Drew Binsky: Traveling the World as a Viral Content Creator

How did you get started? 

I've always liked storytelling and writing, and I got the travel bug when I was living in Prague for study abroad during college. Then when I moved to South Korea to teach English for two years, I had the idea to visit every country and kicked off my travel blog. 

How has your channel evolved since the early days?

In my early days of filming, my videos were like three minutes long. That's because I was filming, editing, and shooting everything myself. 

Over time, I was able to hire editors and get a team, so I started making longer videos and I enjoy doing deeper dives now. I would say my videos average 45 minutes now, which YouTube likes. They want people to stay on the platform longer. You just have to make sure you can hold the attention of the audience. If you can't, then it's no good.

How do you come up with ideas for your videos?

I have a spreadsheet of thousands of ideas that I try to break down by region. If I just come across an idea, then I'll throw it in my spreadsheet. Sometimes I'll do deep dives and go down rabbit holes on Wikipedia, YouTube, or ChatGPT. 

I try to find original stories. That's what I mostly focus on. Unfortunately, it gets harder and harder to find stories that have never been told, but I get most excited about original stories. 

I don't do keyword research. I just have a good gut feeling of what videos I want to tell and that people will want to watch. And then I pass it around to my team. Ideas are really important. If you don't have a good idea from the beginning, then you'll see that it won't hit.

Can you tell us about your most profitable and successful video?

Probably the sleepless man in Vietnam. I went to a small village in South Vietnam to track down a guy who claims that he hasn't slept in 61 years. I spent three days with him and I stayed awake with him a couple of those nights. From my gathering, he actually doesn't sleep. That was a fun journey to go out there and shoot. 

Across platforms, I think that video has like 100 million views and made a couple hundred thousand dollars, which is pretty cool.

After you’ve come up with an idea for a video, what’s your process? How do you go from the ideas spreadsheet to actually creating the video?

If I'm going to Southeast Asia, for example, I'll choose the top 10 videos from my spreadsheet that I want to film there and pass it to my team. Then we’ll choose the three or four best ones. 

Normally I just have the idea, the title, thumbnail, and a concept that’s pre-written and agreed on by my team. And then I'm kind of in charge of making a local friend, who I meet through Instagram or friend of a friend or whatever. Everything else is spontaneous. I'm shooting and as things happen, I'll be taking notes on my phone for my editors, like day one, day two, day three, day four, here's what happened each day, make sure this makes a cut, don't worry about this.

Sometimes I have a script writer on my team who helps with outlines. But what I think I'm good at is figuring out how to tell the most compelling story on the spot.

When you're creating the title and thumbnail, do you come up with a list of ideas and whittle it down? How does the final title and thumbnail make the final cut?

Each thumbnail goes through like 30 to 50 rounds of revisions. We also make three different thumbnails because now you can A/B test on YouTube. 

I have a team of thumbnail artists and they're all working on different thumbnails at once and I oversee that. I'm really involved in thumbnails. I probably spend 30% of my time working on thumbnails because it's that important. 

If you're trying to become a YouTuber and trying to make it to the top and you're not putting that much time on the thumbnails, then it's gonna be really hard to make it. It's literally that important. I try to drill that into people's heads, but everyone spends so much time on the cut and then they just like, throw together a thumbnail, but the process should be the exact opposite.

It's interesting because you focus mostly on views and then obviously the money follows. Do you think that focusing on the money first is something people get wrong?

Yeah, terrible idea. I mean, you gotta do it for the passion. I never once thought about doing it for the money, then the money came. From 2016 to 2019, I made $2,000 a month on average. I was just traveling and making content during those four years and 2020 was a turning point.

I still didn't make that much money, and then it just kind of went up every year. So I’d say you’ve just got to focus on the work. Otherwise you'll burn out really quickly when you realize you can't make money fast. 

If another creator was just starting out in the travel space, what do you think the top three things they should focus on are?

There are a lot of travel creators. So what's your angle when people think about you? What do they know you as? For me, I’m known as the guy who’s been to every country. Maybe you're really passionate about rock climbing. Then you should make content around that and people will know you as a rock climbing specialist. Do things that you like to do and you'll grow a community around that. 

If someone's starting a YouTube channel now, I would spend 70% of your time on thumbnails and 30% on content. It's literally that important.

Focus on ideation, thumbnails, and then when you're shooting, just don't make it boring. Don't sit in a chair and talk. If you have movement, you have good concepts or interesting characters, that's something that'll evolve over time. When I look at my old videos, I don't think they're that great. But yeah, it's all about finding your niche, figuring out how to stand out, and then focusing on thumbnails. That would be my best advice.

While Drew’s YouTube channel demonstrates his skills as a storyteller and creator, he’s also become a travel expert since visiting all 197 countries. This experience led him to launch his Mastermind Travel Hacking Course as a way to share his tips and tricks with fellow travelers, from beginners to experts.

Drew is a great example of how to leverage a large audience on social media to expand your business. If you’ve grown your audience from scratch, whether on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, learn how you can turn your knowledge into digital products using Kajabi.