Overcoming the INSANITY of Online Business and thoughts on Spiritual Content online

[Ethan_05]

Hear me out. I've tried many different online models. Youtube, Blogging, etc. and I'm starting to get this feeling, here it is.

Most people fail in online businesses because they don't stick with it long enough. I wrote over 120 blog posts, THAT'S NOT ENOUGH! I made somewhere in the range of 50 youtube videos, THAT'S NOT NEARLY ENOUGH! After this amount of content that I produced my content creation slowed down, because it felt like INSANITY. You know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Now this is where I think I messed up. I didn't have a fast enough growth process. Many of my videos look the same, and growth from my eyes looks like this. You make massive amounts of mediocre content with little results. Over time your content gets better, you get better at your craft of making valuable content, you knowledge grows in the topics you're educating people on and then eventually you hit the beginning of exponential growth curve and eyeballs start flowing in. It looks like overnight success to all the people viewing your content, but in reality it took months, even years to get to that point. 

The key point is, you grow and your content grows with you. After hours and hours of hard work you begin to master the art of adding value to people's lives and when you do that they'll come back for more. 

Here are some things I hate about the modern teaching on running a business. Just the mere fact about how much it sounds like surface level personal development. They all say the same thing, work harder, become disciplined, blah, blah, blah. I think there really needs to be someone online who teaches people how to develop high quality, and conscious content. 

There are many spiritual youtubers, bloggers, etc. but most of them look the same. A spiritually inclined individual talking in front of camera about different topics with images being overlayed. I think it's time that someone starts making really great content in this niche. Leo's content is great, he's very interesting to listen to and has a very formal style that many people like. But just starting out in this field it's very, very hard to keep people's attention in the youtube space. I don't know how leo does it. So in the future this is what I think good content looks like, I would love to hear if people feel the same. Here's a few resources that I think if combined would be very effective in inspiring people to become more conscious.

1. Actualized.org(in regards to the value presented in the videos)

2. Matt D'avella(in regards to the quality of the filming and the value inserted in such a short amount of time.)

3. Recent "Your Mate Tom" Short Documentary(in regards to the editing work)

This would be really hard to do because each of these creators have somewhat mastered the style of content that they put out, but I think the spiritual space on youtube and online in general needs more of this. Reply your thoughts and if you agree.

I intend to start making content again when my life isn't so hectic, but I just wanted to throw this out there to others who are feeling this INSANITY feeling of doing the same thing over and over again in online business and getting the same results, which are no results at all.

Edited April 28, 2018 by Ethan_05

[Richard Alpert]

How many youtube channels or blogs get popular?

0.01%? or something like that.

Maybe you had wrong expectations. of course there are overnight successes (like pranksters on youtube etc), but i have never seen any solid skills be build in months, it takes years. 

 

[Paulus Amadeus]

yeah it's not all about determination. Maybe you don't have anything interesting to say in your blogs or youtube channel. And then it doesn't matter how many blogs you've written or video's you shoot. People just don't care. Or maybe you are not spending enough time marketing your content. People are usually not just going to stumble upon your content in the beginning. Very impressive that you wrote so many blogs though! That's some serious determination. 

[Guest Quanty]

It is all about believing in yourself and personal love. 

Stop reading and listening to teachers or guides. 

Do your own thing, does not matter what it is. 

 

Be like Forest Gump, just start running. 

[ElenaO]

On 30/04/2018 at 4:57 PM, Paulus Amadeus said:

yeah it's not all about determination. Maybe you don't have anything interesting to say in your blogs or youtube channel. And then it doesn't matter how many blogs you've written or video's you shoot. People just don't care. Or maybe you are not spending enough time marketing your content. People are usually not just going to stumble upon your content in the beginning. Very impressive that you wrote so many blogs though! That's some serious determination. 

Hm, I would say that anyone has something to say that is interesting enough. Of course, it has to carry a clear message and have a decent quality, but I think all of us have our unique style towards some people are drawn.

[Elisabeth]

On 4/28/2018 at 5:32 PM, Ethan_05 said:

Hear me out. I've tried many different online models. Youtube, Blogging, etc. and I'm starting to get this feeling, here it is.

I watched your last video.

It's amazing. The animations are amazing, and the content says "I know what I'm talking about".

What needs some more practice is your voice, I find it a bit flat and unemotional, which makes it hard to keep attention. One great advantage Leo has is him making things personal, and also putting his excitement in, which reflects in the dynamics of his voice and changing pace of speech. I see you'd like to be a little more objective than Leo, which is totally great (and I mean it), but you still have to find ways to convey positive emotion through your voice.

Anyway, great respect. I had a fleeting fantasy about starting a PD blog with the goal to reach people who (like me a few years ago) seek help for their psychological problems but never thought that 'personal development' and 'spirituality' are the words they should be interested in, and also to transfer some of the things I've heard from Leo into my language (since many people still don't dare listen to English content), but I haven't even started.

[dude]

@Ethan_05 I agree you need to make a lot of content, this will bump up the possibility of you getting discovered.

I also (especially for YouTube and blogging) believe in the need to study the inherent functionality of the platform that you are trying to build an audience on whether that is YouTube or Google Search. For example your YouTube video's are not really optimized for the platform which means that if a video catches on it will not blow up as big as it could be when you optimize things like tags. Research of the nice is so important finding titles and thumbnails that are crafted for specific audiences so that they click on your video. That is why finding a specific niche is so important.

All that said only making more content doesn't help a bit. The key to creating great content for me is reflection on past content and comparing your content with others. I had a period where I would just pump out video's. I made a lot of them but they did not get any better. Then when I deliberately after every video looked at what I could improve, compared my speech to other popular video's and reflected on the structure of the content. Only then I stared improving. So I guess constant reflection and adaption is the key to creating better content. As for popularity, you can optimize for it you can market it and by sticking to it you can possibly gain popularity, but you never know.

[Ethan_05]

On 5/6/2018 at 5:42 PM, Elisabeth said:

I watched your last video.

It's amazing. The animations are amazing, and the content says "I know what I'm talking about".

What needs some more practice is your voice, I find it a bit flat and unemotional, which makes it hard to keep attention. One great advantage Leo has is him making things personal, and also putting his excitement in, which reflects in the dynamics of his voice and changing pace of speech. I see you'd like to be a little more objective than Leo, which is totally great (and I mean it), but you still have to find ways to convey positive emotion through your voice.

Anyway, great respect. I had a fleeting fantasy about starting a PD blog with the goal to reach people who (like me a few years ago) seek help for their psychological problems but never thought that 'personal development' and 'spirituality' are the words they should be interested in, and also to transfer some of the things I've heard from Leo into my language (since many people still don't dare listen to English content), but I haven't even started.

@ElisabethI know this thread is quite old, but I have to say I'm looking back at past threads I started and had questions about. This is very insightful and thank you for the advice. If i'm honest with myself I agree with what you're saying and so it's something I need to work on. Have you started your own blog yet on personal development?

[Elisabeth]

1 hour ago, Ethan_05 said:

@ElisabethI know this thread is quite old, but I have to say I'm looking back at past threads I started and had questions about. This is very insightful and thank you for the advice. If i'm honest with myself I agree with what you're saying and so it's something I need to work on. Have you started your own blog yet on personal development?

Thank you for the thank you

I haven't started a blog, but I started a group. So I share stuff with friends both in person and online, and it's really cool.  

 

[Emerald]

On ‎4‎/‎28‎/‎2018 at 10:32 AM, Ethan_05 said:

Hear me out. I've tried many different online models. Youtube, Blogging, etc. and I'm starting to get this feeling, here it is.

Most people fail in online businesses because they don't stick with it long enough. I wrote over 120 blog posts, THAT'S NOT ENOUGH! I made somewhere in the range of 50 youtube videos, THAT'S NOT NEARLY ENOUGH! After this amount of content that I produced my content creation slowed down, because it felt like INSANITY. You know, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Now this is where I think I messed up. I didn't have a fast enough growth process. Many of my videos look the same, and growth from my eyes looks like this. You make massive amounts of mediocre content with little results. Over time your content gets better, you get better at your craft of making valuable content, you knowledge grows in the topics you're educating people on and then eventually you hit the beginning of exponential growth curve and eyeballs start flowing in. It looks like overnight success to all the people viewing your content, but in reality it took months, even years to get to that point. 

The key point is, you grow and your content grows with you. After hours and hours of hard work you begin to master the art of adding value to people's lives and when you do that they'll come back for more. 

Here are some things I hate about the modern teaching on running a business. Just the mere fact about how much it sounds like surface level personal development. They all say the same thing, work harder, become disciplined, blah, blah, blah. I think there really needs to be someone online who teaches people how to develop high quality, and conscious content. 

There are many spiritual youtubers, bloggers, etc. but most of them look the same. A spiritually inclined individual talking in front of camera about different topics with images being overlayed. I think it's time that someone starts making really great content in this niche. Leo's content is great, he's very interesting to listen to and has a very formal style that many people like. But just starting out in this field it's very, very hard to keep people's attention in the youtube space. I don't know how leo does it. So in the future this is what I think good content looks like, I would love to hear if people feel the same. Here's a few resources that I think if combined would be very effective in inspiring people to become more conscious.

1. Actualized.org(in regards to the value presented in the videos)

2. Matt D'avella(in regards to the quality of the filming and the value inserted in such a short amount of time.)

3. Recent "Your Mate Tom" Short Documentary(in regards to the editing work)

This would be really hard to do because each of these creators have somewhat mastered the style of content that they put out, but I think the spiritual space on youtube and online in general needs more of this. Reply your thoughts and if you agree.

I intend to start making content again when my life isn't so hectic, but I just wanted to throw this out there to others who are feeling this INSANITY feeling of doing the same thing over and over again in online business and getting the same results, which are no results at all.

A lot of it has to do with packaging, marketing, branding, and communication style. And then you should also know your way around some basic SEO. So, getting exposure on YouTube often has to do with things that are purely practical and not in relation to the actual spiritual content you're putting out. Luckily, there are a ton of videos to help you learn these things.

So, the quality of the content should be high. But even if a person has high quality content, if their packaging/marketing/branding/communication style isn't there, then a lot of people will just go elsewhere. And this is because, on a subconscious level, people will take a YouTuber less seriously if they don't have a consistent thumbnail style, high quality video imaging, and good editing.

Also, for SEO, on the initial front, be sure to tag, title, describe, and talk using words and phrases that people will likely type into Google search and YouTube search. It will be nearly impossible to be found as a small channel to do otherwise, as it's hard for YouTube to recommend your video to anyone, it won't know where to rank you, and you won't have an established subscriber base to boost your viewcount and watchtime upon initial release.

But there is also a huge luck factor as well. All the biggest channel growth moments for me, have come out of nowhere and in big spurts. Like I recently just jumped from getting about 20 subs per day to getting about 50 subs per day.

But if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

[Leo Gura]

Content alone is never enough.

The reason you're not succeeding is because you're trying to enter markets which are already heavily saturated. Business requires that you find new fertile ground. There are only so many YT spiritual teachers that the world needs. I was successful on YT not because of my content but because I was on there early, before it blew up, and I had significant marketing skills.

My content is NOT what makes me successful or popular. Business success has almost nothing to do with content. It's about marketing strategy.

You need to take some marketing courses.

Your approach might have worked 10 years ago, but not today in those fields. Blogging is almost impossible to enter these days. Even when I started Actualized.org, blogging was basically dead to new entrants. You need to be more original than that.

In business, a new field is only open for so long. After that, it closes. You cannot start a new Facebook today, or a new Google, or a new Microsoft, or a new car company. Those markets are saturated and monopolized already. You must find new markets.

[Naviy]

Why not try social networks? Like FB. Go to consciousness-related groups and write-write-write useful valuable comments there. Get traffic from social networks. Make Twitter and Instagram accounts and post some inspiring quotes or valuable fragments of your FB comments and blog posts there with pretty pictures. Interact with everyone. 

 

+ 

And also you could try live webinars, online marathons, online school with groups and live streams, etc. 

Edited February 2, 2019 by Naviy

[Girzo]

Creating your own blog is a really inefficient tactic in times of platforms like Medium.com or similar.

The same goes for fighting for traffic on YouTube. There are greener pastures like Instagram (even though in 2019 it's fairly saturated as well).

[Ethan_05]

@Leo Gura So Leo,

What are some new markets? By new markets could that just mean like new types of content on youtube/social or a completely new platform altogether. I've just finished a digital marketing course and am currently taking a google adwords course but I feel like this is a little outdated in like trying to get traffic to a website.

I'm trying to figure out if instagram or podcasting are highly saturated niches, it seems like podcasting has a lot of potential but instagram is still highly saturated. I'm in the really early stages, although I own a youtube channel, podcast, motivational instagram account, I still feel like I'm in the early stages of figuring out which tactics work and which don't and where I should begin investing my time into in the future.

Thanks.

[Consept]

You need to look at where your potential subscribers are, for example im not a big youtuber but ive put out a couple of videos in the past on my channel around consciousness as well just to test the water i guess, the first one was about anxiety and it got 525 views which is pretty good for a first time video about a topic like that. The reason why it did relatively well is that i posted it in as many places as i could think of where people would be searching for help with anxiety, reddit, facebook groups, forums etc, this is where your traffic will come from and where you can reach out and get people who are into your content.

You can also search instagram for hashtags and comment on other people in your niche, for example #enlightenment and give a meaningful comment so people may check it out and look at your stuff. 

Regarding your content obviously a lot of people on this forum maybe interested in it but its not mass audience thing, and even those into it have there own channels they watch it really has to be something different to grab them. One way you might want to do it is if you take something that is popular like movies for example and draw parallels with spiritual stuff, you could do non-dual breakdowns of films for example. Or you could examine the egos of popular youtubers, whatever you like but something that you know about and can relate to pd or whatever your passion is.

Your delivery has improved but im not sure your fully there yet but it will come with time. Definitely dont give up if it really is your passion to do this, those that are successful stick it out the longest but also learn and adapt to what works. Good luck