12 Lessons From 10 Years on YouTube

10 years ago I was a broke stupid shy kid with no friends I tried so hard for the first two years and made no money at all but thanks to YouTube today I have millions in real estate traveling around the world with high quality friends and my channels have crossed over 3 billion views but I wish someone made a video like this 10 years ago because it would have saved me so much time and I would have been so much further ahead my name is Dave Nick and the first lesson is clickbait but overd deliver that doesn't mean that you should create false expectation because that's going to ruin your channel but if for example I made a video saying how to make great videos for YouTube no one would click but if a title is how I made $3 million on YouTube then a lot more people would click and then I would overd deliver the value and show them what I did now clickbait can go both ways and if you over promise that's basically the same analogy that I've heard from one of the friends where they said imagine if someone brings a cookie to you and they said hey Dave this cookie only has 200 calories and you're on a diet and you're trying to lose weight and you're like only 200 okay so you eat the cookie and they say oh you know what it actually had like 600 calories you would hate that friend you wouldn't trust them anymore and you wouldn't get any more cookies from them when a flip sign imagine some friend comes in and says hey this cookie only has 400 calories so you're thinking okay let eat it and then they say you know it only had 200 calories so they kind of overd delivered and you're like oh that's amazing so I can eat another one well well that's great now we're going to love that friend the same goes with YouTube as well lesson number two mix current trends with search based content so I saw that this term called Tik Tok creativity program was very trendy and there were a lot of people searching for it so I started making search based content on this topic and actually collected quite a decent market share for this so you would follow what are current trends and you would just combine that with a search based keyword to create best kind of videos especially when you're starting out because it's a lot easier to compete search based than to compete with browse videos number three if a guru can show real proof and only show the lifestyle question what they're saying or what they're selling so the other day I was in Dubai and I was in this hotel I was on the 50 or 45th floor whatever and I'm going down the elevator to the first floor to the gym and I stop the elevator stops around 27th floor or whatever and some guy walk into the elevator and I notied right away that he's staring at me so I kind of like just glance at him and he like hey I know you you're D Nick I know you you're the money guy I started chatting with him and he basically says yeah I'm kind of broke I just saved up $1,000 to come to Dubai so I can take a lifestyle photos so he can sell a Drop Shipping course through Instagram and I was just thinking like this person is broke but they're just going to rent the lambo and they're just going to get these Clowny designer clothes and go to Dubai and spend all of their money just so they can look rich in social media because people will think oh this person is probably credible because they have lifestyle content what most of the guys that I see that are actually making money with YouTube automation don't even have Instagram let alone flesh Lambos or whatsoever they're on their computer so if they can actually show you real proof and analytics then trust them if they're only showing the Lambos and talking about something question it a little bit number four use end screens to Interlink your videos so you never want to signal that the video is ending so you never want to start off with last 60 seconds saying oh I hope you got some value because people will see that there is no novelty there and they will just leave instead you don't want to Signal the end you just want to send them to the next video which actually makes sense for them you will see how I will do it at the end of this one now I usually talk about how one of the best ways to make money from your YouTube channel is to have different products and perhaps use your channels as a traffic source to your website now whether you're on an existing business or you're just starting out a website is the most integral part of your growth online but your domain name is actually very important you can think of this as your business address for the internet a perfect domain for a small business will be the one that works across Industries and tells the customer exactly that the website is their online version of the business or of the YouTube channel and while building the website You' want a domain that is easy to remember and best defines your business online presence lesson number five something that you've just listened and that is that you shouldn't only focus on ad Revenue regardless of whether you have a personal brand or a faceless YouTube automation Channel ad Revenue is a great way to make money but you can get demonetized anytime while if you use your YouTube channels as a traffic source for your website for different businesses or affiliate links you can build a sustainable online business so let me show you some examples here so we have this platform called school which is a platform where people build their communities and you can see that some of these STP by the way these are mostly YouTubers are making like $100,000 a month this one did $177,000 mon Mr and by the way this is transparent you can check it yourself the platform is providing these details and we can see the Mr our current monthly recurring revenue and they added like $4,000 in the last pan 4 hours so you can kind of see what they're doing and they're using their YouTube channels to promote these communities in the description besides the paid communities you can also promote different affiliate links like this is one of the platforms that I use to promote different affiliate links and with this one in particular let it just load we did about half a million dollars in withdrawals so far but I also have a community here on school as well you've probably seen that if you've been following the channel have multiple but this is the $99 a month Community we currently have about3 181 members so you can kind of do the math lesson number six when I was just starting out I would post videos for 6 to 12 months before making the first dollar because the channels were not approved into the partner program because in order to monetize your videos with the partner program and get paid for the views that you are getting you need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time and then you need to apply and actually get approved and for some people this again takes 6 months 12 months sometimes 18 months but now you can fix that and instantly get monetized so