You have to learn to "play the game" ... a person I have never heard of played the song "dance monkeys" on a sax ... his subsrciptions ...followers and views were in the 20 k ... playing the song on youtube it took his views to 100 million ... here is the catch ... its what you do with the 100 million views that makes the difference between becoming a millionare over night of just a another youtuber with 100 million views and a badge to fit on the wall.

Just like bussiness ... you can do the bussiness plan ... pay for the advertsing ... pay for consultants to tell you what to do ... yet you still only have a less 2 % chance of still operating after 10 years ... I am still operating after all these years ... yet I dont advertise ... I choose not to advertise for a reason ... I find that the majority of the calls are more time wasters than valueable customers ... I focus on the right now customers and their customers or freinds or visitors ... I get more "valuable" customers while actually working than I do from any means of advertsing ... but there a catch ... because I choose not to grow and build the company as I did in the first 10 years ... I choose who I want to deal with ... with that comes a few challenges ... an example I got a new customer just before lockdown happened ... thank goodness I chose not to take that huge step ... it was a big project which would have involved employing staff ... I declined the offer and a month later we went into lockdown ... I would have lost everything.

you have to understand what it is you are trying to achieve before you even start ... there are billions of customers out there ... most are looking for a cheap solution/product they dont really care if it only lasts for 2 weeks ... then there are the few who are looking for a good quality long lasting solutuion (not many of them left in the society we live in at present) but specific to what you are selling ...services ... products ... selling a service to a customer is compleletely differnet to selling a product to a customer ... in this day and age ... the majority of sales will depend on price and speed of delivery ... nothing else matters you have to adapt to the now not methods used 2 years ago ... this is where a lot of people fail ... they spend more time trying to setup a way to sell ... but by the time they wipe the zeros out their eyes there is a better faster way of doing things.

Using youtube as an example ... people are getting smart ... advertising (we will go into that) ... but the smart ones learnt that the money is in the product links not only the annoying ads ... so you dont have to lie and tell everyone what a great product you promoting because someone sent it to you for free ... or bog your content up with ad breaks or promoting while trying to share your content ... no I dont feel bad that I use ad blockers.

The joke about advertising on youtube ... people comment about how you should allow ads to help the person create content people shouldnt use ad blockers etc ... what a load of shyte ... you have to waste the first 3 minutes of ads then of him/her advertising themselves their brand ... then the like and subsricbe ... then the paid promotions during the video ... now the person advertising the sponsor of the content ( but I thought the content was paid for by the advertising) ... yeah I know it confusing ... youtube was such a pleasure to watch when it was just people sharing stuff people enjoyed doing.

The bottom line ... advertsing is complicated ... get it wrong and you gonna loose.