The "Guru" Advice doesn't work

Your weekly YouTube education in five minutes

Author

Johnathon Eva
January 27, 2025

What to Watch:

Creator - Kenneth Bender

In this video Kenneth Bender breaks down some of the myths that can creep into the creator space. With my content, and with other YouTube thought leaders it’s always important to take a step back, and think about how they got there. The same thing that works to get 100,000 views, may not be the thing that works to get 1,000 views.

Packaging Breakdown

I’ve talked over and over again about simplicity, But sometimes it doesn’t work. This thumbnail displays a VERY simple concept, but there is something missing. Just because you make something simple doesn’t mean to make it BORING. There’s simply not enough going on here. Not enough to capture the eye. Simple is not the same as not interesting.

Creator - Amit Kumar

Try THIS

Creator - Amit Kumar

In this example we have the SAME style of photograph. They are nearly identical in presentation. Video length is similar, even the titles are similar. But this one is a 100x outlier. Why? It draws the eye. And this is what I mean when I say that it’s exponential gains. A 1% better thumbnail doesn’t lead to 1% more views, it can lead to 100x’s more views.

If you have questions about the concepts above, just reply with em’ I’d love to connect!

Creator’s we love

A Flourishing Place:
AFP is a channel that talks all about simple DIY home projects, and there’s more than a few things that she’s doing very right. Let’s take a look

9.8k Subs - 97 videos - Started posting seriously last year

197k views

25k views

53k views

Key Takeaways

Repeat successes: - Flourishing had a great idea, executed a great video and then repeated it. If there’s even a hint of an outlier in your performing videos, consider doubling down. Not just making the same video but taking those concepts and expanding upon them.
 
Capitalization MATTERS: - Her titles evoke emotion with the words that have the most weight behind them being capital. The word ACTUALLY here implies that there are methods out there that don’t work. These do though, so you’re going to need to click. It draws on the emotion as well of someone that’s tried a lot of methods and has never found success. She’s saying that these videos aren’t like that. They’re different.

Not over edited: Please understand that in the age of Mr. Beast it can be tempting to hyper-edit everything. And if you’ve got a younger audience, maybe you need to do this. If however, you are trying to appeal to someone in their 30s or higher, then it might be beneficial to know that you can actually INCREASES retention by having slower, more thoughtful editing.

Creator News

DigiDay just dropped an article Highlighting the four trends of the creator economy, and wouldn’t you know it - we’ve already talked about all of them in this newsletter, but there’s always room for a good refresher.

Phones with TikTok are selling for thousands. I don’t tell you this to tell you how to make a quick cash grab at a thousand bucks. I say it to tell you HOW important being on, and posting short form content is to some people.

Key Takeaway:
This means that the ability to create and upload shortform may be becoming more and more important. YouTube shorts are just one example of this but don’t neglect your community posts as an alternate means of posting valuable short form text content.

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