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ISBN 9781119716020 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119716044 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119716037 (ePub)
Cover Design: Derral Eves
Cover Image: Doodles: Derral Eves
Ripped paper: © stockcam/iStockphoto
To my wife Carolyn:
No goal or accomplishment would mean anything without you by my side.
You are my everything … for eternity!
FOREWORD
Everyone should have a YouTube channel. Literally everyone, but especially brands. When I see brands that don't have a presence on YouTube, I think they're insane. It's unfathomable that anyone isn't capitalizing on the opportunity there. It's the most coveted job in America, and with good reason. It is quite literally a gold mine.
When I was a kid, I watched YouTube all the time. It was always my dream job. I didn't want to be an astronaut or a doctor—I couldn't envision a world where I wasn't a YouTuber. I started my channel in 2012 and only got 40 subscribers my first year. Now I have one of the fastest growing channels in the world. I gained more than 15 million subscribers in 2019 alone with just over 4 billion video views. And it's still growing every day.
If you are just getting started on YouTube, do not expect to pull any type of viewership in your first year. If this isn't something you can accept, don't start. But if you can, then you need to do this: make 100 videos. It doesn't matter what they are because they will be terrible, but do something you like doing. Your first 10 videos will be garbage. Then make 10 more. These will also be garbage, and so will the next 10. But eventually, things will start to improve. You'll get better little by little. The best way to improve your content is to make content and see what people like.
Then you'll notice something with your 101st video. It will be in a whole different league from your first video. You will still be a long way from good content, but it will be better than your first video was. It took me hundreds of videos over several years before I got good at it. I had been making YouTube videos for two years and still didn't make good quality videos, even though I thought they were good at the time. I was like so many creators: I thought the algorithm hated me because I wasn't getting subscribers and views. But in reality, my content wasn't good enough. In fact, my videos were horrible, like most YouTube videos are. Most YouTubers have their priorities backward. They spend all their time thinking about the algorithm in their first hundred videos when they should really be thinking about how to make better content geared toward the viewer.
Unless you're the rare YouTuber who has created content professionally, you're probably average (at best) at making content. You don't go from entertaining nobody to entertaining millions in a day. It's hard work and a slow progressive workup, and it should be. Because if you got millions of viewers overnight, you wouldn't know how to handle them.
Every video is your competitor, so you have to keep putting in the effort to keep your content relevant and competitive. Viewers have to pick between videos every time they go to YouTube, and they'll choose the better video without a second thought. Make your video the better video.
If a video from your channel from six months ago doesn't make you want to barf because of how much better you are at making content now, you're doing it wrong. I can't even stand watching my videos from six months ago because I am so much better at making content now. I can see how bad my old videos are. They could have been so much better! I'm depressed even thinking about those videos.
There is a huge opportunity on YouTube for brands. If every brand knew what I know, they could get a hundred times the viewership they get on television for the same cost. They should be giving creators like me their advertising budget to make YouTube videos around their brand. I'll give you an example. If I was Coca‐Cola, I could build a pyramid of a million Coca‐Cola cans. Or I could make a video called, “I Filled My Friend's House with a Million Cans of Coca‐Cola.” These are both banger ideas that would get a ton of views if done right. (This was free, Coca‐Cola; next time you can pay me, lol.) Videos like these could lead to millions upon millions more return than TV‐spends, and it's exponentially cheaper. And seriously, who really watches TV commercials anyway. Everyone picks up their phones during commercials.
If brands want to get real visibility, they have to get off of TV. What do you think people do—especially anyone under the age of 30—when the ads start rolling on TV? They pull out their phones and quit paying attention! They're not watching your commercial! Their attention has been moved to Twitter. SnapChat. YouTube. TikTok. Tweets spike during TV commercials. And people don't put their phones down until the commercials are over and their show or sporting event comes back on. Three times fewer people skip a brand deal on YouTube than they do on TV, because people are usually watching from their phones. They don't have a second phone to grab when they come across an ad or brand deal on YouTube, so they watch it. And they're watching a YouTuber they watch all the time, so they are also less likely to skip because they trust these YouTubers.
I have more eyeballs on my content every week than the Super Bowl. And I have a personal connection with my viewers who have built trust in me. This audience trust value is worth so much more than an impersonal celebrity or athlete appearance in a TV commercial. Brands shell out more than $5 million for 30 seconds crammed in with a bunch of other ads during the Super Bowl. With YouTubers like me, you could get 10 to 15 minutes of undivided attention centered on your brand for way cheaper. Then you can get the viewers to go watch more videos and interact with your brand in other ways if you're really smart about it. It's a no‐brainer. You're quite literally insane if you're not capitalizing on the opportunity here.
Business execs think they know more than the YouTuber, especially if the YouTuber is very young. They want to control their integration, giving YouTubers a list of talking points to read verbatim with a call to action at the end. While this works to an extent, brands would convert exponentially more and see greater brand awareness and exposure if they let the YouTubers be themselves. A brand should say, “Here's a bunch of money, do what you do to connect with your viewers … as you've done on literally hundreds of videos with hundreds of millions of views. Do what you think would work best to get our brand talked about or our product sold. We trust you.”
Brands who give the creative license to YouTubers and let them talk naturally like they normally would with their audience are getting more brand exposure and ROI than they could in any other way, guaranteed. And they should quit focusing on views but on what kind of impression they left. Will they remember you? Or will they hear another sleazy sales pitch?
Let me give you an example of the power of a YouTuber. I created