JesusGreen
Posting Mad!
(Skip to the bottom if you don't care about the story and just want me to give you some tips!)
So when I joined YTTalk a little over a year ago, I had less than 100 subscribers. I had no clue what I was doing really, but I told myself: I'm going to work hard, and by my 24th birthday in August 2016, I'll hit 1000 subscribers. I didn't know how I'd do it, but I told myself I would.
It took me another two months from joining YTTalk to hit my first 200 subs, when I made my first milestone post here, a year ago, in February 2016. I had a long way to go until 1000 subs, but once again I told myself it was doable, even if I was only getting about 40-60 subs a month at that point.
A couple of months later, by April, I reached my next milestone, 500 subs. At this point, my goal of 1000 was in sight, and I knew I could do it. Sure enough, in late June, I hit my goal of 1000 subs a couple of months early.
In October 2016 I had ~2200 subs, and I posted my goal to achieve by the end of 2017:
Here's a snapshot from just now:
So I managed another goal, 10 months early! The best part is the 10,000 number is a particularly significant number for me. When I started my self improvement journey (which is what led to me creating my channel), I was motivated to do so by another YouTuber, who had around 10,000 subscribers himself at the time. I remember when I first made my YouTube account I said if I ever got to his size, I would consider that a huge success, and here I am now. It feels awesome.
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So, on to the tips. What have I learned since starting YouTube?
Your YouTube growth is your responsibility. Growth isn't luck based like you might have been led to believe. There are an extremely rare lucky few who got their growth accelerated massively by some freak circumstances: but you or me are probably never going to be one of those. So don't rely on luck and cross your fingers. Actually learn HOW to make your channel grow, and work hard at it.
How do you do that? SEO, aka Search Engine Optimisation. If you don't know what SEO is, you should get studying it. In short, optimise your title, tags, and description, and make highly searchable videos. If none of your videos are discoverable in search, then how is your channel supposed to grow? Your channel grows when people stumble across your videos, and they do that when those videos are possible to find in search. Even ranking videos in suggested/browse features etc depends on good SEO, and also depends on you getting some initial views either from subscribers or through said search before you rank.
Adapt constantly. Treat YouTube like an experiment that you're fine tuning and tweaking endlessly. If you try something, and it doesn't work, don't keep beating a dead horse. Try something new. Switch things up. Try different styles of thumbnails. Try different video lengths. Try making videos about new subjects. Try different upload times and frequencies.
Observe! Look at your analytics regularly. Where are your views coming from? Which of your videos do best? What changes have you made that positively impacted your channel? What changes had a negative impact. Learn from your experimentation. It might take weeks, months, or even years, but eventually through enough trial and error you'll find that formula that works for you and gets you regular views and subscribers.
Work hard. Procrastination. We're all guilty of it. The thing is, I really stand by the idea that the more time you spend working on your channel, the quicker it will grow. I was guilty of not spending as much time on it as I should have until recently - and had I dedicated more time to it, I'd have probably reached two, three, or even four times the size I've grown to by now. Every extra hour you put in to researching keywords, making extra videos, reviewing your analytics, polling your viewers, trying new things etc == a little boost to how fast you'll grow. If you procrastinate a lot and can't convince yourself to work on your channel in your free time, I suggest using a free Todolist app like Todoist or something similar to help you manage your time.
Upload frequently. This is something I've observed more recently, but the YouTube algorithm seems to care a ton about upload frequency. The more frequently you can upload, the better your channel will perform. I haven't tested multiple videos a day, so I can't confirm if that's even better or not, but a video every single day performs far better than just one or two a week (or less) - so if you can manage it, make more videos. If you're strapped for time, spend a day planning videos, come up with 20+ video ideas. Then another day simply bulk recording as many of those (or all of them) and getting as many as possible edited. Then you can just upload and schedule them all for release on different days, leaving you another 10-20 days to work on new ones.
Learn from the experts. If you decided to be a programmer, you'd read some books, watch some tutorials etc. If you decided to learn martial arts, you'd study under a teacher. So take the same approach to YouTube. There are techniques and strategy to learn. So check out some of the YouTubers who help with this. I can give personal recommendations to: Tim Schmoyer/VideoCreators, Roberto Blake, and Derral Eves, all of whose videos helped me out a ton so far.
Hope you get something useful out of this!
----
Also, here's to 20k subs by the end of 2017. Can we do it? I think so!
So when I joined YTTalk a little over a year ago, I had less than 100 subscribers. I had no clue what I was doing really, but I told myself: I'm going to work hard, and by my 24th birthday in August 2016, I'll hit 1000 subscribers. I didn't know how I'd do it, but I told myself I would.
It took me another two months from joining YTTalk to hit my first 200 subs, when I made my first milestone post here, a year ago, in February 2016. I had a long way to go until 1000 subs, but once again I told myself it was doable, even if I was only getting about 40-60 subs a month at that point.
A couple of months later, by April, I reached my next milestone, 500 subs. At this point, my goal of 1000 was in sight, and I knew I could do it. Sure enough, in late June, I hit my goal of 1000 subs a couple of months early.
In October 2016 I had ~2200 subs, and I posted my goal to achieve by the end of 2017:
10,000 subscribers by the end of 2017.
I'm only at 2.2k now, but growth on YouTube always seems to be exponential, so I'm confident if I keep up with my video schedule and keep improving my content and my SEO I can reach the goal.
Views wise, at least 1.5M? Currently at 280k.
Here's a snapshot from just now:
So I managed another goal, 10 months early! The best part is the 10,000 number is a particularly significant number for me. When I started my self improvement journey (which is what led to me creating my channel), I was motivated to do so by another YouTuber, who had around 10,000 subscribers himself at the time. I remember when I first made my YouTube account I said if I ever got to his size, I would consider that a huge success, and here I am now. It feels awesome.
----
So, on to the tips. What have I learned since starting YouTube?
Your YouTube growth is your responsibility. Growth isn't luck based like you might have been led to believe. There are an extremely rare lucky few who got their growth accelerated massively by some freak circumstances: but you or me are probably never going to be one of those. So don't rely on luck and cross your fingers. Actually learn HOW to make your channel grow, and work hard at it.
How do you do that? SEO, aka Search Engine Optimisation. If you don't know what SEO is, you should get studying it. In short, optimise your title, tags, and description, and make highly searchable videos. If none of your videos are discoverable in search, then how is your channel supposed to grow? Your channel grows when people stumble across your videos, and they do that when those videos are possible to find in search. Even ranking videos in suggested/browse features etc depends on good SEO, and also depends on you getting some initial views either from subscribers or through said search before you rank.
Adapt constantly. Treat YouTube like an experiment that you're fine tuning and tweaking endlessly. If you try something, and it doesn't work, don't keep beating a dead horse. Try something new. Switch things up. Try different styles of thumbnails. Try different video lengths. Try making videos about new subjects. Try different upload times and frequencies.
Observe! Look at your analytics regularly. Where are your views coming from? Which of your videos do best? What changes have you made that positively impacted your channel? What changes had a negative impact. Learn from your experimentation. It might take weeks, months, or even years, but eventually through enough trial and error you'll find that formula that works for you and gets you regular views and subscribers.
Work hard. Procrastination. We're all guilty of it. The thing is, I really stand by the idea that the more time you spend working on your channel, the quicker it will grow. I was guilty of not spending as much time on it as I should have until recently - and had I dedicated more time to it, I'd have probably reached two, three, or even four times the size I've grown to by now. Every extra hour you put in to researching keywords, making extra videos, reviewing your analytics, polling your viewers, trying new things etc == a little boost to how fast you'll grow. If you procrastinate a lot and can't convince yourself to work on your channel in your free time, I suggest using a free Todolist app like Todoist or something similar to help you manage your time.
Upload frequently. This is something I've observed more recently, but the YouTube algorithm seems to care a ton about upload frequency. The more frequently you can upload, the better your channel will perform. I haven't tested multiple videos a day, so I can't confirm if that's even better or not, but a video every single day performs far better than just one or two a week (or less) - so if you can manage it, make more videos. If you're strapped for time, spend a day planning videos, come up with 20+ video ideas. Then another day simply bulk recording as many of those (or all of them) and getting as many as possible edited. Then you can just upload and schedule them all for release on different days, leaving you another 10-20 days to work on new ones.
Learn from the experts. If you decided to be a programmer, you'd read some books, watch some tutorials etc. If you decided to learn martial arts, you'd study under a teacher. So take the same approach to YouTube. There are techniques and strategy to learn. So check out some of the YouTubers who help with this. I can give personal recommendations to: Tim Schmoyer/VideoCreators, Roberto Blake, and Derral Eves, all of whose videos helped me out a ton so far.
Hope you get something useful out of this!
----
Also, here's to 20k subs by the end of 2017. Can we do it? I think so!
