How to Make Money Online

hey friends welcome back to the channel today i'm joined by my very good friend david perrell david how are you doing that's me i'm doing well um thanks luther thanks for coming on the channel so basically what we're gonna do is that david and i have both built uh multi-million dollar businesses off the back of building an audience which we started completely from scratch but you've done it in the realm of writing through twitter newsletters and blog and youtube for you and i've done it through youtube through the domain of video and now you're dabbling in youtube and i'm dabbing and writing but really try to take your territory man exactly so you're the writing guy i'm the youtube guy but we've kind of done that same path and we started around about possibly around the same time 2017 2016 yeah around that time complete beginners we did not have an audience beforehand and so in this video we kind of want to break down the five stages of going from absolutely nothing to then having a big profitable business on the other end so we're going to be talking about starting out and kind of pros and cons of writing versus youtube and how easy it is to start love writing versus youtube we're going to talk about how to get better at the craft writing in youtube we're going to talk about how to grow the audience and how that is you know tips on each platform and how that's different between writing and youtube we're going to talk about transitioning an audience from a public platform like twitter and youtube onto private platforms like an email list and blog and finally we're going to talk about monetizing and basically what we're trying to do is give you that road map which both david and i have sort of followed in parallel uh just across these different platforms so if you've been thinking of building an audience or if you're further along that path hopefully you'll get some value out of this video and us sharing the tips that have worked for us because to be honest a lot of these tips even if you're a youtuber it's really helpful to know what a writer does to grow and similarly if you're a writer it might be useful to know what a youtuber does to grow their audience how does that sound let's do it fantastic so let's start with starting out for the first time now i suspect that starting out as a writer is probably easier than starting out as a youtuber i think so because the thing about writing is it doesn't cost anything so if like when i did youtube i'd get cameras and mics and lights and all this sort of stuff but writing you can just go to a coffee shop and just get to work exactly and so like uh what sort of tips would you have for someone who's just starting out like what should they be doing as like their first few steps if they're like cool i want to build an audience online and i'm going to do it through the writing path look i'll tell you what i did so i say write every single day and set like a 60 minute timer and make sure that you show up every single day it's like working out go to the gym and actually when i started working out what i did was i said i'm gonna go for 30 minutes every single day and i did for many years and so i tried to do the same thing with writing and if you can do that it fits in with your schedule do that and just show up and write consistently but one of the things i would say is give yourself a forcing function to publish regularly to because that's then going to improve the quality of what you actually produce and how often would you suggest a beginner publishers stuff start with once a month i think once a week is ideal but once a month is good and commit to that i know it's hard i know it can be scary but once a month just follow that path amazing and what sort of platforms should a complete beginner be trying to build their audience on well i think it depends on what you're doing i think if you're interested in ideas which i think is where we can focus i say focus on twitter twitter is the internet's home for ideas and it's a place where you can easily get distribution and one of the things you can do is you can have little screenshot essays i do this all the time yeah and so what i'll do is i'll write something that's like two three four hundred words and i'll take a screenshot draw a little purple line around it and then i'll just share it on twitter and just watch how people respond to it and then if something does well then i just sort of follow that idea i'm like ah that idea interests people i'm gonna take a mental note of that and then maybe write about it more in the future amazing and how do you figure out what you first want to write about like where would you start let's say you're a beginner you've got all these different things you're interested in like oh have all these interests like how do i know what to write about well i'd be interested to know what you say about that for youtube but i think one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is they don't start because they're not 100 certain about what it is that they want to write about and the thing that i would do is often maybe you've been working in an industry for a while you've been passionate about something for many years if that's the case you know what to write about but also i didn't know what to write about when i started not at all and so whenever i talk to reddit passage students one of the things i'll say is just start writing have good conversations around your writing see what's beginning to resonate and then double down on the intersection of what resonates with you and what's fun to write about and piques your curiosity and then also what resonates with other people how about for youtube how's that yeah yeah so i think for youtube starting out is a lot harder than starting out with writing and that's generally why whenever someone asks me oh how do you build an audience how should i get started as a complete beginner what i say is actually you should start by writing and that you know i actually started writing a year and a half two years before i first started on youtube and i think if i hadn't started my blog and started writing articles on that initially i just published maybe like once a month ish roughly probably less frequently than that because i was a bit of a waste man but if i hadn't started the blog i wouldn't have started the youtube channel because starting the blog was what gave me that push that i needed to be okay with the idea of putting myself out there online but what do i do if like i don't know i want to make youtube videos i want to be a youtuber i love youtube and i want to start doing that but i just don't know what knowledge i have that is worth hearing and i just don't know what i want to make videos about yeah so this is the question we get all the time in our in our youtuber academy there's there's no easy answer it's a bunch of it depends but one framework that i like which we talked about in our podcast is this idea of architect versus archaeologist yeah um so for example an architect is someone who plans everything out and before they before they before the builder lays a single brick the architect has got all of the plans and they know exactly what they're doing on the other hand you have the archaeologists and the archaeologist is someone who like you know they'll think okay that area sounds promising and they're gonna dig they're gonna do the work they're gonna make the videos they're gonna keep on digging and most of those things are going to lead to dead ends but occasionally they might stumble across something that where they're like oh this is interesting i'm going to dig here and once they dig they zoom in more and they keep on digging and i think for most people starting out on youtube being an archaeologist is the way to go once you are already good at making videos then you can be an architect you can do all the market research you can research your niche you can do all of that business type stuff as an architect but for most people my advice is just start making videos about whatever interests you and then once you get to the point where you know how to make a good video at that point you can start thinking more about the strategy and about the nation about like the market and i think this is a good transition into what it's gonna take to get better at the craft i think when you're starting a craft the most important thing is to do the craft and anything that is taking you away from actually doing the craft is gonna be sub-optimal even if that's what all the gurus and all the experts say is like the thing to do yeah no exactly i think you have a nice phrase which is uh imitate then innovate yes um there's another one sort of get going and then and then get good yeah it's all you know the thing that i always preach is that uh quantity is more important than quality at the start and once you get good at that point you switch to quality rather than quantity totally so there's that parable of the pottery class where you know this pottery teacher split that class into into two segments and uh one half the class was told to make a single pot in 30 days so just one pot and the other half of the class was told to make a pot every day for 30 days so they make they made 30 pots and at the end there was a bunch of judges and they judged the quality of the pots and every single one of the top pots came from the quantity group rather than the quality group and i think getting better at a thing often it is just about putting in the reps while also having a little bit of a mind on like marginal improvement over time it's not like the biggest mistake i see from our youtube academy students is this sense of like perfectionism that oh this video needs to be good and if it's not good i'm not going to publish it whereas the way we think of it like the formula that we use is like okay at level one you're just focused on making one video at a time just do everything that it can you can you can't optimize for that at level two do whatever you can to optimize for making one video a week and you know lower the friction do batch filming do whatever it takes just one video a week that's all you need to do once you're comfortable with one video a week at that point you think about making one good video a week so until you're level three you don't even need to worry about the quality at all you just need to focus on the quantity focus on the consistency focusing on making that making that content because i think the thing with youtube and this is probably true of writing as well like there are a lot of skills like for youtube you need to know how to public speak how to write how to do thumbnail how to do titles how to edit how to speak on a camera how to be confident how to be you know engaging all that kind of stuff and you just don't learn that like these are not skills we have by default they're skills that it takes tons and tons and tons of reps of just making bad videos to get good and once you're good at that point you can start thinking strategically and start like you know optimizing all the little things yeah so the other thing that you can do to get better at the craft is pay attention to how people compliment you and this will happen so when people talk about your writing they'll end up saying things about your work we're like huh i didn't recognize that and listen to the things where they'll give you a comment you're like yeah that's actually the writer that i would want to be and begin to cultivate that and then as you do that that skill will become honed and refined and will become a bigger part of your style because i think that that's what we're trying to get to you know i would say style is your personality on the page and we all know that we have a given personality and that takes a long time to refine but you want to do the same thing but do it intentionally with writing and you do that by paying attention to compliments that you get where people are saying this is why i like your work and double down on that yeah it was exactly the same thing on on youtube so for me i started out fairly fairly niche started out giving advice to medical students uh who were applying applying to medical school and then i would look at the i would look at the comments oh this was really helpful i liked how you did that thing i was like oh cool maybe i'll do more of that thing oh this was really helpful i'd love to see a video where you talk about how you studied for exams while doing youtube oh interesting oh this is really helpful i saw that you were using an ipad you know how do you take notes on your ipad i was like cool i'll make a video about how to take notes on my ipad so i think for me was like recognizing the compliments but also recognizing what content ideas the audience was giving to me so that i knew that videos i was making were actually helping people one of the frameworks that we use in terms of getting feedback and one of the things that you can do is ask people in your life for feedback early on my mom edited a lot of my work but then later on it was different readers who even when i only had a couple hundred subscribers they would reach out and i would say hey can you help me edit i would say can you tell me five things and i follow the acronym cribs c for confusing r for repeated i for insightful b for boring and s for surprising and among those five things i could figure out hey this is what i should do more of this is what i want to do less of because whenever somebody tells you hey this is confusing you just rewrite it if something says this is repeated well then delete it if somebody says this is insightful double down on it something is boring delete it and if something is surprising sort of build up to that create suspense for that moment sort of like a horror movie or something and so i like that cribs framework confusing repeated insightful boring and surprising because anybody who edits your work can instantly understand what that means nice yeah i i think that's one of the things that writing really has going for it that you can actually get really good feedback by sending us sending a sending a piece sending an article to other people to get feedback on that specific thing the issue with youtube is that because like it's it's very hard to get specific feedback on a video and it's very hard for that specific feedback to be useful so generally the way i think of improving on videos is don't worry too much about this video think about the next one and so you publish the video you can like depending on what your numbers are you can look at the analytics you can see the comments you can generally get a feel for what bits of the video resonated what bits of the video didn't resonate and you can use that to try and improve slightly for the next time but at the same time i think there is a danger in you know one thing i tried to do in the early days was to be like every video is going to be better than the last and that is completely unsustainable you can just get you caught in a state of paralysis with that and so like one thing that i i had is that i never had goals for my channel other than i just want to make one or two videos every week and i'm gonna do this for a few years and i'm gonna see what happens and hope for the best and slowly try and improve over time how did you think about cultivating inspirations like were there different channels that you were following or were you more inspired by people outside of the world of youtube what did you do there yeah so on youtube so i actually spent a bunch of time on twitter and on youtube so uh and and reading books and listening to podcasts so uh essentially anytime something would resonate with me or i was learning something interesting i would be like oh okay can i make a video where i document this and i really like garyvee's concept of document don't create what does he mean by that so what he means by that is that just document the things you're doing already document the things you're already learning don't think about trying to create new content because like even now 90 of the videos on my channel which is doing reasonably well are documenting the process of something this video we're doing now is both of us documenting and just sharing advice on a thing that we've already done it's not like we're trying to do comedy skits or like at least at least for me on youtube i'm i'm almost never trying to create something completely original do you know the idea of sell your sawdust oh yeah it's sort of like that you know it's like what are the things you're already doing and then how do you take that and turn it into something useful one of the things that i've done in my writing is i try to be very sensitive to when i'm reading a writer whose work i really admire i just stop and i say okay in addition to these ideas being interesting what can i take from the way that the writing is constructed and why is this moving me yeah and one of the things i do is i have a framework that we teach and write a passage it's called pop writing and so what pop writing is is it's personal observational and playful those are the three pillars what personal writing is is it's ideas that touch the heartstrings or talk about that writer they sort of reveal something about themselves observational writing is something that is making good observations in the world and playful writing is something that has some some personality it's got some flavor it's got some fun and if you can have writing that is personal observational and playful if it definitely if you have two or three but if you have all three that tends to be very good writing and so what i'll do is i am good at observational writing i'm not as good at personal and playful and so i'll read different writers and try to identify what allows them to do well and then i'll try to bring that in to my writing and just in the act of thinking about it i improve i don't actually need to like do drills or anything like that because that's not my style yeah yeah i think that personal observational playful really applies to youtube as well i think the two things that i'm good at personally are personal and playful so kind of opposite to you whereas i'm pretty bad at observational but i find that in videos where i'm saying something like sharing a personal anecdote or kind of condensing a lot of personal experience into a single video like i had a video go viral last year how i type really fast 156 words you do type really fast i was actually just watching that it's crazy um but that's a skill that i've been honing for the last 14 years of my life and so all of that personal experience condensed into one video is going to make it more personal like hey here are the things that work for me maybe they'll work for you and playful as well it kind of depends on your vibe there's a nice phrase that we i like called uh which is that your vibe attracts your tribe and so on this channel i i like to be a little bit light-hearted we our whole setup is like light mode rather than dark mode i try and have a bit of banter here and there use colorful things colorful keyboards like all these things just add a little touch of kind of fun into it whereas other youtubers their brand might be a little bit more serious a little bit less fun so it kind of depends on what sort of brand you want to cultivate and how you can then improve your videos to and recognize that that that's a subjective thing but that's that's kind of where you're trying to get to the other thing to talk about is the idea of like unfair advantages and i think this is really important if you're if you're on youtube as well like yes there is a sense of you know just publish videos see what happens but there's also an a big element of strategizing like what are the things that i'm good at what are the things i'm interested in what are the things the market or the audience wants and potentially what are the things i could potentially monetize later and if you can find something that's at the intersection of i'm personally interested in this i'm good at talking about this or good at the thing and the audience seems to want it that is when you get that true sort of creator audience fit and then things really start to take off whereas for me i felt like you know i think how did that show up in your life like when you were identifying those unfair advantages and how can we learn to identify ours yeah so i think i think the thing with unfair advantages is that there's a miles framework that some friends of mine who wrote a book called the unfair advantage which is just over there uh they use they use the miles framework so that is money intelligence and insight location and luck uh expertise and skills skills or status or something like that that's like one framework for it for me it was like it was more of an intuitive thing of recognizing that okay i've got an unfair advantage of the cambridge university medical student brand name and i have the unfair advantage that i had a business that was making money so i could invest in camera gear early on and so those two things i was like okay how can i take advantage of the brand name that i've got and how can i kind of really ramp up the production value so this seems really high quality compared to other student vlogs led me down into the thing of okay let me give advice to medical students where the brand name is helpful if i was i don't know teaching guitar the fact that i'm a cambridge university medical student is completely irrelevant no one cares but if i'm helping kids get into med school it suddenly becomes a useful thing one of the things that i have is my unfair advantage is i paid attention a lot to like what comes naturally to me but it's hard for other people you know naval ravicon has a great line he says do what looks like work to others but feels like play to you and for me i love ideas i have a ton of energy and i get really excited about things and so having observations about the world and going out doing things and then wanting to talk about those things all i needed to do was just go one tiny step more and just put it onto the page and then we were talking earlier about compliments compliments lead to competence and so what ends up happening is once you get those compliments you get some momentum and you double down on those things and then eventually you become competent at whatever it is that you're doing and so i really just paid attention to like what are the super david things and no matter how weird they are let me find a way to double down on that and then use it to get better at my craft sweet so i guess like overall if we're summarizing this idea of how do you get better at your thing i think part of it is you just kind of get better at doing the thing itself so for example getting feedback on your writing doing more of it doing more videos trying to incorporate more editing flair trying to think about the branding but then there's also an element of strategy and that brings us nicely onto part number three which is how do you actually grow your audience that's the big question yeah so what's it like for a writer there's a lot of ways to think about this but i do think you want to ride a wave and having a wave can make growing an audience a lot easier for you so i think that there's a couple ways to think about a wave and i would say what you could do is you could do a wave of ideas you could do a wave of people or you could do a wave of a trend and so a wave and a of an idea is you can summarize that idea and so often that happens through through a book and you can summarize whatever that principle is that's the first thing and there's so many options there then you have a wave of people one of the things that i looked for was who are some big names who will promote my work and then how do i write things that they'll actually be interested in so a huge influence on my life was an economist named tyler cowan and tyler has shared a lot of my work on his blog marginal revolution which is the world's biggest economics blog and because he was sharing my work what ended up happening was i got a lot of reach and distribution and then the third option is you can ride a trend so i think that i've rode the trend of writing online then whatever it is there are certain technological trends ways that society is changing and so if you can focus on an idea a person or a trend you can use that to then grow your audience nice that's a really good framework i really like that i just made it out fantastic it's so good incredible um yeah like the way i think of it on on youtube is like what once you have gotten good at making a video you can actually do all those things as well so you can chase trends that's how a lot of people do it you know reaction to tv shows when squid game was coming up loads of channels blew up off the back of that when like among us was a thing actually that's really good remember mr beast when he published i know it's mr beast i know that's kind of unrelatable but he's really good at this and he made that video about squid games which was like the fastest distributing youtube video ever that i think is very indicative of how the internet works and how to build an audience yeah so i think like trends is one way of doing it on youtube the other way of doing it is actually looking at channels that are similar to yours seeing what videos have done disproportionately well for them like what are their top most viewed videos and is there a way that i can kind of do a similar video if i'm doing that if i'm stealing an idea from someone else i will make a point to not watch their video i literally just take the idea so for example i remember there was one video called how i take notes on my ipad pro as an engineering student that had like a million views and the channel had like 20 000 subscribers so i was like damn okay this video has done like 50 times greater than their subscriber count if my numbers are right therefore what if i do a video called how i take notes on my ipad as a medical student and that video has ended up was the first one that really went viral for us and is now on like five million views or something and that video is the gift that keeps on giving so i think there are intelligent ways to do market research and to think about strategy and some people are like oh but like originality but like really you know there's a great book by austin cleon called steel like an artist which is where he basically makes the point that nothing out there is original everything is just a remix of something else and so when you worry too much about trying to be original you end up actually not being particularly useful whereas if you focus on being useful like what can i add to this what can i do in my own way that's useful to other people at that point originality doesn't really matter and there's a quote that i really like i can't remember who's from but it's it's like there there are no unique messages there are only unique messengers and so you don't need to worry too much like the the nice thing about youtube is that there's no way for me to copy another person's video i will always by default be doing it my own way because i am different to them and i think just leaning into that and recognizing that just because something else exists out there that that does not mean you can't make that video one of the things that i always try to do is just add something so i think that trying to begin with this deal like an artist framework is a great place to start it's not a place where i try to end so what i do is i follow a framework called imitate then innovate and what i'll often do is i'll take an existing idea and i'll try to make sense of it i'll try to say what's missing from this and what's missing ends up being the originality that i bring and so the most viral article i've ever written was called peter thiel's religion and peter thiel is a very famous investor and i saw how everybody knew how his ideas were influenced by this philosopher named renee gerard but what happened was i saw that his ideas were very influenced by christianity and that was sort of what i added but i started off that piece by just trying to summarize his ideas with rene gerard and by writing new things were revealed to me that then i could add something to the picture and so i do always strive to end with originality but i never insist on starting with originality yeah that's really good i think i think also so the way that i do it on youtube is if i'm ever like summarizing a book for example it will never just be a summary of the book it will also it'll always be like a personal reflection on the summary of the book right so even if i'm just summarizing a book where you know every every section of the video i can say and here's how i personally applied this idea in my life i think that automatically adds something to it in in a way where it's it's documenting not creating you know what we could actually apply the pop framework to this that we were talking about earlier personal observational and playful where you can add a personal element which is what you've done there i'm going to summarize a book but do it in a personal way that's how i can add my originality i can have an observational way of looking at things which is i'm looking deeper into whatever that thing is and i'm finding something within that thing that other people aren't seeing and then there's an element of playfulness and i think this is what a lot of youtubers do really well is they'll take serious ideas and then they'll add an element of playfulness and fun and then they don't need to create anything new they're just adding a new flair or a new personality to whatever that is and so you go personal observational playful and then you can get your originality nice uh one thing i wanna talk about was the idea of distribution now i think here here's where like i think writing versus youtube differs a bit very different here youtube has distribution built in like there is the youtube algorithm which is designed to surface the right video to the right person at the right time and if you're making a video that is genuinely good and resonating with people by by which basically i mean people are clicking on it and people are watching it for a long time then the algorithm is just by default going to promote it whereas how does distribution work in the world of writers i know a lot of people are like oh i've started a blog but like how is anyone going to find it like you know that kind of vibe so i have a framework called the public to private bridge where you want to find your audience on public platforms but then build your audience on private platforms so what's the difference so public platforms are places like social media and what you have is they're free and they have these algorithms where good things are really promoted they spread like wildfire right like a viral video on youtube can be seen millions of times but the problem with these public platforms is you don't own your audience and they're mediated by an algorithm so if you then want to reach your audience it can be hard and so what you want to do is you want to transfer people you want to find them on the public platforms but then get them to engage with your private platforms and a private platform could be something like email what i love about email is if i want to reach someone on my email list there's no algorithm that's mediating that i know that that's going to land in their inbox and there's a line in business that says the money is in the list and it's because when somebody signs up for your email list now you can reach out to them with no issues and so i always find people for me it's been on twitter or on youtube increasingly but then i'm saying hey sign up for my email list so that i can reach them the public to private bridge yeah and i think that's a place where kind of both of us started out parallel you starting on twitter and blogging me starting on youtube and we converged on this idea of getting people to sign up to your mailing list like these days most of the revenue in our business goes through our courses and actually most of the sales for our courses don't come from the youtube channel i even i i barely promote the course at all on youtube when it comes out instead i promote the course to the mailing list where people have opted in to get information about the course and that is automatically a far better group to market and sell a course to or whatever the product is because a they've opted into it and by by virtue of the fact they've opted into it they are probably the sort of person you're trying to market this course to i tend not to talk about my kind of 3 000 course on youtube very much because you know i know that it's completely inaccessible for the block of my audience but for the people who've chosen to sign up the mailing list makes perfect sense one of the things i would add is whenever you make it difficult for people to hear about your mailing list or to sign up for your mailing list or you don't do a good job of explaining why they should sign up for your mailing list that's like adding a toll to the bridge and the more expensive the toll the fewer people are going to drive on the bridge so what i do i talk about my mailing list but then i don't just say hey sign up for my mailing list i say i will give you a free 50-day writing series that i have spent hours working on that is all my knowledge of writing distilled and compressed and you if you just enter your email get that for free and now my pitch is so much more compelling than hey i have a mailing list i send out an email once a week sign up that's not compelling at all uh yeah and you can sign up to that by clicking the link link down below and actually i stole that idea from you and so we have like what the the email course yeah the 50 day thing next except i was in seven days because we didn't have time to do for 50 days um and that's like how we get it's like a seven day part-time youtube or a crash course email series and it's free it's got a lot of a lot of value in it it took hours and hours and hours to write but what we're hoping for is that people sign up to the mailing list to get that email course and then each of those emails gets so gives them so much value that they're like oh okay this is interesting so that when we launch our course people are more are more primed to trust us with a topic because we've already delivered value up front and i think that speaks to a broader kind of meta principle throughout all of this kind of stuff where wherever you are on the journey from like complete beginner to multi-million dollar business and beyond like really the rule of the game is to just deliver as much value as possible and garyvee has a framework called jab jab jab right hook where it's like a jab is where you're giving someone really valuable content completely for free and a right hook is when you charge the money or you try and sell them something and what garyvee often says is that he wishes he could have called his book like 20 times before the right hook because that is like the ideal ratio of free content to paid okay so at this point we've started out either as a writer or as a youtuber we've done a lot of practice put in a bunch of reps to get good at the craft then we've done some strategizing we've done some like giving loads and loads and loads of value to people to the point that we've now built an audience on these public platforms like twitter and youtube we have then gone a step further and taken that audience to our private platform like our email list and now we have the option to really ramp up the monetizing side of things and i think monetizing is also where writer versus youtuber differs quite a lot the nice thing about youtube is that it has monetization built in you you never have to sell something if you want or you can like all you have to do is just continue making videos that are adding value to the audience and because of adsense being a thing just by default you'll make money on youtube you also tend to find that once you hit about 10 20 000 subscribers you just start getting brands reaching out to you being like hey skillshare wants to sponsor a video brilliant wants to sponsor a video this random telephone brand wants to sponsor a video and you start getting those inbound opportunities quite a lot what's it like on the writing side if you're sort of building an audience on twitter and then kind of sending them to your blog i think that when it comes to monetization sometimes with the internet what people do is they treat it like this totally different world where there's like internet rules and a lot of these principles that we've been talking about are actually fairly intuitive and one of the things that happens i don't know if you've been to a conference but one of the things that happens is you'll talk to somebody and if they're really impressive like i come to you and i say hey you know i have all this expertise on youtube and hey you should do this this and that i give you a couple ideas you're like that's a pretty good idea we haven't thought about that what are you are going to say to me hey can i hire you yeah you're going to say that to me so i don't even have to sell and so that's what you want to do with your content online you want to get to a place where just like that conference the potential customer doesn't feel like you're coming at them and you're like bye bye bye bye for me you want them to come to you and basically say hey i want to buy from you and even better this is what i want and so if you have an audience and you can cultivate an attitude and a skill of listening to what people want and understanding not just their stated motivations but their implicit motivations behind what they're saying and deliver a product for that now you have all of these customers who are knocking at your door and saying i want to give you money yeah and i guess it was interesting interesting for you the first time you tweeted out about potentially starting a writing course yes what was that like yes i totally forgot about that story good idea so what i did was i was sitting on my couch and i was like you know what i'm gonna teach a thousand people to write in 2019. who's interested so just send out a tweet and at the time i don't know i had a couple thousand subscribers or a couple thousand followers on twitter and i got this uncanny flood of direct messages people from every single continent saying i would love to learn and so i just started talking to them i just said hey what are you interested in how can i help and so i was like perfect i'll do a consulting business and so i started trying to do that i was not a good consultant there's just a lot of things about that i wasn't very good at but what i realized was actually this was a really good time to start an online course business and so i started doing that and so i turned right a passage into a product and i started monetizing and over time i've raised the price and i've done a much better job of listening to what people want and then building an experience for them but what's really important is we got two multi-million dollars in revenue and i didn't spend a single cent on paid advertising not one cent because i had the audience yeah that's great i think it was similar for us when we first launched our youtuber academy i just tweeted something about it i didn't even mention it on youtube for the first two cohorts i just tweeted it and we had an avalanche of people being like oh my god this sounds great i want to sign up where do i sign up we had a few people joking oh just take my money now lol that kind of thing and i think that's what happens when you've just spent so long jabbing ie providing so much value completely for free over such a long period of time that when you do want to sell a product and you kind of a little bit tapped in into what the audience wants it just basically sells itself one of the things i would add here and this goes back to that conference metaphor is when do you know that it's the time and i would say people will start asking you yeah and you don't want to be too pushy i was at a hotel last week and this guy comes up to me and he just starts talking to me and within 20 seconds he's given me his business card what do i think i think this guy has no value to provide he is not going to be a trustworthy person and so i just left the business card on the table i'm not going to contact that guy but if we had had a conversation and he had said hey you know this these are my thoughts on this and that i said hey that's pretty interesting then i would have said do you have a business card and so you want to get to a place where you're providing enough value to people that they're asking you and once you're getting enough people asking that's when you know it's time to monetize and there's this really good book uh the minimalist entrepreneur by our mutual friend lavinia i think um where he kind of talks about this method of monetizing as being like about building an audience first and then building a product that will suit that audience whereas normally the way we think about it intuitively is oh let's build the thing first and then i will find people to buy my thing whereas if you start off by just providing loads of value doing it on public platforms like twitter and youtube transitioning them to your mailing list doing a bit of strategy just really focusing on being as helpful as you possibly can for free to thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people on the internet then when you create a product you will know exactly what they want they will tell you what they want they will be asking you for the product and then you can make it and then the audience is already primed to buy from you if that's what you want to go i'm trying to sort of summarize all this and so i would say it's this get started by sharing ideas and as you do you will learn about whatever it is that you're writing about position yourself as an expert and then because you position yourself as an expert when people come to your stuff ask them to sign up for your email list ask them to keep reading your stuff and as they do certain people who see you as an expert will say hey i would like to learn this this this and that from you once they say that start writing about those ideas eventually they'll say i'd also like to pay you for your help and that's when you begin to have a product but one of the other things that you see sometimes is as you work on something you just see a big hole in the market so the carlson brothers when they were founding stripe they saw wait this is weird it's really hard to accept payments sahil who started gumroad felt the same sort of thing he's like this business doesn't exist and he was his own first customer and so as you create you're going to see opportunities that emerge and once that happens you can start monetizing but what's so great about having an audience is at the beginning you don't need to go out and raise funding you have way less risk because you have people who already trust you and they're going to give you the benefit of the doubt if and when your first product isn't quite up to par so i guess like now both you and i are sitting here kind of with fairly profitable multi-million dollar businesses where we teach stuff where we've got teams of people like five years ago there's no way in hell you and i would have imagined that we're we're going to be sitting here and talking about this right now but it was really a case of just you know like 99.99 of all the stuff that we do is completely free we don't charge a penny for it it's just that we focus on providing as much value to the audience as much as we can adding adding a healthy dose of strategizing and improving and stuff over time such that when we get to the point of being able to monetize we then get to this point of having having these successful businesses and one of the things that i would emphasize is you were up at nights editing videos you insisted on publishing regularly i used to insist on writing for 90 minutes every single day and for something like five years i publish something basically every single day whether that was a tweet or an article i've been doing newsletters and i haven't missed the newsletter in a couple years now that isn't to say that this is impossible because you know we've we've been able to do it but it requires a certain amount of discipline and consistency but what i will say with that is having multi-million dollar businesses that we can run from anywhere in the world and having the freedom to explore ideas for a living is the gift that makes that hard work worth doing yeah i think that's fantastic stuff and i think like often often people ask me like how how did you sustain the motivation and the momentum to keep on pushing out those videos even when you didn't have an audience and even when you weren't making any money and the thing i always come back to is that it just it was fun like when you find something that you're doing for the intrinsic joy of doing it and you find ways to make it fun like trying to get a little bit better trying to incorporate these editing tricks trying to be like oh how can i speak on camera a bit differently next time what elements of peter mckinnon or matt deville can incorporate into my videos that's all the stuff that makes it super fun and so after work when i'd be sitting on my computer editing and my housemate would be like why do you work all the time to me it would just seem a little bit of an unusual question because when you just enjoy that thing so much it really genuinely doesn't feel like work yes there are aspects of it that do and sometimes you do have to grind through the boredom of it but for the most part the more you can enjoy the thing for its own sake rather than once i become a millionaire then i'll have fun the more you can enjoy intrinsically for the joy of the activity itself the more the easier it is to sustain this habit over time and to enjoy the journey along the way so i think that's a good place to end this david thank you so much for joining uh if you guys liked this you should definitely check out our two and a half hour long podcast episode on my deep dive channel that'll be linked over there where we explore all of this stuff in so much more detail thank you so much for watching hit the subscribe button check out david links in the video description and i'll see in the next video bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 544,369

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali abdal, How to Make Money Online - Writing vs YouTube, Writing vs YouTube, How to make money online writing, how to make money online with youtube, How to make money on YouTube, how to make money online, make money online, make money from home, ways to make money online, how to earn money online, best ways to make money, how to start a blog, start a blog, David Perell, david perell write of passage, write of passage, make money online 2022

Id: COhm-736828

Length: 37min 44sec (2264 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022