If I Started YouTube While Working Full-Time, I’d Do This

hey friends welcome back to the channel so if you are looking to start or grow a YouTube channel alongside working a full-time job then hopefully this video is going to help you out if you're new here my name is Ali and I started my YouTube channel way back in 2017 when I was a medical student at Cambridge University and I then spent 2 years working full-time as a junior doctor in the UK's National Health Service including during the pandemic and while working full-time I grew this YouTube channel over 3 years from zero to around 1. 3 million subscribers and so I definitely know how hard it can be to balance working a full-time job alongside starting a YouTube channel but it is definitely possible so in this video I'm going to be sharing my best advice about how you can successfully balance working fulltime with building a YouTube channel I'm going to talk about things like how you can find the time and energy to do both things how much time you should spend on your channel and how to optimize the way that you use your time and energy so that you don't burn out and you can still keep making the videos now I recently asked my audience to send in any questions you guys had about growing your YouTube channels and I'm going to be using a question that hanil sent in to talk directly about this problem that I'm sure a lot of you are facing so let's dive into hil's question and of course there will be time stamps down below so do feel free to skip around the video If if you feel like it hey Ali so I am a veterinarian working from 10: to 6 in a clinic and I also uh do some private cases after I'm done with my 10 to six job and basically the thing is these both these things are like sort of practice jobs where they require my presence and my energy and I really wanted to get into something that will have more like a passive uh way of working and a passive way of of generating income so I was thinking of going into like getting into the YouTube route uh or making content either that would be for veterinarians like myself or pet parents uh educating them about the things that we as veterinarians want them to know beforehand so I really wanted to start this YouTube channel since the past one year and I feel like I just don't get enough of time during the day or even if I have the time I am kind of so drained out that I just want to sleep and not do anything and uh so in order to combat this I thought I would start at least doing live streams of me studying so that I get the hang of being on YouTube and I tried that out once or twice and that kind of stopped there but I think it really worked out well because it kind of kept me focus on the studying part of it as well as I was of putting out content on the channel um so what I have done so far is I've have made that setup and kept it but I would really like to know what would be your opinion on me getting this YouTube channel really up and going even though I have all these things lined up for the day already thanks okay this is a good question how do you do YouTube with a full-time job now I am going to take a little bit of a different approach to answering this because of Honey's background so he's a vet who works full-time from 10:00 a. m.

to 6:00 p. m. he does Private cases as well but he would love to have a passive form of income we all want to make money in our sleep without doing any work so you know this is why I started this journey I can understand why hanal and probably you watching this would like some passive income it sounds great doesn't it um he's thinking maybe YouTube or content maybe content for vets or people who are pet parents that is actually a very good thing to be thinking about he's leaning into his unfair advantages but he's been wanting to start for a year but don't have the time and I don't have the energy classic problem that we all face with anything that we're trying to do either we don't have the time or we do have the time but we but we're so drained by the thing that we do for our day job that we just don't have the energy to do it he's dabbled with some live streams and stuff but really just wants to know how do I make this YouTube channel successful with a full-time job so we need to zoom out and we need to zoom out because if hanil were sitting in front of me right now the first thing I would say to him hanil is like why do you actually want to start a YouTube channel do you want to start a YouTube channel because you are intrinsically motivated to start a YouTube channel specifically or do do you want to start a YouTube channel because you think it is your best route to passive income and the reason why really matters here because if Hil were to say to me that look honestly the reason I want to start a YouTube channel is like I don't really care about YouTube itself I don't really care about making videos I am using the YouTube channel as an instrumental strategy to get to my real goal which is some form of passive income in that sense I would tell hanil look man don't start a YouTube channel if your goal is passive income there are way more efficient ways to make passive income than by starting a YouTube channel I would not recommend YouTube channel if the goal from starting a YouTube channel is to try and make passive income why is that well it's just too much of a slug you know if you really want to make passive income there just are just better paths for it one thing that I would that would come to mind is generally if you want to make want to make money you want to do some sort of B2B offer you want to sell to businesses rather than to Consumers you want to try and sell some sort of product in hil's case he's got expertise in the veterinarian field so like it's it's just more efficient to find a client is a Veterinary practice or going up the supply chain of vet stuff talking to a pharmaceutical company that supplies products to vets trying to figure out what is a service that I can offer them which would solve a problem that they have in their business because businesses have large amounts of money whereas individuals do not have large amounts of money usually when someone wants to start a YouTube channel they're they're trying to go the B Toc approach either they're hoping to get loads and loads of views so that they can get sponsorship and AdSense and stuff and then make money it's not particularly passive because you still have to keep on making the video and you're always going to run into the problem of like kind of time and energy and stuff or you're going to try and sell some sort of product to Consumers so maybe he would sell a course on how to get into vet school which would be sold to Consumers who want to get into vet school and then yeah in that sense it's passive because you make the Course once uh it might it might take six months to make the course but you make it once and then in theory you sell it over time the problem is it's just a very long game there's no guarantee that it's actually going to work there's no guarantee that hanil has what it takes to succeed on YouTube um it takes having some sense of like having expert te in the topic but also a sense of being able to explain things on camera a sense of other people connecting with the sort of Personality that you have on the internet I'm not saying anyone doesn't it's just that these things are not guaranteed whereas if you were genuinely just trying to make money and you were just trying to sell a very useful service to some sort of business that is way more guaranteed the path to selling a service to a business in the vet sphere and making money from it that you can then hire people out to become to make roughly passive that to me I would say has a 10 times more likelihood of working than hanal try to start a YouTube channel as an instrumental technique to get to make passive income that's if hanil would to tell me that really the YouTube channel is just a means to an end if however hanil were to tell me you know what the YouTube channel is not a means to an end I really like the idea of starting a YouTube channel I'd say to him okay you really like the idea of starting a YouTube channel would you do it even if you knew you'd never make money from it if hil's answer is still yes I would ask him why would you do it if you didn't make money from it yes I still would why is that because I get a lot of personal joy and satisfaction from the thought that my content could be useful to someone else that to me is gold standard that's like great we are doing YouTube for the right reasons the people who end up making money on YouTube usually are the ones who didn't set out to make money on YouTube it is very hard to make money on YouTube if you set out to make money on YouTube there are just way more efficient ways to make money but it becomes a lot more doable if the reason you're doing it is an intrinsically motivated reason for starting a YouTube channel because you're motivated by the purpose the service The Joy the love of teaching in hil's case so if anyone is watching this and thinking of starting a YouTube channel as a an instrumental reason for making money I would say don't do it it's not worth it there are more effective ways of making money what are those more effective ways of making money well I have a video over there my honest advice is someone who wants to be financially free that has so many recommendations of books and articles and podcasts that you can check out because that is the more efficient way to make money you should start a business selling stuff to other businesses please for the love of God do not start a YouTube channel if your only reason to start it is to make money there are more efficient ways of doing it having said all of that I'm now going to assume that for the rest of this video that hanal actually does want to start a YouTube channel for its own sake because he's motivated by the pleasure the purpose the joy of service all that kind of stuff and is simply running into the problem of time and [Music] energy I'm going to assume that hil's goal is something to the effect of I want to make one YouTube video per week this I think is a good goal um when we think of goals there's sort of a spectrum of goals there is input goals there is output goals and there is outcome goals generally these are are easier input goals are easier and outcome goals are harder and also broadly um these sort of input goals are more in your control and outcome goals are less in your control or under your control or whatever the phrase is okay so what would an outcome goal be an outcome goal would be I want to get to 100K Subs by I don't know 2026 whatever the thing might be that is an outcome goal that is broadly that's very hard to do in outside of heal's control outside of your control what's an output goal an output goal is one video per week I would like to Output you publish one video per week and what is an input goal an input goal is I want to do I don't know 8 hours per week uh work on my YouTube channel or whatever the thing might be this is an input Anil is inputting 8 hours of time here this is an output he's aiming to Output one video per week this is an outcome he aiming to get 100,000 subscribers by 2026 I don't like outcome goals outcome goals are very hard I think when you're very experienced you can go for outcome goals these days for my business we have outcome goals I'm like you know the goal is to grow the business at 10 million in Revenue by the by the end of next year it's hard it's outside of my control but I'm fairly experienced in the world of business that it it sort of makes sense to have that as an outcome goal if I was a total Noob and I had outcome goals for my business things would be things would be a lot harder and I'd be more likely to lose motivation what I would probably recommend for hanil is starting here starting with the output goal of one video per week because that is an output goal that is you know more or less within our control and it's something that we can then optimize for when we're figuring out this main problem that NE has which is I don't have any time and when I do have the time I don't have the energy so knowing that the goal is one video per week we're now trying to figure out okay how do we get more time and how do how do we find the time and how do we create the energy to be able to make one video per week and knowing that is actually quite useful because one video per week is less of a vague abstract thing than I want to grow on YouTube or I want to do YouTube or whatever the thing might be so we know we want one video per week oh by the way if you're enjoying this video so far you might like to check out my completely free parttime YouTuber crash course it is a 7-Day email course where every day I will email you some super useful principles strategies tools templates stuff that I found useful over the last seven years and gring my YouTube channel it's completely free you can unsubscribe anytime and there'll be a link down below if you want to check it out now then what we have to do and at least this is the way I think about it is we just need to break down what does it look like to make one video per week what is the process of creating a video well you start off with the idea then if hanal is seen any of my content he knows that you should figure out the title in the thumbnail of the video then hanal will probably want to write the video and then probably film and then probably edit and then probably publish and so this needs to happen in order for hanil to make one video per week so let's break this down this is genuinely the advice I give to someone who's in the situation and loads of people are in this situation right well if you if you're watching the video to this point you're probably in the situation where maybe you want to make YouTube videos you want to make maybe one video per week but like how the hell do you find the time and the energy to do it especially with a full-time job I was in this position for 3 years one year while I was a medical student fulltime at Cambridge and then 2 years while I was working full-time as a doctor and then the pandemic happened and then I took a break and stuff and then suddenly I became a full-time YouTuber um well rather a part-time YouTuber and a full-time entrepreneur blah blah blah blah blah but like this is the stuff that I'm very intimately familiar with okay so how do we do it well first thing we need to figure out how much time do we actually have available per week to be able to make this video Anil says he works 10 till 6 during the weekdays and does Private cases after that I'm going to bet that hanil can probably not film videos on weekdays because he's working full-time so now we only really have weekends left hanil might have a life and so he might say that okay I want to get all of this done within 4 hours on a Saturday so let's say 4 hours is what we're trying to go for I think 4 hours may be a little bit unrealistic but we'll just go for that we'll just pretend that hanil has 4 hours the input is 4 hours per week to give to the YouTube channel and the output we're going for is one video per week now it it actually is possible to do that um right now you could open up the YouTube app and you could hit go live and you could do a live stream and you could just film a video and that would produce one video per week because you don't need to edit it it just goes on your YouTube channel and it shows up as a live stream easy enough the problem with that is that the less time you put into creating these videos the less high quality they're going to be so obviously a video that's properly filmed and written and edited with a proper title and proper thumbnail is probably going to do better than a random live stream that you just put online you would then think that okay well that's fine so maybe it's not the live stream maybe a live stream will take half an hour but I still got another 3 and a half hours so what do with that time well maybe you just film a video just off the cuff and then you spend 3 hours editing it that could be it maybe you spend 2 hours looking at the idea 30 minutes writing it filming it and then not doing any edit editing at all like essentially we just have this allocation of 4 hours and we need to allocate the time to these different activities so if I personally had to start a YouTube channel and I was going to make one video a week and I only had 4 hours to put into my YouTube channel this is what I would do firstly I would cut out editing because I would Outsource it how do you Outsource editing well you look at editors on upwork and Fiverr and people per hour if you want to find really good editors you go to hey friends.

Studio which is a company that I'm running with some friends there's ways to find editors people always like oh but I can't Outsource editing cuz it's expensive I have a whole course my parttime YouTuber Academy has like a whole module on how to Outsource your editing but in a nutshell hanil is a veterinarian um he probably makes more money from his day job than it would cost to to hire a video editor in his country um I don't know where hanal is from but I'm going to assume it's somewhere like India where vets definitely get paid more than video editors so what hanil can do is he can Outsource video editing and find someone who's just making less money than he is he mentioned that he does Private cases that means he gets paid Private Practice rates to do private cases so let's say hanil makes $100 for each private case that he does and let's say it costs him $30 or $40 to find someone to edit a video hanil can do some extra cases to buy back his time and to use some of that money to buy back time when it comes to Outsourcing video editing the way the the way to think about this is that 4 hours per week is not that much time to put into a YouTube channel everything takes two resources time plus money and you can argue energy and stuff but actually time and money are interchangeable you can spend time to save money or you can spend money to save time in this context I'm saying that if if it were me and I only had 4 hours per week and I was making money through my vet day job and my private practice I would be spending money to save time I would be Outsourcing my editing if I didn't want to Outsource my editing for whatever ever reason because I'm silly or because I'm broke or whatever the thing might be then we would have to factor editing into this whole process and I would probably say editing would take maybe 2 hours so I'm going to put 2 hours in Brackets over here and yeah you can always edit a video for more than 2 hours on average it takes our editors 5 days to edit one of these videos for my main Channel but back in the day when I was editing my own videos it was taking me like 4 to 6 hours to edit a video sometimes I had to get one out while you know cuz I was aiming for one video a week and so I'd only spend 2 hours in the editing I was editing my own videos for two whole years before I decided to Outsource the editing and that was just dumb of me I wish someone had told me you need to figure out how to Outsource it I'm going to assume hanil is following my advice and is actually Outsourcing his editing great it still probably takes half an hour per week to like uh review the edit go back and forth with the editor use frame. io which is really good software for like feed feeding back on the edits and stuff so we're down to 3. 5 hours what do we do with the rest of that time well I think filming the video we should aim for that to take 30 minutes if hanil is doing content about things that he's experienced in and knows what he's talking about you know it shouldn't take longer than 30 minutes to film a video and maybe maybe each video is like 10 minutes long or like 6 to 10 minutes long you can do that within a 30-minute filming session so that leaves us with 3 hours left what do we do with that 3 hours honestly I'd probably spend two of those hours on the idea the title and the thumbnail and I'd spend one of those hours on writing the video the 2 hours on the idea title the thumbnail 1 hour on writing the video 30 minutes filming the video 30 minutes reviewing the edits that my Source video editor has done and then publishing the video I'm not really going to count in the 4 hours cuz I can just sort of upload it overnight if it depends depends on how good my internet connection is and once I've nailed the tit and thumbnail already that's like the hard part publishing it is like a 5-minute job it's not it's not too hard so I'm going to assume this takes 5 minutes and now this just becomes a math a math puzzle like how do you make the best quality videos given the constraints of time and given the constraints of money so how do we do idea title and thumbnail in 2 hours actually 2 hours is a very reasonable amount of time to do title and thumbnail he comes up with some ideas again this is like a whole thing figure out target audience value proposition competitive analysis unfair advantages the whole shebang but if hanil is just getting started out I would say don't overthink it watch all of the videos I've ever made about how to grow on YouTube maybe sign up to my course if you really want to but it's kind of expensive maybe you can't afford it that's fine whatever the thing might be in fact Hil if you're watching this reach out to us we'll we'll give you free access to the course um whatever it might be it's not that hard coming up with ideas and then you spend maybe I don't know an hour on canva doing doing title thumbnail for that particular video we want to streamline this process to make it as efficient as possible when it comes to writing videos what I would recommend for hanil is don't script your videos If you script your videos word for word it will take way longer than 1 hour to write a video um a 10-minute video is maybe like how many words 1,500 words something like that it usually takes longer than 1 hour to write 1,500 words or 1,000 words generally what I'd recommend is just going with bullet points what I do for my videos especially if it's a topic that I actually have expertise in so if I was talking about medical stuff or whatever whatever um if I was heal I'd be talking about vet stuff I would just decide what are the three to five things I want to say in the video and I just want to limited to three to five things potentially even just three things let's say I were doing a video called how to get into vet school in the UK right and I'd be thinking what are the three main points I want to make in this video well it's going to have an intro and it's going to have an outro sure uh Point number one point number two point number three um this is the triplet method of making videos which I talk about in my course as well uh Point number one um how it works Point number two um tips for getting in and point number three um mistakes people make and then within each of these points I would limit myself to just three points so this is the triplet method the 3X3 method 3x3 I have three main points 1 2 3 and I have three sub points within my three main points and this would take me maybe 10 15 20 minutes to put together that is the time that hanil would use in writing the video and then coming back to our little diagram over here it's actually pretty good I've given hanil a whole hour to write the video and it shouldn't take more than 20 minutes if he's following my method and talking about stuff that he actually has genuine expertise in now we've got way more time to film the video so hanil can hit record on the camera he can film on his phone he can film on a camera whatever the thing is I'm assuming it's easy enough to set up he mentioned he's got this live streaming studying setup so already has the camera he hits record and he just shares from the heart and tries to add as much value to his audience as he possibly can sharing everything he knows within the confines of this triplet method of creating this video the three main points and the three sub points now the video is filmed it then gets uploaded to Google Drve or Drpbox or whatever you hand an SD card to an editor if you know them in real life the editing is outsourced a few days later Anil is going to get a review from the editor and it might take half an hour back and forth and then he publish the video this is the simple process to making a video every week with 4 hours of time the way we then make this process more efficient for example is by recognizing what can we batch so this was a thing that I really realized when I was working full-time as a doctor I realized that the only thing that actually needed large amounts of time was the filming I didn't have a setup in my house so I had to like set up the camera set up the light some tripod of the microphone film the thing and then take them all back down again so it would take me like an hour to set up for filming so what I realized well if it takes an hour to set up for filming every time I set up for filming I should film more than one video I should ideally film two or three or four videos in the same day because if I can do that then I can be very efficient and then I can do my entire like upload calendar in one filming session so i h was being really Pro this is what I would advise I would say hanal you should probably have instead of thinking about about this as like 4 hours per week where it's like it has to be consistent instead let's say this is I don't know a monthly calendar or something you guys get the idea this is a Saturday this is a Sunday now I'm going to assume because hanil Works full-time you can't really do very much Monday to Friday I'm assuming you can't really do very much what I would do if I were Anil is I would say okay the first Saturday of every month is going to be my film day and the goal is to film four videos in that day the goal is to film four videos on that Saturday that means in preparation for that first Saturday where I'm going to take the whole day or the whole like morning or whole afternoon whatever to film four videos I need to make sure I've prepared those four videos so how do we find the time to to prepare those four videos well conveniently when it comes to idea generation titles thumbnails and writing these are actually all of these are things that can be done in small amounts of time here and there when I was working as a doctor full-time for example you know a full-time job is not really a full-time job there are very few days where it's genuinely back to back and you don't even have a single minute to yourself you've got break times you've got lunch breaks you've got those times when you're seeing a patient and then they have to be taken to radiology and it takes 5 minutes to get there and back and there's no other patients to see so you've got 10 minutes of time you've got times when you're on the toilet you've got times when if you're commuting to work it looks like Anil is driving but if you're commuting to work for example on public transport you can use your phone you can get an iPad or laptop or a notepad like there's all these little moments of time here and there and you can use those moments of time to think okay cool my goal is on Saturday the 1st of August I'm going to film four videos so I need four ideas I need four titles and thumbnails I need to have four outlines created so that when it gets to Saturday the 1st of August I now have enough content that I can just bang up four videos on that one filming session and that means then hanil can give all four videos to his one or two or three outsourced editors and they can slowly work on it over time then hanil is not spending that much time reviewing those back and forth because there's lead times and it takes a while to get back from the editors and stuff and this is really how you become a parttime YouTuber this was the exact method that I used to grow my channel from zero to like 1.