, tension, payoff down the side. That's such a given these days that I kind of forget that there was a long period of actually having to check whether this stuff worked, trying to figure out the easiest way to distill it, the easiest way to then implement it in the script writing process. Now, I spent a hell of a lot of time and brain power coming up with that system, but it still pays dividends. 18 months later, I now have something I can follow every single time. So whether or not it's my system or it's your own system comprised of the frameworks that work for you, I cannot encourage you enough to systemize that process. Come up with a step-by-step that makes every script feel repeatable, feel like you're not starting from scratch every single time.
Now, I was looking at my script outline here and I realized at this point there's something I had forgotten to mention, but it is important and I think it's going to be probably the lowest lift way that you can improve your script writing straight away. And it comes down to a decision that I made when I launched the course to include a community. Now, the community was not something that I've been thinking of as I was building the course. In fact, I was just in the trenches trying to finish the damn thing. But about a month before the course launched, I decided I was going to throw in an upsell, two, three times the price. And you also get access to a community. You get access to me. You get a group of people who can help you out with your script. And not only does a community form a opportunity to feel less lonely in this very bizarre, slightly lonely world that we occupy here on YouTube, but it also is a sense of accountability. And the fact that I'm making this video for you now is as a direct result of my own accountability calls that I created for others, but actually it ended up being very useful for me. But the main reason I mention this and the reason I think this is solo lift for you is that having somebody else get a look at your scripts before you publish them is just completely invaluable. And if you have anyone in your life, whether they're a YouTuber or not, who you can throw your script over to before you publish it or before you film it even, that's going to be the lowest lift way to make some serious improvements. And so I encourage you to do that whether it is in a formalized community or just giving it to a friend of yours who runs a YouTube channel or your mom if she if she probably reads everything you write. Mine certainly does. Hi mom. I bet you're watching this.
Now we're rapidly approaching the final part of how this stuff has evolved within my business. How my script writing process has evolved. But I want to take a moment before we get there to acknowledge the most important mental lesson that you can take forward as a YouTuber that I learned the hard way in the last 12 months. Because right after the course launched and I made more money in that weekend than I'd ever seen in my life, I started to make some pretty silly decisions. I started an agency that I knew I was going to hate it and did it anyway. And that famously lasted only 3 months and I closed it. But that was three months that were not fun at all. And it was like right off the back of my biggest success in my business to date. I also, as I've been discovering now due to the lag effect that comes with taxes, spent rather recklessly in that first year. I was like, "Yay, family holiday. I'll pay for everyone. Everyone, let's go and do this. Let's go to America for an entire month." And just stop worrying about stuff. And felt genuinely financially free for a year. And now a year on, when my taxes are due, I'm becoming aware of how reckless I'd been. So, there's that. And just generally, I was having that feeling of being lost again. So, like that conversation that I'd had with with Danny at that point where I was like, "What is my newsletter? I'm a really happy being the retention graph guy and like what what is what is my newsletter about? What is my personality? I felt like I'd come through that but now I was back in a similar place because until that point my identity had been so wrapped up in this idea of launching the course and building that course even. It taken me 6 months to do and as soon as that was you know released to the world the agency was starting and now I was like yeah I'm the agency guy and then that blew up and so I kind of hit this point where I was like what am I what am I doing? What is my business's northstar? What is my desire? Like what kind of business do I want to run? What do I want my life to look like? And this was only compounded when after the first 12 months, my core sales had started to dip. So after pretty consistently the business was doing like 10 $15,000 per month just from the the course and the community, which again increased expenses, but like that was very sustainable. That worked well. The business was was you know felt felt safe and secure. But when that drop started to happen down to like four or 5K per month, which again two years ago me would have been like, "Holy moly, you're making four or 5,000 a month doing basically nothing. It runs on autopilot kind of." Sure, but like now I had expenses and that that that wasn't really even covering my expenses. And so I entered this this period where I was like, "What is like what am I doing? What is the plan here? Where does this thing go?" And I I mention this partly because I know a lot of people are going through this stuff behind the scenes and what you see on camera is is really not always a representation of what's actually going on in reality or you'll see people with millions of subscribers who don't know how to monetize it properly and so actually are in this trapped cycle where they have to present this image that everything is going great when actually maybe it's not.
Now things would take a turn again for me and we'll come on to that in just a moment. But the thing that I wasn't prepared for and the reason I mention this are these kinds of wild swings, whether it's financial or it's mental, because this is something you're going to experience as a YouTuber a lot. For example, you might have a video go completely viral, but then you struggle to get views for the next two months, right? It might not even be related to finances, but but mentally that's kind of tough because you feel like, I've cracked it. I know how YouTube works, but now the views aren't coming in again. Or maybe one script is really really easy to write and you think yes this system works for me and then you try writing another script and suddenly it's like a complete ball of stress. And that's happened to me even since the system that I have now for writing scripts. Sometimes I sit down and it's like this just isn't working today. Like why is this not working? You might have an editor quit. You might have life happen. Who knows? You might launch a product and it might flop. And so beyond script writing, beyond everything else, this is just something that I think anyone should be prepared for. Now, one thing I'm doing to try and combat this, and I think you should probably do the same, is just to start viewing everything in a longer time horizon. I am trying my best to not check in on sales every single day, although mostly failing. I'm trying not to check in on views on this YouTube channel every single day. Maybe I fail at that, but I think the thing to think here is, and what I'm trying to do with every single one of these videos, is to think this is one data point on a long list of data points. Stay the course. Keep making videos consistently. Focus on the inputs and the things you can control. Try and be smart about it. and then over time things will work out hopefully.
So we're pretty much caught up but there's one last thing that has not only given me purpose again but is going to be essential for you in the script writing process going forwards. So I had my rules my frameworks and my systems but then the world changed and for the first year that AI was the thing that it has started to become I was pretty much resisting it. I was putting my head in the sand. I was worried that it was going to replace me. I thought my business was over. Spent a lot of time worrying. But then after that period of time, I decided to pull my head from the sand and realized of course how useful AI can be to this entire process. And so that gave me a new drive. I started to think what are the ways in which we can use AI to speed up that system that I've already created. And this is really a key point. And I think something to keep in mind here is anytime you have a framework, anytime you've systemized anything, that is a piece of data that is screaming to be supercharged with AI. Anytime you can put something into chat GBT or Claude or anything that you use, mostly those two, let's be real. Anytime you can say express your output in terms of this system that I've come up with, express your output in terms of this framework, whatever it might be, that's gold waiting for you. And this gave me a goal again. Having gone through that process of burying my head in the sand and ignoring AI to really using it to supercharge my own process, I felt like I could be somebody here to help take other YouTubers on that same journey and show them how useful it can really be. And so I built a bunch of custom GPTs. I released them as a product. And that seemed to put me on the map more as someone who talks about AI. Thanks to that, I then got to do a talk at VidSummit, literally talking about the very thing that I had been resisting 2 years earlier. It's also helped me launch this channel. The fact that I'm able to write and record a script a week is only really possible because a of my systems and but b using AI to supercharge those systems even while brainstorming and outlining this very script. I was able to use my own custom GPTs that I built and perplexity and all these different AI tools to speed things along. And that's what's keeping this sustainable for me right now. So in whatever capacity feels comfortable for you right now, it is time to start implementing AI in your script writing process. Now I have plenty of free and paid resources for this. So stick with me and I'll help you figure it out.
Now, as for me at this point, I'm probably not going to make as much this year as I made last year, but I am finishing the year strong. And crucially, crucially, if HMRC are listening, I will be able to pay my taxes in January. It's been cathartic, I have to say, to look back over the last four years and to see how the script writing process has evolved. And I'm grateful for you being here with me throughout that journey, however much of it you've been here for. I really appreciate it. Now, to repay you even just a little bit, and seeing as this journey really started for me when I became obsessed with retention, you can check out this video where I'll show you a simple visual tweak you can make to your next video to stop your viewers from clicking away and nudge that retention line up just a little.