Treat YouTube as a skill, not some magic money machine. While YouTube can be life-changing and a powerful tool for acquiring customers, it requires a long-term mindset.

You need to see YouTube content creation as a skill to be developed, not just a quick path to making money. Building this skill takes time, often 1-3 years, before you start seeing significant results.

The key is to focus on consistently improving your abilities in areas like video planning, filming, editing, and delivery. Every time you create a video, you're getting stronger and building expertise, even if the initial results are flat.

Resist the urge to be overly focused on short-term metrics like views and subscribers. Instead, track the quality of leads and customers you're generating from your YouTube content. This long-term, skill-building approach is what will ultimately allow you to turn YouTube into a reliable lead generation machine for your business.

Lesson number two is to experiment with different formats and topics early on until you find your sweet spot. When you're just starting out, it's important to test a variety of formats and topics within your general area of interest.

For example, when I started my channel, I knew I wanted to make videos about AI since I was really into it and building AI businesses. I experimented with different formats like news videos, technical tutorials, videos about selling AI art, and podcasts with AI founders. I tested all these different formats until I found something that worked well for me - AI tutorials showing business owners how to build custom knowledge chatbots.

The key is to look for trends and topics where there is high demand but low supply of content. For example, the custom knowledge chatbot trend was popular because people wanted to have a chatbot with their own data included. By identifying and creating content around this trend, I was able to get a lot of high-quality views from people interested in working with me.

When you're just starting out, don't be afraid to experiment. Try a whole bunch of different formats and topics within your general area of interest. Pay attention to what's getting traction and resonating with your audience. Then, double down on the formats and topics that are performing best. This will help you find your sweet spot and build momentum for your channel.

This lesson revolves around once you've done that experimenting and you've caught on, you've put out maybe 10-20 videos and you've started to see ones that are performing better. Then you need to go narrow and stop trying to be this "everything person" and start trying to be an expert in one small field.

In my case, it was these custom knowledge chatbots. I tested, tested, and tested until I found something that I really enjoyed making, I was interested in, and it seemed like a lot of other people were interested in it too - there was a ton of views coming from it and I was getting a ton of leads.

Once you find that sweet spot with enough testing and intelligent testing in the right areas, knowing what's trending, then you need to go narrow on it and say "Look, people are liking these videos, I'm not just going to do one of those a month, I'm going to do two of them a week, I'm going to say more of this content over and over and over again, and I'm going to become the niche expert in this small and emerging thing or in this trending thing."

That's going to allow you to start to call yourself an expert in this little category, and people buy from experts. If you're watching this video to be able to build a business and generate leads, becoming an expert in a narrow area is so important in order to generate some actual business for you.

A fatal mistake that many people make early on, which I see all the time, is they come onto YouTube and they start talking broad. They're talking about all these broad topics like "Where's AI going next?" or in your field it might be "5 things real estate agents should know." These really broad topics. Unless you have credibility and you have a lot of evidence and proof to back yourself up, you simply do not belong in the pool of conversation with those broad topics. You need to understand that and go narrow, become an expert in that area, get results for those people, and then use those results and that evidence to then talk about it more in your videos. Then you can shoot for broader topics.

Views and subscriber counts may make you feel good, but they are just vanity metrics. What really matters when using YouTube to acquire customers and make money are the real results.

You should be focusing on:

• How many link clicks are you getting from your video descriptions? Use custom tracking links to see which videos are driving the most clicks to your offers.

• How many bookings or purchases are you getting from your videos? Track the quality of the leads - how many are qualified, and how many end up closing as customers?

• Don't get caught up in chasing views and subscriber counts. Those don't directly translate to business results. Focus on the metrics that show you're generating leads and customers.

The key is to build a flywheel where the money you make from your YouTube leads allows you to reinvest in better production quality, more content, and stronger branding. This will enable you to create broader, more authoritative content that can reach an even larger audience. But it all starts with focusing on the real business results, not vanity metrics.

Lesson number five and the final one in this first group where we're focused on quantity and really getting your channel off the ground is to build a team around you.

I was able to grow my channel to about 10,000 subs in like a month and a half. I was fortunate enough to have run businesses before, I had my own funds, and I could invest in paying people to edit my videos for me.

If you want to get fast results, pay someone to do the editing for you, pay someone to do the thumbnail editing and design for you. This is obviously a no-brainer one. But if you spend more of your time focused on skills that you're not really going to use, you're going to spend all this time learning how to edit videos properly. Sure, it might be helpful down the line, but you'll be paying someone else to do it anyway, so why did you spend all this time doing all this rubbish?

If you can't afford it, that's a whole different thing. Maybe go to your friends and say "Hey, look, do you want to start this thing with me?" When I first started my channel, it was just me and my friend Sean, and he wasn't getting paid much early on. But of course, now once things are up and running, everyone's getting paid well and everything's all good.

So if you're starting out, don't try to go crazy with the editing quality. All you need is someone to maybe cutting between you and say a slideshow. If you want to keep the editing costs down, then slideshows are great because you, as the creator, get to put all the work into making the slideshow, that's the visual. It just cuts between your face and the slideshow. I could be doing this via a slideshow and going back and forth, and it means you don't have to get the editors to do all of the B-roll and text and everything, and so it saves a lot of effort on there.

Slideshow is a great one. You go back and look at my early videos, they got hundreds of thousands of views, still, just me and a slideshow that I put together.

When it comes to thumbnail designers, go on to Upwork, go on to Fiverr, test a whole bunch of them. The best way to get the best results is to give them a whole bunch of examples of thumbnails that you like and say "These are the kinds of ones that I want mine to look like." If you don't give them that, they're likely going to be rubbish, and you just need to keep testing different thumbnail designers until you find someone who can take your "I want them to look like this" and spit out consistently ones that you like as well.

The first lesson in this middle stage of focusing on quality is about what Hormuzzi calls the "content accordion" strategy. This refers to the dynamic nature of balancing quality and quantity when creating content.

Early on, the focus should be on quantity - posting 1-2 videos per week to build up your skills and get the necessary reps in. During this phase, you're just trying to consistently create and publish content.

After a month or two, you can start to analyze which videos are performing the best. Use this data to narrow down and focus on creating a smaller number of higher-quality videos - maybe 4-6 per month instead of 10.

Once you've dialed in this higher-quality content, you can then look to expand the quantity again, trying to do 8 or more of these top-performing videos per month.

This process of swinging between quality and quantity, cherry-picking the best performers, and then scaling up the quality content is the "content accordion" strategy. It allows you to continuously improve the value you're providing while also maintaining a consistent publishing cadence.

The key is to not get stuck in one extreme - you need to balance the need for quantity to build skills and audience with the requirement for quality to drive real business results. Mastering this balance is critical for long-term success on the platform.

My channel has primarily been built off the back of a handful of big and super high quality videos that are put together. These are in this sort of stage two where you're scaling up the quality because you need to get that expertise and build up a familiarity with the camera, the editing process, and all the base skills to making content.

Once you've got that base and you've got some momentum and you've got the credibility and results from the stuff that you are talking about on the channel, you've worked with some clients, you've done some consultancy, and you've got some specific evidence about why you're someone people should listen to, then you can invest more time into a bigger and more extensive beginner guide for whatever your topic is.

I've done a three-hour chatbot guide, an hour and a half long one on AI agents and GPTs, and an hour long one on starting an AI business. By the time this goes out, I will have released a 3 or 4 hour video on AI agents. These kinds of big videos have grown the channel more than anything else, with some of them getting 30, 40, or 50,000 subscribers per video.

When you get to a point where you have the experience on the camera and understanding how to make videos on YouTube, as well as the credibility needed to frontload the video with why the viewer should listen to you, you can make these big videos that are beginner-friendly and really just cramming full of your value and your knowledge. You get to build so much trust, you get to tell your story, and you get viewers who are in a bit of a relaxed pace of watching videos saying "Okay, I'm going to sit here and watch a 2-hour tutorial."

Ultimately, those build a much higher quality base of people in your audience than building it off of these maybe fast news videos that are 3-5 minutes or something. You're getting these people who are very serious about upskilling or about learning more about a topic, and there's nothing that has grown the channel more or more consistently than these big, beginner-friendly videos.

The eighth lesson in the middle stage of quality is to use a teleprompter. A teleprompter is a device that displays the script of a video, allowing the presenter to read the content while maintaining eye contact with the camera.

Using a teleprompter offers several benefits:

1. Scripted Delivery: By writing out your script beforehand and using a teleprompter, you can ensure a more polished and structured delivery of your content. This is especially important for longer, more complex videos where you need to convey information clearly and coherently.

2. Improved Hook: The hook, or the opening of your video, is crucial for capturing your audience's attention. By scripting and rehearsing the hook using a teleprompter, you can craft a more compelling and impactful introduction.

3. Reduced Retakes: Without a teleprompter, you may find yourself re-recording the same section of the video multiple times, as you struggle to remember your talking points. The teleprompter allows you to deliver your lines more consistently, reducing the need for excessive retakes.

4. Increased Efficiency: By having your script readily available on the teleprompter, you can film your videos more efficiently, saving time and resources. This is especially beneficial when creating longer, more complex videos that require a significant investment of effort.

To effectively use a teleprompter, it's important to:

• Write a Detailed Script: Spend time crafting a well-structured script that covers the key points you want to convey. This will ensure a smooth and coherent delivery.
• Practice and Rehearse: Before filming, practice reading the script from the teleprompter to get comfortable with the pacing and delivery.
• Maintain Eye Contact: While reading from the teleprompter, make an effort to maintain eye contact with the camera, as this will create a more natural and engaging presentation.
• Adjust Teleprompter Speed: Experiment with the speed of the teleprompter to find a pace that allows you to deliver the content naturally, without feeling rushed or stumbling over your words.

By incorporating the use of a teleprompter into your video production process, you can elevate the quality of your content and deliver a more polished and professional presentation to your audience.

If you've heard about rented and owned audiences, this is a rented audience. I'm relying on the YouTube algorithm to go and push this out to a whole bunch of people who want to make more money with their business through content - same on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever you're renting the audience. You don't own the audience. I'm at the whims of the content algorithm or I'm at the whims of the platform as well - they could try to ban me for releasing too much source on how to grow on YouTube here, they could literally just strike my whole channel out as we saw a few years ago with a lot of different people talking on the wrong topic supposedly.

Building an owned audience is about can you use the rented audience to then capture their emails or their phone numbers and capture the ways to contact those people directly without the need for permission from the algorithm or from the platforms. This is primarily focused on building an email list. It's how can you use your content to push people to a lead magnet or to, in my case, like my school community and all these different places where it allows me to capture their contact information. Then I can communicate with them directly, permissionless. I don't need anyone - there's no one going to block me, apart from my email domain maybe getting burnt out and getting a bad rap, so I always land in spam. I can essentially email those people directly and make offers, I can communicate to them, I can push them to different places.

So a key part of consistency and staying at the top of your game is making sure that you are collecting those emails or you're collecting their phone numbers, you're using that email to keep sending them more value, to most importantly send them a notification when you drop a damn YouTube video. That's the most important part near-term for your YouTube channel - is okay, now I can send a direct notification to these people saying "Hey, I've just dropped this video, here's what it's about." And that's allowed me to consistently get a lot of views on my videos, because whenever I make a video, I just send it to 100,000 people on my email list. Then a good chunk of those people click through, you get 5, 6, 7,000 people click through and watch the video. That's how you fight against sort of declining results on your channel, is because you keep getting that consistent group of people going through to it and getting value from it.

So it's basically like a direct notification method. You can also make direct offers when you say you need more leads for your business, you can send out an email and say "Hey, look, we're taking on more clients right now, does anyone want to come on?" etc. So lots of different things you can do with that email list, but the main thing is to send them back to your content, to keep them engaged with it, and keep yourself consistent on the platform in terms of your views.

When you think about the YouTube platform as a whole, there's certain types of content that everyone can create. In my niche of AI, the easiest thing for people to do is create AI news videos. The requirements to create an AI news video are pretty low - they can be faceless, use AI-generated audio, and require basic editing.

As a content creator, if I was making AI news videos on my channel, I'd be competing with all these people who can also make those kinds of videos. One step up from that would be an AI news channel where I put my face on it. But I'm still competing with others who are doing similar things.

The way I initially escaped competition was by leveraging my entrepreneurial background and coding skills. I could not only talk about AI, but also show people how to build AI-powered applications. This put me in a category of "business-experienced people who could code and put together good tutorials."

I then took it a step further by creating longer-form, highly-produced videos that no one else was really doing. Using good editing, visuals, and animations, I was able to create content that stood out.

The goal is to constantly improve your writing process, the value you provide, and the unique way you present it. The aim is to be in a "category of one" where no one else can really compete with you. This could be due to your background, skills, delivery style, team, and more.

By continuously escaping competition and being in a league of your own, you can solidify your position as the go-to expert in your space on YouTube.

This is something that I neglected for a little too long in my journey. It was literally just me and my friend Sean growing our channel from zero to 350,000 subscribers. This put a lot of strain on us, and we definitely could have done a lot better.

I could have had more time to do other things, and we could have had higher quality editing, longer and more varied videos, and more assistance on the script writing and content creation side.

The key lesson here is that if YouTube is the core part of how you generate leads for your businesses, like it is for me, then you need to be willing to invest in expanding your team and resources.

When content is the main driver of your business, you need to look at how you can smartly invest the money you're making to further your advantage. This could mean:

• Building a larger editing team
• Bringing on writers to help with the content creation process
• Investing in other tools and resources to improve the quality and efficiency of your content production

The point is, if YouTube is truly the engine powering your business, you need to be willing to reinvest in it. Don't be afraid to spend money to make your content creation process more scalable and high-quality.

This is what has allowed me to stay at the top of my game and continue expanding my reach. By investing in the right people and resources, I've been able to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible with my YouTube channel.

Finally, lesson 12 is to network with your peers. When you get to a stage where you're producing high-quality content consistently, you'll find that there are many others around you doing similar work. Instead of viewing them as competition, I'd recommend reaching out and connecting with these peers.

I've found that building a community of other content creators in your space can be incredibly valuable. I've put together a WhatsApp group with a weekly call where we share ideas, provide support, and look for opportunities to collaborate.

Having this network of like-minded creators has been key to helping me stay at the top of my game. You can bounce ideas off each other, get feedback, and even explore joint projects. It provides a valuable support system and can lead to some really cool in-person experiences as well.

Rather than viewing other creators as competition, see them as potential allies. Make an effort to connect, build relationships, and cultivate a community. The rising tide lifts all boats, and collaborating with your peers can take your content and business to new heights.