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YouTube Creators Hub
Navigating Niche and Growth on YouTube: Matt Ragland's Journey
00:43:18
Join Dusty Porter in episode 424 of the YouTube Creators Hub Podcast as he interviews YouTube creator and productivity expert Matt Ragland. In this episode, they discuss Matt's journey from starting a YouTube channel focused on analog productivity...
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- [00:02]
Dusty Porter
Welcome to the YouTube Creators Hub podcast where we help you conquer the Internet one video at a time. We cover everything from how to start a YouTube channel to how to make a video go viral. And now, here's your host, the one and only Dusty Porter. Hello and welcome to episode 424 of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. Each and every Friday, I sit down and interview a wonderful content creator and I talk with them about their journey on YouTube. I talk with them about their failures, what makes them succeed, and the strategies they've put into place. We talk everything from video packaging, video editing, hiring, doing things around the back end of a YouTube channel, and monetization and everything in between. So if you're looking to start, grow or monetize a YouTube channel, this is the place for you. Got a couple of things to shout out before we get started. Number one, our primary sponsor, TubeBuddy. They've been with me since almost the beginning. It's one of the tools that I recommend for everyone to try and you can get a free 30 day trial by checking out the link down below. Also, I offer one on one or one to one coaching if you're looking to launch a YouTube channel. I've worked with hundreds of creators, all of them finding some type of success after working with me. And I it's probably one of my most favorite things that I get to do, aside from the monthly Mastermind calls. And speaking of the Mastermind calls, we have the fastest growing YouTube creator community on the Internet over on our Discord server. And you're probably thinking it's probably a hundred bucks a month to get it. No, it's not. Five bucks on the Patreon and you can give more than that if you like the show and want to support it, but five bucks, that's it. Support us on Patreon. Five bucks. Again, I'm not getting rich on this. I just want to put a dollar sign in front of it just to keep out the people who really don't care or they're not putting in the effort and it keeps the spam out. But I promise you will not regret that you get access to that Discord server where you can chat with other CR creators every single day, all throughout the day, as well as our monthly Mastermind calls. We just had one about a week ago and it was one of our best ones yet. You can go over to our Patreon, check out the recordings of those calls and see the format of that. It's again, something I recommend everyone try at least for a few months. And I promise we've had people that have been part of this group now for almost three to four years and they don't regret it. And it's a very minimal investment for a huge gain. So definitely check that out. And then if you would, wherever and however you are listening to this podcast, hit subscribe absolutely free. It helps the show out and you'll be notified every Friday when we release a new episode. And the beauty of this is that you now have over 400 conversations to go back and listen to at your convenience, obviously. And that valuable information is still there. And it's still valuable. So again, thank you all for listening. I can't wait to get into the last half of this year and have some really fun, exciting things going into 2025. Hope you're all having a great week. Let's go ahead and jump into this week's conversation. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's conversation on the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. Dusty here as always, joined today by Matt Ragland. We're going to talk about his YouTube channel here in a second, but let me give you a little bit about who he is. He's a creator operator hybrid, which I love that word by the way, who's been able to build audiences for his own ideas and work behind the scenes with creators like Ryan Holiday, who I'm a big fan of, Sahil Bloom, and Justin Welsh, again, big fan of that guy as well. He was employee number five at ConvertKit, which I know ConvertKit now known as Kit. I've used them for my email newsletter. And he now runs a community for creators called hey, Matt, how are you doing today?
- [03:38]
Matt Ragland
I'm doing great, Dusty. Thanks for having me. I've been following your channel and show as well. This is an honor. I appreciate it.
- [03:44]
Dusty Porter
Absolutely. I was telling you off air, I stumbled across your channel a few years back. It might have been during COVID and we had some extra time on our hands and I was like, you know what? I'm interested in bullet journaling. And I always did digital journaling, but I never did anything analog. And I was like, I want to. I enjoy watching these videos on YouTube. And your channel just kept coming up and I made a note that I wanted to get in touch with you. And of course it's been a while, but I finally did and super excited to have you on the show. Now tell my audience what they would find if they went to your channel. So if they go to your channel right now, what would they find?
- [04:20]
Matt Ragland
Yeah, so it's all about I call it analog action. And you mentioned the Bullet Journal and it is the main topic keyword that I'm known for on YouTube. And something else I'm sure it'd be fun to talk about is like trying to potentially break out of a niche that you're in on YouTube. Is it worth it? How much effort should you put into it? So what you'll see the majority. I've tried to do that a couple of times, but every time I do, I just post another Bullet Journal video and the views go right back up and the subscribers come in, but that's what you're going to find. And the thing that if you're familiar with the Bullet Journal, then you may look at this and think, oh, those are the beautiful notebooks that I see that are very like artsy and have a lot of stickers and I need to buy like a hundred different colored pens and highlighters. And what I do, I, you know, as the meme says, ain't nobody got time for that. I use pen, paper. I keep it very minimalist. And of course that's a great keyword as well, but I keep it very minimalist. Okay. What I'm here to do is to write down tasks, ideas and execute on them. And so that's what I use the Bullet Journal for. It is ironically, like much closer, I think, to the heart of the Bullet Journal method, which was coined and created by Ryder Carol, I think 2012, 2013. So it's been around a little while, but that has definitely been like my primary vehicle to YouTube success and audience building.
- [05:57]
Dusty Porter
Yeah, I certainly want to touch on what do you do when you're in a niche or a space and you already have an established audience and you want to break away from that because it's very interesting that you say that. I had a client on a call this week in a coaching call, and that was their exact question. They had over one hundred and something thousand subscribers. They had built this beautiful audience. I had helped them build it over the past year or. And now all of a sudden they want to do something else. It's a lot harder and it's unfortunately very difficult in today's YouTube and we'll certainly talk on that. But I want to first take a kind of step back for a second, tell us the story of the channel. If I sort by oldest video, it looks like it was 12 years ago when you did the first video, but it was really eight years ago when you started doing the Bullet journaling and things like that. And so if you would tell my Audience, just the story and the journey took you to get to where your channel is now. The success that you've had, and I haven't mentioned it, you're just under 250 videos, right? At 100,000 subscribers, 99,500. So if you're listening to this, go over to Matt's channel, press that subscribe button. Let's get him that play button. But give us the full story of the channel.
- [07:09]
Matt Ragland
Yeah. I have been creating content online for, I think 2011 was when I set up my first, like, serious blog, because that was the thing back then. And there were a couple of, like, people I was reading back then. Michael Hyatt, copy blogger, pro blogger, Jeff Goins was somebody else that I befriended and gave me a lot of encouragement. And I started that around 2011 and I really enjoyed writing. I started, I actually started a podcast and did 25 episodes of a show in 2013, 2014, which is, like, interesting to think about 10 years later. But then I started working at ConvertKit Now Kit. I was employee number five like you said, and I was really focusing on startups, my career. I was still writing. I'd actually applied for a few content marketing jobs at Buffer and help Scout before I landed at Kit to do customer success and marketing. And I never lost that feeling of wanting to be a creator, though. And one of the things that I hadn't tried yet was YouTube. But it was something like making videos was always something that I enjoyed doing. Like, I have my favorite classes in high school. I'm class of 2002. So a little while ago was TV production, like mini DV tapes and just doing like dumb skits with my friends and recording them and putting them on. And so, like, I had some editing, I had some editing understanding. I knew how to set up some shots and how to like, just make something that was interesting. And I was also watching a lot of Casey Neistat in 2017. And so there was a desire for me to let's just try and make something fun. And it was February 2017 where I got more serious about it. I was like, it's February. I'm going to do 30 videos in 30 days. And I did a daily vlog for those 30 days. And daily vlogging is hard. And I was still working at Kit at the time. And I continued to create videos, usually once, once a week, sometimes twice a week. And around August, September of 2017, I was doing a lot of workflow, sharing, talking about what I was doing at Kid, how we were onboarding New customers, some of the things that we were doing from product management, design perspective, work trips that I was going on. So really still more vlog content. And part of that was I started sharing like workflows and how I plan and stay productive. Especially like we had our first child at that point, he was two years old, we were traveling a lot and I really needed a plan to stay focused and productive. And so I shared something like, here's how I plan my week in a bullet journal. And that video did. That was, I think like my 60th video, give or take. And most of my videos at that time were doing just 100 or 200 views at that point. And it wasn't until a couple of months later, as I was doing like a year in review, I looked at my channel history and saw that the bullet journal video was far outperforming every other video that I had created at that point. And we're talking like 600 views, so it still wasn't like crazy. But when most of your videos are 50 to 100 views, when something 6 or 700 views, you're like, oh, that's interesting. And I've always been someone who like, likes to plan a year, likes to set some goals. And so I was like, I'm going to make a couple of videos at the end of 20. New year, new me, New year, planning to say planning. Planning a new year in a bullet journal. The title was better than that. But that's. That was essentially it. And my thought was, I hope this is the video that eventually could help me get to a thousand subscribers. Because at the time I had made 75 videos that year and I had six or seven hundred subscribers within just a few days. And I had not had any videos that went over a thousand views within just a few days. That video was over a thousand views. And then within a week I was over 1,000 subscribers. And that kicked off something that I always recommend YouTubers do, and really this applies for any type of content, is if you spend time over the course of several months trying out different niches or trying out different topics, different overlaps of topic and audience and ways to talk about it could even be like platform is look back and see what's performing. And then as much as you can double down on that and even double down on it following the feedback of your viewers, of your readers, of your listeners and that I think YouTube is better at that than any other platform. And the way that I then ran my channel for the next six months was to just continue to make workflow videos focused on the bullet journal and other type of analog action taking items. But I would always drop everything if I saw a comment in a video that was asking for a further explanation of something that I had brought up in a previous video. So one example was I used this strategy called like the ten block method. You have ten, ten four hour blocks per week. So how are you using those? You can break them up some, but that was like the easiest thing to talk about and a lot of people were asking about that. So I made two videos about 10 blocks and then which is essentially time blocking. And then I just has, hey, one of the reasons that I'm able to stay focused and productive and understand like how to time block is that I actually track my time. And so like I showed my time tracking grid. Everybody like oh, tell me more about that. So two, three videos about time tracking between that video coming out the week before Christmas 2017, going into 2018. By 20, by middle of 2018 I was over 10,000 subscribers just following that flywheel.
- [13:18]
Dusty Porter
So you basically exactly what you said was that you took something that you saw success with and as a coach this is something that we tell people all the time. Look at your channel now, sort by most popular, look at the data, look at the watch time, see what's performing for you and if you enjoy that, like you said, double down on it and take that train and see where it leads you. Now I've got a couple follow up questions for you and it'll lead into the topic we were just talking about at the Open now that you set this car in motion and you became basically the bullet journal guy, right? Like on YouTube you became that's Matt. Anyone that I saw on other channels and in forums and on subreddits, your content was being linked when it was a bullet journal stuff. So when that happened and it's really hard to stop a car in motion. So when that happened, were you okay with it short term, like getting started? Obviously you found success, you were able to monetize do those things. But as it went, at what point did you realize oh, or okay, I really can't do anything else but just bullet journal. Like when did that happen and what did you do?
- [14:28]
Matt Ragland
It's a really good question. I'm glad you brought it up because it's something now in retrospect that I encourage anyone who's getting into the creator game and especially if you want to be a full time creator, to think seriously about any kind of success that you have. And if it's really what you want to have success in. And at the time, and I think a lot of people fall into this. I won't call it a trap. It's a good thing to have success. But I was like, great, I'm over a thousand. I'm over 3,000, I'm over 5,000, I'm over 10,000. This is great. Awesome. This is the most success that I've had building an audience. And I do think, I certainly believe that looking back, part of why I was able to be successful at that time and then each subsequent success is based on experiences and say, minor under the radar successes or experiences that I've had up to that point. But I did find it hard, say a year later, into 2019 and into 2020, to shift the narrative of the channel away from the Bullet journal or to even make it a kind, or even to make it branch out into other relevant, let's just say, productivity and planning niches. I've had some success with. I've had some success with like platform tutorials like, hey, here's how you do this in Notion or ClickUp, or a calendar like Akiflow or Woven Back in the Day. I've had success with those types of productivity software tutorials, but it always comes back to the Bullet Journal. And often even the templates that I'm showing people how to create in like Notion are still based on, hey, if you're used to doing something like this in a Bullet journal, here's how you could recreate that experience in a tool like Notion or ClickUp. And so it was still like bullet. Like the soul of it was Bullet Journal. And so I do think that if you can pull yourself out of the momentary success and think, okay, this is cool, I'm going to put this down as maybe something I could return to. But is this really what I want to make the next two or three years about minimum? And I got to tell you now that I'm even past that into like year five, six of being consistent on YouTube, that's still very much the case. And I know we talked about this earlier. Like, I don't think anymore that I could transition this channel specifically away from anything that is Bullet Journal or like very analog pen and paper related. Like, I won't even do like Notion tutorials on there anymore.
- [17:20]
Dusty Porter
I started the podcast about 12 years ago and as you were talking, I started thinking, 12 years ago I wanted to grow a podcast. I was listening to Leo laporte Smart Passive Income Podcast. I was listening to all these podcasts that I was interested in. And I was like, I want to do a podcast. And I thought to myself, then I'm starting a YouTube channel. I just got monetized. I know a lot about YouTube. I was going through the process of becoming YouTube certified. I'm just going to do a YouTube podcast. And I quit for about a year after about 11 episodes when the only people listening were my mom. And then I started back when I realized that people were actually listening. And now that I've been doing this for going on 13 years now and we're up getting up to 450 episodes of the show, I will say that I'm very thankful that I did it about something that I really loved. I love talking with creators. I love YouTube. I don't think I could have done it about fly by the seat, things that are hobbies that I had or things that I'm just slightly interested in. It would be very hard to be motivated and keep churning out the content. Whereas now, like today, I was so looking forward to this conversation with you, and I'm every day that I had these conversations, it still burns the fire. And with YouTube, when you're in the early stages, you do the bullet journal videos. At that point, you're. You're seeing number go up and you're just like, oh, I'm going to throw some more stuff at this. Numbers going up. But then you realize that this is your. Yeah, like this is your life. Right. And with that happening, you're now going to have to keep throwing stuff in the fire to find that success, to repeat that over and over again. And I will say, looking at your channel, you are seeing some success with some productivity stuff, the digital stuff. And with time, with time, you can increase the audience. But like you said, the real. The realization of The Matt Ragland YouTube channel is going to probably be known for bullet journal stuff for the forever. And if I wanted to do something different, I would need to launch something else, whether it be a different platform, different new. Yeah, yeah, talk about that now. If you wanted to do something.
- [19:22]
Matt Ragland
And I've been actually experiencing that this year. So you mentioned at the beginning, during the very nice intro, is that I also run a creator for communities called hey Creator. And part of what we're doing in hey Creator is that we have a YouTube channel, we have a podcast, we have things that we're sharing and we had the real discussion and then we actually ran a couple of little experiments. Say, hey, if we run this same video on my channel, how's it going? To perform because a new channel doesn't have anything. It's not monetized. It's not. That's a pain no matter who you are. And it can I think ironically feel more frustrating sometimes if you've had success. Cause she's like, hey, I know these are the things that you're supposed to do. Why am I still at 200 subs or why haven't I? I got over a thousand now, but I still need like all these watch hours. What am I missing? What am I not doing right when there are so many, so many things to consider. But when we ran those experience be like, hey, let's just not even be like not even as much specificity to the hey Creator channel itself. What if I just ran more of a creator focused video and even couch some of it in productivity advice. And it did fine overall if you're looking at it. But it way underperformed for any other type of video that I would have done. And the thing that, and so the thing that I try and think about now when it comes to developing those other channels is that you just really gotta start, not start from scratch because you have all the knowledge and expertise that you've built over the years. You can still apply that. The other thing that I've tried to do to honestly middling success is just to pump the other channel on my main channel. So in screen videos, another way that I've done this and some. The thing that I like about a bullet journal and then like productivity in general is that. And this is something else to think about as you're considering like expanding your audience or your topic list is is there a way that I can find some kind of overlap that I can use my main topic or channel as a Trojan horse to talk about other things. And so like I could as I'm doing like a hey, I'm planning the week type of video for the 30th time is say hey. What I'm working on this week is that I'm doing a podcast. I'm doing a podcast with Dusty. I'm interviewing Dan next week. It's for the hey Creator show. Check out link in the description or like throw a card up in the top right so you can subscribe to that channel. If you are like this type of person or viewer. If you're watching this and you're trying to build a YouTube channel or you're trying to start an online creator business, go here and check it out. So that has been successful. It hasn't been like quite as Much of an impact as I would have initially hoped. But that's. I think if we're not talking about paid, paid or partner traffic going to the channel, which I have some experience into, to middling results, then yeah, that's what I. That's what I recommend. But I do think I'm very much a believer now that they have to be separate. As like, disappointing as that can feel.
- [22:33]
Dusty Porter
Yeah. Once you find a niche. I've tried it many times. My main YouTube channel is technology tutorials. And I tried, I've tried to veer from that multiple times. I tried talking and do this podcast on that channel. I tried to do some other stuff that was not directly related, some productivity stuff because I like you, I enjoy the productivity stuff. I consume a lot of that stuff. It just didn't work. And I built that channel to be an evergreen machine. And I'm very thankful that I did because I still enjoy technology and I still enjoy doing the how to videos. So I'm glad that I did that. But I did try a bunch of times. And then I realized if I want to do a podcast, then the podcast YouTube channel has to be different. It has to be separate.
- [23:15]
Matt Ragland
And.
- [23:15]
Dusty Porter
And I realized all of these things kind of the hard way by experimenting. And hopefully people listening to this can figure it out. And that my YouTube channel, I've built it to where it will generate 50 to 80 to 100,000 views every day. And that's just how I want my channel to run. And through sponsors and ad revenue, I've been able to build a business and then into this podcast. And so I want to ask you now, I love this question. What is something that you wish you would have known sooner? Let's leave aside what we just talked about with that, we'll put a pin in that. Other than that, what is something that around the YouTube channel that you would say to yourself, man, if I would have just done that or known this sooner, the channel would have took off even quicker or had more success.
- [23:55]
Matt Ragland
And the specificity, the niche of it took a little bit to figure out. But I also think that unless you come into it with a defined expertise or idea of what you want to discuss, a lot of people kind of go through the, you know, go through the rounds, put in the reps of figuring out, okay, what is something that I enjoy talking about that people are also interested in hearing about or seeing from me. And that does take time for a lot of people is most people that I talk to, most people in the hey, creator community, most people that I've coached over the years. They have a few things that they're interested in and I had a few things. So it's figuring out what of those few things is the convergence between what you're good at and what other people will watch or pay you for. So if I could have gotten to that faster, I would have. And I also. I would. I wish I would have. And I've gotten much better at this of looking at the thing that I'm moving into, like YouTube in this, in this example, and say, what do I really want to build and what do I really want either my content or my channel or my business to be about? Because I probably wouldn't have said upfront that I wanted to be about analog productivity methods. I just fell into that. And maybe that's like too specific and maybe nobody thinks in like those terms of specificities. But that's something that if I would have been a little bit more intentional about what I want the channel to be and how I can build it. Because I still worked at Kit Convertkit and then Podia for three years after I started my channel, I didn't need like, I started to generate revenue and that was great, but I didn't need for the channel to generate any kind of significant revenue for it to be something that I kept doing. I was making money somewhere else. And I think looking back, I would have tried to stick out more of the personality vlog style. Not necessarily in the way that it was six, seven years ago with Casey and Emma Chamberlain. I think she was getting started around then. But looking at it more from an educational style vlog, not even quite like Gary V, but something that is more day in the life experiential while you're teaching something about your primary topic instead of my bullet journal videos. And they're good. I'm even trying to make this more of my style going forward and like that Trojan horse method. But for years they just felt like they were very much tutorial. Like I would do this. Like I had a system. And again, like it worked, but it just got boring for me and it wasn't okay, am I gonna do another plan with me video? Because I wasn't somebody that drew or colored on my pages. I was just like, hey, this is it. And it just felt like, oh, I said this 20 other times over the past five years. And so I think if I could have stuck with some more of the person, my personality and life experience as a way to cultivate an interest in my work versus just like this tutorial that I was doing that would have some. That would have been something that could have been more sustainable, even though it probably would have taken more time for it to get. I may, I still may not be close to 100k if I had done that, but I think it would have been just as profitable because I think it would have been just as profitable and probably more enjoyable.
- [27:25]
Dusty Porter
What does your video production system look like now and how has it changed from start to finish, from scripting preparation to upload to post upload? What does it look like? What tools do you use and how has that evolved over time?
- [27:41]
Matt Ragland
I've definitely gotten a lot better at scripting than I was. I've always been like a comfortable riffer and off the cuff conversationalist, which works for a podcast. But I've realized that it's not as great for a YouTube video because like I just turned through so much footage, for lack of a better term, and then like this thing that probably only took seven minutes for me to say is 30 minutes worth of recuts because I didn't have as clear of a script as I wanted it to be. But early on I almost always followed a really simple process where I would shoot the headshot, intro and outro and maybe a couple of scenes and scenes in the middle. And then the next 10 to 15 minutes would just be a rig that my friend Mike built. Shout out to Mike who that would like just point the camera straight down onto my desk and then I would just write out my plan and I would talk through it. So I'd have a lot a lav mic, a roadie, road rude lav mic that I would just record and I would shoot the video and then I would edit that down and throw some music on it. And that was it. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. And so I use, I've used Final Cut Pro. I used Imovie for the first year. I use Final Cut Pro. Now. I have nothing against Premiere other than that I don't want to pay the monthly fee. Editor and YouTube co conspirator Tim Forkin, he's got a great channel by the way. Very good modern vlog style. He, when he edits my videos, he use. I know he uses Audition or no Premiere. That's. It's a very simple setup if you like. I use a Canon M50, which I probably won't continue with. When I can get a Sony camera or even like an upgraded Canon, I'll do that. But I've been using it for three, four years. It's a steady little Rig it just needs. It's very slow for 4k. Like it's just dies. I don't know how in depth do you want me to go on tools?
- [29:46]
Dusty Porter
I understand that being someone in productivity, you probably have a lot of systems and people love that kind of stuff. So you don't have to wax poetic about it for an hour but just for just real quickly you can talk about the different tools that you use.
- [29:59]
Matt Ragland
Yeah. So obviously the bullet journal because I do still use it, if not every day, then multiple days per week. Because there is something for me and this is the crux of the channel. Even as I've re recommitted myself to it. I'm more productive and clear and focused when I write things down versus when I even just throw them into a productivity app. Whether it's like reminders on your iPhone or if it's Notion or ClickUp or things or whatever, it might be just the act. Especially for Notion. I love Notion. Notion is by far my favorite productivity software. But there's so much happening inside of Notion and so many things that I could poke around as that even though I have spent lots of time putting together productivity templates in Notion that work really well just in the process of opening it. Like I might see a notification from somebody on my team or I might see something in the sidebars like oh, I want to do a different kind of journal entry or I have an idea to write about or I want to review this readwise highlight. It's. I just. I can't make it.
- [31:07]
Dusty Porter
I'm. I just want to interrupt you there briefly because you're in the same space that I'm in. I found that I'm so much more productive when I'm working, when I have a to do list when I write it down the night before and it's just a simple to do list. And I tried to do the to do list in Notion and try to make Notion my everything and I realized it's just not that it's great for databases and I use it for my video production and for stuff like that. It's amazing like you said. But I found that if I want to get things done, I have the app that I love and I enjoy called Things that is on my iPhone, on my Mac and it's just a simple text based list and Notion is not any good at notes so I wanted it to be my note taker but it's not. So I use Obsidian. I have for a long time now. It's a simple markdown type Note thing. I don't do the analog stuff, but it's almost like it's analog. And so I'm with you. I get distracted by that. So I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I agree with you 100%.
- [32:01]
Matt Ragland
No, I'm glad you. I'm glad you brought it up and because yeah, it's true and it's something that even one. Like I'm. A lot of times I make it even simpler. There's a tool called a tool. It's a note card called Analog by Jeff Sheldon. He runs Ugmon.
- [32:17]
Dusty Porter
Yep.
- [32:18]
Matt Ragland
And so there. It's fantastic. It's just. I think you can put, I don't know, eight to ten tasks down here. And I've talked with Jeff about this a bunch and he's even thinking about. Maybe he didn't say this, but I. Or maybe I suggest is I found that even though there are like spots for eight to 10 tasks on this card, if I put more than four or five down and I'm talking about like real things to do, not update this or something that I just might do without really thinking about it, send a reply, answer this email I'm not about if I do more, if I write down more than three, four, maybe five, depending on the scope of that task, like it's just not going to get done and I end up punting them. So the way that I do often like balance these two is I do have a. I do have a page in Notion where I just throw tasks or ideas and then that's the thing that I just come back to pull. Like, hey, this is because I don't want to have. Sometimes I'll do. I will in the bullet journal write down like here's like a catch all page for tasks during the week. But I'll also throw those in into Notion or if like I'm working at a company or team, obviously that uses something like ClickUp or whatever. So there is like some migration between tools there. But it's really not until I write something down that it becomes a real thing that I'm supposed to do.
- [33:40]
Dusty Porter
That's what I do with the app. Things that I mentioned a few minutes ago is I have the inbox and I'll just put everything there. I have to. As soon as I think about it, I put it in that inbox and that is where I come to do all my processing of okay, what needs to be done today. So if I know it needs to be done today, it's on that. Today it's on My witness on widgets, on my phone, on my Mac. I don't see that inbox. I only go to dump stuff in the inbox and then when I want to get stuff done I got some free time. Beginning of the week, end of the day I'll pull from the inbox kind of what you said. So that's wonderful. Let's get back to the YouTube channel for a minute. How are you making money? Can you tell us how do you make money from the YouTube channel and on average how much you might make on a month with the channel?
- [34:20]
Matt Ragland
Yeah and I'll share this in a couple of different ways. The, the channel itself and may this is partially me has the channel itself in terms of ad revenue has never been like a powerhouse for me. Yeah my best year was like maybe seven, $8,000 in AdSense and that's when I was like that was 2021. I was super committed to it. That was my first year as a full time creator and so that's. That was the most that I, that was the most that I earned. AdSense has always been like pretty much my lowest revenue stream. 7, $8,000 isn't nothing. I just, I don't know if the CPMs for productivity are like. But we don't have to get it don't have to get into all that make money through AdSense through affiliates, referring notebooks, referring software, bullet journal. Obviously Baron Fig is another one that I've used their notebooks a lot affiliates there software affiliates, software affiliates, sponsorships, brand deals. Some of this like kind of ebbs and flows depending on how committed I am to the channel at a particular time. And I'll also say just as a caveat, the last couple of years I've been much more focused on working like partnering with other creators, doing like that operation side more so than the creator side. So I've been able to monetize my expertise in creator content and especially email marketing much easier and faster lately than YouTube itself. But the thing that I made the most money on when I was focused the most on YouTube were courses that people were buying on like productivity, time management and then group coaching also. So that's the, that was the stack for me is that AdSense is always something that I liked and then it was like AdSense sponsorship, brand deals, courses, digital products and then group coaching. And I'd always, my, my goal had always been to like do more of the. Not passive but more of the non coaching, non consulting work as a primary revenue stream. I said coaching consulting services has continued to be like the thing that I can monetize the fastest and the easiest, even though it is the most time consuming. But that's the value ladder is someone would come in and they'd sign up for the newsletter, they'd sign up for a PDF template. They may buy a pack of templates from me for less than $50, buy a course from anywhere from 100 to $300, and then the people who either got the most out of it or wanted the most help with it, then they would join a group coaching or cohort program, and I'd run those. I haven't run one in a couple of years, but I was running two or three of those per year. And you, you asked how much. I don't think I could break it down that cleanly, but in the two years that I was the most focused on those two things, 2021 and 2022, I did 110,000 ish in 2021. And then I, in 2022, I had started taking on some more like consulting clients and operations. So caveat there. That year I did 145. Right.
- [37:38]
Dusty Porter
I appreciate you being so transparent with that. And instead of asking the normal last question that I ask, I want to ask you because you are so ingrained in the email marketing side of things.
- [37:49]
Matt Ragland
Yeah.
- [37:49]
Dusty Porter
Should all creators have an email list? And I'm not necessarily saying a newsletter, because newsletters can come in.
- [37:58]
Matt Ragland
I'm making that distinction.
- [37:59]
Dusty Porter
Yes. Some things can come in different shapes or forms. Right. People are getting newsletter fatigue because a few years ago it was course fatigue. Now it's newsletter fatigue. And I think this stuff ebbs and flows. There was a time three or four years ago where people were like, oh, podcasting. Podcasting is peaking and it's only going to go down from here. And we've seen in the podcasting world, no. The past couple of years, podcasting has only gotten bigger. Ad revenue has only gotten bigger. And so again, these things ebb and flow. So take that again with a grain of salt. But speak on having an email list and owning that list as a creator, it's so important.
- [38:39]
Matt Ragland
I think it's the. My belief is that YouTube is the most valuable, important platform for creators and that an email list is the most important asset that you can have as a creator. And those two, for me, have been the source of any success that I've had. That and the network that I've cultivated. But the thing that I'm so glad you said is, like, having an email list doesn't mean that you have to have a weekly newsletter. I do think that your email list will be healthier and people will pay you more money and that you will have a better business if you email them even once a month. And like I could come back on and talk about newsletter like email marketing strategies for an hour, 45 minutes, easy peasy. But the thing that I'll leave you with is when you set up I like kit the most Bias used to work there, love the team, love how they ship. There are other platforms which are great as well. But what I recommend you doing even if you don't want to send a regular newsletter or updates or whatever you want to call it and you can do this easily in kit on their free plan, go create a landing page that just talks about what you do and how you can help people. Not a bio, what you do, how you can help people and then what I recommend and I can give you a resources like just set up a 3 to 4 email like follow up sequence and the way that you can source the content for those emails, especially as a YouTuber but podcasters, anyone can do this. Basically create written versions of popular videos or messages that you've had in the past. And my first welcome series even before I was like really doing a newsletter a ton is hey welcome, welcome to my newsletter. Let me tell you my planning, my productivity philosophy. Email 2 here's how I set goals. Email 3 here's how I block time to work on those goals. Email 4 here's how I track time so I know how long certain things creating a YouTube video takes so that I can block time appropriately. Email 5, 6 and so on. But all of these weren't unique special emails. These were videos that I had created that I just repurposed basically into something that was more writer friendly, newsletter friendly. So don't even think as you're setting this up because what you want people to do is when they sign up, you don't want to just say hey, thanks for signing up. Confirm your email and they don't hear from you even if all you do is send them 3, 4, 5 emails in the first couple of weeks. That will do a lot to build trust for you and then if you're not a regular newsletter writer you can always pick it back up. But I do recommend sign up to Kit create a landing page and then create a 3, 4, 5 email follow up sequence of your best content that can live somewhere else. And that way people learn more about you right from the signup and then you know you can always contact more from there.
- [41:34]
Dusty Porter
Yeah. And you own that list. It's something that I've done recently and it's grown to. We're getting close to that 5,000 mark and it's. I had one that was way larger than that at one point, but I did it incorrectly and I know there's a lot of things on there that that were not. I just knew I needed to start fresh and so I did. And it's really been beneficial for my coaching business, for my podcasting business and the interactions that I've had. I'm writing about two newsletters a month. I wanted to do one a week, but I'm getting down to about two a month now. Once every other week I'd like to get the cadence of once a week. I found that the interactions that I have are so personal and these people who are getting it in their inbox, it's just as if I'm emailing them and we're having this connection. So it's a great way for a creator to really give a behind the scenes look of what they're doing. So I could not agree more. So again, guys, go check out Matt on his channel at M A T R A G L A N d. Also, hey creator.com. all those links in his Instagram and YouTube channel and stuff will be down below in the description. Matt, thank you again for joining us and best of luck to you and your future endeavors.
- [42:33]
Matt Ragland
Thanks Dusty. Same to you. Appreciate you having me on.
- [42:36]
Dusty Porter
Hello everyone and thank you for listening to this week's episode of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. I really do appreciate it. Don't forget you can subscribe to the show for absolutely free and your podcast player of choice. Also, there are ways you can connect with us. You can support us by supporting our sponsor Tubebuddy, as well as supporting us over on Patreon to get access to our Creator Discord community. And I also offer YouTube coaching and consultation, YouTube channel reviews and just overall business coaching if that's something that you are wanting to look into. So make sure you check us out there and we'll see you next week.