This Was The Day Everything Changed
The Amplified Impact Podcast
September 26th, 2023
Exactly one year ago, our YouTube channel had just 220 subscribers, and I was questioning if all my efforts were in vain.
Each video I created seemed to vanish into the abyss, getting just a handful of views. It was disheartening, to say the least.
But then, a pivotal moment happened. We decided to shift our strategy towards quality over quantity. We put everything into one video, focusing on storytelling and intention.
That video, “From 80K in Debt to a Millionaire in Three Years,” started slowly but then exploded, accumulating over a million views in three months.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing…we faced periods where our videos didn’t perform as expected, and we questioned what had changed. This journey taught me that success is not an event; it’s a continuous grind with evolving challenges.
I’ve come to realize the power of storytelling in content creation. It’s a skill that can transform your impact and influence.
Remember, the path of a creator is tough, but knowing the journey can make it easier to endure.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Being a creator is hard and creating content, whether it’s to boost your personal brand or to move your art forward or to build a business, it can be a grind, it can be hard. And I just want you to know that that is the journey that you’re signing up for.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
So on this day, exactly one year ago, our YouTube channel had 220 subscribers. I had been putting out multiple videos every single week for the previous two years. And all I had to show for it at that point was 220 subscribers and not very many views at all. Each video would maybe get like 10, 12, 20 views. And that was considered good. And you can imagine that putting the time and energy that goes into creating content and putting it out there into the world and then getting crickets, it can be really disheartening. And there comes this point when you start to wonder, like, should I continue? Maybe I’m just not cut out for this. Maybe I should give up.
Anthony Vicino:
And I want to share a little ray of hope for you. If you’re in that position right now, you’re trying to forge your path as a creator. You have these thoughts, you have these ideas, this art that you want to share with the world. And maybe you have a business and you’re using storytelling, you’re using these platforms on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube as a means for spreading your message, but you’re struggling because nobody’s hearing it. I want to share this story with you because hopefully it helps you get through that obscurity desert which we all have to go through. And so on this day, exactly one year ago, we had 220 subscribers on the YouTube channel. And we had made a decision a couple of weeks before that we were going to pivot. We were going to do something a little bit different than what we had been up to this point.
Anthony Vicino:
We had just been focusing on quantity. We’re like putting out as many videos, not as many videos, but multiple videos every single week and just trying to play the numbers game and hope that eventually something would hit. And early in September of 2022, we decided, okay, let’s make a shift towards quality. Let’s see if we can put all of our time and energy and intention into just one singular video. If we could get some traction that way, see if that could be the magical unlock. And so on September 22, 2022, we launched the video called from 80K in Debt to a Millionaire in Three Years. Here’s what I did or here’s how I did it, or something like that. I can’t remember the exact name, but it was the first video that we launched with this new strategy of high intention, focusing on storytelling and trying to just put everything that we had into one video.
Anthony Vicino:
And the first week that it came out, it performed better than any other video we’d ever put out. But it wasn’t crushing by any means. Within the first week, it gotten a couple of dozen views. So our regular video maybe gets like 15 views. This one got like 50 in the first week. And that was great. But this is still not like crazy numbers by any means, especially if we’re given how much time and energy we put into it. But something really interesting happened on day like ten.
Anthony Vicino:
The video, just out of nowhere just started taking off and it went more viral than I had ever had a video go, like, by orders of magnitude. And to this day, actually, it’s still our most viral video. But over the course of the next three months, it got over a million views and it changed the complexity of the YouTube channel. Just overnight, we went from 220 subscribe, put out about two videos every single month during this new transformative period where we’re like, okay, let’s not focus on quantity, let’s just focus on pure quality, see if we can make the best videos possible. And so we put out two videos every month and every video was just doing really well. We had some get up to 800,000 views, 600,400. Those are just vanity metrics, but it just helps to understand the order of magnitude in which we were dealing with suddenly was so different than anything that had come before that. And it was very rewarding in the sense that it was like, finally we’re striking a chord with people.
Anthony Vicino:
We’re resonating the content is meaning something to people and it felt really good. And it happened through a couple of tweaks and I’ve talked about those tweaks and how we approached the actual mechanics of what we did on the YouTube channel. I put it all into the YouTube Playbook, which is you can go check it out for free on the blog. Anthonyvacino.com Backslash YouTube you can go check out that playbook. It’s step by step, exactly what we did. But the most important thing I think that we did really was storytelling. Just really thinking hard about how do we incorporate the human side of entrepreneurship or success with air quotes and trying to give people a more transparent or honest view of what a successful entrepreneur journey kind of looks like. And it’s not what a lot of people think.
Anthony Vicino:
There’s a lot more downsides and there’s a lot more struggle than most people maybe realize. And that really resonated and it was very gratifying to see that. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling recently and just how transformative it’s been in my life and my businesses. And it’s a skill that I think is like one of the most valuable, maybe not the most, but the ability to communicate a message with impact and influence and move people to take an action. I think that’s one of the most priceless skills you can develop. And so we’re putting together something called the Creator Collective, tentatively named it might be something else. I don’t know exactly what we’re going to name it yet, but the idea is I want to help teach people my approach, at least to storytelling. And so if that’s interesting to you, shoot me an email, Anthony@anthonyvacino.com, and say, hey, let me know about the creator collective when it launches, I want to learn about how to Become a Seven Figure Storyteller.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s kind of the catchy title we’re using. I don’t know if it’ll stick, but we’ll see. The other side of this is that it wasn’t all uphill and to the right and just really easy. Even after the very first videos were going viral and the channel was exploding and going really well, something happened around March where we had like a string of three or four videos, which because we only do two videos per month, that’s two months worth of videos where they weren’t hitting. And so our average video up to that point had well over 100,000 views. And then suddenly we had videos getting 65,000, then 60,000, and then 20,000, 15,000. It was crazy and it was very demoralizing because we couldn’t really understand what we were doing different, what had changed. And I share this because success is not like this event that happens and then when you’re on the other side of it, everything just is like rainbows and sunshine and it’s all easy street.
Anthony Vicino:
It’s not like that. Even after you have that first taste of success in business or in your creator career, it’s still kind of a grind in the noop. And the problems that you’re going to have moving forward are slightly different than what you had before. We’re putting out stuff and we didn’t know if anybody cared. We didn’t know if we had the skill or the capacity to create stuff that people would genuinely want to consume. And then once we did that, we now had this new problem which was, okay, we know we can do this, so why is it not hitting our standards now? Why is it not delivering? And so you just kind of like upgrade the problems that you’re dealing with over time. And that’s really the story of entrepreneurship in a nutshell, but it’s also my story with YouTube. And now we’re getting to the point now where videos are starting to take off again, but still it is a struggle.
Anthony Vicino:
And so I want to share this with you guys because being a creator is hard and creating content, whether it’s to boost your personal brand or to move your art forward or to build a business, it can be a grind, it can be hard. And I just want you to know that that is the journey that you’re signing up for. And I think just by knowing that’s the journey, that it can make it that much more easy or that much easier to endure. So I hope this brings you guys some value, some perspective, some insights. If you haven’t checked out the YouTube channel, go to Anthony Vasino. That’s the main channel. Otherwise, if you’re interested in checking out all of these daily podcasts, these are all on the Amplified Impact YouTube channel. So go check those out.
Anthony Vicino:
And and as always, guys and gals, I appreciate you being here. Truly. It means the world to me to know that you’re resonating with some part of the message and the content that we’re putting out there. So thank you for that. We’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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