Ali Abdaal — How I’d Create Content in 2026 (If I Had To Start Over)
Source: YouTube Channel: Ali Abdaal (6620000 subs) Duration: 15:55 Views: 187301 · Likes: 7035 Video: Watch on YouTube
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If you would like to take content [music] creation seriously this year, then here are five tips that I hope will help you out. And by the way, if you’re new here, hello. My name is Ali, I’m a doctor turned entrepreneur and author, and I’ve been making videos here on this channel since 2017, documenting the journey from being a broke-ass medical student to then being a doctor, to then becoming [music] an entrepreneur and a best-selling author and all that kind of stuff. And so, in that time, I’ve made like over a thousand videos on this YouTube channel, made loads of stuff on Instagram, loads of stuff on LinkedIn, and so I’ve been doing content for a very long time. And so, this is the advice that I would give to someone who wants to take content seriously this year. Tip number one, competitor analysis is unreasonably effective. A mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to content is just sort of making it up as they go along, which is totally fine if you don’t have any particular growth goals, shall we say? If you’re doing content as a hobby, then you can actually just stop watching this video because and you can totally just ignore every single thing I’m about to say. But, if you are trying to do content as you’re either trying to make money from it or you’re trying to drive leads to an existing business or anything like that, then your approach to content needs to be more strategic than someone who’s just doing it as a hobby. So, assuming that you actually care about growing your content platforms or using them to generate leads, competitor analysis is unreasonably effective. Literally every big creator that you know has a team, and that team is spending a lot of their time looking at what the other big creators are doing. In my case, you know, Becky, my YouTube producer, Nicole, our social media manager, a lot of what these guys do in their day job is looking at what else other people are doing. Which feels kind of weird, right? It’s a competitor analysis. It’s looking at, you know, for example, on YouTube, what kind of videos are doing well within our niche and within channels related to our niche. I did a video the other day called how to change your life, and it did really well. And then, a bunch of other channels did a video titled how to change your life because their teams all saw that that video from my channel was doing well, and therefore they did their own version of it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with copying the title, cuz it’s not plagiarism. It’s just you’re sort of getting inspiration from what is doing well amongst people who are playing the game well. Amongst students in our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is like my my online business school, they’re all newcomers to creating content, and a big mistake they make is that they don’t look enough at competitors to get a feel for what is working and how their content could be better by modeling what is working. If [music] you’re a complete beginner and you’re already struggling to post consistently, you don’t want to let the need to optimize based on competitors hold you back from posting. Assuming you’ve got the foundation of taking consistent action [music] anyway, looking at what the competitors are doing and trying to model your content based of that and trying to sort of get inspiration from the channels that are growing or the channels that are big is a very reasonable way to adjust your strategy. Everyone is sort of extending the meta together, which is why I’m just not a fan of like “Hey, here are eight things that are working on Instagram right now.” Cuz it’s it’s it’s probably out of date. Like, the way you figure out what’s working on Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube is you look at what is working well on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube rather than taking someone’s word for it. You don’t want to be copying someone’s idea. You want to be sort of like taking inspiration from the idea and doing it in your own way. Now, when I’m doing this, I
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