For the last few years, I've informally mentored a few close friends on building niche blogs and YouTube channels... They've all succeeded, but not to the same degree. In fact, the variance is staggering ($30k/yr to $250k+/yr)... Here are my observations on the biggest blockers that are keeping them from growing, in the hopes it helps you if you're in a similar spot: Inability to "Zoom" It's easy to get stuck on a particular tactic, not realizing that it won't actually grow the business. You can waste months (I've even seen years) in this phase. What do I mean by "zoom"? You need to constantly switch your lens on your business from the EXTREME micro to the EXTREME macro Extreme micro: "Why did my retention drop at 4:58 in one of our 100 YouTube videos and how can I stop that from happening again?" Extreme macro: "How should I grow my team(s) over the next 1-5 years, given I want to make [revenue/profit goal]/yr?" You should be able to switch between those two modes of thinking (and all of the ones in between) at will. Sniping Leverage When I first quit my job at @scribemediaco and went full time on @epicgardening, it was just a blog and made around $400/mo. I needed to get to $3k/mo fast to avoid drawing down on my savings. At the time, the blog primarily made money from Amazon Associates, so I exported a year of data from Amazon and filtered the .csv file to find the highest commission items I regularly sold. I realized it was all coming from one blog post. So, I wrote 4-5 more about that exact same topic, covering it from different angles and keywords. That one move alone grew blog income from $400/mo to $2,500/mo in about 2 months. That's what I mean by sniping leverage. There are often a small subset of actions you can take to dramatically improve your business' performance, and what I notice in those I mentored is that they tend to struggle to "see" those actions, which is a skillset you can develop. Too Much, Too Fast It's tempting to look at the 'end state' of a business you admire and attempt to emulate it from the get go. In a content business, this might mean launching blog, podcast, & YouTube channel at once. Unless you've got prior experience, this is a terrible idea. When I first started, the progression of content platforms went: Blog > YouTube channel > Podcast > Social Media > Physical Books > Ecommerce There was some overlap, but not a ton, and more importantly, WHEN there was overlap, there were people or process there to help with the workload. As you build pieces of your business, leave people & process in your wake as you move to a different part of the business (to snipe leverage there). Don't Stop The Compounding Many people starting a business, especially a content-based business, suffer from shifting priorities over time that leads to stopping the growth engine of the business. All businesses are compounding engines, but content businesses are especially so as platforms & audiences generally reward consistency over time. You can 'freeze' a few hours of labor in time (writing one blog post, making one video) and leverage it for hundreds of thousands to millions of views over multiple years. When given such a gift, DO NOT disrespect it by getting distracted by other opportunities, other priorities, etc. It takes 2-3 years to spin up a micro media empire at minimum unless you're an extreme outlier, so it's tempting to give up at any point in that process. I've seen it happen more times than I can count - people giving up on projects that just needed a bit more time and targeted effort to really kick off...they just couldn't 'see' it. Hope these tips help, just my experience building @epicgardening to the largest online gardening platform in the world.