Cam Jones, YouTuber On Goals and Serving Your Audience

Cam Jones is a YouTuber based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. With his YouTube channel “Goal Guys”, Cam produces educationally centered content that focuses around self improvement and learning new skills. Through his videos, Cam has garnered millions of views, thousands of returning subscribers, and has carved out a full time career producing online video content. In addition to his YouTube work, Cam also consults and produces video content for numerous brands like Squarespace, Audible, Blinkist and many others.

Hilary sat down with Cam Jones of YouTube's Goal Guys to discuss how he hacked YouTube and built a personal development channel that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and garners millions of views. Cam shared how his curiosity turned into a hobby which then turned into a freelance career. He also shared what he has learned about achieving goals after creating almost 100 videos on the subject. 

Episode Highlights

"What's really rewarding about what I do is the creative freedom, the control I have and the ability to connect with people and help other people through my videos which is like, not a lot of people get to do that which is really, really cool. I always try to focus on a holistic approach and not just numbers and growth, which is really easy to focus in on." -Cam Jones

"I get so many people who talk to me who are like 'I would love to start a YouTube channel. I've always wanted to do this'-- or even outside of YouTube. 'I've wanted to start my own business' or do all these different things, but they've never actually done it or they've always put these barriers in their way. For instance, in my field, with video stuff, a lot of people are like 'I'm going to do it once I get this camera lens' or 'once I get this camera upgrade' or 'I'm going to do it once I get a little more money' or 'I'm going to do this, this, this and this.' So it's really, really easy to procrastinate and put things off. Yeah, it's like, my career was built on like, a $300 entry level Canon camera and so--you can't make excuses. You've kind of gotta work with what you've got and take it step by step." -Cam Jones

"I've had people ask me how do you get started in freelance writing? How do you get anyone to take a chance on you? The first thing you do is start a blog, like put something out there. Go on Medium, or whatever. You have to invest in yourself first before anyone else will invest in you." -Hilary Sutton

Bring value. It's really easy to try to hop on trends but I think you need to find something that you enjoy doing. If you're looking for something that's going to be long term and satisfying work for you then I think you need to do something you love and try to bring value to people because there's so many people--especially on YouTube--that rise really quickly and fall really quickly, that are like on one wave of a trend, a flash in the pan. But if you want something solid and stable focus on quality, on bringing value to people, because that's stuff that's going to last." -Cam Jones

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This episode is sponsored by Get Your Dream Off the Ground.