How I'd Create Content in 2026 (If I Had To Start Over)

If you would like to take content 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 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 and you can totally just ignore every single thing I'm about to say. But if you're 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, 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, 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 because 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 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 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 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 because 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 very rarely watch videos from people in my niche because I don't want to accidentally plagiarize the content of the video. But I'll certainly look at the titles. As a YouTuber called Nisha, who's a friend of mine, she did a video called something like 17 Tiny Habits That Made Me Rich. And that was an outlier for her channel. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to watch that video because I don't want to plagiarize it. But I'll be like, okay, that title did well for her. Let me do my own take on that title. So maybe I'll just straight up do a 17 Tiny Habits That Made Me Rich video. Maybe it'll be a One Minute Habits That Made Me More Productive. Sort of it's taking the format and doing my own version of it. And then you can kind of see this work on LinkedIn on Instagram as well. Oh, by the way, quick announcement. On Saturday, the 4th of April, I'm going to be hosting my usual completely free quarterly reflection workshop, The Spring Reset. The idea is that this is a totally free workshop. There's a link down below to register if you'd like. And I will be hosting it and me and hopefully you and several thousand people from all around the world. We're going to get together on a Zoom workshop. Together, we're going to be reflecting on how 2026 has gone so far. And we're going to be setting some goals for the next 90 days. It's The Spring Reset. It's going to be fun. It's going to be vibey. There's more details linked down below if you would like to join. And I will hopefully see you on Saturday, the 4th of April. On LinkedIn, for example, what you can imitate is the hook and the format. If a piece of content was an outlier, the hook must have been really good because if the first one or two lines are not good, no one's even going to click read more on LinkedIn. And so they're not going to engage with the content. If there's an outlier on Instagram or TikTok as a reel, you know that the first five seconds of that video must be good. Even if you want to use that hook word for word, you could totally use the hook, like the first line of the reel. Now it would be a bit plagiaristic if you were to just copy the whole reel. But if you were to just use that line, what's a piece of advice you could give that could follow from that line? If I look at Alex Hormozy's channel and I see that he's got a reel that went viral where the first line was something like, these are three lessons I wish I'd learned in my 20s. I'm like, huh, okay. I'm not actually going to watch his reel to see what those three lessons are, but I'm going to do my own three lessons to help you like in your 20s. This video is an example of an experimental video. I don't know how this video is going to do. I'm filming it while having lunch in a random restaurant in Hong Kong. I don't have a fancy camera. I'm walking into this with a fork. I don't particularly have much of a structure other than thinking, you know what, I'm just going to speak from the heart about this thing like I know some of our students in the Lifestyle Business Academy struggle with. So what's the kind of video I want to do? The thing that advances the meta is people doing experimental content and then most of the time it doesn't work, but some of the time an experimental piece of content does. And it's in those moments that like you then get the outlier for your channel and then other people start to copy that because it works and then it becomes part of the meta and so it's no longer experimental. And so I think 80-20 is a good level of imitation versus innovation to strive for as you're building your content engine. Now, if you are watching this and you happen to be an entrepreneur or a creator, then you're going to want to check out ManyChat who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Now the way ManyChat works is that if you have ever seen someone posting on like Instagram that comment X to get Y resource, that's not like a manual thing that these creators are doing where like people are sending comments and then like the creator is manually like sending these thousands of messages. This is all made possible by ManyChat which is an automation platform for social media. We've been using ManyChat for many years now, not only to send links but also to ask new followers about what content they'd like to see or guide them through a personalized conversation or collect emails for like a marketing campaign. We've also built in a few like Easter egg keywords. For example, you try commenting the word Angus on any of my Instagram posts and then you'll see something interesting pop up in your DMs. But yeah, if you're an entrepreneur or a creator then obviously you know you need to grow on social media and obviously you know that you can use social media to drive leads to your business and make money and ManyChat makes that process way more seamless and way more automated than you just having to do it manually yourself. So if you would like to grow your audience, connect with them meaningfully and also potentially monetize them more effectively then check out ManyChat for free using the link in the video description or use the code Ali Abdaal for a free 30-day trial of ManyChat Pro. So thank you again ManyChat for sponsoring this video and let's get back to it. Another key tip that I would say is that like content is a compounding asset. It's not going to happen within the first week or the first two weeks or even the first month or the first three months. Oh lovely, thank you so much. Can I grab another fork please? Oh, can I steal this one? Thanks for my little firecracker salmon. Especially if you're trying to do a YouTube channel, it's a compounding asset. Like I've been doing this ---- for like nine years now. It's a compounding asset that builds trust. Yes, competitor analysis is important and seeing what works but the single most important metric to optimize for is you enjoying the process enough to keep going with it. If you only do content for three months compared to doing it for three years compared to doing it for 10 years, you'll have drastically different results. I find for me getting away from the desk and you know I filmed a video of the local kebab shop the other day. We did one that was sort of just walking around my office the other day. Like there's something about like being more chill and experimental with the format that keeps the process more enjoyable for me and so I'm willing to take the hit in terms of like views slightly in the short term for the sake of maximizing my enjoyment of the craft. There's all sorts of things to keep in mind, right? Like there's like the foundational baseline of consistency and then there's like the strategy that goes on top but it's also worth recognizing that your own enjoyment to stay consistent with it for years to decades is also a really important part of this. So it's all like a balancing act. Sometimes doing stuff that is under optimized for the sake of you enjoying the process a little bit more is 100% a worthwhile trade to make. I have a lot of kind of big YouTuber friends and a lot of them feel this pull of like there is content that will do well in terms of the views and then there's content that they'll enjoy making and over time their own enjoyment often will diverge from the stuff that they know will get the views and so you get this balancing act between doing it for the views and doing it for the vibes. This is an example of a video that I'm doing for the vibes. If I cared about views in this video we would have thought harder about the packaging. We would have thought harder about the title. I would have thought harder about like the framework of the video but I'm doing this for the vibes because I'm like, you know what? This is a video that I think could be just kind of interesting to do in the middle of lunch. So as you're embarking on your journey of content don't forget that your own enjoyment is the most important part of it. But the nuance there is that like if it's not working you're also not gonna enjoy it, right? Like if your goal is to get leads for your business and you're like the most important thing is for me to enjoy my content but your content's not working you will actually stop enjoying it. In our Lifestyle Business Academy people like students will ask questions about content like how do I improve my content? Can you give me feedback on my LinkedIn profile? Like I'm struggling, I'm not getting enough leads like what's the problem? And then we diagnose and then a lot of it is actually just asking lots and lots of follow-up questions because the advice given to one person the complete opposite advice might actually work for someone else depending on what their situation is. So I'm trying my best in this video to give you a feel of like, what are the trade-offs? Yeah, so I think if you're right at the start of your journey you wanna not think too hard about the enjoyment part because it's like when you're a beginner to anything it will kind of suck. You have to get sufficiently good to start actually feeling the enjoyment of the thing. It's sort of like playing tennis, right? So you know that when you're a noob at tennis it's actually not that enjoyable because the ball fricking goes out half the time and hits the net the other half of the time. At a certain point, you become good enough that you're able to reliably hit the ball over the net and you have a partner who's able to hit the ball back to you. So now in that world when you can actually have a rally and that rally is interesting tennis starts to be fun. It's the same with content. Yes, your own enjoyment is important and also you wanna not think too hard about your own enjoyment of it when you're at the beginning of the thing and at the beginning of the journey you wanna really just focus on getting your first 30 posts out there or your first 50 things or just doing it consistently for three to six months because the enjoyment can totally come later once you feel like you have a little bit more of a sense of mastery is the wrong word but like mastery of the craft, if that makes sense. By the way, if you are enjoying this video so far I would love it if you can leave a comment down below. This is a little bit experimental, like I mentioned and I don't know if this format is gonna work or if you like this sort of stuff but I quite enjoyed making it so let me know what you liked, what you didn't like what you think could be improved for next time down in the comments below. Cool, thanks. And by the way, if you've been wanting to start or grow a YouTube channel but you're not sure where to start I have a completely free seven-day crash course that talks about the strategy, the skills and the systems you need to succeed on YouTube. Another big tip I would say and a mistake I see my Lifestyle Business Academy students make all the time is overusing AI. When you suck at doing content, i.e. you're a beginner the temptation is there to just put stuff into chat GPT and get chat GPT to generate your content. You haven't yet developed the skill of actually doing the content or the taste for what makes good content. And so you just outsourcing it to AI means the AI is doing the work and increasingly people are getting very good especially with text content and immediately telling whether something is written by AI or not. Content is basically relationships at scale. It's a way of increasing people's trust level with you without you necessarily having to know or meet them, right? Like back in the day pre-content the way you would increase someone's trust level with you is you'd spend time with them. This is what networking is. This is what building a professional reputation is. Now it's called a personal brand but that's professional reputation. You're going to networking events. You're speaking to people. You're like adding value to people. You're being helpful. You're exchanging numbers. You're adding people to your Rolodex back in the day. The more helpful you are the more people's trust level with you increases. Now in the world of content you're able to get this trust with strangers through putting useful stuff out there. With my stuff I've been building trust with strangers on the internet for the last nine years. There's like a certain like trust battery that you have with every person that engages with your stuff. And it takes a long time to build up that trust battery but it's also very easy to lose that trust battery. And increasingly I think if your stuff comes across as if it was written by AI because no one wants to follow channels where they can tell that it was written by AI. It's not a flex anymore of like I used AI to write my content. In a world where AI content is like expanding on all these platforms you kind of want to be the voice of humanity the voice of authenticity not one of the other 5 zillion people that are just outsourcing their LinkedIn post writing to chat GPT. So I would say be very careful of where you're using AI in your process and at the start doing things manually is a better way of building up the skill than using AI for your stuff. Another big thing around content is over time you inoculate yourself against feeling cringe. So at the start everyone feels cringe with the content that they post because we all fear social disapproval we're all worried about what people are going to think of us. As you get more comfortable with the content stuff what it takes for you to cringe gets like higher and higher. I'm filming this in a public restaurant. Thankfully there's not that many people around but if there were more people around I would cringe at myself for filming this kind of video. If I vlog in public with the camera out I cringe at myself still even though I've been doing this stuff for nine years. I have a friend Simon Squibb he goes out on the streets and approaches random strangers and he asks them what's your dream. Oh when I imagine myself at the thought of doing that I cringe I'm like oh my god that feels so scary. I'm not judging him for doing it I'm not like Simon Squibb so cringed for like approaching strangers on the street I think it's amazing what he does and I wish I had the confidence to do that but if I just think about it like I feel the palpitations of like holy ---- like will they think I'm creepy will they think I'm weird especially if it's a girl that I go up to I mean that's weird oh my god but Simon doesn't cringe at it he's in his 50s and he's been doing this a long time and this is why he's got like zillions of followers across all the social media platforms because his willingness to do things that will make other people cringe he doesn't feel embarrassed about it. I don't feel embarrassed about sitting here in this like restaurant where there's not that many people around and opining about content. Most people would feel weird about even this sort of even this sort of video. Cringe is a feeling that you fear social disapproval that's not to say that the thing is actually is wrong to do. Now there are some instances where you cringe at doing something and it is also the wrong thing to do morally or whatever but you got to make that decision for yourself right like are you afraid because there's actually a problem here or are you afraid because your brain is wired for like caveman era where we evolved over millions of years to really really care about the approval of people in our tribe and now we're not in that world anymore and in fact the people who are able to do things that are more cringe are the ones who stand out and standing out is how you grow on social media. All right final tip I'd like to share it's really useful to lean into your unfair advantages you don't want to be vanilla ice cream on social media if you have unfair advantages or competitive advantages that you've picked up over the years or things about you that are slightly different or unique or interesting or novel then it's very much worth leaning into those things. This is hard to do initially because you might not even know what those things are for you you might not know how to lean into them you might think I don't have any unfair advantages you might think I'm not unique I'm not a special snowflake and any of this sort of stuff but everyone has a unique combination of advantages. This is where actually the competitive analysis comes in again so when you are analyzing competitors when you're looking at other accounts that are doing well you want to start developing a sense for asking yourself what advantages are they leaning into and usually the accounts that are growing the social media profiles that are big there's usually something quirky about them rather than just everything is beige and everything is non-offensive. You cannot be a big social media account without offending some people you cannot be a life-changing presence to some without being a total cringe embarrassment to others. I think my content like is fairly vanilla like it's not that controversial I don't have that many hot takes but I do have some haters who say that like I'm toxic productivity or like I can't believe he listens to stuff at double speed oh I see such a terrible person for leaving medicine but I think I would actually do better on social media if I leaned even more into quirks into like the sharper edges but I'm afraid what people will think of me and I don't like getting negative comments and so I don't do it as much as I probably could. When you lean into your quirks or your flaws your character flaws it makes you more of an interesting character so if you look at someone like Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes is this like savant level super genius level guy and also he's a drug addict and a bit of a dick but the fact that he's a drug addict and a bit of a dick is what makes him a magnetic character because if he was just someone who was like a know-it-all that's kind of insufferable people don't like that. When you're thinking about building a career on social media you don't need to be an arsehole it is useful to think what are my quirks what are the things that my friends like about me that are slightly different from everyone else in the friendship group and how can I just like lean more into those things. One way of figuring this out is sort of like what do you have a strong belief about that is a little controversial or that other people might disagree with now for me as I was thinking about this like one of the things that I strongly believe is that you should use productivity systems in your personal life and so I did a couple of Instagram reels about like how to date productively dating or sort of relationship productivity system that is something that I actually do stand by like I didn't do that I don't do that content just for the sake of the views and yeah people found that found that somewhat controversial so that's a sign that like oh that's interesting this is something I genuinely believe that sort of goes against the grain a little bit interesting what can I learn from that data point as like a way of sort of leaning into my quirks when I'm doing content like it's not like I'm encouraging you to do something massively controversial or whatever but you probably hopefully have some kind of opinions or views that go against the grain of what most people would believe and so once you figure out what those are which happens over time as you do more content you can then start actively leaning into those a little bit more and sort of doing a little bit of molding of your personal brand around like the sharp edges because the sharp edges are interesting it's what makes you stand out now if one of the platforms that you want to make social media content on happens to be YouTube I've got a video over here which will be about my top tips for growing a YouTube channel this year so you should totally check that out otherwise thank you very much for watching and see you hopefully in the next video bye-bye