Transcription
So, I got monetized on YouTube in just 5 days, and I will put it on the screen here. I'll put like a screenshot showing you how much I got and when in just the two videos that I put up, but I did this on a brand new channel. I did it from scratch. I didn't send it out to an email list. I didn't have anybody share it. And I did all of this in a very restricted niche, which is guns. And hopefully I don't get flagged for saying that too early in the beginning of this video.
But I'm telling you all this because a lot of people think you need to have some kind of leg up to get your first video to be able to go viral or to get monetized so quickly. And I'm hoping in this video I can basically just show you that that's not the case and that anybody can actually do it. The difference is is that a lot of people think that being monetized on YouTube or really just like getting success on YouTube in general is something that is random and it's luck and the algorithm has to bless you and it's kind of just like playing roulette or something like that. But really what it comes down to is it's strategy. It is a replicatable process that I personally believe anybody can do if you follow the right steps.
So if we haven't met yet, my name is Doug and my wife Haley and I actually run a seven-figure YouTube based business. We teach other people how to be able to grow and monetize their YouTube channels. If you want to know more about that system, what it does, how it led to me quitting my nine-to-five job, how it now lets us be able to homeschool our kids and hang out with them and basically live a very full and fulfilling life, then down in the description below, I have a master class that you guys should definitely check out. Or if you have any questions, concerns, thoughts, or you really want to know about how anything works, leave them in the comments below. But let's talk about monetization and how it works and how I was able to do this.
So, the first thing that a lot of people do and they assume and they think about is that like I said earlier, like they think that getting monetized on YouTube is kind of like luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time and post the right thing. And there's like a a little bit of a sense of that. But there's a lot more strategy that goes into picking the right thing at the right time. What's not going to work is hoping your vlog goes viral. Okay? What's not going to work is you saying to your friends, and I've said this before, too, like, "Oh, me and my buddy are so funny on whenever we play Starcraft or whenever we play whatever game we were playing at the time, World of Warcraft, whatever. We're so funny, dude. We should make a YouTube channel about it. People like absolutely love us." Like, when you have that mentality, you're like, "Oh, people will just watch me because my gameplay is so good." There's billions of people out there, okay, that have good gameplay and that are probably funnier than you are. You cannot rely on personality alone to be able to carry you later on down the line. Personality will be a big factor. But when you're just starting out, when you're hitting for the very first time record or you're hitting publish and you're putting up that video, there's a lot more strategy behind it.
So the first part of the strategy that I want to talk about has to do with picking an underserved niche. Now, your niche, obviously, there's a ton of videos that go about it. I've talked about it. Haley's talked about it. A lot of people talk about picking your niche and what goes into that. When it comes to wanting to break through, you want to be able to pick something that a lot of people want, but not a lot of people are making content on. So, we like to call this something that is like an underserved niche, has really high demand and really low supply. But the way that you can tell that this is actually a thing is because small creators, creators with sucky videos or videos that aren't good quality, it's blurry or the audio sucks or it's not very entertaining. The reason why those videos are doing well is because they are speaking on a topic that not a lot of other well-known or mainstream creators are making content on. So viewers have no other choice than to go watch these small town, small-time creators like I am on my firearms channel. Haley and I have been doing this for a while and so we know that this is a way to be able to break out. But I was extremely validated at this when years ago, man, I think it was I I can't even think about how long how many years ago it was. This is when like Ninja was at his top and at his peak, right? And somebody asked him a long time ago, they were like, "Bro, how do you break into streaming?" And he literally said he's like, "You are not going to break out on streaming if you go and play Fortnite." This is when Fortnite was at its peak. You will not make it. There are hundreds of thousands of people posting about Fortnite. He's like, "What you need to do is you need to go find a small indie game that people are not playing as much and become the person that is known for that indie game. You need to become known in that niche and in in that sub-niche that's there." And so, as you do that and as you build up a following, then you can expand and go to other topics. It is the same thing here on YouTube. I'm never going to compete with the Mr. Beasts. I'm never going to compete, you know, with like Grandthum. I'm not I'm not going to be competitive with those types of people. So, what I needed to do was I needed to find an underserved market or an underserved need in this niche. Now, that gap for me specifically was trying to take a non-tactical dad type of spin on the firearms niche and specifically do it within California. So, there's a ton of really good and real amazing firearm content creators that are out there. But a lot of them are like Tennessee, Idaho, a lot of the free states, but in California, there's not really as many firearm content creators because it's so much more restrictive here. But there's a huge demand. Like California has a huge population, and firearms are not something that is only reserved for the South or something like that. And so, people want that here. it just there's not as many people willing to be able to create about it because it's such a like vilified topic.
So, the way that I was able to actually validate this was by looking for small channels. Okay, we don't want to look in the millions or even the hundreds of thousands is a lot, right? Like if I were to go look at like an established firearm content creation channel, it would be like Grand Thumb. It could be Dirty Kid. There could be even like Reno May who's out here in California. There are established creators that you cannot really look at for understanding what is being underserved because they're going to get views a lot at this point, right? Maybe not when they started. When Reno was doing his content earlier on, it was very much so something that was underserved and he was able to capitalize on that. And so I needed to be able to do the same thing. So what I did was I looked at smaller channels and tried to see which smaller channels had more views than they do subscribers on their channel in total. And so what this is, Haley coined this as like the golden nugget method. We're trying to find topics. We're trying to find niches. We're trying to find video ideas where people are just forced to go watch a smaller content creator. And that's exactly actually what I did with my video, which was seven things I didn't expect when I got my CCW in California. So I layered, and we're going to talk about stacking and layering in a second, but I layered my underservedness, I guess you could say, within the market. So, first I went to firearms, which is pretty broad, right? But then I stacked a little bit of underservedness on there, which was California. And then I went even deeper on it, which was concealed carry weapons permit or license technically. And so by doing so, I was able to target a topic that was highly in demand, but just has a low supply for because I saw other creators that had very small channels that were getting views for it. So that is the first step is basically identifying what are people not talking about that people want to have content created on. So if you do that from the start, that's what's going to be able to kickstart your channel. If you start your channel off with a video that's like my first video, it's it's not going to pop off from the beginning and you're not going to have that initial momentum from YouTube that's going to continue to propel and suggest your videos to other people via the algorithm. I mean, if you look at my channel, I when I only have about 2,000 subscribers, I'm at 50,000 views, 7K, 6K, 15K, and 5K. Every video that I have has more views than I have subscribers on my channel, which is where you can tell there is a a market gap that I am filling.
One of the ways that you can actually like really hone in on that underserved market is by doing something that's called niche stacking. Now, the reason why we want to stack niches, and I'll explain what it is in a second, but the reason why we want to do this is because we don't want to have to compete with other people in this market. It could be that you can't go super niche and that there isn't something exact and specific like California CCW firearm holders that are dads, you know, of five that homeschool. You might not be able to really filter down that far. But what you can do instead is you can stack different types of content or different perspectives. So that way you are no longer competing against the top players within that niche. You're instead separating yourself and kind of putting yourself into your own category. This is something that we learned from a book called the Blue Ocean Strategy. It is a very business-oriented book. But what it basically does, like the entire point of this strategy is that when other people see you side by side with like your quote unquote competitor, you want to not even be considered a competitor with that person, right? So like if I went up and had to compete with like let's say Grandthum, and I just keep using him because his channel's like massive. If I had to compete with Grandthum directly, I would never win. Like video quality is insane. The types of guns are insane. His experience is insane. Like everything just blows me out of the water. But instead, what I do is I layer something different on top of that from another previously existing niche. Then I can separate myself. So the niche and kind of the direction that I went in was I went at it with like a data perspective and I talk a lot more about the mindset. A lot of these gun tubers or firearms guys talk about specifics of firearms, the history of firearms, the actual like how to use them, how to shoot them, how well they shoot, how to clean them. It's all very technical, right? But there is a layer of morality, responsibility, and mindset and awareness that a lot of people don't talk on that people do talk about in other niches. So whether that's like not having an ego, whether that is trying to be a good role model, I wanted to take that aspect and blend it with firearms, which then separates me from other people. People are no longer going to compare me to these other channels because we are inherently different with the audience that we're serving and the problem that we're solving. So if you can show this stack differently everywhere, so in your titles, in your thumbnails, in your contents, in your call to actions, then you will essentially start to build and carve your own specific niche, or you'll really start to kind of like flourish in whatever sub-niche it was that you chose. So if you actually go and watch my videos, like on my seven things I didn't expect video, I actually say like in the beginning that I am a homeschooling dad of five that has carried every single day for the past three years. And that is like my that's my thing. That's my go-to differentiator niche stack is the dad that is a protector. I'm not like, you know, ex-military, paramilitary, law enforcement officer teams, SEAL teams, green beret, ranger, whatever. Like I'm none of those things. And so I'm trying to lean in on that stack that's there. It's better to differentiate than it is to be able to compete.
Okay, so that was the second thing. The first thing was pick a good underserved niche. The second thing was stack a different niche on top of that to be able to differentiate yourself. The third thing that I want to talk about is targeting the biggest problems first. So, like I kind of referenced a little bit earlier in the video, if you just put up a video to just put one up and you're like my first video, my first vlog or like why I'm starting this channel, like that's not going to give people enough value to watch your video. That's not going to get enough people to be able to sub or to ever come back again. If you already have an existing channel, like that's okay. Start solving problems now as quickly as you can. See, YouTube is inherently a search engine. And like I consider it social media. Some people don't consider it social media because like you're just watching something. You're not going back and forth or arguing or something like that. But YouTube is inherently a search engine. Now, because it's a search engine, people are usually looking for one of two things. At least in my opinion, as somebody that used to do SEO, as somebody that does YouTube full-time, like this, this is my job, my my wife and I's business is helping creators to be able to grow their YouTube channels and to make money from it. There's two reasons why people come to YouTube. It's entertainment or you're trying to fix something. Okay? Now, trying to fix something isn't always just like, oh, I'm trying to fix like a leaky sink or something like that. But it it comes in a variety of different ways. Entertainment is purely entertainment. That's like Mr. Beast type stuff, you know? Oh, I'm just going to go zone out as these people put their hand on like a plane for as long as they can or something like that. But the problem-solving side of things is where it gets interesting and that is where our opportunity is. Okay, we need to solve problems because people are looking for problems. They're searching for the answers to whatever it is that they're going through. Find a way to solve a problem really well. So for me, that was me talking about things that I didn't expect when getting my concealed carry permit. I'm talking about potential issues or concerns or thoughts people have before they're getting their CCW. And so the problem that people have is like, well, should I get it? What do people think about me getting it? How do I get it? What does it cost for me to get it? Is it a hassle? Is it worth it? Those are huge problems that I knew in the industry that people were constantly asking because I'm like diving head first right into it. This is my my hobby. This is my passion, right? So, when you can solve bigger and better problems, people want those problems solved. they are willing to watch longer. And this is the secret you guys. Okay, YouTube monetization and making money on YouTube is not really about how many views can I get. Okay, if you notice, one of the requirements is watch hours. How long did people watch? So, if we go back and watch look at my first video and I have the analytics pulled up on my screen since published, like it's been a little bit since it's been published now. It's been like two weeks almost maybe. I have nearly 6,000 watch hours. So, like this video on its own is what basically got me enough watch hours to be able to get monetized on YouTube. Why are people watching it? Well, it's because in every single thing that I say or that I talk about, I am solving some sort of problem for them or I'm answering one of their questions. So, the more that you can give them better information and you can kind of just stack the information on top of each other as you go through a video, the longer people are going to be willing to watch it, the more watch hours you get. Therefore, the more you get promoted and potentially you get monetized and even better, you start to grow an audience where you can sell your own product because that at the end of the day, right you guys, that at the end of the day is the goal is that you want YouTube to be the marketing tool, not the monetization, not the entire monetization strategy. And so, we'll touch on that. So, at the end of the day, when it comes to the type of content that you pick, you need to solve problems. You need to go after big problems, the heavy hitters, the stuff that people are looking for.
Now, what if you don't know exactly what those problems are or you're unsure of your niche or you're wondering like, how do people phrase it? Like, what do they say? I don't even know what to look for. Like one of our students does biohacking for instance, right? But it's biohacking for moms. And biohacking for moms isn't necessarily something that's searched. So, how do we figure out what people are searching? How do we figure out what kind of topics we should do? Well, what we should do is we should study other successful channels. Now, I don't mean go look at the channels that have a million subscribers because once you get into that like 200,000, 500,000, a million subscriber bracket, you can post about your foot if you want to and you're probably still going to get a lot of views. Well, maybe for some people you'll get more views, but they can break the rules when it comes to what types of content or what type of content that you can post on YouTube. You cannot do that. You have to study what has been successful for other channels or what made other channels successful when they were growing. You cannot make this up from your head. You cannot just guess and throw things out there. You have to validate. How do you validate? You go search. What you do is you go on to YouTube. You start finding creators that you like, creators that inspire you, creators that answer your questions or problems about this hobby or this niche or this industry, and you go and you look at what video got them to be able to pop off. You go and you look what are their top performers within a short period of time. By doing this, you can start to reverse engineer. Okay, this is the kind of things that people say. This is the things that people don't say. Oh, this title or this topic actually leads to this thing. So, I can learn from that. I know that this is like a lot of generic stuff. So, let me kind of give you an example of what worked on my channel. So, my second top performing video, which I put up as of recording this was 3 days ago, it has 15,000 views and it's you're concealing your gun wrong and here's how to fix it. Now, I know that the problem is is that people have problems with being able to conceal their firearm when they are concealed carry permit holder. Now, the thing is is that I didn't know exactly how people would phrase it to be able to get the most clicks or to be the most intriguing or to basically answer it in the way that I wanted to answer it. They could say, you know, your gun is printing, which is a way to say it. They could say your gun is showing. They could take a different route of it, which was what is the best gear for comfort or for concealment, how to hide your gun. There's a lot of different ways to phrase the same topic. So, I'm going to go look at other channels and see what is something that is top performing. Now, one of the things that I saw was another channel was talking about how to conceal carry in every like situation or every outfit, how to do it for church where like your shirt's tucked in, so it's hard to be able to conceal carry. So, I knew that like concealment was the term that I still wanted to be able to hit. Concealing or concealments. And then what I did was I basically pulled my knowledge or like learnings from other niches which is something else you can do. You can look at parallel niches which means like something either related or maybe sometimes not even that related but I looked at other top performing channels or top performing videos for really small channels. And one of the phrasings was you're doing blank wrong, right? You're doing something else wrong. So instead of just saying how to conceal your gun better, I said you're concealing it wrong and here's what you do to be able to fix it. And so by phrasing something like that, by studying other successful channels and their wording of titles, I am now able to title my videos differently and stand out from these other competitive channels. Now, your title is not the only thing that you're going to reverse engineer. You need to reverse engineer the title, the topic, the thumbnail. You need to reverse engineer the phrasing, the call to actions, the secret words that people use, the tones, the structure of the video. Now, I'm not saying go be those people, right? But what I'm saying is is that you want to understand how and why somebody went viral. Now, 90% of the time why a video gets a lot of clicks is because it has a really good title, topic, and thumbnail. And title and topic are not the same thing. Okay? Topic means like is this topic in general something that's in demand. Title is how did you word that topic? And thumbnail is obviously your thumbnail. And so if you can pick from these different things, if you can pick like, oh, I I like this title from over here. It's going to work with this topic that I'm going to niche stack with. And I know that this thumbnail from this niche did really well. This video has 500,000 views, but the channel only has 3,000 subscribers. What about this thumbnail really attracted people? Let's try to blend some of that in. That is how you study channel successfully. You have to pick and choose from different areas to be able to create basically like the ultimate Frankenstein type of video. So, if you could do that, if you can blend proven patterns, it will just give you a higher percentage chance of success.
So the fifth thing that I want to talk about is retention. Okay, I mentioned this a little bit more in I think it was step three where I talk about going after big problems to be able to increase your retention as much. And so retention is going to happen in the very beginning. Okay, the first like 15 or 30 seconds, even 30 is really too long now today with people's cocoon attention spans. Like it's very difficult to hold someone's attention and that's why your retention and your hook is extremely important. So what you want to do is you want to basically have four parts. First is basically your identity for this video and who you are. It's like here's the real context. Here's the proof. Like I showed you guys the proof that is in the beginning of the video that has the screenshot that's there. You want to have some kind of proof, some kind of real context. Some kind of like why am I qualified? Why you should listen to me thing in the beginning. Again, my firearm videos, I'm a dad of five that has carried every single day. And like when people hear that I've carried every single day, that I'm not new, but I'm a dad. So that qualifies me more in a different way. Then that's going to make them want to stay. That's going to make them want to understand what's going on. The second part of it is is that you want to have some kind of like self-deprecatingness because when you lead really hard with the qualifications, sometimes you have to knock yourself down a little bit to be more relatable. So for me in my top performing video, which was what I didn't expect when I got my CCW, it is basically saying, "Hey, I was dumb. I had like not the best of intentions when I was like, I'm going to go look to carry a gun with me everywhere. I thought it was going to be cool. I thought I was going to be a badass to be able to do and then I was humbled by what I learned through the process. So by doing that, people can relate more to you. If you're just like this is how good I am and this is my proof and you guys will never be able to be like me because I have all these years of experience, then they're not going to empathize with you and they're not going to become true fans. So you need to have a way to be able to be a little bit more self-deprecating within your hook. The third thing that you want to talk about right after that is you want to be able to talk about the stakes of the video or the stakes of the content that you're going to be discussing. So for me, when it came to my CCW, it was talking about how having a CCW has changed my life and the way that I look at life and the way that I interact with people on the daily, with the way that I dress, with the way that I act, with the way that I play with my kids, with the way that I do really anything in life. Like when you have a firearm on you, it's a big deal. And so I really leaned into that in this video and saying that there's a lot more that people don't know. It's there's a lot more that people don't understand and the stakes are big. Like there is so much that changes. And what that does is that opens a loop. Okay? When you open the loop, people are like, "Well, now obviously I need to sit there and figure out what the stakes are and how he changed his entire wardrobe so he can carry a gun." This is the big opener that leads to further retention. And so finally, you want to be able to have a payoff for those open loops or for those retention hooks. This retention strategy doesn't just have to happen in the beginning. Like you can constantly loop and have multi-stages of retention as you go throughout a video. It's a little bit more advanced. But if you guys want to know more about our retention strategy and what we use for our students and what we teach people, let me know down in the comments below. I'm more than happy to talk about it. But you want to have a payoff when you open a loop. So, when I talk about my wardrobe changed, you got to pay it off. You got to show here's why it changed. Here's what happened and here's the lesson that I basically promised you with. If you don't ever deliver on that content or on that value at the end, people are not going to trust you. Now, obviously there are things that you can do for retention, like you can do pattern interrupts, you can do B-roll, you can do music, you can do whatever else. But I feel like when you lead with something like this in the beginning of your video, and when you deliver on open loops and retention payoffs throughout the video, it's going to help you able to extend your audience retention or your video retention, you're going to get more watch hours.
Okay, so this is kind of a weird one, but I believe that when you're just starting a channel, any comment you ever get, you should 100% comment back to. It's like a superstition that I have. I played baseball growing up, so I'm extremely superstitious. So, I believe that whenever you are starting a channel, as much as you can reply back to the comments. It's going to do a couple things. One, obviously, for the algorithm, it's going to be like, "Hey, there's people commenting on here." But secondly, it's going to show people you actually care. And when you show people you actually care, people are more willing to help out and support a small town, a small town influencer or a small town creator, right? If you go and look at my videos on this channel, like I have tons of comments and I comment back to each and every single one of them as much as I can. Like yeah, I'm going to miss some. I'm a dad of five. I have a lot that's going on, but I'm going to comment as much as I can so that way again I can try to potentially superstitiously boost the algorithm, but also just give value back to people.
Okay, stick with me. I got two more things that I want to talk about to be able to help get you monetized quickly. So, the next thing that I want to talk about is taking a clear stand on things. When it comes to being able to break out on YouTube, you have to be again different. But one of the things that drives retention and engagement and clicks for someone who doesn't have the proof at face value, right? Like if nobody clicks on your video, they're never going to get to your hook. They're never going to get to your retention cycle. They can only know based off of your title, topic, and thumbnail. If you do not create divisive content, and I don't mean that in a negative way, but if you do not create content that is non-neutral, like if you don't pick a side, okay, you're never going to get clicked on. Basically, by just being very generic and bland and safe, you're never going to stand out. You need to be spicy, okay? You need to be like going and get Korean hot pot type spicy. All right? When I show up to that place, they look at me, they're like, "You want level white? Level zero." It's literally called level white. I'm not even being racist. Like that's literally what they call it. I'm like, "No, I need that mild at most." Mild. It's really hot. But that but you need to be hot and spicy with your content and with your takes. And I don't mean clickbait them, but I mean take a firm stance in your values and in your morals and in what it is that you believe in. With Haley, one of the big things that got her to break out with her content on her motherhood channel recently was the absolute need to homeschool. You have to homeschool. If you do not homeschool, you're doing something wrong here because the world is a scary place. Maybe it wasn't that extreme, but that's kind of the intent with me with firearms. I'm like, "Dude, you better carry every single day. This is not optional. You have to protect your family. There is a non-zero chance that something violent can happen and you know, the worst of the worst can happen. Look at the world that we live in. Why do you not carry a gun?" And that is my stance that I take with people. People are either going to like it or they're going to hate it and so they can pick one or the other. But when you do that, that is what gets people to click. What it also does is it makes it very clear to who you are and it really builds loyalty if you waver on your values or your feelings. You're never going to create true loyalty. Like Haley built up her channel over a long period of time and she has a lot of really loyal fans that really like her. But she only got the most hardcore loyal fans when she started talking about homeschooling. When she started talking about her faith and being a Christian lost her some subscribers, but gained her a lot more. So, if you want to stand out quickly and get clicks quickly without having to overly rely on like too much proof that people are never going to see, then you just need to take a clear stance on something.
Now, finally, while monetizing through YouTube AdSense is amazing, realistically, one of the best ways that you can in fact get monetized faster, if these things don't happen, if you are not so blessed to be able to get monetized by the YouTube algorithm or by YouTube within 4 days, four or five days, and only like one video or two videos, if if that isn't you, if you're still working on getting monetized through like 10, 20, 30 videos, what you need to do is you need to monetize in a different way. Okay? So for us, what we do is we teach people to be able to sell digital products. We do courses, coaching, memberships. Some people like to do guides, they like to do mini courses. Our take on it and our stance is that you cannot let YouTube say whether you can make money or not. We've had channels demonetized. We've had videos demonetized. Tomorrow they could change the rules and they could be like, "Bam, slap, slap. You're done." Like, "You're not monetized anymore." But I still can monetize my audience in a different way. So, for my firearms niche, for example, I will eventually have a community, and it's probably going to be free, but I'm probably going to try to find other ways to monetize that I'm not going to ruin yet or jinx myself yet with. But something like that I do on this channel is obviously we sell our coaching. And that's something that we do to make sure that we are not overly reliant on YouTube's algorithm, the views, or AdSense to be able to make money. So hopefully this whole thing, this explanation has been able to help you out in understanding monetization, how to grow, how this can continue to propel you forward. Like you don't have to stop doing these things once you get monetized. You should continue to use these strategies cuz it is like a growth strategy overall. But if you have any questions, you have any thoughts, leave them down in the comments below. If you like the video, like it. Subscribe if you're new and you want more of this. And I will see you guys in the next one.