My Roadmap To 1000 Subscribers (Gaming Channel)

evoloz

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So I was recently lucky enough to just pass the 1000 Subscriber mark with my channel and having particularly enjoyed the posts written by Loki Doki when I was much smaller I felt it was about time I wrote a post of my own.

Firstly, a little about me. I started my Channel on 3rd Sept '17 and it has taken me around 10 months to reach the 1000 subs mark. Apart from the odd day off I have been posting videos daily and have varied my content a little as I have changed my niche and learnt but now mostly focus on a game called Total War: Arena.

I guess it goes without saying that all my advice and stuff comes from the point of view of a gaming channel but some may carry across to other formats

1) Picking a Niche:

I personally started out with a game called 'Car Mechanic Simulator 2018' before also visiting racing games, shooting games & even a game about Ants! it took me time to find my Niche but once I did I found growth improved dramatically.

I think this is perhaps the biggest failings of many channels (particularly gaming channels) when it comes to getting started as so many people seem to go for a scatter gun approach jumping between lots of different games with no particularly connection between them (ie. 2 fortnight videos, 1 Call Of Duty Game, 3 races on Forza and a random Vlog) this level of disconnect means that when someone subscribes to your channel for your Forza content they have no interest in fortnight so those videos in turn do badly and thus get ranked badly in youtube and so the cycle continues. Games in a similar Niche such as playing Fortnight, then the odd game of PUBG should be fine.

So what Niche to go for? Personally i'd say go for whatever you enjoy, many people will tell you that the whole market is over saturated and you will never get anywhere with the common games (fortnight, call of duty etc etc). Whilst there is certainly some truth to this I think its possible to buck the trend so pick your niche based on what you enjoy!

Once you have an idea of what you want your videos to be on its then a case of narrowing down your target market into something manageable, a sort of sub-niche. For example, If you create 'generic Call Of Duty gameplay #1' then nobody will ever watch it, it'll never rank in youtube and you'll be just another person producing a Call Of Duty video. However, it you were to create a video that looked in detail at the statistics of the two most popular guns (their DPS, accuracy, range etc) then there would be a lot less of those videos around! More than that you can create a detailed title and start ranking for specific keywords.

The above of course is just a crude example but my point it be specific at the beginning, as you get bigger your existing audience will allow you to produce more general content and get away with it but at the start you need to be making targeted content not trying to rank up with the big you tubers.

2) Titles, Tags & Thumbnails

Getting good titles, thumbnails an SEO is key to growing a channel. This is because at the end of the day Youtube is just a big search engine, if you can't get your videos to rank in search or appear in peoples suggested content that how are any new subscribers going to find you?

This isn't going to be a guide on SEO so for more details on that looking at the other guides available on the forum but for a start at least try and make decent titles! So many new channel make such generic, short, non specific titles that its no wonder youtube doesn't rank the videos and even if they did no one would watch them!

To take out previous Call Of Duty example titles such as 'Call of duty Gameplay #1 or Getting lots of kills in COD or Cool Call Of Duty Moment' are rarely going to get you anywhere. 'Call Of Duty: Overwatch Map Strategy & Analysis' is more likely to rank for specific searches.

An example for one of my titles is: Total War Arena - Matchmaking Changes, Boudica & New Premiums - 3.1.5 Patch News!

3) Marketing & Social Media

I guess the first one to clear up here is Never Sub4sub, it won't help as it'll never generate you any views just dead subscribers and in the long run it'll do nothing but damage your channel.

Social Media is one of those area of which I am personally not a fan and suspect that it can often do more harm than good. For example, if you put a twitter post out say you have just started a gaming channel, please check out my videos etc etc and get it retweeted by all the twitter bots, how many of the people who see or interact with your post are really interested in your content? Are those who find you going to be quality subs or more like sub4sub people? The answer is I don't know, but its something to think about when doing untargeted generic Social Media Posts

Personally, I found my best success with social media came from reddit. If you don't know what reddit is then it is basically a interactive forum where posts get ranked higher when people like them and lower when they don't. I'd highly recommend spending time just being a member of a few reddit communities before posting so you understand how it works.

The other issue with reddit is that they HATE self promotion! A bad reddit post can result in your video accumulating quite a lot of negative comments/ thumbs down etc. So you need to be making sure you are posting in targeted reddit communities. In my case I post in the r/totalwararena community. Therefore, everyone there either knows me or finds my content relevant thus I am much less likely to generate hate from it.

4) Time

It goes without saying that all this takes a lot of time, it has taken me 10 months of posting videos daily (currently at 284 videos) to get where I am. Its not to say that It can't be done with less videos, as there are many people far more talented and video making and far more devoted then me who can and do achieve success in less time but either way its going to a lot of hard work with not a lot of reward!

5) Conclusions

I'm sure there is more I could add but I'd like to try and keep this post to a sensible length haha. To conclude however, Its worth remembering how hard this journey is, complaining you're not getting hundreds of views after 4 videos is just not going to cut it. As above it took me at least 50 videos to get my niche sorted out and my initial tech problems sorted out!

If you're determined to follow the youtube path, then keep at it, don't stop to have a break unless you have to! Make sure to reply to all your comments and try to build a strong a community as possible.

Lastly, all there is to say is Good Luck! :)
 

Alexis Claudio Music

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1000 subs Is a major milestone in my opinion. It marks the beginning of something that's going to be very successful. Also, thank you for those words. I read them all. It really encourages others to keep going and never give up. Congrats and keep at it! :wavespin:
 
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