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Hello and welcome to this special edition of the YouTube Creators Hub podcast. I do this at the end of every year, I say every year for the past few years, where I talk about setting goals, I talk about my goals and what it means as a creator to have some systems in place and some goals set so you can obtain or reach, you know, where you want to be as a creator. If you don't know who and what we are here on the show, I interview wonderful creators about 50 to 51 weeks of the year. Every Friday, I release a new episode where I sit down and have a conversation with a creator and I talk with them about their journey on the platform, things that they've done well, mistakes that they've made, and we really don't have very many advertisers here on the podcast. All I ask is that you check out one of our offerings that we have for creators. We have a Mastermind group. I do YouTube channel reviews, I do one on one creator and business coaching. I have an email newsletter. All of these things are very low friction. They're all in the show notes below. So if you're interested in any of those and you're a creator and you want to reach out to me, you can do that by utilizing any of our links down below. So this episode's going to be a bit shorter than normal. I normally keep these interviews 30 to 45 minutes. This might be 15 to 20 minutes, maybe longer, depending on how long winded I get. But let's go ahead and just dive into it. By the way, I record these kind of sit down monologue episodes about a topic in the creator space every Friday. And those are behind our creator Mastermind group. So if you'd like to listen and view these every week alongside the interview show, you can check out our Mastermind group. I release one there on the feed every single Friday as well. So goals, goals are interesting because people think of goals, they think of fitness, they think of, I want to lose, you know, this many pounds and I want to do this by this date. Whereas my goals have evolved over time for my YouTube channel, a lot of my goals are reach centric. And by what I mean by reach centric, I mean I know who my audience is. And so for this podcast, for instance, for the creator sub show, you know, my goal may be like at the beginning of last year, 2025, my goal, I have it here on my second monitor. One of my goals was to release an episode every single week. Now I think I'm going to miss that by one But I do believe having triplets does excuse me from at least one week. So I will go ahead and say that I've accomplished that goal. So as you can see, that goal wasn't necessarily monetary. It wasn't number based, it wasn't vanity related. It was just, hey, I want to be consistent and put systems in place to achieve a schedule where I don't miss a week of the podcast. Now, when I do my goals, I also write down why I'm doing them and I have like paragraphs as to why I want to accomplish these goals. The main reason I wanted to accomplish that consistency level is that I feel that if I continue to offer the freebies that I have here, and I'm going to give you a little bit of inside baseball and if you hear my dogs barking, I apologize. As you can imagine, my house is a bit crazy at the moment with three newborns here, as well as my two other children and dogs. It's, it's, it's a crazy mess right now. So I do apologize for that. I normally have very high quality audio and video and so if you hear them in the background, just. Excuse me. So with this paragraph for this specific goal, what I did was, is I said, okay, if I can get my freebies out every week, which is this podcast, then my, my paywalls are the things that I'm trying to run my business and make money with. Whether it be YouTube coaching, mastermind calls, whatever, those are going to increase in turn because of that. And that happened. I saw that the consistency led to the results that I wanted. So that goal check, I accomplished that goal. I was very satisfied with the results that I received from that. Now goal number two was to average around 100 to 150,000 downloads, both audio and video across the show. Uh, I did not reach that one. Um, last year it was right at 130,000. This year was like right at 133,000. That's on Spotify, YouTube. So that, that was a goal that I set for the podcast that I really wanted to set and I really wanted to reach. Unfortunately, I didn't reach it. But that's the thing about setting goals. Now I kind of know where the benchmark is. Now in December, the podcast has really taken off. And so with that being the case, I think I might set the goal around the same number for 2026 as well. Goal number three, and this one was for my tutorial YouTube channel. I wanted to average around 20 to 30 tutorial videos every single month. Okay, I'm Going to be honest with you guys, for the first 10 months I did that. I did 20 to 30 tutorial videos every single month. Now for the last two months that wasn't the case. So I think I want to stick to that one going into the new year. But as of right now, that one was not reached. But it really did help me in the early stages of 2025 to create a backlog, create those tutorials that were out there. In some months I did 40, you know, and then another goal, kind of a sub goal there was to really lean into short form content and try to do about 5 to 10 of those a month. Did not reach that one either, but it did get me kind of dip my toes in the water. Now for you as a creator, as you're listening to this, what are the purposes of us setting goals? Why are we doing this? If we don't have. Whether it's on paper or we do it mentally, however we do it, if we don't have a reason or a thought process of okay, I want to reach this milestone or I want to get here, we're really just spinning our wheels and we're really not accomplishing anything and you're throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall. And at the end of the day, I really want to encourage you to have a Google Document or an Apple Notes page or whatever it is, a notion page where you set these goals and you work towards them. Now when you set goals and you have them, you can't just do them. You gotta have and set things in place to kind of get them in motion. And so what I did this year is that I put systems in place that I thought would help me reach. Now these are just a handful of goals that I've read off to you today. But I think that going into 2026, some of the new things that I'm going to do is I'm going to put myself up even more guardrails to make sure that if I set a goal for consistency or for how much money I want to make in a month, that I can have things set in place that can make it very easy for me to obtain that goal. Now, if you don't set lofty goals and you set goals that are going to be easily obtainable, I don't really know how much motivation or how much clarity you're going to have with what you're doing with your channel and your business. But I will say that I know when I set goals that are in my mind, probably not really unobtainable but likely unobtainable. It really drives me throughout the year. And so setting those goals, knowing ahead of time, maybe I can get to that goal or that bench. Benchmark. But there's a chance that I don't get it as well. So I want to encourage you to. When you are setting your goals, yes, you want them to be realistic, but you want them to be lofty enough. You want them to be, you know, adventurous enough to where you, the creator, has something to strive toward and you're not completing this thing by July that you have something to. To get, look in the future for. So now that I've talked about kind of my goals and what I would like to encourage you to do, I want to now talk about just the creator space. As far as, you know, where you might want to start with your goals. Maybe a goal for you is a view metric. So maybe it's 10,000 views a month or every YouTube short that you upload. You want the view floor to be 50. Set something that is, I say, tangible, tangible, something you can touch. It's not really a good analogy, but set something that you can look at and you can say, okay, in January, the view floor for my videos was 42. I wanted to reach 50. Now, what can I do to get there? What changes can I make to get there? I want to encourage you that if you don't reach your goals, if they're monthly goals or quarterly goals, it's not really here to be a deterrent. A goal is really set for you as a creator to help you motivate yourself and say, oh, man, I was so close, or I didn't quite hit the mark this month or this quarter. But if I do this and I saw a little movement here, then I can get to the destination that I'm trying to get to. The goals that you set, really, I'm not saying they don't matter, but the goals that you set are really just a framework to get you, as the creator, where you want to be. Now, I wouldn't discourage you. I just mentioned, like a view count goal or a monetary goal. These are all good. I have them. But they're not the only goals that I set for myself. I set myself a wide gamut of goals of, I want to have this much influence. You know, I want to work with 15 creators every quarter. I want to do do 25 channel reviews every month. Like the reach that I'm trying to have. And the goals that I'm setting are far beyond just the metrics. Now, these are all good. I have them. You know, my goal was to average 25,000 watch hours a month on my tutorial YouTube channel. I did that like 27k and some change. That's a good one for me. I had that there. It's, it's on the spreadsheet, but it's not the only one. And so if we have these metrics that we're trying to reach and they're the only thing that we're striving for, if we don't get them, we can become discouraged, we can become burnt out. But if we see those emails trickle in or the people reaching out on social, or for me, for instance, people emailing me and saying, man, that podcast really hit home for me. Or that mastermind call that you did last month was something that was the most helpful thing for my channel in, ever. These are things that, to me that I'm lumping in and throwing into my goal pile and saying, okay, that's, that's helping me get the reach that I want. So in tandem with these metrics based view count, subscriber count based, these are all important things to do as well. All right, so now I want to transition into encouraging you as we kind of close out the year and go into the new year. If you're listening to this podcast and you say to yourself, I've listened to hundreds of your episodes. I've watched Nick Nimmin, I've watched Roberto Blake, I've read Derral Eves book, you've done all the things and you're still not seeing any movement. I'm here to help, and I might be here to maybe upset you a bit. One of two things are happening. If you've consumed all that content and you're still in the same place and you're not seeing any growth and you're kind of seeing a flat line on the channel, you are not willing to pivot. You are not willing to make the changes necessary to accommodate not only the YouTube algorithm, but to accommodate your audience. A lot of times it starts at the top. Like we think of businesses. You know, at the end of the day, it starts with the CEO and it goes down, but it starts with you. Your channel is yours. Where it goes, how it grows is up to you. If you are okay with the status quo and continuing to get the same amount of views every single month or every single day or every single video, then you're probably just going to keep doing that over and over and over again. But really hitting upload, uploading every week, being Consistent, being persistent, and knowing who your audience is. These are all things that are very easy, they're very cliche, but these are the things that you've got to do. And if you are getting the same results doing the same thing, that's stupidity. Right? You really need to focus in on what can I do this year to move the needle in my channel? Don't have such lofty expectations that I'm going to go viral this year. I'm going to get a million views and subscribers. No, make it realistic. We just talked about goals just a second ago. If you're doing the same thing with the same results, what are you doing? If I want this podcast to grow, then I've got to do different things because I'm going to get the same amount of downloads per month pretty well if I do the same thing over and over again. And as creators, we are guilty of this. We hire coaches, we spend hundreds of dollars. You reach out to people like me. What am I doing wrong? Why can't I find results with this? Well, the reason you can't is because you've been doing the same thing over and over again. And you say to yourself, no, Dusty, that's not true. I've tried different things. I've tried different types of videos. No, it's pretty. I can go to your channels right now and tell you, maybe the packaging looks a bit different, how you wrap it up looks a little bit different, but it's the same thing you're doing over and over and you're seeing the same results. If you want to be a better creator, you gotta be willing to put yourself out there. You gotta be willing to hit upload every week. You got to be willing to mess it up first to see the results that you're going to want to see. There's a reason why Mr. Beast recorded those videos. Like, this is to myself in five years. This is to myself in 10 years. The quality stunk. He sounded like a different person. But now look at it. You just gotta keep hitting upload. You just gotta keep putting yourself out there. And the little tweaks that you make and the knowledge that you consume from podcasts like this and all the different things kind of culminate into results. You want to see results on a YouTube channel in 2026. And yes, it is possible. There are channels taking off, growing, starting right now in the end of 2025 and going into the new year. It is possible, but only if you are willing to put yourself out there, knowing who your audience is, knowing what Your niche is. And creating content that is valuable. Creating content that is there every week when you say it's going to be there. Goals are great. Setting lofty expectations are great. But if you don't show up as a creator, your audience has nothing to view. And if you do show up the same way every time and you're dissatisfied with the results you're getting on your channel, duh, stop doing it that way. Figure something out. Try a different bucket of content. Niche down, niche out. Whatever you think will help you in your specific case, that's what you want to do. Listen, I love this podcast. I love having these conversations every week. I love getting to work with creators. This is one of the most fun things that I get to do every single year. And this year, I got to speak with 49 creators, different, separate creators. And I learned something in every conversation. Maybe that's what you need. Maybe you need a group of people. I'm not trying to sell my mastermind group. Who cares? Go join someone else's. Whatever it takes for you to be a part of a group and to be able to not feel so lonely as a creator, maybe that's what you need. Maybe looking into this lens, talking to this microphone is lonely for you. You feel like you have no one to bounce ideas off of. There's places for that. 2026 needs to be the year that you stop giving yourself excuses and you stop trying to say, maybe it's just not gonna happen for me. Maybe YouTube's just not my thing. Maybe it's not. Maybe. So maybe you should quit. But if you really want your voice to be heard, if you really want to grow a channel, you're gonna stop with the excuses. I don't have time. I don't have this. Yeah, guess what? I don't have time. There's three newborn babies one floor below where I'm recording this podcast right now. Do you think I want to be up here right now doing this? I mean, I do because I love this show and I love what I'm doing, as I just mentioned. But, yeah, there's going to be distractions, there's going to be responsibilities, but you have to put yourself in a position to where you can succeed as a creator. I'm going to do that in my business going forward. Trying new things, doubling down on the things that work, which is one of the things creators never do. It's like, man, you had this video style that's. That's does x what your normal videos do, but you've only done three of them. What are we doing? Learn, double down on successes, take out the trash and get rid of the things that are not working. I hope you all have had a great 2025. If it's 2026 when you're listening to this, hope you're having a great day or week whenever it may be. Set goals. Set goals that are obtainable yet lofty. As a creator, if you want to stand out on this platform, you've got to be able to find what your unique voice is, who you are, and who you're speaking to. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast that we've released this year. We're going to do just as much, if not more in 2026 and beyond. Appreciate all the well wishes and thoughts and prayers for the triplets. Having them home for Christmas was amazing, but you guys are really why I create this show. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart, I want all of you to succeed. And I hope that something that I said today and in one of these shows through one of our guests can help you achieve whatever goal you set next year. Talk to you next week.