242: 6 Questions That Will Lead to Your Success on YouTube in 2023

Hey, before we jump into the show, I just wanted to take a second and say thank you for listening. I know that life is busy and you have a lot of options when it comes to the content you consume. So whether you're new here or you've been listening to the Think Media podcast for years, I just want to say thank you and I appreciate you. Okay, let's jump into the show. What would you want to be known for? What is the position that you want to own? Defending a position easy, establishing it is hard. It's one of my favorite quotes about business and he said the secret to business is staying in business. We want to start new channels, we want to start a new podcast, we want to write new books, we've got 42 different course ideas. Most successful companies find a winning formula and then they stick with that winning formula. One of our goals that think media is to help you think different than everybody else so that you can create an unfair advantage over the competition and I'm excited for this episode of the Think Media podcast where we're going to be going through six questions that when you think deeply about these and you answer them for yourself, for your channel, for your business, they will lead to your success on YouTube this year. These six questions are actually coming from a book called Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind and it's one of the classic books on marketing that is very powerful. Now we've touched on this in the podcast in the past and we'll link up some of the previous episodes for you to check out but these are six questions that the authors give us that are simple to ask but difficult to answer. So I want to encourage you to buckle your seat belt for this episode of the Think Media podcast because I think it'll be maybe one of the most challenging, interesting and at first it may be hard to think about how these even apply to your situation but if you will be diligent and if you will lean into this episode, I believe that these questions can lead you to clarity that will help you increase your views, get more subscribers and ultimately experience more success on YouTube. Here's question number one. What position do you own? Now what positioning is, here's the author's definition, it's thinking in reverse. Instead of starting with yourself, you want to start with the mind of the prospect, start with the mind of the target audience. Here's why this one is hard. If you're just starting, the position you own in the prospect's mind is nothing. You're not known yet. But one of the things this book talks about is it talks about like what is Coca-Cola is positioning? What is Pepsi's positioning? What is Volkswagen's positioning? When you think of Volkswagen, you think about the Volkswagen beetle but you don't think about a truck or a pickup truck like you would if you were thinking about Dodge, Chevy, or Ford. If you're on the YouTube version of the podcast, let me know. What car is your car? What car do you drive? What's your favorite car brand? And ultimately when it comes to positioning, if you think about experts, thought leaders, influencers, as you rise to a different level of prominence, you want to be known for a particular position. Personally, there was a very meaningful moment in my career when I was actually in Park City, Utah, on a snowboard trip with some other people in the industry. I was with Drew Kenoli from Organifi, Shaline Johnson, Brett Johnson. I was with Lewis Howes from the School of Greatness. And I remember Brett Johnson started to call me YouTube. He'd say, hey, YouTube, we're going to lunch. Hey, YouTube, come in here. And actually, as he started to say that, I realized, okay, this positioning thing actually has some legs to it. And it started to make me think, man, you want to be a meaningful specific in a world of wandering generalities. What's the, how would you like people to think of you? Like, what would you want to be known for? What is the position that you want to own? And as the author of YouTube secrets and I think media, as we teach about video overall, but obviously lean a lot into YouTube, certainly not in everybody's mind, but being known for YouTube, Sean Cannell rhymes with YouTube channel is a powerful position to hopefully own the question for you is what position do you want to own? And instead of asking what you are, you actually want to ask what position do you already own in the mind of the prospect? Or what ultimately is already in their mind? Currently, what is their understanding of certain products or offerings in the marketplace? Let me give you an example. When someone doesn't know you yet and they're trying to make sense of what you do, you could compare what you do to something they already understand. So I heard somebody in personal development, they started like a membership platform and they said, it's like Netflix for personal development. That might bring some clarity to people. They're like, okay, I know what Netflix is. Why? Because Netflix has a position. In our minds, we're like, oh, it's a place of streaming content of on-demand content. And then you think, okay, personal development, or let's say, leadership resources. And if you wanted to launch YouTube, it's like a Netflix for leadership content. Again, that would be positioning. So what position do you own? Your goal is to find a way into the mind by hooking your product service or concept to what's already there. What's already in their mind? You know, what I'm kind of trying to do is a combination of Evan Carmichael, where he does compilations with doctors. So Evan Carmichael does like Oprah and rules of success from Tony Robbins or Gary Vaynerchuk. What if you did a health channel that was like Evan Carmichael meets doctors? Now, a lot of people probably out on a macro across America or the world may or may not know some of these examples that we're talking about. But remember, these questions are easy to ask hard to answer. And so if you're trying to make your YouTube channel make sense. If you're trying to cast the vision of your YouTube channel, it is powerful to think about what is in the mind of your prospect. What is the way they're thinking? If they, if I read your channel cover right now, how can you make a statement on the cover of your YouTube channel or a tagline in the beginning of your videos that will make your topic sticky? Oh, that makes sense. Oh, I want to subscribe to that. Well, I would love to follow your YouTube channel. The only way to get heard is to tell the customer what they already know. The only way to get heard is to tell the viewer what they already know. This might sound challenging. Again, you're like, I have new content and new idea. How can you attach that new content and that new idea to something that people understand? You know, I'm like the Netflix for personal development. I'm like the Netflix for whatever it is. You're attaching it to something they understand, something they already know and then introducing your concept. And number one, what position do you own? If you're just starting, the answer might not be any, which brings us to number two, what position do you want to own? This would be now thinking about, okay, what do I want to be known for? What position in the marketplace would I want to be known for? And in a past episode, we kind of talked about this. Let me use myself as an example and I want you to think about how this could apply to you, your channel, your expertise, your niche. So the question I would ask is who owns the YouTube coaching or education space? And I'm very familiar with a lot of incredibly bright people. I want to be clear that this is also, they may be competitors, but a lot of these individuals or friends, a lot of these individuals are people that I collaborate with. And I also am a big believer in the world of abundance. I believe that the world is abundant, that there is a lot of opportunity for everybody. And I know this because a lot of my peers in the YouTube coaching space are all doing great. But nevertheless, the question is, if we understand that it's all love and at the same time, we're thinking about, okay, who owns the YouTube coaching space? And as I look across that landscape, this would be me asking, what position do I want to own the YouTube coaching space? Not that there wouldn't be room for anybody else, but if it makes sense, you know, that's what I would want to be known. Now, the opportunity though is that may be too broad. I'm thinking about a book that I discovered recently was called YouTube for real estate agents. And I thought, oh, that actually is a great insight when it comes to positioning. Because while somebody might be broadly trying to help people when it comes to the YouTube coaching space, there's the opportunity to niche down a little bit. And what a great book title YouTube for real estate agents. And that'd even be different than real estate investors or some of these other disciplines, right? So what position do you want to own? A mistake is trying to own a position that is too broad. It can't be established in the prospect's mind. And even if it could, it couldn't be defended. So when it talks about positioning, while you also might be able to like be known for a season or be known for one viral video or one campaign, the questions the book is trying to get us to answer is how could we establish a position that would be defendable over time? Chances are narrowing down makes it a lot better. Now while I might want to be influential in the YouTube coaching space, that's a position I want to own. It also could be a lot broader than that. If I was like, I want to be the leading expert on all social media, difficult to own that position because there's so much to know about so many different platforms. And that's why for social media coaches or educators, somebody specializing in LinkedIn or somebody specializing on TikTok is a big opportunity. And this is the space I understand the most. So again, think about how that applies to you. And so then thinking somebody who specializes on TikTok for network marketers, mm, now it's like, yeah, hey, she's the leading expert on how to use TikTok to grow a network marketing business. These become more onable or more defendable positions. The tip here is it's better to narrow the focus of your expertise and establish a unique position as a specialist, not a jack of all trades generalist. Question number three, whom must I outgun? Great question. What position does no one else have a firm grip on? Defending a position is easy, establishing it is hard. So who must I outgun? Ideally, you would plant your flag in a position that nobody else has claimed yet. How is that possible? Well, in the example they use in the book from Volkswagen, they talked about Volkswagen competing with other sedans and other trucks and other SUVs and other vans and they couldn't really crack the code and then they invented the Volkswagen Beetle. It was entirely different than everything else. This is why we often say different is better than better. And so if possible, it'd be great to establish a position. Right now, for example, AI is brand new. It's a very new format. Maybe it's been around for a long time, but it's new as far as the kind of consumer public using some of these AI tools. And so whenever something new comes along, it's definitely possible to maybe create a show or video podcast about something new. There could be something that's like a new diet keto was rising in popularity recently. Obviously, ketosis is something that humans have been going in and out of forever, but certain trends happen at certain times. The risk being that maybe you plant your flag is the number one clubhouse expert. If you remember that audio app and you make a course on clubhouse and a book on clubhouse, and then clubhouse falls in popularity and maybe it was the wrong thing to position yourself in, but nevertheless, you would be position yourself in something new or something different. If you want to position yourself in something established, the question is who must you outgun. And this is obviously an incredible list of questions for business owners, of course, for content creators. And a very good question because we started thinking about, how hard is this going to be? What kind of team do I need to build? How much money do I need? One of the things they talk about in the book is ad spend. And I know we talk a lot about organic content here on the Think Media podcast, but they talk about, do you have enough money? Do you have enough cash to burn in the establishment of your brand of brand awareness? Money could be spent on ad spend. It also could be spent on traveling events, you know, sponsoring events, opening up booths, depending on what your business is, whom must I outgun? Who are maybe some of the big competitors? Obviously, if we apply it to some of the traditional things in business, you know, Ford is thinking about, okay, what's Chevy up to? What's Dodge up to? What's Tesla up to? What's Hyundai up to? Who must I outgun? How can we be different? Where are they going next? What's happening with electric vehicles? What's happening next? And so ultimately, what position does no one else have a firm grip on? As you may be audit the evolution of your YouTube channel and where you want to go next, you could be thinking, okay, I see a little bit of a gap in the marketplace over here. Maybe I could specialize down here. No one really has a firm grip on this. No one's really committed to this specific area. And I do want to point you to, again, earlier episodes where we talked about not just positioning, but the other book, Marketing Warfare, where we talk about the four types of warfare, we're linked to that episode. And whether that's going to be defense, offense, flanking, or guerrilla warfare, because picking out maybe how focused, right, the narrow focus of your expertise, the unique position as a specialist is going to be key. And then you define that position, but establishing it as hard. You know, if all of this seems daunting, and if it's kind of knocked the wind out of you a little bit, because you just go, man, man, when I think about my competitors and I look at the competition, it's kind of discouraging Sean. And I want you to know two things. Number one, you can do this. Take a deep breath. Don't quit. Just lean in. One step at a time, one video at a time. But number two, it's going to be hard. If it feels painful, welcome to the club. If it feels challenging, welcome to the marketplace of business. I know that in our world right now, we want things to all be like butterflies and soft. It's all great. It's all going to be easy. But literally the other book in this series is called Marketing Warfare. We've been in a series on the podcast talking all about lessons from military strategists. One of my mentors, Patrick Beddavid, has a t-shirt that says business is warfare. Now, it's a little intense for me because I do think that businesses value and its customer service and its love. But it's also hard. And so when you think about who must I outgun, I know that for some of us listening to this, that's kind of challenging because we want it to all be cum by yaw. But there's no doubt about it. There is supply and demand. There is market dynamics. There is red oceans and blue oceans. There is different challenges that we face. And so these are powerful questions that should then lead us to strategic action that helps us take territory in our niche on our YouTube channel and in our business. Number four, do you have enough money? Do you have enough money? It takes money to build a share of mind. Spend enough money to get above the noise level. We had a guest on the podcast while go go David Meltzger. And in a different setting, he shared with me this tip that I'll never forget. It's one of my favorite quotes about business. And he said the secret to business is staying in business. How profound is that? Does it just laugh out loud? You know what I mean? It actually is an incredibly profound quote. Why the funny thing about business itself, assuming you open up an LLC, if that entity is still in business and is not bankrupt, even if you have debt, because you can always climb out of debt, if you can just survive, keep the lights on, keep the door open, just keep going to your home office after you make a cup of coffee. If you can stay in business, then you can always, you can always come back. You could always climb out of debt. Maybe you have a down year, maybe you have a down decade, but you could always come back. Of course, when does it officially end? It ends when the business shuts down. When you go bankrupt, when you give up, when you stop. And so the secret of business is to stay in business. So oftentimes we think about, do you have enough money? It's just, do you have enough staying power? Again, you could fund your side hustle YouTube channel from your current business. If you're like, I love my rhythm. My nine to five is not too bad. I've got a nice salary. And I kind of like my side hustle. I'm happy to just chip away at my YouTube channel. I'll do it for two years, five years, 10 years. And maybe 10 years from now, I know this nobody likes to think that long, but maybe 10 years from now, just because of the consistency and the learning, and you've been listening to the thick media podcast we've been hanging out. And then there's a tipping point where it's like, Oh, cool. I'm still in it. I've been learning. I've been uploading. But now it's my time to go all in. Do you have enough money to get there? Cool thing about YouTube channels is they're very low overhead. Ultimately, they can be very low liability. But then on the other side, talking about much more of an offensive, scale your business, scale your YouTube channel mentality, it takes money to build share of mine. It takes money to hire people. It takes money to invest in software or AI tools and tools to publish more content. You know, think media is on offense. Last time I checked, we're publishing around 350 pieces of content a week. And we are very much here on the podcast to encourage you as a brand new YouTube channel as a solo creator getting things started. But also this game of media, this landscape of publishing content across channels, not just YouTube, but all the social media channels. We don't just publish that many pieces of content because it sounded like a good idea and it's fun. It is kind of fun, but it's also dressed in overalls and it looks like work like it's challenging to try to think about the systems and the team and the organization and the tracking of it all and tracking the return on investment, the ROI tracking return on investment, Roas return on ad spend tracking what you're putting out there. The bottom line is that whether it's team, whether it's investing in technology, whether it's investing in travel, whether it's investing in ad spend, it takes money to build share of mine. So depending on the hill you're trying to tackle, depending on the giant you're trying to slay, if you've narrowed your expertise, well then that might cost a little bit less money. If you're trying to shoot for the stars and build a media company, do you have enough money? And their encouragement to spend enough money to get above the noise level, I think should be something we're cautious with but thoughtful of. Dave Ramsey would be kind of shaken in his boots right now because of course he would encourage you not to go into debt. He would encourage you to cut up your credit cards. But if you look at what entrepreneurs do and you look at startup companies, they take on a lot of times venture capital, they take on investors. Sometimes they raise a million five, ten, a hundred million dollars and then they hire teams and they scale and they hope they make it and sometimes they reach insolvency and it all crashes and burns. Now for us as startup creators, I'm not suggesting that you incur a bunch of debt and go crazy. But I think there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from traditional startups. And I think that when you apply that to if you will, the smaller arena of like a home-based YouTube business, are you spending enough money to get above the noise level? Could you spend more money to get above the noise level? That's whether setting money aside so you can go all in on YouTube, investing in technology, investing in coaching, investing in your learning, investing in paid ads, Sean, should I spend paid ads on my organic content just to answer that question? No, you shouldn't. But if you have a product or a service, hiring an agency, hiring somebody, learning how to run meta ads or whatever it is, like just, are you spending enough money to get above the noise level? And how could you invest more in your business? If we're applying positioning, the battle for your mind, again, certain enemies are going to take a certain level of energy resources, troops to win the victory. And if you don't deploy enough of all of the above, then you may not break through. These questions are easy to ask, but hard to answer. And this brings us to number five. Can you stick it out? We've already been touching on this, but can you stick it out? I loved this question. And this chapter of the book, and by the way, I had our entire team directors and the directors of Think Media read this. We haven't quite done it yet, but we're going to spend like an entire day discussing positioning. So if you're a serious YouTube strategist, we'll link that up in the show notes. Definitely check out the book positioning and any other resources that we'll put in there. But can you stick it out? Determine your basic position and then stick to it. Listen to this. Most successful companies rarely change a winning formula. One of the things I've learned about YouTube content creators, and I am one, is inherent in the name is creator. And behind that is the word creative. And the problem with creatives and entrepreneurs is we have 365 ideas every single day. We want to start new channels. We want to start new podcasts. We want to write new books. We've got 42 different course ideas. You've got a bunch of different things you want to start. You want to interview a bunch of different people. Half of which have nothing to do with your actual channel. You want to collaborate with a bunch of people. Most of which probably wouldn't even be that good of collaborations. But you just have all these ideas and all these things going through your head. Most successful companies find a winning formula and then they stick with that winning formula. If I go all the way back up to like who owns the YouTube coaching space and I'm honest with you. There's not like a day goes by when I start thinking you know what? I've been talking about this YouTube thing a lot. You know, I think there's some other things I'd want to talk about. And I'm super blessed and I'm so thankful for you because I know we kind of like I'm finding an outlet here on the Think Media podcast to talk about strategy with you, to talk about leadership, to talk about business because that's the stuff I really geek out on, to talk about faith, to talk about principles from the Bible. If there's a lot of different stuff we cover on the podcast and I'm weaving it into YouTube. But the truth is for us at Think Media, our best strategy is to double down and triple down on what we're already doing. And I have to be very disciplined as the CEO to be thinking about not messing up our winning formula. We've actually had consistent successive wins. We definitely have our challenges. We definitely have some challenges that can hit us certain months. But Ivan was talking about recently on a podcast how we've done growth video live five times. And number six is coming soon. By the way, if you're not on the waiting list or you haven't got early bird tickets, grow with video live.com. It's coming back May of 2026 or at least spring of 2024 is the more accurate year. 2026 as well. But that's a little further out in the future. So ultimately, I was thinking about our first event. We lost $20,000. It was super hard. We didn't know what we were doing. But since then, we have not lost money. And most successful companies rarely change the winning formula. And one of the things we're trying to do is learn from the last one and in a way do it again. Now, that's not to say that it's going to be boring and the same stuff. What I mean is the formula. What was the schedule? How should it be structured? How could we do ticketing? How could we do pricing? I want to caution you from switching things up too much. If you're in the season of trying to figure out your winning formula, you might want to be doing more experimentation. But season business owner, season YouTuber, season entrepreneur, listen, most successful companies rarely change a winning formula. A company should almost never change its basic positioning strategy. Only its tactics. The short-term maneuvers that support the long-term strategy. You know, recently we are talking about with our content. It's been a while since we've really gone deep on tech. And we're going to be getting back into tech especially on the Think Media channel. And what's interesting about that is I, it is my conviction as the founder of Think Media and as a studio of the marketplace that our original position of being one of, if not hopefully, yeah, one of the influential channels about like best camera for YouTube. Not just best camera in general, not the best camera for filmmaking, but best camera for YouTube. That was one of the original videos that six, seven, eight years ago actually helped me even get our company to where it is today. The question is as relevant as it ever has been, cameras continue to change, there's different models, there's different comparisons. And a company should almost never change its basic positioning strategy. That's also why people subscribed in the first place. So if you start shifting away, people start going, well, the reason I came to you was for this. If I wanted something different, I would switch it up. Now you can change your tactics and you should. What are tactics? So the short term maneuvers that support the long term strategy. But ultimately, your long term strategy, once you've got it dialed in, your long term strategy when it comes to your positioning, most successful companies lock that down. And then of course, does that mean not use YouTube shorts? No, of course you should use YouTube shorts and vertical video cross-platforms and all the little bells and whistles. But those are tactics. What is your strategy? And listen to this, positioning is cumulative. That's also why me as hopefully a growing leader and maturity and growing in wisdom, realizing that positioning is cumulative, it just means that all of the success of yesterday that you can compound will continue to grow if you stay focused and stick it out. Can you stick it out? Might mean do you have the money to stick it out? Do you have the time? What is your life circumstances? What is the team that's around you, the people that are around you? Can you stick it out? It is also probably a mental question though. Like, do you even want to stick it out? Do you actually see yourself committed to this topic over the long term? Do you see yourself actually finding enough fascination with it? And what I'm grateful for is even though there's a lot of these other things that I'm thinking about. I picked a horse, I bet on this YouTube horse, I bet on this online video horse, and it's something that I a lot of times have to rekindle my fire for, but I'm glad that I did it because it is something that when I get my mind right, my heart right, I'm like, yeah, I love this stuff. Like, let's go. I love this online marketing stuff, this video stuff, this YouTube stuff. Let me go deeper on it. Positioning is cumulative. Can I stick with YouTube for 16 years where I have so far? And can I do it for the next 16? Well, we'll see, but let's keep building this momentum. So take the long view and find new ways to dramatize it. So good, right? So this is all from the book. Can I stick it out? Find new ways to take an old thing and package in a fresh way. Find new ways to share the proven hard one strategies. A lot of times we do do that on the Think Media podcast. I hear the critics say, Sean, you're saying the same things a lot. Yeah. I mean, if it's like a proven principle that is proven to bring success on YouTube, you probably need to hear the same things repeated a lot, but hopefully in fresh ways. So how can you dramatize it? How can you not only continue to sell your listeners and your viewers in your community on the opportunity, packaging it, helping them see the potential, see the same things in new ways. Think about crest or Colgate toothpaste. Have you purchased any recently at the department store or the grocery store? What does it say on the package? It says new and improved. Two observations. Number one, it is impossible for something to be new and improved. If it's new, then it can't be improved because it would actually have to be old and improved observation. Number two, it's not freaking new. What do you mean new? There's no innovations in toothpaste. Forgive me if you're a toothpaste manufacturer. Like, why do they say new? Because they're taking something like toothpaste and there's a fresh packaging to it. There's maybe a new aspect to it. Maybe they added charcoal because charcoal is the trend in toothpaste, right? And so you're finding new ways to dramatize it. Can you stick with your niche? Can you stick with your YouTube channel? Can you stick with your business idea? What is the long view of all of the above? What is the position that you're trying to continue to double down on? Invest money in compound, build momentum, continue to stack because positioning is cumulative. And if you're a little tired and you're a little weary, which I can relate to, can you schedule some time to dramatize it for yourself, to sell yourself on it again? Tired eyes rarely see a bright future. Maybe you need an app. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you need a dust off a book or maybe you need to go to an event or travel a little bit to reinvigorate your passion and your love for the very thing that you've been doing for a while. Before we get to number six to go a little bit deeper on this, I have a lot of empathy because it's so funny. Recently, somebody that's very respected and influential. That's worked at YouTube and is built a lot of influence. I messaged him. I was surprised he knew who I was and he goes, oh, Sean, you're an OG in the YouTube space. And his words carried a lot of weight because as is he and he had worked at YouTube for years. And it was kind of encouraging, but it also was sort of like a moment when I was like, shoot him. I'm like, I've been here. I've been doing this thing for a while. And one of the things I've noticed about content creators is there something about your five, six, your 10 that it's hard to like stay passionate. Question is, can you stick it out? I believe you can. Of course, if you want to pivot, you want to launch something new. It's totally fine to transition. But perhaps you just need some time to dramatize it again to repackage it for yourself to figure out the 4.0 version of your personal brand of your identity to to figure out what is this next season going to look like? And coming with question number five is a warning. Line extension, weekends, your basic position. This is a conversation for an entire episode, but just briefly touching on this. What is line extension? Line extension is when a company like Nyquill, what do you think about when you think about Nyquill? You know exactly what it is. Just something that you have the flu. And you want to fall asleep, you're going to take Nyquill. That's when somebody like Nyquill decides to extend their line and create something and I'll make this up. But if you were to have Nyquill Q-tips, they're like, well, we're solared in the pharmacy area and people need Q-tips to clean their ears out as well. I don't even actually think that Q-tips, that's speaking of positioning, I think they're called cotton swabs, like on the end of a stick. And Q-tip is a brand name that actually has positioning in my mind. So ultimately, the punchline is if you've got a product like Nyquill, if you have a product even like Tylenol and they've certainly launched 462 different versions of it, line extension, they proved in the book, oftentimes weakens your basic position. It dilutes your basic position. And what these companies will do, like a proctering gamble or these different companies, is they actually will launch new brands. It's not that you shouldn't launch new things, it's that they will launch entire new brand names so that Nyquill can mean Nyquill, Tylenol can mean Tylenol and airborne can mean airborne. So airborne is like, okay, the thing you take when you're going to fly, so you don't get sick. But if you go like airborne to help you sleep, no, that's Nyquill's thing, right? So ultimately, line extension. How does this abide to us as content creators? Oh man, it's the biggest temptation of all. What does Think Media known for, I would ask? What is the Think Media podcast known for? Line extension could be trying to cover too many other social media platforms. I hope you subscribe to this podcast mainly for YouTube. About once a year, we go to social media marketing world and we drop some content around the other platforms and we have a TikTok episode and a Facebook episode. We touch on those because we certainly are hopefully known for online video. But line extension weakens your basic position. If you remember my snowboarding trip, Brett Johnson was like, hey, YouTube, come in here. And if I started to try to be known for YouTube and 32 other things, what gets weakened? The basic position. What do you want to be known for? And are you doing too many things? Now, if you want to start something else, eventually, that could mean starting another brand. For us, that's maybe starting another podcast. And with the right team and systems, the right things around find so that that brand name, that thing can be known for what it's known for. It can have its own positioning. And if I know who I must outgun and I've got enough money and I've got enough resources, and I can stick it out and I know I can stick it out here or whatever the systems are, it's not that you shouldn't launch a new thing. But line extension ultimately weakens your basic position. What do you ultimately want to be known for? The final example if you're still needing a little clarity there would be imagine if Toyota started making luxury cars and just called them Toyota Plus. It wouldn't even compare to the success of Lexus. But Toyota and Lexus are the same company. So instead of Toyota just calling their name Toyota luxury, Toyota is known for being pretty decent cars, highly rated, good consumer ratings, affordable, but not luxury. You want a Lexus? Some people may not even know that Toyota and Lexus are owned by the same people, but what is Lexus insinuate? It's going to be a little bit more expensive. It's going to be a little bit higher end. Do not line extend Toyota, launch entirely second car company, an entire brand called Lexus. Can you stick it out with your current brand message focus niche, avoid line extension because it'll weaken your basic position? And finally number six, do you match your position? This chapter was good for me, man. It asked me some questions that are easy to ask, but are hard to answer. Do you match your position? Are you currently in alignment with what you want to be known for? Is the look, colors, brand of your position congruent with the message you're putting out there? My favorite example of this, which is kind of an anti-example, a negative example. There's a lot of people that talk about personal finance, wealth, and money on YouTube or on the internet, which I'm all for. And I think that one of the best subjects to get educated in is to get a financial education. But I always find it humorous when somebody is trying to say like projecting the image of financial stability of wealth, a financial wisdom, let's say on YouTube. And I see this a lot. And they're filming in an echoey kitchen with clutter behind them on a folded card table with not great audio. It looks like they didn't take a shower that day. They didn't put together their appearance, their set, their brand, their lighting, their video, or their audio. Now your argument might be, well, that person could be the wisest person of all, perhaps, but we judge books by their cover. Do you match your position, what you're claiming to be known for, claiming expertise in? Do you've got the receipts to back it up? Are you credentialized? And then visually do your match your position. Do your ads, if you're publishing ads, actually speak the message you want them to speak. Do your clothes actually convey the message you want to convey? Do you match your position? And what they said was that creativity by itself is worthless. Only when it's subordinated to the positioning objective can it make a contribution. This will offend a lot of artists, but it's a very good business lesson that we need. Just being creative for creative say isn't necessarily helpful. Again, if we thought, okay, we could make the video kind of cool. I could wear this and we could do this. But what is the tone of the video, the look of the video, the way you're communicating, the message that's coming across, does it back up the actual message that you are trying to say, or is there cognitive dissidents? We've all seen content where someone's like saying one thing, but all we can pay attention to is what's being communicated and what they're not saying, body language, dress, attire, location. And so do you match your position? And ultimately, you could think about this where sometimes somebody will be like, I'm an expert at launching books or something like that. I'm an expert in writing books, launching books, so I'll go look at their book. And I'll just always wonder, why do they have zero or one Amazon review? I mean, that's one of the only things I can assess. But I go to Amazon of this very claiming they have the ability to be a successful author, right? Or help people launch books. And yet, their book only has one review. I'm not trying to step on your toes. I'm just trying to encourage you that that just speaks something. They're positioning themselves as one thing, but the case studies or the visuals or the results or the public image or the perception, which may or may not be reality, regardless, their perception is not matching up. And just trying to be creative in your marketing or just trying to be creative. It's not helpful. If it's not subordinated to the positioning objective and actually making a contribution to that goal. Creativity is amazing. But the bigger question is what is the positioning objective? You may feel like doing something certainly one other example I could think about is in this world of churches and ministry. One of the things that I find interesting and this is a funny kind of rabbit hole to go down but it's a powerful illustration is what message is a pastor trying to convey from the platform. There's this controversial account called preachers and sneakers, for example. This is a niche thing. If you're in the Christian world, you know about this. But one of the things that this account would cover is that in the world of Christianity and in the world of sharing the Bible and sharing the gospel that ultimately this account started to take these screenshots and show pictures of different pastors that were wearing $800 sneakers or $8,000 sneakers or all this different kind of clothes and stuff. Now, if you asked my opinion on the matter, I kind of don't care. However, as an observer and one that thinks about marketing and positioning and messaging, I actually do think it's pretty important. And I think it could be unwise if what you do on stage ultimately hurts the message you're trying to get across. Should pastors be able to wear whatever they want? I think so. Do we know that they bought whatever from like tied dollars from the church? Maybe it was a gift. Who cares? The bottom line though, is is it effective? His creativity itself is worthless. You ultimately want to support it to the positioning. You want it subordinated to the positioning objective. And if we're going to accurately represent the message of Jesus, the message of Christ, I want to do my best job, of course, dress cool or dress whatever. But if there's something that's going to get in the way of your objective, then why do it? And also why do it on stage or on camera or on YouTube when you could do it elsewhere? And you might say, well, Sean, that's my right. Or like, you're absolutely right. But it just might not be wise. Because ultimately, I want to express myself in my creativity. Cool. And perhaps you understand your mission and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to get across. But if ultimately it's misconstrued and misinterpreted, not saying that's right or wrong, I just think a lot of people lack wisdom because what's the positioning objective? What does winning actually look like? And is anything you're doing with your brand ultimately hurting the positioning objective? These were six questions that will lead to your success on YouTube. They're easy to ask, but they could be hard to answer. And I believe if you take some time to think deeply about these and come up with some great personal answers or forget the pressure of saying great answers. If you just take time to like think about these, apply these to your channel, apply these to your long-term thinking, your strategy, your branding, I really believe that more views and more success is waiting for you on the other side. I want to remind you that if you want to go a little bit deeper, we have a free class at thinkmasterclass.com that is actually going to get a lot more tactical than this. We've been in these conversations that are kind of at a high level, strategic level, and honestly a critical level. But ultimately, we also got to roll up our sleeves and actually apply some tactics that'll get us views. And if you want to watch an on-demand class for an hour, I'll actually share with you the best way we, the best thing we're doing right now at Think Media that's generating over 350,000 views every single day. You can check out that free class at thinkmasterclass.com or there's also a link in the show notes to that free on-demand class. Now, if you also check out the show notes, I want to encourage you to take some time to check out other videos in this series. We've been doing this for a while now on the Think Media podcast. We're talking about positioning, art of war by sunsue, on-war by Karl von Klauswitz. We're looking at military generals. And I hope you've been getting a lot of value from some of the strategic thinking. Our company's called Think Media because we ultimately want to help you think deeper. We want to help you think different. We want to help you think bigger and also think more strategically. And so that playlist in that series, I think, will be a great assistant for your journey and your success on YouTube. And if you've been getting value out of this episode, if you're on the YouTube version, that's the only place you are really able to comment. I would love to hear any of your insights from these six questions. What stood out to you? How did this challenge you? Did it maybe reveal something that now that you know that or you see that, it's going to help you make better decisions going forward? And wherever you watch or listen to the podcast, if you like, rate, or review, it does really help us to get the word out. If you also maybe know somebody, I'd love it if you shared this episode, you know, one of the ways the audio podcast spreads is word of mouth. And so maybe DM somebody this episode or let maybe one person in your world. I think these six questions will help. Maybe they're not a YouTube creator. You probably see by now that if they're a creative entrepreneur, they lead a nonprofit, they lead a church, these six questions can be just really helpful for getting clear and ultimately getting better results in all of our endeavors. So I want to appreciate you. Thanks for listening to the end for the two people that are still here. And I can't wait to connect with you in a future episode of the Think Media podcast.