Get Your Channel Ready for 2026 - NOW | Ep. 69

YouTube Strategy for 2026 is on my mind, and I’m sharing exactly how I’m planning my business and channel for the new year. If you’re a course creator, membership owner, or digital product entrepreneur, I’ll walk you through my approach to content, offers, and staying human in an AI-driven world. Let’s make 2026 easy, peaceful, and fun together!

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Transcript

The new year is coming in hot. I don't know why, but I got really excited to start thinking about what I wanna do in 2026 with my business, with my channel, and there are a lot of things that I feel like I can just see on the horizon.

Specifically when it comes to YouTube and online business, especially like for a course grader, for memberships and programs and digital products, so in this episode, 69 of Video Brand Infusion, I wanna just kind of riff and share exactly how I'm thinking about 2026, how I'm planning my YouTube channel, how I'm planning my business, how I'm keeping it feeling easy, feeling, peaceful, feeling fun when you know, right now I feel like there's a lot of doom and gloom around AI and a GI and like just the world in general.

If you're new here, my name is Meredith and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can build your binge-worthy video brand. And thinking about the new year is honestly like the biggest ray of sunshine for me. I think every year, at the end of every year, I start thinking about the new year sooner and sooner.

I'm recording this video on September 9th, and I'm not saying that I'm gonna move forward with everything on the page in front of me, but I have all of 2026 planned. It's all planned right here in front of me. Now, I am the type of person who gets excited about plans and then doesn't always follow through with every single thing in that plan, but something that I realized as I was putting together.

What I wanna do and putting together my ideas, my content ideas, like how I wanna structure the channel and the business, and so on and so forth. I realized I like having just enough structure so that I feel like I know what to do. But with enough freedom that I can kind of like do what I want. I love doing what I want.

I've always been that way. You can probably, talk to anybody that knows me, talk to my parents, talk to my husband. I pretty much just do what I want on a pretty consistent basis. But I love having structure. I love having a plan. And when it comes to planning out content for my YouTube channel and how it kind of like relates to the business, which. I have a course, I have a membership, I have a content business in addition to the free content on my channel. When I think about like how I want all of that to work, that's exactly how I want it to be.

Enough structure so that I know what to do, but enough freedom that I can do what I want. 

 and as I was sitting here making plans for 2026, I started thinking, oh, you know what? I could make sure that these videos go here. And you know, these videos go in January and these videos go in April and these videos go in July because of this, because of that, because of some such other whatever.

And I just like stopped and went, oh my God, This might sound backwards, but I, I don't wanna run my business by a promotional calendar.

 so one of the first things I decided for 2026 is exactly am I selling? Like what is my business doing? I have my membership video brand academy. That is my. YouTubey your business membership. Grow your audience on YouTube. Sell your course or program with YouTube.

Um, revive Your Debt or Dying YouTube channel. Like that's the YouTubey your business. Membership. It's $49 a month. That's my main, um, know, I guess you could call it my signature program. That's my main thing. That's not going away. That's not changing other than like getting amazingly better with all of our AI tools and everything.

So I want to be able to obviously keep growing the membership and keep. Improving the membership. I also have my video editing made Easy course, which is a completely standalone course. It's not part of the membership, and I obviously want to continue making sales of the course. SoThose are the two, uh, kind of offers that I will focus on throughout the year in 2026, and I will use my backstage pass YouTube funnel system to make those sales happen. In addition to my unlaunch is that I talked about in my very last, uh, video. 

So with only having those two offers in mind throughout the year, the next step that I did was to figure out, so what's the content that I need to create? And this is a little bit tricky, and also like, I wanna say trippy also because. if I put my business hat on, the business has certain topics that it wants to create to attract the right clients and customers to make the sales.

Right. But if I put my YouTube hat on, like the YouTube strategist in me has certain topics or certain like ways that the titles and topics are structured that the YouTube strategist wants to create to keep the channel growing, to keep getting more and more views, more and more watch time, and sometimes 

 the two hats sort of like butt heads because sometimes what works for the business doesn't necessarily make good YouTube strategy and what makes good YouTube strategy doesn't necessarily work for good business strategy. That's the magic of YouTube. Um, that's what makes this. Business. So much fun. Like, I know it sounds sarcastic, but like that's the reality. Like it is actually kind of fun to have that kind of like the two sides of that coin.

 so inside a video brand academy, there is I think like five or six what I call proven growth strategies. These are. Specific strategies, ways of growing your audience on YouTube beyond just keyword research. Like keyword research is in there, spiderweb strategy is in there. I already have spiderweb on my channel.

 spiderweb strategies like practically tattooed into my brain. but there's a handful of ways of sort of like extracting the best possible like juiciest topics that you know are gonna work on YouTube for your audience. 

 there's what I call the shared audience strategy. There's spying on your rich niche. Neighbors love doing that. Uh, there's the snowball method, there's the fill your funnel method, the ultimate user guide. So like there's all these ways of kind of extracting the juiciest. I love the word juicy when it comes to topics and titles in VBA, you always hear me saying like, you gotta ju justify this title.

We gotta make it juicy.

 so I went through all of those methods and actually did each one of those methods. was my own star student and did each of the methods that I teach inside of the program, which kind of satisfies the YouTube strategist in me, right? I, I made a list of all of the topics and all of the titles that came out from that research, and I had like somewhere around.

60 or 70, like good ones. I got rid of the ones that I thought were like garbage. I was left with like 60 or 70 really good titles, really good topics that I felt excited to create. Like, yeah, let's go, let's hit record. We gotta make all of these videos. So that, that answered the YouTube strategist hat. The business strategist hat had a couple of other ideas.

and, um, all of which involved chat GBT. Of course. So one of the things that I did was I have like an ongoing document of. Topics, questions, problems, mistakes, fears, like stuff that comes up on my calls with my clients and group calls inside a video brand academy. There's no like names attached to it.

It's just like my own internal document. 

 Now the business strategist in me said, okay, if we're gonna keep promoting. The membership and we're gonna keep promoting video editing made easy the course. What we need to do is really extract the juicy topics that our ideal clients and customers for those programs. Are really going to like latch onto. So I looked at some of the recordings of my video brand Academy meetups. 

 I looked at surveys from when people joined Video Brand Academy. I used AI to basically help me distinguish. what are people struggling with? What are the mistakes they're making? What are they afraid of? And I asked Chad GPT to give me some highly clickable YouTube titles.

Now. Of course, you know, I'm gonna say this chat, GBT is not a YouTube strategist chat. GBT goes to YouTube and looks at the YouTube titles that it sees and it thinks, oh, all YouTube titles should be written this way and usually without any special training or special instructions.

The titles that chat GPT comes up with for titles are usually like pretty bad. They're pretty like. AI definitely wrote this kind of bad. I was trying to get like the topics, I was trying to just like, let's extract the information, let's extract the topics out of all of the information that we have. And then I have a specific GPT that I trained with the content. And then I have tools inside of Video Brand Academy that are trained on. How I teach to write YouTube titles, and I put that information in there to use that. Specially trained. Trained by Meredith, trained by Meredith's best practices for writing YouTube titles and had my own AI tools kind of like craft some really great clickable, juicy YouTube titles from.

My ideal clients and students, my existing clients and students, honestly.

So that gave me a whole different batch of topics and titles that it all fit within my spiderweb all fits within my existing YouTube strategy. But the topics are like tied to.

What I know my ideal clients and customers are struggling with and like what my existing clients and customers are struggling with because I don't just create content on my channel for people that aren't my clients and customers. I also want people in Video Brand Academy to be watching my YouTube videos too.

I ended up with a list of 120 video topic ideas for my channel. About half of them are for the podcast and the other half are like regular YouTube videos, like how to and tutorial type videos. Really good. and the secret sauce to this, the thing that makes me really excited about it is they're not topics. I don't have a list of 120 topics. I have a list of 120 titles that are already. Written, they're already optimized. They're already like pre-vetted by me, and they're all juicy.

They're all clickable. when I look at this list of 120 titles, I feel excited about all of them. I wanna record all of them.

 and it's a perfect mix of YouTube strategist hat and business strategist hat. 

 and with my existing and new YouTube funnels in place that I'm gonna work on in quarter four, all I have to do is show up in, create the videos. And create the thumbnails and like do the editing and all of that. I feel like I had this orchard of.

Video topics, all I have to do is go out and like pick a juicy topic and decide what do I feel like making that week? Or maybe I can start batching my videos. What do I feel like making for this month? Can I find three topics? Can I find four topics and record all four of those topics when they're already decided and pre-vetted?

 When I see the title is already there, it makes me excited, like it already exists, like. Yes, I want to bring that video into the world. I want to make that video exist. When it's just a list of topics. It's like, oh, now I have to figure out what my titles are. And don't get me wrong, I have great tools inside of Video Brand Academy that are optimized for search and also really clickworthy. 

 but having this list turned into juicy topics makes me really excited about creating all of this content. Now, like I mentioned at the very beginning, it's possibleThat I, you know, I open this whole list up in a week and I'm like, these are all awful.

I don't wanna make any of them. One thing about me is like, that's actually probably true,

 and even though I'm able to stay consistent sometimes, to be totally honest with you, sometimes I don't want to be consistent. Sometimes I just don't want to record. 

 but the closer my list of videos are to being ready to record, meaning not just a list of topics, but the title is already done, and some of these I might even go in and make the thumbnails for. Then it's like, oh, all I had to do is show up and, record the video. It makes it feel so much easier to me. In my mind, I'm just like playing mind games with myself here.

now the reality is nothing that I mentioned about 2026 so far is really that much different than 2025 and 2024 and 2023 for me. But every year I get better and better at keeping my plan cohesive and being able to sort of see. The bigger plan, see the whole year as a whole and see all of the different places where all I have to do is show up. All I have to do is fill in the blank. All I have to do is create these videos. All I have to do is create stuff for, um, video Brand Academy.

And when I see the whole year like that,

it makes it really easy for me to see where I have clarity and where I don't have clarity. 

 but some of the changes that I feel like I'm starting to see on the horizon now, I'm not big on predictions honestly, but What my gut is telling me. is that we already know that AI is disrupting everything when it comes to content creation and marketing specifically, AI is disrupting a lot of things as I record this.

Just a couple weeks ago, um, Google Image generator, codename nano banana just came out and. I'm not big on image generation. I think it's like, takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of energy. I'm very impatient. It takes forever for AI to generate images, you know, and the nano banana came out and it was like, oh, this is actually really fast.

It's actually really good. And I've started playing around with creating really detailed prompts for Nano Banana where. It can generate like actually really good thumbnail, like a surprisingly good thumbnail. Now, none of the thumbnails on my channel are AI generated.

Because they're not, .. That good, but they're good enough that the design, like the composition of the design is like, oh, this is actually really good. I can bring this over to Canva or Adobe Express and just recreate it. But like, for real, recreate it with a real image of myself, you know,

 as fun as that is, you know what I think is gonna happen? I think everybody's thumbnails are gonna be AI generated. They're all gonna look the same, they're all gonna look AI generated, and this is a good time to perhaps zig while other people zag.

 now, I'm not big on predictions. I'm actually very bad at predictions. I thought the iPhone was the worst invention in the world when they announced it. Okay. Like I didn't know then what I know now, obviously, but I've been doing YouTube and online business for 10 years and. 

We know that AI is disrupting everything. It's disrupting everything about content creation and marketing. And I've said this many times, and I will probably be beating this drum probably for the next 10 years It is more important than ever to be as human as possible. And I think when it comes to content and marketing, I think we're gonna see a shift.

I think smart creators, smart marketers are going to make a shift because smart people, the people we're marketing to are smart people and they don't wanna see the AI garbage, and they're gonna detect the AI garbage like instantly. So I think smart marketers are going to start changing the way they do things to sort of prove their humanness.

 and again, this isn't like a prediction. I just think perhaps we're gonna see more. Live streams becoming like a key strategy for marketing, for content creators, for people like you and I, because that's one way we can prove our humanness.

I think we're gonna see less designed thumbnails, less like over the top, like the stupid YouTube face as I like to call it. 

 I think smart marketers will start doing the lesser automated things that right now might seem kind of normal or might have seemed normal for the last five or 10 years. But I think moving forward are going to be like almost impossible to differentiate between is this automated thing real or is it not real?

And I don't think people are gonna stop using ai. I'm not gonna stop using ai. I love ai, but I love using AI to make the human in me more efficient, right? So that I can show up live, show in my meetups, show up in my content in a real human way, 

Because like I wouldn't wanna have it any other way, right? I wanna have a human connection with my audience. I wanna have a human connection with my clients and students. And I think other people want that too. So as AI tools get better and better like AI design, thumbnail tools get better and better.

As AI video generation gets better and better, I think we're gonna see this swing towards like really real human, live like types of content, because that's gonna be the only way that people know they're really connecting with you as a human. So I don't know if any of that made sense, but that's kind of like what's been kind of going around in my head as I think about 20, 26 and beyond, and how I'm looking at.

Planning my content, planning my business, and kind of moving forward, evolving with the industry, while also being smart about how do we stay in business. I think the answer is be more human than the robots, I think we'll be fine.

Anyway, let me know down in the comments if you think it's too early to be planning for 2026. Was this video helpful? Are you like, I can't even think about that. Like, can we just get through Halloween first?