Introduction:
Wondering what this project is about? A year ago, I grew a Minecraft channel to a thousand subs in only a few months. This time I've set myself an even more ambitious goal. A thousand subs in a month, starting from the day my first video is uploaded. I hope that in documenting my journey, I can help and motivate other small Youtubers to grow with my experience. Whether I succeed or not is irrelevent. All that matters is doing Youtube right to prove that growing a gaming channel is not impossible.
Day One - Branding & Recording my First Video
Creators new to the Youtube platform have this awful tendency of immediately turning ouut what they can with the resources available to them. In this age of competition, it is to all intents and purposes impossible to grow a traditional gaming channel. Finding a niche, and being better than the competition is important. Ultimately, your viewers need a reason to watch you over other channels doing the same thing. Doing whatever's hip can cause growth initially, but it is hard to compete with mega-channels such as Pewdiepie, Jacksepticeye or Markiplier who will be doing the same thing. In almost every case, they will have better production value, better personality factor, and superior equipment. Ultimately, they are not popular for no reason.
As I brainstormed ideas to do with my favourite titles, I kept this in mind. Eventually, I settled on Blizzard's new title Overwatch, of which I have been an avid player. I did some quick searching. All the big boys had moved on, and Overwatch had fallen into a niche. Something overwhelming I noticed however was the number of small channels all making great content and managing to grow quickly. There was no big-boy soaking up every piece of attention such as in, say, Minecraft or Counter Strike. So, my medium was settled. Next was naming the channel, and coming up with branding. I'm a big fan of the branding for Minecraft channel
'Mumbo Jumbo'. There is nothing reprehensible being inspired, so long as no plagiarism is involved. Using the chrome plugin
'Eye Dropper for Chrome' I grabbed the two colors in his logo for my own. Before I could go any further however, I needed a name. I wanted something that would sound smart without crossing the border into tackiness. Given Overwatch's military basis, I looked on Wikipedia for military titles for one that sounded cool. After some deliberation, I settled on 'Brigadier' as my first word. A nice ring it has, in my opinion, in addition to carrying a certain degree of seniority.
I arrived at Glyte through a method no more complex than spitballing sounds that I liked. There's not a lot to it.
A bit of Gimp mucking later and a third colour, I arrived at my logo using the free Raleway Heavy Google font. I quickly made a channel banner, endcard, and intro card based on this theme of red-pink and white.
So,
Brigadier Glyte. That's me.
Next, I needed a niche. No channel can grow without a specific topic that they do better than any other channel. This is rather specific to
Overwatch so I won't go into too much detail, but eventually I found there were no well-edited, succinct guides to playing a certain defensive hero called
Junkrat. Instead of a bog-standard 'Tips and Tricks' video, I wanted to string this out into a series that viewers could keep coming back for. Give them a reason to subscribe. Thus was born the 'Junkrat Spam Spots' series. Half an hour later, my first video was recorded. With some fancy transitions and audio equalising, I achieved a result I was happy with. Encoded it to .mp4 using Youtube's officially recommended H.264 video codec on moderate settings. I uploaded the video, and got to work.
Title SEO is important. Keyword cramming is important. Good looking thumbnails are important. I used this title for the video in the hope that I'd show up for relevent search terms:
'Best Junkrat Spam Spots - Temple of Anubis Guide (All Skill Levels)'
This title, in addition to being keyword crammed, looks very clickable for someone wanting to learn to play junkrat.
Diddling with thumbnails to make good-looking ones is really something that can only be learnt with experience. Colour, simplicity and readability are your three main points. With this thumbnail, I've accomplished all three:
I'm really not too fussed about the messy aliasing on the head. It won't be visible when the image is brought down to thumbnail size. Importantly, there is no content that will be covered by the 'Watched' tag in the bottom right or the video length in the top left. It is a common mistake to put text behind these tags, and it really makes the thumbnail look much less appealing. With that, I concluded my evening
Please fill out the poll, so I can guage response to this type of post. Thanks,
~Glyte
