If you wanna grow on YouTube, but you keep getting nowhere, you're not imagining it, YouTube is hard. But it's only because nobody hands you the playbook. So here are the seven hidden rules that take you off hard mode. Helping educational creators figure out what's actually broken in their channels is what I do every day. I've broken every single one of these rules myself, and now I'll give you the playbook that I wish I had. By the end of this, you'll know exactly which rule is breaking your channel right now. Rule one is fix your weakest link first. And I'm starting here because it's where almost every channel that I coach is losing the game. Most creators are pouring effort into the wrong part of the video, and they don't even realize it. The part you love working on is almost never the part that's broken. They polish the script, the storytelling, the b roll. They make the inside as good as they can and assume people will watch. But think about it. When you're on YouTube,
what does it actually take to get you to the end of a video and want to watch another one from that creator?
If you made it to the end, there had to have been a decent payoff.
To reach that payoff, that video had to hold your attention. To get to the meat of the video, you had to be pulled in by the hook. And then to get to that hook, you had to click.
But before that click, the first thing you saw was the thumbnail, and then the title. Sometimes those two flip, but most of the time, the visual leads. And then behind both of them is what I call a concept.
You're trying to figure out, what is this about? Is this worth my time? Is there a reason I need to watch this now? What's the curiosity gap? What's the thing that I wanna know right now? Every video is a chain.
Thumbnail,
title,
concept,
hook,
body, payoff,
Next video. If any one link doesn't do its job, everything after it doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter how good the rest of the chain is if it breaks before you get to that part.
That's what hard mode looks like. You pour effort into the part that you love, and then the chain breaks somewhere you weren't looking. And you can't figure out why nothing's growing.
I have a really good example to share with you. My last video was one of those dreaded 10 out of tens. One of the worst performing videos of mine in a very long time. It had one of the links break, and I wonder if you can spot it. This is my most recent video. I'm proud of its content. The title is solid. I'm proud of that thumbnail, but the concept underneath is what was weak. I messed up. I thought of an idea, and then I tried to find a title and thumbnail that would support it.
The title was picked to fit the concept, and then the thumbnail was designed to work with the title. But the underlying idea didn't compel anyone to click. It wasn't a validated idea. So even with a thumbnail and title I'm proud of, the chain broke at the concept link. None of the other links even got a chance to do their job. The hook didn't matter. The retention didn't matter. The payoff doesn't matter. Nobody saw it because the concept link broke before they got there. That's my weak link right now, and it's what's been on my mind since. Two of the strategists that I trust most on this platform say the same thing in different words.
Patty Galloway puts it like this. I think it's it's interesting because when I think about packaging,
I find that a lot of people outside of the YouTube industry just don't understand
the concept of a Yeah. Differentiator it is. Mhmm. I often actually say that it's 50% of the game,
and that shocks people because you think, you know, YouTube is a video platform. Right? People think you make videos that people watch, but I think about it, you make title thumbnails that people click and videos that people watch. You know, it's it's fifty fifty. So And Samir says the same thing, slightly different. So what are the three rules at YouTube?
The first rule is if they don't click, they don't watch.
Second rule is respect their time.
The third rule is give them more. If you just think about at the core of it,
YouTube is not a video platform, it's a click and watch platform. Right? Meaning, I have to actively make a decision
to click on a video in order to watch it. Both of these guys work with the biggest creators on the planet. And they're saying out loud what most creators won't say to themselves.
Most creators don't know about this rule. They don't realize there's even a chain at all. Now you do. So here's how you find your weak link. I call it the weak link test.
Look at your last five to 10 videos and find the link that's breaking. There's no magic CTR number that's going to help you here. You do this by feel and pattern.
That's the skill. And developing it is one of the most important things that you can do as a creator. Once you know which one's the weakest, that's where your effort goes.
Knowing this rule is one thing, acting on it is another. And to know which link is broken, you have to know who the chain is even for.
Almost every creator I coach gets this wrong. Rule two is the fix. Rule two is same person, same problem. This is the kind of rule that YouTube punishes you for breaking, even when you didn't know it existed.
Imagine you found a video that you really liked. You subscribed to that creator to see what they make next. The next video drops,
but it's a different topic, a different angle, a different mood. And you're confused. It's a shame because you were looking forward to watching what they do next, and now you're not going to, and you move on. You just became a dead subscriber.
The algorithm catches this too. The next time that this creator makes a video, it's less likely to send it to you because the last time it sent one to you, you didn't watch it. Maybe if they make a banger video, they'll send it to you just to double check to see if you still wanna watch this person anymore. That's how a creator resets their momentum without even realizing it. The rule was always there, they just didn't know it. It's healthy to be creative and make a variety of content. But channeled the wrong way, that variety is the thing keeping creators stuck.
They make a review, then an opinion piece, then a tutorial, then a podcast.
And even if all of it is great content, they grow at a sloth's pace. They see videos like theirs working for other creators and can't figure out why it doesn't work for them. Same person, same problem is how I describe consistency.
What this rule means is that every piece of content you make should be designed to be watchable by someone who already watched your stuff. Make it for the same person. Help them with the same problem you've been helping them with. The rule name is designed around the framing for educational channels, but it applies to entertainment channels too, with just a little translation.
Think about it like this. The problem you solve might be a comfortable place for them to study with music, a guaranteed laugh in every one of your videos, the lesser known facts about their favorite games that make them feel informed, a place where they hang out with you and the guys while you do a cooking challenge, Or maybe you're the first place that they look for their favorite meal prep recipes,
and so on. All problems that you can design your content to solve.
Same person doesn't mean the whole human, by the way. I love board games, movie reviews, and YouTube growth. And a channel that tried to talk to all three of those at once would be three different audiences, not one. So this would change your understanding of consistency because most creators get it wrong. It's easy to assume that consistency means how often you upload a video. And I'm not saying that that's wrong, but the more important piece of consistency is making a video for the same person every time for a long period of time. Ask me how I know. I spun my wheels in three different niches before I figured this out. Three self help videos because it was a big part of my life at the time. But I was less than a minnow in a very big ocean,
so I shifted to board game design. Six videos there, and a couple did okay, few thousand views.
But the impostor syndrome was getting to me, And I didn't wanna be known as the board game guy. So I shifted to the hobby and maker space, and that lasted one video.
I told myself that I would start posting again in two weeks. Instead, I quit for over a year. The funny part, those board game videos blew up six months after I quit, and I wasn't even there to watch it. When I came back, I started talking to the same person video after video, and that's the reason this channel started growing at all. So here's how to find who your audience actually is, who the chain is made for. I call it the North Star Test.
Two questions.
One, who do you wanna talk to? Be specific. Their stage, their niche, their pain.
And two, who's actually watching your content right now? Look at your comments. Who's emailing you? The overlap is the person that every video from now on is for. If you wanna do this exercise yourself, I made it dead simple. When you join my newsletter, I will send you a step by step guide to create the audience analysis, so you can know your audience inside and out before your next video. Because once you know who you're talking to, it makes everything so much easier.
Alright. That brings us to the next rule. It's about how to filter the advice you've been listening to. Spoiler alert, most of it's the wrong playbook.
Rule three is don't follow the wrong playbook. Most YouTube advice wasn't meant for you. Most creators are learning from videos that blew up years ago, or from creators giving advice for a stage you're not in yet. So they apply what they hear and it doesn't work. They get frustrated because they don't know that they're playing by the wrong playbook. I'm not above this either, by the way. Here's one of my best performing videos. It talks about the eight things that you should never do before you upload. The things in it are not the things that I would put in it today. There's at least one piece of advice in there that I'll never share again because I bought into something that turned out not to be true, and now thousands of people watch me say it every month.
There are two ways that this happens. The first is about where you are in your journey, and who the advice was meant for. For example, email capture is one of the most important things that you can do. But that's bad advice for an entertainment channel. Posting on every platform as often as you can is a multiplier. But the missing context is that it shouldn't be your goal until you have a team. Optimizing your CTR by 1% is great, but the math is meaningless if your dataset is 70 viewers of video. The second reason is a trap almost every creator never even realizes they've stepped in.
Right now is the best time in history to be making content. The opportunity is insane.
The platform is changing faster than ever. The way that I make content today is dramatically different than the way I did it a year ago. But the big videos, ones that already won, those keep getting bigger and bigger with time. So YouTube keeps recommending them. And more and more creators learn from advice that stopped being right two years ago. That's why so many people are following the wrong playbook without even knowing it. The context of the advice is everything.
I call this the context filter.
Are you in the right place of your journey for this advice? Do you have the same goals as the person who gave it? Was it meant for your style of content? Is it still good advice today? The skill isn't applying the advice. It's filtering it. Even this video might not be directed squarely at you. Filtering what fits your situation is one of the most important skills that you can develop on this platform.
The catch is, this kind of skill is almost impossible to learn alone. You don't know what you can't see. Someone outside your channel has to point it out to you. And that's why I built a community for creators where I do exactly that. Every week, we get on a call and I help them figure out what's broken in their specific channel. When you join, you get my exact systems as a weekly checklist, a personal review of your channel and the ability to ask any question and actually get an answer instead of guessing in the dark. Founding members are in already, and a couple of them have told me they're getting real value out of it within the first week. The top link in the description is where you can learn more and get notified when spots open again. Filtering advice gets you closer to what works for you, but the next rule is what tells you what you're actually up against when you sit down to make a video. Alright. Rule four is YouTube has no beginner mode. This is one of those rules where you don't realize the scope of the situation, but as soon as I explain it, you'll wonder why you didn't see it this way before. Last week, I was on a call with Tim. He's one of my one on one clients. One of the few that I work with every single day. I know his channel inside and out, probably better than he does. And he was struggling with this exact rule. So we did one specific exercise that unlocked it for him in a couple of minutes. Most creators don't treat their packaging the way it deserves. They make it quickly, without researching what works, as an afterthought.
They don't realize that the thumbnail is about to sit on the homepage next to creators with teams.
Creators have been making content for years. The primary way to grow on YouTube is through browse.
The algorithm takes your video and tries to serve it to someone it thinks wants to watch it. But you're not the only one. You're surrounded by a group of other videos all trying to get the same click.
The homepage is a battle royale. Only one person can win. When your video drops in, so do videos from dozens of other pros. Their packaging is polished. Their audiences already trust them. When the viewer scrolls,
you need to win their click, or it's back to the lobby. Try again next time. Your job as a creator is to wave your hand at your video and say, this is the one you should watch. This is worth your attention. Because if you wanna win, you need the viewer to click on yours instead of anyone else's. You're up against those big creators with teams that they've been watching for years. You need to make stuff that holds up next to them consistently for a long period of time, so the viewer can develop a new routine of watching you as often as they do their other favorites.
Easier said than done. But here's the quick exercise that I ran through with Tim. I call it the field comparison.
If you're treating YouTube seriously,
this is something that you should do for yourself right now. It's not complicated. Pull up your video library on one side of the screen. And then on the other side, pull up the outliers in your niche from the last few months. The tool that I use for this is called one of 10. You could do this manually, but I wouldn't suggest it. There's a link in the description, and it's only a dollar for the first month if you wanna go grab it for this. All you need to do is look at them next to each other. No comparing internal quality. Just your packaging on one side, and the outlier's packaging on the other. I'll use Tim's channel here as an example, so you can see what I mean. Look at the gulf.
Not because Tim's a bad creator, he's not. He just hadn't seen his own work next to the field. Most creators never do. They open YouTube studio and the only thumbnail that they see is their own. The comparison they're calibrating against is themselves, but that's not the comparison that matters. The homepage is where the pros play. That's the comparison that matters, and most creators don't even know that it's the one that they're losing. Once you see this gap, you can close it. But seeing the gap is wasted if you're solving for the wrong problem in the first place. Rule five is what tells you which problem actually matters.
Information used to be enough to win on YouTube. It's not anymore.
The things that make someone subscribe,
share, and even buy from you is something else entirely. Most creators don't see this shift, and they're confused why all their information isn't translating into growth.
Have you noticed how creators are blowing up with videos that have no editing?
Or that course sales have taken a dive? I've heard that from multiple sources. The reason is the same. There's a rule in the playbook most creators have missed, and it's transformation over information.
This applies to educational creators specifically, but the same is true for entertainment channels in a slightly different way. What people really care about and what they pay for is transformation.
This has always been true. It's just more true now than ever. Information is everywhere. There's no answer you can't find. You can ask AI a question at four in the morning and get a guide built for your specific situation. Tutorials are dead. If you're competing on information alone, you're fighting a losing battle. There's so much information that people don't know what to pay attention to. What they need is the right information at the right time, in service of the transformation they actually want. I'll use my own audience as an example. You probably don't care about improving your CTR by 1%, or even how to script videos. What you really care about is the ability to live creatively, to quit your day job, to start your own business, to turn your hobby into something real. The CTR thing and the scripting thing, they're in service of that. They're not the goal. They're the path.
Here's the exercise that fixes this. I call it the transformation test. Before you film your next video, write the transformation in one sentence. The thing the viewer will be able to do, see, or feel after watching that they couldn't before.
Then ask, what specific information actually serves that transformation?
Cut away anything that doesn't. Most of what you'd normally include is in service of sounding smart. Cut it anyway. So here's a quick example. I ran this on this video. The transformation is, by the end, you'll know exactly which rule is breaking your channel. So every rule got a name, the problem behind it, and one exercise that you can run for yourself. The deep theory got cut. That's a different video.
If you wanna be a creator who matters, don't aim to be the source of information.
Be a guide. The thing that kept you up at night that you solved for yourself. Give that to others. Not credentials, not authority. The thing you fought for and figured out, that's the transformation.
That's what I'm trying to do here. Pass along what I figured out so that the next creator doesn't have to start from zero. The next rule is how to find the transformations that already work for your audience instead of guessing at them. Most creators have been told to study other creators, and they do. They watch. They notice what works. They borrow what they can see. And most of them copy the surface level without realizing it. They've never seen the rule that the pros are following. Studying what works is another one of those amazing skills to develop as a creator.
But most people copy in the wrong way, and it's an easy mistake to make. I've made it too. It's easy to copy the surface. Things like intro style, transition animations, the topic. None of that is what makes great videos great.
The thing that made the original work was underneath. The premise, the curiosity gap, the framework, the structural decisions.
That's where the magic happens. And it's where your greatest learnings lie.
And what you should actually study and copy. Rule six is steal like an artist. That phrase isn't mine. It's from a book on my TBR list. But the move is mine. Steal like an artist, not like a thief. Here's what this looks like when you do it right. I call it the Frankenstein method. You take the parts that work from a 100 good sources, and then that new thing is yours.
This will make more sense if I give you an example. Let me use this video as the example. The title structure for this video is x is hard until you do this.
I didn't make that up. I searched for videos that did well first. Just anything to spark an idea, and I came across this one.
I liked it a lot, so I went to validate it. And I found a ton of examples of it working. Different niches, but it's the same title framework. And now I see it everywhere.
Look at the title from Callaway's most recent video. It's a cousin to this one. I thought it was pretty cool to see that pop up after I'd already picked the title framework for this one. And Callaway's actually who I borrowed from for this video's seven rule walkthrough format.
That guy's a genius and I study what works. Which means right now, you're watching the principle in action. I studied his video architecture.
I borrowed the structure and I'm using it on you to teach you the same lesson. That's stealing like an artist. What I didn't do is copy his transcript and rewrite it line for line. Don't do what I did when I was starting out. I made the mistake of rewriting every line from a video that I loved. Different words, but it was the same video. Not cool. The structure is what you steal. The script is yours.
Doing this kind of deep analysis manually takes hours.
I built a tool to make it easier for myself, but I think it's something that every YouTuber should use. So I put it on the Chrome Web Store, and I called it Boundless Insight. It's free. There's a link in the description. It will do this deep level analysis for you on any YouTube video. Just press a button, and you'll see the structure. What made it special? What viewers specifically liked? It shows up on every video page, so it's really easy to remember, and I'd love you to have it. And it pairs with one ten, that tool that I mentioned earlier when we did the side by side. One of 10 finds outliers worth studying, and then Boundless Insight breaks them down. That's the workflow that I use for every video I make. And all of those validated outlier screenshots that you saw earlier came straight out of one of 10. That link to try it for a dollar is down there still. Okay. Stealing like an artist gets you better at the craft. And this last rule is what makes the craft pay you back.
People think they make money on YouTube. They don't. And that's the trap. This last rule is one that decides how much you actually make on this platform versus around it. There's a reason that you picked this platform. It's because YouTube is a discovery engine. It goes out and finds people for you. That's what most creators come here for. They wanna collect subscribers, maybe do some brand deals, get paid, have the nice lifestyle.
But if you haven't been trained to think outside the box, or you weren't an entrepreneur before diving into YouTube, you might not realize that making videos just for views is the wrong play. That's only half the system. Let me explain. Because I wasn't kidding when I said that this is all about money. This is the difference between quitting your job in two years from now versus the end of this year instead.
There are two kinds of platforms that a creator works with. Discovery platforms and relationship platforms, and they do different jobs.
Discovery platforms are the ones like YouTube, X, Instagram. They have algorithms.
They go out and find people for you. They surface your work to strangers. That's their value.
Relationship platforms are different. Things like email, podcasts, a Patreon. They don't have algorithms. They don't grow on their own. You need to bring the audience to them. But if you do, then those people become a real audience that you actually own, and that's where the opportunity lies.
The way you make money on YouTube isn't actually on YouTube. It's off platform. The relationship platform is part of that, but it's also everything else. Coaching, programs, courses, memberships, anything you build for the audience that already trusts you. The relationship platform is there for you to nurture that relationship with your owned audience, to keep reminding them that you exist.
So that when it's time and they start thinking about solving the problem that you helped them solve, they think of you. There's nothing on YouTube's platform for this moment, and it's where all the money comes from. YouTube is great,
but you're completely at the whim of its algorithm. It decides whether or not what you made lands in front of your audience. That sucks.
I chose email as my relationship platform. That's why I created Balamis Creator. It's my newsletter.
The reason I've been calling the relationship platform an owned audience is because when you decide to join my newsletter, you've opted in to hear more from me. You give me your email, and there's no algorithm that can stop me from sending you a message.
The only thing YouTube pays me is AdSense, and it's not even one sixth of what I make as a creator business on YouTube. Almost everything else comes from off platform. For me, that's coaching, sponsorships,
products, affiliates.
The off platform opportunities for educational style channels is insane.
Rule seven is everything is downstream of YouTube.
When you think about it, YouTube is the first link in a chain that makes up your creator business. If you don't know how to get attention,
then there's nobody to send to your relationship platform, and nobody to buy your offer.
I know that I've given you a lot of different things to do. Hopefully, it's not too overwhelming.
But here's one more. If you don't already have an email list, today's the day. The platform that I use is Kit, and it's free until a thousand subscribers. There's a link in the description. You can have it set up in an afternoon. And if you want an example of one in action, you can join mine, and I'll send you an email every week. And with that, you now have all of the hidden rules to grow on YouTube. And they were, rule one, fix your weakest link first. Every video is a chain. Find the weakest link. That's where your effort goes first.
Rule two, same person, same problem. Talk to the same person in every video. Variety doesn't grow you. Consistency in who does.
Rule three, don't follow the wrong playbook. Most advice wasn't meant for you. Filter every piece for your situation.
Rule four, YouTube has no beginner mode. The homepage is a battle royale and you're playing against the pros. Rule five, transformation over information.
Viewers want change, not facts. Be the guide. Rule six, steal like an artist. Copy the move, not the surface.
Rule seven, everything is downstream of YouTube. The platform finds you the people. Off platform is where the money lives for educational creators.
Most creators are losing this game without even knowing what game they're playing. Now you know. And if you wanna see exactly what it pays to play it right, you can watch this video next, where I share my real numbers.