How to gain from scratch?

Hi all! Cyntheon I know how you feel because I feel exactly the same. I keep repeating myself that being around by just 2 months it's really too early to start thinking about reaching certain amount of views but I try every time to improve my SEO and I see that I'm not obtaining results so there must be something wrong in what I'm doing.
But my advice is to never give up. It's so easy to just screw everything but in that way you will only have lost all the time you put into the channel for nothing! I know that those may be rhetorical words but just keep doing, always trying to improve the improvable!
 
Cyntheon said:
If any YouTube channel is made up of different ingredients (eg SEO, content, branding, upload frequency, social media, audience interaction, etc), which ingredients should you start with to get the best end result?

Maybe you could even share your personal story of how you got the ball rolling when you started out, or if you're in the same position as me - what do you do / focus on?
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Content is the most important thing. Devote yourself 100% to making the best content you can. When you think your videos are good, do even better. Pay close attention to detail when it comes to editing your videos, along with thumbnails, banners, titles, and everything else. Make things people want to click on. There are so so so many competitors out there that you have to actually compete.

The second most important thing is promoting your channel. As you said, this can reflect badly on your channel and make you look like a desperate spammer, so share carefully. Use your own social media, follow people, and send a direct message to new followers, just nicely and briefly describe your channel and don't ask them to subscribe. I know some people don't like this method, but I've gotten a lot of success with it! I got a handful of hateful comments, but everyone else has been very supportive and I gained loyal subscribers from it. If you feel like your content is really good, share your videos on tumblr and reddit-- there is a possibility it will be ignored on tumblr or downvoted/disliked mercilessly on reddit, but it can generate a bunch of views if they like it. Also, share with people on yttalk and /r/youtubers for critique and possibly new subscribers and friends!

Everything else you mentioned (SEO, upload frequency, etc.) is great but really icing on the cake.

Of course, how you go about growing your channel is up to you! Good luck :D
 
I'm struggling too with the promoting stuff because even if my videos won't be the perfection on this green planet I think that they are not so bad either but I'm still gathering really a low amount of views (even less recently) and I really don't know how I should promote myself properly. I mean I use the automatic message on G+ and twitter (with hashtags) and I share my video on a couple of subreddits and recently I also opened a fb page. More than this I really don't know how to do that.
 
Winger94 said:
I'm struggling too with the promoting stuff because even if my videos won't be the perfection on this green planet I think that they are not so bad either
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They do not have to be absolute perfection since no one's perfect of course, but striving to make videos you consider "good" or even "great" as opposed to "not so bad" should be your first goal. Really pushing yourself to be the best content creator you can be is a process and doesn't happen over night, but there are still strides you can make right now.

Winger94 said:
I really don't know how I should promote myself properly. I mean I use the automatic message on G+ and twitter (with hashtags) and I share my video on a couple of subreddits and recently I also opened a fb page. More than this I really don't know how to do that.
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Actively following other people helped me. No one will like or follow a page if no one knows it exists. In the beginning you have to do all the legwork, or else just rely on natural growth which in this day and age will be very very slow.

You can also share your videos on relevant subreddits, tumblr tags, etc. or on this forum, as I said above.

That's really all I can suggest. The rest of it is just patience and luck.
 
GamingRack said:
Use instagram people keep forgetting that that place is great haha
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Yeah also one of my friends suggested me to share also on instagram but are you sure it helps? Maybe I will give it a try.



Mirandapanda said:
You can also share your videos on relevant subreddits, tumblr tags, etc. or on this forum, as I said above.
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I used tumblr ( with good tags) until a couple of weeks ago so yeah maybe I will return to share a little up there too. For the subreddits there is a problem: not only a lot of subreddits don't allow let's play videos but also a lot of the games I play aren't covered by subreddits, but I know that Reddit is really useful. In the end yeah it all comes to trying to smartly promote in the non-spammy way.
 
@Mirandapanda Thanks for your input!
Mirandapanda said:
send a direct message to new followers, just nicely and briefly describe your channel
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This one seems kind of obvious, yet I've never thought of that for some reason. I don't get Twitter followers often and I don't use it as actively as I should, but that's a good idea! Only downside: wouldn't that come across as annoying to people who just subscribed and also decided to follow me on Twitter, and the first thing I do is bring up my channel? Or would the majority of Twitter followers be the result of Twitter itself rather than YouTube?


As for Tumblr and Reddit, in particular Reddit, it's a little overwhelming, but it might be the next step in trying to get my channel noticed so time to do some research ;) I'll also set up an Instagram account and try to post pictures related to my channel under popular but relevant tags.

Also, maybe I should've waited a little longer to start my channel, because as I was already uploading I was still figuring out a lot of things in Premiere and Photoshop and watched several tutorials per video. Now that I've become better / more efficient at editing, I'll have more time to spend on branding and promoting :)
 
Cyntheon said:
@Mirandapanda wouldn't that come across as annoying to people who just subscribed and also decided to follow me on Twitter, and the first thing I do is bring up my channel? Or would the majority of Twitter followers be the result of Twitter itself rather than YouTube?
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A few people get annoyed at DMs, but not the people who already subscribed. If they subscribed, they like you so they just tell you they already subscribed. There are some people who really hate DMs of all kinds, but you mostly won't get negative messages as long as you keep it to one message, make it short and nice, saying you have a youtube channel and what type of channel it is, and not asking them to subscribe.

How much crossover there is between twitter and youtube depends on how you gain followers. Some people come to my twitter from youtube, but I actively follow people on twitter who follow channels similar to mine, so most of my followers do come from twitter itself. So it depends on how you use social media.


Cyntheon said:
maybe I should've waited a little longer to start my channel, because as I was already uploading I was still figuring out a lot of things in Premiere and Photoshop
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nah. Learn and gain exp. at the same time! :)
 
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