Pep Guardiola changed football forever.
This is my farewell tribute to the greatest manager of this generation.
Here's a little video I did to pay tribute to him. ❤️
https://t.co/Qj0pj8LXuY
@seancannell Frankly, I believe ideation is properly the most underrated part of video creation.
If you get that wrong, the idea might end up being suboptimal.
Sat down on a call with the YouTube wizard @Vexian, where he audited my channel and shared some strategies on what works.
Here's everything I got to learn from a guy with 12 YouTube plaques on his wall.
1/ Niche vs viral is the wrong question.
Unlike a lot of creators who are viral-at-all-costs or niche-wins, Vexian's take was more in the center.
Niche converts better because your audience is dialed in and very specific.
You know exactly who they are and how to monetize them.
Viral, on the other hand, pulls a flood of people into your world and lets your existing content nurture them.
Both work. The better question is where you want to spend your time.
Wanting to go viral means 80% of your life is content. You’re pretty much a full-time content creator.
Being niche means 80% of your life is the business.
2/ Match the strategy to the size of the problem.
He has a fat loss client who aims to get 5 to 10 million views a month.
That's because fat loss is a massive market and raw volume beats niche-specific in his case.
He has another client who helps bodybuilders prep for competitions.
That guy aims for 30k views a video. It’s a smaller, high-intent audience, and a single qualified viewer is worth more than a thousand randoms.
The view count you should aim for is downstream of how big your market is.
3/ My channel was too narrow.
I've spent years going as niche as humanly possible. I built a very profitable business on it.
But here's the nuance. YouTube rewards videos with a large total addressable market. You can stay niche in who you convert while being broader in who you attract. The trick isn't picking narrow or wide.
It's attracting wide and converting narrow.
He told me going after “Personal Brand” is too broad of a keyword.
However, a better keyword to own is “Become an Authority.”
It’s wide enough while also being narrow enough that only founders understand the term “authority building.”
4/ The idea matters more than the thumbnail or the title.
The idea behind the video is the single biggest driver of whether something works. A great thumbnail on a dead idea still underperforms.
5/ “Anchoring content” is the format he's most excited about right now.
Instead of making a video titled around your niche, you anchor your core idea to a bigger known name or market.
So instead of "Three Types of Content to Convert Attention," you do "The Exact Method Alex Hormozi Used to Become the Number One Business Influence in the World.”
You borrow their audience's familiarity. You siphon a slice of a much bigger pond.
Then you pivot: "You don't need to do half of what he did, you just need this, and I know because it's the exact formula I use for my founders."
Broader reach while still being niche.
6/ Treat ideas like dropshipping.
Before you commit to a video idea, paste the title into YouTube. If it's already been done, skip it. It’s already been tested.
I had a list of titles I was proud of. “The Seven Levels of Personal Branding,” for example. He had me check them live. Half were already done.
The real work of growing on YouTube is hunting for the ideas nobody has touched yet, the same way a good dropshipper hunts for products nobody is selling.
7/ Volume first, then quality. In that order.
Until you hit roughly 15 to 20k subs, post two or three times a week. Shots on goal. Faster feedback loops, faster iteration, faster testing.
Once you've saturated 50 to 60% of your market, you let off the gas and switch to quality.
At that point, you're optimizing for quality, and you outsource the volume to clipping or a second channel so it doesn't eat up your time.
8/ Don't anchor your brand to "personal branding." Anchor it to authority.
This was very tactical to my specific situation.
There are a hundred personal branding guys, and I was trying to go after that market.
I'll never out-content a Caleb Ralston or a Kallaway in that lane.
The category I can own is authority and status building.
9/ A long-form video is a pseudo VSL.
He pushed me toward a two-hour course-style video. "How to Build a Brand and Become an Authority in Any Niche."
Authority-frame yourself inside it, deliver real value, and let it run as a sales asset for years.
I've actually proven this one to myself. Last October I published a five-hour Web3 marketing training and it generated more warm inbound than almost anything else I've done.
The observation that my niche was too narrow was the surprising part.
I'm the guy who preaches going niche. But I'm open to having my beliefs tested, and I'm going to run experiments across a few different content angles to see what works.