The process of becoming a successful YouTuber can be a long and confusing one. How do you get people to watch your videos? How do you convert them into a subscriber and build your audience base?
A number of years ago I was one of those YouTube creators who couldn’t understand why my channel wasn’t growing, and why other similar channels had grown at a much faster rate.
I started watching videos on YouTube to try to understand if there was something I could do to improve my subscriber numbers and discovered Tim Schmoyer and the Video Creators courses.
Videocreators.com offers a range of products and services with the aim of helping YouTubers grow their channel and earn a living from it.
Over the years I’ve done several of the courses and thought it would be useful to collect all my thoughts into a single blog post so others know what to expect if they sign up.
This isn’t a sponsored article, I have used affiliate links but the information and views are based on my personal experience of each of the products.
If you find it helpful and choose to make a purchase via my link, thank you very much, you’re helping support this website and my YouTube channel, please visit Video Creators and good luck with your channel.
If you decide to purchase without clicking my link, no hard feelings, I hope you found the article useful.
And of course you might decide NOT to purchase after reading the below, and that’s OK too. My aim is to provide you with an overview of my personal experience of the various courses I’ve taken to help you make an informed decision.
With that out the way, let’s begin!
What is VideoCreators.com?
If you’re a YouTuber who hasn’t experienced the huge growth seen in some channels you’re likely to have turned to YouTube for help, and that will likely have led you to the Video Creators channel setup by Tim Schmoyer.
Aimed specifically at YouTubers, VideoCreators.com offers a range of courses and services to help you grow your channel and be a successful YouTuber.
In total, I’ve tried 4 of the paid services on offer:
- 30 Days To A Better YouTube Channel – On online do it yourself training course
- Video Labs – An online group training course expanding on the 30 day training via group collaboration
- Story Labs – An online group training course focusing on story telling
- The Action Plan – A 3 month customized consulting program with dedicated growth expert
It’s worth noting that a lot of great content is available on the VideoCreators YouTube channel, each of the above gives structured approach to that information with specific tasks and goals. It’s also worth noting there have been some mini courses thrown in which I won’t be covering in this review, but which do add a little value to the over package.
Courses are all managed via a central dashboard, if you’ve ever done any sort of online course it’ll be familiar territory, they use Thikific as the course hosting platform.
How can VideoCreators.com courses benefit online course creators?
VideoCreators.com offers valuable courses for online course creators looking to enhance their skills in creating and marketing online courses. With their courses, creators can learn to maximize the potential of various online course creation tools to create high-quality and engaging content for their audience.
Who is Tim Schmoyer?
Tim Schmoyer is the founder of Videocreators.com and in his own words he’s “living a story as a husband, father, entrepreneur, and certified YouTube consultant. I help video creators spread messages that change lives.”
His origin story for getting into this line of work began when he met a girl. Wanting to share updates with his family back home he would make videos about how they were getting on and post them on a new video hosting platform called YouTube.
Over time, he noticed random strangers were not only watching the videos, they were interacting with them, and this was the start of his obsession with all things YouTube. And if you’re wondering he got the girl and now has a lovely home with many children (I won’t put the number as it seems to keep rising!).
In 2006 he founded VideoCreators.com with the aim of helping video creators and entrepreneurs not only build a community of subscribers but also build income streams that would sustain them full time.
It’s not just us little creators he works with, his expertise has been called on by the likes of Disney, Warner Brothers, eBay and HBO to name just a few.
And being a YouTube creator himself you can get a sense of who he is and what he is about by watching his videos, he puts out a lot of great content, you can learn a huge amount without paying anything.
The original version was a digital book, one you can probably still get your hands on if you Google it. In 2020 it got updated and turned into an online course that you do at your own pace.
Overall I found this course to be excellent, it gives you a fantastic structure to work with, in theory you could complete it in 30 days but it’s up to you how fast/slow you go.
First thing to note, this course isn’t for you if you don’t have a YouTube channel. This doesn’t cover the basics of creating a channel, it’s aimed at those who have created a channel and understand how to make and upload videos.
Both new and established channels will benefit from the course which covers:
- Channel strategy
- Channel design
- Video strategy
- Getting viewers to care
- First steps for growth
- Tools YouTube offers
Buying the course also gets you 1 months access to the YouTube Growth Network, a pay monthly social network set up especially for video creators. Personally I didn’t find this that useful, certainly not something I’d continue to pay for, but it was great to get access to it as part of the course.
Each section has a number of videos and resources to work through. Video quality is, as you’d expect from a seasoned YouTuber, excellent.
The course does a great job stepping you through the basics such as what to use for your channel icon, what information to put in your channel banner, what to consider to make attention grabbing thumbnails.
The 30-day step-by-step approach ensures you’re not overwhelmed with information and tasks, and while you can do the course in 30 days there isn’t any pressure to rush through it, better to take your time with each step to get things right.
The interesting thing about this course is the way it blends business ideas and strategy with YouTube. For example, in the channel strategy section the course walks you through defining a target audience and value proposition, tasks you’d normally do in a workplace.
I got a lot out of this course, it isn’t a 10 minute and your done mini course designed to get you to purchase something else, this is a highly useful well put together course which would be helpful to almost every YouTuber.
I followed the course and have attempted to implement as much of it as possible. I’m sure I’m a much better YouTuber because of the course but it didn’t cause my channel subscribers to skyrocket.
Does that mean it failed me? Actually no, it’s because of the course I know WHY my channel isn’t quickly growing, but we’ll come back to that later.
For more information and current pricing visit Video Creators website.
If you’ve completed the 30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel course and need more help, or if you don’t want to do the course on your own, then Video Labs is the next logical step.
Video Labs is a live group version of the online course where you interact with other people while learning how to improve your channel and future videos.
It doesn’t matter where in the world you are as any group sessions were done via Zoom. At the time I took the course Tim was on all the calls, however it’s been a few years and I know he’s got a couple of assistants now (one of which was on my Video Labs course with me) so he may have taken a step back.
The course is structured to give you tasks to complete, this is brilliant for those who struggle to get things done without an accountability buddy.
We had to review each others channels, have group discussions about different topics, and we were given time to ask Tim questions directly.
I really enjoyed the group element, it is easy to just watch channels you’re interested in so to be asked to watch a range of channels and think about the same elements of each really helps to train you into a certain way of thinking.
The interaction the video labs program provides was really helpful in understanding topics such as if I should use an intro video, why video titles are very important but video tags aren’t, real
At the time the group gave feedback they were disappointed not to get channel feedback from Tim, he chairs the meetings, talks through valuable lessons, but didn’t look at our channels.
We had a private Facebook group set up, I think this has now been replaced with the private Might Networks group.
I had a positive experience with Video Labs, looking back I think if you are capable of being self-motivated and can work through online courses you will likely get 90% of the same benefit from the online course.
For more information and current pricing visit Video Creators website.
I was a beta participant of Story Labs. At the time of writing this course isn’t listed on the website, I suspect it may have been folded into Video Labs rather than be a stand-alone course.
In recent years there has been a shift to following story telling elements in YouTube videos to help with viewer retention and watch time and this course was set up similarly to Video Labs but it focused specifically on story telling.
This wasn’t a topic I knew much about, so I found this fascinating. The course covered what the 3 act structure is, how it can be applied to YouTube videos, examples and live discussions.
It was a very interesting course that had one key issue, it didn’t really help get me (and others) to the point where we understood how to apply story telling techniques to YouTube videos.
I’m a product reviewer, but we also had people with cooking channels, tear down channels, all sorts and in many cases we struggled to understand how best to implement what we learned.
Of course, we were testing a brand-new course and that’s what makes me wonder if it’s been folded into Video Labs rather than be a stand-alone course.
At the time of writing this course isn’t available.
While I was on Video Labs Tim was cooking up a new service called The Action Plan. It was too expensive for me to want to try, but a couple of years later he had redone it, delegated work to his new assistants and asked for beta testers to try the new service, giving feedback in return for a lower cost.
The Action Plan is a 3 month 1-on-1 consultation program that takes a deep dive into your channel and gives feedback on every element, including every video/thumbnail you plan to publish during the 3-month time frame.
I felt I’d done everything I could to get my channel growing and decided this direct one to one feedback would be a good thing to try.
For context, I know the problem with my channel, I’ve identified the issue years ago thanks to Tim: I’m not specific.
By that I mean I don’t have a niche dialled in, I don’t have a mission statement or aim, I just like to review stuff and that stuff can be rather random. One video might look at a new mobile, the next looks at a robot vacuum, the one after that an AI content creating website.
I discovered this thanks to the earlier courses and haven’t changed that side of my channel, but thought there much be other areas I could improve on and potentially an external expert could suggest and guide me through a channel pivot.
After signing up (literally, there’s a contract you have to sign) and sorting out permissions for the team to be able to access my channel statistics it was time to meet the team. I’d been assigned D’Laina Hunt, as with previous courses all interaction was done via Zoom so you can take advantage of this wherever you are in the world (time zones permitting).
Coincidentally the other person that could’ve been assigned to me was someone that did the Video Labs course with me, Tim sends out recruitment emails to previous customers as he knows we have a good grounding in what he offers, so if you take a course you never know, you might end up working with the team!
The first month went over the basics, which didn’t take long as I’d covered most off during the previous training. I made a few changes to my channel art and playlists but generally the channel was in good shape and this allowed us to move on to more in-depth discussions.
I got along really well with D’Laina, she crunched a lot of data ahead of our meetings and put together a slide deck showing where I was doing well, where there were improvements to be made and a set of practical suggestions and tasks covering what I should do to improve things.
Generally I found the suggestions to be spot on, it really helped me consider things like the wording I use, adding more cuts in to keep the viewer interested and some of the video ideas were hit and miss, but that’s part of the process. I did go out of my comfort zone to try and make some different types of videos, and that
As well as the channel feedback she would watch any draft videos and look at any potential thumbnails before I published them, proving great feedback and suggestions (generally “add more b-roll!”).
We also worked on a new channel trailer, the wording and language I used and how to end videos without ending the viewing session (i.e. keep the viewer watching more YouTube).
Overall I found this to be very helpful, but we never did manage to really come up with a way for me to pivot the channel while keeping me able to review lots of different things.
Unlike the course the plan can continue if you feel you need additional support, you can pay for an additional 3 months and keep rolling that over.
I decided the full price wouldn’t provide a good return on investment so only had a single 3-month block.
For more information and current pricing visit Video Creators website.
I’m sure by now some services on offer will have evolved, Tim had explained he is always tinkering, changing and (hopefully) improving the service on offer, good job considering YouTube is a constantly evolving platform!
At the time of writing VideoCreators offer 3 paid for products:
- 30 Days to a better YouTube channel online course
- Video Labs live course
- The Action Plan 3 month consultation
And of course there is a load of free material available on their YouTube channel and via a podcast they have.
Here is my recommendation:
- Work through the YouTube channel videos if you don’t want to spend any money, lots of great information available but you’ll need to figure out what to take from it.
- If you’re ready to spend some money to help improve your channel either buy the 30 days course OR Video Labs, don’t buy both. The 30-day course provides you with a great structure to follow and tasks to complete, much of this was repeated in Video Labs but that adds group discussion and accountability.
- For those needing a lot more help The Action Plan is a very good option, you’ll get your own consultant who will provide you with a detailed analysis of your channel and one-to-one support.
I wouldn’t skip directly to the Action Plan, there is so much you address in steps 1 and 2 it’d be a waste to spend 3 very expensive months fixing the basics rather than really getting stuck in to the advanced topics you can cover.
Ready to hit the purchase button and become a better content creator? Visit Video Creators which is my affiliate link, doing so supports my review work and let’s me know you’ve found this aritcle helpful.
