How to Grow and Monetize a YouTube Channel  🔗 **Source:** [How to Grow and Monetize a YouTube Channel](https://share.snipd.com/episode/be5146d7-f00a-4162-9b19-03506aadb92b) ## Highlights - **Midlife Career Pivot To YouTube Success** - Ty Myers left a 20-year telecom career at 44 to start a YouTube channel and coaching business. - Nearly two years later he has ~36,000 subscribers and a fledgling coaching business that pays the bills without relying on AdSense. Transcript: Ty Myers Okay. Well, with YouTube, it's been almost two years now since I've started my channel. And prior to that, I was in a nearly 20-year career working for a large telecom provider here in the US. Yeah, I just had an itch. I think like a lot of folks out there probably had this compulsion to maybe want to start their own business or maybe they have a creative itch to make content. And ever since COVID, I've always admired people who create YouTube videos. And I was like, do I have a shot at this? A couple years back at 44, I decided I was going to take a bit of a gamble and bet on myself to start a channel and try and start a coaching business and see how far I could get. And so, uh, yeah, I, I basically said, you know what, just throw caution to the wind and see what happens. And so nearly two years later, here I am still doing YouTube now doing it full time. I've got, I guess what I would call a fledgling coaching business that's, um, paying the bills. ([Time 0:01:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ebf99f0f-09a3-42d2-aab7-feac033953ae)) - **Authenticity Beats Entertainer Persona** - You don't need to be an extroverted entertainer to succeed on YouTube; domain expertise and clear problem-solving matter more. - Reps and comfort on camera reveal your authentic voice, which is what audiences actually connect with. Transcript: Michael Stelzner Obviously, you've tried a lot of things, right? Let's just address that a little bit today because there's probably some people that have this maybe false belief in their brain that they could never because. 100%. Ty Myers I hear this all the time. One of the things I hear from people, especially midlife folks, is that they feel like they don't have the right disposition or demeanor or like persona to be on YouTube. Because I think we think of this characteristic, bubbly, charismatic, funny kind of comedian. Mr. Beast-like. Michael Stelzner Yeah, exactly. Ty Myers And I would tell people, number one, you don't need to be that way. And especially if you have some sort of domain expertise, maybe you've got 10, 15 years experience in a career and you want to translate that into content. As long as you have something valuable to offer, it doesn't matter the delivery mechanism. It really, I think, boils down to how well would you know your viewer to help them with a problem? And how succinctly can you communicate that value to them? And how do you make them feel? And so it's funny because there'll be this dichotomy of someone who's super successful in their corporate career, like 30 years in executive leadership. And then you put them in front of a camera on YouTube and all of a sudden they're like a deer in headlights. And it's because it's just a new format for them. It's unfamiliar. And so they kind of tense up and they might get in their heads thinking, well, I'm not cut out for this. Who's going to listen to me? I don't have anything valuable to add. But what you'll find in time is number one, you absolutely do. ([Time 0:06:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e72bd02e-9d84-4c9d-bab9-176264329033)) - **YouTube's Reach And Intent Create Business Leverage** - YouTube's scale and intent make it uniquely powerful for businesses because it sends free impressions and supports search-driven discovery. - You only need a tiny fraction of YouTube's billions of monthly users to build a sustainable, monetizable business. Transcript: Ty Myers Yeah, I think a lot of people just think of YouTube and content creators as having like this really fun and interesting life or lifestyle that gives them autonomy and freedom and money. I mean, there can be some of that. That hasn't been my experience per se. I'll speak from the lens of someone who started a channel with the intention of making it a business. One of the advantages when you do it well from the business lens is that you no longer limit yourself to marketing to people in, say, your local geography. You essentially have the entire world that you can market to through free content. Right. So when I think of an impression that one of my videos gets on YouTube, I'm not paying for that impression like you would if you're paying for ads, for example. And there's like 3 billion monthly active users on YouTube, which is just shy of half the planet. So when you think about that, it's like the single biggest marketplace for ideas, for sales, for community, for entertainment on the planet. And you only need to capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that viewership to make this thing fully viable and sustainable for you. And so, yeah, all of the other cool lifestyle content creator stuff can come off the back of that, I think, when you hit certain financial thresholds. But ultimately, it is a lot of work on the front end. But when you do it the right way, and if you do it for long enough and you provide the right amount of value to people that need something, then monetization is certainly in scope. And, you know, having a multi six figure solo entrepreneur business is certainly plausible. ([Time 0:08:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25639b36-0254-4e40-b94c-18e50f6c3a13)) - **Start With Goals Then Frontload Preproduction** - Follow a four-step process: define goals, identify your avatar, make simple reps, then pivot to quality and pre-production. - Spend most effort on topic, title, and thumbnail because they drive 80% of a video's performance. Transcript: Ty Myers Yeah, I think, you know, you can do like the entertainment angle, you can do the legacy angle, but you could do like the money making angle. I come from the business lens and I think about it really in four steps or four phases. This is obviously the most important place to start is defining your goals. Like, why do you want to do YouTube? Is it to expand a current business? Is it just to, you know, upload funny videos of your cat being weird at home? You know, is it to leave a legacy? Like you have to kind of figure out what your main purpose and your mission is. Once you kind of figure that out, and then it's coming back to who are you serving? The actual specific person, the psychographics, the avatar, the ICP, whatever you want to call it, so that you can speak to that person directly. Because one thing on YouTube, and I see a lot of people struggle with this, is ambiguity is like the biggest killer of channel growth. The more specific, the more niche you can be with solving a problem and just being like hyper specific in your, in your titles, in your thumbnails, in your, in your actual transcript, The further you'll get because the algorithm knows everything you're saying in your video. And it knows everything about the preferences and the viewing habits of the people logging into YouTube. So it's going to direct that specific piece of content to the exact specific person. So goals and mission, number one, number two is your avatar and what you're going to help them with, right? So this is all stuff that you would do well before you even think about recording a video. This comes in. This is like all pre-production. Right. And then step three is just start making super simple videos. And the reason I I say just get going is because some people will spend months at the starting line and they'll just get in their head. You know, perfectionism sets in, especially for midlife folks who, like I mentioned earlier, might have, they might be really good at their day job or in their past career. And they have this like confidence that they know what they're doing, but the moment they try to do social or try to do YouTube and do content, it's like, you know, getting on a bike for The first time when you're four years old, it's terrifying. And so that's why I say just get those early reps in, you know, even if the videos are hot garbage, which they very well might be. And I would encourage anyone interested to go watch my first handful of videos and just see how terrible they are. But you got to get those reps in because you got to chip away at those nerves. You got to chip away at the lack of confidence. And that way, you know, like I said, your true person comes out. Once you, I think, get around 15 videos or so, once you feel like you've got your workflow a little bit dialed in, like you're not, you're not so nervous now getting in front of the camera. At that point, I would take a hard pivot away from focusing on reps and quantity and focusing more on the quality. And again, this comes back to more pre-production work of studying YouTube as a platform, trying to figure out what's, how does this platform even work? Because a lot of people just think of it as a place to go to upload videos as a creator, but it is so much more than that. Video is just the key element, but there's so much in the periphery, so much in the orbit that needs to get ironed out before anyone's even going to want to watch your video. And so when I'm working with my clients, a lot of what we work on is ideation, trying to figure out what are the topics that we should even be talking about? Because not all topics are worth making videos about. And early on, our intuition is not great. And so oftentimes we have to like, think more deeply about does my audience actually care about this topic? Or is it something that just I care about? Right? And if we keep our audience front and center, that's going to give us the best chances of success. But then after the idea comes, the title comes, the thumbnail, and I like to lump in topic, title, and thumbnail all together. And I tell my clients that that is 80% of the game, right? That's where you want to spend most of your time. And then filming and editing comes off the back of that. ([Time 0:14:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/334bde4a-59ac-4cc7-bd3e-cf79814f10bb)) - **Validate Ideas With vidIQ And YouTube Outlier Research** - Do keyword and outlier research with tools like vidIQ and YouTube search before scripting to validate demand. - Look for recent videos with steady, long-tail view growth and reverse-engineer titles, thumbnails, and hooks from outliers. Transcript: Ty Myers It's all under the umbrella of just studying YouTube. And so the first thing is, you know, coming back to the avatar and understanding what are their needs and wants? What are they afraid of? What are they worried about? What keeps them up at night? What are their desires? What are their outcomes or the transformations they want? And then you think about those things and say, okay, if I were to try and solve a problem for my avatar, what would the problem be? And then how would I solve that? Right. And it hopefully is just a couple of words. Like in the case of my channel, I help people start, grow and monetize on YouTube. So I'm thinking to myself, what's a problem that my viewer has? And it might be the audio quality in their YouTube videos is not great and they don't know how to fix it. They're, they're brand new to audio, so they don't have any background. So my idea for my video might be something as simple as how to improve the audio quality in your YouTube video. That in my mind is the question they might want to, they might be asking. I would then go to a tool like vidIQ, which is a great YouTube growth tool. It's free to use and you can do keyword research in there and you can type in, I don't know, something along the lines of how to improve audio on a YouTube video. That might be a very long tail keyword, so it might not yield good results, but you can fine tune it and narrow it. And really for any niche you can think of, there's going to be certain keywords that people are interested in. And you can go to vidIQ to evaluate, are these keywords remotely interesting to people? And it'll tell you the monthly search volume. And that's a good way of just measuring different keywords against each other to know what's the right way to talk about this topic. So that's probably the first area I would go to is VidIQ. And then off the back of that, I would do a very similar search right into YouTube search directly. So just right on the YouTube homepage at the very top, there's the search bar, type in the thing that you're thinking about making a video about. And then you're just going to go through the list that you get served to ask yourself. Michael Stelzner Wait, when you say get served, do you mean like as you type one word at a time, it wants to auto fill the next word? Is that kind of what you're talking about? Or a little drop down list that shows underneath it? Ty Myers Yeah, you can do some of that. I mean, I usually don't use autocomplete. I usually just type in the full keyword as I've been using it in FitIQ. But I know some people will recommend letting auto fill, give you a gauge of what people are interested in. So that's a good kind of advanced tactic. But ultimately, once you get a list of videos, after you've typed in that keyword, you're looking for the number of views these videos are getting, how old are the videos, are there recent Videos on the topic, are there just too many videos on the topic, and that will help inform you who you're competing against. And at that point, you're kind of like looking for outliers, right? And if you have the vidIQ browser extension installed, vidIQ, again, free tool. It's amazing. It will help you understand for any video that you're seeing on YouTube. It'll help you understand, is that video an outlier for that channel? Meaning has that video dramatically outperformed the average of the other videos on that channel? So hopefully that makes sense. And when you find these outliers, what you're thinking to yourself is, okay, this video is special. It got a lot of views relative to the channel. And so let's try and figure out what made it special. And you can look at the title, you can look at the thumbnail, maybe you can listen to the first 15, 30 seconds of the hook. And when you do this enough times, again right you start to see patterns you start to see frameworks you start to see the same types of things show up over and over again and then you kind Of reverse engineer that for your own stuff and that's going to make your content stand out way more so i know it sounds a little convoluted but it's ultimately just psychology that's Really all youtube is it's human psychology figuring out what are the things that make people click? What are the emotional triggers that get people to click? What are the high interest topics that get people to click? And it takes time to develop the skill of seeing those patterns. But that's ultimately what we're doing in pre-production because we don't want to spend 15 hours scripting, filming, and editing a video if the idea wasn't going to perform, you know, To begin with. ([Time 0:21:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9fbbb752-96fc-4406-9b84-334b934ec161)) - **Emulate Formats Then Add Your Unique Experience** - Emulate high-performing formats rather than copying: reuse structure but inject your unique stories, examples, and perspective. - Reverse-engineer script structure and adapt titles/thumbnails, then add personal experience readers can't replicate. Transcript: Ty Myers Yeah. And this is a tricky gray area and probably for anyone who's, who's been doing YouTube, who's doing some of this research, as I've mentioned, you've probably found in any niche on YouTube That people just copy each other all the time. And in some ways, it's tolerated and almost accepted. But I understand, especially for me and for other midlife folks who've probably developed, and this isn't to knock younger people at all, but if you've gotten to your forties and beyond, You know, you've probably developed deeper conviction in your, in your ethics and in your integrity. And so you're, you're probably not keen on copying other people, but I think there's a difference between blatant copying and stealing of other high performing titles and thumbnails And ideas versus emulating. I think emulating is smart, especially when you don't have the skills because in the process of, and I've done this on my own channel, by the way, if anyone's interested, there are some Videos on my channel where I have, I follow this exact process where I will go out and find a video that has performed exceptionally well, maybe from like a year or two ago. And I'll ask myself, am I in a position to make this exact video, but from my own experience? Okay. And if I am, then I'll basically kind of reverse engineer the script. Like how did he structure the script of this video? And what, what would I like about it? And then how do I apply that framework, but include all of my own personal experience that nobody else can talk about, right? So it's me, my story, my analogies, my experience, my perspective. But it's just using someone else's script structure. And then I borrow the same title and I make a similar version of the thumbnail. And that has performed quite well for me on one or two occasions. But in the process of doing this, in the process of studying that outlier, you tend to learn a lot more about what makes a good YouTube video. ([Time 0:28:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6854aed9-b10a-4d5a-998e-805ea46c8f1b)) - **Client Pivoted To Tiny Shed Videos And Grew Fast** - Client 'Kevin' pivoted from retirement budgeting to tiny home shed conversions after researching and copying a popular shed-format on YouTube. - Simple on-site videos at local lots ignited his channel and led to a focused niche around tiny home land buying. Transcript: Ty Myers Okay. So I have a client or one of my earlier clients, his name is Kevin. He's got a channel at Ask Papa. We were studying his niche and we were studying like, what are some videos that are performing quite well in the space that he was trying to target? And he makes content basically to help pre-retirees save better for retirement because he had made some mistakes himself and he didn't want other people to go through that. So early on when we got together, he was talking about budgeting and HSAs and different investment vehicles and things like sinking funds. And those videos, they weren't really catching, like people weren't really watching them. And he started talking about downsizing from a larger home with a mortgage into a tiny home shed conversion. And so tiny homes on YouTube are huge. People love tiny home videos. But he was doing something kind of unique. He was talking about a tiny home, but it was like a shed conversion. And so we were just doing research on sheds. We found some videos, another channel, this older gentleman who was in the Lowe's parking lot looking at the sheds and he was filming, walking around, going into the sheds and like talking About them and like hundreds of thousands of views on these videos. And I told Kevin, I'm like, go to a, go to a local lot and do the same thing. Like go just hang out at the lot, record what you're seeing, talk about the square footage, talk about the pricing, ask yourself, would this work for me? And sure enough, he did that a couple of times and it worked really well for him. That helped really ignite his channel. And now he's completely pivoted and kind of niched down into just talking about tiny home shed conversions, and then also helping people understand how to buy land that you can put a Tiny home shed conversion onto. So it was a trial and error, but it was, again, seeing what's working on YouTube, looking for the types of formats that are popular. What do people care about? ([Time 0:30:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc42bc2e-dd65-4388-be30-f99ef39be94a)) - **Spend Most Time On Preproduction Not Filming** - Spend 60–80% of your YouTube time on preproduction: research, multiple title and thumbnail concepts, and audience validation. - Better ideas yield outsized returns even if early filming and edits are mediocre. Transcript: Ty Myers I kind of hinted at this a bit earlier. Intuitively, we think script, film, edit. And then we kind of like after the fact, come up with a title after the fact, come up with a thumbnail. And oftentimes when we do that, we're I think we're just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Brand new, that is perfectly fine because the idea is we want to reduce friction and get as many reps on the platform. But at some point, if you're serious about growing your channel, you have to make a conscious decision to say, I'm going to front load. Like if I have 10 hours a week to work on YouTube, I'm going to spend six of those hours just studying, like going on YouTube and learning what's working, writing out five, 10, 15 different Titles for this video, writing out three or four different concepts for the thumbnail, looking at vidIQ, looking at YouTube to understand is the topic even worth pursuing. And when you spend your time there and you get closer to what your viewers actually want, then even if you make a mediocre script and a mediocre video with a mediocre edit, you're going To see outsized returns because the idea was sound to begin with. So it's flipping, it's flipping where you spend your time. Again, 60 to 80% of your time should be spent on pre-production. That's, that's my humble take. And I'll, I'll, I'll die on that hill. ([Time 0:32:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/37075b17-75aa-4ed3-9b45-1da21b7a8b31)) - **Use Notebook LM And Claude To Research And Script** - Use AI tools for research and ideation: Notebook LM for deep research and Claude (with vidIQ connector) to interview you and draft scripts. - Have AI interview you one question at a time to pull personal stories and make scripts authentic. Transcript: Ty Myers Yeah. Notebook LM is amazing for deep research. I found I haven't used it for the use case you've, you just mentioned, but a couple of my more recent videos were more data driven where I'm talking about like monetization and statistics. And my first thing is let me go to Notebook LM and ask it to do deep comprehensive research. Cause what it'll do is it'll go out there and find all of these journals and articles and like, you know, look for like messages from CEOs of like Google and YouTube. Um, and then it'll compile all that and give you like an executive summary. And then I can ask it like, what are the main threads here? What are the interesting statistics? What's counterintuitive? And then that becomes the meat of the video. And I can just take that into whatever writing tool I'm using, but it's amazing for deep research. So I love it for that. I've recently been using Claude quite a bit for ideation and scripting. Claude actually has a connector to vidIQ, which is interesting. So now you can be in Claude asking it to do the keyword research and it goes out to vidIQ and does that keyword research. So that's pretty neat. And yeah, ultimately I think collage does a really good job of ideation. Like you could have it interview you to pull context out, for example, because if you were to just give any of the AI tools a prompt and say, Hey, write a script for me on this topic, it's Going to sound like AI and it's going to give you something super generic. So before we even sit down to think about a script, I ask the AI to basically interview me. Here's the core topic. Ask me a ton of questions about all of the things that I think about this. My stories, my experience, my perspective, my analogies, my metaphors. And then when it grabs all that context, it can figure out the story beats. And at that point, you're so much closer to a coherent script for the video. ([Time 0:34:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71460476-f770-46c5-997c-836b58311d3f)) - **Start With Phone Video And A Quality USB Microphone** - Start filming with your smartphone and prioritize audio early; Ty used a Shure MV7 Plus plugged into his phone. - Good audio and soft window light plus a simple tripod beat fancy gear when starting out. Transcript: Ty Myers Yeah, for folks that don't have any background in video whatsoever, I would just start with your smartphone. And it doesn't matter what kind of smartphone you have. I have made over 100 videos with my iPhone 15 from a couple years back. And it works great. I would recommend if you have natural light coming in through a window, maybe with a curtain to diffuse it a little bit, soften the light a little bit, then you're in good shape. The really only thing I think people need to invest in early on, maybe from day one is a good microphone. I sort of got lucky. I made an educated guess on day one and bought a podcasting mic, which I've been using ever since. And I love it. I think it was like the best purchase I've ever made for my YouTube channel. Michael Stelzner Go ahead and say which one you're using. Ty Myers It's the Shure MV7 Plus, which is a podcasting mic. It's less than 300 bucks. Honestly, it's overkill, but I didn't know any better and I just bought it. Michael Stelzner Yeah. Explain how you're doing that. If you're filming from your phone, are you plugging it into your phone or are you in the same room and you're plugging into your computer? Explain how that works. Ty Myers Yeah. I mean, for a lot of my videos, my phone was on a simple tripod and it's USB and the mic is USB. So the mic plugs right into the phone. It's like the most no fuss, no frills way of recording a video. Wait a minute. How does that work? Michael Stelzner Because phones don't have USB ports on them. USB-C. Oh, USB-C. Okay. So, oh, so what you're saying, oh, okay. Hold on a second now. Like dots are connected in my brain. So the newer iPhones, yeah, because I have a 12 Pro. I don't have the newer ones. They all have the USB-C ports, which are those skinny little ones. So what you're saying is that you can get a microphone with a USB-C plug on it and it will plug directly into your phone? Yeah, 100%. Wow, that is super cool. Ty Myers Which is kind of crazy because you think like a nice podcasting mic, you're going to use an XLR cable, right? But I mean, the technology is so good. It's still not going to sound as great with like XLR into a dedicated like sound card or audio device. But it gets the job done. I mean, again, I've been doing this for almost two years. A hundred of those videos were done with this mic plugged directly into my smartphone. ([Time 0:36:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/81166096-bc5f-4761-acf6-ee8b9869c6d0)) - **Hook Viewers Fast With A Clear Callout And Curiosity** - Nail the hook by calling out the viewer, adding a curiosity loop, and layering credibility in the first 15 seconds. - State who you're solving for, promise outcome (e.g., 'four things you need'), and show credibility to keep attention. Transcript: Ty Myers Yeah, the hook is super important. It's really what sets the stage for what the viewer can expect. And so in my mind, I think of there's really two to three main things you really want to get right in the hook. The first is at some point you need to call out your viewer by name, meaning like when I make a video again, coming back to my channel, I help people grow a YouTube channel. So a lot of times I'll start my video by saying, if you're trying to get more views on YouTube, you know, when a viewer hears that as the opening line in their mind, they're thinking that's Exactly what I'm trying to do. Right. So they know that they're in the right place. Right. And then I like to layer in something that might be a little bit counterintuitive or something that might kind of leave a curiosity loop in their mind just to get them thinking a little More deeply about the topic we're going to approach. Sometimes we can layer in credibility, the thing that we've done, the thing that they want to do as well, so that they know that the person they're going to be hearing from in the video Is worth their time, right? So that's something you see a lot of business folks do is when they start their video, Alex Hormozy is famous for this. He'll start his video. And the first thing out of his mouth will be how many businesses he's owned, how many millions of dollars he's made. And yeah, it sounds a little arrogant, but I'm 100% listening because this guy knows exactly what he's talking about. So that's the credibility angle. And then it's kind of setting the stage. It's just letting the viewer know. So in this video, we're going to talk about the four things you need to know to accomplish X, Y, and Z goal, right? ([Time 0:39:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d358c84d-a43e-425a-aca2-1556e2c0c4a5)) - **Prioritize Session Duration Over Direct Offer Endcards** - Use end screens to drive viewers to more of your videos, not directly to offers, because YouTube rewards session duration. - Avoid traditional outros; transition into another unresolved question to push viewers into the next video. Transcript: Ty Myers Use end screens differently than pointing people towards my offer. I like to just keep people binging my content because ultimately my sense of it is YouTube prioritizes session duration. If your videos contribute to somebody staying on the platform longer, YouTube loves that because they get more ad revenue. So I link my videos together. So I never end a video. This is going to be a little counterintuitive for people. Oh, I don't play any outro music. I don't summarize what we just covered. I don't seem to hint or change the energy at all. I go right from the last piece of value that I'm providing right into another question that can only be resolved by watching the next video. So that will hopefully drive more clicks to that next video, which then gives me another opportunity for a call to action, which increases session duration. So it's all the good stuff that YouTube loves. So that's the way I prioritize my, of any of my YouTube videos. ([Time 0:43:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4423974d-d352-4143-b8c6-b291228ab611))