Do You Know Why Some YouTube Experts Are Often Called 'Gurus'?

+PLUS: LinkedIn and the Swarms of Locusts Flooding the Site

3 quotes

Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means. - Ronald Reagan

“Sustainable love is being with someone you like, with someone who frustrates you, someone you fight with, but it is also about being with someone you refuse to give up on.” JGS

“Conflict is drama, and how people deal with conflict shows you the kind of people they are.” - Stephen Moyer, British actor

Career Notes

• Layoffs amid profits: an ‘enigma’ - Microsoft is in the spotlight for its most recent “strategic” layoffs, jettisoning about 15,000 employees, plus another 2,000 cuts that were categorized as underperformers. These layoffs came amid reports that the company’s net income for three quarters was about $75 billion. The net income contrasts with the company’s $80 billion investment in AI infrastructure. Microsoft CEO, in an email. to employees, described the situation as “an enigma.”

• He reads a lot of emails - Mark Cuban, a founder of Broadcast.Com from which earned hundreds of millions of dollars when Yahoo bought it, interviewed for the TV show “Power Hours.” He described his normal day as “pretty boring,” Business Insider reported. “I read and respond to emails, I work out, and I read and respond to emails. I do a couple of Zooms, then I read and respond. to emails. Then I eat dinner. Then I read and respond to emails. To be fair, BI reported, he follows his morning email session with a decaf coffee, a cookie and a shower before taking his daughter. to school. Later he works out out Life Time Fitness, taking anther shower before returning to his emails.

• Thousands of workers tried four-day work weeks. According to a study conducted by Boston College, results, after six months of working four-day weeks, workers reported less burnout, better sleep, and higher job satisfaction.

BIG Idea

This subject may be something most people do not want to hear, but I believe it to be true based on watching and interviewing entrepreneurs and solopreneurs for years: the less sexy the industry, the greater the return on your career capital.

Wealthy elites visit college campuses, and they inevitably tell the students in graduate seminars some variation of “follow your passion,” or, “follow your heart. When you are doing what you love to do, the money will follow.”

Some ‘Cool’ Creators Do Really Well, Most Don’t

What a reassuring thing to hear from a hugely successful person who is sharing career insights. That said, the guest executive probably made his billions in iron ore smelting, says Scott Galloway, a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, and an author, speaker and serial entrepreneur.

People like cool, Galloway believes. They want to be a cool creator or influencer. They want to capitalize on their passion for things like skateboarding, snowboarding, fashion shows on a busy street corner or performing crazy ”hold my beer and watch this” stunts that only a lunatic would attempt. Some influencers have cashed in on the micro-advertising rage where big-name brands hire clever YouTube videographers to promote their brands to narrow market niches, tapping into the creator’s large number of followers.

True, the creator economy is surging. Global investment bank, Goldman Sachs, estimates it will be $500 billion industry by 2027.

Jump in; the water is great. But watch out for the alligators.

The YouTube gurus who specialize in teaching “this is how you make money in a side hustle,” frequently - as in almost always fail to mention that the vast majority of YouTube wannabe influencers do not earn a substantial income from the platform. While it's easy to assume, based on the hype, that a majority of YouTubers are raking in the cash, from direct sales, affiliate marketing deals, and advertising on their site, a large percentage of creators struggle to make even a modest income; the earnings of many are below the federal poverty line.

When I launched my online coaching business with YouTube videos and a snazzy, expensive (over budget) website in January 2022, the bombardment of people willing to share their brilliant marketing skills, usually for a hefty price, began.

I was eager for a solution that would kick-start my coaching practice in a challenging pandemic environment. People who were laid off or furloughed worried about their spending and many pulled out of our customized prremier one-on-one coaching courses. Moving everything online with video courses to reduce costs, made sense. to me. But that meant making more YouTube videos to attract clients. And then the bombardment of marketing calls and badly written emails from the gurus increased. In the end, I got sick from the marketing Kool-Aid, and, subsequently, friends and family diagnosed me as malignantly disillusioned.

Yes, it can be done, but a twenty-something outlook regarding how information should be presented and a PhD in digital marketing wouldn’t hurt. I had neither.

Today I remain a little embarrassed that I got excited about the potential to grow my coaching business using the magic of YouTube. Yes, it can be done, but having a twenty-something mentality and a PhD in digital marketing wouldn’t have hurt. I had neither.

I spent hours upon hours recording courses on career management, from resumes, and networking to a master class for interviewing. I had hours of great content, or so I was assured by still more YouTube gurus in the US, the UK, theMiddle East and India. They all wanted me to hire them. These digital problem solvers came from everywhere — YouTube, LinkedIn, Tik-Tok, Facebook, and Instagram — dozens upon dozens, wave after wave.

With a limited budget and a CFO who was adamant about spending, I could never wrap my brain around the idea of paying $5,000 a month for a six-month engagement to an expert making a variety of impressive promises. Dozens of these gurus who kept using the cool phrase “I want to partner with you,” but wanted nothing to do with sharing the financial risks, which I thought is the essence of partnership. Most knew nothing about my business, but never mind, they had the answer.

I now know why they are called gurus - charlatan must be too hard to spell.

The initial allure of this approach was reinforced by the fact that YouTube, owned by Google, is the second-largest search engine in the world. The number of creators is growing, as are the claims of great success. I reminded myself, what could possibly go wrong?

I believe that the success stories for many people is true, but not the vast majority, some of whom drove their oxcart and substantial savings into the creator economy drainage ditch.

Watch this video.

QUESTION

For grins, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

FINAL THOUGHT

I joined LinkedIn in January 2004. The platform was launched in May 2003. For the first two years, the platform’s growth came from friends, family anda feew people like me.

I was a very early adopter. I like to tell people that I was not there when the brilliant LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman hit the enter button to go live, but I was, unknowingly, on the front porch, searching for a platform to facilitate networking. I was seeing hundreds of executives struggle with networking, and I saw LinkedIn as a potential solution.

Today, I have more than 16,000 followers and more than 13,800 connections. Here is how I see LinkedIn today:

• My initial connections shared my enthusiasm for the promise of this platform, to be a great networking/professional connections tool.

• Then came the people who realized I was a recruiter, so they connected.

• Then came the people who liked my content and wanted to connect.

• Lately, most people who seek to connect want to sell me something. It is probably something I do not need, and it probably doesn’t work.

Today LinkedIn’s power is not in networking, but as helpful research tool and as a talent acquisition platform for high-speed scanners to review member profiles for future recruitment. But there is the dark side that is driving many people crazy — the hordes of people who want to connect to share ideas. That sounds reasonable so I accept, but in less than a minute, they come out of the closet to press you to “jump on a quick call” so they can pitch their product. Good grief.

For a while there were thousands of fake profiles. - women primarily from EasternEurope and China who wanted to “benefit from my great and impressive expertise.” The benefit was more than likely fraud.
My response? I immediately cancel their connection. I now reject 98 percent of all connection requests because those people are stupid enough to think my business would thrive with their service even though they know absolutely nothing about what we do. Many think I am still recruiting, a field from which I retired in 2018. (After 40 years of domestic and international traveling, I decided enough was enough.)

So how would you describe LinkedIn today?

Don’t get me started…

I will share my positive thoughts on LinkedIn — yes, I do have some — later today in the Substack notes section.

Enhance Your Networking Skills

John’s latest ebook focuses on Networking 3.0, a concept that will maximize your investment in networking. It is available on our website, www.johngself.com or in Amazon books.