Building A YouTube Empire, Brick By Brick

avilsd

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If you'd like to create a serious income through YouTube, you must be prepared to invest: a LOT of time, effort and eventually money. If you're not willing to dedicate at least 500 hours every year, or more to YouTube, please stop reading right now. This just isn't for you. I see so many people here who complain about not getting the results they'd like, but then they're just not working hard enough.

There's two routes you can take. Either a personal route, where you're inside of your video and it's either you're the brand, or you're closely related with your brand. People will be able to recognize you easily. The second route is you'll be a ghost behind the channel, and it's up to you whether you want to make an appearance later. You can run anything from a community channel to manage others who are in videos you create. Or it can be something that doesn't require others, such as animation or just voice-overs.

In my opinion, the personal route would probably be better long term. We have to think LONG TERM here! Don't be so easily fooled by the fireworks! They cost a lot of money and you'll only have pleasure for a little bit before you realize you wish you kept going. You could choose the second option however and still go back to the first one after you've established your empire, only to gain even more power at that point. The end goal is to just have a lot of traffic flowing all throughout a network in your hands.

If you have enough traffic, you can sell ANYTHING. Be it a product, service, yourself, your brand, whatever.

Let's begin.

Step 1. Choose a niche or sub-niche that you feel comfortable in. Something that you'll have a passion for and that might be easy to dominate. If you feel that something's about to turn into the latest trend, CAPITALIZE on it. Pull the trigger and go fully into it. If the trend dies down, broaden out the niche. For example, if I still had my Vine channels after vines died down, I would've turned them into a full on entertainment channel. I turned my personal gaming commentary into a community channel. And then eventually I turned it into an entertainment channel before I got too greedy and it got banned (back then they just introduced the fact that you can't abuse meta-data I believe it's called, basically put a bunch of tags in the description and I was too lazy to edit my 600+ videos). Every time I upgraded my channel, it just kept growing more and more. It went from CoD gameplays to everything from GTA glitches to People Are Awesome compilations and bikini babes. And oh yes, clickbait definitely helped spiral my channel towards the tens of thousands of subscribers.

Let's use music as an example niche. The sub-niche will be electronic music. You can then dissect this further into many genres: EDM, House, Trance, Techno, Dance, etc. Let's say you have no money to invest with at the beginning. So you pick a category, like Dance music and you start just one channel. Now you need content. Where will you get it from? (And it has to be something copyright-free... or at least slightly.) Let's go to soundcloud and search up for new DJ's producing tracks in the genre. Also use Twitter, IG, and the other platforms as well. (Never know what you could find on there!) And of course don't forget to look at small youtube channels. Just search up dance music from the past 24 hours and look through all the channels. Message their business emails if they have one, if not message them through Youtube but also leave comments on their videos so they know you sent them one. (Youtube's modern messenger sucks, barely notifies you)

It's a numbers game. Message like 100-500 people within the next 24-48 hours. Make sure to use a professional email and language to get more responses. Use the Streak tool for gmail to see when and where people open your emails. You will eventually get written permission from people to use their content. Make sure to remember the rules of the game. Dale Carnegie. You must give, give, give before you get. People will give you things much easier when they feel like they owe you. In exchange for their content, promise you will actually help their channels grow in the long-run.

Once you have access to their content, of course make sure it's copyright free. Let them know you'll be using it for commercial purposes as well so you're able to monetize it in the future. Download as many videos/songs as you can. Now here's where the fun part begins. You must build your brand. If you do not have one, at least give off the image that you do. Create a high quality logo. QUALITY matters!! Watermark each video with this logo. Fully utilize YouTube's features. As in, fill out the descriptions on your channel and every video. Use annotations and featured content and branding and all of that. Use intros and outros to the videos. If it's music for example, create one of those cool animated backgrounds that flows with the music. Make it stand out from the others. Be creative. Once you have created, edited, and rendered your videos... make sure you make some dope thumbnails. Again, a LOT of time and effort here, but it'll pay off.

Still hungry for that money? Keep reading!

Step 2. Now start uploading as much as possible. At the very beginning, who cares if you have to even upload 100 videos in one day. You wanna know how much videos I've uploaded in a single day? For Vines, since they were only 6 seconds long.. I was able to manage HUNDREDS of uploads PER CHANNEL. I had at least 10 main ones. Yes, there have been days where I've uploaded thousands of videos. It's repetitive as f**k but it'll be sooo worth it!

After you gain some subscribers, like a couple hundred, then limit yourself. Post max a few videos per day. The bigger you'll grow, the more you'll realize you'll get a bunch of subscribers and it doesn't matter if you lose some. But don't ever spam WAY too much, or else your numbers will go way down.

Step 3. Promotion. So the easiest part is just giving out as much content as possible. You want to get views and make money, so the first few days you better be prepared to pump out a LOT. Make sure to make good use of YouTube's SEO by choosing the right hashtags and using the bio fully. A good tool that can help you is TubeBuddy. Now you want to promote the heck out of your channel. A good rule of thumb is to spend FIVE times the amount of time promoting your stuff than it took you to make it. Promote it everywhere. Make a Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and connect it all to your channel.

Promote most definitely on Reddit as well! They are difficult to market on, but if you do the 90/10 rule, and try to give out as much as possible.. certain subreddits will love you. And hey, make your own subreddits as well. Promote those and it'll give you even more exposure for your YT channel. Get your friends on FB to like your page and channel and share it. Get family to do it. Get your neighbors, the mailman and even your ex-girlfriend's boyfriend to share it. It doesn't matter, at this point every single person in the world counts as a view. They will be part of a demographic. You must become addicted to checking analytics daily and studying it and figuring out new ways to boost traffic.

Step 4. Make sure to build long-term relationships with your subscribers. Respond to every comment and encourage everyone to subscribe both inside your videos and outside. Use annotations, write in the description, write in your comments, write everywhere. But make sure to write this only after writing a thoughtful comment or insight of course to help your fans. The first 1,000 subscribers will be the most difficult. After 5-10,000 you will start experiencing natural growth. You may already have gotten a video viral at this point, as all it takes is one video to skyrocket and boom, you're heading for the gold.

Step 5. Make sure to post consistently. After 10,000 subscribers, you may want to create a second channel in the same niche or similar. Maybe make a Trance channel and turn the 2 channels into "sister channels". Promote each other. Do collabs with other channels of your size. Message HUNDREDS again. Offer them something they don't have. Exposure, money, advice, whatever it is, just get as many people to help you out as possible.

After 25,000 subscribers, you may experience natural EXPONENTIAL growth. This is gold. This is what you're aiming for. A point where you keep getting videos going for the hills, becoming viral. Music is really easy to dominate as people will fall in love with a certain track and they'll replay it many times and easily share it with their friends. The larger you grow, the more people you want to get involved in this. CONNECT WITH EVERYBODY. You never know which pair of eyes could be a partner or an investor or a celebrity.

While writing this I just had Adventure Club (191,000+ followers) like one of my personal videos on Instagram. I just decided to check my feed, and lo and behold they're in there. That's awesome, and you know what? It's a personal IG feed, nothing really to do with EDM at all.

Step 6. Keep making channels, keep getting new people to submit content, keep promoting. Once it starts to become too big, hire others to manage certain parts of the channel(s). Reinvest at least half of your earnings into growing your channels. Get other large channels and celebrities (influencers) to promote your channel or videos. The best way to invest money is to pay for targeted shoutouts. Shoutouts SUCK unless you know what you're doing. Let's say for the Dance channel, you type in 5 different hashtags related to Dance music. You will message the top 10 results for each of those 5 hashtags. Look at their engagement. Plot them in Excel. Compare prices. Then choose the top 3 for test shoutouts. The one that brings you the best ROI, form a partnership with that channel. Do a shoutout every week until you find someone with an even bigger channel.

Eventually you want to get to a point where you're making a new channel every month. You can be well on your way to becoming a millionaire by diversifying. For example, you start attacking all electronic music genres. Then you start attacking music in general. Form an entire network of all these channels connected under one brand name. Monetize the videos via ads, donations through YouTube and Patreon, in-video advertisements, shoutouts/promos, selling smaller channels, consultations (once you get to a certain point, you can consult others who want to get to your level but don't have the knowledge), and more. For every channel you sell/flip, make 2 more. Grow your network till you're monopolizing everything.

Step 7. Get managers for each channel, and then managers for those managers. And then once you're dominating on YouTube, make sure to rinse and repeat on all the other platforms. Then funnel all the traffic from all your accounts to one main website.

I used the example of music, but the gaming genre would be even better (I mean just look at the socialblade rankings. The biggest Youtuber in the world is a gamer, and I believe around 1/4 or 1/3 of Youtube's Top 100 are gamers). However you can do this with any genre. Once you have an empire, then show them who's the emperor. Turn yourself into a brand. Because if a channel ever goes down, or YouTube suddenly goes bankrupt, or whatever happens.. at least people will recognize you. You'll still have a lot of power and you'll never go broke again.

I would write more details, however I think I'll leave it as is for now to not make it too long, and for more guides in the future. My experience? I've worked with over 10,000,000 followers over the past 6-7 years throughout all the major platforms. My favorite platforms to work with though are definitely YouTube and Instagram. If you need any help or would like to work together in the future, connect with me! I love it and am definitely crazy about YouTube. HUSTLE hard players.

Also, a good motivational YouTuber for you guys is Gary Vaynerchuk. Good luck to you all. -AVILSD
 
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xingcat

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Thanks for the detailed post!
 

Crown

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Thanks for the detailed post. I have edited out the blackhat advice.

Your approach is certainly unconventional but that's not a bad thing. It makes a change from the thousands of posts saying the same old stuff.

( I've moved this to the tutorials section. )