I’ve seen this pattern a thousand times with product based channels. Other creators who feature their products blow up and get hundreds of thousands of views, meanwhile the channel that actually makes the product doesn’t even show up in the search results.

Most of these product focussed channels aren’t failing because their product is weak, they are failing because their videos never reach anyone new.

Brands understand the importance of video. They know YouTube can be a very powerful discovery engine, they just approach it wrong. It all comes down to what the end-goal is, and most brands don’t give that enough thought.

You can use YouTube as a hosting site for resources, or you can leverage it as a discovery engine to build a community and attract customers. Most product businesses are trying to do achieve the latter by doing the former.

Too many brands treat their YouTube channel like their LinkedIn profile. They post product demos, tutorials and feature rundowns. Everything is packaged and polished to be a beautiful branded encyclopedia of resources centered around the product, but here’s the kicker - nobody cares.

More importantly, the people you are trying to reach don’t care, yet!

If your goal is growth, YouTube is at the top of your funnel. That means reaching people who are not looking for your brand yet, but who identify with the problems that your product solves.

In order to grow a YouTube channel, product businesses need to be making content that attracts a cold audience who have never heard about the product by talking directly to experienced problems.

That means making a hard shift from the “on brand” product-focussed content they are conditioned to produce. It means building a community around aligned shared interests that intersect with the business mission. It means thinking like a content creator.

Content creators don’t start out promoting a product or offer. They begin by making content around something the audience can already relate to, tapping into their frustrations, goals, curiosities and pain points. This does something critical, they earn trust.

Most product channels aren’t doing this. They are entirely focussed on promoting their product to a cold audience who aren’t yet ready to hear about it.

The brands that grow onYouTube are the ones that stop treating the platform like a content library and start using it to build meaningful trust with content that aligns with the audience, not with the product.

Instead of asking “how can we demonstrate our product?”, brands should start by asking “what does our audience already care about before they even know we exist?”. This reframing leads to different content ideas that connect better with a cold audience and over time will build trust. In short — less feature explanation, more problem recognition.

If this sounds like you, I’d love to help! I work with brands who want help aligning their content strategy with business objectives and achieving real growth without viral hacks and trend chasing noise. Book a free discovery call with me to see how we could work together.

You start making content out of pure passion, because it’s fun and rewarding. This is the easy phase, there is no resistance, no anxiety and no pressure. You could do this forever!

Then you start to get a little traction and you suddenly realize that you can build something. People are listening, you have an audience. You watch your views and followers increase and the reward centre of your brain laps it up. This is where everything changes. It stops being a labor of love and starts becoming a bidding war for attention. Your content is driven by your desire to see growth, you’re making what you think the algorithm will push and you lose yourself in the process. You become just another cog in the social media machine, hopping on trending topics and regurgitating the same cookie cutter content you think is working right now.

You’re no longer creating, you’re just playing a rigged game. Chasing views, followers and engagement. Sometimes you feel like quitting but then that one post blows up once in a while and it keeps you on the hamster wheel. You think you’re growing, that the dream is in sight, but you know deep down that something isn’t right. It’s hard now, the resistance is intense and the emotional swings are too much to handle.

The final chapter of your content creator dream is filled with disappointment and despair. You struggle to post anymore because your ideas are hollow and meaningless. The emptiness that you feel staring at a blank screen watching a blinking cursor starts to consume you. Eventually you just fizzle out like a dying star that once burnt so bright.

You take a moment, thinking back on your previous self. The one who loved to create, with fire in your belly and passion in your heart. What happened? What changed? It was all so easy back then.

I write this to help others who are feeling lost. This doesn’t have to be your story. The hardest part of creator growth is staying true to yourself in the face of success… that’s the real secret.

Image by Marion from Pixabay

The social media landscape about to fundamentally change forever. AI is here now, love it or loathe it, we’ve got to adapt or die.

Today I want to talk about authenticity. I’ve seen a lot of creators talking about how authenticity is the way to stay relevant in 2026 and beyond, and they’re right. But what does it mean to be “authentic” and how can you lean into this type of content?

Let’s start by explaining what it’s not. Authenticity isn’t a style of content. You don’t make a video more authentic by just filming it in vlog style on an iPhone in your living room.

Authenticity is about connecting with people on a fundamental human level and tapping into their emotions. As smart as AI can be, us humans will always have an edge when it comes to emotional connection.

We’re about to see an avalanche of AI generated content hit our feeds. It’s going to be everywhere, that’s an unavoidable truth. As much as you might want to disregard it as “AI Slop” and move on, you’re going to have to face the reality that a lot of AI generated content is going to replace content creators and if you don’t want that to be you, then you need to produce something that AI can’t.

No amount of fancy editing tricks, pattern interrupting hooks and slick production can save you if all you are doing is wrapping up information and delivering it. AI will dominate you.

As a small creator, you’re never going to compete on that playing field. Those who will survive the next few years are going to be the ones that people connect with. People will always follow people, it’s in our DNA. That’s the edge that you must lean into to grow in 2026.

This brings us back to authenticity and what it really means.

Authenticity means putting yourself out there, not just your face and your voice, but the real you. It’s about showing you are vulnerable, highlighting your flaws and sharing your failures.

I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy.

When we share from behind a camera or keyboard it’s easy to build a wall around ourselves. We want everything polished and perfect, we only show the very best of us. But that’s not real, being human is an imperfect existence and to compete in an AI world our humanity is our biggest commodity.

So next time you’re coming up with a content idea try to really talk to your audience on a more emotional level. Did you solve a problem? Don’t just show how to solve the problem, tell a story instead. How did this problem affect you? How many times did you try and fail to solve it before finally figuring out the solution. Take your audience on a journey that will tap directly into their emotions.

Your information needs to be gift wrapped in your story, that makes you human, that makes you authentic.

Remember, being authentic is not a content style. There is no guidebook on making authentic content because authenticity comes from within you.

Do you. ❤️

Photo by Toa Heftiba

I’ve been exactly where you are. 10 years ago I started making cooking and camping videos for YouTube with an old camcorder. It was fun and rewarding, there was no pressure or expectations, I was just making the content I wanted to make and sharing it with the world… even if that world was only a handful of people.

A couple years later I started paying attention to how my videos were performing. Some of them started gaining traction. I didn’t have YouTube Studio back then, I wasn’t even thinking about the metrics, but I started to see a couple of videos hit a hundred views, then a thousand.

Wow, people actually liked watching my videos, I wasn’t expecting that.

Around that time I was entering my 40s, disillusioned with my work life and exploring new ways to make a living, my second act. I had floated from one idea to another until I started seeing content creators that were making a living from YouTube. This hit me hard, getting paid to do what you love — the ultimate win in the game of life.

That spark lit the flame, I found my north star. I wanted to be a YouTuber.

What happened next was unexpected. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing back then, I just loved making videos and knew that’s what I wanted to do every day. I saw other creators crushing it on the platform and I knew I needed to level up and learn how to create videos like them.

I started watching videos to help me improve my skills and make better content. YouTube itself was a goldmine of information, a seemingly infinite supply of advice and educational content at my fingertips. This is how it started. I fell into the YouTube growth rabbit hole — and I fell deep!

One video led into the next, and the next. It wasn’t long before YouTube was showing me an endless stream of growth content in my feed. I became obsessed with watching them and the more I consumed the more I convinced myself that they were leading me closer to the promised land. But the only place I ended up was watching the next video.

It took me a while to realize that I was building my own prison. Watching YouTube gurus reveal their secrets on how to tap into endless potential became an addiction. But like any addiction, one hit was never enough. My dream was always in reach, but just far enough away that I needed to watch another growth video to edge closer to it. I was trapped in a perpetual lie.

The deeper I fell into this world the more I doubted my own content. I was so wrapped up in chasing the key to success that I lost myself in it. I went down a path of constant procrastination and overthinking that ultimately led to stagnation. I stopped creating.

During the lowest moments I nearly gave up completely on my dreams. It felt like my goals were always out of reach. I stepped back from it all for a while, disheartened and exhausted. This is where the story ends for many would-be creators. You fall into the YouTube guru machine, get chewed up and spat out as just the shell of the potential creator you once were.

Something happened to me during this time. I started thinking, really thinking, about what was going on. I started looking at the gurus I had been following and seeing their game plan. It was like the curtain was being lifted.

I started delving into the strategies behind the gurus I had so faithfully watched over the years and I saw the same patterns again and again.

I could see it clearly now — the YouTube growth industry is fucking toxic.

It took me a long time to see it. The system is designed to keep you hooked. You get just enough insight in a video to feel that you are improving, but in reality you are just being led blindly through a sales funnel to sign up to their course. You are not being taught, you are being groomed.

Here’s the ugly truth they don’t want you to know. There are a few fundamental concepts that are crucial to succeed on YouTube, but not as many as you think. The rest is fine tuning.

The problem for the gurus is that teaching you the basics is not enough, they need to keep you coming back for more. They release a constant churn of the same rehashed concepts slightly spun with some unique “strategy” to try and make it appear fresh. They need to keep you on the hamster wheel so you eventually sign up for their course where you can unlock all the secrets — don’t fall for the lie.

Let me be clear. There are things you need to learn to be successful on YouTube, and I’m not dumping on all YouTube growth creators, there are some fantastic resources out there that can really help you get started. But there is a darker side to the industry lurking in the shadows that is not aligned with your success.

The trick is finding a healthy feedback loop between doing and learning. Getting trapped in the YouTube growth rabbit hole cost me two years of my creator life and I want to help you avoid that. Find creators that inspire you, not trap you.

Next time you find yourself on a 6 hour educational video binge, remember that as creators we never stop learning, but we learn by doing, failing and improving. Failing is not a bad thing, it’s essential and it will teach you far more than any guru ever could.

Some time ago (probably a very long time ago) you opted to sign up for my newsletter where I promised to deliver regular insights and advice, documenting my process of becoming a content creator in my 40’s.

Well, I guess I failed.

You see, despite my best intentions I ended up in a place that you might be familiar with — stuck in my own head, thinking endlessly about content ideas but struggling to ever finish anything.

It can feel like a curse. Like you have a million great ideas, you can imagine a world where you pour your heart and soul into your content every week and share it with the world. But you’re stuck in dark room and can’t open the door.

If only you could find the key and unlock the door, open the floodgates, let the content flow. But what’s stopping you?

For me the answer is simple, I overthink absolutely everything.

I start with a thought, a concept or a feeling. Pretty soon I’ve distilled that into an idea but before I can take action and create the content the gremlins in my head start ripping it to shreds. I start seeking out similar content from other creators and fall into the comparison trap, which leads to perfectionism which leads to self doubt.

Overthinking is destroying my dreams — I can see that now. My cadence on YouTube is terrible, my newsletter never got going, my short form plans are going nowhere. I have a clear vision in my head of where I want to be in a year, how I want to grow as a creator and the life I want to build, but overthinking is the nemesis I know I need to defeat to achieve that.

Sound familiar? God I hope so. I can’t be the only one.

So here’s a few things I’m now trying to going to do going forward to try and get myself unstuck. None of these things on their own are going to be a magic bullet. Change takes time and effort, but small steps can lead to big leaps, so here’s my new thought process;

Done is better than perfect.

Once you have an idea, it’s ready. It doesn’t need to be filtered down, dissected and perfected in your head, it needs to escape! Thinking of every video, post or newsletter article as a masterpiece will create a a beautiful gallery of content, in your head!

Stop comparing

Comparison completely kills creativity. I’m so guilty of consuming to try and feed my creative process, it doesn’t work. All you end up doing is watching content that you envy from creators who are ahead of you in the journey. It feeds directly into imposter syndrome and breeds self-doubt.

Start messy

When you consume other peoples content, it looks so easy and the gap feels so huge. It can be overwhelming to see the beautifully polished videos, masterful storytelling and elegant wordplay and make you think you could never compete.

But guess what? They weren’t always that good. Content creation is a journey, and like any journey it has a beginning. Every time you release a piece of content you are edging further forward, increasing your skills and building your audience.

Do you want to be someone who dreams of being a creator? Or do you want to be a creator? If it’s the latter then start today, start messy, just start.

For me that means one thing today — start this newsletter!

If this resonates with you then maybe check out my latest YouTube video

How to Overcome Self-Doubt and Just Start Posting

Until the next time!

The online video content industry right now is booming. People are consuming more and more information in video format over traditional written articles than ever before, and brands are acutely aware that if they want their cut of the attention in the marketplace then they need to take video seriously.

I help brands with creating content for YouTube and building strategies to enable them to grow on the platform and get the most out of what YouTube has to offer.

One thing I’ve noticed time and time again working with clients and looking at what other companies are doing on the platform is that brands just don’t get YouTube. Between misconceptions and a fundamental misunderstandings of how YouTube works, brands are consistently failing to grow for a few simple reasons. In this article I’ll explain why brands struggle so much with YouTube growth and what they can do to fix it.

The first mistake many brands are making when approaching YouTube is not fully considering exactly what they want to achieve. The first question I would ask any potential client is what they hope to get out of it in the next year or two. Most brands will say that they want to grow their YouTube channel, increase views and increase subscribers. All good things, but my next question is always going to be; Why?

Goals

This brings us to the goal that the brand is hoping to achieve. Nine times out of ten the goal is to get more customers. There are exceptions that we will talk about later, but for now let’s focus on that. Now we have the “what” and the “why” we can start to get to the real meat on the bone, and that’s the “how”.

This is where it’s important to have a clear content strategy with a well thought out path to achieve said goal. Most brands I see either lack a strategy altogether or have developed one that is not aligned with the goals set out. A good content strategy for attracting new customers can be summarised as a way to get discovered by a cold audience and convert those viewers into a warm audience.

Building a content strategy

The first step to building an effective content strategy is understanding where YouTube fits in to the overall sales and marketing funnel. If the goal for the channel is to grow in order to attract new customers then we want our content to appeal to a cold audience, viewers who may not have even heard about the brand or its products and services. In marketing terms this is considered top-of-funnel, a wide reach to a broad audience with the intent of converting them to a warm audience. A viewer can be considered “warm” when they are aware of your brand and place a certain amount of trust in your message.

Growing a warm audience is the key to lead generation and ultimately sales, so the first step of converting a wider cold audience is critical to the rest of the funnel. YouTube is probably the most effective platform in existence for reaching a cold audience and increasing brand awareness among those potential customers. The key to success on YouTube is through a powerful concept called organic community building.

Community Building

Building a community on YouTube is about far more than just subscriber numbers. A community is a following with a shared interest in a problem space or topic of interest that will build a genuine connection with your content at a personal level. That connection is the key to establishing a channels credibility and gaining trust with the audience. Establishing credibility and earning trust with your audience are the cornerstones of a good content strategy.

This is where I see most brands simply failing to deliver, or losing sight of the goal. The number one mistake I see with so many brands is making the wrong type of content and not understanding the target audience.

The most common example of this I see is when brands start to produce all of their content topics around their own products and services. These are channels that become self-focussed; our company, our journey, our story, our products…

Bringing this back to our content strategy and target audience, we need to ask a simple question, what value are we delivering with this content? That is not to say that the content isn’t in itself valuable, but who gets the most value out of it? This self-focussed content can deliver great value to existing customers or people looking to evaluate the brand. This is a warm audience, already familiar with the brand and its products who likely arrived at the channel through search or other social media platforms. This type of content does not align at all with the growth strategy that we are trying to implement as it does nothing to appeal to a colder audience.

This is the disconnect that so many brands arrive at. They stop community building and start creating a content library around their own products and services. Both are valuable assets which is why it’s important to establish what we’re trying to achieve and stick to a strategy to accomplish it.

A YouTube channel can be one of two things for a brand; a content library of resources or a community. If you are trying to organically grow a community and reach a colder and wider audience then you need to be making content focussed on solutions and education around the problem space the viewer is in. You can then leverage that audience to raise awareness about your products and services off the back of the trust you gain through delivering value. Always ask yourself if the content you are making delivers value to someone who has never heard of your brand.

Content Library

Of course, a content library channel can also foster a community. It can be a community channel that is based around the brand itself that publishes educational resources and reference content centred around the products and services it provides. An example of this would be a software brand that publishes tutorials and explainer videos on how to use its products. This type of channel caters to a very different audience that is much warmer and may already be deeply familiar with the brand.

In this case the function of the channel is very different. Here we are using our YouTube channel to deliver extra value to an already existing audience. The strategy for this type of channel is very different. We rely on SEO rankings for keywords around our products and other social media or existing marketing channels to promote our content.

This all gets back to the original question of what we want to achieve with our content strategy. Brands need to ask themselves what they want out of YouTube, to produce content that delivers value to their existing customers and prospects or to capture a new audience and bring in new customers.

Community or Content Library

It can be hard to do both. One key factor in growing organically on YouTube is giving the platform enough data that it can more effectively target your content at the right audience to gain maximum reach. It does this by testing your videos on a subset of viewers, and based on the levels of engagement will start pushing them to a wider audience. When a channel starts posting a mixture of content for two different audiences, this can potentially hurt the growth of your organic content.

This is why it’s so important for a brand to understand what it expects to get out of YouTube and create a clear strategy that has those goals in mind.

One brand I see executing this process really well is HubSpot, a well known CRM platform focussed on helping companies improve their sales and marketing processes. HubSpot demonstrate that they understand the value of both community building and a value driven content library and have adopted a great approach to maximize both strategies; they have two YouTube channels.

Well, technically they have several, but their two flagship channels are HubSpot-CRM which is a product focussed channel delivering value through tutorials and explainer videos about the platform, and HubSpot-Marketing (recently renamed to Masters in Marketing). The latter is a much broader channel covering a variety of topics around marketing, social media and digital marketing. Two different channels, two audiences and two well defined strategies.

By publishing on two YouTube channels HubSpot are able to grow a community and raise brand awareness by tackling issues in the sales and marketing niche and also provide valuable resources and educational content to their users. This clear distinction between content types helps maximize the effectiveness of both strategies.

I should note I am not in any way sponsored or affiliated with HubSpot, I just admire their thoughtful and well executed YouTube strategy and I think other brands could learn a lot from them.

Final thoughts

In summary, the key to success for brands is to decide on a desired goal and then build a content strategy that delivers value to the right target audience to accomplish it. If your goal is to grow an organic community then focus on creating engaging and valuable content that is going to resonate with a wide audience.

I hope you found this helpful. If you’re looking for advice on YouTube channel strategy or help with video production or editing then get in touch on Instagram. Follow me on Threads for more.

I used to think that being a content creator meant picking a social media platform and posting engaging value driven content to it in order to grow an audience. Of course, that’s certainly part of it, but lately I’ve managed to see that it is so much bigger than that. I’ve started to see my content creation as an interconnected web of processes that create, distill and distribute content in an optimal way to reach my end goal.

Focussing on what my end goal is was the catalyst to finally understanding how to build a content strategy, rather than just aim for higher follower counts. The end goal is more than a follower number, it’s to have a base of people that truly resonate with my content. Having a loyal and engaged audience means they will give you the most valuable asset on the Internet today; their attention.

I’m primarily a YouTube creator but I’ve crossed paths with many people who run successful blogs and niche websites ranking on Google to attract traffic and ultimately earn money through affiliate marketing or product promotions. I’ve never really been keen to follow that model as it just always felt I was at the behest of the Google algorithm and, more importantly, if they turned off the tap I would have no following to fall back on. High intent SEO traffic is certainly the easiest to convert into hard sales, but these are mission orientated visitors who will probably not stick around. I always preferred the idea of fostering trust over time, building communities and a more engaged audience that could lead to conversions over time.

The recent Google update gave me a lot of pause for thought. For those that don’t know Google just dropped a huge update to their ranking algorithm that overnight obliterated many niche websites and affiliate marketing based blog sites that were targeting SEO traffic. I’ve spoken to people who have lost their entire business and are now going back into the workforce because their sites are now worthless. This made me think hard about how much blind ownership we give big media companies over our bread and butter assets.

As I see my subscriber counts going up on a couple of YouTube channels that I’m trying to grow this year, I feel encouraged. It’s awesome to see people enjoying my content enough to subscribe to my channel and leave comments. Once the dopamine rush of that faded I started to question where is the value in that following? Are they truly my followers?… Well, no, if YouTube killed my channel tomorrow it would sever all contact between me and my subscribers, forever. Much like people I’d seen modelling their businesses around Google rankings, I am building a community on YouTube, and only YouTube. And that community is not mine.

At the same time, I have been feeling lately that I miss writing. Writing is a passion I’ve had since childhood. I once thought about pursuing writing as a career but saw that making it as a creative writer was not realistic for me, and writing content on demand for freelance clients was something I didn’t want to do. So it’s largely just been something I do for passion.

It’s all connected

This is where these two divergent trains of thought suddenly collided and everything made sense. I decided to start a newsletter, and SubStack was the ultimate place to do that. My main reason for choosing SubStack over other writing platforms such as Medium was simple, their whole model is about building a community that you own. If I release a new post it gets sent directly to my followers by email. If one day I want to pack up and move to a different platform, I can take my audience with me and that is crucial in todays world. If attention is the most valuable asset on the Internet, then you need to own the source of that attention.

I’ve found great benefits in getting writing back into my content creation workflow. Writing lets my brain explore things that I can’t otherwise explore and come up with new ideas that unleashes more creativity in my video content creation.

I used to think that I needed to decide between writing or video content as a main focus point. Now I am realizing that it’s all connected. Implementing a solid writing plan in my overall content strategy connects all the dots. I can use my writing to unblock me and come up with creative ideas, those ideas can be distilled into video content. And by publishing my writing as a newsletter I can then use the video content to drive my audience to it and complete the circle 🫶

This is the first of a series of regular updates around content creation, YouTube growth and social media. In this series you can expect to receive a condensed summary of the latest curated news in the creator economy.

Thanks for being part of our community, I hope you find this newsletter useful. Let’s get started!

#1 The future of AI on YouTube 🤖

Since the explosion of AI recently we’ve seen a tidal wave of AI generated content hit YouTube. “YouTube Automation” has become a buzzword amongst eager new creators looking for an easy path to monetize a channel and pump out copious amounts of content all generated using AI tools. From using ChatGPT to generate scripts that get fed into AI voiceover tools and then more AI generated or sourced b-roll footage to stream out an endless stream of mind numbing content that seems to be dominating Shorts right now.

At one end of the scale AI generated content is an annoying plague of unoriginal content that still seems to garner some traction on the platform when done right. On the other end superior AI technology is being used to produce deep-fake videos and spread misinformation in a way that is potentially damaging.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is the future and those that don’t harness the opportunities that it gives creators is going to get left behind. But AI is a tool to improve our processes as creators, not a replacement for quality original content. YouTube have finally started to look at how to mitigate the potentially damaging consequences of AI content in a way that doesn’t stifle genuine uses of AI to improve already original content.

YouTube is recognising that AI can add great value to video content creation, but it also poses a risk if it’s misused to create misleading or fake content. The first step YouTube has taken is to require creators to disclose if their content is AI generated by setting an optional flag "altered content”. This tells YouTube that AI has been used to significantly alter audio or video within your content. Right now this will cause a message to be displayed to viewers advising them that the content is AI generated.

YouTube have been careful to emphasise that adding this label to your videos will not effect distribution or monetization of the video. This is an interesting move and it shows that they are genuinely trying to manage the risk of AI in a controlled way that doesn’t penalize creators using AI for genuine content.

If you use AI for your content then don’t worry. It’s clear that YouTube are not planning on banning AI content, nor are they discouraging it through algorithm suppression or demonetzation. The guidance released by YouTube lays out the requirements for declaring AI content and it’s clear that what they are trying to address is AI generated content that represents a real situation or a person falsely. This includes deep-fake videos and realistic looking videos generated by apps like Sora.

I don’t think this is the end of the matter. This is new guidance from YouTube and is likely to be refined over the coming months. But so far we’ve seen them take a pragmatic and sensible approach that so far has little impact on 99% of creators. But we'll be following this topic very closely, so stay tuned!