let's pretend you and I went to catch up at a cafe and you turned to me and said Nate what do I need to do to plan for success with my channel this year really I'd get a smile on my face and say Focus you need to focus like crazy or you'll be lost on this platform Focus or something like that howdy howdy everyone Nate here welcome back by the end of this video I want you to be solid on your focus in these areas so that by the end of watching this video you know
exactly what to do to have a solid successful YouTube plan this year and this comes from working directly with hundreds of YouTube creators including a highlevel cohort that I just wrapped up as of recording this number one we're going to want to set your focus for the year and in order to assist you in accomplishing this process as we walk through it throughout this video I updated my YouTube template you're going to want to get that with the link in the pin comment or description on this video because yes I am still offering it for
free as valuable as it is I felt like it was something I wanted to have zero barrier for you as planning your years so go ahead and get that updated template and follow along as I walk you through this let's talk setting your focus let's focus's focus so if you're following along with the template first thing you'll see is you'll see this handy dashboard that I want you to customize according to whatever you need upcoming videos plans you have as well as bookmarks and important resources here but what we're going to do is go over
here to the sidebar to focus surprise surprise start here over here your focus and brand YouTube is evolving and I am seeing the creators and the founders that focus more on their Specialties and understanding Their audience and bringing the two together being the most important thing you can do to be successful this year so that's why each of these items is focused on focusing two questions first thing I want you to do as you're setting your focus is answer these two questions number one what do you want from your audience and what do you want
for your audience this question feels simpler on the surface than you may realize you put yourself in the situation where you understand your audience and you understand clearly what you want your audience to get out of your content a focused answer to this question could look like I want my audience to know exactly how to get a green lawn at any time of year or I want my audience to come to every one of my videos because they feel comforted and welcome as I'm doing some homemade cooking I want you to describe the answer to
this question as vividly as you can followed up with the answer to this question what results do you want this year this could be Revenue lifestyle what do you want to change for you again use firstperson language and describe it as vividly as you possibly can once we got that it's time to get more into the brand side of what you are bringing to the YouTube platform that looks like defining your brand yeses and your brand Nos and that is NOS as an n o s not n o e subtle difference in spelling big difference
in definition so I gave an example here of what I would write for this channel that you're watching right now I laugh because this is actually my definitions and it's only had slight changes over the past year from when I first presented this template which tells me it was pretty effective so what I wrote as an example for this channel you're watching right now is radical facing fear standing out and making a difference authentic real people and real stories high value meaning it's actionable there's people are getting results and it's making people more wealthy and
then fun meaning approachable and engaging now for the brand knows again if you're watching the close captions on this I need to specify that this is n o s not n o e check the Clos captions I'm curious if YouTube autoc captioning actually captures that or not but brand knows are essentially the opposite of your yeses and this is where you say the things that you do not want your brand to stand for I again give examples for this channel you're watching right now generic tips instead I want to do real examples and real data
or boring delivery instead I want fun fresh and laughter I want people to be enjoying the experience of spending time with me while they're learning so now you've written answers to these things time to move down to Brand position I'm going to make an entire dedicated video just on this thing due to popular demand the amount of people I've had requesting that I make an entire video about this just one was just one thing is a lot we'll just say that but for now I want you to Define your position of you related to your
audience meaning you're roughly going to position yourself in one of four categories a hero a performer a teacher or a commentator and based on what you choose that is what your audience expects out of your content and I included an example also here in the template the other thing we're going to want to do at this point is claim your online brand you'll often hear when you start a new business or you start a new channel hey make sure you go claim your YouTube channel your Instagram your other socials but what more people more creators
and Founders need to be thinking about is the longer term are you going to offer something because if you are going to offer something I'm going to highly recommend that you claim a do store domain or URL and let me explain why that is most creators find that longer term they want to monetize in more than one way and most of the time that monetization involves some sort of offer for Their audience be it merch be it a product be it some sort of service so when you also claim your online brand of your Channel
or your business name. store when your audience visits your Channel or your business do store they know that it's a store it's built it's literally built into the name and therefore they know that there's going to be things for sale it's a massive Advantage the other crazy thing about having a DOT store versus a lot of other online uh products and merch stores is many of them have very complex URLs you know what I'm talking about and I think this is part of the reason why many larger creators and businesses are already claiming their do
store domains because they're seeing the value in the Simplicity of it so go and claim your do store domain using the link I also put in the pin comment and the description on this video and you know me I got you an awesome deal I I got you a code when you go to the website search for your Channel or your brand name and then when you click through I got you a code I'm also going to include it below that gives you a stinking good deal now I know I can't guarantee anything but it's
a very high likelihood that the moment you sell one thing with your dot store with your online brand it will have paid for itself so go claim it before somebody else does dang it now it is time to move on to the next you need a focus go darn it time to focus picking the content that you are bringing to your audience in the form of categories using the template I want you to move to this section labeled fire mix now the fire method is a method that I developed because I deserved so many channels
not understanding the right mix of content that will give them the results that they actually want excuse me but when you're planning your year right now what I want you to do is go up here to the fuel or content mix every type of video that you publish on your channel this year will fit into one of four categories or fuel types I call them fuel types because the analogy is You're Building A Fire that attracts the audience you want to attract and based on what type of category you're doing that video will perform differently
with your audience so for example on a campfire Tinder is the type of content or fuel that catches fire quickly but may also burn out quickly it gets attention very quickly so you're going in and for your audience for your channel the topic that you have on your content you're going to choose some broad categories that you're going to include as Tinder content for this coming year likewise you're going to choose some kindling and these are more of the core content that you publish most likely the most often there there's a lot of nuance to
this but you're defining these types of categories you're going to publish and then likewise with logs these are the bigger or more Evergreen types of videos You'll also not want to skip over defining your Flint videos I used to call these spark videos until I realized based on this recent cohort a really good suggestion was Flint is a better definition here because these are the types of videos that you're not necessarily sure will do well with your audience yet it's more experimental so while you're watching this video you're following along with this template I want
you to pause and put some ideas into each of these categories don't expect yourself to be perfect or know exactly what category to put them in just use these Concepts as Clues and Define your categories right now now here is why this matters so much this year one of the major mistakes that I see creators making and that can't be a mistake anymore especially this year is having too many categories that aren't focused enough or being unintentional with a categories you do cover let me give you an example let's say you have a language learning
Channel and the majority of your content is in teaching certain skills or conjugations or things that your audience wants to learn if out of the blue you decide to do let's say some Vlog videos in a totally different category it's entirely possible that because that category is so far outside of the plan that you've put together right here the audience will observe that and it may not perform as well the point here is not that you can't Test new categories that's why I would put it under a flint category using the fire method it's that
far too often we're unintentional or unaware that we're causing this chaos you see what I'm saying there this is why I built this in right here to help you get really clear and know this is what I am doing in categories and this is what I'm not doing in categories and this is also a good point to invite you to Boop the like button on this video so it can spread to more people as a way to say hey this is being helpful to me so thank you for doing that now it's time for the
next good day mate it's time to focus pity the fool who don't Fus we're going to pick and qualify your video ideas for this year in order to do that you're going to go down to to production right here in the template the first thing you're going to see is a production list but actually we're going to go to idea planning C's and what we're going to do here while you're watching this video go in here to the idea input section and add a bunch of video ideas you can hit add task here or if
you're on mobile you can also do this add all of the video ideas that you've had knocking around in your brain or you have written somewhere else add them all to this list right here because we're about to go through a process with them one of the frustrations that I had as I was publishing videos and I saw many clients also have this was not necessarily having a good solid and simple way to qualify a video of whether or not I should give it the go-ahead or the green light so what I did is I
developed a method to qualify your videos very easily I call it the C's method and essentially it's ranking your videos on five factors spread excitement audience match and simplicity you rate each of these on 1 to five so so let me show you what this looks like in practice you go into idea a here and you scroll over and you say Okay based on roughly what I know of my audience how much spread will this idea have one being low and five being high let's say I think this idea is going to spread really well
I'm going to rate it a five and then I say roughly how excited am I to produce this video you say all right maybe I'm uh four out of five and then you ask yourself roughly how well does this video match my current audience according to my understanding of what they find satisfying and I say I think this one's still decent but let's say it's a three here and then I go to Simplicity I say hey you know what this is a really good idea but it's going to be a bit more complex to produce
a five would be very simple to produce and a one would be very complex let's say this one is actually a very complex video I would give it a one what that does is it outputs a c's score for me and you're going for the higher the ccore the better so you go through this with a batch of videos and you can qualify them in a few ways let's say the C score isn't high enough on idea B and I can say all right I'm going to put this as potentially a future idea it's not
ready yet or maybe I say hey I've reviewed this video and I really don't think it's one I should produce I can hit idea archive we could delete it but sometimes it's nice to be able to see hey we previously had this idea but it just didn't fit and here are the reasons why it saves time for you and your team but let's say idea a gets a passing score and I say all right we're going to produce this I go over here and I move it to Preparing and once I do that I can
go over here to production list and it will add it down here I didn't actually add it because I already have some ideas in here it I think it's getting weird how many times we're saying that's enough Focus now let's pause for a moment to talk about why this is such a good idea to qualify your videos this year it saves time it makes your workflow more efficient whether you're running a solo gig or you have a whole team knowing clearly when a video gets added to the production list as a green Lit video saves
you a ton of time because you've gone through the rounds you understand hey this is a really good video idea I'm going to go ahead and produce it in fact if you want an extra layer of qualifying your ideas before you produce them this year I included this handy template right here which has the name video code video name and within it if you go down here you can copy and paste and follow this entire process as you're producing your videos even before adding it to your production list you can identify what the purpose is
the outcomes you hope to have happen as well as potential title and thumbnails in fact I've been playing around with the idea of making an entire video about how to plan effective YouTube videos and all the steps I'd be going through both from the planning standpoint but also from the actions from your audience standpoint let me know in the comments if you want me to make a video like that and as you're planning out your year here you really could go through add ideas qualify them and then add them to production right now you could
have the entire amount of videos depending on what your channel Niche is you could have your entire year of videos planned right now if you follow this process there are two approaches that I've seen work well for creators the batching approach or the cyclical approach for the cyclical approach it's the one that more people think of when they think of producing YouTube content it usually looks like hey how often am I publishing let's say it's once a week all of the steps that you that go into producing a video ideation qualifying the idea outlining scripting
research all that recording thumbnail edits all of that and it occurs on a cycle according to how often you publish so once a week you go through that same cycle the alternate approach we could take here and this template also works very well for this is a batch approach where you pick a certain amount of time that you want to batch at once so let's say you publish again once a week and you want to batch four videos at once you go in and you batch the idation the planning the scripting the recording you do
that in segments and you're able to accomplish the same thing really depends on what fits you best but as you're planning your videos aside from these statuses of I'm preparing the video when it's ready to record I move it up to here when I've recorded it it moves into editing and then when it's ready to publish it moves right here you also want to keep in mind a few key things here the due date is the publish date of your video and this will populate the calendar view up here you also might want to keep
track of edits due if you're working with an editor thumbnails both mock-ups and final product a link to the video as well as the format if you're collaborating or being sponsored by a company or individual you'll want to include that here so once we've worked through that we've got our entire plan worked out potentially for the entire year right now but what about some unique cases I wanted to show you some additional resources I put in here to hopefully be helpful I'm I'm I'm hoping they're helpful I included a collaboration section for you to keep
track of collaborations and Outreach as well as an Affiliates and sponsors section for you to identify who you're in contact with and what the terms are of that affiliate or sponsorship deal you created but also if you go back to this Focus document I included this targets and timeline section here where you can write out your goals the connections you want to make as well as a rough timeline High quarter of what you want to accomplish with emphasis and this is important on what you can control we've got goals up here like I want to
hit 100K subscribers or I want to make 10K a month but down here on the timeline these are the actions that will help you accomplish that there's also this current resources section where I wish I knew about this earlier the idea of this current resources section is to pull together all of the things that you use regularly like your fonts your colors common assets all of those things and put put it under the same place as a easy point of reference both for you and the people that work for you and below it I included
links to some helpful tools that I recommend as well as some mindset stuff you see I spent a lot of time this year reading books I set the goal to uh read or listen to 100 books this year as a recording this I don't think I'm quite going to make it but among all of the books that I listened to this year the the ones that were not so good there was some that really stood out especially as creators and business owners what you and I are doing here now there's a possibility that as you're
working your way through this process you find yourself stuck you planning out your year maybe you feel a bit disheartened or discouraged the purpose of this video the reason I made this video for me to you was to help you focus this year and feel certain in yourself and as a response to that I will repeat the words that were so impactful for me uh several years ago if you're ever feeling stuck it's because you don't like any of the options that you are aware of I'll say that again another way if you feel stuck
or frustrated it's because you don't like any of the things any of the possibilities any of the paths that you're aware of right now so what does that mean for you and I it means we need to open our eyes step back and say what other possibilities are there available to me what are the things that might make me come alive more and feel more excited this year and now after watching this video here's hoping you have a bit more I don't know who you are but I will find you and I will make you
focus
