Ed, thank you very much for joining me today. You're the first guest I've had where I'm nervous and my technical setup.

Don't be. Mine's pretty simple as it is. It looks good though.

So thank you very much. Some of this stuff here is inspired by your work and I wanted to start by saying that I feel like I know you because I must have watched about 10 hours of your content in the last four or five days.

Wow. You went through the whole back catalog, did you?

I've discovered what I need to do on my channel by watching your stuff and so just to introduce you to anyone that's watching or listening, you are a guru within the content creation space for creators, especially how to really dominate YouTube.

And I ended up in your honey trap. So first of all, thank you.

Yeah. Second of all, do you want to tell anyone watching or listening how you started off and how you kind of got into this space and what you specialize in now?

Yeah, sure. So I used to have a video production company in the UK. We used to do corporate video and so on.

And I always kind of wanted to do a YouTube channel and our plan was let's start a YouTube channel. Let's just go out for 10 years.

Let's put three videos a week on it for 10 years. Let's try and get to half a million subscribers. And within that journey, we'll start building.

You know, a reputation and get clients for our production company. And what actually one of the things I really wanted was just backlinks to our website.

And actually because back then for SEO, you really needed backlinks to ranking Google. And I was like, let's get some backlinks started doing outreach to blog posts to see if they'd link back to us.

And non replied. And I thought, of course, they're never going to reply to me. I'm not a somebody. So I thought, how do I become a somebody? And I thought, YouTube, let's just start YouTube channel and grow that.

So for 18 months, I put three videos a week on it, just targeting search terms, like really simple videos. That was kind of the advice back then.

And the subscribers were about 8,000 we got to. And every video out would get like 70 views in the first week.

I was like, what's going on? No one's coming back. This doesn't make any sense. And then it occurred that this doesn't work. If you ever want to, you know, sell something, I don't want to wait six months from my message to rank in search for someone to find it.

Because that would sometimes take quite a while to happen. So I started re-examining YouTube and realized that the strategy I was following was just nonsense really.

And it was more about the homepage, which is where when you log onto YouTube, see all these videos. And that's where channels blow up. That's where channels get the fastest views.

But that's where you bring people back. Because the second you release a video.

It shows on the homepage to your community and they come flying back. And I thought, I want a really strong community.

I want to have a video that gets, you know, 10,000, 20,000 views in the first week, rather than 80.

Because that to me is going to make a great business and with a great reputation.

...