I Ignored YouTube Gurus and Grew To 1 Million Subscribers (Here's How)

Every YouTube guru told me that I was doing everything wrong. But I ignored their advice and I hit 1 million subscribers anyways. And honestly, I think that's exactly why it worked. I'm talking about deliberately doing the opposite of what all the experts recommended. And somehow that led to faster growth than when I was actually following their strategies. And the crazy part is, while I was struggling to get to a thousand or 10,000 subscribers following guru advice, the moment I stopped listening to them and started doing what I felt was right, my channel exploded. Now, you can see in the background here, this is my channel. We've made over $1,500,000 just from AdSense alone. And I have a couple other channels as well. And I know this sounds completely backwards, but I documented the entire journey. And I can prove that ignoring popular YouTube advice was the best decision I ever made. And in today's video, I'm going to break down exactly what guru advice I ignored, what I did instead, and why going against conventional wisdom actually accelerated my growth. And what's wild is these strategies that got me to 1 million subscribers are the exact opposite of what most YouTube courses teach. Which explains why so many people following those courses stay stuck. Okay, so the number one piece of bad advice from gurus that like is just poison for your mind and it's poison for your chances of having success on YouTube is the expectation that you're going to get rich quick. Okay, I've heard this from gurus all the time. It it's marketing fluff and basically they make it seem like, oh, YouTube's so easy. Like you just, you know, upload a video and you're just, you know, magically you're just going to get a million views and, you know, start a channel that's making, you know, $10,000 a month, right? And once in a while that actually happens. But the truth is like for instance uh I started my brother last month on YouTube and with my guidance going through my coaching program, he did actually make it to a full-time income in one month. Uh stay tuned for that case study because I'm going to be posting it. But that is with my knowledge and my guidance, right? Like there's no way if he was starting off on his own without someone working directly with him that he would have made it that far in one month. All right, quick break. This Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, I'm doing a one-time only workshop where I talk about a new billiondoll a day industry that's suddenly unlocked by AI. And you can check it out down in the description and the pin comment below. At this workshop, I'm going to be giving away my niche GPT. This is a GPT powered by a piece of software that I've been working on for a long time now, and it's been trained on thousands of hours of my teaching, coaching sessions, and more. So, you don't have to spend years to pick a profitable niche. You can do it in a matter of minutes. Heck, it's even possible to do it in seconds sometimes. And I'm going to be giving this away for one time only at the workshop. So, make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And the best way to do that is to make sure you add it to your calendar once you've signed up for it. So, you basically just click add this to your calendar once you're on the thank you page after you've registered. And it'll show up as either Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar, whatever calendar you have. So, you can make sure you won't miss the chance to grab the nicheinder GPT. And you'll also be able to ask me questions live. So, I look forward to meeting you. Can't wait to see you there. See you. Tuesday, 9:00 p.m. Eastern time. I'm going to be showing you this new opportunity. It's completely free and it's amazing. Whether you basically want to use it to get a better job, use it to network, use it to make some passive income, start a side hustle, make a full-time income, or even start a fullon business. It works incredibly well with all of those and it's completely free. And now back to your regularly scheduled content. So, a ton of these gurus make it seem way too easy. They make it seem like you're going to make money super fast. you know, it's going to be like less, you know, a few days or a week, few weeks or a month. And in reality, like most successful YouTubers are going to take many months, if not years before they become successful. And that's just businesses in general. I mean, a lot of businesses out there take 5 to 10 years before they're even profitable. So, if you even have a chance of getting your YouTube channel to the point where it's successful within like, you know, 1 or two years, that's actually way better than the average business. Plus, your quality of life working on a YouTube channel versus the average business is going to be a lot higher, too. So, just as an example, this guy right here, um, he said, you know, he's struggling with faceless YouTube automation, stuck in zero view jail after initial success. And, you know, he said his very first video got 32K views and it was super motivating. And then, you know, his next three videos pulled in a bit over 1K each. And if you actually go to his channel, now this was posted about 2 months ago, but if you actually go to this guy's channel, and by the way, I'm not trying to be mean to this guy or like talk crap on him or anything, but this is just the expectations uh that a lot of people have set. That's just like totally unrealistic expectations. You look at all of his videos and he's actually only uploaded like 12 videos. And when he made that post, at the time he made that post 2 months ago, he only uploaded like eight videos. And we're not talking full-length videos here. We're talking shorts. He's never even uploaded a fulllength video. He's only uploaded shorts, right? So, he literally uploaded like eight shorts and he decided to make this post saying he's struggling with faceless YouTube automation and he's stuck in zero view jail after initial success. I I mean, I I can't I I don't even know what to say here. I mean, this is just totally unrealistic to think that you can upload eight shorts and you're going to just be popping off on YouTube. That almost never happens. Uh, or how about this guy who was basically complaining about not getting that many views despite the fact that his CTR was only 2.9%. This guy here is like a 15-year-old kid who's made a few videos and he's been doing YouTube for a few months and he hasn't immediately been able to make money and he's talking about getting rejected from 10 jobs and basically he's relying on YouTube to make money, you know, as a 15-year-old. Right. Right. So, it's not any of these people's faults. It's the guru's faults for basically making it seem extremely easy. And the truth is, it's not easy, but it is simple. Okay, it's simple, but not easy. And it is going to take a lot of hard work. And the average YouTuber is going to have to work really hard before they have a successful channel. I mean, you can even just look at Mr. Beast, the most successful YouTuber arguably in the entire world. He posted hundreds and hundreds of videos that were basically flops before he had success on YouTube. And I had this same mentality when I started my first YouTube channels. And it's one of the biggest reasons why I failed because my expectation for how hard it was going to be was actually kind of low. I was like, "Oh, this is going to be relatively easy, right?" And then it turned out it was incredibly difficult and it took a lot of hard work. So when I started my channel that actually turned out to be successful, the expectation in my mind is that I was going to be willing to literally grind for 10, 20, 30 years. literally just throwing stuff against the wall for 30 years if I had to while I was working my full-time job before I would allow myself to give up. Like that is the time horizon I had in my head. I was like willing I was like literally like in my head I was thinking if I have to do this for 10 years, I'm going to do it. And if I have to post literally thousands and thousands and thousands of videos before one of them pops off, I'm going to do it. And that's the same mentality I always have on my channel. like I will grind as much as I possibly have to before I have a video pop off and it served me extremely well. So, if you go into it with this mentality that it might take 10 years before your channel pops off, then when it takes one year, you're going to be super happy. All right, the second piece of advice that I completely ignored was to post shorts. Now, this is a piece of advice that YouTube and a lot of gurus out there have been shoving down everyone's throat for the last few years now. I actually made an entire video on this. I don't know if it's going to be out on the channel by the time this posts, but just to summarize that video. Not only do shorts potentially not help your channel, but they might actually hurt your channel. And there's actually a really good amount of evidence that they do hurt your channel. And there's so many examples of people posting about this. For instance, here's a YouTube forum, and it's this guy right here, Trixs React. And he's talking about when he started doing shorts, they nuked his long- form content performance. And basically what happened is he started a new channel and it was doing super well right off the bat. He said the first 10 videos did really well for a new channel and they were averaging 1K to 20K views. And he blasted past 4K watch hours and he rapidly grew to 875 subs. Plus he had tons of comments. And then after watching videos about shorts boosting channels, you know, from some guru probably, he decided to remix some of his long forms into shorts. And he linked them to the long form video. And he said some shorts did well and others not so well. And he maxed out around 100 subs across those shorts. And then he said ever since posting the shorts, every new long- form video has drastically tanked in impressions, views, subs, and recommendations. And it's even suggesting his new videos to a totally different audience. So his new impressions, views, subs, etc. per video dropped. And this guy's not the only one. There's probably hundreds of posts like this across the internet. For instance, this Redditor here says, "Can YouTube Shorts really hurt your main channel?" Well, in this guy's case, he was getting 300K to 1.6 million views per video. And then at the start of 2025, he decided to follow the common guru advice and he began posting daily shorts to promote his main content. And unexpectedly, his long- form video views dropped significantly around 60 to 70%. And then once he stopped posting shorts, his views began getting back to normal again. Here's Oscar Owen in his video, Why YouTube Shorts Will Kill Your Channel. He shares that after 6 months of posting shorts, his long- form engagement dropped. And this graph shows his first upload of a YouTube short three months ago. And from there, the performance went down. So, I could give you a million examples, but the bottom line is 99% of the time, it's not a good idea to post long- form content and shorts on the same channel. Now, if you want to do a channel that's just shorts, that might actually make sense. Just as an example, Zack D. Films primarily post shorts, and he's gotten 3.4 billion views in the last month, and he's made around 34 to $138,000, which is really good money. but he's likely the number one shorts creator on the entire platform. Now, if you can compare that to the number one long- form creator, Mr. Beast, he's making 2.6 million to $7.4 million a month in AdSense money. So, he's making about 70 times more money than Zack D. Films, and that's just from AdSense alone. With long- form content, you can make money from sponsorships, affiliate marketing, selling your own products and services, etc. So, the best long- form creators are probably making something like 100 to 300 times more than the best short form creators. And therefore, it's much easier to make a full-time income with long- form content. So, don't get me wrong, there are people out there that are making a ton of money from shorts. With that being said, if you're going to choose one or the other, 95% of the time, you should choose long- form content. And 99% of the time, you shouldn't mix long- form content with short form content because it's likely going to hurt your channel. All right, the number three piece of bad advice that I've heard over and over again from gurus, and again, basically, you can tell someone's a guru if they just tell you exactly what you want to hear, right? If they tell you exactly what you want to hear and they're just sugar coating everything, they're probably a guru and you probably shouldn't follow their advice. And this is follow your passion. Now, I found this post from a YouTuber who was basically saying that, you know, gaming channels are dead. You know, I said, "It's not the same anymore. So many of my favorite YouTubers that I grew up watching when I was an antisocial kid and was picked on often have either fell off, retired, or doing content that isn't who they were in the beginning." And this is an example of like a let's play gaming channel where you're literally just playing video games and then making videos from your gameplay. And that sounds like a dream job. But the truth is, many people who do this, in fact, literally everyone who does this realizes down the line that it's actually still a lot of work. And in many cases, you can't really enjoy the game you're playing because you're constantly having to think, "Oh, is this going to make good content? Is that going to make good content?" Rather than just doing what you want to do. And this is exactly what PewDiePie said when he made a video about why he stopped playing games. He explicitly mentioned, for instance, he was playing a ton of games that he didn't care about, but he knew they would get a lot of views. And then he also mentioned later on one of the reasons he stopped making those videos is because they took so long to make, aka they were hard work. In fact, it's so much work that YouTubers like Jack Septic Guy basically said that they had to take time off. They had to take breaks for their mental health because it was literally a lot of work and it was stressing them out. So, I'm not saying for you to do something that you hate, but the reality is no matter what you do, it's going to be work. And you need to come into it with that expectation. People come into YouTube thinking, "Oh, I just, you know, I want to make art for a living. It's just going to be fun and I'm just going to be passionate every every second of every day. I'm going to be passionate." And that's just not the case. There's lots of times where I wake up and I'm like, I don't want to work today. But guess what? I go to work anyways because it's not just about the passion. It's about serving other people, right? You're providing a product or service or you're providing content for people to help them. And that's a very important thing that you need to realize. Like, think about it like this. The garbage man. Firefighters, you know, they run into burning houses. Garbage men, they pick up garbage all day long. Do you think they're passionate about that? You think firefighters are passionate about running into a burning house? Probably not. They're probably not passionate about risking their life all the time. Do you think garbage men are passionate about picking up garbage all day long? Probably not. What is the reason they do it? because they're providing a valuable service to society. If it wasn't for garbagemen, we would have garbage all over the streets and that would suck. So, you really need to keep this in mind when it comes to your mentality when it comes to picking what you want to do for your channel. You know, it's not always about you. It's about providing value to other people. Now, with that being said, don't do something that you hate, right? I'm not telling you to do something you hate just because it's valuable to other people. But try to find an intersection there. Try to find the intersection of what people actually want, what people need, right? And what you are passionate about, right? It's like a vin diagram. Choose the thing in between. All right. The next one is retention editing. Now, this is one of those trends that um was really big, especially when I was first starting on YouTube. People are actually starting to realize now that it's not as important. So, just as an example with the retention editing, Alexi posted this video. I lost $100 million. Here's what I learned. and it had massive amounts of retention editing in it. And it got about 385K views. Then he posted this video, how to get so rich you question the meaning of making money. And it was like an hour-ong video of him just giving a presentation on stage with basically zero cuts and zero edits. And it got 4.3 million views. Okay? And I've had this exact experience with my channel. I've made videos where I put like a 100 hours into the video, didn't do that well. And then I've made videos where I put 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours into the video, and it gets millions of views. And pretty much every big YouTuber will have a story about this if you ask them. They'll be like, "I put so much effort into this video. I thought it was absolutely perfect. I uploaded it and crickets doesn't get that many views." And then they'll have another video that they almost didn't upload cuz they thought it sucked and it ends up getting millions of views. And the truth is, if people wanted perfect editing and if they wanted super high production quality, then they would just turn on the TV and watch Netflix or they would turn on the TV and, you know, just watch their network. The reason people come to YouTube is because they want to connect with other people. They don't want perfect production quality. They don't want amazing crazy edits in most cases anyways. They want to connect with other people. And in many cases, overediting actually kind of destroys that connection. So raw authentic content in many cases does extremely well on YouTube. So just as an example, this guy Connor Woodman, he has gone viral recently just making these videos where they have zero edits and he's just talking to a camera in the woods. And he's probably doing it and he's probably doing it like before work on his lunch breaks during work or just right after work. And he went viral with this video. You've consumed enough. God wants you to start creating. Okay? Okay. And he's wearing this big yellow jacket and he's standing in the woods and he's just talking off the cuff to his camera. Basically, no edits, also no fancy thumbnails and he just talks off the cuff to his phone. And this type of content is doing extremely well right now. Another channel is Neuro Knowledge and it's just this guy who talks about, you know, manifestation. That's what he's into. Self-development, manifestation, overthinking. And he just stands in front of a whiteboard and he just draws stuff on the whiteboard and just talks off the cuff. almost no edits, super easy to make. And he's absolutely crushing it as well. And especially when you first start on YouTube, you need to make your videos sustainable. If it takes, you know, 10, 20, 30 hours to make a video, that is not sustainable. When you first start, I recommend you only spend a maximum of 3 hours per video. And in many cases, you might only have to spend like 20 minutes to an hour per video. And because of the fact that you're not spending that much time, you're going to be able to consistently post videos. Now, once you have a channel that takes off and you know the exact format, the exact topics that do really well, then you can consider retention editing. But you actually don't have to. Even in that case, you don't have to. And chances are your channel will still do really well. But if you want to optimize things, increase your average view duration just a little bit, you can consider to do retention editing at that point. But doing it when you're first beginning on YouTube is going to be absolute poison for your channel, and it's terrible advice. So, don't do it. The next piece of advice that I think is terrible is posting everywhere. And I've heard this not necessarily from YouTube gurus, although also from YouTube gurus, but just kind of like gurus in general. They'll be like, "Oh, you need to be posting on every platform." I think this is terrible advice because if you try to post on every platform, you're going to be halfassing a bunch of different things instead of whole assing one thing, right? These platforms are difficult to grow on. And if you're trying to make content for like seven different platforms, the chances of you having success are going to be incredibly low. So instead, just focus on one platform and one type of content, which in my opinion should be YouTube and long- form content because that is where the money's at. People who grow on Tik Tok, for instance, they dream of getting big on YouTube. Like they all try to migrate over to YouTube because it's so much easier to make money here. So posting everywhere, especially when you first start, is going to be a terrible idea because it just divides your focus and your chances of having success are going to be significantly lower. Now, with that being said, let's just say you're making shorts. You might as well put the shorts on YouTube as, you know, YouTube shorts, Instagram as Instagram reels, and Tik Tok as Tik Toks because they're essentially the same for all three platforms. And you can use tools like Opus, for instance, to just automatically clip up your videos and put them on like Instagram and Tik Tok. And that doesn't take all that much time. And hey, if you want to do that, not a big deal. But if you're spending a significant amount of time making original content and ideulating on these other platforms instead of just making more content on YouTube, you're probably shooting yourself in the foot. Okay, so now for the good advice. And I'm not going to spend too much time on this because that's what most of the channel is about. I give a lot of it good advice on this channel. But the most important thing guys is the idea is everything. Not only when it comes to the idea for your niche, but the idea for your videos as well. So let me just give a restaurant analogy to explain this. If you opened the greatest restaurant in the world, but it's in the middle of the desert where nobody lives and nobody even visits, your restaurant is going to fail. That is like making incredibly good content, but doing it on an idea that nobody cares about. Additionally, if you made the best food truck in the entire world, but then you parked it outside of the exit of Bellagio Buffet in Las Vegas, and so literally everyone who saw your food truck had just eaten and they're full because they just went to a buffet, then you're probably not going to make very many sales. You're probably not going to make that much money. That would be an example of making a video on a good idea, but an idea that a ton of other people have made videos on already. or picking a niche where a ton of other people are already supplying content to that niche. However, the third example, if you open a hot dog cart where it's not that good of food, right? It's just hot dogs, but you put it in a place where there's a crowd of starving people, you are going to sell out every single time. So even though your content in this case isn't that good, if you're making the content on the right idea where there's a ton of demand for that idea and there's not a lot of supply, then the content's going to do well. Even if your content isn't world class, right? So this is why the idea is everything, right? This is why I focus on what's known as the icon method for finding the right ideas. And this is not only the ideas, but the niches. Now, additionally, the second most important thing by far is the packaging. Right? Once you've picked the right idea, you need to package it correctly. So, this is basically like the marketing for your product, right? So, you open a great restaurant, but you have to have good marketing to get people to actually go to the restaurant. And that's your title, your thumbnail, and your intro. And I call this the holy trifecta. So, I think there's a lot of content on YouTube about this. There's also a lot of content on my channel about this. But this is the most important thing, right? Besides the idea, the holy trifecta, your title, thumbnail, and intro is the most important thing. So, that's what you should be spending your time on. And then the third thing is to understand your value proposition. What problems you solve with your channel and then always make sure that you deliver that value in every single video. Right? So you want to make sure that your video is valuable. Now making a valuable video doesn't necessarily mean, you know, having super good production quality and having, you know, the perfect camera and having two angles and overediting every single video. That's not what it means at all. Having a good video means just giving good advice in the video. solving the problem that the person went to the video to get solved. And this is the kind of thing that I helped a ton of people out with. Even my brother, he joined my coaching program just last month and now he's already making a full-time income from YouTube. And I'm going to be doing a case study video on him breaking it down. So, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you can check that out. But I've helped a ton of other people as well. And you can actually click the link in the description and the pin comment below to view a video and a page to see all of my testimonials. And on that same page, you will be able to book a strategy call with myself or my team. And in this call, we'll figure out where you are right now, where you want to be. We'll make a plan to get to where you want to be on YouTube, and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together or not. And one of the people that did this just last year was Shawn. He was stuck making around 10 to 30K per month on YouTube, and we scaled him all the way up to over 500K per month within 9 months. And if you want to see exactly how we did that, click this video right here.