Here’s a little secret for you guys– I have absolutely no formal business training at all. All the business information that I get, most of it comes from books that I read that has helped me grow this YouTube channel to a full-time income– not just for myself, but also to support a small team of us that create these videos and these trainings for you guys. Let me give you guys the seven top books that were most influential and helpful for me in building my YouTube business and hopefully they will be for you as well.
No More Dreaded Mondays by Dan Miller
So the first one I really recommend for you guys if you’re trying to figure out where do I go and how do I get there is this book No More Dreaded Mondays by Dan Miller. And this book was really helpful for me because it has a different chapter about different things and then at the end of each chapter has a list of questions that you should think through to really help you determine where do you want to go with your job and your career and the life that you want to create.
4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris
And I actually took the time to answer all those questions. It was a really, super helpful for me, which led me to the second book, which was 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. And that book has a lot of really good inspirational stuff in it, let me tell you.
So not everything in there is like pure gold. There’s a lot of things to be like, OK, he has different motivations for things than I do. But the general principle, the idea that you can build a business and it doesn’t have to absolutely consume your life– there are periods where that happens, even for Tim Ferris and he talks about them in the book– but that it’s possible to do this.
Primal Branding by Patrick Hanlon
The next book I read, number three, I actually now make this required reading for any client I work with now in Video Creators as a full-time thing because it’s especially valuable for any YouTuber– and that is Primal Branding by Patrick Hanlon. That is like a must-read.
He looks at all the top elements that make it really easy for a brand to develop a cult following and he breaks down the seven aspects of the code– he calls it the primal code. And each one of those seven– like if you guys are implementing those into your YouTube channel, or me into my business and my channel– all those things, guys, it makes it really easy for people to be attracted to your channel, to your content, to your videos, to your business.
E-Myth by Michael Gerber
Number four, E-Myth, was a really helpful book for me also. It’s about why most small businesses fail and what you can do to make sure that doesn’t happen to you. It’s more about how to think about your business in a way that makes it scalable so that you can bring on other people and plug them into different areas and help them so they can run it just as efficiently without you.
The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
Book number five is called The Personal MBA. Now, it is a long book and it is worth every single minute you spend reading it or listening to it on audio book– whichever you prefer. It’s basically like a crash course of business all in one volume in really simple, easy to understand language that even I, with like very little to no background experience, could understand.
If you look at the table of contents in this book, it looks like there’s a lot of really boring topics that you really just don’t care about as a creative type of person like I am. But it’s not explained or written about in a very boring way at all. Very easily digestible and very, very, extremely helpful.
Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff
Number six is the book, Pitch Anything. And this book came at a very pivotal time in the Video Creators’ business because I was about to launch onto it full time. I had no backup plan. I was like this is going to work or nothing.
And I had been reading this book Pitch Anything, which is really about what it sounds like. It’s about how to pitch anything, because whatever your business is– your YouTube channel– you’re pitching something, whether it’s pitching your channel for someone to subscribe or you’re pitching a product for someone to sell or you’re pitching yourself for them to hire you for something. Whatever it is.
And so this book goes into a lot of psychology behind why people think and how they think. And not in like a manipulative way, like make them– like twist their– control their mind or anything like that. It’s more just understanding how to present the value that you truly have to offer and want to give in a way that they can actually understand it and receive it very well. It’s really a super good book.
And so this– no lie– this true story. I was bounce– it was my first day full time at Video Creators. I had a call with someone. I was learning this pitch anything stuff. And they were just kind of wanting to, like, throw me something, like a little gig just to kind of help me out. Really didn’t pay hardly anything, was doing a lot of work.
By the end of that phone call– about an hour, an hour and a half later– they were offering me a full-time job with stock ownership in the company, a leadership position in the company, and they wanted to move me out to where they were in California, all within an hour and a half because I had learned this technique in Pitch Anything.
So super good book, whether you’re pitching a channel, pitching whatever– Pitch Anything. I’ll stop talking about that one. It was a really good one.
The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz
And book number seven is The Pumpkin Plan. And the reason why this book is really good for me because it came at a point in my business where I had a lot of stuff going on. I was being spread in multiple directions. All of them were making some sort of money but I just felt like I was spread out way too thin and I was running myself ragged. And so this book came at a time when I just needed to focus. And that’s what this book helped me do on my business.
The basic idea is that in order to grow a prize-winning pumpkin or, in this case, a prize-winning business as the biggest, the baddest, the best in the industry, it can’t have a lot of other little pumpkins growing on the vine. You need a prize-winning pumpkin seed, or an idea. You need to nurture it and grow it. You need to cut off all the other little pumpkins that would suck nutrients from growing the one big pumpkin.
And for me that meant eliminating a lot of clients, a lot of work– that was a pain but I needed to open up bandwidth for the stuff I wanted to be the best at. So it was scary. I took a big cut in income for a little while as I did a lot of reordering and restructuring it, but the payoff of the end is totally worth it.
So those books were helpful for me. You can find links to all them below. You can go to Amazon and pick one up or you can do what I did and that’s actually I listened to each of these books on double speed through Audible.com because it was really hard for me to find more time to read books with everything going on with my family and my business and all my time being spread in so many directions.
So with an Audible.com subscription, I actually listened to them on double speed while working out, while driving in the car, while mowing the lawn– things like that where I could, like, double up on my time. And listening to them in double speed really helped me pay attention closer and I found that I actually retained the information better because I listened to it twice as fast as someone would normally talk.
If you want to try out an Audible subscription, you can use the link below to go try it out for 30 days for free. And you get any book of these or something else you want to listen to. You get to keep that book regardless of whether or not you continue your trial.
- No More Dreaded Monday
- The 4-Hour Work Week
- Primal Branding
- E-Myth
- The Personal MBA
- Pitch Anything
- The Pumpkin Plan
Full disclosure: All of the links above are affiliate links. I get a small percentage of each sale they generate. Thank you for your support!