Reading is for rich people, you’re failing because you read too much, not because you don’t read enough..

I guess I’ve done pretty well for myself over the last 15 years, and one thing that stands out to me more than anything in the divide between those of us that build successful businesses, employ people to help us scale, etc and those that always spin their wheels is this absolutely bullshit idea that reading is the key to wealth.

Everything you could ever need to know about business, wealth, life, love etc is probably in a total of 20 books, and if we just focus on business and wealth creation, let’s call it 10 and that’s being generous.

What 10? that’s up to you really since most books that are decent say the exact same fucking thing in a different way or with different characters.

What billionaires read, or how they start their morning has absolutely NOTHING to do with you. NOTHING.

Do you know why?

Because their ability to read a book a day, meditate twice, do yoga, write in their vision journal, ALL THAT BULLSHIT came AFTER they were wealthy.

While they built their companies, they worked 7 days a week 18+ hours a day, eating shitty fast food or whatever was available, barely showering let alone meditating for two hours.

I succeeded the same way everyone else did, working like an insane person towards my goals each day. Testing, failing, learning, testing.

Sure, read Think and grow rich, read how to win friends and influence people, read the millionaire next door, read the bible or any other religious text with most of life’s lessons told as stories, even read the secret if you want some metaphysical bullshit, because whether it’s real or placebo, if you believe it, it’s real.

But then, GET. TO. FUCKING. WORK.

Stop watching bullshit artist Gary V, or Warren Buffet Talks, or running to Amazon to buy Bill Gates top 10 touching books of the year.

Bill Gates was a fucking savage for decades. There was no Gates reading list 30 years ago, I doubt he read anything that wasn’t market reports.

After 15 years I thankfully have some breathing room to read some books, post bullshit on reddit, laugh hysterically at a Gary V videos and even consider stuff like hot yoga and flotation tanks and what super-food smoothie might make my dick 10% harder and perhaps give me back a few years that I burnt off of my life building a 20 person company.

Early on I got my hands on some Jim Rohn videos at the library, your best year ever seminar or something, probably on youtube now. It was like 5 hours and it was enough to change my life. It all just made perfect sense to me.

If you can read something like think and grow rich and feel the need to consume 500 other books on the subject, you probably won’t be getting anywhere in this lifetime.

STOP READING SHIT. STOP WATCHING SHIT. Downtime is for rich people.

I get that you think a 4 hour Joe Rogan podcast talking about sending your blood and spit and shit to 50 different labs to get a full breakdown of your perfect diet, vitamin and mineral supplementation and optimal workouts and sleep time is what’s going to make you a millionaire, but I assure you it won’t.

It will just make you a really healthy person with insurmountable credit card debt.

Stem cell injections won’t make you Joe Rogan and reading Bill Gates book list won’t make you a billionaire.

Self education is mostly used as an excuse for procrastination. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are getting better by constantly trying to absorb information, not to mention the completely conflicting points of view you encounter when you choose to absorb content from an endless amount of sources.

If you want to learn sales, sell something. Reading 30 books on selling is going to give you 30 conflicting points of view, mostly by people that failed as salesman so they wrote a book talking about all the shit they never did that probably should work if someone actually had the discipline that they don’t.

….but at least they wrote a book which is worth something to them, what’s it worth to you besides a dozen hours you could have been building your business?

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/emhr0n/reading_is_for_rich_people_youre_failing_because/

What you should know about making Thumbnails for YouTube

Thumbnails are the very first thing a potential viewer sees when they’re scrolling through YouTube — and making a good first impression is crucial, or else your video will get scrolled right past.

Why am I saying this?

Because someone asked me to review THIS thumbnail today:

I mean, sure… Content must always be king. It doesn’t matter how good your titles and thumbnails are if your videos suck.

But thumbnails must be perfect. Otherwise, your awesome content won’t be seen.

Let’s take a deep dive into thumbnails:

BAD THUMBNAIL linked above is horrid because it just simply doesn’t work.

It uses too much text to describe the video
Doesn’t have image assets
Black text on a colored background doesn’t create enough contrast to stand out

On the other hand, you have the IM-A-PRO-YOUTUBER-AND-I-THINK-I-KNOW-HOW-TO-MAKE-A-GOOD-THUMBNAIL thumbnail, but guess what? he/she actually doesn’t.

I’m talking about these kind of thumbnails (I just jumped into this one):

Why is it terrible?

First of all, this kind of “thumbnail style” is all over the F**KING FEED. These thumbnails just happened to be “the new meta” or “the new industry standard” that they just don’t stand out anymore.

Take a quick look at it. And I mean like a REALLY QUICK LOOK (as if you were scrolling through the feed).

What happens is that this kind of thumbnail style uses too many visual elements that picture gets lost.

I mean, I had to look at it like 8 secs to understand that there are 4 people but they are the same 2 persons in different positions; I still don’t know where they are becuase of the white clothes and the white background; it’s good to have an emoji accompanying the picture, but it’s completely unnecesary when having already too many visual saturation and when you already have like 3 faces making expressions.

Ok… hope you get the point: sometimes less is more.

Try to keep it simple (but not TOO simple as the first example I showed you). It’s all about finding balance.

So, what is a good thumbnail then?

Well, take this one for example:

It just does a lot of things right:

it uses faces that show emotions
it asks a leading question
it uses bright colors to add contrast
it has an harmonic background

If you are one of those who prefer to go more like the IM-A-PRO-YOUTUBER-AND-I-THINK-I-KNOW-HOW-TO-MAKE-A-GOOD-THUMBNAIL kind of style… it’s ok, but remember to find the perfect balance.

You can walk that path and have a perfect thumbnail. Just look at this example:

To sum up:

Make sure your thumbnail reflects accurately what’s actually in your video
Grab attention. Remember that anyone browsing on YouTube has an almost endless amount of content options.
Focus on faces. Close up shots, especially if the faces you are using convey emotion.
Keep text to the minimum so it’s easy to read at a glance.

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/SmallYTChannel/comments/emilf5/something_you_dont_get_about_thumbnails/

The Right Way To Promote Your Videos on YouTube (that actually gets results)

Context: Not claiming to be ‘the expert’, but I gained ~1000 genuine subscribers in under 3 months, and thought this may help a few others here who are just getting started.

“Build it and they will come” – NOPE! ❌

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐞 it and they will come. ✅

If you upload a new video and wait for our almighty overlord – the YouTube algorithm – to make your video go viral, you’re gonna be waiting a long, long time.

Unless you have thousands of subscribers already, we have to get the initial ball rolling ourselves because we have to PROVE to YouTube the video is good by giving it some data (i.e. people clicking on the video, watching it, and engaging).

Firstly, you need to be advertising each video on your other social media channels, but that does NOT mean just sharing the video link. (I used to do that – big mistake).

For platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, they reallyyyy don’t like you sending their users over to YouTube, so instead write a normal text post that ‘sells’ your video, and attach the video’s thumbnail as an image. As for the actual link, drop that in the comments instead so the algorithm doesn’t restrict your post’s organic reach.

For platforms like Instagram and TikTok, your best bet is giving people a short preview of your video – and in particular, the best / most enticing part of your video! Simply cut ~30 seconds of your YouTube video into a new video file, and upload that natively to the platform you’re on. Make sure you include a call to action that the full video is in your bio link.

But, don’t stop there…

The people who will LOVE your videos have conveniently already got themselves into groups. You just have to go tell them about your content in a non-spammy way.

By this I mean, you join a relevant group/community, provide some real value (without any links) and then eventually share your video with some context of why it may be helpful/interesting for them.

Yes, this takes longer. But it’s 100% worth it.

So where are these groups filled with your ideal viewers?

Forums (search variations of your niche + the word ‘forum’ on google)
Facebook groups
Sub-reddits

And you can no doubt find other communities too with a little searching, but those 3 tend to have some of the best results.

Finally, don’t forget about promoting on YouTube itself. And I don’t mean ads…

If you’re not commenting on other channels in your niche every single day, you’re missing out. I don’t mean commenting ‘sub for sub’ or ‘come check out my videos’ – that’s obviously spam and against the rules. Instead, provide a genuinely useful or funny comment – not only will the creator appreciate that much more, in my experience those generally lead people to check out your channel much more often.

These things are fairly simple, but absolutely make a difference. Best of luck with your channel – you’ve got this!

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/emcut8/the_right_way_to_promote_your_videos_that/

YouTube Trap That You Don’t Want to Fall Into

So I fell in the trap of promoting my actual link on Instagram, Facebook and some sub-reddits. It wasn’t spam, it was always relevant to the topic, but unfortunately things like that backfire. What do I mean by backfire? Yes – I might have gotten some subscribers and nice comments, but I also had the other 90% of people click on my video link, watch 30 seconds to 1 minute, and then get off the video – which really lowered my audience retention and average view time, meaning the YouTube algorithm want even consider me in its selection.

By all means, I’m starting to recover from that with my latest uploads. I feel like I deliver interesting content for those who are interested in tech/programming or learning about the life of a Software Engineer – but obviously that’s not everyone niche and fun concept. I could add on top of that, that recently I’ve altered the style of my videos a little bit more towards the cinematography side, and even non-coders and non-tech people told me they enjoyed my content.

Now, someone in the comments mentioned about instead of a link posting your YouTube channel name. It’s a good idea, but only for those that have a distinct channel name. In my case my channel name is “Filip” but you can never find it by typing that in because there are other YouTubers called “Filip” that are more successful than me. In my case you have to type “FilipGrebowski” to find me.

Now onto the best way of promotion I have found so far – INTERACTION. Yes, comment on peoples YouTube videos in your niche, and add valuable feedback to their video. It’s great to get your channel out there and allow others to organically find it, check your content out and and most probably subscribe. There is a but, and it’s a BIG BUT. If you won’t be one of the first few people to comment when the video gets released, it highly lowers your chances for someone to actually see your comment and check your channel out, so commenting on smaller channels is something that’s usually better. I’ve created my YouTube channel not even 2 months ago, and I’m already at 550 subscribers. I try to interact a lot on the platform, and make interesting and engaging content. You have to film with an idea up ahead, how and what will make your users stay on your video and watch it till the end. I’m in the process of refining and altering my style, video editing etc. and its so far working. I already have a 220% increase in user interaction in my latest video.

9 YouTube Channels That Blew Up Last Year

In 2019 these 9 YouTuber’s blew up and here’s how they did it.

Graham Stephan

‘Graham Stephan’: As a finance YouTuber, he is one of the biggest. Probably number 3 after Dave Ramsey and Dan lok, but if you add Graham’s second channel into the mix, I would say he is bigger on YouTube than Dave Ramsey.

Unlike most of the other finance channels, his is so much more real, transparent and just plain interesting. He makes things like home loans and credit cards sound interesting and fun.

Andrei Jihk

‘Andrei Jihk’, is growing fast in the finance YouTuber world and made over $100k from YouTube in his first year, 2019. He is similar to Graham in how he does his videos, plus he used to be a professional Editor, so his video quality is really good.

Summoning Salt

‘Summoning Salt’ makes long 40 minute videos that go in insane detail of Speedrunning in different games over the decades. He is almost at 1 million subs in a year. He only posts once a month, but every video is an amazing documentary that you want to watch in its entirety even if you don’t play video games or even care about Speedrunning.

Nakey Jakey

‘Nakey jakey’ blew up in 2019. He isn’t the only one to do nostalgic videos, but he does it in a funny way with amazing personality.

I did a thing

A smaller YouTuber, ‘I did a thing’ has gotten over 700k subs in less than year. He makes high quality videos, great jokes, and is like the beautiful child mix of William Osman and You Suck at Cooking.

‘Code bullet’ and ‘Dani’

‘Code bullet’ and ‘Dani’ are both programming YouTubers that make programming games, simulations and AI funny, interesting, and just plain great to watch. They both blew up this last year.

Boffy

Another smaller YouTuber, ‘Boffy’ went from 0 to 300k subs in 2 months. He’s at like 500k now. He has quick editing, a nice voice, and some good reactions. He makes Minecraft videos. A supposedly difficult video type to crack, but he did with his unique way of doing it.

Out of Sight

One guy called “Out of Sight” has only one video with almost half a million views and I think 10K subs now. The video is not perfect by any means but people seem to enjoy and watch it. So since it already has a lot of views and comments it gets more views and comments. The guy has not released another video in I think half a year.

The thing that is the same across all these channels is that you want to finish the videos all the way through. You want to watch every video. That is what makes these channels grow. Content and engagement is king – everything else is not.

Obviously there are many more, but I don’t feel like writing all day.

How to Up Your YouTube Game and Gain Subscribers

Here’s some handy tips on how to gain more subscribers. It won’t be easy but after some hard work you’ll get there.

Follow these tips to get 1000 subscribers on YouTube.

∆ use compelling titles

how to …
the secret of/to
don’t…. until…
outcome driven (the most powerful animal)

∆ create a trailer

∆ tell the viewer to subscribe…

∆ fall in love with your fans (create what they need)

∆ interact with your audience

∆ long term consistency: keep working hard and the rest will follow through.

Here are some articles that will help:

All the best on your YouTube journey.

Here’s how I got 1000 subs in under 6 months

Recently I hit 1000 subs so I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

First let’s go over the basics:

1.) Quality Over Quantity. Your viewers don’t care about upload frequency as much as the entertainment value you provide. That doesn’t mean upload once every 3 months.

2.) Have A Schedule. You need to be consistent with uploads to remain relevant. You don’t have to upload videos every day, at the same hour but aim for once a week.

3.) Don’t Stress Deadlines. It’s ok to not meet your deadlines. If you’re a day or two late nobody will care. It’s important to communicate though.

4.) Have Social Media. This by far the most important piece to growth and I’ll explain why later.

5.) Use Custom Thumbnails. This is pretty obvious but something that I see a lot of people forgetting. Even if your content is a shit sandwich the viewer should at least think it’s a turkey sandwich until they bit into it.

So now that the basic stuff is out of the way let’s go over a little more advance stuff:

1.) Research Your Niche This will help you understand what kind of content your viewers will like.

2.) Improve Your Content This could be upgrading equipment, better editing, better story telling etc. What worked today might not work tomorrow.

3.) Research Marketing/Business If you want to improve faster, look at YouTube as a business. Your Channel is the business and your videos are the product. Business/Marketing strategies translate nicely into YouTube.

4.) Understand Social Media Marketing When you post to your social media accounts, don’t look at it as: Here’s a photo of behind the scenes, this is how my day is going, new video. Instead look at each post as quality content that has an ulterior motive. Posting generic photos with the caption “new video!” aren’t engaging. Instead post a clip of your new video and say something like “I can’t believe this happened 😂🤦‍♂️ Watch the full video on YouTube.” This will create much more engagement thus tricking the algorithm into promoting your content. But social media shouldn’t only be used to promote

5.) Build A Community Social media is a multi-use tool. You can not only promote your YouTube content but it can be a place for your viewers to engage with you. Post behind the scenes photos with captions to spark conversation, show your followers what kind of things you’re into outside of YouTube etc. This is where they can get to know you better.

6.) Network With Other YouTubers It doesn’t even need to be YouTubers, it can be Instagramers or anyone else, but part of building a community is know people who can help you/you can help. This isn’t exclusive to “shoutout for shoutout” but you can help each other improve your content through honest discussions or talk about different ideas to gain subscribers/viewers, maybe even improve your gameplay if that’s your niche, just create a symbiotic relationship with that person.

7.) Research How Others Became Successful Who’s the most successful person/channel in your niche? How did they get to where they are today? It’s important to know the history. It’s not only great inspiration but it will give you an idea on what it takes to become that person/channel.

My personal journey started a year ago. I originally wanted to be a Twitch Streamer. After doing lots of research, I came to the conclusion that Twitch wasn’t going to promote my stream so I had to promote it myself. That’s when I started learning about social media marketing. I had some experience with this but not nearly the level I needed. Before I even started streaming I spent a month growing my Instagram account. I posted content related to what my stream would be. Once I gained some followers I had my first stream. It was nice because a few people from my Instagram showed up and we had a good time. After a couple of months of streaming I hit Twitch Affiliate and realized this wasn’t for me. I continued to grow my social media accounts (Instagram and TikTok).

It was at this point I gained a decent amount of followers on TikTok. I realized that TikTok has a younger audience and my videos (Fortnite content) attract younger people. This is when I decided to capitalize on it. Making videos for Instagram and TikTok made me realize that YouTube would be a perfect fit for me. So when I posted my first official YouTube I had a decent amount of viewers. I used the same philosophy for my Twitch stream: YouTube won’t promote my videos so I have to do it myself.

Reddit has also been a good way to gain viewers but you need to be in the right subreddit. As much as I love this subreddit, a lot of people only want lambda. I get much more engagement for Fortnite related subreddits. So if you want to use Reddit, find the right subreddit.

I’m slowly transitioning into YouTube. I’ve become less active on social media as I shift my focus. I am and will always be active on my socials but there’s less stress on posting videos everyday. My attention is on making more YouTube videos. I grew my channel in less than 6 months but it took a year to build the platforms necessary to get to where I’m at today. I hope this helps you and feel free to ask any questions you may have. I’m sure I’ve left out something but these have been the main things that helped me.

If 6 months down the line you’re not at 1000 subs don’t give up. You got to remind that there’s a million other factors that come into play. Things like knowledge of marketing or editing skills or more importantly your content. All these thing and more will determine your success. Some people will catch on quick others will take some time. We all learn at different rates so don’t be discouraged if you’re not ahead of the curve. Be patient and be focused

3 Important Lessons I am Taking Into 2020 To Improve My YouTube Game

There are three lessons I’ve learned that I’m taking into 2020 and I feel like they might help some others as well!

WORK ON ONE VIDEO AT A TIME

Throughout 2019 I over-saturated myself into not doing anything. I would constantly have ideas for 3-5 videos floating around in my head and I would jump back and forth between them and scratch my head on which I should do and it would result in me never actually making ANY of them. Narrow your focus! Pick ONE video and make it! Then, when that’s done, pick another (ONE) video and make that! Which leads me into my second lesson…

NOT EVERY VIDEO IS GOING TO BE A VIRAL BANGER

One of the biggest things that held me back from creating in 2019. I constantly kept flip flopping back and forth between so many video ideas at one time because I was trying to decide which would be the most viral, which would be the biggest banger that the most people would click on and I would end up doing nothing. Don’t expect for every video to be the hottest shit, sometimes, it’s just a video and good practice… just pick something, ANYTHING! and make it.

DO SOMETHING EVERYDAY

Force yourself to do something every day!!! Whether you’re filming one segment, editing one clip or writing one paragraph of a script. Allot yourself one hour or 30min and dedicate that time to doing SOMETHING that will progress you. You can spare 30min a day and it will add up.

Obviously doing more is better, but if you struggle with motivation, start small and just make sure every day has even a little bit of progress in it.

Anyways… that’s the list! I hope it sparks some thought or motivation or helps some people.

Good luck in 2020 everybody

How to Make Your YouTube Videos Go Viral

Look for popular videos that are similar to yours. Check the source code of the top 5 videos by right clicking on each individual YouTube page (select ‘Source Code’) press CTRL+F and then type in ‘keywords’. You might have to jump to the second result by clicking the little arrow next to the search bar.

Copy and paste all keywords (tags) of each video into an empty document. Compare them and then pick 25 (not 30!) of these tags for your own video.

Make sure your description, title and thumbnail all match the most important of your tags.

Example

Tags: polygel, nail extension, nail art, nail polish, nail tutorial, nail diy, …

Title: Polygel Nail Extension Tutorial

Thumbnail: Image with Text [ POLYGEL Nail Extension DIY ]

Description: In this #diyvideo I show you how you can extend your #nails with #polygel all by yourself……

By using the same keywords/tags as your successful competitors your videos will appear next to theirs in search results and as suggested videos after their videos. Which means you’ll get at least some views. If your content is good enough and viewers keep watching your videos the YouTube algorithm will notice that and you’ll catch momentum.

5 Quick Steps to Improve Audio Quality in Audacity

I see people trying to boost audio quality in post with all these effects and layers, the truth is, you can’t improve low quality audio that much, and the more you push low quality audio, the more you distort it. so while there’s no way to get around a good mic, getting close to the mic, and acoustically treating the room, here’s what I do in Audacity after spending far too much time researching this.

Click the link here to follow along https://imgur.com/GJEJb3R

View post on imgur.com

Audacity

Step 1, noise reduction.

So after I record, I get 10 seconds of silence, then normalize that section to 0db, this shows other background noises you otherwise couldn’t see, so undo the normalize and just select the true background noise, as the cleaner the noise reduction sample, the less it will distort your audio.

Step 2, equalization.

people just like to add a base and treble boost and move on, however the human voice only goes down to about 100Hz, so I do a little base and treble boost as shown, then do a high pass. this removes some of the boomy-ness and muddiness from your audio.

Step 3, compressor

As shown

Step 4, normalize to 0db

I do this because only the peaks of your audio will hit 0db, leaving a good regular speaking volume

Step 5, hard limit to -3 as shown

Unless you’re a professional, less is more, so give these a shot and let me know how you go.

WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN STARTING A YOUTUBE CHANNEL!

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comments/ehs6yb/what_not_to_do_when_starting_a_channel/

I have been posting a few things on this site for a little while and although my stance is very clear on the whole subject, I continuously get asked if I will “Sub4Sub”.

Please let me explain to you why you should not ever get mixed up in the whole “Sub4Sub” illusion.

As many of you already understand and avoid this, please bare in mind many people still think this is the way to grow a Channel so please excuse me if you are reading this and it doesn’t apply to you.

—–

The most severe case I’ve seen on YouTube so far was a Channel with 35,000 Subscribers, hitting 90-110 Views per video.

Myself, at the time was hitting 175-185 Views per video at 250 Subscribers.

People who Subscribe to your Channel just to get you to Subscribe back will never watch your videos, engage in anyway or help you grow. They have a very negative impact, giving you the illusion your Channel is growing yet your engagement % and View count doesn’t seem to be reflecting how many Subscribers you have.

So you do what most YouTubers do when troubleshooting whats going wrong, you check out the analytics, where once again, due to the people “Subscribing” to you, the analytics are skewed.

A few months down the line your Subscriber count drops over night… this has you worried, WTF has happened? – YouTube regularly removes Subscriptions to Channels when said Subscriber does not view the content or engage, is a dummy account or is completely inactive. – This can be very disheartening i’m sure and I see many of you on here asking why you’ve lost 50% of your Subscribers and why your views are only 1-3% of your Subscriber count (as an example).

—–

Please do not engage with “Sub4Sub” requests. – I completely understand that its absolutely awesome to see that Subscriber count go up but if they are what I call “Empty Subs” it’s nothing but a fake number.

Genuine content creators let the Subscribers come naturally.

Those who only care about numbers jump into the “Sub4Sub” posts.

I’m very happy to say after the recent wave inactive removals by YouTube I didn’t lose a single Subscriber as I rejected any offers of “Sub4Sub” and if I did lose Subscribers, I would be very happy that YouTube wiped away the inactives and left me with the real number of fans I have to create for and removes any incorrect data from my analytics.

What are your thoughts, should you Subscribe to someones Channel just to get them to Subscribe to yours?