I wanted to talk about a conversation that my YouTube Producer, Becky, had with a dude called Caleb Ralston at the end of last year, who runs his own channel and business helping creators like me scale their personal brands.
She came back to the team with some really great pointers and one thing Caleb talked about in particular has completely changed the way I’m thinking about coming up with new video ideas moving forward, so I thought I’d share it with you all in today’s email.
I’ve been on YouTube for over 8 years now but I’m still always learning new stuff about the platform, which is why I love these emails as a place to share not only the stuff I know works from years of experience, but also fresh insights I’m picking up from other cool people like Caleb.
So consider this one of those “learning out loud” emails where I’m kinda still figuring stuff out alongside you 🤓
If we think about YouTube right now, the platform’s incredibly saturated. Everyone’s basically copying everyone else so everything ends up looking and sounding pretty much identical.
When you then add AI into the mix, suddenly it’s even harder to distinguish one creator from another because the titles, thumbnails, and even the scripts are starting to all just look the same.
So how do you actually stand out?
Well, here’s where Caleb’s advice comes in: stop looking at your competitors.
I know it sounds counterintuitive at first because surely you need to know what’s working (and not) within your niche.
But Caleb made the great point that if you’re only looking at your competitors, you’re just going to end up making slightly different versions of what they’re already doing. Yep, you might create something that’s 10% better or 10% different, but you’re still playing the same game as everyone else.
So instead, he said you need to shift your attention to creators who are absolutely crushing it in niches that are completely unrelated to yours.
Why? Because this is how you find genuinely unique ways of packaging your videos – the title, thumbnail, and that crucial first 30 seconds of your video (the hook) – and the best packaging ideas often emerge from completely different sides of YouTube.
I’m the sort of productivity guy online and I’m starting to make more videos about financial freedom and building a lifestyle business, but Caleb’s advice made me realise that if I want my videos to actually stand out, I can’t just look at what other productivity and business creators are doing. I need to start paying attention to what’s working in say the gardening space, the tech side of YouTube, the travel niche, or cooking channels.
So the question becomes: how do you actually do this in practice without spending hours randomly scrolling through YouTube? And again, Caleb had some really great advice.
He basically suggested creating what’s called “burner channels” – new Gmail accounts each with a fresh YouTube channel attached. And you want to create at least 5 burner channels so that you can pick 5 completely different niches and optimise each account for one of them.
Maybe you use one account to look at lots of videos in the gaming niche and another to become obsessed with cooking videos, stuff like that.
And the reason you need fresh accounts (instead of just using your own), is because your main YouTube account keeps you stuck in a single echo chamber. I’m constantly fed videos about productivity and business advice and Alex Hormozi videos because YouTube’s algorithm has already figured out my viewing patterns (clearly 😅).
Whereas fresh accounts give you genuinely clean slates where you can explore completely different parts of the platform.
Once you’ve got these set up, Caleb said you’re not looking for anything specific – you just want to look for anything that sparks your interest and curiosity, take a screenshot, and save it somewhere.
That way you’re basically building up this bank of packaging ideas over time that you can always come back to when you’re in need of new ideas or need to find packaging that best fits what you’re trying to communicate with your audience.
Becky and I are already using some new burner channels and if you try this out yourself, I’d genuinely love to hear how you get on – hit reply and let me know.
And if you’re looking for a bunch of other systems and strategies for consistently coming up with fresh concepts and video ideas, then we have an entire module dedicated to this inside Part-Time YouTuber Academy.
Things like the Birdsong technique, the 4A Framework, and Generating 5 Months of Content in 5 Minutes, so if any of that sounds useful, you can check it out here.
Otherwise, have a great week ahead 😊
Talk soon,
Ali xx