This is lofty advice. It's well written, and the analogies are thought out, but it's not as easily applied as it is advised.
1)Make the best video that you can.
2)Make friends (the rare kind that actually log in to their YouTube accounts)
3)Make your friends watch your videos (when you're not there to type in your channels URL for them)
4)???
5)Success!
Would you mind elaborating with some practical tips for promotion?
I think I see what you're saying here...
A lot of the people we know aren't exactly as YouTube-orientated as us so we kinda have to spell out what a channel is, where they can find links to our videos, how they can subscribe.... that sort of thing. And yes, I see where you are coming from. This is something that I think a bit about as well. See, I've shown my videos countless times to family and friends on places like facebook. And yes, they watch the videos and like them too, but they don't subscribe, they don't interact in the way that a Youtuber would. In fact, if you look at my YouTube channel (youtube.com/mrtoastbuster), I have almost as many video views as you but about 1/10th your subscribers as a result of this type of promotion. In that instance, the best thing to do is to promote your videos to fellow Youtubers, the ones that will subscribe/ shoutout/ collab if you are talented. But you can't send direct messages, that's invasion of privacy. You can't comment on famous Youtubers' videos promoting yourself because that's spam. So what do you do? What is that vital step 4 that bridges the gap between failure and success? How can you promote yourself properly to Youtubers without being named and shamed? That my friend, is a mystery. Once you get popular and maybe even get on the mainpage of Youtube it becomes easy, but for now I can only suggest my above method and hope you catch some Youtubers along the way.
(If anyone has any suggestions, you know what to do. How can we promote ourselves well to specifically the YOUTUBE community?)
P.S. One suggestion I have, is to create videos that occupy a before- unrealised niche. People were making minecraft videos willy nilly, you know, bog-standard commentary, talking about their real life, that sort of thing. The game, minecraft if you don't know has no storyline. As a result, Lewis and Simon of the Yogscast decided to throw a plot into their gameplay through story telling and adventure maps to create shows like the Shadow of Israphel. This supply met a new demand, for the already hugely popular minecraft gameplay market but with stories involved. Quite a genius move if I do say so myself. They thought abstractly instead of laterally which many of us don't do, which in turn got them famous. They thought, "Instead of changing to an unpopular game with the same type of video, why not keep the same popular game and change the type of video?" It worked.
Another example of abstract thinking:
There are 30 women in a town who all married the same man, but all have different husbands. How so?
The answer: The man was a priest, marrying the woman, to their husbands.
This outside the box thinking is what defines make or break ideas in this crazy universe of ideas we all know and love as Youtube. If you do this, you don't need to advertise because people will be typing your name into that search box all day long.