Every YouTuber should try getting a one-on-one coach on vidIQ. After 13 years on YouTube and over 4,000 videos, I finally got a coach for the first time. Many people have hired me to coach them for their channels, and I've seen their success, and yet I figured I knew so much that I should be able to do it on my own. Well, coaching is not about how much you know. It's about getting someone to help you and give you a perspective on your YouTube channel.
The one question my coach asked that changed everything
This isn't sponsored. I'm just sharing it because my YouTube coach on vidIQ helped me think about something I'd never stopped to consider: Jerry, why are you on YouTube? What is your bottom line goal? I had not considered that before. I had just been thinking, I want to get views, I want to make money, like everybody else.
And your bottom line goals can change. My goals on YouTube used to be: I want views, I want money, and I want to be famous. Now, when my coach asked me about it and I stopped to think — well, what is my bottom line goal? What would success look like for my channel? — I realized my bottom line is thought leadership, which was a term he suggested. My goal is to communicate ideas, to help share the most powerful ideas I have with you.
Why my real metric is impressions, not views
By his asking that question and me thinking about it, I got a surprising strategy. I realized that if my goal is thought leadership, then my bottom line should be impressions. Because if my videos are getting out there and people are seeing my thumbnail and seeing my title, I've already communicated an idea. I don't even need people to watch my videos. I just need to make videos where the title and thumbnail communicate the idea. And then, if people who want to hear more about that idea actually click on the video, I'm able to make a deeper relationship with them.
What most YouTubers get wrong about titles and thumbnails
But most people on YouTube, all they do is think, I want to get views, I want to make money, and therefore their title and thumbnail are simply a sales pitch to sell someone on watching the video. Most people actually try to hide the value they're giving in their video, or try to make people curious to get them to click. But the thumbnail and the title by themselves aren't really communicating anything. That difference in mindset is exactly why most YouTube advice is built for views, not income.
How the coaching actually works
So I've found this coaching really helpful. Just in the first month, my coach — I hadn't followed up with him in a few days — proactively sent me a message to say, hey, interested in hearing what you're doing. I'm excited to see how my ideas are received by my coach. He'll say, oh, that's really cool, I'd never thought of that before. And if you're coaching people on YouTube and talking to lots of YouTubers, it feels really good to share an idea. So I'm planning to keep doing the coaching indefinitely.
Even the best still have coaches. Tiger Woods has a golf coach. Tiger Woods is a great golfer, but he still has a coach. So I think everyone — if you're curious about being on YouTube, or even if it's just a hobby, just for fun — should know that the coaching is so affordable on vidIQ. I've seen some really expensive, outrageous YouTube courses and coaching programs, and I've never bought any of them because, obviously, they were way overpriced. But when I saw vidIQ's coaching, I'm like, $99 a month? Or, if you do annual, it's $79 a month. I don't even know how they can make this business model work, because there are not a whole lot of YouTubers who have enough experience to be an effective coach.
And to be able to get this value where you can message — I can send up to three messages at a time to my coach, and then I just wait for my coach to respond, and he generally responds several days a week. It's async, or asynchronous, meaning I've got a video, I send a message, and whenever he has time, he gets back to me. This has been amazingly supportive.
Don't wait as long as I did
My main goal in sharing all of this is to help you not wait so long to get a coach like I did. There are YouTubers who are failing, who are struggling. I've struggled so much for so long on YouTube. If this had been available — and it's something fairly new they seem to be offering — over the course of my 13 years on YouTube, I've never even seen something this affordable that I actually wanted to try. So I'm very grateful for the vidIQ coaching, and I'll send this to my coach, too, as a thank you for his help.
If you'd like to go deeper on the thinking behind all of this, I keep these conversations going in my YouTube Coaching playlist.