 Hello, and welcome to the live stream today. We're going to be talking about YouTube and specifically talking about the journey that I've taken so far. I'm still relatively a small channel with just over 6,000 subscribers, but it has been quite a journey over the past two years, nevertheless. So I thought it was a good time to sort of reflect on that and talk a little bit about the sort of origins of the channel and where I'm looking to take it and the sort of pivots that I've made along the way and what has led to those as well. And of course we'll be talking about the M word monetization, because I know that a lot of people are talking about that when it comes to YouTube and they've got certain milestones in their mind around that. But I'll be talking about the way that I've monetized the YouTube channel or I should say really the YouTube business that I'm sort of building out of this. So that's what we're going to be covering. Thanks to everyone for coming in and hanging out. Great to see some familiar face in here. Hi, Katie. Hi, Kalonji as well. Great to see you here and Tanju. Thanks very much. It has indeed been a quite a journey. So I thought it would be worth talking a little bit about the origins of the channel though, because I know that there's some people who have been with me for quite some time now following along with the progress. But there are also a number of subscribers, obviously more every day that are perhaps completely new to the channel and don't maybe understand the sort of origins of it. And even the name because I still get people commenting on my editing skills because they can't see the joints. They say the editing is seamless. They also say I waffle a lot. And those two things are related because I don't actually do any edits. So the channel name take one tech is because all of the videos are made in one take with no edits. Obviously this is a live stream, so no edits here. But even in the recording, the recorded videos, there's no edits in those either. And that really is kind of part of the reason for the origin of the channel. It was because I was making course content for some other business interests that I've got not just take one tech or not at all take one tech at the time. And I was really my own worst enemy when it came to recording that content and those course modules and things like that, because I was the on screen talent in inverted comments. And yeah, really, I was my own worst enemy because if I felt that I could edit something after the fact, I'd be constantly striving for that sort of perfect take. And usually I would kind of screw it up because I would then think, well, I'll just retake this little bit and then maybe, you know, stitch it all together afterwards. And then I'd come to do the edit and then I'd realize that I didn't even have all the right components I needed to stitch it all together. And it was a constant sort of back and forth with me recording these things and then trying to make something that made sense out of it. And I kind of figured that there must be a better way of doing this because, you know, when I'm sitting down talking to somebody teaching them something, because I do find that I'm a lot of people's go to tech guy, whether it's friends, family, business colleagues and so on. And then also just with running a business and having staff, you know, having to educate those people and sort of train them on particular ways to do things. You know, I don't have any issue with sitting down with somebody and teaching somebody something. I don't sort of fall over my words and think, you know, I've got to retake this particular sentence or paragraph like I did do when I was sort of sitting in front of a camera looking into a lens and figuring out, you know, I've got to make this bit of educational content. So as I say, I figured that there must be just a way to do this. If I could just do it as if I was sitting with somebody or standing on a stage talking to a group or whatever, then there wouldn't be any issue. And so that's when I started looking for ways that I could perhaps do this. And then I realized very quickly that there is in fact software that you can use to do this. And the first bit of software I found was something called OBS, open broadcast software, which allows you to basically take your camera feeds directly into your computer. I should say, have your microphones plugged in, set up various different scenes. So for showing your desktop, different camera angles, whatever it happens to be, and then just basically switching between those to live produce your video content. So that's the way I started. And fortunately, I only lasted about a month on OBS. I always say I pulled out my last hair with OBS, but it really didn't speak to my sort of way of thinking. It was not at all logical. It was a little bit like I liken it to when I switch from PC to Mac. I suddenly realized that there's this much better way in my view of doing things and at least that work more in line with the way that I think, essentially. So after sort of struggling, I would say with OBS or maybe not struggling is not the right word, but just feeling like this doesn't this isn't logical. Yes, I know how to do all of these things, but it's not at all sort of an easy logical step by step process to do it. I just happened to be watching one of the video podcasts I've been watching now for over 15 years at this point, I think, Mac Break Weekly with Leo Laporte, and there was a chap on there, Mr. Doc Rock, and he just happened to sort of drop this word, Ecam Live, into it. That's two words, isn't it? But there you go. So he just mentioned Ecam Live, and it wasn't a big part that he sort of talked about it, but he just mentioned that Ecam Live was something that he was using. I think that was before he was the community manager maybe at that point when I saw that. But yeah, I just thought, well, that sounds interesting. He mentioned it was live production software, so I went and checked it out. And sure enough, it just completely spoke my language. So immediately switched over from OBS to Ecam. I just realized how easy it is to create scenes, create layouts, and do all of the things that I wanted to do with this custom Mac app, or I should say an app built specifically for the Mac, as opposed to OBS, which is cross-platform, so it works on Mac and PC. The trouble with cross-platform is usually you end up with the worst of both worlds. You don't get the best because it has to sort of make compromises to do things on one platform versus the other. So yeah, definitely Ecam being just a solely Mac-based product built for Macs and to optimize to get the best performance out of the app from a Mac. It just made total sense to me. It just worked the way that I think. Everyone thinks differently, but this just sort of spoke my language. So that is when I started making the course content for these other projects that I was working on. But I wanted a way to actually practice this process of making videos in one take, and obviously all of the course content was going to be kind of tutorial style videos. So I figured, well, I'll start a YouTube channel where I can just practice this process of making videos in one take that isn't necessarily as sort of mission critical, shall we say, as creating a course that is going to be sort of monetized immediately. And so one of my passions is obviously tech. And getting things done on the Mac productivity is something that I'm very into. I've got a lot of systems and it's something that people often comment on that know me sort of outside of YouTube is the way that I do things on the computer and the sort of the efficiency systems that I put in place to get things done. So that was really going to be the focus of the channel is covering how I do all of those things on the Mac and obviously just making all those videos in one take. So as well as Ecamm live, there was a couple of bits of equipment that I invested in to sort of help with the channel and obviously the making the other videos as well. One was this microphone short MV7. This has been my microphone all the time, although everything else seems to have changed in the studio around me. This is one thing that has stayed the same. And also my stream deck. Stream Deck XL was the first one that I bought. It has multiplied since then. So the live stream last week, I should say, was all about how I'm using five of them now and yet there will be more added into the mix at some point. But the stream deck was something that I bought because looking into video production and live streaming it was something that came to my attention through that. I bought the stream deck XL thinking that I was going to be using it for just switching scenes in Ecamm and basically running the live production of these recorded videos. However, when I got it, I quickly realized what an amazing productivity tool it is just in its own right, completely separate from streaming. And certainly now I use it a lot more for just general productivity on the computer than I do for recording or live streaming. And so this combined with Ecamm, these two sort of products, hardware and software really kind of captivated me. I just found that there was something really magical about the way that you can live stream, create videos and then obviously using this in Zoom calls as well to take Ecamm into Zoom. All of this kind of stuff was just, it kind of blew my mind quite frankly how easy it was to do all of this thing, all of this stuff. And it really enabled me to get my message across in YouTube obviously, but then also in meetings and things like that. And so these things that sort of captivated me then became the focus of my attention and I was just so sort of overjoyed with them that that became almost like the focus of the channel. So if you look at the channel content now, well over a third of the videos are specifically Ecamm Live. Maybe another third are stream deck. Last year I did the roadcaster into the mix as well. So there's obviously been more sort of roadcaster content as well. And so that wasn't necessarily intentional when I started. It wasn't going to be a channel about the tools. It's just that those were the things that were giving me the most joy. And so that is what I ended up sort of making the content about. And there's a bit of a lesson in there as well, which is when you're starting out, you might have an idea of what the channel is going to be, but don't necessarily be afraid or worried to sort of pivot or make a few changes. And I've certainly done that. I always set myself big goals and things like that, but I'm never afraid to take a pivot if I see that there's some other opportunity in a slightly different direction. And I would say that that's the same with your audience as well. The first live stream that I did, which was my first video on YouTube, was effectively two years ago. So it's the 13th here. It was on the 15th of May in 2021. And yeah, it was a live stream to nobody. I literally started obviously with zero subscribers, but I didn't do any marketing for it. I didn't send anything out to any existing database or anything like that. I wanted to really see the process of growing a channel organically. And that was kind of another side sort of project to this, is to be able to just understand what it takes to grow a channel so that I can then talk about that with clients in other businesses in terms of how you can grow a channel to support your business, sort of separately. So as a sort of side experiment, I guess. So I didn't really tell anybody about it. I didn't do any promotion of it. I started with zero, did my first live stream to nobody, which I've got to confess did feel very weird indeed. Talk into yourself when you're on a camera where you know that you're just recording it is one thing. But there was something weird about sort of broadcasting technically to the world. And yet there was nobody there watching in any case. So and I think that very first live stream has had like 100 and something views, 150 views since then. So it's not like and I wouldn't recommend necessarily going back and watching it. I did get it up just to have a little bit of a look back at it before I started this. And yet I think cringe worthy is the word I would use for me personally at least. And there's another little thing in there though, which is part of the thing about doing these things in one take was actually just getting over myself. Because ultimately the reason why I had such a trouble with editing for myself was my perfectionism. And that was something that I always felt at times held me back. And it was that case of having to get something absolutely perfect in my mind before I would ship it, get it out of the door as it were. And that was something I kind of I did struggle with in terms of just needing to feel like something was absolutely perfect before I would kind of release it. And so the channel obviously just by the very nature of doing things in one take and not have given myself a second go at it. By their very nature, I am not happy with any video I've ever created. However, I'm happy with being unhappy about it now, if that makes sense. So what I mean by that is none of them are perfect. I know they're not perfect, but I now accept that. And I don't have my top on today, my recovering perfectionist, but I've got my hat handy. So the recovering perfectionist in me is all about just sort of getting over myself and saying, right, well, I'll just put this thing out because it's much better to actually, you know, get the knowledge out there. If I'm, you know, with what I'm doing, sort of sharing this information with people, it's better that I just get it out there in its kind of raw and imperfect state, rather than me sort of agonizing over the finer details of absolutely every last detail more to the point of a video. And then people are not actually getting the benefit from it. So I do think that that is important, that people understand that, you know, there isn't necessarily an expectation of things having to be absolutely perfect and edited to with an interface life. And it's much better to just sort of come out in at least to get something out there. And I think that there's a thing of where we are kind of like our own worst enemies as well sometimes, because we have this idea of like, if we put something out and it's not perfect, what is it that we're actually afraid of? And, you know, it's this kind of almost, I guess, fear of embarrassment, fear of, you know, the idea that, you know, somebody may think less of us, perhaps if we put something out that isn't, you know, perfect isn't what we know is our best. But then that thing comes back to, well, if it's a fear of embarrassment, it's fear of what people might think of us. But actually what people might think of you is probably nowhere near as bad as what you kind of think of yourself. Or I should be talking in terms of me, I guess, but yeah, most people are very forgiving and they understand that, you know, if you're on, you know, live streaming or you're making videos, first of all, you're in the minority in any case, you know, most people are not doing that. Most people are consuming it rather than watching it. And I've got a lot of admiration and respect for the fact that you're doing it. I know that I personally have for the content creators that I watch. And certainly before I was on YouTube as well, just sort of seeing people getting out there and doing it was something that I was, you know, filled with admiration for people. And so when somebody makes a little slip-up or a mistake, you know, you don't worry about it. And so when we are making mistakes ourselves, I would say we should also shouldn't. Obviously, if you do make some major mistake, then you might want to correct it, as I did on a recent video where I said something that turned out not to be quite as I had portrayed it. So I made a video afterwards to say, hey, I was wrong about it. And as long as you've got that kind of authenticity to use that word, so early in the video. But if you've got that where, you know, you're prepared to admit when you're wrong, then that is definitely a point. But in terms of just the odd little mistake here and there, you'll see through my videos that I often sort of fall over my words occasionally and just sort of correct myself or, you know, make little errors. People don't mind. I think it just makes it feel more real. And certainly the creators that I had watched previously to start in my channel, those were the ones that really resonated with me, the ones that were a lot more sort of real and down to earth and just felt like I was having a conversation with them. Now, when it came to actually starting the channel, I didn't just go straight into it. So although I've said, you know, I'm a recovering perfectionist and I didn't need everything to be perfect. I'm also not an advocate of this idea of, oh, just pick up your phone. You've got a phone in your pocket. Just go live, you know, go live on YouTube. Just grab your phone and anybody can do it and that sort of stuff. I'm not that sort of person either. I do feel that I'd need to do some preparation. And so I did do some preparation for the channel. And so although my first live stream was two years ago, my first video on YouTube, the actual channel was created about a month before that. And in that month, I spent time setting up my scenes in ECAM, setting up my website, putting things into place as well. And I gave myself a deadline. So I'm not a proponent, as I say, of just go live without any preparation whatsoever. But I am a proponent of the idea of just set a deadline for when you are going to go live and then basically just do it then. Don't sort of keep delaying it and delaying it. And so after I set up the YouTube channel, I kind of scheduled that first live stream two weeks out, I guess. So I had given myself that very firm deadline. I also think that one of the things that has helped me on the path without a shadow of doubt is being a part of an accountability group. Now, I started when my channel went live on that first day. I'd actually already signed up to Dot Rock's group, and I had my first session with that the day after I went live. And I was very intentional about not joining an accountability group before I went live for the first time and before I actually started the ball rolling. Because what I was worried about was me going into a group full of lots of different people with lots of different ideas and then getting myself sidetracked. So I wanted to make sure that I'd got a very firm planning place myself first and then you get the ball rolling and then join a group that would then help me with the sort of ongoing accountability and sort of adjusting things as I went forward, rather than allowing myself to be derailed by lots of other ideas before I'd even got off the ground. So that was the way that I approached that. Now, I've continued to be in an accountability group on an ongoing basis. Most recently, obviously, with the Creators pod. So that's the podcast that we have. There's six of us in there. And yeah, it's been a real sort of a real help in just knowing that you've got a group of people who are sort of looking out for you and that you can always bounce ideas off. I think having an accountability group is really important in anything. I've always been part of accountability groups, coaching groups, mentorships and things like that. And that's part of the reason why when I set up the academy it was important for me, the Take One Tech Academy. I suppose I should just mention this. I'll come to it a bit later as well. But if you're interested in checking out the academy, takeonetech.io slash academy. But part of that, depending on the tier that you're on, is this idea of being a part of a group. And so we have weekly Q&As in there and then ongoing coaching and group coaching and things like that. So I do think that that is a really important part of doing anything and having that support of peers who are on a similar path and you can bounce ideas off. And there's been lots of things that I've been considering one way or another and just bounced it around in the group and got the answer back immediately. So I highly recommend that. In terms of having a plan, as I say, I did have a very clear plan of what I was going to do when I started and one of the bits of advice that I got from Doc before he even knew that he was my creator coach was that you shouldn't really look at the stats before you've done 100 videos. And so that's what I set myself a target when I started the channel off of doing 100 videos in my first 100 days, I figured, well, let me just get that out there and then we can start to look at ways to improve on that and get meaningful stats from the content I was creating. And so I did achieve that. I did the 100 videos in 100 days, I necessarily want every day. Sometimes I did two, sometimes I did non, so it all sort of evened out. And then after that 100 days, I basically extended that to the idea of doing 365 videos in a year. And ultimately, I felt a little bit short of that. I think I ended up doing 310 or 300 or something like that. I can't remember exactly because a number of things that came up throughout the year, so I wasn't able to quite manage that. But nevertheless, it did mean that I got that initial start with real data and also got to understand who my audience was. And this is this weird thing of, I mentioned the first live stream just talking into the camera, nobody watching at all. And then slowly over time, the audience revealed themselves to you. And it's just been a wonderful experience, to be honest, to actually get that sort of feedback, to get the comments, to understand who it is that I'm actually helping with the content and then also get that feeding back into ideas for new content and ways to sort of adapt and evolve. So that is an ongoing thing as well. That sort of audience identification, I guess, is a sort of ongoing thing. And yet, I've got to say, it's not quite exactly who I thought necessarily it was going to be when I started out. And it's sort of grown over time. Thanks, Rich, for the slacker comment there. And yeah, there is that as well. I'll just say, Keely, one of the creators part along with Rich as well. That is a big part of it. It's not just about the accountability and oh, this is what I'm going to do and how am I going to do it. It is about the camaraderie and the stuff that goes on in the back end as well. Yeah, just a really close group of friends at this point. So yeah, there's a lot more to it than just accountability really. But that is what you get when you build these close bonds with people who you're all sort of, you know, striving for similar goals together with. So yeah, the 100 video target was there and that was great. One thing I'll say is that when it comes to the analytics, that is something that I have been, you know, on top of from day one, I used to always look at the analytics even up until 100 videos. But I wasn't just basically tweaking based on them. I was always, I mean, I'm a bit of a data geek in any case. So I'm always interested in that kind of stuff. But it was crucial to just basically get the content out there to begin with before starting to look to how to sort of tweak and refine. And I did make some changes. I'll talk about this a little bit later, but I did make some changes to, you know, things like thumbnail styles and so on. And I'll come to that a little bit later because it's not always what you think and you don't necessarily always, or I don't necessarily always know best even though I thought something looked better. It turned out it wasn't better after all. And you can only get that with data. So I'll talk about that a little bit later. But having an audience and have it, sorry, starting with a plan is important. And as I say, the audience will reveal itself and don't be afraid to pivot. But if we look at actually how the growth has gone in those since I started, obviously starting off with zero. So that was 14th of May. Now it took me up until the end of 2021 to get up to a thousand subscribers. And that is kind of this milestone that I think a lot of people when they're starting out on YouTube have because in order to get monetized on YouTube, whereby you can join the YouTube Partner Program and you start receiving commission from ad revenue basically from the ads that are run on YouTube, then you need to have a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. And because I was producing so many videos and also live streaming every week, then I did actually hit the 4,000 hours long before that. But the thousand subscribers actually came at about 10 minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve. So it was exactly at the end of 2021 where I hit that number and then was technically monetized on YouTube. Now up until the end of 2022, so in the following year, I added another 3,000 subscribers. So the kind of rate of increase was increasing as well. And then came to, if I press the right button, stream's ex-good as long as you press the right button. Then in today, I am up to 6,100. So that's just in over, sort of four and a half months, I've added another 2,100 to that amount. So the rate of increase, as I say, is increasing as well. But the one that was quite a landmark for me as well was on the 27th of March, hit half a million views. Now, I know that there are many videos themselves where you look at the video and the video has had over a million views. So it's all relative, isn't it? But for me, the idea that there had been half a million views on my videos seemed quite unbelievable, really. When I think about what I started out doing and the sort of growth of it, that seemed to me quite a nice milestone. I've just checked today and I'm basically about 1,000 or 2,000 videos 600,000. So it just goes to show how that sort of rate of increase does sort of increase in compounds over time. And everybody talks about this kind of like hockey stick curve where it starts off and it seems like it's slow and then it can grow exponentially. Obviously, it doesn't happen to everybody. But I'm certainly seeing the start of those kind of changes where the distance between milestones is getting closer and closer together. So to be at nearly 6,000 now is I'm just kind of blown away by it and I'm just thankful for everybody who watches and comments and I just really am pleased that people find the content useful and valuable as well. So that's been the sort of growth path so far. And in terms of the time spent, there has been a bit of a change in the time spent on YouTube. But ironically, the more time I've spent on my YouTube business, the less actual content has been going on YouTube. So I mentioned that I basically did this for trying to get this 365 videos out in a year. And so that would have obviously taken me to May last year. And I was pretty much doing an average of a video a day. But then I would say it was kind of middle of April right in the middle of Cedar, create every day in April last year. Some things happened in the other side of my business life that basically just required a lot more of my attention. And so I kind of stopped making as many YouTube videos around that time. But that also spurred me into potentially looking at spending more time on the take one tech business. And what I was doing up until that point was I would have two hours every day where I would spend on making a video. And obviously, this whole one take thing, that's where that came into being really, really helped me to be able to achieve that. Because essentially I'd wake up at 3 a.m., that's what time I get up. And then between 4 and 6 was kind of my YouTube time. And so that would be the time where I would, you know, wake up, decide what video I was going to make, record the videos. So my videos typically on YouTube have been around about 30 minutes, something like that. So I'd record a 30 minute video, make the thumbnail, upload the video, and do whatever else I needed to do to sort of, you know, manage the channel basically in any other communication that was going on. Win that sort of two hour window. So it's essentially two hours a day that I was spending on YouTube before, crucially before the kids got up, before it got noisy in the house. And then before I got on with, you know, all the other work that I was doing throughout the day. So this sort of changed though, as I say last year, where I decided that I was going to spend more time on the Take One Tech, brand the Take One Tech business. And I actually launched the first course separate from YouTube. So on my website, so I've got a number of different courses on there. And the first one was my Ecamm Live Masterclass. And that launched around about the end of April, I think last year. And I still was only doing this kind of sort of part time at that point. But then I was looking to basically grow this into a, you know, a fully fledged business of itself because I mentioned about monetization and reaching that monetization level. But everyone will tell you, you know, when you get monetized on YouTube, it's not like suddenly, you know, the millions start running and certainly not with a channel my size. And I'm happy to share what that is in terms of how it looks. If I go over to my analytics, go over to my, there you go, look just exactly 6,100 just today. So if I go to my analytics and then here you'll see my channel views for the last 28 days. So the revenue from YouTube in the last month, basically just nearly $500 thereabouts. And that is kind of pretty typical from a month to month basis right now. Obviously the more views you get, the more that sort of increases. But if I go to lifetime and bear in mind this is effectively monetization since December of last year, if you go to the monetization section. So there it starts on December the 31st, the first amount coming in. And then, yeah, the total amount in all of that time is $4,700. So if you think about the amount of time spent to do all of this, yeah, you're not really getting paid handsomely just, just yet this figure. But I do want to share that because people often talk about how, yeah, it's don't expect big things necessarily when you first get monetized. It's not a major thing. And that is true. However, this is only about 4% of the revenue from Take One Tech as a brand. So that's something to be aware of. There are plenty of other ways that you can monetize on YouTube without, you know, considering this being the primary source. And it certainly isn't my primary source of monetization for the channel. And in fact, even at the date when I got monetized here at the end of 2021, the day that I got monetized on YouTube, you know, technically from all of the other things that I'd been doing. So the other ways that I was monetizing the channel had already made more than that amount here that I've had ever since getting monetized. So things like consultation calls, which I started offering right from the outset. So I'd set up mine. I should have probably mentioned this as part of that preparation. I mentioned I spent a month getting prepared. One of the other things I did was set up all of my affiliate links for things like, you know, Amazon links, Buy Me a Coffee, which is a great way to just get that initial encouragement. I think people do like to support, you know, certainly new creators starting out as well. So having something like Buy Me a Coffee, which allows people to go and just make like a one-off donation as well as, you know, having membership. So I did set up membership from the beginning as well. And it was probably like a couple of months in, I would say, that had somebody first sign up to that. But then also being able to set up things for people to like book calls. So although now I do offer consultations on my main website and you can book a call with me on there. That's all done through my website right now. But originally I just did that as part of the Buy Me a Coffee and that was a great way to sort of help get monetized. So I digress slightly. I've sort of jumped back a little bit there. The point is that, yeah, the monetization on YouTube is just sort of one small fraction of what you can actually create out of it. If you're using YouTube as more of an inbound marketing tool. So there being outbound marketing, being you going and paying for ads and being proactive about going and bringing in clients, inbound marketing is more kind of like content marketing, basically. So the sort of stuff on YouTube where you're sort of getting to know people or people are getting to know you through the content and this could be on YouTube, it could be in a blog, it could be in other social media platforms, wherever that happens to be. That's what they call inbound marketing. And so if you're using YouTube as a tool for that, then yeah, there's plenty of other ways that you can monetize from that. And I will be talking a little bit about sort of how my thought process has changed towards this a little bit later as we go on. But just always be mindful though of how things are changing and there's an expression which is used a lot in business, which comes from the world of ice hockey, I believe. And it's skate to where the puck is going. And it's this idea of rather than being reactive to what is happening right in the moment, directly in front of you and sort of skating towards the target, actually look at a more longer term trajectory of in this case, where the ice hockey puck is traveling to and you want to be heading to that direction so that you're going to sort of meet up with it. And so what it means is sometimes it might feel like you're sort of going off off on a tangent potentially or off somewhere where I'll give you an example when I set up the discord community, thanks to Keely showing me the light there, the discord coach, when I set that up, there was lots of things that I was putting in place that really weren't necessarily warranted for the size of community I had or what I was doing at that specific time. But it was knowing that where I wanted to take things, that I was putting those things in place in advance so that I had that structure in place when I did in fact want to make those changes and so on. So I think that that is something to just bear in mind is when you are like looking at the ways things are changing and then just bear that in mind to sort of put those systems in place and just coming back to the courses then, I feel like I'm jumping around a little bit, so to excuse me but when I did release my first course then the Ecamm Masterclass shortly followed by the Zoom course and then the Roadcaster course came out towards the end of last year and around about October and in my mind I had this idea of well I'm building a collection of courses here and incidentally the reason for those courses was free information on YouTube is great and I don't hold back any information. I never put up a paywall and say right well I'm only going to tell you part of the picture in my YouTube channel whereas if you come and see for the course you'll get more information that's not the case at all. In fact probably everything that I've said in the courses at some place or other I've said in other places outside of the cost of the course. So on YouTube for example however the problem with YouTube is that the information is often out of date and I'm talking about just my channel I've made so many videos about Ecamm Live but Ecamm Live is going through such development and at such a pace that you know old videos that I've done on Ecamm are easier and different ways to do things and the other thing is that on YouTube that you often don't necessarily know if you've got all of the information. So when I'm trying to learn something if I am trying to let's take Ecamm Live when I started looking at Ecamm I did go and watch videos online myself to learn how to use it and I never really knew if I'd got the full picture because it was a 5-minute video here, a 10-minute video there and so on and so you always kind of wondering do I know everything I need to know yet or is it just a case of you know waiting and figuring it out later on and so I wanted to make sure I'd got something that was all encompassing and I did try and address this with my mammoth 4.5 hour Ecamm Live tutorial which was another one take video that I did on my channel and it was basically 4.5 hours I thought right well I'm going to make a video where I sit down and I just go from start to finish with somebody who's never used Ecamm Live before how to get it set up, how to do all the things that I do with it such as create stream deck buttons to you know make personalize your stream deck to control Ecamm with, use Keynote to bring in little animations and stuff and I covered absolutely everything in that one 4.5 hour video on YouTube and I know some people talk about you know people's attention spans and the wanting short little bite size things but that was one of my most popular videos people do actually like having it all in one place knowing that they're going to be through from end to end on how to do things well the problem was that then you know you get to the situation where they bring out a new version of Ecamm and that 4.5 hour video some of it is out of date for example now in Ecamm Live we have camera overlays so I can just make a scene like well like this one that was in where we just got the little camera here of me I've got a screen share over to that side well it used to be in Ecamm that you would need to create this little border in a graphics program to make a little cut out for where your face was going to be and you would have to make overlays to actually mask you know where your camera was whereas now we've got camera overlays that you can just easily make this with very little fuss whatsoever and you don't need all of that functionality so technically that 4.5 hour video which people still do watch is is out of date and so that was the kind of other motivation for making the courses is not to put things behind a paywall but just to give people that organization and so the benefit of having a course is the way my courses are structured is they're all in really short bite size videos and it means a couple of things first of all it makes it a lot more bingeable for once for a better word you know when somebody is learning and they can just see oh I can just watch one more video it's just another minute it's just another two minutes and that isn't in my interest you know it's not like I'm getting extra for the number that they watch like you do on YouTube where you know you actually benefit from people watching more and watching your next videos but it actually just makes it a better learning experience because people feel like it's not so daunting they're not coming into I've got to watch a 40 minute video but rather it's just another minute just another minute they can sort of work their way through it like that but the other thing is it means that it's a lot easier to keep up to date because if there are any features that are added or changed then you don't have to go and recreate the whole video but it does still give people that organization and it also acts as a resource so if somebody's got you know something that they're doing and they just want to know about you know sticking in e-cam live how to create overlays they can just go back to the course and just go to just that specific part knowing that there is that little resource there that's going to help them so I kind of see them as more like sort of encyclopedias almost of the subject matter so that was kind of my motivation for doing it but as I started doing these I was thinking about all of the other different courses that I would create not just for e-cam and zoom and roadcaster and all these other things but also coming back to like the automation course that you know was the kind of instigator I guess for the channel you know thinking about Mac productivity and all of that kind of stuff and then getting feedback from people about using the you know keynote for presentations and it's something that I just sort of take for granted but then I got feedback that people wanted to understand more about how to use that and it's a free application for the Mac and it's really powerful for more than just presentations and so you know creating a masterclass on that as well to sort of teach people how to do these things so as I sort of was creating these courses I always had in my mind that you know at some point I would create an academy because if you're creating standalone courses that's one thing but then there is you know sort of always another course potentially there's always another cost then of well you know which course do I get there's a trade off there and which ones do I need and so that's why the academy was born really was as a way to basically give people the access to all the courses that was creating existing and an ongoing basis that then you know could be an ongoing resource so I suppose I should I should just mention it again and show you but the take one tech academy gives you access to so to all of the existing and upcoming courses as well you can find it all out on the in the take one tech dot IO slash academy and he can see upcoming courses existing courses actually the next one that's coming out which is just I've just got a few more lessons to add in and then it will be into the academy but that is my YouTube beginners guide so as well as the master classes which I started with I was getting a lot of questions for beginners guides for people who just want to get up and running without you know going into a full hundred and thirty hundred and fifty lesson master class but they just want the basics to get up and running and that's what these beginners guides are so actually as I say the next one that's going to be released any day now is the YouTube beginners guide so if you are just starting on YouTube then that would be one to consider but as I say you get this as part of the academy in any case then we've got the master classes in as well and a few testimonials and things like that monthly workshops so I've just run one of those just a few days ago so every month there is a workshop on various different sort of deep dives into specific topics related to related that and then the accelerators are cohort based courses so whilst the beginners guides and master classes you learn at your own pace online the accelerators have got an in-person component not in person I should say virtual meeting component so you don't meet up anywhere as such but you are learning with a group of other people so learning at a specific pace and then there is also group coaching and one-to-one coaching as well and there are a number of different pricing tiers for that as well so that was the academy and that basically launched in the end of March this year so it was kind of like a year on YouTube before I started making the courses and then again about a year after that I actually launched the academy where to get access to all of that ongoing learning resources on a subscription basis now the irony then as I mentioned was that when I started spending more time on Take One Tech I've been producing fewer videos on YouTube and that wasn't necessarily intentional it's just been a nature of the fact of my attention has been diverted to creating all the course content and stuff like that however I don't intend it to be like that forever I am looking to as I start putting out all of the courses that I've got on the schedule to then shift more towards creating more of the YouTube videos and whilst I started out doing the 100 videos in 100 days as I mentioned and they were predominantly pre-recorded I was doing a weekly live stream but the weekly live stream was more of it was kind of my little check-in I guess with everybody in my own personal accountability to be documenting the process so at the start of every live stream for the first year on YouTube at least I was basically explaining what my process had been what my progress had been and sort of charting the growth of the channel so as I say it was kind of like a little check-in in terms of the whole growth in the progress what then happened is I kind of stopped producing the actual recorded videos and then these live streams just became the thing that I was doing and each live stream would be focused on something so the live stream became more of a tutorial as opposed to me just having a chat with some friends in my basement which is where I started I haven't really talked about the studio and the evolution of that the first videos on my channel for the first I guess up until the end of 2021 so at the time that I got monetized was also just happened to be over that Christmas and New Year I set up this space which was my studio space I've actually got my first live stream queued up here so this is what it used to look like with the green screen background there here is me speaking to nobody demonstrating if you can see at the back it does actually have my MV7 so this was the first live stream talking about the gear that I was using to live stream that was from the basement of my house I've now moved into a different space still in the house essentially but it's a different space in the garden and the sort of evolution of the studio just sort of built up over time as well and I digress slightly I don't know why I got sidetracked completely there showing that up but it was just the evolution of the studio space as well and the amount of gear that has sort of grown over time so now if we look at the space that I'm in right now rather than just a single camera mounted on top of the monitor with a green screen and some lights on me there obviously now I've invested in some more studio gear there's been a few more monitors added into the mix a few more cameras previously I was using a 10 year old Canon EOS 60D and then I was using my iPhone or even maybe a Logitech C920 as my top down camera so now I've got a few more cameras into the mix but I think it's important to start with what you've got but then also have a growth plan in place so you don't necessarily need to get all the gear to start with as I say the first thing that I bought for the channel was just a microphone and the stream deck and then repurposed my old camera and that actually I didn't change that camera for nearly a year I think so I can't remember when I got this CVE 10 maybe that was a year ago something like that so starting with what you've got but having a growth plan in place though is definitely the way to go there and don't let the gear hold you back but also consider investing in your setup because it does make things a lot easier as you go forward and so in terms of monetization I feel like I've lost my track a little bit but there you go we'll just continue on in terms of monetization I mentioned obviously about the coaching calls and the obviously the YouTube Partner Program and the Buy Me a Coffee the other thing was Amazon Affiliates so I set up my Amazon Affiliate links that again doesn't bring in a huge amount but with all of these things what I wanted to try and do is make sure that the channel was basically cost neutral from the start so there are things you have to pay for like subscriptions to things like TubeBuddy something that I was using at the time as well Ecam obviously is a subscription and various other things so being able to offset those though with even small little incomes from different things was something that was important to me I wanted to try and start off as I meant to go on and so Amazon is something that helped with that being able to have affiliate links in all of my videos one of the things that I did was I didn't initially have every bit of gear that I was using in my video descriptions it was just if I mentioned something in the video I would put the Amazon Affiliate link however at some point because so many other people do this I realised that what I should be doing is actually putting a bigger list of things that I use in the videos because no matter what you're talking about in the video somebody might go down in the description like something about your video or the way that you're looking or the gear that you're using or whatever and then that might be something that they click on even though I've referenced it in the video like what mic am I using right now well the link is in the video in the description just as all the other stuff is and so one of the tools that I use is TubeBuddy I'll talk about that a bit later as well but they've got this find and replace function and I basically use the finding replace to go and add in a bunch of links into my description and that sort of bumped up my Amazon Affiliate Revenue and that's around about $100 a month just from that aside from the Amazon Influencer Program which I'll talk about later as well so having those Affiliate links just help to offset some of these other costs then again there is all the tools if there's any tool that you're using then definitely find out if they've got an Affiliate Program so Ecamm Live all of these tools by the way if you want to go to find out more you can go to my website and go to the resources page contact.io slash resources there's a load of free resources in there but you'll also find a link to all the tools that I use like Ecamm Live, TubeBuddy and Epidemic for Music obviously all of the banging tunes that you're hearing right now the only thing I use Epidemic for is actually my Outro Music I used to have an intro on my channel but I quickly dropped the intro or not quickly after about a year I dropped the intro because they don't see your intro titles they just want the information but it's just the Outro Music so that's what I use Epidemic for however I am now on the Epidemic Ambassador Program so that comes from after you've had X number of referrals I can't remember if it's 15 or 20 or something like that but what it means is basically I'm not paying for Epidemic anymore so that is a little benefit and I only ever paid for it I think for the first year and then the referral commission I've added up another tool that I use a lot is SetApp which it gives you access to over 200 great apps that you can use on the Mac and they're all kind of utility style apps and there's some really useful ones for live streamers I use for my outlines I don't do scripts for my videos but certainly for live streams I tend to have an outline to try and keep me at least on track of the sort of main bullet points that I want to cover although you'll see that I still get myself lost and don't sort of refer to it too much so for that I use a program called Cloud Outliner that's available on SetApp I use TripMode to toggle off all of the different things that are accessing the internet that is a little app that sits up in the menu bar and means that only the live streaming software is taking up my bandwidth and things like Dropbox and Creative Cloud Adobe Creative Cloud aren't sort of taking up bandwidth and trying to sync things in the background so I use that one I use something called OneSwitch on my Mac again, a little utility I use iStat menus to monitor my processor usage and all of these kind of things so there's a whole bunch of these little apps that are really useful that I use on the channel and so SetApp is one of the programs that I use, or the service I say to get access to all of those different things and they've had a great affiliate program where basically you get one month for every month for everyone you recommend you both get a free month that's the way to say it although they have now actually created a full-on affiliate program where you can get actual commission instead of just sort of free months because I think my SetApp is now effectively paid up till 2027 or something like that because of those sort of free months so that was another thing that I added as an affiliate even though it wasn't actual incoming cash it was still offsetting my costs which is what was important to me when I was in the camp and TubeBuddy being the other one so looking for things that are relevant to your audience that you can run your affiliates on run affiliate programs on to help offset the the cost is something that I think is definitely definitely worth doing so in terms of some of the lessons that have been learned along the way I've already mentioned don't worry about the mistakes too much the mistakes hold you back there is also this thing about consistency and yes it is important to be consistent and so obviously for those first 100 videos I was consistent but some people get really stuck and hung up on this idea of posting at exactly the same time every week and I'm not too sure about that to be honest and if you look on TubeBuddy which is a tool you can use to help manage your channel as I say I'll talk about that a bit more later you can actually find like when is the optimum time to post your video and I think that it's very easy to get hung up on on that certainly for live streaming that's maybe a little bit different because your audience obviously if you want to be live and have a live audience then you've got to do it at a time that it's going to be you know work for everybody or you know work for the biggest possible audience potentially if that's the thing but really if you look at the replay statistics versus the live and certainly look at how many people watch your video like on the minute or the hour that you post it versus the you know the ongoing thing it really pales into insignificance and if I think about like my some of my biggest videos if I come over to my stats if I go over to my channel content here, my page here and then I just sort these in order so if I go to where we go let me have a look I just have to zoom out from here a little bit if I go to views at all of the views on all of my videos sort of highest to lowest so this is my most popular video 40,000 views well I can guarantee that in the day that I posted it or within the week that I posted it it probably only had like a hundred or something like that so this idea of you have to post at a specific time I'm not too sure about that I certainly think it's good to be consistent in terms of you know having consistent content coming out but yeah don't necessarily need to get too hung up on that and in fact this sort of shows you this video did not really very much for the first hundred there you go 114 days in the first 114 days it had had 1400 views now it reached a point where it just suddenly started getting traction and then now this is basically 40,000 views you know two years later it was one of the first videos I did actually also see the revenue there from just that one video bearing in mind that instant monetization started in the end of wherever it was so that's the other thing about these videos when you're thinking about them if you have a video that sort of takes off a lot later then there is the potential for a single video to generate you know a contribute a substantial amount of your YouTube revenue bearing in mind how small the overall revenue is there so that one there was one of my most sort of popular the other thing is if I look through the list of all these top videos I mentioned that Ecam has got like the most videos on my channel however it's not my most popular content they do get consistent views but if you look down this list in order of number of views we've got this one's about stream deck obviously this one here is about using the YouTube shopping tab on your channel where you can add a merch shelf so that is the second highest video and it's about that I mean that is really kind of a departure from generally the stuff that I cover on my channel that's all about how if you look behind this down below this video if you're in the US you should see a shopping thing where you can buy things like this the recovering perfectionist hat and a live streamer hoodie and stuff like that trust me I've bought more of this myself than I've sold so I'm not I'm not re-mortgaging the house my merch sales but anyway it's there nonetheless and then I've got one here about this Logitech remote where is it? I've lost it now but little Logitech remote clicker so yeah that is my third highest video then we come down to stream deck stream deck arranging windows with moon this one about the best folding keyboard which happens to be this I do think I'll have to mention this it is in the link in the description as well but this folding keyboard is just awesome and I sort of mentioned it everyone seems blown away whenever I mention well a few select people who are geeks like me let me rephrase that not everybody some people are like it's just a keyboard I don't care but the thing that's great about this keyboard is it's exactly the same size as the Apple keyboard when it's unfolded but when it does fold away it is just less than the size of an iPad mini so it's a great little travel keyboard that and I use that all the time so I digress slightly just to say that you know that is one of my bigger videos as well so that's like the fifth or sixth largest but as we go down the list we're still seeing basically stream deck stream deck obviously road caster stream deck stream deck and I'm just looking to see if there's any e-cam there we've got to the first e-cam video all the way down here so yeah I am aware of you know what the main sort of audience for my stuff is and it does seem to be more the sort of stream deck and the stream deck content and the road caster content however I think if you look at that in terms of total views that's one thing but that is not obviously everyone who's subscribed to the channel so if you look at the number of views there 40,000 well I've only got 6,000 whatever it is subscribers so they're not all subscribed so I suspect that my subscriber base though like the actual core if you like are more heavily leaning towards e-cam just because that is sort of the community that I spend a lot of time in as well I'm not going to go into analytics too much because we could go down a rabbit hole and certainly looking at things on this really high level doesn't really give you the full picture at all there's lots of other things to consider in terms of traffic sources and all of that kind of stuff but nevertheless I digress once again as I often do in my live streams and also my recorded videos it does make me laugh when people leave comments on some of my YouTube videos talking about the edits or the lack of it saying I should tighten up the edits a little bit more yeah there's no edit I'm afraid so that's the reason for that so the reason we're talking about this was about the sort of consistency then in terms of being consistent on these different channels and I certainly have not been consistent in many respects on my channel apart from the live stream which is weekly and I have missed a couple of those here and there that has been the point of consistency certainly for the last year but if you look at the stats on my channel then what you'll see is that there is a very good correlation between these things so if I go to my analytics and just show you things like my views for example and I'll take this into a bit of a bigger view so let's just look at views I'll go to this one see more information and then I'll just show you a single bar chart basically with just my total views so I'll select total views in here and then I'll go to basically all time clicking in here and go to lifetime I can see the sort of ups and downs of this and I can say exactly what was happening at that time it makes perfect sense you know the times when I've slowed down what I will say is there have been points along here this is perhaps a little hard to see but for when you're kind of looking at this at the time obviously here it's trying to allow for spikes and things like that so all of the data for the down the line where the views were lower are all squashed down however what I did notice was at the time this wasn't squashed it all was spiking up and down and so they will fluctuate throughout the days and weeks and whatever but there were distinct points like here which is on the 4th or 5th of June where there was a video that I put out that suddenly caused a spike in traffic and views and then that kind of like new level it settled down a little bit and then maintained that sort of new slightly higher level then I went along again and then there was another thing that happened where I put out another bit of content which grabbed you know another sort of that of viewers I guess and then when it dropped down it dropped down to a slightly higher level than it was before so you can see that these kind of like spikes and then plateaus and just like this one here so this was a spike where there was something that I put out and then it dropped down and what the video was is kind of irrelevant at this point although I do know what all these spikes were from but when the level has sort of died down it's always come down to a slightly higher level so that's been the story of my channel really it's not been a total you know straight line and it's also not being like a you know a complete hockey stick as we talked about earlier but it is this thing of like these incremental step ups and then sort of drop down again to a higher level than it was it before so we're going sort of stepping up like this but also there's been a number of kind of places where the channel could have I would say taken off a lot more than it has but it's been down to me you know not continuing to be consistent in the video content because I do feel that even though some of my live streams do get really you know high replay value you know after the fact I do think there's this discrepancy between when somebody sees a video on YouTube if they see that it was streamed so many days ago versus if they see that it was you know a recording and I know that I have that feeling as well that when I see a video I think well this is going to be a really sort of concise video about a specific topic whereas if I see something it's a live stream I think well there's maybe going to be audience interaction like that and then there is also this feeling of kind of like well if it was streamed a while ago I've probably missed the boat on it almost so I think that people have a slightly different viewpoint on live streams versus on videos and that's also why I do try on these live streams to keep the content a little bit tighter and not allow myself to be distracted because if you watch my first live streams you know I was just chatting away going off down rabbit holes all of the time and I still do that even with just myself so imagine what it's like if I'm constantly you know asking questions and bringing comments up and all of that kind of stuff as well so I do like to try and get the content part out and then you know have the Q&A more towards the end or at the end of different sections which I realise I'm neglecting the chat so I will come back to you in just a moment as well but that's why I try and do that so that it does improve that sort of replay value as well as the sort of live and then obviously get into any questions if incidentally you do have any questions watching live then do feel free to drop those in if you've got any questions about any aspect of this in terms of the stats or any aspect I'm an open book in terms of this side of stuff and the business and everything like that but yeah so the this has been my sort of growth path has been sort of specific points that have had an impact but there have been parts here like for example I mentioned around about where was it April last year so you'll see that I had a lot of videos going out and then in around mid-April I kind of stopped producing any videos and I didn't put a video out for ages and so the sort of numbers stagnated a little bit because it was just my live stream then this was actually this was around about the time that the Rocaster Pro 2 came out however most of those views were actually driven by not the Rocaster videos that I was putting out but a new update to stream deck which came out and so there was a spike in views from the stream deck videos coupled with the Rocaster videos again if you want to think about this in terms of capitalizing on that audience which is a terrible way of saying it but I didn't really do that because I then went back to not posting consistently on the channel and so that's why these numbers are a little bit up and down because they basically go up when I post something and then they go down when I don't so that's you know the views are obviously driven by the content. I did get a bit more consistent with posting and specifically with my live streamer backstage podcast that drew some of the content in there as well and then it was around about the beginning of end of December or beginning of December should say was my last actual video that I posted and I was really shocked when I came to post a video just about a few weeks ago or a month ago and realized that I hadn't actually posted an actual video to my channel apart from the live streams since December so it had been like four and a half months or something without posting just a pre-recorded video so this is all sort of coming from this idea of consistency and I would say that I have not been consistent except with my live streamer missing one or two here and there but that has been the only thing that has been consistent in my channel and I do want to really get back to the consistency and that sort of brings me on to the future direction of the channel really which is that obviously I'm building out the content for the academy which has taken me away from the stuff that I'm doing on YouTube to some extent however it's just a case of me wanting to make sure that I've got that big body of work there in the academy and course material in the academy because all of those different components do kind of fit into all of the different things that I'm basically helping people with and when it comes to my audience obviously there's everybody who watches on YouTube but when I came to sort of realise that the people who booked coaching calls with me were in a quite a specific demographic and it's essentially either solopreneurs, either business people or coaches that are wanting to use all of these tools in their business and so that is really the core of the people who are ultimately booking calls with me and so the academy has been sort of tailored for people who want to level up their online presence be it social media in YouTube and things like that but also in their business meetings on Zoom and so on and create more engaging content and therefore also more engaging presentations so there's that kind of like sort of crossover between the content creator and also the business entrepreneur who wants to basically level up their appearance in their meetings or also a lot of work with coaches be they business coaches also actual fitness coaches as well but where they're doing things online and they want to be able to deliver their message and educate people online as well so that's kind of like the overall sort of core demographic I would say of people that have been helping in coaching calls and so that's how I kind of adapted the academy but once I've got all of those different core components in place then I will very much be coming back to creating a lot more content for the channel because this is essentially the sort of one of the primary marketing tools essentially for the academy as well and obviously in doing in delivering valuable content as well but nevertheless there is that sort of component to it and what you may have noticed if you've been following along with the channel for a long time is the way that things have slightly changed in terms of the delivery but also the fact that I'm trying to include a very distinct sort of call to action in every in every video as well so certainly with the with the live streams where there is a topic there will usually be some sort of some sort of download or whatever is associated with it because what I'm really looking to do as well is build my email list and I make no secret of that and indeed that is part of what we cover in the academy is how to use a YouTube channel or the social media platform as a content marketing platform as well whereby you're delivering value first and then you know you have other products that you know maybe of interest to those those people so if I just go over to take a look at the website you'll kind of see the direction things are going a little bit this has been something that's been a work in progress and I can say that you know none of the stuff that I'm doing right now is perfect and it's not quite where I want it to be so I haven't sort of said right well I'm not going to get all this ready until absolutely everything is finished I refer you to my previous statements regarding being a recovering perfectionist it's about actually skating to where the puck is going getting the ball rolling and heading in a direction and sort of iterating and so on but just recently I did do a big update to my website if I go to the right scene and this kind of outlines you know all the different components I guess because I didn't really have a consistent look to every part of the website and also I didn't have it make it wasn't necessarily clear all of the different offerings and things like that that you can get with take one text so now I have split that down into essentially three core components being you know personalised coaching and guidance online education with the courses and the academy and by the way the academy courses are still available as sort of standalone courses as well if there's just one particular aspect that you're interested in and then obviously the resources as well resources that are there to help with education as well but then as we go down there's basically just links into each individual section so the academy the coaching some obviously testimonials from happy clients and then also the first actual event which is coming up in October so this is the first kind of live take one tech event I've done plenty of events before that I've run educational events and then networking events and stuff like that but this is the first event for take one tech happening in October it's called a digital stage revolution and it's all about transforming your online impact and using all of these tools together to level up your game when it comes to all the stuff I've just been talking about presentations in meetings online coaching and working with coaching clients and doing that effectively online and then also the online content creation as well so that's coming up in October and you can register your interest for that in the description as well in the you'll find a link in the description digitalstagerevolution.com will link you basically back through to the website and you can register your interest for that event it is in Dallas 7th to 10th of October but I am going to be running an online component of that as well because obviously the irony of talking about a digital stage and doing it as an in person event in a conference room is not lost on me so I will be doing that as a virtual event as well or a hybrid event I should say and part of that will be to actually be live demonstrating like how that is all being done because certainly some of the people who are going to be coming are specifically looking for how to do these kind of live and hybrid events or hybrid and virtual events so that will be all covered in there as well but anyway I'm just talking about this to go through the different aspects of the offerings so you can see here the courses as well we've got the beginner's guides to just get up and running with different topics the master classes that are a deep dive into a specific subject then the accelerators are a way to learn with others and then finally the academy is the all-encompassing gives you access to all of those different learning resources and then more in terms of the coaching and stuff like that that I already talked about coming down then on the website the other offerings here are upcoming virtual workshops so these are monthly workshops included for all academy members but you can also just buy access to those as well if you just want to come to one or the other of them and then this was another early monetization aspect to the channel as well I do make a lot of stream deck icon packs for my own use and so I made those available and again this is only something I mean some of these icon packs there's a couple in here that are you know a couple of dollars well it's amazing how much these couple of dollars add up when you've been doing this for a couple of years it all just does help and so if you want to think about a way to monetize your channel is thinking about some little things like this that you may be able to give for a small cost but that will help offset your overall costs so I've got a number of icon packs there is also a free icon pack in there specifically for the stream deck plus so you can go and check that out at the takeonetech.io store we'll take you over to that one directly instead of going to the home page and then we've got the free resources and this is kind of the point that I was getting to which is that you'll notice that in all of my videos recently there is usually some sort of free download associated with it and I'm very careful to make sure that these are delivering real value and it's not just an upsell I hate these things where somebody says oh go and get this free guide and then you download it and you find it's nothing more than a single page pdf with very little of actual it and so I'm very careful about making sure that whenever I do put something up here that it is something that is going to provide real standalone value but as I say I make no secret of the fact that the point here is that with this and the other resources this is all about you know email database building as well as delivering value and so there's a number of different resources that you can get so these guides, different templates and checklists you'll also find recommended services on this page as well that I'm using to obviously these are all my affiliate links here but these are all services that I use and genuinely believe in and so this is kind of like a focus and a way that I've sort of pivoted really is to make sure that I have all of my offerings clearly visible on my site if you just want to stay up to date if there's a course that you're waiting for then you can also just sign up to the newsletter here as well or sign up to the mailing list that you be kept up to date about any of those new courses that are coming up and you can also just contact me if there's something specific you'd like to see on here as well but yeah this is something that is going to be a bit more of a focus going forward is just being a lot more sort of proactive from my own point and this is probably something I should have done a lot earlier but it was just one of the you know much further down my list of priorities but certainly if you're starting out to be starting to think about you know actually other ways to monetize your channel and be collecting those email addresses to then be able to politely market your services to and I've got to say that I dropped a bit of a dropped something the other day when I inadvertently sent something to the incorrect market segmentation and so I basically sent an email blast out to a large number of people that shouldn't have received it so albeit to send them something free so it wasn't like I was sending something that was like paid or anything like that but nevertheless it was a bit of a mistake on my part but I digress again yeah just thinking about ways to sort of build up your email database and then being smart about the way that you nurture that because I'll confess about this whilst it's something that I've done in all my other businesses and even teach in certain ways when this started out as more of a hobby channel let me be clear about that you know in the beginning a hobby channel and an experiment more to the point as well I wasn't so focused on the sort of monetization aspect of it and had I been and had I be starting out like that from now then I would have been a bit more intentional about not just collecting email addresses in exchange for value but also nurturing that email address because I haven't that email list I should say because I haven't done a great job of doing that and it's something that I will be addressing going forward to start to sort of kick start those those relationships again by delivering ongoing sort of consistent value via email for those that are interested in it as well I should add so so that is something that I would do slightly different now would be starting a little bit more intentionally from that point of view and so once I start creating more of the content on YouTube having got the courses in place in the academy there are also some other areas that I will sort of shift my attention more towards because one of the other areas that I've neglected in actually this year is Amazon live because I am on the Amazon influencer program so I can make Amazon shoppable videos which are essentially making video reviews and things like that for Amazon so that when people are on Amazon browsing for products you may see a little bit further down the Amazon page in the US that there are videos from users that basically demonstrate products and things like that for example those are called shoppable videos and the way that it works on Amazon is if somebody watches your video prior to making the purchase then you get the affiliate credit for that and there is also live video on Amazon where it's basically like a live stream but then you have what's called the carousel down below and when you are planning your live stream you basically choose the products that you are going to be talking about in a live stream and then when you stream you can basically select to highlight the product that you are talking about at any given time and these actually appear not all the time but they will choose who is going to appear actually right at the top of the page of the products that you are talking about in your video so if I do a ROCASTER unboxing for example then it will appear right at the top when somebody is looking at the ROCASTER they will say oh there is a live stream they can go and check it out and see what somebody is saying about the product and again you get the commission from that so that is something that I did do towards the end but this year just with a slightly shift in focus and time constraints I haven't got back into that so that is something else I want to increase my focus on probably in the second half of this year and get back to doing that the other thing that I have neglected also on a similar note to that is my live streamer backstage podcast and you may have seen that there has been episodes going out recently however those were recorded at the end of last year and the way that podcast worked is I would stream it to LinkedIn and to Amazon Live LinkedIn because live streamer backstage was all about how people were using live streaming in their business and so it had an appeal for the business audience was my thinking rationale here but then also at the end of the episode we talk as well about the tech that they are using and so streaming it to Amazon simultaneously was for the sort of tech side where they are talking about their gear and kit and things like that to be helpful to Amazon shoppers who are looking for those kind of things and can actually see the products in the context of somebody who is using them for live streaming as well so then after live streaming to Amazon and LinkedIn then what I do is I take the recording of that and have posted it to my YouTube channel so going forward I think I might slightly evolve the format of that I have done 25 episodes of the podcast now and again I kind of went on a hiatus of recording I batch-recorded them basically I got off doing one a week for the scheduling out the guests that I was going to have on but then I had a couple of instances of people dropping out at the last minute having to get somebody in and so I thought what I need to do is just batch-record them so I started just recording basically four a week and got them all together so then the recordings could sort of drip out after that in terms of having that on my channel going forward obviously podcasts have now come to YouTube in fully implemented in YouTube you can now create a podcast in YouTube however I'm still not entirely sure that this channel is the right place for that podcast when I look at the views that I get on that versus the other content I often wonder you know is this the right place for that and should it be a channel in its own right so I'm still sort of debating debating what to do about that in my own little brain so we'll see where that goes but I'm certainly thinking of sort of pivoting the format of it slightly and I'll reveal more about that a little bit later not today but as we go forward and as I kind of figure it out I'm thinking about changing the formatting of it slightly and deciding where to put that but certainly I mentioned there LinkedIn that is another focus going forward I want to be creating more content for LinkedIn and I'm actually wanting to be a little bit more specific about what I'm putting where and maybe having some slightly different content that I'm doing in other live streams so having at the moment I do this one live stream a week on YouTube before last half of last year when I was doing more stuff on Amazon I also did a weekly thing on there the Sunday session where it was basically a deep dive into some aspect of tech specifically talking about products so I'll be doing more of that going forward as well again second half of this year and yeah just looking at doing some different live shows on Amazon going forward sorry on LinkedIn specifically more for the sort of business side of things so that's where I'm looking to sort of go I'm fully into the obviously the academy getting that initial content that is my my main focus right now but then also more of these live events so I'm doing one in Dallas obviously at the end of October that I've talked about but I will be looking to do these in different locations so I'm initially looking at Singapore it's close to me where I am here in Thailand but then also looking in Europe and Australia as well to run some sorts of similar events so we'll see see about that and upcoming dates to be released but incidentally on that note if you're not interested in the one in October in terms of being there in person but you are interested in the idea of this digital stage revolution event then you can certainly still sign up and you'll be on the list then kept up to date with all of those different dates I will just mention TubeBuddy because I've sort of talked about it a few times and I will say that it's something that really really did help me and you can get a free trial at takeonetech.io slash TubeBuddy and in that page you'll also find it's linked in the description by the way you'll also find a link to my TubeBuddy playlist because I've got a lot of tutorials on it and I found that it has been really valuable when I was first starting out it basically seemed to be a really great way to act as a checklist to help me when I'm uploading videos and it's got such deep integration with YouTube Studio so if I just come out of these stats for a minute if I was to go into any one of the videos on my page let me close down some of these things for a second if I go down to my content and then go into any one of these videos what you'll see is that TubeBuddy is you can see it up here at the top first of all there's a little TubeBuddy icons dotted all over the place here you've got various different things down here this one here is if I go down a bit too far there this best practices it will give you a little check marks to tell you if you've done all of the right things for the video so it helps you in terms of adding in chapter markers getting your title right your description so I found that it was a really great checklist for me to go through initially but then it's been really helpful in crafting better titles really great for split testing of thumbnails and things like that and split testing descriptions and titles as well and that is one thing that I mentioned earlier where I got to a certain point I decided that I was going to do a slight tweak or redesign to these very basic thumbnails in any case and I changed them to something that I thought looked better but the analytics came back and what I'd created actually was significantly lower in terms of performance when you look at the click through rate so how many times it showed the video versus how many people clicked well with the new thumbnail sort of like for like the older style it seems better so it's been really valuable for that because I wouldn't have necessarily known it went against what I thought in my own personal judgment this looks better the stats came back and said no actually you're wrong the other one did so TubeBuddy's been really valuable I mentioned as well the find and replace as well so there's various different tools in here to be able to do lots of different things but one of them is this find and replace so if you want to go and update a load of data in your you know in your descriptions or anything like that not data but wording in your descriptions you can do that from in here so these bulk tools you can also add overlays over the top of your thumbnails so for example when I'm running a giveaway or promotion then I can just go and apply an overlay to all of my thumbnails that direct people to go and do that and use that find and replace to go and add a link you know into the description or whatever and that might be something like the Rocaster Duo giveaway I'm just currently running so you can find a link to that in the description as well and also down in the chat but yet at the end of this month at the end of May I'll be picking one winner to win one of the new Rocaster Duos the Rocaster Pro 2 has been just an amazing bit of gear for me and it's just completely changed the way that I've done things from a presentation point of view in Zoom in these videos as well and being able to do things with discord as well where I can root the backstage audio into me whilst it's not going out into the livestream it's just an amazing piece of gear and the Rocaster Duo is almost like the ultimate Rocaster for this specific use case that I have because I could quite easily get away with only having two mic inputs and fewer mixers, fewer faders this is really kind of like the ideal device for me and that is why I'm giving one away because I feel like for my target core demographic the people that I have consultation calls with this would be the perfect device the Rocaster Duo so not yet released it's been announced obviously but if you want to enter go and check the link in the description and that draw will be done at the end of May and I'll be doing the draw live on the livestream as well so let's just hope it isn't a friend or family member that wins it otherwise that will look very odd but anyway we'll see how that goes but I digress once again when I want to promote something like that it's really easy you'll see if you go into any of my other videos you'll see that there is a link to that giveaway in those videos so TubeBuddy has been really great in that respect so I just really wanted to give it a little shout out also the little milestones that you get on TubeBuddy so on the TubeBuddy app on your mobile you can go to the website and you can get these little milestones for a thousand subscribers whatever it happens to be so all these little milestones that I've been talking about earlier the little celebration that you get from posting that on Twitter or Instagram and the encouragement you get back from that and I really like that aspect of it it's a nice little thing so TubeBuddy is definitely being with me all the way and you can find out about that in the description takeonetech.io TubeBuddy now I'm going to come to some comments because I have been completely neglecting the comments so if you're still watching watching from, hi Jamie, watching from Brisbane, Australia well thanks I'm glad you find the lessons useful and it is really nice to get positive feedback in comments, I don't really get much negativity in fact in the recent episode of the Creators Pod podcast we talked about negativity and negative things that you get in the comments but I don't really get much of that I only get I suppose really truth which is I waffle a bit too much which I do, I sometimes take too long to get to the point which I do so nobody's ever said anything really nasty but it's been really nice to get all the positive feedback and also using the feedback for things, you know, questions that people ask to feed back into the videos and in fact some of my most popular videos and the ones that have had the biggest impact have been ones that have been purely driven by somebody else's question be it in another video I've done or maybe in the Ecamm Live group because I spend a lot of time in there and listen to what people are struggling with and the questions they've got and then I'll make videos to address that great to you here thank you very much for the congratulations thank you Professor Mark great to see you here too thanks I'm glad you like the videos too David Harvey great to see you too lots of familiar faces and the people I know who've been around for a long time follow me so it's great to see you all here as well and yes the gear acquisition syndrome the gas is something that is very real and I think that there's I mean there is one thing about buying gear for the sake of it but there is something to be said for and it is a bit of a thing isn't it any problem there's usually a bit of tech that you can solve it with so it does need to have its limits but yeah I think when you're sort of building things up and you are buying things that are improving your content and what you're delivering is it is an investment and it's a useful investment as well I certainly don't feel that you know any of the things that I've now got in my studio space which I didn't have when I began I wouldn't necessarily have gone and bought all of this stuff straight off the back because it's only been through me understanding what I'm trying to do that I've realized you know the things that I need to add in to improve so yeah it's easy to look from the outside at somebody's overall setup and then feel like you need to go and get all of that it's always better to start with what you get and then just build up over time but that part you mentioned there about procrastination I think that that is a very real thing that sometimes people look at you know somebody else's studio and think that you know I really need to get all of this before I can start and so definitely never let the the tech be something that holds you back whatever you know stage you're at and in that case I mentioned earlier about you know oh don't just go live on your phone and what I was meaning by that was I feel like yeah having some preparation is the way that it worked for me but there's nothing wrong totally with actually using your phone I mean these days the iPhone's cameras and Samsung or whatever brand you're using are just amazing so you can totally use a phone as your main camera and if you're using either continuity camera on the Mac or something like camo to get a lot more finer adjustment out of your your camera then yeah the iPhone is technically all you need just get some nice nice lighting going on then then you're good to go so so I cut the lesson or learning bit from your live as a shorter standalone video oh I guess that yeah I guess that's where I was talking about the sort of format of it yeah I could totally actually just cut out the sort of lesson part and repost that and that just comes down to the reason I haven't done that Michael is just because of the this whole thing of editing I've always talked about repurposing my content but I never get around to it because again I'm it's just this editing factor as well do you have course content in setting up multiple monitors on a Mac do you know what I actually did my I actually did a workshop this week last week which was about technical setup for virtual presentations and it was all about it was intended to be all about how to set up from a technical point of view using multiple Macs first of all and to do presentations on zoom or e-cam or whatever or in their teams I should say and then how to actually set up everything on the Mac I've certainly got tutorials on the channel about these different things however this was the the event that I that I inadvertently sent to a rather large email database and initially it was intended to be a much smaller event for a much more smaller group of people who I knew were at a certain level and so I'd got a whole sort of plan of attack for that laid out but then because this email suddenly went out to a massive group of people due to my own foolishness and error then there was going to be people coming in that were potentially at a completely different level and maybe didn't even know about e-cam never mind managing things on the computer automation and stuff the automation tools I was using so in the end the workshop I'll say did not go entirely to plan because I basically rewrote what I was going to deliver kind of four hours before the event now I got some good feedback so people maybe didn't notice but I'll just tell you that's what happened but then because I had also mentioned in the email that there will be a replay available of this now obviously I've got to got to stand by that and fulfill that but what I'm figuring is I feel like the workshop that I delivered technical presentations for technical setup for virtual presentations I feel like it was not the best for either group either the people that wanted to really in depth technical stuff nor for the people that maybe were coming in that didn't really have that initial sort of base knowledge so what I've decided I'm going to do is I'm actually going to create a completely free course that fulfills my free replay will be available a completely free course which is basically going to cover at a relatively high level how to set up with multiple monitors using you know the equipment that I'm using right now so having camera teleprompter multiple screens if I switch over to this one again this is the way that I have this setup at the moment and in fact maybe I could switch to this other view there we go sorry about my shiny bald head here but this is basically the way that I've got this sort of laid out on my monitor is I've got these six different zones on this 43 inch monitor and this is what I share in Ecamm so in Ecamm live when I'm sharing you know my youtube stats it's over here my youtube website is sorry my personal website is over here I've got this one here which was that youtube video that I just queued up this one down here is actually where I've got my discord for the live streamer backstage area my main discord window over here and this is just stream deck so I've got these six different areas of the screen that I can share then in front of me just down here I've got a monitor that's got all of the chat then in Ecamm to bring it in I've also got one that is just the actually the youtube chat itself in a popped out window just sometimes some extra things coming there they come in a bit quicker and then I've got this sort of run of show sort of notes down here and some Ecamm live controls and then in front of me I am looking at my teleprompter which is not actually prompting me but I've just got my Ecamm output so essentially I can see what you see and then also in the workshop I talked about how I use a second monitor a second computer to bring in a presentation so in answer to your question Jamie I will have a course specifically on Mac automation in the academy but I will also be making this this kind of like free mini course that will be available that will talk about all of the setup of these individual components including setting up multiple monitors specifically for this use case as well so if that is something that is interesting to you then definitely go over to the website and you can find the link to just sign up to the mailing list is right there on the front page so takeonetech.io just go down to this let's connect and then as soon as that is available I'll be sending that out to everybody who's interested because yes as I say made a bit of an error sending this out to everybody but now that I've promised this replay I'm not happy with the quality of the replay for those that are coming in without all of the background knowledge so I'm just going to make a mini course and make that available to everyone for free basically so that is what I would recommend I do also though on my channel if you search for MOOM that is what I use for actually organising all of the content on my monitors so with MOOM you can basically create little snapshots you can put all the applications where you want save it as a snapshot when you come to open all of those apps again you can just press the keyboard shortcuts or a stream deck button and it will put all of those apps back in those same places on the screen so that is just to maybe answer the direct question I use MOOM for that window management incidentally there was a stream deck update that came out yesterday or the day before and I released a video about that and they've now added the close action into stream deck which is something that was missing because you can set up a multi-action stream deck with the open command to open a whole series of applications files and folders and then use MOOM to put them where you want them but previously there wasn't a close command to close it all back down again after the fact whereas now in stream deck 6.2 there is so that was a video that I just posted yesterday or yes yesterday so going down the list thanks Michael great to see you here first of all and glad you are finding it interesting hey Parker great to see you too and indeed the appropriate use of the little cowboy emoji there so oh yes the Michael is also the October fest in Munich I thought so yeah there definitely will be something in Europe coming up and well thank you very much and the one thing is so yeah who could give negative things to say to me well of course yes who should dare however there are some very genuine things that people say so yeah they're not unfounded the negative comments they have it's usually about me waffling on and not getting to the point quick enough which is very very very true and everyone is different as well obviously people don't appeal to everybody do they hey Bickey great to see you and you're forgiven no problem that you're a bit late Jamie what can I say about discord and why I use discord well I was I won't say anti discord but I didn't really feel it was for me when I ultimately or just before I ultimately set up my discord server and the reason is because I'd been in discord servers before I in various stock trading circles that I was moving in that is a big use for discord or that is a group that typically use discord quite a lot and the first of all there is this thing of discord is for gamers I think there are some people who think that which certainly is the the origin of it that's where it started however I'd my experience of it was in these sort of trading servers and what I found was they were very poorly organized very poorly managed and they'd got a load of people with and very poor moderation and in terms of not all of them but the ones that I happen to be in and so it was really off putting for me to be honest because I went in there and I kind of felt like it was a little bit lost first of all couldn't find what I was looking for didn't see the value in it and yeah it just didn't really appeal to me so it kind of put me off discord quite a lot and then fortunately somebody who we were in in doc rocks group was keely done and the discord coach so if you search for discord coach I'll just drop the handle in into the chat discord coach yeah she was had been using discord extensively herself for I've probably spelled that wrong can't even spell the word coach never mind if you search for discord coach you'll find it but she was had been using discord in her own community for her other business as a hockey coaching community and she she was basically telling us how you know how it really transformed her interaction with her community now she quickly convinced doc doc rock to take on discord as well and so then we got to see an actual real live community in what keely basically created for doc and when I went into that community already been a part of doc's community but I mean going into his discord community I realized that actually the experience you have in discord is very much dictated by the server architect that you have been designed the server that you're in so the organizational structure that you get in there as I say is something that can be vastly different from one to the next and so I realized quite quickly that I'd got a very skewed view of discord based on those other experiences I've had whereas when I saw what keely did with doc's server and the way that it was all structured and organized then it was just like a light bulb going off and yeah it didn't take me long to be convinced quite honestly because the difference with discord versus things like Facebook groups if you want to make that comparison they shouldn't really be compared like for like but I know a lot of people will think about creating a Facebook group for their community and the trouble with that is you're still basically being served what Facebook wants you to see and then you've got these issues of how do you if you've ever been into a Facebook group you've seen a post that's really interesting and you want to come back to it later how easy is it to find it's not at all is it if ever you can even find it and sometimes it'll be you know I'll remember somebody has posted something in the e-cam live Facebook group that solved a problem that I had you know a year ago or 18 months ago I feel like there's no hope of me finding that original post that solved that problem however one of the things that keely discord was that you know it is so much easier to first of all organize things into structured threads and I guess what I should be doing here at this point is actually showing you my server rather than just talking about it and I say my server this is all being done with a great deal of help and assistance from keely I always say that if you see anything in here that looks good it's likely keely's idea if you see anything that doesn't look right it's probably me going off of reservation off script but here's my discord server and if you look down the left hand side it's split into different sections and so I've split it up into different things for my academy members there's some things in here let me just shut these down I've just noticed that Michael is in the academy voice channel I'm not sure if you mean to be in there or in the on-air backstage but you can just Michael hop over on-air backstage that's where I do all of my live streams so we're in there and we can have like a little voice chat it's like a zoom call going on in the background in there but anyway I digress the point of showing you this was to show that you've got these different sections so when somebody's new into the discord server there's these different things like the little rules the rules aren't very difficult it's just basically be nice orientation so here posts to help people find their way around floor plan as well that just tells people what all of these different sections are for, a place for people to introduce people and so on I've then got a space for all of my content so I wanted a way to sort of collect all that together so as a community that's obviously built around take one tech then if you click into the video section it will show you all of my videos on my channel but then also you know the creators pod so that's the podcast that I do with Rich and Keely Michelle Nina and I was going to say something cruel then I was going to say and Rob sister and Rob so that also gets posted in there so this is kind of like a resource for the take one tech content and by the way actually just while we're talking about this definitely say if you're not already a member of the take one tech community then you can find it at takeonetech.io family I'll just stick that up again and that's how you get into the take one tech server it's completely sort of free to join and so then you can see my Instagram posts any guest appearances that I'm on on other shows on other people's shows and so on but then further down here this is where the real value comes and this is in this tech talk section and this is where I was saying about comparing this to Facebook in Facebook you've just got a long stream of posts basically whereas in here in the tech talk section we've got a channel for e-cam live so this is for discussions about e-cam live one for roadcaster all about the roadcaster latest updates things like that any issues that people are having they can just drop in here other channels in here for things like loopdeck video idea studio gear automation productivity podcast in YouTube so all the kind of things that I cover on and around my channel are in here but maybe you are not interested in roadcaster so you don't need to get that cluttering up your feed because you could actually come in here and you can actually just mute this channel you don't hear about the roadcaster stuff if you're not interested maybe you're only interested in automation and productivity and so you can come and just watch see what's going on in those threads and those conversations as well the other reason that discord is great as a creator though is because you are able to assign different roles to people which give them access to different things so if you come into the take one tech family I don't like to call them servers because I don't think that makes it sound a bit inaccessible maybe to some they maybe think it's too techie or something you know a server well actually it's just a family it's a forum that kind of thing so it's just like being in a Facebook group except infinitely better and so you can assign different levels of access to people so anybody can get access to this tech talk and get access to all of the conversations that are going on in there however there is then an academy section so in the academy section there are such as the weekly Q&A that we have that goes on in here there's also pdf guides and different feedback I should say on things like the pdf guides and monthly workshops so I'm getting feedback directly from academy members what they want to see me create in terms of videos workshops and so on but only the people who are academy members get access to all of this stuff the same with my channel members as well and they get access to a whole separate area of the discord server that regular members don't however I am very conscious of the fact that I want to make sure that all of these resources in terms of the conversations about specific topics are available to everyone so highly recommend if you're not already then come along and jump in here it's also a much better place to have a conversation and part of my motivation for doing it was I got a bit frustrated with comments on YouTube where I'll see a list of comments that have come in I'll answer to the comment but it's almost like the second that I answer to it it's kind of gone off my radar and it's not easy to keep up with any replies to that not easy to follow sort of threaded conversations the other thing is if somebody comments on a YouTube video and I reply to that YouTube comment first of all who is actually seeing that other than the commenter if people aren't going down and reading those comments after the fact, after they've watched the video and then also who's getting involved in that conversation whereas having a community specifically in Discord to go along with your channel or your business or whatever it is then that means that first of all everybody can see the questions and everyone can see the replies but also there are people in there far smarter than me that can also add to the conversation and give their input as well so it's a much better place for that and yeah this has been something that has just been like grown out of Discord and the community aspect to the whole channel and the people that are in there now it's just been another really rewarding aspect to it and I guess it was in the beginning of last year that I actually set up the take one text server and then it took a few months I would guess it was around about March time when I actually sort of opened the doors to it officially if you like rather than just getting all the things set up but yeah all credit to Keely for helping me get that up and giving me the information that I needed to structure it and advice on how to structure it I won't show you any examples of bad servers there are plenty but yeah the feeling in this is very much modelled on what Keely did for Doc and what she's done in her own server and yeah it's I highly recommend if you're considering if you're considering using Discord I see Keely's dropped you a link there and for Twitter as well definitely hook up with Keely get a coaching call with her one of the discovery calls or whatever and just find out what this call can do for your specific business because yeah nothing but good things to say in that respect highly highly recommend it so if there are any questions or comments either in the live feed or if you are watching this on the replay and you want to know any more about anything that I've covered in this sort of rumbling almost two hour odyssey into various aspects of what I've been doing on YouTube then do feel free to reach out either in the comments or better still as I say go over to that Discord link and join the family over there and ask me any questions in there as well I'm a total open book about all of this stuff it's what I talk about in the academy so we've got people in there that are looking to start their own businesses and look to adding a YouTube component to it and indeed as I said the YouTube beginners guide is going to be the next course that is added to the academy and also just to the general course catalogue so if you're interested in that YouTube beginners guide the best thing to do is to actually just head over to the website takeonetech.io and just sign up to that mailing list because then you will get notified as soon as that is available and if you want to find out more about the academy specifically then you can also just go and book a call if I just show you quickly the academy page if you are not sure which of these different tiers is right for you then just down at the bottom you'll see that there is a little let's chat button so just click on that and then you can have an initial call we can have a conversation to find out whether this is right for you if you want to book an individual consultation session you can do that as well so if you go to the consultation page there then you'll be able to find there is an option there to book just a free discovery call it's a 20 minute call we can have a little chat to find out how any of this might be of benefit to you in your business or your content creation journey and discordcoach.com I think just to answer your question Jamie I think that works too let me just get that fairly sure that that one works as well I'll just drop that into the chat because that has got all the ways in there as well I dropped in there oops not that I copied your own comment there or your own name let me try that again there we go that is the link there for you I don't know what that other code is there but there you go so that is the the way to get in touch with Keely highly recommend anybody interested in discord at all or maybe if you're not interested in discord you probably should be so if you haven't considered it you definitely should have that code just to find out how it may be able to help you in your business anyway what I will do is I'll leave a link to some of my other youtube content over on the right hand side for those that are interested in content creation and growing on youtube thanks to all of my channel members and of course all of my academy members too I really appreciate all of your ongoing support and encouragement