Really excited to say that the Part-Time YouTuber Academy (PTYA) is back and we’ll be launching Cohort 7 of our flagship course on Monday 31st October 2022 at 1600 GMT.
Here’s a breakdown of everything that’s changed between this Cohort and the last, with some of the thoughts behind the changes we’ve decided to make this time round.
So as always, PTYA is a live, cohort-based course where we’ll welcome hundreds of creators who want to level up their YouTube game.
Each student becomes part of our community of over 2,000 creators and goes through the course with hundreds of other YouTubers, ranging from beginners who want to tackle YouTube with as much knowledge as possible, to advanced creators with millions of subscribers who are trying to find ways to level up their content creation processes and systems.
Changing the format
We’ve decided to tweak the format of the course again this Cohort.
Cohort 6 which took place in summer ‘22 was a five-week live cohort, with instruction and video submission and feedback happening simultaneously.
However, our focus groups and student feedback have indicated that students feel one of the most valuable aspects of the course is being able to submit your video for feedback from a trained team who’ll break down improvements that could be made to a huge range of aspects; from their hook to their production quality, editing, branding choices, flow, end card, you name it.
♻️ Consistency over everything else
This lines up with what I’ve always believed to be the most fundamentally important part of becoming a YouTuber - posting YouTube videos.
If you’re not willing to consistently post a video a week (or something similar) for at least two years, it’s very hard to say with any certainty what will happen to your YouTube trajectory.
The more we can get our students to post videos and improve in small iterations over time, and the more support we can give them to overcome any barriers they’re facing, the more likely it is that they’ll come away from PTYA confident in their ability to consistently post videos every week from then on.
To that end, we’ve shorted the instructional part of the course to four weeks of live sessions and workshops.
All of the material from the week we’re removing will still be available to anyone who joins Cohort 7, as there’s some really good stuff in there we’ve been working on for a very long time, but an additional two weeks are now being added for people to submit videos for feedback.
🗺 Build you own adventure
This means that Cohort 7 will be a little bit more build-your-own-adventure than previous Cohorts - if a student wants to focus on the material at the start and then drop the hammer on the video creation, they’ll have time to do so without the two overlapping.
If someone misses a week or two because life gets in the way, they’ll have a chance to catch up and get some really actionable feedback.
And if someone is able to keep their systems in place from the start and consistently produce videos, they’ll have the opportunity to submit a video every week for the six weeks, iterate on the feedback and come away a consistent beast of a creator.
Each week of the course still focuses on a different topic; identifying your niche, generating endless content ideas, helping people fall in love with your channel, getting people to click, keeping viewers watching and systematising and scaling your process.
I’ll be delivering these keynote sessions with a Q&A at the end where people can ask questions on the material or anything else they could use some guidance with, and the full PTYA team will be present to reach out to people who need more support and to help with queries in the chat.
We’ll also be hosting dedicated Q&A sessions each week with a happy hour-style session afterwards to do some friendship stuff.
The rest of the week is comprised of various workshops covering more specific topics like thumbnails, tech and editing, camera confidence and advanced YouTube theory with a number of incredible experts and members of the team.
We’ll also have a weekly guest workshop from content creators like Nathaniel Drew, Lana Blakely and Unjaded Jade and FilmBooth.
😮💨 Reducing overwhelm
In the past, we’ve had up to three workshops every single day while a Cohort is underway.
Our goal was always to completely overdeliver on value, but the struggle was always balancing this with entirely overwhelming our students.
Trimming down the number of workshops ensures that this genuinely is a part-time academy which someone can attend while working or studying full time, and that there are clear and crystallised goals and systems they can work towards and implement.
In another effort to reduce overwhelm, we’ve compiled a massive bank of supplementary material for students to work through long after the course has ended. The aim here is to ensure that PTYA isn’t just a one-time valuable experience, but instead gives students actionable tips and interesting and inspiring content they can peruse for weeks (or months) after the Cohort is over.
We’ve got over 20 hours more content and more than 10 worksheets in our supplementary materials alone, so it’s basically another course stacked on top of PTYA 🙌
We’ve got a full breakdown of everything else we’re adding to the course and what you could expect as a student which you can check out on our sick new landing page.
If any of the above sounds interesting to you and has you itching to spend the next 4 weeks learning about the ins and outs of YouTube, you can sign up for our waiting list and I’ll let you know once we open PTYA for enrolment on Monday 31st October 2022 (and send you some educational resources so you can already 🙌 improve your journey on YouTube).
Thanks!
Ali xx