How To Build A YouTube Content Flywheel in 2025

Have you been thinking about starting a YouTube channel? Or whether you should prioritize YouTube versus writing on LinkedIn or writing on X? Or maybe you're just curious about how to build a YouTube content flywheel and how creators and writers are using this channel to drive hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars in revenue?

Well, over the past year, I've invested over a quarter million dollars into YouTube, including building out two production studios. So, we built the first one in Miami, we called it the Shipyard. And then I built a second one here in my house, called the Shipping Container. I've also hired multiple YouTube coaches, so people to give me feedback on how are my videos doing, what could I change, what could I improve, uh, where are their opportunities in the market? Doing an audit on our niche. And I've also hired all sorts of different employees, contractors, and agencies to help with, you know, video editing, shorts, uh, thumbnail design, posting, you name it.

And in that time, so over the past year, I've gone from never having done YouTube before, ever, zero subscribers, to almost 30,000 subscribers. We're almost there, so if you want to hit subscribe, go for it. We'll hit our goal soon. Over a million total views here on YouTube. And YouTube as a traffic source has driven hundreds of thousands of dollars for us. I mean, even just in this short amount of time, uh, for our writing program, so Ship 30 for 30 and our premium ghostwriting academy. And I think by the end of this year, once we do all of the numbers, we'll probably see that YouTube has driven millions of dollars in revenue for us. Um, right now, it's accounting for about 30% of new students and new customers that come into our ecosystem. So it's been a very ROI positive investment for us. Which is why in this video, I want to do a little breakdown of how to build a YouTube content flywheel like this, and then also answer some questions about how we did it.

So, first, here's high-level how a YouTube content flywheel works, and this is how we've structured it for ourselves. So, step one is, since video and audio are much larger lifts than writing, you want to treat this medium as a pillar. This is really the starting point of, or it should be the starting point of all the other content that you create. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's not like, oh, I can only create this one asset and then I can only pull things from that one asset, but you want to think in that direction. You know, this is sort of the primary because it's a bigger lift, and then how can you extract as many things as possible from it to republish on other platforms?

Gary V has been talking about this for a decade at this point. I remember when he first started his YouTube channel, Ask Gary V, back in like 2014. I remember watching the first episode of that, and I remember him over the years explaining this model of creating this pillar content and then you sort of extract all the short form from there. And it's really true. I mean, I've lived it as well. It's been our entire strategy for us as we've built our system. So I think that's the most helpful way to think about it is if you're going to do the hardest lift, make that sort of the core, the nucleus, and then think of all the ways that you can extract content from there.

Step two is, after the long form has been created, then we start pulling shorts. And we've experimented with a bunch of different things here. I've tried some scripted shorts, I've tried some more informal shorts. But really, where we landed, and Hosi has a great framework for this, where he just calls it, you know, more, better, different. And really, whenever you're trying to get up to speed on something, the impulse is always to do something different. Like there's always the shiny object. But really, in the beginning, the first step is just more. You just want to figure out where your threshold is of how can I do more volume and how can I push the limits? Usually, that would be constrained by, you know, labor. There aren't more hours in the day, or posting. Like there are only so many slots that you could post on any given platform.

So we've changed our strategy for the time being to just focus on more. And what that means is, after I record a long form, we will pull shorts just from that long form. We're not scripting other shorts. We're not treating shorts as some completely different initiative. It's just, I took the time to create the long form, let's extract as many shorts as possible. And we will do that until we max out more. And once you max out more from there, the thing that you would improve on is, well, I'm doing as much as I can now, how do I do it better? That's why I love this framework so much. And you can do more, better for a long time. Like we need to establish what the cadence is, and then we're going to improve within that cadence until we've done it to the absolute best of our ability, and the channel's not growing anymore. And then only then would we consider to do something different. Right? So for the time being, we're just pulling shorts from long form.

And if you notice, or if you want to dig into it, uh, you know, on my YouTube channel and on Instagram, all we're really doing is republishing shorts from the long form. And then what we'll do from there is we will pass all those assets to our internal content team. And then they can also have the option, you know, these channels are the lesser priority with this sort of short form content, but they have the option of going, okay, well, let's use that short. It seems to be doing really well. Let's put that on X or let's put that on LinkedIn. So start with long form, then distribute into short form.

Step three is, then it's all the labor. It's just, okay, well, now we got to go schedule all the shorts. We got to maximize all the different, uh, posting slots. Um, we have our goals for each platform. Like these are how many times we'd like to post on each platform. Everyone thinks this is the secret. Let me, let me tell you what the secret is. More. Like, if you're posting twice on YouTube, the next question is, how do I post three times a day? If you're posting three times a day, the next question is, how do I post four times a day? And very rarely is the answer actually, oh, you only post once a day at 8:47 AM and that's the secret, right? The secret is just more.

And I've gone, I've spent so much time, even as we've built this, just studying other creators. And without fail, all of the biggest creators are just doing more than we are. We could argue that maybe their content is better in some ways, and we will get to better. But the baseline is, well, they're posting 10 times a day and we're posting twice a day. So we have some work to do on the supply chain. We got to get up to 10 before we should even worry about better, right? And I think that it's such a simple way of thinking about it. And yet, I feel like the simplest things, people always make the most complicated. So I'm just being transparent. This is how we're thinking about it.

And then from here, step four, which is really completes the loop, is if you notice, underneath every single video, short form, long form, doesn't matter, points to one of our two educational email courses. So the first one is, it points people to start writing online, which is really the beginning of the funnel for the Ship 30 side of our business. And then the other links people to our premium ghostwriting blueprint, which is our free email course for PGA, for our ghostwriting side of our business. And all we do is we just, every time I talk about digital writing or something that leans more that direction, we link to the start writing online email course. Every time I talk about ghostwriting or something that leans more that direction, maybe monetizing, we drive people to that email course. And that is what completes the loop.

And so really, a YouTube content supply chain is very simple. It's just create a lot and link people to some sort of opt-in. And I find most often, people will jump into YouTube or they will jump into a new channel before they have the opt-in. And they will think to themselves, well, you know, I need to have 100,000 subscribers before I can begin pushing people somewhere. No, no. We had those opt-ins day one when we started YouTube. Because what you want to do is you want to capture all of that traffic on the way up, right? If you're going to grow from zero to 30,000 subscribers, you don't want to just do all that and then go, oh, and I didn't get anyone's email on the way up, right? So I find that that is usually the missed opportunity for a lot of writers and a lot of creators.

Now, here are some of the challenges we've run into and some of the hard lessons we've learned along the way. So the first one is, for the first 100 videos, production quality really doesn't matter. This is probably something that we jumped the gun on a bit. Um, one of the first things we did was build that studio in Miami. And the reason that we did it, truthfully, was because at the time, we were running live cohorts for Ship 30. And so we weren't really thinking about YouTube at that time. We were more treating the space as a huge upgrade for the production quality of our cohort-based program. And I'm glad that we did that at that time, and that made sense. But in hindsight, if I could go back and especially if I was telling someone else who wanted to start a YouTube channel, what they should do, all I would do for the first 100 videos is just record looms of me talking over my notes in the Google Doc. That's all I would do.

Because something that I've really learned about YouTube, and also if you think about the audio component, like the podcast component, if you want to double dip, is that it requires such different skills than sitting down to write. It's in many ways, the only similarity it has with writing is just the clarity of thoughts. That's it. Like writing is how I, you know, I write about all of these topics and I write my notes ahead of time. But other than that, there really aren't any other similarities. And so all of these other skills need to be built. And you don't need production quality to build these skills, right? So things like not being awkward on camera. Well, you don't need a $100,000 home video setup to do that. You can do that and learn and acquire that skill by recording a loom video, right? Or being able to speak confidently on a topic. It is crazy to me, and you can go back on my channel and watch this. It is crazy to watch the early videos just back to back to back to back to back because I can literally hear the confidence and the cadence in my voice changing from video to video. And I think what's CRA, what's, it's so hard for me to wrap my head around because at the time, each video I made, I thought, oh, that felt really good. I felt really confident talking about that, right? And when I say confidence, I don't mean like, like the cliche, oh, I'm puffing my chest out and being confident. It's more of like conviction, being able to speak clearly and confidently about a topic. And every time I would record a video, I thought, oh, that felt so much better. And then I would record five more. And then I would look back and go, oh my gosh, that I was coming off so much more timid, right? So again, a skill that you don't need a fancy setup to acquire. You can practice that with loom videos.

Um, another one is, if you're using a teleprompter, same thing. Some of my early videos, the first time I used a teleprompter, it was like watching a, like a freshman in college, intro to broadcast journalism major, read a teleprompter for the first time. Like I was just fumbling over and over and over again. Or you could tell my eyes were like fixated on the sentences. And I'm not using a teleprompter now. Now I'll just prep my notes and speak to them. But for scripted videos, reading off of a teleprompter is a completely different skill. And again, you don't need some crazy fancy setup to do that. There are teleprompter apps on your phone that you can get for 99 cents. Like, go practice with that. Just staring into your phone, reading off of a script. That is a different skill, right?

Um, and most of all, just learning how to compress your thoughts into something that someone could listen to. That is such a different skill than writing. And so for all of these things, you know, and I had the same faulty belief. I thought, well, in order to dive into YouTube, I need to have insert all of these other assets or all of these other things. I needed an editor, I needed lights, I needed a fancy camera, I needed soundproof walls. Like I thought I needed all this stuff. And in reality, none of those things were the bottleneck. The true bottleneck were all of the skills. And so that's what takes time to learn. And so you don't need to over-invest.

I would never start a YouTube channel without a lucrative business that was already built, already humming, okay? And the reason is because it's just too much effort to do YouTube even mediocrely well. It requires so much time, energy, and as it grows, resource. It requires a lot of things. And through an entrepreneurial lens, it just doesn't make sense to open that loop when you're still figuring out your business, you're still dialing in your offer, you're still trying to figure out, well, how do I get to $10,000 a month, $20,000 a month? Or maybe you're starting to scale, you're doing $30, $40, $50,000 a month, but you have now, you know, as you've grown, you've unlocked all of these new operational complexities. You're like, oh, I need to hire and train someone. I need to smooth that out. I need to automate that system, right? So when you're in the thick of all of that, it's very hard to go, I'm also going to start playing the YouTube game. Which is why we postponed YouTube for a very, very, very long time. Four years ago, people were telling us, you should also have a YouTube channel. Three years ago, two years ago, last year. And the reason why we didn't open that loop was because our business was still growing and we were still sort of in the weeds of, well, we're going through our next growth spurt. This is going to take a ton of time and attention. And so it's not worth opening this new loop and having this massive shiny object when you're still figuring out a lot of the foundational things. And I like to think of YouTube as amazing gas that gets poured onto a business, not really the core of the business itself. A lot of times, I think people have them flipped. And if you're one of those, you know, outlier YouTubers that just picked up a camera and everything you make goes viral and you have 3 million subscribers, okay, yeah, you did the thing first and now you go build the business. But for most people, that's not how it goes. And so from what I've learned, it is much better to dial in the business first and then add YouTube on as gasoline for the fire later.

Lesson number three: All roads lead back to people just want to know how to make more money online. We test all sorts of things internally. We test subject lines, we test video headlines, we test thumbnails, we test hooks. We test all sorts of stuff. And without fail, we can do all the testing in the world, and all the data always comes back and tells us, people just want to know how to make money writing online. That's it. And sometimes that's a painful conclusion because there are a lot of topics that I really want to talk about. And there are a lot of things that I know, like, if you understood this thing over here, it would make monetizing much easier. But every time I lead with the broccoli, nobody wants to eat it. So I sort of have to lead with, hey, and by the way, I have ice cream, in order to get someone. And I have to sneak the broccoli in there. And that's one of those things where it's so easy to romanticize how some of these games get played. It's easy to romanticize, oh, starting a YouTube channel must be so fun. It's like, yeah, I have some fun doing it. I enjoy this dynamic. But there's also a lot about it where I go, yeah, that's not what I would prefer to do, but that's what the game requires. And so I guess I got to go do that if I want to achieve my larger goal, which is to help writers and help writers monetize and actually make a living from their career, right? So if that is my ultimate mission, I sort of have to play the game a little bit in order to help get people there. And that's one of those things where when you first start something, it's so easy from afar to have all of your assumptions of how it goes. And you make up this narrative in your head of, oh, I'm sure it's like this, and once I dive in, it's just going to be so much fun. And I'm going to love turning on the camera. And a lot of times, it's not that at all. A lot of times, it's you sitting down going, well, I've said this a hundred times already, and I know I need to frame it in this way in order to get people to click and want to give me their attention. And so my hope is I play that game a little bit, but then as they fall into it, I can actually sneak a lot of the valuable stuff in there. So that way, I know I'm helping them, but I got to get them in there first, right? And there's nothing romantic about that. You have to be very brutally honest with yourself about how these things work. And I always find, without fail, the writers, the creators, the quote unquote marketers that continue to romanticize aspects of the game are the ones that struggle the most. And the ones that stop romanticizing it and just accept it and then lean into it are the ones that grow the most. And I see it over and over and over again. And that has been one of the things that I've had to really untrain in myself is like letting go of the how often I in the past would romanticize what it meant to be a writer or be a digital writer. No, you got to accept the game for what it is and then play the game.

Lesson number four: You will repeat yourself a painful amount of times. So I really want to stress, almost everything I would, I would say 98% of what I have shared on YouTube so far are things that I have already written about elsewhere. And not just written about once or twice or three times, but probably written about a hundred times in content, in newsletters, in different curriculum, in books. I've talked about it on podcasts. So a lot of what's here, it's not that this is a new channel and so I need to do something completely different. When we decided to invest in YouTube, the very first thing I did was pull up my analytics of everything that had performed well on X and LinkedIn over the past three years. And all I did was go down the list and go, that performed well on X or LinkedIn. Chances are, if I talk about it in a video, it'll probably perform well too. And sometimes I'm right, and sometimes I'm wrong. Sometimes there's platform differences. Sometimes it's just my first time talking about it, right? Different skill versus writing about it. So, oh, okay, so I vocalized that, well, video does well. Or, oh, I notice I didn't vocalize that that well. This is a new skill. Okay, video doesn't do as well, right? So so much of this game, and this is true for written content, but it's also true for video. So much of it is it goes back to the hormos quote that I love is, people need to be reminded more than they need to be told. And so much of video and audio, and also written content, is you're just reminding people over and over and over and over again. And ultimately, over a long enough time horizon, that's what makes them trust you. And because you're so consistent, this is the point that I find so many people misunderstand. The fact that you are so consistent with reminding them is what builds the trust over a long period of time. You don't trust someone just because they said something smart one time to you. The reason that you trust them and the reason that you look to them is because you're almost impressed by their ability to keep saying the same thing over and over again because they know that that's what you need to hear, right? And so if you want to be that sort of person, or if you want to have what that creator you see has, then that's what you need to do. You need to go into your niche and you need to be the person repeating these things over and over and over again to help the next person who needs to be reminded more than they need to be told.

And maybe the most important lesson of all, lesson number five: The lower ticket your offer, so whatever you're selling in your business, the lower ticket your offer, the more traffic you're going to need. The more top of funnel you're going to have to go in your content. The higher ticket your offer, the less traffic you're going to need. The more bottom of funnel you can go with your content. So let me explain what this means. Translation: If you are trying to sell a $100 digital product, if that is your business, that is your core offer, that is low ticket. When you have a low ticket offer, you need lots of volume, right? In order to make $10,000 a month selling a $100 digital product, you need 100 customers a month, every month, right? Which means you need to optimize for traffic, which means you need to lean more broad, because if you want lots of traffic, you're going to have to broaden the scope a little bit, which inherently means you have to create more top of funnel, viral content, okay? And if that's the game you want to play, more power to you. But just understand that that's the game you're going to have to play. And I think again, going back to romanticizing what really goes into succeeding on these platforms, you have to start before you dive into a new channel. You have to start with the context of, well, what is your business? And do you have a low ticket business or do you have a high ticket business? And depending on what type of business you have, you're going to need different things out of the platform. YouTube is a great example. If you have a low ticket business, you're going to need to play the YouTube game in a specific way. You're going to have to optimize for volume and for traffic and for reach, right? So you need to know that going into it, because that's going to completely dictate what sort of content you create.

On the other side of the spectrum, if you have a high ticket offer, so like a group coaching program, or you're selling a service that's high ticket, which means you need a lot less volume, right? So to make $10,000 a month consistently, you don't need 100 customers, you need like two customers. And then because it's higher ticket, especially with a service, if they're signing up for a monthly retainer, you might not even need two customers every single month because you might sign them up and then they might stick with you for six months, right? So you need significantly less volume, which means you don't need to optimize for traffic, right? And you can optimize instead for resonance. And when you have that luxury of optimizing for resonance, you don't have to play the viral game. You can just lean into your niche and really focus on building a super valuable library of content because it doesn't actually matter if your video gets a thousand views or a million views. The only thing that matters is, are you helping the specific type of person that you're trying to attract? And if you get one client, well, then who cares if it gets a thousand views or a million views, right? Because you don't need that much volume, you just need one customer, one client. And that's a different game.

And so, for example, you know how this works for us. Our primary business at this point is PGA, our premium ghostwriting academy. And if you notice, a lot of the content that I create is not top of funnel. I am not trying to play the, you know, this is how I make a million dollars a month bizop opportunity, like just go as wide as possible. That's not the game because we also don't need that, right? We have a higher ticket offer. And so all we really need is, I just need a couple people to watch my videos or listen to my podcast and go, wow, Cole knows a lot about writing. I think he could help me. And then that contributes massively to our business, right? So I don't need volume, which means I can create more niche educational content, which truthfully is a lot more enjoyable for me. That's what I enjoy digging into anyway. But I have to be clear that that's the game that I'm playing, right? I don't need to go viral. I just need to build a really great library. And we've learned, and the data confirms this for us, if someone listens to me talk about writing for more than 30 minutes, they go through our whole funnel, they opt into all our email courses, and they download all our free resources, and they join our free groups on school, and they book a call with PGA, and there's a very high likelihood that they join. Because all I need is for them to listen for 30 minutes in a video, and it's very, very apparent that I know how to help them. And so when that is the game that you're playing, now you know what to optimize for. And so it's not, you know, it's not that either game is better or worse. They're just very different. And so when you jump into YouTube, it's important to start from a place of, what sort of business do you have? And how do you need to treat YouTube in order to help your business grow, right? If we went and created a bunch of top of funnel, super viral videos, I don't know that it would really make our business grow any more than it currently is. And Hosi talked about this too. When he was making super top of funnel content, he got a lot more views, but he didn't really get more potential deals. Those are his customers, you know, companies to invest in. He didn't really get more deals, and he didn't get higher quality deals. He just got more views, right? So that doesn't help his type of business. And the same is true for our business. And so again, just going back to, what's the lesson? Start with, what sort of business do I have? Low ticket or high ticket? And how do I need to treat the platform that will benefit my business the most?

All right, now let's answer some questions. On Spotify, Emily asks, which by the way, I check Spotify comments all the time, so feel free to leave questions there as well. Emily asks, I'd be interested in what your flywheel process is for the podcast. Do you batch it? How much time do you commit to it per week? How does it fit in with your lean writing method? And are you repurposing content to your newsletter or other platforms?

So again, everything I talk about here, I've probably written about somewhere else. Short form, long form, in a newsletter, in a book, in a curriculum. I've talked about all these things a hundred different ways. So that's what makes the content process, quote unquote, easy for me. But I still do a lot of prep work for this. So for context, at this point, for YouTube, I focus on recording one day a week. Uh, right now, I'm doing it on Mondays. Uh, if it's podcast style like this, and I'm just talking, I could maybe record two or three of them. If I'm doing like a high production long form video, I might just do one of them, maybe two of them in a day. And that usually takes me about four hours. So I'll usually have meetings in the morning on Mondays. I'll take a break for lunch. And then all afternoon, from like 12:30, 1 PM to around 4 PM, I'm just straight recording. But I also do prep work before that. So usually on Sundays, I will spend two to three hours prepping notes. Like, for example, here in this video, I'm talking off of a bunch of notes that I've put together on this topic. Took me, I don't know, an hour to do that for this video. And so I do all of that prep work on Sundays because A, I don't really have the time to do that on Mondays because I have a bunch of meetings with my team in the mornings. But then also too, it allows me to to marinate on all of this stuff overnight. I really like, I do this for almost everything, uh, that I'm working on. I will prep one day and then sleep on it and just let it marinate in my subconscious. And then the next day, I'm like, okay, cool. I've thought about it somewhere on the back burner. Now I'm ready to go do the thing.

All right, Jamie asks, how will you track the overall impact of your YouTube channel? How do you plan to track conversions from YouTube to sales of your products?

So, for example, the above the fold link that we have under each of my videos, either points people to startwritingonline.com, which is our Ship 30 funnel, or to our premium ghostwriting blueprint, which is our PGA funnel. And we'll just tailor the links based on whatever the video is about. So if I'm talking about something related to digital writing, it'll point people to start writing online. If I'm talking about ghostwriting or monetizing, I will point people to the premium ghostwriting blueprint. And then we track everything from there. So high level, we'll track stuff like how many clicks we get from YouTube each day, each week, each month. We'll track how many page views that landing page gets. We will also track the opt-in percentage. So of the page views, how many people typed in their email? And those were really the only metrics that we had for a long time. And our assumption was just, well, hey, if we make more long form video content, chances are our business will grow. And that hypothesis turned out to be right. But more recently, this only was in like the past couple months, we then built the whole system to track all of the metrics inside the funnel from there. So we track everything from how many people complete the email course, how many people fill out an application for PGA, how many people book calls on the calendar to learn more about the program, and then how many people keep their calls, right? They don't cancel, or maybe they're a no-show. So what's the show-up rate? And then ultimately, how many people end up joining PGA? So the final conversion rate. And so we have a lot of visibility over YouTube as a channel, how much traffic it's driving, how many new subscribers we're getting, how many high quality calls are showing up on the calendar, how many people ultimately join PGA as a result. And again, this is a newer thing for us. But I can already tell you, the data says that people that come and enter the funnel from YouTube are some of the most high quality people that we get in our ecosystem because there's just such a clear through line of, you hear me talking about these things on video, you can see me, you can hear me, you can hear the passion and excitement in my voice, right? It builds the relationship in such a different way that we see a lot of very, very high quality students coming in from YouTube. But I also want to put the asterisk, we didn't have this all set up in the beginning. And I think it's a mistake whenever you're starting something new, thinking, I need to have the perfect system engineered and I can't start until I do. No, we built all of these things as time went on. And truthfully, we're probably going to rebuild it 10 more times as we grow because every time you grow, you learn something, you need to change something, you want more visibility into a certain metric. So you don't need all of these things. These are just things that we're building as time goes on.

All right, Lyle asks, how's keeping content fresh while maintaining consistency? Simple task, difficult balance.

So to be honest, a lot of this stuff isn't fresh. Uh, I trick myself into making it fresh. I find new ways to explain it, or I will challenge myself to, uh, put it in a different framework, or tell a different story. Or, you know, I sort of have to come up with those challenges within myself, just to keep myself entertained. But the reality is, is a lot of these topics are things that are, they're, I want to say this very specifically, they're not fresh to me. I've been saying these things for years, years and years and years. And I've said them so many times that I could say them with my eyes closed, half asleep, right? And so a lot of, when you start to grow as a writer and as a creator, and especially as you begin building dominance in a niche, so much of the game isn't about like keeping it fresh. It's actually about building endurance. It's getting comfortable with the fact that you are going to repeat yourself a million times, and that's okay. And the way that I've reframed it for myself is thinking less selfishly, less like, oh, I'm so tired of repeating myself, and thinking more mission-driven. Every time I repeat myself, I help someone, right? Maybe this is the first time, this might be the thousandth time I've said it, but this might be the first time you're hearing it from me. And so I keep reframing it for myself, thinking, well, yeah, I might be used to this, but the next person who enters our ecosystem, this might be brand new to them. And how exciting. So that's what I try and remind myself. It's not like my own selfish desires.

All right, Denise asks, what are the key differences between the way you write scripts versus digital writing?

They are very different in a lot of ways. I mean, there are some clear similarities. But first of all, there's a distinction between script, as in like a YouTube script or a short script that you are reading off of a teleprompter, versus notes for a podcast like this. Here, notes for a podcast, it's been fascinating for me as I've gotten into this. When I write out my notes, I'm basically writing a newsletter. I'm, I mean, it might not be formatted the same way. I write it out just like a long bulleted list, but that's really what it is. I'm just writing a long form piece, but breaking it up in a way where visually I can look down and go, oh yeah, that was the next thing that I wanted to say. And then I'm just speaking to it, which is a different skill than writing scripts and reading scripts off of a teleprompter. And the script side, I have found to be a very, it's a fun challenge, but it's a very different challenge than learning how to write on the internet. Because so much of it is all the little decisions that you don't realize in your writing, you can get away with because you're not always reading your writing out loud. But off of a teleprompter, you are reading the whole thing out loud. And so every little word, or how long it takes you to finish a sentence, or wrap up a thought, all of those things become painfully apparent in sound or on video. And so a lot of the skill is, and truthfully, this is how I've gotten better and better at it, is when I will write long form scripts, I will actually write and speak it at the same time. So as I'm writing, I will say what I'm trying to say out loud for each sentence, so that I can hear it. Because I'm like, I'm going to have to say it eventually, so I might as well say it now and see, am I fumbling over that line, or is that taking too long to get to the point? So whenever I'm writing long form scripts, I'm actually saying it out loud and then writing down, oh yeah, that, that I like how I said that, that'll be the line in the script. So if you're getting into script writing, I would really, really encourage taking that approach.

All right, Thomas asks, how do you decide which topics to cover to keep your audience engaged?

So two big things I pay attention to here. One is what I know writers want, which is always based on data. So objective data. This topic performed better than this topic. I should probably create more on the first one. So I'm always looking at the data. And the data doesn't have to just be on YouTube. I look at the data of X, of LinkedIn. And when I say data, I don't mean some big fancy dashboard. All I will do each week is just scroll through my feed and go, huh, that was interesting. That post got, you know, twice as many likes as all the other ones. I should probably talk about that one on YouTube this week, right? So I'm not saying you have to go build some super fancy, in-depth system. All you're really doing is just looking high level, what are the topics that resonate with people? And again, every time I explain this, people go, well, I don't have any followers, I can't generate any data. Yes, you can. If you write 10 things and nine of them get zero likes, and one of them gets one like, that is a 100% difference, okay? So you just got data. The problem was you were ignoring it, right? So it really doesn't matter if you're going from zero likes to one like, or a thousand likes to 3,000 likes. It's the same thing. It's all just ratios. And so that's all you're looking for. You're just looking for directionally, what are people interested in?

Now, also, even if the data might not be validating it for me, I still throw out hypotheses in my content all the time. I know there are certain things that writers need to hear in order for them to move to the next level, or for them to acquire a certain skill, or for them to, you know, reframe the way they're thinking about a problem. So even if I don't have the objective data telling me that's a great idea, every, you know, all in my content strategy, constantly each week, I'm always throwing in new things of testing new data points, going, well, I think this would be helpful. I think this would be valuable. And sometimes the data tells me, no, Cole, that actually wasn't helpful. Or no, people didn't click on that. Or no, people didn't listen to that. And sometimes I see that it was helpful, and a topic that I didn't know was going to perform well, all of a sudden performs really well. And I go, oh, that's a whole new topic that now I can write about and talk about over and over and over again. So it's a, it's a blend of both. It's keep doubling down on what's currently working and keep testing new things that you have hypotheses around. And then the ones that don't work, eh, you can just let them go. And the ones that do work, keep doubling down on them. And that's the whole process of being a quote unquote prolific creator or writer. It's just funny because there's really nothing prolific about it. All you're doing is just trying things, looking at what works, and goes, huh, I should probably do that more.

And lastly, Roy asks, at what point in writing did you decide it was time to dabble into YouTube?

So I mentioned this earlier, we postponed YouTube for as long as possible. Um, more objectively, you know, I waited until I had over 100,000 subscribers, subscribers, 100,000 followers on X. Um, I'm almost at 100K on LinkedIn. You know, those are meaningful numbers. It's really not though about the follower count. It's more about dialing in and understanding each platform and not moving on to the next one until you've sort of mastered the first one. So in the beginning, all I did, and all my co-founder Dicky did, was write on X. Back then it was known as Twitter. And we only wrote there for two years. And the reason was because, you know, Twitter is its own language. We wanted to understand, well, how does content perform well here? And we wanted to acquire those skills and we wanted to master that game. And we did. We racked up, I, hundreds of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of subscribers and, or email subscribers and followers and customers. We scaled Ship 30 for 30 to millions of dollars in revenue just off of Twitter/X, right? So we didn't need to move on. You just have to master one platform. And then once we mastered Twitter/X, we went, okay, well, why don't we just republish everything that's working on LinkedIn? And then we learned LinkedIn as a platform. And we did that for a year and a half, you know, almost two years. And then it wasn't until, so we were like, all right, we understand Twitter and we understand LinkedIn. Now let's go add in YouTube, right? And also the business had sort of matured at that point. We had some headspace, we had some time, we had some resource. Like then it made sense to enter YouTube. But I always find that the big mistake writers and creators make in the beginning is they start going, I need to be on every platform. And the reality is, each platform is so different. Each platform has its own sub language. And so it is very, very hard to get good at multiple platforms all at the same time. You just can't do it. Some people can, but the only people who truthfully do that are people that have massive businesses where they can just go hire 10 people and go, we're going to tackle all of these platforms at once. So you, you are going to need a tremendous amount of resource in order to do that. And for the vast majority of people, that's not an option. So you're much better off going, I'm just going to pick one platform, dial in my business, drive traffic from here, get to a point where I have, you know, really created the systems where my business sort of runs on its own, I'm profitable, I have the time, I have the resource. Now I can enter a game like YouTube. But I think before that, it's really a big mistake. It's just too much of a time suck. And I know that there's always outliers, there's always people who are successful that defy everything that I'm saying here. But I'm just sharing from my experience and our experience as a team. I'm really, really glad that we postponed YouTube as long as we did.

So I hope this was helpful for you. Um, this is a topic I plan on talking about more. But truthfully, this is one of the first times, this is one of the first data points that I've put out talking about YouTube and our content flywheel and how we think about this as a platform. So again, you know, everything I've shared here, if this is helpful for you, let me know. Drop me a comment, drop me a question, tell me that you would like me to talk about this topic more. And I will, cuz I'm always listening for that data. And if nobody comments and nobody asks any more questions, then I'm going to go, huh, I guess YouTube isn't really that valuable or helpful of a topic. I won't talk about that as often. So let me know what is helpful. That data and signal really helps me. And then whenever I see that there's signal, I just double down on it. So that's your crash course intro to building a YouTube content flywheel. And I am very excited to keep our flywheel spinning.