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If you’re thinking of starting your own channel, you might have a few expectations that could be far off from reality. In today’s podcast, Nate Woodbury breaks down expectations from reality in working for YouTube based on his own experience as a producer for himself and other clients, so keep listening!
I’m a producer for 13 different YouTube channels. Been at this for a while and I had some expectations at the beginning that have not been met. And others that were exceeded. So, I’m going to dive into that and just let you know what to expect. Now, the other day I watched Gillian Perkins version of this video. All of her answers were awesome and they’re completely different than mine. So, I do recommend you check out her video or her channel there. She’s got a real cute personality. And she puts a lot of detail into… Her videos are actually really helpful. So, I recommend checking out Gillian. Now, the first expectation that I had. I expected to achieve will just say big things within a 6 to 12 month time line. And I have achieved big things. But the first… I don’t know. The shortest stint is probably 36 months for me to achieve big things on a channel. We’re talking huge things. You know, hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. But I just… My expectations were a lot quicker. 6 to 12 months. Really took 36 months. Looking at a lot of other channels, I mean, I see the same thing in them. I really see that YouTube is a long-term play. You can’t just start a campaign and expect to be making Bank 6 months from now. One thing that actually surprised me… My strategy is business backed. So, I wasn’t really planning on making a whole lot of ad revenue. I have a lot of friends that that’s their main monetization strategy even to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars a month. But that wasn’t my strategy. It’s just different types of content. They make entertainment content I make how-to content that drives leads into a website. And the cool thing is last month, my ad revenue from YouTube… YouTube paid me $16,000. That was unexpected. But that is a welcome. Surprise. I am not sending it back. Alright. Another expectation that this is kind of a recurring one. Sometimes I’ll make a video the ones, that I expect to go viral don’t go viral. And that’s kind of a trend. I don’t have videos that go viral. Mine are all very strategic and it works and we’re doing well. But I guess I get discourage. Every time I’m just making amazing video, “This one’s going to be great.” And my tribe likes the video and whatnot. But I just expect it to go viral. You know, some news station or some famous blog or some big influence around Facebook will take that and post it. So, all my videos even the ones that have had of views, none of them went viral. They all got pushed by YouTube itself not because of some social virality or anything like that. Okay. I expected to make money from Amazon’s affiliate program. I mean thought, “Yeah, I use a lot of Amazon products. I buy stuff on Amazon.” So, I should link to it all the time. And I linked to it a lot. And I don’t think I’ve made a dollar. I don’t think I’ve made a dime on affiliate revenue from Amazon. So, that was an expectation. I mean, I have a friend who that’s where he makes his main source of revenue. I don’t know what I’m doing different than him. I haven’t, you know… I guess focused on that approach. But I thought that I would have at least made something. Another expectation I had in the beginning is that I believed that I could eventually hire someone else to do the editing. And this one is true. This one is true. I’ve got a whole team of video editors because I produced 13 channels and you know that I’m not doing the editing on all 13 channels. That would just be nuts. And so I’m glad that that one turned out to be reality. It’s really… Well, I was going to say it’s easy. It takes time and I’ve got other videos where I talk about that about why I hire people in the Philippines. You can link to that right up there. But it is a reality. You can hire people to a 100% edit your videos. Now, on the flip side, I didn’t think that I’d ever be able to hire somebody to do the filming for me or my clients. I don’t know why. I decided to try it a year ago. And it kind of worked out with the first person I tried. But then the second person I tried, needless to say she’s still working with me. And the third person I tried she’s still working with me. So, I’ve got 2 amazing people on my filming team. And I didn’t expect that. If you would have asked me years ago, well I talked about it. I just I said, “Yeah, I just can’t imagine that somebody could do the same job that I do.” Anyway. And so that’s where I’ve been proven wrong. I didn’t think I could do it. And I did glad I did, of course. Okay. This one surprised me. When I meet people, you know, you have the standard conversation. “Hey, what is it that you do? What do you do?” And I tell them “I’m a YouTube producer.” And you know, asked me what that is. So, when they find out what I do, the thing that surprising is what goes on in their mind. A lot of people will say, “Oh! Well, my 12-year old really wants to be a YouTuber and I ask more questions about it and they always dream of playing video games and making a living on YouTube.” All the time. This is like a recurring thing that happens every time I meet somebody and they’re not in the YouTube world already. They’ll just say, “Oh! YouTube producer. Tell me about that. What is that? Wow, I ought to have you talk to my daughter. I got to have you talk to my son. So, I’m going to start mentoring them to become YouTube gamers.” And that I just didn’t expect that. I don’t know how to make money by putting video games. That would be fun. That would be pretty cool. I have no idea how to do that. So parents out there, don’t send your kids to me that want to be gamers on YouTube. Alright. In the beginning, if you go back and watch some of my earlier videos, I was way more reserved than I am now. So, you think of me of calm people said like I’ve got the zen-like personality. And you know, that’s cool. I like… But I’m more dynamic. I mean, I use facial expressions. I can talk conversationally. And the biggest difference is I thought that I would use a teleprompter forever. Because back then I had to spend all this time writing a script, writing it out word-for-word. Putting on a teleprompter. So, I’m looking at the lens but I would be able to see the words going up and down. Or not down. But scrolling up, right? And it started to work. And it was a big help for me at the time. It gave me a big boost of confidence. They helped me be a lot more efficient. And because it was working for me, I required all of my clients to use a teleprompter. Even some that that were resistant. They like, I speak all the time. I don’t need a teleprompter. So, I got a little thing in my eye. One person I remember specifically Felicia Slattery. Great friend of mine. She’s been friend of mine for years now. She was pretty resistant. And yet, she was coaching us is like, “Alright Nate, I’m going to do it.” And her videos did well. So, I mean my coaching paid off but knowing what I know now, yes, she didn’t have to use a teleprompter. Like I required her to. What goes beyond that is when you can be conversational. I mean right now, I’ve got bullet point notes of each thing that I want to talk about. I just look down, “Okay, well we’re not going to talk about next.” And so, I’ve got notes. I prepare that a lot quicker than a script oh and I can take an hour in preparing a script for a video where I’ve worded it out. And there’s lots of disadvantages to that. So anyway, I could talk more about the pros and cons of a teleprompter, whatnot. But that was definitely unexpected –is I thought that, “Yep, teleprompters. I’m going to be using those. That’s just going to get easier and easier from here.” Okay. This one’s actually pretty similar to Gillian. But I I think it’s because I have good filters set up. So, I expected to get a lot of mean rude hate type comments on my own channel. I don’t get them. But I set up really good filters. In fact, Grant Thompson who passed away a few months ago. Amazing channel. The channel still going. He created a legacy that’s still moving on. The King Of Random. Amazing channel. So, Grant shared his swear word list. He sent out this big long document of swear words that you could copy and paste and put it into the YouTube filters. So, that anyone that used that type of language in their comments would be filtered out. And I used his filter and it works really, really good. So, I don’t really get hate comments. Maybe it’s because of that or maybe people are just nice. So, I like that. I’m glad that my expectation was not met there. Okay, this next one is interesting. I have a pretty awesome successful… Hugely successful strategy that I developed. It’s my keyword research strategy. My leaf strategy. I kept this a secret for many years. Do you know why? Because I expected that when people learned what my strategy was, that everyone out there would start copying it. They would start using it and compete with me. It didn’t happen. I started teaching my strategy. No one uses my strategy except for my clients. It works. I mean, what do I mean by it works? I can make a video. First of all, I do keyword research. I find a title. Then I make that video and I give that video that title I put it on YouTube. And it ranks on the top of YouTube on day one. It’s an amazing strategy. It’s an amazing strategy. And what I thought would happen is that all other YouTubers, all other SEO knowledgeable people would change their ways to follow my unique strategy. And it hasn’t happened once. Hasn’t happened. My clients implement it. My clients implement it and that’s it. So, I still think it’s really strange. But now you know how valuable my strategy, isn’t that you should implement it. So, that is definitely the video that you should what next. I’ll link to it right there and it’s up there and a card as well. Watch my leaf strategy video. This will change the game on how you can get results on YouTube.