A Proven Method To Achieving Success On YouTube
Let’s keep this guide as quick and brutally straightforward as possible. You want to try to become a YouTuber despite the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people around the world trying to do the exact same thing. And with odds like those, understandably, most people just chalk up any success on YouTube to luck. Yet, if it were truly a matter of luck, how is it that every single YouTuber I’ve personally guided has managed to go from 0 to 100,000 subscribers in less than a year? That’s more than twenty people! And why is it that plenty of other coaches have accomplished the same? Because it’s not about luck, it’s about taking the right approach.
In this guide I will attempt to hit on all of the main lessons I usually try to hammer home with my partners. This guide will be a bit lengthy of a read, but as long as you truly take these lessons to heart and are willing to put ample amounts of time into your Channel, you WILL see success.
The Three Key Factors
Finding Your Niche
So first thing’s first, you need to think long and hard about what kind of content you’re going to be making. This is because no matter what genre of content you decide to focus on, there are going to be countless other people doing the exact same thing. I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely crucial it is that you are bringing something to the table that nobody else is, something that will allow you to truly stand out from the rest of the crowd. My time is limited and my options are limitless, so you need to give me one hell of a reason to spend it on you instead of the literally millions of other options at my fingertips. You need to practically be trailblazing an entirely new breed of content within your genre, so that you can capitalize on a high-in-demand topic without actually having to compete against anybody else doing the same thing. You want to be one of the Channels other people are copying, not one of the Channels that’s doing the copying. Carve out your own specific piece of the pie and establish a solid monopoly over it.
I want to really drive home what I mean by all of this, so let’s do a little thought experiment to try putting it into practice. Let’s say you want to create a successful Gaming Channel. But the thing is, Gaming is the most oversaturated genre on the entire platform; surely it’s impossible to grow a Channel for it, right? Well, not really, as said it’s mostly just about taking the right approach. Like what if you were to hop on a hot new mobile phone game that just came out? Sure, you might be the only Channel making content for it (the one coming up in everybody’s searches). And yeah, maybe the audience isn’t huge. But a small yet dedicated audience is actually a fantastic start. The first 1000 subscribers are the hardest to get, and once you get them, you can really start growing faster and faster. This is because the more subscribers you have, the larger the base viewership each time you post a video; meaning the algorithm is more likely to push your content to other new viewers too. The larger you get, the easier it becomes to grow.
Yet I should also add that you don’t necessarily need to be one of the first to a topic in order to see success in it. Maybe you want to play a game that’s already mildly popular? Well perhaps you can hone in on a specific market for this game like helpful guides, funny skits, insane challenges, entertaining mods, something else specific. A niche within a niche so to speak. Something that nobody’s really making content for at the level of quality and/or frequency at which you think you can. Heck, maybe you’re dead set on some super popular game like Fortnite. Whilst not recommended, success is still possible. Maybe you come up with a really strong gimmick that catches fire? Who knows, maybe your videos of you wearing a shock collar that shocks you anytime you get shot or your videos of you using a dance dance revolution pad as a controller really catch on. Don’t be afraid to experiment, there’s no shame in throwing a bunch of different ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Try to find things you're passionate about, areas of YouTube you enjoy, and come up with your own little unique spin on them.
Bonus points by the way if you can come up with a type of content that is somehow related to a currently popular property (for example a recent show, videogame, product, or activity). Whilst not a requirement, fan content has long been known to be one of the easiest ways to start to get noticed on the internet and get that initial ball rolling. Although do keep in mind that whilst a Channel that’s focused on one specific audience does generally perform far better than a Channel trying to juggle several genres at once, do still make sure you have some level of maneuverability with your audience. Things fall out of popularity, so it doesn’t hurt to occasionally upload videos about other topics that may still be of interest to your primary audience, that way if needed you can jump ship and still retain some of your audience. Also make sure to infuse personality into your content as well as it will bring you followers who will stick with you regardless of what you upload; which can make switching paths much easier.
Captivating Thumbnails
Moving on, even more important than the actual videos themselves (sadly) is how you present them; we’re talking about your thumbnails. For the vast majority of YouTubers the thumbnail is an afterthought slapped on after the video is finished. And this is just about the single greatest mistake a YouTuber can make. You could have the greatest video in the world and it would still be meaningless if you can’t get people to click on it. You need to be putting a significant amount of thought and time into your thumbnails. I will literally scrap entire videos, videos I thought would be amazing, purely because there was no way I could do them justice in the thumbnail.
Although it is worth noting I’m limited by the fact that I refuse to use anything in my thumbnail that doesn’t appear in the original video. If you don’t personally feel bound to do that, doing an entirely separate photoshoot for the thumbnail or commissioning an artist to craft one for you often can bring fantastic results especially if you have a video that otherwise would not have allowed for a good thumbnail. However I do still advise that you avoid outright lying in your thumbnails. It’s a crappy thing to do and may even upset some of your audience, causing them to unsubscribe. That being said, using your thumbnail to insinuate that something could potentially happen (even if it doesn’t) is fine. In fact, something you really want to try to get good at doing with your thumbnails is sparking intrigue, getting people to ask questions.
Most people don’t realize this but even a completely new Channel’s very first video will get placed in hundreds if not thousands of peoples’ recommended feeds. So as much it may hurt you to hear this, the truth of the matter is that if your videos aren’t getting views, it is entirely your fault. Your thumbnail is competing against a screen full of other thumbnails, and it’s your job to beat them all out through proposing the most clickable premise. When people scroll by your thumbnails you want them to stop and take a second to think things like “Wait a minute, that’s a good question! What WOULD happen if you filled an entire swimming pool with Orbeez?” or “WOAH! Is that a bear fighting a lion? I gotta see how that would turn out!”. YouTube notices if videos have high click through rates and they will start pushing your videos in the algorithm a ton if they notice your Channel is consistently beating out the competing thumbnails. I cannot stress enough how important top tier thumbnail making is to success on YouTube. Anytime you make a thumbnail you need to step back, put yourself in the shoes of a random person scrolling by your content, and ask yourself if your video’s thumbnail would genuinely get you to want to click on the video. In fact in general learning how to objectively analyze your own work from a third person perspective is a crucial skill on YouTube. And if you can’t learn how to do it, you should at the very least be getting some second opinions from people who can do it for you. Honestly it’s not a bad idea to do that even if you ARE good at critiquing your own work. Anytime I make a video I create multiple thumbnails for it and poll a group of subscribers on which one catches their attention most. Now nine times out of ten I do know which one is going to get picked, but occasionally I’m caught by surprise, I’m proven wrong, and am better off for it, because I now know to switch to the winner instead of the one I was originally going to go with. And some of those surprise winners have gone on to earn me millions of views. You never know, so it’s really helpful to get an outside perspective.
But before we move on, let me just throw in a couple extra things to keep in mind. Like that even though you’re probably making your thumbnails on a computer, you should really be viewing how they look on a phone as that’s how more than 90% of people are going to be viewing them (on a tiny screen). Also, spring for Photoshop if you haven’t already as it’s by far the best program for making thumbnails plus if you get the whole Adobe Creative Cloud suite it comes with Premiere (the best video editing software) and Audition (the best audio editing software). And in regards to the titles that accompany your thumbnail, they should either be asking the question you want your potential viewers to be asking OR they should be throwing important keywords associated with your video in the title (to boost its performance) alongside an additional question to accompany your thumbnail if it already does a good job getting viewers to ask a different question; a great title can really go hand in hand with a great thumbnail.
Extending Watch Time
Finally, the third important key factor is watch time. Your goal should be to stretch your viewers’ watch sessions as long as possible while still keeping your videos entertaining enough that they don’t click off. And the best way to do that is to get your videos going “PA” more often. But what does “PA” mean? Well if YouTube notices a video is not only getting a ton of people to click, but also generating a ton of watch time, it is going to start pushing that video a crap load. This is going to result in it generating even more watch time which is going to cause it to get promoted even more which in turn is going to get it generating even more watch time which in turn...you get the idea. Your video is going to be put into this amazing cycle where it keeps itself perpetually afloat, PA, in YouTube’s recommendations. And these videos are an EXCELLENT insurance policy as they ensure that even if you upload several badly performing videos in a row or can’t upload for a long stretch of time, that you still continue to receive a steady flow of views preventing YouTube from marking your Channel as dead and ending all promotion of your content (which usually will completely kill a Channel). These videos can stay PA for months, even years, so I highly recommend you avoid making your content too topical; you want these videos to remain entertaining no matter what year they’re being watched, that way they can stay PA as long as possible. I should also note that PA videos are fantastic for growth not only because of all the watch time they generate for your Channel, but because their high view count means they’re reaching far wider audiences than your regular videos do. This allows you to tap into viewer bases who would normally never reach; so aim for as many PA videos as possible.
However videos CAN sometimes go PA even if they’re short, and you don’t necessarily need to make longform content to thrive on YouTube. If you make content that has to be short in length or has to be topical, I highly recommend you chain your videos together through End Cards and through having them all flood eachother’s recommended feeds through them constantly sharing the same keywords in the metadata. By doing this, you can actually create some impressively addictive / bingeable content that keeps viewers reaching for bite after bite for hours at a time without even realizing how much time has gone by. Yes, longer is generally better, but not always. If you’re forcing long video lengths at the expense of how enjoyable your content is, that’s going to reduce your watch time, not increase it. And you do want your videos at a length where you can still get them out on a reasonable schedule. Ideally you should be uploading as frequently as possible, yet not quite to the point where it causes you to put out crappy videos or to burnout from stress or struggle to keep up schedule. Figure out what works best for you.
And that’s pretty much it, those are the three major keys to success on YouTube. Nail those and you should be good to go. However if you’re willing to stick around, I’m going to try to rapidfire some additional helpful advice that I rarely see emphasized despite how much of a huge impact it can make on the long term course of peoples’ YouTube Channels.
Additional Advice
Call To Action
This may sound ridiculous but many viewers actually need to be told to subscribe (and to turn notifications on) otherwise they won’t think to do it. Specifically, this should be done in the Intro near the start of your video as most viewers don’t stay for the Outro. Everyone I’ve convinced to do this has reported back to me at least a 50% increase in daily subscribers and some have even reported multiple times that. Personally I saw an increase of over 100% on videos where I did this, so as much as I hate how it looks artistically, it’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.
An Immediate Hook
Speaking of Intros, you should also be careful. Data shows that viewers have insanely short attention spans, so as soon as your video starts you need to immediately be reeling the viewer in. It’s of the utmost importance that you get them so invested in what’s going to happen next, that they don’t ever think about clicking off the video. And then, you need to continuously hold said interest for the entirety of the video, making sure that there is always something stimulating happening in the video. This is why it’s usually best to only flash branding for a second or two at the start, to only do your call to action thirty seconds or a minute into the video (after you’ve already sucked them in), and to save your sponsored ad read (if you have one) for the middle of the video that way they’ve been around so long that they’re too invested to leave during it. Now depending on your content you may need to bend those rules; and to be fair you can probably get away with wasting the first three or five seconds while only losing ten to twenty percent of your viewers over it. But if you’re passing seven or even nine seconds without anything exciting happening you could already see more than half of your viewers clicking off at the start of the video. I highly recommend checking your videos’ audience retention graphs in your Analytics so that you can analyze what the key moments were that caused people to leave. Doing this will allow you to identify what mistakes you made that way you can avoid repeating them later on.
Outro Opportunities
While we’re at it, look into adding an Outro to your videos as it’s an opportunity to place End Cards in your video (which can be used to call attention to other videos of yours that the viewers may enjoy). However be forewarned that most people are used to immediately clicking off the video as soon as the Outro starts, so do something to get their attention. Personally I think the Outro is a great place to make your viewers laugh and to show off your personality a bit more. Handle your Outro right and you can see as much as a 10% even 20% increase in views.
Putting Together A Team
The very first thing EVERY YouTuber should do the second their Channel starts pulling in enough money, is to immediately hire an editor. I know it’s hard to give up artistic control of how your videos appear, but editing is just not a step in the video making process that you need to be involved in. Time is precious, and hiring an editor will save you countless hours. You are infinitely better off putting that time into areas where you ARE required like making deals with companies and coming up with new video ideas. Trust me, once you hire an editor, you’ll never be able to go back. You may even want to consider hiring other staff members too. You should also consider getting incorporated (for tax purposes) if you find yourself paying out a lot of cash.
Fruitful Collaborations
Speaking of working with others, let’s talk about collaborations. Despite what a lot of YouTubers (and even YouTube staff members themselves) have claimed; collaborations generally aren’t a good way to grow a Channel. More than anything they’re really just a nice fun little opportunity to get to know other YouTubers you’re a fan of and possibly even get to befriend them.
However if you’re dead set on growing through them, there are still three ways you can make them work. The most reliable is to appear on a podcast or host one with other YouTubers. After an hour of viewers getting to know you (or in the later case tens of hours) they will eventually get curious enough to check out your Channel. This is in contrast to most collaborations where you just randomly appear in somebody’s video for a little bit, which definitely isn’t going to drive anybody to check you out. Moving on, the second method is to get lucky enough to appear in a viral video or with an absolutely massive YouTuber, in which case you will get people visiting your Channel out of curiosity as to why they’ve never heard of you despite you having enough clout to appear in what they just watched. Finally, the third method is that if you’re in a really niche genre for which there’s not a lot of content creators (to the point where viewers are kind of starved for more YouTubers like the one they’re watching), appearing in somebody else’s video could actually work for once. I suggest a two part video with each Channel hosting one part, that way you can both hook your viewers into checking out each other’s Channels. Assuming all goes well and they happen to like your style, you should see a small boost in subscribers.
Strategic Quality Reduction
Speaking of how you stylize your videos, unfortunately, sometimes viewers just aren’t capable of noticing how much hard work you put into certain aspects of your videos. Depending on your audience demographic as well as the type of content you make, you may want to cut down on the amount of time you spend on those aspects in favor of more effective uses of your time. For example why waste an extra three hours on some new fancy editing transitions you don’t think your audience is going to notice when you could instead put that time towards improving that script you’re feeling iffy about or those audio recordings you felt could have been better. Heck, maybe you want to make a major change to how you format your videos, so that you can deliver content to your subscribers more frequently. You need to weigh the cost versus the benefit of every action you take when it comes to your Channel. Everybody has the same twenty four hours a day you have, so make sure that you’re spending yours as efficiently as possible. Still strive for clean content, but also try to find the perfect balance between quality and quantity.
Getting To Know Your Audience
However fine tuning your content for your audience is going to require a deep understanding of them. I highly recommend that at least once a year you ask your subscribers to fill out a survey that you fill with questions that can help you thoroughly figure out who your demographic is, the things they’re into, and the direction they’d like to see you take the Channel. It can also help to get to know some of them on a more personal level. Consider opening a Discord server or hosting the occasional livestream, some way that you can talk with them one on one. Not only will getting a feeling for what they’re like help you improve your content, but it’s also a reminder that your subscriber count isn’t just a number; that those are real people you’re impacting.
Dealing With Harassment
Unfortunately, sometimes real people can suck. Now nasty comments I couldn’t give less of a crap about nor should you; after all they’re just opinions and it’s important to remember that most people watching you are in full support of you (although if you receive valid criticism do use it to guide your content, don’t just brush it aside and label the commenter as a hater). The real problem however is that once you get to a certain size, you will start to run into some truly psychotic/obsessed people. Because of this, I highly recommend you scrub as much private information about you off of the internet as possible in order to lower the odds of people being able to doxx/swat/visit you. I also recommend that you take steps to avoid people being able to hack you. Make sure you use a unique highly complex password for each account that’s important to you, as well as turn on double verification. Although there’s still ways around both of those, so link an authenticator app or get a physical authenticator key if you can. You may also want to consider self-defense classes. Maybe this comes off as overly paranoid, and maybe you’ll be lucky enough to never have to deal with crap like this, but speaking from personal experience it can literally end up saving your life so better safe than sorry. Sadly there’s not really much you can do other than ignore these people until they get bored one day.
Dealing With Being Cancelled
And not to be a downer but while we’re at it, let’s tackle the other negative topic on the list, getting cancelled. This can be an absolutely devastating experience, I’ve seen innocent people end their own lives because of this crap, so I ask that you please listen to what I have to say as you’re going to end up going through hell if you try to go through this crap all on your own. If you are in the process of being cancelled, the only thing you should be doing the first few days is surrounding yourself with people who love you and doing activities that’ll keep you in high spirits. STAY OFF THE INTERNET. No matter what you’d like to believe, you are simply not equipped to deal with the sheer amount of hate you are about to receive let alone giving a good public response to it. Not to mention once one person accuses you of something, all sorts of accusations are going to start pouring in so any kind of response you could give would end up neglecting some major accusations. It is crucial that you wait until the dust has settled a bit before you decide how to proceed, as you’re going to have two main choices to choose from.
The first choice, and what the VAST majority of YouTubers should do, as much as it hurts to do, is to just simply ignore the situation as if it never happened. I know, it’s painful to see so many people believe so many awful things about you that in your heart you know couldn’t be further from the truth. But in reality, if you just ignore it, the impact on your Channel should be minimal. You may lose some subscribers, but the vast majority of them just aren’t going to hear about it. You may also want to moderate your comment section for a week or two to help keep them shielded from it (and if you’re getting dislike bombed you may want to disable ratings as well).
What you don’t want to do however is flag down any videos attacking you (even if they’re spreading blatantly false information) as it’s just going to draw more attention and let them further vilify you. And what you DEFINITELY don’t want to do is respond; the only thing that accomplishes is guaranteeing that all your subscribers hear about this crap (which could result in them looking into the situation and consuming false information that leads to them turning against you). Unfortunately you’re just going to have to accept the fact that life isn’t fair. Bad things can happen to good people for no reason, and there’s nothing you can do about it other than take the loss and move on. Try to learn from the situation, use it to grow as a person. Use it as motivation to work even harder so that you can prove to all these people there’s nothing they can do to prevent you from chasing your dreams. Because whilst these people are all living such deeply miserable lives that they need to constantly tear down others in order to feel better about themselves, you’re actually out there accomplishing your goals, making a positive impact on the world, and living a truly fulfilling life. Don’t EVER let them pull you down to their level. Be a force for good, and never let anybody take away your positive outlook on life.
...however, there ARE a few rare cases where an accusation is too big to ignore. If you are being accused of something truly awful on a grand scale (like sexual assault or running your Channel in a highly illegal way), then you may actually need to respond. First off, reach out to a trained public relations professional who can work with you to make sure you give the right responses (they’re not expensive to hire). You may even want to consider grabbing a lawyer if you suspect this is going to do some major long term financial damage (although don’t get your hopes up as libel is notoriously hard to prove in court). Nonetheless, what’s important is that you give a short and concise response refuting all major false claims and disproving them. This should at least allow you to save face amongst anybody out there who’s reasonable. However sadly that’s a minority these days, and the angry mob doesn’t give a crap about the facts nor will an apology satiate them; all they want to do is see you burn. So not gonna lie, you’re pretty screwed. But the truth of the matter is there’s nothing you can do to change that, so you just gotta do damage control, pick up whatever pieces of your career remain, and keep moving on.
Turning YouTube Into A Career
But on the topic of your career, let’s move onto something a lot more positive, the amazing feeling of being able to transition your hobby into a full time career. It’s important to remember that even if you manage to grow your Channel to a large size, the battle isn’t over yet; you still need to figure out how to turn a profit. And considering most big Channels only peak for around five years, you need to be making bank as soon as you hit your stride. Ad revenue should only be a small fraction of what you make, your true earning potential lies elsewhere. Sponsorships should be your first go to, finding companies (or agencies that will find companies for you) that you can work with to do integrated adverts. After that, merchandise is a big one, and can actually be bigger depending on your Channel. For example Makeup Channels and Fitness Channels really excel at integrating their merchandise into what they do on the Channel. Whatever you do, be smart about it. Finally, donations is the last major earning area, whether that be through livestream donations or a monthly membership system like Patreon. However be careful, I see a lot of people put way too much time into avenues like these for how little they’re getting out of it. Once again, you need to think about what kind of audience you have and adapt to the earning strategy you think will best fit them yet still be time efficient for you.
Other Social Media Platforms
Speaking of efficiently using your time, it’s best that you avoid other social media platforms as even if you get lucky enough to figure out how to explode on them, the amount of time you have to put in STILL probably won’t be worth how little growth/profit there is to gain from them; you’re much better off spending your time elsewhere. Not to say they can’t be worth it, but it’s unlikely.
Starting A Second Channel
On a similar note, for some reason YouTubers always seem to want to start a Second Channel. Now if your Main Channel is doing fantastically yet you still have a lot of free time (because you’ve got a team more or less running it on auto pilot for you) then yes starting a Second Channel can be beneficial to expand your brand through posting content that wouldn’t otherwise fit on your Primary Channel. But very few YouTubers are in that position, so I recommend you hold off on starting a Second Channel until you reach that point or at the very least if you do start one, just keep it as a small side project you put a little time into here and there just for fun.
Fighting Strikes, Claims, and Demonetization
Anytime you use music or footage belonging to a large company you put yourself at risk so try to do so as sparingly as possible. If you get claimed, don’t fight it, they might strike you in retaliation. If you get falsely claimed, do fight it, not only will you easily win but you could end up getting their Content ID privileges revoked (preventing them from doing this to other Channels). If you get striked by a large company, try reaching out through the provided email address and explaining to them that you could lose your Channel; ask them if they can remove the strikes so that you can remove the videos yourself (you’d be surprised how often the employees handling the strikes are kind enough to let you do this). On the other hand If you get striked and it’s not by a large company, you should always fight it as you will virtually ALWAYS win. If the striker isn’t a large company YouTube requires them to sue to keep the strike, which NEVER happens like you can literally count on your fingers the number of times this has happened. The only time you won’t win is if you straight up reuploaded their stuff in its entirety in which case your appeal may get rejected (and rightfully so). As for demonitization, the more family friendly and positive you can keep your content the better. Or at the very least keep the start clean because when you appeal demonetization, the reviewers usually only ever check the start (funny enough you can actually get away with being as dirty as you want the rest of the video). And in regards to all of these issues, if your Channel is ever in serious trouble, the best thing you can do is ask Team YouTube for help on Twitter and make a big stink about it online (even better if you can get any news YouTubers to cover it) in order to pressure YouTube into helping you.
And, well, that’s it! Feel free to message me any questions, I’m wishing you the best of luck!
