I've been struggling to get any views for the past eight months.
I started my YouTube channel, I think, seven months ago.
I haven't gotten any video above 2,000 views.
Seven months of posting regularly.
Seven months of practice, regular practice, and I still haven't seen any results.
I've been studying so much over the past couple months, but I wasn't really intentional about
getting better on YouTube until two months ago.
These past two months, I've been honing in and practicing and studying about YouTube.
I've been watching lots of different videos.
One video that I saw Hamza talk about, he basically said that when he and his editor,
Sam, were basically brainstorming, what made him great?
What was his strong qualities?
Hamza thought, oh, it was his leadership, his great... I don't remember all the things
he listed, but he... Hamza thought it was leadership or his improvement or whatever.
But Sam was very adamant that it was actually his storytelling.
That was just one instance.
That was one time where I was like, oh, storytelling.
I was familiar that storytelling was a very important thing because I read a book, the
book that actually got me to start down this journey of content creation.
The book that got me to create my podcast was called Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson.
While I was reading that book, I was hanging out with my friend every day at the park.
We were both into business and entrepreneurship, and we were both reading that book.
I was like, dude, we got to start reading or we got to start practicing our storytelling
because storytelling is extremely crucial.
It's extremely important.
I just realized that my pants are the same color as the wall.
That could look weird if someone edited it.
Over the summer, I started realizing that storytelling was important.
I was conscious, and I was intentionally practicing it a little bit more and more.
Back in those days, I was doing one hour of practice every single day of podcasting.
I would literally just sit down in my basement, pick up the microphone, and literally just
speak for an hour straight.
Fast forward, I started realizing that YouTube was very important.
I went down the whole rabbit hole of thinking, oh, if I can make my editing the best possible,
then that's what is going to make my videos great.
That's what's going to make them pop off.
Two months later, after learning how to edit, learning how to create thumbnails, no real
results.
I have 80 subscribers, and my best video is 1.5,000 views.
Then I realized that my dream customer actually didn't want highly edited views.
I went down that whole rabbit hole of thinking, oh, what is my dream customer want?
All that.
I came to the conclusion that I shouldn't be editing the videos.
I should be just having raw videos just like this.
Then I started reading a book called Power Personal Storytelling.
This was actually before I came to that conclusion.
I realized just how important storytelling was.
I started to realize just how important storytelling was because the reason that prompted me to
read that book, Power Personal Storytelling, was because I realized that YouTubers are
just great storytellers.
The difference between me and a successful YouTuber is they're better at storytelling.
Their videos are more captivating because they tell a story.
I'm going down this rabbit hole.
I realize that it's all about storytelling.
All about storytelling.
I start like habits, practicing my storytelling every day, figuring out stories every day,
and all that stuff.
I finally get to the point where yesterday I went and hung out with my friend and my
other friend.
One of them is my mentor.
My friend, he has got a YouTube channel just like me.
We're growing.
My other friend, he has a YouTube channel as well.
He's got 50,000 subscribers and I've got 50 subscribers.
He's my mentor.
He's teaching me a lot of stuff.
I'm at the park with him, just hanging out, talking, strategizing, and master-mining.
I'm not sure if it was really meant to make me think or meant for me, which I'm sure it
was meant for me.
My mentor basically just said, you got to figure out what makes me different.
What makes me different?
Because he was talking about how there's hundreds of hams of clones.
You've seen it all over the place.
All these people, which I don't really think hams of clone is the right thing.
I think that they were just starting their channels and they were influenced by hams
of.
That really made me think.
I am in a sea full of a bunch of people who are struggling for their existence.
I went back home and the next morning, I literally just researched all my competitors.
I found a bunch of people I have never seen before and they were all doing the same exact
things that I was.
Or at least they were doing something similar.
That leads me to question what makes me different.
After that, I started a spreadsheet.
I created a Google Docs and I literally just listed all of my competitors, all their channels,
all their top videos.
Then I found one guy in particular, Hoff, H-O-F-F.
He's got like 3,000 subscribers, a bunch of videos, but one of them, all of his videos
got hundreds of views, but one of them got 167,000 views.
That guy, when I found his channel, I saw his most popular video.
First of all, I really liked the video.
When I first saw it, I was captivated.
I was like, whoa, how am I drawn into this?
He literally had the worst camera quality.
It didn't even span the whole.
It was in portrait mode, so it didn't even span the whole thing.
He had two black strips along both edges of the video.
His thumbnail was absolutely awful.
It was literally just a picture of him with terrible camera quality and two black strips
in portrait mode.
I was like, how did this guy get 167,000 views?
It was no accident.
That just doesn't happen.
You know, ask me how.
I know that doesn't happen because I posted 100 podcast episodes, zero views.
Then I've also seen, I studied his channel.
I was literally trying to figure out how come he got 160,000 views on this video, but his
very next video only got 2,000 views.
Then the next video after that got 800 views.
I literally just, this morning, I was literally just rewatching that video and then watching
his other videos.
Then I was like, once I got stumped, I browsed YouTube because right now I'm training my,
there's a whole, okay, I'm going to go on a little side tangent, but over the summer,
I would stop watching YouTube, but every once in a while I would allow myself to peek at
the homepage and then it would always change my life because the algorithm knows exactly
what I need to see.
I decided that YouTube was terrible.
It was bad.
I cut out YouTube completely.
Then just the other week, I started watching it again because my mentor sent me a video
saying why you should watch it.
I agreed.
Then just yesterday when I went to the park, I talked to my friend and I literally said
that the YouTube algorithm is literally the most powerful tool in the history of mankind.
That thing, if you remember back in summer, we would only look at it every once a week
or maybe once a month or once every other day.
I don't know, but we would just look at it and in that one homepage, it would give us
the exact answers and the exact things that we needed.
It's stupid not to utilize this amazing tool.
It's literally the most powerful tool ever created in mankind.
I'm not even exaggerating.
Now I'm starting to actually train my YouTube algorithm to give me the things that I need.
That's why as I'm studying Hoff, I'm studying his most popular video.
Once I get stumped, I'm writing all this stuff down in a Google Docs and I get stumped.
I'm like, how is this video better than this one?
Then I go onto YouTube and I look at the feed and it gives me a bunch of storytelling videos
and a bunch of videos.
I watch it because I'm training it to teach me how to be a YouTuber.
I watch the videos and I probably watch four videos.
I go watch a video, take notes, and then I go back to the Hoff video and I take more
notes and then I basically apply what I learned from that video by watching the Hoff video.
Then I go back and forth.
It takes probably like three hours of this.
I go back and forth and I come up with a lot of different notes.
What I came to the conclusion was he just had a great story to tell.
He had 170,000 views.
The camera quality was terrible, so there's no excuse for camera quality.
That's why I'm not going to worry about my monitor.
He literally just sat in his bedroom, so the environment doesn't really matter.
That's why I don't care about showing the ceiling and all these lights.
Then I did notice that he was dressed fairly well.
He looked good in the video.
He had good, his hair was done well, and then he was wearing a nice sweatshirt that fit
well on him and looked good on him.
Those things were good.
Then I was like, he was doing a lot of this stuff in his other bad video.
What's the difference?
I haven't yet come to the conclusion, but there's one theory.
It's either the video was very, the idea was good.
Maybe that is why.
Then there's another reason.
The actual execution of the video, of his best one, he literally said, two weeks ago,
I was in a rut.
He was like, two weeks ago, I was in a rut.
He leaned in, and he literally, within the first three seconds, he revealed the actual
purpose of the video.
Then he stepped back for a little bit and said, a rut is basically where you don't do the
things you should be doing.
He went on and straight away, within 10 seconds, he started telling a story.
He started telling a story right from the beginning by saying three weeks ago I was
in a rut, but he actually started the story within nine seconds.
He also, his story was told very well.
It had surprise.
He basically said, I was laying in my bed, scrolling mindlessly on TikTok, and then I
decided to sit on the floor.
Sounds strange, right?
I started to sit on the floor.
Now I'm still scrolling through TikTok, but at least I changed my environment.
I noticed the whole time, he was narrating very well.
He was giving his inner monologue.
He was basically making the story very relatable by narrating his inner monologue that everyone
experiences, all of the negative emotions, negative sayings that their minds are telling
them to do.
I realized that he was narrating his inner monologue very well.
It was a very relatable story.
Then the whole story had two journeys, which is perfect because I've heard of the journey
of transformation and the journey of accomplishment many times in many different books and many
different YouTube videos.
He had two journeys, the journey from point A to B, which was from his bed, onto his computer
to start working.
The journey of transformation, the emotional journey, was him, his inner monologue, what
was going on in his mind, how he grew, and he literally just stared at a wall for 30
minutes, and then stared at a blank document for five minutes.
This is the journey of transformation.
He was just telling him, he was narrating every step of the way, which I really think
captivated me.
The way he was telling the story also really worked out very well.
He was saying he would just start changing tones a lot.
Then he would be like, sounds strange, right?
He would give narrations.
This channel, even though it's like 3,000 subscribers, I have this thing where I like
to study the end product.
Why study a channel with 3,000 subscribers when you can study Mr. Beast with 300 million
subscribers?
Because it's a lot more applicable.
I realized that there's no point in me studying Mr. Beast's videos because I don't have the
budget, so I can't do nearly as much stuff as he is, and he's in a completely different
niche.
He's entertaining people, and he has the fast-paced videos.
That's not the type of videos I want to create.
Those are the types of videos I was creating, which didn't do well because I was creating
those for the wrong person.
I realized that my dream customer did not want to see those videos.
He wanted to see the long-form storytelling videos.
The conclusion I came to amongst all of this was I could have studied Hoff.
Hoff, his channel is literally the best study material for me that I've found so far because
he has a channel just like mine, where he had a bunch of videos.
They didn't really perform that well, like less than 1,000 views, and then all of a sudden
he blew up and he got 167,000 views in one video, and then he fell off.
He had one video that was perfectly crafted, but then the rest of the videos were not.
There's definitely a subtle difference that makes all of the difference in the video between
the best one and all of his other ones.
That's why studying Hoff is literally the best study material for me at this moment.
The conclusion that I came to amongst all of this stuff is the same exact conclusion
I came to yesterday and the week before and the month before.
Actually maybe not the month before, but same exact conclusion is go all in on storytelling
and to wrap, like to go full circle to where I was talking about how my mentor said that
I have to figure out how I'm different.
How am I going to stand out from the crowd, from all the masses?
I just become the best storyteller because I realized that another big difference between
Hoff's best video, and I actually didn't check his other videos to see if he did not do this,
but in Hoff's best video he said he only told a story.
He basically, his time stamps went like this.
Story, moral of the story.
So the first 80% of the video was him telling a story and then the last 20% was just the
moral of the story and he did not tell the viewer what to do.
He did not say sit at a wall, sit in front of a wall and stare at a wall.
Even though the video was literally the purpose of the video was to get the viewer to stare
at a wall.
He didn't say that, yet he probably caused hundreds of people, thousands of people to
sit and stare at a wall, even though he didn't tell anyone to do that.
Why?
It's because he influenced them because he told them a great story.
In the past, I have heard thousands of stories that have influenced me weeks, days, or months
later.
Because you remember stories, you don't remember, or at least if you do remember someone telling
you to do something, you are much less likely to do it because they did not influence you
to do it.
It's all about influencing someone to do it because you're not going to be able to, like,
you have zero influence if you tell them.
The way you influence is by saying a story because when you tell a story, you're basically
holding up a mirror in front of someone and saying, oh, look, look how this relates to
your life.
Like, Hoff's video was so great because it was relatable.
Like everyone watching that video has done this at one point in their life.
They lay, they wake up in the morning and they're laying in bed and they reach for their phone
and they're in the trap.
They're just mindlessly scrolling.
They are in the trap.
And Hoff told that story.
It was relatable.
So he was holding up a mirror in front of them and then he continued the story and told
them exactly what he did to solve it, his journey.
He literally just sat on the floor and continued to scroll.
That was the first step.
And then he got rid of his phone and stared at a wall.
That was the second step.
And then he got up after 30 minutes because the boredom was so painful he needed to take
action on his work.
He basically tricked himself to go from highly saturated, highly dopamine watching TikTok
to lower dopamine watching TikTok on the floor to even lower dopamine staring at a wall.
Extreme boredom staring at a wall.
And then because of this extreme boredom, now he had a desire to actually take action
and start working.
So the dopamine from the TikTok started going down and the desire to take action on his
work started going up.
And then it hit a tipping point and then it started getting so strong that he literally
had to take action.
That is what he had to do.
He was so bored he just wanted to take action now.
And so he did.
So that's the influence.
That's the whole story.
So that's exactly what I'm practicing, influence and storytelling.