Gary Vee says the Key to YouTube Success is Distribution. What do you think?

[JV Trammell]

Gary Vee understands the basis of success. I'm not trying to put anyone down, but there's a reason why many people in this forum and elsewhere stay under 500 or so subscribers year after year. This woeful belief that just by consistently making content will bring in all the success they're searching for is a doomed mindset. Consistent and content is king, no doubt, but none of it means anything if you're not out there trying to show people the content in the first place. We all know how notoriously disadvantaged smaller YouTubers are in the realm of discover-ability, but that doesn't mean that there are no outlets to increase the chances of you being discovered. I "hustled" heavily in the beginning stages of my YouTube journey, going on different websites and sharing my content. I received huge amounts of backlash, but at the end, the backlash means nothing if it meant that the small percentage of receptivity brought in high degrees of success.

If you truly believe in your content, then do everything you can to get people to see it.

Could you possibly lay down any specific tips or techniques you used? Or what specific websites?

 

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Could you possibly lay down any specific tips or techniques you used? Or what specific websites?

When I started out, it was all about showing my family and friends how extremely important my venture on YouTube is to me. I showed them my work early into the brainstorming stages and they were all extremely receptive. That lead to them sharing my content, which is crucial early on to garner subscribers at the very instant you go live with the channel.

After that, it's all about reaching out to all types of social media. This is where I believe that finding the right social media platform to share your content is dependent on your type of content. Some content will do better on certain platforms than others. My bread and butter early on was Reddit. Reddit loves to learn and love opinions, which my early videos were chalked full of these aspects. Sharing persistently on Reddit with the help of my friends in "upvoting" the content helped push some of my posts to the top of the video subreddit. Of course, as I mentioned, this can lead to a lot of backlash, which it certainly did. For every "success" post on Reddit, I had at least 10-15 failed posts. Ultimately, my channel was "shadowbanned" from Reddit and I can no longer promote through that outlet. But at that point, it didn't matter. My channel garnered enough subscribers and success where I can then focus more on delivering content rather than heavily marketing (which I still do in other respects).

Of course, there is also the game of SEO and tags. YouTube is a unique platform that has a unique search/suggestion algorithm structure. Interaction among viewers, shares, likes, and consistent uploading are the most crucial in getting your content discovered. Mix that with a healthy understanding oh how keywords and tag rankings work, then you can put yourself in a position where your content is highly discoverable through means of keyword searching and falling into the suggestion bar in other popular videos.

If you make very niche videos, you're already in a disadvantage in being discovered. That's not to say that you shouldn't stick to your niche, but have the occasional video where the whole goal of that video is to bring in new viewers and potential subscribers by making that video more relevant and searchable by a larger demographic.