**My Journey to YouTube Success: A Cautionary Tale**

As I sit here reflecting on my journey to becoming a successful YouTuber, I am reminded of the importance of perseverance and learning from one's mistakes. It's a lesson that I wish more people would take to heart, especially those who are just starting out in their own creative pursuits.

I remember the first time I tried to make it big on YouTube. I was young, naive, and eager to succeed. I spent countless hours creating content, promoting my channel, and interacting with my audience. But, despite my best efforts, things didn't quite go as planned. In fact, they went horribly wrong. I cheated the system and got caught, which led to me losing access to my account and nearly ending my YouTube career.

It was a devastating blow, but one that ultimately taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of integrity and honesty. If I had given up at that point, I would never have reached my current level of success. Instead, I took a step back, reflected on my mistakes, and vowed to do things differently in the future.

**The Importance of Small Steps**

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was trying to rush into things too quickly. I wanted to make it big right away, without putting in the hard work and dedication required to achieve success. This approach ultimately led to my downfall. If I had taken small steps, focusing on building my channel gradually over time, I might have avoided some of the mistakes that I made.

As I look back, I realize that success is not a destination; it's a journey. It takes time, effort, and perseverance to build something truly remarkable. Don't be discouraged if you don't see immediate results or if your content isn't performing as well as you'd like. Keep pushing forward, even when the going gets tough.

**The Power of Failure**

I want to emphasize that failure is not the end; it's often a stepping stone to success. I've failed twice in my business ventures, and each time, I learned something valuable that helped me to grow and improve. If you're willing to take risks and try new things, you'll inevitably face setbacks and failures. But don't let those experiences discourage you.

In fact, most successful people have experienced failure at some point in their lives. In my business classes, I learned that many top investment firms won't even consider investing in someone who hasn't had a failure in the past. That's because they know that person doesn't know how to cope with adversity or bounce back from setbacks.

**Lessons Learned**

Looking back on my journey, I realize that there are several key lessons that I've learned along the way. First and foremost, it's essential to be patient and persistent. Success rarely happens overnight; it takes time, effort, and dedication.

Secondly, don't be afraid to take risks and try new things. That was one of my biggest mistakes early on – trying to play it too safe and not taking enough risks. By being willing to step outside of your comfort zone and try something different, you'll often find that you're able to achieve more than you ever thought possible.

Finally, don't be discouraged by failure or setbacks. Instead, use them as an opportunity to learn and grow. Ask yourself what went wrong and how you can improve moving forward.

**The Benefits of Long-Term Success**

I'm grateful to say that my YouTube career has been incredibly rewarding. Not only have I built a loyal community of fans, but I've also had the opportunity to pursue my passions and make a living doing something I love.

But what's even more fulfilling is knowing that all of this was worth it in the end. If I'm being completely honest, there were times when I doubted myself and wondered if it was all worth it. But looking back, I realize that the struggles and setbacks were all part of the journey to success.

**A Message to My Fans**

To my incredible fans who have supported me from the very beginning, I want to say thank you. Thank you for subscribing, liking, commenting, and sharing my content with others. Your support has meant the world to me, and I'm so grateful to have you all along for this wild ride.

If you're just starting out on your own creative journey, I hope that my story can serve as a cautionary tale and a reminder that success takes time, effort, and perseverance. Don't be discouraged by failure or setbacks; instead, use them as an opportunity to learn and grow. And always remember that the slow and steady approach will often yield the best results in the long run.

**A Final Thought**

As I close this out, I want to leave you with a final thought. There's always a reason why we're not where we want to be, whether it's financial struggles or personal doubts. But what's important is that we don't let those obstacles hold us back. Instead, we use them as opportunities to learn and grow.

I hope that my story can inspire you to keep pushing forward, even when the going gets tough. Remember that success is a journey, not a destination – and with patience, persistence, and hard work, anything is possible.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthree months ago I made a video telling you guys how a car changed my life through telling that story I found that I was able to inspire ton of you guys to kind of like follow your dreams and do things you're passionate about and that's so cool a lot of you guys were asking me to make a video that was similar to that one but instead I have a kind of interesting idea rather than tell you guys another story of success that I'm proud of I kind of want to delve back into the past and bring up something that I'm kind of embarrassed I let myself do I actually had three YouTube channels before this one I've been a youtuber for seven years that's right seven years but my old channels are kind of lost in the archives of YouTube and I don't think that any of you would just stumble upon them anymore but let's just get to the point I skimmed YouTube I got BAM three times it all started when I was about 16 I got my first YouTube channel where I was a partner and I was able to put advertisements on my videos and it was super cool because I started making a little bit of money but I was young I was stupid and I was greedy at the time I watched a youtuber by the name of Arsenal Falco he only had about like 10,000 subscribers but that was the biggest BMX channel at the time I'm a very observant person so I see what other people are doing and I try to implement it in my own things when I find something that I like or find something that someone's doing that's successful an Arsenal Falco was actually putting annotations on his videos asking people to click advertisements before I go any further I just want to kind of explain to you guys how the whole advertisement pay thing works so you guys know what I'm talking about essentially Google or YouTube at the time has contracts with different advertisers whether it be a company like coca-cola or Kia or Honda or some sort of company and those companies pay YouTube to put their advertisements on YouTube videos now like five years ago this whole system worked a bit differently and you are paid based on a thing called your CTR or your click-through rate basically it's just a percentage of people that click the ad when they saw it higher CTR means you get paid more money so if you're not in control of the ad that's on your channel how can you make more money by having a more effective ad well the answer to that is by going around the system and asking people to click ads it's fraudulent it's very illegal and it defeats the entire purpose of advertising let me repeat I was young I was stupid and it is not a smart thing to do now of course YouTube being the big company that they are they're smart enough to understand this and they have lots of ways of tracking to see if it's fraudulent clicks and all that stuff but Arsenal Falco found a way around the system and that was through using annotations to ask people to click the ads if you directed traffic from an external website having people click ads YouTube could tell if you had something in the description or the comments asking people to click ads YouTube could tell but somehow their system wasn't advanced enough yet whereas if you had it in the annotation saying like hey can you click this advertisement they wouldn't know I was young I was stupid and I asked people to click ads on probably one out of every three or four videos that I posted but I was smart and I didn't just ask people to click ads I would do something in a video like maybe something would break and I would kind of utilize that to my advantage you'd be like hey I need to buy a new phone can you guys help me out by like clicking an ad or two and when lots of people do that it makes the difference between a video making like maybe ten dollars and a video making a few hundred dollars I got away with this for a pretty good amount of time maybe a couple months maybe almost a year but then I got caught see Arsenal Falco was smart enough to stop doing it before he got caught but I wasn't I was young I was stupid and I was greedy one day I woke up and there was an email in my inbox saying that my youtube channel had been banned from ever becoming a partner again I quickly frantically searched on YouTube and tried to figure out if there was a way to reinstate my account and basically all of us said you're screwed your accounts gone forever you really messed up you shouldn't have done that so like all right how can I do this again so I kind of navigated the Uncharted channels of YouTube and was able to create a new account under someone else's name under someone else's social security number and was able to start doing YouTube videos again but I was stupid and I kept asking for clicks on ads at this point my channel actually started to gain some success and I think I was getting close to like 30,000 subscribers on my channel where I basically uploaded lots of informational and helpful how to's so yeah let me just talk about that real quick so it doesn't just seem like I was making videos to make money like I was really putting a lot of work into our videos or making cool edits we were making how to's and instructional videos for BMX so it's not like I would just make videos and just only telling people to click ads this was maybe like one out of every four videos so this next part is kind of hazy but I do believe that I did ask people to click ads on that new channel for a short period of time and then I wised up and I was like okay I don't want to get this channel banned too so let me just stop it the issue with that however is that I have a lot of loyal subscribers and they all stuck with me and they remembered those videos asking them to click ads so they continued clicking the advertisements so the issue with this is YouTube is smart now and I can see like hey we have people clicking ads multiple times and like they're not really watching the video and they're just clicking the ABS this is pretty fraudulent and if they see a repeated history of this they're probably gonna ban your channel and it happened again that was like devastating for me I had been putting so much work into my videos I've been really like taking YouTube a bit more seriously and like my channel is my baby so to get that email again and to figure out that I was banned like really kind of crushed me it's not like I was making some crazy amount of money but at the time I was in high school and I made a few thousand dollars and like that was a lot for me back then I was convinced that I was screwed there'd be no way for me to start another channel and just that I was just destined to keep getting my channels banned because all my fans remember that I asked them to click ads so I just went back to my roots and I still loved making videos on YouTube I never did it only for the money that was just kind of like an added benefit the icing on the cake the tires on the car the whipped cream on my cherry sundae you know what I mean so I went back and I started uploading to my old channel the original one and I would just upload videos like they might have a copy or a song or something but I didn't have ads on any of them and they weren't to make money if you didn't understand the channels weren't necessarily banned from existence they were just banned from the possibility of me ever making money on them ever ever ever ever my channel was doing great I was having a blast doing it but I never really planned on taking it anywhere in life I'm really doing anything more than just having fun with it until one of my friends in my marketing class by the name of Dan Nolte convinced me that I should give it one last go that's when I started the channel that you guys are watching now back then it was called L Z BMX now I just changed it to my name because the content really does revolve around me and not just BMX but it was honestly a breath of fresh air I loved making videos I love the idea that I could make money off videos and I can make it something that's sustainable and damn Catholic ignited a fire in my head that you know maybe it was possible to do it again so I got in touch with a multi-channel network they turned into like hounds at the time and they were just scooping channels up wherever they possibly could and the cool thing was I got on the multi-channel network and I kind of parted by ways with Google Adsense and there wasn't really any more chance of that happening because the multi-channel networks kind of in control of all that and it just kind of got rid of the possibility of my channel giving banned so it gave me this sense of security and I finally started putting all my efforts back into YouTube because I knew that I wasn't just gonna get this random email anymore and get banned I just realized that I didn't tell you guys any of the names of these channels and I don't want it to be a mystery so like I encourage you to go back and like watch these old videos and you can kind of get an idea of what I'm talking about my first channel was called BMX guitar five I would make BMX videos guitar videos edits that goes all the way back to like 2008-2009 after that came Adam Elzey how to's which was mainly just like how-to videos short little clips stuff like that and there was also another one in the mix called BMX guitar no nope it wasn't called that it was called BMX reviews and how to's and that one was kind of a channel that I split with my friend Gino and we made like again instructionals and just stuff like that now all that money that I made the few thousands of dollars what did I spend it on well I spent on pretty much Starbucks every day I spent a lot on food I would always treat all my friends because back then like since it was kind of cheating the system and I was making money off nothing I've really did a place of value on it like I didn't feel like I earned the money so I was just like okay yeah I'll buy your dinner okay yeah I'll buy you a coffee and I just blew the money like I don't know where it went what's the takeaway from this whole situation for you guys like why why did I just wake up today and decide that I wanted to make this video well first off I think there's a very important lesson to learn about being greedy I was young I was stupid and I was greedy and I have wanted short-term success you know I wanted money so I could buy car parts I wanted money so I could buy Starbucks and I cheated the system and I did something that was very wrong so I could get money in the short term and through that I almost completely got rid of any chance of having long term YouTube career if you will can you guys imagine where I would be right now if I still had my first channel and I was still making videos on that chances are I'd probably be at a million subscribers already I don't know if it's applicable in this case but there's always that saying you know that the slow and steady wins the race the turtle wins the race and the hare doesn't win the race because the hare is turbo lag and the turtle is just like a v8 naturally aspirated so it's like that's I don't know but seriously like don't be discouraged if you don't have success initially from the beginning like take small steps and just work towards a goal because if you try to like go all-out everything at once chances are something's gonna go wrong you're gonna make a stupid mistake you're gonna cut corners and your long term success won't be there would you rather have $2,000 today right now or would you rather make $200 every month for the rest of your life the first situation assumes that you're not going to make any money for the rest of your life and that you can't invest that $2,000 and gain interest on it so I don't want to hear that argument now on top of that there's also an important lesson to learn about failure I failed twice I got so discouraged I almost gave up on YouTube completely I can't imagine where I would be today if I gave up but when something goes so wrong that you've put so much hard work towards it's extremely discouraging and I can see why people give up on things every single day but listen to this this is something that almost every single business cos I've been in has told me and that's that the more you fail the more your chances are of being successful don't look at failure as the end but rather look at it as an experience to learn and to not make those same mistakes again 90% of the most successful people in our country have failed with a business or something in the past and that's helped them to get to where they are now 90% of statistics are also false including that one right there but I'm pretty sure that a lot of the most important people and smart people failed at one time I do know for a fact that I did learn in my business classes that a lot of the top like investment firms that will invest in companies actually won't even touch someone that hasn't had a failure in the past because then they know that that person doesn't know how to cope with when their business is going downhill I encourage you guys to go back and look at my old channels and see how much my content has evolved see how much I as a person have evolved and just see like some of the mistakes I made and how that helped me to get to where I am I hope you guys seeing a channel that only has a few thousand views and has like probably 90% negative comments might give you guys some inspiration if you're starting a channel yourself or if you're doing something and you're not insanely successful from the get-go to close this out I just want to thank you guys like so much I know there's even some of you out there that have been subscribed since the first BMX guitar 5 channel and that's insane that you guys have stuck with me like 6 years now so if you have been subscribed to me since that channel thank you so much like if you can like comment cuz I think it'd be cool to see how many of you guys are still around I just I think it's so cool that you guys kind of grow and evolve with us and you see everything from like me getting my first car to moving to college to getting sponsored to starting drifting to getting married like we're on a honeymoon right now while you guys are watching this we're so insanely grateful to have fans like you guys and I hope that this story gave you something that you could take away and I hope that it resonated with you if you have a friend that just failed there's someone that's struggling with something maybe showing them this video will help them and I always appreciate you guys sharing to help them out help me out by hitting the like button and leaving a comment and I will see you guys next time even though I just talked a lot about money and my own materialistic desires keep in mind that is not the point of this video I'm not trying to teach you guys how to make money and I'm not trying to tell you that the only reason I've ever done anything was just for this car this video was about goals that is the reason why this car changed my lifethree months ago I made a video telling you guys how a car changed my life through telling that story I found that I was able to inspire ton of you guys to kind of like follow your dreams and do things you're passionate about and that's so cool a lot of you guys were asking me to make a video that was similar to that one but instead I have a kind of interesting idea rather than tell you guys another story of success that I'm proud of I kind of want to delve back into the past and bring up something that I'm kind of embarrassed I let myself do I actually had three YouTube channels before this one I've been a youtuber for seven years that's right seven years but my old channels are kind of lost in the archives of YouTube and I don't think that any of you would just stumble upon them anymore but let's just get to the point I skimmed YouTube I got BAM three times it all started when I was about 16 I got my first YouTube channel where I was a partner and I was able to put advertisements on my videos and it was super cool because I started making a little bit of money but I was young I was stupid and I was greedy at the time I watched a youtuber by the name of Arsenal Falco he only had about like 10,000 subscribers but that was the biggest BMX channel at the time I'm a very observant person so I see what other people are doing and I try to implement it in my own things when I find something that I like or find something that someone's doing that's successful an Arsenal Falco was actually putting annotations on his videos asking people to click advertisements before I go any further I just want to kind of explain to you guys how the whole advertisement pay thing works so you guys know what I'm talking about essentially Google or YouTube at the time has contracts with different advertisers whether it be a company like coca-cola or Kia or Honda or some sort of company and those companies pay YouTube to put their advertisements on YouTube videos now like five years ago this whole system worked a bit differently and you are paid based on a thing called your CTR or your click-through rate basically it's just a percentage of people that click the ad when they saw it higher CTR means you get paid more money so if you're not in control of the ad that's on your channel how can you make more money by having a more effective ad well the answer to that is by going around the system and asking people to click ads it's fraudulent it's very illegal and it defeats the entire purpose of advertising let me repeat I was young I was stupid and it is not a smart thing to do now of course YouTube being the big company that they are they're smart enough to understand this and they have lots of ways of tracking to see if it's fraudulent clicks and all that stuff but Arsenal Falco found a way around the system and that was through using annotations to ask people to click the ads if you directed traffic from an external website having people click ads YouTube could tell if you had something in the description or the comments asking people to click ads YouTube could tell but somehow their system wasn't advanced enough yet whereas if you had it in the annotation saying like hey can you click this advertisement they wouldn't know I was young I was stupid and I asked people to click ads on probably one out of every three or four videos that I posted but I was smart and I didn't just ask people to click ads I would do something in a video like maybe something would break and I would kind of utilize that to my advantage you'd be like hey I need to buy a new phone can you guys help me out by like clicking an ad or two and when lots of people do that it makes the difference between a video making like maybe ten dollars and a video making a few hundred dollars I got away with this for a pretty good amount of time maybe a couple months maybe almost a year but then I got caught see Arsenal Falco was smart enough to stop doing it before he got caught but I wasn't I was young I was stupid and I was greedy one day I woke up and there was an email in my inbox saying that my youtube channel had been banned from ever becoming a partner again I quickly frantically searched on YouTube and tried to figure out if there was a way to reinstate my account and basically all of us said you're screwed your accounts gone forever you really messed up you shouldn't have done that so like all right how can I do this again so I kind of navigated the Uncharted channels of YouTube and was able to create a new account under someone else's name under someone else's social security number and was able to start doing YouTube videos again but I was stupid and I kept asking for clicks on ads at this point my channel actually started to gain some success and I think I was getting close to like 30,000 subscribers on my channel where I basically uploaded lots of informational and helpful how to's so yeah let me just talk about that real quick so it doesn't just seem like I was making videos to make money like I was really putting a lot of work into our videos or making cool edits we were making how to's and instructional videos for BMX so it's not like I would just make videos and just only telling people to click ads this was maybe like one out of every four videos so this next part is kind of hazy but I do believe that I did ask people to click ads on that new channel for a short period of time and then I wised up and I was like okay I don't want to get this channel banned too so let me just stop it the issue with that however is that I have a lot of loyal subscribers and they all stuck with me and they remembered those videos asking them to click ads so they continued clicking the advertisements so the issue with this is YouTube is smart now and I can see like hey we have people clicking ads multiple times and like they're not really watching the video and they're just clicking the ABS this is pretty fraudulent and if they see a repeated history of this they're probably gonna ban your channel and it happened again that was like devastating for me I had been putting so much work into my videos I've been really like taking YouTube a bit more seriously and like my channel is my baby so to get that email again and to figure out that I was banned like really kind of crushed me it's not like I was making some crazy amount of money but at the time I was in high school and I made a few thousand dollars and like that was a lot for me back then I was convinced that I was screwed there'd be no way for me to start another channel and just that I was just destined to keep getting my channels banned because all my fans remember that I asked them to click ads so I just went back to my roots and I still loved making videos on YouTube I never did it only for the money that was just kind of like an added benefit the icing on the cake the tires on the car the whipped cream on my cherry sundae you know what I mean so I went back and I started uploading to my old channel the original one and I would just upload videos like they might have a copy or a song or something but I didn't have ads on any of them and they weren't to make money if you didn't understand the channels weren't necessarily banned from existence they were just banned from the possibility of me ever making money on them ever ever ever ever my channel was doing great I was having a blast doing it but I never really planned on taking it anywhere in life I'm really doing anything more than just having fun with it until one of my friends in my marketing class by the name of Dan Nolte convinced me that I should give it one last go that's when I started the channel that you guys are watching now back then it was called L Z BMX now I just changed it to my name because the content really does revolve around me and not just BMX but it was honestly a breath of fresh air I loved making videos I love the idea that I could make money off videos and I can make it something that's sustainable and damn Catholic ignited a fire in my head that you know maybe it was possible to do it again so I got in touch with a multi-channel network they turned into like hounds at the time and they were just scooping channels up wherever they possibly could and the cool thing was I got on the multi-channel network and I kind of parted by ways with Google Adsense and there wasn't really any more chance of that happening because the multi-channel networks kind of in control of all that and it just kind of got rid of the possibility of my channel giving banned so it gave me this sense of security and I finally started putting all my efforts back into YouTube because I knew that I wasn't just gonna get this random email anymore and get banned I just realized that I didn't tell you guys any of the names of these channels and I don't want it to be a mystery so like I encourage you to go back and like watch these old videos and you can kind of get an idea of what I'm talking about my first channel was called BMX guitar five I would make BMX videos guitar videos edits that goes all the way back to like 2008-2009 after that came Adam Elzey how to's which was mainly just like how-to videos short little clips stuff like that and there was also another one in the mix called BMX guitar no nope it wasn't called that it was called BMX reviews and how to's and that one was kind of a channel that I split with my friend Gino and we made like again instructionals and just stuff like that now all that money that I made the few thousands of dollars what did I spend it on well I spent on pretty much Starbucks every day I spent a lot on food I would always treat all my friends because back then like since it was kind of cheating the system and I was making money off nothing I've really did a place of value on it like I didn't feel like I earned the money so I was just like okay yeah I'll buy your dinner okay yeah I'll buy you a coffee and I just blew the money like I don't know where it went what's the takeaway from this whole situation for you guys like why why did I just wake up today and decide that I wanted to make this video well first off I think there's a very important lesson to learn about being greedy I was young I was stupid and I was greedy and I have wanted short-term success you know I wanted money so I could buy car parts I wanted money so I could buy Starbucks and I cheated the system and I did something that was very wrong so I could get money in the short term and through that I almost completely got rid of any chance of having long term YouTube career if you will can you guys imagine where I would be right now if I still had my first channel and I was still making videos on that chances are I'd probably be at a million subscribers already I don't know if it's applicable in this case but there's always that saying you know that the slow and steady wins the race the turtle wins the race and the hare doesn't win the race because the hare is turbo lag and the turtle is just like a v8 naturally aspirated so it's like that's I don't know but seriously like don't be discouraged if you don't have success initially from the beginning like take small steps and just work towards a goal because if you try to like go all-out everything at once chances are something's gonna go wrong you're gonna make a stupid mistake you're gonna cut corners and your long term success won't be there would you rather have $2,000 today right now or would you rather make $200 every month for the rest of your life the first situation assumes that you're not going to make any money for the rest of your life and that you can't invest that $2,000 and gain interest on it so I don't want to hear that argument now on top of that there's also an important lesson to learn about failure I failed twice I got so discouraged I almost gave up on YouTube completely I can't imagine where I would be today if I gave up but when something goes so wrong that you've put so much hard work towards it's extremely discouraging and I can see why people give up on things every single day but listen to this this is something that almost every single business cos I've been in has told me and that's that the more you fail the more your chances are of being successful don't look at failure as the end but rather look at it as an experience to learn and to not make those same mistakes again 90% of the most successful people in our country have failed with a business or something in the past and that's helped them to get to where they are now 90% of statistics are also false including that one right there but I'm pretty sure that a lot of the most important people and smart people failed at one time I do know for a fact that I did learn in my business classes that a lot of the top like investment firms that will invest in companies actually won't even touch someone that hasn't had a failure in the past because then they know that that person doesn't know how to cope with when their business is going downhill I encourage you guys to go back and look at my old channels and see how much my content has evolved see how much I as a person have evolved and just see like some of the mistakes I made and how that helped me to get to where I am I hope you guys seeing a channel that only has a few thousand views and has like probably 90% negative comments might give you guys some inspiration if you're starting a channel yourself or if you're doing something and you're not insanely successful from the get-go to close this out I just want to thank you guys like so much I know there's even some of you out there that have been subscribed since the first BMX guitar 5 channel and that's insane that you guys have stuck with me like 6 years now so if you have been subscribed to me since that channel thank you so much like if you can like comment cuz I think it'd be cool to see how many of you guys are still around I just I think it's so cool that you guys kind of grow and evolve with us and you see everything from like me getting my first car to moving to college to getting sponsored to starting drifting to getting married like we're on a honeymoon right now while you guys are watching this we're so insanely grateful to have fans like you guys and I hope that this story gave you something that you could take away and I hope that it resonated with you if you have a friend that just failed there's someone that's struggling with something maybe showing them this video will help them and I always appreciate you guys sharing to help them out help me out by hitting the like button and leaving a comment and I will see you guys next time even though I just talked a lot about money and my own materialistic desires keep in mind that is not the point of this video I'm not trying to teach you guys how to make money and I'm not trying to tell you that the only reason I've ever done anything was just for this car this video was about goals that is the reason why this car changed my life\n"