I discovered Ali by listening to Nathan Barry’s podcast. At the time, Ali had around 2 million YouTube subscribers; now, he has almost 6 million.
What content does Ali create?
Ali’s content is vast – you may quickly become overwhelmed if you try and create as much as he does from day one.
Articles
Ali has been writing content on his site since 2016. One of his first articles was about overcoming the fear of personal blogging. His content has varied in how often it’s written, with some years (like 2018) only having four pieces written.
Newsletter
Ali has been a lot more consistent with his weekly Newsletter. This used to be called “Sunday Snippets” but has recently been rebranded to LifeNotes and sent “weekly(ish)”. He’s grown it over the years up to 290k subscribers.
He started to monetise the podcast through sponsors in 2022 and booked up sponsorship slots into 2023 and beyond.
Podcast
Ali takes his Deep Dive podcast seriously, which for him means committing to regularly producing content for it. It has the added benefit of being filmed and put up onto YouTube – benefiting from things like Adsense and Sponsorships there too.
Even better, through deep dives into the minds of entrepreneurs, creators and other inspiring people – Ali is always learning and developing his own deep understanding.
YouTube
This is where Ali has focussed his time and it shows with the majority of his subscriber-base there.
He joined YouTube in 2007 and has uploaded almost 1,000 videos with each video improving over the last.
Courses
Ali runs different courses which he self-hosts, watching previous videos on Ali’s channel he promotes
Neither of these courses you’ll find on Ali’s courses page which he’s now changed to promote Part Time YouTuber Academy ($995) and Part Time YouTuber Accelerator ($5,995).
Skillshare
Ali has seven classes hosted on Skillshare and you can view them here. He’s been very smart here and created content, which he then plugs during his YouTube videos. In addition, Skillshare sponsor his YouTube videos.
He’s promoting his own classes on Skillshare (one which is a 5hr YouTube class). This gains him royalties from Skillshare based on student view time as well as pushing people to his channel and other types of content.
Book – Feel Good Productivity
Affiliate Links
If you check out Ali’s videos or even his tech page you’ll notice he’s got affiliate links everywhere and they bring in a lot of revenue for him. This isn’t just Amazon Associates links – it’s also negotiated affiliate terms for products he uses and loves – such as Skillshare.
Book reviews
Ali does what a lot of great creators do. He reads a lot of books. He then writes book notes and covers them on YouTube too which you’ll notice at the end of his book notes on Die With Zero.
Community
Finally, Ali also runs a community around productivity called Productivity Lab. At the time of writing this deep dive, it’s currently sold out but promoted as a 12 month plan for access to the community.
How does Ali promote it?
Ali is active on all the Social channels you’d expect him to be. He’s recently started to monetize his Instagram and TikTok through sponsored posts but primarly uses them to repurpose YouTube shorts and snippets from longer videos.
Ali is active on Twitter and posts regular threads on productivity and other topics – at the end of this thread he promotes a related Youtube video and his Productivity Lab community.
He does exactly the same on threads – with a useful value added thread with a link through to a video.
Another example of a Twitter thread sharing Social Proof on his cohort based course, tagging the person who had success. This brings FOMO and more people will want to replicate the same success.
It’s a lot of work if you’re doing it all yourself but Ali will delegate these tasks to his team so the content on socials is leveraged to drive results for his business.
Not to mention that Ali is a guest on various podcasts (like Nathan’s where I discovered him) and also collaborations with other YouTubers like Thomas Frank
How does Ali make revenue?
Ali’s revenue is split amongst different income streams (and this doesn’t even include investment income if he’s invested profits and personal dividends over the years). The clear front runner is his PTYA cohort-based course which leverages his success on YouTube to teach others how they can do the same.
Ali made this analysis very easy for me with this video. The data covers up to the end of 2022. The key thing to notice is the diversification of income.
- YouTube Adsense
- Amazon Associates
- Affiliate Income
- YouTube Sponsorship
- Podcast Adsense & Brand deals
- Newsletter
- IG + TikTok
- Merch
- Digital products
- Skillshare
- Self hosted courses
- Cohort courses
Over the past two years he’s also launched Productivity Lab and had a new york times best-selling Book “Feel Good Productivity” so his income is likely higher and his latest video shows profit projections are similar to 2022 (at around £2m).
What can you learn from Ali?
My main take-away is there’s a LOT that Ali puts out there under his name. It’s not just Ali doing all this though. He’s built a team around him, outsources and delegates what he can.
It’s also taken him YEARS of doing this consistently. Even when the first two years didn’t bring in lots of revenue he stuck with it.
- Year 1: $2
- Year 2: $24,216
- Year 3: $130,091
He’s didn’t give up too soon after years of $0. He’s stuck with it and continued to produce what he believes in and is passionate about.
The biggest growth was on the back of his launch of the cohort-based “Part-time YouTuber Academy” and the positive feedback and additional cohorts ran during 2021 and 2022.
Final thoughts
Ali is an inspiration for many. The content he creates is vast and some of the hardest content (video content) to produce to a high standard and edit so it’s engaging. I’d advise starting with a single focus (like a Newsletter) and work on that consistently to find your audience-market fit and then build out more content in the same niche.
I wrote a X/Twitter thread summarising this deep dive and would love it if you could RT if you use X/Twitter.
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