If I Started YouTube from Scratch in 2026, I’d Do THIS

Seven years on YouTube. Three channels. One channel with a video that crossed 1.1 million views. Another channel where a single Ring doorbell tutorial racked up 283,000 views and kept earning affiliate commissions for years. And yet, Alston Godbolt will be the first one to tell you he left serious money on the table, chased the wrong metrics, and burned through months of momentum before he figured out what actually works.

This post is the reset. If Alston were starting from zero today, here is exactly what he would do differently, in the order he would do it, including the math that turns “just 20 views a day” into a real income without a single brand deal or AdSense check.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The mindset shift that stops you from chasing subscribers and starts you chasing real income
How to use the piggybacking strategy to find proven video ideas before you record a single frame
What niche bending is and the exact technique that generated a 1.1 million view video
Why email marketing is the one asset YouTube cannot take away from you
How to create a simple digital product in a weekend that starts earning money five videos in
The Alphabet Soup keyword method for building a searchable video library that earns for years
The math showing how 20 views per day per video can add up to nearly $100,000 a year
The one tool Alston uses to figure out which online income path fits where you are right now: finder.platformproof.com

Stop Waiting on the YouTube Partner Program

The first thing Alston would change is his goal. For too long, the goal was subscribers and watch time. That focus is a trap, and here is why: when you optimize for subscribers, you start creating content for the algorithm instead of for your audience. You chase views. You try to go viral. You compare yourself to other creators in the worst possible way, not to learn, but to feel behind.

The YouTube Partner Program (YPP) requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours before you see a single dollar. Even after you hit those numbers, AdSense rates vary wildly, and you are entirely at YouTube’s mercy. They can change the rules, demonetize a topic, or flag your content at any point. You are not a partner. You are more like a contractor on a short-term agreement that can be cancelled without notice.

Alston’s advice: stop treating YPP like the finish line. It is one possible revenue stream, not the plan.

Start With the End in Mind: How Will You Get Paid?

Before you record video number one, answer this question: how am I going to make money? Not someday. Specifically. “I will sell a $27 PDF to people who want to do X” is a plan. “I will eventually figure out monetization” is not.

Alston is direct about the honesty most creators avoid: you are making videos because you want to make money. That is not shameful. That is smart. But if you do not build a clear revenue path before you start, your content will drift. One week you are covering Amazon Web Services, the next week you are doing product reviews, and YouTube has no idea who to put your videos in front of because your channel has no clear identity.

Write down two things before your first video: who you want to help, and how they are going to pay you. Even if the product does not exist yet, have the plan. Commit to the niche. Then go make videos that serve that exact audience.

Alston’s preferred monetization model is digital products, and the rest of this post shows you exactly why.

The Piggybacking Strategy: Find What Already Works

One of Alston’s biggest early mistakes was trying to be unique. He wanted to stand out, be different, bring a fresh angle. YouTube does not reward different. YouTube rewards proven. The platform wants to show viewers videos that have already demonstrated they hold attention, and the signal it uses is performance data from similar content.

The piggybacking strategy is simple: find videos in your niche that have a high view-to-subscriber ratio, meaning they got more views than the channel’s subscriber count would predict. That ratio tells you the content has pull beyond the creator’s existing audience. YouTube is actively putting it in front of new people.

Here is a real example from Alston’s channel. He found a video titled “10 Best Neutral Paint Colors Sherwin-Williams for a Timeless Look” that had 100,000 views on a channel with just 3,000 subscribers. He made a version of that same video, went a bit longer and more thorough, and the result performed well. He even spotted an older version of the same concept titled “10 Best Sherwin-Williams Interior Paint Colors for 2025” and recognized the opportunity: make that exact video but updated for 2026. The topic had already been proven to work, multiple times, across multiple creators.

You are not copying anyone’s script or footage. You are identifying a proven format and creating your own version with your voice, your depth, your angle. Go as far back as one year when searching. If a video was getting strong views-to-subs ratios twelve months ago and similar content is still appearing in search today, that topic has staying power.

Niche Bending: How to Combine Two Winning Ideas

Niche bending is what Alston calls taking a viral format from outside your niche and fusing it with a proven topic inside your niche. His clearest example: the “I Tried It” video format.

Videos like “I tried staying at the most dangerous hotel” were pulling 24 million views. “I survived the most dangerous” formats were hitting 43 million views. Those were entertainment creators, not money-making content creators. Alston saw the format and asked: what if I apply “I Tried It” to make-money-online content that is already proven to do well in my niche?

The result was a series of videos with titles like “I Tried It: Earn $7 Every 60 Seconds.” That series became the single biggest subscriber driver on his channel. Six of his top eight videos at one point were “I Tried It” videos. The combination of a viral entertainment format and a proven money niche topic created something that neither category alone could produce.

To do this yourself: pick a viral format from outside your niche (reaction, survival, transformation, “I spent 24 hours…”) and ask how you can apply that same energy to a topic your audience is already searching for. Write down the combination before you judge it. Sometimes the ideas that sound strangest in theory perform best in practice.

Do the Same Thing That Works, Over and Over

This is the discipline most creators break. You find something that works, you feel the excitement of a good result, and then you get bored and try something new. YouTube does not want new from you. YouTube wants more of what it already knows your audience responds to.

When the “I Tried It” format was working, Alston kept making “I Tried It” videos. Eventually he stopped, and it was not because the format stopped working. It was because the original source videos (like “Earn $7 Every 60 Seconds”) started being taken down and the channels behind them were deleted. The raw material for the format dried up. He stopped because the environment changed, not because he got bored.

If something is working on your channel, the answer is almost always: make another one of those. Yes, it will feel repetitive. That is fine. Your audience is not watching every single one of your videos. New people are discovering your content all the time, and they want the version of you that works, not the experimental version you got excited about last Tuesday.

Build Your Email List Starting Now

YouTube can suspend your channel. The algorithm can change overnight. A policy update can wipe out an entire content category. The one thing that survives all of that: your email list.

Alston has 20,000 emails collected over the years. If his YouTube channel disappeared tomorrow, he still has access to those 20,000 people. He can still communicate with them, send them to new content on a new platform, and sell products directly.

Starting email marketing does not require a big setup. You need three things: a simple landing page, a lead magnet (something free and specific you give in exchange for the email address), and an autoresponder sequence. The autoresponder sends emails automatically on your behalf, whether you are awake or not. Those emails can send people back to your latest video, recommend an affiliate product, or sell your own digital product.

Here is a move Alston recommends for creators who do not have a product yet: build the list first, then email your subscribers asking what they are struggling with. They will tell you exactly what to create. Build the thing they ask for, sell it back to them, and they will call you a genius. The market tells you what it wants. You just have to listen.

Create a Simple Digital Product Early

Alston is specific here: do not wait until you have a big audience to create a product. Create something small and sell it starting at video five. The sooner you have a paid offer, the sooner you start earning on your own terms.

What counts as a simple digital product? Templates. Cheat sheets. Workbooks. Planners. Swipe files. Step-by-step guides. Something small, specific, and built to help your exact target audience get one specific result. You can make this in Canva, in Google Docs, export it as a PDF, and sell it. No inventory. No shipping. No customer service calls about broken packages.

Alston’s first digital product was a 60-second business blueprint, a step-by-step guide for making money on TikTok. He created it back when TikTok was still mostly known for dancing, before you could even put a clickable link in your bio. He sold it to internet marketers and affiliate marketers who wanted to get ahead of the curve. Small, specific, and built for a real audience with a real problem.

When you sell your own digital product, you keep all the revenue. You do not split it with YouTube, a label, a publisher, or a platform. One sale of a $7 product is yours. One sale of a $27 product is yours. That direct income gives you freedom early, because you are not waiting to hit 1,000 subscribers before you see a dollar.

Not sure what to sell or where to start?

Answer a few questions and get a personalized recommendation for the income path that fits your situation at finder.platformproof.com.

Dedicate One Video Per Week to Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the version of revenue that keeps paying you while you sleep. You make a video, you put affiliate links in the description, people discover that video six months or two years later, they click the link, they buy something, and you get a commission. No extra work after the video goes live.

Alston’s Ring video doorbell tutorial has been earning affiliate commissions for years from a single 6-minute talking head video that did not even get a huge view count at launch. The people who did watch it clicked the affiliate link and bought. That is the value: a small, targeted audience that trusts your recommendation converts at a higher rate than a massive audience that half-watches a viral clip.

You do not have to build your entire channel around affiliate marketing. One video per week focused on tools or products your audience actually uses is enough to build a meaningful secondary income stream over time. For a content creator niche: best tools for making digital products, best tools for video editing, best microphone under $100. Apply to become an affiliate, put the links in the description, done. Brands you already reference become a revenue source without any formal partnership requirement.

Add a Call to Action to Every Single Video

Most people watch a video and do nothing after. Not because they do not care, but because you did not tell them what to do. People need a next step. If you do not give them one, someone else will, and that someone else will collect the sale your video warmed up.

Every video you make should have one clear CTA. It can be: subscribe so you do not miss the next video, join the email list and grab the free guide in the description, check out the digital product linked below, or click the affiliate link if you want to grab the tool I just showed you. Pick one per video. Do not stack five CTAs at the end and expect anyone to follow all five.

The mindset shift: your video is not just content. It is a sales mechanism. Every minute of watch time is warming a viewer up to take an action. If that action does not have a destination, the warmth disappears the second they click to the next video.

Make Search-Based Videos, Not Viral-Chasing Videos

Going viral feels like the goal because viral videos get millions of views in a week. But viral views are a one-time event. Search-based views are a permanent income source.

A video answering “how to install Ring video doorbell” will get views every single day for years, because people are searching that question every single day. It does not need to go viral. It needs to be the best answer to a question people are always asking. That Ring doorbell tutorial Alston made has 283,000 views across seven years, not from a viral moment, but from steady, compounding search traffic.

Brian G. Johnson, a YouTube educator Alston references, put it this way: make a video that gets you 20 views a day. That might sound small. But run the math and it changes your perspective entirely.

The Alphabet Soup Method for Endless Video Ideas

Finding search-based video topics does not require expensive keyword tools. Here is the method Alston uses, called the Alphabet Soup method:

Type your core keyword into YouTube search: “how to lose weight”
Add a space and then each letter of the alphabet, one at a time: “how to lose weight A…” “how to lose weight B…” and so on
Screenshot the autocomplete suggestions for each letter
Pick a specific phrase: “how to lose weight quickly while pregnant”
Run the Alphabet Soup method again on that phrase for another layer of specificity
Check the top results for that phrase, look at the view-to-subscriber ratio, and see if there is an older video you could do better or a more current version you could create

You will run out of time before you run out of topic ideas using this method. And every topic you find is something real people are actively searching for, which means the video you make will keep getting found long after you post it.

The Real Math: How 20 Views Per Day Adds Up to $98,000 a Year

Here is the math Alston walked through in the video, step by step.

Start with one video getting 20 views per day. Not a viral hit. Not a breakout moment. Just a solid search-based video that steadily earns 20 views every 24 hours.

20 views per day times 365 days = 7,300 views per year, per video
If you post one video every three days, that is roughly 100 videos over a year
100 videos times 7,300 views = 730,000 total views per year
If you post closer to every other day, you get 200 videos, which gives you 1.46 million views per year
Take 1% of those views as buyers of your digital product: 1.46 million times 0.01 = 14,600 buyers
Sell a $7 product to each of them: 14,600 times $7 = $102,200 per year

That is over $100,000 a year from a $7 digital product. That number does not include affiliate commissions. It does not include email marketing sales. It does not include any AdSense if you eventually join the Partner Program. It is just the math on one revenue stream from search-based videos that get modest, consistent views.

This is why the goal is not viral. Viral gets you a spike and then nothing. Steady search traffic gets you compounding, durable income that grows as you add more videos to the library.

One Video, One Purpose

Every video you post should have a job. Not just a topic, but a destination. Where is this video supposed to send people? The answer should always be one of four places: your email list, your digital product, an affiliate product, or a subscription to the channel if you are still in the early stages of building an audience.

A video without a purpose is a wasted video. You did the work of scripting, recording, and editing. The viewer watched. And then they left without doing anything, because you did not ask them to do anything. That is the leak in most creators’ income, and it is one of the easiest things to fix: decide where the video leads before you hit record.

The Full Framework: What to Do in What Order

If Alston were starting from scratch today, this is the exact sequence he would follow:

Step 1: Choose a niche. Write down who you want to help and what specific problem you will solve for them.
Step 2: Decide how you will get paid. Identify one direct revenue path before you record anything.
Step 3: Set up a simple landing page and email autoresponder. ConvertKit, MailerLite, or Beehiiv all work for this.
Step 4: Create a simple digital product. A PDF, a template, a short guide. Done in a weekend using Canva or Google Docs.
Step 5: Use the piggybacking strategy to find your first 10 video topics. Look for proven videos with high view-to-subscriber ratios in your niche from the past twelve months.
Step 6: Use the Alphabet Soup method to build out a list of 50 search-based video topics.
Step 7: Identify one niche bending idea. Find a viral format from outside your niche and combine it with a proven topic inside your niche.
Step 8: Start posting. Every video has one CTA. One video per week includes affiliate links.
Step 9: When something works, do it again. Do not pivot until the environment forces you to.

Honest Drawbacks

This approach is not glamorous. Posting search-based videos on proven topics is not how you become a YouTube celebrity. If you want viral fame and massive follower counts, this strategy will feel slow and boring. That is by design.

Building a channel this way also takes more upfront thought than most people are willing to do. Setting up an email list before you have an audience feels like building a store with no customers. Creating a digital product before you know if anyone will buy it requires a leap of faith. Most people skip these steps because they feel premature. Then they wonder why 200 videos later they have no income to show for it.

The piggybacking strategy and niche bending both require research time before you record. You cannot just open up a camera and wing it. You have to find the data, check the view-to-subscriber ratios, and make an intentional decision about each video topic. That discipline is what separates creators who build real income from creators who post hoping something sticks.

Find Your X

Knowing the strategy is step one. Knowing where you fit inside it is step two. Are you the right person to sell a digital product right now, or would affiliate marketing be the faster first move? Is niche bending the right play for your audience, or does piggybacking make more sense for where you are starting?

Alston built finder.platformproof.com to help you get a clear answer to that question fast. Answer a few questions about where you are, what you have, and what you want, and the Finder points you toward the income path that matches your situation. No guessing. No wasted months going after the wrong thing first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to already have an audience before I create a digital product?

No. Alston recommends creating your first digital product as early as video five. A small audience that trusts you and has a real problem is more valuable than a large audience that found you through a random viral video. The product does not need to be perfect. It needs to solve one specific problem for one specific person.

What email marketing platform should I use when starting out?

Alston does not name a specific platform in this video, but the setup he describes, a landing page plus autoresponder, is available on ConvertKit (now called Kit), MailerLite, and Beehiiv. All three have free tiers that work until your list grows. The platform matters less than starting. Pick one and build the landing page this week.

How do I find affiliate products to promote?

Start with products you already use. Look for an affiliate or partner program on their website, or search for the product name plus “affiliate program.” Most tools and software companies have one. You apply, get a link, and put it in your video description. Amazon Associates is the easiest entry point for physical products. ShareASale and Impact are good networks for digital tools and software.

Is the piggybacking strategy legal? Am I copying someone’s video?

Yes, it is completely legal and it is standard practice on YouTube. You are not copying anyone’s script, footage, or creative work. You are identifying a topic that has proven audience interest and creating your own original video on that topic. YouTube is full of multiple videos covering the same subject. That is the nature of search. Your job is to make a better, more thorough, or more current version.

How long does it take to start making real money with this approach?

The timeline depends on how quickly you post and how well your topics match actual search demand. Alston’s examples show channels with 3,000 subscribers reaching 100,000 views on individual videos within six months. Digital product income can start on your first sale, which could happen at any point once the product exists. Do not expect a full income in month one, but a few hundred dollars in the first few months is realistic if you have a product and a real CTA in every video.

What if I show my face on camera? Do I have to be a faceless channel?

Alston has run both face-based and faceless channels successfully. The strategies in this post apply equally to both. Niche bending, the piggybacking strategy, the Alphabet Soup method, email list building, and digital products all work whether your face is on screen or not. The format does not change the fundamentals.

How specific should my niche be?

Alston says to niche down. Not into a corner, but enough that YouTube can clearly identify who your content is for. “Make money online” is too broad. “Make money on YouTube with digital products” is specific enough to build an audience that actually buys. When your niche is specific, YouTube can match your content to the right viewers, and those viewers are more likely to follow your CTA because your content speaks directly to their situation.

Should I ever apply to the YouTube Partner Program if this strategy does not rely on it?

Yes, eventually. AdSense is an additional income stream, not the main one. Once you hit the threshold, apply and collect the extra revenue. The point of this strategy is not to avoid AdSense forever. It is to avoid making AdSense your primary goal while building the channel, because that mindset causes you to make decisions that hurt your long-term income potential. Once AdSense comes in on top of product sales and affiliate commissions, it is a nice bonus, not a lifeline.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “If I Started YouTube from Scratch in 2026, I’d Do THIS” on YouTube, Platform Proof channel
Brian G. Johnson, YouTube educator referenced for the “20 views per day” framework
Alston Godbolt’s security camera channel, referenced as his first serious YouTube channel, over 7 years old, Ring doorbell video at 283,000 views
Alston Godbolt’s faceless/AI channel, referenced, oldest video 4 years ago, top videos over 104,000 views within 6 months
Beyond AdSense Workbook, Alston’s digital product referenced in the video as a step-by-step guide for creating and selling a digital product through YouTube