Everything You Need to Know About 100 Days of YouTube | the Dunning Kruger effect Mount Stupid & Valley of Despair

Here’s an overview on my 100 days of YouTube, including a breakdown on the Dunning Kruger effect Mount Stupid & Valley of Despair. Enjoy!

Links Mentioned In This Video:

Rich’s YouTube Resource Guide (sign up to access a copy) – https://teachingmillionaires.com/recommends/youtube-resources
Sign Up for the Waitlist for Rich’s LLC Concierge Service – https://teachingmillionaires.com/waitlist
Sign Up for Rich’s Email List to Get Important Updates – https://teachingmillionaires.com/news
Subscribe to Rich’s YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLQhG0U7kfHPPC4JMeETLig?sub_confirmation=1
Join Rich’s Private Facebook Community – https://www.facebook.com/groups/teachingmillionaires
Book a One-on-One Consultant Call with Rich – https://teachingmillionaires.com/work-with-me

[elementor-template id=”4878″]

Video Transcript:

You read that title correctly. 100 days on YouTube, I have climbed Mount stupid and I’m currently in the valley of despair. Now don’t worry if you don’t get the reference. I’m a happy guy right now, and I’m going to walk you through with my past a hundred days. I’ve had a few months where I could dedicate almost basically full time to YouTube. And I wanted to share with you some of the results, some things that I’ve learned, and hopefully give you a little inspiration. If you’re finding yourself in a little bit of a creative rut, especially if you’re a content creator like me. So you’re not going to want to miss this.

So you heard right about a hundred days ago, I decided to dedicate myself to YouTube full-time and that included making a content calendar where I was going to be recording about three to four videos per week posting multiple times per week. And I also wanted to keep up a lot of the business items behind the scenes as well. Now, before we dive in, don’t forget to drop a little like here. I’m going to be a little honest with you, a little authentic and a lot vulnerable because guys, it’s not going so well. So hitting that like button would really help me out. I appreciate it. And thanks. So for those of you who are new to the channel, or maybe you didn’t catch this one video, I did a one year in review video and folks that couldn’t have gone better. I started YouTube about 17 months ago, a little less than a year and a half.

And we were off to the races monetized right out the gate, got close to I think, 20 subscribers in the first year and made right around $18,000. Now, trust me, that was nothing that I was expecting. That number is still is like, makes me smile because it, it helps to turn this little creative project into a real business. For me, however, being a full-time teacher, I knew that I would have a very unique opportunity over the summer to dedicate myself full time to this business. And my little experiment did not go so well. The first lesson that I learned is that putting forth more effort doesn’t necessarily make the results like 2, 3, 4 X specifically on YouTube. We’re talking in terms of uploading more videos in order to gain more views, subscribers, and money you see over the past 100 days or so, the views are down.

The subscribers are down and the money is down. And it’s here where I want to put on this screen. Something known as the Dunning Kruger effect. If you’re not familiar with this chart, you can take a look on the left-hand side. You can see that Y axis that says confidence and folks, my confidence at the end of one year of YouTube was sky high. But if we go back to this chart, you can see, I was probably at the peak of Mount stupid because I was a baby on YouTube. I knew next to nothing compared to those that have been doing it for multiple years and have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And if we go back to this chart, as you go over on that right-hand side, that X axis, you can see you go from knowing essentially nothing to gaining wisdom and maybe even becoming an expert.

However, after my 100 days of YouTube, I am in the valley of despair and you can see, I still have a smile on my face because it’s not like everything’s dried up. There are some things I’m going to mention that are happening behind the scenes that are so exciting and hopeful that I know that I will eventually begin to climb back up and gain that confidence that hopefully I can also pair with wisdom and be successful a little bit more longterm. Now let’s move on and dive in behind the scenes. What you don’t see when I’m posting multiple videos per week and putting out blog posts and podcasts is that I wanted for the first time in my YouTube journey to try to get a little ahead to have, I think they call it like a cadence of how often I’m recording videos, how often I’m posting.

And I have actually recorded over 50 videos in the past 100 days. However, I decided to only post two per week to give myself a little bit of leeway or a little bit of cushion just in case something came up. If I have a vacation planned, if I get sick, if my kids get sick, I’ll have a few videos in the can that I could post. Now, if we go back to this chart right here, you can kind of see that I’m on that slope of enlightenment because over the first 52 weeks creating 52 53 videos, there were so many days that I was editing and finishing the thumbnail and uploading the video the very day that it would be posted to YouTube and something like that’s just not sustainable. So to anyone out there that is listening to this, I want you to give yourself permission to have that gift of time, give yourself a potential week, two off.

If you know that you’re going to need it, especially if you can set a deadline and meet it for yourself. A lot of us work well with deadlines. I would recommend trying to record videos in batches, maybe two, maybe three, and then move on to something like the editing and do that in a batch as well. The next thing I wanted to talk about is just the seasonality of it. All. I have a few blogger friends who know that their, their page views skyrocket around the holidays. And then again, there’s others who make videos about travel. And when the shutdown happened, everything dried up for them. And that’s where the wisdom and experience comes into play. If you can recognize the seasonality of, of this, that people are going to be interested in things like credit cards and saving money on shopping at certain times of the year, then I myself, and you can plan content around that and know that there’s going to be trends, peaks, and valleys and not let it kind of bring down their confidence.

Now, we haven’t talked about money. So I’m going to show that chart one more time. The plateau of sustainability, this is where you can be a content creator or run your own business and know that what you’re doing can sustain you. Long-Term whether it’s simply as a hobby to fill up your time and enrich your life, or if you’re using it to actually make income and provide for you and your loved ones. Going back to my views, subscribers and money being down, I have been forced to innovate and find other ways to make revenue with this type of content that I’m creating here on YouTube. So let me tell you about the three ways that I am growing my brand and business and making revenue outside of YouTube AdSense. The first one has the lowest bar to entry for any other content creators out there.

And that would be simply repurposing your content into short form or short clips. As we all know, Tik TOK is exploding and you can earn money. Once you hit as of this recording, 10,000 subscribers on Tik TOK. Likewise, if you didn’t know this, it was just brought to my attention about two weeks ago or so that YouTube in your analytics is actually paying for YouTube shorts as well. So take a video like this, chop it up into a couple of short clips and post it on YouTube as a shorter Tik TOK as well. And you’ve repurposed that content and created an additional revenue stream. My second suggestion would be to explore affiliate marketing I’m in the finance space. So if I want to suggest a credit card or a bank account or an insurance product, I can earn additional money. If people go ahead and click the link down below in the description that I mentioned so often, it’s very rare that it actually converts for people like a really a really high number.

It might be three or 4% of all the clicks, but that revenue can build over time. And I’ll I’ll preview like my, my end of year two video, that that money might be more money than I earned doing these YouTube videos. I do have a YouTube resources guide that I will update, and it’ll include some affiliate marketing partners. Some, some places you could go to explore products and see if you wanted to sign up. So again, if you’re interested in that, I’ll leave a link down below in the description. So you can download a copy of that. It’s free. You just got to sign up using your email and the third and final revenue stream that I have been working on is paid products. Now, let me stop you right there. I’ve never been a fan of gurus saying, Hey, let me teach you how to do what you’re doing.

And all you gotta do is buy my course and you’ll make a bunch of money. It always sounds like a get rich, quick scheme for them. And it almost sounds too good to be true, but I do have personally some expertise where I help family and friends explore credit card rewards, or I haven’t mentioned this yet in any videos, but I have just done the research and gone through all the processes and payments to establish three new LLC businesses here in New York state. One is for content creation here on YouTube. One is for my real estate portfolio. And the third is for future investments. I am looking into offering that as a concierge service in the future, basically a signature product of my brand, taking your side hustle to legitimate business. Now think of it like hobby side hustle to LLC. Those types of paid products, I think are services that could really help other small business owners and content creators make things more legitimate.

That’s my area of expertise. So be on the lookout for something like that in the future. In fact, I expect that product to launch at the beginning of the new year. So if you’d like to join the wait list, I’ll leave a link down below in the description. And let me know if you’re interested, you’ll be the first one to be notified. A couple of key takeaways using this chart from the Dunning Kruger effect. I feel like I completely understand the creative and innovative people who are trying something and realizing that they knew nothing. When they first started out my first year on YouTube, I gained all the confidence in the world. And I thought that if I just doubled down that the views, the subscribers, the money would two X, three X, four X, and folks that just didn’t happen in the near future.

I’m looking forward to rebranding optimizing my processes and slowing down in terms of being on that hamster wheel of content creation. There are other ways to make money and to connect with people beyond simply making YouTube videos. However, YouTube will still be my initial starting point. I love making videos. I see myself doing this. I’ve mentioned this before as a retirement job, as somebody who can help people with their personal finance in a way where they feel like they’re learning the money lessons that they never learned in school, but should have, as opposed to from some sleazy, like a guru who just wants them to sign up for their courses. With that being said, I’ve been exploring, repurposing some of this content and affiliate marketing along with creating a paid product or two that would service the people who are interested in me and my brand and everything that I’m doing.

I got to say that I was really at a loss for what to say while making this video. I have nothing planned out nothing’s scripted, but I just sorta wanted to speak from the heart and have this kind of serve as a, as a journal entry in my YouTube journey. I look forward to making another video like this in the next few months, maybe at my two year anniversary. So if you like videos like this, please show your support. Just leave a little comment down below with the hashtag rich. I would appreciate any words of affirmation. Maybe you’ve experienced something like this in the past as well. And I think it’ll go a long way to hopefully be inspirational to anybody who finds themselves in that valley of despair. Looking ahead to know that it’s all going to be okay with that being said, if you are new to the channel, thanks for watching. And don’t forget to hit subscribe and ring that notification bell. All right, as always I’m Rich. And until next time, for those of you who do it’s the grounds to the end.

Yes, this is a shirt with my face on it. One of the many mistakes that I made in the past hundred days, I thought it’d be a funny joke, money snacks, hashtag money snacks. It turns out it’s not the greatest t-shirt, but it does make for a pretty memorable business card. So I’m going to be handing these out at fin con if you’re going to be there to track me down and I will give you a hashtag money snacks, business card, I guess when you go to these conferences, you meet you know, a hundred people and everyone’s handing out their cards for can never put a face to the name. So I thought it would be a good idea. Alright. Thanks for sticking around to the end.