Philip Borrowman

Former baker and cafe owner. Now working online as an Internet Marketer & Coach.

Travelling the world as a digital nomad. 🎉

➡️ www.takingaction.online
➡️ https://www.youtube.com//

21/08/2026

When I run a promotion with a real deadline, I email hard on the last day.

Twenty four hours left. Twelve. Six.

Some people unsubscribe over it, and that's fine.

I've thought about this more than I probably should have, because I spend a lot of time attacking fake urgency, and there I am with a countdown in a subject line.

Here's where I landed. The difference was never the reminders.

It's whether the deadline is real. A fake timer resets when you refresh the page. A real one closes, and the people who wanted in and forgot are the ones messaging you the next day, annoyed.

Pushing on the last day isn't the manipulation.

Pretending there is a last day is.

21/08/2026

Can you outsource the videos? Yes. Eventually.

One of the best performing videos on my scrappy little demo channel isn't even narrated by me. A freelancer recorded the voiceover, and it has done better than anything I've spoken on.

So I'm not precious about it.

But look at the order of that answer. Eventually.

You can only outsource a job you already know how to do. Otherwise you're not delegating, you're paying somebody to make decisions you have no way of checking. You won't know the pacing is off, or the title is weak, or they skipped the bit that made it useful, because you've never made one.

People want to outsource at video two. That isn't scaling. That's hiring someone to be a beginner on your behalf, at your expense.

Make the first fifty yourself. Badly.

Then hand over the part you've got sick of.

20/08/2026

Keep your first videos short. One to five minutes.

Not because short is better. Because you're building a muscle, and you can actually finish a two minute video on a Tuesday night after work.

You can't finish a forty minute one. You'll start it, run out of evening, and it will sit there half recorded until you quietly stop opening the file.

The long in-depth ones come later, once you've got fifty of the small ones behind you.

Start with the video you can actually finish tonight.

19/08/2026

Don't try to fix your channel. Fix one thing in the next video.

This week, zoom in when you click. Next week, highlight the cursor. The week after, open on the finished result so people know what they're staying for.

One change, done properly, then the next one.

Most people try to get good at all of it by Friday, get overwhelmed, and make nothing at all.

Forty videos with one small fix each ends up looking like someone who knew what they were doing.

They didn't. They changed one thing at a time.

19/08/2026

Video three is probably going to embarrass you.

Not today.

In six months, when you watch it back and wonder how you ever thought it was good enough to publish.

That’s a good thing.

The cringe is proof you got better.

What I don’t want you doing is treating that old work like an emergency.

Don’t stop publishing so you can spend two weeks re-recording your first ten videos.

That feels productive because you’re busy.

But you’re polishing the past while nothing new is being built.

The redo comes later.

Once you’ve made enough videos to actually know what you’re doing, you go back and improve the whole system.

➡️ The early videos
➡️ The lead magnet
➡️ The emails
➡️ The bridge pages

That second pass is much faster because you’re not staring at a blank page anymore.

You’re improving something that already works.

Your early work isn’t a mistake you need to hide.

It’s the first version of something you’ll eventually make much better.

But you need the first version before you can have the second.

You can’t improve a video you never published.

18/08/2026

People pick finance or AI because those niches pay more per thousand views.

Then they make four videos about something they find boring, and stop.

If you are bored out of your mind by video four, it does not matter what the niche pays. You are never going to make video forty. You are guaranteed to fail at it.

Pick the one you could still be making videos about in eighteen months, when it has stopped being interesting to anybody except you.

18/08/2026

There are three marketplaces I tell my students to stay away from.

Warrior Plus. ClickBank. JVZoo.

I am not throwing stones from a safe distance here. I used to promote products on all of them.

That is where everyone was when I started out, so that is where I went.

It took a year or two to see what was actually going on. The launch was never really the product. It was the doorway. Get somebody in cheap, walk them up through the upsells, and point them at a coaching package at ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars.

Then I started taking calls from the people at the other end of that.

Ones who bought the course, then the upsell, then the downsell, and kept going until their savings were gone.

After enough of those calls I was done with the whole thing.

I have not promoted anything on those platforms in years. If a vendor from there approaches me now it is an immediate no, because I already know what I would be handing my audience over to.

And this is the part I was slowest to understand.

It was never only about whether the product was any good. The second somebody registers, the platform itself starts emailing them. Latest product of the day, every day, forever.

I was not recommending a product.

I was signing people up to the machine.

17/08/2026

I used to come home from marketing conferences feeling worse than when I left.

Two days surrounded by people who understood exactly what I did. Then a flight home to a place where nobody did.

That contrast was harder than I expected.

It's one of the quieter reasons I eventually left the UK. Not the money. Not the weather. I wanted to be somewhere I could sit across a table from people building the same kind of thing.

Nobody warns you about this part.

You're doing something in a spare room that the people closest to you can't really picture, so you stop bringing it up. Then it's just you and a laptop, for a long time, with nobody to say "yes, that happened to me too."

That is not a small thing. I've watched it end more attempts than any strategy problem ever did.

Find one person doing what you're doing.

One is enough to stop it feeling mad.

17/08/2026

YouTube tags do not matter.

Not "matter less than you think". They do not matter, and they have not mattered for a very long time.

YouTube works out what your video is about from the title, the thumbnail and the video itself. Then it decides whether to keep showing it based on whether people actually watch.

That is the whole system.

So the keyword tool you have open, and the thirty tags you are about to paste in, are not a small win. They are not a win at all.

Put that time into the title and the thumbnail instead.

Those two still decide whether anybody clicks.

16/08/2026

Most people pick a niche too big because a big niche feels safer. More room. Less chance of running out of things to say.

It works the other way round.

Broad means every video pulls a different stranger who never comes back. Narrow means one person watches four of them and subscribes.

You don't run out of ideas in a small niche.

You run out in a big one, because nothing you make connects to anything else you've made.