Scaling and Monetizing a YouTube Channel with Rafeh Qazi

In This Episode

• [02:07] – Stephan welcomes Rafeh Qazi, and they dive into their experience in a mastermind group. Rafeh shares his day-to-day process for achieving maximum productivity.
• [13:54] – Rafeh explains his content process.
• [21:31] – Rafeh reveals the secret sauce to his success of having 1000 videos on his channel.
• [26:40] – Rafeh offers courses on his own platform and offers high-ticket programs with hands-on support for job placement.
• [30:41] – Rafeh talks about his approach to videography and how he produces high-quality content.
• [35:10] – Stephan and Rafeh discuss monetizing their content, with Rafeh emphasizing how he leverages YouTube as a funnel and compares it to Instagram.
• [40:56] – Here’s how you can connect with Rafeh Qazi.

Jump to Links and Resources

Qazi, it’s so great to have you on the show. 

Thank you, man. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. 

We met through METAL, a mastermind brotherhood I’m in, and we met in person in 2019. It’s good to finally have you on the show. 

Yeah, it’s been a minute. It was amazing, man. It was a great experience. I miss it. I’m returning to LA, so if they’re still running it, I might try to join it again. 

They do it virtually now, so you can join from anywhere in the world. 

They don’t do it physically at all anymore? 

No, it’s all virtual. 

Oh man, that is heartbreaking. That was an amazing experience. 

I loved going to the theater on Saturday mornings to hang out with the guys. 

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Why did they change that? Is it just because of like post-COVID? 

Yeah, it was during Covid. 

Why did they never go back, though? 

They have so many more members now. It’s crazy. They’ve grown. 

Yeah, I know. 

I like in-person experiences, too. I think it’s awesome. 

Yeah, like another Zoom call. That’s not the same. 

Are you in any masterminds currently? 

Not currently, but I’d like to be in a group. I miss being around other entrepreneurs and learning from them. That would be fun. I just sleep, lift, and then grow the business, and that’s all I do. It’s a very boring lifestyle, but that’s all I do. I like working on the business for 12 to 14 hours a day. I love doing that. I enjoyed that. 

Wow, is that sustainable, though? That sounds like a lot of burning the candle at both ends. 

Yeah, I’ll see if I end up gassing out at some point, but I just enjoy it. I love it, so I’ll probably keep doing it forever. To me, it’s very enjoyable. If you had to ask me about New Year’s, go out, party, or spend a couple of extra hours on the business, I would have much more fun working on the business. That, just to me, is fun. 

You’re serving over a million people, and what you’re up to is amazing. I can see how that mission would inspire you to keep working hard at it. What does your day look like if you spend 12 or 14 hours? How do you break that up, and how do you start it? What sort of morning rituals or processes do you employ to get into the flow state and maximize productivity? 

Absolutely. I’m very spontaneous, which means I don’t adhere to schedules very well. It makes me feel constrained like I’m trapped, so I avoid it like the plague. For me, it’s just like as soon as I wake up, I shower. After that, I just started working. It basically starts working right away. I have almost no time to start and no time in between.

I work out before I start work. I wake up, shower, work out, and get to work pretty much right away. That’s my routine—it’s very simple. Then, I work all the way through until I’m kind of exhausted from working. 

We have outcome-based goals, but we’re focused on the leading indicators.

Around 8 PM or 7 PM, something like that, I’ll just chill and watch. Recently, I’ve started watching random politics-like stuff. I’m not a political person, but I’ve always watched Patrick Bet-David on YouTube. I love his content and just binge-watch it. Basically, at night, I just watch something mindless until I fall asleep. And then I just woke up. 

I’ll also occasionally take on meetings at night. At 8 PM, I’ll have brainstorming meetings with my team, specifically about what my work looks like in the morning. It changes quite a bit depending on what I’m doing because I’m running my company, Clever Programmer. I’m the CEO. 

It changes between content creation. I have been making content for YouTube or Instagram recently, and what I’m doing is launching this brand-new product. For that product, somebody needs to think about what needs to go in there and what kind of systems and processes we need to put in place to make sure our students get results. My goal is to help a thousand people land high-paying tech jobs in 2024, and that program needs to be able to deliver on that. 

I just keep thinking about systems and automating stuff. I’ll give you an example of the stuff that I’m automating. If one of my clients has not been reached out to by one of my coaches in the last five days, the whole team gets an alert. That client has not gotten a touch point in over five days. That client’s status changes from good health to warning health or risk, and the whole team gets notified of that.

That’s an example of a system I’m building because I’m also a developer and coder. I love doing the automation work. I’m sure I should probably hire somebody to do this for me, which I’m looking for people, but it just brings me so much joy. 

My last many days have been 10 hours of me, like building automated systems that keep track of my clients, ensuring they succeed. Every time a meeting takes place in my company, I get these AI summarized notes sent to me as a text message right away. I have a pulse on my entire team on what’s happening and what’s happening with my clients, and I have so many of these systems that I’ve built that I enjoy building. That’s probably going to be my focus.

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My tasks change from content creator to coding, automation, and leading a team. That’s what my day-to-day looks like. 

Oh, that’s cool. That sounds like a lot of really rewarding and stimulating activities that you’re working on. 

Yes, 100%. 

What sort of tools are you using to build your automation? Zapier? Are you coding from scratch? You’re using an AI to write the code for you and then you’re just revising it or checking for bugs? How does that all work?

I love these questions. Are you a developer, or have you done anything with development yourself? 

I used to code. In fact, I wrote software as a service. I wrote the prototype. It was called the GravityStream. It was because I sold the company and the technology; it was a middleware tool, reverse proxy. I’m geeking out here with this. 

It would swap in optimized titles, URL structure, navigation, meta tags, body copy, etc. It fixed all these issues without going into the underlying e-commerce platform or CMS because many of them were very convoluted and difficult to optimize from an SEO perspective back in the day. 

The videos that perform the best are tutorials on popular languages like JavaScript and Python that I’m teaching.

That was the approach, and we charged on a cost-per-click basis. It was beautiful because we were making money from every click. We had Nordstrom and Zappos as clients, and they were paying us a lot more than if we had just been doing consulting for them—a lot more. It was cool. 

A big reason the company was acquired was that technology. I coded the first prototype. We hired a development team, and everything after that, but the working prototype, I wrote that. 

That’s incredible, cool, and awesome. I love building internal tools. A part of me is like, “If I could get paid to do this, I would start a company with this.” I would love to do that because I’ve been building internal tools and automations as far back as I can remember. 

I have Airtable and Zapier, wherever they are involved like ChatGPT kicks in. I don’t have too much AI stuff kicking in for what I’m doing yet, but that’s how I set up this automation and track everything. 

I track if Stephan became a lead. I know things like Stephan came from my Instagram sign-up. I also know this specific reel he watched, and that’s the reel that drove him to become a lead. I can see exactly how many customers I’ve gotten from specific pieces of content, specific real, specific YouTube videos, et cetera. I love tracking as much as I can, and I enjoy building these systems; to answer your question, Airtable, Zapier, and a little bit of Make. 

I was going to ask about Make.

Yeah, I’ve realized that many people are moving towards Make. Then it’s kind of crazy how much you could do with Airtable because it has automation now. It allows you to build interfaces and dashboards, which has been incredibly helpful and allows you to move quickly. Then, many front-end apps connect with Airtable, software, or glide apps. 

If I wanted to build a front end for clients, for example, a portal for my clients because we’re applying for jobs for them. Our goal is to apply to thousands of jobs per month per client. I want to build a visual dashboard for our clients where they can see how much progress we’ve made on their behalf and how many jobs we’ve applied to.

Our goal is to apply to thousands of jobs per month per client.

I’m sure with Airtable and one of these other front-end tools, they’ll be able to make a front end for the client and a client portal very quickly. That’s kind of one of the next upcoming missions I’m going to be working on. I’m nerding out and getting excited to work on it. 

That’s awesome. What happens a lot of times is that a company founder will get so successful that he or she becomes a manager and a front person, frontman in your case, and doesn’t have time to go in and invent stuff anymore. That’s a real bummer, and it happens time and time again. 

I love going there and figuring out how to create novel interfaces, user experiences, and tools. I love figuring things out. I love reverse engineering algorithms and trying to optimize for those algorithms. 

I can relate. I want to say that it breaks my heart because I’m good at sales, and sales brings a lot of cash into our business. Before this call, I was actually on a sales call, and I was about to do a close for $7500, and it takes an hour of my time, and I’m potentially closing an $8000 deal, $10,000 deal, or whatever.

The ROI on that is phenomenal, but I hate that because I want to be doing automation, and this stuff, like sales, does not give me life. Sales is something I only do if I have to, and we’re looking to bring more closers to the team. The reason why I’m taking some of the sales calls is that one of our current closers is not performing well, so until we replace him, I’m going to be taking some of the calls. 

What I love doing is the automation stuff, and that stuff just gives me so much life. But I hate the fact that I will probably have to hire somebody to do the automation then and continue making them because I look at my to-do list, and if you look at my to-dos from the last month, 80%–90% is I’m doing operations, which is just so dumb. I should be just making content and marketing, which should be what I should be doing 24/7 because that’s where we have the highest leverage, but it makes me so happy. 

When producing content, are you doing short-form and long-form content? Are you producing for a particular platform? Do you do separate stuff for Instagram? And shoot it separately versus what you’re producing for YouTube? Tell me more about how that all works.

My content process is sometimes; I will make dedicated content for Instagram. We have some content that’s dedicated reels for Instagram. Most of the time, what we try to do is I try to just make content for YouTube. That’s our biggest, number one, most valuable platform. What we try to do is, for example, recently, what we’ve been doing around 7 AM or 8 AM. I have a content session. 

Amaan is part of my team. He joins them. He’s our head of growth, so it’s like two people—just Amaan and me. We get on something like Riverside, except it’s not Riverside; it’s Ecamm. He’s the man behind the scenes. I’m full screen; he’s not there; he’s behind the screen, so he hears what’s happening. Here’s how we do it.

We’re currently trying to make this video of a JavaScript tutorial. It’s going to be like a five-hour course or something like that I’m going to make, or a couple of hours I’m going to make. Every time I make it and drop it on YouTube, it bangs. It gets millions of views. I know it’s going to get a million-plus views, and it’s going to take me probably a week or two to focus on this one piece of content and nothing else and just shoot it daily.

I’m focused on shooting the video long-form, but we’ll end up with about 50 short-form pieces of content distributed to get a couple of million views.

In the morning, our last session, what that looked like, we got together at 8 AM. We spent an hour and a half researching, ensuring we put the best content in there, and making the outline for the course. Then what I did is I started shooting, so we shot for a couple of minutes. 

Now I’m shooting the long-form video, YouTube video, but any parts that Amaan thinks are good 60-second segments in which I rant or talk about a hot topic for 60 seconds, he timestamps in real-time. He’s writing down while watching me do this and timestamping those. The purpose of those timestamps is that we could redistribute those as Instagram reels, TikTok reels, Facebook reels, and YouTube shorts. In vertical content, the power is that it could just be distributed everywhere. 

This way, I’m focused on shooting the video long-form, but out of that, we’ll end up having about 50 short-form pieces of content distributed. Collectively, I imagine this will go on to get a couple of million views. YouTube videos will probably get a million views. Then, the distribution, those 50 reels that come out of it, we’ll probably get a total of a million plus views. That’s kind of how we’re going about it right now. 

You’re using Ecamm live to record the long-form and keep track through your head of growth, where all the punchy bits are for short-form pieces. Then, he and your team will turn those into edited short-form videos for TikTok and shorts.

How long are the long-form pieces of content, and how often are you doing these Ecamm live video recording sessions? Is it every day of the week? 

Again, this is where I work in sprints, so I work very weirdly. If you’re a structured person, having two to three sessions a week at that time is perfect. My entire life, if I go through my last eight years of doing content, it’s like I have these sprints where I do nothing else but content for a few months, and it’s like all day I’m just shooting content.

Then it’s like I don’t even know how to spell content, and it’s just three months of building the sales team, hiring talent, growing the business, growing cash, etc. Even though I’ve posted over a thousand videos over the last many years, there isn’t ever any like I did this weekly. It wasn’t like I dropped X amount of videos per week. I work in sprints. I want to say that. 

But as of now, I’m trying to do about three sessions per week. Our goal is to hit 12 content sessions per month. If we hit three content sessions per week, we can hit that goal. If we hit that goal of 12 content sessions, we’ll crush content-wise. I know that. I’m focusing on the process. We have outcome-based goals, too, but we’re focused on the leading indicators. 

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What are the leading indicators? 

Leading indicators for us will be having 12 content sessions. If we have that, we will do well on YouTube. That’s a big one. 

Twelve content sessions per month? 

Per month, we will have twelve content sessions. The results are that if we can generate 100,000–300,000 new views, meaning from videos published that month, and if those videos generate 100,000–300,000 views, they will be long-form videos, and our YouTube will be growing very healthfully.

Got it. How long are these long-form videos? 

My channel is a funny example, but my videos are ridiculously long. Here’s what I’ll say, depending on what type of long-form video it is. Let’s say an average video is 10–15 minutes or 10–30 minutes long. A video I’m doing is like the top five programming languages to learn. That’s a hot video. Lots of people love it. That’s usually a 20-minute or 30-minute video max.

My ability to relate with people at encoding became my strength.

The JavaScript tutorial I’m doing, the most recent one I dropped, has millions of views and is still growing. It’s 12 hours long. Many of the videos on my channel are eight—and 10-hour-long tutorials. I have a 20-hour tutorial. My long forms go from 10 minutes to 20 hours.

You’re not recording all this in one session, are you? 

No, but I have done a lot in one session. For example, we used to do this series where we would just build real-world apps live. For example, we would build Twitter in one video, Facebook in one video, and Instagram in one video.

Those would be six-hour or eight-hour-long live streams, and we would start from scratch to the end and build the entire app. We did that with LinkedIn, Disney, and many other popular things. 

We have done that, but we’re not doing that right now. Those would be one sitting because it’s all live. Since they’re recorded, this is not a one-sitting. The JavaScript tutorial will be broken up over multiple days, but I would like it to be as few days as possible. I find it better to shoot for 10 hours one day, 10 hours the other day, and just get that done rather than keep making a tiny bit of progress over a long period.

Wow, that’s cool. You’re very dedicated, and I can definitely hear the passion in your voice. 

Thanks. I appreciate that. I’m very impatient.

Let me ask you this. You have over a thousand videos on your channel. What are, in your opinion, your standout successes and why? What was the magic or the secret sauce that made those successes?

That’s a great question. I think that the videos that perform the best turn out to be tutorials that I’m teaching on popular languages like JavaScript and Python. These are programming languages that we use everywhere. JavaScript, if somebody is watching, they’re just like, I don’t know what JavaScript is. If you go to YouTube and press play or hit pause, that’s JavaScript. If you’re on Instagram and you heart somebody’s video and your girlfriend finds out, that’s JavaScript. JavaScript is everywhere, and it is one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

When I teach that online, that tends to do well. Why does it do well? I think it’s because the thing that I thought was my weakness when I was in college I was like, “Am I too dumb?” Because I just don’t understand how programming works when these professors teach me. They’re like one plus one is two, a plus b is like this. Then they’re like, let’s build the craziest, most complicated thing, and we’re going to do object-oriented programming, and it’s going to be Java.  

I’m like, “What happened in between? What did I miss? How do I not understand? Am I just stupid?” I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to teach myself,” and I taught myself very slowly. I fell in love with programming when I taught myself like that. 

I just felt like college was horribly rushed because it’s like a farm where thousands of cows are just going through whatever. It’s like there’s just putting this feeding these cows through the thing, and then these people who think they’re not smart enough would quit on their dreams and would be like, “I guess I’m just not smart enough to become a programmer,” and they would quit.

I saw this happen to so many people who were intelligent enough to become programmers but weren’t taught the right way. That was so frustrating for me because I took a whole summer and taught myself slowly. I would get a cup of coffee. I remember my first programming problem. It was from this website called udacity.com. I’ve taken this course. It was an unbelievable programming course. 

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One of the first exercises I worked on was Age in Days. Somebody should be able to input their birth date into your function, and you should be able to tell them how many days old they are. I remember sitting there drinking my coffee from 8 AM to 3 PM, thinking about it. 

It was so entertaining because there are so many challenges to date. You would think, “Oh, it’s simple.” You’re like, “I just multiply it by 30 or something every month,” but then you’re like, “Oh wait, some months are 31, some months are like 29.” Then you’re like, “Then there are leap years. Then there’s like these leap centuries.” All these oddities come in the way, and you have to keep solving them one by one. 

But what’s cool is once you solve it one time, you never have to do it again. It just automatically and instantly happens the right way every single time in the future. The program ends up kind of becoming smarter than you are because it has all these rules that you don’t even remember anymore, but you just remember putting them once at a time. I fell in love with it. I started enjoying coding so much. I discovered that people were just taught it the wrong way.

So many people get straight-up jobs from watching my YouTube content.

I’m like, “You know what? I’m just going to teach it to the ‘dummy me’ who didn’t get it before,” and I just started making content on YouTube. People started resonating with that, and that became my strength. My ability to relate with people at encoding became my strength. Those are the videos that have done the best in teaching coding because I think what people get out of it is that it’s simplified very heavily for them because I give very simple, plain examples to help them understand programming. 

For example, when somebody is explaining loops, they’re like, “For loops are constructors, and when you do this, you iterate over.” For somebody who doesn’t know what a for loop is, they have no idea what iterate means. They have no idea what any of that means.

An example I was giving is when people say, “For loops are like this thing you iterate through.” If you don’t know about loops, you also don’t know what iterates mean. Most new people have no idea what the heck that is. When I was teaching coding, I was outside by the water, and I was like, “Here’s a for loop while caught or like a while loop while ’cause he’s not tired. He’s going to keep doing pushups.” So then I just start doing pushups, and you, the camera, could see me. 

After 10 or 20 pushups, I’m tired. I’m like, “Now, let’s actually write it in code,” and then we would go and write it in code. People get that and visually understand how that works. That’s why I think that resonated with people, and those videos where I’m teaching coding kind of blew up the most.

Where do you send people if they want to take an entire course that’s not just the one video or a series or playlist of videos on YouTube, but they want to pay you money or maybe get a certification or some sort of proof that they took your course afterward? Do you have courses on a platform like Udemy, Coursera, or something like that? Or is it on a custom platform, or is it all just on you?

Yeah, a lot of my stuff is on YouTube, and 99% of my training is there. We have so many people who just get straight-up jobs from watching my YouTube content. We have thousands of people who have happened to us, which is incredible to hear. It’s like, “Hey, I just got a job at Sonos, making $180,000 a year.” How? From just watching our content. 

I love that. The 1% who want to move faster don’t want to sift through all that; they want to get results faster and have support. We have courses on our platforms—not on Coursera or Udacity, but on our platforms. We have courses there, and then we have a high-ticket program where they could join, and we help them. We’re very hands-on and help them get a high-paying job.

Awesome. Do you get a percentage of that? Let’s say they get a $180,000 job. Do you get a piece of the signing bonus or something? Do you get an ongoing residual, or is it just a set fee? X amount of dollars, and that’s going to get you six months.

Exactly. Right now, it’s exactly like the second thing that you just said. It’s $7500. It gives them six months of support right now, and we help them get a job. What we are trying to do is our next thing, which would be to make a deal with the hiring companies. Let’s say these people come in and pay us $7500, but then when we get them placed at that company, maybe that company will give us $10,000 to place them. That’s something we’re looking to get to in the future. 

I suck at those business partnerships right now; that side of the hiring side that’s my weakness. I have to learn how to do that and build those relationships, but for now, we just get a flat fee.

I focus on the practicality of building, so we have a very solid community of builders.

Do you offer a certification program? Are you planning that in the future? CISSP, for example, there’s training to get that certification. Have you trained people to get that certification? Do you offer your certification? Or is any of that in the works? 

It’s not in the works cause I’m super anti-corporate. I just focus on teaching them the skills because, personally, I dropped out of college and stuff like that. I’m not very paper-oriented, let’s just say. Could it be valuable? I’m sure it may be something to think about, but I just focus on the practicality. 

In my courses, people join, and within 20–30 minutes, people are building their first apps. We have so many testimonials like that of people joining, having never coded before, and their first 20–30 minutes, on average, are building their apps. Then, I’m also teaching them how to sell subscriptions and make money from that. To me, the practical side of building is just so exciting. I don’t focus a lot on the theory. I just focus on the practicality of building, so we have a very solid community of builders.

I got you. Do you have your own videography team, and how does that play in the stuff where you’re doing pushups or something? I presume you will be on screen sharing your screen for long periods, like through Ecamm Live. What’s the balance between them? How do you figure that out? 

Right now, I just shoot everything myself with this exact setup. That’s it because all I need is the camera, me, and my screen, and I can do that with the Eccam. I can switch back and forth between them. I just shoot everything like this. Most of my content is like that; 98% of my content that gets a lot of views is like that. 

I used to have a videographer, but I don’t really need one anymore. We do have editors, and I have editors who help edit the videos. 

If you can trust your content and publish it as is, that takes away time and speeds it up.

From a content perspective, I am very focused on being one takes. I believe in one take. I believe in not trying to fix it and post because you make everybody’s life hell. If you take any of my videos, like if I make a JavaScript tutorial that’s eight hours long, Stephan, it’s going to be eight hours of publishable content with zero mistakes in there, and that’s very rare, and not a lot of people talk about that, but that allows me to speed up the process a lot because if you have editors who need to go through eight hours of content, fix mistakes and stuff, good luck, you’re going to get your content a month or two. At least a couple of weeks. 

If you can trust your content and publish it as is, that takes away a lot of time and speeds it up. I focus a lot on that where it’s like everything I shoot. I just pretend I’m alive, and there’s no going back because if you’re in real life, how often are you sitting there talking to somebody and having a conversation? Have you ever been at METAL talking to those people and be like, “Actually, no, no? Let me take a retake of that.” That’s never happened. 

Just restating the same thing a little bit better this time.

Exactly. You don’t have to do that in real life. We do that on camera because we always feel like we have this out: “Oh, it’s going to get edited in post. We’re going to fix it in the post.” But for me, I just believe in committing 1000%, like you’re live on a stage, there’s no going back. You just burn all the bridges, and you don’t doubt anything that comes out of your mouth. It’s almost like the word of God comes out of your mouth when you’re speaking to the camera. You just cannot doubt anything. 

When I go in that mode and shoot, I can just turn it on like that. After doing lots of videos, I feel like you have to start practicing it instantly. You don’t have to get to a certain level to practice it. You could start practicing it now, and what’s beautiful about it is that you just start producing ten times more content. 

Imagine there are two people, okay? One person says something, and then he goes and fixes it. He uploads the video, then he deletes it because he doesn’t think it’s good enough. After doing that a couple of times, he has one video published. On the other hand, somebody has just straight-up shot ten different videos at the same time. 

My funnel is simple: It’s YouTube. I then give them something for free on YouTube and collect their email in exchange.

On one side, you have person A with one video and person B with ten videos. Person A has taken all their improvements and poured them into one video, which is great and fine. Person B has made every incremental improvement they put in video two. Then they’re like, oh, I need to improve something. I’m going to improve it in video three. I’m going to improve something in video four and video five.

Quality-wise, let’s just say quality is roughly the same as where they got to. Quality is roughly the same, but you have 10x the output on one side. Not just 10x the output; you also have 10x the feedback from the market because you actually published all those videos.

In my opinion, the person will go on to become a content creator who’s 10 to 100 times better in the long run. It’s just my personal opinion. That’s something I focus on a lot. I know it’s something random, and you never asked me, but I just wanted to share it because I feel like it’s important to me.

Well, it is important and reminds me of the old adage: perfect is the enemy of done. 

Yes, 100%. That’s a great way to say it.

How much of your revenue comes from YouTube videos getting revenue from Google, monetized YouTube video content, and how much of it, or percentage-wise, is coming from those high-ticket sales? 

Sure. I’ll give you an example. YouTube paid me a whopping $600 last month, and my business paid me $86,000 last month. This is why monetizing through AdSense is a terrible idea for many content creators unless you’re a massive content creator like MrBeast, which is even then a terrible idea because when he can monetize his own thing, he makes $5000 times more money.

I learned very quickly and very early on. From very early on, I had advice from people around me who were like, no, no, no, you need to make your product. You need to sell your product. Do not rely on this. YouTube AdSense pays almost nothing. In a year, if we made $1.5 million, YouTube AdSense would be like $10,000 grand cash. Our courses and high-ticket programs would bring in everything else. 

Where does Instagram fit in this? I know you focus to some degree on Instagram and the reels and maintaining your presence there. Is the juice worth the squeeze there?

For me, not really so far. Different people work differently. One of my friends, Nas, uses Instagram and closes software agency deals. One deal for him will make him $10,000 a month, $20,000 a month, or something like that. For him, Instagram works well. 

Maybe I haven’t fully cracked the code on Instagram. I’m up to 150,000 or 160,000 followers, but monetization-wise, it’s not as good as YouTube for me. That’s what I’ve noticed. I think it’s just because, on Instagram, people see a 62nd reel, whereas, on YouTube, they’re watching a 12-hour or a two-hour-long tutorial.

But the funnel and how it works: If somebody’s watching, I want them to get the full value and context out of this. My funnel is simple; it’s YouTube. I then give them something for free on YouTube; in exchange, I collect their email. On YouTube, I’ll be like I have free training.  

Retaining is hard. You have to be on top of it and communicate.

The next step is for them to join my free training, and I’ll get their email. Then I email them and sell my $300 course. If anybody buys that $300 course, we’ll get on a call and pitch some more $8,000 programs. That is it. That’s my entire business model.

That sounds pretty simple, which is a good thing. 

It’s a very simple business model. 

Now you mentioned Nas. You’re talking about Nas Daily.

No, but that would be awesome. I’ve gotten that multiple times. No, not Nas Daily. Nas Domonsky, he’s getting there. He’s going to be Nas Daily one day. 

Okay, right now, he’s Nas Weekly. 

That’s funny. Exactly. 

Awesome. It sounds like you don’t need a lot of editing done, but you do use editors, especially for short-form video content. How do you find them, and how do you retain them?

Retaining is hard. You have to be on top of it and communicate with them. Good editors are really hard to find and even keep. One secret I discovered, and this is really pro insight that I’ll give you because it’ll save you, is that I’ve paid my content teams $60,000 a month, a lot of money, and they were okay. Right now, we have a pretty solid content team. 

The hack that I did to find great content people is this. I learned this from Airrack’s team. Airrack is one of the biggest YouTubers. I’m sure you’ve heard of MrBeast on YouTube. Airrack is also a really big up-and-coming YouTuber, but not at MrBeast level. 

I spoke with his team, and they told me what they do. They gave me a recommendation, and then I put it into action: find a great editor. Hayden Hillier-Smith is a well-known video editor and YouTuber, and he’s big in the editing niche. Now, Hayden Hillier-Smith is going to be hard to hire because there’s just so much demand for him. He’s probably not going to be good for hiring. 

But what you do is you go to his Twitter, and you do not see who’s following Hayden because everybody’s going to be following Hayden. You see the people Hayden is following. You look at the people Hayden Hillier-Smith is following, and you look at the editors he’s following specifically. Those are the editors you want to hit up. 

If you want to go and have a bigger pool of editors, you go and then hit up the people those editors are following.

If you want to go and have a bigger pool of editors, you go and then hit up the people those editors are following. They could keep widening your pool like that, but it’s vetted. Hayden isn’t going to be following a random editor. He’s going to be following a solid editor, and you speak with these guys. 

A lot of these guys end up being third-world countries. They end up being outside of us, so they end up being a lot cheaper. I’ve paid for the same videos for $3000 or $5000, but with some of these guys, I’m paying about $250. Short-form content. I’m paying probably $25 per reel. I used to pay hundreds of dollars per reel. They do an amazing job. They do a fantastic job.

That’s a ninja hack. I love that. That’s a great way to end this interview. We’re out of time, but where would you suggest our listeners or viewers go if they want to learn more about YouTube marketing and monetization of their YouTube channel and all the cool stuff?

Absolutely. Just go to my Instagram @rafeh.qazi. A lot of great content is there, and more importantly, they can get in touch with me. If they have questions, just ask me directly. I love tactical conversations and engaging and answering questions around this type of stuff. It geeks me out. It’s exciting. They can just hit me up, and I’d love to chat with them. 

Awesome. Well, Qazi, thank you so much. This was awesome, and congratulations on all the success. It was a lot of fun. 

Thank you. I appreciate you. This was a lot of fun. 

Yeah, awesome. Thank you, listener. We appreciate you, too. Go out there and make it a great week. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Focus on producing high-quality, in-depth tutorials on popular topics that provide immense value. Create content that solves the genuine needs of my target audience.

Prioritize shooting videos in a single take to speed up the editing process. Publish rapid content while maintaining the high quality my audience expects.

Amplify my core content. Grow my viewership by repurposing long-form YouTube videos into short clips for Instagram Reels, TikTok, etc.

Create courses and products that appeal to my audience. Avoid relying solely on YouTube revenue. Recognize YouTube as a top-of-funnel tool to create my community and email list, rather than as my ultimate goal.

Implement an email marketing funnel. This will help me nurture YouTube subscribers into paid customers. My email campaign can help build audience trust and outstanding results.

Monitor my viewer analytics closely. This helps me to understand which content drives the most leads. I can then precisely determine the tutorials and topics that resonate with my prime target audience.

Automate processes and set up systems to provide a high-touch experience for my students.

Find talented video editors by discovering who industry experts are following on social media platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter).

Outsource my tasks. This allows me to stay hyper-focused on content creation and marketing. Any task that doesn’t directly relate to my core priorities is a candidate for outsourcing.

Connect with Rafeh Qazi on Instagram and LinkedIn. Discover his valuable content on YouTube growth and monetization strategies to successfully build a loyal and engaged audience. 

About Rafeh Qazi

Rafeh Qazi grew his YouTube channel to 1m+ subscribers and monetized it to over $5m+ with digital courses and high-ticket offers. Now, he works with creators to help them do the same.