A live YouTube channel audit of a $700K a month business.

From 1:04 →

The starting point

The consult begins with the business owner’s own account of the channel. He says the business did about $700,000 last month, around half of it from upsells and renewals, with roughly $350,000 to $400,000 a month on the front end from YouTube and Instagram together and about $200,000 attributed to YouTube. These are his figures, stated in the video, and are not verified here.

From 4:08 →

How the ideas were being chosen

Topics came from patterns in sales calls, objections and onboarding forms. Jake’s point at 19:58 is that this tells you what your clients say, not what the market searches and watches on YouTube, where the same idea can use different words.

From 19:58 →

Validate demand in YouTube’s own language

Jake’s first recommendation is a YouTube research process, run by an assistant, that checks which topics and wordings already attract viewers before a video is made.

“You can only come up with an idea as good as the information that you have.”Jake, 47:03

From 20:58 →

An adjacent niche map and a depth-first search

Instead of researching only your own niche, list niches whose viewers share your viewers’ behaviour and intent, then search each systematically and record the outlier videos in a research database. Jake says his own team has automated this with AI and still needs people to spot patterns.

From 32:21 →

Formats that make an unfamiliar subject worth clicking

One format Jake highlights frames a boring mechanism around the outcome people already want. The example he gives is a doctor whose subject was insulin: the title was framed around the outcome people want, fat loss, rather than the mechanism.

From 34:29 →

When demand is small, make the definitive video

If a topic has little demand, one option is a single, full-length video that absorbs all of it. Jake describes a client whose topic would otherwise reach five to ten thousand views, where a one-hour course reached around 300,000.

From 47:03 →

Packaging: clear at a glance

Jake’s feedback on the thumbnails is about clarity: a viewer should know the video is for them before reading the title, and a bare number is less remarkable without context such as the time frame or the owner’s age.

“the thumbnail is the thing that they see before they even read the title”Jake, 47:03

From 54:25 →

Making the video: carry over what made the format work

When borrowing a format, Jake says to check whether the title, thumbnail or the way the video is built drove the result, for example a list of around forty points rather than the usual five to ten, and to keep that structure.

From 1:00:42 →

Calls to action: link to the next video and give something useful

End each video by linking to the next relevant one, which keeps viewers on the channel. Jake also recommends a free asset made for that specific video, so the call to action is a give.