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YouTube Creators Hub
Growing Organic Traffic: Anthony Gallo on Transforming Paid Ad Success into YouTube Growth
00:41:00
Join us on this episode of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast where host Dusty Porter interviews Anthony Gallo, co-founder of . Anthony shares his journey from starting with zero audience in 2020 to building a thriving business with over 150,000...
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- [00:00]
Dusty
Hello and welcome to the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. Quickly, we're going to tell you, we're brought to you today by the fine folks over at TubeBuddy. It's the one tool I recommend, really help you jumpstart your YouTube journey. And if you're already on your journey, it's a great kind of asset to have and companion tool. We record interviews with content creators each and every Friday and the show continues to grow. And I'm so excited about some of the interviews that we have ready to release in the first half year of 25. Also, I am a professional YouTube coach. If looking for someone to go alongside you along your journey, check the links out in the description. You can work with me one on one. And then lastly, we have something that's called the Creator Communities Group. It's hosted over on our Discord server. Five bucks gets you in that group. You get access to not only that, hundreds of creators, past guests of the show. You also get access to the monthly Mastermind calls that I host on Zoom. We just had one this week for February 2025. Those are hosted by me on Zoom one time every month. We get on there, we do rapid fire questions, we do deep dives on people's channels, we do watch alongs. It's just a great way to rub shoulders and elbows with other YouTube creators. So with all that said, let's jump into this week's conversation. Hello everyone and welcome to today's conversation of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. Dusty here joined today by Anthony Gallo. Anthony, a little bit about him. He is the co founder of Content Creator.com which by the way, kudos on getting that URL as Well as the YouTube channel to go along with it where they've built courses, tools, marketplaces and Software with over 150,000 customers worldwide. He started with zero audience back in 2020, grew the business through organic YouTube content and highly converting paid ad funnels. He loves helping beginner creators of all shapes and sizes. Anthony, how are you doing today?
- [01:52]
Anthony Gallo
I am doing great man. Thanks for having me on.
- [01:55]
Dusty
All right, so let's talk about this. The Content Creators YouTube channel as of recording is sitting right at 353,000 subscrib subscribers, not even 100 videos. So you've really made the most out of the uploads, which is something we can certainly talk about. But I want to back up before we do that, can you just talk about your journey back in 2020 when you decided to take this thing seriously? How did the content creators brand and channel come to Be yeah, for sure.
- [02:25]
Anthony Gallo
So you know, at. When I was in college, 2015, I started getting super passionate about video. I started a video business working for local businesses, trying to travel the world, shoot music videos, concerts, all that stuff. And it ended up going really well. Started scaling that business, graduated from college, so on and so forth. Right around 2020, the business was doing really well, but I hit a plateau of, okay, I'm putting as much time into this thing as I can. And I could see myself growing it bigger by hiring more people, doing all this stuff. But I wanted to try and find something that was an avenue where I could make money without having to actively invest my time doing it. There were a lot of routes. I'm sure the audience listening to this knows the paths that you can follow. But I was like, I'm super passionate about this video thing. I really don't want to do anything else with my life. If I start a online course, digital product business, I could grow that using YouTube, organic content, paid ads, all these skills that I'd learned basically through my freelance video business. Partnered up with a really good friend of mine named Paul, who is a really smart marketer, really great business owner in his own right. And we came up with our first course which was 14 day filmmaker. We launched it online. It was one of those moments where a lot of work went up to it. But it did feel like we just blew up overnight with that thing. And very quickly we started realizing we wanted a organic presence beyond just the ads that we were using. Because we literally had zero subscribers. I had a couple thousand followers on Instagram. I was a no name. I was just working for local businesses, brands, companies, all that stuff. But we were good. I'd been running paid ads, I'd shot a lot of ads for my clients over the years, so we hit it pretty well. But people wanted to see us on YouTube, people wanted to see us on Instagram. So we started from there. The whole business was built off of our names to begin with. It was just Mr. Paul Xavier dot com. We knew we wanted to separate from that eventually and we did at about like the six month mark. We were like, who are we trying to serve? What's this business truly all about? And ironically we were looking online and the domain content creators was or content creator.com was available. It was expensive. It was a really big leap of faith for us. But we were like, this is the audience we want to serve. That, that term wasn't even really that like big at the time. Like now you. Everyone's a Content creator, like, it's such a good, valuable term. But it was just gaining popularity at that time, at least in our eyes. But we did that. We started the YouTube channel right around the same time. Struggled a bit at first, trying to catch our identity in stride on YouTube. But through some strategies that we can talk about on this podcast today, we really did hit that stride on YouTube. As a side business, it was definitely not our main hustle. Content critter.com was keeping the current businesses afloat. Was. But slowly and steadily, that YouTube channel just grew again, pretty dang fast compared to, I think, most channels out there. And it's become just a staple of our brand. A lot of our customers come from that. We make great connections, work with some awesome brands through it, and it's been a journey.
- [05:31]
Dusty
So the course came first, then. So you did the courses like you were mentioning, you're running the paid funnels. And then you realized, hey, listen, we want some organic traffic. Which, for those listening, I'm sure you already know, organic is the free traffic that just happens through video or whatever it may be your socials. And then paid traffic, obviously is where you're paying for ads on the different platforms to bring people to your CTA or to your landing page. So can you just. Most people do it the other way, right? They have a YouTube channel, they gain an audience, they build the trust currency, and then they go and they do the course. What made you decide or make that click of, okay, I do you talk to your other guy? And you were like, just, hey, we want to do this thing right? We want to make sure we have a presence outside of just these paid ads in the courses. What was the thought process there?
- [06:14]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, for a lot of people, I think they. It's all comes. It all comes back to what your desire is. Right. And my desire was more so on the business side and having a company, a product, a system that I could really lean on and scale over time. My aspirations have really never been about building an audience for myself. And even if you look at our brand, you'll see this because you won't see my name anywhere, right? Everything is content creator dot com. I barely ever really say my name. And so we wanted to build the business first and have a product that we knew we could work and would do well that way. Then as we built the audience over time, it would just be like pouring gasoline on something that already worked. And I think something that a lot of people could probably relate to is I massively struggled with imposter syndrome. Like why would somebody want to listen to me? Why should my content even be online? And for some reason in my brain, ads, paid ads, right? Running Facebook, Instagram ads to a product that I did feel was worthy of investment felt like less of a leap of faith than creating this content online where people will find it and see if it's valuable or not find it, right? You can post a video and get no views versus an ad. You can pay. And if the product is good, if people see value in it, theoretically it should work. And I just had a lot more experience as a business operator than I did a YouTuber at that time. Like I was still finding my way in that space. And I'm really glad we did it that way. I feel like our business is built on the fundamentals of having a good product, fitting it with the market, and then building the traffic streams to adverses. A lot of people, I think they, they're passionate about something, they have stories they want to share. They go to YouTube first, maybe not knowing the business side quite as much, they build that following and then they put a product onto the traffic they're already generating, which both strategies work really well. I think a lot of the biggest creators on planet earth in terms of like business operator content creators do the audience first. We just, I think through fear on my side of maybe being ridiculed on YouTube, I started with the product.
- [08:27]
Dusty
I have to ask, this episode's gonna be number 439 for us here. We're over a decade into this thing now and I'll have to say it took me over a hundred some odd episodes to ever get beyond the imposter syndrome of. I had a YouTube channel that at the time when I started had over 200, 000 subscribers. I was getting 50000 views every single day on the channel. I had proof of concept. I knew what I was doing was working. But even still talking to creators like what you and I are doing today, I would have that feeling of whenever I would hang up, man, did I deserve to talk to that person. Should I be expressing my opinion on this topic? What did you do to bust through that to where you just. I know where I am currently. A lot of that comes with age and maturity of just knowing that I don't really care what anybody thinks. I have two kids now, I have a family. And so there's a lot of things that mattered to me then that don't matter now. But how did you personally get through the imposter syndrome that a lot of people listening to this are dealing with still today.
- [09:26]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, for sure. That's a million dollar question. And I can only answer, let's say my part of it and the strategies that work for me were first and foremost, never claim to help somebody that you aren't sure you can help. Right. When I got into YouTube, I knew video, I knew elements of it, right. And I only helped people on things that I knew. Right. I wasn't helping them shoot Hollywood blockbusters, I wasn't claiming, hey, I'll help you get a show on Netflix. I was saying, hey, I can help you take the camera you already own or the smartphone you already own and shoot video that's better than the video you shot a week ago. And so I started with these really small bite size wins that I knew I had under my belt. Just really had the thousand hours in it of experience and started there and said anything that I do want to teach that I don't feel qualified on yet, I will just continue doing that in the background by myself until I get good enough where I feel confident doing so. So that that was just a huge, huge part of my journey. And then the other side of that coin would be just making sure that I put my whole heart into everything. Right. Like I know that at the end of the day I always ask myself what is worst case scenario with this video? And if the video content I'm putting out to this to people, I feel like I really tried hard on, I think it can help people, it can add value, can make them laugh. I'm not really an entertainer in that, but still that's to people. And if I can rest my head knowing I tried really hard and the sun's still going to come up tomorrow, it's like worst case scenario, it doesn't get any views and even if it sucked, nobody saw it. So kind of almost like hedging your bets a little bit on that side. I'm still dealing with it, right. I don't want anyone to think that I have I'm over imposter syndrome. To this day I'm always struggling with is this something I know enough to teach? But as long as I have that 95% of the way down and I know I can help people get to stage one, I just go all in.
- [11:19]
Dusty
On it is something that still creeps up with me. It's something that I don't know if it ever goes away, but it's really interesting to hear you talk about just getting through that barrier. And so I appreciate you being honest with me on that. One of the things that you and I talked about before we hit record was just talking about niching down and people on YouTube now of what might have worked seven, eight, ten years ago just doesn't work now. And one of the ways to not guarantee success, but to put yourself on the path to success is to niching down into a topic that may be, you know, not as broad. So we talk fitness, right? So instead of talking fitness, maybe you get into water aerobics, and that's your niche that you're niching down even beyond that broad topic. Can you talk about just kind of what you're seeing across the board with your tens of thousands of people that take your course and. And people that you come in contact with speak on this topic a bit and talk about what we were mentioning before we hit record?
- [12:17]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, for sure. I. I just think generally speaking, it's gonna sound scary at first, but it's gonna get better. Trust me. If you're listening, YouTube is competitive, and it's getting more competitive every single day. But the good news is the algorithm is getting smarter and smarter by the second. It's outpacing the increasing competitiveness where it is so good at finding the right viewers for your content, if you're specific in what your video provides as far as value is concerned. So I see a lot of beginners getting into YouTube and they create what they see. And typically what broad audiences see when they look at YouTube is broad content. So you're going to see the Alex or Moses of business, right? They can just talk business and people will listen. And a beginner getting into business might just talk business on their content. And you are competing with these big dogs and it's, look, all the audience, all the viewers of that big dog, Alex or Mosey, whoever it is, they're getting served already. The people who aren't getting served are the much smaller, more specific niches. Right. Back to your example of fitness. There's a ton of fitness content out there. But what about, like, pregnant women who. Or maybe not pregnant, they just gave birth and they have some very specific needs that their goals that they're trying to achieve, right? They can watch the generic fitness content if that's all that's out there. But if there's a video out there for women who just gave birth and they're trying to achieve X, Y, Z thing with their health, and if you're one of 10 videos on that topic, you have astronomically higher odds of building a really good connection with, albeit a smaller audience. But you're building a deeper connection. And that's where success on YouTube is built long term. Right. It's super hard to crack into those super really broad audiences and make the best video. But if you take these smaller niches, you can create the best content or really good content in that niche. YouTube will find your audience for you. You build your foundation and then ironically, over time, as you, as that foundation grows, you can get more broad and you become one of those big dogs. But it doesn't happen overnight.
- [14:28]
Dusty
And this can be applicable to existing creators. Right. You mentioned off air that this kind of was the path that you took in, that you were wanting to talk about film and just the broad topic that is, you know, video editing and what you're doing as a filmmaker. But then you realize that there was this really nice kind of exploding sub niche of hey, how do I create and optimize video for mobile devices? And you really tackled that. You went to that kind of below the belt there. And then now you've been able to, once you've got a name for yourself, to expand back out to the overall overarching topic. So explain kind of your journey with that and what you saw along the way.
- [15:12]
Anthony Gallo
Exactly. Yes. We jumped into YouTube and again, the goal was to build an audience, get subscribers and gain traction as fast as possible. I wasn't super attached to the exact type of content I wanted to make.
- [15:26]
Dusty
Right.
- [15:26]
Anthony Gallo
I just wanted to make content that was valuable, that got seen by people. Due to my freelance videography background, I was like, oh, that's where I'll start in. The first couple of videos I did in that realm were broad, were competing with all the other people out there creating that broad content. And at the time, 20, 20, 2021 phones were really experiencing huge leaps in quality when it comes to their cameras. And I saw that as an underserved market. Right. It was a niche within a niche. And so I was like, screw it. I might not be the world's best phone videographer who was back at that time. No, we all were just beginners picking up our phone. But I was like, I can learn this system and get good at it. Put myself as a bigger fish in a small pond. That's how we got our first couple hundred thousand view video. And then we stayed focused on that smartphone niche. That's how we got a million view video. And it kept rolling to the point where now the YouTube algorithm trusted us, we had a decent audience that trusted us. It only took a couple videos in the first year or after the first year to Get a hundred thousand subscribers. Now we have the grace from the algorithm in our audience to create content on what's the best video editing? Laptop. Right. That's just a super broad topic, but we have hundreds of thousands of views on that topic because we started small, started specific and grew over time. And the beauty now is we. You could do whatever you want, right? I can make a smartphone video, I can make a video on general cameras, I can make a video on general editing and then go back to smartphone. But you gotta start with those baby steps first in my eyes.
- [17:02]
Dusty
So let's make a, a slight pivot here and talk about mobile filmmaking. You've covered it, you've talked a lot about it. You have a 20 minute video that's the trailer on your YouTube channel right now that's got hundreds of thousands of views called Master mobile filmmaking in 20 minutes. Talk about the people that are either they have to do it on their mobile device because of budget constraints, or they just want to do it because of the convenience. What are some kind of quick tips that you can give the listeners of just optimizing the camera that they have?
- [17:34]
Anthony Gallo
Oh my gosh. Yeah. We are in a playground of smartphone cameras nowadays. Doesn't matter. IPhone, Android, whatever you have, you can make great content with it. The number one tip that I could give anyone is to understand that video photo. Everything comes down to the sensor within your camera. And knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your sensor will help you produce the best image possible. Smartphones have great computers, but really small sensors and small sensors struggle in low light conditions. So right now, if you're watching this stream, I'm in a really well lit room. I have a big light over here. It's not expensive, but it's big and it's putting off a lot of light. You need light to make your smartphone images look good. If you are in a low lit room, if you're outside in the shade, if the sun's going down, whatever it may be, you're just putting your camera in a situation where it's not going to perform really well. And smartphones especially are really sensitive to low light. So focus on your lighting over any other aspect. You could have every single setting wrong on your phone. Shutter speed, frame rate, resolution, all these things could be backwards. But if your lighting's good, your video will look good. So that would be number one in my eyes. Understanding what the different lenses on your phone are best at. Right. If you're filming YouTube content, most phones nowadays have a One X, right? Your standard focal length they might have an ultra wide. They might have a telephoto. Understand that the one X camera on your phone is always going to have the biggest and strongest sensor. So use that. Don't use the selfie cam. Even though it's nice to be able to see yourself while you're filming, get comfortable speaking to that back 1x camera with good lighting and right off the bat your content will look so, so much better.
- [19:16]
Dusty
Yeah, lighting is the kind of superpower you and I. You mentioned lighting as 1A. I'm. I'm an audio person. I love audio. I think that on YouTube, I think that that's the unsung hero of what can really carry a video. Obviously the content first and what's within the video. But man, if you don't sound good in your video, it's just. It's really hard to watch. Which is the same. It's very much applicable to lighting as well. And it's something that I'm still learning myself. And if you're watching the video version of this podcast, you can see that Anthony is very well lit. And I have evolved my settings in room environment. I have a window over here that kind of allows some natural light to come in. And then I have a box light as well with some shadows and things like that. And tried to add a little bit of color behind me there. It's hard to get it right. And people oftentimes say it's expensive to get lighting. But you mentioned the big light that you're using is not very expensive. So let's talk about gear for a minute. What gear do you recommend? We mentioned and talk about these really nice new toys and I'm a gearhead. I'm assuming you probably are too. You love to try out the new toys and gadgets. But what would you recommend? Just for the just over just general creator of. Just start rattling off some of the things that. That have worked for you and the things that you recommend to the people you work with.
- [20:29]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, for sure. If we're talking about YouTube talking head creators. Right. Like myself, that's pretty much what we focus on most on YouTube. You hit the nail on the head as well. Before you get a light, you do need good audio. And then after that I would say get a light. My favorite lighting brand for bang for your buck Lights. All right. Stuff that you're going to get great output from without having to remortgage. Your house would be newer. That's N E W E R. Pretty much every light they sell is high quality. They Have a light called the CB60. It's like $100. That's going to be a great light that can do pretty much any type of content that you're working on. From there, you're going to want to get a diffuser, something to soften the light and make it actually look flattering on your face. Hopefully you can't see all my wrinkles right now. That's what lighting will do for you. Again, if you're watching the video. But a good softbox, a lantern diffuser, either of those will help you out. Other than that, microphones that I really like to use, my podcast microphone here is the Shure MV7X. That's a great one. And outside of that, a cheap, affordable, but really high quality Bluetooth microphone is the Hollyland Lark M2. Great. You can clip it onto your shirt, run around. It's Bluetooth, so it'll sync directly back to your phone. It will sync back to a camera like a DSLR or mirrorless, if that's what you're using as well. That's a trifecta right there. Or bifecta, I don't know. A light in a microphone is all you need other than that. You could prop your camera up on a stick, on a desk, on a chair, whatever it is. And you have, Quite frankly, a YouTube setup that looks a lot better than most people who don't have a light in a good microphone. And that's a lot of people on YouTube.
- [22:13]
Dusty
Yeah, I ditto everything you just said. I have. I film weddings. It's one of my side hustles, my many side hustles. And one of the things that I've discovered the past year is JI have the. These really nice microphones. I don't know exactly the model. I'll find that out and link them in the show notes. But they come in this box and you open them up and they sync. You put a little receiver on top of your mirrorless. Do you know what they're called, Anthony? Yes, I think you have video.
- [22:38]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, I have them right now.
- [22:40]
Dusty
Yes.
- [22:41]
Anthony Gallo
So we did DJI wireless microphones. That's what they're called if you just type.
- [22:46]
Dusty
Just a general microphone. And we did a video two weekends ago. And one of the things we always struggled with is that early on, seven or eight years ago, we'd use what's called a TASCAM microphone, which is a wired lapel microphone. We'd have to run it through the bride's dress or through the officiant and get it to where the Photographers were happy with us that it wasn't showing in the pictures. But these DJI microphones have magnets on them and the quality on them. And here's the beautiful thing, and Anthony knows this, it syncs up. So whereas with a Tascam, you have a micro sd, you get back in post, you get in Premiere Pro, you're having to click and figure out where these things matching up, where's my sound wave coming in? And you don't have to worry about that. So again, those are a little pricier. I think they're a few hundred bucks. I don't know, 200 bucks, 179 at Best Buy. I believe the buddy of mine that brought them, that's what he paid for his. But it again, there's so many tools out there now that are much cheaper, that can get you to a point to where you can look and sound. Amazing that there's really that barrier to entry of funding really isn't there anymore. Now, obviously for some people, you can say 50 bucks is a lot of money. For you, that's fine. I don't know your current situation, but I appreciate Anthony kind of mentioning all those things there. Speaking of money, let's talk about monetization. Obviously, I would assume the main cog in your wheel as far as monetization goes is your course. I'm not asking you exactly how much you make on a monthly basis, but can you just tell me the different buckets where you make money around your business and around the YouTube channel, like how it fits in?
- [24:15]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm fine. I. I try to claim to be one of the most transparent people doing this. Are you looking for current right now? Five years in or more so like the first year? Yeah.
- [24:25]
Dusty
So talk about the differences in those. So talk about the first year first and where you are now so we can just see the growth and kind of how you've expanded since then.
- [24:32]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, for sure. So the first month, I remember it Vividly, we launched 14 day filmmaker. We spent 68 $70 on ads that first day and made four sales at 48 dollars. So we made 3X return on our investment, whatever that was. And we scaled that rapidly. Right. We just came up with new ads, increase the budget quickly.
- [24:55]
Dusty
Where are you running these ads? I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt you. Where are you running at all yet?
- [24:59]
Anthony Gallo
These were primarily Facebook and Instagram ads. Yeah, Facebook owns Instagram. So when you run ads on Facebook, you're pretty much running them on both. So within the first month we were actually making not profit. Total revenue was about $35,000 per week. Selling that $48 course, we were scaling it very rapidly. So we were okay, if, hey, you lose money on Tuesday, but then you make five times what you spent on Wednesday and Thursday, where is it going to be? You don't know while you're scaling. But we just knew we had something really good and we wanted to strike while the iron was hot and scale up. And so that first year, almost entirely from paid ads, we did, I want to say, $2 million in revenue selling a $48 online course with a couple others like very small side bonuses here and there, little bumps that we would offer to our audience and whatnot. Just helpful things that they had asked for it. And we were like, here, we created it, whatnot, YouTube came in, when YouTube came in. I forget exactly when that was in the journey. But like anything, it starts off really slow. But what I love about this and why I recommend people create a small digital product before they get on YouTube is even if we were getting very low views when we started, we had something of value that we could sell through our channel. And it really opened our eyes to the power of YouTube because we had next to no subscribers getting maybe a couple hundred, couple thousand views on our early videos. But all we needed to do was convince 1, 2, 3, 4 of those couple hundred or thousand viewers that our course was worth the small investment of $48. And now that video just made a couple hundred dollars, couple sales, right? And now those people will watch your future YouTube content as well as consume your course content. And that just put the fire under our butts to say, hey, this YouTube channel, however small it is right now, if we just keep investing our time and effort into this, along with all the other stuff we were doing with paid ads, we've got an incredibly monetizable business right here through both paid and organic traffic. So long and long story short, we do currently millions of dollars a year selling our online courses. We aim to do about our Target is around $10,000 per month in brand deals and sponsorships. We really, and this is something I'm sure people will find interesting. We don't focus on those that much because what we've found is designing our content to be fully viewer focused to provide as much value as possible without having to be beholden to a sponsor. Right? Because when you have a sponsor now, it's like, I might need to move the video idea I originally had off in this direction that falls in line with this sponsor. And when you do that now you sacrifice a part of the video that might have been more valuable to the viewer at the end of the day. So we've essentially become our own sponsor on all of our videos. And at the end of every video I say, look, if you found this valuable, check out our online course. It's super affordable. It has a money back guarantee if you don't like it. So there's no risk. And I'd love to work with you because we have a student community. I'm very active in there. I host weekly Q and A calls. It's all about that kind of community aspect. But anyways, target $10,000 per month through brand deals and sponsorships. We do about five to $10,000 per month in affiliate revenue, recommended gear, different products, we use stuff like that. And then our AdSense revenue fluctuates between 4 and $6,000 per month. Remove the courses and YouTube is still an extremely profitable business. We really love it. But having that digital product truly changes the game.
- [28:31]
Dusty
So you have, right now you have the 14 day smartphone filmmaker course, you have the weekend YouTuber course, you have the reels, TikTok and shorts course and a few other kind of add ons and upsells and things like that. Can you talk about now how, what is the ratio of, in your current business in the present time of how many paid ads are you having to run now that you're getting all of this organic traffic?
- [28:54]
Anthony Gallo
We still get the vast majority of our sales from paid ads. The nice thing about the YouTube sales, even though it's lower volume, it's pure profit, or at least it's profit after having to make the videos pay our editors and whatnot. But with ads, it's like this fire hose where as long as you can make more than what you're spending, you can continue scaling. So I would say on a given day, if we do 214 day filmmaker sales, I would say probably 150 of those, 160 of them come from paid ads and then 40 to 50 come from YouTube. But the beautiful thing about all this is once we started building out our YouTube channel, our paid ads got more profitable because everyone, I'm what I imagine who's watching this podcast has seen an ad where they look at the person on the ad and they're like, that guy's lying. This is a scam, right? Let's go do research on him. And you can't find any posts on his page. He doesn't have a YouTube channel. He's like this ghost that's nowhere outside of in this one paid ad trying to sell you something. And so we found having a Trust, a YouTube channel that's really just focused on providing value. I'm up there doing free, giving away free content. We give away editing templates and sound effects and we just try to be like your friendly neighborhood content creator. Our ads got more profitable because people would check between the two and be like, oh, they're actually legit. They'd see the positive comments on our YouTube channel from existing students, say, hey, just bought the course. I love it. So they really do cross pollinate each other in a beautiful way. And the same thing applies to Instagram content, all short form content as well. It's a holistic picture. But at the end of the day, paid ads does represent the largest portion of our business. And it also plays into the motivation me and Paul had to create this business at the end of the day, which was I never want to be beholden to a posting schedule. If you look at our YouTube channel, there's no consistency, right? Sometimes we post a couple times a month, sometimes we don't post. I'm pretty consistently inactive on my social media channels. And again, our goal was to create a business that separated time from money, right? We own a system. We worked really hard on creating that system and it takes a lot of time to manage it. But at the end of the day, over Christmas, in the holiday period, I did nothing on YouTube. I really wanted to spend some time with family and just enjoy myself a little. And the business kept running that entire time because of paid ads. So that's why I think for a lot of people it's good to have both worlds working for you.
- [31:20]
Dusty
I feel that I'm right there with you. I make evergreen search based content on my channel. It's all technology tutorials. And I've decided to pass through three years to just basically, I think I've made one video this December, zero last year and zero the year before that in December, and allowed me to really have that time with my family. And it's important. It's a luxury that YouTube and just being a creator allows. When you're talking about the courses, what are the platforms that you're using and what are some recommendations that you can give the audience of? If they're a little scared about the notion of creating a course, what are some tips you can give us in that area?
- [31:53]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, for sure. I would say a shameless plug here. We do, due to popular demand, have a course that we offer called 30 day course creator where we teach people what we've done to create this business, run ads, all that stuff there. The course costs money, but we do have like free previews, free trainings they can check out. But we use a combination between Content Creator Machine, which is our partnership with Go High Level, that's a big software company and we created our own custom build out of it. And then we historically used Kajabi. We sold our first like 100,000 students using kajabi, which is a big online course hosting software. And because we had 100,000 plus contacts on Kajabi when we built Content Creator Machine, those like those contacts still live there. But a lot of our marketing is done through Content Creator Machine. So those are the two softwares we use. And again, the beautiful thing about not just courses but digital products, because they are really all kind of one in the same is outside of the money it costs per month to host an online course. Right. Which is 200 depending on your software and a few other knickknacks along the way in a 3% credit card processing fee, there are no expenses. Right. Like you have a YouTube channel and courses you sell. Right. Any courses you sell, there's no shipping fees, there's no manufacturing fees, there's none of that stuff going on. So it's just a business model that really made sense to me and it's what drew me to it in the first place. But those two tools are essential and then just having value that you can deliver. Right. Those are the key ingredients.
- [33:23]
Dusty
Yeah. And I think Kajabi is a tool that I've tinkered around with before. And if someone's listening to this, Kajabi is actually something that you can go and you can look at what they have to offer. I believe they have a free trial and you can sign up for that. As far as a structure of a course goes, do you feel that the mixture of the talking head on camera type video and screencasting is the best combination? Especially if, you know, just for me, for instance, I'm currently working on a course, how to launch a podcast. And obviously it's going to have a much clever name, more clever name than that. But for me, I have bits of the course that's going to be showing people in real time on my screen how to do it. And then I'm going to have some talking head pieces of just some informational bits. What is the best kind of structure of a course or a digital asset? And just along from what you've learned.
- [34:12]
Anthony Gallo
Yeah, it's going to vary a lot depending on what you teach. Right. Like a cooking course is going to look a lot different than a podcasting course. But I always just ask myself, what is the zero to one transformation I'm helping people achieve with this course and what's absolutely necessary to allow them to make that transformation. I think the vast majority of courses are exactly how you described it. It's going to be talking head videos of the theory based things. Right. And then anything that is, hey, over the shoulder, follow me, do what I do, screencast or show it live. So for you, setting up the back end of a podcast YouTube channel, Getting it on different streaming sites, that's you sharing your screen. If you are creating a course that teaches people how to bake the perfect cake, that's going to be literally over the shoulder showing the ingredients, getting mixed graphics on screen, outlining the different important elements. So it will vary in that sense, but it's always going to be a mixture of basically talking head and then we'll call it like live demo content, which is for your core screencasting screen sharing. For us, it might be a video where you're literally just watching me edit a video and I talk through every step. And again, for the cooking instructor, it would be like an overhead camera looking down at a mixing bowl as they throw in ingredients. So that's as simple as it needs to be.
- [35:30]
Dusty
Yeah, I love that. I think for me, a hobby of mine is I love, I love Ultimate Frisbee. And I remember doing a course of learning just the different techniques within Ultimate Frisbee. And for that course it was obviously on the field learning the different techniques and the different things. No, I don't, and I don't want to say it because I'll be wrong and it'll promote the wrong person. This has been years, years when I was much younger, had more time. But I just know that it was a fantastic course. I might ping you later and tell you what the name of it is. I assume you're thinking that maybe that person took your course to learn how to make the course. That would be then the.
- [36:03]
Anthony Gallo
Whatever it is. I'm not a Ultimate Frisbee person, but like the National Ultimate Frisbee association has a like accredited course that they sell and the people who made that course are, are students of our program. So I didn't know if it aligned in that way. But they're great people.
- [36:20]
Dusty
That's cool.
- [36:21]
Anthony Gallo
Great course.
- [36:22]
Dusty
I, I want to close this out by asking you this as a content creator in general now Years in the game, and you have your own YouTube channel and you sell your own digital products, and you're an entrepreneur and you're doing very well for yourself. What is something that you wish you would have known sooner, now that you are years into this? Something that, if you would have known, could possibly help propel you even quicker? What is something would that be?
- [36:45]
Anthony Gallo
For sure, yeah. My biggest answer is, I thought I knew the value of focusing on just one thing when I got started. I actually. I have the word tattooed on my wrist so that I never forget this thing. But I think back to my journey through my journey as a content creator and entrepreneur. And the number one things that always slowed me down was convincing myself that I could juggle more balls than just one at a time. So for people listening to this podcast, I invest in real estate. I own Airbnbs, I own car washes, all with my partner Paul. And we've done other side projects here and there because it's natural, right? We're all creative, passionate people. We get interested in something, we want to start it. But now, five years in, I know that I would probably be the equivalent of 8 to 9 years in on content creator.com specifically if I had said no to a lot of those other options, right? We all hear the term, every millionaire has seven income streams. And although I do believe that quote is true, they didn't become millionaires through having seven income streams. They became millionaires by focusing relentlessly on one thing and doing that to make $1 million. And then they invest it. And now all of a sudden, they have these income streams. And this quote that we literally, we preach in every meeting we have at our company now, because we have weekly prioritization meetings, is saying yes to one thing is saying no to everything else. So when you choose to say yes to something, you need to be very committed to doing just that one thing. And it'll have associated subtasks, right? Everything does. But you have that one North Star, that one thing that you're trying to serve, and you just do that for as long as you can, right? As long as you can. And that. That would be it, right? I love the real estate that we own. I think we have a lot of real estate horror stories. I don't think I would necessarily remove real estate from my portfolio, but I would have done a lot less of it because it's definitely slowed down. The true North Star, which is content creator dot com.
- [38:45]
Dusty
I feel that deep in my soul, I feel like that there are things that I look back on my journey so far. And if I would have just put down the other things, the noise is what I call them, I could have grown. There's things that I'm doing within the structure of even this podcast that I put off for years because I had so many. And it's natural to us. Like you said, as an entrepreneur, sometimes it's irritating to those around me, like my, my, my wife and family, because I'm always trying to figure out new ways to optimize and new ways and new business ideas. Just the other day I was talking about getting a vending machine with this guy and my wife's like, you don't have time for that. And she's right. I don't. Like, why would I do that? Yeah, there may be some income down the road. It may lead to some connections, but as an entrepreneur, you're always. It's one of the reasons why sometimes sleep is hard for me because I'm always thinking about, oh yeah, the different things and the different options that I could do. Anthony, you have been a fantastic guest. And if you've been listening, you've been listening to Anthony Gallo from the Creator or content creators YouTube channel. Again, that's very simple, easy to get to, which is why I believe it's worked so well. Again, content creators or content creator.com go check out his courses, Go check out what he's got going on. And Anthony, we'll talk to you next time.
- [39:59]
Anthony Gallo
Thank you, man. Great to be here.
- [40:01]
Dusty
And that's a wrap on this week's episode of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. If you would leave us a review. It really does help the show out. So wherever and however you listen to your podcast, just leave us a review. It really does help us within the algorithm. And if you're a podcaster, you know exactly what I mean. Also, I've talked about it before, but our Discord server, the Creator Communities Group, is growing very fast and I believe that you're missing out if you're not joining that group. Five bucks gets you in. Get you access to the Creator Communities Group as well as our monthly mastermind calls that I host on Zoom. I promise you will not regret doing that. And if you want to go even farther than that, I do offer one on one YouTube coaching. I've actually opened up my services and I'm offering longer calls as well as a monthly retainer where you can set up a six call onboarding. And then we get into the analytics and then we go through a process of what I believe you can do to be more efficient on your channel. With all that said, thank you again for listening to this week's episode. See you next week.